Three Minutes Page 28

  “Our policy is clear on this subject. The US does not negotiate with criminals.”

  “And as I’ve said before, the individual I’m negotiating for was employed by us, paid by us, working for us.” She took the flash drive from her trouser pocket, stepped forward, and put it in the middle of the vice president’s desk. “I want you to look at this—it’s the cage Crouse is sitting in right now. This person knows where it’s hidden and how to free the speaker.”

  “Sorry, Sue. You’re not going to convince either of us of that.”

  “He has the exact location. But in order to free Crouse, he wants a written agreement. When he’s returned the speaker to us alive—he wants the Seven of Hearts crossed off the kill list. A life for a life.”

  “No.” This time it was the chief of staff who answered. “Even if what you say is true—we explained this to you, Sue. International confidence.”

  “If the speaker, one of the world’s most powerful people, is freed and credits US expertise publicly, that would inspire confidence.”

  “No.” Now it was the vice president’s turn. “Negotiating with a criminal is inconceivable, as is the idea that one man—alone—could locate and free a hostage, then escort him to safety.”

  “You know what he’s capable of.”

  “What we know is what you’ve told us.”

  “He’s the best informant I’ve worked with as DEA chief. He’s infiltrated the furthest into the organization responsible for Crouse’s kidnapping. And, according to him, he knows where the speaker is. But that’s also his lifeline. He’ll never reveal that without compensation. If he’s taken off the kill list, he’ll deliver the speaker. What have you got to lose? Besides face?”

  Vice President Elena Thompson and Chief of Staff Daniel Perry walked side by side. Marched really—left legs forward, then right legs forward at the same time. It was unconscious. The hour was late, they were both tired, annoyed, and in a hurry to make their way through the hallway and down the stairs to the bottom floor. To the Situation Room. The most mythical room in the entire West Wing—not because of its appearance or size, it was no more than five thousand square feet when all its sections were combined, but because of the operations that had been initiated there, developed, worked through to their most minuscule details. It was still furnished with the conference table JFK had chosen. The only room at this time of day and with so little notice that had the right equipment and staff. Sue Masterson had been asked to wait in the vice president’s office, and it was unclear if she should continue standing. No one had offered her a seat.

  “Is the object still in place?”

  The operator nodded hello and continued the slow, monotonous work he and his two other colleagues on the night shift were responsible for—observing the large screen on the wall across from the conference table’s short side. “Yes, ma’am. The object is still there. Now we’re waiting for the next one.”

  The plasma screen showed a satellite image of a city that despite the late hour was nowhere near going to bed. Every window in the hotel was lit. Brothels in a row. A street in a city called Cali. The next target in the Final War on Drugs. A building that belonged to a man called El Mestizo, who for the past twenty-four hours had been inside it. The Jack of Hearts. But it wasn’t enough. They were now waiting for his constant companion and bodyguard, El Sueco, to get there too. The Seven of Hearts. Next time they crossed names off the kill list, it would be after yet another double attack.

  “We know their pattern—this is where they usually meet. I’m pretty sure we’re close now.”

  “And this?” The chief of staff pointed to another large screen. “Can we borrow it for a few minutes?”

  “That’s intended for Delta Force helmet cameras—but it won’t be used until the strike.”

  “Good. Can you play this?” Perry handed the flash drive to the operator, who inserted it into a computer, turned on the screen, and handed over a remote control.

  “Works just like your remote at home. Play is there, pause there, and the volume is this button.”

  A satellite image, just like the one on the other screen. But the difference was that this showed absolutely nothing. Masterson had talked about the jungle and the mud and the roof of a cage. What they saw, however, was some green and some brown and a shade of gray, and something that looked like a small yellow spot. Blurry, out of focus, and barely moving film that could be anything. For twenty-five minutes. No matter how many times they moved the cursor back and forth.

  “Do you have a minute?” The vice president put her hand on the operator’s shoulder. “Can you help us to try to interpret this video?”

