The Helicopter Heist: A Novel Based on True Events

49

4:54 p.m.

It’s a few minutes before five. His shift ends then, when the evening and night staff take over. But it’s been quiet all afternoon, so he goes out to get changed a couple of minutes early.

He has been working at the Statoil gas station on Magelungsvägen in Bandhagen for almost two years now, and he likes his job. There’s a small gang of them that usually work shifts together, three guys and two girls, and they’ve also started hanging out after work. When he first arrived from the north five years earlier, he had trouble finding a job and making new friends. He got by, lived in sublet sublets like everyone else, and the days passed. He heard about the job at the Statoil station by chance while he was working overtime for a pizzeria in Högdalen, delivering pizzas on a moped he’d stolen from outside the Globe Arena. He had happened to stop there for gas and heard the manager complaining about how they were one man short that night.

He started immediately, eating the pizza he had been carrying rather than delivering it.

They gave him more and more night shifts, and after a year or so he started working during the day.

That was what everyone there wanted; no one feels like sabotaging their circadian rhythms.

Like always, they pause outside the gas station for a while, chatting before they head home. His gym bag is on the floor between his feet. It’s pretty big, an overnight bag, but he often has it with him, so no one thinks anything of it.

It’s Tuesday evening and nothing much is going on, there’s nothing worth watching on TV. Someone invites the others over to watch a film; The Girl Who Played with Fire came out in theaters on Friday, but it’s already up on Pirate Bay.

Ordinarily, he likes their film nights, but this time he says no.

The others laugh and make fun of him. Does he have something secret on the go? Someone secret?

He laughs with them and says there’s no secret at all, he’s going to work out. He gestures to his bag.

As a joke, one of the other guys bends down to grab it and remove the obstacle to their film evening.

But when he takes the handles and tries to lift the bag from the ground, he’s completely unprepared for the weight of it. He can’t even make it budge.

“What the hell?”

Inside the spacious gym bag is a long, thick chain. One that has metal barbs soldered onto it and which will be stretched across Elektravägen at the crossroads with Västbergavägen in a few hours’ time.

He swings the bag up onto his shoulder.

He’s keen for it to look like a simple motion.

Then he laughs at how heavy it is and starts making his way toward the bus stop.

He has a job to do. He takes out his phone and makes a call.

50

5:01 p.m.

The minute the phone rings, everything gets under way. Months of planning, years of dreaming about the building in Västberga.

It’s time.

Michel Maloof gets up from his chair and goes over to the kitchen counter. He picks up and hears his chain man say that he’s on the way. His task for the night is to stretch the string of caltrops across Elektravägen at the crossroads with Västbergavägen, and also across Västberga Allé by Drivhjulsvägen, to put a stop to any police cars which might come racing out of the station on Västberga Gårdsväg.

Maloof quickly confirms and then hangs up.

He returns to his chair by the window. It has rapidly become his favorite spot in the newly built, sparsely decorated apartment in Norrtälje that Zoran Petrovic swore no one would be able to link to them. Petrovic knows the guy who installed the HVAC when the apartment were built a few years earlier, who’s the one who got them the key.

Maloof has been staring out that kitchen window for four days now, and there’s one thing he’s sure of: He’ll never move to Norrtälje.

His mind turns to Alexandra Svensson. He hasn’t missed anything more than her soft body over these past few days. The scent of her skin has filled his dreams. He can’t remember that ever having happened before.

Soon, he’ll be able to look her in the eye without having to worry that she can see straight through his pupils and into his soul, finding him out. Over the past few weeks, he was worried she would be working tonight, that for some reason he would bump into her in Västberga in the middle of it all. But a week or so ago, he learned that Alexandra’s night shifts didn’t start until Thursday, meaning she would be at home in Hammarby Sjöstad tomorrow morning. That was an enormous relief.

Soon, everything will be different.

Soon, he won’t have to lie to her about what he’s doing anymore. Never telling her what he did won’t be a problem for him; it’s the basis for every relationship Maloof has ever had.

He sinks into daydreams and mentally ticks off the list of things that could go wrong tonight and tomorrow morning. There are so many that he no longer has the energy to care. He hears Sami talking about his “plan F” and smiles. When reality gets its teeth into their plans—as it always does—it’s the ability to improvise that separates the pros from the amateurs. That’s why he’s working with Sami Farhan and Niklas Nordgren: they both know how to improvise.

All three set up filters earlier that week. Went underground. Nordgren calls it “ducking.” A week or so before a big job, you vanish from the radar. Then you find somewhere to lie low, alone, for a few days.

It’s not just because of the police, it’s also because of their own families and friends. If no one knows where they are, no one can give them away or accidentally reveal anything important.

Maloof sighs. It’s as much a sigh of satisfaction as it is of fear. He hates these last few hours of passive waiting ahead of a job. During the planning phase, he’s always calm and methodical. He makes lists in his head and ticks off the points one by one. And once things get started, it’s as though he transforms. With a mask covering his face, it’s like he rediscovers his true identity. His senses are heightened, he breathes more calmly and thinks more clearly.

But this period of limbo between planning and action is unbearable.

He throws his phone onto a cloth on top of the dishwasher, tips the last of the cold coffee out of the pot and refills it with water to brew a fresh batch.

Petrovic isn’t coming until one. Maloof smiles at the thought of his tall friend and the way he made the Swedish police think the robbery would be taking place on the fifteenth.

Petrovic enjoyed doing that, and he spoke extensively about how he did it. He said it’s hints that are reliable, not loud statements.

And he was right.

51

10:50 p.m.

The old man in the hat walking northward toward Karusellplan in Västberga could, without doubt, have lived in one of the three-story buildings in the area, and though it was approaching eleven at night, he wasn’t drawing any attention to himself.

Nor had he done so earlier that day, when he spent just over an hour tending to his car at the gas station overlooking the G4S cash depot. Or when he sat down on the grass behind the depot reading a book in the still-warm sunshine. He just looked like an old man taking care of his old car, someone who liked to read old books.

He turns off into the Västberga industrial park, a place people don’t tend to go for a late-night stroll.

He isn’t worried about being seen. He isn’t doing anything illegal, he has no criminal record, and tomorrow morning he’ll head back to Åkersberga, where he lives.

In his jacket pocket, he has two cell phones. One of them is his, and the other has been loaned to him. Only one number has been saved in that phone, and his job is to call it and report on the situation.

If he sees anything out of the ordinary.

Police officers out on patrol, guards that don’t seem to belong in the area. Or any unusual activity around the building itself.

He’s even meant to call if everything seems fine.

Just to report that.

52

11:05 p.m.

The phone rings.

Though he has been waiting for the call, the sound still surprises Sami. He jumps up from the sofa and runs into the kitchen. He has four phones, lined up in a perfect row on the table, each loaded with a brand-new SIM card. The vibration from the ringing phone makes the others tremble in anticipation. He had programmed the numbers he would need that night and early morning the previous Sunday.

TEAM 1, he reads on the screen. That’s how he’s labeled them, with different numbers, and that’s what he’s planning on calling them. Nordgren had pointed out that a “team” needs more than one member. Sami explained that this isn’t some grammar exercise.

He picks up the phone and answers.

“Still quiet,” says Team 1.

“Good.”

That’s all.

The afternoon has been a long one. It felt endless. Sami Farhan has been in the apartment on Kocksgatan in Södermalm for three days now, two floors up, facing the courtyard. This is where he has been lying low ever since driving back from Hamburg.

He hasn’t been out during the day. Instead, he has watched TV, slept and eaten. His sister had left food for him in the fridge and the freezer; the apartment belongs to one of her friends, currently traveling around Asia. The friend has no idea that her place is currently being used by a robber who, for the past few days, has turned his sleeping patterns on their head in order to be able to perform at his best during a night that has been six months in the planning.

Three days have passed since Sami went underground and vanished from the police and his friends’ radars, heading for Arlanda. He hasn’t spoken to Karin since, he hasn’t been in touch with his mother, Michel Maloof or Niklas Nordgren; he hadn’t touched a cell phone in a week.

