The banknotes packed on the upper shelves were soaking wet, but would retain their value when they dried. He wasn’t interested in them. He got down on his knees in the water that flowed out over the floor and searched the lower shelves for anything that might contain the encryption key. He soon found, beneath a jewelry box and a couple of smaller gold bars, a little notebook with a black cover. He knew of course that documents could be damaged by water, by the blast and gas expansion, but also the notes in a closed notebook would probably still be intact as long as they weren’t written down with the wrong kind of pen.

6:12 PM

(3 hours and 50 minutes remaining)

He had flipped to the last page of the notebook and cried out.

From joy, from relief.

Everything was possible again.

There they were—row after row.

Written down and crossed out RSA codes.

Neither pencil nor marker—Hamid Cana had used an ordinary ballpoint pen, and its ink wasn’t affected by the water. And at the very bottom, on a line that began with yesterday’s date, stood twenty letters and numbers and characters in no particular order at all, which had not yet been crossed out.

The current code. With this he would be able to decrypt the contents of that computer and find whoever was trying to take over the Swedish weapons market by threatening his family and murdering their competitors. He could tell Grens, who would then have enough time to act.

Piet Hoffmann didn’t laugh, he was too busy, but his elation felt almost tangible, softened his whole body as he left the safe and pushed the secret entrance back into place. He’d packed Cana’s computer and phone into his backpack and was climbing up to the hole in the ceiling, when his phone buzzed again. The same number. But no link this time—just a picture. At first Hoffmann couldn’t make out what he saw. Then he magnified it. Now he could see—but he didn’t want to.

The picture was of Andy.

A dead Andy.

Slumped over at his usual place, his head had those unmistakable double bullet wounds.

The rest of the studio apartment was visible in the background—the drawn blinds, the monitors with their various surveillance images. And when Hoffmann enlarged a little more, he saw something else he wished he hadn’t.

On one of the TV monitors, obviously intended to be centered in the composition, just as much as Andy’s slumped-over body, you could see that the surveillance cameras had caught two faces looking out a window.

Zofia. And Hugo.

6:23 PM

(3 hours and 39 minutes remaining)

Piet Hoffmann stood in the middle of the tower room’s drenched floor and stared at his phone. He knew it was going to ring now.

“Good evening, Hoffmann. You thought you could break an agreement. That has a cost.”

The distorted voice.