The Helicopter Heist: A Novel Based on True Events

23

One Monday in early August, Niklas Nordgren installed an air-conditioning unit in a shop in Sigtuna and then headed up to Arlanda airport, which was just a fifteen-minute drive away.

Airports were always sensitive targets, classified as high security and guarded around the clock. The police were based in one of the buildings adjacent to the main terminals, but the signs and the building itself were more impressive than the actual staff. The representatives of the law at Arlanda were neither the best educated nor the most heavily armed; their work usually just involved apprehending or ejecting disorderly vacationers who had been trying to drown out their fear of flying with alcohol. Terrorist threats and tips about drug smugglers were handled by other, more suitable units than the Arlanda police.

Nordgren parked his car inside the round multistory parking garage by Terminal 5 and took the glass bridge over the taxi stand to the terminal buildings. He turned left into SkyCity, which linked the international terminal to the domestic ones. It was here that he found the information desk.

A young woman chewing gum looked irritatedly up from her book. Her hair was dyed red and she had a piercing in one eyebrow.

“Excuse me,” Nordgren said, looking at her from beneath the shadow of his cap. “Just a quick question. Where do I find the police helicopter base?”

“Helicopter base?” the woman mumbled, using her middle finger to search the directory she had on the screen in front of her.

Both Michel Maloof and Niklas Nordgren had, each in their own way, used the Internet, police websites, Flashback and other chat forums to try to find out where the police helicopters were based.

They hadn’t had any success, they hadn’t found a single straw to clutch at.

Nordgren was well aware that audacity was something you should use sparingly if you were in the robbery business. But sometimes that method was best, and he was prepared to go further than usual right now.

“Nope, can’t find it,” the woman eventually said. “Give me a second and I’ll call over to the police and ask.”

Nordgren nodded gratefully.

“Hi,” she said once she was connected. “This is Sophie from the information desk in SkyCity. I’ve had a question about the police helicopters. Are they based here somewhere? Terminal Three?”

She continued chewing her gum as she listened to the answer. Then she thanked the person on the other end of the line and hung up.

“Nope,” she said, “the police have never had any helicopters here. We actually have very few helicopters at Arlanda. They said they weren’t sure but that you should try Tullinge.”

“Tullinge? The police said that?”

“That’s what they said,” the woman confirmed, losing interest in him and returning to her book.

Three days later, Michel Maloof was in the passenger seat of Niklas Nordgren’s car, watching the rain fall over Tumba. The nonstop music on the radio provided a perfect accompaniment.

“I still can’t believe it,” Maloof said.

“It was a surprise,” Nordgren agreed. “But a good one.”

“I can’t believe it though. You’re really sure? Completely sure?”

Nordgren was as sure as he could be. He had several contacts within the police force in Stockholm, and none of them had been able to say where a police helicopter depot might be based. But the one thing they did all claim was that there was only one helicopter stationed in the capital.

“They’ve got a helicopter in Norrland,” Nordgren said to Maloof. “One in Malmö, one in Gothenburg and one in Stockholm. It sounds strange, but… when it flies over the city, everyone can see it, and they take it for a couple of spins a day so we think there are more. Apparently they sometimes borrow the one from Gothenburg. If they need it for any particular reason. If we’re unlucky.”

Maloof nodded. If Nordgren said it was so, then that was that.

“Just one helicopter… it’s still so strange.”

They reached Tullinge and turned off toward the old airfield’s only landing strip to take a look around.

“But you don’t… think it’s here?” Maloof asked.

“No,” said Nordgren. “I’m pretty sure. But you never know. The police have apparently been moving the helicopter around for years. Not to be clever, but because no one seems to want it.”

“No.” Maloof nodded. “Why doesn’t anyone want it?”

“No idea,” said Nordgren. “But it doesn’t help.”

In appearance, the two men were very different: the outgoing, always-smiling Lebanese man with thick, glossy hair and a perfectly groomed beard, and the introverted and sullen Swede with no hair at all. They had grown up close to one another—it was no farther than a good goal kick between Nordgren’s Vårby Gård and the Maloof family’s Fittja—and neither had been particularly interested in school. But where Nordgren had discovered a love for extreme sports, Maloof had stuck to the position of center back on the soccer team, something that reflected their personalities well.

Niklas Nordgren’s need for company was limited. He was more interested in electronic circuits than human relationships, and the questioning look with which he studied the world around him from beneath his cap was constant. He didn’t want to label himself a brooder, but the concept of happiness had never seemed definite to him. At times, he struggled with his self-image, and there was no denying the fact that there was a hint of destructiveness in his choice of work.

Michel Maloof was different. He liked sun more than rain, soccer more than hockey; he preferred the solution to the problem. He wasn’t someone who made life difficult for himself. Maloof’s parents were both Christians, and they had forced their children to traipse off to church at regular intervals. But the Christian faith had never managed to take hold in Maloof’s heart, and his siblings were convinced that it was down to his Buddhist orientation. Maloof’s ability to tolerate injustice, to remain indifferent to provocation, to smile at stupidity rather than get worked up, to sit still and listen while someone told the same story for the hundredth time—that was nothing but miraculous. The Dalai Lama claimed that the road to happiness was achieved by replacing every bitter or negative thought with one that was positive and beautiful. That was precisely how Maloof lived his life.

His only problem was money.

He didn’t have enough of it.

But what that word—“enough”—meant, he couldn’t say.

Michel Maloof’s family, his four siblings and happily married parents, were the bedrock of his life. Thanks to the combined strength of the family, the children had made it through the Swedish school system with only superficial bruises and established themselves in the society their parents still frequently misunderstood. All but him. And the reason was that he had never been able to define the word “enough.”

Even Niklas Nordgren’s parents’ near forty-year marriage had survived the strains that many of their friends’ relationships had collapsed beneath. Niklas didn’t have the same feeling of belonging to a flock as Maloof, he had only one sister, but neither she nor his parents had ever come close to the kind of life he ended up living.

Their sons’ criminality had come as shock to both Nordgren’s and Maloof’s families. All the same, they had done nothing but be supportive, both when the two men made their pathetic calls for help from prison that very first time, and when they broke their promises never to do it again and ended up calling a second, third and fourth time. Their crushed mothers and brooding fathers had loyally waited outside the prison on leave days, and furious siblings had angrily had a go at them when they came home.

And worse than the thought of the isolation cells in prison was the thought of being a disappointment in the eyes of their families when the blue lights of the police appeared in the rearview mirror.

Unlike the majority of other people Nordgren and Maloof met in their line of work, they were both exceptions in their respective families.

And the fact that their friendship, once it had been established, grew strong was because they could both see themselves in the other person’s self-appointed isolation.

The rain was still falling when they arrived, and it would have been difficult to find a more abandoned and gloomy place. The idea that planes had ever taken off and landed on this tiny strip of ground was hard to imagine. They drove a few loops around the area to make sure there was neither a living soul nor a threadbare helicopter hangar in sight.

Maloof sighed and ran his hand over his beard.

“This is… different.”

Nordgren laughed. “Some people go fishing in the archipelago. We’re on a helicopter safari in the Stockholm suburbs.”

But there was no police helicopter to be found in Tullinge.

Before they parted ways, they divided Google Earth between themselves. Nordgren had printed out and drawn a line right through Stockholm County. He would take the eastern half, Maloof the western.

“What is it we’re… looking for?” Maloof asked.

“A hangar. In a forest. Big enough for a helicopter or two. With asphalt in front of it. It doesn’t need to be as big as a landing strip for planes.”

“Right, right.” Maloof nodded with a smile. “It’s… it sounds… more like a hangar in a haystack.”

“We don’t have any other option, do we?” Nordgren said firmly.

The rain had grown heavier again, and was now hammering against the windshield as he drove along Hågelbyvägen, back toward Fittja.

24

It was three thirty in the morning, and no one would be coming out of the door they had been watching since midnight. Caroline Thurn, task force leader with the National Police Authority’s Criminal Investigation Department, had already given up hope an hour earlier. Still, she had chosen to stay.

They were parked on Karlavägen, almost at Karlaplan. The building on the other side of the road functioned as a covert brothel for foreign ambassadors stationed in Stockholm, but it seemed like the diplomats’ testosterone levels must be low that night.

Thurn glanced at Detective Chief Inspector Mats Berggren, her colleague for the past three weeks. He was asleep in the passenger seat. The whistling noise coming from his throat, along with the sound of his fleshy cheeks vibrating, would be difficult to get used to. But so far, Thurn had managed to work well with every colleague she had ever been subjected to, and she had no intention of failing with Berggren. The secret was respect and distance.

Thurn didn’t become friends with anyone, or enemies. It was about being professional. Her job wasn’t to make friends, it was to maintain and defend their democratic society.

“Mats,” she whispered, and he jerked awake. “Let’s give up for tonight.”

She had never met anyone as big as Berggren before. He had to weigh around 300 pounds, and she had heard that he was always struggling with one diet or another. Clearly it was an unequal struggle. She herself weighed only 135 pounds, despite being five foot nine. She had denied herself sweet things and white bread since her teens, though she no longer thought about pushing her food around her plate rather than eating it, to avoid any questions about why she wasn’t eating.

Thurn wasn’t the missionizing type. Everyone could do as he or she liked, and if her new colleague didn’t manage to lose any weight, that wasn’t something she had any opinions on.

“Maybe we just got the wrong night?” Berggren said.

He had a rough voice, which definitely wasn’t improved by only just having woken up.

“Wrong night,” she agreed. “Or day, or date, or time? Or maybe they’ve just managed to move somewhere else.”

Berggren mumbled something inaudible, and then added,

“Jesus Christ, I’m tired. Just the thought of making my way home…”

He was the whining type, she had realized that the very first day.

“I live around the corner,” she replied. “If you want, you can get a few hours’ sleep on my sofa before you go back to Hägersten.”

In Caroline Thurn’s world, not making the suggestion wasn’t even an option. That kind of good-mannered consideration had been drummed into her from a young age; it was a reflex, like breathing. Being kind was also risk free, because the answer was always no.