Throughout his thirty-year life, Sami has involuntarily had plenty of experience of loneliness and inactivity, both in custody and in prison. But lying low means that the boredom is self-inflicted, which makes things only slightly better. The closer to the finishing line he comes, the harder it is to keep his cool.

His lift won’t arrive until twelve thirty. He has, in other words, just over an hour to kill.

He thaws a couple of square chunks of fried chicken in the microwave and then stares at them on his plate, completely uninterested. Ketchup won’t make them any more appealing. Even food requires planning. He knows how much he can drink every hour without having to go to the toilet. After having spent days and weeks planning the helicopter route and the strength of the explosives, it would have been idiotic not to chart his own body’s processes. He knows he shouldn’t eat any more solids after a quarter past eleven.

He leaves the kitchen after throwing away the remains of his meal, turns off the light in the living room and sits down in an armchair. He tries to focus.

53

11:15 p.m.

Niklas Nordgren takes the last boat to Stavsnäs at dinnertime. He is the only person waiting on the jetty on Runmarö, but it doesn’t matter if the captain can point him out at a later date. Having been on Runmarö isn’t incriminating evidence.

With each day that has passed, he has become increasingly stiff from sleeping in the slightly too-short bed in the playhouse on Runmarö. He has flipped his normal routine upside down, and spent his days asleep. Though the house is on the east of the island, and dangerous reefs off the coast prevent any boats from getting too close, he didn’t want to move around on the plot of land during the day. At this time of year, there are barely any tourists left in the archipelago, and the boats that do pass belong to the year-round residents, people who keep an eye on where there are guests and where there should be empty houses in the middle of September. Instead, he took quick runs in the woods after midnight, constantly afraid of stepping on a snake or coming face-to-face with a badger. But he knew that he needed to keep moving, otherwise he wouldn’t be ready when the time came.

On Tuesday afternoon, when he woke and realized that his short vacation in the archipelago was over, he felt great all the same. His back wasn’t aching in the slightest, and the cold he thought he could feel developing when he went to bed at dawn seemed to have vanished.

After catching the connecting bus directly to Danvikstull, he kills a few hours in an Espresso House before arriving at Kettola’s place at midnight, as agreed. He had been fantasizing about a cup of hot coffee and a muffin during his time in the playhouse, when his only sustenance came from warmed-up cans.

54

11:30 p.m.

She gets a fare out to Bromma and has to wait only half an hour before she gets another back into town. That’s the good thing about working for one of the big taxi firms, there are always plenty of new customers. This time, it’s a businessman with flushed red cheeks who probably couldn’t have said no to an extra bottle of cognac on the plane.

If they still served alcohol on domestic flights?

She doesn’t know, it’s been years since she last flew anywhere.

The businessman is headed for Östermalm, he gives her the address. The man stares out the window the whole way there, he’s too good to talk to her. Just a few minutes into the drive, she already knows that he won’t leave a tip. That type never does.

She drops him off and checks the time. She makes trips to Östermalm often enough to have become hooked on the specialty hot dog kiosk on Nybrogatan. Does she have time to try out one of his Turkish lamb sausages and then squeeze in one more fare? But before her conscience has time to give an answer, her stomach directs her onto Kommendörsgatan, down to the old post office where the kiosk is. There’s a parking space right next to it, which she takes as a sign.

The sausage is just as spicy as she hoped.

When she gets back behind the wheel, it’s already a little past twelve, and she has two, three hours before it’s time. She isn’t really meant to clock off before morning, but she will shut down the system at three, making herself both unavailable and invisible. In the trunk, she has the chain with the caltrops welded onto it, the one she is meant to stretch across Västberga Allé. She assumes it will take her a while; according to Niklas Nordgren, the chain needs to be fastened on either side, but he couldn’t explain how to do it, he just gave her two padlocks.

She’s an imaginative woman, she’ll work something out.

She drives downtown and passes the long line for taxis outside the restaurants there. In a way, it feels good to be avoiding the fight for yet another fare that night, even though her job of stretching the chain across the road won’t pay much more than a few trips to and from Arlanda.

She takes out her phone.

55

11:31 p.m.

Niklas Nordgren feels the buzz of his phone in the inner pocket of his jacket. He fishes it out and answers with a grunt.

It’s his chain woman. She has no idea that she’s part of a bigger plan. She has no idea that she’s one of many. She’s calling to say that she knows what she has to do. Nordgren answers monosyllabically and then hangs up. He hopes she finds somewhere solid to fix the chain at either side of the road.

He reaches the doorway on Rosenlundsgatan at ten past twelve, five minutes earlier than planned. The building is where Jan Kettola lives. Kettola sometimes helps out at the electricians’ where Nordgren works, and he’s the one who has promised to drive Nordgren out to the meeting place in Stora Skuggan Park. The two men aren’t close friends. They’ve done a couple of jobs together, a few years ago now, but there’s a certain loyalty between them. Nordgren isn’t worried. All Kettola knows is that they’re driving out to Stora Skuggan. Even when he hears the news about what happened on the radio tomorrow morning, there’s no way he’ll join the dots.

Rather than ringing the buzzer, Niklas Nordgren starts to worry. He thinks about the huge rock at the gravel pit in Norsborg where they’ll land once it’s all over. Without the patience or the sense to use pulleys, the rock is impossible to shift, it weighs almost a ton. But it should work, he instructed the team in Norsborg himself.

Then his thoughts turn to the police helicopter.

When he told the others what he had eventually worked out, how he was planning to keep the helicopter—or helicopters—on the ground, he did it with a certainty that immediately convinced both Maloof and Sami. They asked questions afterward, particularly Sami, since it’s one of his teams who will do the job there in a couple of hours. But neither of them had doubted the idea itself.

But now Niklas Nordgren has second thoughts.

Would it really work?

56

11:35 p.m.

Claude Tavernier’s mother had always said that he was a natural leader.

It wasn’t something he quoted, he wasn’t stupid, he knew how it sounded when a man in his thirties referred to his mother’s opinions. But for Tavernier, those words had taken on lifelong meaning. His mother had given him the self-confidence, which had given him the conviction, which had given him the courage. He wasn’t much of a scholar and he definitely wasn’t an athlete; he had studied economics at college in Lyon, but he still had his dissertation to write. He had moved to Sweden and learned the language because of a love that had turned out to be more fragile than he had imagined, but since he had already organized both a job and a place to live, he remained in Stockholm when it all fell apart. He still wasn’t sure whether that was just a temporary detour, or whether it was the path he would take in life.

Deep down, he knew he was the kind of person other people followed. He was a leader. That was what his mother had predicted, and that was how he had always thought of himself. Despite the setbacks and limitations.

He usually ate out when he worked nights. Then he would hang around in a bar somewhere until it was time to go. The alternative was spending the evening at home, checking his watch every five minutes. Night shifts started at midnight and ended at eight the next morning. They worked to a rolling schedule, two nights in a row, one day off, and then three day shifts from nine till five.

Just over four years after he was first hired, he had been called to the top boss and asked whether he was ready to take the next step in his career. It hadn’t come as a surprise. On the contrary. Tavernier had calmly asked about the pension terms, taken the weekend to make it seem like he was thinking about it and then signed the contract.

He was in his third year in a leadership role now, and felt like it would soon be time to move on. Remaining an anonymous middle manager among hundreds of others wasn’t what his mother had meant when she saw the leader in him.

All the same, he was in no hurry to leave. The work itself might have been monotonous, and it was a struggle to convince himself he was doing something meaningful. But whenever he scrolled through the job listings in either Stockholm or Paris, he felt certain that things would be no different anywhere else. Neither in terms of working conditions nor career prospects, neither in Lyon nor in Malmö.

When it came to colleagues, Tavernier assumed that in any group, there would always be those that people liked, and those that people liked less.

In his current workplace, there was an older woman, Ann-Marie Olausson, who drove him mad. She was sixty-one, had worked for the company her entire life, and acted as though she owned it. She was the type of person who, without an ounce of irony, would say, “But that’s how we’ve always done it.” Tavernier assumed that his youth must antagonize her, but there wasn’t much he could do about that.

