The Helicopter Heist

16

Zoran Petrovic, sometimes called Tall by his friends, was sitting in Café Stolen on Upplandsgatan. The restaurant was only a powerful stone’s throw from the building where he lived. He had ordered a glass of lukewarm water, and it stood on the table in front of him. The place was almost empty, but he had still chosen a table far enough toward the rear that he wouldn’t be visible from the street.

He was speaking on the phone, in Montenegrin.

It was an agitated conversation, and he used his left hand to paint a wide arc through the air as the words poured out of him. His right hand had a tight grip on the glass of water. Zoran Petrovic was a storyteller. He spoke both as he inhaled and exhaled; he wasn’t going to let language, objections or reality get in his way. It was that which had taken him to the top.

Over the years, Petrovic had bought up all the places he liked to visit on Upplandsgatan, from his building down to Norra Bantorget. That had left him with a handful of restaurants, Café Stolen and Mandolin among them, and a beauty salon, where he liked to sit down in the comfortable chairs for manicures and pedicures—he flashed his vanity, it was the best way to avoid being accused of it—and he had also stepped in as a financier for a framing shop and a secondhand-clothes boutique.

Zoran Petrovic had been born in Lund, but he’d barely had time to learn to walk before a moving van brought the family up to the capital. Once in Stockholm, the Petrovics bought Benny Andersson’s old house in Tumba. This was a few years into the seventies, and the former owner naturally became more and more interesting to mention as the popularity of his band grew. A few years after ABBA’s success with “Waterloo,” Petrovic’s parents divorced. He and his brother moved with their mother to Hallunda, and later to Norsborg; by the time Petrovic began school, he had lived at six different addresses.

After he’d been thrown out of his first school just in time for Christmas, and the second during second grade, Petrovic’s parents decided to send him to Montenegro, where discipline and respect for adults were built in to the system. However, their hopes that a tougher school system would tame him turned out to be futile.

In the playground on the very first day, Petrovic had been given a taste of the forbidden fruits that he would never be able to get enough of going forward: the power of manipulation and the force of provocation. He had realized that he could make people do what he wanted, sometimes in exchange for nothing but flattery, praise or a smile. Other times, using threats of violence as persuasion. People reacted in different ways, and discovering what worked for each individual in his class was a challenge he could spend days, weeks and months on.

Until he had learned to control them all.

Unfortunately, this was at roughly the same time that the school decided to expel him. Norsborg or Podgorica, it made no difference.

The best thing about the two years he spent with his maternal grandparents in Montenegro was that he had learned a new language. Plus, he’d made friends for life. He returned to Sweden and continued his education in Fittja, but by then it was more like the school had adapted to Zoran Petrovic than the other way around.

His mother would often blame the school system for the career her son later chose. But what made his parents most bitter, both of them dyed-in-the-wool Communists, was to see their son grow up to be a full-fledged capitalist.

Money was Zoran Petrovic’s first great love.

And it was a love that would never fade.

The new waitress changed the radio station and carefully turned up the volume. Petrovic gestured for her to turn it down again. He was working. It was just after lunch, and the afternoon clientele who usually sat playing with their beer coasters still hadn’t turned up.

Petrovic had barely finished the call with Montenegro when his phone rang again. A typical day for him. A never-ending stream of phone calls.

“Yes?” he said into the phone.

“It’s Svenne,” said Gustafsson from the scrapyard in Lidingö. “Something’s arrived for you. Damn dodgy thing. Big as hell. Should we try to set it up? There are drawings and stuff with it.”

A powerful feeling of joy filled Petrovic. Finally.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said breathlessly down the phone. “Set it up! Put it in the container. Drop everything else and assemble the bastard. I’ll be there in fifteen!”

Without another word, he got to his feet, bumping the table and knocking over his glass. The water ran across the tablecloth and dripped to the floor, but he didn’t notice.

He was finally about to defeat those damn secure bags.

Zoran Petrovic could smell the money.

The idea was neither original nor difficult, and it was, as usual, the implementation that had caused him problems. Petrovic took a right up by Tegnérlunden Park and crossed Sveavägen just as the lights turned red. He was driving a BMW he had borrowed from a friend who owed him money, a fast car built for Germans with long legs. Neither Ferrari nor Maserati seemed to realize that people could be taller than six and a half feet.

The plan was to film how to break into one of the G4S bags without causing the dye ampoules to explode. A bit of basic editing, some cool music, and then the film would be uploaded to YouTube. Would-be robbers across Europe—and the rest of the world—would be able to watch it, meaning that G4S would have to scrap the blue bags within a few hours, binding contract or not. That was when Maloof would return to the security firm’s head office and remind them that there was another, better bag that they could order now that the secrets of the blue bag had been revealed.

If Petrovic had calculated the production and distribution costs and the business tax correctly, a company with an exclusive contract to sell security bags to G4S could make a profit of a million or so during the very first year. After that, you could probably maintain a sustainable level of earnings of a few million in Sweden alone.

The BMW flew over the Lidingö Bridge.

He parked badly outside the scrapyard and ran on his long legs through the building, out the back and across the labyrinthine car cemetery to the container. There were three men inside, all studying the masterpiece that had been sent over from France, and which they had just managed set up in line with the instructions.

“Move, move!” Petrovic demanded.

The machine was worth veneration.

It was a guillotine.

What could be more French? A guillotine with huge titanium blades, so sharp that they could cut a strand of hair. Or a brick.

Or a steel bag.

But not just that. The blades—there were two of them—weren’t reliant only on gravity. The manufacturers had helped nature along by installing them onto two steel posts with a chemical rocket engine on each bracket. The blades’ short journey toward their goal was an explosive one. Petrovic had seen the machine in action a couple of times, and the force was incredible.

Zoran Petrovic had asked the manufacturers of the magnificent rocket guillotine to construct two titanium blades that came down onto a rectangular plate. The measurements of the plate were the same as the blue security bags’ minus seven millimeters on the short sides.

In other words, the guillotine would be able to cut the dye ampoules straight off the bag in one fantastic clean sweep.

“It’s beautiful,” he said with a sigh, happy as a small child, staring at the unlikely machine.

“What the hell is it?” asked Svenne Gustafsson.

Petrovic sent Gustafsson and his men out. His own amateur engineers would be arriving soon, two of the kids who usually worked in the container and in whom Petrovic had developed a special confidence over the past few months.

He moved around the guillotine, admiring its razor-sharp blades and brilliant steel construction. Basking in his own genius.

During the afternoon, it transpired that they would need more cables and connections before everything worked like it should. It wasn’t until nine that evening, under the glow of the bright ceiling lights in the container, that they were finally ready to put one of the blue bags onto the guillotine for the first real test.

The six video cameras that had previously been on tripods facing each of the workstations had now been turned to face the guillotine. From six different angles, they would capture the moment the blue security bag from G4S was freed of its edges and Petrovic’s financial future was secured.

