Three Seconds

Sunday

An hour to midnight.

It was late spring, but darker than he thought it would be. Probably because of the water down below, almost black, a membrane covering what seemed to be bottomless.

He didn't like boats, or perhaps it was the sea he couldn't fathom. He always shivered when the wind blew as it did now and Świnoujcie slowly disappeared. He would stand with his hands gripped tightly round the handrail until the houses were no longer houses, just small squares that disintegrated into the darkness that grew around him.

He was twenty-nine years old and frightened.

He heard people moving around behind him, on their way somewhere, too; just one night and a few hours' sleep, then they would wake in another country.

He leaned forward and closed his eyes. Each journey seemed to be worse than the last, his mind and heart as aware of the risk as his body; shaking hands, sweating brow, and burning cheeks, despite the fact that he was actually freezing in the cutting, bitter wind. Two days. In two days he'd be standing here again, on his way back, and he would already have forgotten that he'd sworn never to do it again.

He let go of the railing and opened the door that swapped the cold for warmth and led onto one of the main staircases where unknown faces moved toward their cabins.

He didn't want to sleep, he couldn't sleep-not yet.

There wasn't much of a bar. M/S Wawel was one of the biggest ferries between northern Poland and southern Sweden, but all the same; tables with crumbs on them, and chairs with such flimsy backs that it was obvious you weren't supposed to sit there for long.

He was still sweating. Staring straight ahead, his hands chased the sandwich around the plate and lunged for the glass of beer, trying not to let his fear show. A couple of swigs of beer, some cheese-he still felt sick and hoped that the new tastes would overwhelm the others: the big, fatty piece of pork he'd been forced to eat until his stomach was soft and ready, then the yellow stuff concealed in brown rubber. They counted each time he swallowed, two hundred times, until the rubber balls had shredded his throat.

"Czy poda panu cos jeszcze?"

The young waitress looked at him. He shook his head, not tonight, nothing more.

His burning cheeks were now numb. He looked at the pale face in the mirror beside the till as he nudged the untouched sandwich and full glass of beer as far down the bar as he could. He pointed at them until the waitress understood and moved them to the dirty dishes shelf.

"Postawk ci piwo?" A man his own age, slightly drunk, the kind who just wants to talk to someone, doesn't matter who, to avoid being alone. He kept staring straight ahead at the white face in the mirror, didn't even turn around. It was hard to know for sure who was asking and why. Someone sitting nearby pretending to be drunk, who offered him a drink, might also be someone who knew the reason for his journey. He put twenty euros down on the silver plate with the bill and left the deserted room with its empty tables and meaningless music.

He wanted to scream with thirst and his tongue searched for some saliva to ease the dryness. He didn't dare drink anything, too frightened of being sick, of not being able to keep down everything that he'd swallowed.

He had to do it, keep it all down, or else-he knew the way things worked-he was a dead man.

He listened to the birds, as he often did in the late afternoon when the warm air that came from somewhere in the Atlantic retreated reluctantly in advance of another cool spring evening. It was the time of day he liked best, when he had finished what he had to do and was anything but tired and so had a good few hours before he would have to lie down on the narrow hotel bed and try to sleep in the room that was still only filled with loneliness.

Erik Wilson felt the chill brush his face, and for a brief moment closed his eyes against the strong floodlights that drenched everything in a glare that was too white. He tilted his head back and peered warily up at the great knots of sharp barbed wire that made the high fence even higher, and had to fight the bizarre feeling that they were toppling toward him.

From a few hundred meters away, the sound of a group of people moving across the vast floodlit area of hard asphalt.

A line of men dressed in black, six across, with a seventh behind. An equally black vehicle shadowed them.

Wilson followed each step with interest.

Transport of a protected object. Transport across an open space.

Suddenly another sound cut through. Gunfire. Someone firing rapid single shots at the people on foot. Erik Wilson stood completely still and watched as the two people in black closest to the protected person threw themselves over said person and pushed them to the ground, and the four others turned toward the line of fire.

They did the same as Wilson, identified the weapon by sound. A Kalashnikov.

From an alleyway between two low buildings about forty, maybe fifty meters away.

The birds that had been singing a moment ago were silent; even the warm wind that would soon become cool, was still.

Erik Wilson could see every movement through the fence, hear every arrested silence. The men in black returned the fire and the vehicle accelerated sharply, then stopped right by the protected person in the line of fire that continued at regular intervals from the low buildings. A couple of seconds later, no more, the protected body had been bundled into the back seat of the vehicle through an open door and disappeared into the dark.

"Good."

The voice came from above.

"That's us done for this evening."

The loudspeakers were positioned just below the huge floodlights. The president had survived this evening, once again. Wilson stretched, listened. The birds had returned. A strange place. It was the third time he had visited the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, or the FLETC, as it was called. It was as far south in the state of Georgia as it was possible to go; a military base owned by the American state, a training ground for American police organizations-the DEA, ATF, U.S. Marshals, Border Patrol, and the people who had just saved the nation once more: the Secret Service. He was sure of it as he studied the floodlit asphalt: it was their vehicle, their people and they often practiced here at this time of day.

He carried on walking along the fence, which was the boundary to another reality. It was easy to breathe-he'd always liked the weather here, so much lighter, so much warmer than the run-up to a Stockholm summer, which never came.

It looked like any other hotel. He walked through the lobby toward the expensive, tired restaurant, but then changed his mind and carried on over to the elevators. He made his way up to the eleventh floor which for some days or weeks or months was the shared home of all course participants.

His room was too warm and stuffy. He opened the window that looked out over the vast practice ground, peered into the blinding light for a while, then turned on the TV and flicked through the channels that were all showing the same program. It would stay on until he went to bed, the only thing that made a hotel room feel alive.

He was restless.

The tension in his body spread from his stomach to his legs to his feet, forcing him up off the bed. He stretched and walked over to the desk and the five mobile phones that lay there neatly in a row on the shiny surface, only centimeters apart. Five identical handsets between the lamp with the slightly overlarge lampshade and the dark leather blotting pad.

He lifted them up one by one and read the display screen. The first four: no calls, no messages.

The fifth-he saw it before he even picked it up.

Eight missed calls.

All from the same number.

That was how he'd set it up. Only calls from one number to this phone. And only calls to one number from this phone.

Two unregistered, pay-as-you-go cards that only phoned each other, should anyone decide to investigate, should anyone find their phones. No names, just two phones that received and made calls to and from two unknown users, somewhere, who couldn't be traced.

He looked at the other four that were still on the desk. All with the same setup: they all were used to call one unknown number and they were all called from one unknown number.

Eight missed calls.

Erik Wilson gripped the phone that was Paula's.

He calculated in his head. It was past midnight in Sweden. He rang the number.

Paula's voice.

"We have to meet. At number five. In exactly one hour."

Number five.

Vulcanusgatan 15 and Sankt Eriksplan 17.

"We can't."

"We have to."

"Can't do it. I'm abroad."

Deep breath. Very close. And yet hundreds of miles away.

"Then we've got a bastard of a problem, Erik. We've got a major delivery coming in twelve hours."

"Abort."

"Too late. Fifteen Polish mules on their way in."

Erik Wilson sat down on the edge of the bed, in the same place as before, where the bedspread was crumpled.

A major deal.

Paula had penetrated deep into the organization, deeper than he'd ever heard of before.

"Get out. Now."

"You know its not that easy. You know that I've got to do it. Or I'll get two bullets to the head."

"I repeat, get out. You won't get any backup from me. Listen to me, get out, for Christ's sake!"

The silence when someone hangs up mid-conversation is always deeply unnerving. Wilson had never liked that electronic void. Someone else deciding that the call was over.

He went over to the window again, searching in the bright light that seemed to make the practice ground shrink, nearly drown in white.

The voice had been strained, almost frightened.

Erik Wilson still had the mobile phone in his hand. He looked at it, at the silence.

Paula was going to go it alone.

Monday

He had stopped the car halfway across the bridge to Lidingö.

The sun had finally broken through the blackness a few minutes after three, pushing and bullying and chasing off the dark, which wouldn't dare return now until late in the evening. Ewert Grens rolled down the window and looked out at the water, breathing in the chill air as the sun rose into dawn and the cursed night retreated and left him in peace.

He drove on to the other side and across the sleeping island to a house that was idyllically perched on a cliff with a view of the boats that passed by below. He stopped in the empty parking lot, removed his radio from the charger, and attached a microphone to his lapel. He had always left it in the car when he came to visit her-no call was more important than their time together-but now, there was no conversation ro interrupt.

Ewert Grens had driven to the nursing home once a week for twenty-nine years and had not stopped since, even though someone else lived in her room now. He walked over to what had once been her window, where she used to sit watching the world outside, and where he sat beside her, trying to understand what she was looking for.

The only person he had ever trusted.

He missed her so much. The damned emptiness clung to him, he ran through the night and it gave chase, he couldn't get rid of it, he screamed at it, but it just carried on and on… he breathed it in, he had no idea how to fill such emptiness.

"Superintendent Grens."

Her voice came from the glass door that normally stood open when the weather was fine and all the wheelchairs were in place around the table on the terrace. Susann, the medical student who was now, according to the name badge on her white coat, already a junior doctor. She had once accompanied him and Anni on the boat trip around the archipelago and had warned him against hoping too much.

"Hello."

"You here again."

"Yes."

He hadn't seen her for a long time, since Anni was alive.

"Why do you do it?"

He glanced up at the empty window.

"What are you talking about?"

"Why do you do this to yourself?"

The room was dark. Whoever lived there now was still asleep. "I don't understand."

"I've seen you OUT here twelve Tuesdays in a row now."

"Is there a law against it?"

"Same day, same time as before."

Ewert Grens didn't answer.

"When she was alive."

Susann took a step down.

"You're not doing yourself any favors."

Her voice got louder.

"Living with grief is one thing. But you can't regulate it. You're not living with grief, you're living for it. You're holding on to it, hiding behind it. Don't you understand, Superintendent Grens? What you're frightened of has already happened."

He looked at the dark window, the sun reflecting an older man who didn't know what to say.

"You have to let go. You have to move on. Without the routine." "I miss her so much."

Susann went back up the steps, grabbed the handle of the terrace door and was about to shut it when she stopped halfway, and shouted: "I never want to see you here again."

It was a beautiful flat on the fourth floor of vastmannagatan 79. Three spacious rooms in an old building, high-ceilinged, polished wooden floors, and full of light, with windows that faced out over Vanadisvagen as well.

Piet Hoffmann was in the kitchen. He opened the fridge and took out yet another carton of milk.

He looked at the man crouching on the floor with his face over a red plastic bowl. Some little shit from Warsaw: petty thief, junkie, spots, bad teeth, clothes he'd been wearing for too long. He kicked him in the side with the hard toe of his shoe and the evil-smelling prick toppled over and finally threw up. White milk and small bits of brown rubber on his trousers and the shiny kitchen floor, some kind of marble.

He had to drink more. Napij sir kurwa. And he had to throw up more.

Piet Hoffmann kicked him again, but not so hard this time. The brown rubber around each capsule was to protect his stomach from the ten grams of amphetamine and he didn't want to risk even a single gram ending up somewhere it shouldn't. The fetid man at his feet was one of fifteen prepped mules who in the course of the night and morning had carried in two thousand grams each from winoujcie, onboard M/S Wawel, then by train from Ystad, without knowing about the fourteen others who had also entered the country and were now being emptied at various places in Stockholm,

For a long time he had tried to talk calmly-he preferred it-but now he screamed pij do cholery as he kicked the little shit, he had to damn well drink more from the bloody milk carton and he was going to fucking pij do cholery throw up enough capsules for the buyer to check and quality-assure the product.

The thin man was crying.

He had bits of puke on his trousers and shirt and his spotty face was as white as the floor he was lying on.

Piet Hoffmann didn't kick him anymore. He had counted the dark objects swimming around in the milk and he didn't need anymore for the moment. He fished up the brown rubber: twenty almost-round balls. He pulled on some kitchen gloves and rinsed them under the tap, then picked off the rubber until he had twenty small capsules which he put on a porcelain plate that he had taken from the kitchen cupboard.

"There's more milk And there's more pizza. You stay here. Eat, drink and throw up. We want the rest."

The sitting room was warm, stuffy. The three men at the rectangular dark oak table were all sweating-too many clothes and too much adrenaline. He opened the door to the balcony and stood there for a moment while a cool breeze swept out all the bad air.

Piet Hoffmann spoke in Polish. The two men who had to understand what he was saying preferred it.

"He's still got eighteen hundred grams to go. Take care of it. And pay him when he's done. Four percent."

They were very similar, in their forties, dark suits that were expensive but looked cheap, shaved heads; when he stood close to them he could see an obvious halo of day-old brown hair Eyes that were devoid of joy, and neither man smiled very often. In fact, he'd never seen either of them laugh. They did what he said, disappeared into the kitchen to empty the mule who was lying there, throwing up. It was Hoffmann's shipment and none of them wanted to explain to Warsaw that a delivery had gone all wrong.

He turned to the third man at the table and spoke in Swedish for the first time. "Here are twenty capsules. Two hundred grams. That's enough for you to check it."

He was looking at someone who was tall, blond, in shape, and about the same age as he was, around thirty-five. Someone wearing black jeans, a white T-shirt and lots of silver around his fingers, wrists, and neck. Someone who'd served four years at Tidaholm for attempted murder, and twenty-seven months in Mariefred for two counts of assault. Everything fit. And yet there was something he couldn't put his finger on, like the buyer was wearing a costume, or was acting and not doing it well enough.

Piet Hoffmann watched him as he pulled a razor blade from the pocket of his black denim jacket and cut one of the capsules down the middle then leaned forward over the porcelain plate to smell the contents.

That feeling again. It was still there.

Maybe the guy sitting there, who was going to buy the lot, was just strung out. Or nervous. Or maybe that was precisely what had made Piet call Erik in the middle of the night, whatever it was that wasn't right, this intense feeling that he hadn't been able to express properly on the phone.

It smelled of flowers, tulips.

Hoffmann was sitting two chairs away but could still smell it clearly.

The buyer had chopped up the yellowish, hard mass into something that resembled powder, scooped some up on the razor blade and put it in an empty glass. He drew twenty milliliters of water into a syringe and then squirted it into the glass and onto the powder which dissolved into a clear but viscous fluid. He nodded, satisfied. It had dissolved quickly. It had turned into a clear fluid. It was amphetamine and it was as strong as the seller had promised.

"Tidaholm. Four years. That's right, isn't it?"

It had all looked professional, but it still didn't feel right.

Piet Hoffmann pulled the plate of capsules over in front of him, waiting for an answer.

"Ninety-seven to two thousand. Only in for three. Got out early for good behavior."

"Which section?" Hoffmann studied the buyer's face.

No twitching, no blinking, no other sign of nerves.

He spoke Swedish with a slight accent, maybe a neighboring country. Piet guessed Danish, possibly Norwegian. The buyer stood up suddenly, an irritated hand slightly too close to Piet's face. Everything still looked good, but it was too late. You noticed that sort of thing. He should have got pissed off much earlier, swiped that hand in front of his face right at the start: Don't you trust me, you bastard.

"You've seen the judgment already, haven't you?"

Now it was as if he was playing irritated.

"I repeat, which section?"

"C. Ninety-seven to ninety-nine."

"C. Where?"

He was already too late.

"What the fuck are you getting at?"

"Where?"

"Just C, the sections don't have numbers at Tidaholm."

He smiled.

Piet Hoffmann smiled back.

"Who else was there?"

"That'll fucking do, okay?"

The buyer was talking in a loud voice, so he would sound even more irritated, even more insulted.

Hoffmann could hear something else.

Something that sounded like uncertainty.

"Do you want to get on with business or not I was under the impression that you'd asked me here because you wanted to sell me something."

"Who else was there?"

"Skane. Mio. Josef Libanon. Virtanen. The Count. How many names do you want?"

"Who else?"

The buyer was still standing up, and he took a step toward Hoffmann. "I'm going to stop this right now."

He stood very close, the silver on his wrist and fingers flashing as he held his hand up in front of Piet Hoffmann's face.

"No more. That's enough. It's up to you whether we carry on with this or not."

"Josef Libanon was deported for life and then disappeared when he landed in Beirut three and a half months ago. Virtanen has been put away in a maximum security psychiatric unit for the past few years, unreachable and dribbling due to chronic psychosis. Mio is buried-"

The two men in expensive suits with shaved heads had heard the raised voices and opened the kitchen door.

Hoffmann waved his arm at them to indicate that they should stay put.

"Mio is buried in a sandpit near Alstaket in Varmdo, two holes in the back of his head."

There were now three people speaking a foreign language in the room. Piet Hoffmann caught the buyer looking around, looking for a way out.

"Josef Libanon, Virtanen, Mio. I'll carry on: Skane, totally pickled. He won't remember whether he did time in Tidaholm or Kumla, or even Hall for that matter. And as for the Count… the wardens in Harnosand remand cut him down from where he was hanging with one of the sheets around his neck. Your five names. You chose them well. As none of them can confirm that you did time there."

One of the men in dark suits, the one called Mariusz, stepped forward with a gun in his hand, a black Polish-made Radom, which looked new as he held it to the buyer's head. Piet Hoffmann utspokoj sir do diabla shouted at Mariusz; he shouted utspokoj sir do diabla several times, Mariusz had better utspokoj sir do diabla take it easy, no fucking guns to anyone's temple.

Thumb on the decocking lever, Mariusz pulled it back, laughed, and lowered the gun. Hoffmann carried on talking in Swedish.

"Do you know who Frank Stein is?"

Hoffmann studied the buyer. His eyes should be irritated, insulted, even furious by now

They were stressed and frightened and the silver-clad arm was trying to hide it.

"You know that I do."

"Good. Who is he?"

"C. Tidaholm. A sixth name. Satisfied?"

Piet Hoffmann picked his mobile phone up from the table.

"Then maybe you'd like to speak to him? Since you did time together?"

He held the telephone out in front of him, photographed the eyes that were watching him and then dialed a number that he'd learned by heart. They stared at each other in silence as he sent the picture and then dialed the number again.

The two men in suits, Mariusz and Jerzy, were agitated. Z drugiej strony. Mariusz was going to move, he should be on the other side, to the right of the buyer. Blizej glowy. He should get even closer, keep the gun up, hold it to his right temple.

"I apologize. My friends from Warsaw are a bit edgy."

Someone answered.

Piet Hoffmann spoke to whoever it was briefly, then showed the buyer the telephone display.

A picture of a man with long dark hair in a ponytail and a face that no longer looked as young as it was.

"Here. Frank Stein."

Hoffmann held his anxious eyes until he looked away.

'And you… you still claim that you know each other?"

He closed the mobile phone and put it down on the table.

"My two friends here don't speak Swedish. So I'm saying this to you, and you alone."

A quick glance over at the two men who had moved even closer and were still discussing which side they should stand on to aim the muzzle of the gun at the buyer's head.

"You and I have a problem. You're not who you say you are. I'll give you two minutes to explain to me who you actually are."

"I don't understand what you're talking about."

"Really? Don't talk crap. It's too late for that. Just tell me who the hell you are. And do it now Because unlike my friends here, I think that bodies only cause problems and they're no bloody good at paying up."

They paused. Waiting for each other. Waiting for someone to speak louder than the monotonous smacking sound coming from the dry mouth of the man holding his Radom against the thin skin of the buyer's temple.

"You've worked hard to come up with a credible background and you know that it crumbled just now when you underestimated who you were dealing with. This organization is built around officers from the Polish intelligence service and I can check out what the fuck I like about you. I could ask where you went to school, and you might answer what you've been told, but it would only take one phone call for me to find out whether it's true. I could ask what your mother's name is, if your dog has been vaccinated, what color your new coffee machine is. One single phone call and I'll know if it's true. I just did, made one phone call. And Frank Stein didn't know you. You never did time together at Tidaholm, because you were never there. Your sentence was faked so you could come here and pretend to buy freshly produced amphetamine. So I repeat, who are you? Explain. And then maybe, just maybe, I can persuade these two not to shoot."

Mariusz was holding the handgrip of the gun hard. The smacking noises were more and more frequent, louder. He hadn't understood what Hoffmann and the buyer were saying, but he knew that something was about to go down. He screamed in Polish, "What the fuck are you talking about? Who the fuck is he?" then cocked his gun.

"Okay."

The buyer felt the wall of immediate aggression, tense and unpredictable.

"I'm the police."

Mariusz and Jerzy didn't understand the language.

But a word like police doesn't need to be translated.

They started shouting again, mainly Jerzy, he roared that Mariusz should damn well pull the trigger, while Piet Hoffmann raised both his arms and moved a step closer.

"Back off!"

"He's the police!"

"I'm going to shoot!"

"Not now!"

Piet Hoffmann lurched toward them, but he wouldn't make it in time, and the man with the metal pressed against his head knew. He was shaking, his face contorted.

"I'm a police officer, for fuck's sake, get him off me!"

Jerzy lowered his voice and was b/ii4 almost calm when he instructed Mariusz to stand closer and to z drugiej strony swap sides again-it was better to shoot him through the other temple after all.

