Three Seconds

trouser pocket, with the cigar case and plastic tube from the chemist. He pushed in a button on the front, it flashed green. The battery was fully charged. He held it in front of his mouth and whispered:
Government Offices, Tuesday the tenth of May
and was careful not to turn it off as he slipped it into the cigar case which he would cover in lubricant until it glistened.
    Paper towels around the base of the toilet. The microphone lead slipped through the small hole in the top of the cigar case.
    He had done this many times before; fifty grams of amphetamine or a digital recorder, a prison or the Government Offices, the only way to safely transport something that you didn’t want to be found.
    He undid his trousers and sat down, the cigar case between his thumb and forefinger. He leant forwards and pushed it slowly up his anus, short thrusts until he felt it slip in a few centimetres, only then to slide out again and land on the paper towels.
    Another attempt.
    He pushed again, short thrusts, centimetre by centimetre, until it disappeared.
    The microphone lead was long enough for him to pull it from his anus, along his crotch to his groin, where he fixed it to his skin with a small piece of tape.
    __________
    The security guard behind the glass window was wearing a grey and red uniform, an older man with almost white hair and a shy smile. Piet Hoffmann stared at him for a bit too long, then looked away when he realised it.
     
    He reminded him of his father. He would have looked just like that.
    ‘Your colleague has already gone in.’
    ‘Toilet, had to go.’
    ‘Sometimes you just have to. State secretary for the Ministry of Justice, is that right?’
    Piet Hoffmann nodded and wrote his name in the visitors’ book just under Erik Wilson, while the white-haired man checked his ID.
    ‘Hoffmann, is that German?’
    ‘From Königsberg. Kaliningrad. But a long time ago. My parents.’
    ‘What do you speak then? Russian?’
    ‘When you’re born in Sweden, you speak Swedish.’
    He smiled at the man who for a moment could have been his father.
    ‘And a fair bit of Polish.’
    He had spotted the camera as soon as they had arrived, right at the top of the glass box; he looked straight at it as he passed, stopped for a couple of seconds, his visit registered yet again.
    It took seven minutes to walk behind a third security guard from the entrance and along a corridor on the second floor. It came over him so suddenly. He wasn’t prepared. The fear. He was standing in the lift when it hit him, felled him, made him shake. He had never felt fear like it before, fear that spilled over into panic, and then angst, and when he still couldn’t breathe, death.
    He was frightened of a man lying on the floor with three gaping wounds in his head and a breakthrough in a conference room in Warsaw and nights in a small cell and a death sentence that would become even more critical inside those walls, and Zofia’s cold voice and the children’s feverish skin and of no longer being able to tell the difference between the truth and lies.
    He sat down on the floor of the lift, exhausted, and avoided the guard’s eyes until his legs stopped shaking so much and he dared to walk gingerly to the door that was standing half open at the end of a rather nice corridor.
    One more time.
    Piet Hoffmann stopped a couple of metres from the door, emptied himself as he always did of all thoughts, all feelings, pushed them aside and kicked them down and then he had put on his armour – that thick, horrible layer, his bloody shield, he was good at it, at not letting himself feel anything – one more time, one more bloody time.
    He knocked on the door frame and waited until the feet that he heard scraping the floor stood in front of him. A policeman in civvies. He recognised him. They had met on two occasions. Erik’s boss; the one called Göransson.
    ‘Do you have anything that should be left out here?’
    Piet Hoffmann emptied his inner pocket and trouser pockets of two mobile phones, a stiletto, folding scissors and put it all in an empty glass fruit bowl on the table opposite the door.
    ‘Hold out your arms and spread your legs.’
    Hoffmann nodded and turned his back to the man who was tall and thin with an ingratiating smile.
    ‘Apologies. You know that we have to do this.’
    The long, slim fingers felt over his clothes, against his neck, back, chest. When they pressed against his backside and balls, they touched the thin microphone