Three Seconds

A Day Later

He liked the brown bread, thick slices with seeds all around the crust, it filled him and crunched a little when he chewed. Black coffee and orange juice that had been pressed as he watched. A couple of minutes from the flat, on the corner of Odengatan and Döbelnsgatan, Ewert Grens had eaten breakfast there a couple of times a week for as long as he could remember.

He had slept for nearly four hours, in his own bed, in the big flat and without dreaming about running and someone in pursuit. He had known it would be a good night as soon as he had shut the door, sat down in the large kitchen, and looked out of the window, gathered up all the files and papers that were still lying on the table, stood singing in the warm shower for a bit too long, listened to the voices of night radio.

Grens paid for his breakfast and four cinnamon buns, asked if they could be put in a bag, then a quick walk alongside the cars that stood waiting for each other in the dense morning traffic, Sveavägen to Sergels Torg, Drottninggatan to Rosenbad and the Government Offices.

The security guard, who was young and probably new, studied his ID and compared his name for a second and third time with the one given in the meeting book.

"The Ministry of Justice?"

"Yes."

"Do you know where her office is?"

"I was here a couple of nights ago, but we've never met."

The camera was in the middle of the corridor at face height. Ewert Grens looked into it, just as a police informant had done a few weeks ago, smiled at the lens, at roughly the same time that one of the security staff opened the door to a control room several floors down in the huge government building and discovered that the metal shelf with numbered security tapes was empty in two places.

They were waiting for him by the large table at the far end of the room. A half-empty porcelain cup in front of each of them.

It was eight in the morning and they had already been there a while; they had taken him seriously.

He looked at them, still not a word.

"You asked for a meeting. Well, you've got a meeting. We presume it won't take long. We've all got other planned meetings to go to."

Ewers Grens looked at the three faces, one at a time, long enough for it to be just too long. The two first faces, if they were calm, if they were pretending to be. Göransson, on the other hand, had a shiny forehead, his eyes kept blinking, his lips creased as he pressed them together hard.

"I've brought some cinnamon buns."

He put the white paper bag on the table.

"For Christ's sake, Grens!"

Hoffmann had had a family.

Two children who would grow up without a father.

"Does anyone want one? I bought one for each of us."

What if they looked him up in years to come? What if they asked questions, what would he answer?

It was my job?

It was my damned duty?

Your father's life was not as valuable to me and society as that of the prison warden he was threatening?

"No? Well, I think I'll take one. Göransson, can you pass me a cup?" He drank the coffee, ate a cinnamon bun, and one more.

"Two cinnamon buns left. If anyone changes their mind."

He looked at them again, one at a time as before. The state secretary met his gaze-she was calm, even a faint smile. The national police commissioner sat completely still, his eyes turned to the window, the Royal Palace roof and Storkyrkan tower. Göransson stared at the table. It was difficult to tell, but it looked like his shiny forehead was covered in droplets.

Ewert Grens opened the briefcase and produced a laptop.

"Good machine this. Sven took a similar one with him to the USA. He was there yesterday."

With fumbling fingers, he slipped in the CD, opened the file and a black square filled the screen.

'A lot of keys. But I'm quite good at it now. And by the way, it was Erik Wilson that Sven went to meet. With his laptop."

The security cameras were situated in two places. One about a meter above the glass security desk, the other in the corridor on the second floor. The footage he had seized late in the evening a couple of days ago was jumpy and slightly blurred, but they could all see what it was.

Five people entering one of the rooms in the Government Offices within a short space of time.

"Do you recognize them?"

Grens pointed at the picture.

"You might even recognize which room they're going into?"

He stopped the film, a still frame on the screen, someone standing with his back to the camera, arms outstretched, someone else behind him, hands on his back.

"The last thing that happens. The person in front here, with his arms out, is a man with a criminal record who, when this was recorded, worked as an informant for the city police. The man searching him, with his hands on the informant's back, is a chief superintendent."

Grens looked at Göransson, slumped at the table.

He paused, no eye contact.

"The laptop belongs to the police. But this is mine."

He had his hand in the outside pocket of the briefcase and was now holding a CD player.

"I was given it by Ågestam nearly five years ago after we'd had a slight altercation. It's a modern one, the kind that young people have. Don't tell him, but I haven't actually used it much. Until a couple of weeks ago, that is. When I started listening to some interesting recordings."