On Tuesdays, Claude Tavernier liked to go to the middle bar at Sturehof, waiting for midnight and the start of his shift. The middle bar was small and intimate, at once both a passageway and a cozy corner. He liked to exchange a few comradely words with the hardworking barman and then just stand around with his cold beer, watching all the beautiful people come and go in the mirror. In the taxi on the way to work, he would then chew some menthol gum so that no one would notice that he stunk of alcohol and decide that he had a drinking problem.

There was no real need for him to take a taxi out to the suburbs. Tavernier had bought a used Nissan a year earlier, a car he liked more than he cared to admit. But since the number of parking spots the company had out in Västberga was limited, Tavernier would have to wait for someone else to quit or die before he managed to get ahold of one.

He sighs, pays the bill and heads out onto Stureplan. He finds an empty TaxiKurir, the company he feels loyal to for some unclear reason, and then jumps in the backseat.

“Västberga Allé,” he says.

The driver nods and steps on the gas.

When Claude Tavernier climbs out of the taxi outside the G4S cash depot on the night of September 22, it’s ten to twelve. And there, just as he is making his way into the building, he loses all confidence for a very brief moment.

It’s something that happens a few times a week.

It’s like when you’re on a plane and the weather is good, and then it suddenly, unexpectedly, drops a few feet due to turbulence. Or like when you’re sprawled over the toilet and have been throwing up and up and up, so much that it feels like there’s nothing left to throw up, but still you know that the next stomach cramp is on the way.

I’m no one, he has time to think. I can’t be in charge of a load of people. I can’t make decisions for others.

Claude Tavernier takes a deep breath. He fills his lungs with the cool night air, raises his face to the sky and then the moment passes.

He’s the night manager for Counting on the sixth floor of G4S once again.

A young career man.

He finds his ID card in his pocket and holds it up to Valter Jansson, the security guard in Reception that night. Tavernier and Jansson have worked plenty of nights together in Västberga; they feel comfortable with one another.

57

11:52 p.m.

On the top floor of one of Stockholm’s few skyscrapers, a building where the newsrooms of Sweden’s biggest morning paper, Dagens Nyheter, and the country’s second-biggest evening paper, Expressen, were once based, is an internal dining room available only to the businesses in the building. Turning the room into a commercial restaurant has been discussed on a number of occasions; the views are spectacular and it’s not like there has been a lack of interested restaurateurs. But one of Dagens Nyheter’s historic boardrooms is on the other side of the wall to the kitchen, and though it’s been decades since the paper moved downstairs, the top floor is still thought of as its executive floor. And, naturally, it doesn’t want any outsiders up there.

It’s approaching twelve when the kitchen staff leave the restaurant kitchen on the twenty-third floor that evening. Food has been cooked and served to a working group from Expressen. Top-level management must have been present, because less alcohol has been consumed than usual, and the evening was quickly wound up. The kitchen and service staff are glad for the early finish, and they laugh on their way down to street level on Rålambsvägen.

No one notices that someone who has been working on the cold buffet all night is missing from the cramped elevator. If they had, they might just assume that he had already left or that he was sorting out one last thing in the kitchen before heading home.

Both assumptions would have been wrong.

The missing man waits on the twenty-third floor until he sees on the display that the elevator carrying his colleagues has reached ground level. He holds back until he’s sure that none of the elevators are coming back up again. Then he takes out his electronic pass and opens the door to the stairwell. He climbs the stairs to the roof and opens the door, which is locked from the inside. Before he steps out into the night, he pushes a cork into the doorway so that the door won’t lock behind him.

During a shift a few days earlier, he had gone up to the roof to take a leak and hidden a pair of night-vision goggles behind one of the chimney stacks. This time, he’s carrying a black gym bag from SATS, inside it a warm sweater, a thermos full of coffee, four bananas and a bar of Marabou chocolate. It’s going to be a long night, and he’ll need the extra energy.

The man from the cold buffet breathes in the cool night air and looks out over the beautiful capital. Right below him, Riddarfjärden glitters in the glow of the streetlamps, the water curling like an autostrada from Rålambshovsparken to city hall. In the other direction, to the west, the Traneberg Bridge rises up across the narrow sound, and to the south, he can see red and white dots of light moving along the winding bridges of the Essingeleden highway.

It’s because of the view that the man is on the roof. From the highest building in Marieberg, he’ll be able to see anyone approaching Västberga from the air. He’ll be able to blow their cover in good time, whether they’re on the way from Berga or Uppsala.

He takes out a brand-new cell phone and dials the only number saved in the contact list.

Sami Farhan answers.

“Team Four. I’m in position,” the man from the cold buffet says.

58

11:55 p.m.

Ezra Ray is sitting in a gray 1999 Volvo V70, with all the registration and tax documents in the glove compartment. He doesn’t know who owns the car, but he assumes it belongs to the scrapyard in Lidingö where he picked it up an hour or so earlier. He drives across Lidingö Bridge and decides not to take the route through Lill-Jansskogen Park. It’s the middle of the night, and he imagines that the risk of being pulled over by the police will be greater if he chooses a dark forest road. Instead, he takes Valhallavägen, wide and well lit, full of heavy trucks delivering or picking up goods from the harbors beyond Gärdet.

Ezra Ray doesn’t know exactly what is happening tonight, but by putting together the pieces he has been involved in, the drawings he stole from the town planning office and the ladders he bought from Bauhaus, he could work some of it out. Studying the items beneath the blankets in the roomy trunk of the Volvo, he could probably work out the rest. There’s a circular saw and some mailbags. Ropes and frame charges. Detonators, cables and explosives. Face masks, body armor and headlamps. Two crowbars, an enormous sledgehammer and a smaller toolbox. The ladders. The longer of the two is twelve feet long when folded, Ezra had to push it between the front seats and let it rest on the dashboard. He still couldn’t close the trunk lid properly.

But he doesn’t put the pieces together, he doesn’t draw any conclusions. If he never thinks it, it’ll be easier to deny knowledge later. If he has to deny anything.

It’s not the ladders preventing him from closing the trunk that will be his biggest problem if the police pull him over. If they’ve set up a drunk-driving checkpoint by Roslagstull, if the car’s registration number is in a database of people who haven’t paid parking fines, or the traffic police happen to stop him, it’s all over. Possession of explosives is an offense in Sweden. Ezra knows that he’s aware of only a fraction of the planning that must have gone into this evening. He knows how this type of project is built on hopes and dreams.

And right now, the entire thing hinges on him.

Ezra smiles. He glances at the speedometer. The risk isn’t that he’s driving too fast, it’s that he’s driving too slowly in his attempts to seem law abiding.

The lights are green all the way to Roslagstull, and he drives straight on toward the university and Frescati. They had scoped out the place a few weeks earlier, and since then Ezra has swung by a few times at this time of night. He’d never seen another living soul there, not a single dog owner or taxi driver stopping for a piss.

He passes the turnoff to the university and drives on, via Svante Arrhenius Väg, so that he’s approaching Stora Skuggans Väg from the north. After a thousand feet, he turns onto a small forest road he would never have noticed in the dark. He parks. Kills the engine and immediately starts unloading the car. He runs the items from his trunk into the woods in batches. It’s quite a long way from the car to the meeting place, but that’s how it has to be. Discovering the car can’t be the same as discovering them.

It’s a few minutes after midnight.

Ezra Ray takes out his phone and dials the number saved on it.

Sami answers immediately.

“I’m here,” Ezra says.

59

11:58 p.m.

The phone rings again. It’s the fourth call in an hour.

This time, TEAM 2 flashes on the display.

Team 2 is responsible for moving the huge rock used to block the entrance to the gravel pit in Norsborg. It’s there that the getaway cars will be waiting once it’s all over. It’ll still be dark then, so Team 2 also has to make sure that the helicopter pilot can see where he’s landing.

“Yeah?” Sami answers.

“We’re here,” says the voice on the other end.

“Thanks,” Sami replies, hanging up.

It’s time to get changed.

