The Helicopter Heist

34

“Seems like an uphill struggle,” said Ali Farhan.

“Tricky,” Adil Farhan agreed.

Sami Farhan shrugged. His brothers were, of course, right.

They were eating dinner at their uncle’s restaurant in Liljeholmen, and the fact that they were three brothers sitting around a table wasn’t something anyone could have missed. Big brother Ali looked oldest, tougher than the others, with furrows on his forehead and around his eyes. Still, his eyes and nose were identical to Sami’s. Their younger brother, Adil, had considerably more hair and smaller eyes. There was also a sense of calm about him, whereas both Sami and Ali gestured intensely as they spoke, and radiated the same kind of impatience.

“I mean, sometimes it’s just like that,” Sami defended himself. “Things are a bit up and down?”

“Yeah, but there are uphill struggles and uphill struggles. You lot seem to be stuck,” Ali determined.

Coming to the restaurant as a guest was a very different experience from working in its cramped kitchen. In the kitchen, you toiled away and were proud of your work. The equipment wasn’t new, but it was well cared for; the fresh ingredients weren’t exclusive, but they were carefully chosen. Ambitions were always high in the kitchen, and the food they prepared was worthy of a better fate than ending up in the hands of the weary serving staff who carried the plates out into the tired, dark restaurant that looked like any other drinking hole.

Being a guest should have been better than working on the cold buffet, but to Sami it was the exact opposite. He had just gone through the situation. Not in detail, but he had given his brothers the bigger picture. There was no doubt they were right. Right now, everything was going in the wrong direction.

“We’ve got something on the go,” said Ali. “Maybe you could hang with us instead?”

“Yeah,” Adil agreed. “It would be cool. Like back in the day.”

Sami squirmed.

“I need to pay people back first,” he said. “You know what I mean? You get your interest first, then we can talk about the future.”

“Take it easy, little brother,” said Ali.

“The hell with that. We’ll get the money when you get the money. No more complicated than that,” Adil backed him up.

Sami knew they wanted to be kind, that they wanted to play down the fact he had burned their money and allowed himself to be screwed over by the captain of some fucking ship. But neither the fact that Hassan Kaya had also been burned nor his brothers’ consideration made it feel any better. He owed them, and he had to repay that debt. As well as the promised interest.

“No, it doesn’t work like that,” Sami said, pulling at the neck of his T-shirt. “I made you a promise. You know?”

They understood, but they took no notice of him. Ali changed the subject and started talking about soccer instead. Adil joined in. Sami had nothing to add to a conversation about Chelsea and Arsenal, and he quickly retreated to the silence that his brothers always reduced him to.

They ordered coffee and tiramisu.

It was his older brother, Ali, who had dealt out the roles in their family, in the much the same way as you would deal a pack of cards. It was him the siblings had looked up to during their teens, when they first started trying to find their own identities; he was the one they had feared and admired. But once the others had taken their cards and defined themselves, the pack was dealt, and Sami’s position between his protective older brother and explosive younger sibling was still something he struggled to define. There had been days, moments, when he thought he had finally managed to find an image of himself, but then the outline had quickly lost its sharpness and vanished. All that had been left for Sami was the Joker.

“It has to be over for United now,” Ali said, as though it were a question. “Everything has its time, and Manchester United’s is over. Finished. Done. From now on, it’s all about Arsenal.”

“Arsenal!” Adil shouted, pretending to look shocked. “How the hell can you say that? Arsenal? Did I miss Drogba being transferred?

They laughed at the joke, and Sami laughed with them, though he didn’t know why. He didn’t care about soccer, never had, he was the middle brother who didn’t quite fit in. For a long time during his teens, the solution had been to wrap his hands tight, pull on the boxing gloves and punch his knuckles bloody on sandbags and balls. He had feinted and jabbed at the shadows of a father he could barely remember and who had left behind the mystery of why he disappeared. Then, damp with sweat, his brow split and his rib broken, Sami had been able to slump into the changing room after the fight and, for an hour or two, while his body recovered, experience a peace he never usually felt.

Now, in the restaurant, Sami found himself getting lost in his thoughts. No one, neither his brothers nor the friends who had invested in his plan, had pressured him to repay the money. But he had made each of them a solemn vow that he would get it by autumn. The Stockholm underworld had been his witness. Everyone had heard him say it, and now it was already September.

“Listen to me now, Sami,” Ali said, tasting the dessert that had been more or less dumped onto their table. “I still think you should stick with us. Screw whatever you’ve got planned, it doesn’t seem to be working anyway.”

“We’ve come too far to drop it now,” Sami mumbled.

“Sometimes you’ve got to spend a bit of time on something before you see the truth,” Ali said wisely, giving Adil an encouraging look. The younger brother nodded in agreement.

Sami left his brothers in Liljeholmen at eleven and took the subway back to Södermalm. He had been away for most of the past few weeks. There were moments when Karin let him know that, but then there were evenings like tonight.

When he got back to the apartment, both kids were asleep and Karin was sitting on the sofa. She smiled when she saw him.

“What?” he asked suspiciously, taking a few steps into the room.

“I watched a romantic comedy,” she said. “It put me in a good mood and I remembered why I let you convince me.”

“Convince you? How did I convince you?”

“I could’ve kept my clothes on, you know?” she said. “Or at least my underwear. But I didn’t. You convinced me.”

“I’ve got the gift of the gab,” he smirked.

“Maybe. But you’d also poured a lot of vodka down my throat.”

“The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”

He peeled off his coat and threw it onto an armchair. Then he moved over and sat down next to her on the sofa, but he was still on his guard. Over the past few days, he had been worried that she knew what he was planning. On a few occasions, both yesterday and the day before, she had repeated her mantra: that their relationship was built on him not doing anything stupid. And by that, she didn’t mean other women; she wasn’t worried about that. Sami had loved Karin since high school and there would never be anyone else for him. She knew that.

“Why’re you saying that?” he had asked. “I haven’t done anything I shouldn’t.”

“Just a reminder,” she replied.

He hated female intuition.

But now, he put an arm around her and pulled her close.

“I seem to remember,” he said, his face so close to hers that he could smell her lipstick, “that you took off your bra before I even suggested it.”

Karin smiled, wormed her way out of his grip and got up.

“Not the first time,” she replied. “It’s every other time you’re thinking of.”

She pulled her top up, over her head.

35

On the morning of Wednesday, September 9, Detective Chief Inspector Caroline Thurn left the offices of a business called Panaxia on Linta Gårdsväg 5 in Bromma. There were six days to go until the biggest heist in Swedish criminal history.

Without letting on that the situation was critical, she had spent over an hour in the Panaxia meeting room on the third floor, going over every conceivable scenario with the management team. The room was bright and airy, and low-flying planes passed overhead at regular intervals on their descent into Bromma airport.

For Thurn, the conversation had walked a fine line between revealing too much and making sure she wouldn’t regret anything in a week’s time. If she told them everything she knew, there was a risk the information would be leaked, which could result in the robbers changing their plans. But if she didn’t prepare Panaxia for what might happen and one of the company’s employees ended up getting hurt, she would bitterly regret her secrecy.

Panaxia was on the verge of moving some of its business activity away from Bromma. In exactly one week’s time, on Wednesday. September 16, the move was scheduled to finish, but until then, the company would be more vulnerable than usual, from a security point of view. As a result, it was “positive that the police are showing an appropriate level of interest,” as Panaxia’s security chief put it.

Thurn, who hadn’t known about the move in advance, nodded in agreement.

They had gone over the flow of the building in detail, and when Thurn eventually got up on her long legs to shake hands with everyone in the room, she thought she had found the answer to the question they had been searching for.

She knew where the helicopter robbery would take place.

The car was parked directly outside the entrance. As Thurn sat down behind the wheel and fastened her seat belt, the feeling that Panaxia was some kind of provincial cousin to the international G4S welled up. On the one hand, its staff did their best, but on the other, their best wasn’t enough. There was something that didn’t seem right about the country’s second-biggest secure transport company, but Thurn couldn’t put her finger on exactly what that was.

Maybe the robbers had made the same observation?

She started the Volvo and pulled out into the road.

The figure the Serbian informant had mentioned to the police, a haul of up to €10 million, could be found in only three places in Stockholm. The central bank and the two cash depots, Panaxia in Bromma and G4S in Västberga.

It was unlikely that anyone would attempt to rob the central bank. It was one of the few buildings in Sweden that even Caroline Thurn dared call secure, and there was no way you could land a helicopter on the roof.

Of the two remaining depots, only Panaxia in Bromma matched the description of a four-story building with a flat roof.

Today, Thurn had learned that the company had been planning to move parts of its business for some time, and that the move was scheduled to begin on the fourteenth of September. The robbers had chosen the fifteenth, which had to be seen as the optimal time, given that the company would be particularly vulnerable then.

Whoever was planning the robbery had to have someone on the inside of Panaxia, Thurn thought; otherwise, they would never have found such a perfect opportunity. She wondered whether she could ask for lists of employees now, without raising suspicions. She turned left onto Drottningholmsvägen and headed back toward Alvik and Kungsholmen.

On the way up to her department in police HQ, Thurn passed the colleagues responsible for listening in on Zoran Petrovic.

They had microphones hidden in Petrovic’s restaurants on Upplandsgatan, in the bedroom and living room of his apartment and in the headrest of his BMW. The resources that had been put at the disposal of the investigation were wastefully large, and Thurn knew that this was partly because of the personal involvement of the minister for foreign affairs in the case.

