Three Seconds

Monday

They were standing so close to him.

Two of them behind him who would rub right up against his back if he took a step back in the confined space, two more in front, staring in his eyes, ears, nose, their every breath warm moisture on the skin of his face.

They had been warned.

All the wardens in Stockholm's Kronoberg remand prison had read the documents about one of Sweden's most dangerous criminals, and they had all heard the story that ten days ago, when he had just been arrested in the pool hall by Sankt Eriksgatan, he spat in the face of one of their colleagues as they walked through the parking lot and then threatened him with two bullets the next time they met.

This time he was being transported elsewhere. The small elevator down to the metal cage in the garage under Kronobergsparken and then the transport bus to Aspsås prison. There were four of them, two more than usual, and the prisoner was in handcuffs and leg irons. They had even considered a waist restraint, but decided against it.

He was the kind who hated everything and used what little intelligence he had to cause trouble; they had seen a few over the years, serious criminals with a one-way ticket to an early grave. The wardens kept a constant eye on the prisoner and each other; it was in the short distance from the elevator to the waiting bus that he had spat the last time, only to get an almighty knee in the balls in return when three of them happened to look the other way at the same time.

They were waiting, prepared, he was going to make a move soon, they knew it.

He was silent as they escorted him to the bus. He was silent as he got on. He was silent as he sat down on one of the back seats. The prisoner who hated everything and needed extra guards was silent as they drove through the underground garage toward the exit and security desk by Drottningholmsvagen. Then it started.

"Where the fuck you going?"

As he was being shoved onto the bus, the prisoner whose name was Hoffmann had noticed another guy already sitting there in equally baggy clothes with the Prison and Probation Service logo on his chest. He had stared at him, waited until he caught his eye.

"Österåker."

One of the other prisons to the north of Stockholm. The transport bus from the remand often took several prisoners to various prisons where they would serve their sentences.

"And what the fuck you in for?"

The prisoner whose name was Hoffmann got no answer.

"One more time. What the fuck you in for?"

"Assault."

"What you get?"

"Ten months."

The wardens looked at each other. This wasn't good.

"Ten months, eh? Guessed as much. You look like one of them. Little shits who beat up their women don't get much more than that."

Hoffmann had lowered his voice to a growl and tried to move closer as the bus passed through the security barrier and headed north along Sankt Eriksgatan.

"What d'you mean?"

The prisoner who was going to Österåker had noticed the change in Hoffmann's tone and his aggression, and tried without realising to back away.

"That you're the kind of guy who only hits women. The kind that the rest of us have a problem with."

"How the fuck… how the fuck d'you know that?"

Piet Hoffmann smiled to himself. He'd guessed right. And he knew that the guards were listening-that was what he wanted, them to listen and then to talk about the dangerous prisoner with threatening behavior who needed extra cover.

"You can always tell a cowardly little prick who deserves to die."

They were listening and Piet Hoffmann was sure that they'd already realized what his next move would be. They had all seen it before. It was always dangerous and a risk to transport pedophiles and wife beaters with other prisoners. He looked at the seat in front, his voice calm.

"You've got five minutes. But only five minutes, mind."

They both turned around and the guard in the passenger seat was about to answer when Hoffmann interrupted.

"Five minutes to chuck this bastard out. Otherwise… things could get messy in here."

They'd tell the other guards later.

Word would spread, to people inside as well.

It was all about building respect.

The guard in the passenger seat sighed loudly before making a call on the radio, saying that a car had to be sent immediately to the prison transport bus that was waiting by Norrtull as there was a prisoner who needed to be picked up and taken to Österåker in a separate vehicle.

Piet Hoffmann had never been inside the walls of Aspsås prison before. He had mapped out all the buildings from the church tower and had studied the bars in front of every window, and while on remand, with Erik's help, he had learned about the prisoners and staff in all the corridors of Block G, but when both iron gates opened and the bus headed toward the central security, it was the first time that he had actually been inside one of the country's highest security prisons. It was hard to move with the tight, heavy leg irons on, each step was too short and the sharp metal cut into his skin. Two guards right behind him and two just as close in front when they pointed to the door to the left of the normal visitors' door, the one that went straight into registration and more guards from security. They undid the restraints and he could move his arms and legs freely while he was naked and bent over double, with a rubber-gloved hand checking up his ass and another pulling at his hair like a comb and a third feeling around in his armpits.

He'd been issued new clothes that hung off him and were just as ugly as the others, and was then escorted to a sterile waiting room where he sat on a wooden chair and didn't say a word.

Ten days had passed.

For twenty-three hours of the day he had lain on a bunk behind a metal door with a peephole in from the corridor. Five square meters and no visitors, no newspapers, no TV, no radio. Time to break you and make you compliant.

He had gotten used to having someone there. He had forgotten how much loneliness reinforced your longing.

He missed her so much.

He wondered what she was doing right now, what she had on, how she smelled, if her steps were long and relaxed, or short and irritated.

Zofia might not be there for him anymore.

He had told her the truth and she would do with it what she wanted and he was so scared that in a couple of months he would no longer have anyone to miss, he would be nothing.

He had been staring at the white walls of the waiting room for four hours when two guards from the day shift opened the door and explained that a cell in G2 Left would be his home at the start of the long sentence. One in front and one behind as they started to walk through a wide passage under the prison yard, a few hundred meters of concrete floor and concrete walls, a locked internal door with a security camera and another passage and then steep stairs up to Block G.

He had left behind the days cooped up in remand at Kronoberg and the fast-track trial, where he did exactly what he told Henryk and the deputy CEO he would do.

He had admitted to possession of three kilos of amphetamine in the trunk of a rented car.

He had got the prosecutor to confirm that he was acting alone and was solely responsible for the crime.

He had declared himself satisfied with the judgment and had signed the document and thereby avoided any unnecessary wait for it to enter into force.

The following day, here he was walking through one of the passages in Aspsås prison on his way to a cell.

"I'd like to have six books."

The warden in front of him stopped.

"Excuse me?"

"I'd like to borrow-"

"I heard what you said. I was just hoping that I'd heard wrong. You've only been here a few hours, you're not even in your unit yet, and you start talking about books."

"You know it's my right."

"We'll talk about that later."

"I need them. It's important to me. Without books I won't survive this."

"Later."

You don't understand.

I'm not here to serve some shitty sentence.

I'm here to knock out all the drug dealers in your leaky prison in a matter of days and then take over myself.

Then I'll carry on working, analyzing, putting together the pieces until I know everything I need to know, and with that knowledge I will destroy the Polish organization's operations, in the name of the Swedish police.

I don't think you've understood that.

The unit was completely deserted when he arrived, sandwiched between two young and quite nervous guards.

Ten years had passed and it was a completely different prison, but it could well have been the same unit as back then: he was back on the corridor with eight cells on each side, the well-equipped kitchen, the TV corner with card games and thoroughly thumbed newspapers, the table tennis table at the far end of the small storeroom with a broken bat hanging in the middle of the tattered net, the pool table with the dirty green baize and every ball safely locked away… even the smell was the same: sweat, dust, fear, and adrenaline and perhaps a hint of moonshine.

"Name?"

"Hoffmann."

The principal prison officer was as short as he was round and he nodded at the two guards from inside his glass box, indicating that from here on he would take charge.

"Haven't we met before?"

"Don't think so."

He had small eyes that seemed to pierce everything he looked at and it was hard to imagine that there was actually a person in there.

"From your papers, I understand that you… Hoffmann, was it?… are someone who is familiar with the way things work in a place like this."

Piet Hoffmann nodded silently at the principal officer. He wasn't there to tell some fat fucking inspector that he deserved a thrashing.

"Yes. I know very well how it works."

The unit would be empty for another three hours, until they came back from the workshop or the library and classroom. He had time for a guided tour with the unit's principal officer to learn how and where he should piss and why lock-in time was seven thirty and not seven thirty-five, and still have plenty of time to sit down in his own cell and come to terms with the fact that from now on this was his home.

Piet Hoffmann positioned himself in the TV corner a few minutes before the others were due back. He had seen photos of all the other fifteen prisoners in the unit and knew their backgrounds, and if he sat here he could see every single one as they came in, but more important, he himself would be seen, it would be obvious that there was someone new in Cell 4, someone who wasn't scared, someone who didn't hide and wait for the right moment to sneak out and show his papers for approval, someone who had already sat down in someone else's favorite chair and taken someone's marked cards and started to play solitaire on someone's table without even asking if he could.

He was looking for two faces in particular.

A heavy, almost square pale face with small eyes that were set too close together. A thinner, longer face with a nose that had been broken in several places and not healed well and a chin and a cheek that had been sewn up by a hand that wasn't a doctor's.

Stefan Lygas and Karol Tomasz Penderecki.

Two of the four members of Wojtek who were serving long sentences at Aspsås, his helpers in knocking out the competition and taking over the drug market, and his executioners the moment he was exposed as Paula.

The first questions were asked at supper. Two of the older men, thick gold around bull necks, one on either side of him with their warm plates and sharp elbows. Stefan and Karol Tomasz got up to stop them but he waved to them, they should hold off, he would let the two men ask the same questions that he had on the prison bus a few hours ago; it was all about the same thing really, respect based on the shared hate of perverts.

"We want to see your papers."

"That's what you say."

"Have you got a problem with that?"

Stefan and Karol Tomasz had already done the bulk of the work. They had been talking about the fact that Piet was coming for the past few days, what he had been taken in for, who he'd worked with, his status with one of the eastern European mafias. They had managed to get in copies of 721018-0010 from the National Police Board criminal records, the criminal intelligence database, prison records and his most recent judgment, via Stefan's lawyer.

"No, but I've got a problem with people sitting too close."

"Your papers, for fuck's sake!"

He would ask them into his cell and he would show them his papers and then he wouldn't have to answer anymore questions. The new prisoner in Cell 4 wasn't a sex offender or a wife beater, but in fact had precisely the background he claimed to have; he would probably even get a few smiles and a cautious slap on the shoulder-prisoners who had shot at policemen and were convicted of attempted murder and aggravated assault of an officer were the kind who didn't need to fight for their status.

"You'll get my judgment, if you just shut it now and let me finish my food."

They played stud poker later with toothpicks that cost a thousand kronor each and he sat in the place that he'd taken from someone who no longer dared to take it back and he boasted about the fucking pig in Söderhamn who had begged for his life when he aimed at his forehead and he smoked rollies for the first time in years and he talked about a woman he was going to fuck senseless on his first supervised leave and they laughed loudly and he leaned back and looked around at the room and the corridor that was full of people who had longed to get away for so long that they no longer knew where.

Tuesday

He had driven slowly through the Stockholm dark which now had turned to light-one of those nights again, long hours of turmoil and restlessness. He hadn't been there for more than two weeks, but at around half past three he had found himself in the middle of the Udine, bridge once again, looking at the sky and water, I never want to see you here again, he had been on his way to the nursing home that he was no longer allowed to visit and the window where she no longer sat, what you are frightened of has already happened, when he suddenly turned around, drove back toward the houses and people, the capital that was so big and yet so small, where he had lived and worked all his life.

Ewert Grens got out of the car.

He had never been here before. He hadn't even known he was on his way here.

He had thought about it so many times and planned and started to drive, but never made it. Now, here he was standing by the southern entrance that was called Gate 1 and his legs felt rubbery like they would both collapse and there was pressure in his chest from his stomach or maybe his heart.

He started to walk but then stopped after a few steps.

He couldn't do it, his legs lacked the strength and whatever it was that was pressing inside came in regular thumps.

It was a gentle dawn and the sun shone so beautifully on the graves and grass and trees, but he wasn't going to go on. Not this morning. He would turn back to the car and drive into the city again as North Cemetery disappeared into the distance in his rearview mirror.

Maybe next time.

Maybe then he'd find out where her stone was, and maybe then he would go all the way there.

Next time.

The corridor at Homicide was deserted and dark. He helped himself to a forgotten, rather dry slice of bread from the basket on the table in the staffroom and pressed two cups of coffee out of the machine and then continued down to the office that would never sing again. He ate and drank his simple breakfast and lifted up the thin file for an ongoing investigation that was at a standstill. They had managed to identify the victim within the first couple of days as an informant for the Danish police, had secured traces of drug mules and amphetamines and confirmed that there had been at least one other Swedish-speaking person in the flat at the time of the murder, the voice that had raised the alarm that he had now listened to so often it had become a part of him.

They had discovered a Polish mafia branch called Wojtek, assumed to have a head office in Warsaw, and then they hit a wall.

Ewert Grens chewed the dry, hard bread and drank up the coffee that was left in the plastic cup. He didn't often give up. He wasn't the sort to do that. But this wall was so long and high and no matter how much he had pushed and shoved and shouted in the past two weeks, he had not managed to get around it or beyond it.

He had followed up the blood stains on the shirt that was found in a garage and had come to a dead end in a register with no matches.

Then he had gone to Poland with Sven to follow up the yellow stains that Krantz had found on the same item of clothing and had ended up in the remains of an amphetamine factory in a town called Siedlce. For a couple of days they had worked closely with some of the three thousand policemen assigned to a special police force to combat organized crime, and had encountered a sense of helplessness, a hunt that never gave results, a nation with five hundred criminal groups that fought every day for a slice of the domestic Polish capital cake, eighty-five even larger criminal groups with international connections, police who frequently took part in armed battles, and a nation that raked in more than five hundred billion kronor every year from the production of synthetic drugs.

Ewert Grens remembered the smell of tulips.

The amphetamine factory that was connected to the stains on the murderer's shirt had been in the basement of a block of flats in the middle of a rundown and dirty neighborhood a couple of kilometers west of the center-uniform buildings once built in their thousands as a temporary solution to an acute housing problem. Ewert Grens and Sven Sundkvist had sat in the car and watched a raid that had ended in a shoot-out and the death of a young policeman. The six people who were in some of the rooms in the basement had then not said a peep to either the Polish or Swedish interrogating officers, and had remained silent, just sneering or staring at the floor, as they knew, of course, that anyone who opened their mouth would not live for long.

Grens swore out loud in the empty room, opened the window and shouted something at someone in civvies who happened to be walking along the asphalt path across the courtyard of Kronoberg, then wrenched open the door and limped up and down the long corridor until his back and forehead were wet with sweat, then sat down on his chair to catch his racing breath.

He had never felt like this before.

He was used to anger, almost addicted to it. He always looked for conflict, hid himself away in it.

It wasn't that.

This feeling, like it was there, the truth, as if the answer was staring at him, laughing at him, a peculiar feeling of being so close without being able to see.

Ewert Grens took the file in his hand and went to lie down with his legs outstretched on the floor behind the corduroy sofa. He started to leaf through the papers starting with the voice informing the police about a dead man in Västmannagatan, through the following two weeks working at full capacity with access to all technical resources, to his trips to Copenhagen and Siedlce.

He swore again, maybe shouted at someone again.

They hadn't gotten anywhere.

He was going to lie on the floor until he understood whose voice he had listened to so many times, what it was he didn't understand and couldn't quite get hold of, why the feeling that the truth was close at hand, laughing at him, was so intense.

He heard the keys jangling.

Two guards unlocking and opening the cells at the far end, the ones with a view over the large gravel pitch, Cell 8 and opposite, Cell 16.

He braced himself, prepared himself for the twenty minutes each day that could mean death.

It had been a god awful night.

Despite having been awake for days, he had lain there, waiting for sleep that never came. They were there with him, Zofia and Hugo and Rasmus, they had stood outside the window and sat on the edge of his bed, lain down beside him and he had been forced to drive them away. They no longer existed; inside he had to stop feeling, he had a mission that he had chosen to complete and that left no room for dreaming-he had to suppress, forget. Anyone who dreamed in prison soon went under.

They were getting closer. The keys jangled again, Cell 7 and Cell 15 were opened and he heard a faint morning and someone else reply go to hell.

He had eventually gotten up-when Zofia had disappeared and the dark outside was densest he had held the dread at bay with chin-ups and sit-ups and jumping on and off the bed with both his feet held together. There wasn't much space and he had hit the wall a couple of times, but it was good to sweat and to feel his heart beating in his rib cage.

His work had already begun.

In a matter of hours on that first afternoon he had earned himself the respect in the unit that he needed to continue. He now knew who was in charge of supplies and dealing, in which units and in which cells. One of them was here, the Greek in Cell 2; the other two were on separate floors in Block H. Piet Hoffmann would get in the first grams soon, the ones he was responsible for and that he would use to blow out the competition.

The guards were even closer, opened Cell 6 and Cell 14. Only a couple of minutes more.

The time after the cells were opened, between seven and seven twenty, was crucial. If he survived that, he would survive the rest of the day.

He had prepared himself in the way that he would prepare himself every morning. In order to survive, he had to assume that in the course of the evening or night, someone had found out about his other name, that there was a Paula who worked for the authorities, a snitch who was there to break the organization. He was safe as long as the cell was locked, a closed door would hold off an attack, but the first twenty minutes once the cell had been opened, after the first good morning, were the difference between life and death; a well-planned attack would always be carried out when the guards had disappeared into their room for a cup of coffee and a break-twenty minutes with no staff in the unit and the time when several of the many murders in prison had been carried out in recent years.

"Good morning."

The guard had opened the door and looked in. Piet Hoffmann was sitting on the bed and stared at him without replying-it wasn't how he felt, it was just something he said because the rules said he should.

The idiot guard didn't give in, he would stand there and wait until he got an answer, confirmation that the prisoner was alive and that everything was as it should be.

"Good morning. Now fucking leave me in peace."

The guard nodded and carried on, two cells at a time. This was when Hoffmann had to act. When the last door was opened it was too late.

A sock around the handle, he pulled the door-that normally couldn't be locked or closed completely from the inside-toward him, jamming it by forcing the fabric of the sock between the door and door frame.

One second.

He put the simple wooden chair that normally stood by the wardrobe just inside the threshold, careful to make sure that it blocked the greater part of the doorway.

One second.

The pillow and blanket and trousers were made to look like a body under the covers, the blue arm of his training jacket a continuation of the body. It wouldn't fool anyone. But it was an illusion that would be given a fast double take.

Half a second.

Both the guards disappeared down the corridor. All the cells were unlocked and open now and Piet Hoffmann positioned himself to the left of the door, with his back to the wall. They could come at any moment. If they had found out, if he had been exposed, death would strike immediately.

He looked at the sock around the handle, the chair in front of the door, the pillows under the blanket.

Two and a half seconds.

His protection, his time to hit back.

He was breathing heavily

He would stand like this, waiting, for twenty minutes. It was his first morning in Aspsås prison.

There was someone standing in front of him. Two thin suit legs that had said something and were now waiting for an answer. He didn't reply.

"Grens? What are you doing?"

Ewert Grens had fallen asleep on the floor behind the brown corduroy sofa with an investigation file on his stomach.

"What about our meeting? It was you who wanted it this early. I assume that you've been here all night?"

His back ached a bit. The floor had been harder this time.

"That's none of your business."

He rolled over and heaved himself up, using the arms of the sofa for support, and the world spun ever so slightly.

"How are you?"

"That's none of your business either."

Lars Ågestam sat down on the sofa and waited while Ewert Grens went over to his desk. There was no love lost between them. In fact, they couldn't stand each other. The young prosecutor and older detective superintendent came from different worlds and neither had any inclination to visit the other anymore. Ågestam had tried at first, he had chatted and listened and watched until he realized it was pointless, Grens had decided to hate him and nothing would change that.

"Västmannagatan 79. You wanted a report."

Lars Ågestam nodded.

"I get the distinct feeling that you're getting nowhere."

They weren't getting anywhere. But he wouldn't admit it. Not yet.

Ewen Grens fully intended to keep hold of his resources, which Ågestam had the power to remove.

"We're working on several theories."

"Such as?"

"I'm not prepared to say anything yet."

"I can't imagine what you've got. If you did have something, you'd give it to me and then tell me to shove off. I don't think you've got anything at all. I think it's time to scale down the case."

"Scale down?"

Lars Ågestam waved his skinny arm at the desk and the piles of ongoing investigations.

"You're not getting anywhere. The investigation is at a standstill. You know as well as I do, Grens, that it's unreasonable to tie up so many resources when an investigator is having no success."

"I never give up on a murder."

They looked at each other. They came from different worlds. "So, what have you got then?"

"You never scale down murder cases, Ågestam. You solve them." You know-"

"And that is what I have done for thirty-five years. Since you were running around peeing in your diaper."

The prosecutor wasn't listening anymore. You just needed to decide that you weren't going to hear anything and then you didn't. It was a long time now since Ewert Grens had been able to hurt him.

"I read through the conclusions of the preliminary investigation. But it was… quick. You mentioned a number of names on the periphery of the investigation that haven't been fully probed. Do that. Investigate every name on the periphery and close it. You've got three days. Then we'll meet again. And if you haven't got anything more by then, you can make as much fuss as you like, I will scale down the case."

Ewert Grens watched the determined suit-back leave his office and would no doubt have shouted after it if the other voice hadn't already been there, the one that had been in his head every hour for two weeks now, that was once again whispering and wheedling its way in, persistently repeating the short sentences, driving him mad.

"A dead man. Vdstmannagatan 79. Fourth floor."

He had three days.

Who are you?

Where are you?

He had stood with his back pressed hard against the cell wall for twenty minutes, every muscle tensed, every sound an imagined threat of attack. Nothing had happened.

His fifteen fellow prisoners had been to the toilet and showered and then gone to the kitchen for an early breakfast, but none of them had stopped outside his door, no one had tried to open it. He was still only Piet Hoffmann here, a member of Wojtek, arrested with three kilos of Polish Yellow in his boot and convicted of possession, and a previous conviction for having beaten some bastard pig before firing two shots at him.

They had disappeared, one by one, some to the laundry and the workshop, most to the classrooms, a couple to the hospital. No one went on strike and stayed in their cell, which often happened: the striker laughed at the threat of punishment and continued to refuse to work as the extra couple of months on twelve years existed only on official papers.

"Hoffmann."

It was the principal prison officer who had welcomed him the day before, with blue eyes that pierced whoever was standing in front of him.

"Yes?"

"Time to get out of your cell."

"Is it?"

"Your work duties. Cleaning. The administration building and the workshops. But not today. Today you're going to come with me and try to learn how and where and when to use your brushes and detergents."

They walked side by side down the corridor through the unit and down the stairs to the underground passage.

When Paula arrives at Aspsås, his work duties will already be fixed. On his first afternoon, he'll start as the new cleaner in the administration block and workshop.

The shapeless fabric of the prison-issue clothes chafed against his thighs and shoulders as they approached the second floor of Block B.

Prison management usually only grants cleaning duties as a reward.

They stopped in front of the toilets outside the main door to the workshop.

Then reward him.

Piet Hoffmann nodded-he would start his cleaning round here, with the cracked basin and piss pot in a changing room that stank of mold. They continued into the big workshop with its faint smell of diesel.

"The toilet out there, the office behind the glass window and then the entire workshop. You got it?"

He stayed standing in the doorway, looking around the room. Workbenches with something that looked like bits of shiny piping on them, shelves with piles of packing tape, punch presses, pallet jacks, half-full pallets and at every work station, a prisoner who earned ten kronor an hour. Prison workshops often produced simple items that were then sold to commercial manufacturers; at Österåker, he had cut out square red wooden blocks for a toy manufacturer. Here it was lamppost components: decimeter-long rectangular covers for the access hatch to the cables and switches that is positioned at the base, the kind that you see ten meters apart along every road, which no one ever notices but has to be made somewhere. The principal prison officer walked into the workshop and pointed at the dust and overflowing bins, while Hoffmann nodded at prisoners he didn't recognize: the one in his twenties standing by a punching press bending over the edges of the rectangular cover; the one who spoke Finnish over by the drilling machine and made small holes for every screw; and the one farthest away by the window who had a big scar from his throat to his cheek and was leaning over the barrel of diesel as he cleaned his tools.

"Look at the floor. It's damned important that you're thorough about it. Scrub as hard as you damn well can, otherwise it smells."

Piet Hoffmann didn't hear what the principal prick was saying. He had stopped by the barrel of diesel and the window. It was the one he had aimed at. He had lain on the church tower balcony holding an imaginary gun and shot at the window he selected exactly fifteen hundred and three meters away. It was a beautiful church and you got a clear view of the tower from here, as free a view as you got of the window from the tower.

He turned around, back to the window, memorized the rectangular room that was divided by three thick, whitewashed concrete pillars, big enough for a person to stand behind and not be seen. He took a couple of steps forward toward the pillar that was nearest to the window and stood close by it. It was just as big as he thought-he could stand there and be completely hidden. He walked slowly back across the room, getting the feel of it, getting used to it, didn't stop until he got to the room behind the glass wall that was an office for the prison wardens.

"Good, Hoffmann, that room… it's got to shine."

A small desk, some shelves, a dirty rug. There was a pair of scissors in the pen holder, a telephone on the wall, two drawers that were unlocked and mostly empty.

It was a matter of time.

If everything went wrong, if Paula was exposed, the more time he had, the more chance he had of surviving.

The principal officer walked in front of him along the passage and under the prison yard to the administration building, four locked doors with four watchful cameras. They looked up into each one, nodded to the lens, then waited for central security to press one of their buttons and the click that told them that the door was open. It took them more than ten minutes to put a couple of hundred meters underground behind them.

The first floor of the administration block was a narrow corridor with a view of the prison reception area. Every prisoner who was escorted in fresh from the chain, through security to reception, could be studied from the six offices and the poky meeting room. The chief warden and his administrative staff had seen him as he was led in yesterday, a priority prisoner with handcuffs and leg irons in Kronoberg remand clothes, with streaky fair hair and a salt-and-pepper two-week beard.

"Are you following me, Hoffmann? You'll be coming here every day. And when you leave, there won't be a speck of dirt left behind. Will there? Loads of floors to be scrubbed, desks to be dusted, trash cans to be emptied and windows to be cleaned. Do you have a problem with that?"

The rooms had institution-gray walls and floors and ceilings, as if the gloominess and hopelessness of the corridor spilled over into the offices. There were a few pots with green plants and a few circles of ceramic tiles on one of the walls, otherwise it was all dead, furniture and colors that did not tempt you to dare dream of anywhere else.

"Perhaps we should introduce you. Get a move on."

The chief warden was in his fifties, a man who was as gray as his walls. It said Oscarsson on his door.

"This is Hoffmann. He's the new cleaner here from tomorrow."

The chief held out a hand that was soft, but with a firm grip.

"Lennart Oscarsson. I want both cans emptied every day. The one under the table and the one over there by the visitors' chairs. And if there are any unwashed glasses, take them with you."

It was a big room with windows that faced the fence and prison yard, but the same feeling as in all the others: a joyless institution, no room for anything private here, not even a family photo in a silver frame or a diploma on the walls. With one exception. On the desk, two bunches of flowers in crystal vases.

"Tulips?"

The principal officer went over to the desk and the long green stems with equally green buds. He held the white greeting cards in his hand while he read the message on both of them out loud.

"With thanks for a successful partnership, Aspilis Business Association."

The governor arranged one of the bunches on his desk, twenty-five yellow tulips that hadn't yet bloomed.

"I think so, they certainly look like tulips. We get a lot of flowers nowadays. The whole of Aspsås works here. Or supplies us with something. And all the study visits. It wasn't long ago that everyone looked down on the prison service. Now it's bloody nonstop, and every arrangement or incident fills the news bulletins and front pages."

He looked with pride at the flowers that he had somehow just complained about.

"They'll open soon. It usually takes a couple of days."

Piet Hoffmann nodded and then left, the principal prison officer a few meters in front, as before.

Tomorrow.

They would bloom tomorrow.

Ewen Grens removed two empty plastic cups and a half-eaten almond slice from the small wooden table, then sat down and sank into the softness of the corduroy sofa while he waited for Sven and Hermansson to sit down on either side.

