Three Seconds

exact point beyond which they can’t go.
    This was his.
    ‘Or as
someone
has asked
you
?’
    __________
    ‘Get up.’
     
    Piet Hoffmann was standing between the two naked bodies. He had bent down towards one of them and spoken close to the tired, old eyes until they had finally understood and started to get up. The prison warden who was called Jacobson grimaced with pain as he straightened his knees and back and started to walk in the direction pointed out by the hostage taker – past the three solid concrete pillars and in behind a wall near the door, a separate part that seemed to be some kind of store: unopened cardboard boxes stacked up one on the other with sticky labels from tool and machine part suppliers. He was to sit down – Hoffmann pushed him to the floor in irritation when he didn’t move fast enough – he was to lean back and stretch out his legs, so that itwould be easier to tie his feet together. The older man tried to reach out to him in desperation several times, asking why and how and when, but got no answer, then watched Piet Hoffmann’s silent back until it disappeared somewhere behind a drill and a workbench.
    __________
    That bloody banging. Ewert Grens shook his head. It seemed to follow a pattern. The nutters banged on their cell doors for two minutes, then waited for one, then banged for two more. So he walked over to the security office, with Edvardson directly behind him, and made sure he closed the door properly. The two small monitors side by side on a desk showed the same picture, all black, a camera turned to the workshop wall. He reached over for the coffee pot which was cold and had a brown, heavy fluid at the bottom. He turned it almost upside down and waited while brown fluid trickled slowly into one of the already used mugs, offered it to John Edvardson, but had it all to himself. He drank and swallowed – it wasn’t particularly nice, but strong enough.
     
    ‘Hello.’
    He had just about emptied the white plastic mug when the telephone in front of him started to ring.
    ‘Detective Superintendent Grens?’
    He looked around. All these bloody cameras. Central security had seen him go into the security office and connected the call.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Can you hear who it is?’
    Grens recognised the voice. The bureaucrat who sat a couple of floors up from him in the police headquarters at Kronoberg.
    ‘I know who you are.’
    ‘Can you talk? There’s something making an almighty din there.’
    ‘I can talk.’
    He heard the national police commissioner clear his throat.
    ‘Has the situation changed at all?’
    ‘No. We want to act. We should be able to. But right now we haven’t got the right people. And time is running out.’
    ‘You asked for a military marksman.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘That’s why I’m calling. Your request is now on my desk.’
    ‘Just a moment.’
    Grens waved at Edvardson, he wanted him to check the door, make sure that it was closed properly.
    ‘Hello?’
    ‘I think I have a solution.’
    The national police commissioner was quiet, waiting for a reaction from Grens, but then carried on when the void was filled with the noise from the corridor.
    ‘I’ve just signed a contract. I have employed an instructor and military marksman, who was recently discharged, as an assistant commissioner for six hours. He’s been serving with the Svea Life Guards at Kungsängen. The position will initially entail supporting Aspsås police district. He has just left Kungsängen in a helicopter and will land at Aspsås church in ten, max fifteen minutes. When his contract ends, in exactly five hours and fifty-six minutes, he will be collected and taken back to Kungsängen in the same helicopter and will then apply for the newly vacant position for an instructor and military marksman which has not yet been advertised.’
    __________
    He heard it when it was no more than a small spot in the cloudless sky. He ran over to the window and watched it grow as the noise got louder and then land, blue and white, on the tall grass in the field between the prison wall and the churchyard. Piet Hoffmann looked at the two people waiting high up on the church tower balcony, then at the helicopter and the police officers running towards it. He listened to the people moving around on the roof above his head and the ones just outside the door and he nodded to no one in particular. Now, now everything was in place. He checked that the nameless prisoner’s hands and legs were