The Helicopter Heist: A Novel Based on True Events

2

Michel Maloof had decided to go for a walk through the newly built waterfront area along Hornsbergs Strand. He was wearing a thin black coat over his dark suit, and the smooth soles of his shoes hadn’t been designed for the icy ground. Every now and then he slipped on the path. He was carrying a black briefcase in one hand. It acted as a kind of counterweight, helping him keep his balance when he turned onto the path down toward the canal on the other side of the Ekelund Bridge.

He was early. The meeting wasn’t until two, meaning he still had twenty minutes to kill. He had parked his pale gray Seat Ibiza right outside the entrance to the G4S offices on Warfvinges Väg. The car was the most anonymous he had ever driven; if he left it in a big car park, he might even walk straight past it. But for Maloof, it was often important not to draw any attention to himself, and the Seat Ibiza seemed to have been designed with that very ambition in mind.

Even so, he didn’t have the patience to sit and wait in it for almost half an hour.

He had never come this close before.

It wasn’t nerves he was trying to shake off during his quick walk, it was excitement.

The cold weather was back after a warm January, but the narrow canal was still clear of ice. Maybe the city made sure to keep all its channels open? He didn’t know anything about Stadshagen, it wasn’t his neighborhood.

Michel Maloof had been born in Lebanon. When he was six, his family had fled the country’s bloody civil war and made their way to Italy, via the coast, but for his father, the final destination had always been clear. They were going to Scandinavia, that paradise on earth. How or why his father had come to believe that the Nordic countries were the solution to all their problems, young Michel hadn’t known, but he hadn’t been raised to question his father. Their journey from Italy continued north, and the bright colors and warm winters of the Mediterranean were replaced by cold Norrland seriousness. Maloof’s lasting memory of that time in his life was that he had been freezing. Constantly.

After their first year in Åsele, in the north of the country, roughly halfway between Östersund and Arvidsjaur, even Maloof’s father had decided that he was fed up with the silence, the darkness and the forests. He made the family pack up their few belongings once again. The dream of Sweden still lived on, but living so close to the Arctic Circle was too extreme. So the family set down roots in the Stockholm suburb of Fittja instead, a place many associated with criminality, poverty and social problems. But it was there that the family had finally found the security they had been searching for, where the positives were so great that the negatives could be ignored. It was where they lived to this day.

At the foot of the Essingeleden Bridge, Maloof turned to head back. A fine layer of powdery snow was covering the grass on either side of the path, making the gray afternoon seem a little brighter.

Of all the neighborhoods in Stockholm, Stadshagen, tucked away to one side of the city center, was one of the most anonymous. The district had been an industrial area since the fifties, with no other ambition than to offer cheap square footage and accessible docks. It was only recently that the politicians and town planners had realized that the location was far too good to be an industrial and business wasteland, and they were poised to transform the area into an attractive place to live.

As Maloof walked back up onto Hornsbergs Strand and saw the signs of the building work, which had been temporarily brought to a halt by the cold, he felt the familiar relief at not living in central Stockholm.

He liked Fittja and never felt the urge to come into town; in fact, he almost always wanted to get away from it.

He looked at his watch. Ten to two.

Maloof took a deep breath.

An older woman with blow-dried blond hair and glasses with black frames was sitting in reception. On the wall behind her, the G4S logo glowed like a religious icon for its employees to bow down to every time they came into the office.

The woman gave Maloof a stern look as he climbed the stairs from the street.

He unconsciously straightened the knot in his tie, quickly pushed his long hair behind his ears and ran a hand over his neat beard. Then he smiled broadly.

“I have a meeting with Anders Mild at two?”

The woman wasn’t falling for his charms. She nodded reluctantly and told him to sit down to the right of reception while she called Mild’s secretary.

The minimalist sofa was even less comfortable than it looked, and as Maloof sat down, he was reminded of just how much he disliked wearing a suit. The modern cut felt tight across his shoulders. He had bought a dark red tie the day before, and it had taken twenty minutes of increasing frustration to manage a nice knot. How was anyone supposed to feel successful with a noose around his neck?

Maloof leaned forward and peered down the corridor of offices. The man he was waiting for, Anders Mild, was the managing director and head of G4S in Sweden. Without Zoran Petrovic’s help, Maloof would never have managed to arrange this meeting, and as Mild’s secretary came down the corridor toward him, Maloof realized how Petrovic had managed it.

Mild’s secretary was very young and very cute.

Maloof got to his feet. He realized he was clutching the handle of his black attaché case far too hard. He shook the girl’s hand.

“Can I get you anything?” she asked as she showed him into a large meeting room with a view out onto the roofs of the surrounding buildings and the treetops down by the canal. “Water? Coffee?”

“Sure,” said Maloof. “That’s fine, thanks.”

He pulled out a chair in the middle of the long table and set down his briefcase on the one next to it.

“Do you need to use the projector?” the girl asked, still not sure whether her guest had said yes or no to the offer of coffee.

At first, he didn’t know what she meant.

“For the presentation?” she explained. “You’re giving a presentation to Anders, no?”

Maloof shook his head. “Right, right. Yes… no projector today,” he said, patting his briefcase with a smile. “This is my presentation.”

She nodded, not caring what he meant, and then left him with the door open while she went to fetch her boss.

Maloof was far too worked up to sit down.

Along with Zoran Petrovic, Maloof had done a lot of research. G4S was the world’s biggest security company. Operating in 125 countries, it was also one of the largest private employers, with over 600,000 staff globally. The company’s humble origins could be traced back to Copenhagen, where, around the same time as fireworks lit up the night sky to celebrate the dawn of the twentieth century, a small firm that hired out night guards had been born. A few decades later, the company was renamed Group 4 Falck, but it would be a while before its growth really took off.

“It’s all about money,” Petrovic had explained to Maloof. “You can chug away for year after year without anything really happening. I mean, who hasn’t run a security company? But without resources, you’re not going to get anywhere.”

Some time after the dawn of the next century, the venture capitalists had suddenly turned their attention to the security industry. They opened their coffers, brandished their whips, changed the company’s name to Group 4 Securicor and launched an extensive takeover plan. In Sweden, the once state-owned ABAB fell victim to the growing firm, and Petrovic turned nostalgic and told a long, pointless story about how he used to trick ABAB guards in an industrial area.

Group 4 Securicor, or G4S, grew rapidly on the London Stock Exchange and eventually split into two distinct business areas: G4S Secure Solutions, which dealt with surveillance, and G4S Cash Solutions, which handled the secure transport of valuables.

Anders Mild was responsible for G4S Cash Solutions in Sweden, and he didn’t leave Michel Maloof waiting for more than a moment or two in the meeting room. Mild was blue eyed and average height, with a neck that barely seemed able to support his head, and he was dressed in a shiny gray suit and an exclusive pale blue shirt that was unbuttoned at the collar. He moved energetically around the conference table, shook Maloof’s hand and nodded toward the older man who had come in behind him, but who had chosen to remain on the other side of the table.

“This is Rick Almanza,” Anders Mild said, introducing his colleague. “Rick here is responsible for our European activity, Michel. He’s my boss. I told him about our meeting, and he thought it sounded so interesting that he flew over from London to join us. Is it OK if we continue in English?”

Maloof smiled and nodded.

Could it be true? What exactly had Zoran Petrovic said? Anders Mild didn’t know a thing about Maloof, who hadn’t even used his real surname when he booked the meeting, to avoid any problems with Google. Did people really fly over from London on such vague grounds? Was it a trap?

Suspicion was precisely what he needed. He felt his racing heart slow, his nerves give way to energy and this new challenge sharpen his focus. This was how he worked.

He was only ever nervous before the task itself, never while he was sorting it out. He nodded and enthusiastically shook Rick Almanza’s hand over the table.

“English. No problem. I’m truly honored.”

Anders Mild went back over to his boss’s side of the table and sat down.

Maloof debated whether to move over to the whiteboard, but decided against it. It wasn’t like he had anything to draw on it, anyway.

He glanced at the lapel on Mild’s jacket, where there was a small G4S logo badge. Michel Maloof had been robbing secure transport vehicles bearing that same logo since his early teens. Did the two men opposite realize that they had just let one of Sweden’s most notorious robbers into the boardroom of the world’s biggest security firm?

3

Out in the hallway, Sami Farhan tied his boots, pulled on a thick, dark green down jacket over his polo shirt and was just about to step into the stairwell when he heard John wake.

He paused in the doorway, his fingers silently drumming the handle, listening tensely. The cot was in their bedroom, by the window. Since it was only six in the morning, he had pushed the door shut to avoid waking Karin or the boy. He stood completely still for a moment, and the babbling seemed to stop, but then he heard an expectant gurgle that gradually increased in volume.

The baby was definitely waking up.

Sami gently closed the front door and quickly made his way back down the hall and into the bedroom, still wearing his coat and boots. Karin was sleeping, but she turned anxiously in the big double bed. She had been up at least two or three times during the night, he wasn’t exactly sure. Sami lifted the tiny body from the cot and held the boy against his soft down jacket, gently rocking and lulling the little bundle. But his efforts were doomed to fail. John was hungry, and no amount of rocking would fix that.

“What time is it?”

Karin mumbled into the pillow. Sami carefully lowered the baby onto the bed next to her. The scent of breast milk practically made John howl, and Karin pulled back the covers, revealing her round, pregnant belly as she uncovered her breast.

“Where are you off to so early?” she asked, still not knowing what time it was.

Sami was sweating under his thick coat. He stood there irresolutely, rocking nervously, as though he were still holding the baby. He couldn’t tear his eyes from them. The pregnant woman breastfeeding the tiny child. His family. The scent of bodies filled the room. Skin, closeness.

“Are you going to school?” she asked.

He grunted. It could be interpreted as a confirmation without actually being one.

“What’s the time?”

The minute Karin opened her eyes and turned her head, she would see the digital clock on the bedside table. He told the truth.

“Five past six.”

“Have they started doing dawn lectures or something?”

She smiled, but her eyes were still closed. The baby guzzled.

Sami was enrolled at the Kristineberg culinary school, in his second semester. He had always been good at cooking, but now he was going to learn the trade from scratch. He had promised her. When she got pregnant for the first time, she had given him an ultimatum. In her usual clear way, she had explained that if there was a risk that the father of her child would end up in prison, she would find a new one, one who had different ambitions in life. Either Sami stopped using his days to plan one spectacular robbery or break-in after another, or he could clear off right then, before he became emotionally attached to the baby. And vice versa.

There had been no question for Sami, it had been obvious. He was willing to do anything for Karin’s sake.

That was why he had applied to Kristineberg. He had finally decided to get himself a real job.

“The whole class is going out to Frihamnen to meet the boats coming in with shellfish,” he answered, bending the truth slightly.

Like always, he talked with the help of his arms and hands. He showed the direction of Frihamnen, mimicked the boats moving into the harbor and made a gesture that might have represented some kind of shellfish.

“Go,” Karin whispered with a smile. “Get going. We might fall asleep again…”

He nodded. Tapped his foot like he was keeping time with a techno tune at double speed. But still, he couldn’t move. John was feeding noisily. Karin could sense his hesitation. She opened her eyes and looked at him, standing fully dressed in front of her.

“You’re so damn handsome.” She smiled. “Don’t just stand there being so ridiculously handsome, get going.”

He smirked, nodded again and freed himself from the spell by turning abruptly and heading back out into the hall. He ran down the uneven stairs of their old building on Högbergsgatan. Those thousands of hours in the ring during his teenage years had left their mark; he practically flew down them.

As he stepped out into the cold February air, he allowed himself to fill with pride. During all their meetings and discussions last autumn, he had kept the feeling to himself. There had been so many loose ends that he hadn’t wanted to talk about it in advance. But now he finally dared believe it was actually going to happen.

Sami jogged down the street. The snow that had fallen during the night would blow away as the day wore on. When he turned the corner onto Katarina Västra Kyrkogata, the bare trees in the churchyard were like black silhouettes against the dark gray sky. The sun wouldn’t rise for hours yet.

The plan was to be back home with Karin by lunch, after a quick stop at Systembolaget to buy a magnum of Moët to celebrate.

When he reached the car, he sat down behind the wheel with a smile on his face. Without Karin and John, he reminded himself, he would never have made it this far. Without them, maybe he wouldn’t have even tried.

He drove toward Katarinavägen, thinking about all the warnings he had been given over the years. Bitter former bachelors who missed their carefree lives. Those who knew enough to say that babies meant no sleep to begin with, then no sex, followed by no life. He would say they were partly right. He was sleeping badly and his sex life was nothing to boast about.

But John was a miracle who outweighed it all.

Change was always difficult. People stayed in the same jobs for year after year because they didn’t dare try anything else. They hung out with childhood friends they had long since grown apart from, who were easier to call up than finding anyone new. Sami’s childhood had been one long journey of discovery through the southern Stockholm suburbs. If it had been twenty or forty different addresses in the end, he had no idea, but it didn’t matter. In his day, the segregation hadn’t been what it was today. Back then, people had just been lumped together, Muslims, Christians and Jews. Turks, Iraqis and Yugoslavians. He had learned to get along with everyone, had found it easy to talk and become friends with both Finnish migrants and African refugees. He had become a chameleon, been forced to learn how to quickly adapt to new situations.

It was something he made use of now. He had thought it before, but this time it was real. For Karin’s and the kids’ sake, both born and unborn, he would leave the criminal life behind him. He would shed his skin. Not delete any of the thousands of names in his contacts list, but add some new ones instead.

It wasn’t the easiest way to go about it, but it was his way.

Sami Farhan drove across Skeppsbron and through Blasieholmen. It was Tuesday morning, and the traffic in central Stockholm was still sparse. Across the water, he could see Af Chapman, the ship that had been turned into a youth hostel. Its illuminated white hull lay quietly in the water, which was as black as a pool of ink.

He was out in good time. What he called being careful, others might call a need to be in control.