The idea of selling the black bags to the security firm through a new company, a legitimate tax-paying company that submitted annual reports registered with the Patent and Registration Office, seemed particularly appealing to Petrovic. The profits would be big enough that he and Maloof might as well share it with the state. As only wealthy people could afford to do.

Petrovic switched on each of the six cameras himself. Then he took a few steps toward the door. He nodded gravely, and one of the two assistants placed a bag on the plate. Petrovic nodded again, and the other assistant pressed the button.

The guillotine motors exploded into life.

The razor-sharp titanium blades fell at rocket speed toward the security bag, but in Petrovic’s eyes, everything happened in slow motion. He saw the blades gliding down the two poles, and the cameras captured every tenth of a second.

The titanium forced itself into the edge of the bag and ate its way into the steel. Petrovic grinned.

Then it stopped.

Everything stopped.

Something was putting up a fight.

And just a second later, they heard the sound of the dye ampoule exploding inside the bag.

Petrovic and his engineers jumped at the familiar noise.

Their disappointment was mute, and time seemed to come to a standstill.

“WHAT THE HELL?”

The young men were on their way out of the container before Petrovic even had time to say another word. They knew that the easygoing nonchalance the tall man radiated, those streams of words that usually entertained them, was masking something else.

Something hard and black.

And they had no intention of staying to witness that.

“Shit,” Petrovic mumbled quietly, without even noticing that he was alone beneath the bright strip lights.

The expensive, wrecked machine stood in front of him, a hope that had cost months of his time and hundreds of thousands of his kronor, and which had proved to have no value at all.

It was over.

The idea of replacing the blue security bags with the black briefcase from Slovenia had lived for almost five years. But that night, it died. He tried to calculate how much it had cost him, but the figures quickly grew so large that he gave up. It was far too depressing.

Maybe he could sell the container to Gustafsson and the scrapyard?

Maybe the titanium in the blades would be worth something if he took it apart?

Petrovic slumped onto a stool by one of the six workstations. He fished his phone from his inner pocket and dialed Michel Maloof’s number.

Maloof answered immediately.

“Did you say you needed help?” Petrovic asked.

“Right, right,” Maloof’s voice came down the line. “It was that thing we talked about last time… getting off the ground?”

Petrovic thought for a moment. He was used to riddles of this kind, you could never talk plainly over the phone. After a few seconds, he remembered what Maloof meant. The cash depot in Västberga, the helicopter.

“Sure,” he said. “I remember.”

“Do you know anyone with… one of those machines?” Maloof asked.

“Consider it done,” Petrovic replied.

He shoved the phone back into his pocket. He had found himself a new project. But how did you get hold of a helicopter?

17

“You locking up, Niklas?”

Carsten Hansen was standing by the open door, and without waiting for Niklas Nordgren’s answer, he let it swing shut behind him.

Nordgren continued his soldering. He was used to locking up and setting the alarm, and he usually got more done once the others had left. The working hours at the electricians’ were flexible. Carsten, who owned the business, preferred to arrive and leave early. Nordgren thought that was good, better than staying on and surfing the tabloids’ websites instead of going home to the family.

The reason Nordgren often stayed longest in the evening was that his partner, Annika Skott, rarely got home from work before seven. That meant he might as well work a few extra hours before leaving for the day. He fully accepted that the overtime might not always be reflected in his monthly paycheck. In a way, he had a permanent job, but the company had only four employees, and if there wasn’t much work around, you couldn’t expect any extra pay, no matter how many hours you worked.

It had started as a simple repair job on a couple of electrical circuits in a food processor from the sixties, but Nordgren had soon taken the entire device apart. He couldn’t help it. People brought in all kinds of strange objects to be fixed, and nine times out of ten it would have been better to say no from the outset. But Nordgren liked fixing old things. Modern mixers couldn’t compete with the quality of the past; these days, a particularly thick dough could blow the fuses, a tough nut could knock out the power in an entire house. But the bulky food processor lying in pieces in front of him had once been able to knead stoneware clay without overheating.

It was obvious that Nordgren would stay behind a few extra hours to fix a machine like that.

At six thirty, he took the bus home. He had stopped off at the supermarket on the way, to buy food for dinner. The gray sky seemed not to be taking into account the fact that the calendar claimed it was June, and Nordgren stepped beneath the bus shelter to get out of the rain, which had been drizzling down since yesterday morning. He was wearing a quilted navy jacket he had bought from H&M the previous autumn, some boots he had found on sale at Naturkompaniet, and he was holding the carrier bag from ICA in one hand. He had pulled his blue-black cap low on his head, and no one who saw him on the bus would remember him afterward.

In the public sphere, Niklas Nordgren was the anonymous man who crossed the shot as the evening news was setting up a camera in Sergels Torg, randomly filming people on their way down to the subway. He was ordinary personified, a statistician’s wet dream.

Niklas Nordgren’s mother and father had been married for almost forty years, and their love story was one of the family’s most repeated legends. The way Lars Nordgren, working for PEAB construction at the time, had traveled to Poland to build apartments, and while he was there met Ewa—who would later become Niklas’s mother. After a year living not far from Crakow, the pair had moved to Sweden, where they bought a small house in Vårby Gård.

Just in time for Niklas to start high school, the family moved to Skärholmen, somewhere Nordgren’s three-years-older sister had never learned to feel comfortable. He had suffered through school in silent protest. The way the teachers and the curriculum managed to drain such a curious young man of his thirst for knowledge was a miracle, Niklas thought today. He had barely had time to start school in Botkyrka when his parents moved again, this time north, to Solna. His sister moved with them and found an apartment in Sundbyberg, where she lived to this day, but he had taken the opportunity to fly the nest.

Like so many other people of his age, he had ventured out into the world. Today, the years he spent in Asia and Europe seemed like a dream someone else had dreamed. And when he returned to Sweden, he ended up in Lidingö. It had been down to chance, like so much else in his life.

Niklas Nordgren stepped off the bus at the stop in Larsberg and trudged eastward along empty sidewalks. The anonymous blocks of apartments that rose up from the rocks had been built in the late sixties, with an aesthetic, ambition and thrift similar to that of the infamous suburbs of Tensta and Akalla. But that evening, almost all the windows glowed cozily, and the views across Norra Djurgården were spectacularly pretty in the early sunset. To Nordgren, the large, anonymous tower block area was perfect. He wasn’t someone who liked being the center of attention. He wasn’t someone who thought that life was about collecting friends and acquaintances.

There had been a time, immediately after he returned from Asia, when he had tried to take on the role of someone who was both seen and heard. He had made an effort to become someone people pointed out, talked about.

No good had come of it.

At the entrance to his building, Nordgren entered the security code and pushed the door open with his shoulder. The empty street and anonymous buildings, the silhouettes of the industrial area: this was exactly how he wanted it.

When Annika got home, just after seven, Nordgren had already started to prepare dinner. He wasn’t a particularly remarkable cook. When men cooked, they often had trouble not spicing up their performance with testosterone, but Nordgren cooked everyday food. Today, it was pasta with Bolognese sauce. He fried grated carrots, onion and garlic, and then added half a jar of ready-made tomato sauce to make his Bolognese more juicy.

