A hidden room.

One meter deep, a few meters wide. With a single object inside. A safe.

Here.

The encryption key had to be inside that heavy steel structure.

4:01 PM

(5 hours and 59 minutes remaining)

He’d blown safes before, most recently in northern Africa. But this time, a regular, fast explosion wouldn’t work. The whole neighborhood would be able to hear that, and he didn’t want them to find out he was here before time was up. It would attract the guards, and if people were to die, there was a law-abiding police officer not far away who would be forced to act—and Hoffmann wanted that police officer on his side, not against him. Above all—it was too risky for the contents, the encryption key.

He would have to open it in another way. A slower, more cumbersome way, one he rarely used and that would eat up time he didn’t have.

He took a small drill, detcord and a detonator, a plastic pipe and a tightly rolled hose out of his backpack. He drilled a hole through the safe—the outer layer of steel, the middle section of concrete, the interior of steel—and poked through the thin pipe connected to the hose. Now he needed water. Latifi’s latest message had said that the room next door was being dusted now, and the cleaner never even noticed Hoffmann until two hands were around his chest, and soon he was bound to a pipe inside the bathroom. With one end of the hose on the faucet, the time-consuming work of filling the safe with water began. Piet Hoffmann checked to make sure the first liter had reached its destination and sat down on the floor. Now all he had to do was wait, and check now and then to make sure the guards were still in their places, with their attention turned in the wrong direction, ready to meet any external enemy.

5:43 PM

(4 hours and 19 minutes remaining)

Filling a safe with a few hundred liters of water via a very small drilled hole no more than eighteen millimeters in diameter was like filling a bathtub through a McDonald’s straw. It took even longer than feared.

He was looking at the time, estimating about fifteen minutes more, when the safe should be full and the detcord could be poked in and ignited.

When the phone started to vibrate in his hand. A text message. From a number he didn’t recognize.

Not one of the four he’d given his number to. Neither Zofia, Grens, Latifi, or Andy.

A text with a link to a voice message. That was it. No instructions, no greeting. He pressed the link and was thrown straight into a recorded phone call between two unknown voices.

“It took you a while to answer.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Aren’t you at all curious how a phone ended up in the mattress in your cell?”

“I don’t give a shit.”