He really was going to Frihamnen. But he was going there alone, not with his classmates from Kristineberg. For him, the hours behind a school desk were over, there wouldn’t be any more lectures on cooking. He would never be able to give his family the life they deserved by slicing cucumber for cold buffets or pouring béarnaise sauce over filet mignon.

Today, that morning, was the first day of their new lives. And, like always, it was luck that had given him this chance. It hadn’t been easy to find the money. He had gone in with everything he had, all the cash he’d been able to withdraw. Plus he had brought in other financiers. His brothers, first and foremost. They had mocked him, doubted him and called him “the fishmonger.” But they had still made the investment, like so many of his other friends and acquaintances. Karin’s uncle had even stepped up, and all without her knowing a thing. Clean money being placed into a lawful business.

By the time he reached Nybroplan, the city had clearly woken up. There were people walking from Strandvägen toward Hamngatan, and from Blasieholmen toward Östermalm. Stockholm’s wealthiest neighborhood had never appealed to the Södermalm resident Sami. Besides, the suburbs felt more present in the city center than they did where he lived, and he had long since had enough of the suburbs. Karin Flodin was born and bred in the streets around Nytorget, and the schools there were some of the best in town. It was in Södermalm that his children would grow up.

Sami had loved Karin for as long as he could remember. He’d always believed that one true love awaited every person, and he had been lucky. He had met his while he was just a teenager.

The moment she transformed from his unattainable, youthful obsession into his actual lover, the love he felt for her had deepened in a way he would never have been able to predict. Vague dreams became a physical reality. Crumpled tubes of toothpaste, unwashed plates and scrunched-up underwear on the bathroom floor were all points of irritation that had never featured in his fantasies. But nor had he been able to imagine how the skin of her stomach would smell in the morning, how her eyes would glitter when she looked at him, or how she would grab his hands whenever he told a story, hold them still and gaze deep into his soul, revealing things about him that he hadn’t even been aware of himself.

When she added the next role to those she had filled earlier and became the mother of his child, his love had undergone another transformation. It was most obvious when he thought about how he would feel if he lost her. That had always been his worry, but he could no longer imagine a life without Karin. The thought was too painful.

That was why Sami Farhan was in the car on that dark, early February morning. Driving along Strandvägen toward his new life.

4

“Here it is,” Michel Maloof said in English.

He lifted the black briefcase from the chair next to him and placed it on the table.

Director Anders Mild and Chairman Rick Almanza stared suspiciously at the bag.

“Your briefcase?” Mild asked. “But… I think I must have misunderstood something. I thought this meeting was about streamlining our Swedish distribution activity.”

“Exactly, exactly.” Maloof smiled, flashing his white teeth, set off by his dark beard, at the two men. “There’s no better way to put it. Streamlining. In Sweden.”

“What do you mean?” Mild wondered.

“I mean that maybe… now that we’re speaking in English anyway… this could be of interest elsewhere than just Sweden?”

The best way to deal with a bluff was to call it.

Maloof was still unsure whether the Englishman was who he claimed to be. The idea that the chairman had flown in to see him seemed absurd.

But the older man remained silent, and Maloof felt more like he was being observed than questioned.

“Let me… tell you about my briefcase,” Maloof continued. He had told Anders Mild’s secretary that he had flown up from Malmö for the meeting in Stockholm. “It was on the floor under the seat on the plane yesterday. And I had it next to me this morning when I drove over here. So… well… how many people do you think noticed it?”

It was a rhetorical question. The black briefcase on the table was as anonymous as the room they were sitting in. It looked neither cheap nor expensive, and it seemed to be utterly lacking in design. From a distance, it looked like leather, but a closer inspection would suggest it was some kind of tough plastic.

“Are you saying…” the Englishman began. He had worked out where Maloof was heading.

“Right, right.” Maloof smiled, and his grin grew wider. “This briefcase isn’t just the equivalent… it’s more secure than any other security bag on the market. It holds much more.”

He tried to prevent his pride from turning into self-conceit. But the truth was that Maloof himself was fascinated by the bag on the table in front of him.

Anders Mild seemed to have worked out what the day’s meeting was about, what Maloof was doing there. The director twisted uncomfortably in his seat and gave a short sigh. Plenty of salesmen tried to sell new security bags to G4S. A Swedish company from the north of the country, SQS in Skellefteå, was already well into the development stage and had a number of customers on the continent. Maloof was sure that SQS, like everyone else, had also tried to get a meeting. But without a Zoran Petrovic to date the director’s secretary, those doors remained closed.

It was too late now for Mild to do anything about it; Maloof’s bag was already on the table.

“Is it really possible?” Mild asked. He sounded doubtful. “For it to be that big inside?”

Without further ado, and with an infectious enthusiasm, Maloof began his detailed demonstration of the inside of the briefcase.

For years now, G4S had been using blue security bags produced in southern Germany. One of Zoran Petrovic’s Serbian contacts had been to the top-secret factory, and it was there that the idea had been born. The German bags were big and bulky, meaning the guards had to move them about using small dollies, and it was impossible to either pick up or drop off the cash without drawing attention to it. As a consequence, they had made a virtue of necessity and developed the big blue bags into portable spy centers. They contained, in addition to GPS devices capable of being tracked within a sixty-mile radius, built-in security cameras and hidden microphones. Which meant that they also registered and documented everything that a potential robber said or did. Many of Maloof’s friends had learned that very fact during trials, as prosecutors presented the court with evidence that was impossible to deny.

According to Petrovic, the bag’s greatest feature was its security-protected locking function. For one, it was impossible to pick with ordinary skeleton keys, but screwdrivers, crowbars and brute force wouldn’t work either. A couple of inexperienced kids or an opportunistic junkie would never manage to crack the lock. Even professional robbers who took the blue bag to a workshop and laid into it with real tools would fail. The bag was booby-trapped and would detonate if opened incorrectly, causing dye ampoules to explode. The money, and sometimes even the robber’s clothes, would be destroyed in the process.

The black bag Michel Maloof was demonstrating to the European division of G4S that Tuesday afternoon in February could boast all the same features as the blue bag. And since the company from Skellefteå still hadn’t managed to take out patents on its products, Maloof’s bag had also borrowed several functions from them.

But in addition to that, there were two crucial improvements. First of all, Maloof’s black briefcase was roomier than the blue bags. The security and technology features had been condensed and stored in the lid and the bottom, leaving more space for the valuables requiring transport. The result was a light, discreet bag, when compared with the blue monsters currently being used.

“Incredible,” Mild said once he had allowed himself to be convinced.

“Right, right,” Maloof agreed. “We… that is… manufacture takes place in Slovenia. That’s the reason… for the price.”

He looked the two men straight in the eye. They still hadn’t talked prices; the men hadn’t asked and Maloof hadn’t wanted to bring it up until he was sure they were convinced. But judging by how intensely they had been nodding during his presentation, he was cautiously optimistic. The Englishman was harder to read, but toward the end he had even allowed a quick smile.

Now the older of the two cleared his throat and spoke directly to Anders Mild.

“This was a surprise,” he said. “Truly.”

Almanza’s English was the kind Maloof had grown up with on TV during the late seventies, from programs based in rural English castles and country manors, with men in green tweed clothing who hunted foxes at weekends and employed an army of servants.

The Englishman turned to Maloof.

“I’m in Sweden for a conference, not flying home until tomorrow evening,” he explained. “Anders asked whether I would like to join him for this meeting, and I answered yes mostly because I had nothing urgent to attend to. I’m glad I did.”

Maloof tried to hold back a satisfied smile, but he only half-managed it. He stroked his beard and looked proudly at his black security bag, as though it had performed particularly well.

“Naturally, there are a number of questions we will have to return to,” Almanza continued. “Among them the security in the Slovenian factories.”

“Of course,” Maloof replied.

“And then there’s the question of exclusivity.”

Maloof nodded.

“Exclusivity. If G4S makes an order… then obviously none of your competitors would be able to buy our product.”

He gave a wide smile. The Englishman nodded with satisfaction. Maloof realized that the price was clearly a minor detail in this context. They still hadn’t asked about it. He had gone into the meeting with the intention of asking for 20,000 kronor per bag, but he now realized he could just as easily say 30,000. It would make absolutely no difference. He hardly dared think about how much money that would mean within the Swedish market, but imagine if they were talking about a Europe-wide deal?

According to Zoran Petrovic, each bag cost 5,000 kronor to produce. The number of security bags used in the Swedish market was somewhere around ten thousand.

The amount was dizzying.

“And there will have to be some discussion in London,” Almanza added drily, “but I’m fairly sure my enthusiasm will rub off onto our colleagues there.”

He raised a confident eyebrow to show that this was just a formality, and Anders Mild nodded in agreement.

“And you could fly over to London to repeat this presentation?”

Maloof smiled and sat down. “Of course, of course. Just give me a few hours… I’ll be there.”

Almanza looked pleased.

When Michel Maloof and his family had landed at Arlanda almost thirty years earlier, he had torn up his Lebanese passport and flushed it down the toilet before they even reached passport control. That was what you did back then, that was the advice they had been given from relatives already in Sweden. Without a passport, refugees were registered as stateless, which minimized the risk of being sent back. Where could they be sent back to? But that early morning in a toilet cubicle at the airport was something Maloof had come to regret over the years. He and his family had been permitted to stay in Sweden, but getting ahold of a Swedish passport without a foreign one to swap it for had proved almost impossible. And by the time Maloof had waited long enough for it to finally be a possibility, he had been arrested for the first time.

That meant he had ended up at the back of the line. The same thing would go on to happen again and again. Michel Maloof was now thirty-two, but he still didn’t have a passport, neither Lebanese nor Swedish. And since England was outside the Schengen zone, there was no way he could make the trip to London. He would have to send someone else. Petrovic could go. It wasn’t a big problem.

Rick Almanza stood up, and Mild did the same.

“Thank you so much, Michel,” the Englishman said. “It’ll be a pleasure to do business with you.”

Maloof got to his feet. He felt dazed and confused. He shook hands with the two men on the other side of the table.

He had just earned more money than he ever could have dreamed of. Millions. Tens of millions.

“Thank you. And as for the price… the quantity… and the delivery date…?”

Almanza laughed.

“We’ll have plenty of time to get back to you about that,” the older of the men said. “The contract on our current security bags doesn’t expire until 2024. That gives us fifteen years to negotiate.”

Maloof’s smile faded. Had he heard him right? Had he misunderstood?

“As I’m sure you can understand,” Anders Mild explained in Swedish, “we can’t do much as long as we’re tied into our current contract. But we plan ahead within G4S, and I hope you can do the same.”

2024?

Were they pulling his leg?

5

Sami Farhan turned left onto Tegeluddsvägen and drove across the train tracks toward the offices and warehouses in Frihamnen. It was six thirty in the morning, the sky was still dark and expectation made him drum the wheel with his fingers.

Compared with the sleepy inner city, the harbor was a hive of activity. Vans and trucks shuttled along Frihamnsgatan in the glare of the bright spotlights that replaced the streetlights out there, cranes lifted containers from ships and the thought that a metal box just like that would be the starting point for Sami’s new life got him worked up.

Hassan Kaya’s office was in Magasin 6, and Sami pulled up next to the loading dock.

In just under half an hour, the boat would be coming in.

He hadn’t been able to stop himself from coming down to see it with his own eyes. He had agreed to meet Ibrahim Bulut, the one who had originally attracted him to the project, on the dock. It would be a moment to remember.

Four months earlier, Sami had stepped into Hassan Kaya’s cramped, cluttered office off a narrow corridor with no windows on the second floor.

Ibrahim Bulut had taken care of the introductions.

Sami had boxed with Bulut at a club called Linnea during his teens. It hadn’t been for more than a couple of months, but that was all it took for the two to strike up a friendship. They continued to see one another from time to time over the years, and had even done a couple of jobs together in the early 2000s. Since then, Bulut had been busy doing exactly what Sami was about to do. He had changed sides. The Turk had left his criminal life behind him and now ran a successful business importing flowers in Årsta. It was through his import work that he had come into contact with Hassan Kaya last autumn, just as Kaya was about to start a new company. That Sami had been invited to get involved was purely because he had been in the car with Bulut when Kaya called to talk about his plans.

A few days later, they met up in Kaya’s office in Magasin 6. The room smelled damp and had been full of files and papers. Sami had sat down on a wooden chair and listened as Kaya explained the setup.

He had been in the game for a long time, he said, and had been importing fresh and frozen shellfish since the mid nineties. But now he was changing tack, giving up the fight against the big monopolies—ICA and Axfood. That was why he needed new partners. The majority of fishing for prawns and mussels was done in the North Sea, but if you went farther, up toward the Arctic Ocean, the quality of the shellfish was much better. The reason so few did it was that the journey back to Sweden often took a long time because the seas were so rough. But Hassan Kaya had managed to find a captain who froze the shellfish as soon as it was loaded onto the boat, and who also delivered superior-quality products at a reasonable price. With the kind of markup you could add as a wholesaler, they would be making money hand over fist.

On a paper napkin he grabbed out of an old takeout carton from a Chinese restaurant on Valhallavägen, Kaya had scrawled out the plan. Sami had taken the figures away with him. So he could work out for himself just how much money there was to be made in the import branch.

“We’re starting a company,” Kaya had explained. “You, me and Ibrahim. My captain needs to upgrade the freezers on board, and that needs capital. Ibrahim’s promised to go in with ten million and I’m doing the same. How much were you thinking of investing?”

After the meeting, Sami had felt overwhelmed. He didn’t have that kind of money. Once he had emptied his own bank account and his brothers had reluctantly agreed to loan him the majority of their savings, Sami had eventually managed to convince some of his friends and Karin’s uncle to get involved. He managed to scrape together a total of five million. For that, he got 20 percent of the newly formed import company.

He told Karin about the project, but failed to mention just how much he was staking on it.

Still, risks were something he had lived with his entire life.