He was still lying in bed. It was one of those mornings when your body doesn't want to wake up and the world feels a long way off. Erik Wilson breathed in the humidity.

The south Georgia morning air that slipped in through the open window was still cool, but it would soon get warmer, even warmer than yesterday. He tried to follow the fan blades that played on the ceiling above his head, but gave up when he got tears in his eyes. He'd only slept for an hour at a time. They had talked together four 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 meters away, in the next practice ground, a number of bright-eyed Border Patrol officers in military-like uniforms were running toward 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 completed without 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 so 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 meter 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 United States for a week now; two weeks left of this training session for European policemen on informers, infiltration, and witness protection programs.

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 toward 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 learned 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 and would never again be able to live outside a nursing home. When he read the report later, Sven Sundkvist had come across her name in several places. Anni Grens. He had had no idea that they were married.

"Ewert, what on earth are you doing?"

He was packing something into the large brown cardboard boxes. That much was plain to see. But not what. Sven Sundkvist knocked again. The room was completely silent, and yet Ewert Grens still didn't hear him.

It had been a difficult period.

Like all others who grieve, Ewert's first reaction had been denial-it hasn't happened-and then anger-why have they done this to me? But he hadn't moved on to the next phase, he just carried on being angry, his way of dealing with most things. Ewert's grieving process had probably not started until very recently, a few weeks ago-he was no longer as irascible, but more reserved, more pensive, he talked less and presumably thought more.

Sven went into the room. Ewert heard him, but didn't turn around, sighing loudly instead as he often did when he was irritated. Something was bothering him. It wasn't Sven, something had been bothering him since he had gone to the nursing home, which usually gave him peace. Susann, the medical student who had been there for so long and looked after Anni so well and who had now become a junior doctor, her comments, her disgust, you can't regulate your grief; well it was bloody easy enough for a little girl to run around Udine, spreading her twenty-five-year-old wisdom, what you're frightened of has already happened. What the hell did she know about loneliness?

He had driven away from the nursing home faster than he'd intended, straight to the police headquarters, and, without knowing why, gone down to the stores to get three cardboard boxes and carried them to the office that he'd had for as long as he could remember. He had stood for a while in front of the shelf behind his desk and the only things that meant anything to him: the cassettes of Siw Malmkvist songs that he had recorded and mixed himself, the early record sleeves from the sixties that still had strong colors, the photograph of Siwan that he had taken one evening in Kristianstads Folkets Park; everything that belonged to a time when all was good.

He had started to pack it all away, wrapped in newspaper, and then stacked one box on top of the next.

"She doesn't exist anymore."

Ewert Grens sat on the floor and stared at the brown cardboard. "Do you hear me, Sven? She will never sing in this room again." Denial, anger, grief.

Sven Sundkvist was standing directly behind his boss, looking down at his balding pate and seeing images from all the times he had waited while Ewert slowly rocked back and forth alone in his room in the dismal light-early mornings and late evenings and Siw Malmkvist's voice, standing dancing with someone who wasn't there, holding her tight in his arms. Sven realized that he would miss the irritating music, the lyrics that had been forced on him until he knew them by heart, an intrinsic part of all the years he had worked with Ewert Grens.

He would miss the picture.

He should laugh, really, because finally they were gone.

Ewert had gone through his adult life with a crutch under each arm. Anni. Siw Malmkvist. And now, finally, he was going to walk alone. Which was presumably why he was crawling around on the floor.

Sven sat down on the tired sofa and watched him lift up the last box and put it on top of the two others in a corner of the room, then laboriously and carefully tape it up. Ewert Grens was sweating and determined. He pushed the boxes until they were exactly where he wanted them and Sven wanted to ask how he felt, but didn't, it would be wrong, mostly out of consideration to himself, because the very fact that Ewert was doing what he was doing was answer enough in itself. He was moving on, though not yet aware of it himself.

"What have you done?"

She hadn't knocked.

She had walked straight into the room and stopped abruptly in the absence of music, in front of the gaping hole on the shelf behind the desk. "Ewert? What have you done?"

Mariana Hermansson looked at Sven who first nodded at the gap on the shelf and then at the pile of three cardboard boxes. Never before had she been to his room without hearing music, the now removed Siw Malmkvist. She didn't recognize it without her voice.

"Ewert…"

"You want something?"

"I want to know what you've done."

"She no longer exists."

Hermansson went over to the empty shelf, ran a finger along the dusty lines left by the cassettes, the cassette player, speakers, and a black and white photo of the singer that had stood there all these years.

She wiped off a dust ball, hid it in her hand.

"She doesn't exist?"

"No."

"Who?

"Her."

"Who? Anni? Or Siw Malmkvist?"

Ewert finally turned around and looked at her.

"Did you want something, Hermansson?"

He was still sitting on the floor, leaning against the boxes and wall. He had been grieving for nearly a year and a half now, lurching between a breakdown and madness. It had been an awful time, and she had told him to go to hell more than once and just as many times apologized afterward. On a couple of occasions she had almost given up, resigned and walked away from this difficult man's bitterness that seemed to have no end. She had gradually come to believe that one day he would capitulate, go to pieces completely, lie down and never get up again. But his face now, in the midst of all the suffering, had something purposeful about it, a determination that had not been there before.

Some cardboard boxes, a gaping hole on a bookshelf, things like that could spark unexpected relief.

"Yes, I did want something. We've just had a call-out. Västmannagatan 79."

He was listening, she knew that, he was listening to her in that intense way that she had nearly forgotten.

"An execution."

Piet Hoffmann looked out of one of the beautiful apartment's big windows. It was a different flat in a different part of the center of Stockholm, but they were similar, three carefully renovated rooms, high ceilings and light-colored walls. Only there was no prospective buyer lying on the wooden floor here, with a gaping hole in one temple and two in the other.

Down on the wide pavement, groups of well-dressed people were making their way, full of anticipation, into a matinee performance at the large theater; breathless and slightly hammy actors going in and out of doors onto the stage, proclaiming their lines.

Sometimes he longed for that kind of life, just everyday, normal people doing normal things together.

He left the dressed-up, excited people and the window with a view of both Vasagatan and Kungsbron, and crossed the largest room in the flat, his room, his office with its antique desk and two locked gun cabinets and an open fire that was very effective. He heard the last mule spewing up in the kitchen-she had been at it for a long time now. She wasn't used to it: it took a couple of trips before you were. Jerzy and Mariusz were standing by the sink with yellow rubber gloves on, picking out the bits of brown rubber that the young woman threw up, along with the milk and something else, in the two buckets on the floor in front of her. She was the fifteenth and final mule. They had emptied the first one in Västmannagatan, and had been forced to empty the rest here. Piet Hoffmann didn't like it. This flat was his protection, his cover, he didn't want it to be linked with either drugs or Poles. But they didn't have time. Everything had gone wrong. A person had been shot through the head. He studied Mariusz; the man with the shaved head and expensive suit had killed someone only a couple of hours ago, but showed nothing. Maybe he couldn't, maybe he was being professional. Hoffmann wasn't frightened of him, and he wasn't frightened of Jerzy, but he respected the fact that they had no limits; if he had made them nervous, suspicious of his loyalty, the shot that had been fired could just as easily have been aimed at him.

Anger chased frustration chased dread and he struggled to stand still with all the turmoil inside him.

He had been there and he hadn't been able to prevent it.

To prevent it would have meant death for him.

So another person had died instead.

The young woman in front of him was done. He didn't know her, they had never met. He knew that she was called Irina and she came from Gdansk, that she was twenty-two and a student and was prepared to take a risk that was far greater than she imagined and that was enough. She was a perfect mule. Just the sort they were looking for. Of course there were others, junkies from the suburbs of larger cities who flocked in their thousands, willing to use their bodies as containers for less than she was paid, but they had learned not to use drug addicts as they were unreliable and often seemed to throw up by themselves long before they reached their destination.

Inside, the anger and frustration and dread, more emotions, more thoughts.

There hadn't been any operation. But there had been a delivery over which he had no control.

There hadn't been any results. The Poles should have been back in Warsaw by now, his tool for mapping and identifying another partner.

There hadn't been any deal. They had shipped in fifteen mules unnecessarily, ten experienced ones who they supplied with two hundred capsules each and five new ones who took one hundred and fifty capsules each, in total more than twenty-seven kilos of freshly produced amphetamine which, once it had been cut for sale, would come to eighty-one kilos with a street value of one hundred and fifty kronor per gram.

But without any backup, there was no operation, no result, not even a deal.

It was an unchecked delivery that had ended in murder.

Piet Hoffmann gave the young, wan woman called Irina a brief nod. The money had been in his trouser pocket since the morning, counted and rolled up in bundles. He pulled out the last bundle and flicked through the banknotes so she could see it was all there. She was one of the new ones and didn't yet have the capacity that the organization expected. She had only delivered fifteen hundred grams on her first trip, which would be three times as much when cut to its sellable form, worth a total of 675,000 kronor.

"Your four percent. Twenty-seven thousand kronor. But I've rounded it up to three thousand euros. And if you dare to swallow more next time, you'll earn more. Your stomach stretches a little each time."

She was pretty. Even when her face was pale and her hairline sweaty. Even when she had been on her knees in a three-room flat in Sweden, puking up her guts for a couple of hours.

"And my tickets."

Piet Hoffmann nodded to Jerzy, who took out two tickets from the inner pocket of his dark jacket. One for the train from Stockholm to Ystad and one for the ferry from Ystad to winoujcie. He held them out to her, and she was just about to take them when he pulled back his hand and smiled. He waited a bit then held them out again, and just when she was about to take them, he pulled back his hand, again.

"For fuck's sake, she's earned them!"

Hoffmann snatched the tickets from him and gave them to her. "We'll be in touch. When we need your help again."

The anger, the frustration, the dread.

They were finally alone in the flat that functioned as an office for one of Stockholm's security firms.

"This was my operation."

Piet Hoffmann took a step closer to the man who had shot and killed a person that morning.

"I am the one who speaks the language and I am the one who gives the orders in this country."

It was more than anger. It was rage. He had contained it since the shooting. First they had to take care of the mules, empty them, secure the delivery. Now he could release it.

"If anyone is going to shoot, it's on my order and only my order."

He wasn't sure where it was coming from, why it was so intense. Whether it was disappointment that a business partner had not materialized. Whether it was frustration because a person who probably had the same brief as he did had been killed without reason.

"And the gun, where the fuck is it?"

Mariusz pointed at his chest, to the inner pocket of his jacket.

"You murdered someone. You can get life for that. And you're so fucking stupid that you've still got the gun in your pocket?"

Rage and something else tearing at him. You should have been reporting back to Poland. He blocked out the feeling that might equally be fear, took a step toward the man who was smiling, pointing at his inner pocket, and stopped when they were face to face. Play your role. That was all that mattered, power and respect, taking and never letting go. Play your role or die.

"He was a policeman."

"And how the fuck d'you know that?"

"He said so."

"And since when did you speak Swedish?"

Piet Hoffmann took measured breaths. He realized that he was irritated and tired as he walked over to the round kitchen table and the metal bowl that contained 2,749 regurgitated and cleaned capsules: a good twenty-seven kilos of pure amphetamine.

"He said police. I heard it. You heard it."

Hoffmann didn't turn around when he replied.

"You were at the same meeting as me in Warsaw. You know the rules. Until we're done here, it's me, and only me, who decides."

He had been uncomfortable during the short journey from Kronoberg to Vasastan. Or rather, he'd been sitting on something. When Hermansson swung into Västmannagatan and pulled up outside number 79, he lifted his heavy body a touch while he felt around on the seat with his hand. Two cassettes. Siw mixes. He held the hard plastic cases in his hand and looked at the music that should have been packed away, and then at the passenger seat and glove compartment. There were two more cassettes in there. He bent down and pushed them as far under the seat as possible. He was as scared of being near them as he was of forgetting to take them with him, the last four remnants of another life that would remain packed away in a cardboard box sealed with tape.

Ewen Grens preferred sitting here in the back.

He no longer had any music to play and he had no desire to listen to or answer the frequent calls on the radio. And anyway, Hermansson drove considerably better than both Sven and he did in the busy city traffic.

There wasn't much room on the street; three police cars and forensics' dark-blue Volkswagen bus double-parked alongside a tight row of residents' cars. Mariana Hermansson slowed down, drove up onto the pavement and stopped in front of the main door, which was guarded by two uniformed policemen. They were both young and pale and the one closest rushed over to the unknown men and a woman in a red car. Hermansson knew what he wanted and at precisely the same moment that he tapped on the window, she rolled it down and held up her police ID.

"We're investigators. All three of us."

She smiled at him. Not only did he look young, he was probably considerably younger than she was. She guessed he was in his first weeks of service, as there weren't many who didn't recognize Ewen Grens.

"Was it you who took the call?"

"Yes."

"Who raised the alarm?"

"Anonymous, according to the CCC."

"You mentioned an execution?"

"We said it looked like an execution. You'll understand when you get there."

Up on the fourth floor, the door farthest away from the elevator was open. Another uniformed colleague was standing watch. He was older, had been in the force longer; he recognized Sundkvist and gave him a nod. Two steps later Hermansson had her ID ready and was just about to show it, and she wondered if she would ever stay anywhere long enough to be recognized by more than her immediate colleagues-she didn't think so, she wasn't the sort who stayed.

They put on their white coats and transparent shoe covers and went in. Ewert had insisted on waiting for the elevator that was slow down and slow up, so he'd be there soon.

A long hallway, a bedroom with nothing in it but a narrow bed, a kitchen with nice cupboards painted in a shade of green, and a study with an abandoned desk and empty shelves.

And one more room.

They looked at each other, and went in.

The sitting room really only had one piece of furniture. A large, rectangular oak dining table with six matching chairs. Four of them were by the table, the fifth had been pushed back at an angle, as if the person sitting there had gotten up suddenly. The sixth was lying on the floor. The heavy chair had for some reason fallen and they went over to establish why.

The dark patch on the carpet was the first thing they saw.

A large, brownish stain with uneven edges. They guessed about forty, maybe fifty centimeters in diameter.

Then they saw the head.

It was in the middle of the stain, on top of it, as if it were floating. The man looked relatively young-it was hard to tell as his face was mangled, but his body was strong, and his clothes were not the sort that older men often wear: black boots, black jeans, a white T-shirt, lots of silver around his neck, wrists, and fingers.

Sven Sundkvist tried to concentrate on the gun in his right hand.

If he only looked at it for long enough, if he blanked everything else out, he might avoid the ugliness of death that he would never understand.

It was shiny and black, nine-millimeter caliber and a make that he didn't often see at crime scenes: Radom, a Polish weapon. He bent down closer to it, thereby distancing himself from the life that had spilled out onto the expensive carpet and left a large dark stain. It seemed that the ejector was stuck in the discharge position and he could clearly see the bullet casing in the chamber. He studied the barrel, the butt, the grip safety, looking for something to fix his eyes on, anything but death.

Nils Krantz was standing farther away, flanked by two younger colleagues. Three forensic technicians who together would scour every nook and cranny in the room. One of them had a video camera in his hand and was filming something on the white wallpaper. Sven took a step away from the head, and looked at what the camera was focused on: a small discolored parch of something, something harmless and sufficiently far away from the lifeless eyes.

"The victim has one entrance wound from one shot to the head."

Nils Krantz had sneaked up behind his filming colleague and was now close to Sven Sundkvist's ear.

"But two exit wounds."

Sven turned away from the wallpaper and discoloring and looked askance at the older forensic scientist.

"The entrance wound is larger than both exit wounds because of the contact gas pressure."

Sven heard what Krantz was saying, but he didn't understand and chose not to ask. He didn't need to know and instead followed the finger that was pointing at the discoloring on the wallpaper.

"By the way, what we're just filming and what you're looking at right now comes from the victim, brain tissue."

Sven Sundkvist took a deep breath. He had wanted to avoid death and had therefore chosen to focus on the discoloring on the wallpaper, but he had only found more death, as real as it ever could be. He lowered his eyes and heard Ewert come in to the room.

"Sven?"

"Yes?"

"Perhaps you should go down and talk to our colleagues who took the call? And maybe some neighbors? The people who aren't here."

Sven looked at his boss with gratitude, hurried away from the dark stains on the carpet and discoloring on the wallpaper, while Ewert Grens hunkered down to get closer to the dead body.

The balance of power had been redistributed and restored. But it would happen again. And he had to win every time.

Carry on acting. Or die.

He stood between Mariusz and Jerzy at Hoffmann Security's round kitchen table, emptying 2,750 capsules of amphetamine The latest delivery from the factory in Siedlce. Their white medical-gloved fingers first picked off the brown rubber that was there to protect the mule's stomach in case of any leaks, then cut open the capsule with a knife and poured the powder into large glass bowls where it was mixed with grape sugar. One part amphetamine from eastern Poland to two parts grape sugar from the supermarket on the corner. Twenty-seven kilos of pure drugs transformed into eighty-one kilos that could be sold on the street.

Piet Hoffmann put a metal tin on some kitchen scales and filled it with exactly one thousand grams of cut amphetamine. A piece of tin foil was placed carefully over the powder and then something that resembled a sugar lump was put on the foil. He held a match to the methaldehyde pellet and when the white square started to burn, he closed the lid of the tin. The flames would then die when the oxygen ran out and one kilo of amphetamine would be vacuum-packed.

He repeated this operation, one tin at a time, eighty-one times. "Benzine?"

Jerzy opened the bottle of petroleum ether, splashed some of the colorless fluid on the tin lids and sides and then rubbed the metal surfaces with cotton wool. He lit another match and a bluish flame flared that he then smothered with a rag after ten seconds.

All the fingerprints had now been removed.

The bloodstains were smallest on the hall carpet, slightly bigger on the wall at the other end of the spacious sitting room, even bigger by the table, and largest by the overturned chair. They also got darker and deeper the closer to the body they were, and the most visible was the large patch on the carpet in which the lifeless head was floating.

Ewert Grens was sitting so close that if the body on the floor had started to whisper he would hear it. This death didn't feel like anything, it didn't even have a name.

"The entrance wound, Ewert, here."

Nils Krantz had crept around on all fours, filmed and photographed. He was one of the few experts Grens actually trusted and had proved often enough that he wasn't the kind of person who would take shortcuts just so he could get home an hour earlier to watch TV.

"Someone held the gun hard to his head. The gas pressure between the muzzle and the temple must have been enormous. You can see for yourself. Half the side's been blown off."

The skin on his face was already gray, his eyes empty, his mouth a straight line that would never talk again.

"I don't understand. One entrance wound. But two exit wounds?" Krantz held his hand near the hole that was as large as a tennis ball in the middle of the right side of the head.

"I've only seen this a couple of times in thirty-odd years. But it happens.

And the autopsy will confirm it-that it's only one shot. I'm sure of it."

He tugged at the sleeve of Grens's white overalls, his voice eager.

"One shot to the temple. The bullet was jacketed, half lead and half titanium, and it split when it hit one of the skull bones."

Krantz got up and stretched his arm in the air. It was an old flat and the ceiling was about three meters high. A few hairline cracks, but otherwise in good shape, except for where the forensic technician was pointing: a deep gash in the whitewash.

"We took half the bullet down from there."

Small pieces of plaster had fallen where careful fingers had dug out the hard metal.

Some way off there was a considerably larger tear in some soft wood. "And that is from the other half. The kitchen door was obviously closed."

"I don't know, Nils."

Ewert Grens was still sitting by the head that had too many holes.

"The call-out said execution. But having looked… it could just as easily be suicide."

"Someone has tried to make it look like that."

"What do you mean?"

Krantz slid his foot closer to the hand that was holding a gun.

"That looks staged. I think that someone shot him and then put the gun in his hand."

He disappeared out into the hall and came back immediately with a black case in his hand.

"But I'll check it. I'll do a GSR test on the hand. Then we'll know." Ewert started to calculate, looked over at Hermansson; she was doing the same.

One hour and forty-five minutes since the alarm was raised, they still had plenty of time. The body hadn't yet started to attract enough foreign particles to make a residue test worthless.

Krantz opened his case and looked for a round tube of fingerprint lifting tape. He pressed the tape against the victim's hand several times, in particular the area between the index finger and thumb. Then he went out into the kitchen, to the microscope that had been set up on the worktop, put the fingerprint lifting tape on the glass plate, and studied it through the ocular.

A few seconds passed.

"No gunshot residue."

"As you thought."

"So the hand that was holding the gun didn't fire it."

He turned around.

"This is murder, Ewert."

He put his left hand to his right shoulder and pulled at the leather strap until the pressure on his shoulders was released and he could hold the holster with one hand. He opened it and pulled out a Radom with a nine-millimeter caliber. He did a recoil operation, put the last bullet in the magazine, so that fourteen were in place.

Piet Hoffmann stood still for a while, his breathing so loud he could hear himself.

He was alone in the room and the flat that looked out over Vasagatan and Kungsbron. The last mule had taken the train south a couple of hours ago, and Mariusz and Jerzy had just started their car and headed off in the same direction.

A long day, but it was still only the afternoon and he had to stay awake for hours yet.