But she also knew that the national police commissioner’s plan was to defend the increased costs at the end of the year by going public with the international success their efforts had led to.

And that success was something she held Caroline Thurn responsible for.

Thurn stuck her head around the door into a room full of electronics. “Nothing?” she asked.

Two technicians wearing headphones turned to the doorway and stared at her like they had just woken up. Their eyes were red and they didn’t look like they had changed their clothes in weeks. A couple of empty white cartons on the desk made the place stink of Chinese food.

“You kidding?” one of them said.

“You’ve always been a real joker, Caroline,” said the other.

“No,” the inspector said with a friendly smile. “Not joking at all.”

The technicians sighed.

Bugging Zoran Petrovic was a bit like pointing a microphone toward a soccer stadium during a derby and then hoping to hear someone whisper. Words poured into the ears of the police officers who, in increasing confusion, allowed hard drive after hard drive to fill up with talk of great deals and boasts about conquests of impossibly beautiful women.

Though Petrovic didn’t appear in any of the police databases, the officers listening to him were certain that someone had taught him to speak like a seasoned criminal. He never named names, and whatever he did say usually lacked a time and a place.

The police now knew that Zoran Petrovic was active in the building trade, but he also seemed to have a finger in the cleaning and restaurant trade, the beauty world, the import and export branches. Exactly what he did, owned or spent his time doing in any of these areas remained unclear, however. It was possible that he was just a silent partner, some kind of adviser, or maybe the businesses were run by dummies and Petrovic himself was ultimately in control. In all likelihood, it was a combination of all those things, but since Petrovic’s phone conversations were vague and elusive, never naming names or exact amounts, this was all guesswork on the part of the police.

During an ordinary day, he might have upward of twenty meetings, and they took place all over Stockholm. He could send fifty text messages and make a similar number of calls, half of them in Montenegrin, a language closely related to Serbian. Since the police interpreters weren’t always available, there was a chance they would find something more useful in the conversations that weren’t in Swedish, but judging by the conversations they’d had translated so far, the content seemed to be exactly the same.

They weren’t getting anywhere. The only reference to the helicopter robbery came when Petrovic uttered that he was planning something on September 15. But that was something the Serbs had known from the beginning.

Caroline Thurn struggled on up the stairs and down the corridors of police headquarters. She was just passing Mats Berggren’s room, heading for her own office farther down the corridor, when he saw her and shouted.

Thurn stopped. The sun was so low in the sky during the morning that she was no more than a silhouette in his doorway.

“How did it go?” he asked.

“It’s going to be Panaxia,” she said.

The information about their upcoming move had convinced her.

She had her left hand high on the doorframe, meaning that the sleeve of her blouse had slipped down her arm. If the light had been different, he never would have noticed it. But the smooth skin of the scar shone straight across Thurn’s wrist, and Berggren immediately recognized the type of wound.

He had been on the verge of asking something else about the cash depot in Bromma, but he lost his train of thought. If it had been anyone else, the discovery wouldn’t have hit him nearly as hard.

“What are you thinking, Mats?” Thurn asked. She had noticed something had happened to her colleague.

“No, no… nothing,” he mumbled.

She shrugged and left his doorway.

36

Zoran Petrovic was sitting in Café Stolen, and he felt restless. It made him a bad listener. He glanced down at his watch. He was meeting the potential new helicopter pilot in an hour, but until then he was stuck listening to a vegetable grower from Poland who was trying to establish himself in Årsta. The Pole needed help with both contacts and cash, and he was bragging about his biodynamically grown carrots and beetroot. Petrovic, who was relatively familiar with the vegetable trade after a few attempts to break into the market himself, knew that the care the farmer put into the quality of his produce would never be compensated for in price. He hated meetings that ended on a bad note.

After escorting the Pole to the door, Petrovic took a moment to glance up and down the street. To begin with, he didn’t spot anyone, but then he saw them. They were standing on Upplandsgatan. Over the past week, they had been everywhere. It might be the badly dressed, early middle-aged man who turned around when he left the pub late one night. Or the neutrally dressed woman pretending to stare into an uninteresting window opposite the door of his building.

The police always seemed to be able to catch the scent whenever anything particular was on the go, once the vague talk turned into concrete plans, and the stroll along the water’s edge in Gröndal was now about a security company’s routines rather than last night’s girl. Petrovic had long since stopped being surprised by the sharp nose of the police force, and he now accepted it as a fact.

Besides, that refined sense of smell had reached the same level of sophistication on both sides of the law.

Someone within the police force or prosecution authority must have suddenly decided it was worth keeping Petrovic under tabs, and he felt a reluctant sense of flattery. His relationship with his self-image was split. Just over a year earlier, his face had accidentally flashed up in a TV4 report on criminality in Farsta. He had barely been involved, but he was still the one the camera crew had caught on film. As a result, he had ended up in custody. Petrovic had sued the TV channel and been awarded a symbolic figure as some kind of sticking plaster over the wound. All the same, other than that film, the police didn’t have anything on him.

Which meant that their newfound interest both worried and amused him.

Just before twelve, Café Stolen started to fill up with lunch guests, meaning it was time for Zoran Petrovic to leave. He had to get out to Saltsjöbaden to meet the American pilot Jack Kluger, but his new followers left him with no choice but to perform an evasive maneuver first.

Petrovic left the restaurant, crossed Tegnérlunden, walked down the hill toward Sveavägen and then continued straight ahead. His two tails did the same. When the Yugoslavian reached Birger Jarlsgatan, he turned right and paused outside a food shop. His followers slowed down and stopped ten yards away, pretending to be interested in the way a garage door had been constructed.

Using the reflection in the shop window, Petrovic decided that Jason, who worked in a computer shop farther down the street, had followed his instructions. He glanced in the direction of the plainclothes police officers, smiled and waved.

Everything happened very quickly after that.

Petrovic ran straight across Birger Jarlsgatan. He jumped over the barriers at the bus stop and continued toward the motorbikes parked on the other side. He leaped onto a Honda whose engine was already running and, with a roar, tore off in the direction of Roslagstull.

He left the two disconcerted police officers in his wake.

Petrovic drove at high speed for a few minutes, passing Odengatan, and then turned right onto Surbrunnsgatan and parked the bike outside the building where Jason lived. He hung the keys on a forked branch on the cherry tree by the door and then walked up Valhallavägen to find a taxi out to Saltsjöbaden.

37

“You seem a bit low, Michel?”

Alexandra Svensson was looking at him with concern. It was just before lunch on a Tuesday as overcast as Maloof’s mood, and they were walking across the bridge toward Skeppsholmen, trying to ignore the fact that they were freezing. Summer was definitely over, and autumn’s arrival had been abrupt. Despite that, Alexandra was dressed for summer, in a skirt and blouse with a thin cardigan on top. It hadn’t been a good choice.

She had been nagging Maloof to go to the Moderna Museet with her for several weeks now, and he had finally given in.

He deeply regretted that decision.

He had experienced setbacks before. Without making any claim to be scientific about it, he would say that nine plans out of ten never came off. The criminal life was, just like all other ways of living, based on hopes and dreams. The wildest ideas were barely ever meant to come true; they were more like a box of chocolates—something sweet to savor for a moment.

He would even say that it was quite unusual to get as far as they had with the Västberga plan. Being forced to call it off now, with just days to go, when they’d thought they had everything in place, was out of the question.

They had met two days earlier, at the Kvarnen pub in Södermalm. Sami, Maloof and Nordgren. They had arrived early, before it filled up, and sat at one of the tables behind the bar, at the very back.

When you were planning a job, the first rule was that you never allowed the group to be seen together so close to the deed. But they hadn’t had any choice.

“You’re sure?” Sami had asked.

“I’m sure.” Maloof nodded. “Absolutely.”

“I trust you,” Sami swore. “I trust you. It’s your friend I don’t know. I’ve never even met him. You know what I’m saying? You can’t trust someone you don’t know. And the fact he has a tail…”

“And it’s definitely him with the tail?” asked Nordgren. “Not you?”

Maloof nodded. After the incident in Skärholmen, he had spent the rest of the week reassuring himself that no one was after him. He had hunted for bugs, searched for shadows, but nothing. He’d had no contact with Petrovic, so he had no idea how things were on that front.

“I’m clean,” he said. “So that thing with the car… it’s not something else. It isn’t the first time they’ve tried the scare tactics.”

“Easier to cut him out than risk it, maybe?” Sami suggested. “Maybe? You know? I don’t know if—”

“No. We need him,” Maloof interrupted. “He’s in.”

Sami didn’t reply. He pulled at the neck of his T-shirt, trying to make it looser; maybe he needed more space to breathe.

“That’s not the issue anyway,” said Nordgren.

He met their eyes from beneath his cap.

“It’s the roof,” he explained.

“But we need to work something out?” said Sami. “You know? After plan A, there has to be a plan B. That’s how it works. Something happens, we move on to plan C. Then D, then E, then F?”

They nodded. But what was plan F?

Maloof had gone home after that, and taken out the drawings of the building in Västberga. He had spread them out on the living room floor. The answer had to be there somewhere. If you couldn’t go through the roof, if that wasn’t possible, maybe they didn’t need a helicopter and a pilot after all?

But how could you get up onto the sixth floor any other way?