When Sami Farhan ran up the two flights of stairs in Magasin 6 to exchange a few words with Hassan Kaya that cold February morning, he wasn’t surprised to find the door to the unassuming office locked. Kaya had advised Sami not to go out there to meet the boat; unloading a container full of frozen prawns was hardly a spectacular event for someone who had done it countless times before.

But Sami hadn’t listened.

He rushed back down the stairs and out of the building. The water of the Baltic Sea was still a few degrees warmer than the chilly morning air. Fog lay over the bay and the docks, and his face grew damp as he crossed the street. It was ten to seven, and he smiled when he saw Ibrahim Bulut’s white Mercedes parked at the end of the dock.

The successful wholesaler climbed out of his car as Sami approached, and they greeted one another.

“Time to make some damn money,” Bulut said with a hoarse laugh. A cloud of condensation left his mouth, as though he were laughing in a speech bubble. “Where’s the boat?” he asked, glancing around.

Sami shook his head and pointed randomly toward the harbor entrance. “You’re the one who knows this stuff. I’ve got no idea. Are boats like planes? Do they dock at a set time, or how’s it work?”

“When did a plane last land on time?” Bulut asked. “Have you seen the trucks?”

Hassan Kaya had shown them sketches of the trucks that would be emblazoned with the company’s logo. They should have been there to take the cargo, but there was no sign of them. Sami was jumping up and down on the spot like a child who wanted immediate answers to his questions.

The clock struck seven, and the two friends talked about Årsta warehouses and how much money they were going to make on frozen shellfish, all while trying to keep warm as best they could. Sami was constantly glancing in the direction of the Baltic, hoping to catch sight of the boat.

But there was no boat anywhere to be seen, and no trucks either.

By seven thirty, Sami couldn’t hide his frustration any longer. He told Bulut to wait by the Mercedes while he went away to talk to a couple of men busy unloading goods.

Sami Farhan wasn’t someone who left things to chance. During the two months that had passed since he invested in the project, he had asked Hassan Kaya thousands of questions, and Kaya had patiently answered them all. Thanks to that, Sami not only knew that the boat they were waiting for sailed under an Estonian flag, but also what its designation was and where it would dock.

But no one working in the harbor that morning could give him the slightest idea as to what had happened.

At quarter to eight, Sami called Hassan Kaya. The phone rang, but there was no answer. For once, it also didn’t go to voice mail.

“I don’t like this,” Sami said when he returned to Bulut and the car. “You know what I mean? This doesn’t feel good.”

He thumped his chest through his down jacket.

“You’re just paranoid.” Bulut smiled. He was leaning against his Mercedes, smoking a cigarette. “As usual.”

“It’s not just my money. Do you get that? People are expecting things. From all directions.”

“You’ve mentioned that a few times,” Bulut pointed out. “Like, a hundred.”

“So where the hell’s the boat?”

Sami’s hand drummed against his thigh, and he shook his head.

“You want to sit down and wait?” Bulut suggested. His friend’s behavior was starting to stress him out.

They climbed into the Mercedes and Bulut turned the ignition to get the heater going. They stared at the empty harbor entrance in silence, Sami still drumming his hands. On his thighs, on the dashboard, on the car door. After a few minutes, he couldn’t bear it any longer.

“I’m going to see if he’s in the office yet.”

Ibrahim Bulut nodded.

When Sami Farhan returned to the corridor in Magasin 6, the majority of the doors were still closed. He knocked on Kaya’s. Gently at first, then harder. Nothing happened.

He took out his phone and tried calling the number the shellfish importer had always answered in the past. It rang, but again, no one answered.

With the phone pressed to his ear, Sami studied the closed door. Some of the offices down the corridor had metal doors, but this one was wood. He shoved his phone back into his pocket and tried the door with his shoulder. It gave. Not much, but enough for him to know that it was worth another try, with more force this time.

On his fifth attempt, the door gave way. The frame broke with a crack and Sami suddenly found himself inside the tiny office he had visited so many times before.

It was empty. Even the desk had gone.

His blood was pounding in his temples.

There wouldn’t be any boat. There wouldn’t be any trucks.

Like a tiger in a small cage, Sami paced the room. The bastard had screwed them over.

Ibrahim Bulut was still waiting in the car. Sami tore open the door.

“He’s gone! Do you understand what I’m saying? Gone! The office is empty, his phone’s off. Shit! Shit, shit, shit. We’re driving over to that asshole’s place for a chat right now.”

“What the hell are you saying?” The color had vanished from Bulut’s face.

“We’re screwed. There’s no fucking boat. We’re going over to that bastard’s place now to get our money back.”

“But…” said Bulut, “I don’t know where he lives…”

“You don’t know where he lives? What the hell are you saying?”

Sami couldn’t believe it.

“Somewhere in Gothenburg, I think,” said Bulut. “Or Landskrona or somewhere on the fucking west coast.”

“You said you knew him?”

“Yeah, but what the fuck, I do know him. We’ve fucking worked together. But not so much that I know where the hell he lives! He lives with his fucking prawns somewhere, that’s all I know.”

Sami was thinking about the money. He was thinking about Karin, about her big belly and the way she nursed John. He was thinking about his big brother, who had called him “Lord of the Prawns” and laughed.

He thought about how, in just a few moments, he had gone from being a successful businessman in the import branch to a debt-ridden trainee chef with a criminal past.

“Shit!” he shouted, hammering his hands against the solid paneling of the German car. “Shit, shit, shit!”

6

This wasn’t where it was meant to happen.

Music was pounding from invisible speakers, so loud that she couldn’t hear her own panting breaths.

You’re hot then you’re cold, Katy Perry sang. You’re yes then you’re no.

Why, Alexandra Svensson wondered as she mirrored the energetic instructor with a series of quick squat jumps, could her life be summed up by three short minutes of a pop song? She didn’t want to be predictable. You’re in then you’re out. But it wasn’t her fault. She had to remember that. For once, it wasn’t her fault. Giving him an ultimatum had been the right thing to do. He couldn’t have his cake and eat it too.

That Thursday afternoon, there were twenty or so people working out at her branch of Friskis & Svettis in Ringen. Alexandra had gone straight after work, and there were just two men in the room. One of them was gay. The other was desperate. Neither of them was a suitable candidate.

High knees.

Arms spinning.

Alexandra Svensson came to the gym twice a week and had learned all the moves, but it wasn’t the place she would meet someone she could share her life with.

In the row in front of her, to the right, was Lena Hall.

Alexandra watched her friend in the mirror. Lena had an hourglass figure, and she always ordered a pastry of some kind when they stopped for a coffee afterward, scoffing it down in a couple of breathless bites and not thinking anything of it. But still, Lena’s knees were higher than the instructor’s, and she never seemed to sweat.

Life was deeply unfair, and Lena Hall was proof of that.

Lena and Alexandra were unlikely friends. They hadn’t known one another particularly long, but Lena was the type of person people felt like they knew, even if they had just met her. When the women sat down in Espresso House for their usual coffee—and pastry—after class, Alexandra would talk about work and Lena about clothes. Those were the roles they had assigned to themselves. Alexandra told a new story about her boss, and Lena spent half an hour on a dress she had seen online, one she wanted to buy even though it was too expensive and she hadn’t tried it on.

“I should do it though, right?” she asked.

“I don’t buy many clothes,” Alexandra replied.

She glanced at the time on her phone at regular intervals. She wasn’t really in a hurry to get back to her apartment in Hammarby Sjöstad, all she had planned was to stop off at the supermarket in Hammarby Allé and buy dinner. Alexandra gazed longingly at Lena’s pastry and decided she would add one of the mint dark chocolate bars from Lindt into her basket. She needed something to console herself with as she watched TV that evening.

Alexandra knew she shouldn’t keep thinking about the man she would probably never see again, she knew he was no great loss, that he was just a placebo.

But she couldn’t help it.

She had the ability to fall in love with the hope, she fell in love with love itself, and the actual object of her feelings wasn’t always that important. Not to begin with. But sooner or later, reality always struck. And the man lying asleep in her bed would transform from a handsome magician who had made her loneliness disappear into a snoring pig who talked about himself with his mouth full while he ate breakfast.

All the same, she wasn’t made for the single life.

She sighed.

“What?” Lena asked.

“No, nothing,” said Alexandra.

“You know what I’m talking about though, right?”

The truth was that Alexandra hadn’t been listening, so when she nodded she hoped there wouldn’t be any follow-up questions.

Lena had finished her pastry and asked for the bill. “See you on Tuesday?” she asked.

Alexandra nodded. Going to the gym had become more fun with Lena there, but more than twice a week was too much.

“Maybe we could try the yoga class too?” said Lena. “Did you get the invite?”

“What invite?”

“Was it yesterday? No, over the weekend? No, hang on, it was through the Facebook group.”

Alexandra shrugged. She had been on Facebook for a while now, but there were so many Alexandra Svenssons that everyone who ever contacted her seemed to be looking for someone else. It was easier not to take part.

“No,” she replied. “I didn’t see it.”

“Seemed totally reasonable. Four classes for two hundred kronor, something like that. Shall we go?”

Lena began to talk enthusiastically about yoga groups, and Alexandra found her thoughts drifting again.

Life, her mother had said just before she died of cancer one overcast November day seven years earlier, was like any old party. If you want to, you can stay by the bar and drink until you’re so drunk that you have to go to the toilet and throw up. Or else you can sneak home after dinner because you think everyone else is an idiot. Maybe you can try to have a deep conversation with some depressing guy who thinks he’s an artist. Or maybe you’ll dance the night away. Life is what you make of it, but it rarely gets better than that.

Alexandra had grown up with her mother. Just the two of them. Only four months had passed between diagnosis and death, and though it had now been seven years, Alexandra could still sometimes see her in her reflection.

She was home by seven, and an hour later she had eaten dinner. She washed up and then changed into a dressing gown and sat down on the sofa with her bar of chocolate. There was a film on TV about a female lawyer fighting the mafia. Being a lawyer was something Alexandra Svensson was still considering. She liked rules.

As anxious as she was about her loneliness, she was satisfied with her job. She worked at G4S out in Västberga, a huge multinational where she felt comfortable. She assumed she would find something else one day, maybe in the center of town, but she was in no rush. She was only twenty-four, she had her entire life ahead of her.

First, she needed to meet someone.

There were times when she could have gone home with absolutely anyone from work, cooked dinner and massaged his shoulders, just to avoid facing the loneliness awaiting her.

There were times when she woke at night, alone in her bed, curled up in the fetal position, and hugged a pillow.

There were times in the morning when she just wanted to scream to break the silence in her cramped, practical kitchen in Hammarby Sjöstad.

7

It was ten in the morning when Sami Farhan maneuvered the stroller into the elevator. For the first six months, they had just left it by the front door, but it had been stolen a few months ago. The new stroller Karin had bought with the insurance money had followed them up into the apartment ever since. What went on in the mind of someone who stole a stroller, Sami wondered, swearing to himself at the cramped elevator.

Out on the street, the light was unexpectedly bright. He slowly walked up Skånegatan, and the baby was asleep before he even reached the top of the hill.

Sami turned off into Vitabergsparken, pushing the stroller ahead of him up the slope toward the Sofia Church. He could see the silhouette of a man in a black jacket waiting for him outside the entrance to the house of God. His head was shaved, and there was a strikingly wide scar looping around it. As though his halo had fallen and branded him for life.

Toomas Mandel.

“Shitty business,” was the first thing Mandel said as they greeted one another. “Real shitty.”

Sami sighed. The whole city knew what had happened. He had no idea how the rumor had spread, he hadn’t started it. But now it was too late to do anything about it. Everyone knew he had been screwed over by the Turk, who seemed to have gone up in smoke; everyone knew the whole frozen shellfish business had gone down the drain.

Sami shrugged. He was still pushing the stroller ahead of him like a plow, and Mandel fell in step with him. The two men walked through the park toward Nytorget.

“You thought about it?” Mandel asked.

Sami nodded. “I’m not sure. I’m really not sure, you know?” he said. “I’ve got thousands of questions. Or hundreds, at least.”

“Ask away. I’m not sure I have all the answers yet,” Mandel cautiously replied, “but I’m working on it.”

“Tell me about the gates again. They shut when the alarm goes off, was that it? And there were how many guards…?”

“Sixteen guards on site at night,” Mandel replied.

“But that means sixteen people calling for backup. You know? If every guard calls in backup, and one car turns up per guard… That’s like, a hundred pigs. How long do we have?”

It was a good question. Carrying out a raid on Täby Racecourse was all about speed. The money was kept waiting in a locked room for the guards to come and pick it up at midnight. Getting into that room wouldn’t be the problem, it was getting out afterward that they still needed to solve.

While Mandel explained his plan, they turned right toward Malmgårdsvägen. Sami listened carefully and asked questions.

Ten days had passed since Sami stood on the dock in Frihamnen, waiting for the boat of prawns that would never arrive. When he got back home that morning, it had been without the champagne he had been planning, and with a despondency he couldn’t hide.

Karin had been awake, eating dry, sticky prunes straight from the bag in the kitchen. The outer walls of their building on Högbergsgatan were cracked, and a cold draft rolled in across the floor. Karin had been wearing a long, white terry dressing gown that Sami had given her for Christmas, and she pulled it tight around her body.

“You think I’m gross now, right?” she asked.

He smirked and shook his head.

“I’m used to it,” he replied. He still hadn’t taken off his coat.

“What? Did I eat prunes last time?”

“Yeah.”

She hadn’t been able to control her craving for prunes then either. She was just over seven months into this new pregnancy; the baby was due in early April, meaning there would be just under a year between the two children.

“There should be a law against having kids this close together,” she said.

She stared angrily at the prunes. After every bag, she was forced to spend an hour on the toilet. She had told him to stop her from eating too many of them, but when he saw her greedy eyes on the bag, he couldn’t bring himself to say anything.

“Why can’t I have cravings for something healthy?” she asked. “Some people just want broccoli.”