The handwritten, single sheet of paper from a notepad was stained brown in one corner where some coffee had spilled, and had grease marks in another from stray almond-slice crumbs.

A list of seven names.

People who were on the periphery of the preliminary investigation and who they had three days to investigate and who perhaps meant the difference between the case staying live or being scaled down-between a solved and an unsolved murder.

He divided them into three columns.

Drugs, thugs, Wojtek.

Sven was going to concentrate on the first column, on the known drug dealers who lived or operated in the vicinity of Västmannagatan 79: Jorge Hernandez on the second floor of the same building; Jorma Rantala in the block where a bloody shirt was found wrapped in a plastic bag in the garbage bin.

Hermansson chose the second column: Jan du Tobit and Nicholas Barlow, two international hitmen who according to the Swedish Security

Service were in Stockholm or the surrounding area at the time of the murder.

Ewert Grens was going to look after the last three names: three men who had previously worked with Wojtek International AB. A certain Maciej Bosacki, Piet Hoffmann, and Karl Lager. Each one the owner of a Swedish security firm, which-entirely legally-had been contracted for bodyguard services by Wojtek's head office when Polish officials were on state visits, the official business that any well-functioning and untouchable mafia organization is dependent on, a visible shell that both hides and hints at their business. Grens was one of the people in the Stockholm police who knew most about organized crime from the other side of the Baltic, and in this room, the only one who knew how to investigate whether any of the three could be linked to the other Wojtek, the unofficial organization, the real one, the one that was capable of carrying out assassinations in Swedish flats.

No one questioned him anymore.

No bastard sat too close or stared at him while he ate his meat and two veg. By lunch on the second day he was already someone but they didn't have a clue that very soon he would also be the one who decided everything, thanks to the power of drugs, and in two days he would control all supplies and sales and surpass even murderers in the prison hierarchy. Anyone who had killed someone was the most highly appreciated inside, got the most respect, then the big-time drug dealers and bank robbers and, at the bottom of the pile, pedophiles and rapists. But even the murderers bowed to whoever controlled the drugs and supplied the syringes.

Piet Hoffmann had followed close behind the principal prison officer in order to learn his new cleaning duties and had then waited on his bunk in his cell until the other men in the unit had come back from the workshop and classrooms for food that tasted of nothing. He had had eye contact with both Stefan and Karol Tomasz several times-they were impatient and waiting for instructions so he mouthed wieczorem at them until they understood.

This evening.

This evening they would knock out the three main dealers.

He offered to clear the table and wash up while the others smoked roll-your-owns with no filter out in the gravel yard or played stud poker for thousand-kronor toothpicks. Alone in the kitchen, there was no one who saw him wiping down the sink and worktop and stuffing two spoons and a knife into the front pockets of his trousers at the same time.

He walked over to the aquarium, the guards' glass box, knocked on the pane and got an irritated flick of the wrist back. He knocked again, a bit harder and a bit longer, making it clear that he had no intention of leaving.

"What the hell d'you want? It's lunchtime. Wasn't it you who was going to clean the kitchen?"

"Does it look like there's anything left to do out there?"

"That's not the point."

Hoffmann shrugged, he wasn't going to pursue it.

"My books?"

"What about them?"

"I ordered them yesterday. Six of them."

"Don't know anything about it."

"Well, then it might make sense to have a look, eh?"

He was an older warden, not one of the ones who had dealt with him yesterday. He waved his arm around in irritation, but after a while went into the glass box and looked on the desk.

"These ones?"

Hardbacks, library covers. A label stuck on the front of each one: STORE in blue typed letters.

"That's them."

The older guard glanced quickly at the author presentations on the back sleeve, leafed through some pages here and there without really concentrating and then handed them over.

"Nineteenth Century Stockholm. The Marionettes. What the hell is all that?" "Poetry."

"A bit gay, eh?"

"Maybe you should try reading some."

"Listen here, you prick, I don't read faggot books."

Piet Hoffmann closed his cell door enough so that no one could see, but nor so much that it would arouse suspicion. He put the six books on the small bedside table; titles that were seldom borrowed and which therefore had to be collected from the store in the basement of Aspsås library when the request from the large prison came through that morning, and that were then handed over to the driver of the library bus by an out-of-breath, single female librarian in her fifties.

The knife he had stolen from the kitchen had felt sharp enough when he had run his fingertips across the blade.

He pressed it hard down the hinge between the front board and the first page of Lord Byron's Don Juan. It loosened thread by thread and soon the front and the spine were hanging just as freely as they had thirteen days earlier when he had opened it at a desk on Vasagatan. He thumbed to page 90, took hold of all the pages and pulled them off in one go. In the left-hand margin of page 91, a hole that was fifteen centimeters long and one centimeter wide, with thin walls constructed of Rizla papers, three hundred pages deep. The contents lay there untouched, just as he had left them.

Yellowish-white, a little sticky, exactly fifteen grams.

Ten years earlier he had consumed most of what he smuggled in himself. Only occasionally when he had too much might he sell some on. On a couple of occasions he was so hard up that he used it as part payment for his most pressing debts. This time, it was going to be put to different use. Four books with a total of forty-two grams of 30 percent manufactured amphetamine was his weapon for squashing the competition and taking over himself.

Books, Blossom.

Small amounts, but he didn't need more right now. The tricks he had learned over the years were foolproof and wouldn't be discovered by prison routines.

Back then, he'd been sent to Österåker as soon as he'd come back from his first secure leave. Someone had tipped the guards off about drugs up his ass or in his belly, and he'd been put in the dry cell, with glass walls, a bunk to lie on and a toilet that was a closed system… that was it. He had stayed there for a week, naked twenty-four/seven, three guards watching him when he went for a dump, checking his shit, eyes staring at him through the glass as he slept, always without a blanket, an ass that couldn't be covered.

He had had no choice then, what with the debts and threats, he became just another dry celler. But now, he had a choice.

Every day in every prison, every waking hour was about drugs: how to get them in, and how to use them without it being discovered by the regular urine tests. A relative who came to visit was also a relative who could be forced to smuggle in some urine, their own, urine that was clean and would test negative. Once, in his first few weeks in Österåker, some mouthy Serb got his girlfriend to piss into a couple of mugs, the content of which was then sold for a great deal of money. None of them tested positive, despite the fact that more than half of them were under the influence, but the tests did show something else, and that was That every man in the unit was pregnant.

Don Juan, The Odyssey, My Life's Writings, French Landscape.

He emptied them one after the other, stopping every now and then when he heard steps passing his cell door or sounds that were unfamiliar-fortytwo grams of amphetamine in four books that not many people chose to read.

Two books left. Nineteenth Century Stockholm and The Marionettes. He left them on the bed, untouched, texts that he hoped he would never need to read.

He looked at the yellowish-white substance that people killed for. Every gram would cost more in here.

Here demand was greater than supply. Here the risk of being caught was greater in a locked cell than when you were free. Here the judgment inside would be harsher than outside; the same amount would always give you a longer sentence.

Piet Hoffmann divided up the forty-two grams of amphetamine into three plastic bags. He would keep one himself for the Greek in Cell 2 and put the other two out for collection, for Block H where the two other major suppliers were, on the top and bottom floor. Three plastic bags with fourteen grams that would knock out all the competition in one go.

The spoons from the kitchen were still in one of his trouser pockets.

He took them out and felt them, then pressed them hard against the edge of the steel bunk until they were both bent to nearly right angles like two hooks; he checked them, they would do. His blue jogging pants with the Prison and Probation Service logo were lying on his bed. With the knife he cut the waistband, pulled the elastic out and then cut it again into two lengths.

The cell door ajar, he waited-the corridor was empty.

The bathroom was fifteen fast steps away.

He closed the door behind him, went into the toilet cubicle furthest to the right and made sure that the door was properly locked.

Ewert Grens had gone to get another plastic cup of black coffee and bought yet another crumbly almond slice with sickly icing on top. The handwritten list of seven names had acquired several more brown stains, but it was still legible and it would stay where it was on the table by the sofa until they had all been investigated and struck off one by one.

They had three days.

One of those handwritten, coffee-stained names held the key to keeping open the investigation into an execution carried our during the day at a rented flat in the middle of Stockholm. Or else, in three days, it would be scaled down to one of the thirty-seven preliminary investigations in thin files on his desk and would probably never amount to much more than that. There was always a new murder case, or an assault that would gobble up all the resources for a week or two until it was solved or left on a forgotten pile.

He studied the names. Maciej Bosacki, Piet Hoffmann, Karl Lager. All owners of security firms, which, like all other security firms, installed alarm systems, sold flak jackets, gave courses in self-defense, offered bodyguard services. But these three had all been used by Wojtek Security International in connection with Polish state visits. Official jobs with official invoices. Nothing strange about that, really. But it piqued his curiosity. Sometimes what was official concealed what was unofficial and he was looking for things that couldn't be seen, if they existed at all-links to another Wojtek, the real organization, the one that bought and sold drugs, weapons, people.

Ewert Grens got up and went out into the corridor.

The feeling that the truth was laughing at him got stronger. He tried to catch it and it just slipped through his fingers.

He had spent two hours studying three personal ID numbers in the Police Authority's databases-page after page with lists of ARREST WARRANT INFORMATION, IDENTIFICATION INFORMATION, CRIMINAL RECORDS, INTELLIGENCE INFORMATION, PERSONAL HEALTH-and he had got a number of hits. All three had previous convictions, all three names were in the criminal intelligence database and suspects' register, they had all given fingerprints, two were in the DNA register and had been wanted at some point, and at least one of them was a previously confirmed gang member. Grens hadn't been entirely surprised, as more and more people moved in a gray zone where knowledge of crime was a prerequisite for knowing about security.

He walked a couple of doors down the corridor. He should perhaps have knocked, but seldom did.

"I need your help."

The room was considerably bigger than his and he didn't come here very often.

"How can I help you?"

It wasn't something they'd ever talked about. But in some way they had just agreed. In order to work together, they made sure they never met. "Västmannagatan."

Chief Superintendent Göransson has no piles of paper on his desk, no empty paper cups, no crumbs from artificial cakes from the vending machine. "Västmannagatan?"

So he can't understand where it's coming from; this feeling of discomfort, that there's no room.

"That says nothing to me."

"The killing. I'm investigating the last names and want to check them against the firearms register."

Göransson nodded, turned to his computer and logged on to the register which only a few authorized people had access to, for security reasons. "You're standing too close, Ewert."

The discomfort.

"What do you mean?"

It came from inside.

"Can you move back a couple of steps?"

Whatever it was that demanded more space.

Göransson was looking at a person he didn't like and who didn't like him, so they seldom got in each other's way. That was all there was to it. "Personal ID?"

"721018-0010. 660531-2559. 580219-3672."

Three personal ID numbers. Three names on the screen.

"What do you want to know?"

"Everything."

Västmannagatan.

Suddenly he understood.

"Göransson? Did you hear? I want everything."

That name.

"One of them has a license. For work, plus four hunting guns." "Guns for work?"

"Pistols."

"Make?"

"Radom."

"Caliber?"

"Nine millimeter."

The name that was still blinking on the screen.

"Damn it, Göransson. Damn it!"

The detective superintendent had gotten up quickly and was already halfway out the door.

"But we already have access to them, Ewert."

Grens stopped mid-step.

"What do you mean?"

"There's a memorandum here. All the weapons have been seized. Krantz has them, no doubt." "_Why?"

"It doesn't say. You'll have to ask him."

The dull sound of a heavy body limping away down the corridor. Chief Superintendent Göransson didn't have the energy to fight the feeling that something was afoot, the dread that made him shrivel inside. He looked at the name on the screen for a long time.

Piet Hoffmann.

Ewert Grens would only have to press a few buttons and make a couple of phone calls to find the registered gun-owner's current domicile and then go to the small town with a big prison to the north of the city and he would question him until he got the answer he mustn't get.

What wasn't meant to happen had just happened.

Piet Hoffmann waited behind the locked toilet door until he was absolutely sure he was alone.

Elastic, spoon, plastic bag.

This was exactly how he had hidden drugs and syringes in Österåker. Lorentz had told him that it still worked despite the fact that it was so damn simple. Maybe that was why. No guard in any prison would search the actual toilet U-bend.

The cistern, the drains, the waste pipe under the sink, hiding places that you might as well forget these days. But the U-bend, after all these years, they still had no idea.

He put the elastic, the bent spoon, and the plastic bag full of amphetamine down on the filthy toilet floor. He attached the plastic bag to one end of the elastic and the spoon to the other, then got down on his knees beside the toilet bowl, holding the plastic bag in his hand and pushing it as far down the pipe as he could, stretching the elastic. His arm and sleeve were wet up to his shoulder when he flushed and the pressure of the water pushed the plastic bag even farther down the pipe, the bent spoon catching on the edge of the pipe. He waited, flushed again. The elastic should stretch even more and the plastic bag would be suspended at the other end somewhere far down the pipe.

You couldn't see the spoon that was hooked over the edge of the pipe, holding the plastic bag in place.

But it would be easy to get hold of next time.

Down on his knees, hand in the wet, carefully haul it in.

Ewert Grens had left Göransson and the Homicide offices, and the truth that he couldn't quite grasp wasn't laughing so loud now. Radom. For the first time since the preliminary investigation started he had a lead, a name. Nine millimeter. Someone who might be the link to an execution.

Pier Hoffmann.

A name he had never heard before.

But who owned a security firm that got official bodyguard jobs from Wojtek International when there were state visits. And who had a license for Polish-manufactured guns, for work purposes, despite having served a five-year sentence for aggravated assault. Guns which, according to the register, were already in the hands of the police. Seized two weeks ago.

Ewert Grens got out of the elevator on his way to the forensics unit.

He had a name.

Soon he would have more.

Piet Hoffmann had sore knees when he got up off the toiler floor and listened to the silence. He had flushed twice more, listened again, but there were still no other sounds when he unlocked the door and went out into the corridor, making it look like he'd been sitting in there for a while, dicky tummy that took its time. He went over to the TV corner, shuffled a pack of cards, made it look like he was entertaining himself for a few minutes, while he sneaked a look over at the wardens' office and the kitchen in order to locate the guards that ran around in the unit.

Faces that were turned away, uniformed backs doing something. He held up his middle finger, that usually got them moving.

Nothing. No one reacted, no one saw.

The others still had an hour left of their afternoon stint in the classroom and workshop, the corridor was empty, the screws were some place else. Now.

He walked toward the row of cells. A quick look back at nothing. He opened the door to number 2.

The Greek's cell.

It looked the same, the same damn bed and the same damn wardrobe and chair and bedside table. It smelled different, stuffy, maybe sour, but it was just as fucking warm and the air he breathed was just as dusty. A photo of a child on the wall, a girl with long dark hair, another photo of a woman, his daughter's mother, Hoffmann was convinced.

If anyone opened the door.

If anyone saw what he was holding in his hand right now, what he was about to do.

He gave a start, just an instant-he mustn't start to feel.

Not many injections or snorts-thirteen or fourteen grams-but enough in here, enough for a new judgment and extended sentence and immediate removal to another prison.

Thirteen or fourteen grams that had to be put somewhere up high.

He tested the curtain rail, pulling it carefully; it came loose on the first attempt. A bit of tape around the plastic bag and it stayed in place against the wall. It was easy to lift the curtain rail back.

He opened the door and had a last look around the room-he stopped at the photo on the wall. The girl was about five, she was standing on a lawn, and in the background some happy children were waving. They were all on their way somewhere, a school trip, backpacks in their hands and yellow and red baseball caps on their heads.

Her father wouldn't be here when she came to visit next time.

Ewert Grens bent forward over the low workbench and the row of seven guns.

Three Polish-manufactured Radom pistols and four hunting rifles. "In one gun cabinet?"

"In two gun cabinets. Both approved."

"He had a license for them?"

"The very ones issued by city police."

Grens was standing beside Nils Krantz in one of the forensic unit's many rooms that look like a small laboratory with fume cupboards and microscopes and tins of chemical preparations. He lifted up one of the pistols, held the plastic covered weapon in his hand, weighed it in front of him in the air. He was absolutely certain-the dead man lying on the sitting room floor had been holding one like this in his hand.

"Two weeks ago?"

"Yes. An office in a flat on Vasagatan. Serious drug offense."

"And nothing?"

"We've test-fired them all. None of them have been used for any other crime."

"And Västmannagatan 79?"

"I know that you hoped you'd get another answer. But you're not going to. None of these weapons have anything to do with the shooting."

Ewert Grens hit his hand hard on the piece of furniture that was closest. A metal cupboard shuddered as the books and files fell to the floor.

"I don't get it."

He was about to hit the cupboard again when Krantz stood in his way to save it.

Grens chose the wall instead-it didn't shudder as much but made just as much noise.

"Nils, I don't bloody get it. This investigation… it's like I'm standing on the sideline the whole time, watching. So, you seized all his weapons? Twenty days ago? Damn it, Nils, there's something that's not right. Don't you understand, this bastard, he shouldn't have any guns at all, even less a license issued by us. Okay, it's ten years ago, but… given the conviction

. I've never heard of such a serious criminal being given a permit."

Nils Krantz was still standing in front of the metal cupboard. It was never easy to know if his colleague was done with thumping inanimate objects.

"You'll have to talk to him then."

"I'm going to. When I find out where he is."

"In Aspsås."

Ewert Grens looked at the forensic scientist who was one of the few people who had been in the building as long as he had.

"Aspsås?"

"That's where he's doing his rime. And it's a long sentence, I believe."

He had sat in his new place in the TV corner this afternoon again and waited until his neighbors came back from the workshop and classroom one by one. They had played more stud poker and a couple of games of casino and talked about the bastard guards who had been on duty that morning and quite a bit about a bank job in Taby that had gone wrong and then got engrossed in a passionate discussion about how many times you could jerk-off on a gram of injected amphetamine. They had laughed raucously at several graphic descriptions of a speed hard-on, and Stefan as well as Karol Tomasz and a couple of Finns had bragged about having a boner and fucking for days, as long as there was enough strong whizz. After a while, Piet had given the Greek a vague nod and offered him a chair without getting any response; the man who sold and controlled the supply here, who had the highest status wasn't prepared to talk to a fish.

A couple of hours more.

The plastic bag would be sitting there behind the curtain rail and the hard fuckwit wouldn't know what had hit him before it was over.

Ewert Grens stood behind his desk clutching the telephone receiver even though the conversation had finished some time ago now. He was holding a piece of paper that was stained with coffee and almond slice crumbs.

Nils Krantz had been right.

The name at the bottom of his short list was already in prison.

He had been caught with three kilos of amphetamine in his car trunk, had been held on remand and in record time had been convicted and taken to the prison at Aspsås.

Amphetamine that smelled of flowers.

A distinct scent of tulip.

He lay down on the hard bunk and smoked a cigarette. It was several years now since he'd rolled his own-not since the days when there were no children, as both he and Zofia had stopped the day they saw a centimeter-long life on a monitor; something that was barely visible but which was affected by every breath they took. He was restless, smoked too fast and soon lit another… it was hell just lying here waiting.

He got up, listened, his ear to the hard cell door.

Nothing.

He heard sounds that weren't there. Maybe the faint clunking that frequently came from the pipes in the ceiling. Maybe someone's TV. He'd chosen nor to have one so that he didn't need to participate in the world outside.

If everything went according to plan, they would come any minute.

He lay down again, a third cigarette, it was good just to hold something in his hand. Quarter to eight. It was only quarter of an hour since lock-up, and normally it took about half an hour-they usually waited until everyone had settled.

Everything was in place, just as he wanted it. He had had final confirmation in the bathroom that evening when the guards were waiting for everyone to go back to their cells. Both the plastic bags that until recently had been stowed some meters down one of the toilets' waste pipes at the end of a piece of elastic were now in Block H, hidden behind two curtain rails.

Now.

He was absolutely certain.

Dogs barking eagerly, black shoes slapping on the corridor floor.

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.

Farther down the corridor, the first cell doors were flung open.

Loud voices clashed as one of the Finns started to shout and one of the guards screamed even louder.

It took twenty-five minutes and eight cells before they got to him and a hand threw open his door.

"Inspection."

"You can suck my cock, you flicking screw."

"Out of the cell, Hoffmann. Before you get what you want."

Pier Hoffmann spat as they dragged him out into the corridor. Criminal. He carried on spitting as they checked all the cavities. You have to be a criminal to play a criminal. He stood outside the door in white, badly fitting boxers while two guards went into his cell and searched everywhere for what might be hidden, but couldn't be found.

Two cells were inspected at the same time, always the two opposite each other, and there wasn't much room where the open doors met.

Two guards in each cell, two guards outside to watch the prisoners who were swearing, mouthing off, threatening.

He watched as the bedclothes were pulled off and shaken out, the wardrobe tipped forward and every shoe emptied, every sock turned inside out, the pile of six library books on the bedside table flicked through, several meters of floorboards taken up, pockets and seams on his trousers and jackets and tops pulled open at the stitching and the barking dogs let in and lifted up ro the ceiling and the lamp and the curtain rail when there was chaos on the linoleum floor.

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?

One more floorboard, under the sink.

And behind the bedside lamp, the small hole in the wall for the wall plug.

"Everything all right? You found anything? No? What a shame. You'll have to go jerk-off in some other cell. Or d'you want me to help you?"

The guy opposite laughed. The guy beside him banged on his door and hissed keep doing them up the ass, Hoffmann.

They had heard.

Piet Hoffmann sat down on the edge of the bunk when they locked the door again and went on to the next cell. There was half a cigarette under a pair of boxer shorts in the mess under the bedside table; he lit up and lay down.

Ten minutes more.

He smoked and scoured the ceiling, then the dogs began to bark. "What the fuck, fucking hell, it's not mine, for fuck's sake!"

The Greek in Cell 2 had a piercing voice, the kind that opened locked cell doors.

"What the fuck, that- you've planted that, you fucking bastard screws, I'm going to-"

One of the security guards had lifted up the black dog that was now frantically pawing above the window behind the curtain rail. The plastic bag had been taped to the wall and contained fourteen grams of high quality amphetamine. The Greek was escorted down the corridor and out of the unit, shaking and swearing, and would be transported to Kumla or Hall the next day to serve the rest of a long sentence that just got longer. At roughly the same time, two more plastic bags with the same amount of amphetamine were found in two cells on the top and bottom floors of

Block H and three inmates in all would now be spending their last night in Aspsås.

Piet Hoffmann lay on the bed and could smile for the first time since he'd been inside the high walls.

Right now.

Right now, we've taken over.

Wednesday

He had slept heavily for nearly four hours when it was darkest outside the barred windows and once the Finn two cells away had presumably calmed down. The jangling of keys had penetrated his brain and prevented him from sleeping every time the bastard rang the bell and demanded attention. The unit hadn't settled until a couple of the other prisoners had threatened a riot the next time a Finnish finger played with the bell,

Piet Hoffmann pressed his back against the wall. An anxious glance at the pillow under the covers and the chair in the threshold and the sock between the door and its frame. His protection, exactly the same as yesterday and as tomorrow, two and a half seconds if anyone knew and attacked at the only time of day when the guards couldn't see or hear.

One minute past seven. Nineteen minutes left. Then he would go out, have a shower, and eat breakfast with the others.

He had taken the first step. He had felled the three main dealers in Aspsås prison with forty-two grams of 30 percent manufactured amphetamine. Warsaw and the deputy CEO had already received the reports they needed and opened a bottle of 2ubrOwka, raised a glass to the next stage.

Eight minutes left.

His breathing was measured, every muscle tensed, death didn't come knocking.

Today he was going to take the next step. For Wojtek, the first grams to the first customers and the rumor that there was a new supplier in one of Sweden's hardest prisons. For the Swedish police, more information about supplies, delivery dates, and distribution channels until the operation had been built up enough for it to be destroyed-days or weeks waiting for the moment when the organization had full control but hadn't yet expanded to the next prison, when an informant's knowledge was sufficient to reach the very heart of the organization back in a black building on ul. Ludwika Idzikowskiego in Warsaw.

Hoffmann looked at the alarm clock that was ticking too loud. Twenty past seven. He moved the chair, made his bed and after a while opened the door to a sleepy corridor. Stefan and Karol Tomasz smiled at him as he passed the kitchen and breakfast table. The prison bus usually came with any new prisoners around this time and it was obvious that someone who was called the Greek was now sitting on one of the evil-smelling seats with a couple of guys from Block H opposite him and presumably they weren't saying much to each other as they looked out of the windows and tried to understand what the fuck had actually happened.

He had a hot shower, washing away the tension of twenty minutes behind a cell door ready to fight and flee. He looked in the part of the mirror that wasn't steamed up yet at someone who was unshaven and whose hair was a bit too long-leave the razor in his pocket, the salt and pepper stubble would stay where it was today.

The cleaning cart was in a cupboard just outside the main door to the unit.

A metal frame with a black garbage bag, hard rolls of considerably smaller white trash bags, a small brush with a wobbly dustpan, a smelly plastic bucket, small bits of material that he assumed were used for washing the windows, and at the bottom some unperfumed detergent that he had never seen before.

"Hoffmann."

The principal prison officer with piercing eyes was sitting in the aquarium with the wardens when he passed the big glass panes.

"First day?"

"First day."

"You have to wait at every locked door. Look up at every camera. And if and when central security decides to let you through, you do it as fast as possible in the few seconds that it's open."

"Anything else?"

"I looked through your papers yesterday. You've got… now, what was it?… ten years. I don't know, Hoffmann, but with a bit of luck that should be enough time for you to learn how to clean properly."

The first locked door was at the start of the underground passage. He stopped the cart, looked up at the camera, waited for the clicking sound and then went on through. The air was damp and he felt chilled as he walked under the prison yard; he had been escorted through a similar passage several times in the year he was at Österåker: to the hospital unit, or the gym, or the kiosk where every kronor earned could be exchanged for shaving cream and soap. He stopped in front of each door, nodded at the watchful cameras and then hurried through while the door was open-he wanted to attract as little attention as possible.

"Hey you!"

He had nodded at a group of prisoners from the other side of the prison on their way to their various workplaces when one of them turned around, looked at him.

"Yeah?"

A druggie. Skinny as hell, evasive eyes, feet that found it hard to stand still.

"I heard- I want to buy. Eight g."

Stefan and Karol Tomasz had done a good job.

A big prison is a small place when messages pass through walls. "Two."

"Two?"

"You can get two. This afternoon. In the blind spot."

"Two? Fuck, I need at least-"

"That's all you'll get. This time around."

The skinny prick was waving his long arms when Hoffmann turned his back and carried on down the wide passage.

He would stand there. His body shaking, counting the minutes until he

got that feeling that made this all bearable. He would buy his two g and he

would inject them with a dirty syringe in the first available toilet.

Piet Hoffmann walked away slowly and tried not to laugh.

Only a few hours to go.

Then he would have taken over all drug dealing in Aspsås prison.

The lights in the homicide corridor were strong and flickered every now and then. An irritating brightness that blinded you, combined with a jarring, whirring sound every time they flickered. The two strip lights by the vending machines were worst. Fredrik Göransson could still feel the dread of yesterday in his body; it had taken him all afternoon and evening, a night's sleep and some time after he had woken to realize that the visit from Grens had sparked a gnawing, consuming feeling that would not go away, no matter how hard he tried. Prioritizing infiltration inside prison walls over and above a murder investigation was not a good solution. He had sat at the table in Rosenbad and weighed it against control over the Polish mafia and had chosen to restrict criminal expansion.

"Göransson."

That bloody voice.

"I want to talk to you, Göransson."

He had never liked it.

"Morning, Ewert."

Ewert Grens limped more noticeably now-either that or the corridor walls just amplified the hard sound of a healthy leg meeting a concrete floor.