The bag of cinnamon buns was in the way, so he moved it.

"But these I've borrowed from the property store. From a burglary in a flat in Stora Nygatan. The preliminary investigation was closed. The seized property released. No one claimed it."

He positioned two small speakers on the table and took his time wiring them up.

"If they're good… who knows, I might just keep them."

Ewert Grens pressed one of the buttons.

Chairs scraping, noise of people moving.

"A meeting."

He looked around the room.

"In this room. At this table. Tenth of May at fifteen forty-nine. I'll fast forward a bit, twenty-eight minutes and twenty-four seconds."

He turned to his line manager.

Göransson had taken off his jacket, revealing dark stains near the armholes of his light blue shirt.

"The person speaking. I think you'll recognize the voice."

"You've dealt with similar cases before."

"You let me, Sven, Hermansson, Krantz, Errfors and…"

"Ewert-"

"… a whole bloody bunch of policemen work for weeks on an investigation that you already had the answer to."

Göransson looked at him for the first time. He had started to speak but Grens shook his head.

"I'll be done soon."

Fingers on the machine's sensitive buttons, got the right one after a while.

"I'll fast forward some more. Twenty-two minutes and seventeen seconds. The same meeting. Another voice."

"I don't want that to happen. You don't want that to happen. Paula doesn't have time for Västmannagatan."

Ewert Grens looked at the national police commissioner.

Maybe the well-polished veneer was starting to crack, it certainly felt like that: too many twitches around the eyes, hands rubbing slowly together.

"Lie to your colleagues. Burn your employees. Give some crimes immunity so that others can be solved. If that is the future of policing… then I'm glad it's only six years until I retire."

He didn't expect a response, adjusted the speakers so they stood face on when he turned them toward the state secretary.

"He was sitting directly opposite you. Doesn't it feel strange?"

"I guarantee that you won't be charged for anything that happened at

Västmannagatan 79. I guarantee that we will do our best to help you complete

your operation in prison."

"A microphone, at about knee-height, on a person who was sitting in the same place that I am now."

And… that we will look after you when the work is done. I know that you will then have a death threat and be branded throughout the criminal world. We will give you a new life, a new identity, and money to start over again abroad."

Grens lifted the small speakers, moved them even closer toward the state secretary.

"I want to be sure that you hear what comes next."

Her voice again, exactly where he'd interrupted her.

"I guarantee you this in my capacity as a state secretary of the Ministry of Justice."

He reached for the white paper bag, first one more cinnamon bun, then what was left of the coffee at the bottom of his cup.

"Crime: failure to report a crime. Crime: protection of a criminal. Crime: conspiring to commit crime."

He was anticipating that they might ask him to leave, threaten to call security, ask him what the hell he thought he was doing.

"Crime: perjury. Crime: gross misuse of public office. Crime: forgery of documents."

They sat still. They said nothing.

"Perhaps you know of others?"

Some seagulls had been circling outside the window since the meeting began.

Their loud screeches were now the only thing to be heard.

That, and the regular breathing of four people around a table.

Ewert Grens stood up after a while, walked slowly across the room, first to the window and the birds, then back to the people who were no longer in a rush to get anywhere.

"I won't carry the guilt. Not anymore. Not again."

Three days earlier he had dared to make a decision he had dreaded throughout his working life-to fire a lethal shot at another person.

"I was not responsible for his death."

Last night he had dared to spend several hours in a cemetery-a modest grave that he had been more frightened of than anything else he could remember.

"I was not responsible for her death."

His voice, it was remarkably calm again.

"It was not me who committed murder."

He pointed at them, one at a time.

"It was you. It was you. It was you."

Another Day Later

A couple of centimeters above the tail bone, the third or fourth vertebra, the pain was unbearable at times. He moved with care, he pedalled with his feet in the air, one at a time, then nothing could be heard and the intense pain was dulled for a while.

He didn't notice the smell, the stench of urine and feces; in the first few hours perhaps, but that was a long time ago, not now, not anymore.

He had kept his eyes open the first evening and night and morning, looking for what couldn't be seen, shouting voices and running feet. But he had his eyes closed all the time now, the heavy darkness. He couldn't see anything in any case.

