Three Seconds

problems with his balance: it had been an almighty blast, the sort that could burst your eardrums.
    You’re alive
.
    That was why he had been sitting at his desk for three hours looking at a hole growing on the bookshelf.
    I didn’t make a decision about death.
    That was why he had to determine if what he had just seen was something he should be concerned about or whether it was of no significance if no one else knew.
    Hoffmann is alive. You didn’t make a decision about death either.
    He laughed again while he took a document out of the desk drawer – summons to the court proceedings for the issue of arrest warrants that he was about to attend and that would lead all the way to a conviction and long sentences for three high-ranking officers who had abused their power.
    He laughed even louder, danced across the floor of the silent office, after a while quietly humming something that anyone passing just then might have recognised as a melody that perhaps sounded like a song from the sixties, like ‘Somebody’s Fool’ and Siw Malmkvist.

and yet another day later
     

It was as if the sky was slowly closing in.
     
    Erik Wilson stood in the asphalt yard, his thin clothes itching as nervous flies searched among the pearls of sweat. Ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit, just above body temperature and it would be even hotter in a couple of hours, in the early afternoon – the heat seemed to settle around that time of day.
    He wiped his forehead with an already moist handkerchief and wasn’t sure whether his skin or the material benefited most. It had been hard to concentrate in the lecture hall, the air conditioning in the building had broken down in the morning and the discussion about the follow-up course
advanced infiltration
had petered out. Even the heads of police from the west of the USA who normally liked to listen to their own voices were listless.
    He watched, as he usually did, through the fence and barbed wire that overlooked the large practice ground – six black figures trying to protect a seventh, shots fired from two low buildings and two of them threw themselves over the protected object and the car raced forwards and then off. Erik Wilson smiled. He knew how it would end, this president would also survive and the baddies who fired from the buildings would be unsuccessful. The Secret Service won every time, the same exercise as three weeks ago, different police officers, but the same exercise.
    He turned his face up to the cloudless sky, as if to torment himself, the sun would wake him up.
    At first he had blamed the heat. But it wasn’t that.
    He just wasn’t there.
    He hadn’t been present at all in the last few days – he had taken part in the discussions and exercises, but he wasn’t in the room, his thoughts and energy drained from his body.
    Four days had passed since Sven Sundkvist had asked him to drive seventy kilometres to the state line and Jacksonville for lunch in a restaurant that had room for laptops with security camera images on itswhite tablecloths. He had seen Paula’s face in a prison window and then an explosion and black smoke when the shot fired by a sniper had ripped apart a human being.
    They had worked together for nearly nine years.
    Paula had been his responsibility. And his friend.
    He was nearly at the hotel, fleeing the heat on his cheeks and forehead. The spacious lobby was cool, jostling with people who were delaying going out. He headed for the lift and the eleventh floor, the same room as before.
    He got undressed and had a cold shower and lay down on top of the bed in his dressing gown.
    They burnt you.
    They whispered and then looked the other way.
    He got up, the restlessness had returned, the lack of focus. He flicked through the day’s edition of
USA Today
, yesterday’s
New York Times
, drowned himself in TV adverts for washing powder and local lawyers. He wasn’t there, no matter how hard he tried. He wandered around the room, stopping after a while in front of the mobile telephones he had already checked in the morning, his link to all the informants: five handsets side by side on the desk since the evening he arrived. It was usually enough to check once a day, but the restlessness and the feeling of being absent … he checked again.
    Lifted them up, studied them, one by one.
    Until he held the fifth phone in his hand, he sat down on the edge of the bed, shaking.
    __________
    One missed call.
     
    On a mobile phone that he should have disposed of