He goes into the bedroom and takes off his sweatpants and T-shirt. He shoves these, along with his toiletries, into the small bag his sister will pick up tomorrow afternoon. She’s also promised to tidy up after him.

Sami picks up the waist pouch he bought. He fastens it around himself after checking the documents for the tenth time that evening. Inside the small pouch, his passport and a plane ticket to Punta Cana. His plan is to head straight to Arlanda from the gravel pit in Norsborg and then kill some time in one of the cafés in SkyCity. The plane takes off seven hours later, which might seem like a long time, but it’s considerably less than he’s waited already today.

On top of the waist pouch, he pulls on a thin black sweater. Over that, he’ll be wearing a tight black windbreaker. His trousers are a pair of black jeans. They’ve agreed to wear black, all three of them, with one exception. Sami has to be wearing his white sneakers. Adidas. They bring him luck.

Once he’s ready, he goes back out into the living room and waits for the next call. It should have already come in, but maybe they rang at the exact same time as Team 2, maybe they got the busy signal?

The minutes tick away.

By the time the display reaches 12:05, Sami can’t sit still in the armchair any longer. He gets up, grabs the phone and goes into the bedroom. He moves around his bag, which he placed on the floor by the bed, and then goes back out into the living room. He repeats this twice. It’s 12:09, and his phone still hasn’t rung.

Team 3’s number is saved in his phone, but he knows he isn’t meant to make any calls from this SIM card. If they’ve run into trouble, a vibrating phone in their pocket isn’t going to help.

Sami composes himself. Moves behind the armchair and peers out the window. When the living room is dark, the glow from the streetlights on Kocksgatan seems even brighter.

His phone rings. It’s 12:18.

Team 3. They’re in Myttinge on Värmdö. It’s Team 3 that is responsible for keeping the police helicopters on the ground, a prerequisite for being able to carry out the job in Västberga tonight. If any of the chain teams fail, it’s unlucky, but it’s not critical.

Team 3, on the other hand, has to succeed.

Sami answers.

“Hello?” he hears a voice say on the line.

“Yeah?” Sami replies.

“It’s not here,” says the voice.

“What do you mean?”

“The hangar’s empty. The helicopter’s not here.”

60

12:50 a.m.

Michel Maloof sees the car approaching through the kitchen window. It’s the first one to drive down Billborgsgatan, in the heart of Norrtälje, in over half an hour. The nightlife in the town could hardly be called pulsing. The car slows down and finds an empty parking space right outside his door.

Zoran Petrovic unfolds himself from the driver’s seat. It’s a new BMW, it looks black from Maloof’s window, but it could just as easily be dark blue. The passenger’s side door opens. It’s the American, Jack Kluger. This is the first time Maloof has seen him. The man on the sidewalk reminds him of a quarterback from an American football team, he’s knock-kneed and his upper body is oversized in relation to his lower half. In all likelihood, he has no real idea where he is right now.

Petrovic and the American step into the building, and a few seconds later the buzzer rings. Maloof opens the door.

“Been a while,” Petrovic says, stepping into the apartment.

Maloof grins. “Right,” he says. “Been a while. Hi, hi.”

He shakes the American’s hand. Kluger’s grip is strong and dry. Reassuring.

“Where’s the food?” Maloof asks.

“Shit,” says Petrovic. “I forgot it.”

“You forgot it?” Maloof repeats, unable to hide the disappointment in his voice. He scratches his cheek. “But, I can’t… you can’t have forgotten it?”

They’re speaking Swedish. The American doesn’t seem to care what they’re talking about. Or maybe he understands Swedish but isn’t letting on. According to Petrovic, Kluger has been living and working in Sweden for a few years now.

“Sorry,” Petrovic says again.

Maloof struggles to seem indifferent. He smiles and shrugs. All the same, he can’t understand how Petrovic can have forgotten to drive by McDonald’s. They’ve been working together for so long now that he should know better.

“No, no,” Maloof says. “No, it’s OK. No problem. We can go now instead.”

He glances at the helicopter pilot and adds, in English: “We need some food.”

Maloof doesn’t wait for a reply. He goes out into the hall and pulls on his shoes and coat.

“You’re not serious?” Petrovic says.

“He’s coming. The weapons are in the bedroom. We can’t leave him alone with the weapons…”

When Maloof took the bus up to Norrtälje a few days earlier, he had walked past a McDonald’s on Stockholmsvägen. It was one of the few places that stayed open until one in the morning. They didn’t have much time.

“Come on, come on,” he says when he notices that the American is hesitating.

Maloof wouldn’t call himself superstitious. He’s not even religious. But there is also no point tempting fate.

He always eats a large meal from McDonald’s before a job.

It’s nonnegotiable.

61

1:15 a.m.

In the end room in the apartment on Strandvägen, there is a deep alcove, and it is in this alcove that Caroline Thurn has placed an enormous armchair. It isn’t visible unless you actually step into the room. The soft embrace of this armchair is where Thurn sometimes spends her nights, her legs on the matching footstool or her knees drawn up to her chin, staring out across Nybroviken. She can either turn to face the roof and masts of the Vasa Museum, next to the silhouettes of the roller coasters of Gröna Lund, or else the other way, toward the center of town and the heavy stone facades of Nybrokajen leading up to Raoul Wallenbergs Torg.

Over the past week, she has found it unusually easy to banish certain thoughts and keep her worries at bay.

She’s wearing a pair of big, white headphones, and the incessant chatter saved on the hard drives she copied and brought home with her, hard drives that are now piled up on the kitchen counter next to her Nespresso machine, is fascinating her. Listening to Zoran Petrovic’s monologues is like watching waves roll ashore; there’s a kind of uniformity to them which has her spellbound.

Despite the hundreds of hours they have recorded, they still haven’t found a single clue relating to the aborted helicopter robbery.

Their surveillance has now stopped, but Thurn had wondered whether they should go back to the beginning and listen to the tapes without specifically trying to spot anything linked to the aborted raid on Panaxia. If they listened with an open mind, without any preconceptions, what might those hours of phone calls reveal? Petrovic’s address book was overflowing with criminal contacts, after all.

That was the original thought behind copying the hard drives and bringing them home. But the more Caroline Thurn listens to Zoran Petrovic’s insufferable torrent of words, the constant flow of noise aimed at promoting himself, making himself seem more interesting, emphasizing his importance, sharing his experiences and moving himself higher up the hierarchy, the bigger the knot of anger grows in her chest. The man Thurn had spent her nights focused on just one week earlier is as obsessed with himself as he is full of disgust for the society which gave him his chances in life. No matter how humble Petrovic tries to make himself appear, he is actually ruthlessly arrogant toward his countrymen and -women, all toiling away so that people like him can sail through life with the least possible resistance.

Injustice, Thurn thinks. She hates it. She knows how it feels when it strikes.

And the task force leader’s initial long shot has evolved into increasingly manic behavior. She starts to methodically write down the clues Petrovic throws around during conversations in his car and in restaurants. Nothing is enough to send him down on its own merit, but if they cross-reference Petrovic’s insinuations with real events that autumn, Thurn is increasingly convinced that they’ll find something.

She hears his confident tone in her ears, it fills her consciousness, and she wonders what he will sound like when she is finally in front of him, her service weapon drawn and an arrest warrant in hand, pushing him into her car on the way to Bergsgatan and remand prison.

Much more pathetic, she guesses.

62

1:16 a.m.

It’s a cool, crisp night. The scent of moss and pine in the air. In the glow of Ezra’s flashlight, Sami Farhan and Niklas Nordgren go through the equipment. They check that the ladders can be easily extended and secured. They count the number of mailbags, feel the ropes, open the toolbox to make sure everything is there and then put it into one of the mailbags along with the crowbars and the saw. All of this happens in silence, and Ezra shines his flashlight wherever Sami points.

Nordgren and Sami arrived at roughly the same time. It’s ten days since they last saw one another, in Hjorthagen. Nordgren had pulled on his balaclava at the very moment he arrived, he doesn’t want Sami’s friend Ezra to be able to identify him.