He was stirring the sauce when he heard the front door open. Annika took off her coat in the hallway, went into the bedroom and changed. The gray dress she wore during the day at the accountancy firm where she worked was put back onto its hanger, and she pulled on some jeans and a sweater instead. She came into the kitchen, gave him a quick hug and then got to work grating parmesan as Nordgren drained the boiling water from the pasta.

“Good day?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he replied. “You?”

She shrugged. “Scent of a Woman’s on tonight,” she said.

“Which channel?”

“Four.”

“Mmm,” he replied without enthusiasm.

He didn’t know whether he could bear to watch Bengt Magnusson deliver a half-hour news report midway through the film.

“I think I’ll watch it,” Annika said.

He nodded. To keep the peace, he would sit down next to her and start watching the film, but they both knew that he would disappear into his hobby room as soon as the news started, probably not returning when the film came back on.

Things had been worse than usual these past few days.

“Are you working on anything special?” she asked suspiciously when they sat down at the kitchen table and started to eat.

“Yeah,” he said.

It wasn’t as a conversationalist that Niklas Nordgren had built his reputation.

The evening unfolded as usual. Annika used the news interlude to get herself ready for bed, and by the time she returned to the living room to watch the rest of the film in her dressing gown, he had vanished. She slumped onto the sofa with a resigned sigh, but as her eyelids started to droop during the first ad break, she realized she wouldn’t manage to make it through the film tonight either.

The attractiveness Nordgren had radiated when he first met Annika had been linked to his mysteriousness. Like many others, she had been struck by the contrast between his criminal past and his down-to-earth honesty. But the things that had once attracted her now left her cold. He was no more than he pretended to be. It had come as a surprise to her, even if it shouldn’t have.

In a grand gesture, Annika had let him take over the room next to the living room, turning it into a space for his hobbies. How he had managed to collect so many things was beyond her. He was essentially an orderly person, but it was impossible to organize chaos when it was constantly growing in scope. It was as though things were drawn to him, tools of all kinds, wood and plastic tubes, old cell phones, broken food processors, mountains of nuts and bolts, copper wire and detonators. Within their group of friends, everyone knew that rather than throwing away their worn-out stereo or old showerhead, they could just give it to Nordgren. He would appreciate it.

And so, the piles of junk in his hobby room grew.

It was almost twelve thirty when Nordgren realized he would need the screwdriver with the short handle to finish the night’s self-appointed task: installing a clock in a radio-controlled car. But he had stored the screwdriver and some other tools down in the basement last week.

Was that a sign he should finish up for the night?

He looked at the car on the table. An Opel, perhaps? It was battered and blue, and he didn’t know how it had come into his possession. But he nodded to himself. He would sleep better if he finished it off rather than leaving it until tomorrow. And so he got up, opened the door to the living room and padded silently into the hallway, past Annika, who had fallen asleep in front of the TV.

He found the screwdriver where he had left it, in the toolbox. Just as Nordgren was about to turn off the light, he caught sight of something black on the floor beneath the shelves. For a moment, he thought it was a rat, but then he realized what it was. The lava rock. He went back, bent down and picked it up. It was dry and porous. The reason he had once shoved it into his backpack was that it weighed almost nothing.

His eyes searched for the dark brown packing box where the stone should be. It was closest to the wall, of course, beneath a couple of other boxes. That was why, he now remembered, he had never put the stone back.

Nordgren glanced at his watch.

He decided to overcome his laziness. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes to move the other boxes to one side. But it wasn’t the physical effort that was the problem. He knew what would happen when he opened the door to his past, and on that particular night he let it happen.

In the brown box where the black lava stone was meant to be, there were four photo albums. There was also a skateboard, a bag of extra wheels and a couple of trucks that had never been used. There were two BMX pedals he had once ordered in from Germany, and a bottle of special lacquer for treating the wood on surfboards. Another small box, containing gloves, glasses and the climbing harness he had used in Thailand, lay beside it.

He stared at these hidden remnants of a forgotten life and found himself frozen to the spot, the open box on the floor in front of him.

What had happened?

Why had he given up on the skateboard, the surfboard and the bike?

Why had he swapped that kind of adrenaline for a darker, more destructive kind?

He sat down on the cold stone floor and lowered his head between his knees. Life, he reminded himself, was what went on while he fixed radio-controlled cars and food processors from the sixties. The days went by. They turned into weeks and months.

It was six months now since he had been released from prison. What had he done with his freedom? Wake up beneath a pitch-black sky, get dressed, eat breakfast, go to work and then come home as the darkness was once again descending over Lidingö. But that wasn’t living, it was just a way of passing the time.

Nordgren peered into the box and closed his eyes. These were the memories of the life he had once begun.

The waves foaming and thundering onto the beaches in Bali, the way his body had tensed completely as the water reached his chest, hand on surfboard, looking out to the horizon to spot the waves it was worth paddling toward.

The silhouette of the Matterhorn’s dramatic peak; the thin, clear Alpine air, and the way his eyes had sought out the best way up the mountain as he stretched his aching muscles by bending his fingers backward after the morning’s stages.

The pain in his tailbone when a 360 failed on the half-pipe, and the board that had rolled away, leaving him with a friction burn stretching from his knee halfway down his leg. He still had the thin white scar today.

He could no longer explain why he had abandoned that life.

He had loved it.

But something had gotten in the way, he had found a kind of excitement that was even more intense. His criminality had been an addiction. Could he break free of it by searching for his future through his past, by following in the tracks of what was in the brown cardboard box?

He put the black lava rock into the box and folded the flaps down. Then he pushed the box back toward the wall and stacked the two others on top of it so that everything looked just like it had before.

18

“What… I mean… what is this place?”

Michel Maloof glanced around. He was in one of the nightclubs near Stureplan in central Stockholm, it was three thirty in the morning and the beautiful people had been even more beautiful a few hours earlier. Pounding house music washed over the low clusters of sofas where men bragged about their achievements to women who gave fake laughs and flashed their teeth. Lips glistened, drinks were drunk, skin sweated, hands waved and Maloof was in agony.

“Let loose, Michel!” Zoran Petrovic said, laughing at how uncomfortable Maloof looked. “You should get out more. Widen your horizons. There’s nothing wrong with Fittja, but, you know, there are people in other places too?”

The tall Yugoslavian set off toward the bar, and Maloof made sure he was hot on his heels. The nightclubs had been Petrovic’s playground since the late 1990s and early 2000s. Dressed in an Armani suit and with a pistol in a holster beneath his arm, he had been king of these places. His jacket pockets had been full of wads of notes tied with elastic bands, just like in the movies. Some months, he had probably spent more money in the restaurants and bars around Stureplan than Montenegro had in GDP.

They pushed their way over to the long, white bar where people were crowded together, trying to talk over the music with short, confidence-inspiring phrases. As Petrovic approached, a space suddenly seemed to open up for them, something that never would have happened if Maloof had been alone.