Sami didn’t reply, and it was only then that Karin looked up.

“What is it?” she asked. “What happened?”

The easygoing tone was gone, replaced by a concerned crease on her forehead and a look completely lacking in affection.

Sami had just turned fifteen when he first fell in love with Karin. She had been unobtainable, and he had no idea how they could have ended up in the same class. Karin was from the city and Sami the suburbs, she was from the middle class and he from somewhere below. Months had passed before he even dared to speak to her, much longer before he worked up the courage to actually ask her out. Sami and his brothers had always talked openly about girls, but he didn’t dare say a word about Karin, terrified that his brothers would take an interest in her before he had time to get anywhere himself.

He was seventeen when they finally got together. For a couple of months, his experience was straight out of some predictable teenage American film, a time when every single song on the radio seemed to have been specially written for him and Karin. And then one evening he happened to tell her about something he had done, a break-in. Or happened to; he was boasting about it. He felt tough, grown up; it was something he had done with his big brother. Now he couldn’t even remember what they stole. Karin had broken up with him a few minutes later. Just like that. He had caused the exact opposite of what he wanted. But her explanation had been clear. She didn’t want to—ever—be with a criminal.

It had taken him a few years to win her back, but since then the pattern had repeated itself. Time and time again. Before she agreed that they should have a baby, he had promised once and for all that he was done with his old life. They had a future together, a life in which she wouldn’t have to worry about the police turning up one day to take him away, lock him up and throw away the key. And the fact she was choosing to believe him, she had firmly explained, was proof of her love. But her belief had since been tested a number of times, and the frown on her forehead was a clear sign that this was another such occasion.

Sami explained what had happened, that he had been set up and the frozen prawns had been a lie, and Karin breathed out.

“Business can always be sorted out,” she comforted him.

He didn’t know where she got her strength from.

When he told his brothers what had happened later that evening, their reaction was very different. They shouted and swore, and spent an intense twenty-four hours searching for Hassan Kaya. But the Turk had gone underground, or else he was holed up with their money in the Taurus Mountains. There was no sign of him. Once his brothers realized that, they had sighed, sworn some more and told Sami that he didn’t need to look so damn guilty. They had invested in the business together, and all three of them had been screwed over. That was that. It was no one’s fault but Hassan Kaya’s, and if that bastard ever turned up again…

To his friends who had invested money and who got in touch, one by one, as the rumors started to spread, Sami said the same thing over and over again. He would fix it. He would deliver. He had promised them a good investment, had promised them interest, and they would get it. Not in the form of earnings from frozen shellfish, but somehow.

He said the same to everyone he met, people who took his defeat as a sign of weakness and gullibility. The plan was still to go straight, to take on the role of a father. He would leave the life of crime behind him.

The difference was that he just needed to do one last big job to get back on his feet first. And the sooner it could happen, the better.

“I know how it sounds,” Sami had said when he got in touch with Mandel. He’d heard that the Estonian had something in the pipeline. “You know what I mean? It’s not that I don’t know how it sounds, one ‘last’ job, but I mean it. I want to do one more job, and whether that’s yours or someone else’s depends on what turns up first.”

Sami stopped dead.

What?” Toomas Mandel asked anxiously.

“Quiet.”

Sami was completely motionless, listening intently. Mandel did the same. He couldn’t hear a thing.

“Is it the pigs?”

Sami bent down to the stroller and lifted John from beneath the layers of blankets and covers. What had started as a quiet sniffle had turned into crying. It happened sometimes, when he woke from a deep sleep. Sami assumed it was his dreams that scared him.

“What the hell… is that a real baby?” Mandel blurted out in amazement.

“Are you stupid or what?”

“I just thought the stroller was a decoy.”

“A decoy?”

“To fool the pigs!”

“You’re sick,” Sami told the Estonian, rocking the baby in his arms until the little one calmed down and dozed off again.

Mandel shook his head.

“Don’t worry,” Sami said, gently putting the baby back into the stroller. “He’s not going to snitch.”

Mandel rolled his eyes. They turned back into the park. As they walked, Mandel went over the team and how he was planning on splitting the money.

“I need six million,” Sami said. “You can split it any way you want, but that’s my minimum. Got that? If you can’t guarantee me that, I’m out.”

“There’ll be more,” Mandel reassured him. “Much more.”

The majestic silhouette of the church was dark against the bright blue sky as they struggled back up the hill.

“The point,” Toomas Mandel explained, “is that it’s only three minutes to the boat club. No one’s going to believe we’re on our way there. We make it to the boat, we’re practically home. The police are up in Vaxholm and we’ll be in Bergshamra in less than ten minutes. They’ll never make it down in time. By then, we’ll be long gone, too much of a head start.”

“But does that mean you’re saying,” Sami asked, “that we have to ride down to the boat club? I don’t know… I’ve never even been on a horse…”

He had a feeling that rather than this being an idea that would get better the longer he sat on it, it was the opposite.

“It’s a possibility,” Mandel replied.

“But the whole of Täby fucking Racecourse is full of riders. You know? We’ll never manage to get away from them. They’re professionals.”

“All I’m saying is that it’s a possibility,” Mandel repeated. “It might be a bad idea, but if you’re on a horse, you can make it from the racecourse down to the boat club without getting caught up by any police vans or response units.”

Sami shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I buy the rest of it. Or I don’t know, a lot of it’s good. But you need to come up with another way of getting out. You know?”

“I’ll work on it.”

8

Michel Maloof was in the Hallunda McDonald’s, waiting to pay for his large meal, when the inconspicuous and now crumpled scrap of paper bearing Alexandra Svensson’s name and phone number followed a handful of change out of his pocket. To begin with, he didn’t remember where it had come from; eight weeks had passed since he’d met the man with the dogs. Maloof waited for his cheeseburger, twisting and turning the piece of paper in his hands. And then he spotted the address for the dating site. That jogged his memory.

He took his tray and sat down in one of the window seats, looking out at a branch of Bauhaus. He had never used any dating sites himself, he’d never had trouble meeting women. But he assumed that it suited some people, and each to his own.

He held up the note and drank his Coke through the straw.

Should he call her?

After the meeting at G4S, Maloof had thrown the black bag into his car and dejectedly driven away, emotionally overwhelmed and exhausted. Going in just a few short minutes from believing he would earn millions to realizing that he had fifteen years of negotiation and discussions ahead of him had been a real blow.

It felt like he had been subjected to some kind of cheap joke, as though the two directors had deliberately allowed him to misunderstand the situation and then piled on the pressure with their “contractual agreements.”

Maloof had driven straight from Stadshagen to Upplandsgatan to tell Zoran Petrovic what had happened. Maloof wasn’t much of a car enthusiast, but driving a Seat was frustrating when you were angry. Any sudden braking became smooth, and his sharp accelerations had no bite. Though maybe it had a calming effect, because by the time he reached Café Stolen, the worst of his anger had abated.

Petrovic had been waiting for him in one of the booths. His long, slender upper body stuck up like a twig above the table. He had a glass of lukewarm water in front of him. It was three thirty in the afternoon, and other than the staff, the place was empty. A new waitress Maloof had never seen before came over and asked what he wanted.

“I gave her a job mostly to test my self-control,” Petrovic had said once the girl in the tight skirt had gone back into the kitchen to fetch a cup of coffee.

It had been years since Maloof had stopped being surprised by Zoran Petrovic’s attitude toward women. He ignored the comment and told him about the meeting he had just come from instead. Though Petrovic was one of Maloof’s oldest friends, it was impossible for the Yugoslavian to detect any of the anger or frustration Maloof had just been feeling. Instead, he found himself faced with the always-smiling, calm and indifferent Maloof, who neutrally recounted the absurd conversation from the G4S conference room.

“That’s perfect though,” Petrovic had replied with his usual enthusiasm. “You’ve introduced yourself, they know who you are and what you have to offer. It couldn’t have gone better.”

“Right, right,” Maloof had said, laughing. “But, I mean, no. They could’ve bought the bags.”

“Forget about it,” Petrovic said with a laugh. “This is just the beginning. Going forward, shit, there could be a lot of money in this.”

After a few minutes, Maloof had reluctantly allowed himself to be infected by his friend’s enthusiasm. Both men were fundamentally optimistic; if things had been any different, they never would have made it this far.

Maloof put the scrap of paper onto the tray, but his eyes didn’t leave it as he lifted his cheeseburger out of the box.

Maybe Petrovic was right and everything would go to plan, but it was just as likely he was wrong. And what harm could calling her do? Hadn’t the man with the dogs said that this Alexandra Svensson was good-looking?

Maloof picked up his phone.

He invited her to a restaurant called Mandolin.

They agreed to meet at seven that Friday. Maloof made sure he was early, and he was waiting on the sidewalk on Upplandsgatan when the bells of Adolf Fredriks Church struck the hour. He had pulled up his hood to protect himself from the drizzle. The modern era’s winter had the capital in its loose grip, and galoshes would probably have been the best kind of shoes for that time of year.

When he saw a woman coming toward him from Tegnérlunden Park ten minutes later, he immediately knew it was her.

Alexandra Svensson was wearing a pair of practical rubber boots with a slim fur trim at the top, and her long down coat was pale blue. In her description of herself, the one Maloof had found on Match.com, she had written that she was someone who wanted to “bring a little luxury to life.” He was sure that the fur on her boots and the color of her coat were part of what she meant.

When she passed beneath the streetlight at the crossing with Kammakargatan, he could see her more clearly. She had written online that “biological age is meaningless,” but Maloof would have guessed that Alexandra was around twenty-five. A blond-haired, blue-eyed woman with round cheeks, a distinct protruding chin and a small, pouting red mouth, as though she wanted to be kissed. Maloof waved. Alexandra took a few happy, skipping steps toward him and gave him an impulsive hug.

Maybe her experience was that men who got in touch online didn’t always turn up?

They went into the restaurant together and were shown to a secluded table. They spent a moment reading the menus, but when the waiter came back to take their orders, he said that the chef wanted to surprise them instead.

“I promise you won’t be disappointed.”

Alexandra gave Maloof a questioning look, and with a smile and a quick laugh, he explained that he knew the owner.

Zoran Petrovic owned several places on Upplandsgatan.

They had a good night together. There was no other way to describe it. Maloof had decided in advance not to ask about either Västberga or G4S. If she wanted to talk about cash depots then he would listen. With interest. But if she decided not to, which had been the case for the majority of their dinner, he wasn’t going to insist. He was convinced that he had to win her trust first, and only then could he approach the questions he was interested in. It was all about patience.

As it happened, Alexandra Svensson wasn’t a particularly secretive person. Neither was she quiet. She talked openly about herself and her life. She had grown up in Nacka, studied economics at Stockholm University and dropped out to start working before she graduated. She liked having a regular income every month, it made her feel safe. She was subletting, or maybe she was subletting a sublet, a studio in Hammarby Sjöstad, and she said a few words about the secure transport company where she had worked for almost two years, and that she liked it.

“But basically half my wage goes to flowers,” she confessed.

“Flowers?”

“I love flowers,” said Alexandra Svensson. “When you get home and there are, like, flowers on the table, when it smells like roses and hyacinths… Is there anything better?”

“Yeah,” said Maloof. “No.”

“I’ve got a little herb garden in the kitchen, too. Nothing exotic. Basil, rosemary and, like, coriander. I think. Then there’s my balcony. I don’t know what I’d do without it.”

“No,” said Maloof.

“This time of year, all you can really do is plan ahead. But I’ve got all my geraniums in pots in the basement and as soon as it gets a bit warmer I’ll bring them up and put them out on the balcony again. I had, like, no idea they could even survive over winter, but they can.”

“Right, right.” Maloof smiled with a laugh.

Alexandra suddenly grew serious, and looked straight into his brown eyes. “It’s so easy to talk to you,” she said. “Like, I really think that. Really.”

“Right,” he replied, flashing all his teeth in a wide smile. “It’s… I think so too.”

“Cheers, Michel.”

She raised her glass and they sipped their red wine.

They were on their second bottle.

Alexandra Svensson continued. She hardly needed any encouragement; she took his opinions and thoughts for granted, and the evening passed without him having to give anything but his attention.

Something he was willing to give her.

They went back to Michel Maloof’s apartment through a Stockholm that was damp, empty and dark, and he didn’t even have time to take out the teacups before she had pushed him up against the wall with her tongue in his mouth. He was slightly shorter than she was, but he was surprised by her strength. She forced him to the floor in the living room and grabbed the blanket Maloof’s mother had made, the one that had been on the sofa, so that they wouldn’t be naked on the parquet floor.

After that unexpected and intense lovemaking session in which they had barely taken off their clothes, they sat down at the kitchen table and smoked—he had a pack of Marlboros stashed next to the spices in cupboard above the stove—before they went into the bedroom to make love again. This time more considerately.

Afterward, Maloof wanted to do nothing but sleep. It was four in the morning and he was tired from too much red wine and too many monologues. But it was right then, as he was on the verge of falling asleep on the soft down pillow, that she started talking about the building in Västberga.

He forced himself to wake up.

A few minutes later, he finally understood why the old man in the woods had suggested he meet Alexandra Svensson.

9

“Maybe it’s best if the uniforms wait outside?” Kant said in the elevator on the way up through the third of the five Hötorget buildings in central Stockholm.

Björn Kant, director of the Regional Public Prosecution Authority, was in his sixties and was one of Sweden’s most experienced criminal prosecutors. Seeing him walk the streets of the capital like an ordinary citizen, rather than sitting behind a desk, was an uncommon occurrence. The last time he had personally taken part in an arrest had to have been some time during the seventies, Caroline Thurn thought.

The prosecutor’s crumpled, dark brown suit even seemed more creased than usual.

“You want them to stay outside?” she asked. “Why?”