Sami has told him that the police helicopter isn’t in Myttinge, but Nordgren takes that information in his stride. He’s counting on problems arising, and that’s easy enough to handle. They can’t do the job if they don’t have the police helicopters under control. It’s that simple. All they can do is keep working and hope for the best.

Nordgren continues to go through the equipment, paying particular attention to his own items. He has already prepared the cut-up Coca-Cola cans with silver tape packages at the bottom. The packages are full of neodymium magnets. He has prepared six cans, but he hopes he’ll need to use only one of them.

He also has four U-channels, similar to an upside-down train track, cut into short pieces. They’re heavier and more cumbersome, which is why the number is smaller. He’s also hoping to use only one of them. He goes through the explosive putty and the detonators and worries about moisture.

“I should test one,” he says, mostly to himself.

Sami has no objections. They’re miles from the nearest built-up area.

Nordgren gets to work. It takes him only a few minutes to discover that the long detonation cable isn’t with the detonators and the battery.

“Which damn cable?” Ezra asks, holding his hands up in the air.

It’s the first thing he has said since the two key players arrived. He knows his place. Nordgren has his balaclava pulled down over his face, and though Ezra has worn one like it many times before, it still commands respect.

Sami, who had been testing the headlamps, turns around.

“The cable,” says Nordgren.

“I took everything that was there!” Ezra shouts. “Do you think I’m some fucking—”

“The long cable’s missing. It’s fifty feet long.”

There’s no doubt in Nordgren’s mind. He knows he packed it.

“I mean, shit, I don’t know…” Ezra begins, but he quickly falls silent.

“What the hell!” Sami says, glancing at his watch.

It’s quarter to two.

“We’ve got to have it,” Nordgren says. “Without that long cable, we can’t blow out the reinforced glass on the sixth floor.”

Sami walks over to the rest of the equipment. He feverishly rifles among the ropes and bags, hoping to find the cable.

But it isn’t there.

“Shit, Ezra!” he hisses.

Ezra Ray looks deeply unhappy.

63

1:17 a.m.

In the apartment in Norrtälje, Michel Maloof places the food on the kitchen table. He had gone into the McDonald’s alone while Petrovic and Kluger waited outside. Three large Big Mac meals with Coke Zero. Extra salt. He sits down and starts eating before it gets cold. Halfway through his burger, he realizes that the others aren’t planning on joining him.

He gets up from the table and goes into the bedroom. They’re busy checking the weapons. Petrovic and the American have taken apart the machine guns and handguns and laid out all of the parts on two sheets.

It turns out that Kluger is as much a perfectionist as the tall Yugoslavian, and every single bullet has to be checked before it can be pushed back into the magazine.

“I could do this blindfolded,” the former marine says in his broad Southern accent, adding, “I have done it blindfolded.”

“Right.” Maloof nods. “The burgers are getting cold?”

“That’s fine,” Kluger replies.

“I might have a few fries later?” Petrovic says, to show goodwill.

“No, no,” Maloof says. “Or maybe… can I have your burger?”

“You’re insane,” Petrovic decides.

“So it’s OK?” Maloof asks.

“Totally fine.” Petrovic returns to his machine gun parts.

The realization that Petrovic and the American are like two big children playing with Legos strikes Maloof as he sits back down at the table and tries to stop the lettuce from falling out of the burger when he lifts it from its cardboard carton.

Back in the bedroom, Kluger makes the exact same remark.

“He’s like a little kid,” the American says to Petrovic. “I mean, who eats McDonald’s?”

64

2:05 a.m.

Sami grabs a large branch from the ground and swings it down onto a rock. Splinters fly. But he doesn’t say a word. The helicopter isn’t where it’s meant to be. The detonation cable is missing. He’s also worried that the ladders might be too short.

They’re “extension ladders,” or at least that was what the kid at Bauhaus had called them. One is thirty-six feet long, with three twelve-foot sections, and the other is twenty-four, three eight-foot sections. You unscrew the plastic clips, pull out the two collapsed sections and then screw it back together again.

The longer of the two ladders will be lowered through the glass roof down to the balcony on the fifth floor. They’ll then use the shorter ladder to climb up to the sixth floor and blow a hole in the reinforced glass. But Sami isn’t convinced that thirty-six feet will really reach all the way to the balcony from the roof.

Not that there were any longer ladders suitable for being strapped onto a helicopter.

It had to be enough.

He moves in circles around all their things. Loop after loop, and Nordgren starts to get annoyed. He does the math in his head. To Lidingö and back can’t take any more than forty-five minutes. They’ll be able to get the cable here before the helicopter lands. He’s sure it must be lying exactly where he left it.

Water has worked its way into Nordgren’s left shoe through a small hole. Suddenly, he feels exhausted, but he knows his weariness will vanish the minute it’s time to get going. Since Ezra still isn’t back, Nordgren pulls off his balaclava for a moment. His hair is damp.

Sami’s phone starts to ring and both men jump. The silence in the woods is so compact, the breeze so faint, that it’s not even making the treetops whisper; to them, the phone sounds like it could wake half of Östermalm.

It’s five past two in the morning.

Sami glances at the display. It’s Team 3. Myttinge.

He takes a deep breath before he answers.

“Yeah?”

“The police helicopter just landed.”

Västberga, Marieberg and Norsborg have all called in. Everything seems fine.

“Time for Michel to do something at last,” Sami says.

He calls Maloof in Norrtälje. It’s the first time they’ve spoken since Hjorthagen.

“Morning, morning,” he says.

“Good morning,” Maloof replies.

“All green,” Sami says. “Time to go.”

“Right, right,” says Maloof, hanging up.

65

4:39 a.m.

Team 3 consists of two nervous teenagers lacking in experience, if not criminal records. They have been lying low in the woods in Myttinge for some time now, waiting for the police helicopter to return to its base. They have no idea how much is at stake; no idea that without their input, months of planning will have been in vain. They saw that the hangar was empty and then started playing strategy games on their phones.

But not on the phone Sami had given them.

When they hear the sound of thudding rotor blades in the distance, long before the helicopter’s blinking warning lights appear in the dark night sky, they’re not even sure it really is the police helicopter at first.

A few minutes later, they hear the sound of the chopper landing on its dolly, followed by the noise of its being rolled into the hangar. Five minutes after that, the pilots leave the area. They lock the huge iron gate with a chain and padlock, then drive away in the car that has been parked outside the fence.

That’s when Team 3 lets Sami know that the helicopter is back.

And then they wait for the green light.

When the phone rings and Sami shouts that it’s time, they feel like they’ve been waiting a long time.

One of the boys carries the two black toolboxes, the other takes the bolt cutters. They move quickly through the trees, involuntarily squatting as they run, as though that will make them less visible. But there’s no one around to see them, nothing but a startled hare or two. The police helicopter base, still considered temporary after six years of use, has been left abandoned and alone in the deep forests of Värmdö.

The boys cross the road. The first uses the bolt cutters to smash the surveillance camera on a post opposite the gates, then he moves on to the chain and the lock. At first, he tries to cut the padlock, but it’s impossible, the shackle is too thick. He tries the chain instead. That proves easier. After just a few attempts, he manages. When he pulls the chain through the steel fence, the noise is ear splitting.

The boy runs back onto the road to keep a lookout while his friend, carrying the black toolboxes, opens the gates and moves into the area. The hangar has two doors, and the boy decides to prepare the boxes in front of the farthest one. He sets them down on the ground and opens the lids.

Inside each box is a rock and a dummy car alarm that Niklas Nordgren bought from Teknikmagasinet in Fältöversten.

The dummy alarms consist of a battery-powered bulb for sticking onto the dashboard of a car. Their red blinking lights are meant to trick car thieves into thinking that the vehicle is alarmed. The black toolboxes are plastic, bought online, and they weigh almost nothing. The stones are just ordinary rocks that Nordgren found in the woods, but without them, a strong breeze would be all it took to tip the boxes over.

The boy switches on the two fake alarms and then sticks them to the boxes. Afterward, he places one of the dummy bombs outside each door into the hangar, takes a few steps toward the gate and turns around.