"The firearms register."

Whatever it is that takes up so much room.

Fredrik Göransson avoided the heavy hands that fumbled for plastic cups and the coffee machine buttons beside him.

There's no room here again.

"You're standing too close."

"I'm not going to move again."

"If you want an answer, you're going to have to."

Ewert Grens stayed where he was.

"721018-0010. Three Radom pistols and four hunting rifles." The name that was still blinking on his screen.

"Yes, what about it?"

"I want to know how someone with his criminal record was granted a firearms license for work."

"I'm not sure what you're getting at."

"Assaulting a police officer. Attempted murder."

The plastic cup was full. Grens tasted the warm liquid, gave a satisfied nod and pressed the button for another.

"I don't get it, Göransson."

I get it, Grens.

He has a firearms license because he is not violent and is not a classified psychopath and does not need to be branded dangerous and has not been convicted of attempted murder.

Because the database entries that you've seen are a tool, fake.

"I'll look into it. If it's important."

Grens tested the second cup, looked just as happy and started to walk away, slowly.

"It is important. I want to know who issued that license. And why." It was me.

"I'll do what I can."

"I need it today. He's in for questioning first thing tomorrow morning." Chief Superintendent Göransson stood where he was under the flickering, whirring light as Grens walked away.

He shouted after the detective who had demanded answers.

"And the others?"

Grens stopped without turning round.

"Which others?"

"You had three names when you came to me yesterday."

"I'm dealing with those two today. This bastard is doing time already, so I know where I've got him, he'll be there tomorrow too."

Too close.

The ungainly body carrying a plastic cup in each hand limped off down the corridor and disappeared into an office.

Grens had been standing too close.

The toilet bowl was yellow from piss and the sink was full of wet tobacco and cigarette butts with no filter. The unscented detergent didn't even remove the top layer of dirt. He scrubbed for a long time with the brush and then with the scouring cloth, but they only slid over the worn porcelain surface. The toilet outside the door to the workshop was small and used by people who pissed outside the bowl in the short breaks they could get from the work they hated, a couple of minutes' respite from a punishment that was never clearer than when you were standing by a machine that drilled small holes for screws at the bottom of a lamppost hatch.

Piet Hoffmann went into the big room and greeted the same faces that he had the day before. He wiped over all the workbenches and shelves, washed the floor around the diesel barrel, emptied the bins, cleaned the large window that faced the church. Every now and then he'd glance over at the small office behind the glass wall and the two guards sitting there. He was waiting for them to get up and do their round of the workshop, which they had to do every half an hour.

"Is it you?"

He was big, hair in a long ponytail and a beard that made him look much older than his-Hoffmann guessed-twenty years.

"Yes."

He was working on the press, big hands holding metal that would be shaped into rectangular hatches-he could do a couple a minute if he didn't stop to look out the window.

"One g. For today. Every day."

This afternoon."

"Block H."

"We've got a man there."

"Michal?"

"Yes. You get it off him and pay him."

Hoffmann took his time. He wiped and scrubbed for an hour or more-it was a good way of getting to know the room and working out the distance from the window to the pillars and noting the position of all the surveillance cameras, to know more than everyone else, to be able to control every situation, the difference between life and death. The guards got up from their chairs and left the office and he hurried in with his cart to wipe over an empty desk and an equally empty can, careful to stand with his back to the glass wall and workshop the whole time. He only needed a couple of seconds, the razorblade was in his pocket and he switched it to the top drawer of the desk in an empty space between the pens and paperclips. A new bag in the can, still with his back to the glass, then he went out, took the elevator down to the passage with four locked doors to the administration block.

His body felt itchy and his suit was too tight over the chest. He loosened his tie a touch and ran even faster down the corridor and through the door into the larger building that had swallowed the surrounding buildings and now constituted the greater part of a block dedicated to police operations.

Fredrik Göransson had sweat on his cheeks, neck, back.

Piet Hoffmann. Paula.

Ewert Grens was on his way there, to Aspsås prison, had already booked the time and room. He would only have to question Hoffmann for a couple of minutes, no more, before Hoffmann would lean over the table, ask Grens to switch off the recorder and then burst out laughing and explain that you can go home now, we're working for the same side, for Christ's sake, I'm here working for one of your colleagues and it was your bosses, in that room in the Government Offices, who chose to overlook an execution in a flat in the center so that I could carry on my infiltration here, on the inside.

Göransson stepped out from the lift and into a room without knocking on the door and without any consideration to the hand that was holding a telephone receiver and the arm than waved that he should wait outside until the call was finished. He sank down into one of the sofas and tugged absent mindedly at his increasingly red throat. The national police commissioner asked if he could call the person on the other end of the phone back and finished the conversation, looking at a person who was a stranger to him.

"Ewert Grens."

His forehead was moist and his eyes were darting around.

The national police commissioner got up from the desk and walked over to a cart filled with big glasses and small bottles of mineral water. He opened one and poured it over two ice cubes, hoping that it would be sufficiently cool to calm the man down.

"He's on his way there. He's going to question him. It's not good… it's… we have to burn him."

"Fredrik?"

"We have to-"

"Fredrik, look at me. Exactly what are you talking about?"

"Grens. He's going to question Hoffmann tomorrow. At the prison, in one of the visiting rooms."

"Here. Take the glass. Have some more to drink."

"Don't you understand? We have to burn him."

There were people at every desk in the administration block. He started with the narrow corridor outside, cleaned and scrubbed it until the gray linoleum almost sparkled. Then he waited until one at a time they signaled that he could come in and empty the can and dust the shelves and desk. The rooms were small and anonymous and all looked out over the prison yard. He saw groups of prisoners he didn't know out there, cigarettes in hand as they sat down in the sun to daydream, some with a football on their lap, a couple walking around the track alongside the inner wall. Only one door was shut and he passed it at regular intervals, hoping that it would be open enough for him to look in, and a couple of hours later, it was the only room that remained.

He knocked, waited.

"Yes?"

The prison governor didn't recognize him from yesterday.

"Hoffmann. I'm here to do the cleaning, I thought-"

"You'll have to wait. Until I'm ready. Clean the other rooms in the meantime."

"I have."

Lennart Oscarsson had already closed the door. But Piet Hoffmann had seen what he wanted to see over his shoulder. The desk and the vases of tulips. The buds that had started to open.

He sat down on a chair near the door, with one hand on the cart. He looked over at the door at shorter and shorter intervals. He was starting to get impatient, it was all in place, now all he needed to do was take the second step.

Knock out all existing players.

Take over.

"You there."

The door was open. Oscarsson was looking at him.

"It's fine to go in now."

Oscarsson was on his way to the neighboring office, a woman who according to the sign on her door was something to do with finance. Piet Hoffmann nodded and went in, positioned the cart by the desk and waited. One minute, two minutes. Oscarsson had still not come back, his voice intertwined with the woman's when they laughed at something.

He leaned forward toward the bouquets. The buds had opened enough, not completely open, but enough for fingers to pluck out the cut-down, knotted condoms that contained three grams of chemical amphetamine, made with flower fertiliser rather than acetone in a factory in Siedlce, hence the strong smell of tulips.

Piet Hoffmann emptied fifteen buds in one go, dropped the condoms into the black garbage bag on his cart, listened to the voices in the next room.

He smiled.

He would soon have completed Wojtek's first delivery to the closed market.

Göransson had drunk two glasses of mineral water and had painstakingly chewed each ice cube, a crunching sound that was not nice to listen to.

"I don't understand, Fredrik. Burn who?"

"Hoffmann."

The national police commissioner found it difficult to sit still. He had felt it already when his colleague had walked straight into the room: something that he couldn't put his finger on had barged its way in.

"Would you like coffee?"

"Cigarette."

"But you only smoke in the evening."

"Not today, I don't."

The packet of cigarettes was unopened and lying at the back of the bottom drawer of his desk.

"It's been there for about two years. I don't know if you can smoke them anymore, but it was never my intention to offer them to anyone. They were just meant to be there after every cup of coffee, when there's a yawning hole in your stomach, just as proof that I hadn't started again."

He opened the window as the first puff of smoke drifted over the desk, "I think it's better if we keep it closed."

The national police commissioner looked at the man who was drawing hard on the cigarette and was right, so he closed the window again and breathed in a smell that was so familiar.

"I don't think you understand-we haven't got much time. Grens will sit down opposite him and listen to the consequences of a meeting we should never have had. Grens will-"

"Fredrik?"

"Yes?"

"You're here. And I'm listening. Just calm yourself down now and give me the full picture."

Fredrik Göransson smoked until there was nothing left to smoke, stubbed out the cigarette, lit a new one and smoked it halfway down. He went back to the sinking feeling by the coffee machine and a detective superintendent who was following up a name that had popped up on the periphery of an investigation-someone who had worked for the official Wojtek and who, according to the authorities' records, had been convicted of aggravated assault and still been given a gun license, a name that was now serving a long sentence for drug offenses and tomorrow morning would be questioned in connection with a murder at Västmannagatan 79.

"Ewert Grens."

"Yes."

"Siw Malmkvist?"

"That's the one."

"The sort who doesn't give up."

The sort that never gives up.

"It'll be a disaster. Do you hear, Kristian, a disaster?"

"It won't be a disaster."

"Grens doesn't let go. Once he's questioned Hoffmann. it'll be us, the ones who legitimized all this, protected him."

The national police commissioner didn't say anything, didn't break out in a sweat, but he now understood the anxiety that had entered the room, the kind of anxiety that had to be chased off immediately so that it couldn't grow.

"Wait a moment."

He got up from the sofa and went to the phone, flipped to the back of a black diary and then after a while dialed the number he had been looking for.

The ringing tone when he got through was louder than normal and could even be heard from where Göransson was sitting on the sofa… three rings four rings five rings… until a deep man's voice answered and the national police commissioner pulled the mouthpiece in closer.

"pal? It's Kristian. Are you alone?"

The deep voice was a bit too far away, just a faint murmur, but the national police commissioner looked satisfied, gave a brief nod.

"I need your help. We have a mutual problem."

Piet Hoffmann stood in front of the first locked security door in the passage between the administration block and Block G. The camera moved, central security changing the angle and zooming in on a bearded face of around thirty-five that was studied on the monitor, perhaps also compared with a photo in the prison files, a prisoner who had arrived a couple of days ago and was still just one of a whole host of criminals who had been given long sentences.

He had been careful when emptying the trash to make sure that the contents lay on top of the big trash liner on the cleaning cart, so that anyone passing who looked into it would see crumpled-up envelopes and empty plastic cups, not fifty condoms and one hundred fifty grams of amphetamine. He had used the forty-two grams that were in the four library books to knock out the three main dealers in the prison and would now use what had been hidden in the buds of fifty yellow tulips for the first sales from the prison's new dealer. In a few hours, all the prisoners in all the units would know that plenty of chemical drugs were now being sold and distributed by a new prisoner called Piet Hoffmann somewhere in Block G. He wasn't going to sell more than two grams to any of them first time round, no matter how much they begged or threatened; Wojtek's maiden fix had to be divided between seventy-five imprisoned drug addicts-their first debt with a ruler who would definitely demand it back. He would sell more in a few days once he had taken over the two prison wardens in Block F who were paid by the Greek to regularly smuggle in large amounts.

The clicking sound, central security had finished checking him and opened the door for a few seconds. Hoffmann went through, turned right up the first side passage and stopped after a few long strides, about two and a half meters in. A five-meter blind spot between two cameras. He looked around, no one coming from Block H, no one leaving the administration block.

He rummaged around in the trash bag until he had fished out fifty condoms and emptied the contents into a black plastic bag on the hard floor. A small teaspoon from one of the cups in the governor's office held exactly two grams if the powder was level; he divided up the drug into seventy-five small piles.

He worked fast but meticulously, ripping the small white bags into strips and wrapping the two-gram piles in plastic; seventy-five portions at the bottom of the big trash can liner covered by the contents of the admin cans.

"We said eight g, didn't we?"

He had heard him coming, a druggie's steps, feet dragging on concrete. He knew that he would stand there and fawn.

"Eight, that's right isn't it? We said eight?"

Hoffmann shook his head in irritation.

"What's so bloody hard to understand? You'll get two."

Every customer would be able to get at least one hit-today once again journey to a world that was artificial and therefore so much easier to live in. But no one would get enough to begin with to be able to sell on, no other dealers, no competition, the drugs would be controlled from a cell in the left-hand corridor, G2.

"Fucking hell, I-"

"You'll fucking shut up if you want anything at all."

The skinny junkie was shaking even more than he had been in the morning, his feet moving constantly, his eyes everywhere except for the face they were talking to. He was silent, held his hand out until he was given a small white ball and started to walk off before he'd even put it in his pocket.

"I think you've forgotten something."

The skinny prick had a twitch by his eyes, the spasms increased and his cheeks rippled unrhythmically.

"I'll fix the money."

"Fifty kronor a gram."

The twitch stopped for a couple of seconds.

"Fifty?"

Hoffmann smiled at his confusion. He could ask anything from three hundred to four hundred fifty. Now when there were no other suppliers, maybe even six hundred. But he wanted the news to pass through all the walls, and then they could raise it, when all the customers were on one list, the one that belonged to the prison's sole supplier.

"Fifty."

"Fuck, fuck. then I want twenty g."

"Two."

"Or thirty, maybe even-"

"You're in debt now."

"I'll fix it."

"We keep an eye on our debts."

"Don't worry, man, I mean I've always-"

"Good. We'll find a solution then."

Faint steps thumping down the passage from Block H that quickly got louder. They could both hear them and the druggie had already started to walk away.

"Do you work?"

"Study."

"Where?"

The skinny guy was sweating and his cheeks were twitching and rippling.

"Fuck, does it-"

"Where?"

"Classroom F3."

"You can order from Stefan from now on. And collect from him."

Two locked doors and the elevator up to Block G. He pushed the cart into the cleaning cupboard that stank of damp cloths, stuffed eleven of the small plastic balls into his pockets and left the rest under the crumpled documents. In an hour they would be passed to other hands in the various prison buildings and in each unit there would be consumers who knew about the new supplier and the quality and the price, and he and Wojtek would have taken over, the lot.

They were waiting for him.

Some in the corridor, a couple in the TV corner, evasive eyes full of hunger.

He had eleven sales in his pockets for a unit that was like all the others: five were going to pay from cash that could be counted in millions, earnings from criminal activities that society seldom managed to stop; six didn't have enough money to pay for the socks on their feet and would end up working for Wojtek on the outside to pay off their debt-they were an investment, criminal labor and he owned them.

Fredrik Göransson sat on one of the national police commissioner's sofas and listened to the voice on the other end of the telephone talk loudly, the initial low murmur had become clear words in short bursts.

"Mutual problem?"

"Yes."

"This early in the morning?"

The deep man's voice sighed and the national police commissioner continued.

"It's about Hoffmann."

"Well?"

"He's going to be called in for questioning this morning, in one of the visiting rooms. A detective superintendent from city police who's investigating Västmannagatan 79."

He waited for an answer, a reaction, anything. He got nothing.

"That interview, Pål, is not going to happen. Under no circumstances are you going to let Hoffmann meet a policeman as part of the preliminary investigation in connection with that address."

Silence again and when the voice responded, it was once more a low murmur that couldn't be heard from a few meters away.

"I can't say anymore. Not here, not now. Apart from that you've got to fix it."

The national police commissioner was sitting on the edge of the desk and it was starting to be uncomfortable. He straightened his back and there was a crunching sound from somewhere in his hip.

"Pål I just need a couple of days. A week maybe. I want you to do this for me."

He put the phone down and leaned forward, a few more crunches, sounded like his lower back.

"We've got ourselves a few days. Now we have to take action. In order to avoid the same situation happening again in seventy-two or ninety-six hours."

They shared what was left in the coffeepot. Göransson lit another cigarette.

The meeting a couple of weeks earlier in a beautiful room with a view of Stockholm had mutated into something new Code Paula was no longer an operation that the Swedish police had worked on and waited for for several years, it now also involved a criminal counterpart who they did not know much about and who had knowledge that would have consequences far beyond that oblong meeting table if it were to be passed on.

"So, Erik Wilson is abroad?"

Göransson nodded.

"And Hoffmann's Wojtek contacts in the unit, do we know who they are?"

Chief Superintendent Göransson nodded again, leaned back a touch and for the first time since he sat down, the fabric felt almost comfortable.

The national police commissioner looked at his face, which seemed calmer.

"You're right."

He lifted up the empty coffeepot to see if there was anything left. He was thirsty: he'd never really understood all the fuss about water with bubbles, but poured himself a glass as it was there and, because the room was full of cigarette smoke, found it refreshing.

"If we let it our who Hoffmann is? If the members of an organization find out there's an informant among them-what the organization does then with that knowledge is not our problem. We will not and cannot be responsible for other people's actions."

One more glass, more bubbles.

"Like you said, we'll burn him."

Thursday

He had dreamed about the hole. For four nights in a row, the straight edges in the dust on the shelf behind his desk had become a yawning, bottomless hole and no matter where he was or how much he tried to get away, he was drawn toward the black hole and then just as he started to fall, he woke up breathless on the floor behind the corduroy sofa, his back slippery with sweat.

It was half past four and already warm and bright in the courtyard of Kronoberg. Ewert Grens went out into the corridor and over to the small pantry, where a blue hand towel was hanging from the tap. He wet it and went back to the office and the hole that was much smaller in reality. So many hours, such a large part of his day for thirty-five years had revolved around a time that no longer existed. With the wet cloth he wiped over the long, hard edges that marked where the cassette recorder he had been given for his twenty-fifth birthday had stood, then the considerably shorter edges from the cassettes and the photo, even the squares that had been the two loudspeakers, which were kind of beautiful in their clarity.

And now there wasn't even dust.

He moved a cactus plant from the windowsill, the files from the floor-the majority of which contained long-since completed preliminary investigations that should have been filed somewhere-and filled every tiny space on the now empty shelves so that he wouldn't need to fall anymore; the hole had gone and if there wasn't a hole, there couldn't be a bottomless pit.

A cup of black coffee around which the air was still full of swirling dust particles looking for a new home didn't taste as good as usual, as if the dust had dissolved in the brown liquid; it even looked a shade lighter.

He left early-he wanted straight answers and prisoners who were still sleepy were often less mouthy, not so insolent and scornful; interviews were either a power struggle or an attempt to gain confidence and he didn't have time to build up trust. He drove out of the city too fast and along the first kilometers of the E4, then suddenly slowed when he passed Haga and the large cemetery on the left, hesitated before continuing straight on and accelerating again. He could turn off the road on the way back, drive slowly past the people with plants and flowers in one hand and a watering can in the other.

It was still thirty kilometers to the prison that he had visited at least twice a year for the past three decades. As a policeman in Stockholm he would regularly be involved in investigations that ended up there, questioning, prison transport, there was always someone who knew something and someone who had seen something, but the hatred of uniforms was greater there than anywhere else and their fear of the consequences justified, as a never survived long in an enclosed space, so the most usual answer on the recorder was a sneering laugh or simply empty silence.

Yesterday, Ewert Grens had met and written off two of three names on the periphery of the investigation who owned security firms with official links to Wojtek International. He had drunk coffee with a certain Maciej Bosacki in Odensala outside Marsta, and more coffee with Karl Lager in Sodertalje and after only a couple of minutes at each table had known that they didn't do executions in city center flats.

Far in the distance, the mighty wall.

He had on occasion walked under the huge prison yard through a network of passages and each time he had met people he avoided in reality, in life. He had taken days and years from them, and he understood why they spat at him, he even respected it, but it did not affect him. They had all pissed on other people and in Ewert Grens's world, anyone who felt they had the right to harm someone else should have the balls to stand up for it later.

The gray concrete grew longer, higher.

He had one name left on the brown-stained paper. Piet Hoffmann, previously convicted of aiming and firing at a policeman, and who had then been granted a gun license all the same. Something was amiss.

Ewert Grens parked the car and walked over to the prison entrance and the prisoner who would shortly be sitting in front of him.

It didn't feel right.

He didn't know why. Maybe it was too quiet. Maybe he was getting locked into his own head as well.

He had fought off any thoughts that carried Zofia with them, which had been worst around two in the morning, just before it started to get light.

He had gotten up, like before, chin-ups, jumping with his feet together until the sweat poured from his forehead and down his chest.

He should be relaxed. Wojtek had gotten their reports, three days in a row. He had stamped out and taken over. From this afternoon, he would be getting bigger deliveries and selling more.

"Morning, Hoffmann."

"Morning."

But he couldn't relax. Something was bothering him, something that demanded space and couldn't be reasoned away.

He was scared.

The doors had been unlocked, his neighbors were moving around out there, he couldn't see them but they were there, shouting and whispering. The sock between the door and the doorframe, the chair in front of the threshold, the pillow under the covers.

Two minutes past seven. Eighteen minutes to go.

He pressed himself against the wall.

The older man at central security studied his police ID, typed something on a computer, sighed.

"Questioning, you say?"

^" Yes.^"

"Grens."

"Yes."

"Piet Hoffmann?"

"I've reserved a room. So it would be great if you could let me in. So I could get to it."

The older man was in no rush. He lifted the phone and punched in a number.

"You'll have to wait a moment. There's something I need to check."

It took fourteen minutes.

Then all hell broke loose.

The door was pulled open. One second. The chair was kicked over. One second. Stefan passed close to him on the right, a screwdriver in his fist.

There's a moment left, a beat, people always experience half a second in such different ways.

There were probably four of them.

He had seen this happen several times, even taken part himself twice.

Someone ran in with a screwdriver, a table leg, a cut piece of metal. And straight behind, more hands to punch or kill. Two out in the corridor, always at a distance to keep watch.

The pillow and sweatshirt under the covers, his two and half seconds were over, his protection, his escape.

One blow.

He wouldn't manage more.

One single blow, right elbow to the carotid receptors on the left side of the throat, a hard blow right there and Stefan's blood pressure would rocket, he would collapse, faint.

His heavy body fell to the floor, blocking the door for the next pair of balled fists, a sharp piece of metal from the workshop, Karol Tomasz hit out in the air with it in order to keep his balance. Piet Hoffmann squeezed out between the doorframe and a shoulder that still hadn't quite fathomed where the person who was going to die was hiding. He ran out into the corridor between the two who were standing guard and on toward the closed door of the security office.

They know.

He ran and looked around, they were standing there.

They know.

He opened the door and went into the guards' room and someone roared stukatj behind him and the principal prison officer shouted get the hell out of here. He probably didn't shout anything himself, he couldn't be certain but it didn't feel like it, he stayed where he was in front of the closed door and whispered I want to be put in isolation, and when they didn't react, he said a bit louder I want a P18 and when none of the goddamn staring guards moved at all, in spite of everything he did scream, now, you fuckers, presumably that's what he did, I need to be in isolation now.

Ewert Grens sat on a chair in the visiting room and looked at a roll of toilet paper on the floor by the bed and a mattress that was covered in plastic and stuck our over the end of the frame-fear and longing that for one hour every month was distilled down to two bodies holding each other tight. He moved over to the window, not much of a view: a couple of crude bars edged with barbed wire and farther back, the lower part of a thick gray concrete wall. He sat down again, the restlessness that was always in him and never let him relax. He played with the black cassette recorder that stood in the middle of the table every time he came here to question people who hadn't seen or heard anything; he remembered the faces as they came closer and lowered their voices, stared at the floor, full of hate, until he shut off. He wasn't sure that any of the interviews he'd done in this room had ever really helped him to solve an investigation.

There was a knock at the door and a man came in. According to the documents, Hoffmann was not yet middle-aged, so this was someone else, considerably older and in a blue prison staff uniform.

"Lennart Oscarsson. Chief Warden of Asps5s."

Grens took his outstretched hand and smiled.

"Well blow me down, the last time we met you were just a lowly principal officer. You've come up in the world. Have you managed to let anymore go?"

A few years in a couple of seconds.

They were there, back to the time when Principal Prison Officer Lennart Oscarsson had granted a convicted, relapsed pedophile an escorted hospital visit, a pervert who had done a runner while he was being transported and murdered a five-year-old girl.

"Last time we met, you were just a detective superintendent. And now… you still are?"

"Yes. You need to make major mistakes to be kicked up the ass."

Grens stood on the other side of the table and waited for more sarcasm, something just as funny, but it didn't come. He'd seen it as soon as Oscarsson entered the room-the chief warden seemed distant, unfocused, his mind elsewhere.

"You're here to talk to Hoffmann."

"Yes."

"I've just come from the hospital wing. You can't see him."

"I'm sorry, I notified you of my visit yesterday and he was fit as a fiddle then."

"They were hospitalized last night."

"They?"'

"Three so far. Soaring temperatures. We don't know what it is. The prison doctor has decided that they should be in isolation. They are not permitted to see anyone at all until we know what it is."

Ewert Grens gave a loud sigh.

"How long?"

"Three, maybe four days. That's all I can say at the moment?'

They looked at each other, there wasn't much more to say and they were just getting ready to go when a piercing noise ripped through the air. The black square of plastic on Oscarsson's hip flashed red, one flash for every loud bleep.

The warden grabbed the alarm that hung on his belt and read the display, his face aghast at first, then stressed and evasive.

"Sorry, I've got to go."

He was already on his way out.

"Something has obviously happened. Can you find your own way out?"

Lennart Oscarsson ran toward the stairs, down and along the passage toward the prison units. Checked the alarm display again.

G2.

Block G, first Floor.

That was where he was.

The prisoner he had just lied about on the explicit order of the head of the Prison and Probation Service.

He had shouted at them and then sat down on the floor.

They had reacted after a while-one of the guards had locked the door from the inside and stayed by the glass window to keep an eye on the men out in the corridor, and another had rung central security and asked for assistance from the prison riot squad to escort a prisoner to an isolation cell following a supposed threat.

He had moved to a chair and was now partially hidden from the people circling outside who whispered stukatj sufficiently loud for him to hear as they passed.

Stukaj.

Snitch.

The door to the national police commissioner's office was open.

Göransson knocked lightly on the doorframe. He was expected-a large silver thermos on the table between the sofas, open sandwiches in crumpled paper bags from the small breakfast cafe at the other end of Bergsgaran. He poured two cups of coffee and wolfed down a sandwich. He was hungry, the anxiety was draining him. He had walked down the corridor and slowly past Grens's office, the only one where the lights were often on early in the morning, drowning everything in banal music. It was as empty as Göransson felt. Ewert Grens, who normally slept there and was at his desk working as soon as it was light outside, wasn't there. He had already left for the prison in Aspsås, as early as he said he would yesterday. Grew must not talk to Hoffmann. A large piece of bread got stuck in his mouth and grew until he was forced to spit it out onto the paper plate. Hoffmann must not talk to Grew. He drank some more coffee, rinsing down what was still stuck.

"Fredrik?"

The national police commissioner had returned and sat down beside his colleague.

"Fredrik, what's wrong? Are you okay?"

Göransson tried to smile but couldn't, his mouth just wouldn't do it. "No."

"We'll manage to sort this out."

He took a bite of a sandwich, lifted up the cheese-something green underneath, pepper or maybe a couple of slices of cucumber.

"I've just gotten off the phone. Grens is on his way back from Asps5.s. And has been told he won't be able to see the prisoner called Piet Hoffmann for three, maybe even four days."

Göransson looked at the piece of bread. The cramps in his body receded somewhat, so he picked it up and tried to fill the void again.

"Troubled."

"Pardon?"

"You asked how I was. Troubled. That's what I am. Bloody troubled." He left the cheese and bread on the plate, and later threw it in the trash. He couldn't do it. His mouth, his throat, he was so dry.

"Troubled in case Hoffmann talks. Troubled to find out what I'm prepared to do to stop him."