He was lying on square pieces of aluminum that had been welded to form a long, round pipe-he guessed about sixty centimeters in diameter, just enough room for his shoulders and if he stretched his arms up he could press his palms against the top of the pipe.

There was still pressure on his stomach and he let go of the drops that trickled down his thighs-it felt better, eased the discomfort. He hadn't had anything to drink since the morning before he took the hostages, only the urine he managed to catch and lift to his mouth, a couple of handfuls over a hundred hours.

He knew that a person could survive a week without water, but thirst was like hosting madness and his lips and palate and throat shrivelled in the presence of dryness. He held out, just as he held out against the hunger and pain in his joints from lying so still, and against the dark that he had relaxed into once the shouting and running feet fell silent. It was the heat that had made him think about giving up a couple of times. All electricity had been turned off in connection with the smoke and fire and when the ventilation system no longer supplied fresh air, the temperature in the sealed pipe had risen and felt like a fever. In the last few hours he had just aimed at a couple of minutes at a time, but that didn't work anymore, he couldn't stand much more.

He should have left the pipe yesterday.

That was what he had planned: three days for the adrenaline and full alert to die down.

But yesterday afternoon someone had opened the door, come in, and walked around in the substation. He had lain petrified and listened to the footsteps and breathing of a guard or electrician or plumber only half a meter below him. The control room for the prison's water and electricity was only checked a few times a week, he knew that, but still he waited for another twenty-four hours to be on the safe side.

He pulled his left arm up toward his face, looked at the watch that had belonged to the elderly warden.

Quarter to seven. Another hour to lock-up.

Then an hour and a quarter for the staff to change shifts, when the day guards became the night guards.

It was time.

He checked that the scissors were still in his trouser pocket, the ones that had been in a pen holder on the desk in the workshop office and that he had cut his long hair with on the first day, his arm and hand movements restricted by the inside of the pipe, but he had plenty of time to do it and it had been a good way to forget the sound of people looking for body parts. He teased them out of his pocket again and, arm back, hit the inside of the pipe hard with the point until his fingertips felt a hole and he could slash the soft metal with the blades. He braced his body directly above the cut and pushed back, feet against the base, both hands against the sharp edges of the metal. He was bleeding heavily when the pipe finally gave way and he sank through the aluminum and fell onto the stone floor of the substation.

He counted fifty-seven small red and yellow and green lights on panels that controlled the water and electricity; counted them one more time.

No steps, no voices.

He was certain that no one had heard a body landing on the floor in one of the rooms with a door straight out into the passage that linked Block G and central security. He grabbed hold of a washbasin with his hands and hauled himself up. He was dizzy but the sensation crawling around his body disappeared after a while and he trusted it again.

He searched around in the unnerving darkness.

There was a flashlight on a hook on the wall under a fuse box. He chose that rather than the ceiling light-he could turn on the flashlight and let his eyes slowly adjust to the light. It hurt more than he'd imagined when the dark became light and it's possible he cried our when it was thrown back at him by the mirror above the washbasin.

He closed his eyes and waited.

The mirror didn't attack him anymore.

He saw a head with hair of varying lengths, big tangles that hung loose. He picked the scissors up from the floor and straightened it, cut it as short as he could, only a few millimeters left. The razorblade had also been in one of the desk drawers and later in the same trouser pocket. He leaned down and gulped some water from the tap and then wet his face and bit by bit peeled off the beard he had started to cultivate on his way out of the meeting in Rosenbad, following the decision to infiltrate inside Aspsås's high prison walls.

He looked in the mirror again.

Four days earlier, he had had long, fair hair and a three-week beard. Now he was cropped and clean-shaven.

Another face.

He let the water run, got undressed, and rubbed the piece of dirty soap that was lying on the washbasin. He washed his body and waited until it had dried in the warm room. He went back to the pipe and the sharp metal edges and with his hands felt around and caught the pile of clothes that a few days earlier had been worn by a principal prison officer called Jacobson, before becoming a makeshift pillow to save his neck and prevent the clothes from being soiled by body fluids.

They were about the same height and the uniform fit almost perfectly. The trousers were perhaps a bit too short, the shoes perhaps a bit too tight, but it didn't matter, it didn't show.

He stood by the door and waited.

