Three Seconds

didn’t understand, had kicked him in the cheek and wound the sharp plastic tape round his legs as well.
    Martin Jacobson had gradually started to feel what he hadn’t had the energy to feel when everything was chaos and he had to concentrate on trying to get the hostage taker to communicate.
    A creeping, terrible, engulfing fear.
    This was serious. Hoffmann was under pressure and resolute and another person who would never think, talk or laugh again was already lying on another floor.
    Jacobson rocked gently again, took a deep breath – it was more than fear, perhaps, he had never felt like this before, absolute terror.
    ‘Keep still.’
    Piet Hoffmann kicked him in the shoulders, not hard but enough for his bare skin to shine red. He then started to walk through the workshop, along the rectangular workbenches, and reached up and turned the first camera to the wall, and then the second and the third, but he held the fourth in both hands for a while, his face right up to the lens, he stared into it, moved even closer until his face filled the entire screen, then he screamed; he screamed and then turned that one to the wall as well.
    __________
    Bergh was still sweating. But he wasn’t aware of it. He had moved the chair in the glass box that was central security and was now leaning forwards in front of the monitors, four of them with pictures from the Block B workshop. A couple of minutes ago, someone had joined him. The prison governor was standing right behind him and they were watching the same black-and-white sequences with shared concentration, almost silence. Suddenly something changed. One of the monitors that was connected to the camera nearest the window went black. But not an electronic black, it was still working – it wasmore like it was obstructed by something or someone. Then the next one. The cameras had been turned quickly, maybe to the wall – the darkness could be a film of grey concrete only centimetres away. The third one, they were prepared, they spotted the hand just before it was turned, a person who forced the camera round on its fixture.
     
    One left. They stared at the monitor, waiting, then both jumped.
    A face.
    Close up, as close as you could get, a nose and a mouth, that was all. A mouth that screamed something before it disappeared.
    Hoffmann.
    He had said something.
    __________
    He was cold.
     
    It wasn’t a chill from the cold floor, it came from fear, from losing the will to fight thoughts of his own death.
    The prisoner beside him had made a threat again – more hate, more scorn – until Hoffmann got a rag from one of the workbenches and stuffed it in his mouth and his words were swallowed.
    They both lay still, even when he left them every now and then, purposeful steps over to the far glass wall, a window into the office. When he turned his head, Martin Jacobson could see him go into the small room, bend down over the desk and lift something that from a distance looked like a telephone receiver.
    __________
    The mouth moved slowly. Narrow, tight lips that looked chapped, almost split.
     
    He is
.
    They looked at each other, nodded.
    They had both recognised the movements of the mouth that formed the words.
    ‘Next.’
    Oscarsson was sitting beside Bergh in the cramped security office and eager fingers pressed the play button, one frame at a time. The mouth filled the whole screen, the next word, the lips wide and stretched.
    ‘Did you see?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘One more time.’
    It was so clear.
    The words, the message from the lips, said with such aggression that they were an attack.
    He is a dead man
.
    __________
    His hand was shaking – it happened so suddenly he had been forced to let go of the telephone receiver.
     
    What if he got an answer?
    What if he didn’t get an answer?
    A quick look out through the internal window into the workshop and the naked men; they were still lying there, without moving. A porcelain cup in the middle of the desk, half full of day-old coffee, which he downed, cold and bitter but the caffeine would stay in his body for a while.
    He dialled the number again. The first ring, the second, he waited, was she still there, did she still have the same number, he didn’t know, he hoped, maybe she—
    Her voice.
    ‘You?’
    It had been so long.
    ‘I want you to do exactly what we agreed.’
    ‘Piet, I—’
    ‘
Exactly
what we agreed.
Now
.’
    He hung up. He missed her. He missed her so much.
    And now he wondered if she was still