“What do you want?” the tall Yugoslavian asked.

“Mineral water.”

Petrovic nodded, but a second later his eyes moved diagonally across Maloof’s shoulder. Maloof turned and found himself staring straight into a blond woman’s décolletage. When he looked up and caught sight of her bright red lips, he understood why Petrovic had temporarily lost interest in their drink order; those lips were precisely the type of attribute he was interested in.

“Can I get you a drink?” Petrovic asked.

The tall blonde was wearing a white dress that she definitely wore only in the summer. June had just arrived, though the air felt more like March.

“Champagne,” she replied.

“In that case, a 1988,” said Petrovic. “Don’t drink any other vintage, they’re not worth the trouble.”

And with that, he had caught her interest.

“Have you ever been hunting with hawks?” he asked.

Equally confused and impressed, she shook her head.

Petrovic told a short story about how, in the vineyards of the Champagne region of France, they trained hawks to wipe out any pests that might damage the vines, and then he leaned his long body over the bar. In doing so, he crossed the invisible but absolute line between the paying guests and the hardworking staff on the other side. The bartender immediately came running. Petrovic ordered two glasses of champagne. He even remembered Maloof’s mineral water.

While they waited for their drinks and Petrovic entertained the blond with the story of why the grape harvest in 1988 had been so good, Maloof noticed a short, wide-eyed man, somewhere in his early middle age, heading straight toward them through the crowd. He was wearing a pair of well-worn jeans and a checked shirt with huge sweat patches beneath the arms.

Maloof elbowed his tall friend. “Is that him?

Petrovic turned and instantly lost interest in the blonde.

“Manne!” he shouted. “Come, come.”

The invitation was unnecessary. Manne Lagerström was already next to them. He smelled awful.

“Are we going?” Manne asked.

He stared at Petrovic without acknowledging either Maloof or the blonde.

“Sure,” said Petrovic. “Behave now, Manne. This is Michel. I don’t think you’ve met before.”

Maloof held out a hand. Manne had a limp, wet handshake.

“I hate this fucking place,” he mumbled.

Then he leaned forward to say something else, but the music was too loud and Maloof heard only every other word.

“What’s he saying?” asked Petrovic.

“He’s asking for money.”

Petrovic shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Let’s go,” he said.

The pretty blonde seemed to have completely vanished from his consciousness.

“Right, right,” Maloof agreed.

The bartender had just returned with two glasses of champagne and a bottle of sparkling water. Petrovic dug around in his pocket and fished out a couple of 500 kronor notes. He threw them onto the bar, put a hand on Manne’s shoulder and steered him toward the exit.

“Next time,” he shouted over his shoulder to the blond woman. “Next time.”

She picked up her champagne and turned her back to them.

When they came out onto the street, Manne started protesting again.

“It’s payment in advance, you know?” he said. “Money. Now.”

His voice was weak and shrill. It was as though Lagerström’s sweaty body contained too much energy, and part of it had found an outlet through his mouth.

Petrovic shook his head. They were walking west, along Birger Jarlsgatan, and there seemed to be as many drunk people out on the sidewalk as there were inside the clubs. The taxis were parked up in rows three deep, waiting for customers to stagger into their backseats; the police had positioned a patrol car on Biblioteksgatan as a reminder of their existence; and techno music was leaking out through doors and windows.

“Shut it, Manne. You promised to show us what you had. Then I’ll show you what I’ve got.”

“It’s four in the damn morning,” Manne whined. “I’m not going all the way up there for fun. Because it’s not fun.”

They had reached the car, and Petrovic opened the door for the skinny man, whose entire body seemed to be trembling. But he shook his head and refused to get in.

“I swear,” he said, and his weak voice reached a falsetto. “I don’t work for the Red Cross. I’m not some free app.”

Petrovic sighed, shoved a hand into his pocket and pulled out a roll of banknotes held in place with a rubber band. He threw the money into the backseat, and Manne jumped in after it. Petrovic closed the door behind him.

“He’s like a dog,” Petrovic said to Maloof, glancing at the man in the backseat with a look of disgust. “Just easier to train.”

Petrovic was driving toward Roslagstull. He had changed 500-kronor notes into twenties to make the roll seem thicker, and Manne was deep in concentration in the backseat, counting them. When he finished, he started counting from the beginning again. That kept him busy until they reached the Stocksund Bridge. By then, he was satisfied that the roll contained the amount they had agreed on, and he shoved it into his pocket and stuck his head between the two front seats. The energy that had made him shake with anxiety earlier seemed to have undergone a transformation, and it was now directed at the two men sitting in front of him.

“OK, guys,” he said. “Since we’re on this little trip together, we need to make the most of the situation. Will one of you sing me a song?”

Manne Lagerström laughed at his own joke as though it were the funniest thing he had ever heard. His laugh was bright and piercing, and it barely stopped before he continued:

“No, no, serious now, no singing tonight. But, Jesus, when I was little, that was all my mom and dad used to do when we went on car trips. Sang all those old songs and smoked menthol cigarettes. But you two aren’t singers. Or smokers. Right, lads?”

The roar of laughter that followed was like a minor explosion, though neither Petrovic nor Maloof knew which part of his monologue was meant to be funny. But Manne Lagerström wasn’t a performer who relied on the reactions of his audience; just having an audience was enough. He talked without break all the way to Norrtälje. He laughed uncontrollably at his own jokes, was moved to tears by his admissions, and told them his entire life story—everything from the early years in Sollentuna to the lonely man he was today.

Manne worked as a caretaker at the helicopter hangar in Roslagen. He had been in the job almost ten years now, and he hated it. He almost never saw the owners of the helicopters, other than when they turned up and shouted at him for doing something wrong. The pilots were invariably bullies who thought they were better than everyone else just because they could pull on a lever and step on a pedal at the same time.

“It isn’t fucking difficult to fly a helicopter,” Manne explained. And having a stupid certificate didn’t give anyone the right to act like an utter shithead. Not bothering to say hello, stubbing out cigarettes on the floor or putting chewing gum under the seats.

“You know how to fly?” Maloof asked.

“Course I fucking do!” Manne replied.

He was like a child in the back of the car, shifting back and forth on his seat and pulling at the dials for the air-conditioning before he realized that the backseats could be raised and lowered. That kept him busy for a long time, but he kept talking all the while.

“Can you?” Petrovic repeated. “Do you really know how?”

“Of course I can!” Manne yelled. “But who the hell can afford doing the cert? Who the hell has access to a helicopter?”

This was yet another joke that seemed to surprise him with its finesse. He laughed loudly.

“Right, right,” Maloof agreed, and in an attempt to bring some clarity to the matter, he asked, “But you’ve… never actually flown?”

“No, I’ve never flown a helicopter,” Manne Lagerström shouted. “I can, but I never have. Forget that now. Forget it. Did I tell you about when my dad chased the bloody badger that lived in the earth cellar?”