On Saturday, he had sent a message saying he couldn’t play in the soccer match that had been planned for that afternoon. On Sunday, he had called his mother and said he felt lousy, and rather than going for Sunday lunch with his parents and siblings, he’d gone up to Kungens Kurva, bought food from McDonald’s and then returned to the drawings, which had to contain the key. Breaking the glass skylight would be easy enough, but what would they do then? There was nothing beneath the dome, just six floors of free fall.

“No, no,” he now replied to Alexandra Svensson, not looking her in the eye. “I think I’m just getting a cold, that’s all.”

She shook her head. Women were always complaining that Maloof was hard to understand, that he was hard to read. He didn’t react the way they expected him to, he remained calm until the day he ended things. He rarely got angry, never showed any weakness, and that was why Alexandra’s intuition confused him. He hadn’t behaved any differently with her than he had with the others.

The waves were foaming beneath the bridge. The wind was strong, and they hurried over to the island on the other side.

“A cold? Really? You never said anything about that yesterday?”

Alexandra had called early on Monday morning. By then he had already decided that his strategy of staying locked up in his apartment in Fittja wasn’t sustainable. Maloof wasn’t really the giving up type, and setbacks tended to make him more determined to prove the opposite. But he did admit that it felt tough.

“Sometimes,” she said as they continued up the hill on the other side of the bridge, “things can feel, like, hopeless.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s true.”

“So let’s say something’s happened,” she continued.

“I think it’s just the start of a cold,” Maloof insisted.

“But say it’s not that,” she said firmly. “Say it’s like I said, something tough’s happened, and that’s why you look like you want to hang yourself or something?”

Maloof didn’t reply. He was staring straight ahead and continued to plod up the hill toward the museum building that the original Spanish architect, after all the political modifications, no longer wanted to be associated with.

“That’s when you’ve got to find that extra bit of strength, Michel,” Alexandra continued. “That power we’ve got, the thing that’s made us come this far. You know?”

He couldn’t help but smile and run his hand over his beard. Every time things felt too much, she was there to support him. But as nice as it was to have her support, he also felt a pang of guilt.

Maloof was used to living a double life. During all the years he’d worked at the youth center in Fittja, his family and friends had thought that was how he earned his money. As a youth leader. No one knew that at night, he pulled a balaclava over his head, or that in parallel with his law-abiding life, he’d also found himself another career, a profitable kind of moonlighting. But that was how he had wanted it, and it wasn’t something that had bothered him.

But now, with Alexandra, things felt different.

He felt less and less comfortable lying to her.

They had reached the open space by the museum entrance, and Maloof stopped.

“Right, right,” he agreed. “You’ve got to be strong. But you’ve gotta be a realist too. Being an optimist can’t mean that… you’re a dreamer?”

“Find a new solution,” Alexandra said firmly. “That’s why I like you, Michel. You’re like, the happiest person I’ve ever met. It’s like there are no barriers for you, you know? Like, you fix them.”

“No,” said Maloof. “Well…”

“Come on, Mickey,” she said, laughing, using the nickname he hated.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said with a smile. “I’ll sort it out.”

He looked at her big, pale pink lips, shiny with gloss; lips that never wanted to stop talking. He raised his gaze and met her blue eyes.

“Cheer up now,” she said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

He laughed again. At how easy he was to read, and at how right she was.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “You can help.”

“So tell me how?”

“You can let me off going to the museum today.”

“I can help in any way. Other than that, I guess,” she replied with a laugh, pulling him toward the entrance.

38

Jack Kluger parked his Jeep in the Royal Swedish Yacht Club parking lot and crossed the bridge onto Restaurantholmen on foot. Tucked into the cove behind him was Saltsjöbaden’s magnificent Grand Hotel Stora. Not that big, white houses impressed a man from Texas. To him, the natural world of Stockholm’s inner archipelago was far more exotic. The moss-covered rocks, the trails lined with last year’s needles and fallen leaves, the pines and spruce trees whose dense foliage created a green grotto all around him. The smell of the brackish water of Baggensfjärden blowing in over the islet.

Kluger had never been there before, but he immediately knew that the tall wooden building that rose up by the rocks at the water’s edge was the place he was looking for. Stockholm’s only open-air baths, hidden away and grand in their decay. When building work had started on the baths over a century earlier, there had been plans for an amphitheater on the slope down to the water; it would be somewhere people could sit in high galleries, watching the swimmers jump from the protruding jetties below. But the money ran out before the building was finished, meaning the jetties and high wooden walls with their narrow balconies looked less Grecian and more archipelago.

By September, the tired old outdoor baths, with their three sections for men, women and communal bathing, were abandoned for the season. Kluger found a way in and immediately spotted his contact, who was on his phone up in one of the balconies. The American climbed the narrow spiral staircase, his colorful boots echoing in the stairwell.

“Jesus, you make a lot of noise,” Zoran Petrovic shouted from a distance.

Kluger worked his way forward along the balcony. Fifty or so feet below, the waves from the bay rolled in onto the rocks. The sky was gray, and the day cold, but the closer the American got, the clearer it became that the tall, slim Yugoslavian waiting for him on the balcony was wearing a white bathrobe.

“Where the hell are your swimming trunks?” Petrovic asked when Kluger was only a few steps away. “This place is for swimming.”

Jack Kluger stared at the Yugoslavian, not knowing whether he was joking. The two men had never met before. In fact, just three days earlier, Jack Kluger had never even heard of Petrovic.

“Go and get changed first,” Petrovic now said in English. “I brought an extra bathrobe. It’s hanging in the changing room.”

“Are you kidding?” The American was genuinely shocked.

“You don’t know me, I don’t know you. What better way to build friendship than a little shared nudity?” Petrovic smiled.

Kluger stared at him, red in the face. They were the only two people there, and the weather wasn’t exactly made for bathing.

“You think I’m bugged?” he eventually asked.

“I don’t think anything,” Petrovic replied. “Just go and get changed.”

Kluger shrugged in irritation, but he went back down the spiral staircase and found the changing room. Sure enough, there was a white bathrobe hanging up inside. He took off everything but his underwear, pulled on the bathrobe and went back up the stairs. He demonstratively opened the robe to show the Yugoslavian that he had neither a weapon nor any listening devices on his nearly naked body.

“Sit, sit,” said Petrovic said, and Kluger sat down on the bench diagonally above. “You sure you’re alone?”

“Do you think I’m some fucking amateur?” the American asked.

Petrovic didn’t answer. Jason, who had helped him with the motorbike just a few hours earlier, had found five bugs in his apartment on Upplandsgatan the day before yesterday. Later that day, they also found a further two beneath the table in Petrovic’s usual booth at Café Stolen. For some reason, the police were suddenly obsessed with listening to his every word and following his every movement. He couldn’t be careful enough.

Petrovic had left all the bugs where they were. Better to let the police think he had no idea they were listening to him. There was a challenge in doing so that he couldn’t help but enjoy.

“OK,” he said with a nod. “OK. I’m Zoran Petrovic, nice to meet you.”

In the American’s eyes, Zoran Petrovic looked like a typical European. There was, Kluger thought, a certain kind of appearance that looked neither Scandinavian nor French, not English or Italian, just European. Maybe it had something to do with their heads being so small.

“I’m supposed to pass on greetings from Basir Balik,” said Petrovic. “I hear you’ve done a few jobs together?”

If Jack Kluger had worked for Balik, that decided things for Petrovic; the man could be trusted.

“The job involves flying at night, at a low altitude,” the Yugoslavian said.

“Heard that. I’ve done it before.” Kluger nodded with a wide smile, showing off his white teeth. “Thousands of hours in the Afghan mountains and ravines. I can do it.”

“Shit, the entire meaning of life has to be flying low and landing softly,” Petrovic said, looking out over the bay.

The waves foamed as they rolled in toward the building and broke against the jetties.

“Could be,” Kluger admitted. “Could be.”

This was the reason he was still in Sweden. One job kept leading to another. Nothing big or well paid, but he had enough money to get by.

It was a long time since he had last been behind the controls of a helicopter, and he was longing to get up in the air again.

“It’s also about being able to keep your mouth shut and be loyal,” Petrovic added.

Kluger’s face turned red again. “Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?” he asked.

The broad-shouldered man leaned forward and, in a single breath, reeled off a list of qualifications including far more than just the jobs he had done for Basir Balik. Some of what he said would be easy enough to check out. If what he said was true, there was no doubt that Jack Kluger had the experience.

They agreed on the terms of payment, and since there was so little time left, there was no point setting out smoke screens. Petrovic was straight with him, told him everything, and Kluger said he would be ready.

What the pilot failed to mention was the moments of confusion that struck him several times a week, and which had so far stopped him from setting foot in a helicopter ever since he left Afghanistan. Because he couldn’t predict or ward off these periods of confusion, he hadn’t been sure he could trust himself. But it had been so long now.

And from a purely technical point of view, the job was simple.

“I want half the payment up front,” he said.

Petrovic nodded. “No problem.”

They shook hands. Petrovic swayed as he got to his feet.

“Christ, this is high,” he said, trying not to look down toward the water.

“It’s not you I’m flying, right?” Kluger said.

Petrovic laughed. “You get changed first,” he said. “I’ll wait till you’re done and gone.”

Kluger nodded and headed down the stairs in his white bathrobe. Petrovic allowed fifteen minutes to pass before he went to get dressed himself. On the way back to Upplandsgatan, to his police tail and bugs, he felt lighter than he had in a long while.