The gun cabinets stood on the floor behind the desk. Two identical cabinets, a couple of meters high, about a meter wide, a smaller shelf on top and two rifles on a considerably larger shelf below. He put the gun on the top shelf in the first cabinet, and the full magazine in the same place in the second.

He walked through the rooms that had functioned as offices for Hoffmann Security AB for two years now. One of Wojtek Security International's many branches. He had visited most of them several times, and the ones farthest north in Helsinki, Copenhagen, and Oslo more often.

The fireplace with its dark tiles and white frame was beautiful, the sort that he knew Zofia wanted at home. He fished up a handful of small dry twigs from the bottom of the wood basket and lit them, then waited until the larger, thicker logs that he placed on top started to burn before taking his clothes off. The jacket, trousers, shirt, underpants, and socks were all eaten by the yellow flames. Next, a pile of Jerzy's and Mariusz's clothes. The flames were red and intense now, and he stood naked in front of the fire, enjoying the warmth until they died down sufficiently for him to close the bathroom door and shower away this awful day.

A person had had half his head blown off.

A person who probably had the same job as he had, but had a less solid background.

He turned on the shower and the hot water pummelled his skin, testing his pain threshold, but he knew if he persevered, his body would eventually go numb and be filled with a strange calm.

He'd been doing this for too long; he sometimes forgot who he was and it frightened him when his life as someone else encroached on his life as a husband and father, and day-to-day reality in a house in a neighborhood where people cur their grass and weeded their flowerbeds.

Hugo and Rasmus.

He had promised to pick them up just after four. He turned off the water and took a clean towel from the shelf by the mirror. It was nearly half past four. He hurried back into the office, checked that the fire had died down, opened the wardrobe and picked out a white shirt, a gray jacket, and worn jeans.

You have sixty seconds to leave and lock the fiat.

He jumped and realized that he would never get used to the electronic voice that spoke to him from the coded lock on the front door, as soon as he had punched in the correct six digits.

The alarm will be activated in fifty seconds.

He should contact Warsaw immediately, he should have done it already, but had waited on purpose, he wanted to know that the delivery was secure first.

The alarm will be activated in forty seconds.

He locked the front door of Hoffmann Security AB and closed the wrought-iron gate. A security firm. That was how the organization worked. That was how all branches of the Eastern European mafia worked. Piet Hoffmann remembered his visit to St. Petersburg a year ago, a city with eight hundred security firms, established by ex-KGB men and intelligence agents, different fronts for the same business.

He was halfway down the stairs when one of his two phones rang. The mobile phone that only one person knew about.

"Wait a minute."

He had parked the car just down Vasagatan. He opened the door and got in, then carried on the conversation without the risk of being overheard.

"Yes?"

"You need my help."

"I needed it yesterday."

"I've booked a return flight and will be back in Stockholm tomorrow. Meet you at number five at eleven. And I think you should make a trip yourself, before then. For the sake of your credibility."

The gaping holes in the dead man^'s head seemed even larger from a distance.

Ewert Grens had followed Nils Krantz into the kitchen, but turned around again after a while to look at the man who was lying by an overturned chair and had one entrance wound in his right temple and two exit wounds in his left. He had been investigating murders for as long as the man on the floor had been alive and had learned one truth-each death is unique, with its own story, its own sequence of events, its own consequences. Every time he was faced with something he had not seen before, and he knew even before he looked into the empty eyes that they were looking in a direction that he couldn't follow.

He wondered where this particular death had ended, what these eyes had seen and were looking toward.

"Do you want to know or not?"

Krantz had been squatting on the kitchen floor for a bit too long. "Otherwise I've got plenty else to be getting on with."

His hand was close to a crack in the marble floor. Ewert Grens nodded, I'm listening.

"That spot there, can you see it?"

Grens looked at something that was whitish with uneven edges.

"Bits of stomach lining. And it's definitely no more than twelve hours old. There are several similar spots in this area."

The forensic scientist drew a circle with his hand in the air around himself.

"All with the same content. Food remains and bile. But also something far more interesting. Bits of rubber."

When Grens looked closer, he could see the white spots with uneven edges in at least three places.

"The rubber is partly corroded, probably by stomach acids."

Krantz looked up.

"And traces of rubber in vomit, we know what that means."

Ewert Grens gave a loud sigh.

Rubber meant human containers. Human containers meant drugs. A dead man in connection with a delivery meant a drugs-related murder. And a drugs-related murder always meant investigation and lots of hours, lots of resources.

"A mule, a swallower who's delivered the goods right here in the kitchen."

He turned toward the sitting room.

'And him? What do we know about him?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Not yet. You have to have something to do, Grens."

Ewert Grens went back into the sitting room and over to the man who no longer existed, watched as two men took hold of the dead man's arms and legs, as they lifted him and put him into a black body bag, as they pulled up the zipper and put the body bag on a metal stretcher that they only just managed to push down the narrow hall.

He left Vasagatan and then got caught in a traffic jam by Suisun. It was nearly five o'clock and he should have been at the kindergarten an hour ago.

Piet Hoffmann sat in the car and desperately tried to fend off the stress and heat and irritation caused by the afternoon traffic, which he could do nothing about. Three lanes at a standstill as far down the tunnel as he could see. To combat this battle with the city, he often thought about the soft skin on Zofia's face when he stroked it, or Hugo's eyes when he managed to ride his bike on his own, or Rasmus's hair, splashed with carrot soup and orange juice, standing out in every direction. It didn't work. Who did you do time with? Images of the people he was thinking about merged every time into images of a deal in a flat in Västmannagatan that had ended in another man's death. Skåne. Mio, Josef Libanon, Virtanen. The Count. How many names do you want? Another infiltrator with the same mission as he had. Who else? But the other infiltrator who sat facing him just didn't act as well. Who else? He, if anyone, should know what a faked background looked like, how it was put together, and which questions were needed to make it collapse. They had both been working for the police in their respective ways and ended up in the same place. He didn't have any choice, otherwise they might both have died, and one was in fact enough, one who wasn't him.

He had seen people die before. It wasn't that. It was part of his daily life and his credibility required it; he had learned to shrug off dead people who weren't close to him. But he had been in charge of this operation. A murder, he risked life imprisonment.

Erik had phoned from the airport outside Jacksonville. Nine years as a secret civil servant on the unofficial payroll of the Swedish police had taught Piet Hoffmann that he was valuable. The authorities had magicked away offenses in both a private and professional capacity before, so Erik Wilson should be able to make this one vanish too. The police were good at that, a few secret intelligence reports on the right bosses' desks was usually enough.

The temperature had risen in the stationary car and Piet Hoffmann dried away the sweat from his shirt collar just as the blasted line started to move. He fixed his eyes on a number plate that was edging slowly forward a few meters ahead and forced his mind back to images of Hugo and Rasmus and his real life, and twenty minutes later got out of the car in the visitors' parking lot at Hagtornsgarden, in the midst of all the flats in Enskededalen.

By the front door he suddenly stopped with his hand in the air, a few centimeters from the handle. He listened to the voices of the noisy, boisterous children who were playing and smiled, lingering awhile in the best moment of the day. He went to open the door, but stopped again; something tight across his shoulders. He quickly felt under his jacket, heaved a sigh of relief-he had remembered to take off his holster.

He opened the door. It smelled of baking, a late snack for some of the children who were sitting around a table in the lunch room. The noise was coming from farther in, the big play room. He sat down on a low stool in the entrance, near the tiny shoes and colorful jackets on pegs marked with the children's names and hand-drawn elephants.

He nodded at one of the young women, a new member of staff. "Hi."

'Are you Hugo and Rasmus's dad?"

"How did you guess? I haven't-"

"Not many left."

She disappeared behind some shelves filled with well-used jigsaw puzzles and square wooden building blocks and reappeared almost immediately with two boys aged three and five who made his heart laugh.

"Hello, Daddy."

"Hello-lello, Daddy."

"Hello-lello-lello, Daddy."

"Hello-lello-lello-"

"Hello, you two. You both win. We haven't got time for anymore hellos today. Maybe tomorrow. Then there will be more time. Okay?"

He reached out for the red jacket and pulled it on to Rasmus's outstretched arms, then sat him on his lap to take his indoor shoes off the feet that wouldn't keep still, and put on his outdoor shoes. He leaned forward and glanced at his own shoes. Shit. He'd forgotten to put them in the fire. The black shininess might be a film of death, with traces of skin and blood and brain tissue-he had to burn them as soon as he got home.

He checked the child car seat that was strapped onto the passenger seat, facing backward. It felt as secure as it should and Rasmus was already picking at the pattern on the fabric as was his wont. Hugo's seat was more like a hard square that made him sit a bit higher and he fastened the seat belt tight before giving his soft cheek a quick kiss.

"Daddy's just going to make a quick phone call. Will you be quiet for a while? I promise to be finished before we drive under Nynäsvägen."

Capsules with amphetamine, child car seats secured, shoes shiny with the remains of death.

Right now he didn't want to see that they were different parts of the same working day.

He closed his phone the moment the car passed the busy main road. He had managed to make two quick calls, the first to a travel agent to book a ticket on the 6:55p.m. SAS flight to Warsaw, and the second to Henryk, his contact at the head office, to book a meeting there three hours later.

"I did it! I finished on this side of the road. Now I'm only going to talk to you."

"Were you talking to work?"

"Yes, the office."

Three years old. And he could already distinguish between the two languages and what Daddy used them for. He stroked Rasmus's hair and felt Hugo leaning forward to say something behind him.

"I can speak Polish too. Jeden, diva, trzy, cztery, pire, szege, siedem-"

He stopped, and then carried on in a slightly darker voice: "-eight, nine, ten."

"Very good. You know lots of numbers."

"I want to know more."

"Osiem, dziewire, dziewire."

"Osiem, dzieunre… dziewirc?"

"Now you know them."

"Now I know."

They drove past the Enskede flower shop and Piet Hoffmann stopped, reversed and got out.

"Wait here. I'll be back in a moment."

A couple of hundred meters farther on, a small red plastic fire engine was standing in front of the garage and he just managed to avoid it, but only by scraping the right-hand side of the car against the fence. He released the seat belts and child car seats and watched his children's feet run over the moss green grass. They both threw themselves down on to the ground and crawled through the low hedge into the neighbor's garden, where there were three children and two dogs. Piet Hoffmann laughed and felt a warmth in his belly and throat. Their energy and joy-sometimes things were just so simple.

He held the flowers in one hand as he opened the door to the house that they had left in such a rush-it had been one of those mornings when everything took a little bit longer. He would tidy away the breakfast dishes that were still on the table, and pick up the trail of clothes that spread through every room downstairs, but first he had to go down into the cellar and the boiler room.

It was May and the timer on the boiler would be turned off for a long time yet, so he started it manually by pressing the red button, then he opened the door and listened to it cranking into action and starting to burn. He bent down, undid his shoes and dropped them into the flames.

The three red roses would go on the middle of the kitchen table in the vase that he liked so much, the one they'd bought at the Kosta Boda glassworks one summer. Plates for Zofia, Hugo, and Rasmus in the places where they had sat every day since they left the flat the same summer. Half a kilo of defrosted ground beef from the top shelf in the fridge which he browned in the frying pan, salt and pepper, cream and two tins of chopped tomatoes. It was starting to smell good. He dipped a finger in the sauce, which tasted good too. A half-full pan of water and a bit of olive oil so that the pasta wouldn't boil over.

He went upstairs to the bedroom. The bed was still unmade and he buried his face in the pillow that smelled of her. His overnight bag was in the wardrobe, already packed: two passports; wallet with euros, zloty, and U.S. dollars; a shirt, socks, underwear, and a toilet bag. He picked it up and carried it down into the hall. The water had started to boil, half a bag of dry spaghetti into the bubbling water. He looked at the clock. Half past five. He didn't have much time, but he would make it.

It was still warm outside, the last of the sun would soon disappear behind the roof of the neighboring house. Piet Hoffmann went over to the hedge that would have to be pruned properly this summer. He saw two children he recognized on the other side and called to them that food was ready. He heard a taxi approaching down the narrow road. It pulled up and parked in the driveway by the garage. The red plastic fire engine survived once again.

"Hi."

"Hi."

They hugged each other, like they always did and every time he thought he would never let go.

"I can't eat with you. I have to go to Warsaw this evening. An emergency meeting. But I'll be home again tomorrow night. Okay?"

She shrugged.

"No, not really. I was looking forward to having the evening together. But Okay."

"I've made supper. It's on the table. I've told the boys food is ready so they're on their way. Or at least, they should be."

He kissed her quickly on the lips.

"One more. You know."

One more. Always an even number. His hand on her cheek, two more kisses.

"Now it's three. So one more."

He kissed her again. They smiled at each other. He picked up his bag and walked over to the car, looked back at the hedge and the hole at the bottom in the middle where the children would appear.

No sign of them. He wasn't surprised.

He smiled again and started the engine.

Ewert Grens looked at the mat that disappeared under the passenger seat and Sven Sundkvist. He had pushed the two cassettes in there. Two more were lurking in the glove compartment. He would take them with him sometime, pack them away, forget them.

The two young but slightly less pale uniformed police were still standing on the pavement between the hood of the car and the entrance to Västmannagatan 79. Hermansson had started to reverse when one of them came over and knocked on the window, and Sven rolled it down.

"What do you think?"

Ewert Grens leaned forward from the back seat.

"You were right. It was an execution."

It was late afternoon at Kronoberg, and finding a parking place on Bergsgatan wasn't easy. Hermansson drove round the tired police headquarters three times before parking on Kungsholmsgatan, by the entrance to Norma1m Police and the County Criminal Police, despite protests from Ewert Grens. Grens nodded vaguely at the security guard and walked in through the entrance he hadn't used for years; he had long since learned to appreciate routine and had stuck to his rigidly in order not to fall apart. One corridor and a narrow staircase and then they came out into the County Communication Center, the heart of the vast building. In a room the size of a small football field, a police officer or a staff employee sat at every second computer, watching the three small screens in front of them and the considerably larger ones that covered the walls from floor to ceiling, ready to deal with the four hundred or so emergency calls that came in every day.

Holding a cup of coffee each, they sat down next to a woman in her fifties, one of the civvies, and the sort of woman who put her hand on the arm of the person she was talking to.

"At what time?"

"Twelve thirty-seven, and a minute or so earlier."

The woman who still had her hand on Ewert's arm typed in 12:36:00, and then the silence that felt like eternity, as is often the case when several people sit together listening to nothing.

Twelve thirty-six twenty.

An automatic voice, the same one that was used in the rest of the police world, followed by the voice of a real woman who was crying as she reported a domestic at an address in Mariatorget.

Twenty thirty-seven ten.

A child screaming about a dad who'd fallen down the stairs and there was alot of blood coming from his cheek and hair.

Twelve thirty-seven fifty.

A scraping sound.

Obviously somewhere indoors. Possibly a mobile phone.

Unknown number on the screen.

"Pay-as-you-go card."

The female operator had removed her hand from Ewert Grens, so he didn't answer in order to avoid anymore physical contact. It was years since anyone had touched him and he didn't know how to relax anymore.

"Emergency services."

The scraping sound again. Then a buzzing interference. And a man's voice that was tense, stressed, but he spoke in a whisper that was trying to sound calm.

"A dead man. Vdstmannagatan 79."

Swedish. No accent. He said something more, but the buzzing sound made it difficult to hear the last sentence.

"I want to listen to it again."

The operator slid the cursor back along the time code that stretched across one of the computer screens like a black worm.

A dead man. Västmannagatan 79. Fourth floor."

That was it. The buzzing disappeared and the call was cut. The monotone electronic voice said twelve thirty-eight thirty and a distressed old man reported a robbery in a newsagent on Karlavagen. Ewert Grens thanked her for her help.

They walked together through the endless corridors of the police headquarters to the homicide unit. Sven Sundkvist slowed down to talk to his boss who limped more with each passing year, but refused to use a stick.

"The flat, Ewert. According to the owner, it was rented out a couple of years back to a Pole. I've asked Jens Klövje at Interpol to find him."

"A mule. A body. A Pole."

Ewert Grens stopped by the stairs that would take them up two stories. He looked at his colleagues.

"So, drugs, violence, Eastern Europe."

They looked at him, but he didn't say anymore and they didn't ask. They went their separate ways at the coffee machine, and with a cup in each hand he managed to open the door to his office. Out of habit he went to the bookshelf behind his desk, lifted his arm and then suddenly stopped. It was empty. Straight lines of dust, ugly squares of varying sizes: the cassette player had stood there, and all his cassettes, and there, two identical squares, the loudspeakers.

Ewert Grens ran his fingers through the traces of a lifetime.

The music he had packed away that belonged to another era would never again play in this room. He felt like he'd been tricked, tried to get used to a silence that had never existed here before.

He didn't like it. It was so damn loud.

He sat down on the chair. A mule, a body, a Pole. He had just seen a man with three big holes in his head. So, drugs, violence, Eastern Europe. He had worked for thirty-Five years in the city police force and seen crime rise steadily, get worse. In other words, organized crime. Not surprising that he sometimes chose to live in the past. That's to say, mafia. When he started out as a young policeman who had thought he could make a difference, the mafia had been something far away in southern Italy, in American cities. Today, executions like the one he had just seen, the brutality, it was all so dirty-colleagues in every district could only stand by and watch while money was laundered from all kinds of organized crime: drugs, gun running, trafficking. Every year, new players made a violent debut in police investigations, and in recent months he had been introduced to the Mexican and Egyptian mafias. This was another he had not come across before, the Polish mafia, but it had the same ingredients: drugs, money, death. They investigated a bit here and a bit there, but would never catch up; every day the police risked their lives and sanity and every day they lost a little more control.

Ewert Grens sat at his desk for a long time, looking at the brown cardboard boxes.

He missed the sound.

Of Siwan. Of Anni.

Of a time when everything was far simpler.

The arrivals hall at Frédéric Chopin airport in Warsaw was always overcrowded. The number of departures and arrivals had increased steadily in line with the airport's expansion and he had lost his luggage twice in the past year in a chaos of bewildered travelers and large forklift trucks that drove too fast and too dose.

Piet Hoffmann walked past the luggage carousel with his small overnight bag already in hand and went out into a city that was larger than Stockholm, which he had left two hours earlier. The dark leather in the taxi smelled of cigarettes and for a moment, as he looked out at the city that had changed beyond recognition, he was a child again, with his mom and dad on either side on the narrow back sear, on their way to visit Granny. He called Henryk at Wojtek and confirmed that the plane had landed and he would meet them at the time and place agreed. He was just about to hang up when Henryk told him that two other people would be there. Zbigniew Boruc and Grzegorz Krzynówek. deputy CEO and the Roof. Piet Hoffmann had visited Wojtek International's head office for meetings with Henryk every month for the past three years. Hoffmann had gradually won his trust and Henryk had been a helping hand from behind as Piet worked his way up the organization. Henryk was one of the many people who trusted him and who, without knowing it, was trusting a lie. The deputy CEO, however, Hoffmann had met only once before. He was a military man, and one of the many former secret police who had started and run the mother company from a forbidding building in the center of Warsaw. An army major with a straight back who still moved in the manner of an intelligence officer despite the applied veneer of a businessman-they were careful to call themselves that: businessmen. A meeting with the deputy CEO and the Roof, he didn't get it. He leaned back in the smoked leather car seat and felt something in his chest that might be fear.

The taxi sped through the light evening traffic, past the big parks, and as they approached the part of town called Mokoraw, elegant embassies appeared behind the dirty window. He tapped the driver on the shoulder and asked him to stop, he still had two phone calls to make.

"It'll cost you more."

"Just stop, please."

"It'll be twenty zloty more. The price you got was without stops." "Just stop the car, for Christ's sake!"

He had leaned forward and was talking straight into the driver's ear, his unshaven cheek looking shiny and soft as the car pulled off Jana Sobieskiego and parked between a newspaper stand and a pedestrian crossing on al. Wincentego Witosa. Piet Hoffmann stood in the evening chill and listened to Zofia's tired voice explaining that Hugo and Rasmus had both fallen asleep with their pillows beside her on the sofa and that they had to get up early tomorrow, one of the nursery's many outings to the Nacka reserve, something to do with a wood and spring theme.

"Piet?"

"Yes?"

"Thank you for the flowers."

"I love you."

He loved her so much. One night away, that was all he could bear. It was never like that before-before Zofia he hadn't felt the loneliness strangling him in unattractive hotel rooms, that it was pointless to breathe without having someone to love.

He didn't want to hang up and stood for a long time with the phone in his hand, looking at one of Mokotów's expensive houses and praying that her voice wouldn't vanish. Which it did. He switched mobile phones and made another call. It would soon be five in the afternoon on the east coast of the USA.

"Paula's meeting them in half an hour."

"Good. But it doesn't feel good."

"I'm in control."

"There's a risk that they'll demand that someone takes responsibility for the fiasco in Västmannagatan."

"It wasn't a fiasco."

"A person died!"

"That's not relevant here. What's important is that the delivery is safe. We can tough out the consequences of the shooting in a matter of minutes."

"That's what you say."

"You'll get a full report when I see you."

"Eleven hundred hours at number five."

