Three Seconds

the reception wasn’t any better. He concentrated, listened, he had to
– had to
– understand every word.
    ‘And if you hit him?’
    ‘He’ll die.’
    That was enough.
    Piet Hoffmann crossed the room to the small office with a desk at the back. He pulled open the top drawer and picked up the razor that was lying in an otherwise empty compartment between the pens and paperclips, then a pair of scissors from the pencil case. He carried on to the storeroom, to the warden called Jacobson who was still sitting against the wall. Hoffmann checked the plastic packing band round his wrists and ankles, then with one tug he pulled down the curtain from the window and, picking up the rug from the floor, he went back into the workshop and the other hostage.
    The little plastic pockets of nitroglycerine were still attached to his skin. The pentyl fuse was tightly wound round his body. Hoffmann met his pleading eyes as he threw the rug over him and secured it with the curtain.
    He pushed the barrel of diesel by the workbench over and positioned it by the hostage’s legs.
    He groped under the rug, found the detonator and taped it to one end of the pentyl fuse.
    Then he went back to the window, looked up at the church tower, and at the gun that was pointing at him.

They were standing by one of the tall windows on the second floor of the Government Offices. They had just opened the thin glass window wide and were drinking in the fresh, cool air. They were ready. Forty-five minutes earlier they had informed the gold commander on site at Aspsås church that he would shortly have the military marksman he had requested. He was already on his way.
     
    What was irresolvable was now resolvable.
    Everything was in place for a decision to be made based on the available documentation.
    A decision that was Ewert Grens’s alone, that he would shortly make on his own and for which he would be solely responsible.

He had never been in a church tower before. Not as far as he could remember. Maybe as a child, on some school trip traipsing behind an ambitious class teacher. Strange, really – all these years of training and he had never fired from such an obvious place: a church that was the highest point here as in many other places. He leant back against the wall and looked at the heavy cast iron bell. He was sitting in there alone, resting as he should do, as a marksman always does before firing, a moment of peace in his own world while the observer stayed with the gun.
     
    He had arrived at the church an hour earlier. In five hours time he would be back in Kungsängen, he would have left his temporary post with the police and have been re-employed by the army. On his way here he had assumed it was a matter of shooting at an inanimate target. But that was not the case. In a few minutes he was going to do something he had never done before. Aim and fire a loaded gun at a person.
    A real person.
    The kind that breathes, and thinks and will be missed by someone.
    ‘Object in view.’
    He wasn’t afraid of firing the shot, of his ability to hit the target.
    But he was afraid of the consequences, the internal ones, which you can never prepare for, like what death does to the person who kills.
    ‘I repeat. Object in view.’
    The observer’s voice was urgent. Sterner went out into the light wind, lay down, held the weapon steady in his hands, waited. The shadow in the window. He looked at the observer – he felt the same thing, had made the same observation: neither of them were convinced that the man standing down there in profile didn’t realise that it
was
in fact possible to hit him at this distance.
    ‘Preparing to fire.’
    The heavy detective superintendent with the aggressive manner and a stiff leg that looked like it hurt more than he wanted to show, was standing directly behind him.
    ‘If Hoffmann doesn’t withdraw his threat, I’m going to order you to shoot. His time runs out in thirteen minutes. Are you ready?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And the ammo?’
    Sterner didn’t turn round, he stayed lying on his stomach the whole time, facing the prison, his eye focused on the telescopic sight and a window on the top of Block B.
    ‘
With the correct information
, I would have loaded and used the undercalibrated ammunition that is leaving Kungsängen in a helicopter this very moment and that won’t get here in time. With this … if I’m going to penetrate reinforced glass to hit the target … it’ll work. But I repeat … it