Michel Maloof had a pilot once more.

39

National Police Commissioner Therese Olsson was sitting in a big, beautifully decorated office with views out onto the park. As yet, there was still no sign of any red or yellow in the dense green treetops outside her window. She looked up from her desk as Thurn and Berggren came into the room.

“Caroline. Mats. Come in. Sit down. Lars is on his way.”

One of Olsson’s many qualities was her surprising capacity for remembering names. She was a politician, a careerist. At some point, Thurn thought, she must have been a good police officer. But that was a long time ago, and being a good boss was now enough.

It was down to Thurn’s initiative that Hertz would be involved in the meeting. The prosecutor may have been inexperienced, but he had shown a certain sharpness. Thurn knew that he wouldn’t show any initiative himself, but she was no longer afraid he would sabotage the operation.

While they waited for the prosecutor, they made small talk about the ambassadors, the brothel on Karlavägen and how the minister for foreign affairs would react when the time for prosecution finally came around. Hertz appeared ten minutes later, and breathlessly sat down on one of the chairs in front of the desk.

“Well,” said the police commissioner, “now I’m obviously curious what you have to say.”

Thurn concisely summed up what they had found out about Panaxia in Bromma. When she finished, the prosecutor made his first request, as Thurn had instructed him to do that morning.

“We would like to move the police helicopter from the base in Myttinge,” Hertz said.

“Move it?”

“It’s cheaper to move it than to increase our surveillance out there,” Mats Berggren explained.

He knew which arguments would be most effective.

“But do you really think—” Olsson began.

“The robbery is going to take place on the fifteenth,” said Thurn, “and we have information suggesting the robbers will try to destroy the only active helicopter in the Stockholm area. Why wouldn’t we move it?”

“And where should it go?”

“Our suggestion,” Hertz took over, “is that we leave it with the National Task Force in Sörentorp until further notice.”

It wasn’t a big decision, but the police commissioner had learned to gain points whenever she could. As a result, she looked hesitant at first, and jotted down a few words on a pad of paper on her desk. Then she nodded her approval.

“We had a similar thought,” she eventually said, studying Thurn thoughtfully. “I was planning to talk to you about the National Task Force.”

No one replied, despite the fact that Olsson had left a clear pause for them to say something.

“Yes, well,” she continued, “as you know, the preliminary investigation has, as of lunchtime, been upgraded to an extraordinary event.”

Berggren nodded.

“On my initiative,” Prosecutor Hertz pointed out, annoyed not to have been given credit. “It was my suggestion to upgrade it to an extraordinary event.”

Within the National Criminal Police, an “extraordinary event” meant that the case was now being given highest priority, with increased preparedness a result. An “extraordinary event” could be anything from the attempted murder of a high-ranking politician to an acute terror threat.

“And so,” Therese Olsson said, not paying any attention to the prosecutor’s territorial thinking, “we have come to the conclusion that we should call in the Task Force.”

A silence settled over the room. Thurn looked down at her hand, seemingly studying her nails. Mats Berggren had more difficulty being quite so subtle.

“What the hell do you mean by that?” he said. “Why bring in that pretend army to mess about in this? Don’t you think we can handle the situation?”

“It’s a decision we came to jointly,” the police commissioner said deliberately.

“Jointly?” asked Berggren.

“Within command,” Olsson clarified. “Even Carlbrink was involved.”

“Command?” asked Thurn. “Because that’s not good. The more who know about this, the greater the chance of leaks.”

“Are you suggesting that Carlbrink… that the head of the National Task Force can’t keep a secret?” Olsson snapped.

“I don’t mean anything other than that the more people who know, the greater the chance of leaks,” Caroline repeated.

She could no longer hide her irritation. She looked up, straight into the commissioner’s eyes.

“This is our case, Therese. We have it under control. Don’t you think we can manage without their army boots and rocket launchers? You’re our boss. Don’t you have any faith in your own staff?”

“Are we talking about the entire Task Force?” asked Berggren.

“Fully armed,” Olsson confirmed. “And with orders to shoot down a helicopter, if necessary.”

“This is a robbery we’re talking about,” Thurn pointed out. “It might be spectacular, possibly better planned than anything we’ve ever seen on Swedish soil. But it’s still just a robbery, not a coup. The police force has the resources to be able to handle this. We don’t need help from—”

“The Serbian police aren’t the only ones following this case,” Olsson interrupted. “Interpol is being updated continually. And the minister for foreign affairs has a personal interest in it too. If we let him down, then the minister for justice won’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to discussing resources at the next budget.”

Politics. There were few things that interested Caroline Thurn so little that could also make her quite so agitated. But she could see that this wasn’t a simple matter of police work, that it was about the ministers’ egos and the way the state distributed resources.

She got up.

“Fine,” she said. “So let the National Task Force handle it.”

The prosecutor got to his feet too. He nodded stiffly, and Thurn got the sense that somehow he had also been involved in the decision.

“We know where and when they’re going to strike,” said Berggren, who also got up from his chair with a labored groan. “By this stage, with everything handed to them on a silver plate, even the Task Force should be able to manage this.”

“They will be ready outside the Panaxia premises in Bromma from twenty-three hundred hours on the fourteenth of September,” Olsson replied. “But let us be clear about one thing. Until then, it’s you who are responsible.”

40

There was a balcony on the fifth floor.

Michel Maloof spotted it after his deathly boring visit to the Moderna Museet. He had parted ways with Alexandra Svensson outside the Grand Hotel and headed straight home to his drawings. He hadn’t given the fifth floor the same manic attention as the sixth, where Counting was located, but he spotted it among the drawings on the floor by his dining table. One sheet had been covering another, and when he pushed it to one side, there it was.

A small balcony sticking out from the fifth floor above the open atrium.

It meant they could go in through the glass ceiling.

If they smashed the glass and used a long ladder, maybe they would be able to reach all the way to the balcony.

Alexandra had been right, he thought. He wasn’t someone who gave up. He found new ways forward.

Maloof pulled out his phone and called Sami.

“There’s a balcony,” he said. “Looks like a little ledge. We could use ladders. One to get down and one to get back up to the sixth floor.”

“You sure?” asked Sami. “About the balcony?”

“Definitely, definitely,” Maloof replied. “I’ll check with Nick.”

“This is Plan F, I can feel it,” Sami said defiantly, adding, “Is Nick any good with ladders?”

“He’s good with everything,” Maloof mumbled.

“Maybe he can work out how long the ladder needs to be?” Sami continued. “It’s gonna take a damn long ladder. You know what I mean?”

“I’ll talk to Nick.”

Maloof hung up. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest, feel himself literally sitting taller. He was himself again.

That evening, Niklas Nordgren spent hours in his hobby room, studying the drawings from Vreten 17. Once he knew what he was looking for, it didn’t take long for him to find the balcony on the fifth floor.

All night, and long into the early hours, Maloof, Sami and Nordgren called one another from different phones with different SIM cards. They spoke without mentioning any key words, using broken sentences and repeated euphemisms, just to make sure that if anyone happened to be listening to their conversation, they wouldn’t understand a thing.

Nordgren agreed that it shouldn’t be impossible to smash the glass on the roof and lower a ladder down to the balcony.

The wall out onto the atrium on the sixth floor was made of bulletproof glass. It was there to let light into what would otherwise be an entirely dark floor.

“What the hell do we do about that?” Sami asked.

Nordgren reassured him. The words “bulletproof glass” implied something more impressive than the reality. Using a shorter ladder to climb up from the balcony on the fifth floor and blow a hole in the glass on the sixth wouldn’t be a problem. But the explosion would cause glass to rain down onto the balcony, meaning that the only place they could take cover would be up on the roof.

They would have to climb down to the balcony, apply their explosives to the strengthened glass, and then climb back up to the roof. They would also have to make sure the detonation cable was long enough to reach up to the roof with them.

All of this meant a hell of a lot of climbing, Sami declared.

“We’ll manage it,” Nordgren said drily. “The doors’ll be worse.”

Once they made it through the armored glass on the sixth floor, they would end up in the room directly next to Counting. All that divided the two rooms was some kind of fire door and a security door.

“What the hell’s a security door?”

“Made of steel. Thicker kind. Fire doors are easy. Security doors are… worse.”

“Worse? But, can you do it?”

“It’s fine,” Nordgren was firm. “It’ll be fine.”

“We only have ten minutes,” Maloof reminded him.

“Impossible,” Nordgren replied. “Ten minutes won’t be enough. Maybe if we had fifteen? We’ll have to count.”

“No longer,” said Maloof.

“OK, let’s say fifteen,” Nordgren said.

Sami was happy.

The question now was how long the ladder from the ceiling to the balcony would need to be. Judging by the plans, the fifth and sixth floors looked like they were a normal height, and according to Maloof, Alexandra Svensson had suggested that the ceiling height definitely wasn’t any more than ten feet.

“How the hell could you ask her about that?” Nordgren wondered.

“She talks more than Zoran,” Maloof said. “I don’t ask, I just listen.”

“Ouch. How d’you manage that?”

“Exactly, exactly. That’s a better question.”

All of this meant that in total, there were nineteen or twenty feet between the floor of the balcony on the fifth floor and the ceiling on the sixth. A thirty-six-foot ladder would leave them with sixteen feet to spare once it was through the skylight.