They had burned informants before. We don't know who he is. Dropped them when there were too many questions. We don't work with criminals. Looked the other way when the hunt began and the criminal organization that had been infiltrated found its own solutions.

But never in a prison, never locked up with no escape.

Life, death.

Suddenly it was all so clear.

"What troubles you most?"

The national police commissioner leaned toward him.

"You have to think about it, Fredrik. What troubles you the most? The consequences if Hoffmann talks? Or the consequences if we take action?" Göransson was silent.

"Do you have any choice, Fredrik?"

"I don't know."

"Do I have any choice?"

"I don't know!"

The silver thermos fell to the floor when Göransson made an uncontrolled, sweeping gesture over the table. The national police commissioner waited, then picked it up when he decided that the man wasn't going to strike out again.

"Fredrik, listen to me."

He moved closer.

"What we are doing is not wrong. It's just the way things are. We are doing no wrong. The only thing we are doing and the only thing we have done is to talk to a lawyer who represents two Wojtek members who are doing time in Aspsås. If he then decides to give that information to his clients, if he decided to do that yesterday evening, then we can't be held responsible. And if his clients then choose to do something, which prisoners often do, we are not responsible for that either."

He didn't come much closer but did move forward a little more.

"We can't be responsible for anything other than our own actions."

It was possible to see Kronobergsparken from the window. There were some small children playing in the sandpit and a couple of dogs running around that refused to listen to their masters who each waited with leash in hand. It was a lovely little park right in the middle of Kungsholmen. Göransson looked at it for a long time, he didn't normally go there and he wondered why.

"The consequences if he talks."

"Sorry?"

Göransson stayed standing by the window, soothed by the air that came in through the small open rectangle at the top.

"Your question. What troubles me most. The consequences if Hoffmann talks."

He moved the chair slightly to the left. Now he could see the whole corridor through the glass, and the pool table where the four who had just attacked him were pretending to play while keeping an eye on him. It was obvious that they wanted him to know that he was a goddamn rat who had nowhere to go, a prison is a closed system with walls that shut you in and anyone who wants to run will soon meet something hard that they can't get past. Karol Tomasz was standing closest-he raised his arm, pointed at his mouth, formed the word stukatj over and over again.

Paula no longer existed.

Piet Hoffmann tried to find somewhere deep inside that wasn't roaring, he had to try to understand that he now had a new mission, to survive. They knew.

They must have found out in the evening, during the night. Nothing had changed at lock-up time, someone had communication channels that opened locked doors.

If you're about to be exposed, you can't escape very far in a prison, but you can demand to be put in isolation.

There were ten of them, helmets and riot shields to protect them, and armed with sedatives to keep control. The prison riot squad had run across the yard and up the stairs of Block G. Six of them would stay to prevent and discourage repeated violence, four of them would escort the vulnerable prisoner down the passage and deep into the bowels of the earth, to Block C and the voluntary isolation unit, two escorts behind, two in front.

You might be given a death sentence. But you're not going to die.

Sixteen cells here as well. Voluntary isolation was built to look like any other unit in any prison-the wardens' room, the TV corner, the showers, the kitchen, the Ping-Pong table-the people who asked to come here could move around freely without the risk of bumping into prisoners from other units in the prison. The faces he saw were the only ones he would meet.

A week.

He would wait, avoid confrontation; he could stay alive here, survive here. Outside the door he was dead-every part of the big prison was a potential screwdriver to the throat, a table leg against his forehead as many times as was needed to make it cave in. In one week, Erik and the city police would come and get him. He wouldn't die, not yet, not with Hugo and Rasmus, not with Zofia, he wouldn't

would not

would not

would

not

Are you all right?"

He had fallen to the floor without using his hands, hitting his cheek and chin, and for a few seconds was somewhere else: the attack, the guards in the aquarium, the mouths forming stukatj, the riot guys in their black uniforms. He suddenly found it hard to breathe and had felt his legs swaying as he tried to stay upright.

He hadn't known until now that all the damned energy just drains from your body when the only thing that exists is a fear of death.

"I don't know. Toilet, I need to wash my face, I'm sweating."

The sink in the middle looked almost clean. He turned on the tap and let the water run until it was cold, stuck his head under it to cool his neck and back, then filled his hands and rubbed against the skin of his face, as if he was returning-he wasn't even particularly dizzy.

The kick caught him on the side.

The pain was intense, burning from somewhere on his hip.

Piet Hoffmann hadn't seen or heard the solid, long-haired guy in his twenties coming in, running toward him, but with guards from the riot squad outside he wasn't going to do much more, he just spat and whispered stukatj and closed the door when he left.

Death sentence. Already on his head.

He got up, coughed, and felt over his hip with one hand. The kick had caught him farther up than he first thought, broken a couple of his ribs. He had to get out of here. To the next level. Solitary confinement. Total isolation, only contact with the guards, never have any contact with other prisoners, twenty-four hours a day, locked in a cell with no way in and no way out.

Stukatj.

He had to get away again. He mustn't die.

Ewert Grens had stopped halfway back from Aspsås, at the OK gas station in Taby, and was sitting on one of the stools by the window with an orange juice and a cheese sandwich. Soaring temperatures. Isolation. Three, maybe four days. He had stood in the visiting room with its toilet rolls and plastic-covered mattress and wanted to thump the walls, but had refrained; it would be pointless to argue with a prison doctor about infections he'd never heard about. He bought another artificial sandwich, it was the final stretch back to Stockholm and he couldn't put it off any longer. He turned off the E4 at Haga South, drove past the hospital and stopped some way down Solna kyrkvag. Entrance 1, as far as he had come the last time.

He was not alone.

Visitors, park attendants, and watering cans, all heading toward the grass and rows of headstones. He rolled down the window, it was muggy, air than stuck to your back.

"Do you work here?"

A person in blue overalls with two spades on the back of a moped. The park attendant, or church warden, stopped by the man who was still in his car, shielded by the door, not daring to get out.

"Have for seventeen years."

Grens fidgeted uneasily and moved the sandwich wrapper that rustled on the seat. His eyes followed an old lady leaning over a small gray stone that looked new, a plant in one hand and an empty pot in the other.

"So you know the place well?"

"You could say that."

She started to dig, then with great care put the plant in the soil, had just enough room in the thin strip between the headstone and the grass.

"I was wondering…"

"Yes?"

"I was wondering… if you want to find out about a particular grave, where someone is buried… what do you do?"

Lennart Oscarsson stood by the window at the far end of a room he had aspired to all his adult life. The chief warden's office at Aspsås prison. After twenty-one years as a prison warden, principal officer and acting chief, he had finally been appointed as prison chief warden four months ago and had moved all his files into the shelves that were slightly longer and attached to the wall next to the sofas that were slightly softer. He had dreamed of having this office for so long that when he stood there with his dream in his hands, he didn't know what to do with it. What do you do when you no longer have dreams? Escape? He gave a faint sigh as he looked out of the window at prisoners on a break in the yard: large groups of people who had murdered, abused, stolen, and were sitting out there on the dry gravel, either reflecting or repressing their emotions in order to cope. He looked up over the wall to the small town with rows of white-and-red houses, stopped at the window that had for a long time been a family bedroom-now he lived there alone, he had made a choice, but he had made the wrong choice, and sometimes it is too late to right our wrongs.

He sighed again without realizing it. The evening and night had been filled with fury, the sort that crept up on you, started to ferment in your mind, then grew into frustration. It had started with a feeling of irritation just by his temples when he heard the voice that he recognized, but had never spoken to before. He had been sitting at the kitchen table eating his supper as he always did, even though it was now only set for one, and he had almost finished when the phone rang. The general director had been friendly but firm when he told him that the detective superintendent from city police who was coming to Aspsås in the morning to question a prisoner in G2, Piet Hoffmann, must not be allowed to do so. They must not meet under any circumstances, not today nor the next day nor the next. Lennart Oscarsson had not asked any questions and had not understood until later, when he was washing up one plate, one glass, one knife and fork, where the irritation that had turned into rage was coming from.

A lie.

A lie that had just been born.

He had asked Ewert Grens to leave and had been on his way out when the alarm sucked all the air from the small room. A prisoner had been threatened, an emergency escort from G2 to the voluntary isolation unit.

Piet Hoffmann.

The name he had been ordered to lie about.

Oscarsson bit his lower lip until it started to bleed. He chewed the wound with his teeth until it stung, as if to punish himself, maybe in order to forget for a moment the fury that made him want to open the window and jump out and run to the town and the people who knew nothing.

The attack and the phone call to say that a policeman must not be allowed to carry out an interview were linked. There was more-he had been given another order-he was to allow a lawyer to visit a client last evening. They did come knocking every now and then when an imminent trial or recently pronounced sentence required a lawyer in the cell, but never on order and seldom after lock-up. This one had visited a Pole in G2 and was one of the lawyers paid to convey planted information, Oscarsson was sure of it.

A late visit by a lawyer in the same unit as a reported attack the next morning.

Lennart Oscarsson bit his lower lip again, his blood tasting of iron and something else. He didn't know what he'd expected. Perhaps he had been naive, all the days he had looked up at the room where he was now standing and thought about the uniform he was now wearing. Whatever it was, he had never imagined that it would mean this.

A cell with absolutely no personal belongings, just a bunk, a chair, a wardrobe, no colors and no soul. He had not left it since he got here and he wasn't going to be staying. His death sentence had gotten here before him. It had been standing in the bathroom, waiting, with a kick to the hip and a mouth that whispered stukatj with the promise of more. If he was going to survive a week, he could only do it in another sort of isolation, solitary confinement, where prisoners were separated not only from the rest of the prison but also from each other, locked into the cells every hour of the day.

He stood on his toes when he pissed-the sink was a bit too high on the wall, but he wasn't going to go out there, not to the toilets.

Then he pressed a button by the door and held it down.

"You want something?"

"I want to make a phone call."

"There's a phone in the corridor."

"I'm not going out there."

The guard stepped into the cell and bent over the sink.

"It stinks."

"I have the right to make a phone call."

'Tuck, you pissed in the sink."

"I have the right to call my lawyer, non-custodial services, the police and my five approved numbers. And I want to do that now."

"In this unit, which you asked to come to yourself, we use the toilets in the corridor. And I haven't got your damn list."

"The police. I want to call a number on the City Police switchboard. You can't refuse me."

"There's a telephone in-"

"I want to call from here. I have the right to call the police in private." Twelve rings.

Piet Hoffmann held the cordless phone in his hand. Erik Wilson wasn't there, he knew that he was away in the United States, at some course in the south-east, during the period that they were not going to have any contact. But that was where he called, his office, that was where he had to begin.

He was put through again.

When you've asked to be put in isolation, once you have that protection, contact us and wait for a week. That's the time we'll need to get the papers sorted for someone to come and get you out.

Fourteen rings.

Erik wasn't going to answer, no matter how long he waited.

"I want to call the switchboard."

I am alone.

The regular tone of a switchboard, muffled, feeble.

No one knows yet.

"Police Authority, Stockholm, can I help you?"

"Göransson."

"Which one?"

"The head of criminal operations."

The female voice put him through. Then that muffled, feeble ringing, again and again. I am alone. No one knows yet. He waited with the receiver pressed to his ear. The regular sound got louder, with each ring it got a little louder until it was piercing his brain and mixing with the voice from the bathroom that passed the closed cell and shouted stukatj once, twice, three times.

Ewert Grens lay on the corduroy sofa and looked at the shelf behind the desk and the hole that he had filled again early that morning, the row of files and a lonely cactus that concealed a whole life. As if there hadn't been any dust. He turned round and looked at the ceiling, spotted new cracks that were about to separate and then come together, only to separate again. He had stayed in the car. The park attendant had pointed toward the lawns and trees that were practically a forest, explained that the new graves were at the far end toward Haga. He had even offered to go with him, show the way to someone who had never been there before. Grens had thanked him and shaken his head, he would go there another day.

"The noise?"

Someone had stopped in his doorway.

"Do you want something?"

The noise."

"What damned noise?"

"The noise. That… atonal one. Dissonance."

Lars Ågestam crossed the threshold.

"The noise that I normally hear. Siw Malmkvist. I was heading for it now. Until I realized that I'd walked past. That it was… silent."

The public prosecutor stepped into an office that looked different, as if it had taken on new dimensions and what had previously been at the center had disappeared.

"Have you rearranged the furniture?"

He looked at the shelf. The files, preliminary investigations, a dead potted plant. A bit of wall that had previously been something else, presumably the center.

"What have you done?"

Grens didn't answer. Lars Ågestam listened to the music that had always been there, that he detested and had been forced to listen to.

"Grens? Why…?"

"That's got nothing to do with you."

"You've-"

"I don't want to talk about it."

The prosecutor swallowed-there might have been something to talk about that wasn't to do with law; he had tried and he regretted it as usual. "Västmannagatan."

"What about it?"

"I gave you three days."

Not a sound. And that wasn't how it should be, in here.

"Three days. For the last names."

"We're not quite finished."

"If you still haven't got anything… Grens, I will scale down the case this time."

Ewert Grens had been lying down until now. He quickly got up, his body leaving a deep impression on the soft sofa.

"You damn well won't! We've done exactly what you suggested. Identified and contacted several names on the periphery of the investigation. We've questioned them, dismissed them. All except one. A certain Piet Hoffmann who is already doing time and right now is in the prison's hospital unit and out of bounds."

"Out of bounds?"

"Isolation. For three or four days."

"What do you think?"

"I think he's very interesting. There's something… he doesn't fit."

The young prosecutor looked at the files and the potted plant that disguised what once had been. He would never have believed it, that Grens would let go of something that he only needed to love at a distance.

"Four days. So that you can question this last guy. Either you manage to link him to the crime in that time, or I scale it down."

The detective superintendent nodded and Lars Ågestam started to walk out of the room he had never laughed in, not even smiled in. Every visit here had been fraught with conflict and an inhabitant that tried at once to repel and hurt. He moved quickly in order to get away from the staleness and so didn't hear the cough and didn't notice when a piece of paper was pulled from an inner pocket.

"Ågestam?"

The prosecutor stopped, wondered whether he'd heard correctly. It was Grens's voice and it sounded almost friendly, perhaps even apologetic.

"Do you know what this is?"

Ewert Grens unfolded the piece of paper and put it down on the table in front of the sofa.

A map.

"North Cemetery."

"Have you been there?"

"What do you mean?"

"Have you? Been there?"

Strange questions. The closest they had ever come to a conversation. "Two of my relatives are buried there."

Ågestam had never seen this arrogant bastard so… small. Grens played with the map of one of Sweden's largest cemeteries and struggled for words. "Then you'll know… I wondered… is it nice there?"

The door to the cell at the end of the corridor in the voluntary isolation unit was open. The prisoner from G2 had been escorted there through the underground tunnel by four members of the prison riot squad and after that he had demanded to phone the police, and then proceeded to make their lives hell. He had kept ringing the bell and demanding to be moved again, had shouted about solitary confinement and hit the walls, overturned the wardrobe, smashed the chair and pissed all over the floor until it ran our under the door into the corridor. He had been terrified but seemed to hold himself together, scared but in control. He knew what he was saying and why and he didn't go to pieces and collapse-the prisoner called Piet Hoffmann would only be quiet when he knew that someone was listening. Lennart Oscarsson had been standing in his office looking out over the prison yard and town hall in the distance when he had been informed of the disturbance involving a prisoner in the voluntary isolation unit in Block C and had decided to go there himself, to meet someone he didn't know but who had haunted him since a late phone call the night before.

"In there?"

He had seen him before. The cleaner in the administration block. He had seemed taller then, more straight-backed, eyes that were curious and alert. The person sitting on the bunk with his knees pulled up under his chin and his back pressed hard to the wall was someone else.

Only death, or fleeing from it, could change someone so quickly. "Is there a problem, Hoffmann?"

The prisoner who couldn't be questioned tried to look more together than he actually was.

"I don't know. What d'you think? Or did you come here to get your trash emptied?"

"I think it would seem so. And that it's you that's causing it. The problem." The order to grant a lawyer access to your unit.

"You asked for voluntary isolation. You refused to say why. And now you've got it, voluntary isolation."

The order that you must not be questioned.

"So… what's your problem?"

"I want to be put in the hole."

"You want what?"

"The hole. Solitary confinement."

I see you.

You're sitting there in the clothes we've issued.

But I don't understand who you are.

"Solitary confinement? Exactly… what exactly are you talking about, Hoffmann?"

"I don't want to have any contact with the other prisoners."

"Are you being threatened?"

"No contact. That's all I'm saying."

Piet Hoffmann looked out through the open door. Prisoners who moved around freely represented death just as much here as in any other unit. They had been moved away from others but not from each other.

"That's not the way it works. Hoffmann, solitary confinement is our decision. It's not something that individual prisoners can decide. You've been moved here on your request, in accordance with Paragraph eighteen. That's our duty. We are under obligation to do that if you request it. But the hole, solitary confinement, has a completely different set of regulations and conditions. Paragraph fifty is not something you can request, it's not voluntary, it is a decision that is enforced. By a principal officer in your unit. Or by me."

They were walking around out there, and they knew. He wouldn't survive the week here.

"Enforced?" "Yes."

"And how the fuck is that decision made?"

"If you're a danger to someone else. Or to yourself."

With walls that locked you in there was nowhere to hide.

"A danger?" "Yes."

"In what way?"

"Violence. Toward fellow prisoners. Or one of us, one of the staff."

They were waiting for him.

They whispered stuka.

He moved closer to the chief warden and looked into a face that crumpled with pain-he had hit him hard.

He sat on the hard concrete floor. He^'d heard talk of solitary confinement cells that were called the hole or the cage, he'd heard tales of people who excelled in violence in the world outside but who had broken after a few days in solitary confinement and were taken to the hospital unit in a fetal position, or those who had quietly hanged themselves with a sheet. A person couldn't be farther removed from life, from what was natural.

He was sitting on the floor as there wasn't a chair. A heavy metal bed and a cement toilet bowl that was solidly attached to the floor. That was it.

He had hit the chief warden in the middle of the face with his fist. The top of the cheek, eye, and nose. Oscarsson had fallen from the chair onto the floor, bleeding but conscious. The guards had rushed in, the governor held his hands in front of his face to protect himself against anything else, and Piet Hoffmann had voluntarily stretched his arms and legs for them to carry him out. The four guards each struggled with a part of his body while the prisoners lined the corridor and watched.

He had survived the attack. He had survived voluntary isolation. He had managed to get here, as much protection as you could get in a closed prison, but he shrank just as he had before, I am alone, no one knows yet, he curled up on the hard surface, freezing then sweating then freezing again. He was still lying there when one of the guards opened the square hatch in the door to ask if he wanted his hour out in the fresh air-an hour a day in a cake slice-shaped cage with blue sky high above the metal mesh-but he shook his head. He didn't want to leave the cell, didn't want to expose himself to anyone.

Lennart Oscarsson closed the door to the voluntary isolation unit and went slowly down the stairs, one at a time, to the ground floor of Block C. One hand to his cheek, his fingertips touching the swelling. It was tender and particularly swollen along the zygomatic bone, and there was a taste of blood on his tongue and in his throat. Give it about an hour, then the area around his eye would turn blue. The chief warden felt physical pain every second from a face that would take a long time to heal, but it meant nothing. It was the other pain, the one from the inside that he felt-all his working life he had lived with men who had no place in real society and he had been proud that he could read difficult people better than anyone, his professional knowledge, the only thing he felt was worth anything anymore.

This punch, he hadn't seen it coming.

He hadn't understood the desperation, hadn't anticipated the force of Hoffmann's fear.

The riot squad had carried him down to where the bastard belonged, and he would stay there for a long time in the shirtiest of shitty cells. Lennart Oscarsson would file a report that afternoon, and a long sentence would become even longer. It didn't help. He felt his tender cheek with his fingers. It didn't change anything, didn't ease his frustration at having misread a prisoner.

The iron bed, the cement toilet. No matter how long he waited, the cell was never going to be more than that. The dirty walls that had once been white, the ceiling that had never been painted, the floor that was so cold. He rang the bell again, kept his finger on the button long enough to irritate them. One of the guards would break in the end and hurry over to tell the prisoner who had assaulted the chief warden to stop ringing the bell or to look forward to days in a straitjacket.

He was cold again.

They knew. He was a snitch, he had a death threat. They would manage to get in here too. It was just a matter of time, as not even a carefully locked cell door could protect him. Wojtek had money and anyone could be bought when death was involved.

The square hatch was some way up the door. It scraped and whined when it was opened.

Staring eyes.

"You want something?"

Who are you?

"I want to make a phone call."

Guard?

'And why should we let you phone?"

Or one of them?

"I want to call the police."

The eye came closer, laughed.

"You want to call the police? And do what? Report that you've just assaulted a prison warden? Those of us who work here don't have much time for that sort of thing."

"None of your fucking business why and you know that. You know that you can't refuse me a phone call to the police."

The eye was silent. The hatch was closed. Steps disappeared.

Piet Hoffmann got up from the cold floor and threw himself over the button on the wall, held it in he guessed for about five minutes.

Suddenly the door was pulled open. Three blue uniforms. The staring eyes that he now was convinced belonged to a guard. Beside him, another one, the same kind. Behind them, a third, with enough stripes for him to be a principal officer, an older man, in his sixties.

He was the one who spoke.

"My name is Martin Jacobson. I'm the principal officer here. Boss in this unit. What's the problem?"

"I've asked to make a phone call. To the police. It's my damn right."

The principal officer studied him-a prisoner in oversize clothes who was sweating and found it difficult to stand still-then looked at the guard with the staring eyes.

"Roll in the phone."

"But-"

"I don't care why he's here. Let him phone."

He crouched on the edge of the iron bed with the telephone receiver in his hand.

He had asked for the city police every time he got through. More rings this time-he had counted twenty for both Erik Wilson and Göransson. Neither of them had answered.

He sat locked in a cell that had nothing other than an iron bed and a cement toilet bowl. He had no contact with the world outside or the other prisoners. None of the guards outside his cell door had any idea that he was there on behalf of the Swedish police.

He was stuck. He couldn't get out. He was alone in a prison where he had been condemned to death by his fellow prisoners.

He undressed himself and stood there shivering. He waved his arms around and started to sweat. He held his breath until the pressure in his chest was more than pain.

He lay face down on the floor, wanting to feel something, anything, that wasn't fear.

Piet Hoffmann knew as soon as the door into the corridor opened and then shut again.

He didn't need to see, he just knew-they were there.

The heavy steps of someone moving slowly. He hurried over to the cell door, put his ear to the cold metal, listened. A new prisoner being escorted by several wardens.

Then he heard it, a voice he recognized.

"Stukatj."

Stefan's voice. On his way to a cell farther down the corridor. "What did you say?"

The guard with the eyes. Piet Hoffmann pressed his ear even harder to the inside of the cell door-he wanted to be certain that he heard every word. "Stukay, It's Russian."

"We don't speak Russian down here."

"There's someone who does."

"Into the cell with you now, just get in!"

They were here. Soon there would be more, every prisoner in solitary confinement from now on would know that there was a snitch here, stewing in one of the cells.

Stefan's voice, it had been pure hate.

He pressed the red button and he would continue to press it until the guards came.

They had let him know they were there. Now it was just a question of when, of time. Hours, days, weeks, the pursuers and the pursued knew that the moment would come when there was no more waiting.

The square hatch opened, but it was other eyes, the older principal officer.

"I want-"

"Your hands are shaking.

"For fuck's sake-"

"You're sweating heavily."

"Telephone, I want-"

"You've got a twitch in your eye."

He was still pressing on the button. A piercing pitch that echoed in the corridor.

"Finger off the button, Hoffmann. You've got to calm down. And before I do anything… I want to know what's up."

Pier Hoffmann lowered his hand. It was eerily quiet around them. "I have to make another phone call."

"You just made one."

"The same number. Until I get an answer."

The cart with the phone and telephone directory on it was wheeled in and the gray-haired principal officer dialed the number he knew by heart. He watched the prisoner's face the whole time: the spasms in the muscles around his eyes, his forehead and hairline that were shiny and dripping, a person who was fighting his own fear as he waited for a phone that was not answered.

"You're not looking good."

"I have to make another call."

"You can do later."

"I have to-"

"You didn't get an answer. You can call again later."

Piet Hoffmann didn't let go of the receiver. He held it in his hands that were shaking as he met the eyes of the warden.

"I want my books."

"Which books?"

"In my cell. In G2. I have the right to have five books down here. I want two of them. I can't just sit here staring at the walls. They're on my bedside table. Nineteenth Century Stockholm and The Marionettes. I want them here, now."

The prisoner didn't shake as much when he talked about his books. He calmed down.

"Poetry?"

"You got a problem with that?"

"Not often that it's read down here."

"I need it. It helps me to believe in the future."

The flush on the prisoner's face had started to recede.

"Then suddenly it hits me that the ceiling, my ceiling, is someone else's floor .”^"

"What?"

"Perlin. Barefooted Child. If you like poetry, I can-"

"Just get me my books"

The older warden said nothing, just pulled the cart out of the cell and locked the heavy door. It was quiet again. Piet Hoffmann stayed on the cold floor and wiped his wet brow. He had twitches and spasms, he was shaking, he was swearing. He hadn't realized that it was visible, his fear.

He had moved from the floor to the bed and lain down on the thin mattress that didn't have any sheets or covers. He was freezing and had curled up in his stiff, oversize clothes and eventually fallen asleep, dreamed that Zofia was running in front of him and he couldn't get close to her no matter how much he tried, her hand disintegrated when he touched it, she shouted and he answered but she couldn't hear him, his voice dwindled to nothing and she got smaller and smaller, farther and farther away until she disappeared.

He was woken by noise outside in the corridor.

Someone was being escorted to the bathroom or the cage for some air, someone who had said something. He went over to the door, ear to the square hatch. It was another voice this time, Swedish, no accent, a voice that he hadn't heard before.

"Paula, where are you?"

He was sure that he'd heard it right.

"Paula, you're not hiding are you?"

The warden with the eyes told the voice to shut up.

It had shouted in no particular direction, but just outside his cell, selected a specific listener.

Piet Hoffmann sank down behind the door, sat there with his chest and chin against his knees, his legs weren't working.

Someone had exposed him as a stukatj last night, he had been given a death sentence. But… Paula… he hadn't understood it, not until now, that this someone had also known his code name. Paula. Christ… there were only four people who knew the code name Paula. Erik Wilson had made it up. Chief Inspector Göransson had approved it. Only those two, for many years, only those two. After the meeting in Rosenbad, two more. The national police commissioner. The state secretary. No one else.

Paula.

It was one of those four.

It was one of them, his protection, his escape-one of them had burned him.

"Paula, we want to meet you so much."

The same voice, farther away now toward the showers, then the same tired "shut up" from the wardens who didn't understand.

Piet Hoffmann held his legs even tighter, pressed them into his body.

He was already everyone's quarry. He was a snitch in a prison where informants were hated as much as sex offenders.

Someone banged on their door.

Someone screamed stukatj on the other side.

Soon it would be as it always was when the shared hate was focused on one locked cell door. First, two who banged, then three and four, then more, minute by minute, hatred channelled into the hands that hit harder and harder. He put his hands to his ears, but the banging penetrated his head until he couldn't stand it anymore, he pressed the button and held it down until the noise of the bell drowned out the monotone rhythm.

The square hatch opened. The principal officer's eye.

"Yes?"

"I want to make that phone call. And I want my books. I have to phone and I have to have my books."

The door opened. The older principal prison officer came in, ran his hand through his thick, gray hair and pointed out into the corridor.

"All that banging… has that got anything to do with you?"

"No."

"I've been working here for a long time. You're twitching, you're shaking, you're sweating. You're bloody frightened. And I think that's why you want to phone."

He closed the door and made sure that the prisoner made note. "Am I right?"

