Three Seconds

command.’
    ‘OK.’
    ‘We’ve got a critical situation.’
    __________
    John Edvardson was standing in the middle of the beautiful churchyard at Aspsås. Twenty minutes earlier he had come down from the church tower, leaving the marksmen who had seen Hoffmann and the hostages on two occasions now. They could force their way in whenever they wanted – a few seconds was all they needed to break down the door or come through a skylight and overpower the hostage taker, but as long as the hostages were alive, as long as they were unharmed, they wouldn’t risk it.
     
    He looked around.
    The churchyard was being guarded by a patrol from Uppsala Police, who had cordoned off the area. No visitors were allowed inside the blue and white plastic tape, no priests, no church wardens. Two patrol cars had come from Arlanda and another two from Stockholm and he had positioned one at each corner of the concrete wall that surrounded the prison. He now had four police officers from Aspsås district, and as many again each from Uppsala, Arlanda and Stockholm, and when thetwelve remaining members of the national task force arrived shortly, a total of thirty-seven police officers would be in place to watch, protect, attack.
    John Edvardson was tense. He stood in the churchyard looking at the grey wall and felt the unease that had been there from the start, gnawing at him, irritating him, yet he couldn’t put a finger on it, there was something … something that wasn’t right.
    Hoffmann.
    The man over there who had threatened to kill again, it didn’t fit.
    In the past decade, Edvardson guessed there had been two, maybe three hostage takings a year in Swedish prisons. And each time the national task force was called in, with the same predictable scenario. An inmate had somehow managed to get hold of moonshine somewhere in the prison and had got steaming drunk, and then come to the conclusion that he had been wronged and treated unfairly, by the female prison staff in particular and, with the grandiosity that so often accompanies intoxication, had acted on impulse, become potent, dangerous and had taken hostage some poor twenty-nine-year-old female warden who was only working there for the summer, rusty screwdriver to her throat. The alarm had been raised and two dozen specially trained police marksmen had been called out and then it was just a matter of time – the amount of time it took for the alcohol to leave his system and for it to gradually dawn on the hungover prisoner where the balance of power actually lay – before he gave himself up with hands above his head, and as a result was given a further six years and more stringent terms for leave.
    But Hoffmann didn’t fit that pattern.
    According to the wardens he had locked up in two separate cells, he was not under the influence, his actions were planned, each step seemed to have been analysed, he was not acting on impulse, but with purpose.
    John Edvardson turned up the volume on his radio when he gave out instructions for the twelve members of the task force who had just arrived: four outside the door into the workshop in Block B to set up microphones, five to scale the walls of the building to get up onto the roof with more listening equipment, and three to reinforce those already out in the stairwell.
    He was closing in on the workshop and he had sealed off the churchyard.
    He had done everything that he could and should for the moment.
    The next step was up to the hostage taker.
    __________
    The heavy steel door into the third floor of the police headquarters was open. Ewert Grens ran his card through the card-reader, punched in a four-digit code and waited while the wrought-iron gate slid open. He went into the small space and over to the box with a number on it, opening it with his key and taking out the gun that he seldom used. The magazine was full and he pushed it into place: ammunition with a slightly pitted jacket, which was compensated for with something that looked like transparent glass, the kind of bullet that tore things to shreds. He then hurried back to Homicide, slowed down as he passed Sven Sundkvist’s office,
we’ve got a job, Sven, and I want to see you and Hermansson in the garage in fifteen minutes and I want to know what we’ve got in our database for 721018-0010
, then rushed on. Sven may have answered something, but in that case he didn’t hear.
     
    __________
    There was something up on the roof.
     
    Scraping noises, shuffling