Those weren’t huge margins, but they would be enough.

When Maloof eventually fell into bed at dawn that morning, it was with a wide grin on his lips. He was convinced things were about to turn around now, that they were overcoming their problems.

Late the next afternoon, when he woke, he realized Petrovic had been trying to get in touch with him several times, to tell him both the good and the bad news. The good news was that they had a new pilot.

“But I’ve got half the police force on me.” Petrovic sighed. “It’s not a mistake, they haven’t got me mixed up with someone else. It’s me they’re after, but the one thing I don’t know is why.”

41

Caroline Thurn wasn’t the type of police officer to leave things to chance. On Wednesday afternoon, the decision had been made to allow the National Task Force to keep the Panaxia cash depot in Bromma under surveillance during the night of the fourteenth of September.

But by Friday afternoon, Thurn had started to have doubts.

Most of what they knew pointed to Panaxia, but she suddenly felt unsure.

What exactly suggested that the G4S depot in Västberga wouldn’t be the target of the helicopter robbery?

Thurn was at the gym, and with every mile that passed on the rowing machine, the feeling grew. Eventually, she had to get off, go into the changing room and call Berggren.

He was still at the office in Kungsholmen, and he sighed loudly when she told him about her hunch.

“And you’re aware that it’s three thirty on a Friday?” he said.

“Meaning what?”

“People are heading home, Caroline,” Berggren explained. “It’s the weekend. They want to spend time with their families, eat chips and watch some TV show with an overexcited host who laughs at their own jokes.”

Thurn didn’t watch TV, she wasn’t even sure whether there was one in the apartment on Strandvägen.

Before she moved into the nine-room apartment with views over the water, she had instructed the auction firm Bukowski’s to sell everything that might be of value. Anything left behind had been stashed in one of the rooms looking out onto the courtyard. That was almost six years ago now, and Thurn still hadn’t opened the door. She would deal with it one day, but not quite yet.

“Plus,” Berggren continued, “G4S doesn’t fit the information we have. The building in Västberga has six floors. And we know that Panaxia’s starting a big move the day before, meaning there’ll be people running all over the place and that security’ll be lower.”

“That’s what the tip we have said,” Thurn replied. “Which isn’t the same thing as knowing it. I just want to check one last time.”

Berggren was careful not to sigh audibly again.

Thurn’s need to be in control was about as big as Berggren’s appetite.

“Do you want me to do anything?” he asked.

“No need,” Thurn replied. She wanted to add that it was Friday afternoon and that he should prioritize his family, but then she realized that she didn’t even know if Mats Berggren had a family.

Caroline Thurn never asked her colleagues personal questions. It meant she could avoid being asked the same kind of thing in return.

On that overcast Friday afternoon, the task force leader drove through town toward Västberga. Like always, there was a lot of traffic heading south, and she had to join a long convoy of trucks. But Västberga Allé, the street that cut straight through the industrial area, was deserted.

Work at the loading docks often finished early in the afternoon ahead of the weekend, and the offices there were already empty. Thurn drove slowly past the deserted buildings and then slowed down further as she approached the G4S building at the corner of Vretensborgsvägen. Work there went on seven days a week, but even cash depots were quiet on Friday afternoons.

Thurn glanced out of the side window. The six-story building was like a fortress on the inside, and the cash depot’s vault was in a completely different league from the Panaxia safe in Bromma.

No, Thurn thought, it was reasonable to assume that this wasn’t the building the robbers were planning to attack. Besides, Thurn could practically see all the way to the police station on Västbergavägen. Given the choice, Panaxia was better in every respect.

She drove on.

Rather than doing a U-turn, she turned right at Vretensborgsvägen. She sped up and was just about to take another right onto Drivhjulsvägen, looping the block and continuing north, back toward the highway, when she glanced in her rearview mirror.

She slammed on the brakes.

It was sheer luck that there were no cars behind her.

From where she was sitting, she could see the G4S building from behind. It had to be built into a hillside, or at least a steep slope.

From this side, it looked like the building had four stories.

42

Hans Carlbrink, the head of the National Task Force, was the type of officer who made the general population hesitate before calling the police. His career path had been through the military, which was also where his references and attitude toward the world came from. His sense of discipline was stronger than his sense of justice, and if you wanted to emphasize his positive sides, you might say that he radiated some kind of equality. He was equally arrogant toward victims and perpetrators, civilians and police officers, men and women.

Caroline Thurn and Mats Berggren drove out to Solna, where Carlbrink’s men were stationed and the police helicopter was now safe behind walls and barbed wire. It was late in the afternoon on Saturday, September 12. Carlbrink gave the tall, fit Thurn an appreciative glance and then turned to Berggren and stared at his considerable stomach with a look of disgust. He showed his visitors into a windowless room to one side of the canteen, a room that gave Thurn the feeling that it was being used in an attempt to demonstrate how tough the conditions were for the Task Force.

“Three more days,” said Carlbrink.

They were in agreement that it was a frustrating and unusual experience to be counting down the days. The reason for not just bringing Petrovic in, thereby preventing the robbery, was that the information they had was already a month old. Plenty could have changed, and Thurn spared a thought for the technicians who spent all day, every day listening to the slippery Montenegrin refuse to give himself away. What exactly did they have on him?

All the same, Thurn couldn’t deny that the excitement rose with every day that passed. Her colleagues from National Crime nodded in understanding whenever they passed her office, and with just three days to go, all those involved could feel their hearts beating that little bit quicker. Even the minister for foreign affairs had been in touch for an update.

They sat down at a tired old conference table.

Thurn got straight to the point and explained what she had discovered the previous evening. That the G4S depot in Västberga was also, if you chose to look at it from a certain angle, a four-story building.

“But G4S isn’t planning a move on Tuesday,” Berggren butted in.

His usual whininess had increased in this new environment. He felt uncomfortable under Carlbrink’s elitist gaze, and he hated the uncertainty that Thurn had introduced into the equation.

“We don’t know that,” said Thurn. “I haven’t asked them.”

“Come on, it’d be pretty unlikely?”

Thurn agreed.

“My point is that we can’t rule out Västberga. And my question, Hans, is whether we should station some of your men out in Västberga and some out in Bromma?”

Carlbrink nodded. That was perfectly doable.

“I’ve heard there’ll be around twenty people?” he said.

“Involved in the preparations,” Thurn replied. “I doubt there’ll be twenty people there during the actual robbery.”

“It’s not a problem,” Carlbrink said, smiling as though he were eating something tasty. “Let them come. Twenty or thirty. We could probably handle it. My suggestion is that we make sure to have enough men and equipment to be able to take down a helicopter in both Västberga and Bromma. But that we leave the majority wherever you feel it’s more likely to happen.”

“Which is Bromma anyway, right Caroline?” asked Berggren.

Thurn looked unsure.

“If you’d asked me yesterday,” she said, “I would’ve been sure. But now I don’t know anymore.”

43

Niklas Nordgren was struggling to concentrate. He was sitting on the stool by his desk in the hobby room, and through the wall, he could hear the TV news from the living room. Rather than soldering the phone case in front of him, he was listening to the host’s serious voice reporting on the death of the American actor Patrick Swayze.

He wasn’t worried about Annika coming in and seeing what he was doing. The wall between their worlds, between a normal and a criminal life, may have been thin, but it was thick enough. Annika would never open the door to his hobby room without knocking first. And if her thoughts were elsewhere and she did happen to come in without warning, she wouldn’t understand what he was doing. She wouldn’t recognize the explosive putty he was pushing into the cell phones he was busy priming.

How many times had she threatened him? She would leave him the minute he broke their agreement. She had waited long enough, their relationship wouldn’t survive another stint in prison. Sometimes, he still got the feeling—and it happened increasingly often—that she was actually just looking for an excuse.

But it wasn’t the fear of her leaving him that was making it hard for Nordgren to concentrate that evening.

Eventually, he put down the soldering iron and unplugged it at the wall. He went over to the window. The light on top of the Kaknäs tower was blinking away on the other side of the water. He stood there, the dark night in front of him, and allowed himself to get lost in the moment.

From the minute the helicopter landed on the roof, no more than fifteen minutes could pass before it took off again. That was how long it would take for the G4S security staff to mobilize, for the police to organize themselves and make rational decisions.

Considering how close the police station was, he would have preferred it if they had been able to do it in ten minutes.

Getting out of the helicopter, smashing the skylight, putting the ladders into place and climbing into the building would take at least two to three minutes.

Breaking through the bulletproof glass would take two to three minutes.

Getting through the security door would take two to three minutes.

Filling the bags with money wouldn’t take any less than two to three minutes.

Hauling the bags of money back onto the roof wouldn’t take any less than two to three minutes.

And then their time would be up.

There was no room for error; they would have to work quickly and without any surprises. Their biggest problem would be if the staff in Counting caused any trouble. Obviously it would be best if the premises were emptied before the security door was blown open, but that type of thing was hard to take for granted.

If the staff were still inside when they made it in, their plans would fall apart. Gathering them together and making sure they stayed calm wouldn’t be a problem; Nordgren was sure of that, it wasn’t a risk. But it would take time.

The Kaknäs tower flashed away in the distance.

A large boat covered in colorful lanterns was on its way through the channel between Lilla Värtan and Saltsjön.

But the fact they might run out of time wasn’t the thing worrying him most.

