And besides, most organizations worthy of the name criminal had long since made arrangements with their gun suppliers. They had their own smuggling channels—there was no urgent need for new actors in an already functioning and saturated market.

So.

That’s where he came in.

Piet Hoffmann, for the sake of a still nameless someone, had to create a need that didn’t exist, make sure the already well-armed wanted more powerful guns.

Piet Hoffmann would alter, maybe even destroy, the balance of terror by creating a new predator with no natural enemy, therefore forcing everyone else to buy the weapons they believed everyone else was buying.

Who?

What organization was trying to enter the illegal gun trade?

And why didn’t they take care of this themselves? Why pull him into it—an outsider who everyone knew had already gone straight?

Two ambulances and a tow truck later and traffic finally started to inch forward. In that slow and confusing way of commuters, ten meters at a time. Until he finally reached an off ramp and could exit the chaos of the highway.

He parked with a wheel up on the sidewalk in the zone intended for school taxis. It wasn’t pretty but it would have to do. He started to run across the schoolyard, but soon slowed—he had to calm down—and he started to walk with long, firm strides toward the white building where the lower grades had their classrooms. As soon as he stepped inside he realized that he’d never been here during the daytime. The PTO meetings and parent-teacher conferences that he’d been to were all held in the evening when the building was empty of children. As he walked through the hallway, he noticed how absence had been replaced by presence, dullness by energy, silence by all those voices leaking through closed doors. He passed three classrooms and stopped in the corridor near the fourth. He saw a long line of hooks bearing the bags and backpacks of twenty-four pupils who were spending their afternoon learning to write letters that might come in handy some day. And above each hook stood a small rectangular sign, made by the students themselves and then laminated. RASMUS in handwriting that Hoffmann knew well, and it made him smile. And next to the name—a drawing of a blue crocodile with glasses and a top hat. Or at least that’s what Hoffmann thought it was. A crocodile with its mouth wide open, showing off sharp green teeth. Hoffmann snuck over to the door and peered through its round window. Marie was walking around the classroom with her back to him while her students sat at their desks writing in a concentrated way. She was able to get her two dozen eight-year-olds to simultaneously and throughout a long lesson do what he found so impossible to do with just one eight-year-old—make them focus for more than two minutes in a row.