“No, it’s just…” Kant replied, “this isn’t an ordinary… I mean, there’s no need to embarrass the man. I don’t know what kind of meeting he’s in, and…”

“Embarrass?” Thurn repeated. She was surprised. “We’re here to arrest him. Maybe that is something he should find embarrassing?”

She was genuinely surprised. Though she was only half Kant’s age, she had worked as a task force leader with the Swedish Police Authority’s Criminal Investigation Department for four years, and during that time she’d had plenty of dealings with the prosecutor. She had never thought of Kant as anything but efficient, objective and decisive.

She glanced at him now, standing next to her in the dark elevator in which one of the lights wasn’t working. Thurn had a wiry, hard body, as tall as she was slim, with sharp features and blond hair tied up in a messy ponytail whose sole purpose was to cause as little bother as possible.

“Is that why you’re here in person?” she asked. “To make sure I don’t ‘embarrass’ our suspect?”

They had been working on the investigation with Interpol for almost two months now, and there was no doubt that Director Henrik Nilsson, with his thick, gray, combed-back hair and healthy tan, currently in a meeting on the eighteenth floor of the skyscraper, was much more than a simple tax evader. Thurn was convinced that the man had blood on his hands, even if he had made sure it was only flecks, splattered from a distance. He was a criminal and he would be brought to justice.

During the investigation, Björn Kant had been less convinced about the extent of Nilsson’s activity than Thurn, but that he was guilty of a number of financial crimes was something they both agreed on.

“I know you think it’s irrelevant, Caroline,” Kant said. He was having trouble looking her in the eye. “But you know that he hunts pheasants with the minister for enterprise.”

“That makes no difference!” Thurn blurted out.

With them in the elevator were the two uniformed police officers Thurn had more or less grabbed along the way. Both were staring at the floor, pretending they weren’t hearing the conversation that was going on next to them.

“All I’m saying is that we should take it easy,” Kant mumbled, knowing that his more pragmatic side wouldn’t be appreciated by the young, and still shockingly naive, task force leader.

Certain police officers grew cynical after their first week on the job, but others were more resilient. The fact that Thurn had managed to retain her confidence in her fellow man year after year, despite everything she had been through, was an achievement in itself. Kant respected her highly for it, but he also knew that if the moral compass was working, it did no harm to act smoothly.

The elevator pinged and the doors opened.

The four public servants stepped out and moved quickly down the corridor toward the conference and meeting room on the south side of the building. The corridor was as tired-looking as those in police headquarters, Thurn thought. It even smelled of the same cleaning products.

“Do we know this is the right way?” she asked.

“I’ve been here before,” Kant replied.

She didn’t ask the obvious follow-up question. She was afraid that Björn Kant was yet another member of the minister’s hunting team, and that if she asked he would be forced to admit it. Better, she thought, not to know.

They came to a door with a frosted glass panel. They could hear voices from the other side, and Kant knocked.

“You can wait by the elevator,” he said to the two police officers, who nodded obediently.

Thurn sighed.

They stepped into the room.

It was smaller than Thurn had expected. The curtains were drawn, hiding what had to be a fantastic view of the capital, with City Hall and possibly even Riddarfjärden in the distance. There were five men sitting around the white conference table, all wearing dark suits, white shirts and ties. Director Henrik Nilsson, the man the police were looking for, had clearly been giving some kind of presentation. He was standing by a whiteboard and stopped to turn to them.

“Björn?” he exclaimed in surprise.

“Hello, Henrik,” Kant replied.

Henrik Nilsson shook his head in confusion.

“What are you doing here? I’m… Björn, could you wait in my office, I’ll come as soon as I’m done here? Fifteen, twenty minutes? I’m… a little busy, as you can see.”

He gestured to the men sitting at the table, all of whom looked equally surprised and were staring at the prosecutor and the prosecutor’s pretty companion.

Kant hesitated. “No, I’m afraid it’s not quite that simple, Henrik. I can explain… If you give me a couple of minutes, I can…”

The prosecutor nodded toward the corridor.

“A couple of minutes? Now?” the suspect said with a forced laugh. “Like I said, Björn, I’m in the middle of an, er, let’s say… a presentation of sorts. And I really need to finish it.”

He turned to the men around the table for support, but they didn’t say a word.

“I’m sorry, Henrik, but this can’t wait,” said Kant, trying to drum up some courage.

“Look,” Nilsson said, this time with a note of sharpness and irritation in his voice, “I’ll ask you for the last time, please go to my office and wait there, and I’ll come as soon as I’m done here.”

Caroline Thurn, who had been standing behind Prosecutor Kant until this point, had already lost her patience after their opening exchange. She had tried to help put the prosecutor on the right track using her body language, but now she stepped forward and said, loudly: “Henrik Nilsson, you’re under arrest. You’re going to come with us to police headquarters where we will conduct a preliminary interview.”

Nilsson’s jaw dropped.

“This is the most ridiculous damn…”

He shook his head. He didn’t have the words.

“Henrik,” said Kant, trying to soften Thurn’s lack of tact, “we do actually have to…”

“Get out!” Nilsson shouted, suddenly finding his tongue. “My lawyers are going to—”

But Thurn couldn’t bear to listen any longer.

Where the handcuffs had come from wasn’t something the prosecutor would be able to explain afterward, but she stepped straight past him and snapped one of them around Henrik Nilsson’s wrist. It all happened so quickly that the director barely had time to realize what was happening.

Caroline Thurn quickly fastened the second cuff around the wrist of prosecutor Björn Kant.

She looked at the two friends with a broad smile.

“I’m going back to police headquarters now,” she said. “And wherever I go, the key goes too. Do stop by and see us.”

With that, she left the room. She walked toward the elevators and the two waiting officers.

“The others are just coming,” she said. “We might as well wait here.”

10

Michel Maloof had chosen the soccer field in Fittja as their meeting place. Soccer fields were always a possibility, as were any other open spaces where you could be sure there was no one eavesdropping behind a bush. Maloof had said that he had followed up on the tip from the man with the dogs and that it was something Sami should hear with his own ears. But he hadn’t said any more than that.

That was why Sami Farhan was waiting in a parking lot in Fittja, in the shadows behind a garage. One by one, the lights had gone out in the windows of the hulking tower on the hill, the enormous block of apartments that had been built during the fifties and sixties as part of the government’s political experiment, an extensive public housing program known as the Million Project. Every time Sami went to places like Bredäng, Botkyrka or Flemingsberg, he was reminded of exactly why he now lived in Södermalm.

Out here was his past, not his future.

It was ten thirty in the evening. Though he was wearing two sweaters under his coat, his clothes were no protection against the cold. March had arrived, but the mercury was still hitting new lows.

Michel Maloof had said he would be there at quarter past ten, and, like always, Sami had arrived in good time. He had been waiting almost half an hour now. His impatience was worse than the cold. An inheritance from his father, his mother always said. A quick run around the park would warm him up and get rid of his restlessness, but who knew which eyes were on him in the tower block up there.

Another five minutes passed before a gray Seat pulled into the parking lot. Sami sighed gently. He wanted to be home before midnight, Karin had already been suspicious when he said that he had to help out on the cold buffet for the second night in a row. It wasn’t a lie that he worked extra shifts at his uncle’s place in Liljeholmen, and the money it had brought in so far was proof of that. But his wages from the cold buffet were barely enough to cover the rent, diapers and gruel. It was Karin who kept the family together, both financially and socially. She was one of Stockholm’s many struggling small-business owners, who, along with a friend, had opened a dressmaker’s shop on Maria Prästgårdsgata. They had been lucky and skilled enough to win a couple of big repeat customers, which helped them build up a certain level of stability and success. But things varied, of course, and some weeks were better than others. All the same, the majority of her months were considerably better than Sami’s.

The nondescript Seat parked next to an Audi some way from the garage, and Sami immediately recognized the short, compact shape of Maloof as he moved around the car and opened the passenger’s side door. The woman who climbed out was wearing a bulky blue down jacket and a white knitted hat. Sami couldn’t make out much more than that from where he was standing.

He made himself visible by stepping forward out of the shadows. Maloof waved, and a few minutes later they were face-to-face.

“Alexandra, this is Sami. Sami, Alexandra Svensson,” Maloof introduced them.

Sami took off a glove and shook Alexandra’s hand. She looked away. If it had been light, Maloof was convinced he would have seen her blush.

“So… well… you can keep us company for a while?” Maloof suggested, as though they had only bumped into one another by chance.

Sami nodded and smirked. “What a coincidence,” he said. “Bumping into you two here. You on the way back to your place, Michel?”

“Right, right. Some hot tea… with honey,” Maloof replied, completely without irony.

Alexandra laughed as though he had told a joke, so that no one would believe she had gone along with the tea-and-honey idea.

Sami knew that Maloof’s family had put down roots in Fittja and then let those roots grow wide in the suburban Swedish world. Sami didn’t feel any such belonging to a place or neighborhood, not even to Södermalm.

They started walking. Maloof took them across the soccer field, which was currently bathed in darkness. The snow crunched beneath the soles of their shoes. Alexandra didn’t say a word, and Sami waited for Maloof to start the conversation. Lights from the highway fell across the field in thin strips, and as they walked through one of them, Sami took the chance to get a better look at Alexandra Svensson.

He would have described her as more ordinary than cute. The shadows of her long lashes fell onto her round cheeks, which had turned red in the cold night air. She sensed his gaze and turned her head. The glimmer in her eye told him that she was slightly drunk, but she wasn’t an idiot.

Sami made a mental note.

“Yeah, so,” Maloof began, “we were in town for dinner. A place in Kungsholmen… well… yeah… Did you know Sami was a chef?”

“You’re a chef?” Alexandra asked with interest. “I love food. And cooking. But I’m, like, not very good at it. I could never go on Come Dine with Me or anything like that. Or maybe I could? I’m good at chocolate mousse.”

“Right,” Maloof added, though it wasn’t clear what he was referring to.

“I like baking,” Sami confessed.

“Do you?” Alexandra sounded enthusiastic.

“Cookies, mostly.”

She stopped and looked up at him in surprise.

“Yeah, raspberry caves, Finnish sticks…” Sami went on. “You know?”

He sounded serious, but the thought of this big, strong man stooped over a baking tray, adding raspberry jam to his cookies, seemed so unlikely. She laughed briefly, as though to show that she understood.

“Where do you work?” she asked.

Sami told her the name of the restaurant in Liljeholmen.

“What about you? What do you do?” he asked.

“I count money,” she said, giggling again.

Maloof was impressed. Sami had managed to get her to bring up the subject much quicker than he had. That was what he had expected, it was the reason he had wanted to let Sami hear it from her rather than recapping what she had said. Maloof would never be anywhere near as convincing.

“Count money?”

“I work for G4S,” she explained, unnecessarily adding: “It’s a company that does secure transports. We collect money from shops and stuff like that.”

“Wow,” Sami said tonelessly. “You like it?”

“It’s OK, but like, I dunno…? The hours are a bit… two days a week you have to work nights. Then the day after’s ruined, you wake up late in the afternoon and can’t sleep that night because you’re not really tired. It’s tough.”

“A bit like being a chef,” said Sami.

“I never thought of that.”

Her voice sounded eager when she realized that she happened to have something in common with the stranger.

Maloof stopped by the far goalpost. A soft breeze was blowing across the open field, carrying with it the smell of exhaust fumes and an icy chill that stung their skin.

Without thinking about it, all three turned their backs to the wind and their faces to the ground. The sound of lone cars passing with a low whine on the highway was all they could hear. Sami stamped his feet hard against the snow, which was lying like a thin white blanket on the grass.

“Right, right,” said Maloof. “And… didn’t you say it felt like hard work… going out to Västberga every day?”

Maloof wanted her to get back to the main subject, and Alexandra was someone who quickly adapted to that kind of demand.

“Yeah, that’s the thing,” she willingly agreed. “Super hard. Västberga, I mean. What even is that place? I sublet in Hammarby Sjöstad, so you can go straight through Årsta, but… Especially in the evening and nights, it’s like traveling abroad. Trains and metros and buses. I applied for a job at Lugnet, the school right next to where I live, but I didn’t get it. There were like a thousand people who applied.”

“You can just ask your new boyfriend for a lift,” Sami joked, elbowing Maloof. “He works nights too, sometimes.”

“My new boyfriend?” Alexandra blurted, surprised, realizing a moment later who Sami meant. “Yeah, I mean… I don’t know…”

Maloof wasn’t amused by the joke. He urged her on.

“And,” he said gently, “you said you didn’t have the best colleagues either?”

“Nope, that’s true,” Alexandra replied, though a note of hesitation had appeared in her voice.

Maloof was worried. Was she starting to realize how odd the situation was; that she had been brought out onto a cold soccer field in Fittja to talk with a complete stranger about her pointless job? But he was counting on her need to please being stronger than her anxiety.

“No, it’s not exactly like I’d choose to socialize with them outside of work,” she continued. “But I guess it’s always like that? Plus, I’m not planning to stay there counting money for the rest of my life…”

“No,” said Sami. “You seem smart, you could do whatever you want.”

“Right, right.” Maloof backed him up.

“I’m freezing, Michel,” she said. “Can’t we…”

“We’re going,” he promised. “But… I mean… while we’re on the subject of your job…”

He turned to Sami. “When Alexandra told me about Västberga last time… you said… that it felt uncomfortable? Sometimes? ’Cause there are people who… you know, are planning to rob the place?”

“It’s like, pretty hard to rob us.” Alexandra nodded.

“Right, right,” said Maloof. “But it’s still possible?”

He was careful not to leave any pauses that might unintentionally increase the importance of what he wanted her to talk about.

“Because you had an idea…?” he continued.

She laughed self-consciously and glanced around. As though someone was listening. But the soccer field was deserted that dark evening, and if anyone was approaching, they would notice them from a mile off.

“It’s not exactly my idea,” she said. “Everyone talks about that kind of thing during the breaks, you know. About how the people working in the vault think they’re special because it’s impossible to get in there. And then the rest of us, working up in Counting, we ask why someone would try to get in the vault. There are like a thousand doors and locks and cameras. But up in Cash, we’ve got hundreds of millions of kronor and nowhere near as much security stuff.”