He waved in irritation when the taxi driver hooted his horn. A couple of minutes more in the dark loneliness and cool air. He was sitting between Mom and Dad again, traveling from Stockholm and Sweden to a town called Bortoszyce, only a few miles from the Soviet border, in an area that is now called Kaliningrad. They had never called it that. They refused. For Mum and Dad it was always Konigsberg; Kaliningrad was the invention of madmen. He had caught the contempt in their voices, but as a child had never been able to understand why his parents had left the place they always yearned for.

The hooting driver swore loudly as they pulled out of al. Wincentego Witosa and drove past well manicured green areas and big business properties. Not many people around in this part of town. There seldom are in places where the price per square meter is adapted to supply and demand.

They had emigrated at the end of the sixties. He had often asked his father why but never got an answer, so he had nagged his mother and been given a few scraps about a boat, and that she was pregnant, and about some nights in the dark on the high sea when she was convinced they would die, and that they had gone ashore somewhere near a place called Simrishamn in Sweden.

Right onto ul. Ludwika Idzikowskiego, quarter of an hour to go.

In the past few years he had visited this country, which belonged to him, so many times. He could have been born here, grown up here and then he would have been very different, like the people in Bortoszyce who had tried to keep in touch for so long after his mother and father died, and who had eventually given up when he gave nothing back. Why had he done that? He didn't know. Nor did he know why he never got in touch when he was nearby, why he had never gone to visit.

"Sixty zloty. Forty for the journey and twenty for that bloody stop that we hadn't agreed on."

Hoffmann left a hundred-zloty note on the seat and got out of the car.

A big, dark, old building in the middle of Mokotów-as old as a building could be in Warsaw, which had been totally destroyed seventy years ago. Henryk was waiting for him on the steps outside. They shook hands but didn't say much; neither of them knew how to do small talk.

The meeting room was at the end of a corridor on the tenth floor. Far too light and far too warm. The deputy CEO and a man in his sixties, who he assumed was the Roof, were waiting at the end of the oblong table. Piet Hoffmann accepted their unnecessarily firm handshakes and then went to sit down on the chair that had already been pulled out. There was a bottle of water on the table in front of it.

He didn't shy away from their piercing eyes. If he had done that, chosen to retreat, it would be over already.

Zbigniew Boruc and Grzegorz Krzyneywek.

He still didn't know if they were sitting there because he was going to die. Or because he had just penetrated farther.

"Mr Krzynówek will just sit and listen. I assume that you haven't met before?"

Hoffmann nodded to the elegant suit.

"We haven't met, but I know who you are."

He smiled at the man whom he had seen over the years in Polish newspapers and on Polish television, a businessman whose name he had also heard whispered in the long corridors at Wojtek, which had emerged from precisely the same chaos as every other new organization in an Eastern European state; a wall had suddenly fallen and economic and criminal interests merged in a grab and scramble for capital. Organizations that were established by the military and police and that all had the same hierarchical structure, with the Roof on top. Grzegorz Krzynówek was Wojtek's Roof and he was perfect. A champion with a central position, extremely robust financially and unassailable in a society that required laws, a guarantee that combined finance and criminality, a facade for capital and violence.

"The delivery?"

The deputy CEO had studied him long enough.

"Yes."

"I assume that it's safe."

"It's safe."

"We'll check it."

"It will still be safe."

"Let's continue then."

That was all. That was yesterday.

Piet Hoffmann wasn't going to die this evening.

He wanted to laugh-as the tension vanished something else bubbled up and longed to escape, but there was more to come. No threats, no danger, but more ritual that required continued dignity.

"I don't appreciate the condition you left our flat in."

First he made sure that the delivery was safe. Then he asked about the dead man. The deputy CEO's voice was calmer, friendlier now that he was talking about something that wasn't as important.

"I don't want my people here to have to explain to the Polish police, on the request of the Swedish police, why and how they rent flats in central Stockholm."

Piet Hoffmann knew that he had to answer this question too. But he took his time, looked over at Krzynówek. Delivery. I don't appreciate the condition you left our flat in. The respected businessman knew exactly what they were talking about. But words are strange like that. If they're not used officially, they don't exist. No one here in this room would mention twenty-seven kilos of amphetamine and a killing. Not so long as a person who officially didn't know anything about it was sitting in their midst.

"If the agreement that I, and only I, have the authority to lead an operation in Sweden had been respected, this would never have happened." "I'd like you to explain."

"If your people had followed your instructions instead of using their own initiative, the situation would never have arisen."

Operation. Own initiative. The situation.

Hoffmann looked at the Roof again.

These words. We're using them for your sake.

But why are you here? Why are you sitting next to me listening to all this that means everything and nothing?

I'm not frightened anymore.

But I don't understand.

"I assume that this will not be repeated."

He didn't answer. The deputy CEO would have the last word. That was the way things worked and Piet Hoffmann knew what to do, how to play the game, otherwise, he also knew, the end was nigh. The instant he became Paula, he no longer existed-he would end up like the buyer ten hours ago, in a car on his way to a Warsaw back street with two Poles and a cocked gun to his head.

He knew his role, his lines, his history, he wasn't going to die. Dying was for other people.

The Roof moved, not much, but gave a definite nod to the deputy CEO.

He looked satisfied. Hoffmann was approved.

The deputy CEO had hoped for that and counted on it. He got up, almost smiling. "We have plans to expand in the closed market. We've already invested and taken market shares in your neighbouring Nordic countries. Now we're going to do the same in your country. In Sweden."

Piet Hoffmann looked at the Roof in silence, then at the deputy CEO.

The closed market.

The prisons.

The harsh light from the angle-poise lamps was reflected in both metal spoons. Nils Krantz lifted up one of them and filled it with a light blue powder and water before asking Ewert Grens to pull back the green sheet that covered the person on the table in the middle of the room.

A naked man's body.

Pale complexion, well built, and not particularly old.

A face with no skin, a skull on top of an otherwise complete body.

A strange sight. The bones had been cleaned so the observer could get as close as possible, the skin that was in the way of a clear answer had been scrubbed off.

"Alginate. We use it. It works. There are more expensive brands, but we don't waste them on autopsies."

The forensic scientist separated the lower jaw from the upper jaw and pushed the metal spoon with the light blue fluid against the teeth in the upper jaw and held it there until it hardened.

"Photographs, fingerprints, DNA, dental imprints. I'm pleased with that."

He took a couple of steps back into the sterile room and nodded to Ludvig Errfors, the forensic pathologist.

"Entrance wound."

Errfors pointed to the bare skull bone on the right temple.

"The bullet went in through the os temporale and then lost speed just here."

He drew a line in the air with his finger from the large hole in the temple to the middle of the skull.

"Mandible. The jaw bone. The trajectory shows clearly that the jacket of the bullet hit this hard bone and split into two smaller bullets with two exit wounds on the left side of the head. One through the mandible and one through the os frontale."

Grens looked at Krantz. The forensic scientist had been right from the start, there on the floor in the flat.

"And this, Ewert, I want you to have a look at this, in particular."

Ludvig Errfors was holding the dead man's right arm, a peculiar sensation when the muscles don't react, the fact that something that was so recently alive can become so rubbery.

"You see that? The visible marks around the wrist. Someone held his hand post-mortem."

Grens looked at Nils Krantz again who gave a satisfied nod. He had been right about that too. Someone had moved the arm after he'd died. Someone had tried to make it look like suicide.

Ewert Grens left the brightly lit table in the middle of the room and opened one of the windows out in the corridor. It was dark outside, and the late evening was deepening into night.

"No name. No history. I want more. I want to get closer to him."

He looked at Krantz, then at Errfors. He waited. Until the pathologist cleared his throat.

There was always more.

"I've looked at a couple of the fillings in his teeth. Take this one here, in the middle of the lower jaw. About eight, maybe ten years old. Most probably Swedish. I can deduce that from the way the work has been done, the quality, a plastic material that is noticeably different to the ones that the greater part of Europe import from Taiwan. I had a body here last week, a Czech who had a root filling in his lower jaw, cement in all the canals, which was… well, far from what we would see as acceptable here."

The pathologist moved his hands from the skinless face to the torso. "He's had his appendix removed. See the scar here. A good cosmetic job. That, and the way in which the large intestine has been sewn up-both indicate that the operation was done in a Swedish hospital."

A muffled sound and the feeling that the ground was moving. Just before midnight, and a truck had driven through the secured area, passing close to the window of the Solna institute of forensic medicine.

Ludvig Errfors caught the question in Grens's eyes.

"Nothing to worry about. They unload a short distance away. No idea what, but it's the same every evening."

The pathologist moved away from the table; it was important that Ewert Grens came closer.

"The fillings, the appendix and what I would call a Northern European appearance. Ewert, he's Swedish."

Grens studied the face that was a death mask of white, washed bone.

We found traces of bile, amphetamine and rubber.

But they didn't come from you.

We've confirmed a drug deal with the Polish mafia.

But you're Swedish.

You weren't a mule. You weren't the seller.

You were the buyer.

"Any traces of drugs?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"No syringe marks, nothing in the blood, nothing in the urine." You were the buyer, but didn't use drugs yourself.

He turned to Krantz.

"The alarm call?"

"What about it?"

"Have you managed to analyze it yet?"

Nils Krantz nodded. "I've just come back from Västmannagatan. I've got a theory. I went back to check it out. That sound you can hear just before the person who raised the alarm is about to finish with fourth floor? Right at the end of the brief call?" He watched Grens, he remembered. "Well, I had a hunch that it was the compressor in the fridge in the kitchen, Same frequency. Same interval."

Ewert Grens's hand brushed the dead man's leg.

"So the call was made from the kitchen?"

"Yes."

"And the voice? Did it sound Swedish to you?"

"No accent whatsoever. Malardal dialect."

"Then we have two Swedes. In a flat at the same time that the Polish mafia was concluding a drug deal, which ended in assassination. One of them is lying here. The other one raised the alarm."

His hand moved toward the dead man's leg again, as if he hoped that it would somehow move.

"What were you doing there? What were you both doing there?"

He had been so scared. But he wasn^'t going to die. He had met the Roof for the first time and it hadn't meant death, so that meant he was farther in. He didn't know how or where, only that Paula was getting closer to the breakthrough he had risked his life for every day, every minute for the past three years.

Piet Hoffmann sat beside the empty chair in the far-too-brightly-lit meeting room. Grzegorz Krzynówek had just left with his elegant suit and clean appearance and words that pretended to be something other than organized crime and money, and violence to get more money.

The deputy CEO no longer had tight lips when he spoke, nor strained to keep his back straight. He opened a bottle of Zubrówka and mixed it with apple juice: there was an intimacy and confidentiality associated with drinking vodka with the boss, so Hoffmann smiled at the piece of grass in the bottle which wasn't particularly good, as that was polite and the custom, and at the former intelligence officer in front of him who had so meticulously transgressed his class and even swapped the ugly glasses from the kitchen table for two expensive, hand-blown tumblers, which his enormous hands were not quite sure how to hold.

"Na zdrowie."

They looked each other in the eye and emptied their glasses, and the deputy CEO poured another.

"To the closed market."

He drank up and filled the glasses a third time.

"We're speaking plain language now."

"I prefer it."

A third glass was emptied.

"The Swedish market. It's time for it. Now."

Hoffmann found it hard to sit still. Wojtek already controlled the Norwegian market. The Danish market. The Finnish. He was starting to understand what this was all about. Why the boss had been sitting there. Why he himself was holding a glass of something that tasted like bison grass and apple juice.

He had been heading here for so long.

"There are about five thousand people in prison in Sweden. And nearly eighty percent of them are big time consumers of amphetamines, heroin and alcohol, aren't they?"

"Yes."

"Which was also the case ten years ago?"

"Yep, back then too."

Twelve bloody awful months in ()sterner prison.

"One gram of amphetamine costs one hundred and fifty kronor on the street. In the prisons it's three times as much. A gram of heroin costs a thousand kronor on the street. On the inside, three times as much."

Zbigniew Boruc had had this conversation before. With other colleagues in other operations in other countries. It was always about the same thing. Being able to calculate.

"Four thousand locked up drug addicts-the amphetamine freaks who take two grams a day, the heroin addicts who use one gram a day. Just one day's business, Hoffmann… between eight and nine million kronor."

Paula had been born nine years ago. He had lived with death every day since then. But this, this moment, made it all worthwhile. All the damn lies. The manipulation. This was where he was headed. And now he had arrived.

"An unprecedented operation. Initially, though, big money has to be invested before we can even start, before we get anything back."

The deputy CEO looked at the empty chair between them.

Wojtek had the power to invest, to wait as long as it took for the closed market to be theirs. Wojtek had a financial guarantee, the Eastern European mafia's variant of the consigliere, but with more capital and more power.

"Yes. It's an unprecedented operation. But possible. And you are going to lead it."

Ewert Grens opened the window. He normally did around midnight to listen to the clock on Kungsholms Church and then another one that he had never managed to locate, he only knew that it was farther away and couldn't be heard on nights when the wind swallowed any fragile sound. He had been pacing around his office with a strange sensation in his body, the first evening and night in the police headquarters without Siwan's voice anywhere in the dark. He had got so used to falling asleep to the past, and at this time of night had always listened to one of the cassettes he had recorded and mixed himself.

There was nothing here now that even remotely resembled peace.

He had never been bothered by all the night sounds that played outside his window before, and already he loathed the cars on Bergsgatan that accelerated as they approached the steep incline on Hantverkargatan. He closed the window and sat down with the sudden silence and the fax that he had just received from Klövje, from the Swedish section at Interpol. He read the interview, which he was reliably informed had been requested by the Swedish police, with a Polish citizen who had been the registered tenant of the flat in Västmannagatan 79 for the past two years. A man with a name that Ewert Grens didn't recognize and couldn't pronounce, forty-five years old, born in Gdansk, registered in the electoral roll for Warsaw. A man who had never been convicted or even suspected of any crime and who, according to the Polish policeman who had questioned him, had, without any doubt, been in Warsaw at the time when the incident in Stockholm took place.

You're involved in some way.

Ewert Grens held the printout in his hand.

The door was locked when we got there.

He got up and went out into the dark corridor.

There were no signs of a break-in and no signs of violence. Two cups from the coffee machine. Someone had used a key to get in and out. A cheese sandwich wrapped in plastic and a banana-flavored yogurt from the vending machine. Someone who is linked to you.

He stood there in the silence and dark, emptied one cup of coffee and ate half the yogurt, but left the sandwich in the bin. It was too dry, even for him.

He felt safe here.

The big, ugly police headquarters where colleagues were swallowed up or hidden away, the only place where he could bear to be, really-he always knew what to do here, he belonged; he could even sleep on the sofa if he wanted to and avoid the long nights on a balcony with a view of Sveavägen and a capital that never stopped.

Ewert Grens went back to the only room in the homicide unit where the lights were still on, to the boxes of packed-away music, which he gave a light kick. He hadn't even gone to the funeral. He had paid for it, but hadn't taken part, and he kicked the boxes again, harder this time. He wished he had been there, maybe then she would be gone, truly gone.

Klövje's fax was still lying on the desk. A Polish citizen who could in no way be linked to a dead body. Grens swore, marched across the room and kicked one of the boxes for the third time, his shoe leaving a small hole in the side. He hadn't gotten anywhere. He didn't know anything except that a couple of Swedes had been in the flat while the Polish mafia were completing a drug deal, and that one of them was now dead and the other had raised a whispered alarm from near a fridge in the kitchen-a Swedish voice with no accent, Krantz was certain of that.

You were there and raised the alarm while someone was being murdered. Ewert Grens stood by the cardboard boxes, but didn't kick them again. You are either the murderer or a witness.

He sat down, leaned back against the boxes, covering the recent hole.

A murderer doesn't shoot someone, make it look like suicide, and then ring and raise the alarm.

It felt good to sit with his back to the forbidden music, he was probably just going to stay there on the hard floor through the night, until morning. You're a witness.

He had been sitting by the window for two hours, watching the specks of light that were so tiny when they were far away and then slowly grew as they sank through the dark toward the runway at Frédéric Chopin. Piet Hoffmann had lain down fully clothed on the hard hotel bed just before midnight, and tried to sleep, but had soon given up-the day that had started with someone being killed in front of him and ended with the responsibility of taking over the drug market in Swedish prisons continued to live inside him; it whispered and screamed until he couldn't be bothered to block his ears and wait for sleep.

It was blowing hard outside the window. Hotel Okęcie was just eight hundred meters from the airport and the wind often swept over the open ground, creating spots of light that were prettiest when the branches on the trees refused to stay still. He liked to sit here, for one night at a time, looking out over this last piece of Poland, where he always observed but never took part, even though he should feel at home here-he had cousins and aunts and an uncle here. He looked like them and talked like them but was forever someone who didn't belong.

He was nobody.

He lied to Zofia and she held him tight. He lied to Hugo and Rasmus and they hugged their daddy. He lied to Erik. He lied to Henryk. He had just lied to Zbigniew Boruc and drank another Zubrawka with him.

He had been lying for so long that he'd forgotten what the truth looked and felt like, who he was.

The specks of light had now become a huge plane that had just landed; it swerved in the strong crosswinds and the small wheels bounced out of control a couple of times on the asphalt before sinking down and rolling the plane toward some steps by the newer part of the arrivals hall.

He leaned forward to the window and rested his forehead on the cool glass.

The day that wouldn't end, that whispered and screamed.

A person had stopped breathing in front of him. He had realized too late. They had the same role, were part of the same game, but on different sides. A person who perhaps had children, a wife, who had maybe also lived a lie for so long that he didn't know who he was anymore.

My name is Paula. What was yours?

He sat on the window sill, looking out into the dark, as he cried.

It was the middle of the night in a hotel room a few kilometers from central Warsaw. He had a real person's death on his hands and he cried until he could cry no more and sleep took him, and he fell headlong into something that was black and couldn't be lied to.

Tuesday

Ewert Grens had woken when the first light forced its way through the thin curtains and started to irritate his eyes. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the three stacked cardboard boxes, but he then lay down on the hard linoleum to avoid the dawn light and slept for another couple of hours. It wasn't a bad place to sleep: his back barely ached and he had been able to keep his stiff leg stretched almost straight the whole night, which he never got room for on the soft corduroy sofa.

No more nights there.

Suddenly he was wide awake, rolled over on to his belly and used his arms to lever up his bulky frame. From the tin on his desk he grabbed a blue marker, which released a strong odor as he wrote on each side of the brown cardboard boxes.

PI Malmkvist.

Ewert Grens looked at the taped-up boxes and laughed out loud. He had been able to sleep with the packed music and felt more rested than he had done for a long time.

A couple of dance steps, no singing, no music, just unaccompanied steps.

He tried to lift the box on top, but it was far too heavy, so he pushed it out of the room and down the long corridor to the elevator. Three floors down, to the cellar, to the property store. He wrote a reference number on the top of the box with the marker again-I9361231. Then he went down another corridor, even darker than the last, and pushed and sweated on to the door that opened into confiscated property.

"Einarsson."

A young lad, civilian staff, was standing behind the long wooden counter that felt so old. Every time Grens came here he was reminded of a grocer's shop he often went to as a boy on his way home from school, a shop near Odenplan which had long since disappeared and was now yet another cafe for teenagers who drank milky coffee and compared mobile phones.

"Can I help you?"

"I want Einarsson to look after this."

"Yes, but I-"

"Einarsson."

The young man snorted loudly, but said nothing. He left the counter and went to get a man of Ewert's age, with a black apron tied tightly round his rotund body.

"Ewert."

"Tor."

One of the policemen who had been really good and then after years of working together, had suddenly sat down one morning and explained that he couldn't face all the crap anymore, let alone investigate it. They had talked a lot about it at the time and Ewert had understood that that was how things could be when you had something to live for, when you yearned for days without pointless deaths. Einarsson had sat there and did not get up until his superiors had opened the door to the basement and the confiscated goods that were indeed a part of ongoing investigations, but which seldom stayed with you all evening.

"I've got some boxes I want you to look after."

The older man behind the counter took the things and read the square letters in blue marker.

"PI Malmkvist. What the hell is that?"

"Preliminary investigation Malmkvist."

"I realize that. But I've never heard of the case."

"Closed investigation."

"But then it shouldn't-"

"I want you to keep them here. In a safe place."

"Ewert, I-"

Einarsson was silent, studied Grens for a long time, then the box. He smiled. Preliminary investigation Malmkvist. Reference number 19361231. He gave another even broader smile.

"Jesus, that's her birthday, isn't it?"

Grens nodded. "A closed investigation."

"Are you sure about that?"

"I'll be down with another two boxes."

"In that case… investigations like this are best stored here. If the stuff is unique, I mean. Better than some unsafe attic or damp cellar."

Ewert Grens hadn't realized how tense he was until, to his surprise, he felt his shoulders, arms and legs slowly relax. He hadn't been sure that Einarsson would understand.

"I need a chain of custody record. So, if you could just fill these in now. Then I can find a safe place."

Einarsson handed him two blank forms and a pen.

"In the meantime, I'll mark clearly that it's classified information. Because it is, isn't it?"

Grens nodded again.