“Yeah, sure,” said Berggren, who hadn’t grown up in the same kind of social environment.

They drove into a garage on Väpnargatan, around the corner from Strandvägen, and took the elevator straight up to the top floor, where Caroline Thurn lived. As Mats Berggren stepped into the hallway and looked around, he had to fight to hide his surprise.

The words that popped into his head were straight out of an estate agent’s ad: “Grand apartment at the city’s most exclusive address.”

The dawn light cast a warm glow through the windows, and the fishbone parquet flooring in the suite of rooms seemed never to end. But as Berggren peered around, he saw that the apartment was in need of renovation. There were cracks in the ceiling, though hopefully just in the paint. Someone had started to take down the yellowed wallpaper in the hallway and given up before he or she finished the job, and the parquet was almost black in places. But what made the greatest impression on Berggren was that the place was almost completely empty.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” he mumbled, not knowing what else to say.

Berggren had been working for the National Criminal Police for only a week when he was asked if he wanted to be Thurn’s new partner. He had been equal parts terrified and curious. Thurn had a reputation. She kept her distance. She was respected because she rarely failed, she was approachable and obliging, and yet none of her colleagues could be counted among her friends.

Mats Berggren had done some research on his new partner before their first meeting. He hadn’t needed to go any further than the details in the police’s own database.

Caroline Thurn was born on February 16, 1977, meaning she was thirty-two years old. Berggren couldn’t see where she had grown up or gone to school, but she must have enrolled in the police training academy straight after high school, because she had been given a position with the Stockholm police force as early as autumn 1998. After that first year on the beat, she was recruited to a group that had been given a good deal of media coverage back then, part of an international exchange. Berggren remembered it well; his own application to the program had been unsuccessful.

That initial year abroad had turned into several for Caroline Thurn, but in 2005, she had moved back to the National Criminal Police, and after that there was no information about exactly what she had been doing. Berggren had needed only to ask a couple of his new colleagues in the department for the picture to emerge: Caroline Thurn was someone who worked day in and day out, and who couldn’t handle failure. Still, Berggren was congratulated by everyone he asked. Thurn was the kind of person you wanted on your side.

The first time they met, Mats Berggren had been shocked. After everything he had heard and read about her, the tall, slim woman wasn’t at all what he had been expecting. Her profile, with that narrow, beaklike nose and those high cheekbones, was certainly razor sharp, but Thurn turned out to be both warm and empathetic. Berggren would even go as far as to say soft.

He took a step into the room off the hallway.

“Have you just moved in?” he asked.

The suite of five rooms stretched along Strandvägen, a street that was home to Stockholm’s rich and powerful, with views out onto the whole of Nybroviken and Blasieholmen on the other side of the water. There was no furniture, no rugs, pictures or curtains, just creaking wooden floors.

“Mmm,” she eventually said, “my parents bought this place just after the war. I… haven’t got round to dealing with the decoration yet.”

“Haven’t got round to it?” Berggren said, going over to the window. “Which war are we talking about?”

“I have a sofa where you can sleep,” she replied, waving him away from the view out onto the calm waters.

They passed through another couple of empty rooms on the way into a smaller room with a door. Inside, there was a deep, worn sofa.

“Do you live alone?” Berggren asked.

Men had long since fulfilled their role in Caroline Thurn’s life. That wasn’t a bitter fact, she assumed her experience of relationships was no different from other people’s. Still, she had made the decision to live on her own. She didn’t like talking about it. In other people’s eyes, choosing to live alone took on political or philosophical dimensions.

Instead of replying to Berggren’s question, she said,

“Get a few hours’ sleep. You need it.”

“Looks comfy.” Berggren nodded toward the sofa, suddenly remembering how tired he was.

She smiled. “You can make coffee in the kitchen when you wake up,” she said. “I don’t have much china, but if you can’t find anything you can wash one of the cups in the dishwasher.”

If I can find the kitchen, Berggren thought.

He had grown up with his parents in a small apartment on Hantverkargatan in fifties and sixties Stockholm, back when the city had been full of hope for the future and what would later come to be called “honest hard work.” His childhood had been a struggle. Being fat had meant he was always an outsider. He hadn’t played sports, never got invited to parties. His ambitions had always been bigger than his abilities, which meant that his schoolwork had been one long torment. He had inherited his pathos, his passion for solidarity and justice, from his father, a metalworker who had moved to Stockholm from Falun. From his mother, the academic from Kungsholmen, he had learned that a just, democratic society had to be built on the principle of equality in the eyes of the law. From both of them, he had learned not to believe that he was better than anyone else. He had always known he would be a police officer, and the one time in his life he had managed to shed some of his excess weight for a few months was ahead of his entrance examination to the National Police Academy.

But he had never lived anywhere bigger than that childhood apartment.

“How many square feet is this place?” he couldn’t stop himself from asking.

“More than I need,” Thurn replied. “You’ll be OK?”

“What?” he asked. “Are you… leaving?”

“I just remembered something,” she said. “I wanted to check if there was some other way into that building on Karlavägen. Through the building next door, or the garage. We never checked.”

“Now?” Berggren was taken aback.

“I don’t need much sleep. You get some though.”

Berggren knew he should protest, but he didn’t have the energy. Instead, he nodded and lay down on the sofa, which was even more comfortable than he could have imagined. He fell asleep immediately.

25

During the Second World War, Montenegro’s capital had been flattened by the sixty or more bombing raids the city was subjected to. It sounds absurd, some kind of gross overexaggeration of Podgorica’s importance, but that was how many times the bombers had swept into the beautiful valley and unloaded their cargo, an evil rain, onto the once pretty town where the two rivers met.

By the end of the war, there was nothing left.

When the Communist Party got to work rebuilding the city during the fifties and sixties, it did so following the same model as everywhere else in the new Eastern Europe: it created a kind of budget variant of brutalist modernism. Like Stockholm, Podgorica became a city where the buildings were never allowed to be taller than five or six stories. But unlike Stockholm, Podgorica became homogeneous, planned, cheap and soulless.

Filip Zivic, the helicopter pilot, loved Podgorica, but not because of the city’s beauty. Lots of positive things had happened to the overall look of the town over the past twenty years, but Zivic would play no part in how it continued to develop over the next few decades.

It was with sorrow in his heart that he loaded his bags into the trunk of his car.

“Shall we go?” his wife asked. She was already sitting in the passenger’s seat.

Their son was in the back, focused on some kind of game on his phone. As far as the boy was concerned, there was no real difference between Montenegro and Serbia, and the thought made Filip Zivic all the more depressed.

“Yes,” he said. “Let’s go.”

The Serbian justice minister, Nebojsa Have, assumed that the meeting straight after lunch would involve a new negotiation of some kind. But unlike the other meetings he suffered through during his long days in the government offices at Nemanjina 11, a beautiful corner building, he wouldn’t have to conceal it. He was a minister in a Serbian government that, beneath the surface, sprawled in all directions and built on compromises.

He heard a knock at the door, and a moment later one of his secretaries appeared, a young man with a straight back and ambition in his eyes.

“Filip Zivic is here to see you,” he said.

“Good,” said Have. “Ask him to come in.”

Have knew what kind of impression his office gave to someone visiting for the first time. Ceilings almost thirteen feet high, with decorative stucco, tall windows out onto the street and heavy, pale velvet curtains. He had a cluster of antique armchairs and a glittering crystal chandelier above a coffee table, and the walls were covered in oil paintings of famous Serbian men. It was impossible not to be impressed.

Filip Zivic stepped into the room. The two men’s friendship was so old that golden pen holders and Persian rugs should have had no impact on it, but Zivic still reacted to the elegance of the place.

“We can sit here,” the minister suggested, pointing to a more modern cluster of chairs near one of the windows.

They sat down opposite each other.

“I was slightly surprised by your call, Filip,” Have began. “I didn’t even know you were in Belgrade.”

“No,” Zivic replied, “that’s deliberate. No one knows I’m here. But I think I have something which might finally bring our negotiations to a close.”

The justice minister nodded, but he said nothing.

Have was sure his room had been bugged, and he assumed that whoever was listening wished him well. All the same, he had made it a habit not to say anything on tape that could be turned against him in future. Regimes toppled one another, after all; it was practically a national tradition.

“I have information,” Zivic said, “about a robbery. The people involved are from Montenegro. And the whole thing is… spectacular…”

Nebojsa Have continued to nod.

“I can’t use information based on rumors,” he explained. “We’ve already talked about this, haven’t we, Filip?”

“This is more than just rumor.”

“And this robbery is going to take place here in Belgrade?”

“No.”

“In Montenegro?”

“No, it’s going to happen in Sweden,” said Zivic.

“Really?”

“Wasn’t it an EU country you wanted?”

“Sweden is good,” Have confirmed. “Sweden is very good.”

The justice minister was keen for his country to be involved in Europe-wide police cooperation, but it was always a case of give and take. The last time he had talked to Zivic about it was over a year ago. Back then, he had been careful to stress that any agreement must be based on mutual benefit.

“I can give you detailed information,” Zivic continued. “I don’t have many names, but I have everything else. Using that, the Swedish police should be able to work out where, when and how the robbery is going to take place. Judging by the plan, this would be the biggest robbery in Swedish history.”

Have sighed.

“Everyone’s planning to carry out the biggest robbery in history,” he said. “It’s practically par for the course.”

“But I need reassurances that you can keep your promise.”

Have had made the promise to his childhood friend a year earlier. It was the sole reason the pilot was sitting in his office today.

During the war, Filip Zivic had taken part in events that had earned him enemies for life. For a few years, it had seemed as though all had been forgotten, but then these old injustices had suddenly blown up again. He didn’t know why, but for eighteen months now, he and his family had been living under constant threats of death. Zivic forced his wife and son to move at least once a week, and he slept with a weapon on the bedside table. He had also cut off all contact with the majority of his friends and family. It was a way of protecting them, rather than himself.