Piet Hoffmann looked at the blue uniform in front of him. He seemed friendly. He sounded friendly.

Don't trust anyone.

"No. It's got nothing to do with that. I just want to make a phone call now."

The principal prison officer sighed. The telephone cart was standing at the other end of the corridor, so this time he got out his mobile phone, dialed the number of city police and handed it over to the prisoner who refused to admit that he was frightened and that the banging out there had anything to do with it.

The first number. Ringing tone and no answer.

Twitching, shaking, sweating, it all got worse.

"Hoffmann."

"One more. The other number."

"You're not in a good way. I want to call a doctor. You should go to the hosp-"

"Dial the fucking number. You're not moving me anywhere." Ringing tone again. Three rings. Then a man's voice.

"Göransson."

He had answered.

His legs, he could feel them again.

He had answered.

He was just about to tell them, in a couple of moments they could start the administrative procedures that would mean freedom in a week.

"Jesus, finally, I've been trying… I need help. Now."

"Who am I talking to?"

"Paula?"

"Who?"

"Piet Hoffmann."

The silence didn't last that long, but it sounded like the phone had been put down, the electronic void that is empty, dead.

"Hello? For fuck's shake, hello, where-"

"I'm still here. What did you say your name was?"

"Hoffmann. Piet Hoffmann. We-"

"I'm very sorry, I have no idea who you are."

"What the fuck… you know… you know perfectly well who I am, we met, just recently in the state secretary's office… I-"

"No, we've never met. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a lot to do." Every muscle was tensed, his stomach was burning and his chest and his

throat and when everything is burning you have to scream or run or hide or… "I'm going to call the hospital unit now."

The telephone in his hand. He refused to let go.

"I'm not going anywhere until I've got my two books."

"The phone."

"My books. I have the right to have five books in solitary confinement!"

He loosened his grip on the cordless phone and let it slip out of his hand.

It cracked when it hit the floor, plastic bits bouncing in every direction. He lay down next to them, his arms around his stomach and chest and throat, it was still burning and when everything is burning, you have to run or hide.

"Did he sound desperate?"

"Yes."

"Stressed?"

"Yes."

"Frightened?"

"Very frightened."

They looked at each other. If we let it out who Hoffmann is? They had more coffee. What the organization then does with that knowledge is not our problem. They moved the piles of paper from one side of the table to the other. We will not and cannot be responsible for other people's actions.

It should have been over.

They had arranged a meeting for a lawyer with one of his clients that evening. They had burned him.

And yet, not long ago, he had called from a cell, from prison. "Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"It can't have-"

"It was him."

The national police commissioner fetched the pack of cigarettes that was kept in a desk drawer and not to be smoked. He offered the open pack to his colleague, the matches were on the table and the room was immediately awash with white.

"Give me one too."

Göransson shook his head.

"If you haven't smoked for two years, I don't want to encourage you." "I'm not going to smoke it. I'm just going to hold it."

He felt it between his fingers, sorely missed and familiar-now it offered calm when he most needed it.

"We've got plenty of time."

"Four days. And one's already gone. If Grens and Hoffmann meet…, If Hoffmann talks… if-"

Göransson interrupted himself. He didn't need to say more. They could both visualize the limping detective inspector, aging and obstinate, the sort who never gives up, who pursues the truth as far as he can and then some more when he realizes that a handful of colleagues have known it from the start. He would carry on and he wouldn't stop until he found the ones who had protected it and then buried it.

"It's just a matter of time, Fredrik. An organization that gets hold of that kind of information and has the means will use them. It might take a bit more time when there's no contact with fellow prisoners, but the moment will come."

The national police commissioner fingered the cigarette that wasn't lit.

It was so familiar. He would soon smell his fingertips, hold on to the forbidden pleasure a bit longer.

"But, if you want, we can… I mean, being locked away like that, in solitary confinement, it's a terrible place. No human contact. He should be moved back to the unit he came from, to the men he's gotten to know-if he's suffering down there, he should… well, he should be with other prisoners. On… humanitarian grounds."

He paused as he normally did in front of the window in the chief warden's office and looked out over his universe: the big prison and the small town. He had never been particularly curious about what might be elsewhere, what could be seen from here was all he had ever wished for. The reflection of the sun made the window a mirror and he gingerly touched his cheek, nose, forehead. He felt tender, it was hard to see properly in the darkened glass, but looked like the blue around his eye was already changing shade.

He had misread him, a desperation that he hadn't recognized. "Hello?"

The telephone on the desk had interrupted the feeling of his skin tightening.

"Lennart?"

He recognized the general director's voice.

"It's me."

There was a faint crackling in the receiver, a mobile somewhere outdoors and a strong wind.

"It's about Hoffmann."

"Okay.”

"He's to go back. To the unit he came from."

The crackling was now nearly inaudible.

"Lennart?"

"What the hell are you saying?"

"He's to go back. First thing tomorrow morning at the latest." "There's a serious threat involved."

"On humanitarian grounds."

"He is not going back to that unit. He should not even be in the same prison. If he's going anywhere, it's away, express transport, to Kumla or Hall." "You're not going to express him anywhere. He's going to go back."

"A prisoner who has been threatened is never sent back to the same unit." "It's an order."

The two bunches of tulips on his desk had started to open, the yellow petals like lit lamps in front of him.

"I was given an order to allow a late visit from a lawyer and I did it. I was given an order not to let a DS carry out an interview, and I did it. But this- I won't do it. If 0913 Hoffmann is sent back to the unit where he was threatened-"

"It's an order. Non-negotiable."

Lennart Oscarsson bent down toward the yellow petals, wanted to smell something that was genuine. His cheek brushed against a flower and tightened again; it had been a powerful punch.

"I personally would have nothing against seeing him go to hell. I have my reasons. But as long as I'm head of this prison, it's not going to happen. That would only mean death and there have been enough murders in Swedish prisons in recent years, investigations that no one has seen and no one has heard of and bodies that are eventually hidden away as no one is actually that interested."

The crackling again, whether it was the wind or labored breathing into a sensitive microphone.

"Lennart?"

It was breathing.

"You'll do it. Or you'll lose your post. You've got two hours."

He was lying on the iron bed with his eyes shut. I'm very sorry, I have no idea who you are. The people who were supposed to open the door and lead him back to reality had declared that he didn't exist.

He was officially condemned to ten years' imprisonment.

If those in the know denied it, if the people who had arranged a fake trial and produced a criminal record, if they denied it, there was no one else who could explain.

He wouldn't get out. He would be pursued to the death and no matter how much he ran and how long he managed to stay hidden, there was no one there on the other side of the wall who would open the door and help him out.

It was windy out in the prison yard, warm air rebounding off the concrete wall and coming back with even less oxygen. The prison's chief warden walked briskly and wiped his damp forehead with his shirt sleeve. The main door to solitary confinement was locked and he rattled through his keys. It wasn't often he visited the dismal corridor that was the temporary home of those who couldn't conform even with the country's most serious criminals.

"Martin."

The wardens' room was just inside the door and he nodded to three of his employees, Martin Jacobson and two temporary wardens, youngsters whose names he hadn't learned yet.

"Martin, I'd like to talk to you for a moment."

The two temps nodded; they had heard what he hadn't said and went out into the corridor, closing the door behind them.

"Hoffmann."

"Cell 9. He's not looking good. He-"

"He's to go back. To G2. By tomorrow morning at the latest."

The principal officer looked out into the empty corridor, heard the big ugly clock on the wall ticking, the second hand filling the room. "Lennart?"

"You heard right."

Martin Jacobson got up from the chair by the narrow desk that was largely used as a place to put cups, looked at his friend, colleague, boss. "We've been working together here for… a good twenty years. We've been neighbors for almost as long. You are one of my only friends in here, and out there, one of the few people I ask over for a Sunday drink." He tried to catch the eye of someone who wasn't there.

"Look at me, Lennart."

"No questions."

"Look at me!"

"I'm asking you, Martin, this time, no goddamn questions."

The gray-haired man swallowed, in surprise, in anger.

"What's this all about?"

"No bloody questions."

"He'll die."

"Martin-"

"This goes against everything we know, everything we say, everything we do."

"I'm going now. You've got an order. Do it."

Lennart Oscarsson opened the door; he was already on his way out.

"He punched you, Lennart… is this personal?"

It tightened. And when he moved, every step ached, a shooting pain from his cheekbone down.

"Is it? Is it personal?"

"Just do as I ask."

"No."

"In that case, Martin, do as you are ordered!"

"I won't do it. Because it's wrong. If he's going to be moved back. then you're going to have to do it yourself."

Lennart Oscarsson walked toward Cell 9 with two huge holes in his back. He could feel his perhaps best friend's eyes, staring, and he wanted to turn around and explain the order that he himself had so recently been appalled by. Martin was a wise friend, an experienced colleague, the sort who had the courage to speak up when someone who should know better was wrong.

An unconscious hand to the back of his jacket as he approached the locked cell, brushed over the fabric, by the holes, the eyes, trying to get rid of them. The temps with no names were close behind him and stopped by the door, keys jangling as they looked for the right one.

The prisoner was lying on the iron bed, naked except for a pair of white underpants. He was resting, trembling, his torso as white as his face. "You're going back."

The pale body, he didn't look like much, but only a couple of hours ago he had punched him hard in the face.

"Tomorrow morning. Eight o'clock."

He didn't move.

"To the same unit and the same cell."

He didn't seem to hear, to see.

"Did you hear what I said?"

The chief warden waited, then nodded to his young colleagues and to the door.

"The books."

"Excuse me?"

"I need the books. It's my legal right."

"Which books?"

"I've asked for two of the five books that I have the right to have. Nineteenth Century Stockholm. The Marionettes. They're in my cell."

"You're going to read?"

"The nights are long here."

Lennart Oscarsson nodded to the wardens again-they should close and lock and leave the cell.

He sat up. Back. He was going to die. Back. He was dead the moment he went back into the same unit, hated, hunted, he had broken one of the first prison rules, he was a snitch, and you killed snitches.

He got down on his knees in front of the cement toilet bowl, two fingers down his throat, he held them there until he started to puke.

Fear had sucked everything out of him and he spat it out, he had to get rid of it. He stayed on his knees and emptied himself, emptied out everything that had been, everything that was inside him, he was on his own now, the people who could burn him had burnt again.

He pressed the button.

He wasn't going to die, not yet.

He had kept it pressed in for fourteen minutes when the hatch in the door opened and the warden with the eyes shouted at him to goddamn take his finger off.

He didn't turn round, just pressed even harder.

"The books."

"You're going to get them."

"The books!"

"I've got them with me. Chief's orders. If you want me to come in, take your finger off the button."

Piet Hoffmann spotted them as soon as the door opened. His books. In the guard's hand. His chest, the pressure that had been there, making him shake, was released. He relaxed, wanted to collapse, wanted to cry, that was how it felt, released and he just wanted to cry.

"It smells of puke in here."

The guard peered into the cement hole, started retching, and moved back.

"It's your choice. You know that no one cleans in here. That smell, you'll just have to get used to it."

The warden gripped the books in his hands, shook them, flicked through, shook them again. Hoffmann stood in front of him but felt nothing, he knew that they would hold up.

He had sat on the iron bed for a long time holding the two books from Aspsås library close by. They were intact. He had just been down on his knees and emptied himself, now, now he was calm, his body felt soft, he could nearly bend over again and if he rested, if he slept for a while, he could refill it with energy, he wasn't going to die, not yet.

Friday

He had woken gleaming with sweat, fallen asleep again, dreamed in fragments and without color, the sort of sleep that is shallow and black and white and far away. He had woken again and sat up on the iron bed and looked at the floor and the books that were lying there for a long time-he wouldn't lie down again, his body was screaming for rest, but as sleep rook more energy than it gave he chose to stay sitting where he was and wait as the dawn turned into morning.

It was quiet, dark.

The solitary confinement corridor would sleep for a few more hours.

He had emptied himself yesterday of the fear that got in the way and had to be gotten rid of, the smell still stringent in the air around the cement hole. He had emptied himself and now there was only one thing left, the will to survive.

Piet Hoffmann lifted up the two books and put them down in front of him on the bed. Nineteenth Century Stockholm. The Marionettes. Bound in hard, mono colored library boards, marked with STORE in blue and ASPSS LIBRARY in red. He opened the first page, got a firm grip of the cover and with a powerful rug pulled it loose. Another tug and the spine of the book collapsed, a third and the back came off He looked over at the locked cell door. Still quiet. No one walking around out there, no one who had heard and hurried over to the hatch at the top of the door with meddlesome eyes. He changed position, back to the door-if anyone were to look in all they would see was a fidgety long-termer who couldn't sleep.

He ran his hand carefully over the torn book. His fingers along the left-hand margin and a cut-out, rectangular hole.

It was there. In eleven pieces.

He turned the book over, coaxed out the metal that in a matter of minutes would be a five-centimeter-long mini-revolver. First the larger pieces, the frame with the barrel and cylinder pivot and trigger, a couple of gentle taps with the handle of the sewing machine screwdriver on the millimeter-long pins between them, then the barrel protector with the first screw, the butt sides with the second screw and the butt stabiliser with the third.

He turned to the door, but the footsteps were only in his head, as before.

He spun the tiny revolver's cylinder, emptied it, took his time checking the six bullets as long as half a thumbnail that were lined up on the iron bed-ammunition that together weighed no more than a gram.

He had seen a person stop breathing in that godforsaken toilet far away in winoujcie ferry terminal, the short barrel right up close to a petrified eye, the miniature revolver had killed with a single shot.

Piet Hoffmann held it, raised it, aimed it at the dirty wall. Left index finger light on the trigger-there was just enough room with the trigger guard sawn off-slowly pull back, he watched the hammer follow the movement of the finger, a final squeeze and it leaped forward, then the sound, the sharp click. It worked.

He ripped apart the second book in the same way, revealing a hole in the left-hand margin, a detonator the size of a nail and a receiver the size of a penny. He ran the sewing machine screwdriver along the bottom edges of the book's thick covers, front and back, cut open the glued hinge and pulled out two nine-meter-long pieces of pentyl fuse and an equally thin plastic envelope containing twenty-four centilitres of nitroglycerine.

It was a few minutes past seven.

He heard the wardens changing shift out in the corridor behind the locked door-night shift to day shift. One more hour. Then he would be collected and taken back.

G2 left. Back. He was condemned to die there.

He pressed the button on the wall.

"Yes?"

"I need a shit."

"You've got a hole beside the bed."

"It's blocked. My puke from yesterday."

The single speaker crackled.

"How urgent?"

"As soon as possible."

"Five minutes."

Piet Hoffmann stood by the door, footsteps, several footsteps, two guards coming to get someone, to the cell, who unlocked the door and opened it, toilet visit, never two prisoners in the corridor at the same time, get in your cell for Christ's sake. The revolver was resting in the palm of his hand-he opened the cylinder, counted the six bullets, pushed it to the bottom of one of the deep front pockets on his trousers and the coarse fabric hid it, just as it hid the detonator and receiver in the other pocket and the pentyl fuse and plastic envelope with nitroglycerine stuffed down his underpants.

"Open for the prisoner in number nine."

The guard who had shouted was right outside his door. Hoffmann ran back to the bed, lay down, and watched the square hatch opening and the guard looking in long enough to confirm that the prisoner was lying down precisely where he should be.

The jangling of keys.

"You wanted to go to the toilet. Get up and do it then."

One warden by the cell door. Another one farther down the corridor. Two more out in the yard.

Hoffmann looked over at the wardens' room. The fifth one was sitting there. The older one, Jacobson, the principal officer, gray thinning hair and his back to the corridor.

They're too far apart from each other.

He walked slowly toward the shower room and toilets, three guards inside, they're too far apart from each other.

He sat down on the dirty plastic toilet seat, flushed, turned on the tap. He breathed deeply, each breath from somewhere deep in his stomach, the calm that was down there, he needed it, he wasn't going to die, not yet.

"I'm ready. You can open again."

The warden opened the door and Piet Hoffmann launched himself forward, showed the mini-revolver first and then held it hard to the bastard's eye that stared at him through a hatch in the cell door.

"Your colleague."

He whispered.

"Get your colleague to come here."

The warden didn't move. Maybe he didn't understand. Maybe he was petrified.

"Now. Get him to come here now."

Hoffmann kept his eye on the personal alarm hanging from the warden's belt and pressed the muzzle of the gun even harder against the closed eyelid.

"Erik?"

He had understood. His voice was feeble, a careful wave of the hand. "Erik? Can you come here?"

Piet Hoffmann saw the second warden come closer, then stop suddenly, realising that his colleague was standing stock-still with what looked like a piece of metal to his head.

"Come here."

The warden who was called Erik hesitated then started to walk, casting a glance up at the camera that maybe someone was watching right now up in central security.

"Once more and I'll kill him. Kill. Kill him."

With one hand he pressed even harder against the eyelid and with the other he tore loose two pieces of plastic that were their only way to raise an alarm.

They waited. They did precisely what he said. They knew that he had nothing to lose, it was obvious.

One more.

One more person who could move around freely in the corridor. Hoffmann looked over toward the wardens' office. The face was still turned away, the neck bent forward, as if he was reading.

"Get up."

The older, gray man turned around. There was about twenty meters between them, but he knew exactly what was going on. A prisoner holding something to someone's head. A colleague standing absolutely still beside them, waiting.

"No alarm. No locked doors."

Martin Jacobson swallowed.

He had always wondered how it would feel. Now he knew.

All these damn years waiting for an attack and all the damn anxiety that just this sort of situation might arise.

Calm.

That was how he felt.

"No alarm! No locked doors. I'll shoot!"

Principal Prison Officer Jacobson knew the security instructions for Aspsås prison by heart. In the event of attack: lock yourself in. Raise the alarm. He had many years ago helped to formulate the instructions that underpinned a prison culture with unarmed staff, and now for the first time was about to put them into action.

He should first lock the door to the wardens' office from the inside. Then he should raise the alarm with central security.

But the voice, he had listened to it, and the body, he had watched it, he had heard and seen and knew Hoffmann's aggression and he knew that the prisoner who was shouting and holding a gun was both violent and capable. He had read the prison file and the reports on an inmate who was classified as psychopathic, but his colleagues' lives, human lives, were so much more important than security instructions. So he did not stay in the office and he did not lock the door. He did not press his personal alarm nor the one on the wall. Instead, he approached them slowly just as Hoffmann had indicated that he should, past the first cell door where someone started to bang on it from the inside, a heavy monotonous sound that echoed in the corridor walls. A prisoner reacting to something that was going on out there and doing what they always did when they were angry or wanted attention or were just happy about something, anything that was out of the ordinary. Every door he passed, someone else began to knock, others who had no idea what was actually going on out here but were keeping up with something that was better than nothing.

"Hoffmann,

"Shut up."

"Maybe we-"

"Shut up! I'll shoot."

Three guards. All sufficiently close now It would take at least a few minutes more before the ones out in the yard would come in.

He shouted down the empty corridor.

"Stefan!"

Again.

"Stefan, Stefan!"

Cell 3.

"Fucking snitch."

The voice was vicious, ripping through words and walls.

Stefan.

A couple of meters away, a locked door, the only thing that separated them.

"You're going to die, you fucking snitch."

When he pressed the gun harder against the young warden's eyelid it slid on something.

Something wet, tears, he was crying.

"You're going to swap places. You go in there. Into Cell 3."

He didn't move. It was as if he hadn't heard.

"Open the door and go in! That's all you've got to do. Open the door, for fuck's sake!"

The warden moved mechanically, pulled out his keys, dropped them on the floor, tried again, turned the key with great precision, moved once the door had slowly swung open.

"Fucking grass. With his new mates."

"You're going to swap places. Now!"

"Bastard snitch. What-what the fuck you got in your hand?"

Stefan was considerably taller and considerably heavier than Piet Hoffmann.

When he stood in the cell doorway, he filled it-a dark and despising shadow.

"Get out."

He didn't hesitate. Sneering, he moved too fast, too close.

"Stop!"

And why should I do that? 'Cause some little snitch shit has a gun to a screw's head?"

"Stop!"

Stefan kept coming toward him, the open mouth, the dry lips, the warm breath. His face was too close, it was invasive, it was attacking.

"Go on, fucking shoot. Then there's one screw less in the world."

Piet Hoffmann's mind was blank as the heavyweight body approached him. He had wanted to swap hostages, threaten Wojtek rather than the Prison and Probation Service, but had underestimated the hatred. When Stefan broke into a run for the last few steps toward him, his brain wasn't working, only his fear gave him the drive to survive. He pushed the guard away and aimed the revolver at the hating eyes and fired, one single bullet through the pupil, the lens, the vitreous, to the soft mass of the brain, where it stopped somewhere.

Stefan took one more step, still sneering, he appeared to be unaffected, but a second later he fell heavily forward and Hoffmann had to move to avoid finding himself underneath him, then he bent down toward him, pressed the muzzle to his other eye, one more bullet.

A person lay dead on the floor.

The thumping banging that had drummed persistently and the echo of the shot… suddenly, suddenly everything was silent.

A strange, breathless silence.

"You can go in now."

He pointed to one of the younger men, but it was the older one, Jacobson, who answered.

"Hoffmann, now let's-"

"I'm not going to die yet."

He looked at the three guards that he needed, but were in the way. Two were younger, shaking, close to break down. The older one was fairly calm, the sort who would carry on trying to intercede, but also the sort who wouldn't break down.

"Go into the cell."

Metal on eyelids that were crying, darkness only a finger-twitch away. "Get in!"

The young warden went into the empty cell and sat down on the edge of the iron bed.

"Close! And lock!"

Hoffmann tossed the keys to Jacobson; not a word this time, no attempt to communicate, no false contact intended to confuse, generate trust, emotion.

"The body."

He kicked it, it was about maintaining power, keeping distance.

"I want it outside Cell 6. But not too close, so that the door can still be opened."

"He's too heavy."

"Now. Outside Cell 6. Okay?"

He moved the gun from his temple to his eye, to his temple from his eye. "Where do you think it will be when I pull the trigger?"

Jacobson got hold of the soft arms that no longer had muscle reflex; the sinewy, elderly body pulled, dragged 250 pounds of death along the hard linoleum floor and Hoffmann nodded when it was positioned just so the cell door could be opened.

"Open it."

He didn't recognize him, they had never met, but it was the voice that had passed his cell yesterday and called him Paula several times, one of Wojtek's runners.

"You fucking stukatj."

The same voice, shrill as he stormed out, when he stopped in his tracks.

"Jesus…"

He looked down at someone lying at his feet, stock-still, lungs that weren't breathing.

"You fucking bastard…"

"Down on your knees!"

Hoffmann pointed at him with the miniature gun.

"Get down!"

Hoffmann had expected threats, maybe contempt.

But the man in front of him said nothing as he collapsed beside the motionless body and for a second Hoffmann stood still-he had been prepared to kill again, and was now standing in front of someone who obeyed.

"What's your name?"

The young warden, when he felt the pressure of the muzzle, had closed his eyes and cried.

"Jan. Janne."

"Janne. Get in there."

Another person in a prison uniform sitting on the edge of yet another empty iron bed when Jacobson locked the door to Cell 6.

Hoffmann counted quickly. It felt like eternity, but he had only just begun. Eight, maybe nine minutes had passed since he opened the door to the toilet and raised the gun, no more. Two of the guards were locked up, the third was in front of him and the fourth and the fifth would stay out in the yard for a while longer. But central security could choose at any moment to look at the cameras in this unit on their monitors, or guards from other units might pass. He had to hurry. He knew where he was going. He had been on his way there since he realized he was on his own, with a death threat, burned by some of the few who knew his purpose and code name; on his way to the place he had chosen a long time ago in order not to die if what shouldn't happen happened.

They were standing close by. Just as close as they had to. Enough distance for him to be in full control but to avoid being overpowered, and the prisoner who still had no name was dangerous, he would kill if he could.

"I want you to get that lamp there."

He held his outstretched arm toward a simple standard lamp that was lit in one of the corners of the wardens' office and waited until Jacobson had put it on the floor in front of him.

"Tie him up. With the extension cord."

Hands behind the prisoner's back and Jacobson pulled the white cord until it pressed into the equally white skin. Hoffmann felt it, checked, then wound the cord around the warden's waist and they started to move up the stairs that seemed to be alive: closed unit doors held back loud exchanges between angry prisoners and the rattling clatter of plates being laid on the table and the voices of irritated card players and a lonely TV that had been left on full volume. One single scream, one single kick on a door and he would be caught. He moved the gun barrel between the prisoner's and the guard's eyes, they should know, they should know.

They got to the top of the building, to the narrow corridor just outside the workshop.

The door was open. All the lights in the large space were turned off.

The inmates who worked here were still eating breakfast with an hour to go before the morning shift.

"That's not enough."

He had waited to command the prisoner down onto his knees until they were in the middle of the workshop.

"Even lower. And bend forward."

"Why?"

"Bend forward!"

"You can kill me. You can kill the fucking screw. But Paula, that's what your fucking pig friends call you, isn't it, you're still dead. In here. Sooner or later. Doesn't matter. We know. We won't let you go. You know that's the way it works."

Hoffmann brought his free fist down on the prisoner's neck with force. He didn't know why, it was just what happened when he couldn't answer. After all, it was true. Wojtek's runner was right.

"Take down some packing tape. Bind his wrists! And then pull off the cord!"

Jacobson stood on his toes as he lifted a roll of the hard gray plastic packing tape that is used for cardboard boxes down from the shelves over the press machine. He had to cut two half-meter lengths and tape them around the prisoner's arms, tight, until it cut into the skin and made it bleed, then he had to rip the clothes from the kneeling prisoner and undress himself, each piece of clothing on the floor in two piles, then he had to turn round, his naked back to Hoffmann, the hard plastic around his own wrists as well.

Piet Hoffmann had carefully remembered everything about the room that smelled of oil and diesel and dust. He had located the surveillance cameras over the drilling machine and the smaller pallet jacks, paced out the distance between the rectangular workbenches and the three large pillars that held up the ceiling, he knew exactly where the diesel barrel was and which tools were kept in what cupboard.

The prisoner with no name and the gray-haired guard were on their knees, naked, with their hands behind their backs. Hoffmann checked again that they were properly bound, then lifted up both piles of clothes and carried them over to a workbench near the wall with the big windows facing the church. The receiver was in one of his front pockets. He put it in his ear, listened, smiled, and looked out of the window toward the church tower-he heard the wind blowing gently across a transmitter, it worked.

Then the wind was drowned out.

A loud, repetitive sound took over.

The alarm.

He hurried toward the piles of clothes, grabbed the plastic thing that was flashing red from the belt in the waist of the blue uniform trousers and read the electronic message.

B.1.

Solitary confinement. The unit they had just left. It was sooner than he had expected.

He looked out through the window.

Toward the church. Toward the church tower.

He still had another fifteen minutes before the first police reached the outer wall. And another couple of minutes before the correctly trained staff were in the correct position with the correct weapons.

The alarm had been raised by one of the principal officers who was on his

way to the prison yard, but who on passing the closed door to the stairs had popped in to say morning and to check that everything was okay. The first guards now rushed down the dimly lit corridor, then all stopped at the same time, all looking at the same scene.

A dead man lying on the floor.

Persistent banging on locked cell doors from confused and aggressive prisoners.

A pale and sweating colleague was released from Cell 6.

The released colleague was agitated and pointed to Cell 3.

Another imprisoned colleague was let out, a young man who was crying-he looked down at the floor and said something, he shot him, and then repeated it much louder, as if to drown out the banging, or perhaps because he needed to say it again, he shot him through the eye.

He heard them storming up the stairs, and saw even more rushing over the prison yard. The two naked bodies on the floor twitched anxiously. He moved the gun from one face to the other, the eyes, reminding them: he needed some more time before they discovered him.