"Good. Then it can only be opened by authorized persons."

The policeman who had once been a detective himself and who now wore a black apron and worked behind a counter in the basement, slapped a red sticker over the flaps of the box, a seal that could not be broken by anyone other than the man who could identify himself as DS Ewert Grens.

Ewert was full of gratitude as he watched his colleague struggle over to the shelves with the cardboard box in his arms.

Someone who didn't need an explanation.

He left the form on the counter and turned to leave when he heard Einarsson singing one of Siw Malmkvist's songs somewhere between the rows of seized property.

The tears I cried for you could fill an ocean

The Swedish version of "Everybody's Somebody's Fool." Ewert Grens stopped and shouted in the direction of the cramped storage space.

"Not now."

But you don't care how many tears I cry

"Einarsson!" Ewert bellowed, and Einarsson popped his head round some shelves in surprise.

"Not now, Einarsson. You're disturbing my grief."

He felt lighter when he left-the basement was almost attractive and he shook his head at the elevator and decided instead to take the stairs three floors up. He was about halfway when the mobile phone in the inner pocket of his jacket began to chime.

"Yes?"

`Are you heading the investigation into the murder in Västmannagatan 79?"

Ewert Grens was out of breath. He didn't often take the stairs. "Who's asking?"

"Says who?"

The voice was Danish, but easy to understand, probably from somewhere near Copenhagen, the part of Denmark that Grens had worked with most over the years.

"Was it you or me who phoned?"

"Apologies. Jacob Andersen, crime operations unit Copenhagen, or what you call homicide."

"And what do you want?"

"To know whether you are leading the investigation into the murder in Västmannagatan 79?"

"Who said it was a murder?"

"I did. And it's just possible that I know who the victim is."

Grens stopped on the last step, tried to catch his breath while he waited for the voice that had presented itself as a Danish policeman to continue.

"Do you want me to call you back?"

"Put the phone down."

Grens hurried to his room, found the file he was looking for in the third drawer of his desk. He leafed through it for a moment or two and then left it open in front of him as he dialed the switchboard of Copenhagen police and asked for Jacob Andersen from the crime operations unit.

"Andersen." It was the same voice.

"Put the phone down."

He called the switchboard again and asked to be transferred to Jacob Andersen's mobile phone.

Andersen."

The same voice.

"Open the window."

"What?"

"If you want the question answered, then open the window."

He heard the voice put the phone down on the desk and fiddle for a while with a rusty window hook.

"Okay?"

"What can you see?"

"Hambrogade."

"Anything else?"

"The water if I lean out far enough."

"Half of Copenhagen can see water."

"Langebro."

Grens had looked out of the window from the crime operations unit several times. He knew that it was the water by Langebro that was sparkling in the sun.

"Where does Moelby sit?"

"My boss?"

"Yes."

"In the room opposite. He's not here right now Otherwise-" 'And Christensen?"

"There is no bloody Christensen here."

"Good. Good; Andersen. Now we can continue."

Grens waited, it was the Danish voice that had phoned him, so it was the one that should continue. He went over to his own window. Not much water to be seen in the dreary courtyard of the police headquarters.

"I have reason to believe that the dead person worked for us. I'd like to see a photograph, if possible. Could you fax one to me?"

Ewert Grens reached for a folder that was lying on his desk, checked that Krantz's pictures were still there, the ones that had been taken in the flat, when the face still had skin.

"You'll get a photo in five minutes. I'll wait for the call when you've had a look."

Erik Wilson enjoyed walking in the center of Stockholm.

Mad people, suits, beautiful women, pushers, strollers, running clothes, dogs, bikes, and the odd person who wasn't going anywhere. Half past ten, mid-morning in the city. He had passed them all on the recently repaired pavement in the short distance from the police headquarters to Sankt Eriksplan. It was cooler here, easier to breathe; it had already been too warm in southern Georgia, and in a few weeks it would be unbearable. He had left Newark Liberty International in the afternoon, just after five local time, and landed at Arlanda eight hours later, early in the morning. He must have slept a bit on the plane, fallen asleep despite the two old ladies in the seats in front who chatted incessantly, and the man in the seat beside him who coughed loudly every five minutes. As the taxi approached the city and the police headquarters at Kronoberg, he asked the driver to stop first at Västmannagatan 79, the address he had been given by Paula. Wilson showed his ID to the security guard at the door of the fourth floor flat, with blue-and-white tape criss-crossed over the doorway and a sign that said it was a secured crime scene, and then walked on his own through the abandoned rooms that not even a day earlier had witnessed a man being killed. He started by the large, dark patch on the carpet under the table in the sitting room. A life had seeped away just here. An overturned chair was lying by the edge of the patch, the stain of death. He peered at a hole in the ceiling and another hole in the closed kitchen door, obvious damage from the split bullet. Then he stood for a while by the pins and flags that marked the discoloring on the sitting room wall, and which was interesting in terms of the angle and force of the shot. That was what he had come for, to analyze the blood splashes. That was what he needed for the next meeting, that and Paula's version. Erik Wilson concentrated on the funnel-shaped area that the guys from forensics had marked out with two pieces of string, one end of which had no flags and no blood and no brain tissue. He studied and memorized it until he was certain of exactly where the two people who were important to him had been at the moment the shot was fired: where the person who fired had stood and where the person who hadn't fired must have been standing.

There was a pleasant breeze blowing on Sankt Eriksbron as he looked out over the boats, trains, cars-that was what he liked so much about walking, being able to pause for a while, to look.

He had heard Paula's version of events and the tension last night on his mobile phone, and now that he had had the opportunity to study the flat in peace and quiet, it looked like what he said was true. He knew that Paula was capable and that if the choice had been between life and death, Paula had both the strength and the ability to kill. It could easily have been he who fired the shot, but Wilson was now certain that that was not the case. Paula had sounded more and more harassed and frightened with every phone call. After nine years working together as handler and infiltrator the close contact had developed into trust, and Erik Wilson had learned to hear when he was telling the truth.

He stopped in front of the door to Sankt Eriksplan 17, brittle glass in an old wooden frame, so close to the heavy traffic of the main road. He looked around. A face passed by but didn't notice. He checked again, then went in.

He had left the marks and splashes of blood in ^.V^.stmannagatan, then taken the waiting taxi to Kronoberg and finally to an office in the homicide unit. According to the Duty Management System, a detective had already been assigned to the case. Ewert Grens, assisted by Sven Sundkvist and Mariana Hermansson. Grens and Wilson had worked together in the same unit for a number of years, but he didn't really know the strange detective superintendent. He had tried to make contact for a long time, without any response whatsoever, and had then just given up, decided that he did not need an old man in his life who had once been the best, but now just listened to Siw Malmkvist and was bitter. Erik Wilson stayed in front of the computer. He switched from the DMS to the Crime Reporting system and searched for Västmannagatan 79, and found three hits in the past ten years. He called up the most recent entry, dealing in stolen goods, one ton of refined copper that was sold by a man with a Finnish name in one of the flats on the ground floor.

Erik Wilson closed the door to Sankt Eriksplan 17 and paused in the silence, away from the traffic frenzy. The stairwell was dark and when he was unsuccessful in his third attempt to turn on the lights he decided to take the small elevator up to the fifth floor, getting out into a construction site. The flat was being totally renovated, so the tenants had been moved out. He stood on the brown paper and listened to nothing until he was certain that he was alone, then opened the locked door with STENBERG written on the letter box, went in to the two rooms and kitchen and checked over the furniture that was protected by transparent plastic sheeting. This was how he operated. A couple of the biggest private landlords in the city gave him the keys and work schedules for flats that were empty and being renovated. This was number five. Wilson had used it for just under a month; he'd met several different infiltrators here. He would keep it until the renovation was finished and the tenants had moved back in.

He pulled back the plastic from the kitchen window, opened it, and looked out over the communal gardens at the back, with carefully raked gravel paths and some new outdoor furniture over by the two swings and short slide. Paula would be there in a minute. He'd come out of the back door of the house opposite that had an entrance at Vulcanusgatan 15. Always in an empty flat, always with a communal garden at the back that could be accessed from another address.

Erik Wilson closed the window and taped the plastic back against the glass, just as the door below opened and Paula hurried along the gravel path.

Ewert Grens impatiently clutched the folder that contained Nils Krantz's photographs of a dead man. Ten minutes earlier, he had sent one of them to a fax machine in the crime operations unit in Copenhagen, a photograph of a head that had been washed, but still had skin, before the autopsy. There were three other pictures in the folder and he studied them while he waited. One taken from the front, one from the left side, one from the right. A considerable amount of his working day was taken up looking at pictures of death and he had learned that it was often difficult to distinguish whether someone was asleep or actually dead. This time it was fairly obvious as there were three great holes in the head. If he hadn't been to the scene or been handed a photograph by someone from forensics or received it by fax from a colleague somewhere else, he usually started by looking for the shiny steel stand that the head always rests on, and if he found it, it was a photograph from an autopsy. He looked at the pictures again and wondered what he would look like, what a person studying the photo of his head on a steel stand would think.

"Grens."

The phone finally rang and he put the folder down on the desk. "Jacob Andersen, Copenhagen."

"Well?"

"The photograph you faxed."

"Yes?"

"It's probably him."

"Who?"

"One of my informers."

"Who?"

"I can't say. Not yet. Not before I'm absolutely certain. I don't want to disclose an informer unnecessarily. You know how it works."

Ewert Grens knew how it worked and didn't like it. The need to protect the identity of covert human intelligence sources-CHIS- had increased as they had become more numerous, and sometimes was more important than the need for the police to provide each other with correct information. Nowadays, when each and every policeman could call themselves a handler and had the right to make their own CHIS contacts, the secrecy was more often a hindrance than a help.

"What do you need?"

"Everything you've got."

"Dental impressions. Fingerprints. We're waiting for the DNA." "Send it."

"I'll do that straight away. And I assume that you'll call again in a few minutes."

The head on the steel stand.

Grens stroked his finger over the smooth photographic paper.

An infiltrator. From Copenhagen. One of two people who spoke Swedish in a flat when a Polish mafia execution took place.

Who was the other one?

Piet Hoffmann walked down the gravel path through the dull communal garden. A quick glance up at the fifth floor of the building opposite, where he caught a glimpse of Wilson's head in a window that happened not to be protected by plastic. He had left Frédéric Chopin on the first plane just after eight, the Polish carrier LOT. He had spent the night with his forehead pressed against a cold windowpane, but he wasn't particularly tired. Anxiety and adrenaline from a day that had included a person being killed and an important meeting in Warsaw jostled in his breast; he was definitely heading somewhere and had no idea how to stop. He had called home and Rasmus had picked up the phone and didn't want to let go of the receiver because he had so much to tell; it hadn't been easy to follow it all, something about a cartoon and a monster that was green and horrible. Piet Hoffmann swallowed and shook, as you do when you miss someone more than you were physically prepared for-he would see them this evening and he would hold all three of them tight until they asked him to let go. He got to the fence and opened the gate, and moved from the garden of Vulcanusgatan 15 to that of Sankt Eriksplan 17, and then in through the back door to the stairs that remained dark, even though he flicked the switch for the lights several times. Five flights of steep stairs, never a elevator with the risk of getting stuck, each step covered with brown paper that made it difficult to move without making a noise. He checked the bells and names on the letter boxes. The door with STENBERG on it opened from inside at eleven hundred hours precisely.

Erik Wilson had taken the plastic off two chairs and the table in the kitchen and was now uncovering the gas cooker and a cupboard under the sink. He hunted around until he found a pan and a jar of something that looked like instant coffee.

"The Stenbergs' treat. Whoever they are."

They sat down.

"How's Zofia?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"We haven't seen much of each other in the past couple of days. But her voice-we spoke for quite a long time on the phone last night and again this morning-and I can hear it, she knows that I'm lying, that I'm lying more than usual."

"Take care of her. You know what I mean?"

"You know damn well that I take good care of her."

"Good, that's good, Piet. Nothing you do is worth more than her and the kids. I just want you to remember that."

He didn't like the instant coffee much, there was a stale aftertaste, reminiscent of the coffee in the more expensive restaurants in Warsaw.

"He should never have said he was the police."

"Was he?"

"I don't know. I don't think so. I think he was like me. And that he was bloody frightened."

Wilson nodded. He probably had been frightened. And in a panic had flung out the words that he thought would protect him. But had had the opposite effect.

"I heard him scream I'm the police, a gun being cocked and then a shot." Hoffmann put his cup down-the instant coffee was undrinkable, no matter how hard he tried.

"It's been a while since I saw someone die close at hand. That silence when they stop breathing and you hold on to the last breath until it ebbs away."

Erik Wilson was looking at someone who had been touched by death and lived with the responsibility for it; the rather lean man in front of him who could be hard as nails when he needed to be, was someone else right now It was three years since they had taken the first steps to infiltrate Wojtek Security International. The national crime operations division had identified the company as a flourishing branch of the Eastern European mafia that was already established in Norway and Denmark. The CHIS controller at City Police had forwarded the intelligence report to Wilson and reminded him of Paula's background, that Polish was his other mother tongue and that he was in ASPEN, the criminal intelligence database, and had a criminal record that was solid enough to withstand any checks and probing.

They were there now.

Paula had courage, authority, and criminal credibility, and had reached the top of the organization-he had communicated directly with the deputy CEO and the Roof in Warsaw, behind the facade of what was supposed to be a Polish security firm.

"I heard him cock the gun but wasn't quick enough."

Erik Wilson looked at his infiltrator and friend, at the face that switched between Piet and Paula.

"I tried to calm them down, but could only go so far… Erik, I had no choice, you see that, don't you? I have a role to play and I have to do it bloody well, otherwise… otherwise I'm a dead man too."

It was always unexpected; his face had become completely Paula now.

"It was him who didn't play his role well enough. Something wasn't right. You have to be a criminal to play a criminal."

Erik Wilson didn't need convincing, he knew the score, that Paula risked death every day as a consequence, that people like him, squealers, were hated by their own. But still, without really knowing why, he wanted to test Piet's innocence before doing everything he could to ensure that he got criminal immunity.

"The shot…"

"What about it?"

"What angle?"

"I know what you're after, Erik. I'm covered."

"What angle?"

Piet Hoffmann knew that Wilson had to ask his questions, that was just the way it was.

"Right temple. Left angle. Held to the head."

"Where were you?"

"Directly opposite the dead man."

Erik Wilson cast his mind back to the flat he had recently visited, to the parch on the floor and the flags on the wall, to a cone-shaped corridor where there was no blood or brain tissue.

"Your clothes?"

"Nothing."

So far, the right answers.

There was no blood in the corner opposite the dead man.

The person who had fired the shot would have been sprayed with blood. "Do you still have them? The clothes?"

"No. I burned them. To be on the safe side."

Hoffmann knew what Erik was looking for. Proof.

"But I rook the killer's clothes. I offered to burn them and I saved the shirt. In case it was needed."

Always on your own. Trust no one but yourself:

That was how Piet Hoffmann lived, that was how he survived. "I guessed as much."

"And the gun. I've got that too."

Wilson smiled.

"And the alarm?"

"That was me."

Correct answer again.

Wilson had twelve passed through the County Communication Center 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, much cheaper 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 ratted 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 damn 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 anymore, 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 leaned back. This moment made it all worth it.

Three hellish years constructing a person and role that was dangerous enough to penetrate an organization 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 organization 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 criminals on the outside. When they've done their time they'll be given the choice between working to pay off their debt or two bullets."

The moment when the Swedish police could make their move, squash the criminal expansion, the moment that would never come again.

"Do you understand, Erik? This country has fifty-six prisons. And more are being built. Wojtek will control every single one. But also an army of indebted serious criminals on the outside."

The Eastern European mafia's three areas of operation.

Arms. Prostitution. Drugs.

Wilson sat at what would soon once more be a plastic-covered kitchen table with a view out to the communal gardens. Criminal organizations were in control and the police could only stand by and watch. Now Wojtek was about to make their final move. First the prisons, then the streets. But this time there was a massive difference. This time the police had their own man at the top. The police knew where, how, and exactly when it would be possible to sweep in and launch a counterattack.

Erik Wilson watched Paula open the gate, close it and disappear into the house on the other side of the garden.

It was time to call another meeting.

At the government offices.

They had to have guarantees that he wouldn't be held responsible for the murder in Vasrmannagatan 79, so they could continue their infiltration work, even from inside prison.

There were still two cardboard boxes in one corner of the room. Soon he would push them down the corridor, down to Einarsson and the protection of a classified stamp and safe storage in the property store.

She had been all on her own.

He hadn't really understood that at the time, it had been all about him, about his own fear and how lonely he had been.

He hadn't even gone. When she was being buried, he had lain, clean-shaven, in a black suit, on the corduroy sofa in his office and stared at the ceiling.

Ewers Grens turned around-he couldn't bear to look at the boxes that were so strongly associated with her, he was ashamed.

He had tried to forget about Västmannagatan 79 for a while-he was getting nowhere and his desk was full of ongoing investigations that were getting older and harder to solve by the hour. He looked through the preliminary investigation files and put them to the side, one after the other. Attempted extortion and pimply youths from the Sodra Station area who had threatened shop owners in Ringens Centrum. Car theft and an unmarked police car that had been found stripped of its computer and communication equipment in a tunnel under the Sankt Eriksbron. Violation of a woman's integrity and a former husband who had repeatedly breached his restraining order and gone to his former wife's domicile on Sibyllegatan. Uninteresting and soulless, but nonetheless, such investigations were his daily fare and he would sort them out later. He was good at that, after all, at reality. But not right now A dead man was lying in the way.

"Come in."

Someone had knocked on the door. Even a knock echoed in a room with no music.

"Do you have a moment?"

Grens looked up at the doorway and someone he didn't particularly like. He didn't know why, there was no real reason, but sometimes that's just the way it is, something that you can't put your finger on, that bothers you all the same. "No, I don't have time."

Thick blond hair, slim, bright-eyed, eloquent, intellectual, presumably attractive, still quite young.

Erik Wilson was everything that Ewert Grens was not.

"Not even for a simple question?"

Grens sighed.

"There's no such thing as a simple question."

Erik Wilson smiled and came in. Grens was about to protest, but stopped himself. Wilson was one of the few who had never complained about the loud music in their shared corridor. Perhaps he had the right to pop into the silence.

"Västmannagatan 79. The shooting. If I've understood correctly. you're the one investigating?"

"That's what you say."

Erik Wilson looked the curmudgeonly detective superintendent in the eye. The day before he'd had a look on the computer at the CR system and was convinced that he had found a good enough excuse to hide his real purpose.

"Just a thought. Was it on the ground floor?"

A Finnish name, stolen goods, a ton of refined copper.

"No."

According to the entry in the register, a case that was no longer open, and a sentence that would already have come into force.

'A year ago. Same address. I investigated a Finnish man who was dealing in serious amounts of stolen refined copper."

A minor crime that Grens had not investigated, so presumably he lacked the same knowledge that Wilson did.

'And?"

"Same address. Was just curious. Is there any connection?"

"No."

"Are you sure about that?"

"I'm sure about that. This involves some Poles. And a dead Danish infiltrator."

Erik Wilson had the information he wanted.

Grens was investigating.

Grens already had dangerous information.

And Grens would continue to dig and delve. The older man was glowing in the way that he sometimes did, when he was at his best.

"Infiltrator?"

"You… I don't think you've got anything to do with this."

"Well, you've certainly whetted my curiosity."

"Close the door when you leave."

Wilson didn't protest, he didn't need anymore. He was already out in the corridor when Grens's voice cut through the dust.

"The door!"

Two steps back, Wilson shut the door and walked to the neighboring one.

Chief Superintendent Göransson.

"Erik?"

"Do you have a moment?"

"Sit down."

Erik Wilson sat down in front of the man who was his boss and who was Grens's boss and who was also the CHIS controller in the city police district.

"You've got a problem."

Wilson looked at Göransson. The room was big, the desk was big. Perhaps that was why he always looked so small.

"Have I?"

"I've just been to see Ewert Grens. He's investigating the killing at Västmannagatan. The problem is that I'm not investigating, and I know considerably more about what happened than the appointed investigator does right now."

"I don't understand why that should be a problem."

"Paula."

"Right?"

"Do you remember him?"

"I remember him."

Wilson knew that he wouldn't need to explain much more.

"He was there."

The automatic voice.

Twelve thirty-seven fifty.

Scraping sounds. Obviously somewhere indoors. The voice was tense, whispered, with no accent.

A dead man. Västmannagatan 79. Fourth floor.

One more time."

Nils Krantz pressed play on the CD player and carefully adjusted the speakers. By this point they both recognized the humming of a fridge that made it difficult to hear the last two words.

"One more time."

Ewert Grens listened to the only link they had to a man who had witnessed a murder and then decided to vanish.

"Again."

The forensic scientist shook his head.

"I've got a lot to do, Ewert. But I can burn a CD for you so you can listen to it as much and as often as you like."

Krantz burned the sound file of the alarm call that was received by the County Communication Center a matter of minutes after the man had been shot onto another disc.

"What do I do with it?"

"You don't have a CD player?"