But that kind of existence was unsustainable in the long run.

In parallel to this, Serbia’s justice minister—in an attempt to achieve real change in a country saturated with corruption and organized crime—had created the first credible witness-protection program. A program people could trust. In exchange for information, the state could provide a new identity, a new life under a new name, and it did seem as though all government leaks had, for the moment, been stopped.

Because Filip Zivic had followed Nebojsa Have’s career since his friend first entered politics, he knew that this was his chance. Have’s ambitions and morals were greater than any other politician’s.

“I can’t guarantee anything,” he now said, being deliberately cautious. “Especially since people know that we have been friends for years.”

“Let me say this,” said the pilot. “If I had information which was so unique and relevant that it could be used as currency in conversation with the Swedish and European police, would that get me into your program?”

“Of course,” said the minister. “You wouldn’t be treated differently to anyone else.”

“OK then,” said Filip Zivic. “The man planning the robbery I mentioned is called Zoran Petrovic and he lives in Stockholm. Should I save the details for the Swedish police?”

26

It was ten thirty when the national police commissioner’s name flashed up on Caroline Thurn’s phone. Thurn was having a coffee at Villa Källhagen on Djurgården at the time. Earlier that morning, she had discovered a door leading from the garage into the property on Karlavägen, but it didn’t matter, because the location of the garage meant that she and Berggren had—unwittingly—also had it under surveillance that night.

Thurn had returned home to find Berggren still snoring away on her sofa. She had pulled on her running clothes and decided to do a lap around Djurgården. It was on the way back that she had stopped for a black, liquid breakfast.

National Police Commissioner Therese Olsson sounded agitated.

“We’ve had a tip-off,” she said down the line. “We’re considering it extremely interesting. Meet me outside the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in half an hour.”

Thurn confirmed and hung up.

After that, she called Berggren. He sounded like he had just woken up. She passed on the National Police Commissioner’s orders.

“See you there,” said Berggren. “And thanks for letting me use the sofa.”

She could hear cars in the background and assumed that Berggren was no longer in her apartment.

It wasn’t unusual for Caroline Thurn to be called in to meetings at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, which was based in one of the oldest buildings on Gustav Adolfs Torg in the very heart of Stockholm. One of the reasons the National Criminal Police had been formed was to facilitate cooperation with foreign police authorities, and as a result there was a natural connection between the two institutions.

As Thurn parked her new-smelling service Volvo in one of the reserved spaces immediately outside the entrance to the building, she saw both Berggren and the commissioner waiting on the sidewalk.

Olsson was in uniform, and Berggren in the same clothes he had been wearing that morning.

It was the twentieth of August, and the summer heat had returned to the east coast a few days earlier. The sky was pale blue beneath a faint haze of cloud, and families wearing ugly sneakers were leaning against the railings by the water, using their phones to take photos of themselves with Norrbron in the background. It was only eleven o’clock. Late-summer Stockholm was a tourist’s paradise of hesitant cars on the roads, backpacks on the subway and pickpockets in every crowd.

Thurn climbed out of the car.

“You beat me,” she said to Berggren with a smile.

“I was just around the corner,” he said apologetically, as though he felt disloyal at having arrived before her.

Berggren wanted to ask about her bedroom, but he realized it wasn’t the moment.

When he woke that morning, he had searched the apartment for Thurn and realized that there wasn’t a bed in any of the rooms. Other than behind a locked door in the kitchen, he had looked everywhere. There was no bedroom.

They showed their IDs at reception and the state secretary to the minister for foreign affairs appeared a few minutes later.

“To what do we owe the minister’s interest?” Thurn asked as they climbed the wide stone staircase to the second floor.

Olsson made some kind of dismissive gesture that indicated that she would like to explain, but not right now. Therese Olsson was consumed by her professional role, and she would rather be accused of being boring than unclear. Climbing your way to the top of the envious ranks of the police hierarchy wasn’t something you did with straightforwardness and a cheerful temperament.

The police officers were ushered into the minister’s room behind the secretary, and they sat down on a sofa and waited in silence. When the minister appeared, they got to their feet.

The energetic minister greeted each of them with a firm handshake and asked them to sit down.

“I understand,” he said, and Thurn wondered whether it was his coarse dialect that made the Swedish language sound forced coming from his mouth, “that we are continuing our cooperation with Belgrade?”

“That is correct,” Olsson replied.

“As you know,” the minister continued, “I still have good relationships with the majority of decision makers in the Balkans. I just wanted to point out that if you need any help, I’m at your service.”

“That’s very kind, Minister,” Olsson replied, “but I think we have the situation under control. While the initial contact was at the ministerial level, our Serbian colleagues have also provided our liaison office in Belgrade with extremely detailed information that they seem to have stumbled on by chance.”

“Well, stumbling is rarely deliberate, is it?” said the minister.

Berggren laughed, and the minister flashed him an appreciative glance. Caroline Thurn smiled reflexively. She wasn’t much of a fan of jokey word games. A wave of weariness washed over her, and she closed her eyes and fell into a microsleep. She opened her eyes a few seconds later, without anyone else in the room having noticed what had happened.

Sleep was Thurn’s greatest enemy and challenge. She had always slept badly, but she couldn’t remember exactly when her nights had turned into drawn-out nightmares. At some point during her late teens, she would guess. It had begun as a sleeplessness, an inability to get any rest. The nights had become one long torment, the days a hazy fight to stay awake until it was time to repeat the whole process again.

She had experimented with everything she could think of. Eaten a lot or very little in the evenings, worked out or avoided working out after a certain time of day. She had bought mattresses of varying firmness, humidifiers and sound effects—rain and wind. She had started meditating and taken a long list of concoctions and drugs that both ordinary doctors and therapists had prescribed to her. Things had become more and more dramatic.

It was after only a few years, once she stopped fighting it and managed to find the right dose of medication, that her days became tolerable again; when she decided to stop trying, and didn’t even bother going to bed at night. Instead, she would sit in the dark and allow her thoughts to come and go, without any resistance and with the aim of saving as much energy as she could for the day ahead, before it was time to function in a social context once again.

The microsleep she had hated in the past—because it made promises and always broke them—became her best friend.

But she also knew she was different and that different wasn’t good. When Mats Berggren later asked where her bedroom was, she would lie like she always did and mention a fold-down bed hidden in the wall.

When Caroline Thurn and Mats Berggren left the office of the minister for foreign affairs thirty minutes later, they weren’t much the wiser. Commissioner Olsson had repeated over and over again that they had received a tip of great importance. She had even used the word “unique,” which was why Serbia’s foreign minister had contacted his Swedish counterpart. To win political points at the highest level.

The crime being planned would be the biggest robbery in Swedish criminal history. And thanks to their foreign colleagues, the Swedish police suddenly had a real lead, Olsson said.

But when Caroline Thurn tried to find out exactly what that lead was, the commissioner failed to answer. She didn’t know the details, she said. But she knew that this was a unique chance to show organized crime in the Balkans what the Swedish Criminal Police could do, what international cooperation could achieve. For the minister for foreign affairs and the government, it meant a debt of gratitude to the Serbians.

“I’ll call Björn Kant when I get back,” Thurn said as they were leaving the building. “He can fill me in.”

She hadn’t seen Kant since Henrik Nilsson’s arrest in one of the Hötorget buildings a few months earlier. Nilsson had barely made it into police headquarters before his lawyers and contacts had seen to his leaving again. When Thurn heard about that, she had gone out to Djurgården and run three loops of the canal to work out her anger. Men like Nilsson always got off, despite Sweden’s best prosecutor having been involved in the case. If Henrik Nilsson ever crossed her path again, she swore she would send him down.

“Björn Kant wasn’t available,” the police commissioner said in a neutral tone. “The International Public Prosecution Office appointed someone else to this case. Lars Hertz.”

“Lars Hertz?” Thurn repeated, racking her memory. “Is he from Gothenburg? I don’t think I know who…”

“This will be Hertz’s first criminal case,” Therese Olsson replied.

Caroline Thurn stopped dead.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think I understand. We’re meant to be working with a prosecutor who’s never tried a criminal case before?”

“I’ve heard he’s very competent,” said the commissioner.

A black car pulled up to the sidewalk. Olsson opened the back door and climbed in without another word. Thurn and Berggren were left standing outside the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

Thurn was furious, but she managed to force a mild smile.

“I guess it’s up to us to give Lars Hertz a crash course in international criminality,” she said.

27

Through the half-drawn curtains, Michel Maloof could see down to the soccer field, the high and, farther in the distance, the dense forest. There always seemed to be an open box of pizza from the night before within reach, and he grabbed one of the leftover slices he had been managing to resist since lunch.

He didn’t know how long he had been staring at his computer screen. He hated Google Earth. The afternoon was slowly drawing to a close, and this was what he was spending his time doing. Searching for something he would never find. On the table beneath the pizza box, he had the printout of the map Niklas Nordgren had given him. Maloof had methodically split it up into squares, and he still had as much of it left to go over as he had already checked.

His one consolation was knowing that to the north of the city, in Lidingö, Niklas Nordgren was doing the exact same thing.

It was six thirty in the evening when, as he was staring three days later at the pixelated version of reality provided by Google, Michel Maloof found the dolly. Over the past week, the light from the screen and the terrible resolution of the images had given him headaches, so when he first spotted it next to the two small buildings in the middle of the forest on Värmdö, he was sure he was imagining things.

He leaned back and stared and stared, but he couldn’t come to any other conclusion: the picture, taken by chance by an American satellite, really was what he had been looking for.

Helicopters had no wheels, and that was why they landed on a metal plate that did—a so-called dolly—meaning they could be pulled, either by hand or using a vehicle, in and out of the hangar. What Maloof was staring at in the fuzzy image in front of him looked just like one.

He opened a new tab, found a picture of a dolly and brought it up alongside Google Earth.

Staring at the two images, he called Nordgren.

