Three Seconds

alarm?’
    ‘That was me.’
    Correct answer again.
    Wilson had
twelve
passed through the County Communication Centre
thirty-seven
when he left Kronoberg and had checked
fifty
the recording.
    ‘I listened to it. You were in a state. You had reason to be. But we’ll sort this out. I’ll start working on it as soon as we’ve said goodbye, in a while.’
    __________
    Ewert Grens was tired of waiting. It was twenty minutes since their last conversation. How long did it take to verify a dead man’s dental impressions and fingerprints? Jacob Andersen from Copenhagen had talked about an informer. Grens sighed. The national police authority’s future vision: private individuals as covert human intelligence, muchcheaper than detectives, and the police could get rid of an informer if necessary, burn them without any responsibility or militant unions. A future that was not his – he would have retired by then – when police work would be interchangeable with criminals who grassed on their own.
     
    Twenty-four minutes. He phoned up himself.
    ‘Andersen.’
    ‘You’re taking your bloody time.’
    ‘Ah, it’s you, Ewert Grens.’
    ‘Well?’
    ‘It’s him.’
    ‘You sure?’
    ‘The fingerprints were enough.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘We called him Carsten. One of my best infiltrators.’
    ‘Not the bloody code name.’
    ‘You know how it works, as his handler, I can’t—’
    ‘I’m leading a murder investigation. I’m not interested in your hush-hush secrecy. I want a name, a personal identity number, an address.’
    ‘You won’t get it.’
    ‘Civil status. Shoe size. Sexual orientation. Underpants size. I want to know what he was doing at the murder scene. Who he was working for. Everything.’
    ‘You won’t get it. He was one of several infiltrators involved in this operation. So you can’t get any information whatsoever.’
    Ewert Grens slammed the receiver down on the desk before shouting into it: ‘So … let’s see … first of all, the Danish police are operating on Swedish territory without informing the Swedish police! And when the shit hits the fan and the operation ends in a murder, the Danish police still don’t give the Swedish police any information, even though they are trying to solve the murder. Andersen, how does that sound?’
    The telephone receiver slammed down onto the desk again, harder this time. He wasn’t shouting any more, it was more like a hiss.
    ‘I know that you’ve got a job to do, Andersen, and that’s why you’re behaving the way you are. But I have too. And if I haven’t solved this in … say twenty-four hours, then we’re going to have a meeting, no matter what you think, and you and I are going to exchange information until there is nothing left to tell.’
    __________
    Piet Hoffmann felt lighter.
     
    He had answered the Deputy CEO’s questions about the incident at Västmannagatan correctly and so avoided a trip to the edge of town and two bullets in the head. And he had just answered Erik’s questions correctly, the only person who could confirm his true mission and who was now working to avert a trial and sentence.
    The meeting with the Roof in Warsaw, their financial guarantee for the work involved in taking over the closed market in Sweden, this was what they had been waiting for.
    ‘Four thousand captive, big time consumers. Prices three times higher than outside the walls. Eight, maybe nine million kronor per day. If everyone pays, that is.’
    Hoffmann pulled a piece of plastic off the kitchen table.
    ‘But that’s not the plan.’
    Erik Wilson listened and leant back. This moment made it all worth it. Three hellish years constructing a person and role that was dangerous enough to penetrate an organisation that they otherwise couldn’t get near. Paula’s information was worth the work of forty detectives – he knew more about this mob than the Swedish police.
    ‘The plan is to control the outside as well.’
    This moment was what motivated him to put up with the exposure, the constant threat.
    ‘There are people who can pay for their drugs from their cell, who have plenty of money.’
    The moment when an organisation was about to expand, take power, become something else.
    ‘And there are others who can’t pay, but we keep selling to them and they keep consuming and when they’ve served their sentence, they’re released with a couple of T-shirts, three hundred kronor and a ticket home. Wojtek’s boys. That’s how we’ll recruit new