“I don’t understand,” said Sami.

“No, so,” Alexandra explained, “if you were a thief, you shouldn’t try to get into the vault. You should just go in through the roof. You’d just have to drill a hole and then you’d be in our section.”

“A hole in the roof?”

“Right.” Maloof nodded, trying to rein in his excitement. “Alexandra’s department is on the top floor.”

“So you’d go in through the roof?” Sami repeated in an attempt to understand.

“That easy.” Alexandra nodded.

“Right?” Maloof laughed.

That was exactly what he thought. For years, more than he could remember, Michel Maloof had been trying to find out how to get into the cash depot in Västberga. Nowhere else in Sweden held as much cash as it did. But it had always seemed impossible, and the security was legendary.

And then it turned out to be this easy.

Right beneath the ceiling was an unguarded room full of hundreds of millions in cash.

The three stood in silence for a moment or two.

“My feet are freezing, Michel,” Alexandra moaned.

“Right, right. Let’s go now,” he replied, putting an arm around her to share some of the warmth he felt inside.

They took a step toward the grass slope where you could take a shortcut straight to one of the foot tunnels.

“Through the roof?” Sami repeated, nodding to himself. “OK. See you later, Michel. Nice to meet you, Alexandra.”

Maloof and his new girlfriend disappeared into the darkness.

11

Her water broke at home on Högbergsgatan on the second of April.

It wasn’t anything like the first time.

Karin and Sami had gone to the hospital too early then. There hadn’t been any free rooms, and they’d had to wait in the corridor of the maternity ward for six hours, from two in the morning until eight. When things finally got going, it took another twelve hours. Sami had fallen asleep in the bed in their room that afternoon, while Karin paced around him trying to manage her pain.

He knew that sleep was the body’s way of managing a situation that couldn’t be managed, but he had still felt ashamed when he woke up. Being so physically close to the person you loved and still being shut out and helpless was awful. He couldn’t lessen or share Karin’s pain, so his only escape had been to shut down.

The tension in the delivery room had grown the longer her labor went on, the nurses’ eyes had started to wander, and by dinnertime, he’d heard them whispering about a cesarean. But then the time suddenly came, and John had been born that evening.

The second time was different.

When they arrived at the maternity ward, her contractions were so close together that the nurses and midwife immediately took them into a delivery room. Just under an hour later, John’s little brother was born, and two hours after that, Sami was back home on Högbergsgatan.

During the month that followed, the Farhan family—Sami, Karin, John and the baby—lived life as though in a cocoon. They and the rest of Stockholm were trapped beneath a gray blanket of incessant rain. There were days when they didn’t even get out of bed, days they never got dressed, with a newborn baby and his one-year-old brother both needing closeness, warmth, food and care. It didn’t feel right to leave either of the kids with a babysitter, not even with their grandmothers.

It was only as April was suddenly on the verge of May that the new parents felt their isolation start to grate. They took turns leaving the apartment, striking up contact with family and friends and regaining their respective identities outside of being a parent.

Awaiting Karin was early spring, blue skies and mild winds, loyal friends and a longing grandmother. Awaiting Sami were debts that hadn’t paid themselves during his monthlong paternity leave.

And on top of that, a large number of missed calls from Michel Maloof.

The planning for different jobs went in phases, and you kept doors open because you never knew what would happen. Things were leaning more and more toward the Västberga job, though Sami still didn’t want to rule out the Täby Racecourse plan.

The last thing he had done before he entered the new-baby haze was to promise that he would try to verify Alexandra Svensson’s story. The idea of going straight through the roof into the room where they counted money on the sixth floor sounded almost too good to be true. Had she made it up because she wanted to impress them? Sami thought he knew a way to check. And so, one day in early May, he walked up to Pro Gym on Högbergsgatan to meet Ezra Ray.

“Here!”

Ezra shouted across the entire gym. It was just after ten on Saturday morning, but despite the relatively early hour, the place was full. As ever, interest in working out always peaked once spring was on its way; the thought of swimming trunks and bikinis terrified people back onto exercise bikes and StairMasters.

Sami waved and made his way over to the corner with the free weights, where Ezra was busy. He recognized that familiar gym scent: sweat and metal, deodorant and cleaning products.

“Jesus!” Ezra Ray shouted across the room. “You look like shit!”

Everyone within hearing distance automatically turned to see exactly who it was who looked like shit. Sami Farhan felt their eyes mercilessly boring through his thin sweater, revealing the excess fat he had gained around his stomach over the winter.

He’d had trouble getting back into working out for the past few years; he associated that sort of discipline with the routine in prison, and ever since he’d gotten out, lifting weights was the last thing he wanted to be doing.

“What about you, then?” he said to his friend. “You’re so weedy you look like a stickleback. You need to be able to put some weight behind those punches.”

Ezra had been using the dumbbells, but he dropped them onto the mat with a rattling thud. With his shaved head, high cheekbones, sunken cheeks, broken nose and wiry, overly muscular frame, Ezra Ray didn’t have trouble looking intimidating.

“You what?!” he shouted. “You what?”

The entire room fell silent.

Ezra clenched his fists and got into the classic boxing position. All around them, people’s mouths were open, they were staring. Sami lost no time in mirroring his friend’s pose.

“Right, you bastard,” said Ezra, “I’ll show you how weedy I am!”

A second later, he burst into laughter. Disappointed, the drama-thirsty gym rats had no choice but to turn their attention back to themselves.

“Seriously though, Sami,” Ezra said once he picked up the dumbbells to finish his last few repetitions, “you look like you’ve lost some of your edge.”

Sami nodded. There was no denying it.

The two men had first met during their teens. They had worked out together from time to time, but for Ezra Ray, boxing had been too traditional, too regulated. He had started with karate and jiujitsu, but he’d had trouble taking all the bowing and meditating seriously. When Ultimate Fighting broke through, it was as though the sport had been made for him. He was probably too old for it now, but so long as he won matches, his age wasn’t a problem. During the last ten years, Ezra Ray had constantly been in training for one championship or another, and that Saturday in May was no exception.

These days, he rarely ended up on the podium, but he never came last either.

“I’m just going to finish up,” he said, “then we can have a delicious protein drink and talk seriously.”

“I spoke to my sis,” Ezra Ray said a few minutes later when he joined Sami at the makeshift bar on the other side of the room. A strawberry white-chocolate protein shake was waiting for him. “I didn’t tell her exactly what it was about, but I asked how you could get hold of the plans for different buildings, if she could sort that kind of thing out. She said you just have to go to the town planning office.”

Ezra Ray’s sister Katinka worked for an architecture firm. She was the one Sami had been thinking of when he promised Maloof to double-check Alexandra Svensson’s story.

“The town planning office?”

“I checked. Anyone can go there. You don’t even have to be an architect. It’s on Fleminggatan. That’s your patch, Sami.” Ezra laughed. “Next to the police station and the jail.”

“Cool,” Sami said, though he didn’t smile.

“That’s that anyway.”

Ezra sipped his shake and was left with a pale pink protein mustache. Somehow, it suited his wild appearance. “Shit, that’s good!”

“I don’t know,” Sami replied. “Just going into the town planning office and asking for the drawings for the city’s biggest cash depot doesn’t exactly seem smart. You know what I mean?”

Though he was sitting on a bar stool, he managed to keep his ankle moving so that his leg bobbed up and down.

“Katinka said that was how it worked. Can’t you sit still?”

“But it’s a cash depot,” Sami replied, his foot keeping the same rhythm.

“Yeah.”

“She must’ve been joking. Course they won’t give out the drawings. You know? Maybe you can get the drawings for an ordinary house, but a bank? Of course you can’t.”

Ezra shrugged.

“She said all the drawings were at the town planning office. I’ve got no idea. Guess we can try.”

“You’re insane,” Sami declared.

“You know it,” Ezra laughed, downing the last of the liquid in his glass and getting strawberry on his nose. “I can test it out if you want?”

Sami smirked. Ezra Ray had been kicked in the head one too many times.

On Monday morning, they parked up on Scheelegatan. Sami waited in the car as some kind of moral support while Ezra walked down the hill toward the town planning office.

He crossed Fleminggatan in his typically inimitable way. His arms didn’t just swing by his sides, they were like small propellers. Ezra had been severely bow-legged since childhood, meaning that every step forward looked more like a lurch to the right or the left.

He jogged up the stairs to the huge brick building, and used the information board at the entrance to work out where the town planning offices were located. It was just before eleven, and he didn’t see another soul on his way through the long corridors, which eventually came to an end by a pretty glass door.

He rang the buzzer. A whirring sound opened the door and Ezra stepped inside.

Without hesitating, not even for a fraction of a second, he walked over to the elderly man sitting behind the reception desk.

“Hi,” he said cheerily, “I’d like to look at the drawings for a building in Västberga? Västberga Allé Eleven?”

The man behind the desk studied the relatively young fighter wearing a pair of ripped jeans, a black leather jacket and a broad smile. He nodded and then typed the address into his computer.

“Aha,” he said without looking up. “Vreten Seventeen, you mean? By Georg Scherman. On the corner of Västberga Allé Eleven and Vretensborgsvägen Thirty-Two?”

“Exactly,” Ezra replied, not having a clue what the old man was talking about.

The man was reading the screen.

“The last time someone requested these drawings was October 1979,” he said. Ezra shrugged. The man seemed to be reading aloud from the archival notes.

“If you go in there,” he continued, nodding toward a small room full of desks and chairs, “I’ll bring you everything we’ve got. Are you familiar with the rules?”

Ezra didn’t dare answer yes to that question. His hesitation caused the old man to explain.

“You can study the plans on site, you can take photographs if you want, but the originals don’t leave this building. Understood?”

Ezra Ray nodded.

“Right then,” the old man said, waving his visitor away to the adjoining room and leaving Reception in order, Ezra assumed, to go down to some dark basement archive and dig out the drawings.

Ezra Ray wasn’t the least bit surprised. His big sister Katinka had said it would be this way, and she was never wrong.

It took twenty minutes for the old man to return with a huge stack of papers, which he dumped onto the table in front of his young visitor.

“This is everything we had,” he said. “Enjoy.”

Ezra looked down at the pile of papers and leafed through them at random. Understanding these lines and numbers required knowledge he himself lacked.

“Thanks,” he said, pretending to be absorbed by one of the blueish originals.

But the old man was already on his way back to Reception, with zero interest in what Ezra Ray was doing with the documents.

Ezra stayed in that small room for almost an hour. That was how long it took for the next visitor to turn up. This time, again, there was a short discussion at Reception and then the old man got up to disappear into his archive.

Sami, waiting patiently in the car and, becoming more and more anxious about not making it back to Karin by twelve as promised, suddenly saw a madman running down Scheelegatan with his arms full of papers. Through the open window, he heard Ezra’s triumphant voice:

“I did it! See, you fuck! I did it!”

12

The first modern bridge to the Stockholm suburb of Lidingö was completed after the end of the First World War, and by the time the next one ended, the country’s politicians had decided to transform the villa enclave into a modern community. They planned and built new neighborhoods, with functionalist blocks of apartments in Rudboda, Käppala and Larsberg. These were the finishing touches to a suburb that would reflect the big city. Traces of the older rural society’s farms and fields remained, as did the beautiful merchants’ villas from the nineteenth century. A handful of the island’s industrial areas and magnificent brick factories even managed to survive the later vogue for tearing things down, all while the Swedish welfare state’s 1950s aspirations for solidarity were abandoned on the island, just as they were everywhere else.

Today, Lidingö is far from a homogeneous rich enclave, but the middle-class majority in the municipal council remains unchanged.

Hersby was one of a handful of areas on Lidingö mentioned as early as the Viking age, but the scrapyard next to Vasavägen isn’t named on any rune stones. For a couple of twenty-kronor notes, or maybe a hundred, Svenne Gustafsson offered a solution to busy city dwellers who didn’t know what to do with a car that was no longer worth repairing.

He towed the rusty vehicles around the corner, behind the little wooden building that also served as his office. He had blocked off the scrapyard with a high fence topped with barbed wire, and, using a stationary crane, stacked the car skeletons on top of one another while he waited to sell their unique spare parts, each of which was worth more than he had paid for the car itself.

The stacks of cars formed narrow alleyways, and at the very end of one of these was a large container, tucked halfway into the woods. From the outside, its green corrugated metal looked unassuming and rusty, but when Zoran Petrovic opened the door at one side, he stepped straight into a modern workshop. The walls had been clad with aluminum foil beneath an interior wall of steel, and the ceiling was soundproofed.

Petrovic was Svenne Gustafsson’s business partner and financier, but no one knew that. It was how Petrovic wanted it. He was involved in a number of other businesses in the same way: a cleaning firm, a couple of restaurants, a handful of beauty salons, a building firm in Tallinn and one in Montenegro.

Among others.

The tall, slim Yugoslavian, who had been born in the southern Swedish city of Lund almost forty years earlier, closed the container door behind him, and the six people working inside looked up from their workstations. On top of their clothes, each was wearing a bulletproof vest, and they all had on helmets with visors. It was like being on the set of a science fiction film where the props had been bought from Bauhaus.

“No, no, just keep working, keep working,” Petrovic instructed them.

On each of the six workbenches was a blue security bag that had recently been stolen from a secure transport vehicle or a guard. Without the right code and key, a dye ampoule would explode if they tried to open the bags using force. Petrovic was paying the six amateur engineers to find a way of opening the bags without setting off the explosives. The youngsters—and all six were young—had divided the methods of attack among themselves. One was using a welding flame to try to open the bag, another a small circular saw. One was trying to pick the lock, and another was trying to tackle the bag from the bottom. Each had a digital camera mounted on a tripod just behind them, filming his or her every move. What all six had in common was that none had made any progress in weeks.