He went back to his desk and plugged in the soldering iron. The plan was to prepare four phone bombs. Two would be placed in the police helicopter on Värmdö and two would be kept as backups. The risk of the Stockholm police’s other helicopter turning up, the one currently on loan to Gothenburg, wasn’t particularly high, but neither was it impossible. Meaning they would also need to be able to place two phones in that one, if necessary.

But as Nordgren moved the tip of the iron to solder the casing together, he realized that it was this that was causing him to hesitate.

The idea of putting the phones in the police helicopter and then, while they were heading toward Västberga, blowing the thing to pieces by activating the charge.

Would there be a pilot behind the controls?

Would there be anyone else in the hangar?

Would this plan, meant to prevent anyone from following them, turn into a bloody massacre?

There was no way to ensure it didn’t happen.

Through the living room wall, he heard “The Time of My Life” from Dirty Dancing, probably being used as the soundtrack to Patrick Swayze’s life for the customary retrospective of his career.

Nordgren nodded to himself. In the documentary of his life, no one would be able to say that he had killed anyone. That line was as clear as it was unwavering. He was a criminal, he was a robber, but he wasn’t a killer.

He looked down at his explosive phones.

44

Hjorthagen sports complex was just behind the gas tanks in the neighborhood tucked away beyond Östermalm and Lidingö, built at one time to give guest laborers somewhere to live. It was thanks to soccer that Michel Maloof had first gone there, and he had realized just how perfect Hjorthagen was for meetings that needed to stay secret. Though the area had its own subway station, it was still one of the city’s most forgotten neighborhoods. A professional soccer team used the sports complex to train, but at one in the morning, it was guaranteed to be empty.

On his way to the meeting, Maloof had changed trains several times before he felt confident enough to sit down on the red line toward Ropsten.

Walking toward Hjorthagen from the station, he thought about how quickly the bright summer nights had turned into something more like autumn. Though the trees were still green and the lawns looked as though they thought it was midsummer, the darkness had returned at night. It wouldn’t be long before it was time to dig out the hats and gloves, he thought.

Or maybe six months in Thailand would be preferable to winter in Sweden.

If everything went according to plan, that wouldn’t be unthinkable, and he was sure Alexandra Svensson wouldn’t have anything against going with him.

Maloof crossed the parking lot and kept to the edge of the woods as he moved around the fence surrounding the soccer field. Someone had cut a hole near the very middle, and it had gone ten years without being fixed. He pushed the fence to one side, squatted down and sneaked in, then he hid in the shadow of the changing rooms, right next to the entrance.

Sami Farhan appeared on Artemisgatan five minutes later. Maloof saw him from a distance and shouted gently. Sami took the same route via the woods and the hole in the fence.

“Tell me everything’s sorted,” was the first thing he said.

Maloof recognized the tone of voice.

That aggressive and expectant tone.

“I don’t give a shit what this is all about,” Sami said. “Let’s go. I can’t wait any longer.”

“Wait till Nick gets here.”

Nordgren appeared from the long shadows of the trees. Maloof saw the movement before he saw the person, and he jumped.

“Sorry,” said Nordgren. “Didn’t mean to scare you. I got here a bit early. Just wanted to make sure you weren’t being followed.”

Maloof nodded. He liked Nordgren’s caution, he always had. Sami, on the other hand, was annoyed.

“What the hell is this?”

“Can’t be too careful,” said Nordgren.

They walked toward the northern end of the field, by Gasverksvägen. The trees were tight around them. All three men were wearing dark clothes and talking quietly. It would be impossible to see them unless you got very close.

“I don’t get why we always have to meet on soccer fields,” Sami muttered grumpily, gesturing to the eerie, empty field.

Maloof laughed. “Soccer’s… a team sport, Sami,” he said. “Maybe you could try it sometime.”

They stopped on the goal line. It was a cool, clear night, and Maloof knew that it was one he would remember.

It was time to make a decision.

“We’ve got a pilot,” he said.

The relief of the others was greater than their joy. Sami did a quick pirouette.

“Finally!” he shouted. “Let’s do this!”

Maloof told them what he knew about the American, what his qualifications and references were. He added, “But it was Zoran they were tailing, not me, and not by mistake. They’re on him twenty-four seven. They put microphones in his apartment, in the restaurants. And a couple in the car.”

His words dampened the mood.

“OK,” Sami eventually said. “So they suspect your friend? What’s that got to do with us? You know? Nothing.”

“Lay off,” Nordgren mumbled.

“I’m serious,” Sami continued. “It’s his business.”

“Right, right,” said Maloof. “Except… Zoran knows everything. Him and us… we’re doing this together.”

“Yeah, I know,” Sami said, unable to stand still any longer. “But he hasn’t been involved in any of the details. You know what I mean? He must have a tail for some other reason. We’ve been working round the clock for months. He’s… done a load of other stuff. You know? He’s got his business, we’ve got ours.”

“You think he’s said anything?” Nordgren asked. “That they’ve heard?”

It was the question they had to consider. The reason Petrovic was being watched and listened to so intently had to be because of something else, or had the police heard something about Västberga on one of their microphones over these past few weeks?

Maloof shook his head.

“Don’t worry. He’d never name names. Never say anything which…”

“So why’s he got a tail?” asked Nordgren. “That kind of surveillance. Sounds really fucking weird.”

Maloof shook his head again. He didn’t know.

“Can’t be a leak,” said Sami, “because no one knows. No one. It’s us four and only us.”

“The pilot knows now too,” said Maloof. “Zoran had to tell him. There’s no time left.”

“But when did that happen?” Sami asked. “Yesterday? A few days ago? It’s not him.”

Maloof shook his head. He didn’t know any more than that.

“So… what do we do?” he asked, his calm smile making his face impossible to read, like always.

No one replied. Nordgren’s cap was casting a dark shadow over his face. Sami was digging the toe of his shoe into the grass. His mind was on his brothers, his investors. But above all, he was thinking about Karin. And the boys. He wasn’t planning to let them grow up with a dad who was away every night, doing the occasional job and being sent away at regular intervals. A dad they would be embarrassed of, one they would never get to know. He needed this to work.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “What do we do? We do it.”

His words were followed by a long silence.

“I agree it sounds weird,” Nordgren said when Maloof didn’t reply. “We’re going to steal a helicopter and fly it to a cash depot where there’s a police station just down the road. We climb down ladders and blow open doors and carry out the biggest robbery in Swedish history. And all while we know the police have unlimited resources, that they’ve been listening to Petrovic for a month while we’ve been working on the details.”

“This is a job everyone will hear about,” Sami tried to convince his friends. “You know? Across the whole world.”

“Right, right,” said Maloof. “Or… at least the whole of Sweden.”

“I guarantee you,” Sami said, “this is bigger than Sweden.”

His gesture was directed out into space, as though their fame would reach far out into the universe.

“Are we really doing it?” Nordgren wondered.

Silence again. This time, it was Sami who broke it.

“I’ll say it again. It’s a go. We’re doing it. What do you think, Michel? You in?”

Maloof laughed. He glanced at Sami, standing there with a wry smile and drumming his hand against his leg while he waited for an answer. He thought about the months of planning, the drawings spread across the floor in his dark apartment in Fittja, and about Alexandra. Could a life with her be awaiting him? Would it be enough money? In his head, he turned over the question: If this wasn’t enough, what would be? His serious face cracked into a wide smile.

“Definitely,” he said. “Yeah, definitely. I’m in. We’re doing it.”

“OK,” said Nordgren. “Then we’re doing it.”

45

Prosecutor Lars Hertz and Detective Chief Inspector Caroline Thurn were sitting in the front seats of Thurn’s newly washed, dark blue Volvo. It was parked in the shadows between a couple of wheelless wrecks outside a tire-fitting company at Linta Gårdsväg 25. Hertz looked unashamedly alert, his blond fringe bobbing like a thick cloud above his forehead, and he seemed tangibly excited to be involved in a huge police operation. The difficult scent of Mats Berggren’s aftershave enveloped them both, and it was something Hertz would forever associate with that night in the car.

Berggren was in the back. He leaned forward between the seats and said that memories of family car trips in Europe were coming back to him. Were they nearly there yet?

In the front seat, the reaction to his joke differed. Thurn smiled kindly. The idea that her parents might have ever taken her on car trips when she was younger was about as unlikely as it was bizarre. Herz blushed in the darkness, thinking that he wouldn’t have anything against starting a family with Caroline Thurn.

Since the moment she had stepped into his room a few weeks earlier, the prosecutor had found it difficult to look her in the eye. She had the kind of appearance that made him shy. He assumed it was her lack of flattery and her clear unwillingness to please that appealed to him.

And embarrassed him.

They sat and waited in the darkness. The fourteenth of September had crossed over into the fifteenth a few hours earlier. The anticipation they had felt as they drove out to Bromma had passed, but the minutes still felt endless. Thurn’s breathing was heavy and regular. She had fallen into a microsleep a couple of times, but for no more than ten minutes in total. She had also wound down one of the side windows to prevent them from fogging up with condensation. The crickets were all that broke the silence, and the clouds that had rolled in an hour earlier filtered the moonlight into narrow stripes on the flat land on the other side of the road.

“It’s two o’clock,” Berggren informed them.

“That’s correct, Mats,” Thurn replied.

“We’ve been sitting here for three hours.”

Thurn didn’t reply. She wasn’t impressed by her colleague’s mathematical abilities.

