“Exactly, Hoffmann. You’ll head there tomorrow—if everything goes as I hope this evening. As an official employee of the Stockholm City Police. An extremely temporary position, of course, but no one needs to know that. You were the one who said it. I infiltrate for you, you infiltrate for me.”

“And I’m headed to Albania because . . . ?”

“Because of this.”

The last paper in Grens’s stack. But instead of hanging it on the whiteboard, he handed it to Hoffmann.

“You wanted me to position a phone call. Use my contacts and locate the receiver. And much like forensic technician Krantz, I’m a wise enough man to know when not to ask questions. Such as whose phone had called that number. I imagine I wouldn’t like the answer, right? It might even require a police investigation of its own?”

Piet Hoffmann didn’t say a word. Grens was right—that the phone belonged quite recently to some now very badly injured security guards on Birger Jarls Street was exactly the kind of thing the detective wouldn’t want to hear in the midst of his informal investigation at his informal police station. Instead, Hoffmann started to peruse the paper he’d been handed. Information about the phone call he’d forced them to make by leaving the camouflaged hand grenade on their sink basin. He was here! Hoffmann! Which would lead him to the person behind this threatening organization. That’s exactly what he . . . Hang up, for fuck’s sake! He wanted you to call me! A conversation that Grens, with the help of his contact at the telecom company, was able to trace to a city in northern Albania called Shkodër. There was even an address—Rruga Komanit, and a picture of a building—a white house, luxurious in comparison to its neighbors, on a small street with a forest of antennas on its roof.

“In the room that looks like a tower, there, to the right on the second floor, that’s where a man picked up that call.”

“We know with that much precision?”

“We do.”

“And this city, Grens, which I can’t even pronounce—Shkodër, was it?—apparently has some fucking connection to this other investigation you don’t want to tell me about?”

Ewert Grens smiled, not much but enough to look pleased.

“Not yet, Hoffmann. I don’t want to tell you about it yet. An official investigation based in the real police station, which you don’t have anything to do with. But yes—it seems like my instincts as a cop were right, there is no such thing as a coincidence. Because the paper you’re holding in your hand shows, even proves, that both investigations are really just one.”

Chapter 38

Just like some cop movie.