Three Seconds Read Online Free PDF Page A

Mariusz were standing by the sink with yellow rubber gloves on, picking out the bits of brown rubber that the young woman threw up, along with the milk and something else, in the two buckets on the floor in front of her. She was the fifteenth and final mule. They had emptied the first one in Västmannagatan, and had been forced to empty the rest here. Piet Hoffmann didn't like it. This flat was his protection, his cover, he didn't want it to be linked with either drugs or Poles. But they didn't have time. Everything had gone wrong. A person had been shot through the head. He studied Mariusz; the man with the shaved head and expensive suit had killed someone only a couple of hours ago, but showed nothing. Maybe he couldn't, maybe he was being professional. Hoffmann wasn't frightened of him, and he wasn't frightened of Jerzy, but he respected the fact that they had no limits; if he had made them nervous, suspicious of his loyalty, the shot that had been fired could just as easily have been aimed at him.
        Anger chased frustration chased dread and he struggled to stand still with all the turmoil inside him.
        He had been there and he hadn't been able to prevent it.
        To prevent it would have meant death for him.
        So another person had died instead.
        The young woman in front of him was done. He didn't know her, they had never met. He knew that she was called Irina and she came from Gdansk, that she was twenty-two and a student and was prepared to take a risk that was far greater than she imagined and that was enough. She was a perfect mule. Just the sort they were looking for. Of course there were others, junkies from the suburbs of larger cities who flocked in their thousands, willing to use their bodies as containers for less than she was paid, but they had learned not to use drug addicts as they were unreliable and often seemed to throw up by themselves long before they reached their destination.
        Inside, the anger and frustration and dread, more emotions, more thoughts.
    There hadn't been any operation. But there had been a delivery over which he had no control.
    There hadn't been any results. The Poles should have been back in Warsaw by now, his tool for mapping and identifying another partner.
    There hadn't been any deal. They had shipped in fifteen mules unnecessarily, ten experienced ones who they supplied with two hundred capsules each and five new ones who took one hundred and fifty capsules each, in total more than twenty-seven kilos of freshly produced amphetamine which, once it had been cut for sale, would come to eighty-one kilos with a street value of one hundred and fifty kronor per gram.
        But without any backup, there was no operation, no result, not even a deal.
        It was an unchecked delivery that had ended in murder.
        Piet Hoffmann gave the young, wan woman called Irina a brief nod. The money had been in his trouser pocket since the morning, counted and rolled up in bundles. He pulled out the last bundle and flicked through the banknotes so she could see it was all there. She was one of the new ones and didn't yet have the capacity that the organization expected. She had only delivered fifteen hundred grams on her first trip, which would be three times as much when cut to its sellable form, worth a total of 675,000 kronor.
        "Your four percent. Twenty-seven thousand kronor. But I've rounded it up to three thousand euros. And if you dare to swallow more next time, you'll earn more. Your stomach stretches a little each time."
        She was pretty. Even when her face was pale and her hairline sweaty. Even when she had been on her knees in a three-room flat in Sweden, puking up her guts for a couple of hours.
        "And my tickets."
        Piet Hoffmann nodded to Jerzy, who took out two tickets from the inner pocket of his dark jacket. One for the train from Stockholm to Ystad and one for the ferry from Ystad to winoujcie. He held