From a distance, the red blinking lights look ominous, and the black boxes are hard to make out; they’re perfect.

“Let’s go,” he says to his friend, and they start walking along the road.

There’s a bus stop about a mile away.

After a hundred or so yards, the first boy hurls the bolt cutters into the woods. They land so softly they don’t make a sound.

66

4:40 a.m.

When Michel Maloof, Zoran Petrovic and Jack Kluger pull the door to the apartment in Norrtälje closed behind them, they leave very few traces of themselves, other than the uneaten remains of their McDonald’s meal. Petrovic has promised to make sure someone goes over to get rid of “every last bit of DNA” the following morning.

The men go down the stairs without talking, and Maloof grabs the door so that it swings shut quietly behind them. The street is deserted.

They take Zoran Petrovic’s car, the dark blue BMW. The moon, which was shining brightly a few hours earlier, is currently hidden behind a cloud. Just an hour earlier, Petrovic had asked the pilot whether the moonlight made much difference to night flying.

“Makes it easier to see, but it also means you’re easier to spot,” came his reply.

Petrovic chose to interpret that as meaning Kluger was indifferent to whether the dawn was light or dark.

The American climbs into the front seat next to Petrovic, and Maloof chooses to jump in the back with the weapons. Not because he doesn’t trust Kluger, but just because it’s a bad idea to let any old stranger sit behind you with a loaded gun.

Petrovic has filled the trunk with cans of helicopter fuel. They’ll pick up everything else down in Stora Skuggan.

For once, Zoran Petrovic is quiet as the car slowly carries them out of the small town. Back in the apartment, the American’s aftershave hadn’t been much more than a faint scent of musk, but in the confined space of the car, the smell is stronger. Maloof cracks open the window to let in some fresh air.

“It’s to the right here, yeah?” Petrovic asks.

Maloof glances around. “Yeah, yeah.”

They turn off onto Kustvägen. From there, it takes less than two minutes to reach the helicopter hangar in Roslagen. They park, leaving the weapons in the backseat, and all three men go over to check that everything is as it should be. There are no other cars anywhere to be seen, the hangar is bathed in darkness, and the stillness is absolute. The pines and firs down by the lake are their only breathless audience.

The American walks over to the hangar door and studies it skeptically.

“These things are solid,” he says in his nasal English. “You can’t pick these. This needs to be blown open.”

“Right, right,” Maloof agrees.

And then he laughs. It’s comical. The door into the hangar is as secure as can be. They probably installed it on the recommendation of the insurance company, in some attempt to lower their premiums. Blowing it open would work, but the charge would also echo across the entire neighborhood.

Maloof takes out the long-bladed knife that he had been wearing in a holster beneath his coat. He goes over to the door.

“That’ll never work,” says the American, as though Maloof had been planning to attack the steel door with his blade.

But instead, he cuts a long slash into the canvas of the hangar, right next to the door. Since the hangar is made from fabric, he doesn’t even have to exert himself. One more cut, and he’s managed to create a flap that can be pushed to one side, and with a welcoming gesture and a grin, he invites Petrovic and the surprised pilot into the hangar.

Petrovic laughs.

“Smart of them to buy an expensive door.”

Maloof’s grin grows wider, and he follows them in.

The helicopter, a white Bell 206 JetRanger, is where it should be, at the end of its row, making it relatively easy to roll out.

So far, everything is just as Manne Lagerström had promised.

The American quickly inspects the machine. The hangar smells of gasoline and electronics, and the huge, empty helicopters are lined up in three rows. Maloof can’t help but liken them to bees. It’s as though they’ve flown in to rest for the night, and come dawn they’ll wake up again, their heavy, drooping rotor blades suddenly starting to spin, panels lighting up and engines roaring.

Kluger walks around the helicopter, occasionally raising his hand to the metal body. He climbs up and inspects the rotor blades and the mechanics. Maloof and Petrovic leave him to it and head back out to carry in the weapons and petrol cans from the car. When they return, the pilot has finished his checks. Everything is as it should be, the tank only partially filled so that they can fly with a heavy load, and he gives them the thumbs-up. They manage to maneuver the helicopter out of the hangar using the small tractor. The wheels on the dolly move smoothly over the flat ground, possibly because Manne gave them an extra oiling ahead of tonight’s events.

The white helicopter glistens in the moonlight. Kluger starts the engine, and the rotor blades slowly come to life. A low whirring, rising to a controlled roar. After ten or so seconds of picking up speed, he can no longer see them; they’re just one great big spinning disc above the body of the helicopter.

“OK!” Petrovic shouts over the roar of the helicopter once they’ve loaded the weapons. “See you in a few hours, hopefully.”

“Right, right,” Maloof shouts back.

Kluger is already in his seat. He’s wearing ear protectors but no headphones. He isn’t planning to turn on the communications system during their flight. His feet are on the pedals and his hands on the levers. Petrovic has bought a pair of goggles, but Kluger doesn’t need them. In his experience, they’re more trouble than they’re worth.

Maloof takes his seat next to the American. The two bowl-shaped seats behind them are empty for now.

A second later, they lift off. The wind from the rotor blades tears at Petrovic’s clothes, and he watches the enormous white bumblebee fly away.

He turns around and rushes back to the car.

It’s almost five in the morning.

67

4:41 a.m.

The dark blue BMW is factory fresh, and the engine more powerful than the car Zoran Petrovic usually drives. He borrowed the vehicle direct from the reseller, a friend of a friend who owed him a favor or two. Petrovic’s part in the events of that early morning isn’t over yet.

He doesn’t have much time. He needs to make it from Norrtälje to Skärholmen in fifty minutes, and he’s going flat out. When they first talked about it, Maloof had said it was too tight, that they would need to find someone else, but Petrovic had insisted. He could do it.

Driving down the empty highway at 120 miles an hour that bright September night, the steering steady, Petrovic feels pure joy. The car isn’t swaying in the slightest, the engine nothing but a low whirr, and he turns on the radio. He needs music for this. “Run This Town,” by Jay-Z and Rihanna. The radio stations have been playing it all summer. He turns up the volume.

And that’s when he notices it.

The blue lights loom up in his rearview mirror. He has no idea where the police car has come from, he hasn’t overtaken any, but there’s no doubt it’s him they’re after. There aren’t any other cars on the road.

The goggles the helicopter pilot recently turned down are lying on the seat next to Petrovic. He realizes that he probably has traces of gunpowder on his clothes and his hands from checking the weapons earlier. And he also knows that if he doesn’t turn up at the agreed meeting point in time, there’ll be trouble.

He stares into the rearview mirror.

He still hasn’t slowed down. In fact, according to the speedometer, he is now doing 140 miles an hour.

The police are gaining on him. He won’t be able to lose them on the highway. But turning off now?

Petrovic doesn’t even know where he is.

68

5:02 a.m.

Since Ezra Ray returned with the cable for the detonators, not much has been said in the woods out in Stora Skuggan. He had found the cable lying beneath a plastic bag full of empty bottles.

At regular intervals, Sami walks over to the open field where the helicopter will land and squints up at the sky. He knows he will be able to hear it before he can see it, but he can’t sit still. The grass is damp with dew, and he can already feel the adrenaline building. It’s lying in wait to start pumping around his body in the next half an hour or so. Ideally, he would like to go for a quick run around the field, but he decides not to.

Nordgren has managed to find a stump that is more comfortable than the rock he was sitting on earlier. His weariness has vanished, but he doesn’t feel either nervous or expectant. It’s hard to explain. He can spend weeks and months planning something that, from the very beginning, is a real challenge; where every problem that he solves leaves him with a deep sense of satisfaction. But when the time finally comes, all that’s left is his desire to get it done. Nothing else.

“You’re not sleeping, are you?” Ezra asks from his rock a few yards away.

It’s a joke.

“No chance,” Nordgren replies quietly.

It’s two minutes past five when Sami’s phone rings. He is halfway back to the woods and he knows Nordgren will have heard it. Maloof’s voice is drowned out by the sound of the engine. Sami can’t hear what he’s saying, but from the context, it’s clear why he is calling.