"What's this all about?"

The older warden, crouched over on his knees, his joints aching intensely, didn't say anything else but it was obvious that he was rocking back and forth to distribute the weight.

Piet Hoffmann heard him but didn't answer.

"Hoffmann. Look at me. What is this all about?"

"I've already answered that."

"I didn't understand the answer."

"Not dying yet."

The man leaned his head back, face up, and looked at the revolver with one eye and Hoffmann with the other.

"You won't get out of here alive."

He looked at him, demanding an answer.

"You've got a family."

If he spoke, became someone, changed from an object to a subject, a person who communicated with another person…

"You've got a wife and children."

"I know what you're doing."

Pier Hoffmann moved, walked behind the naked bodies, maybe to check that the plastic tape round their wrists was still in place, but probably to avoid the watching, demanding eyes.

"You see, I have too. A wife. Three children. All grown up now. It-"

"Jacobson? Is that what you're called? Shut up! I just said in a friendly way that I know exactly what you're fucking up to. I don't have a family. Not now."

He pulled at the plastic which cut in deeper, bled some more.

"And I'm not going to die, yet. If that means that you have to die instead, so fucking what. You're just my protection, Jacobson, a shield and you'll never be anything more than that. With or without your wife and children."

The principal officer from B2 had tried to make a connection with the colleague he had just released from Cell 3 a couple of minutes ago. A young man, not much older than his son, just covering for the summer. He hadn't even been there a month yet. That's the way it goes. Someone might spend their entire working life waiting for a morning like this. Others could experience it after only twenty-four days.

Only the one sentence.

He had repeated the same thing in answer to every question. He shot him, through the eye.

The young warden was suffering from acute shock-he had seen a man die and had had a gun pressed to his eye, the circle on the soft skin still obvious. He had then sat and waited, locked inside a solitary confinement cell with death. There wouldn't be anymore words, not for a while. The principal officer instructed the guards who were nearest to look after him, and went on to the other colleague, the one who had been in Cell 6 and who was pale and sweaty, the one who whispered, but was perfectly audible.

"Where's Jacobson?"

The principal officer put a hand on his shoulder, which was thin and trembling.

"What do you mean?"

"There were three of us. Jacobson, he was here too."

The conversation had ended some time ago.

When the words dried up, he was irritated and hoped for more, something mitigating, calming, a continuation that assured him everything was fine now. But there wasn't anymore to say. The principal officer from B2 had explained all there was to explain.

Two guards locked in. A dead prisoner.

And an assumed hostage-taking.

The chief warden hit the receiver against the desk and a vase of yellow tulips fell to the floor. A third warden, Martin Jacobson, had been taken by an armed prisoner serving a long sentence who had been in solitary confinement, a certain 0913 Hoffmann.

He sat down on the floor, his fingers distracted by the yellow petals that floated in the spilled water.

Of course he had put up a protest. Just as Martin had later put up a protest.

I lied outright to a detective superintendent. I lied because you ordered me to. But this, I won't do this.

He tore the yellow petals to shreds, one at a time, small, porous strips that he dropped onto the wet floor. Then he reached over for the telephone receiver that was still hanging from the wire, dialed a number and didn't stop talking until he was absolutely certain that the general director had understood every word, every insinuation.

"I want an explanation."

A cough. That was all.

"Pål, an explanation!"

Another cough. And nothing more.

"You call me at home late at night and order me to move a prisoner back to the unit where he was threatened, and no questions. You tell me that it has to happen by this morning at the latest. Right now, Pål, that prisoner has a loaded gun aimed at one of my employees. Explain the connection between your order and the hostage-taking. Or I'll be forced to ask someone else the same questions."

It was warm in the security office that was part of the entrance to Aspsås prison and was called central security, just as it is in every prison in Sweden. The warden in a creased blue uniform, who was called Bergh, was sweating despite the fan on the table right behind him that made any loose paper and his thin fringe flutter. So he turned around and looked for the towel that hung in the space between the red and green buttons on the control panel and the sixteen TV monitors.

Naked bodies.

The resolution of the black-and-white image wasn't great, and it flickered a bit, but he was sure.

The picture on the screen closest to the towel showed two naked bodies on a floor and a man wearing prison-issue clothes holding something to their heads.

He looked up at the beautiful blue sky. A few wispy clouds, a pleasant sun and a warm breeze. It was a lovely summer day. Apart from the sound of the sirens from the first police car, two uniformed officers in front, both from Aspsås police district.

"Oscarsson…?"

The governor of Aspsås prison was standing by the main gate in the asphalt garage, the concrete wall like an unpainted gray set behind him. "What the hell-"

"He's already shot someone."

"Oscarsson?"

"And threatened to do it again."

They were in the front with the windows rolled down: a young policewoman whom Lennart Oscarsson had never seen before sitting beside a sergeant of about his own age, Rydén-they didn't know each other, but knew of each other, one of the few policemen who had served in Aspsås for as long as Oscarsson had worked at the prison.

They turned off the blue light and got out.

"Who?"

I've just come from the hospital unit. You can't see him.

"Piet Hoffmann. Thirty-six years old. Ten years for drugs offenses.

According to our records, extremely dangerous, classified psychopath, violent." A sergeant from the Aspsås district who had been to the large prison enough times to know his way round.

"I don't understand. Block B. Solitary confinement. And armed?" He's going back. To G2. By tomorrow morning at the latest.

"We don't understand it either."

"But the gun? For Christ's sake, Oscarsson… how? Where from-?" "I don't know. I don't know."

Rydén looked at the concrete wall, over it and at what he knew was the second floor and roof of Block B.

"I need to know more. What kind of gun?"

Lennart Oscarsson sighed.

"According to the warden who was threatened-he was confused, in shock, but he described some kind of… miniature pistol."

"Pistol? Or revolver?"

"What's the difference?"

"With a magazine? Or a rotating cylinder?"

"I don't know."

Rydén's gaze lingered on the roof of Block B.

"A hostage taking. A violent, dangerous convict."

He shook his head.

"We need a completely different kind of weapon. Different knowledge. We need policemen who are specially trained for this."

He went over to the car, a hand in through the open window. He could just reach the radio microphone.

"I'll contact the inspector on duty at the CCC. I'll ask them to send the national task force."

The dirty floor was hard and cold against his bare lower leg.

Martin Jacobson moved carefully, tried to rock his body back, pain pressing on his joints. Crumpled, bent forward, hands behind their backs, they had been kneeling beside each other since they came into the main workshop. He shot a look at the prisoner who was so close he could feel his breath. He couldn't remember his name, it was seldom that those who were locked up in solitary confinement became individuals. Central European, he was sure of that, big, and his hate was tangible, there was bad blood between them, something old-when their eyes locked, he spat, sneered, and Hoffmann had gotten tired of him screaming in a language that Jacobson didn't understand, had kicked him in the cheek and wound the sharp plastic tape around his legs as well.

Martin Jacobson had gradually started to feel what he hadn't had the energy to feel when everything was chaos and he had to concentrate on trying to get the hostage taker to communicate.

A creeping, terrible, engulfing fear.

This was serious. Hoffmann was under pressure and resolute and another person who would never think, talk, or laugh again was already lying on another floor.

Jacobson rocked gently again, took a deep breath-it was more than fear, perhaps. He had never felt like this before, absolute terror.

"Keep still."

Piet Hoffmann kicked him in the shoulders, not hard but enough for his bare skin to shine red. He then started to walk through the workshop, along the rectangular workbenches, and reached up and turned the first camera to the wall, and then the second and the third, but he held the fourth in both hands for a while, his face right up to the lens, he stared into it, moved even closer until his face filled the entire screen, then he screamed; he screamed and then turned that one to the wall as well.

Bergh was still sweating. But he wasn't aware of it. He had moved the chair in the glass box that was central security and was now leaning forward in front of the monitors, four of them with pictures from the Block B workshop. A couple of minutes ago, someone had joined him. The chief warden was standing right behind him and they were watching the same black-and-white sequences with shared concentration, almost silence. Suddenly something changed. One of the monitors that was connected to the camera nearest the window went black. But not an electronic black, it was still working-it was more like it was obstructed by something or someone. Then the next one. The cameras had been turned quickly, maybe to the wall-the darkness could be a film of gray concrete only centimeters away. The third one, they were prepared. They spotted the hand just before it was turned, a person who forced the camera around on its fixture.

One left. They stared at the monitor, waiting, then both jumped. A face.

Close up, as close as you could get, a nose and a mouth, that was all. A mouth that screamed something before it disappeared.

Hoffmann.

He had said something.

He was cold.

It wasn't a chill from the cold floor, it came from fear, from losing the will to fight thoughts of his own death.

The prisoner beside him had made a threat again-more hate, more scorn-until Hoffmann got a rag from one of the workbenches and stuffed it in his mouth and his words were swallowed.

They both lay still, even when he left them every now and then, purposeful steps over to the far glass wall, a window into the office. When he turned his head, Martin Jacobson could see him go into the small room, bend down over the desk and lift something that from a distance looked like a telephone receiver.

The mouth moved slowly. Narrow, tight lips that looked chapped, almost split.

He is.

They looked at each other, nodded.

They had both recognized the movements of the mouth that formed the words.

"Next."

Oscarsson was sitting beside Bergh in the cramped security office and eager fingers pressed the play button, one frame at a time. The mouth filled the whole screen, the next word, the lips wide and stretched.

"Did you see?"

"Yes."

"One more time."

It was so clear.

The words, the message from the lips, said with such aggression that they were an attack.

He is a dead man.

His hand was shaking-it happened so suddenly he had been forced to let go of the telephone receiver.

What if he got an answer?

What if he didn't get an answer?

A quick look out through the internal window into the workshop and the naked men; they were still lying there, without moving. A porcelain cup in the middle of the desk, half full of day-old coffee, which he downed, cold and bitter but the caffeine would stay in his body for a while.

He dialed the number again. The first ring, the second, he waited. Was she still there, did she still have the same number, he didn't know, he hoped, maybe she-

Her voice.

"You?"

It had been so long.

"I want you to do exactly what we agreed."

"Piet, I-"

"Exactly what we agreed. Now."

He hung up. He missed her. He missed her so much.

And now he wondered if she was still there, for him.

The blue, flashing light got stronger, clearer, and would soon push its way through the woods that separated the country road from the drive up to Aspsås prison. Lennart Oscarsson was standing next to Sergeant Rydén in the parking place by the main gate when two heavy, square, black cars approached. The national task force duty troops had left their headquarters at Sorentorp and Solna twenty-four minutes earlier and dropped off-while the heavy vehicles were still moving-nine identically clad men in black boots, navy blue overalls, balaclavas, protective visors, helmets, fireproof gloves, and flak jackets. Rydén rushed forward and greeted the tall thin man who got out of the passenger seat of the first car. Head of the task force, John Edvardson.

"There. The black roof. Top floor."

Four windows in the building nearest the outer wall. Edvardson nodded, he was already heading over there and Oscarsson and Rydén had almost to run to keep up. They looked around and saw the eight others following, submachine guns in hand, two of them with long-distance sniper guns.

They passed central security and the administration block, continued through an open gate in the next wall which was slightly lower and divided the prison up into different sectors, identical squares with identical three-story L-shaped buildings.

"G Block and H Block."

Lennart Oscarsson kept close to the inner wall where they had an overview but were still protected.

"E Block and F Block."

He pointed at the buildings one by one, the home of long-term prisoners.

"C Block and D Block."

Sixty-four cells and sixty-four prisoners in each complex.

"Normal prisoners. The special sex offenders' unit is in a separate part of the prison, as we had a few problems some years ago when several prisoners crossed paths."

They continued sprinting along meter after meter of thick concrete, getting closer to the last L-shaped building. Oscarsson was flagging a bit, but he kept up.

"Blocks A and B. One in each arm. Block B faces the other way. He's been spotted a few times in the big window, the one that looks out over the fields, toward the church over there, Aspsås church. I've had sightings from two separate wardens and they're absolutely certain."

A gray concrete bunker, a Lego brick, an ugly and hard and silent building.

"At the bottom, the isolation unit. Solitary confinement. Bl. That's where he took the hostages. That's where he escaped from."

They stopped for the first time since the armed task force had arrived in their vehicles a couple of minutes earlier.

"One floor up, B2 left and B2 right. Sixteen cells on each side. Normal prisoners, thirty-two of them."

Lennart Oscarsson waited for a few seconds, still speaking in short bursts-he hadn't caught his breath back yet.

He lowered his voice a bit.

"There, at the top. B3. The workshops. One of the prisoners' workplaces. You see that window? The one that faces the yard?"

He stopped talking. The big window, it felt so strange-it was beautiful outside, the sun and the green fields and the blue sky, and inside, behind the glass, death.

"Armed?"

While he waited for Rydén's answer, Edvardson ordered six of the national task force men to position themselves at the three entrances to Block B and the two snipers to check out the roofs of the nearby buildings.

"I've asked the guards who saw his weapon twice. They're still confused, in shock, but I'm fairly certain that what they're describing is a kind of miniature revolver that can take six bullets. I've only ever seen one in real life, a SwissMiniGun, made in Switzerland and marketed as the world's smallest gun."

"Six bullets?"

"According to the guards he's fired at least two."

John Edvardson looked at the prison chief warden.

"Oscarsson… how the hell did a prisoner who's locked up manage to get hold of a deadly weapon in the hole, in one of Sweden's high-security prisons?"

Lennart Oscarsson couldn't bear to answer, not right now. He just shook his head in despair. The national task force chief turned toward Rydén.

"A miniature revolver. I don't know anything about it. But you reckon it's powerful enough to kill?"

"He's already done it once."

John Edvardson looked up at the window that faced the beautiful church; the hostage taker had been spotted there, a prisoner serving a long sentence who obviously had contacts who could get him a loaded gun in a high-security prison.

"Classified psychopath?"

“_yes:,

Reinforced glass in the window.

Two hostages lying naked on the floor. "And a documented history of violence?"

“Yes.”

The man in there had known what he was doing the whole time. According to the wardens he was calm and determined, he had chosen the workshop, and that wasn't by chance, either.

"Then we've got a problem."

Edvardson looked at the front of the building where they wanted to get in. They didn't have much time, the hostage taker had just threatened to kill for a second time.

"He's been seen in the window, but the snipers can't access it from inside the prison. And given your description of this Hoffmann and his record… we can't force our way in either. Break down the door or smash in one of the skylights on the roof, it would be simple enough, but with such a dangerous and sick prisoner… if we were to do that, if we stormed him, he wouldn't turn on us, he'd stand his ground, he'd point the gun at the hostages, no matter how threatened he was himself, and he'd do what he's promised to do. He'd kill."

John Edvardson started to walk back toward the gate and the wall. "We're going to get him. But not from here. I will position the snipers. Outside the prison."

He moved away from the window.

They were lying naked at his feet.

They hadn't moved, hadn't tried to communicate.

He checked their arms, legs, pulled a bit at the sharp plastic band, which already was cutting in deeper than was necessary, but it was all about power. He had to be sure that word of his potency got out to those who were just turning theirs in toward him.

He had heard sirens for the second time. The first, about half an hour ago, were police from the local station, the only ones who could get here that fast. These ones had a different sound, more persistent, louder, and had lasted for as long as it took for them to get from the national task force headquarters in Sorentorp to the prison.

He walked across the room, counted his steps, studied the door, studied the second window, looked up at the ceiling and the layer of loose glass-fibre tiles, used to absorb and dampen sound in the noisy workshop. He picked up a long, narrow metal pipe from one of the workbenches and starred to force the fiberglass tiles loose until they fell to the floor, one after the other, and revealed the actual ceiling.

The heavy black car left the parking place outside the main gate into Aspsås prison and stopped about a minute and a kilometer later outside another, considerably smaller gate-one that opened onto a gravel path that led up to a proud, white church. John Edvardson walked along the newly raked gravel, Rydén beside him and the two marksmen right behind. Some visitors to the sunny, well-maintained graveyard looked uneasily at the armed, uniformed men with black faces-they didn't fit together somehow, violence and peace. The church door was open and they looked into an empty but impressive nave, and then chose the door to the right and the steep stairs up to the next door which, given the fresh evidence on the door frame, looked like it had recently been forced open, and then finally the aluminum steps that led CO a hatch in the roof and to the church tower. They bent down to pass under the cast iron bell and didn't straighten up until they were our on the narrow balcony, where the wind was stronger and they got a clear view of the gray, square blocks of the prison. They kept a firm hold on the low railing as they studied the building nearest the wall and the window on the second floor where the hostage taker had been seen and was assumed to be hiding.

Piet Hoffmann had knocked down half of the fiberglass tiles from the ceiling when he suddenly stopped his angry movements. He had heard something. A noise in his ear. He'd heard it clearly. What until now had just been a light wind in the receiver became a bang, then steps, and then scraping. Someone was walking around, more than one, there were several pairs of feet. He ran to the window. He could see them, they were standing up on the church tower, four of them, standing there, looking at him.

A shadow at the very edge of the window, just briefly, then gone.

He had been standing there, he had seen them and then disappeared.

"This is a good place. The best place to access him. We'll operate from here."

John Edvardson gripped the iron balcony railings even harder. It was blowing more than he'd realized up here and it was a long way down.

"I need your help, Rydén. From now on, I'll be working from here but I also need someone closer to the prison, with an overview, someone like you, eyes that know the surroundings."

Rydén watched some of the visitors to the graveyard; they had looked up anxiously at the tower several times and were now leaving, the peace they had sought and shared with others was gone and wouldn't be recaptured here today.

He nodded slowly. He had been listening and understood, but had another solution.

"I'd be happy to do that, but there's a policeman, a commanding officer, who knows the prison even better, who worked in this district while it was being built and who has come here regularly ever since, to hand over prisoners for questioning. A proper detective."

"And who's that?

"A DS at city police. His name's Ewert Grens."

Every word was transmitted with perfect clarity, the silver receiver worked just as well as he knew it would.

`And who's that?"

He adjusted it slightly, a gentle push on the thin metal disc with his index finger to push the earpiece harder against his inner ear.

"A DS at city police. His name's Ewert Grens."

Their voices were clear, as if they were holding the transmitter to their mouths and trying to talk straight into it.

Piet Hoffmann waited by the window.

They were standing by the low iron railing, perhaps even leaning ever so slightly forward.

Then something happened.

Clear scraping noises, first a metal gun meeting a wooden floor, then a heavy body lying down.

"Fifteen hundred and three meters."

"Fifteen hundred and three meters. Is that right?"

"Yes."

"Too far. We don't have any equipment for that distance. We can see him, but we can't reach him."

The car was barely moving.

The morning traffic was bumper to bumper, tired and tetchy as it crept along in both lanes of the Klarastrand road.

An angry passenger got off a bus in front and started to walk along the edge of the busy main artery, and looked happier as he passed the warm vehicles and reached the slip road to the E4 long before his fellow passengers. Ewert Grens thought about tooting at the man who was walking where he shouldn't, or maybe even getting out his police sign, but he didn't; he understood him and if a furious walk in polluted air alongside cars that had fused together prevented people from thumping the dashboard and frightening their fellow commuters, then that was exactly what they should be allowed to do.

He fingered the crumpled map that was lying in the passenger seat. He had decided. He was on his way to her.

In a couple of kilometers he would stop in front of one of the gates to North Cemetery that were always open and he would get out of the car and he would find her grave and he would say something to her that resembled a farewell.

His mobile phone was under the map.

He let it stay there for the first three rings, then looked at it for the next three, then picked it up when he realized that it wasn't going to stop.

The duty officer.

"Ewert?"

"Yes."

"Where are you?"

The familiar tone. Grens had already started to look for ways out of the frozen queue-a duty officer who sounded like that wanted help quickly. "The Klarastrand road, northbound."

"You've got an order."

"For when?"

"It's damned urgent, Ewert."

Ewert didn't like changing plans that had been decided.

He liked routine and he liked closure and therefore found it difficult to change directions when in his heart he was already on his way.

And so he should have sighed, perhaps protested a bit, but what he felt was relief.

He didn't need to go. Not yet.

"Wait."

Grens indicated, nudged the nose of the car out into the opposite lane to make a U-turn over the continuous white line, accompanied by hysterical hooting from vehicles that had to brake suddenly. Until he'd had enough, rolled down the window and put the blue flashing light on the roof.

All cars went silent. All the drivers ducked their heads.

"Ewert?"

"I'm here."

"An incident at Aspsås prison. You know the prison better than any other officer in the county. I need you there, now, as gold command."

"Okay.”

"We've got a critical situation."

John Edvardson was standing in the middle of the beautiful churchyard at Aspsås. Twenty minutes earlier he had come down from the church tower, leaving the marksmen who had seen Hoffmann and the hostages on two occasions now. They could force their way in whenever they wanted-a few seconds was all they needed to break down the door or come through a skylight and overpower the hostage taker, but as long as the hostages were alive, as long as they were unharmed, they wouldn't risk it.

He looked around.

The churchyard was being guarded by a patrol from Uppsala Police, who had cordoned off the area. No visitors were allowed inside the blue-andwhite plastic tape, no priests, no church wardens. Two patrol cars had come from Arlanda and another two from Stockholm and he had positioned one at each corner of the concrete wall that surrounded the prison. He now had four police officers from Aspsås district, and as many again each from Uppsala, Arlanda, and Stockholm, and when the twelve remaining members of the national task force arrived shortly, a total of thirty-seven police officers would be in place to watch, protect, attack.

John Edvardson was tense. He stood in the churchyard looking at the gray wall and felt the unease that had been there from the start, gnawing at him, irritating him, yet he couldn't put a finger on it, there was something… something that wasn't right.

Hoffmann.

The man over there who had threatened to kill again, it didn't fit.

In the past decade, Edvardson guessed there had been two, maybe three hostage takings a year in Swedish prisons. And each time the national task force was called in, with the same predictable scenario. An inmate had somehow managed to get hold of moonshine somewhere in the prison and had got steaming drunk, and then come to the conclusion that he had been wronged and treated unfairly, by the female prison staff in particular and, with the grandiosity that so often accompanies intoxication, had acted on impulse, become potent, dangerous, and had taken hostage some poor twenty-nine-year-old female warden who was only working there for the summer, rusty screwdriver to her throat. The alarm had been raised and two dozen specially trained police marksmen had been called out and then it was just a matter of time-the amount of time it took for the alcohol to leave his system and for it to gradually dawn on the hungover prisoner where the balance of power actually lay-before he gave himself up with hands above his head, and as a result was given a farther six years and more stringent terms for leave.

But Hoffmann didn't fit that pattern.

According to the wardens he had locked up in two separate cells, he was not under the influence, his actions were planned, each step seemed to have been analyzed, he was not acting on impulse, but with purpose.

John Edvardson turned up the volume on his radio when he gave out instructions for the twelve members of the task force who had just arrived: four outside the door into the workshop in Block B to set up microphones, five to scale the walls of the building to get up onto the roof with more listening equipment, and three to reinforce those already out in the stairwell.

He was closing in on the workshop and he had sealed off the churchyard.

He had done everything that he could and should for the moment. The next step was up to the hostage taker.

The heavy steel door into the third floor of the police headquarters was open. Ewert Grens ran his card through the card-reader, punched in a four-digit code and waited while the wrought-iron gate slid open. He went into the small space and over to the box with a number on it, opening it with his key and taking out the gun that he seldom used. The magazine was full and he pushed it into place: ammunition with a slightly pitted jacket, which was compensated for with something that looked like transparent glass, the kind of bullet that tore things to shreds. He then hurried back to Homicide, slowed down as he passed Sven Sundkvist's office, we've got a job, Sven, and I want to see you and Hermansson in the garage in fifteen minutes and I want to know what we've got in our database for 721018-0010, then rushed on. Sven may have answered something, but in that case he didn't hear.

There was something up on the roof.

Scraping noises, shuffling noises.

Piet Hoffmann was standing by the pile of fiberglass tiles. He had made the right decision. If they had still been up there under the ceiling, they would have swallowed and muffled the small movements that were now happening above his head.

More scraping sounds.

This time outside the door.

They were up the church tower, on the roof, by the door. They were reducing his field of action. There were enough of them now to guard the prison and still prepare for an assault on several fronts.

He picked up the square fiberglass tiles and threw them, one after the other, at the door. They would hear it. They would be standing out there with their listening equipment and they would know that it was now more difficult to get in; that there was something in the way that would take another second to pass, the extra time a person holding a gun needs to shoot his hostages.

Mariana Hermansson was driving far too fast, sirens wailing and blue lights flashing. They were now some distance north of Stockholm and were strangely silent, perhaps remembering previous hostage takings, or earlier visits to the prison as part of their day-to-day investigations. Sven rummaged around in the glove compartment and after a while managed to find what he was looking for, as he usually did: two cassettes of Siwan's sixties hits. He put one into the player, as they had always listened to Grens's past in order to avoid talking and gloss over the realisation that they didn't have much to say to each other.

"Take that out!"

Ewert had raised his voice and Sven wasn't sure that he understood why. "I thought-"

"Take it out, Sven! Show some respect for my grief."

"You mean-"

"Respect. Grief."

Sven ejected the cassette and put it back in the glove compartment, careful to close it in a way that Ewert would see and hear. He rarely understood his boss and he had learned not to ask questions, that sometimes it was easier just to let people's peculiarities be just that. He himself was one of the boring ones, someone who didn't seek out conflict, who didn't demand answers in order to position himself in the hierarchy. He had long since decided that those who were anxious and lacked confidence could do that,

"The hostage taker?"

"What about him?"

"Have you got the background then?"

"Hold on a sec."

Sven Sundkvist pulled a document out of an envelope and then put on his glasses. The first page, from the criminal intelligence database, had the special code that was only used for a handful of criminals. He passed it to Grens.

KNOWN DANGEROUS ARMED

"One of those."

Ewert Grens sighed. One of the ones who always meant reinforcement or special units with specially trained policemen whenever an arrest was planned. One of the ones who had no limits.

"More?"

"Criminal record. Ten years for possession of amphetamines. But it's the earlier conviction that's interesting for us."

"Right."

"Five years. Attempted murder. Aggravated assault of a police officer." Sven Sundkvist looked at the next document.

"I've also got the grounds for judgment. When he was arrested in Söderhamn, the hostage taker first hit a policeman in the face several times with the butt of a gun, then fired two shots at him, one in the thigh and one in the left upper arm."

Ewert Grens put his hand up.

His face had turned a shade of red. He leaned back, and drew his other hand through his thinning hair.

"Piet Hoffmann."

Sven Sundkvist was taken aback.

"How do you know that?"

"That's what he's called."

"I hadn't even read his name yet, but, yes, he is called that. Ewert. how did you know?"

The red in Ewert's face deepened, his breathing was perhaps more labored.

"I read the judgment, Sven, precisely that goddamn judgment less than twenty-four hours ago. It was Piet Hoffmann I was going to see when I went to Aspsås in connection with the murder at Västmannagatan 79."

"I don't understand."

Ewert Grens shook his head slowly.

"He's one of the three names I was going to question and eliminate from the Västmannagatan investigation. Piet Hoffmann. I don't know why or how, but he was one of them, Sven."

The churchyard should have been beautiful. The sun was shining through the high, green leaves, the gravel paths had recently been raked and the grass was in neat squares in front of the gravestones that stood silently waiting for the next visitors. But the beauty was an illusion, a facade that when they got closer was replaced with danger, anxiety, and tension, and the visitors had replaced their watering cans and flowers with semiautomatics and black visors. John Edvardson met them at the gate and they hurried toward the white church with the high steps up to a closed wooden door. Edvardson handed the binoculars to Ewert Grens, waiting in silence while the detective superintendent looked and found the right window.

"That part of the workshop."

Ewert Grens handed the binoculars to Hermansson.

