Three Seconds

recruited, he had promised himself that he would never put anyone he loved in danger. This was the only time. It would never happen again. It had almost happened once before, a few years ago, when there had been an unexpected knock on the door and Zofia had asked the two visitors in for coffee. She had been charming and pleased and had no idea of who she was serving: the Deputy CEO and the number four. They were just checking out in more detail someone who was on his way up. Hoffmann had explained to her later that they were two of his clients and she believed him, as she always did.
    Two more minutes.
    He leant over to the back and kissed their surprisingly cool foreheads, said that he had to leave them on their own for a very short while, that they had to promise to sit still like big boys.
    He locked the car door and went in through the entrance to Hökens Gata 1.
    Erik had gone in through the door to Götgatan 15 twenty minutes earlier and was watching him now from a window on the second floor, as he always did when Paula crossed the communal gardens.
    Meeting place number four at fourteen hundred hours.
    An empty flat, a beautiful central flat that was being renovated for the next few months, one of six meeting places. Two flights up, the door with LINDSTRÖM on the letter box. He nodded at Erik and handed him the plastic bag that had been lying in one of the locked gun cabinets and contained a shirt with blood stains and gunshot residue, the one that Mariusz had been wearing twenty-four hours earlier, then he hurried back down to the children.
    __________
    The steps from the SAS plane down to the runway at Copenhagen airport were made of aluminium and too shallow to take one step at a time yet too high when he tried to take two. Ewert Grens looked at his fellow passengers, who were having the same problem. Ungainly movements down towards a small bus that was waiting to drive them to the terminal building. Grens waited by the last step for a white car with blue strips and the word POLICE written on it, with a young uniformed man behind the wheel, similar to the Swedish officer who had dropped him off near the departures hall at Arlanda just under an hour ago. The young man hurried out, opened the door to the back seat and saluted the Swedish detective superintendent. A salute. It had been a while. Just as he had done for his bosses in the seventies. No one seemed to do that any more, now that he was a boss, which he was happy about. Found all that submissive waving hard to stomach.
     
    There was already someone else in the back.
    A man in his forties in civilian clothes, similar to Sven, the sort of policeman who looks nice.
    ‘Jacob Andersen.’
    Grens smiled.
    ‘You said that your office looked out over Langebro.’
    ‘Welcome to Copenhagen.’
    After driving four hundred metres, the car stopped by a door which was roughly in the middle of the terminal building. They went into the airport police station. Ewert Grens had been there several times before, so he made his way to the meeting room at the back, where there was coffee and Danish pastries on the table.
    They picked you up by car. Booked a meeting room in the local station. Served you coffee and cake.
    Grens looked at his Danish colleagues who were sorting out plastic cups and sugar.
    It felt good, as if the strange stand-offishness, the silent opposition to working together had evaporated.
    Jacob Andersen wiped his fingers on his trousers after eating a sticky pastry and then put an A4 photograph down in the middle of the table. A colour copy, enlarged several times. Grens studied the picture. A man somewhere between thirty and forty, crew cut, fair, coarse features.
    ‘Carsten.’
    In the autopsy room, Ludvig Errfors had described a man ofnorthern European appearance with internal surgical and dental work that would indicate that he had probably grown up in Sweden.
    ‘We have a different system here. Male code names for male informers, female code names for female informers. Why make it more confusing than necessary?’
    I saw you on the floor; you had three gaping holes in your head.
    ‘Carsten. Or Jens Christian Toft.’
    I saw you later on Errfors’ autopsy table, your face stripped of skin
.
    ‘Danish citizen, but born and raised in Sweden. Convicted of aggravated assault, perjury and extortion and had served two years in D Block at Vestre Prison in Copenhagen when he was recruited by us. In much the same way that you do. Sometimes we even