"I think Ågestam gave me a machine once, after we'd had a small confrontation about a father who shot and killed his daughter's murderer. But I've never used it. Why should I?"

"Here, borrow this one. And give it back when you're done."

"One more time?"

Krantz shook his head again.

"Ewert?"

"Yes?"

"You don't know how to use it?"

No."

"Put on the headphones. And press play. You'll manage."

Grens sat at the far end of the forensics department. He pressed a few random buttons and gingerly pulled at a rather long flex, and then jumped when the alarm voice was suddenly there again, in the headphones.

It was all he knew about the person he was looking for.

"One more thing."

Nils Krantz gestured to his ears. Ewert had to take the headphones off. "We've scoured Västmannagatan 79. All the rooms. And we've found nothing that can be linked to the investigation."

"Look again."

"I’ll have you know that we're not sloppy. If we didn't find anything the first time, we won't find it the second time. You know that, Ewert."

Ewert Grens did know that. But he also knew that there was nothing else, that right now he had gotten absolutely nowhere with the investigation. He hurried through the vast building with the CD player in his hand, toward the exit to Kungsholmsgatan. A few minutes later, he waved down a passing patrol car from the pavement, opened the door, got into the back seat and asked the astonished policeman to drive him to Västmannagatan 79 and to wait for him there.

He made his way up to the fourth floor, stopping briefly in front of the door with a name plate with the Finnish name that Wilson had tried ro push him to discuss this morning, then continued on to the flat that was still being guarded by contracted security men in green uniforms. He looked at the big blood stain and the markers on the walls, but this time it was the kitchen that interested him and a spot near the fridge where Krantz was one hundred percent certain that the man had been standing when he called and raised the alarm. You sound calm despite the fact that you're frightened. He put the headphones on and pressed the two buttons that had worked the last time. You are precise, systematic, purposeful. The voice again. You can cut yourself off and carry on functioning, despite that fact that you're in the midst of chaos. Grens walked between the sink and the worktop, listening to someone who had been in exactly the same place and had whispered a message about a dead man while the people on the other side of the door stood next to the body that was still bleeding heavily. You're involved in the murder but chose to raise the alarm and then disappear.

"This thing is damn marvelous."

He had rung Nils Krantz as he walked down the stairs.

"What are you talking about?"

"The machine that you lent me, Jesus, I can listen to it when I want, as many times as I want."

"That's good, Ewert. Great. Speak to you again soon."

The car was double-parked outside the front door, waiting, the policeman ready behind the wheel, with his safety belt still on.

Grens clambered into the back seat.

"Arlanda."

"Excuse me?"

"I want to go to Arlanda."

"This is not a taxi, you know. I knock off in quarter of an hour."

"Then I think you should stick on the blue light. It's quicker?'

Ewert Grens leaned back in the seat when the car approached Norrtull and the northbound E4. Who are you? He had the headphones on, so he would be able to listen to it several times before they stopped outside Terminal 5. What were you doing there? He was on his way to see someone who knew more about at least one of the people who had been in the flat when a lead and titanium bullet had penetrated one man's head, and he would not return until he knew more himself. Where are you now?

He held the plastic bag in his hand, swinging slowly back and forth between the steering wheel and the door.

Piet Hoffmann had left number five at half past eleven that morning, an empty flat that could be accessed from two addresses. He had felt stressed, the shooting at Västmannagatan, the breakthrough with Wojtek, trust or potential death sentence, stay or run. When he closed the gate to the communal gardens, his phone had rung. Someone from the nursery who mentioned fever and two little boys with burning cheeks lying on a sofa, who needed to be picked up so they could go home. He had gone straight to Hagtomsgarden in Enskededalen, collected the two hot, sleepy children and then headed toward the house in Enskede.

He looked at the plastic bag, at the shirt that was in it, gray and white checks that were now covered in blood and tissue from a person.

He had put the boys to bed, where they had each fallen asleep clutching an unread comic. He had phoned Zofia, promised to stay at home with them, and she had kissed the receiver twice-always an even number.

He looked out of the car window at a clock above a shop door. Six more minutes. He turned around. They sat there silently, with shiny eyes and floppy bodies. Rasmus was almost flat out on the back seat.

He had wandered around in the watchful house, every now and then giving a sleeping, feverish cheek a worried caress, and had realized that he didn't have any choice. There was a bottle of Calpol, in the door of the fridge and after much protest that it tasted horrible and they would rather be ill, both had eventually swallowed a double dose, served to them in a dessert spoon. He had carried them out to the car, driven the short distance to Slussen and Sodermalm and parked a couple of hundred meters from the entrance on Hökens Gata.

Rasmus was now actually lying on the back seat. Hugo was half on top of him. Their flaming cheeks were slightly less red for a while as the Calpol worked its magic.

Piet Hoffmann felt something in his chest that was possibly shame. I'm so sorry. You shouldn't be here.

Right from the start, when he had been 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 leaned 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 Gotgatan 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 LINDSTROM 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 aluminum 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 toward 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 stripes 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 sear 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 anymore, 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 meters, the car stopped by a door that 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 standoffishness, 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 8 x 10 photograph down in the middle of the table. A color 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 of northern 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's 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 recruit them when they're on remand."

I recognize you, it's you, even in that picture from the autopsy when you were being washed, you looked the same.

"We trained him, gave him a background. He was paid by Copenhagen Police as an infiltrator to initiate deals with as many of the big players in organized crime as possible. Hell's Angels, Bandidos, the Russians, Yugoslavians, Mexicans… whichever gang you like. This was the third time that he had initiated a deal with the Polish group, Wojtek."

"Wojtek?"

"Wojtek Security International. Security guards, bodyguards, CIT. Officially. Just like in all the other Eastern European states. A facade for organized crime."

"Polish mafia. Now it has a name. Wojtek."

"But it was the first time he was dealing with them in Sweden. Without backup. We wanted to avoid an operation on Swedish territory. So it was what we call an uncontrolled purchase."

Ewert Grens apologized. He had the photo of the dead man in one hand and his mobile phone in the other as he left the room and went out into the departures hall, dodging the bags that were hurrying toward a new queue.

"Sven?"

"Yes?"

"Where are you?"

"In my office."

"Get in front of the computer and do a multisearch for Jens Christian Toft in all the databases. Born in 1965."

He bent down and picked up a bag that had fallen off a smiling, sunburned old lady's cart. She thanked him and he smiled back as he listened to Sven Sundkvist pull out his chair, and then the irritating note that sounds like a tune every time you turn on the computer.

"Ready?"

"No."

"I haven't got much time."

"Ewen, I'm logging on. It takes a bit of time. There's not a lot I can do to change that."

"You can open it faster."

A couple of minutes of clacking on the keyboard, Grens walking restlessly between the travelers and the check-in desks, waiting for Sven's voice.

"No hits."

"Not anywhere?"

"No criminal record, not in the driver's license register, he's not a Swedish citizen, his fingerprints haven't been recorded, he's not in the criminal intelligence database."

Grens walked slowly around the bustling departures hall twice.

But he had a name. He now knew who had been lying in a dark patch on the sitting room floor.

It meant nothing.

He wasn't interested in the dead man. A lifeless identity was only meaningful Wit helped him to get closer to the perpetrator. It was his job to check the name, but it wasn't to be found in any Swedish register, so it didn't make the slightest difference.

"I want you to listen to this."

Ewert Grens was once again sitting in the room with the oversized Danish pastries and miniature cups in Kastrup police station.

"Not yet."

"It's not much. But it's all I've got."

A voice whispering seven words to the emergency services was still his closest link to the murderer.

"Not yet, Grens. Before we carry on, I want to make sure that you are absolutely clear about the terms of this meeting."

Jacob Andersen took the CD player and headphones but put them down on the table.

"You didn't get any information earlier on the phone because I wanted to know who I was talking to. And whether I could trust you. Because if it becomes known that Carsten was working for us, there's a risk that other infiltrators-who he had recommended and backed for Wojtekmight also die. So what we talk about here doesn't go beyond these walls. Okay?"

"I don't like all this cloak-and-dagger stuff surrounding informers and their operations. It interferes with other investigations."

"Okay?"

"Okay."

Andersen put on the headphones and listened.

"Someone raising the alarm from the flat."

"I realize that."

"His voice?" Ewert Grens pointed at the photograph on the table. "No."

"Have you heard it before?"

"I'd need to hear more to be able to give you a definite answer." "That's all we've got."

Jacob Andersen listened again.

"No. I don't recognize the voice."

Carsten, who was called Jens Christian Toft, was dead in the picture but it felt almost like he was looking at him, and Grens didn't like it. He pulled the photo toward him and flipped it over.

"I'm not interested in him. I'm interested in who shot him. I want to know who else was in the flat."

"I have no idea."

"You must've damn well known who he was going to meet for one of your operations!"

Jacob Andersen didn't like people who raised their voices unnecessarily. "Next time you talk to me like that, this meeting is over."

"But if it was you who-"

"Understood?"

"Yes."

The Danish detective superintendent continued.

"The only thing I know is that Carsten was going to meet representatives from Wojtek and a Swedish contact. But I don't have any names."

"A Swedish contact?"

"Yes."

"Are you sure about that?"

"That's the information I have.^),

Two Swedish voices in a flat where the Polish mafia was tying up a deal. One was dead. The other raised the alarm.

"It was you."

Andersen looked at Grens, taken aback.

"Excuse me?"

"The Swedish contact."

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm saying that I'm going to find the bastard."

The house was only a couple of hundred meters from the heavy traffic on Nynäsvägen, which thundered through any thoughts. But you only had to drive down a couple of little back streets, past the school and a small park, to discover another world. He opened the car door and listened. You couldn't even hear the hum of the heavy trucks that were trying to overtake one another.

She was standing in the driveway, waiting in front of the garage when he swung in.

So beautiful, with her slippers still on and not enough clothes. "Where have you been? Where have the children been?"

Zofia opened the back door and stroked Rasmus on the cheek, lifted him up in her arms.

"Two clients, I'd forgotten about them."

"Clients?"

'A security guard who had to have a bullet-proof vest and a shop that needed its alarm system adjusted. I had no choice. And they didn't have to sit in the back seat for long."

She felt both their brows.

"They're not too warm."

"Good."

"Maybe they're getting better."

"I hope so."

I kiss her on the cheek and she smells of Zofia, as I cobble together a lie. It's so simple. And I'm good at it.

But I can't bear to tell yet another one, not to her, not to the kids, not anymore.

The wooden steps creaked as the two parents carried their feverish children indoors and up to bed, their small bodies under white duvets. He stood there for a while looking at them. They were already asleep, snoring and snuffling as people do when they're fighting lurking bacteria. He tried to remember what life was like before these two boys whom he loved more than anything in the world, empty days when he had only himself to think of. He remembered it well, but felt nothing, he had never been able to comprehend how what had once been so important, so strong and so absolute, was suddenly meaningless as soon as someone small had come along, looked at him and called him Daddy.

He walked from one room to the other and kissed them each on the forehead. They were starting to get hot again, the fever burning on his lips. He went back down to the kitchen and sat on a chair behind Zofia and watched her back as she washed the dishes, which would then be put away in a cupboard in his home, her home, their home. He trusted her. That was what it was, he felt a trust that he had never dared dream of. He trusted her and she trusted him.

And she trusted him.

He had just lied to her. He seldom thought about it, it was habit. He always considered the plausibility of a lie before he was even conscious that he was going to lie. This time the lie had been reluctant. He sat behind her and it still felt unreasonable, demanding, hard to bear.

She turned around, smiled, stroked his chin with a wet hand. The hand that he so often yearned for.

But now it just felt uncomfortable.

Two clients, I'd forgotten about them. And they didn't have to sit in the back seat for long.

What if she hadn't trusted him? I don't believe you. What if she hadn't accepted his lie? I want to know what you've really been up to.

He would have fallen. He would have collapsed. His strength, his life, his drive, he had built it all up around her trust.

Ten years earlier.

He's locked up in Österåker prison, just north of Stockholm.

His neighbors, his mares for twelve months-they all have their own way of living with the shame. They have carefully constructed their defense, their lies.

The man opposite, in cell 4, a junkie who stole to pay for his habit, who burgled fifteen houses a night in some suburbs, and his damned insistence that I never hurt children, I always shut the door to their room, I never steal anything from them; his mantra and defense to help him bear the shame, a home-made set of morals that made him seem a little better than he was, to himself at least, that kept self-loathing at bay.

Piet knew, just like everyone else knew, that the man in cell 4 had pissed on that morality long ago. He stole whatever he could sell, from the children's rooms as well, because the need for drugs was stronger than his self-respect.

And the man farther down in cell 8, who had been sentenced for assault so many times, who had devised another life lie, his own moral with another mantra, to keep himself afloat: I never hit women, only men, I would never hit a woman.

Piet knew, just like everyone else knew, that the man in cell 8 had separated word from deed long ago. He hit women too, he hit anyone who crossed his path.

Made-up morals.

Piet had scorned them, just as he had always held those who lied to themselves in contempt.

He looked at her. The soft hand had been uncomfortable.

He only had himself to blame. He had trampled all over his own morals, the very reason he was still someone he liked: my family, I will never use my family for lies, I will definitely never force Zofia and the boys to get caught up in my lies.

And now he'd done it, just like the man in cell 4 and the man in cell 8 and all the others he had despised.

He had lied to himself.

There was nothing left of him that he could like.

Zofia turned off the water-she was done. She wiped around the sink and then sat down on his knee. He held her, kissed her on the cheek, twice like she always wanted, he burrowed his nose in the dip between her neck and shoulder, staying where the skin was softest.

Erik Wilson opened an empty document on the computer that he only used after a meeting with an infiltrator.

M pulls a gun

(Polish 9mm Radom)

from shoulder holster.

M cocks the gun and holds it to

the buyer's head.

He tried to remember and write down Paula's account from their meeting at number five.

To protect him. To protect himself.

But more than anything, to have a reason for paying out police reward money, should anyone ask why and when. Without an intelligence report and the pot for rewarding information from the general public, Paula would not be paid for his work or be able to remain anonymous and off the official payroll, nor would any of his colleagues.

P orders M to calm down.

M lowers the gun, takes a step

back, his weapon half-cocked.

When the confidential intelligence report left his desk and was taken to the commissioner of the county criminal police, via Chief Superintendent Göransson, Wilson would delete it from the computer hard disk, activate the code lock and turn off the machine, which was not connected to the Internet for security reasons.

Suddenly the buyer shouts

"I'm the police."

Erik Wilson wrote it, Göransson checked it and the county commissioner unit kept it.

If anyone else read it, if anyone else knew… the infiltrator's life was at risk. If the wrong people found out about Paula's identity and operations, it would be as good as a death sentence.

M again aims the gun

at the buyer's head.

The Swedish police would not strike this time. They would not arrest anyone, or seize anything. The Västmannagatan 79 operation had had one single purpose: to strengthen Paula's position in Wojtek, a drug deal as part of Wojtek's day-to-day business.

P tries to intervene and

the buyer screams "police."

M holds the gun harder to

the buyer's head and pulls the trigger.

Every infiltrator had an as yet unspoken death sentence as his or her constant companion.

Erik Wilson read the last lines of the secret report several times. It might have been Paula.

The buyer falls to the floor, at a right

angle to the chair.

It might not have been Paula.

The person or persons who had worked on the Danish informer's background had done a lousy job. Erik Wilson had constructed Paula himself. Step by step, database by database.

He knew that he was good at it.

And he knew that Pier Hoffmann was good at surviving.

Ewert Grens waited in one of Copenhagen airport's beer-smelling bars drinking Danish mineral water from a brown paper cup.

All these people on their way somewhere armed with Toblerone and chocolate liqueur in sealed plastic bags. He had never been able to understand why people worked for eleven months of the year to save enough money to then go away in the twelfth.

He sighed.

He hadn't got any farther with the investigation. He didn't know much more now than he had when he left Stockholm a few hours ago.

He knew that the dead man was a Danish informer. That he was called Jens Christian Toft. That he worked for the Danish police and had initiated a deal with a criminal organization.

Nothing about the murderer.

Nothing about who had raised the alarm.

He knew that there had been a Swedish contact person in the flat with Polish representatives from a branch of the Eastern European mafia that went by the name of Wojtek.

That was it.

No faces, no names.

"Nils?"

Grens had managed to get hold of Nils Krantz in one of the forensics offices. "Yes?"

"I want you CO extend the search area."

"Now?"

"Now."

"By how much?"

"As much as you need. Every garden, stairwell and trash can in the block." "Where are you? There's a lot of noise in the background."

"In a bar. Danes trying to drown their fear of flying."

"And what are you doing in-?"

"Nils?"

"Yes?"

"If there's anything there that can help us, find it."

He drank what was left of the warm mineral water, grabbed a handful of peanuts from the bowl on the bar, and walked toward the gate and the line of people who were waiting to board the plane.

The secret report from Västmannagatan 79 comprised five closely written letter-size sheets which were stuffed into a plastic sleeve that was too small. Chief Superintendent Göransson had already read it four times within an hour when he took off his glasses and looked up at Erik Wilson.

"Who?"

Wilson had watched the face that was often confused, almost bashful, despite its owner's powerful position.

With every reading of the report it became redder, more tense. Now it was about to explode.

"Who is the dead man?"

"An infiltrator, possibly."

"Infiltrator?"

`Another infiltrator. We think he was working for our colleagues in Denmark. He didn't know Paula. And Paula didn't know him."

The head of homicide was holding five thin sheets of paper that felt heavier than all the department's preliminary investigations put together. He put them down on the desk beside another version of the same murder at the same time at the same address. A report that had been given to him by Ågestam, the public prosecutor, on the progress that Grens, Sundkvist, and Hermansson were making with the official investigation.

"I want a guarantee that any part Paula may have played in the murder in Västmannagatan stays here. In this report."

Göransson looked at the two piles of paper in front of him. Wilson's secret report about what had actually happened. And Grens's ongoing investigation that contained and would continue to contain only as much as the two policemen here in this room allowed it to contain.

"Erik, that's not the way it works."

"If Grens finds out It's just not possible. Paula is close to a breakthrough. For the first time we can actually break a mafia branch before it's fully established. We've never managed that before. Göransson, you know just as well as I do, this town is not run by us anymore, it's run by them."

"I won't give any guarantees for a high-risk source."

Erik Wilson slammed the desk hard. He had never done that with his boss before.

"You know that's not true. You've had reports about his work for the last nine years. You know that he has never failed."

"He is and will always be a criminal."

"That's one of the prerequisites for a good infiltrator!"

"Accomplice to murder. If he's not a high-risk source, then what is he?" Wilson punched the desk again.

He reached for the plastic sleeve, forced the five sheets into it, then gripped it firmly.

"Fredrik, listen to me. Without Paula, this opportunity is lost. And we won't get it again. What we lose now, we'll lose forever; we only need to look at the prisons in Finland, Norway, and Denmark. How long can we just stand by and watch?"

Göransson held up his hand. He needed to think. He had listened to what Wilson had to say, and he wanted to understand the full implications. "You want the same solution as for Maria?"

"I want Paula to continue. For at least two more months. We'll need him for that long."

The head of homicide had decided.

"I'm going to call a meeting. At Rosenbad."

When Erik Wilson left Chief Superintendent Göransson's office, he walked slowly down the corridor, hovering outside Ewert Grens's open door, but the office was empty. The detective superintendent who would never close his investigation was not there.

Wednesday

A wall of people.

He had forgotten that at eight in the morning, it stretched from the metro platform through the corridors up onto Vasagatan.

The car was still standing in the driveway, alongside a red plastic fire engine, in case the children's fever got worse, in case Zofia had to drive to the doctor or the drugstore. Piet Hoffmann yawned as he zigzagged through the commuters who were moving too slowly, still sleepy. He had gotten out of bed every hour through the night as their temperatures rose. The first time was just after midnight when he had opened all the windows in both boys' rooms, folded the blankets back from their hot bodies and then alternated between the two bedsides until they went back to sleep. The last time was around five, when he forced a dose of Calpol into them. They needed to rest, sleep, to get better again. Two whispering parents in dressing gowns had agreed at dawn how to divide up the day, as they always did when one of them was ill or the nursery had a planning day. He would work in the morning, then come home, they would have lunch together, then Zofia would go to work in the afternoon.

Vasagatan wasn't exactly beautiful, a sad and soulless stretch of asphalt, but it was still where many visitors, having just gotten off the train or out of the airport bus or taxi, emerged into the Stockholm of water and islands that the shiny tourist brochures had promised them. Piet Hoffmann was late and didn't pay much attention to what was beautiful or ugly as he approached the Sheraron hotel and the table nearest the bar at the far end of the elegant lobby.

They had met thirty-six hours earlier in a spacious, dark building on ul. Ludwika Idzikowskiego in Mokotów in central Warsaw. Henryk Bak and Zbigniew Boruc. His contact and the deputy CEO.

He greeted them, firm handshakes from men who were careful to demonstrate that they gave firm handshakes.

The visit was the head office's way of showing they were serious.

This was where it all started. This was a priority operation. Delivery times and dates to the prison would be managed directly by Warsaw.