"There's only one entrance and exit to that part of the workshop. If you want to take hostages… that's completely the wrong place to go."

"We've heard them talking."

"Both of them?"

"Yes. They're alive. So we can't go in."

The room that was to the right just inside the church door wasn't particularly big, but it was big enough to be made into a control post. A room where the immediate family would gather before a funeral, or the bride and groom would wait before a wedding. Sven and Hermansson moved the chairs back to the wall while Edvardson went over to the small wooden altar and unfolded a plan of the whole prison and then a detailed plan of the workshop.

"And visible… all the time?"

"I could order the marksmen to shoot at any time. But it's too far. Fifteen hundred and three meters. I can only guarantee that our weapons will hit at max six hundred meters."

Ewert Grens pointed a finger at the drawing and the window that, for the moment, was their only contact with a person who had committed murder a few hours ago.

"He knows that we can't shoot him from here, and behind bars, behind reinforced glass… he feels safe."

"He thinks that he's safe."

Grens looked at Edvardson.

"Thinks?"

"We can't shoot him. Not with our equipment. But it is possible."

There was a drawing lying on the large conference table in one of the corner rooms in the Government Offices. It was bright and the light from the ceiling blended with light from the high window with a view over the water at Norrström and Riddarfjärden. Fredrik Göransson smoothed the folds in the stiff paper with his hand and moved it so that it would be easier for the national police commissioner and the state secretary to see.

"Here, this building nearest the wall, is Block B. And here, on the second floor, is the workshop."

The three faces leaned over the table and, with the help of a piece of paper, studied a place they had never visited.

"So Hoffmann is standing here. Close to him, on the floor, are the hostages. A prisoner and a warden. Completely naked."

It was hard to comprehend, from the straight lines on the architect's drawing, that there was someone standing there, threatening to kill.

"According to Edvardson, he has been totally exposed in the window since the national task force arrived."

Göransson moved the files and a thick folder with the Prison and Probation Service documents from the table onto one of the chairs in order to make more space, and when that wasn't sufficient he moved the thermos and three mugs. He then unrolled a map of Aspsås district and with a felt pen drew a straight line from the squares that were the various prison buildings across the green area and open space to one of the other rectangles on the map, the one marked with a cross.

"The church. Exactly fifteen hundred and three meters away. The only place with a view that is clear enough for the snipers. And Hoffmann knows that, Edvardson is sure of it. He knows that the police don't have the equipment to reach him and that's what he's telling us by standing there."

There was a little coffee left in the thermos and the stare secretary poured herself half a cup. Then she got up and moved away, looked at her visitors and spoke in a quiet voice.

"You should have informed me yesterday."

She didn't expect an answer.

"You've maneuvered us into a corner."

She was shaking with rage. She looked at them one at a time, then lowered her voice even more.

"You have forced him to action. And now I don't have any choice, I have to act as well."

She continued to look at them as she walked toward the door. "I'll be back in fifteen minutes."

Each step had been painful, and when Ewert Grens spied the aluminum ladder that led up to a hatch in the church tower, his stiff leg protested with a series of small sharp twinges that obliterated any other thoughts. He said nothing when he slipped on the first rung, nor when his chest seemed to push up into his throat a few rungs up. His forehead shone with sweat and his arms were numb when he hauled himself through the wooden hatch and banged his head on the edge of the heavy cast iron bell, cutting himself. He lay down and managed to creep the final stretch to the door that led our onto the balcony and the cooling breeze.

They now had forty-six police officers positioned outside the prison, inside the prison, outside the church, and two up here, in the church tower-marksmen who were keeping an eye through binoculars on a window on the second floor of Block B.

"There are two possibilities. The railway bridge over there is probably a couple of hundred meters closer, but the angle is harder and the target area is too small. Whereas from here the target area is perfect. We have full view of him. But we have a problem. Our marksmen use a gun which is called a PSG 90 and is designed for firing distances of around six hundred meters. That's what our men are trained for. And the distance from here is far greater, Ewert."

Ewert Grens had gotten up and was now standing at the far end of the narrow balcony, gripping the railing with his hands. He saw the shadow again, Hoffmann's shadow.

"And what does that mean?"

"The distance is impossible. For us."

"Impossible?"

"The greatest known distance that a sniper has covered successfully is two thousand, one hundred and seventy-five meters. A Canadian marksman.^),

"So?"

"So what?"

"So it's not impossible."

"Impossible. For us."

"But it's nearly nine hundred meters less! So what's the bloody problem?" "The problem is that we have no officers who can shoot at that distance. We don't have the training. We don't have the equipment."

Grens turned toward Edvardson and the balcony shook-he was heavy and he had pulled hard at the railing.

"Who?"

"Who what?"

"Who does? Have the training? The equipment?"

"The army. They train our marksmen. They have the training. And they have the equipment."

"Then get one of them here. Now."

The balcony shook again. Ewert Grens was agitated and his ponderous body swayed as he tossed his head and stamped his foot. John Edvardson waited until he was done; he normally didn't care that much when the detective superintendent tried to look menacing.

"It doesn't work quite like that. The armed forces can't be used for police matters.

"We're talking about someone's life!"

"Statute SFS 2002:375. Ordinance on support for civil activities by the Swedish Armed Forces. I can read it for you, if you like. Paragraph seven."

"I don't give a damn about that."

"It's Swedish law, Ewert."

He had listened to them moving around on the roof, small movements, they were there the whole time, they were ready and waiting.

Then there was a crackling in his earpiece.

"The army. They train our marksmen. They have the training. And they have the equipment."

Pier Hoffmann smiled.

"Then get one of them here. Now."

He smiled again, but only inside. He was careful to stand in profile, his shoulder at a right angle to the window.

The equipment, the training, the know-how.

A sniper. A military sniper.

The map of Aspsås district was still lying on the conference table when the state secretary returned to the room and made a point of closing the door behind her.

"So, let's continue."

She had been tense and flushed when she left the room fifteen minutes ago, and whatever it was she had done, whoever it was she had spoken to, had done the trick-she looked calmer, and she was resolute and concentrated as she drank the rest of her coffee.

"The log book?"

She nodded at one of the files that had been moved from the table. "Yes?"

"Give it to me."

Göransson handed her the thick black file and she noticed as she leafed through that the pages were handwritten alternately in black and blue ballpoint pen.

Are all the meetings between your handler and this Hoffmann recorded here?"

“Yes.”

"And this is the only copy?"

"It's the copy that I keep as CHIS controller. The only one."

"Destroy it."

She put the file down on the table and pushed it over toward Göransson. "Are there any other formal links between the police authority and Hoffmann?"

Göransson shook his head.

"No. Not for him. Not for any other informant. That's not how we work." He seemed to relax a bit.

"Hoffmann has been paid by us for nine years. But only from the account that we call reward money. An account that can't be linked to personal data and therefore doesn't need to be reported to the tax authorities. He's not on any payrolls. Formally, he doesn't exist for us."

The file with the Prison and Probation Service documents was still lying on one of the chairs.

"And that one? Is that his?"

"That's only about him."

She opened it, looked through the printouts and reports about his mental health.

"And this is all?"

"That is our picture of him."

"Our picture?"

"The image we've created."

"And the overall image… if I can put it like this… does it give a sufficient basis for the gold commander to make a clear decision about Hoffmann… well, the consequences of the hostage taking?"

The room brightened as the sun flooded in and the white sheets of paper intensified and reflected the light.

"It was a sufficiently strong image for him to be accepted by the mafia branch that he penetrated. We've since developed it to make him totally credible in relation to the work inside Aspsås."

The state secretary put the file down to one side, looked at Göransson, who as commanding officer could easily have been in charge of the hostage-taking operation.

"Would you… with this information and in the current situation at

Aspsås where the hostages' lives are in danger… would you make a decision based on the fact that Hoffmann is dangerous, capable?" Chief Superintendent Göransson nodded.

"Without a doubt."

"Would all the police officers who might be assigned as gold commander make the same decision based on that information?"

"Given our information about Hoffmann, no police officer at the scene would question the fact that he is prepared to kill a prison warden."

The sun wearied of fighting the light clouds outside the window of the Government Offices and the bright light subsided, making it more comfortable to look round the room.

"So… if the gold commander at Aspsås is convinced that Hoffmann is prepared to kill the hostages… and has to make a decision… what would he do?"

"If the gold commander considers the hostages to be in acute danger, and that Piet Hoffmann will kill them, he would then order the men to storm the premises in order to safeguard the hostages' lives."

Göransson moved closer to the table and the map, and drew his finger over the paper from the rectangle that represented Block B to a rectangle one and a half kilometers away that represented a church.

"But it's not possible from here."

He drew a circle in the air over the building that was marked with a cross and kept his hand there, a slow movement, around and around, a circle that stopped when he did.

"So the gold commander will, if he must, order the national task force marksmen to take out the hostage taker."

"Take out?"

"Shoot."

"Shoot?"

"Put out of action."

"Put out of action?"

"Kill."

The room with the small wooden altar had already been transformed into the control post. There were drawings of Aspsås prison lying on every surface intended for the priest to prepare his services. Paper cups of vending machine coffee from the local gas station stood empty or half finished on the floor, the small window, which had been opened wide to let in some oxygen to replace that which had long since been breathed out by stressed and raised voices, creaked gently on the breeze. Ewert Grens moved restlessly between Edvardson, Sundkvist, and Hermansson, loud but not aggressive or even angry; he had just taken over as gold commander and was resolute and solution-orientated. He would have to make the final decision in a while. It was he, and he alone, who was directly responsible for several people's lives. He left the room with no air, wandered through the empty churchyard, between the headstones and newly planted flowers and saw in his mind's eye another cemetery that he had not yet dared to visit, but that he would now, later, when this was all over. He stopped between a gray, rather beautiful headstone and a tree that looked like it might be a maple, lifted the binoculars from his chest and studied the building behind the Aspsås prison wall. The man who could be seen behind the window, the one who was called Piet Hoffmann, whom Grens should have questioned the day before… there was something odd going on, something wasn't right-people who suddenly got ill rarely had the strength and focus to shoot someone else through the eye.

"Hermansson?"

He had gone over to the open window and shouted through.

"I want you to contact the prison doctor. I want to know how a prisoner who was put in isolation in the hospital unit yesterday morning is now, at lunchtime today, standing over there pointing a gun at hostages."

Ewen Grens stayed outside the open window for a while and looked over at the prison. The inner strength he had, the one that was always there and forced him to keep at it, keep at it, keep at it until he had an answer, he knew exactly where it was coming from this time. The older warden. If the two people who had been taken hostage were both fellow prisoners, he wouldn't have been so motivated, he wouldn't have felt the same driving edge. That's just how it was. He didn't care much about one of the naked bodies on the workshop floor, he felt nothing for the prisoner who in theory could be in cahoots with the hostage taker. It wasn't something that he was proud of, but that was how he felt. The warden, on the other hand, who wore a uniform and worked there, an ordinary representative of a workplace that the general public hated, an older man who had given his life to this crap, shouldn't have to deal with such deep humiliation, a person who believed they had the right to take his life, a gun to his head.

Grens swallowed.

It was the warden, that's what this was all about.

He lowered the binoculars and fished out his mobile phone. He tried to remember if he had ever before asked his line manager for help two days in a row. After all, they had had an unspoken understanding for a long time to stay out of each other's way in order to avoid conflicts. But he had no choice. He dialed the number of the office only a couple of doors down from his own. No reply. He dialed again, the switchboard this time, asked them to put him through to his mobile phone. Chief Superintendent Göransson answered after the first ring, his voice hushed, as if he was in a meeting and leaning forward to speak.

"Ewert… I don't have time right now. I'm trying to find a solution to a critical problem."

"This is critical too."

“We-“

"I'm exactly fifteen hundred and three meters away from the prison in Aspsås. I'm responsible for an ongoing hostage situation. There's a risk that one of the prison wardens might die if I make the wrong decision and I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that that doesn't happen. But I need some bureaucratic assistance. You know, the sort of thing you do."

Chief Superintendent Göransson ran his hand over his face and through his hair.

"You're at Aspsås, you say?"

"Yes."

"And you're the gold commander?"

"I just took over from Edvardson. He's focusing on the task force." Göransson held the telephone high up over his head and pointed at it with big gestures, catching the attention of the national police commissioner and state secretary and nodding vehemently at them until they understood.

"I'm listening."

"I need a competent marksman."

"The national task force are there, aren't they?"

"Yes."

"Then I don't understand."

"I need someone who is trained and equipped to shoot over a distance of fifteen hundred meters. Apparently the police aren't. So I need a military marksman."

They were listening, the national police commissioner and the state secretary, they were sitting next to him and had started to get the picture.

"You know as well as I do that the armed forces can't be used against civilians."

"You're the bureaucrat, Göransson. If you're good at anything, then it's that. Being a pen-pusher. I want you to come up with a solution." "Ewert-"

"Before the hostage dies."

Göransson held the phone in his hand.

Dread.

It was there again.

"That was Ewert Grens. The DS who's investigating Västmannagatan 79. And right now he's standing right here."

He pointed at the map, at the thin lines that symbolized something that actually existed. Ewert Grens was actually standing there. It was Ewert Grens who would shortly make a decision based on the doctored information that was accessible in the databases and records, an image that was developed by his own colleagues and that for any police officer would provide powerful grounds to shoot.

Shoot.

"Here… he's standing precisely here, as the assigned gold commander. He's the one who is leading the whole operation, who is responsible for it, who will make the decision on how to resolve it."

Göransson's hand was shaking. He pressed it hard against the paper of the map, but it continued to shake-it didn't normally do that, shake.

"He is fifteen hundred and three meters from the window where

Hoffmann has been sighted regularly, but the snipers, the police marksmen, don't have the right training and equipment. So he's asking for a military marksman. A more powerful weapon, heavier ammunition, someone trained to shoot at extreme distances."

Shoot to kill.

"There's always a solution. Always a reasonable solution if you really want to find it. And clearly it is in all our interests to find it, to help to resolve this." The state secretary's voice was calm, clear.

"It is our responsibility to save the hostages' lives."

Ewert Grens had asked for a suitably trained and equipped marksman.

With the information that was now common knowledge in the prison corridors, Hoffmann would not give up his hostages.

If Grens got his military marksman, he would also use him.

"What are you actually saying?"

Göransson straightened his back. He looked at the slight woman sitting in front of him.

They wouldn't have their finger on the trigger.

It would be the gold commander who ordered the sniper to fire. It would be the marksman who fired.

They wouldn't make the decision.

They were giving others the opportunity to make the decision.

"Bur… Jesus Christ=

Göransson's finger was still on the map when he suddenly pulled the paper toward him and scrunched it into a ball with both hands.

"-what the hell are we doing?"

He got up abruptly, his face stiff and flushed.

"We're making Ewert Grens into a murderer!"

"Calm down, please."

"We're legitimizing murder!"

He threw the ball of paper so that it hit the window and fell with a thud onto the state secretary's desk.

"If we give the gold commander the solution that he's asking for… if he then makes a decision based on the information he has about Hoffmann… Ewert Grens could be forced to order a shot to be fired at a person who has actually never committed a violent crime, but who is believed to be violent, merciless and capable!"

The state secretary leaned forward and picked up the paper ball, held it in her lap, for a long time looked at the face that was about to explode.

"If that is the case, if the gold commander has the military marksman and then later decides to shoot… then it will be to save the hostages' lives."

Her voice was controlled, and was quiet enough to be heard but not loud enough for those listening not to hold their breath.

"Hoffmann is the only one who has killed anyone. And it is only Hoffmann who is threatening to do so again."

The square yard at Aspsås prison was covered in coarse, dry gravel that was dusty, no people, no noise; all the prisoners had been locked in their cells for the past few hours, behind doors that would not be opened until the hostage siege was over. Grens was walking with Edvardson beside him, two members of the national task force in front of him and Hermansson a couple of steps behind. She had been waiting for him just inside the prison gate and had briefly told him about her meeting with the prison doctor who had heard nothing about an epidemic and had never asked for anyone to be isolated in all his time at Aspsås. As they approached the outside door to Block B, Grens stopped and waited for her.

"It's all a goddamn lie, all of it, all this is connected. I want you to carry on, Hermansson, find the prison chief warden and get an answer out of him."

She nodded and turned around and he watched her rather slim back and shoulders through the light cloud of dust. They hadn't spoken much together recently, not at all in the past year-he hadn't really spoken to anyone. Once he had been to the grave he would seek her our again. He who was never going to talk to a policewoman again had learned to appreciate her more and more each year. He was still not sure when she was laughing at him or was annoyed with him, but she was good at her job and intelligent and she looked at him in a way that was at once demanding and uncompromising, in a way that very few dared. He would talk to her again, maybe even ask her to leave the offices with him for a while, ask her for a coffee and a cake in the cafe on Bergsgatan. It felt good to be having these thoughts, to look forward to something, to having a coffee with the daughter they never had.

Ewert Grens opened the door to the solitary confinement unit and the corridor where everything had kicked off a few hours ago. The body that had fallen forward with blood pouring from the head had already been removed-strapped onto a stretcher and taken for an autopsy-and the two prison wardens who had been threatened with a gun and each locked away in a cell were now with a crisis management team in one of the visiting rooms, talking to a prison psychologist and prison chaplain.

His first thought was actually about the banging.

In each cell on the ground floor, the prisoners in solitary confinement were banging on their closed, locked doors. A regular thumping sound that made your heart beat out of rhythm. He knew that that was what they did and had decided to ignore it, but it forced its way into his mind and he was relieved to go up the stairs behind Edvardson and past the armed police on the first landing.

They stopped when they got to the second floor and nodded silently to the eight members of the national task force standing outside the workshop ready for an order to break down the door, throw in a shock grenade and take full control of the situation within ten seconds.

"That's too long."

Ewert Grens was talking quietly and John Edvardson leaned in closer in order to reply in an equally quiet voice.

"Eight seconds. With this team, Ewert, I can get it down to eight seconds."

"It's still too long. Hoffmann, to aim and then move the muzzle from one head to the next and shoot, he doesn't need more than one and a half seconds. And in his frame of mind… I can't risk a dead hostage."

John Edvardson nodded at the ceiling and the dull shuffling of bodies changing position every now and then.

Grens shook his head.

"That's not going to work either. From the door, from the roof, the number of seconds you're talking about… the hostages could die several times over."

The banging, he couldn't stand it much longer, his concentration couldn't stretch to encompass both the madmen downstairs and the madman in there. He was on his way back down the stairs to the thundering noise, but turned when Edvardson put a hand on his shoulder.

"Ewert…"

"Thank you."

They stood in silence, with the waiting police breathing behind their backs. "In that case, Ewert, unless Hoffmann suddenly gives himself up, if and when we deem his threat to be more than just a threat… then there's only one solution. The military marksman. With a weapon that is powerful enough to kill."

The dread hounded him, translating into jerky movements and a nervous cough. Fredrik Göransson had been walking for ten minutes now in endless circles, between the window and the desk in one of the rooms of the Government Offices, and he hadn't gotten anywhere.

"We made sure that the prisoners got the information about a snitch." The crumpled map was in the wastepaper basket-he picked it up and unfolded it.

"We forced him to act."

"He had a job to do."

The national police commissioner had let the state secretary answer thus far. Now he looked at his colleague.

"That didn't involve threatening another person's life."

"We burned him."

"You've burned other informants before."

"I have always denied that we even work with infiltrators. I've stood by and watched without giving any protection when an organization has dealt with that person. But this… this isn't the same. This isn't burning him. This is murder."

"You still haven't understood. We are not the ones who will make the decision. We are only providing a solution for the police officer who will make that decision."

The agitated man with the jerky movements couldn't bear to stand still any longer, and with the dread chasing right behind him, he made a dash past the table to the closed door.

"I want no part in this."

He wasn't cold anymore. The floor that smelled of diesel was just as hard and just as cold, but he didn't feel the cold, nor the pain in his knees, he didn't even think about the fact that he was naked and bound, and would shortly get another kick in the side from someone who intermittently whispered that he was going to die. Martin Jacobson didn't have the strength to speak, to think-he lay down and didn't move. He wasn't even sure if he was seeing the things he saw now, if Hoffmann really did walk over to the largest workbench and pull a plastic pocket from the waist of his trouser that had some kind of fluid in it; if he then cut it into twenty-four equally sized pieces and with a roll of tape from the shelf, attach them to the nameless prisoner's head, arms, back, stomach, chest, thighs, lower legs and feet; and if he took from the same place something that looked like a thin piece of pentyl fuse that was several meters long and wrapped it around and around the prisoner's body. If that was the case, if what he saw was what was really happening, he couldn't face anymore. He turned his eyes slowly the other way so he didn't need to see-there was no room left for things he didn't understand.

One of the three chairs that had been pulled out from the conference table was empty, and the person whose office it was, a state secretary from the Ministry of Justice, ran her hand back and forth over a crumpled map as if subconsciously trying to smooth out the bumps that shouldn't be there.

"Can we do this?"

The man opposite her, a national police commissioner, heard her question but knew that it didn't mean just that she was asking if they were capable of something, no one would contend that, it wasn't Göransson alone who was going to solve this, the possibility didn't vanish along with him. What she was really asking was do we trust each other, or perhaps do we trust each other enough to first solve this and then to stick to what we've decided, especially the consequences?

He nodded.

"Yes, we can do this."

The state secretary had moved over to the bookshelf behind the desk and taken a pile of black spines from a file. She leafed through them and found the statute she was looking for: SFS 2002:375.

Then she turned on her computer and logged on, opened the complete version and printed out two copies.

"Here. Take one."

SFS 2002:375.

Ordinance on support for civil activities by the Swedish Armed Forces. She pointed at the seventh paragraph.

"This is what it's about. This is what we have to find our way around.

When support is given pursuant to this Ordinance, members of the

Armed Forces cannot be used in situations where there is a risk that

they may be required to use force or violence against a private individual.

They both knew exactly what that meant. It would not be possible to use the armed forces for police activities. For nearly eighty years, this country of theirs had sought not to resolve problems by allowing the military to shoot at civilians.

But that was precisely what they had to do.

Are you of the same opinion? Do you agree with the DS who is in situ? That the only way to resolve this, for a shot to be fired from here that will reach… here, to this building… is to use a military marksman?"

The state secretary had smoothed out the map enough for it to be possible to follow her finger.

"Yes. I'm of the same opinion. More powerful guns, heavier ammunition, better training. I've been asking for that for several years now."

She smiled wearily, got up and walked slowly round the room.

"So, the police are not allowed to use the snipers who are employed by the armed forces."

She stopped.

"The police can, however, use the marksmen who are employed by the police. Is that not the case?"

She looked at him and he gave a hesitant nod and threw his hands up in the air-she was aiming at something, but he had no idea what. She went over to the computer again, looked at the screen for a while, then printed out another document in duplicate.

"SFS 1999:740."

She waited until he had found the right page.

"Ordinance on police training. Paragraph nine."

"What about it?"

"We'll start there and work our way forward."

She read out loud:

The National Police Board can, under special circumstances, grant

exemptions from the training set out in this Ordinance .

The national police commissioner shrugged.

"I'm familiar with that paragraph. But I still don't understand what you're getting at."

"We'll employ a military marksman. For police service as a police sniper." "He would still be military staff and not have formal police training." The state secretary smiled again.

"You are, like me, a lawyer, is that not so?"

"Yes."

"You are the national police commissioner. You have police authority, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Despite the fact that you do not have formal police training?" "Yes."

"So let's use that as our starting point, and work toward a solution." He was none the wiser as to where she was heading.

"We'll find a trained, equipped military marksman. With the cooperation of his superiors, we'll discharge him from service in the armed forces and then make the newly discharged military marksman an offer of a… say… six-hour temporary contract with the police. As a superintendent or another rank. You choose what rank and title you want him to have."

He wasn't smiling, not yet.

"So, he will be employed by the police for exactly six hours. He will complete his contract. And he will then, six hours later, apply for the vacant position that the armed forces haven't yet had time to advertise, and be reinstated."

Now he was starting to understand what she was getting at.

"And what's more, the police never give out the names of their marksmen, during or after an operation."

Exactly what she was getting at.

"And so no one will know who fired the shot."

An empty, clean building.

A floor that no feet had stamped on, windows that no eyes had stared through.

There were no lights on in the building, no sound, even the unused door handles shone. Lennart Oscarsson had envisaged the inauguration of the newly built Block K, with even more cells, greater capacity, more prisoners, as a manifestation of a newly appointed chief warden's ambition and drive. That would never happen now. He walked down the empty corridor, past the wide-open cell doors. He was about to turn on the strong lights and activate the new alarm system and soon the smell of paint and newly upholstered pine furniture would blend more and more with fear and badly brushed teeth. The uninhabited cells would instead be inaugurated in a few minutes' time by hastily evacuated prisoners from Block B who were under serious threat with the national task force prepped at every door and window, guns at the ready, and a hostage situation on the second floor of the building that no one really knew anything about, why the man had done it, his aims and demands.

Another day from hell.

He had lied to an investigating officer and chewed his lower lip to shreds. He had forced a prisoner to go back to the unit where he was threatened and when the prisoner had taken hostages, had ripped the yellow petals of the tulips into tiny, porous pieces and dropped them on the wet floor. When his mobile phone rang, the ringtone echoing in the empty surroundings, he went into one of the empty cells and lay down exhausted on one of the bunks with no mattress.

"Oscarsson?"

He recognized the general director's voice immediately, stretched out his body on the hard bunk.

"Yes?"

"His demands?"

"What are his demands?"

"Nothing."

"Three hours and fifty-four minutes. And not a single demand?" "No communication at all."

He had just seen a mouth fill a TV monitor, tight lips that slowly formed words about death. He couldn't bear to talk about it.

"If there are demands, when he makes demands, Lennart, he's not allowed to leave the prison."

"I don't understand."

"If he asks for the gate to be opened, you mustn't allow it. Under any circumstances."

The hard bunk. He couldn't feel it.

"Am I understanding you correctly? You want me to… to ignore the policy that you yourself have written? And that all of us who hold senior positions have signed? That if anyone's life is in danger, if we believe a hostage taker is prepared to carry out any threats he has made, if he demands to be released, we should open the gates to save lives. And that is the agreement that you now want me to ignore?"

"I know what policies and regulations I've formulated. But… Lennart, if you still like your job, then you'll do as I ask you."

He couldn't move. It was impossible.

"As you ask me?"

Everyone has their limits, an exact point beyond which they can't go. This was his.

"Or as someone has asked you?"

"Get up."

Piet Hoffmann was standing between the two naked bodies. He had bent down toward one of them and spoken close to the tired, old eyes until they had finally understood and started to get up. The prison warden who was called Jacobson grimaced with pain as he straightened his knees and back and started to walk in the direction pointed out by the hostage taker-past the three solid concrete pillars and in behind a wall near the door, a separate part that seemed to be some kind of store: unopened cardboard boxes stacked up one on the other with sticky labels from tool and machine part suppliers. He was to sit down-Hoffmann pushed him to the floor in irritation when he didn't move fast enough-he was to leanback and stretch out his legs, so that it would be easier to tie his feet together. The older man tried to reach out to him in desperation several times, asking why and how and when, but got no answer, then watched Piet Hoffmann's silent back until it disappeared somewhere behind a drill and a workbench.

That bloody banging. Ewert Grens shook his head. It seemed to follow a pattern. The nutters banged on their cell doors for two minutes, then waited for one, then banged for two more. So he walked over to the security office, with Edvardson directly behind him, and made sure he closed the door properly. The two small monitors side by side on a desk showed the same picture, all black, a camera turned to the workshop wall. He reached over for the coffeepot which was cold and had a brown, heavy fluid at the bottom. He turned it almost upside down and waited while brown fluid trickled slowly into one of the already used mugs, offered it to John Edvardson, but had it all to himself. He drank and swallowed-it wasn't particularly nice, but strong enough.