He should be frightened, stressed, anxious. He felt nothing. He had been forced to adopt this life state when the ability not to feel meant the same as survival: no thoughts and no longings, no Zofia and Hugo and Rasmus, everything he had to remind him of life.

He had stepped into it as he passed through the prison gate.

Only dropped it for two seconds.

When the shot was about to be fired.

He had stood by the window and adjusted the earpiece and for the last time looked over at the church tower. He had glanced at the rug that concealed a body covered with explosives and the barrel of diesel and gas close to their feet and the fuse that was resting in his hand. He had checked his position, he had to stand in profile, he had to force them to aim at his head so no forensic scientist would later question the absence of a skull bone.

Two seconds of pure fear.

He had heard the order to fire on the receiver. He had to stand there and wait. But his legs had somehow moved too early, they had moved without him intending to do so.

Twice he had not managed.

But the third time, the state of control had returned, no thoughts and no feelings and no longings, he was protected again.

The shot was fired.

He stood firm.

He had exactly three seconds.

The time it would take for the ammunition, in a wind strength of seven meters per second and a temperature of eighteen degrees celsius, to leave the church tower and at a distance of fifteen hundred three meters hit a head in a workshop window.

I mustn't move too soon, I know the sniper's observer is watching me with binoculars.

I count.

One thousand and one.

I hold the lighter in my hand with the flame naked and ready.

One thousand and two.

I take a swift step forward just as the bullet hits the window and I hold the flame to the fuse that is attached to the body under the rug.

The shot had been fired and it was no longer possible to see the object through a window that had been seriously damaged.

He now had two seconds left.

The time it would take for the fuse to burn down to the detonator, pentyl and nitroglycerine.

I run to the pillar that I chose earlier, just a couple of meters away, one of the square concrete blocks that carry the ceiling.

I stand behind it when the last centimeters of fuse disappear and the stuff that is wound and taped around a person's body explodes.

My eardrums burst.

Two walls-the one behind the principal prison officer and the one into the office-collapse.

The shattered window is blown out and falls down into the prison yard.

The pressure wave finds me but is dampened by the concrete pillar and the rug over the hostage's body.

I am unconscious, but only for a few seconds.

I am alive.

He had been lying on the floor with the howling pain in his ears when the heat from the explosion reached the diesel barrel and black smoke assaulted the room.

He had waited until it had found its way out through the hole that had until recently been a window, creating a grayish-black wall that blanketed and hid much of the workshop building.

He had taken the pile of uniform clothes that belonged to the older guard and thrown it out through the window, then jumped out himself, onto a roof that was only a few meters below.

I sit without moving and wait.

I am holding the clothes in my arms, I see nothing through the thick smoke and with no eardrums I struggle to hear, but I feel the vibrations of people moving around on the roof close by, policemen who are there to put an end to a hostage drama; one of them even runs into me without realising who I am.

I don't breathe, I haven't since I jumped through the window, I know that breathing in this toxic smoke is the same as death.

He had moved close to those who heard the steps without realizing that they belonged to the man they had just seen die, over the roof toward the shiny sheets of metal that looked like a chimney. He had climbed down into the hole, his arms and legs pressed hard against the walls until the pipe narrowed and it had been difficult to keep his grip, then he had let go, fallen the last bit down to the bottom of the ventilation shaft.

I crouch down and crawl into the pipe that is sixty centimeters in diameter and leads back into the building.

With my hands against the metal, I pull myself forward bit by bit, until I am above a room that is a substation and has a door straight out into the lower prison passage.

I lie down on my back, the pile of clothes under my head like a pillow. I am going to stay in the ventilation shaft for at least three days. I will piss and shit and wait but I will not dream, I will not feel, there is nothing, not yet.

He put his ear to the door.

It was difficult to make out, but there might be someone moving about out there-wardens walking past down the passage, not prisoners at this time of day, it was after lock-up and they would all be in their cells.

He ran his hand over his face and head, no beard, no hair, down his thighs and calves, no dried urine.

The new clothes smelled of another person, some deodorant or aftershave that the old warden must have used.

Movements out there again, more people passing.

He looked at the watch. Five to eight.

He would wait a little longer; it was the guards coming off duty and on their way home, he had to avoid them, they had seen his face. He stood waiting for fifteen minutes more, the dark substation and fifty-seven yellow and red and green lights around him.