“Hey. Listen… you can probably turn off the computer.”

The line was silent. Maloof could hear Nordgren breathing.

“Are you telling me you’ve… have you found it?”

“Right, right.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Yeah. Ninety-nine percent.”

“Unbelievable.”

“I’ll double-check tomorrow. OK. Sleep well.”

“Finally,” Nordgren declared.

Myttinge was to the north of Värmdö.

Maloof picked up Sami Farhan at Slussen just before lunch, and they drove out toward Gustavsberg in Maloof’s silvery-gray Seat. Thanks to the highway, it didn’t take much more than half an hour to reach Värmdö, but then the road past Ängsvik and Siggesta Gård was narrow and curving. There was no other traffic, but it was still hard to get up to the speed limit.

And then, suddenly, they saw it.

The hangar.

It was to one side of the road, unassuming and without any kind of surveillance. The fence surrounding it was made of ordinary chicken wire. They found a small forest trail around a bend in the road and parked the car, walking back to the hangar to make sure they really had found the right place.

The police had put up stickers on both the buildings functioning as the helicopter depot and on the gates. There were two small hangars, and through the window on the side of one, they could see a helicopter.

On the way back into town, Sami was in high spirits.

“It’s like they’re keeping it in a child’s house.”

“Right, right,” said Maloof.

“Getting in there with Nick’s mobile bombs’ll be a piece of cake.”

They drove over Danvikstull and then continued along Stadsgårdsleden where the huge ferries lay in wait for their paying conference attendees.

“I can give you a ride home,” said Maloof. “I don’t have to be anywhere until two.”

“Could you drop me off by Sergels Torg instead?” Sami asked. “I promised Karin I’d swing by that stroller shop to see if they have any spare wheels.”

While Sami went into great detail about the stubborn locking feature on the wheel of the stroller, Maloof drove along Skeppsbron, passing the king’s ugly castle and heading straight after the bridge. Kungsträdgården Park was lush and green, beautiful even without any elms, and there were people sitting on the grass around the statue of Karl XII, enjoying the heat. The schools had gone back already, but you couldn’t tell; summer vacation still seemed to be ongoing.

“God, that looks nice,” Sami remarked at the lightly dressed sun worshippers sitting with their picnics. He lowered the window on his side of the car.

Maloof slowed to a halt as the bus ahead of them pulled into a stop.

“What the HELL!”

It was Sami who had shouted. It came completely out of the blue, and Maloof, who had been just about to pull away, slammed on the brakes.

“Look! What the hell, LOOK!”

“What the hell is it?”

Maloof felt a cold wave course through his body. It was quickly followed by a rush of adrenaline.

“It’s him!” Sami shouted, pointing out the window. “The Turk! Hassan Kaya! That’s the fucking prawn thief!”

And before Maloof had time to process what was happening, Sami had opened the door and was sprinting across the road. A red Porsche screeched to a halt and the people who had just left the bus had stopped and were pointing, but Sami continued to run.

“YOU BASTARD!” he shouted.

“STOP!” shouted Maloof.

28

Early the next morning, after their meeting at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Thurn and Berggren were called into the prosecutor’s office on Östermalmsgatan. They met at a 7-Eleven not far from there at quarter to nine. Each bought a coffee, and Berggren couldn’t resist paying another five kronor for a sweet bun to go with it. To make the defeat less painful, he had eaten it by the time he left the shop. Thurn had trouble not looking away as he made a mess of himself. He was ashamed and could completely understand her.

“Want a napkin?” she asked.

He shook his head and licked his sticky fingers. “Let’s go now,” he said. “I’m curious. I heard it was something really impressive. You know, same level as the National Museum.”

Berggren was referring to one of the most audacious heists in Swedish criminal history. The robbers had struck two days before Christmas Eve, on a Friday just before closing, when the museum had been virtually empty. They had grabbed three priceless paintings no bigger than postcards, two Renoirs and a Rembrandt, and shoved them inside their coats. And then the robbers had run twenty yards to a waiting boat, which had disappeared into the pitch-black darkness of Stockholm’s open waters.

Caroline Thurn mumbled something inaudible.

“You worked on that, right?” Berggren asked. He didn’t want to sound too curious.

“Yeah,” Thurn replied. “Ali Farhan sent his younger brothers in to steal the paintings. There were loads of us on that case. We never would’ve managed it without the FBI. But we got them in the end. Not just the Farhan brothers either, there were plenty of others involved. They ended up being convicted of receiving stolen goods.”

“Right,” Berggren said, pretending to recall the information that he and every other police officer already knew in detail; almost as much had been written about the subsequent investigation as the robbery itself. “No, it’s one thing to wave an automatic weapon in the air, but it’s trickier to do business afterward.”

Caroline Thurn didn’t reply. She wasn’t sure she agreed. Doing business required different skills, of course, but did that have anything to do with the level of difficulty? And how were you meant to assess the risks being taken? When criminals put their lives on the line, it was often for a fraction of the amount of tax that director Henrik Nilsson withheld from the Swedish state. And the only risk Nilsson was taking was a few petty fines. In the traditional world of crime, the risk was no longer relative to the reward; it was in the newer criminal sphere, the world of banking and finance, that the big money was up for grabs.

Still, a crime was a crime, Thurn thought, regardless of whether it happened behind a desk or out on the street.

Prosecutor Lars Hertz was sitting in one of the impersonally decorated rooms along the long, dark corridor in the Swedish Prosecution Authority’s offices.

He leaped to his feet and greeted the two police officers with a firm, enthusiastic handshake when they came into his room. Hertz was a man in his prime, seemingly fit and fashion conscious in a slim-fitting, well-ironed white shirt. He looked kind, the furrows on his brow suggesting a troubled thoughtfulness, the thick mop of blond hair and blue eyes screaming energy and youth.

Berggren, who had begun panting as he made his way up the stairs, pulled out a tissue from his pocket and wiped his forehead as he sat down on the austere wooden chair in front of the prosecutor’s desk. Thurn sat down next to him.

“So,” Hertz began, “as I understand it, this is something of a sensational story?”

Berggren took out a notepad and pen. It was a habit of his; he could think more clearly with a pen and paper in hand, even if he rarely read through his notes afterward.

“What’s sensational?” Thurn asked. She hated the word, it sounded like a vulgar tabloid headline and had no place in serious police work.

“Well, I mean, the sensational aspect is in the level of detail in the information we’ve been given,” Hertz replied uncertainly.

“We were only given this case yesterday,” said Mats Berggren, “so we’re obviously curious about the details.”

“Of course,” said Hertz. “Of course. I understand. Well… as you might have heard, this will be my first criminal case?”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Thurn said encouragingly.

“I need your help,” the prosecutor replied. “You have the experience I’m lacking. I’m well aware of my limitations.”

He looked from Thurn to Berggren and back again. During his career, he had learned not to waste time on pessimists and prophets of doom. The corridors and halls of the country’s courts and prosecutors’ offices were full of bleak professionals who barricaded themselves in their dark rooms and dismissed every possibility as meaningless.

The two police officers in front of him seemed difficult to place in a particular category. They seemed to be opposites; the tall woman, who was more beautiful than she pretended to be, was still smiling encouragingly. He had never come across such charming condescension before. And by her side, the fat, sweaty man no one would ever call beautiful, jotting down every word and seeming so at ease in his subordinate role.

“The information came from the Serbian police,” Hertz began. “We don’t have the name of their source, but it’s someone who has sought and been granted witness protection in Serbia.”

Hertz pushed his fringe, a serious tangle of hair, to one side.

“Witness protection?” Thurn repeated. “In Serbia? That’s a bit like hiding behind a lamppost.”

“No, it’s not,” Hertz objected, wounded on behalf of the law-abiding European state. “We’re talking about our colleagues here, correct, Detective Chief Inspector. Besides, it’s in Europe’s interests that our witness protection systems really do work.”

“You said the original source was granted witness protection,” Berggren interjected. “Does that mean there are others?”

The prosecutor nodded. “After the original tip, the Serbs tapped several phones. One of them, the most active, has been in regular contact with an individual in Sweden.”

“Who? Do we have a name?” asked Berggren. “You need to tell us what we know.”

“We know that they are planning a robbery on a cash depot in Stockholm,” said Hertz. “Not a secure transport vehicle, not a courier, the depot itself. The original source was one of the people who would be carrying out the robbery. He’s considered entirely trustworthy, an experienced helicopter pilot from the civil war down there.”

“A helicopter pilot?” Berggren repeated, looking up from his notebook. “The robbers are going to fly helicopters?”

Berggren laughed as though he had told a joke, but he fell silent when he saw the prosecutor’s face.

“Yes,” Hertz said. “According to the information we have, the robbers are planning to fly a helicopter to a cash depot in the Stockholm area. The depot is apparently in a four-story building. They’re going to blow a hole in the roof. They’re also planning to sabotage and neutralize the police helicopter so that they can make their getaway undisturbed.”

The room was silent. Not even Caroline Thurn knew what to say. This kind of detailed information from a reliable source wasn’t something they often had access to.

Hertz smiled. He knew he had won a partial victory. He pushed his fringe to one side again.

“Which cash depots in Stockholm—” Berggren began, but he didn’t have time to finish his sentence before Hertz started speaking again.

The prosecutor knew how to ration information. He had more to reveal.

“Through our unique channels,” he continued, sounding more like he was talking to a large audience than two police officers, “we have also been able to confirm the informant’s information. As a result, we know that the robbery will take place on the fifteenth of September.”

“That’s just over three weeks away!” Berggren panted.

“Yes, correct. Slightly over three weeks. This information is fresh, but it also leaves us with time to prepare.”

“Incredible,” said Thurn.

She was willing to admit that this tip really could be described as sensational. But Hertz wasn’t done yet. He continued, amazing the officers further:

“We know that the helicopter the robbers will use to get to and from the cash depot is likely to be a Bell 206 JetRanger—”

“Surely it can’t be that hard to find one of those?” Thurn interrupted. “What do you think, Mats? There must be some kind of register of helicopters in Sweden?”