“Shut up, Manne,” Petrovic ordered as the forest on the sides of the road seemed to grow darker. “We don’t care about your dad. Just shut up.”

The story about the badger lasted almost all the way to Östhamra.

When they arrived, Manne jumped out of the car and ran around the hood to open the door for Petrovic. Then he ran across the parking lot to make it to the helicopter hangar first.

“So… Manne,” said Maloof, “seems… pretty special?”

“There aren’t enough letters in the alphabet to describe his combination,” Petrovic said with a sigh. “But beggars can’t be choosers.”

To the sides of the open landing site in front of the building were a number of tall pines. They formed a wide alley down toward Lake Limmaren. The office park on the other side of the main road was quiet and deserted, but the breeze carried with it the smell of burned rubber and wood.

On the way over to the hangar, Petrovic told Maloof what was what.

There were fifteen or so helicopters based in Roslagen. They were either owned directly by multinational corporations or else by private individuals who recouped the costs by renting out their expensive investments to the multinationals. Manne was the caretaker and the helicopter club’s only employee. His job was to make sure the hangar always looked clean and tidy. If management groups were going out on shorter day trips, the machines had to be ready, tanks full, all the paperwork in order. Manne could even carry out a basic service on them, if necessary.

When the managing directors’ secretaries called to book a helicopter for their bosses, Manne was the one who looked after the calendar. Zoran Petrovic knew many secretaries at that level.

The overexcited caretaker was waiting impatiently next to the unlocked hangar doors.

“Come on, come on!” he shouted.

There was a strong smell of gasoline and metal inside the hangar. The helicopters were lined up in rows in the darkness. Like sleeping horses, Maloof thought, not that he had ever seen a sleeping horse. There was something solemn about the scene. Powerful. Excessive. Rich. And the fact that Manne was running back and forth, babbling constantly, was extremely annoying.

“Here it is,” he shouted, waving them over. “Here it is, this is the one I thought you could take? A Bell 206 JetRanger. Nice, right?”

The distinguishing feature was that the helicopter was white, but otherwise Maloof thought that it looked just like all of the others.

Manne moved around it, pointing out features and telling them stories that seemed increasingly incoherent.

“You borrow it, you bring it back. I’ll take payment in advance. You know that, Zoran, I always take the money in advance. That’s how it goes. Money first.”

“Feels like you’ve already been paid,” Petrovic replied.

“Right, right,” Maloof agreed.

“No joking, boys, no joking,” Manne begged them. He looked like he had been wronged. “I’ll get my money. And I’ll make sure she’s ready with a full tank whenever you need her. You just make sure it looks like you’ve stolen her. Everyone’s happy. OK?”

Maloof didn’t answer, but he nodded.

They had found themselves a helicopter. Now they just needed to find someone who could fly it.

19

Blood had been spilled.

The knife, whose razor-sharp blade had cut the entrecôte into strips, was still lying next to the chopping board on the kitchen counter. Sami Farhan never tidied up while he was cooking. The browned meat had been simmering away in the stew for over an hour now, but there was still blood on the counter. There were dirty bowls on the kitchen table, pots stacked up in the sink; knives, wooden spoons and whisks were everywhere, dripping onto the floor and the counter. If he had been asked to re-create the whole process again afterward, explaining what he had used each of the tools for, he would have found it impossible. He cooked the same way he did everything else in his life: with a restless, physical energy.

The aromas of his cooking filled the kitchen. Sami had started the day by making a vegetable stock. There was nothing wrong with cubes, but if you had the time, then real bouillon was better.

He added some finely chopped fresh red chili, cinnamon and sambal oelek to the stock in the stew. Onions and garlic were frying in the pan next to that. He would later mix the softened onion into the couscous with some apricots and orange.

Karin had taken the kids to her mother’s house a few blocks away on Sankt Paulsgatan. The idea was to give Sami an afternoon to himself and his stew, and it was the best present she could give him. There were people who emptied their minds by running mile after mile on the treadmill. Others had sex or got drunk. But Sami’s preferred method of soothing his soul and bringing new ideas to life was cooking.

When he tasted the bouillon with a teaspoon, he didn’t give a single thought to the recurrent anxiety he had been feeling at nights lately. Rumors about how he had been screwed over with the frozen prawns seemed to be growing, and soon there wouldn’t be anyone in the whole of Stockholm—suburbs included—who didn’t already know the story. Whenever he bumped into people he hadn’t seen for years in the supermarket, they would lower their voices and sympathetically ask how much money he had really borrowed from his brothers. Then there were the young men from the suburbs who, just a few months earlier, would have barely dared look him in the eye. Now they laughed behind his back.

There were no more clean knives in the drawer, but he found one on the windowsill, with no idea what it was doing there. He gave it a rinse and then chopped the apricots into smaller pieces. That took all his concentration, which meant he could avoid torturing himself with all the questions he still needed answers for, even if Maloof and his friend said they had sorted out a helicopter.

Sami peeled the skin from the oranges with a knife as sharp as the one he had used on the meat and continued to work at the same high tempo. Karin and the boys would be back at five, but Sami finished preparing the food by two. The stew could bubble away under the lid for a while. He didn’t plan to mix in the couscous until the last minute.

He glanced around the kitchen.

He needed to tidy up, but this was about using his own time for something more valuable than washing bowls. He took off his apron, threw it onto the kitchen table and went out into the living room.

Several years earlier, Sami Farhan had read a long article about online footprints, and ever since he had been worried about what Google and Facebook could reveal about him. The less he used computers and phones, the better. Being called a technophobe was a low price to pay.

He went over to the bookshelf and took down a trusty old telephone book. His children, he knew, would never understand why someone had printed these enormous stacks of paper and delivered one to every home in Sweden, much less why anyone had ever opened them.

The first pages of the yellow section contained maps of Stockholm’s suburbs, Västberga included.

Sami leafed forward to the right spread and studied the map. He put his finger on the building at the crossing of Västberga Allé and Vretensborgsvägen. Vreten 17, the G4S cash depot. He used a pencil to mark a thin line on each of the access routes.

The plan was to spend less than ten minutes inside the building.

In other words, they needed to hold the police off for the same amount of time.

The usual approach was to scatter so-called caltrops across the road, sharp steel spikes that puncture car tires by embedding themselves in the rubber. The problem with that method was that once they had been discovered, they could simply be swept away. They would provide a few minutes’ distraction, but no more.

Michel Maloof had told Sami that the Serbs did things differently. They soldered the caltrops onto a chain that they then pulled tight across the road, fastening it on both sides. Car tires would be ripped to shreds without taking the tacks with them, which meant that the following car’s tires would also be punctured. You couldn’t just sweep them away, you had to cut the chain with pliers instead.

Rather than delaying the police for two to three minutes, the chains would add roughly the same amount of time. Assuming it would take a few minutes once the alarm went off, and another couple before the police reached wherever the chains had been stretched, that was all they needed.