Now.

Several of them, and at this time of day, it could only be the night shift. The ones that clocked in after lock-up, who never met the prisoners and therefore didn't know what they looked like.

His hearing was dramatically impaired but he was certain that they had passed. He unlocked the door, opened it, went out and closed it again.

Three wardens with their backs to him about twenty meters down the passage that linked Block G with central security. One was roughly his age, the others much younger and presumably newly qualified, on their way to one of their first workplaces. At the end of May Aspsås prison was always affected by the large influx of summer temps who, after a mere one-hour introduction and a two-day course, put on their uniforms and started to work.

They had stopped in front of one of the locked security doors that divided the passage up into smaller sections and he hurried to catch up. The older one was holding a set of keys and had just unlocked the door when he came up behind them.

"Can you wait for me, please?"

They turned around, looked at him, up and down.

"I'm a bit behind."

"On your way home?"

"Yes:"

The guard didn't sound like he suspected anything when he spoke; it had been a friendly question, between colleagues.

"You new?"

"So new that I haven't got my own keys yet."

"Less than two days then?"

"Started yesterday."

"Just like these TWO. Third day for you all tomorrow. Your first key day." He followed behind them.

They had seen him. They had spoken to him.

Now he was just one of four wardens walking together down a prison passage toward central security and the big gate there.

They parted at the stairs that went up to Block A and an eleven-hour shift. He wished them a good night and they looked with envy at their colleague who was about to go home for an evening off.

He stood in the middle of the reception area. There were three doors to choose from.

The first was diagonally opposite him-a visiting room for a woman or a friend or a policeman or a lawyer. It was there that Stefan Lygis had sat when he was told that there was an informant, a snitch in the organization, someone had whispered so someone must die.

The second one was directly behind him, the door that opened on to the corridor that ended in Block G. He almost laughed-he could walk back to his own cell dressed in uniform.

He looked at the third door.

The way past central security and the ever-watchful TV monitors and numbered switches that meant that all the locked doors in the prison could be opened from the large glass box.

There were two people sitting in there. At the front a fairly plump guard with a dark unkempt beard and a tie thrown over his shoulder. Behind him another, considerably slimmer, man with his back to the exit-he couldn't see his face but guessed he was around fifty and probably had some kind of senior position. He took a deep breath, stretched and tried to walk straight: the explosion that had taken both eardrums had also played havoc with his balance.

"Going home in your uniform? Already?"

"Sorry?"

The guard with the round face and sparse beard looked at him. "You're one of the new ones, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"And you're going home in your uniform already?"

"Just the way it worked."

The guard smiled-he was in no rush, some more empty words and the evening would be shorter.

"It's warm out. Darn nice evening."

"I'm sure it is."

"Going straight home?"

The guard leaned to one side and moved a small fan that was standing on the desk, fresh air in the stuffy room. It was easier to see the other man, the one who was thin and sitting on a chair at the back.

He recognized him.

"I think so."

"Someone waiting for you?"

Lennart Oscarsson.

The chief warden he had assaulted a few days ago in a cell in the voluntary isolation unit, a fist in the middle of his face.

"Not at home. But we're meeting again tomorrow. It's been a while." Oscarsson snapped shut the file and turned around.

He looked over at him.

He looked but didn't react.

"Not at home? I had one once, a family that is, but well, I don't know, it just, you know-"

"You'll have to excuse me."

"What?"

"I haven't got time."

His tie was still flung over his shoulder, there were bits of food on it, or maybe it was just wet and lying there to dry.

"Haven't got time? Who does have time?"

The guard pulled his beard, flared his nostrils, his eyes hurt.

"But by all means. Go. I'll open for you."

Two steps up to the metal detector.

Then two steps to the door that was opened from inside the glass box.

Piet Hoffmann turned around, nodded to the guard who was waving his hands around in irritation.

Lennart Oscarsson was still there, right behind him.

Their eyes met again.

He expected someone to start shouting, to come running.

But not a word, not a movement.

The man who was clean-shaven with cropped hair and wearing a warden's uniform when he disappeared out through the gate in the prison wall may have seemed familiar but he didn't have a name-the summer temps seldom did-this one smiled when his face was brushed by the warm wind. It was going to be a lovely evening.