  The operator blushed. The vice president had just put her hand on his shoulder. “Absolutely, ma’am.” He watched the screen silently for a minute, then another minute. “That . . . is a jungle, Madam Vice President. Recorded from a satellite.”

  “That much we figured out. But this?” Vice President Thompson pointed to a yellow spot roughly in the center of the picture. And then, in the center of the yellow spot, a darker stain. “What do you make of that?”

  The operator enlarged the image with a magnifying tool. “Sorry, ma’am . . . can’t help you much there, because the image is already enlarged as much as possible. That spot, the yellow one with the little black that you pointed out, the pixels break down immediately when I start working with it.”

  “But what do you see? You interpret images every day.” Her hand still lay there on his shoulder.

  “It could be, and now I’m guessing really, ma’am . . . a very small house. A hovel. Or a large stone.” Then he leaned even closer to the big screen. “And it could be . . . this may sound a bit odd, but it could be—with a little imagination—a bamboo ceiling. And this could be the bamboo shaped like a grid. Or that might just be an optical illusion. From the pixelation.”

  “And the dark spot in the center of the yellow?”

  “With a little, no, with a lot of imagination it could be a man. But like I said—you do end up with optical illusions when the picture quality is that bad. Or, maybe a condor sitting on a fallen rubber tree? Or some kind of large monkey standing on a stump? Or . . . well, you see what I mean.”

  “We do. It’s a desperate lie. Thank you.”

  Thompson and Perry waited in silence while the operator moved his focus to the second screen, his main task—to monitor the next target, a brothel owned by the Jack of Hearts, patiently waiting for the arrival of the Seven of Hearts, the signal for a double-attack.

  They spoke quietly to each other. “Sue Masterson has had contact with an individual we forbade her to contact.”

  They both knew it.

  “And she’s obviously prepared to say anything.”

  The DEA chief was done.

  “She just lost her job.”

  The meaningless flash drive was back in the vice president’s hand, and she was about to head back when Perry stopped her. “Wait. Sue Masterson has to be removed. And it pains me, Elena, you know that. I liked her, still like her. She has to go, but not yet. We have to keep things as peaceful as possible while we’re in the middle of this—and that’s the opposite of a former high-level official speaking out in anger. Media focus has to be maintained so we have public support for this operation.”

  His voice was even quieter now. “So now we go to her. Open the door and smile. Explain that we’re going along with this—that we’re prepared to negotiate. That if the Seven of Hearts—who we’re now concerned about for entirely different reasons—can get ahold of Crouse and bring him all the way here, then they have their deal.”

  Perry nodded toward the screen that showed a street lined with brothels in western Cali. “That will be enough to keep her calm—she has no idea that we’re about to liquidate him. And she’ll never know how it happened. Just that one day he disappeared off her radar.”

  EWERT GRENS HAD stayed at Saxby’s Coffee until the owner kindly asked him to drink up and go, because they were
closing for the evening, and—he added with a wink—they were running low on sweets and Colombian coffee. Their new customer had gone through their supplies. Two streets away, on Thirty-Seventh, the detective found a bar and sat down at a table in the farthest corner. With his eyes on the room, he drank a bottle of water and ate an omelet with black olives and feta. Several customers in varying degrees of intoxication placed their empty glasses on his table and tried to initiate a conversation with the solitary guest, who was not one of the regulars—but they tired of it when he shrugged and spoke Swedish to them.

  Besides that, it was just waiting. For an answer. After playing his last card in a hand that was all about hearts. His highest card. If Sue Masterson got a no from the White House, then there were no more solutions. Hoffmann would remain on a kill list that was getting methodically shorter day by day.

  It was half an hour after midnight when he finally saw her through the large window, headed toward this ever darker, ever noisier room. She opened the door, searched among the tables, and approached his.

  Grens tried to read her face. Neutral. Professional. She’d played her hand and revealed nothing. He wouldn’t want to be interrogated by her. A man’s life hung in the balance, his survival dependent on what she was about to say.