They had spent the first hour in whispered, uninspired conversation about the latest in a line of internal investigations into the organizational structure of the Swedish police force. There had been a presentation of the findings in one of the conference rooms a few days earlier, and both Thurn and Berggren had felt obliged to attend. Hertz hadn’t been there, of course; he worked for the prosecution authority and had no strong opinions on where the county police’s responsibilities started and ended. Berggren, on the other hand, had formed a whole range of opinions that he was more than happy to share with his colleagues in the front seats. Thurn knew that the conclusions of the internal reports would be compromised down to nothing, which meant that her level of interest was negligible.

Since then, they had been sitting in silence.

Thurn had made the decision to place the majority of the Task Force outside the Panaxia building in Bromma the day before, but Carlbrink had enough men lying in wait outside G4S to stop a small army all the same.

There were two walkie-talkies in Thurn’s lap. One to contact Carlbrink in Bromma, and the other to be able to quickly get in touch with the team in Västberga.

So far, both had remained silent.

The minutes passed reluctantly.

The Panaxia depot rose up like a huge dark block, high above the surrounding buildings. A few hours earlier, the contracted moving team had left the building. They had been working since the morning before, right up until midnight.

As the movers drove away in their vans, Thurn breathed out. Money was money, colorful pictures printed onto paper that could be exchanged for valuable things, services and experiences. But human lives couldn’t be swapped for anything at all.

What had been worrying Thurn most was that they would end up with a hostage situation that the National Task Force, under the leadership of the insensitive Carlbrink, would fail to handle. But now that the moving staff had gone, that risk had vanished.

Thurn and Berggren had taken a trip out to Solna to brief Carlbrink before his men set out at around ten thirty that evening.

The two officers from the National Criminal Police had watched the elite unit’s preparations. The amount of weapons, shields and safety equipment they packed into their vans was striking. Their arsenal even included a couple of rocket launchers, presumably in case they had to open fire on a helicopter.

“It’s like being back in Israel,” Thurn had commented, mostly to herself.

“Never been,” Berggren replied.

Thurn had given Carlbrink a good head start before she and Berggren drove back into town. She went via Fleminggatan, where she picked up Hertz, and then they headed out to the area behind Bromma airport. She had found the parking lot outside the tire fitter during an obligatory reconnaissance mission on Sunday.

Berggren suddenly jumped in the backseat.

“What was that?” he said.

They sat perfectly still, straining to hear. Even the crickets had fallen silent. After a few minutes, they started breathing normally again. False alarm.

“Still pretty impressive that Carlbrink can get his soldiers not to mess about with their weapons,” Berggren said quietly. “I thought we’d be able to hear them rattling the bolts all night.”

“Where are they?” Hertz asked.

Thurn pointed out the rear window, and the prosecutor thought he could discern the outlines of the vans.

“How many?”

“Not sure,” Thurn replied. “Was it twenty men?”

“Don’t know either,” Berggren piped up from the backseat. “Felt like a small army. They must be packed like sardines inside those vans.”

“Maybe that makes it easier to sleep against one another?” Hertz joked.

The image of those elite police officers leaning their heads on one another in the back of the vans made Berggren laugh.

Thurn hushed him.

“Are you scared they’ll hear me from the helicopter?” he snapped.

“They might arrive in a helicopter,” said Thurn, “but they could just as easily turn up in a couple of cars. Maybe the helicopter’s just their escape plan. We have no idea.”

Berggren was about to argue, but he resisted the urge.

They knew considerably more than that, they knew an incredible amount, that was why they were sitting in this car, waiting for one of Sweden’s biggest robberies to take place.

But the minutes passed, and Mats Berggren grew more and more restless.

“Isn’t this exciting, Lars?” he said to the prosecutor in the front seat. “Finally getting to see what real police work’s like?”

Hertz gave a brief laugh and the conversation died out. The two men fell asleep, and Thurn stared out into the darkness as the hours ticked by.

At three in the morning, the police helicopter took off from Solna. Just like the National Task Force, it had been put at the operation’s disposal. Rather than allowing the pilots to sleep in the nearby barracks, it had been decided that the helicopter should be in the air once an hour during the night. That way, it would not only be able to help with the surveillance work, it would also be much quicker onto the scene when the time came.

There had been discussions as to whether they should try to move it to Bromma airport, meaning they would be able to get to Panaxia even more quickly, but a decision against the idea had eventually been made. The airport’s rates were, in the eyes of the government, hairraising, and the distance between the area in Solna and the airfield was only three or four minutes as the crow flies.

The agreement was that the helicopter wouldn’t fly anywhere close to Bromma until it was called in. They didn’t want to scare the robbers away.

“That was definitely something!”

Berggren was whispering loudly. The sound had come from some distance away, though not too far.

“Did you hear that?”

He hissed, his voice reaching a falsetto. Thurn had thought that Berggren was asleep. But she had heard it too. It wasn’t his imagination this time. The clear sound of movement in the grass not far from the road.

Thurn glanced at her watch. Five past four.

“It’s not far away. Should we let Carlbrink know?” Berggren whispered from the backseat.

Thurn nodded. She didn’t know where Carlbrink had positioned his men, but there was a risk that none of them were stationed along the road.

The detective silently closed the window, picked up one of the walkie-talkies and pressed the button.

“We can hear something,” she whispered into it.

“Understood,” came the immediate reply, followed by silence.

Thurn gently placed the radio in her lap and lowered the side window again. The three of them listened carefully. Hertz and Berggren nodded almost simultaneously. Someone, or perhaps several people, was out there in the darkness.

Movement. Silence. Movement. Silence.

It was heading straight for them.

“Are they moving away?” Hertz whispered.

His observation was correct. The sound was heading away from the Panaxia building.

“But that’s impossible,” Berggren said, equally quietly. “Carlbrink has a ring around the building. No one could’ve made it inside and back out again already.”

A few seconds later, they spotted the dog.

It was big and black, a cross of several breeds, and it wasn’t wearing a collar. It was thin and hungry; its ribs were clearly visible.

“Stay here,” Thurn instructed, possibly to stop Berggren from getting out of the car.

She picked up the walkie-talkie.

“False alarm,” she whispered.

They heard a crackling on the other end, which Thurn took as a confirmation.

The realization that nothing would happen, that the robbery wouldn’t be taking place, didn’t dawn on them until Berggren informed the others that it was quarter past six in the morning and that the sun was coming up.

It began as a joke.

“The Serbs said it would be a night flight,” said Berggren, “but I think it’s getting a bit late.”

Thurn muttered something incomprehensible. Her body was stiff. Her mouth as dry as paper.

“The one thing I’m worried about,” Berggren continued when neither of his colleagues replied, “is that if Carlbrink doesn’t get to set his army on the robbers, he’ll take his disappointment out on us.”

Hertz had dozed off in the front seat. He was sleeping deeply, his breathing calm, and neither Thurn nor Berggren wanted to wake him.

For some reason, the robbers had changed their plans.

Suddenly, Thurn jumped. One of the radios in her lap buzzed.

Was it Västberga?

Was G4S the target?

She picked up the walkie-talkie and held it to her ear, but it wasn’t Västberga. It was Carlbrink trying to get ahold of her.

“Nothing,” his tired voice said down the line. “And nothing in Västberga either. Over there?”

“Nothing,” she replied.

Caroline knew it was over.

She thought about the commissioner, about the minister for foreign affairs. Then she thought about all the police officers who had been involved in the investigation; those hundreds of hours of Zoran Petrovic’s inane chatter they’d had to listen to.

She sighed.

Had there been a leak at police HQ? It wasn’t impossible, the leaks there sometimes resembled a Chinese river delta. Maybe the robbers knew it had been a trap, and that was why they had canceled.

But it was equally likely that some part of their plan had failed at the last minute. With so many people involved, anything could have happened.

When the clock struck six thirty, Caroline Thurn was sure.

It wasn’t her job to dismiss Carlbrink, and so she called the commissioner instead, on her direct line.

“Hi, it’s Caroline,” she said, using her normal voice rather than whispering for the first time in hours. “It’s a nonstarter,” she continued.

Hertz woke in the passenger seat.

Thurn listened in silence for a moment while Berggren and Hertz looked searchingly at her.

She put down her phone and started the engine.

“They’re sending Carlbrink home,” she said. “They’re moving the helicopter back to Myttinge. The political version will be that with the help of our Serbian colleagues, we managed to prevent one of the biggest robberies in history.”

“Did we?” Hertz asked, newly woken. “Did we stop the robbery?”

“What do you think, Lars?” said Thurn. “What do you think?”

46

“I feel pretty crappy,” Niklas Nordgren said to Carsten Hansen.

“Yeah? But you hardly ever get sick.”

“I guess it was something I ate yesterday. My stomach’s kind of churning.”

“Shouldn’t you go home then?”

“I just got here,” Nordgren protested.

It was nine in the morning on Friday, September 18.

“But,” he added, “I really don’t feel right. Shit. You sure you’ll cope?”

“Go home and rest,” said Hansen. “It’s more important you’re OK than that the locksmith’s microwave works.”

“Yeah,” Nordgren agreed. “Yeah, I guess. Thanks, Carsten. It’s good of you.”

Nordgren packed up his things, thanked Carsten again and pulled on his coat. But as he turned the corner, he didn’t head for home. He headed for the station instead. He took the Lidingö line to Ropsten, the subway to Slussen, and from there a bus to Stavsnäs. When the Waxholm ferry docked at the quay and Nordgren stepped on board, he calculated that it had been five years since he last made this journey.