Sami marked the access route from the north, from the highway and via Västberga Allé. Then he drew another line over Elektravägen, since that was the road the local police would take from their station. Just to be on the safe side, he drew a third line across Västberga Allé by Drivhjulsvägen, in case anyone tried to approach from the south. The question was then whether they also needed chains across Karusellvägen and Vretensborgsvägen. The likelihood was pretty small, Sami decided, plus those were both detours that, in themselves, would take more time.

Next, he tried to work out exactly how wide the roads he had marked out were. Since neither he nor Maloof dared go out to the Västberga industrial park and risk being seen in the vicinity of the cash depot, he had no choice but to estimate.

He decided that they would need three, maybe four, fifty-foot chains with caltrops soldered onto them. It seemed like a lot, but though he calculated again and again, he kept coming to the same conclusion.

Two hundred feet of chain would cost money.

Exactly where they would be able to fix the chains on either side of the road would be down to the creativity of the person setting them out. Doing any kind of reconnaissance in advance was far too risky.

It was three o’clock when Sami finally felt happy with his afternoon’s work. He pushed the phone book back onto the shelf, confident that no one would see the pencil lines that, just to be on the safe side, he had rubbed out. He returned to the kitchen and was met by fantastic aromas and chaotic mess.

He took a deep breath and turned on the radio on the windowsill. It was playing nonstop music he didn’t recognize, and he started cleaning. He had just managed to wipe the table and most of the counter when the local news came on. It made him stop in his tracks.

“Just before midnight yesterday, thieves struck Täby Racecourse in a robbery linked to the Diana Race…” said the news reporter.

Sami’s jaw dropped.

That madman. He had done it.

“…but after a failed escape attempt on horseback, the thieves were apprehended before they reached the gates. We head now to our reporter at the scene…”

And failed.

20

Zoran Petrovic was early.

He moved on foot through the streets of Podgorica as dusk fell over the valley and the lights of the city replaced the overcast day with a warm, yellow glow in the sky. Petrovic was heading west. He turned right onto the wide Svetog Petra Cetinjskog Boulevard, which skirted the edge of Kraljev Park. The trees were in full bloom, as though they didn’t dare believe in a long summer and thought it would be best to give everything they had before June was out. Spring and early summer had been unusually cold in Montenegro, and the short, thin navy coat Petrovic had had tailor-made at Götrich in Stockholm wasn’t enough to keep out the chill. As a result, his long stride was even longer than usual.

Podgorica was a city that had been given many names over the years. It was somewhere that had always attracted settlers, the point at which two great rivers met on their way through Europe toward the Mediterranean.

Petrovic walked over the ugly new highway bridge spanning the Moraça River. From there, he could see the remains of the old stone bridge over the Ribnica, one of the few historic structures that had survived the bombs of the Second World War. The Hotel Podgorica, where he was now heading, was on the other side. In the bar, just beyond the front desk, one of the capital’s best bartenders was hard at work.

Petrovic took a table by a window that looked out onto the lush riverbed, and he ordered olives and glass of lukewarm water.

It was only a quarter to eight, and he was fifteen minutes early. He took out the phone he used whenever he was in Montenegro. It was two weeks since he had last been there, and he had forty-three new messages. He scrolled through all of them before going back to the top of the list to reply to those worth replying to. His more important business contacts would use his Swedish number if they needed to get ahold of him, so these were really the dregs of his acquaintances.

Though he came down to Montenegro no more than once or twice a month, he felt as comfortable there as he did in Sweden. Generations of Petrovics had left their mark in Podgorica, making him part of their shared history. Those relatives who had survived centuries of war and ruin had done so thanks to their deep roots. You could always find a family connection if you looked far enough back in time.

He had created his own universe in Stockholm. Everyone seemed to be a new arrival there, whether from the north of Sweden, Finland or Istanbul. The suburbs buzzed with energy, a suspicious nervousness that stemmed from efforts to fit in or stay on the outside.

He didn’t want to live without either of his two cities.

The bar and restaurant slowly started to fill with guests. Compared with Stockholm, things were done late in Podgorica; the rhythm of daily life in the countries around the Mediterranean was suited to a different climate. Through the huge windows out onto the river, he watched as the deep gray sky turned dark above the line of mountains. He usually waited like this only for beautiful women or rich men.

Filip Zivic belonged to neither category.

This was all for Michel Maloof’s sake.

Petrovic felt like he was both Maloof’s protector and admirer. It had been an oddly mixed feeling to see little Michel grow up and take the blows that had made him into the man he was. Petrovic no longer had any reason to take such a protective attitude, but after so many years it was hard not to.

In this particular case, there were two reasons he thought it was especially important to help out his younger friend. Partly because he knew how long Maloof had been eyeing the cash depot in Västberga. This was a chance for him to realize a lifelong dream. And also because Petrovic felt guilty for having wasted Maloof’s time on the blue security bags.

It had taken him a while to find Manne Lagerström, but that there would be helicopter pilots in Montenegro had seemed obvious from the outset.

The ugly civil war in the Balkans had raged for the whole of the nineties. Historical injustices had been atoned for or deepened, and the wider world had been taken by surprise by the hate that these former neighbors held for one another. Early on, one of Zoran Petrovic’s uncles had advised him to “ignore the politics as long as you live,” and that was precisely how Petrovic had handled the war. For as long as possible, he had tried to avoid taking any side in questions that had no answers. He continued to refer to himself as “Yugoslavian” and with time became a skilled diplomat in a conflict that demanded that everyone pick a side.

It was during the war in the nineties that he had come into contact with those people who now held high office in both Serbia and Montenegro. People who, back then, had run wild in Bosnian forests were now in charge of infrastructure spending, approving construction permits and dealing out taxes. Back then, dressed in ragged uniforms, they had mined bridge abutments against the enemy. Today, they wore suits and ties, surrounded themselves with lawyers and economists, and set political traps for their opponents.

Zoran Petrovic had called several of these people to ask for help, which was how he had come to hear about Filip Zivic—a man who, at that moment, at the very stroke of eight, had just entered the room.

Petrovic immediately knew it was him.

Zivic was a short man with thick hair and a dense, dark beard. He was wearing a well-made suit, and nothing about him screamed pilot or former soldier. Petrovic’s uncle had known Zivic’s father, and Petrovic thought that he had a childhood friend who had married one of Zivic’s sisters.

There was a calm presence to the man as he took a few steps toward the bar and glanced around. Petrovic raised a hand, Zivic nodded, came over to the table and sat down. He looked at Petrovic’s glass.

“Water or vodka?” he asked.

“Water,” Petrovic replied. “Lukewarm.”

Zivic laughed. “Your trademark, so I hear.”

“You’ve been checking me out?” Petrovic asked.

“Of course.” Zivic nodded with a smile. “And I’m assuming you’ve done the same for me.”

Petrovic nodded.

“I got the brief,” Zivic continued, “and I think it sounds exciting. You can count on me.”

Petrovic felt an immediate trust for the helicopter pilot, who also ordered a glass of water, this time carbonated, with ice and lime.