Yet Another Day Later

Ewert Grens was sitting at his desk in front of a bookshelf with a hole that could not be filled, no matter how hard he tried, and the dust lay in straight lines no matter how often he wiped it away. He had been sitting there for nearly three hours. And he would continue to sit there until he had worked our whether what he had just seen was something he should be concerned about or whether it was just one of those moments that seemed to be important but that lost all significance if it wasn't shared with someone else.

The day had started with a beautiful morning.

He had slept on the brown corduroy sofa with the window to the courtyard open and had been woken by the first trucks on Bergsgatan. He had stood for a while looking up at the blue sky and gentle wind and then, with a coffee cup in each hand, had gone to the elevators and the remand jail a couple of floors up.

He couldn't resist it.

If you were there early enough and it was clear enough, at this time of day, for a few hours, you could walk along the obvious line cast by the sun in the corridor of the remand jail. This morning he had walked where the floor shone most, making sure to pass the cells where he knew they were in custody for the third day with full restrictions. Ågestam had been careful to ensure that they would wait for most of the statutory seventy-two hours and later that day Grens would attend the court proceedings for the issue of arrest warrants for a chief superintendent, a national police commissioner, and a state secretary from the Ministry of Justice.

The hole on the bookshelf It was as if it was growing.

It would continue to do so until he had made up his mind.

He had spent two days fast forwarding and rewinding tapes from the security cameras at Aspsås prison, frame by frame through locked doors and long passages and gray walls and barbed wire barriers back to those seconds that exploded with thick smoke and dead people. He had studied

Krantz's forensic reports and Errfors' autopsy report and all Sven's and Hermansson's interviews.

He had spent considerable time on two things in particular.

A transcript of the dialogue between the sniper and the observer just before the shot was fired.

Where they talked about a rug that Hoffmann had put over the hostage and tied with something that later in the investigation proved to be a pentyl fuse.

A rug that encapsulates and directs the blast pressure downward, protecting anyone standing nearby.

An interview with a principal prison officer called Jacobson.

Where Jacobson described how Hoffmann covered the hostage's skin with small plastic bags filled with some sort of fluid, which later in the investigation proved to be nitroglycerine.

Nitroglycerine in such large amounts that every part of the body is shattered and can never be identified.

Ewert Grens had laughed out loud in the office.

He had stood in the middle of the floor and looked at the video recorder and the transcripts on the desk and had continued to laugh as he left the police headquarters and drove out to Aspsås and the wall that dominated the small town. He had gone to central security and requested to see all footage from the prison security cameras from twenty-six minutes past two in the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of May and thereafter. He had driven back, got himself some fresh coffee from the machine and sat down to watch every moment that had passed since a lethal shot was fired from a church tower.

Grens had already known what he was looking for.

He had selected the camera that was called number fourteen and was installed about a meter above the glass front of central security. He had then fast forwarded and stopped to study every person who went out. Wardens, visitors, prisoners, suppliers, one head at a time as they passed, their hairline close to the lens; some showed their ID, some signed the register, most were waved through by a guard who recognized them.

He got as far as a tape that was recorded four days after the shot was fired.

Ewert Grens had known instantly that he'd found it.

A man with cropped hair in a Prison and Probation Service uniform had looked up at the camera as he left at six minutes past eight in the evening, looked up for just too long, and then gone on.

Grens had felt the pressure in his stomach and chest that was normally anger, but this time was something else.

He had stopped the tape and rewound, studied the man who chatted with the guard for a while and then looked up at the camera in the same way that he had done three weeks earlier with another guard in another glass-fronted security office, the one in the Government Offices. Grens had followed the uniformed person through the metal detector and the gate and the wall via cameras number fifteen and sixteen and had observed that the person had problems with his balance: it had been an almighty blast, the sort that could burst your eardrums.

You're alive.

That was why he had been sitting at his desk for three hours looking at a hole growing on the bookshelf.

I didn't make a decision about death.

That was why he had to determine if what he had just seen was something he should be concerned about or whether it was of no significance if no one else knew.

Hoffmann is alive. You didn't make a decision about death either.

He laughed again while he took a document out of the desk drawer-summons to the court proceedings for the issue of arrest warrants that he was about to attend and that would lead all the way to a conviction and long sentences for three high-ranking officers who had abused their power.