It was lunchtime when he stepped off the boat on the island of Sandhamn. The season was short in the archipelago, and by that time of year, mid-September, the only people to get off ahead of Nordgren were a couple of handymen in overalls. No more than a hundred or so people lived permanently on the island, and for that reason seeing strangers was unusual. Nordgren passed the hotel with determined steps, and then headed up the hill toward Trouville. He too was wearing overalls and was carrying a tool bag. If anyone noticed him, they would just assume he was on his way to repair something in one of the houses that lay empty at this time of year, along the road toward the island’s southern cape.

In summer, the beach in Trouville offered seclusion to any tourists wanting to swim, at least if they moved away from the more built-up area. But by September, the area was completely deserted.

Nordgren turned right when he reached the water, and walked along the narrow beach. He clambered over piles of damp seaweed that had washed ashore. It didn’t take long for his shoes to be soaked through.

He was looking for the rowboat he had dragged onto land five years earlier. He had pulled it up to the edge of the trees and tied it to a trunk. You couldn’t see the boat from the water, and barely even from land unless you got lost in the woods and tripped over it. It belonged to an old childhood friend of Nordgren’s parents, who had sold their place on Sandhamn and bought another on Runmarö. But the little boat had been left behind, and it wasn’t in anyone’s way.

He went too far at first, but Nordgren eventually found the little plastic boat exactly where he had left it. The oars were still inside, as was the bailer. He couldn’t manage to undo the knot he had tied around a tall pine, and he had to cut the rope with a knife instead. He pulled the boat down to the water, pushed it out and jumped in. His shoes were already soaked anyway.

Thanks to the southerly wind, it took him no more than two hours to row over the strait to the edge of Runmarö. That was where his parents’ friends had bought their new house, and there was a playhouse with a bed in their yard. Nordgren had slept there before.

47

Just as Niklas Nordgren was rowing ashore on Runmarö, the referee blew his whistle to start the match at Råsunda Stadium in Solna. The arena had been built as the national stadium for the Swedish soccer team, and it could hold almost forty thousand fans. Tonight, with AIK playing Trelleborgs FF at home, roughly half that number of paying spectators were in the seats. It was AIK’s year, the team was heading for victory in the Allsvenskan league, and that fact made Michel Maloof neither happy nor sad. He didn’t have a favorite team in the Allsvenskan; he thought English league soccer was far superior to Swedish, and was much more interested in the Premier League. On top of that, Trelleborg were one of AIK’s least entertaining rivals, sitting midtable and with a game that could sympathetically be described as defensive.

But there was no denying that the nearly twenty thousand spectators that evening were giving the boring match a relatively grand feeling. The terraces were lively, and though the score was 0–0 at halftime, it was going to be the home side’s night; you could feel it in the air. Maloof bought a hot dog and a Coke Zero in a soft plastic cup that was difficult to hold, and he went back to watch the second half, still not feeling particularly engaged.

Sure enough, the home team sent a ball into the back of the net at seventy-five minutes, and a quarter of an hour after that, Maloof got up and pushed his way out of his row. He was carrying a sports bag in one hand. It wasn’t unthinkable that the lukewarm cola had forced him to go to the toilet with just injury time to go.

Next to the enormous men’s restroom and its many cubicles and urinals, there was a separate disabled restroom with a door you could lock behind you. That was where Maloof headed.

With just a few minutes of the game left to play, the corridors of the stadium were practically deserted. This was when everything would be decided out on the field, it wasn’t something you wanted to miss.

Still, Maloof was careful to make sure no one saw him open the door to the restroom.

He locked it carefully, hung the bag on a hook on the back of the door and pulled out a sleeping mat and pillow. The room reeked of urine, but he had seen worse. He put everything on the floor in the corner opposite the toilet and sat down on the mat. He had a book with him, a thick Stephen King paperback, but he wouldn’t read any of it. It was more a ritual; he always brought a thick book that he wouldn’t read.

It took almost ten minutes before the noise outside the restroom door gradually increased to a roar. Desperate soccer fans who didn’t want to wait in the long lines for the normal toilets started pulling at Maloof’s door.

But the lock held, and Maloof remained sitting on the floor.

After fifteen, possibly twenty minutes, the stadium fell quiet again. All that remained now was to wait. The cleaning staff wouldn’t arrive until the next morning, it was a way for the company to avoid paying overtime. Zoran Petrovic had been running a successful cleaning company for ten years, and he knew how things worked at Råsunda.

But not even Petrovic knew where Michel Maloof was at that moment.

Maloof slept in intervals of fifteen minutes, the floor was too hard and the mat too thin for any longer than that. When he eventually got up at four thirty in the morning, he was stiff and in a bad mood.

He opened the door to the disabled restroom and found Råsunda Stadium quiet and deserted.

Maloof walked slowly down its dark corridors, past the shutters on all the food stalls. It was impossible to think that just last night, tens of thousands of people had been shouting, cheering, drinking and laughing on the now-empty terraces; right then, it felt more like the day after a nuclear holocaust.

There were turnstiles at the exits. They turned only one way, so there were no locks. Maloof left Råsunda in the early-morning darkness, taking the train out to Kårsta. From there, he would take a bus to Norrtälje.

The likelihood of him bumping into anyone he knew in any of those places was tiny.

48

Sami Farhan waited another day, until Saturday, September 19. If Michel Maloof had found it easy to disappear and Niklas Nordgren slightly harder, the task was by far the most difficult for Sami.

He did what he usually did. He booked a flight leaving late in the afternoon. This time, he had chosen Hamburg as his destination. The return journey was booked for a month’s time, but the seat back to Arlanda would be empty. When he landed, there would be a car waiting for him at the airport, and he would drive it back to Stockholm that evening and night.

He was doing someone a service, the car had been bought in Germany and would later have to pay duty in Sweden. But that wasn’t his problem. He would leave it in a parking garage in Östermalm and then make his way through the city unnoticed, heading for an apartment in Södermalm where no one would either think to look for or be able to trace him.

Abracadabra, and Sami Farhan would have disappeared.

No, that wasn’t the problem.

It was the farewells that were impossible.

That Saturday morning had followed its usual, chaotic pattern. The baby had woken and started screaming at four, and before he had been fed and gone back to sleep, he had managed to wake his older brother. Sami had walked around and around the kitchen table with John in his arms, loop after loop after loop, listening to his sniffles eventually grow quieter and cross over into sleep.

But the minute he put the boy down in his bed, a mattress on the floor in the room Karin had previously used as her office, Sami himself had felt wide awake. He had sat down on the sofa in the living room and tried to work out what he was going to say. It was impossible.

By five, he had dozed off again, and he slept through until seven. He woke to the sound of Karin trying to make coffee as she prepared the gruel for the one-year-old. She had been up since six, and she handed Sami a bottle and pointed to the baby, who was sleeping in the stroller in the hallway. After that, she staggered into the bedroom, pulled the door shut and slumped onto the bed with the hope that a few hours’ uninterrupted sleep would allow her milk to thicken enough for the next feed.

This isn’t right, he thought.

I can’t leave her like this.

Not now, not for a week, not even for a day.

But he had no choice.

Going underground and disappearing from the system was his way of protecting Karin and the kids. Both in the long and the short term.

Sami wasn’t planning to be sent away again. He couldn’t, not now that he had created all of this. A home. A family.

His plan was to stay away for almost three weeks, but he was doing that to avoid being sent away for three years.

Or even longer.

It wasn’t that prison scared him. If you got into the game, you had to accept the rules. But for his family, things were different.

Sami made lunch and gently woke Karin by taking her a tray of food, a ham-and-cheese omelet and a large glass of milk. For once, both boys were sleeping.

He put the tray on the bed and sat down by her feet. He watched as she wearily sat up. She was so incredibly beautiful. Like always when he watched her without her knowledge, he knew that he could never be with anyone else.

“I have to go away,” he said.

The words came suddenly, and he surprised himself. However he had been imagining their conversation would start, it wasn’t like this.

She had just picked up the cutlery to start eating, but she put it back down.

“No,” she said firmly.

Her eyes were serious.

“Honestly, love, it’s got to wait. Whatever it is. I need all the help I can get right now.”

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

He sat perfectly still. Karin could count on one hand the times she had seen him sit motionless like he was right now. She allowed the silence to grow before she asked the question.

“Where are you going?”

“I have to go away,” he repeated.

“Where?”

He couldn’t meet her eye. He turned to look out of the window. He pulled at his sweater, which suddenly felt tight.

“I can’t say.”

“Don’t do it,” she said. “You promised.”

She spoke quietly, so as not to wake the boys. There was no anger in her voice, just sadness. That made everything worse.

“I know,” he said. “I’ll keep my promise.”

He meant it. He wasn’t going to live a criminal life. He truly believed that.

“So you can tell me where you’re going then,” she said. “Is it overnight?”

“It’s for a few weeks,” he said.

That made her explode.

“You can’t!” she shouted.

The tray tipped. Milk sloshed out of the glass.

“You can’t just go away for a few weeks! Not without telling me where you’re going. Not when we’ve just had a baby!”

And at that very moment, the baby started crying in the hallway. Sami took it as an excuse to get up.

“Did you hear what I said!” she shouted after him.