“But I do have a couple of questions,” Zivic continued.

It ended up being a long night, and Zoran Petrovic reluctantly said more than he had been planning to. Filip Zivic had survived the Balkan wars by not leaving anything to chance. He asked questions and then follow-up questions—both expected and unexpected. Petrovic answered as best he could.

Landing on the roof of a building in the middle of the night was, according to Zivic, no problem. It might seem difficult, but even in normal cases, helicopters landed on something called a “dolly,” a metal plate on wheels that wasn’t much bigger than the helicopter itself, and considerably smaller than the roof of a cash depot.

No, Zivic was more concerned about other things. Could Petrovic be sure that the Swedish police wouldn’t get into their own helicopters? Could the robbery really be carried out in ten minutes? And wasn’t there a risk that the police would open fire?

Zivic wasn’t happy until Petrovic had given him long, detailed answers.

By midnight, the two men had finally managed to talk everything through, and Zivic knew exactly what was expected of him.

“OK,” he said. “And when am I meant to be doing this?”

“We were talking about the fifteenth of September at the latest,” Petrovic replied.

“Why then?”

“Partly”—Petrovic sighed at the pilot’s inquisitiveness—“because of the day of the week. It has to be a particular weekday. And partly to give us enough time to prepare everything. Sweden comes to a standstill during July and half of August…”

“It’s a long time until September. Can I be sure you won’t change your minds?”

“This is going to happen,” Petrovic reassured him.

“Do I have your word?”

“You can have something better than that.”

Petrovic took out his Montenegrin checkbook. He found a pen in his inner pocket and wrote out a check for 20,000 kronor. He tore it out and handed it to Zivic, who stared at the slip of paper in surprise.

“I don’t need this if I have your word,” said the pilot.

“One doesn’t cancel out the other,” Petrovic replied with a smile.

They got up and shook hands.

21

The antenna on top of the Kaknäs radio tower blinked lazily in the distance. Its diffuse white glow vanished into the night, fading against the pale sky. The deer that hid among the trees on Djurgården during the day roamed across the dry fields at night, confident of remaining undiscovered by either dogs or people out for a stroll. And along the beaches around Hundudden, the swans rested at the edge of the water and the white-breasted Canada geese dozed by the footpaths.

The explosion ripped through the tranquil air.

The car was in the parking area hidden away behind the old riding school by Djurgårdsbrunn. During the winter, it was mostly used as a dumping ground for snowplows, and in summer by only the occasional taxi driver needing to attend to a sudden urge.

The windshield flew out of its frame, and tens of thousands of shards of glass rained down like crystals onto the concrete and into the woods. A red-and-yellow blaze flared up when the oil in the engine caught fire, ripping the hood from its hinges and sending it in a wide arc over the parking lot. It landed with a pitiful clatter a few yards away.

“Shit,” Michel Maloof said, running his hand over his beard.

“Wait,” said Niklas Nordgren.

They were standing at the edge of the woods, fifty or so yards away, watching the burning oil trickle beneath the car, a line of flame heating the gas in the tank. The flames from the engine compartment died out as suddenly as they flared up, and the wrecked car looked dark and burned out.

“Wait,” Nordgren repeated.

His words were followed by a second, more powerful explosion, as the flames finally made their way into the gas tank, possibly through the exhaust pipe or from beneath.

Maloof instinctively fell to his knees. Car parts flew through the air and landed on the ground all around them: window frames, electronics, plates and metal. Once it was all over and the silence had returned, the foam filling from the seats was still floating slowly through the air.

“Shit,” Maloof said again.

Nordgren took out his phone.

“The interesting thing about using a phone,” he explained, “is that you can be absolutely anywhere. On the other side of the world, if you wanted to be. All you need is for someone to put the other phone by the accelerator, or even better in the engine cavity, then you can call that phone’s number from the other phone and detonate it.”

He held up the phone he still had in his hand. “And then it explodes.”

“Shit,” Maloof said for a third time. He was genuinely impressed.

“Was it something like this you had in mind?” Nordgren asked.

He still didn’t know exactly what Maloof was planning. He was starting to suspect it was something big, something meaningful, but he had learned not to ask any questions, not even of his close friends. All Maloof had asked him so far was how they could use cell phones to detonate bombs from a distance. That was the reason for their trip to Djurgården.

From Maloof’s perspective, the secrecy wasn’t even about mistrust. It was more about respect. The robbery in Västberga was still in the planning stages, and raising Niklas Nordgren’s expectations would have been doing him a disservice. There were few people Maloof trusted as fully.

“This is better,” Maloof replied. “Much better.”

Nordgren smiled.

The two men stared at the wrecked car. It looked more like a burning skeleton.

“Should we… go?”

“Just need to put it out first,” said Nordgren.

He went to fetch a fire extinguisher from the car that Maloof had parked over by the old stables.

As they crossed the Lidingö Bridge, both the sun and the moon were visible in the pale summer sky. Maloof felt satisfied. Their quick trip out to Djurgården had shown once again that Niklas Nordgren’s know-how was exceptional. The man always lived up to expectations. He kept a low profile, but he knew more about almost everything than most other people. Maloof had never regretted saving Nordgren as “100%” in his contacts list. They had met five years earlier when they were both arrested for instigating the same robbery.

By then, Maloof had already lost count of how many times he had been thrown into a claustrophobic cell inside Kronoberg remand prison. For Nordgren, it had been the first time. They arrested him at work. Drove him to Kungsholmen in cuffs, booked him in, took DNA samples and fingerprints and then left him to spend a few nights on a rickety pallet bed before they unlocked him and sent him home. It turned out that Nordgren hadn’t had anything to do with the robbery that Michel Maloof would be convicted of just a few months later.

And so, when two uniformed police officers knocked on Niklas Nordgren’s door in Lidingö a few days later, he had assumed it was a simple misunderstanding.

“No,” he protested. “I’ve already been cleared in that investigation. You must have old information.”

The police grinned.

“You bet we do,” they replied, and while Nordgren said a few words to Annika about being back in time for the late news, the officers waited for him in the hallway.

It would be five years before Nordgren next sat down on the sofa in front of the TV.

Any DNA found at crime scenes across Sweden is registered and archived, and, as a matter of routine, this DNA is also checked against the country’s master database. As it happened, Niklas Nordgren’s genetic evidence had caused the computers in the police station to flash like one-armed bandits, spitting out one jackpot after another.

It transpired that Nordgren was a match for DNA found at the scene of a four-year-old bank robbery in Sollentuna. He was also matched to a two-year-old robbery in Mörby. And to a raid on a post office in Sundbyberg in 2001. As well as a robbery at a jewelry shop in Östermalm the year after that.

By chance, Niklas Nordgren was sentenced to the same amount of time in prison as Michel Maloof. When they got out, it was almost like they had gone down together. They started meeting more and more often.