But before Berggren had time to reply, Hertz raised his voice a few notches to answer the question and finish off his monologue:

“The register won’t help. That type of helicopter is very common, and buying a helicopter for private use has never required any particular license. Plus, the helicopter they’re planning to use could just as easily have been brought over from one of our neighboring countries, or flown in from Germany. Because this robbery is big. We believe that there are already around twenty people involved in the preparations, and the haul is estimated to be at least ten million euros.”

Thurn and Berggren stared at the prosecutor.

“OK, that’s all.” Hertz nodded.

A new silence descended over the anonymous office of prosecutor Lars Hertz. Mats Berggren’s mouth was open. Thurn was grinning.

“You’re in luck, Lars,” she said.

“Yes. Or rather, what do you mean?”

“The chances of you succeeding in your first criminal case seem pretty good.”

She got up, and Berggren followed her lead.

“We know what the robbers are going to do,” she summed up. “We know when they’re going to do it. So all that’s left is to find out where they’re going to do it. There aren’t all that many options. How long have you been sitting on this information?”

“Since the evening before last,” Hertz replied. “The Serbian police approached us in Belgrade, but there was some delay after the ministers’ meeting.”

“We’ve lost several days?” asked Thurn.

“The Serbian police have been keeping the pressure on,” Hertz reassured her.

“And our Swedish suspect?” said Berggren. “You said the Serbs had been listening to a Swede?”

“Correct,” Hertz confirmed.

“Do we have a name?” asked Thurn.

“Zoran Petrovic. He’s the one who will carry out the robbery,” Prosecutor Lars Hertz replied.

“We’ll have eyes on Petrovic within the hour,” Thurn said, speaking clearly as she stood in front of the prosecutor’s huge desk. “Twenty-four seven. I’d like to bug him too. I want to be able to hear everything he says. I want microphones in his car, wherever he works, in his bedroom. Do you understand, Lars? I want to know who he’s calling, where his mother is from, who he went to school with. Everything. OK, Lars?”

Lars Hertz nodded. He understood. What he didn’t mention was that he had already requested the relevant background information, but that Zoran Petrovic wasn’t in the police crime database, or in any other register. He didn’t say that. He was keen for their first meeting to end on a positive note.

“I’ll sort it out,” he said. “You can have everything I’ve got.”

29

Michel Maloof pulled over to the side of the road and, from his seat behind the wheel, watched the disturbance unfolding on the southern edge of Kungsträdgården.

Sami ran straight across the road. Cars slammed on their brakes, sounded their horns, people raised their fists. But the boxer saw none of this, he was running as though his life were at stake.

Sitting at a table outside one of the park’s busy cafés was Hassan Kaya, the Turk who had conned Sami out of his money in the shellfish business. The man who had gone underground without a trace. He was here. In the flesh.

Sami wasn’t thinking, couldn’t think; how many nights had he dreamed about finding Hassan Kaya? And finally, here he was.

“YOU BASTARD!” he shouted, running straight toward him with his fists clenched and his eyes black with hate.

As he reached the line of tables closest to the road, Kaya finally realized what was happening. He stared in terror at the furious, sprinting Sami Farhan, and got to his feet with a start. The table he had been sitting at tipped and fell, his plate of food shattering on the gravel, and then Kaya fled, as fast as he could, knocking over several other tables on the way. He ran toward Hamngatan, away from the danger.

Sami’s bulky frame plowed its way between the tables. Rather than taking a detour on the paved footpath where he would have had no trouble running past the office workers, he transformed into a homing missile. He shoved tables to the side, pushed people who got up to protest out of the way. It was like watching a huge combine harvester make its way across an unplowed field, leaving a path of overturned tables and chairs, crying children and confused diners in his wake.

Kaya ran faster than his heavy old body could really manage.

“Stop, you bastard!” Sami shouted.

But his words only made the Turk change gear. He turned right, around the corner of the café with the outdoor seating area, and crossed the road.

Maloof was still waiting by the sidewalk with his engine running. Kaya came charging past. He was only five, six yards away, and if Maloof had wanted to, he could have put the car into gear and rammed straight into the Turk.

But that was the last thing he wanted.

No.

After weeks of searching, he had finally found the police helicopter. Drawing attention to himself was the last thing he needed. And Sami should be thinking the same thing. But as Maloof saw the furious boxer come running after the Turk, who had continued down Arsenalsgatan, he realized it wasn’t consideration controlling the big man’s movements.

Hassan Kaya had reached the entrance to Kungsträdgården subway station, and Sami was hot on his heels. He had realized that the Turk was getting tired. That the burst of explosive energy awoken by his fear had been used up.

Sami was gaining on him.

Inside the subway station, there were a number of short escalators down to the ticket hall. Kaya took the stairs to the right instead, and then leaped over the high ticket barrier. He almost managed to clear it, but one of his feet got caught, and he stumbled and fell to the floor on the other side. He scrambled back up and hurried toward the escalators down to the platforms. It was clear that his strength was failing him.

That gave Sami a renewed burst of energy. The station was the last stop on the blue line, and in the middle of the day it was practically deserted. Sami had time to use his card to get through the barriers, and then he continued to run.

Now, you bastard.

Kaya had already reached the escalators, but if there was one thing Sami was good at, it was running down stairs. Kungsträdgården was the city’s deepest metro station, almost one hundred feet belowground, and the escalators were endlessly long and steep. Sami felt his confidence grow. The prawn bastard was screwed. Sami ran as though he were a bull and Kaya his red flag, and the distance between them grew smaller.

To Sami’s surprise, Kaya passed the first set of escalators and continued toward the one farthest away. He was so close now that Sami could almost touch him.

Kaya awkwardly reached the top of the escalator. Along the far wall, which was made of red mesh, there were a number of advertising boards, and Kaya desperately tore one of them loose, a poster encouraging people to drink juice.

Sami couldn’t work out what the Turk was playing at. He didn’t care. He lunged at him just as Kaya threw himself forward, the sign beneath him like some kind of sled, and started to slide downward on the metal surface between the escalators. Not even the ridges, which stuck up at regular intervals, could stop him; they made distinct clicking sounds as he passed, but the Turk quickly gained speed.

“What the hell…?”

Sami rushed down the escalator without letting the Turk out of his sight. The metal sled picked up speed as though it had been shot from a catapult. Kaya flew toward the platform. Soon enough, there would be no way for the Turk to slow down. He was going too fast.

“Shit,” Sami swore, not knowing exactly what he meant. “Shit!”

His legs pumped away like two sewing machine needles as he raced down the escalator.

“Shit!”

And below him, at the very bottom, Kaya disappeared from view.

Had Sami lost him again?

But when he made it down to the empty platform a minute or two later, he found Hassan Kaya in a bloody heap on the concrete floor. He was several yards away from the escalator, beneath a replica of an ancient Greek statue. There was no sign of the metal sled, which spoke volumes about the journey through the air that must have ended his ride.

Sami stopped. Glanced around. There was no one else about. Slowly, he walked forward, squatted down and carefully turned over the Turk.

“I don’t have it,” Kaya mumbled.

Those were his first words. His face was covered in blood, his eyes closed. When he opened his mouth, blood trickled down his chin.

“You lost five, but I lost ten mill,” he groaned. “The fucking captain bought his fucking freezers and then vanished. He screwed us all.”

The Turk’s voice grew fainter and fainter. Sami leaned in so that he could hear his final words, which came out as a faint whisper.

“I didn’t dare… I thought you’d kill me… I’m sorry…”

And then he lost consciousness.

As Sami took the escalator back upstairs, he could still see Kaya’s chest rising and falling. He would live.

Up on Kungsträdgården, Maloof was waiting in the car. Sami jumped in.

“And that was really necessary, was it?” Maloof asked. “Today, of all days?”

30

“You look worried,” Zoran Petrovic said mockingly.

Michel Maloof’s smile was as wide as usual, but Petrovic had detected a rare flash of uncertainty in the eye of his short friend.

“Right, right,” Maloof replied, quickly running his hand over his beard. “No… it’s just… don’t worry. Course we’re going to do this. And your pilot…”

“Zivic.”

“Zivic. He’s good. Right?”

Petrovic smiled.

They were standing next to the launchpad at the helicopter hangar in Roslagen, just south of Norrtälje. Maloof hadn’t told Petrovic about Sami and the way he chased Hassan Kaya. The impulsivity of it still bothered him; it wasn’t something Petrovic needed to know.

It was a beautiful Sunday. The breeze was making the waters of Lake Limmaren glitter temptingly, the sky was pale blue and the bank of white clouds was keeping to a reasonable distance, far out over the Baltic. Still, the difference between today and when they had last been there at night, with Manne Lagerström, was smaller than you might imagine. There was an entire summer between the two occasions, but there was still a beauty and tranquility to the place.

As long as you stood with your back to the industrial area on the other side of the road.

“We could fly over to a couple of my friends on Blidö,” Petrovic suggested. “I know a guy who owns a mink farm on the island. I think he’s started with polecats too. Makes forty thousand an animal. I helped him take the first pair over there. Long time ago now. We hid them in the rubber hoses we used when we built the wet rooms for that area in Nacka, you know? They can be thin as worms, mink. Polecats too, I guess.”

Maloof nodded, and Petrovic got lost in a long story about what had happened when the load of building materials had crossed the border between the Soviet Union and Finland and one of the animals had started squealing. Without listening too closely, Maloof flashed an extra-wide smile whenever it seemed appropriate.

A certain amount of activity was going on in front of them. After a few blustery weeks in early August, the meteorologists had finally been able to promise a calm, beautiful weekend. Several of the owners of the private helicopters parked in the hangar had taken that as an opportunity to finally get up in the air after a long summer break.

Petrovic and Maloof had made sure they weren’t in the way. They were standing a few yards away from the opening in the hangar, at the edge of the woods, watching the simple tractor reversing the huge flying machines out of the hangar. The helicopters looked like angry bees, their antennae drooping toward the ground.

