Someone was watching him, studying his family, probably doing so right now, and he had no clue who or why.

Start a small war? What the hell did that even mean?

But he recognized the MO. It reminded him of how he used to threaten people. You drive them toward what you want them to do, but you give them just one piece of information at a time. You keep a tight grip on them while pushing them in the right direction. Until your mark really starts to wonder, starts getting worried and scared, more susceptible. That’s when you deliver your message—tell them what they need to do.

He checked the time. A quarter past two. After the first call, he’d stopped by the safe houses and transitioned clients out of one of his three units, the older couple hiding behind tulle curtains, who dared to testify against a gang—in their place, an emergency installation of a young woman who had been forced to flee her family after getting pregnant with a man of the wrong ethnicity. He’d then driven to his office on Vasa Street and had a meeting with someone from a computer company in Kista, a recurring customer looking to upgrade their external security. Mechanical. That was probably the best description of how he functioned. Sure, he looked like he was smiling and talking and selling, he sounded professional and engaged, but it wasn’t him. Inside he was somewhere else. With Zofia and Luiza. With Rasmus and Hugo. With whoever was threatening them in anonymous letters, who spoke in a distorted voice, and who would soon be coming back to push him further in the direction they wanted.

Now.

Now was that time.

He could hear the phone ringing in his inner pocket.

“Good afternoon.”

The distorted voice. An unknown number on the display screen.

“You’re going to start a small war for us.”

Piet Hoffmann had just turned off the lights in his office and turned on the alarm, and he was stepping out into the hall when the phone rang. He glanced around quickly. Finding a camera, a controlling eye just a centimeter wide, which could be placed basically anywhere, was as impossible here as on the streets around his house in Enskede. He hurried to the stairs. Was that fucking voice sitting somewhere studying him on a computer screen? Were they across the street in some window? Were they hiding inside a parked car? Was he being watched this whole time and didn’t know it?

“Mmm. You said that yesterday. Start a war? What the hell does that mean?”

“Exactly what it sounds like. And you’re going to do it on your own. With a weapon called a FN BRG-15.”

An already bizarre conversation was now even more so.