They let go of each other's hand and the deputy CEO sat down again by the half-empty glass of orange juice on the table. Henryk started to walk beside Hoffmann toward the exit, but then slowed down and carried on half a step behind him, as if he were unsure of the way or just wanted to have control. Vasagatan was just as soulless from this angle. They passed the entrance to the metro and then crossed the road between the passing cars and followed the pavement on the other side to a doorway, where a security firm had offices on the first floor.

They didn't talk to each other, just as they hadn't spoken on their way to meet the Roof one and a half days earlier in Warsaw. They were silent as they climbed the stairs to the door of Hoffmann Security AB, and then carried on to the second, third, fourth, and fifth floors, and right on up ro the single metal door into the loft.

Piet Hoffmann opened it and they went into the dark. There was a black switch somewhere on the wall. He felt around and eventually found it after having fumbled considerably lower down than he could remember it being. They locked the door from the inside and were careful to leave the key in the lock, so that no one else could get in. The storeroom with number 26 on the door was empty, except for four summer tires that were lying on top of each other in the far corner. He picked up the top one and pulled out the hammer and chisel that were inside the rim, then went back out into the narrow passage with the dim lighting and followed the large, shiny aluminum pipe that was suspended a few centimeters above their heads to where it met the wall and disappeared into a fan heater. He placed the tip of the chisel against the edge of the steel band than joined the pipe and the heater and then hit it hard with the hammer until the band moved and he could rake out eighty-one whitish metal tins from the temporary opening.

Henryk waited until the tins were lined up on the loft floor and then picked out three: the tin farthest to the left, one from the middle, and the second last on the right.

"You can keep the others."

Hoffmann put the remaining seventy-eight tins back in the hiding place in the fan heater while Henryk peeled off the protecting foil from the three that were left and the loft filled with a scent of tulips that was so strong it was almost unbearable.

A yellow, solid lump at the bottom of each tin.

Manufactured amphetamine cut with two parts grape sugar.

Henryk opened his black briefcase and set up some simple scales beside a stand with test tubes, a scalpel, and a pipette. One thousand eighty-seven grams. A kilo of amphetamine plus the weight of the tin. He nodded to Hoffmann: it was exact.

Henryk used the scalpel to scrape at one of the lumps until a piece no bigger than would fit in the first test tube loosened. He put the pipette into the second test tube, which contained phenylacetone and paraffin, sucked up the fluid and then released it over the loose bit of amphetamine, and shook the test tube a couple of times. He waited for a minute or two, then held the test tube up to the window: a clear bluish fluid equaled strong amphetamine, a dark cloudy fluid meant the opposite.

"Three or four times?"

"Three."

"Looks good."

Henryk sealed the tin with the foil and closed the lid, repeated the same procedure with the two others, looked again at the bluish clear fluid and, satisfied, asked his Swedish colleague to put them back in the heater, then hammer the band back in place until they heard the clicking noise that told them that the ventilation pipe was whole again.

The door to the loft was locked properly from the outside. Six flights of stairs down to the asphalt of Vasagatan. They walked in silence.

The deputy CEO was still sitting at the same table, a new half glass of orange juice in front of him.

Hoffmann waited by the long reception desk while Henryk sat down next to Wojtek's number two.

Clear bluish fluid.

Eighty-one kilos of cut amphetamine.

The deputy CEO turned around and nodded. Piet Hoffmann felt something relax in the pit of his stomach as he walked across the expensive hotel lobby.

"All those bloody bits. They just get stuck to your teeth."

The deputy CEO pointed to his half-empty glass of juice and ordered two more. The waitress was young and smiled at them, just as she smiled at all the guests who gave her a hundred-kronor tip and might well order again.

"I will be leading the operation on the outside. You're leading inside, from Kumla, Hall or Aspsås. Maximum security Swedish prisons."

"I need a coffee."

A double espresso. The young waitress smiled again.

"It was a long night."

He looked at the deputy CEO, who paused.

It could be a demonstration of power. Maybe it was.

"Nights sometimes are. Long."

The deputy CEO smiled. He wasn't looking for respect. He was looking for a strength he could trust.

"Right now we've got four people in Aspsås, and three in both Hall and Kumla. In different sections, but they're able to communicate. I want you to be arrested within the week for a crime that is serious enough to merit a sentence in one of them."

"Two months. Then I'm done."

"You'll be given all the time you need."

"I don't want more. But I do want a guarantee. That you'll get me out at exactly that point."

"Don't worry."

"A guarantee."

"We'll get you out."

"How?"

"We'll look after your family when you're inside. And when you're done, we'll look after you. New life, new identity, money to start over again."

The lobby of the Sheraton was still empty.

Those who had come to the capital on business wouldn't check in until the evening. Those who had come in search of museums and monuments were already out and about with a fast-talking guide and new Nike trainers.

He had finished his coffee. He motioned to the reception, another double espresso and one of those little mint wafers.

"Three kilos."

The deputy CEO put his glass of juice down next to the others. He was listening.

"I'll be caught with three kilos. I'll be questioned and plead guilty. I'll explain that I'm working on my own, so I get a short remand as charges can be brought immediately. I'll be given a substantial sentence by the city court-three kilos of amphetamine is a priority crime in Swedish courts, and say that I accept the sentence, so I won't have to wait until it enters into force. If everything goes smoothly, I should be behind bars in the right institution within two weeks."

Piet Hoffmann was sitting in a hotel lobby in the center of Stockholm, but was in fact looking around the small cell in Österåker prison from ten years ago.

Hideous days when voices screamed urine test and grown men lined up to stand in the mirrored room where gimlet eyes inspected their penises and urine. Horrendous nights with spot inspections, standing barely awake in your underpants outside the cell door while a gang of screws stripped, smashed, and emptied everything and when they were done, just walked away from the chaos.

He would deal with it this time. He was there for reasons greater than the humiliation.

"When you're in place, there'll be two stages to the operation. In exactly the same way that we took one prison after the other in Norway from Oslo prison, or in Finland from Riihimaki, which was the first."

The deputy CEO leaned forward.

"You'll knock out any competition that's already there. Then we'll deliver our products through our own channels. To begin with, the remaining seventy-eight kilos that Henryk just approved: you'll use that to dump prices. Everyone inside has to learn that we are the dealers. Amphetamine for fifty kronor a gram instead of three hundred. Until we've got it all. Then we'll raise it. Fuck, maybe we'll do more than that. Keep buying. We'll bump it up to five hundred, why not six hundred per gram. Or stop injecting."

Piet Hoffmann was back in the cramped cell in Österåker. Where drugs ruled. Where those who owned the drugs ruled. Amphetamine. Heroin. Even bread and rotten apples left for three weeks in a bucket of water in a cleaning cupboard-the minute they changed into twelve percent moonshine, it was the owner of the cleaning bucket who ruled.

"I need three days to knock out the competition. During that time I don't want to have any contact and it's my responsibility to take in enough gear."

"Three days."

"From day four, I want one kilo of amphetamine to be delivered once a week through Wojtek's channels. It's my job to see that it's used. I don't want anyone hiding or storing anything, nothing that resembles competition."

Hotel lobbies are strange places.

No one belongs there. No one has any intention of staying there.

The two tables closest to them, which had been empty until now, were suddenly transformed into two groups of Japanese tourists who sat down to wait patiently for the rooms they had booked, which weren't ready yet.

The deputy CEO lowered his voice.

"How will you get it in?"

"That's my responsibility."

"I want to know how you're going to do it."

"The same way that I did at Österåker ten years ago. The same way that I've done it several times since in other prisons."

"How?"

"With all due respect, you know that I'm capable, that I'll take responsibility for it, and that should be enough."

"Hoffmann, how?"

Piet Hoffmann smiled-it felt unnatural-for the first time since last night.

"Tulips and poetry."

The door wasn^'t properly shut.

He distinctly heard footsteps out in the corridor, and they were hurrying toward him.

He didn't want any visitors right now He wasn't going to share this with anyone.

Erik Wilson got up from his chair and checked the door handle. It was already closed. He had imagined it, the steps scraping on the floor, getting louder and louder, were not there. He was more anxious, more stressed than he realized.

Two meetings in a matter of hours.

The longer one at number five with Paula's version of the murder in Västmannagatan and his report from the meeting in Warsaw, and the considerably shorter one at number four when a plastic bag containing a bloody shirt changed hands.

Wilson looked over at the locked cupboard by the wall on the other side of the room.

It was in there. A murderer's battledress.

It wouldn't stay there much longer.

The steps out in the corridor had disappeared, as had the ones in his head. He looked at the computer screen.

Name Piet Hoffmann

Personal ID number 721018-002.0 Number of hits 75

His most important tool over the past nine years for developing the best infiltrator he'd ever heard of.

ASPEN, the criminal intelligence database.

He had started as soon as Piet was released from Österåker, his first day of freedom and first day as a newly recruited infiltrator. Erik Wilson had himself met him at the gate, driven him the fifty kilometers to Stockholm in his own car and when he had dropped him off, he carried on straight to the police headquarters and recorded the first observation of 721018-0010 in ASPEN, intelligence that from that moment would be available to every police officer who logged on to find out more about Piet Hoffmann. A concise, but accurate account of how, on his release, the suspect was met at the gates of Österåker by a car and two previous convicts and known criminals with confirmed links to the Yugoslavian mafia.

Over the years he had successively made him more dangerous observed near the property that was raided in connection with suspected arms dealing and more violent observed fifteen minutes before the murder in Ostling in the company of the suspect, Markovi? and more ruthless. Wilson had varied his formulations and the degree of misinformation, and with each new observation had added to the myth of Piet Hoffmann's potency until, according to a database on a computer, he was one of the most dangerous criminals in Sweden.

He listened again. More footsteps out in the corridor. The sound got clearer, louder, until they passed his door and slowly disappeared again.

He tilted the screen up.

KNOWN.

In two weeks' time, Piet would be given a long prison sentence and then take over enough power to control the drug supply, the kind of force that was treated with respect inside.

DANGEROUS.

Which was why Erik Wilson now wrote this in capital letters.

ARMED.

The next colleague to check Piet Hoffmann in the database would now be presented with a special page and a special code that was only used for a handful of criminals.

KNOWN DANGEROUS ARMED

Any patrol with access to this truth, which was their own intelligence after all, would know him to be extremely dangerous and confront him as such, and this reputation would then accompany him in the secure transport that would transfer him from custody to prison.

He held the mobile phone to his ear. According to the automatic voice that spoke every ten seconds, it was exactly half past twelve when the dark door with HOLM on the letter box opened from inside and Piet Hoffmann walked into a plastic-sheeted flat on the second floor. The parquet floor was uneven and creaked, probably due to water damage.

Number two.

Högalidsgatan 38 and Heleneborgsgaran 9.

Erik Wilson had made some instant coffee, as he usually did, and as normal, Hoffmann did not drink it. A soft sofa in what must have been the TV room, transparent plastic sheeting to protect the fabric during the two-month renovation that rustled when they moved and after a while clung to the film of sweat on his back.

"We'll use this."

Piet Hoffmann knew that they didn't have much time.

He could see it in Erik's eyes, for the first time, as they darted around the room, restless and unfocused. The man who had been his contact for nine years and who had never laughed or cried was stressed, and therefore doing what stressed people often do, trying to hide it, thus making it all the more obvious.

Hoffmann opened a small tin that once had been manufactured and sold for storing tea leaves, but which now contained the yellow, cohesive substance smelling strongly of tulips.

"Blossom."

Erik Wilson carefully scraped off a piece with the plastic knife that Hoffmann gave him, put it to his tongue, felt it burning, and knew he would get a blister there.

"Bloody strong. Two parts grape sugar?"

"Yep."

"How much?"

"Three kilos."

"Enough for a fast-track trial and a long sentence in a high security prison."

Piet Hoffmann pressed down the lid and put the tin back in his inner pocket. The other eighty-one kilos were still in the fan heater in the loft of the turn-of-the-century building on Vasagatan. He would later describe to Wilson where and how to find it. But not yet. It still had to be cut one more time, his own share, which he sometimes did, sold it on.

"I'm going to need three days to knock out all other business. Wojtek will get the reports they need to continue. Then we'll do what we set out to do. Eliminate."

Erik Wilson should have felt calmer, happier, curious. His best infiltrator was on his way to prison, exactly where both the Swedish police and Wojtek had planned for him to be, and he would start and end a mafia branch expansion. He wasn't used to the stress and he saw that Piet had clocked it.

"I'm trying to solve Västmannagatan in the usual way. A report to the head of homicide and the secret locker. But… it's not enough this time. Murder, Piet! We'll have to take it higher than police headquarters. We have to go to Rosenbad. And you're going to come too."

"You know that's not possible."

"You don't have any choice."

"Erik, for fuck's sake, I can't just stroll in through the main entrance of the Government Offices, together with the police and politicians!"

"I'll collect you from 2B."

Piet Hoffmann sat on the sofa that was protected with plastic sheeting that was sticking to his back and slowly shook his head.

"If anyone sees me… I'm dead."

"In the same way that you'll be dead the minute anyone in prison discovers who you are. Only, you'll be banged up then. You need the authorities. To get out. To survive."

He left the instant coffee in the second floor flat and instead drank a dark roast coffee with warm milk in a café on the corner of Palsundsgatan, and tried to concentrate on the sound of Italian crooners and a table of giggling girls who had swapped their school lunches for a plate of cinnamon buns, and two people at a table at the back who were trying to look like poets and talking too loudly about writing, but only succeeded in being an imitation of others who talked too loud.

Erik was right. Always on your own. He had no choice. Trust no one but yourself

He put down his empty coffee cup and walked over Vasterbron accompanied by a cautious sun, paused quietly for a while by the railings, twenty-seven meters above the water, and wondered how it would feel to jump, the seconds that were all and nothing before your body slammed into the transparent surface. He phoned home and spoke to Zofia from the middle of Norr Malarstrand and, yet another lie, told her that her work was just as important as his but that he couldn't come home and hold the fort until later on tonight. He heard her raise her voice and then put the phone down when he couldn't bear to lie anymore.

The asphalt became harder the closer to the heart of the city he came.

When he walked into a multi-story garage opposite an expensive department store, the pavement on Regeringsgatan was empty despite the fact it was only early afternoon. He climbed the narrow stairs up to the first floor, moved between the parked cars in section B until he spotted the black minivan with darkened windows in the far corner by the concrete wall. He went over and tried the handle on one of the back doors. It was unlocked. He opened the door to the back seat of the abandoned car, then looked at his watch. He would have to wait ten more minutes.

Zofia had not stopped talking when he put the phone down. She had continued to talk to him in his head as he walked along the water at Norr Malarstrand and past the ugly buildings at Tegelbacken, and was there beside him with her frustration on the seat in the empty car. She wasn't to know that he was the sort who lied.

He shivered.

It was always cold in these sterile garages, but this particular chill came from within, a chill that neither clothes nor movement could change. There is nothing that chills like self-contempt.

The door to the driver's seat opened.

He checked his watch. Ten minutes exactly.

Erik usually waited somewhere on the floor above, where you could see every car in Section B if you bent down, and anyone who might be too close. He didn't turn around when he got in, said nothing, just started the minivan and drove the short distance from Hamngatan to Mynttorget, and in through the gate to the small stone yard and the building where the MPs had their offices. They got out and were no sooner through the door than a security guard came to meet them and asked them to follow him down two flights of stairs and along a corridor under the Riksdag building that came out in Rosenbad; it only took a few minutes to walk along the corridor between the two centers of political power in Sweden, and it was the only way to get into the Government Offices without being seen.

He checked the door, only a few meters from the main security office by the official entrance to Rosenbad. He held the door handle until he was certain that it was locked.

It was hard to move.

The sink merged into the toilet seat and the whitewashed walls pressed against him.

The thin oblong digital recorder was in his trouser pocket, with the cigar case and plastic tube from the drug store. 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 leaned forward and pushed it slowly up his anus, short thrusts until he felt it slip in a few centimeters, only then to slide out again and land on the paper towels.

Another attempt.

He pushed again, short thrusts, centimeter by centimeter, 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 gray-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 realized 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 Konigsberg. 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 elevator 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 elevator, 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 meters 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 armor-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 recognized 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 lead twice without feeling anything. It slipped down a bit and Piet Hoffmann held his breath until it got stuck, about halfway down his thigh. It felt like it was going to stay there.

Big windows with deep white sills and a view over the still waters of Norrström and Riddarfjärden. The room smelled of fresh coffee and detergent and there were six chairs around the meeting table. He was last, only two places left, he moved toward one of them. They studied him without a word. He passed behind their backs and made sure to feel the fabric of his trousers with a casual hand: the microphone was still there, but facing in the wrong direction. He adjusted it as he pulled out a chair and sat down.

He recognized all four people, but had met only two of them before, Göransson and Erik.

The state secretary was sitting closest to him and she pointed to a document in front of her, then got up and held out her hand.

"The document-. I've read it. I assumed… I assumed that it concerned a… woman?"

She had a firm handshake. She was like the others, the ones who press too hard and think that it's the same as power.

"Paula."

Piet Hoffmann kept hold of her hand.

"That's my name, in here."

The uncomfortable silence dragged out and while he waited for someone to start speaking, he looked down at the papers that the state secretary had referred to.

He recognized Erik's way of expressing himself.

Västmannagatan 79. The secret report.

A copy of the same document lay in front of each of them. They were already part of the chain of events.

"This is the first time that Paula and I have met like this."

Erik Wilson was careful to look everyone straight in the eye when he spoke.

"With other people. In a room that we haven't secured. Where we don't have control."

He held up the report, the detailed description of a murder witnessed by one of the people at a meeting table in the Government Offices.

"An unprecedented meeting. And I hope that we will leave having made an unprecedented decision."

Ewert Grens had been lying on the office floor when Sven Sundkvist had knocked on his door a couple of minutes earlier and walked in. Sven hadn't said anything, hadn't asked any questions, he just sat down on the corduroy sofa and waited, like he always did.

"It's better here."

"Here?"

"On the floor. The sofa is starting to get too soft."

He had slept there for a second night. His stiff leg didn't ache at all and he had more or less gotten used to the cars accelerating all the way up the steep slope on Hantverkargatan.

"I want to report on Västmannagatan."

"Anything new?"

"Not much."

Ewert Grens lay on the floor and peered at the ceiling. There were some large cracks near the lamp, which he had never paid attention to before. Whether they were new or whether the music had always just been in the way.

He sighed.

He had investigated murders all his adult life. Västmannagatan 79, a feeling somewhere in his chest-there was something that didn't fit. They had identified the body, the flat owner, even the remains of amphetamine and bile from the mule. They had blood stains and the angle from which the gun was fired. They had a witness with a Swedish voice who chose to raise the alarm and a Polish security firm that meant the Eastern European mafia.

They had as good as bloody nothing.

They were no closer to a solution than they had been in Copenhagen Airport the evening before.

"There are fifteen flats in that block. I've interviewed everyone who was there at the time of the murder. Three of them have observations that might be of interest. On the ground floor- Are you listening, Ewert?"

"Carry on."

"On the ground floor there's a Finn who can give a pretty good description of two men he'd never seen before, as he has the best possible observation point-everyone who goes in or out passes his door. Pale, shaved heads, dark clothes, forties. Only through the peephole and only for a few seconds, but you can actually see and hear more than I thought from there and he also mentioned a Slavic language, so it all fits."

"Polish."

"In terms of the tenant, that would seem likely."

"Mules, bodies, Poles. Drugs, violence, Eastern Europe."

Sven Sundkvist looked down at the older man on the floor. He just lay there and couldn't care less what anyone else thought, with a confidence that Sven could never achieve, as he was the sort who, no matter how much he had tried to change it over the years, wanted to be liked and therefore tended to be amenable and not make a fuss.

"There's a young woman who lives on the fourth floor, a couple of doors down from the crime scene, and an old man up on the fifth floor above. Both of them were at home at the time of the murder and said that they heard what they describe as a clear bang."

"A bang?"

"Neither of them was willing to say more than that. They don't know anything about weapons and couldn't say whether it was a gun shot. But they are both certain that what they called a bang was loud and a sound that was not a normal part of the building."

"That's all?"

"That's all."

The ringing from the phone on the desk was sharp and irritating, and did not let up, despite the fact that Sven remained sitting on the sofa and Ewert stayed on the floor.

"Should I answer?"

"I can't understand why they don't give up."

"Should I answer it, Ewert?"

"It's on my desk."

He got up patiently and lumbered toward the loud ringing.

"Yes?"

"You sound out of breath."

"I was lying on the floor."

"I want you to come down here."

Grens and Sundkvist didn't say anything, they just left the room and went down the corridor, waited impatiently for the elevator that took for ever to go down. Nils Krantz was at the door to the forensics department and showed them into a narrow room.

"You asked me to extend the search area. I did. All the stairwells between numbers seventy and ninety. And in the trash store of Västmannagatan 73, in a paper recycling container, we found this."

Krantz was holding a plastic bag. Ewert Grens leaned closer and put on his reading glasses a few moments later. Something in fabric, gray-and white checks, partially covered in blood, a shirt perhaps, or maybe a jacket.

"Very interesting. This could be our breakthrough."

