Free Three Seconds by Anders Roslund, Börge Hellström

What were you both doing there?"
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        He had been so scared. But he wasn ' t going to die. He had met the Roof for the first time and it hadn't meant death, so that meant he was farther in. He didn't know how or where, only that Paula was getting closer to the breakthrough he had risked his life for every day, every minute for the past three years.
        Piet Hoffmann sat beside the empty chair in the far-too-brightly-lit meeting room. Grzegorz Krzynówek had just left with his elegant suit and clean appearance and words that pretended to be something other than organized crime and money, and violence to get more money.
        The deputy CEO no longer had tight lips when he spoke, nor strained to keep his back straight. He opened a bottle of Zubr ówka and mixed it with apple juice: there was an intimacy and confidentiality associated with drinking vodka with the boss, so Hoffmann smiled at the piece of grass in the bottle which wasn't particularly good, as that was polite and the custom, and at the former intelligence officer in front of him who had so meticulously transgressed his class and even swapped the ugly glasses from the kitchen table for two expensive, hand-blown tumblers, which his enormous hands were not quite sure how to hold.
    "Na zdrowie."
        They looked each other in the eye and emptied their glasses, and the deputy CEO poured another.
        "To the closed market."
        He drank up and filled the glasses a third time.
        "We're speaking plain language now."
        "I prefer it."
        A third glass was emptied.
        "The Swedish market. It's time for it. Now."
        Hoffmann found it hard to sit still. Wojtek already controlled the Norwegian market. The Danish market. The Finnish. He was starting to understand what this was all about. Why the boss had been sitting there. Why he himself was holding a glass of something that tasted like bison grass and apple juice.
        He had been heading here for so long.
        "There are about five thousand people in prison in Sweden. And nearly eighty percent of them are big time consumers of amphetamines, heroin and alcohol, aren't they?"
        "Yes."
        "Which was also the case ten years ago?"
        "Yep, back then too."
        Twelve bloody awful months in ()sterner prison.
        "One gram of amphetamine costs one hundred and fifty kronor on the street. In the prisons it's three times as much. A gram of heroin costs a thousand kronor on the street. On the inside, three times as much."
        Zbigniew Boruc had had this conversation before. With other colleagues in other operations in other countries. It was always about the same thing. Being able to calculate.
        "Four thousand locked up drug addicts-the amphetamine freaks who take two grams a day, the heroin addicts who use one gram a day. Just one day's business, Hoffmann… between eight and nine million kronor."
        Paula had been born nine years ago. He had lived with death every day since then. But this, this moment, made it all worthwhile. All the damn lies. The manipulation. This was where he was headed. And now he had arrived.
        "An unprecedented operation. Initially, though, big money has to be invested before we can even start, before we get anything back."
        The deputy CEO looked at the empty chair between them.
        Wojtek had the power to invest, to wait as long as it took for the closed market to be theirs. Wojtek had a financial guarantee, the Eastern European mafia's variant of the consigliere, but with more capital and more power.
        "Yes. It's an unprecedented operation. But possible. And you are going to lead it."
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         Ewert Grens opened the window. He normally did around midnight to listen to the clock on Kungsholms Church and then another one that he had never managed to locate, he only knew that it was farther away and couldn't be heard on