Three Seconds

with the mobile phone in his hand. His conversation with a distressed voice from central security had been clear: they had been given a countdown and every minute, every second meant less time to make a decision. He straightened the ladder, opened the hatch and crawled out on to the balcony. Ewert was there with the new marksman and his observer. Sven told them all loudly that there wasn’t time any more to discuss things that had already been discussed.
     
    Ewert looked at him, his eyes alert, the vein on his temple pulsing.
    ‘How long ago?’
    ‘One minute and twenty seconds.’
    Ewert Grens had been expecting it, but he thought that it might take longer, that he would have more time. He sighed; so that’s how it was, that’s how it always was, there was never enough time. He held on to the railing and looked out over the small town, over the prison. Two worlds only metres apart, but two separate, unique worlds with their own rules and expectations, that had absolutely bugger all to do with each other.
    ‘Sven?’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Who is he?’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘The prison warden?’
    The man in the window over there, behind the reinforced glass, he knew, Hoffmann knew exactly how it fucking worked and he had decided that it would start now, that we will act because of an elderly guard. And he’s right. It’s the grey-haired prison warden we care about. If … if it had only been a drug dealer with a long sentence, well, it wasn’t easy to say, to imagine, we might not have made such an effort.
    ‘Sven?’
    ‘Just a moment.’
    Sven Sundkvist looked through his notebook, tightly written pages in biro, not used by many these days.
    ‘Martin Jacobson. Sixty-four. Has worked at Aspsås since he was twenty-four. Married. Grown-up children. Lives in the town. Liked, respected, no threat.’
    Grens gave a distracted nod.
    ‘Do you need more?’
    ‘Not right now.’
    The anger. His inner engine, the driving force, without it he would be nothing. Now it took hold of him, shook him hard. No way, no bloody way was that naked, bound man with a miniature gun to his eye, who had worked for forty years for peanuts with people who hated him, going to die on a foul-smelling workshop floor one year before retiring, no bloody way.
    ‘Sterner?’
    The military marksman was lying by the railing a bit further along the balcony, holding up the binoculars.
    ‘You’re a police officer now.
You are a police officer now
. For five-and-a-half hours more. And I have been assigned as gold commander here. So I am your boss. And that means that from now on you must do exactly as I order you to do. And I am,
now listen carefully
, not particularly interested in arguments about soft targets and international law. Do you understand?’
    They looked at each other – he didn’t get an answer, but he hadn’t expected one either.
    The big window.
    A naked, sixty-four-year-old man.
    He remembered another person, another hostage, nearly twenty years ago now, but he could still feel the choking rage. Some children in care, lethal and criminal, had planned to escape, so they decided they needed a hostage and had assaulted a retired woman who was doing some extra work in the kitchen. Cheap screwdriver to her throat, they chose the weakest member of staff and she had later died, not while she was being held hostage but as a result of it – they had somehow stolen her life from her and she didn’t know how to take it back.
    This was just as bloody cowardly, just as premeditated, the oldest member of staff, the weakest in the group.
    ‘I want to take him out of action.’
    ‘What do you mean.’
    ‘Injure him.’
    ‘I can’t.’
    ‘Can’t? I just explained—’
    ‘I can’t, as I would have to shoot at his torso. And from here … the target’s too small. If I was to shoot at one of his arms, say, first of all there is a risk that I would miss, and second, if I did hit one arm, other parts of his body would also be shot to bits.’
    Sterner handed the gun to Grens.
    The black, almost skinny weapon was heavier than he had imagined, he guessed about fifteen kilos, the hard edges pressing against his palm.
    ‘That sniper gun … the force of impact would destroy a human body.’
    ‘And if you hit him?’
    ‘He’ll die.’
    __________
    The earpiece had almost fallen out a couple of times so he kept his finger on it, like before, every word was crucial.
     
    ‘Injure him.’
    Something crackled, a disturbance. He changed ears –