Three Seconds

times through the night and Paula had sounded more and more tense each time, a voice with an unfamiliar edge, stressed and desperate, on the verge of fleeing.
    He had heard familiar sounds from the great FLETC training grounds for a while now, so it must be past seven o’clock, early afternoon in Sweden – they would be done soon.
    He propped himself up, a pillow behind his back. From his bed he could look out through the window at the day that had long since dawned. The hard asphalt yard where the Secret Service had protected and saved a president yesterday was empty, but the silence after a pretend gunshot still reverberated. A few hundred metres away, in the next practice ground, a number of bright-eyed Border Patrol officers in military-like uniforms were running towards a white and green helicopter that had landed near them. Erik Wilson counted eight men clambering on board, who then disappeared into the sky.
    He got out of bed and had a cold shower, which nearly helped. The night became clearer, his dialogue with fear.
    I want you to get out.
    You know that I can’t.
    You risk ten to fourteen years.
    If I don’t complete this, Erik, if I back out now, if I don’t give a damn good explanation … I risk more than that. My life.
    In each conversation and in many different ways, Erik Wilson had tried to explain that the delivery and sale could not be completedwithout his backing. He got nowhere, not with a buyer and the seller and mules already in place in Stockholm.
    It was too late to call it off.
    He had time for a quick breakfast: blueberry pancakes, bacon, that light, white bread. A cup of coffee and the
New York Times
. He always sat at the same table in a quiet corner of the dining room as he preferred to keep the morning to himself.
    He’d never had anyone like Paula before, someone who was as sharp, alert, cool; he was working with five people at the moment and Paula was better than all the others put together, too good to be a criminal.
    Another cup of black coffee, then he had to rush back to the room: he was late.
    Outside the open window, the green and white helicopter whirred high above the ground and three Border Patrol uniforms were hanging from a cable below, about a metre apart, as they shimmied down into pretend dangerous territory near the Mexican border. Yet another practice, always a practice here. Erik Wilson had been at the military base on the east coast of the USA for a week now; two weeks left of this training session for European policemen on informers, infiltration and witness protection programmes.
    He closed the window as the cleaners didn’t like them being open – something about the new air conditioning in the officers’ accommodation, that it would stop working if everyone aired their rooms whenever they pleased. He changed his shirt, looking at the tall and fairish middle-aged man in the mirror who should by now have been making his way towards a day indoors in a classroom with his fellow students and policemen from four American states.
    He stood still. Three minutes past eight. They should be done now.
    Paula’s mobile phone was the extreme right of the five on the desk and just like all the others only had one number stored.
    Erik Wilson didn’t even have time to ask.
    ‘
It’s a total fucking mess.
’

Sven Sundkvist had never learnt to like the long, dark and, at times, damp corridors of the homicide unit. He had worked with Stockholm City Police all his adult life, and from his office at one end of the unit, not far from the pigeonholes and vending machines, had investigated every category of crime in the penal code. This morning, as he made his way through the dark and damp, he stopped suddenly as he passed the open door to his boss’s office.
     
    ‘Ewert?’
    A large, rather bulky man was crawling along one of the walls.
    Sven knocked gingerly on the doorframe.
    ‘Ewert?’
    Ewert Grens didn’t hear him. He continued to crawl in front of a couple of large, brown cardboard boxes and Sven repressed that sinking feeling. He had once before seen the obstreperous detective superintendent sit on another floor in the police headquarters. Eighteen months ago. Grens had sat on the floor in the basement with a pile of papers from an old case in his lap and slowly repeated two sentences over and over.
She’s dead. I killed her
. A twenty-seven-year-old preliminary investigation into an assault on a constable, a young policewoman who had been seriously injured