The forensic scientist opened the plastic bag and put the fabric on something that looked like a serving tray, and with a bent finger pointed at the obvious stains.

"Blood stains and gunshot residue that take us back to the flat in Västmannagatan 79, as it's the victim's blood and gunpowder from the same charge that we found in the flat."

"Which doesn't get us anywhere. Which doesn't give us a damn shit more than we already knew."

Krantz pointed at the gray-and-white piece of clothing.

"It's a shirt. It's got the victim's blood on it. But there's more. We've identified another blood group. I'm certain that it belongs to the person who fired. Ewert, this is the shirt that the murderer was wearing."

A courtroom. That's what it felt like. A room that smelled of power. A document that described a violent incident lying on an important table. Göransson was the prosecutor who checked the facts and asked the questions; the state secretary was the judge who listened and made the decisions; Wilson, to his right, was the defense who claimed self-defense and asked for leniency. Piet Hoffmann wanted to get up and walk away, but was forced to stay calm. After all, he was the accused.

"I didn't have any choice. My life was in danger."

"You always have a choice."

"I tried to calm them down. But I could only go so far. I'm supposed to be a criminal, through and through. Otherwise I'm dead."

"I don't understand."

It was a bizarre feeling. He was sitting one floor away from the Swedish prime minister in the building that ruled Sweden. Outside, down on the pavement in the real world, people were walking back from lunch with a warm low-alcohol beer and a cup of coffee because they'd chosen to pay five kronor more, while he was here, with those in power, trying to explain why the authorities should not investigate a murder.

"I'm their number one in Sweden. The people who were in the flat have been trained by the Polish intelligence service and know how to sniff out anything that doesn't feel right."

"We're talking about murder. And you, Hoffmann, or Paula, or whatever I should call you, could have prevented it."

"The first time they put the gun to the buyer's head, I managed to stop them shooting. But the next time, he had just exposed himself, he was the enemy, a snitch, dead… I didn't have a bloody choice."

"And as you didn't have a choice, neither do we, and so should we just pretend that the whole thing never happened?"

All four of them looked at him, each with the report in front of them on the table. Wilson, Göransson, and the state secretary. The fourth person had remained silent. Hoffmann couldn't understand why.

"Yes, if you want to break this new mafia branch before it gets established. If you want to do that, then you don't have any choice."

This courtroom was like all the others, just as cold, no real people. He had been in this situation five times before, the accused, in front of people he did not respect but who would decide whether he should be part of society or live in a few square meters behind a secure door. A couple of suspended sentences, a couple of acquittals due to lack of evidence, and just one prison sentence, and a year from hell in Österåker.

That time he had not been successful in defending his case. He would not do it again.

Nils Krantz leaned nearer the computer screen as he pointed to the image of small red peaks that all pointed upward over different numbers.

"The top row, if you look here, is from Copenhagen police. The DNA profile of a Danish citizen called Jens Christian Toft. The man who was killed in Västmannagatan 79. The bottom row is from the National Laboratory of Forensic Science, an analyzis of all the blood stains on the shirt over there that we found in the trash at Västmannagatan 73 that are at least two by two millimeters. You see, identical rows. Every single STR marker-that's the red peaks-is exactly the same length."

Ewert Grens listened to him, but still only saw a very uniform pattern. "I'm not interested in him, Nils. But I am interested in the murderer." Krantz considered a sarcastic retort or irritated comment. But he did neither, chose to ignore Grens instead, as it often felt better.

"But I also asked them specifically to give the same priority to analyzing even smaller spots of blood. Too small to stand up as evidence in court. But big enough to establish any marked difference."

He showed the next image.

A similar pattern, red peaks, but with larger distances and different numbers.

"These are from another person."

"Who?"

"I don't know."

"You've got the profile."

"But no hits."

"Don't be so damn difficult, Nils."

"I've matched and compared them with everything I've got access to. I'm certain it's the murderer's blood. But I'm equally certain that this DNA won't be found in any Swedish database."

He looked at the detective superintendent.

"Ewert, the murderer is probably not Swedish. The course of action, the Radom gun, no DNA matches. You'll have to start looking farther afield, in other places."

It looked like it would be a lovely evening. The sun was already dipping like a ripe orange at the point where the sky melted into Riddarfiarden, the only thing you could see from the large window of the state secretary's office. Piet Hoffmann looked into the light that made the sad, expensive birch meeting table look even sadder. He longed to be out of here, for Zofia's soft body, for Hugo's laugh, Rasmus's eyes when he said Daddy.

"Before we continue the meeting-"

He wasn't there. He was as far away from it all as he could be in a room that contained power and the people who could decide whether he should be put even farther away.

Erik Wilson, the defense lawyer in this trial, cleared his throat.

"Before we continue the meeting, I want a guarantee that Paula will not be charged for anything that might have happened in Västmannagatan 79."

The state secretary had one of those faces that showed no emotion. "I understood that that was what you wanted."

"You've dealt with similar cases before."

"But if I am to grant criminal immunity, I also have to understand why." The microphone was still in place, halfway down his thigh.

But it was about to slip again, he could feel the tape was gradually becoming unstuck. The next time he got up, he was sure that it would not stay where it was.

"I'd be more than happy to explain why."

Wilson gripped the report firmly in one hand.

"We could have smashed the Mexican mafia in an expansion phase nine months ago. We could have eliminated the Egyptian mafia in an expansion phase five months ago. If we'd had the mandate for our infiltrators to respond in full. But it didn't happen. We stood by and watched as two more players happily helped themselves. Now we have another opportunity. This time, with the Poles."

Piet Hoffmann tried to sit still and with one hand under the table attempted to untangle the lead and the pieces of tape that had started to stick together.

Small movements with searching fingers.

"Paula will continue to infiltrate. He will be in the right place at the point when Wojtek takes over all drug dealing in Swedish prisons. He is the one who will supply Warsaw with reports about deliveries and sales and at the same time supply us with information about how and when to launch an attack and smash them."

He'd got it. A microphone the size of a pinhead under the material of his trousers. He fixed it again, trying to pull it up, back toward his groin, as it sat better there and it was easier to point in the direction of whoever was talking.

He stopped abruptly.

Göransson, who was sitting directly opposite him, suddenly started to stare, his gaze unflinching.

"High security Swedish prisons. And Wojtek are going to concentrate on two categories of prisoner. First of all, the millionaires, the ones who have earned their money through organized crime and are inside for a long time, and who will transfer their ill-gotten gains gram by gram, day by day, to a property on ul. Ludwika Idzikowskiego. And then the lackeys, the ones who have no money and who leave prison with substantial debts and in order to survive, pay off these debts by selling large quantities of drugs or committing violent crimes, debts that Wojtek can link to a dangerous criminal network."

He let go of the microphone and placed both his hands on the table, where they were visible.

Göransson was still looking directly at him and it was as hard to breathe as it was to swallow, each second an hour, until he looked away.

"I can't say it anymore clearly than that. It's you who decides. Let Paula continue or stand by and watch once again."

The state secretary looked at each of them, and then out of the window at the sun, which was so beautiful. Maybe she also longed to be out.

"Could I ask you to leave the room?"

Piet Hoffmann shrugged and started to walk toward the door, but stopped suddenly. The microphone. It had come unstuck and slithered down between his right leg and the material of his trousers.

"It will only take a couple of minutes. Then you can come back in."

He said nothing. But he held up his middle finger as he left the room. He heard a tired sigh behind him. They had observed it, were irritated, kept their eyes averted. That was what he had intended, he wanted to avoid any questions about what was being dragged behind his foot as he shut the door.

The state secretary's face still gave nothing away.

"You mentioned nine months. Five months. The Mexican and Egyptian mafia. I said no because the criminals you use as infiltrators can only be deemed to be high risk."

"Paula is not a high-risk source. He is Wojtek's ticket to expansion. The whole operation is built around him."

"I will never give criminal immunity to someone who neither you nor I trust."

"I do trust him,"

"Then perhaps you can explain to me why Chief Superintendent Göransson body-searched him out there not long ago."

Erik Wilson looked at his boss and then at the woman with the blank face.

" I am Paula's handler, I am the one who works with him every day. I trust him and Wojtek is already here! We’ve never managed to position an infiltrator so centrally in an expanding organization before. With Paula, we can cut them down with one fell swoop. If he's given immunity with regard to Västmannagatan. If he is allowed to operate fully from the inside."

The state secretary went over to the window and the golden sun, and a view of the capital that was going about its afternoon business without any idea of the decisions that governed it. Then she turned and looked at the fourth participant in the meeting who had not yet said anything.

"What do you think?"

She had opened her door for Detective Superintendent Wilson and Chief Superintendent Göransson. But it was in decisions like this that she turned to the top man in the police authority and asked him to sit down at the table with her and listen.

"The criminal elite, multimillionaires, major criminals as Wojtek's financiers. The criminal grass roots, those indebted, the petty thieves, as Wojtek's slaves."

The national police commissioner had a sharp, nasal voice.

"I don't want that to happen. You don't want that to happen. Paula doesn't have time for Västmannagatan."

Piet Hoffmann had a couple of minutes.

He checked the CCTV close to the elevators, and positioned himself right underneath to be certain that he was in a blind spot. He made sure that he was on his own and then undid his trousers and soon got hold of the thin microphone lead and pulled it up to his crotch and positioned it on his groin.

The tape had dislodged.

Göransson's hands had disturbed it when he searched him.

A few more minutes.

He pulled a thread loose from one of the inner seams, and with clumsy fingers tied the lead to the fabric and angled the microphone toward the zipper of his trousers, then pulled down his sweater as far as he could over the waistband.

It was not the best solution. But it was the only one he had time for.

"You can come in again now,"

The door midway down the corridor was open. The state secretary waved to him and he tried to walk as naturally as he could, with short steps.

They had decided. At least, that's what it felt like.

"One more question."

The state secretary looked first at Göransson, then at Wilson.

"Just over twenty-four hours ago, a preliminary investigation was opened. I'm guessing it's being led by the city police. I want to know how you'll, er, deal with that."

Erik Wilson had been waiting for her question.

"You've read the report that I sent to the head of homicide."

He pointed at the copies of the document that were still lying in front of each one of them on the table.

"And this is the report that the investigators, Grens, Sundkvist, Hermansson, and Krantz, have written. What they know, what they've seen. Compare it with the contents of my report, with the actual events and background as to why Paula was taking part in the operation in the flat."

She leafed quickly through the pages.

"A real report. And one that shows how much our colleagues know."

She didn't like it. As she read, the dead face came alive for the first time, the mouth, the eyes, as if it was warding off the contempt and a decision that she thought she would never have to consider.

"And now? What's happened since this was written?"

Wilson smiled, the first smile for a long time in a room that was being suffocated by its own solemnity.

"Now? If I've understood rightly, the investigators have just found a shirt in a plastic bag in a gargabe bin near the scene of the crime."

He looked at Hoffmann, still with a smile on his face.

"A shirt covered in blood and gunshot residue. But… blood that's not recorded in any Swedish database. My guess is that it may be a red herring, one that will get them nowhere but that will take time and effort to investigate."

The shirt was gray-and-white checks and had stains that now, after twenty-four hours, were more brown than red. Ewert Grens picked at it in irritation with a glove.

"The murderer's shirr. The murderer's blood. But yet we're getting nowhere."

Nils Krantz was still sitting in front of the image of red peaks above various numbers.

"No identity. But maybe a place."

"I don't understand."

The cramped room was just as damp and dark as all the other rooms in forensics. Sven looked at the two men beside him. They were the same age, balding, not particularly jolly, tired but thorough, and, perhaps the greatest similarity, they had lived for their work until they became their work.

The younger generation that was just starting out was not likely to ever be the same. Grens and Krantz were the sort of men who no longer had a natural place.

"The smaller flecks of blood, the ones that belong to the murderer, don't come from anyone in our databases. But a person with no name has to live somewhere and always takes something with them when they move around. I usually look for traces of persistent and organic pollutants that are stored in the body, difficult to break down, that have a long life and don't dissolve easily-sometimes they point the investigation in the direction of a specific geographic place."

Krantz even moved like Grens. Sven, who had never noticed it before, looked around to see if there was a sofa, suddenly convinced that the forensic scientist also stayed in his office sometimes when the light had faded and his own flat meant loneliness.

"But not this time. There's nothing in the blood that can link your murderer to a specific place, country or even continent."

"Damn it, Nils, you just said-"

"But there's something else on the shirt."

He unfolded the shirt on the workbench with great care.

"In several places. But here in particular, at the bottom of the right arm. Flower fragments."

Grens leaned forward in an attempt to see something that could not be seen.

"It's Blossom. Polish Yellow."

They were finding it more and more often in raids. The smell of tulips. Chemical amphetamine from factories that used flower fertilizer instead of acetone.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. The ingredients, smell and even the yellow color, like saffron, a sulphate that gives off color in running water."

"Poland. Again."

"And, I know exactly where it comes from."

Krantz folded the shirt with small movements, just as carefully as he had unfolded it.

"I've analyzed amphetamine with exactly this composition in connection with two other investigations in less than a month. We now know that it is manufactured in an amphetamine factory just outside Siedlce, a town about a hundred kilometers east of Warsaw."

The strong sunlight had become uncomfortably warm and made his jacket itch on his neck and his shoes feel too tight.

It was fifteen minutes since the state secretary had left the room for a brief meeting in an even bigger room, and a decision that would mean all or nothing. Piet Hoffmann had a dry mouth and swallowed what should have been saliva, but now was anxiety and fear.

Strange.

A small-time dealer who had served a sentence in a locked cell in Österåker prison. A family man with a wife and two young boys whom he had come to love more than anything else in the world.

He was someone else now.

A man of thirty-five, sitting on the edge of a desk in a building that was the symbol of power, the state secretary's phone in his agitated hand.

"Hi."

"When are you coming back?"

"Later on this evening. This meeting seems to be going on forever. And I can't leave. How are they?"

"Do you care?"

Her voice upset him. It was cold, hollow.

"Hugo and Rasmus, how are they?"

She didn't answer. She stood there in front of him-he knew every expression, every gesture, her slim hand massaging her forehead, her feet fidgeting in oversize slippers. Any minute now she would decide whether or not she could bear to carry on being angry.

"They're a bit better. An hour ago their temperature was one-oh-one point three."

"I love you."

He put the phone down, looked at the people around the table and then at the clock. Nineteen minutes had passed. Damn saliva, there wasn't any, no matter how much he tried to swallow. He stretched and had started to walk toward his empty chair over at the far end of the table when the door opened.

She was back, with a tall, well-built man, half a step behind her. "This is Pål Larsen, the director general."

She had made her decision.

"He's going to help us. With what happens next."

Piet Hoffmann heard what she was saying, and should perhaps have laughed or clapped his hands. He's going to help us. With what happens next. She had made up her mind to overlook his presence which, legally, was tantamount to accomplice to murder. She was taking a risk. And deemed that it was one worth taking. He knew of at least two other occasions where she had granted a secret pardon to infiltrators who had been given a prison sentence. But he was fairly certain that she had never before chosen to overlook what she knew about an unsolved crime-solutions normally stopped at the level of the police.

"I want to know what this is about."

The director general of the Swedish Prison and Probation Service made it quite clear that he had no intention of sitting down.

"You are going to-now, how did we put it-help us position someone." "And who are you?"

"Erik Wilson, City Police."

"And you think that I should help you with a placement?"

"Pål?"

The state secretary smiled at the general director.

"Me. You're going to help me."

The well-built man in a tight suit said nothing, but his body language betrayed his frustration.

"Your task is to position Paula-the man sitting next to me here-in Aspsås prison to serve a sentence he will be given once he has been arrested for the possession of three kilos of amphetamine."

"Three kilos? That'll be a long sentence. Then he'll have CO go to a holding prison first, Kumla, before being transferred."

"Not this time."

"Yes, he-"

"Pål?"

The state secretary had a voice that was soft but could give surprisingly harsh instructions.

"Deal with it."

Wilson weathered the embarrassing silence.

"When Paula arrives at Aspsås, his work duties will already be fixed.

He'll start as the new cleaner in the administration block and workshop." "Prison management usually only grants cleaning duties as a reward." "Then reward him."

"And who the hell is Paula? He must have a name? Do you? Because you can talk for yourself, can't you?"

The director general of the Prison and Probation Service was used to giving orders and being obeyed, not being given them and having to obey.

"You'll get my name and personal details. So that you can put me in the right prison, give me the right work and make sure that at lock-up time exactly two days after I've arrived, there will be an extensive spot check of every cell in the prison."

"What the hell-"

"With dogs. That's important."

"With dogs? And what happens when we find what you've planted? To the fellow prisoner who you've wasted your drugs on? No chance. I don't buy it. It means putting my staff at risk and as a result, someone being charged for a crime they didn't commit. I just won't buy it."

The state secretary stepped closer to Larsen, put her hand on the arm of his jacket and looked straight at him while she spoke in a soft voice.

"Pål, just sort it. I appointed you. And that means that you decide what happens in the Prison and Probation Service, You decide what you and I agree that you should decide. And when you leave, could you please shut the door behind you."

There was a bit of a draft from an open window farther down the corridor.

Perhaps that was why the door slammed so loudly.

"Paula will continue to infiltrate the organization from the inside. We have to make him more dangerous."

Erik Wilson waited until the noise from the door subsided.

"He will have committed some serious crimes. He'll be given a long sentence. He'll only be able to operate freely from his cell if he gets respect.

And when the other prisoners check his criminal record, and you can be sure that they will, on the first day in fact, they will find all the answers we want them to."

"How?"

A hint of a frown on the state secretary's blank face.

"How will he get that background?"

"I normally use one of my civilian contacts. Someone who works in the national courts administration, a civil servant who files information directly in the criminal records database. An original document from there… well, it's never been questioned yet by anyone in a prison corridor."

He had expected more questions. About how often he tampered with the national court administration databases. How many people were walking around with false convictions.

He didn't get any.

They were sitting at a meeting table where elastic solutions were not unusual and the names and titles of key people who adjusted flows or shortened waiting times for court cases were not required.

"In thirty-eight hours, a wanted person will be arrested and questioned." He looked at Hoffmann.

"He will plead guilty, state that he acted alone, and a couple of weeks later will agree with a city court judgment and a long sentence that is to be served in Aspsås, one of the country's three high-security prisons."

The room was still irritatingly bright and wiltingly warm.

They all stood up. They were done.

Piet Hoffmann wanted to hammer down the door and run out of the building and not stop until he was holding Zofia's body tight in his arms. But not yet. He wanted it to be formulated as clearly as possible so that there could only be one interpretation.

Always on your own.

"Before I leave, I'd like you to summarize exactly what you are guaranteeing me."

He had expected to be dismissed. But she realized that he needed to hear it.

"I'll deal with it."

Piet Hoffmann stepped closer and felt the loose lead slapping against the fabric of his trousers. He leaned slightly to the right, so that it would be directly in front of her; it was important that he caught absolutely everything.

"How?"

"I guarantee that you won't be charged for anything that happened at Västmannagatan 79. I guarantee that we will do our best to help you complete your operation in prison. And… that we will look after you when the work is done. I know that you will then have a death threat and be branded throughout the criminal world. We will give you a new life, a new identity, and money to start over again abroad."

She gave him a vague smile. At least, that's what it looked like when the bright light caught her face.

"I guarantee you this in my capacity as a state secretary of the Ministry of Justice."

Wojtek or the Government Offices. It didn't really matter. Same choice of words, same promises. Two sides of the law with the same exit route.

It was good. But not good enough.

Trust no one but yourself

"I still want to know how."

"We've already done this three times before."

A glance over at the national police commissioner. He nodded to her.

"Officially, you will be pardoned. On humanitarian grounds. That doesn't need to be explained in anymore detail. Medical or humanitarian grounds are sufficient for a decision that the Ministry of Justice will then stamp as confidential."

Piet Hoffmann stood in front of her in silence for a few seconds. He was pleased. He was close enough.

She had said what he wanted to hear and clearly enough for it to be heard again.

They walked side by side down the underground corridor that linked the government offices with the parliament building and stopped by an elevator that took them to Gamla Stan and Myntrorget 2. They should have been in a hurry, there wasn't much time left, but it was as if they were both trying to understand where they were actually going.

"You're an outlaw now."

Erik Wilson stopped.

"From now on, you're dangerous to both sides. Wojtek, who will kill you the instant you're exposed as an infiltrator. And for the people who were around the table with us just now too. You now know things that no one in that room will admit. They'll sacrifice you the moment you're a threat, they'll burn you in the same way that the authorities have burned other informers when it's a matter of protecting power. You're Wojtek's main man. You're our main man. But if anything happens, Piet, you're on your own.

Piet Hoffmann knew what fear felt like and he would fight it off, as he always did, but he needed just a little more time, he wanted to stay in the dark under the streets of Stockholm; if he did that they wouldn't get into the elevator and then into the parked car that was waiting in the courtyard and he wouldn't need to fight anymore.

"Piet?"

"Yes?"

"You have to be in control, at all times. If everything goes wrong… the authorities won't look after you, they'll burn you."

He started to walk.

He had exactly thirty-eight hours left.