Zoran Petrovic had lost count of how many bags he had sacrificed so far in his quest to open them without setting off the explosives.

He slowly went over to each of the young workers and exchanged a few words with them. Petrovic found talking to a nineteen-year-old emo kid as easy as talking to the infrastructure minister of Montenegro. That was how it had always been.

“Good, good,” he said to a girl in her twenties. She was busy using the welding flame to burn a hole in the bottom right-hand corner of the bag.

Petrovic stretched out a long arm and, with a lazy elegance, drew a pattern in the air above the metal of the bag.

“That’s how to do it, that’s right. It’s like painting a picture, you move the flame back and forward, like Monet. Or Manet. I have an acquaintance, he’s the head of a museum in Lyon, obsessed with brushstrokes, he’s filled his yard with sand and bought a special rake that’s finer than a normal rake, so he can drag it across the sand and…”

“Zoran?”

It was Svenne Gustafsson’s assistant who had stuck his head around the door. The Yugoslavian turned around, annoyed.

“What?”

“You’ve got a visitor. Maloof’s here.”

“OK.” Petrovic nodded. “OK. I’ll finish the story later. Just keep going. And remember, we’re not in a hurry. We’re never in a hurry, nothing good will come of that.”

His statement was met with a certain gratitude, but Zoran Petrovic had made it only halfway back through the scrapyard labyrinth to Gustafsson’s office when he heard a dull thud, a sound so familiar that he didn’t even jump. Yet another bag had been triggered, and they would be forced to burn yet another stack of dyed notes. They had tried cleaning the dye from the notes in every way possible, but not even boiling them, putting them into the washing machine with chlorine or scrubbing them by hand had brought the color out. It simply couldn’t be done.

Petrovic stooped to avoid hitting his head as he stepped into the building through the back door. Michel Maloof was waiting on a chair in the kitchen behind Svenne Gustafsson’s office. Gustafsson was currently out, something he always made sure to be whenever Maloof stopped by.

“Just a glass of lukewarm water,” said Petrovic.

“What?”

“I don’t want anything else.”

Maloof stared at his tall friend in amazement as he sat down at the table. “Water? You want me to get your water?” he asked.

Petrovic made a gesture that showed it was clear that Maloof should be serving him the water. Maloof laughed and shook his head.

“Right, right,” he said, getting up. “Yeah, well, it is your… lukewarm water.”

Maloof went over to the counter and filled a glass from the tap. Overly casually, he returned to the table and placed it in front of Zoran Petrovic, who nodded indulgently.

The two men had known one another a long time, but their relationship would always be shaped by the fact that Petrovic had been leader of the playground where Maloof had hung out during his school years. Zoran Petrovic became the only role model that Maloof had who didn’t play soccer. And since Petrovic had known how to spend money even back then—his wardrobe had been full of nothing but Armani, and he had never left home on a Friday evening without his American Express card—that had helped Maloof define his own life goals.

“I’m going to be a millionaire,” the young Maloof had said, and Petrovic had laughed.

“A million’s what I make in a month,” he had replied.

“Through the roof?”

“Right, right,” Maloof explained with a smile, “through the roof.”

It was two thirty in the afternoon. The stack of plates and mugs in the sink had been there for months. Svenne Gustafsson wasn’t the pedantic type, and both Maloof and Petrovic did their best to pretend that the broken drain in the toilet didn’t stink. They never usually had this type of conversation unless they were out walking somewhere, but the heavens had suddenly opened and neither of them wanted to get wet. They had been talking about all the money they would earn from the black security bags when Maloof mentioned Alexandra Svensson.

“Talk about an old dream,” said Petrovic. “You’ve been going on about Västberga for years.”

Maloof smiled and nodded.

“OK,” said Petrovic, “But how the hell do you get onto the roof?”

“There must be a way.”

“Jumping shoes?” Petrovic sneered. “Or what’s it called… a jet pack? With a jet pack, like in the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Is that what you’ve got planned?”

“Right, right.” Maloof smiled. “Like the Olympics. Exactly. No.”

“Maybe you could use a cherry picker? I’ve got a friend with a company in Monaco. He cleans windows, you know, thirty floors up. Monaco’s one great big window. He sends people up in a box. It’s big enough for five, six people. I sat in one of his cherry pickers once during the Formula One. You know, fifteen floors up, right above the track. The cars were driving past under our feet. We were drinking fizz and the girl dropped a sandal. I thought I’d shit myself. You know? A sandal straight onto the track. Jesus.”

“A cherry picker?” Maloof asked. “Is it on a flatbed?”

Petrovic nodded. “He has them mounted on cars.”

“Right,” Maloof replied, thinking aloud. “A crane? On the front? A building crane. One you could drive up at night.”

Petrovic reached for the glass of water on the table and took a sip.

“Could work,” he said thoughtfully. “Could work. Getting hold of a crane’s not exactly hard…”

“Or… a hot air balloon.”

“Are you serious?”

“A helicopter?”

“Is there room for a helicopter to land on the roof? Have you ever flown a helicopter, Michel? Damn noisy.”

“No… But you’d be able to get away in a helicopter too.”

“I prefer the crane,” said Petrovic.

Maloof nodded and grinned.

“Exactly. Sounds most plausible, maybe? But… how would you get away then?”

They heard the outer door open and close. Gustafsson had returned from his made-up errand, and Maloof got to his feet. It was time to leave.

“OK. Well… think about it,” he said.

“A crane,” said Petrovic. “I’ll think about it.”

“How’s it going in the container out there? Getting anywhere soon? Or not?”

Petrovic twisted self-consciously.

“Just take it easy,” he said in a superior tone. “It’ll work out.”

“You think?”

“You don’t want to wait fifteen years, I don’t want to wait fifteen years. So it’ll work out because it has to work out.”

“Right, right.” Maloof nodded.

“I’ve got something on the go,” said Petrovic. “I ordered something from France. It’s coming next week. A crazy thing, but it’ll solve the problem. I’m not even going to tell you how much it cost.”

They heard yet another faint boom from out in the container. Petrovic got up.

“I’m going to tell them to stop,” he said, sounding annoyed. “I don’t want to have to find more bags. It’ll work out. Next week. Finally.”

Maloof grinned. “What kind of thing?” he asked as Petrovic was on his way out.

The rain had eased up, but it was still coming down.

“You’ll see,” the Yugoslavian said over his shoulder. “All you need to know for now is that it’s going to make you a rich man.”

13

Jack Kluger was sitting in the Wasahof restaurant on Dalagatan, waiting for Basir Balik. It was twelve thirty, and though they had agreed to meet at twelve, Balik was always late for lunch. Kluger didn’t mind, he wasn’t in a hurry.

At the table next to him, two women were eating shrimp salads. Kluger would have guessed they were in their thirties, and that they might have worked at the hospital farther down the street. Both were blond and well dressed, and Jack couldn’t stop himself from smiling and giving one of them a friendly nod. The one sitting closest to him said something in Swedish that Kluger couldn’t understand, but her expression was crystal clear.

She wasn’t amused.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but in my part of Texas, nobody speaks Swedish.”

Then he smiled again, showing off the white dental veneers the American army had paid for.

It worked every time. His American accent was like a skeleton key, it could unlock any door. The woman’s irritated expression was replaced by an embarrassed smile, and just a few minutes later the three of them were sitting together, making small talk. There was nothing people in this city liked more than speaking English with a man from Texas. Kluger had even started dressing like a cowboy, with rough checked shirts and traditional boots. Clothes he had never worn when he lived in Texas.

“So if I only have a couple of days in the city, what would you suggest I do?” he asked.

Jack Kluger wasn’t a city person, but the minute he opened his mouth and said anything in his broad Southern accent, he was immediately identified as “American” and therefore someone who thought that Sweden and Stockholm were small and provincial.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Compared with Goldsboro, Texas, Stockholm was an exotic metropolis, full of dangers and temptations. Temptations in particular. There were beautiful women everywhere. They were in the parks, on the streets, sitting in restaurants. And the real miracle was that they all seemed to want to talk to him, of all people. Back home in Texas, he had been just one of many well-built boys who played American football and had a jaw as square as a cake tin. But in Scandinavia, he became exotic and unique.

In the past, he’d had low self-confidence when it came to the opposite sex, not least because he wasn’t much of a talker. It had been easier to fight for his opinions than to defend them with words. That was something he had inherited from his father; none of his siblings were particularly quick thinking.

But in Europe, and Sweden in particular, no one called Jack Kluger an idiot. There, the language barrier became a natural defense. Though everyone watched American films, no one realized that his vocabulary was as limited as his education.

“Gamla-stan?” he said, pronouncing the area of the city in his heavily accented way. “From what you’re saying, I’d need a guide. Would either of you ladies be interested?”

They laughed, but he could see that both were willing to lead him through the narrow streets of the capital’s main tourist thoroughfare.

Kluger glanced at his watch. Quarter to one. Where was Balik?

Goldsboro was a town of a few hundred people just south of Abilene, itself home to a hundred thousand inhabitants and a few hours west of Dallas. Kruger had been on his way back there for years now, but he was constantly finding new excuses not to get on the plane.

The detour to Stockholm hadn’t been planned, but he had managed to stay put there. He had always thought that Sweden was the country where they made chocolate and cuckoo clocks, but he now knew he had mistaken it for Switzerland. Geography had never been one of his favorite subjects at school. In fact, he hadn’t had any favorite subjects at all.

He was the third of five children. He had no contact with his brothers, but he thought that his older and only sister was still living at home. Kruger himself had dropped out of high school and enlisted in the army, back when the war in Afghanistan had recently begun, and since that day he hadn’t seen either of his parents.

Joining the military hadn’t been a patriotic decision, even if his sense of patriotism had grown during his service. It was just a way of getting away from home, of getting a job and health insurance and being able to avoid thinking about what he was going to do with his life.

Jack Kluger wasn’t much of a thinker.

He didn’t want to think about the war or about Afghanistan. He was tired of all the films about Rambo and war veterans coming home full of regret and with shot nerves; men who couldn’t sleep at night and started drinking or smoking crack, who lost their jobs if they’d even had one to begin with. Jack Kluger was better than that. He wasn’t helpless, he wasn’t a victim, he wouldn’t go crazy and kill himself or be haunted by memories of people blown to pieces or children losing their legs. He was strong. He could control his thoughts. He could shut out everything he needed to, and turn his mind to beautiful, easy and fun things instead.

But sometimes, whenever he lowered his defenses for a moment or two, the doubt reared its head. It was as though he got confused, and it always happened without warning. In the middle of a conversation, at the checkout when he went to the supermarket, or during a lunch when he was meant to be talking work.

Or, like now, when he was trying to charm two women in a restaurant.

He lost focus, suddenly didn’t know where he was or what he was doing there.

And as long as these moments of confusion continued to affect him, he held off on buying that ticket back home to Goldsboro, Texas.

He wanted to be completely back to normal before he returned.

He was just about to ask one of the women, the one with the bigger lips, what she was doing that evening and whether she wanted to go to a restaurant he had been recommended, when Balik came in through the door.

The sight of him made Kluger quickly end his conversation, and he got up to greet his friend. When the women left a few minutes later, the one with the bigger lips left her phone number on a napkin on the table. Kluger let it lie. There were plenty of other phone numbers in Stockholm.

14

Michel Maloof had been surprised at how unfazed Alexandra Svensson was by her own nakedness. Not wearing a thread, she climbed out of bed, went into the bathroom and left the door open. Once she was done, she flushed and continued, still naked, into the kitchen, where she first switched on the coffee machine and then began to slice oranges.

It was an early Sunday morning in early May. Alexandra had slept at Maloof’s place again; it was almost becoming a habit, the third time in two weeks. Compared with the way she lived, with someone else’s furniture in a tiny studio apartment, staying at his place was like visiting a castle. The roller blind wasn’t fully down, and he could feel the warmth of the sun on his skin. He lay in the soft bed, slowly waking to the sound of Alexandra in the kitchen. There was a growing knot of anxiety in his stomach, and he knew exactly why.

He was enjoying this far too much.

Maloof slowly turned onto his back, his head on the pillow. He opened his eyes. The sun glittered on the mirror on the wall. Why did his bedroom suddenly feel so much more comfortable? He glanced around and realized it was because of all the new feminine touches; the cushions she had brought over from her place, the new striped sheets she had bought, the pots of creams and perfumes on the counter, all the clothes she had strewn about and that smelled like a woman.

Maloof’s phone was on the bedside table, but he didn’t reach for it. That was one of the privileges of Sunday mornings.

He would have to watch out, he realized, though he was already longing to get back into bed after breakfast. Ideally with Alexandra. He smiled at the thought. He wasn’t in a proper relationship right now, though he did know a couple of women who wanted just that. If he didn’t actively fight it, he might easily end up in one with Alexandra Svensson. Just because it felt nice to know whom you would be spending the night with, and it was better than giving out keys to several women at once. He was well aware that that wasn’t a good enough reason to move in with someone, which meant he had to try to keep Alexandra Svensson at arm’s length. He was letting her sleep over for professional reasons, and he had to bear that in mind.

He climbed out of bed. After the obligatory visit to the bathroom, he pulled on his T-shirt and underwear from the day before. He was far from as comfortable with his own naked body as she was with hers.

He found her by the counter in the kitchen. She was standing with her back to the door, squeezing oranges against the juice press with both hands. Her round bottom trembled with the vibrations it was sending through her body. He laughed quietly.

“Can I help?” he asked.

“Very manly of you, Michel,” she replied without turning around. “But I think I can manage to make some orange juice without your help? You could, like, take out the coffee cups? Do you want anything else? Should I toast some bread?”

“No, don’t worry,” he said. Coffee and juice was a perfect breakfast.

She moved around his kitchen as though she was at home; she had even rearranged the furniture. He took out two cups and two glasses and put them down on the counter. He couldn’t help but glance at her small breasts as he did it.

“Stop it,” she said with a smile when she realized.