"Hello."

He had just about emptied the white plastic mug when the telephone in front of him started to ring.

"Detective Superintendent Grens?"

He looked around. All these damn cameras. Central security had seen him go into the security office and connected the call.

"Yes."

"Can you hear who it is?"

Grens recognized the voice. The bureaucrat who sat a couple of floors up from him in the police headquarters at Kronoberg.

"I know who you are."

"Can you talk? There's something making an almighty din there." "I can talk."

He heard the national police commissioner clear his throat.

"Has the situation changed at all?"

"No. We want to act. We should be able to. But right now we haven't got the right people. And time is running out."

"You asked for a military marksman."

"Yes."

"That's why I'm calling. Your request is now on my desk."

"Just a moment."

Grens waved at Edvardson, he wanted him to check the door, make sure that it was closed properly.

"Hello?"

"I think I have a solution."

The national police commissioner was quiet, waiting for a reaction from Grens, but then carried on when the void was filled with the noise from the corridor.

"I've just signed a contract. I have employed an instructor and military marksman, who was recently discharged, as an assistant commissioner for six hours. He's been serving with the Svea Life Guards at Kungsangen. The position will initially entail supporting Aspsås police district. He has just left Kungsangen in a helicopter and will land at Aspsås church in ten, max fifteen minutes. When his contract ends, in exactly five hours and fifty-six minutes, he will be collected and taken back to Kungsangen in the same helicopter and will then apply for the newly vacant position for an instructor and military marksman which has not yet been advertised."

He heard it when it was no more than a small spot in the cloudless sky. He ran over to the window and watched it grow as the noise got louder and then land, blue and white, on the tall grass in the field between the prison wall and the churchyard. Piet Hoffmann looked at the two people waiting high up on the church tower balcony, then at the helicopter and the police officers running toward it. He listened to the people moving around on the roof above his head and the ones just outside the door and he nodded to no one in particular. Now, now everything was in place. He checked that the nameless prisoner's hands and legs were tied well enough and then hurried over to the wall that separated the storeroom from the rest of the workshop, managed to get the old warden up, forced him to walk in front of him across the floor to one of the cameras that was pointing to the wall-he turned it and made sure that the whole of his mouth and the warden's was clear when he spoke.

He leaned forward as he walked, dressed in a white-and-gray camouflage uniform. He was in his forties and had introduced himself as Sterner.

"I can't do this."

As they walked over to the church and then went up the stairs and the aluminum ladder, Ewen Grens had described a hostage drama that was out of control and might culminate in a shot from the church tower.

"Can't? What the hell do you mean?"

The military marksman who, for another five hours and thirty-eight minutes would legally serve as a policeman, had emerged onto the narrow balcony and switched places with one of the two men already lying there.

"This is not a normal sniper rifle. It's an M107. It's a heavier, more powerful, anti-materiel rifle. For targeting buses. Or boats. Exploding mines.

He had greeted the colleague who was still there and would function as an observer.

"Long distance. That was the information I was given. That was what I should be prepared for. But this- I can't shoot at a soft target."

Holding the binoculars, he had observed Piet Hoffmann in one corner of the window and realized what this was all about.

Now he looked at Grens.

"I'm sorry, so he-that man there-is a soft target?"

"Yes."

"And… what exactly does that mean?"

"It means that the ammunition that I have with me is fire and explosive ammo, and can't be used for a person."

Grens laughed-at least that was what it sounded like: a short, irritated laugh.

"So… what the hell are you doing here?"

"The firing distance is fifteen hundred and three meters. That was the job I was given."

"The job you were given was to prevent someone from taking the lives of two other people. Or, if you prefer it-one soft target taking the life of another soft target."

Sterner focused the binoculars on the hostage taker, he was still standing in the same place by the window, exposing himself, and it was hard to understand why.

"I'm just complying with international law."

"A law… for Christ's sake, Sterner… they're made up by people who hide behind desks! But this… this is reality. And if the guy who is standing there, the soft target, the one who is our reality right now, if he's not stopped, other people will die. And both of them and their nearest and dearest will presumably be extremely pleased to know that you are complying with… what was it now… international law."

The binoculars' zoom was powerful and despite the fact that his hands were moving in the wind, it was easy to follow the man who had long fair hair and sometimes turned and looked down at something-the hostages, Sterner was sure of it-that was lying on the floor close to him; that was where they were.

"If I do what you want me to, if I fire at this sniper, with the ammo I've got here, he'll lose his arms and legs. They'll be blown clear off the body. There will be nothing left."

He lowered the binoculars and looked up at Grens.

"You'll find the soft target, the person-you'll find body parts everywhere."

The face, the mouth, it was there again.

The man in the blue crumpled guard uniform got up. The same monitor as the last time, the same camera that had been turned away from the concrete wall. Bergh was still warm but had switched off and moved the desk fan so that it was now by the wall in the small central security room-he needed more space in order to see properly when he linked up and transmitted the picture on all sixteen screens.

The mouth was saying something, and then the other one, another person, Jacobson, naked and bound. The hostage taker was holding him and suddenly took a step back: he wanted to make sure that they could see that he had a miniature revolver to Jacobson's head. And then he said the words again.

Bergh didn't need to rewind this time.

He recognized the first words.

He is a dead man.

And the three last words were incredibly easy to interpret from the clear lip movements.

In twenty minutes

Sven Sundkvist ran up the church stairs with the mobile phone in his hand. His conversation with a distressed voice from central security had been clear: they had been given a countdown and every minute, every second meant less time to make a decision. He straightened the ladder, opened the hatch and crawled out on to the balcony. Ewert was there with the new marksman and his observer. Sven told them all loudly that there wasn't time anymore to discuss things that had already been discussed.

Ewert looked at him, his eyes alert, the vein on his temple pulsing. "How long ago?"

"One minute and twenty seconds."

Ewert Grens had been expecting it, but he thought that it might take longer, that he would have more time. He sighed; so that's how it was, that's how it always was, there was never enough time. He held on to the railing and looked out over the small town, over the prison. Two worlds only meters apart, but two separate, unique worlds with their own rules and expectations, that had absolutely fuck-all to do with each other.

"Sven?"

"Yes?"

"Who is he?"

"Who?"

"The prison warden?"

The man in the window over there, behind the reinforced glass, he knew, Hoffmann knew exactly how it fucking worked and he had decided that it would start now, that we will act because of an elderly guard. And he's right. It's the gray-haired prison warden we care about. If… if it had only been a drug dealer with a long sentence, well, it wasn't easy to say, to imagine, we might not have made such an effort.

"Sven?"

"Just a moment."

Sven Sundkvist looked through his notebook, tightly written pages in foutain pen ink, not used by many these days.

"Martin Jacobson. Sixty-four. Has worked at Aspsås since he was twenty-four. Married. Grown-up children. Lives in the town. Liked, respected, no threat."

Grens gave a distracted nod.

"Do you need more?"

"Not right now."

The anger. His inner engine, the driving force, without which he would be nothing. Now it rook hold of him, shook him hard. No way, no goddamn way was that naked, bound man with a miniature gun to his eye, who had worked for forty years for peanuts with people who hated him, going to die on a foul-smelling workshop floor one year before retiring, no bloody way.

"Sterner?"

The military marksman was lying by the railing a bit farther along the balcony, holding up the binoculars.

"You're a police officer now. You are a police officer now. For five and a half hours more. And I have been assigned as gold commander here. So I am your boss. And that means that from now on you must do exactly as I order you to do. And I am, now listen carefully, not particularly interested in arguments about soft targets and international law. Do you understand?"

They looked at each other-he didn't get an answer, but he hadn't expected one either.

The big window.

A naked, sixty-four-year-old man.

He remembered another person, another hostage, nearly twenty years ago now, but he could still feel the choking rage. Some children in care, lethal and criminal, had planned to escape, so they decided they needed a hostage and had assaulted a retired woman who was doing some extra work in the kitchen. Cheap screwdriver to her throat, they chose the weakest member of staff and she had later died, not while she was being held hostage but as a result of it-they had somehow stolen her life from her and she didn't know how to take it back.

This was just as bloody cowardly, just as premeditated, the oldest member of the staff, the weakest in the group.

"I want to take him out of action."

"What do you mean."

"Injure him."

"I can't."

"Can't? I just explained-"

"I can't, as I would have to shoot at his torso. And from here… the target's too small. If I was to shoot at one of his arms, say, first of all there is a risk that I would miss, and second, if I did hit one arm, other parts of his body would also be shot to bits."

Sterner handed the gun to Grens.

The black, almost skinny weapon was heavier than he had imagined, he guessed about fifteen kilos, the hard edges pressing against his palm. "That sniper gun… the force of impact would destroy a human body." "And if you hit him?"

"He'll die."

The earpiece had almost fallen out a couple of times so he kept his finger on it, like before, every word was crucial.

"Injure him."

Something crackled, a disturbance. He changed ears-the reception wasn't any better. He concentrated, listened, he had to-had to-understand every word.

`And if you hit him?"

"He'll die."

That was enough.

Piet Hoffmann crossed the room to the small office with a desk at the back. He pulled open the top drawer and picked up the razor that was lying in an otherwise empty compartment between the pens and paperclips, then a pair of scissors from the pencil case. He carried on to the storeroom, to the warden called Jacobson who was still sitting against the wall. Hoffmann checked the plastic packing tape round his wrists and ankles, then with one tug he pulled down the curtain from the window and, picking up the rug from the floor, he went back into the workshop and the other hostage.

The little plastic pockets of nitroglycerine were still attached to his skin. The pentyl fuse was tightly wound around his body. Hoffmann met his pleading eyes as he threw the rug over him and secured it with the curtain.

He pushed the barrel of diesel by the workbench over and positioned it by the hostage's legs.

He groped under the rug, found the detonator and taped it to one end of the pentyl fuse.

Then he went back to the window, looked up at the church tower, and at the gun that was pointing at him.

They were standing by one of the tall windows on the second floor of the Government Offices. They had just opened the thin glass window wide and were drinking in the fresh, cool air. They were ready. Forty-five minutes earlier they had informed the gold commander on site at Aspsås church that he would shortly have the military marksman he had requested. He was already on his way.

What was irresolvable was now resolvable.

Everything was in place for a decision to be made based on the available documentation.

A decision that was Ewert Grens's alone, that he would shortly make on his own and for which he would be solely responsible.

He had never been in a church tower before. Not as far as he could remember. Maybe as a child, on some school trip traipsing behind an ambitious class teacher. Strange, really-all these years of training and he had never fired from such an obvious place: a church that was the highest point here as in many other places. He leaned back against the wall and looked at the heavy cast iron bell. He was sitting in there alone, resting as he should do, as a marksman always does before firing, a moment of peace in his own world while the observer stayed with the gun.

He had arrived at the church an hour earlier. In five hours' time he would be back in Kungsangen, he would have left his temporary post with the police and have been re-employed by the army. On his way here he had assumed it was a matter of shooting at an inanimate target. But that was not the case. In a few minutes he was going to do something he had never done before. Aim and fire a loaded gun at a person.

A real person.

The kind that breathes and thinks and will be missed by someone. "Object in view."

He wasn't afraid of firing the shot, of his ability to hit the target.

But he was afraid of the consequences, the internal ones, which you can never prepare for, like what death does to the person who kills.

"I repeat. Object in view."

The observer's voice was urgent. Sterner went out into the light wind, lay down, held the weapon steady in his hands, waited. The shadow in the window. He looked at the observer-he felt the same thing, had made the same observation: neither of them were convinced that the man standing down there in profile didn't realize that it was in fact possible to hit him at this distance.

"Preparing to fire."

The heavy detective superintendent with the aggressive manner and a stiff leg that looked like it hurt more than he wanted to show was standing directly behind him.

"If Hoffmann doesn't withdraw his threat, I'm going to order you to shoot. His time runs out in thirteen minutes. Are you ready?"

"Yes."

"And the ammo?"

Sterner didn't turn around, he stayed lying on his stomach the whole time, facing the prison, his eye focused on the telescopic sight and a window on the top of Block B.

"With the correct information, I would have loaded and used the undercalibrated ammunition that is leaving Kungsingen in a helicopter this very moment and that won't get here in time. With this… if I'm going to penetrate reinforced glass to hit the target… it'll work. But I repeat… it isn't possible just to injure him. Once it's fired, the shot will be lethal."

The door was shut.

Brown, maybe oak, several scratches around the lock, a set of keys that scraped the door a little each time a key was turned twice in the stiff barrel. Mariana Hermansson knocked lightly on the door.

No footsteps, no voice-if anyone was in there they didn't move, or say anything, it was someone who didn't want to make contact.

On Ewert's order she had gone to look for the prison doctor on the other side of the large prison, inside the same walls, but several hundred meters away from the workshop and Hoffmann and the risk of more death. In Block C, through one of the hospital unit's small windows, she had watched a prisoner coughing in bed while a man in a white coat explained to her that 0913 Hoffmann had never been in any of the beds, that the symptoms of an epidemic had never been identified and that isolation had therefore never been ordered.

Ewert Grens had come up against a lie. The chief warden had prevented him from questioning an inmate. And right now that prisoner was holding a gun to a principal officer's head.

She knocked again, harder.

She pressed the handle down.

The door was unlocked.

Lennart Oscarsson was sitting in a dark leather armchair, his elbows on the wide desk in front, his head in his hands. His breathing was labored, deep and irregular, and she could see his forehead and cheeks shining in the harsh ceiling light; it could be sweat, it could be tears. He hadn't even noticed her coming into his office, that she was now standing only a few meters from him.

"Mariana Hermansson, City Police."

He jumped.

"I'd like to ask a few questions, about Hoffmann."

He looked at her.

"He is a dead man."

She chose to stay where she was.

"He said that."

His eyes were evasive-she tried to catch them, but couldn't, they were always somewhere else.

"He is a dead man. He said that!"

She didn't know what she had expected. But it wasn't this. Someone who was on the verge.

"His name is Martin. Did you know that? One of my best friends. No, more than that, my closest friend. The oldest employee at Aspsås. Forty years. He's been here forty years! And now… now he's going to die." She pursued the darting eyes.

"Yesterday, Ewert Grens, a detective superintendent who is in fact leading the operation right now from the church tower, was here. He came to question one of the prisoners. Piet Hoffmann."

The square monitor.

"If Martin dies…"

The mouth that moved so slowly.

"If he dies…"

He is a dead man.

"I don't know if-"

"You said that it wasn't possible. That Hoffmann was ill. That he was in isolation in the hospital unit."

"-I don't know that I could bear that."

Lennart Oscarsson hadn't heard her.

"I have just been to Block C. I spoke to Nycander. Hoffmann was never there."

The mouth.

"You lied."

Moving.

"You lied. Why?"

When it moves slowly on that monitor, it looks like it's talking about death.

"Oscarsson! Listen to me! A person is lying dead on the floor in one of the corridors in Block B. Two other people have exactly nine minutes left to live. We need to make a decision. We need your answer!"

"Would you like a cup of coffee?"

"Why did you lie? What is this all about?"

"Or tea?"

"Who is Hoffmann?"

"I've got green and red and normal tea in bags. The sort that you dunk."

Large drops of sweat fell from the governor's face onto the shiny desktop when he got up and walked over to a glass and gold-frame cart stacked with porcelain cups and saucers in the corner of the room.

"We need an answer. Why? Why did you lie?"

"It's important not to leave it in too long."

He didn't look at her, didn't turn round despite the fact that she had raised her voice for the first time. He held one of the cups under the thermos and filled it with steaming water, then carefully dropped a bag with a picture of a red rosehip attached into the middle.

"About two minutes. No more."

She was losing him.

"Would you like milk?"

They needed him.

"Sugar? Both perhaps?"

Hermansson put her hand under her jacket, angled her gun so that it slipped out of its holster, stretched out her arm in front of the chief warden's face, recoil operation: the shot hit the middle of the rectangular cupboard door.

The bullet went straight through, hitting the back wall, and they heard it falling to the floor among the black and brown shoes.

Lennart Oscarsson didn't move. The warm cup of tea still in one hand. She pointed to the wall clock behind the desk with the muzzle of her gun.

"Eight more minutes. Do you hear? I want to know why you lied. And I want to know who Hoffmann is, why he's standing in the workshop window with a revolver to the hostage's head."

He looked at the gun, at the cupboard, at Hermansson.

"I was just lying on a… an unused bunk in Block K, searching the nice, newly painted white ceiling. Because… because I don't know who Hoffmann is. Because I don't know why he's standing there, daiming that he's going to shoot my best friend."

His voice-she wasn't quite sure whether he was going to cry, or whether it was just the fragility of having given up.

"What I do know is… is that it's about something else… that there's other people involved."

He swallowed, swallowed again.

"I was ordered to allow a lawyer to visit a client the evening before Grens was here. A prisoner in the same unit as Hoffmann. Stefan Lygas. He was one of the people who attacked him. And he was the one who… who was shot this morning. Lawyers, you might know, are often used as messengers when someone wants information to be spread inside… that's often the way it's done."

"Ordered? By whom?"

Lennart Oscarsson gave a fleeting smile.

"I was ordered to prevent Grens-or any other police officer for that matter-from getting near Hoffmann. I stood there in reception, tried to look him in the eye, explain that the prisoner he wanted to see was in the hospital unit, that he would be there for three, maybe four days more."

"By whom?"

Same smile, impotent.

"I was ordered to move Hoffmann. Back to the unit he'd come from. Even though a prisoner who's been threatened should never be moved back."

Hermansson was shouting now.

"By whom?"

The smile.

"And I was given orders, just now, that if Hoffmann demands that the gates are opened for him and the hostages… that I mustn't let him out." "Oscarsson, I have to know who-"

"I want Martin to live."

She looked at the face that wouldn't manage to hold on for much longer, then at the clock that was hanging on the wall.

Seven minutes left.

She turned around and ran out of the office, his voice following her down the corridor.

"Hermansson!"

She didn't stop.

"Hermansson!"

Words that ricocheted off the cold walls.

"Someone wants Hoffmann to die."

His legs tied. His hands tied. His mouth gagged. His head covered.

Nitroglycerine against his skin. Pentyl fuse around his chest, torso, legs.

"Setting thirty-two."

He dragged the heavy body over to the window, hit it, forced it to stand there.

"TPR three."

"Repeat."

"Transport right three."

They were close to firing. The dialogue between the marksman and the observer would carry on until they fired.

He needed more time.

Hoffmann ran across the workshop to the storeroom and the other hostage, the prison warden with the pale face.

"I want you to shout."

"The packing tape, it's cutring-"

"Shout!"

The older man was tired. He panted, his head hung to one side, as if he didn't have the strength to hold it upright.

"I don't understand."

"Shout, for fuck's sake!"

"What…?"

"What the fuck you like. There's five minutes left. Scream that." The frightened eyes looked at him.

"Shout it!"

"Five minutes left."

"Louder!"

"Five minutes left!"

"Louder!"

"Five minutes left!"

Piet Hoffmann sat still and listened: careful sounds outside the door. They had understood.

They had understood that the hostages were still alive, they wouldn't break in, not yet.

He carried on to the office and the telephone, the ringing tone, once, twice, three times, four, five, six, seven. He was holding the empty porcelain cup and threw it against the wall, shards all over the desk, the pencil holder, the same wall, she hadn't answered, she wasn't there, she…

"Object out of sight for one minute, thirty seconds."

He hadn't been visible enough.

"Repeat."

"Object out of sight for one minute, thirty seconds. Can't locate either object or hostages."

"Prepare for entry in two minutes."

Hoffmann ran out of the office and they were moving on the roof again, getting ready, finding their positions. He stopped by the window and pulled the rug toward him-the hostage had to be close and he heard him wince as the plastic cut deeper into the wounds around his ankles.

"Object in view again."

He stood still, waiting, now, abort now for Christ's sake.

`Abort. Abort preparations for entry."

He let out a slow sigh and waited, then he ran back to the office and the telephone, try again. He dialed the number, the ring tone, he couldn't bear to count them, that bloody ringing, the bloody fucking ringing, that bloody-

It stopped.

Someone had answered but didn't say anything.

The sound of a car, a car driving, the person who answered was in a car driving somewhere, and maybe, very faint, as if they were sitting farther away, it had to be, the sound of two children.

"Have you done what we agreed?"

It was difficult to hear, but he was sure, it was her.

"Yes."

He put the phone down.

Yes.

He wanted to laugh, to jump up and down, but just dialed another number.

"Central security."

"Transfer me to the gold commander."

"Gold commander?"

"Now!"

"And who the hell are you?"

"The person in one of your monitors. But, I guess for this room it's completely black."

A clicking sound, a few seconds' silence, then a voice, one that he had heard before, the one that made the decisions-he had been transferred to the church tower.

He is a dead man in three minutes.

"What do you want?"

"He is a dead man in three minutes."

"I repeat… what do you want."

"Dead."

Three minutes.

Two minutes and fifty seconds.

Two minutes and forty seconds.

Ewert Grens was standing in a church tower and felt totally alone. He was about to make a decision about whether another person should live or die. It was his responsibility. And he wasn't sure anymore if he had enough courage to do it and then live with it afterward.

The wind wasn't blowing anymore. He certainly felt nothing on his forehead and cheeks.

"Sven?"

"Yes?"

"I want to hear it again. Who he is. What he's capable of"

"There isn't anything else."

"Read it!"

Sven Sundkvist was holding the documents in his hand. There was only time for a few lines.

"Extremely antisocial personality disorder. No ability to empathize. Extensive reports, significant characteristics include impulsiveness, aggression, lack of respect for own and others' safety, lack of conscience."

Sven looked at his boss but got no answer, no contact.

"Shooting incident involving a police officer in Söderhamn, at a public space on the edge of town, he hit-"

"That's enough."

He bent down toward the prostrate marksman.

"Two minutes. Prepare to fire."

He pointed to the door into the tower and the aluminum ladder peeping over the top of the hatch. They would go down into the room with the wooden altar-the marksman was to be disturbed as little as possible. He was about halfway down when he turned on the radio and held it to his mouth.

"From now on, I only want traffic between myself and the marksman. Turn off your mobile phones. Only the marksman and I will communicate until the shot has been fired"

The wooden stairs creaked with every step-they were approaching the control post and he would only leave again once it was over.

Mariana Hermansson knocked on the dirty window and looked at the camera that was focused on her. It was the fourth locked door in the long passage under the prison and when it was opened, she ran toward central security and the exit.

Martin Jacobson didn't understand what was happening. But he felt that it was nearing the end. In the last few minutes, Hoffmann had run back and forth several times, he was out of breath and he had shouted loudly about time and death. Jacobson tried to move his legs, his hands, he wanted to get away. He was so frightened, he didn't want to sit here anymore, he wanted to get up and go home and eat supper and watch TV and have a drink of Canadian whisky, the kind that tasted so soft.

He was crying.

He was still crying when Hoffmann came into the cramped storeroom, when he pushed him up against the wall and whispered that soon there would be an almighty explosion, that he should stay exactly where he was, that if he did that he would be protected and wouldn't die.

He was lying with both elbows positioned on the wooden floor of the balcony and enough room for his legs; his position was comfortable and he could concentrate on the telescopic sight and the window.

It was close.

Never before on Swedish soil had a marksman taken another life in peacetime, not even shot to kill. But the hostage taker had threatened his hostages, refused to communicate, made another threat. He had gradually forced the situation to this choice between one life and another,

One shot, one hit.

He was capable; even at this distance he felt confident: one shot, one hit.

But he would never see the consequences, a person blown to bits. He remembered one morning during training, the remains of live pigs that had been used as target practice-he couldn't bear to see a person like that.

He edged fractionally farther out on the balcony so that he could see the window even better.

She ran through the open prison gates and out into the nearly full parking lot, she rang Ewert's number for the second time and for the second time was cut off, she was nearly at the car and tried Sven and tried Edvardson without getting through, she got into the car, started it and drove over the grass and plants, looking up at the church tower as much as at the road as there was someone lying there, waiting.

Ewert Grens removed his earpiece, he wanted to get rid of the voices that were there because he had ordered them to be, that were his responsibility now and that had one single task.

To kill.

"Target?"

"Single man. Blue jacket."

"Distance?"

"Fifteen hundred and three meters."

He didn't have much time left.

Hermansson turned out of the prison drive and drove toward the small town of Asps1 s on the wrong side of the road.

"Wind?"

"Seven meters per second right."

She accelerated fast as she turned up the volume on the radio to max. "Outside temperature?"

"Eighteen degrees."

Oscarsson, what he had just said, Ewert… before anything was fired, before… he had to know.

I have never shot at a person.

I have never ordered anyone else to shoot at a person.

Thirty-five years in the police. In one minute… less than one minute. "Grens, over."

Sterner.

"Grens here, over."

"The hostage… he's covered… as if there's some sort of blanket wrapped round him."

"Right?"

Ewert Grens waited.

"I think… the blanket… Grens, it looks pretty weird…" Grens was shaking.

It wasn't the people outside the walls who were going to decide, it was the hostage taker, he was the one who moved the boundaries, challenged them, forced them.

"Continuer"

"… I think he's preparing for a… an execution."

You've worked there your whole life.

You're the oldest one there. You're the weakest. You're the chosen one. You are not going to die.

"Fire."

He had been watching the tower and the people up there the whole time. He had been careful to stand in profile, with the hostage close by, the diesel barrel close by, he had listened to their voices which had been crystal clear, it had been easy to understand the order.

Fire."

Fifteen hundred three meters.

Three seconds.

He heard the click.

He hesitated.

He moved.

The shot.

Death.

They waited.

"Abort. Object out of sight."

Hoffmann had stood there, his head cocked, in profile, he had been easy to see and easy to hit. Suddenly he moved. One single step was enough.

Ewert Grens was breathing heavily, he hadn't noticed before. He put a hand to his cheek, it was hot.

"Object in sight again. Ready to fire. Awaiting second order."

Hoffmann was back, he was standing there again.

One more time. A new decision. He didn't want to do it, couldn't face it.

"Fire."

He had heard a click. When the gun was cocked. And he had moved. This time he stayed where he was. In the middle of the window.

The first click in his ear and he stayed where he was.

Next.

The second click.

A finger on a trigger.

Fifteen hundred and three meters. Three seconds.

He moved.

One single moment.

It stretched out. It was empty and it was silent and prolonged.

Ewert Grens knew everything about moments like this, how they tormented you, ate you up and never, never let go.

'Abort. Object out of sight."

He had moved again.

Ewert Grens swallowed.

Hoffmann was about to die and it was as if he knew-one single moment, he used it and moved again.

"Object in sight again. Ready to fire. Awaiting third order."

He was back.

Grens grabbed hold of the earpiece that was resting on his shoulders, put it back in.

He turned toward Sven, looking for a face that was turned away. "I repeat. Ready to Fire. Awaiting third order. Over."

It was his decision. And his alone.

A deep breath.

He fumbled for the transmission button, felt it with his fingertips, pressed it, hard.

"Fire."

Piet Hoffmann had heard the order for the third time.

He had stood still when the gun was cocked.

He had stood still when the finger pressed on the trigger.

It was a strange feeling, knowing that a bullet was on its way, that he had three seconds left.

The explosion blocked out all sound, light, her breath… somewhere behind her something detonated that sounded like a bomb.

She braked abruptly and the car lurched, pulling her over toward the edge of the road and the ditch. She hung on, braked again, and regained control. She stopped the car and got out, still so shaken that she hadn't had time to be scared.

Mariana Hermansson had only had a couple of hundred meters left before she would reach Aspsås church.

She turned around, toward the prison.

A sharp, intense fire.

Then thick, black smoke that forced its way out of a gaping hole that until moments ago had been a window in the front of a prison workshop building.