  He did the same. Waved at her, pulled out a vacant seat, revealed nothing. Despite the pressure in his chest, something wanted out. “A beer?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Something stronger?”

  “I’m just here to give you an answer. Then I’m headed home.”

  He poured the last of his water into his own glass, drank half of it. “Well?”

  Still neutral. If it had been a negative answer, she might be drawing this out because it cost too much to communicate it. If it was positive, she was dragging this out because she could. “Come on!”

  “Grens?”

  “Yes?”

  “You just got your clearance.”

  “In writing?”

  “The proposal was accepted in full. Verbally. That’s how formal agreements work in that kind of place. Crouse’s life for Hoffmann’s life.”

  Grens wanted to hug her, rose with his arms outstretched before thinking better of it. She’d already confused his eagerness with courtship once. He sat back and raised his glass in a kind of toast and explained that from now on he and Hoffmann promised to leave her alone. He waited while she walked toward the exit and entered the Washington night, then waved for the check and made a call from a phone he only used to communicate with a single subscriber.

  They had their go-ahead. Hoffmann had his yes. He would be allowed to live.

  PIET HOFFMANN FOLDED up the phone. Grens and Masterson had done their part. Now he had to do his.

  He left his car in the garage near the temporary housing in Comuna 6, started walking the first lap around the block in the darkness. He always did at least one lap in each direction to make sure everything was as quiet as it seemed.

  He should be happier, should be rejoicing silently. He had his yes. A life for a life. But this agreement, which meant everything to him just a day or two earlier, wasn’t enough anymore.

  A rag doll lay in the way.

  First lap done. He changed direction, cutting through the darkness of a poor neighborhood with no street lighting. He followed the cameras’ three-hundred-meter radius, the extended perimeter. And on the second lap he took note of two vehicles he hadn’t seen there before, a car and a pickup, checked their registrations via his phone and continued walking when he saw that the owners had lived in this area for a long time. On his way to the front door, he stopped in front of camera 14, the one that sat a little higher up surveying the greater part of the entrance, and adjusted it a few degrees to the right, minimizing a blind spot he’d just discovered where the path to the garbage room crossed the path to what could be bicycle storage, but was mostly used to store old furniture and piles of worn tires.

  Three flights up to an apartment as dark as night. They were asleep. He loved listening to them breathe. They were alive. They had no idea what it looked like when a little girl didn’t quite fall to the ground because her father held on to her, desperately, without understanding.

  He wanted to sit down at the kitchen table, try to understand. How he had to stick to his plan. The one that would give him and his family a chance. And which became even clearer the moment El Mestizo ended a child’s life as part of an economic negotiation.

  But there was no energy. He had always, always found the strength, but where was it? Here, among the ones he loved, he could let go of that vigilance, that constant searching, and he’d felt it as soon as he opened the door—when he deflated, shriveled, became nothing once the tension pushing him forward dissolved, his whole body lacking solidity. He slipped and lost his balance twice over the short distance to the bedroom, hit his elbow and forehead hard on the door frame, and fell into bed with his clothes on, huddled close to her warm, naked body, and fell asleep as soon as he put his arm around her.

  And dreamed. About someone arguing about money who ended up with a big hole between his eyebrows, buried deep in a pit. About a child hired to take a life. About the hellish screams of a man as he tried to escape electricity and barbed wire. And they all came back. To him. They pursued him, hunted him. So he shot at them. Again. And again. Stabbed them with a knife, stabbed, stabbed, and they fell, but got up again, and continued running straight for him. He beat and beat, stabbed and slashed, they fell and got up, and he couldn’t run anymore, his legs didn’t work, and he slipped and lay on the ground as they got closer.

  He woke up several times. Sweaty, with the sheets in a pile at his feet. The last time he fell asleep, he was with a rag doll—and she looked at him, talked to him, even though she had no head.