“Toys for people who already have everything,” said Petrovic.

“Right, right,” Maloof agreed.

“I’d rather buy a Bentley, you know?”

“Right.” Maloof nodded, though he had absolutely no interest in cars.

Michel Maloof had never been in a helicopter before, and he had figured that he needed to get up in the air at least once before the big day. How big was the inside of a helicopter? What was the storage space like? Navigating at night didn’t seem to be a problem, but with the normal communications systems shut off to reduce the risk of being spotted on radar, how well would an ordinary GPS system work up in the air?

Maloof wasn’t the only one who had thought that the day’s trip was necessary. Filip Zivic, the Serbian combat pilot Petrovic had already paid, had also insisted that they carry out a few test flights over the summer. There was nothing strange about that. Every aircraft had its quirks, Zivic had explained, and both Maloof and Petrovic had appreciated what they saw as dedication and diligence on the part of the pilot.

Petrovic had contacted Manne, who promised they would be able to borrow the white helicopter for a few hours without any trouble. Manne could write the usual pilot’s name in the logbook, and, if anyone asked—which was unlikely—he could just say he had made a mistake. That kind of thing had happened before.

Maloof was also looking forward to meeting the pilot and looking him straight in the eye. This job would succeed or fail on the helicopter pilot’s skill, and that was why Maloof had been eager.

“If you can drive ninety miles an hour under the bridges in Croatia, and I mean under the bridges, I promise you can also land a helicopter on a roof in Västberga,” Petrovic had said.

“Right, right,” Maloof had replied. “But… no… you don’t actually know that?”

He glanced at his watch.

“It’s twenty past two.”

He gave a quick laugh, almost like he was apologizing for pointing it out, but then he scratched his beard nervously.

“It is strange,” Petrovic admitted. “When we met in Montenegro, he came dead on time.”

“OK,” said Maloof.

“I’ll call and check.”

Petrovic had saved Zivic’s number under “P” for “Pilot” in his phone. But it didn’t ring, Zivic’s phone was switched off.

Petrovic hadn’t just bought the plane ticket to Sweden, he had also arranged a room for Zivic at the August Strindberg Hotel on Tegnérgatan. Petrovic knew the night porter, and in exchange for certain services he could have one of the rooms for free whenever he wanted.

He called the hotel.

“What was the name?” the receptionist asked.

“Filip Zivic,” Petrovic replied, speaking excessively clearly. “He checked in yesterday, late afternoon.”

There was a moment’s silence on the other end of the line, and then the receptionist’s voice returned.

“I’m sorry, but that particular guest never checked in.”

“What?”

Petrovic instinctively turned away from Maloof to hide his reaction.

“I can see that we were expecting a guest by that name,” the receptionist continued, “but no one named Zivic ever checked in. I… don’t know any more.”

Michel Maloof didn’t get his helicopter ride that afternoon.

Instead, the two men returned to Stockholm in the Seat. On the way Zoran Petrovic came up with at least a dozen reasonable explanations as to what might have happened. Maybe Filip Zivic was ill. A stomach bug from the food on the plane from Croatia, one so bad that he couldn’t even make it out of bed to call and cancel their meeting. Or maybe something had happened on the way to the airport in Dubrovnik. Petrovic had booked a plane from there because he wanted a direct flight. He might’ve been ambushed on the way, struck down and robbed of his phone, passport and money. He could be lying in a rock crevice somewhere along the Croatian coast, with no way of getting in touch.

“Right, right,” Maloof agreed. “Or… anything?”

“When I get home, it’ll take me five minutes to check,” Petrovic swore. “Five minutes.”

“Right, right. Five minutes.”

Maloof dropped off the tall Yugoslavian on Upplandsgatan. Petrovic nonchalantly crossed the street, trying to use his body language to show that he had the situation under control, but the minute the door swung shut behind him he ran up the stairs.

He found his Montenegrin phone on the desk in his office and called his uncle in Podgorica. He got straight to the point, setting out the situation for him.

It was his uncle’s responsibility to track down Filip Zivic, since it was through his contacts that the pilot had been signed up in the first place.

The uncle promised to look into it. When Petrovic said he needed answers that same evening, his uncle laughed and explained that it wasn’t going to happen. He was going to a soccer match and then planned to go out for a beer. It was Sunday.

Petrovic didn’t have the energy to argue. Instead, he made a few more calls to Montenegro, and by evening he had five different people trying to find out what had happened to Filip Zivic.

But no one he put on the job managed to get ahold of Zivic that night. Petrovic grew more and more anxious. It wasn’t a feeling he was used to.

He fell asleep around dawn and was woken by the sound of his Montenegrin phone ringing the next morning.

Without getting out of bed, he fumbled for his phone and answered without opening his eyes.

“Mmm?”

“He’s gone.”

It was his uncle on the line.

Petrovic sat up in bed. He was wide awake.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s gone. Filip’s missing. Him, his family, wife and boy, the lot of them are gone.”

Rage rose up inside him. He stared straight ahead, the blood pounding in his temples.

“What do you mean, gone?”

“Their place is empty. No one saw them leave. No one knows where they are. It’s a few weeks since anyone saw them.”

Zoran Petrovic threw the phone across the room. It broke into a thousand pieces against the radiator beneath the window. His shout woke the people living in the apartment above his.

31

It was five in the morning when Niklas Nordgren and Sami Farhan climbed out of the car Michel Maloof had parked on Malmskillnadsgatan, just around the corner from Mäster Samuelsgatan. They were only a stone’s throw from the absolute center of Stockholm, but it was so quiet that they could hear their own breathing.

Maloof hadn’t told Nordgren and Sami about the missing helicopter pilot yet. Petrovic had said there was still a chance he would turn up, and without definitive answers, Maloof didn’t want to worry the others.

The city center was deserted. Other than the odd summer temp, the office buildings around Sergels Torg would be empty all day. Sweden had slowly adapted to European practice, and August was now one long, drawn-out run-up to autumn. During summer, native Stockholmers fled the inner city; if you could afford to live in the center of town, you could also afford a summer house in the archipelago or one last charter holiday to Greece. Behind them, they left closed, dug-up streets that the authorities took the opportunity to repair when there was no one but German trailer campers, American cruise passengers and families with small children from the south of Sweden to annoy with the traffic jams and chaos. In a week’s time, normality would resume, the roadwork would end and the summer temps would be sent home, but so far the summer calm was still holding sway over the capital.

Nordgren went to fetch his huge rucksack from the trunk.

The bag was full of plastic explosives, batteries and detonation cables. Like always, he kept the detonators themselves inside his vest.

Together, the three robbers walked toward Jakobsbergsgatan. The sun had risen, but it was hidden behind a haze of white cloud. The smell of chlorine and old beer lingered in the air, and a confused gull was flying between the buildings up by Oxtorget, but they couldn’t hear any of the nightlife that probably was still going on around Stureplan. A street sweeper passed by with its brushes spinning, and the sound of its industrious swishing faded as it turned the corner.

They spotted the police car at the same moment.

It was driving straight toward them, no faster than five miles an hour.

The police were looking for someone or something.

Without having discussed how they would handle a situation like this, Niklas Nordgren stopped, squatted down on the sidewalk and pretended to tie his shoelaces. Sami Farhan sped up and sneaked around the corner onto Jakobsbergsgatan, and Michel Maloof continued heading straight for the police car.

Rather than being three men in a group on Malmskillnadsgatan at five in the morning, they now looked like three strangers with different agendas. They seemed less threatening.

The reason Maloof, Nordgren and Sami were on Malmskillnadsgatan that early August morning was that Nordgren was worried. The plan was to blow a hole straight through the roof of the cash depot where Alexandra Svensson worked. They would have ten minutes in total, and Nordgren had promised that the explosion wouldn’t take more than a couple of those precious minutes.

But earlier that week, he had learned from Ezra’s sister Katinka that the roof of the cash depot in Västberga consisted of three layers. Concrete on the very top, joists beneath that and then the sheet metal protecting the inner ceiling. Blowing a hole in the sheet metal with a U-channel was possible. The joist layer was nothing but wood and insulation, and he could manage that with a saw and a crowbar.

The question was how thick the concrete was.

To avoid any surprises on the day, Nordgren had started looking for buildings that had been built in the same way, so that he could carry out a test. The partially completed building on the corner of Jakobsbergsgatan and Regeringsgatan in central Stockholm was the result of his search.

Its roof was constructed in the exact same way as Västberga’s. Over the summer, the builders had managed to lay the foundations, construct the load-bearing outer and inner walls and build the floors and ceilings on each of the eight floors. There was an entire skeleton for Nordgren to practice on, with no risk of anyone getting hurt. But since the building was still under construction, they had been forced to get up at dawn to beat the builders to the site.

Maloof was just a few steps from being able to turn the corner onto Jakobsbergsgatan, a pedestrian street, when the police car rolled up next to him. Nordgren was ten yards away, still busy tying his shoelaces. He heard how close the police car was, but managed to stop himself from looking up. It was the most careful knot he had ever tied.

A moment later, out of the corner of his eye he saw the blue-and-white car roll on. He made sure not to get up. As Maloof disappeared around the corner, out of sight, Nordgren took the opportunity to tie his other shoe, and then he got up.

He resisted the urge to turn and check whether the police car had stopped at the crossroads of Mäster Samuelsgatan. Instead, he rushed to catch up with his friends, who were already some way down the steep slope of the pedestrian street.

“Puts you on edge,” Sami said.

“With a bag full of explosives in the middle of town, we’ve got reason to be,” Nordgren added.

They reached Regeringsgatan without meeting anyone else. Farther down the street they could see a young couple making out furiously; the girl was pushed up against the wall and was practically climbing the man’s leg. They could hear the sound of the street sweeper in the distance.