They’re on their way.

A minute later, and the silence over Frescati and Stora Skuggan is broken.

It’s no more than a low whirring sound at first, way in the distance, but it completely possesses them.

Niklas Nordgren gets up and stands perfectly still.

Sami and Ezra, who had been going to bring the equipment to the field, stop where they are.

Listening.

Allowing the sound of the helicopter to grow louder.

It’s as though someone had turned the volume far above what the speakers can handle.

And, as though on command, Sami and Ezra drop the equipment and run with Nordgren into the dark field. They stop. They had measured out the triangle an hour or so earlier. They turn on the torches.

The helicopter comes in low. The sound is deafening, but Sami experiences it as pure joy. Euphoria. The white machine seems to almost glide in above the treetops, toward where they’re standing.

Slowly, the pilot attempts to find the right position above the three lights. For a few seconds, the helicopter is completely still, hanging freely in the air, but then he lowers the machine to the ground. The wind makes the trees rustle and the bushes lie flat.

Sami and Ezra pull on their balaclavas.

Neither plans to let the pilot see their faces.

Jack Kluger lands, kills the engine and the rotor blades come to a halt. Maloof jumps out of the helicopter. He hugs Nordgren and Sami, but they don’t say much to one another. There’ll be time for that later.

Each of them is aware that the clock has started ticking. It’s not unlikely that someone has seen or heard the helicopter, either on the way down from Norrtälje or on a radar screen somewhere.

While Maloof, Nordgren and Ezra run into the woods to grab the equipment and load it on board, Jack Kluger moves around the helicopter, showing Sami the minimal storage space. There’ll barely be room for a single mailbag. They’ll have to use the main cabin instead.

Maloof and Nordgren fasten the ladders to the landing skids using cable ties. It’s much easier than they had thought it would be, the short ladder isn’t too short and the long ladder not too long. While they do that, Sami and Ezra load the rest of the gear into the cabin.

When the helicopter takes off a few minutes later, things are cramped. They plan to abandon a lot of what they brought with them in Västberga, leaving room for the bags of money.

Nordgren and Sami are in the seats behind Kluger and Maloof. The pounding inside the cabin is loud and rhythmic. It’s almost ten past five in the morning when they feel the power of the liftoff and the helicopter swings up into the air. The movement feels at once incredibly light and unbelievably heavy.

Kluger puts the machine into a sharp turn, and the dark contours of the woods by the university are heading straight toward them from one side until he straightens up again. Beneath their feet, the silent black expanse of Haga Park spreads out. To the north, Solna glitters like a small town, and to the south, the Wenner-Gren Center towers over the buildings around it, a reminder that Stockholm is a low-lying city. The red and white lights of the cars on Uppsalavägen are like drops of water rolling along a viaduct.

Sami, Maloof and Nordgren struggle into their bulletproof vests in silence, pulling on black plastic masks on top of their balaclavas. Before they climbed on board, both had taped up any openings in their clothes, around their gloves and shoes, to make sure they don’t leave any DNA behind.

Nordgren pulls on his cap. The equipment makes them less mobile, but they have no idea what might be awaiting them inside the building. The explosives are a risk. That’s the reason they’re wearing headlamps. If the electricity cuts out for any reason, they’ll need lights of their own to be able to move freely.

Kluger turns across the water. At high speed, and flying low, he follows the line of the highway south, past the Essinge Islands, where the beautiful houses are bathed in darkness at the top of the rocks, cars parked tightly along the narrow streets. The cloud cover breaks, the winds are strong at that height this morning. But lower down, it’s no more than a few miles per hour.

Nordgren checks the explosives, cables, batteries and soda cans in his backpack once more. He has the detonators in one of the pockets on his vest.

Sami checks his gun.

Maloof glances at his watch. They have plenty of time, the question is whether they’re moving too quickly. Will Zoran Petrovic make it? Should he ask him to send a text once he arrives, just to stay on the safe side? Maloof isn’t sure. And then his thoughts drift to Alexandra Svensson, who would be shocked if she could see him right now, in his black balaclava. He doesn’t feel guilty at not having told her everything about himself; leaving out certain details isn’t the same as lying. He has two different lives, and he wonders whether they could merge into one. Could Alexandra, he wonders as thin veils of cloud sweep by like anxious ghosts outside the helicopter, become a permanent part of his life? Could he imagine her sitting in the kitchen at his mom and dad’s house in Fittja, actually enjoying herself there? He hopes so. If everything goes to plan over the next hour or so, he’ll be able to be more open about himself in the future, once the money is clean and life is simpler. Maloof nods imperceptibly. That’s what he has been longing for, to make life more simple.

They float through the sky. From time to time, the helicopter lurches suddenly, and it comes as a surprise every time. An unexpected gust as they’re landing would flip this little steel bubble, Sami thinks. He knows it won’t happen, he’s gone through the statistics, flying a helicopter is relatively safe. But the sudden lurches mean he can’t relax; it feels as though they’re at the end of a rubber band that someone keeps erratically pulling on.

His thoughts turn to John, to how much he would be laughing through the pockets of air that occasionally make them bounce sideways.

Sami doesn’t fantasize about what will be awaiting them when they arrive. He knows what he has to do, from the second the helicopter lands on the roof in Västberga until the moment they climb into the cars that will take them away from Norsborg. His own run-throughs and preparations over the past week have been so frequent and intense that, in a way, it almost feels as though he has done this before, like the robbery has already taken place.

Instead, as he stares down at the lights on the highway, the headlights rushing toward Södertälje like a string of white pearls, his thoughts are on his two families; his parents and siblings, Karin and the boys. Deep down, he knows that he can’t win over both of them. What he will be able to tell his brothers tomorrow would win back their respect and recognition, but it’s also the very same thing that could cause Karin to pack up the kids and leave him.

It’s a catch-22. If he can never tell anyone where the money came from, then how will his brothers ever know that it was more than just words, more than empty promises? And if he tells the truth, if the rumors about who was responsible for this robbery spread across town, then how will he explain to Karin that he had no choice, for their sake?

The helicopter suddenly veers to the right, and Sami falls to one side. It’s the wake-up call he needs. He empties his mind. Ignore all that, all those thoughts and speculations. He’s here now, and it’s time to get to work.

69

5:02 a.m.

Zoran Petrovic veers off from the highway. He drives down the exit ramp at just over ninety miles an hour. In the rearview mirror, he can see that the police car has moved considerably closer. Petrovic turns off the radio and hears the police siren.

He doesn’t have a plan.

He’s improvising.

The exit takes him onto a small country road leading into a forest. He slams on the brakes just before he reaches a crossroads and throws himself out of the BMW. The police car is still several hundred feet away, and the sound of its sudden braking cuts through the darkness.

Petrovic runs around the car to the edge of the road. He unbuckles his belt, unbuttons his trousers and drops them to the ground, along with his underwear. As the police pull up behind him, he squats down.

He’s not pretending. He loudly tries to take a real shit.

The police jump out of their car. One of them is holding a flashlight, and he shines it straight at the crouching Yugoslavian.

“What the hell are you playing at?” the police officer shouts.

But when they see what Petrovic is doing, they keep their distance.

“I’ve got such a fucking stomachache,” Petrovic whines pathetically. “I panicked. I had to.”

“You can’t just sit here and…”

“What a damn creep,” says the other.

“You’ll have to find a real toilet,” the first police officer says firmly.

“I’m lactose intolerant,” Petrovic moans, still not getting up.

“Did you hear what I said?” the first officer asks, in a considerably gruffer tone this time. “This is disorderly conduct. You could go to prison for this.”

It’s a threat the police are sure will work and, with a despairing sigh, more like a howl, Petrovic reluctantly stands up.

“There’s a toilet at the Statoil station,” the police officer’s colleague says nonchalantly, trying to be just helpful enough.

“Shit,” Petrovic whines. “How far’s that? I don’t know if I—”

“Get going!” the first officer says. “Right now. And make sure you stick to the damn speed limit, even if you do have a stomachache.”

