“Well, that’s, well . . . very nice. That you found someone, I mean. And that Wilson found someone. That you no longer, well, need to live alone, I mean. But still—he’s your commanding officer, Mariana. You work in the same unit. One of you is going to have to transfer. That’s what the regulations say. Don’t you know that?”

“And why do you think we didn’t want to talk about it?”

The stool was hard, lacked any back support, and it was difficult for him to sit without pain. But he couldn’t stand up, not yet. He asked Sven and Mariana to leave the cell and wait for him at the guard’s box. He had heard what she said. He knew her so well, her serious ways that he’d come to depend on so much. Lost me. You and I are over, too. Unlike him, she’d never say that and not mean it.

He had nobody other than those two. His closest colleagues were also his closest friends.

And he already knew how it would feel, once he had time to feel. When the last few hours of this race against time were over, and he could do no more for Hoffmann. Despair. That was what awaited him if she really did leave him, and he hated that goddamn terrible feeling, he’d tried his best to bear it after Anni disappeared.

7:15 PM

(2 hours and 47 minutes remaining)

The brick at the center and top, a light press. Then that metallic click. And a wall slid open.

Piet Hoffmann left the boiler room’s oily odor for the smell of mold and moisture in a seventy-five-meter long tunnel. He had reopened the hidden space behind the bookshelf and dragged the two bodies inside it—they’d lie there until their stench seeped out like a dead animal stuck in the wall. He’d made his way through the house and down to the basement, worried with every step that the gunshots might have attracted more notice. Halfway into the tunnel, he relaxed somewhat, he was on his way. Out. Away. Toward somebody he thought he’d seen for the last time. Because when Latifi gave him the message that Hamid Cana had left his house with his hawk eyes and his bodyguards, Piet Hoffmann assumed he would never have to think about where that Albanian arms dealer was again. When he came across the decryption key in a watery safe, he was convinced. Their paths would never cross. Then everything changed. Again. The organization’s Swedish branch realized they were at risk and sacrificed their boss to protect themselves. And to ensure that, they renewed and intensified their threats to a hidden family. They now had access to their address and their executioner.