The iron gate outside the building was locked with a chain and padlock. Nordgren pulled out some clippers. That was all he needed to cut the chain. He opened the gate and they sneaked inside. Nordgren put the chain back in place, with the cut-off section hanging inward. To a passerby, everything would look normal.

“Should we use the elevator?”

Just the thought that the three of them might get stuck in the slow, creaking, rickety building elevator, fully visible from all directions and with a rucksack full of explosives, was completely idiotic.

And it felt no better a minute or so later when they actually stepped inside it.

“This is insane,” Sami said.

“Right, right,” Maloof agreed.

Nordgren didn’t say a word. In just a few minutes’ time, he would be trying to blow a hole in a concrete roof in the heart of Stockholm. He didn’t want to admit it, but the idea was starting to seem doubtful to him. Though at the same time, the alternative was worse: not having done his homework and being forced to realize that it was impossible at a more critical moment.

The elevator seemed to take forever, and when they finally made it up to the roof, the view wasn’t what they had expected. They had been talking about it in the car, how they would be able to look out across the entire city, but the neighboring buildings blocked their line of sight. The haze in the sky suggested it would be a warm day.

Nordgren glanced around. He pointed to a big pile of timber.

“We can use that to shield ourselves,” he said.

And with that, he started to prepare the explosives. Like always, he would try a small charge to begin with.

Sami read his thoughts.

“We can’t do that now,” he said. “You know what I mean? We’re on a roof. In the middle of town. The police are driving around right below us. You know? We can’t be testing and testing and testing. We’re not out in the woods anymore.”

“No…” Nordgren began hesitantly.

Caution was a virtue he was reluctant to give up.

“Right, right,” said Maloof. “One time only. No more. One charge to… see if it works. Then we run.”

Nordgren heard what they were saying.

“OK,” he mumbled, bending down to dig deeper into his rucksack.

They were right, of course. In a few weeks’ time, when they were standing on the roof of the cash depot, they wouldn’t need to be discreet or precise, it would be a simple matter of blowing a big enough hole to be able to get down to the joist level. And that was the morning’s task. To see whether it was possible.

Niklas Nordgren took a small yellow plastic cone from his bag. It was the type soccer teams used when they practiced moving laterally. The shape of the cone was perfect, given that the aim was to aim the explosion directly downward.

Nordgren filled the cone with explosives. He was using red plastic explosives with a detonation velocity of twenty-five thousand feet a second. He wanted to create a concentrated explosion so that he could guarantee a hole. Semtex would have managed the same task, but the explosives used by the military were both more expensive and more difficult to get ahold of. He pressed a detonator into one edge.

“OK,” he said. “One try. No more, no less.”

He clipped the detonation cable onto the loose wires of the detonator, and the three ran behind the pile of wood and squatted down.

“It’s going to be a hell of a bang,” Nordgren said matter-of-factly.

Maloof and Sami got onto their knees. They had their hands over their heads, and Nordgren touched the exposed metal of the detonation cable to the poles of the motorbike battery.

The explosion was deafening.

But what came next was worse.

The entire building shook. Nordgren got to his feet, and a second later it was as though the ground had been snatched from beneath them. He hadn’t been prepared for that. The pile of timber they were behind fell to one side, and again the noise was incredible, even louder than the initial explosion. Maloof fell over.

“Shit!” Sami shouted.

In a compact cloud of dust, the floor where they had been crouching collapsed onto the one below. Two or three different alarms started ringing simultaneously.

“Sami!” Maloof shouted.

He couldn’t see a thing.

“I’m here. Where’s Nick?”

“Here!” a voice shouted from the cloud of dust.

They could hear one another, but a few seconds passed before they could see anything.

“We need to get out!”

Nordgren started running toward the elevator, which, unbelievably, seemed to have survived the blast unscathed. Sami and Maloof followed him. As the dust started to settle, they studied the damage around them.

Sirens from emergency vehicles could be heard in the distance.

They ran into the elevator and Nordgren pushed the button. The motor started with a jolt, slowly winching them toward the ground. Down on the street, a crowd of people had already gathered.

“What the fuck happened?” asked Sami.

His forehead was damp, his eyes bright. He shook his sweater. Flapped it here and there.

“Bad workmanship,” Nordgren replied. “We took down the entire roof.”

“Shit!”

Maloof started to laugh. Sami’s mouth twitched.

“You two are insane,” Nordgren snapped. “It’s not funny. The place’ll be crawling with cops any minute.”

After what seemed like an eternity, they reached the ground. The alarms on the building site sounded even louder down there. A TV van pulled up by the sidewalk at roughly the same time as the first fire engine from the station on Malmskillnadsgatan arrived. The explosion had even set off three or four car alarms.

People were pouring in from all directions.

The three men responsible for the chaos discreetly left the former eight-story building as the firemen stormed inside. Nordgren, Sami and Maloof sneaked quietly past the spectators on the sidewalk, all of whom were desperate to get a glimpse of what was going on.

“This is insane,” Sami said as they moved quickly down Jakobsbergsgatan.

None of the three turned as the police cars began to arrive, their sirens blaring. They headed back to the car without saying a word, and only once they had climbed inside and shut the doors did Nordgren break the silence.

“Fuck,” he said. “It didn’t even make a hole. We’re not going to be able to get in through the roof.”

32

On Karlavägen, just around the corner from Skeppargatan, there was an elegant candy store called Karla Frukt. It had been there since the midsixties, supplying the neighborhood’s praline-eating residents and sugar-starved students with sweet treats. Its pretty neon sign, shaped like a peeled orange, lit up the front of the building. The front windows of the shop angled into the building, giving Caroline Thurn space to stand in the shadow of the overhanging roof by the entrance. Tucked away there, she could be completely invisible, despite the streetlight illuminating the sidewalk just a few yards away. It was two thirty in the morning, a clear summer’s night, and Karlavägen was quiet.

Karla Frukt was diagonally opposite the door Thurn and Berggren had been keeping under surveillance, the door to the supposed brothel. Thurn knew she should drop the case, but she didn’t want to. The National Criminal Police had been brought in because the case involved ambassadors, foreign citizens committing crimes on Swedish soil. The information they had was from a reliable source, and the vice squad also supported their theory of a brothel.

The traffic along Karlavägen was separated by a wide footpath in the middle of the road. Lawns, leafy trees and thick bushes had been planted along the gravel path on which dogs were exercised in the evenings and children walked to school in the mornings. Thurn had been standing in the entrance to Karla Frukt since midnight, and nothing had happened. No one had either entered or left the building opposite.

She hadn’t bothered to ask Berggren whether he wanted to come with her. Right now, he was completely focused on the cash depot robbery, and he would have just told her to hand the case over to their colleagues in vice. In all likelihood, the supposed brothel probably had as many visits from Swedish dignitaries as it did foreign ones, and her colleagues at Stockholm Police also needed something to do.

Thurn smiled to herself. She could just hear Berggren’s argument.

And then she saw him.

On the other side of Karlavägen, a lone man was walking along the street. Thurn had noticed him as he passed Artillerigatan, he was on his way toward Karlaplan. Almost immediately, she had taken in his unusual walking style. He limped, as though one leg was shorter than the other, and every step he took involved pushing his right hip forward with a slight twist.

It took Thurn a few seconds to retrieve the relevant information from the rich archive of her subconscious. She knew exactly who the man with the limp was.

On the opposite sidewalk, at two thirty in the morning, in the middle of one of Stockholm’s sleepiest neighborhoods, a recently retired headmaster from the deepest forests of Värmland was out for a walk. Jan Löwenheim.

And given everything Caroline Thurn knew about Headmaster Löwenheim, the chances that he was heading for the brothel the police had long been trying to uncover were good.

Thurn was halfway over the road when Löwenheim reached the building she had been watching. But rather than stopping, the limping man continued past the door and turned the corner onto Grevgatan, just before the roundabout by Karlaplan’s fountains. Thurn started to run.

The fact that Löwenheim had passed the brothel both surprised and relieved her.

She rounded the corner at high speed, and found herself about to run straight into the older man. He was standing outside the entrance to Grevgatan 63 with one hand on the door handle, and he turned around in panic.

“I, what?” he exclaimed.

His shock was understandable. He hadn’t seen another living soul in several minutes, only to find himself being almost mowed down.

Thurn stopped dead. Her pulse was racing, her breathing heavy, and she had no idea what to say.

In the next instant, he recognized her.

“Caroline?” he said. “Is that you, Caroline? My… what a coincidence!”

She tried to compose herself.

“Headmaster Löwenheim,” she replied. “It’s… been a while.”

He held out a hand and she took it automatically, shaking it as though she was thanking him for a diploma at a graduation ceremony. His handshake was limp and damp, she remembered it well. But it wasn’t his handshake that the girls at school had gossiped about, it was the hugs that quickly became too intimate, the glances that lingered for far too long before they reached your eyes. The scandal with the matron in one of the boardinghouses was something Löwenheim could never shake off.

“I saw your father only last week, at a dinner in Nääs,” Löwenheim now said. “He seemed to be in good spirits.”

“Yes,” Thurn replied evasively. “I’m sure he is.”

“We spoke about your brother for quite some time, but we never got round to you…”

“No,” she said, “these things happen.”

Caroline von Thurn hadn’t used her noble “von” since she realized that Grefvelsta Gård in Närke, the place where she and her father, her grandfather and great-grandfather had all grown up, would be taken away from her.

She was fifteen at the time, and had recently enrolled at Lundsberg boarding school, where her classmates had explained what would happen. She wouldn’t get a thing. Thanks to laws dating back to the seventeenth century, the farm and its land would be inherited by her younger brother. Fifty years earlier, the Swedish parliament had agreed to phase out the so-called fideicommissum, the rule that decreed that the oldest son was the heir of his ancestors, but an exception had been made for Grefvelsta, among other places.

To begin with, she hadn’t believed her friends. Thurn had called her mother that evening, but all she had been able to do was refer her to her father. She explained that she had nothing to do with “all that”; it was something her father had decided.