He laughed even louder, danced across the floor of the silent office, after a while quietly humming something that anyone passing just then might have recognized as a melody that perhaps sounded like a song from the sixties, like "Somebody's Fool" and Siw Malmkvist.

And Yet Another Day Later

It was as if the sky were slowly closing in.

Erik Wilson stood in the asphalt yard, his thin clothes itching as nervous flies searched among the pearls of sweat. Ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit, just above body temperature and it would be even hotter in a couple of hours, in the early afternoon-the heat seemed to settle around that time of day.

He wiped his forehead with an already moist handkerchief and wasn't sure whether his skin or the material benefited most. It had been hard to concentrate in the lecture hall, the air conditioning in the building had broken down in the morning and the discussion about the follow-up course advanced infiltration had petered out. Even the heads of police from the western United States who normally liked to listen to their own voices were listless.

He watched, as he usually did, through the fence and barbed wire that overlooked the large practice ground-six black figures trying to protect a seventh, shots fired from two low buildings and two of them threw themselves over the protected object and the car raced forward and then off. Erik Wilson smiled. He knew how it would end: this president would also survive and the baddies who fired from the buildings would be unsuccessful. The Secret Service won every time, the same exercise as three weeks ago, different police officers, but the same exercise.

He turned his face up to the cloudless sky, as if to torment himself; the sun would wake him up.

At first he had blamed the heat. But it wasn't that.

He just wasn't there.

He hadn't been present at all in the last few days-he had taken part in the discussions and exercises, but he wasn't in the room, his thoughts and energy drained from his body.

Four days had passed since Sven Sundkvist had asked him to drive seventy kilometers to the state line and Jacksonville for lunch in a restaurant that had room for laptops with security camera images on its white tablecloths. He had seen Paula's face in a prison window and then an explosion and black smoke when the shot fired by a sniper had ripped apart a human being.

They had worked together for nearly nine years.

Paula had been his responsibility. And his friend.

He was nearly at the hotel, fleeing the heat on his cheeks and forehead. The spacious lobby was cool, jostling with people who were delaying going out. He headed for the elevator and the eleventh floor, the same room as before.

He got undressed and had a cold shower and lay down on top of the bed in his robe.

They burned you.

They whispered and then looked the other way.

He got up, the restlessness had returned, the lack of focus. He flicked through the day's edition of USA Today, yesterday's New York Times, drowned himself in TV ads for detergent and local lawyers. He wasn't there, no matter how hard he tried. He wandered around the room, stopping after a while in front of the mobile telephones he had already checked in the morning, his link to all the informants: five handsets side by side on the desk since the evening he arrived. It was usually enough to check once a day, but the restlessness and the feeling of being absent… he checked again.

Lifted them up, studied them, one by one.

Until he held the fifth phone in his hand. He sat down on the edge of the bed, shaking.

One missed call.

On a mobile phone that he should have disposed of as the informant was dead.

You don't exist anymore.

But someone is using your phone.

He was sweating again, but it wasn't the heat; this came from inside, a feeling that burned and cut, like nothing he had known before.

Someone has control of your phone. Someone has found it and has dialed the only number that is stored there.

Who?

Someone investigating? Someone in pursuit?

The room was cool, he was freezing so he pulled back the bedclothes and crept down under the duvet that smelled of scented conditioner and lay still until he started to sweat again.

Someone who doesn't know who has this phone. Someone who is calling a number that isn't registered anywhere.

He was shivering again, more than before; the thick duvet was chafing his head.

He could phone. He could listen to the voice with no risk of being identified.

He dialed the number.

A sound wave looking for a harbor in the weightless air, a few seconds stretched to hours and years, then the ringing tone, a long shrill peep.

He listened to the tone that rasped in his ear three times.

And a voice he could recognize.

"Mission completed."

Careful breathing on the other end, at least that's what it sounded like-perhaps it was just the signal that was weak and atmospheric interference was trying to muscle in.

"Wojtek eliminated in Asps å s."

He lay on the bed, didn't move, scared that the person talking to him would vanish from his hand.

"See you in an hour at number three."

Erik Wilson smiled to the voice that blended with another, a repeated call over the loudspeakers, probably in an airport.

He had perhaps known, somewhere deep, deep down, or at least hoped. Now he knew.

He answered.

"Or another time, another place."