Maloof’s infectious positive attitude toward life, his good nature and clear loyalty were a good match for Nordgren’s thoughtful curiosity. On top of that, they shared a fundamental character trait: both always looked forward, never back.

Maloof turned right after the bridge and continued along Södra Kungsvägen toward Larsberg. He parked two blocks from the building where Nordgren lived, and together they walked along the empty sidewalks through the warm summer night. It was just before midnight.

“You know… if you want,” Maloof said, “you can get in on it? There’d be four of us. Split everything by four?”

“OK?” Nordgren asked. “How big is it?”

“Well…” Maloof replied. He knew that not even paraphrasing it could make the plan seem less mad. “We’re planning to… land a helicopter on a cash depot right next to a police station and then grab a few hundred million.” He laughed.

“Seriously?” asked Nordgren.

“Yep, yep.” Maloof nodded.

Nordgren looked his friend in the eye.

“I’m in,” he said.

“That’s why we need your phone bombs,” Maloof continued. “To stop the police helicopters from taking off.”

22

At around nine in the morning, Sami gently pushed the door to the bedroom open. Karin had been up since five.

“We’ll go out for a while,” he whispered, referring to himself and John.

The baby had fallen asleep during his feed and Karin’s breast was still in his mouth. She gently pulled herself free.

“That’s not a problem, is it?” she wondered.

There was no mistaking the relief in her voice.

“Get a few hours’ sleep,” Sami said gently.

“So the milk has time to thicken and put him to sleep this afternoon,” she whispered with a sigh without opening her eyes.

“Kids are great,” he replied with a wry smile.

He gently closed the door again.

John was waiting on the floor in the hallway. When Sami picked him up, he laughed. He was a happy baby. According to his parents, the boy was already talking, though not even his grandmother could understand the noises Sami heard as “Mom,” “Dad,” “car” and “bird.”

In truth, he was a little too heavy to be carried around now, but he liked it, and Sami felt freer without the stroller. In the bag he swung over his shoulder, he had packed gruel and extra diapers, and he added a blanket. Summer had spread its warm embrace over Stockholm the day before, but the weather report that morning had said that the warm front would be taking a temporary break for a few days. They wouldn’t be needing the overalls, at least, and for that Sami was grateful.

He carried John on his arm as he walked down Högbergsgatan, but as he turned the corner onto Götgatan, the feeling of being followed struck him unexpectedly.

The sidewalks were crowded. One week into July, and people still hadn’t started their summer holidays. Or maybe that was the reason everyone seemed so stressed, Sami thought. Over the course of four drizzle-filled summer weeks, passions were meant to be rekindled, relationships with children restored, books read, friends met and the fence scraped before being repainted. When it was finally time to go back to work in August, it felt like crawling back onto land after swimming through the stormy waters of time off.

They reached Medborgarplatsen. Sami quickly headed for the subway station and ran down the escalator. Once he was almost at the bottom, he turned around. At least a handful of people farther up seemed to be in as much of a rush as he was.

On the platform, he boarded the train toward Hagsätra that had just pulled into the station. But just before the doors closed, he jumped back off again. John, still resting on Sami’s arm, laughed happily. The leap onto the platform had given him butterflies in his stomach.

No one else seemed to follow Sami’s example.

He crossed the platform. According to the screens, the train toward Åkeshov was two minutes away. When it pulled into the station, he repeated the maneuver. Stepped on board, waited a few seconds and then jumped back out onto the platform. When he didn’t see anyone else do the same, he climbed back on board. John gave a big, gurgling laugh.

They took a train to the central station, where Sami ran up to street level only to take the escalator right back down to the blue line.

By this point, he was pretty sure he had been wrong.

No one was following him.

Still, to his son’s amusement, he repeated his platform-hopping trick on the train toward Hjulsta.

Sami Farhan had moved around Stockholm’s southern suburbs while he was growing up, but he was less familiar with those to the north. When he finally emerged aboveground in Rissne, between Sundbyberg and Rinkeby, he initially went in the wrong direction. He was heading for the Shurgard building, a warehouse where private individuals could rent a dark storeroom to lock up whatever they didn’t want to use, throw away or sell.

The one-year-old had almost fallen asleep during the subway ride, but as they came out into fresh air, he opened his eyes and seemed to be on the verge of protesting. As long as he was being carried, however, things could be worse, and so he remained in a good mood.

The walk should have taken five minutes, but it took Sami fifteen. Eventually, he managed to find the place. He spotted the Albanian sitting on a stool outside the entrance to the new building from a way off. He was the sort of beefy man who, beneath all the fat, was more muscular than the majority of people. The man’s hands and arms were covered in tattoos, and on his neck, above the collar of his T-shirt, dark green flames licked at his earlobes.

The Albanian struggled to get up from the stool as Sami approached. He didn’t give the baby a single glance.

“You can go in,” he said.

The building was dark, but there was some light coming from an open door farther ahead. Sami saw two more people inside the office. They looked exactly like the man who had been left on guard duty outside, and he remembered that they were all brothers. He had never done business with them before, but that was the whole point. Not using any of his normal contacts. The room was crowded and dirty, and the computers looked like something IBM had thrown together during the nineties.

“This way,” one of them said, laboring to get up from a dark green velvet armchair that was leaking stuffing.

Sami followed the man into the corridor, up a dark staircase and past a long line of locked doors. They didn’t pass anyone else along the way. Maybe the brothers were renting out the entire building?

The Albanian stopped in front of the second-to-last door, unlocked it, reached inside and switched on the light.

“Have a look round,” he said. “And tell me what you want.”

Sami stepped into the room. It was both an exhibition room and a storage area. Machine guns and smaller firearms were displayed on top of wooden boxes in the same way you would see sneakers on sale at ICA Maxi. Sami absentmindedly touched some of the pieces with his left hand; he was still carrying John with his right arm.

The Albanian followed him.

“We’ve got a few new pieces over here,” he said. “If you want… But… what the hell’s that smell?”

“What do you mean?” Sami asked, unconcerned.

“You can’t smell it?” the Albanian said. “Smells like shit?”

Sami had felt it against his arm as they climbed the stairs: the pattering fart and subsequent warmth. He had thought it could wait.

“Can you give me a minute?” he said. “I just need to do something. It’ll be quick.”

Before the Albanian had a chance to reply, Sami was on the way out. He ran down the stairs, out of the building and around the corner. He lay John on his back on the grass next to the parking lot, took out the blanket and wet wipes from the bag and put a clean, dry diaper on his son. On the way back to the Albanian and the automatic weapons, he found a trash can by the ticket machine and threw away the old diaper.

The boy laughed as his father ran up the stairs two at a time.

Sami chose a traditional Kalashnikov that he knew he could handle. He pointed to a couple of pistols and read from the list he had been given by Maloof. It detailed the things Niklas Nordgren had asked for.

“Let’s do it like this,” said the Albanian. “Next time you come here, you bring the dough. We give you a key to one of the stores. The things you’ve asked for’ll be inside. You can pick them up whenever you want, then just leave the key in the lock when you’re done. OK?”