And when her father came to her school a few weeks later, it wasn’t for Thurn’s sake, it was because he sat on the governing board. He was more irritated by her questions than anything else. He didn’t need to justify a thing, he couldn’t be held accountable. It was just how it was, the way it had always been, it wasn’t about fairness. People were born into a certain context, in a certain place, some were born men and others were born women. The girls in the family would never be running farms or inheriting land.

When her father left that day, the betrayal had burned in Thurn’s throat and heart. By evening, she could barely breathe. It was as though a thin, beautiful rug on which her entire childhood was depicted had been pulled out from beneath her feet, leaving her standing on an earth floor that stunk of old prejudices and was steeped in small-mindedness.

Over the week that followed, her initial shock was replaced by a deep sense of injustice. It was something she would nourish and develop during the three years she spent at that boarding school in the forests of Värmland. When she graduated from high school, it had long been too late for her to return to her family home.

The day she left school was the last time she saw her father, mother and brother. There were no dramatic farewells, she was far too well raised for that kind of drama; causing scenes was something that the boarding school drummed out of its pupils, if they hadn’t already learned it earlier. She would see her mother and father again if it was necessary. If not, she wouldn’t bother.

And so, Caroline von Thurn became Caroline Thurn, and she sought out a different life for herself.

She became a police officer.

“Well,” said Headmaster Löwenheim, “running into one another like this, in the middle of the night? But I’m afraid I must hurry off.”

“Aha?” said Thurn. “Where are you heading?”

In the moment he recognized her, he had let go of the door handle as though it had burned him. He now mumbled a vague reply.

“I have a sister whose sister-in-law lives around the corner. I sometimes help… it was urgent… she has trouble with her hip… living alone isn’t easy.”

He was already on his way, backing up a few steps.

“Say hello to your parents, Caroline,” he added before turning around.

She stood there, watching as he limped away. She let him leave.

Then she turned to the door he had been about to go through.

This address on Grevgatan, this entrance, led into the same building they had been watching on Karlavägen. And she realized it was the reason she had never seen anyone go in or out of the brothel.

The ambassadors and members of society who frequented the establishment would enter through this considerably more discreet entrance around the corner.

Sometimes, the answer was simpler than you wanted to believe, Thurn thought.

She slowly walked back out onto Karlavägen. As she did, she called for backup. The uniformed officers could go up into the building and catch the men there in the act.

There was no doubt about where Löwenheim had been heading, and when he failed to follow through on his plans, he had inadvertently revealed them.

Caroline Thurn no longer had any interest in going in to make the arrests herself. If the headmaster knew about the brothel, there was a risk that other men from her father’s circles might be up there in its bedrooms. And she was happy to avoid that discovery.

33

When Maloof pulled into the parking garage at Skärholmen Centrum on Tuesday, August 25, it wasn’t particularly busy. For once. He had planned for them to keep moving along the long, shop-lined corridors of the shopping center, but he changed his mind when he saw how quiet it was. Zoran Petrovic was a head taller than everyone else, and it took a real crowd to hide him.

Better to go for a walk in the woods around the shopping center, Maloof thought, pulling in between two dirty gray cars—it was impossible to determine their make, an Asian variant of some old car.

The parking garage smelled of exhaust fumes and greenery. Maloof took a deep breath and shivered in the cool breeze. On the backseat, he found a scarf that must have been lying there since spring. He wasn’t ready for autumn yet.

He also hated problems. Petrovic was suddenly having to find a new pilot. Nordgren hadn’t managed to blow a hole in the concrete roof, meaning they had to come up with another way of getting in. If that was even possible. Everything seemed to be going against them all of a sudden.

Maloof saw Petrovic’s blue BMW approaching from the north entrance. He also noticed the car that pulled in after it, a silvery-gray Saab. It was no more than a brief observation, however; the car rolled on and he soon forgot about it.

Petrovic parked and then the tall Yugoslavian came loping across the garage in his short, pale summer coat. He waved cheerily.

Maloof replied by pointing toward the woods.

Petrovic turned and started to walk in the other direction, away from the shopping center. Maloof followed him.

Rather than parking, the silvery-gray Saab continued to creep along at a safe distance behind Maloof and Petrovic.

The first stage of their walk took them down a winding path deep into the forest, over hills and past small fields. The ground was dry, the deep furrows the summer rain had dug into the gravel on the slopes had vanished without a trace, and Maloof’s new sneakers survived without getting dirty.

They were talking about helicopter pilots.

“I might have a guy,” the ever-hopeful Petrovic said. “When I was down in Cannes last time, I met an American who… he was in the import and transport branch. Sold American chemicals that made potatoes grow bigger. Or maybe it was less grainy? Anyway, he’d been in… the transport branch… a long time. And when he was working over in the West Indies, he’d had a helicopter pilot who flew stuff between the islands. That guy, Kluger, he’s been in Sweden for a few years now.”

The path led them out into an open field, and they passed an abandoned farm. Maloof had never seen a single sign of life in there. As they reached the middle of the open field, approaching the next wooded area, something made him turn around and look back.

The silvery-gray Saab was parked by a broken fence, almost out of sight. This time, Maloof paid attention to it. He waited until they were back among the trees before he said anything.

“We’ve got company.”

“What?”

“We’ve got company,” he repeated. “Look.”

They walked back on themselves. Maloof pointed between the thinning trunks and Petrovic saw the silvery-gray car.

“It followed you into the parking lot.”

“Me?” said Petrovic. “Are you sure?”

Maloof smiled and shrugged. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “No.”

“No?”

“Let’s check.”

Rather than continue into the woods, Maloof turned back and cut across the grass to the narrow paved road that passed the abandoned farm, the way the Saab must have driven. Petrovic followed him. After walking for a few minutes, Maloof took out his phone and held it in front of him. In the reflection of the screen, they saw the car start up and slowly begin to follow them.

“Shit,” Petrovic swore.

They continued toward the shopping center parking garage. Maloof’s intention was to shake off the tail by heading down into the subway. An increasingly irritated Petrovic, however, seemed to have different plans.

“Jesus Christ,” the Yugoslavian swore. “This is so fucking low. We’ll show that bastard. He’s got no damn right to follow us. We haven’t done anything.”

“Well, I mean…”

“Today. We haven’t done anything today.”

They had reached the parking garage, and while the silvery-gray car continued to creep along the small road, Petrovic ran to his BMW and jumped in. He leaned across the passenger seat and opened the door for Maloof.

“Come on!” he shouted.

Hesitantly, Maloof climbed inside. In the rearview mirror, he saw the Saab approach the entrance to the parking garage and then come to a halt. After that, everything happened very quickly. Petrovic reversed out of the space so quickly that the tires screeched. He threw the car into first gear, revved the engine and drove straight at the exit. To make his intentions even clearer, he sounded the horn madly.

“What are you doing?” Maloof shouted in surprise.

Petrovic didn’t reply, he just continued to drive straight forward. The driver of the Saab realized that he would end up on the wrong side of the exit unless he did something, and so he picked up speed and made it just before Petrovic, who turned the corner on two wheels.

“What are you doing?!” Maloof shouted again.

The sudden turn had thrown him against the door, and he crawled back upright and put on his seat belt.

“We’ll get him. I want to ask why that bastard is following us!” Petrovic snapped irritatedly, attempting to talk over the engine, which was approaching 4,500 revs.

“Right, right,” Maloof mumbled. “We’ll get him. We’ll get him?”

The German car roared. The Saab was a hundred or so yards ahead of them, on its way up the exit to the highway.

“We’ll force him off the road!”

Maloof didn’t reply. It was the worst idea he had ever heard. He glanced over to the speedometer. They were already doing a hundred, but the Saab seemed determined not to let them catch it.

“Why isn’t he stopping?!” Petrovic yelled.

The Saab was heading toward Södertälje, and Petrovic kept after it. They were almost bumper to bumper, but whenever the traffic thickened, the tall Yugoslavian changed his mind and focused on survival.

“We’re chasing a cop,” Maloof pointed out.

“That’s the way it should be,” Petrovic said, laughing.

“Right, right,” Maloof agreed. “But if he’s police, why doesn’t he just pull over, stop us and give us a ticket for speeding?”

After passing the exit for Fittja and Botkyrka at 120 miles per hour, they approached Södertälje.

“To hell with this now,” Maloof pleaded.

He looked indifferent, as usual, but inside, the panic was rising. However this ended, it couldn’t be good. But Petrovic seemed to have no intention of giving up.

On the straight stretch to the south of Salem, they saw the roadblock. Right in the middle of the highway.

To begin with, it seemed to be nothing but a single patrol car with its blue lights flashing, but the closer they came, the clearer it became that this was something else. Maloof could count five police cars parked across the road, waiting for them.

“Shit,” Maloof mumbled, sinking into his seat as though he were trying to make himself invisible.

Up ahead, the silvery-gray Saab slowed down. The cars blocking the road moved to the side, and it passed them. The gap closed again behind it.

Petrovic braked. He slowly pulled up and came to a halt a few yards from the patrol cars, he wound down his window. A female police officer came over and nonchalantly greeted him, as though she were helping a tourist with directions.

Maloof was expecting the worst, but nothing happened.

“That was a bit fast, wasn’t it?” she said kindly.

Maloof couldn’t believe it. Why did she sound so friendly?

“We want to report that car,” Petrovic said, pointing to the Saab which was vanishing into the distance. “He’s been harassing us.”

“In what way has he been harassing you?”

“He was following us.”

“Really?” the officer replied, giving Petrovic a few seconds to think.

“Not right now,” Petrovic said when he realized why she had paused. “That was me following him. But only to ask him to stop following us.”

“I suggest we draw a line under this,” the police officer said. “You’ve clearly been following one another. I think we can leave it like that?”

Maloof continued to stare through the window, but the situation was just getting stranger and stranger. Why weren’t they asking for driver’s licenses, ID, how could she not point out that they had been driving at 120 miles an hour?

The police directed Petrovic onto the other side of the highway, where he could drive back to Stockholm.