  “Piet? Honey?”

  He was awakened by Zofia sitting beside him on the bed, pulling on his arm. And crying. Because of the way he’d been screaming. And he held her and asked her to lie down again, told her it was nothing, just a nightmare, no more. He lay quietly next to her, his arm on her hip, until he was absolutely sure that she’d fallen asleep, rocked by her slow breaths.

  He kissed her and walked into the dark kitchen—dawn light was still a long way off—turned on the lamp above the stove, since its light was the weakest.

  It was late at night, and in sleep it had been able to reach him, grab hold of him. When he could no longer defend himself. Sometimes he dreamed about those first shootings in Colombia, mostly of the man and the woman he killed in the brothel during the first month of his employment, something he later realized was a test. Occasionally, he dreamed of the two inmates he shot at the Aspsås prison in Sweden in order to survive. But they were never like this.

  He sat down at the kitchen table in front of a newspaper and spread out the crossword. She’d brought it with her from their house, which—like this cramped apartment—she’d never seen as their home, but still tried to relate to. The same crossword, which the other night had been unsolved, was now half complete, filled in with pencil.

  She had clung to her father’s arm, lifeless. And he had refused to let go of her, because if he did, he was letting go of her life.

  Toyas made his living selling cocaine, he was supposed to pay. El Mestizo made his living protecting cocaine, he was the one who shot. But also the so-called El Sueco made his living this way, and even received a salary from two bosses due to cocaine. That was why he loaded the cargo into that vessel and then made sure it was seized. That was why he went into the hacienda’s kitchen and fetched a five-year-old girl.

  He created the conditions for that shot. He didn’t shoot. But he didn’t stop it either.

  Hoffmann had gone past a limit and knew it would haunt his dreams for as long as he lived. That was his punishment. Every time he abandoned himself to sleep at night, he would be inviting her in, and she would hang there trying to reach him.

  The handwritten piece of paper remained where he’d hidden it
on his way out of the jungle chill—folded in the bottom of the leather holster of his knife, next to a typed note. He looked through the lines he’d already crossed off. Coordinates. Low Earth Orbit. Time window. Cesium-137. And those he still had to solve. Prism bomb. Magnets sled. And then he wrote a new line at the very bottom, where there was still a little room left.

  Suitcase.

  Zofia was right. They had to get out of here.

  DAWN. AND THEY were still asleep. The ones who meant everything to him. Zofia. Hugo. Rasmus. Nothing, there was nothing without them. And he—he existed only through them.

  They slept, but he couldn’t. Thinking about a plan stood in his way.

  The bedroom door creaked, bare feet over the creaking floor. Zofia. Her sleep-warm arms around him, two kisses on the neck. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “At this hour?”

  “I have to go soon.” He took hold of her hands, kissed each of them twice. “You gave me a week, Zofia. I’ve spent two of those days. And I need a couple more. But when I get back, my death sentence will be over.”

  It wasn’t far to his first stop. Half an hour in the car to one of Cali’s southern suburbs, a bit past Jamundí. Alone in the car, with no armor, no protection, here his thoughts were what they were. The truth. The truth was that he wasn’t nearly so sure of his ability to solve this as he tried to make Zofia believe. Did she believe him? He wasn’t sure. Probably not. She knew him better than he did himself, could read in his voice and movements what he himself wasn’t even aware of. But she said nothing, showed nothing, understood as well as he did that sharing her anxiety was useless right now.

  He stopped near a small industrial building on a carelessly paved plot. A printing company, until recently filing for bankruptcy. This was how these mobila labs were placed, a few months’ rent in a temporarily vacant premises, while the owner looked for a new tenant. This version of Carlos, the name all chemists shared, Hoffmann had met twice before, but never here, his base for the last month, and for only one more month, when operations would be moved again to a similar facility in Medellín. Constantly requested, one of the few in Colombia who converted cocaine into an odor-free product in the shape of suitcases.