Three Seconds

delay them flowering.
    The next time they opened it would be at room temperature on a governor’s desk.
    When he wanted them to.
    __________
    Piet Hoffmann stood in his large office looking out of the window at the people and cars on Kungsbron and Vasagatan, as was his wont. He had filled fifty tulips with a total of one hundred and eighty-five grams of 30 per cent amphetamine, without even thinking about the fact that the whitish-yellow powder had stolen years of his life and there had been a time when every waking hour was used to steal enough to get more for the next day. The rehab centre, the fear, the prison sentence, the drug had been all-consuming and everything else meaningless until the morning she was suddenly standing in front of him. He had never injected since. She had forced him to hold onto her hand hard, as only people who trust each other can.
     
    __________
    The cigar case was lying on the desk. The digital recorder beside it.
     
    The document— I’ve read it. I assumed … I assumed that it concerned a … woman?
    A recorder small enough to be transported in your anus.
    Now it was voices on the computer.
    That’s my name, in here.
    He copied the whole recording onto two separate CDs and put one in a brown and one in a white A4 envelope. He took down four passports from the top shelf in the gun cabinet, put three of them in the brown envelope and the fourth in the white envelope. Finally, he got out two small transmitters and two earpieces and put one in each envelope.
    ‘It’s me.’
    He had dialled the only number stored on the mobile phone.
    ‘Hello.’
    ‘Västmannagatan. Your colleague’s name, I’ve forgotten it. The guy who’s investigating.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Erik, I’ve only got thirty-five hours left.’
    ‘Grens.’
    ‘His whole name.’
    ‘Ewert Grens.’
    ‘Who is he?’
    ‘I don’t like the sound of this. What are you up to?’
    ‘
For Christ’s sake, Erik. Who?
’
    ‘One of the older ones.’
    ‘Good?’
    ‘Yes, he’s good. And that makes me uneasy.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘He’s … he’s the sort that doesn’t give up.’
    Piet Hoffmann wrote the name on the front of the brown envelope in big, clear letters, then the address underneath in smaller letters. He checked the contents. A CD, three passports, one earpiece.
    The sort who doesn’t give up
.
    __________
    Erik Wilson enjoyed the last of the sun as it sank slowly into Lake Vättern. A moment of peace after Piet’s strange phone call about Ewert Grens a short while ago, and before a meeting that would make an infiltrator even more dangerous. He had sensed the change hour by hour in recent days, how Piet retreated more and more. The last conversation he had had was with someone who could only be called Paula. He knew that it was necessary and even what he preached, but it still shocked him every time someone he liked became someone else.
     
    He had walked the short distance from Jönköping station to the Swedish Court Administration offices on several occasions in recent years, and if he cut down along Järnvägsgatan and Västra Storgatan, he could be at the heavy entrance door in just five minutes.
    He was there to manipulate the system.
    And he was good at it, at recruiting people, regardless of whether it was someone serving a sentence who could be used to infiltrate other criminal networks or a civil servant who could be used to add or delete a line or two here and there in a database. He was good at making them feel important, getting them to believe that they were helping society, as well as themselves, good at smiling when necessary and laughing when necessary and ingratiating himself with the infiltrator and informer so that they liked him more than he would ever like them.
    ‘Hi.’
    ‘Thank you so much for staying late.’
    She smiled, a woman in her fifties whom he had recruited several years ago in connection with a case in Göta Court of Appeal. They had met in the courtroom every day for a week, and over dinner one evening had agreed that her position gave her authority to make changes in the databases that might be of assistance to the Swedish police in their ongoing work to map organised crime.
    They walked up the steps of the imposing court building together and she waved over to the security guard
I’ve got a visitor
, then they continued to Administration on the first floor. She sat down at her computer and he pulled over a chair from the neighbouring empty desk and