He tried, but he couldn’t help himself.

“Are you working tonight?” he asked.

They were sitting at the kitchen table. Alexandra had pulled on a dressing gown so as not to distract her lover, one made of silk that seemed to have taken up permanent residence in Maloof’s wardrobe.

“Yep,” she replied with a nod. “I tried to put together a time sheet for May where I wouldn’t have to see Claude, but no matter what I do he just turns up anyway. I mean, it doesn’t matter. He’d never dare do anything. But, I don’t know, he’s creepy.”

Maloof nodded. The kitchen smelled of cinnamon, something it only ever did when Alexandra was there. He didn’t know why, maybe it was her perfume.

“You get it, right?” she asked, continuing without waiting for an answer. “He thinks he’s, like, the world’s best boss. He’s been through management courses. And he’s basically promising me a career. I mean, what does he think? There are fourteen of us working nights, when we’re all in, which only happens on Tuesdays and Thursdays. What kind of career is that going to be, exactly?”

“Right, right. Is there… more to do on Tuesdays and… Thursdays, or something?” Maloof wondered.

“Mmm. We take the most money then. But, I mean, day shift on Fridays, there’s never more than maybe seven, eight people? So what’s he thinking? Am I meant to be the boss of three people and him the other four?”

She laughed. Maloof did too.

“It’s like,” she said, “get it together, you know?”

“Right, right.”

“I don’t want to go straight home,” Alexandra said with a sigh, changing the subject. “It’s going to be a nice day. If you wanted, we could have a picnic.”

This was how Maloof’s knowledge of the cash depot in Västberga grew. Each time he saw Alexandra, she revealed something else that could prove useful. That morning alone, he had learned that it was the morning after a Tuesday or Thursday that they should strike.

It was a long-winded way of planning a job, but this was how he worked. Thoroughly.

Alexandra’s dressing gown slipped open when she twisted to close the window. He couldn’t resist the urge, and reached forward to move his fingertips gently over her small nipple, which immediately hardened at his touch.

“Or,” she said with a shiver, “we could blow off the picnic and do something else?”

It was Alexandra Svensson’s description of the counting department that eventually convinced Maloof that Ezra Ray had stolen the right documents from the town planning office. She had described the big room on the sixth floor as being “banana shaped” several times now. What she was trying to say was that the open-plan office where she worked was constructed in some kind of arc, a gentle curve, across the top of the building.

Maloof had been in the café by the bowling alley in Heron City on the afternoon when Sami had given him the drawings. The thundering of the balls and the crash of the occasional strike had drowned out the canned music. Each had ordered a cup of black coffee, and Maloof had leafed through the stack of papers that Sami had brought in a plastic bag from H&M.

“But the fact he stole them,” Maloof had asked, “isn’t that basically like… announcing we’re planning something?”

“Do you know when someone last requested these documents?”

Maloof had shaken his head. Sami’s leg bounced impatiently beneath the table.

“October 1979. That was the last time. And before that, it was 1970. Said so on a note that came with them. Like some kind of library card.”

“Right, right,” Maloof had said, though he had never taken out a library book in his life.

“If someone only asks to see these drawings every thirty years, there’s not much risk in borrowing them for a few months, right?”

“No, no, of course,” Maloof replied, searching through the pile of papers and realizing why no one was interested.

The drawings were indecipherable. It was impossible even to tell whether the Vreten 17 building really was the G4S cash depot.

When Maloof got home from Heron City that day, he had spread out the drawings on the floor and started to methodically go through them. What made them particularly difficult to interpret was the large, open atrium that cut straight through the building. There was a glass dome on the roof, in the shape of a sharp pyramid, and beneath that, the huge space opened out. The various floors were built around that square void in the center.

After an hour or so, he managed to find the room Alexandra had been talking about. Its curved form was the only one like it in the entire building, and the key to understanding the drawings. Using that room as his starting point, Maloof was able to work out far more over the days that followed.

It didn’t worry him that he still wasn’t sure what the lower floors of the building were like. He found what he assumed was the vault, split between two levels, but knew there was no point attempting to break in there. Not just because Alexandra had talked about the legendary security system, but also because he had been hearing stories about officials from the Swedish Central Bank going there to study the setup before updating their own security systems for years.

The vault was one of Scandinavia’s most expensive. If you had access to a small army, you could probably get in, but otherwise it was better not to even try.

Every night, Maloof called Sami and gave him an update on his progress. The exhausted father was enthusiastic rather than helpful.

“OK,” he said to Maloof, “but is it going to work? What do you think?”

“Yeah,” he told Sami. “Just like she said. You blow a hole through the roof, and that takes you straight to place we’re aiming for. It… should take five, ten minutes. No more.”

There was a general rule that if it took more than fifteen minutes to get in and out of a bank or post office, the police would have time to arrive. But five to ten minutes felt good.

“OK,” said Sami. “But how the hell do you get onto the roof to begin with? And how do you get down again?”

15

It wasn’t like in the movies.

Sami Farhan had never been to a racecourse before, but he felt like he had seen hundreds of Hollywood films full of people doing dodgy deals as they walked around the trotting tracks, or cheering on their favorites from the stands.

The atmosphere at Täby Racecourse was nothing like that.

On the way in, there had been far more horse paddocks and stalls than he had expected, but once they reached the main building, he couldn’t hide his disappointment. There was barely anyone around, and the whole place was in disrepair. It was a gloomy, abandoned scene.

“Where is everyone?” Sami asked.

“At home in front of their computers,” Toomas Mandel replied. “They built these grandstands before you could gamble online. They thought thousands of people would come to the races. Tens of thousands. But now you’d be lucky to see a few hundred.”

It seemed incredible. If you watched daytime TV in Sweden, harness and traditional racing seemed to be two of the country’s great interests. How many times had Sami seen cute girls with huge microphones asking short men in colorful clothes whether the track was heavy or not? Where were all the TV cameras today?

They went into the restaurant. It took Sami a moment to realize that the restaurant was Täby Racecourse. There was nothing else for the spectators.

“I don’t know,” he said as they each ordered a tomato salad from an old, bored waiter. “If it’s this empty, surely there can’t be any money here? You know what I mean?”

“No,” Mandel said. “There isn’t. Three hundred and sixty-four days a year, you’d get no more than small change. That’s why they reduced the number of security guards and got rid of the police. These days, they only have surveillance around the tracks and the stalls. They’re not worried about anyone stealing money, they’re just worried someone’s going to… mess with the horses.”

Sami nodded. He knew people who had made money on harness racing. People he had grown up with, but others too. People from the pub. Half celebrities. Mafia.

“OK,” Sami said. “So tell me the plan again?”

“The Diana Race is the exception. It’s the same day as the Jockey Club’s Jubilee Race. Always in early summer. I’d guess there’d be up to ten million in cash here then. Maybe more? Still no police or guards though.”

“Ten million?” Sami repeated.

He was disappointed. Like always when you were planning a job, people had a tendency to overexaggerate. Toomas Mandel was trying to sell this opportunity, and it was clear he was exaggerating. Meaning the ten million was probably more like five. Which would be split among several people.

“It’s not that much,” Mandel agreed, “but it’s relative to the risk. It’s a small amount of money, but it’s low risk.”

“Riding down to the boat club afterward? Low risk? That’s not low risk.”

“I told you, the riding thing is just one of several ideas,” Mandel replied, sounding annoyed. “Forget that. I’ll think of something else.”

Their salads arrived. Sami could say with confidence that the restaurant kitchen at Täby Racecourse wouldn’t be the future of racing. And that, despite having had several weeks, Mandel still hadn’t come up with anything better than riding off with the money. Like a couple of cowboys.

Sami called Michel Maloof that same afternoon, and they agreed to meet in Skärholmen the next day. He had thought he would be able to sneak off for a few hours around lunch, but Karin woke with a migraine and he had no other option than to take the baby with him. They hadn’t decided on a name yet, but it had taken a while last time too. Karin was relieved when he left. It meant she could pull down the blinds in the bedroom and wrap herself in darkness; the only way to dull the pain. Her mother was taking care of John.

Sami left the stroller at home, as it was impossible to get around with one on the subway. And so, with a warmly dressed baby in his arms—though it was the second week in May, the temperature still hadn’t made it above 50 degrees—he walked down to Slussen and took the red line out to Skärholmen. Sami didn’t know what the baby could see through the dark windows in the tunnels, but it must have been fascinating enough to keep him captivated the entire way. When they finally arrived, he was so tired that he had fallen asleep.

They met outside a Foot Locker.

The baby lay like a bundle over his father’s shoulder, and Sami effortlessly greeted Maloof with his right hand.

Maloof laughed and nodded. “That alive… or what?”

“You bet your ass,” said Sami.

Maloof laughed again. “Right, right. But you know… Pacino probably wouldn’t—”

“I’m not Al Pacino,” Sami interrupted him.

“No, no, not even Al Pacino is these days,” Maloof agreed.

They started walking. It was just before lunch on a Thursday, and the shopping center wouldn’t be setting any new sales records that day. But there were still enough people around for no one to pay any attention to the ill-matched pair, the short Lebanese man and the big Iraqi with a baby on his shoulder.

Sami had peeled back the baby’s outer layers of clothing like a banana skin. They were now hanging from his feet.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said.

Maloof nodded. He had too. He didn’t know if he wanted to call it a plan. It was more like jigsaw pieces scattered around his head, waiting to be put together.

“Yeah?”

“What kind of money are we talking about? Do you know?” Sami asked.

“Yeah, yeah. More than any individual bank in Sweden. You want the exact amount?”

“Roughly?”

“Half a billion?” Maloof suggested.

Sami nodded. He absentmindedly patted the baby’s diaper through his trousers. It was as he had thought. There was no comparing it with the Täby Racecourse job.

“How do we move forward?” he asked.

“The first step…” said Maloof, “is to find a helicopter.”

Because if they were going to pull off the job in Västberga, they were going to need a helicopter.

There were a number of different ways of getting onto the roof, but only one realistic way to get off it. Since his conversation with Petrovic, Maloof had looked into how fast a crane could drive, and then banished the thought. He had even learned about using climbing equipment, bolts and ropes, on mortar. It was too complicated. Elegant solutions like hot air balloons and gliders looked exciting on film, but they were unthinkable in reality. Jet packs, on the other hand, those small flying motors you wore on your back, were a possibility. But if you could afford to buy a couple of jet packs, you didn’t need to rob a cash depot.

No, it had to be a helicopter, or else they could forget the whole idea.

“OK,” said Sami. “A helicopter.”

They continued through the shopping arcade. Over the years, the men had perfected the art of strolling. They knew how to walk slowly, without drawing attention to themselves. They stopped at every third shop window and absentmindedly looked in at the spring coats, headphones, bikes and sofas.

Thanks to this way of meeting, they could talk freely without worrying about being overheard.

“I don’t know,” Sami continued, “who do we know with a helicopter? Who has a helicopter just sitting in the garage?”

“There’s…” Maloof replied. “It’s no harder than getting hold of a boat.”

“It’s harder,” Sami argued. “Plus, anyone can drive a boat. I can drive a boat. You can drive a boat. You know what I mean? Neither of us can fly a helicopter. Maybe we can steal one, but we won’t be able to get it to lift off.”

The baby on his shoulder was slowly waking up. Sami assumed that Maloof wouldn’t appreciate sitting down with a bottle, so they started walking again, Sami in a bobbing motion he hoped would send the baby back to sleep.

“Right, right,” said Maloof. “We’ll have to… find someone. A pilot.”

“I don’t know,” Sami said again. “Do you know anyone?”

“I don’t know anyone,” Maloof said with unexpected firmness. He laughed briefly. “Or actually… I know someone who can sort something out.”

“Your friend? Tall? Petrovic?”

“Right, right.” Maloof smiled.

“Seems difficult. And her, the girl…”

“Alexandra.”

“You’re completely sure about her now?”

“Definitely.”

“I don’t know. Why would she tell you so much? You know? She must be wondering.”

“Nope,” Maloof replied. “We talk… you know. I’m not the one asking. She just talks.”

“OK… Maybe…” Sami said hesitantly. “So what do we do once we’ve landed the helicopter on the roof?”

Maloof nodded and smiled. “We’ll have five minutes… There’s a police station two blocks away. Maybe ten minutes? Max. We blow a hole in the roof… we find someone who can blow a hole in the roof. Below that’s the room where Alexandra works. Cash. Counting. She calls it different things. On Tuesdays and Thursdays they take in… a few hundred million in cash.”

They were standing outside a secondhand shop, studying the strange objects in the window. Sami was rocking gently to keep the baby asleep.

“Money into bags…” Maloof continued, “back up onto the roof… using a ladder? And then we fly off.”

“And the police helicopters?” Sami asked. “Where are they? You know what I mean? If we’re on the roof and there’s a swarm of police helicopters just waiting for us above?”

“Right, right,” said Maloof. “No. We’ll have to make sure the police helicopters never get airborne.”

“How do we do that?”

“We’ll work something out.” Maloof laughed confidently.

Sami nodded. Then he shook his head. He felt the tiny body on his shoulder wake and stretch, the prelude to a loud protest that could be stopped only by giving him something to suck on.

“What you’re saying is,” Sami quickly tried to sum up, “that we need to find a helicopter. And a pilot. Then we’re going to blow our way in through the roof and climb down a ladder to grab the money. And that all this can take ten minutes max. And at the same time we need to make sure the police helicopters can’t take off.”

“Exactly, exactly.” Maloof nodded. That was roughly what he had envisioned.

“It sounds… you know how it sounds, right?” Sami asked. “You know what I mean?”

Maloof laughed, but it was with pride. He thought the plan was full of possibility, challenges, grandeur.

People were mad, Sami thought. Horses and helicopters.

He quickly said goodbye to his friend and headed into an Espresso House, where he could ask the staff to warm a bottle of breast milk for him.

It sounds crazy, he thought with a wry smile.

Hundreds of millions?