Three Seconds

time.
    No steps, no voices.
    He was certain that no one had heard a body landing on the floor in one of the rooms with a door straight out into the passage that linked Block G and central security. He grabbed hold of a washbasin with his hands and hauled himself up. He was dizzy but the sensation crawling round his body disappeared after a while and he trusted it again.
    He searched around in the unnerving darkness.
    There was a torch on a hook on the wall under a fuse box. He chose that rather than the ceiling light – he could turn on the torch and lethis eyes slowly adjust to the light. It hurt more than he’d imagined when the dark became light and it’s possible he cried out when it was thrown back at him by the mirror above the washbasin.
    He closed his eyes and waited.
    The mirror didn’t attack him any more.
    He saw a head with hair of varying lengths, big tangles that hung loose. He picked the scissors up from the floor and straightened it, cut it as short as he could, only a few millimetres left. The razor blade had also been in one of the desk drawers and later in the same trouser pocket. He leant down and gulped some water from the tap and then wet his face and bit by bit peeled off the beard he had started to cultivate on his way out of the meeting in Rosenbad, following the decision to infiltrate inside Aspsås’ high prison walls.
    He looked in the mirror again.
    Four days earlier, he had had long, fair hair and a three-week beard.
    Now he was cropped and clean-shaven.
    Another face.
    He let the water run, got undressed and rubbed the piece of dirty soap that was lying on the washbasin. He washed his body and waited until it had dried in the warm room. He went back to the pipe and the sharp metal edges and with his hands felt around and caught the pile of clothes that a few days earlier had been worn by a principal prison officer called Jacobson, before becoming a makeshift pillow to save his neck and prevent the clothes from being soiled by body fluids.
    They were about the same height and the uniform fitted almost perfectly. The trousers were perhaps a bit too short, the shoes perhaps a bit too tight, but it didn’t matter, it didn’t show.
    He stood by the door and waited.
    He should be frightened, stressed, anxious. He felt nothing. He had been forced to adopt this life state when the ability not to feel meant the same as survival: no thoughts and no longings, no Zofia and Hugo and Rasmus, everything he had to remind him of life.
    He had stepped into it as he passed through the prison gate.
    Only dropped it for two seconds.
    When the shot was about to be fired.
    He had stood by the window and adjusted the earpiece and for the last time looked over at the church tower. He had glanced at the rug that concealed a body covered with explosives and the barrel of dieseland petrol close to their feet and the fuse that was resting in his hand. He had checked his position, he had to stand in profile, he had to force them to aim at his head so no forensic scientist would later question the absence of a skull bone.
    Two seconds of pure fear.
    He had heard the order to fire on the receiver. He had to stand there and wait. But his legs had somehow moved too early, they had moved without him intending to do so.
    Twice he had not managed.
    But the third time, the state of control had returned, no thoughts and no feelings and no longings, he was protected again.
    The shot was fired.
    He stood firm.
    He had exactly three seconds.
    The time it would take for the ammunition, in a wind strength of seven metres per second and a temperature of eighteen degrees, to leave the church tower and at a distance of fifteen hundred and three metres hit a head in a workshop window.
    I mustn’t move too soon, I know the sniper’s observer is watching me with binoculars.
    I count.
    One thousand and one.
    I hold the lighter in my hand with the flame naked and ready.
    One thousand and two.
    I take a swift step forwards just as the bullet hits the window and I hold the flame to the fuse that is attached to the body under the rug.
    The shot had been fired and it was no longer possible to see the object through a window that had been seriously damaged.
    He now had two seconds left.
    The time it would take for the fuse to burn down to the detonator, pentyl and nitroglycerine.
    I run to the pillar that I chose earlier, just a couple of metres away, one of the square concrete blocks that carry the ceiling.
    I stand behind it when