Petrovic has no intention of tempting fate. He buttons his trousers as he moves around the car, and climbs in behind the wheel before the police officers have time to change their minds. He drives off. In the rearview mirror, he can see them standing there.

They’re probably finding the whole incident hilarious.

The minute they are out of sight, Petrovic puts his foot down again, back up to ninety miles an hour. His cell phone flashes in the seat next to him. A message from ZLATAN JR. One of his many names for Michel Maloof. Without lifting his foot from the accelerator, he grabs the phone from the seat to read the message.

70

5:13 a.m.

They’re approaching from the north.

The helicopter’s rotor blades cut a path through the calm air.

The rhythmic pounding of the engine shatters the silence.

Two hundred and fifty feet below them, the black water races past at sixty miles an hour, as do the huge, forest-covered islands where the occasional light reveals a cluster of houses or a farm. Tonight, the outlines of the islands look like ominous gray Rorschach inkblots.

Inside the helicopter, the four silent, black-clad men are strapped into their seats. Each of them is completely still, staring straight ahead, lost in himself and his thoughts.

Down on the ground, the lights of the cars and streetlamps glitter, illuminated facades and bulbs that have been burning all night in the low office buildings along the edge of the highway. But the four men don’t see any of that. Their eyes are fixed straight ahead.

The brightest light ahead of the helicopter’s curved windshield is shining up from the roof of the G4S cash depot in Västberga. It’s like a beacon lighting up the building, like a revelation.

From this point on in the robbers’ lives, there will always be a before and an after these few seconds, this morning of September 23.

Sami’s grip tightens around the machine gun in his lap.

Nordgren closes his eyes for a moment.

Maloof catches a flash of stars through a quick gap in the clouds.

That’s a good sign.

Kluger gets into position directly above the building. He allows the helicopter to sink slowly but deliberately through the air.

They land feather-light on the roof. Kluger turns to Maloof with a grin and then nods.

It’s almost a quarter past five in the morning; the journey took just as long as planned.

Everyone knows what he needs to do. Each has his own role.

They have to work quickly now.

Maloof is first out of the helicopter. Nordgren stays inside and begins to pass the equipment out to him.

Sami grabs the handle of the heavy sledgehammer and jumps out of the cabin. As he runs toward the glowing, pyramid-shaped skylight, Nordgren climbs out of the helicopter and helps Maloof unfasten the ladders from the helicopter’s landing skids. They work in time with the dull thudding of the rotor blades. And just as they finish and carry the ladders away, Kluger lifts off.

The white helicopter pulls up into the dark night sky. The wind from the rotor blades tears at the mailbags full of equipment still lying on the roof.

Sami has made it to the skylight.

He lowers the heavy end of the sledgehammer to the roof and gets a good grip on the wooden handle. Then he gets ready. Bends his knees; finds a low, stable position. He raises the sledgehammer and, in one fluid motion, swings it in an arc above his head. He can feel the weight of it in every inch of his body, can feel the power of the movement take over and help him follow through.

The hammer crashes down in the middle of one of the square, three-foot-wide windows. The vibration travels up the handle and into Sami’s hands. It couldn’t have been more perfect.

He stares at the glass.

There doesn’t seem to be a scratch on it.

71

5:14 a.m.

The night has been relatively uneventful so far. Kalle Dahlström, the duty officer on shift at the police force’s regional communication center, has barely had anything to do. Tonight’s night shift is his second of the week, the time sheet has him down for three in a row followed by one day off before he goes back to ordinary hours. The phones are quiet and his colleague Sofi Rosander is sleeping on the uncomfortable couch that some sadistic person brought in to stop the staff from taking naps. When she wakes up, it’ll be with a back that feels like it’s been welded straight.

Kalle is playing Tetris on his phone. He’s secretly proud of how good he is, but he won’t share his high score. Despite the hours, weeks and days he has spent with those blocks and squares, he’s still an amateur compared with the real pros.

When one of the phones suddenly starts to ring, Dahlström jumps. He answers by pressing a button in front of him. He doesn’t even need to look up from his smartphone.

It’s 5:14. The man on the other end of the line is a security guard, and he’s speaking in broken, almost incomprehensible Swedish.

Eventually, Dahlström manages to work out that he’s talking about a robbery on a cash service in Västberga.

“Secure transit robbery?” he replies; he isn’t surprised.

Secure transit vehicles were the new banks. Six out of every ten robberies these days had something to do with guards either carrying or transporting cash. All that surprises Dahlström is the time. Who could be out collecting money at this time of night?

“It’s the G4S cash depot,” the guard says down the line. “They came in a helicopter.”

Dahlström looks up from the blocks and squares. He stares blankly at his computer’s blue home screen as though it might give him the answers, and then he asks the guard to repeat what he just said.

“It’s a helicopter,” the guard insists.

“A helicopter?” says Dahlström.

“It’s taken off again. It’s hovering above now.”

Dahlström can’t believe what he’s hearing. A helicopter attacking a cash depot in Västberga? He knows the area, the Söderort district station is on Västberga Gårdsväg, less than a quarter of a mile from the secure transport company’s offices. He’s been to the station himself, as recently as a month ago.

“Are you sure about this?” he asks.

“Are you stupid?” the guard replies.

Sofi Rosander has woken up on the sofa. She’s heard the conversation, their phone calls play automatically over the loudspeaker.

“We need to call someone,” she whispers.

“Stay on the line,” Dahlström orders the guard, ending the call.

“We need to raise the alarm,” Sofi Rosander repeats. “And call the district commissioner.”

“I can’t ring Caisa fucking Ekblad and wake her up,” Dahlström protests, terrified by the thought. “I’ll call Månsson instead. He’s in charge of Söderort. It’s his problem.”

It takes a while for Dag Månsson to answer. He sounds muddled, newly woken and annoyed. Dahlström introduces himself and repeats the information that has just come in. Månsson reacts with the same degree of surprise.

“The cash depot in Västberga? But it’s right next to the station?” he says.

Dahlström has to repeat the information several times before Månsson finally understands that the robbers have landed a helicopter on the roof of G4S.

“I’m on my way in,” he says. “I’ll call the commissioner en route. You raise the alarm.”

72

5:16 a.m.

The helicopter is in the air, hovering just to the right of the building, far enough away not to hinder the three men working on the roof.

Maloof had run over to Sami when he realized something wasn’t right. Together, they squat down and study the pane of glass close up. Thanks to the lights below, they can see a small crack, thin but long.

Maloof knows that it could have been there before, but he decides not to mention that.

“Keep going, keep going,” he says instead, returning to Nordgren, who has started to screw together the ladders.

The longer of the two seems inconceivably long, but it does need to reach all the way to the fifth floor.

“Let’s move everything over to the window,” he says to Nordgren.

It’s more a type of therapy than anything else. They need to keep themselves busy while Sami lets the sledgehammer do its job.

Sami strikes the glass. He strikes it again. The movement reminds him of a condemned prisoner in a chain gang in some film from the early sixties. Every time the sledgehammer hits the window, it makes the same dull thud, the same anticlimax, and after the fifth or seventh or eleventh strike, once Nordgren and Maloof have moved all the bags, ropes, ladders, tools and explosives over to the window, his patience starts to wear thin.

Maloof had planned on them being out of there in quarter of an hour. Fifteen minutes. It can’t take any longer than that.

Three of those fifteen minutes have already passed, and they haven’t even managed to smash the window.

“I’ll blow it open,” Nordgren says quietly to Maloof, who nods.

Nordgren bends down to prepare a charge, but as he does so, they finally hear the sound of the hammer breaking the glass into thousands of tiny pieces.

With Nordgren’s help, Maloof lifts one end of the longer ladder above his head and they raise it vertically in the air. Next, they carefully lower it through the hole in the skylight. The balcony on the fifth floor is directly below them, little more than a ledge.

Slowly, they lower the ladder down through the building. It has to be long enough.

Afterward, Michel Maloof will look back at those few moments and think of them as having been the longest of the morning. If the ladder is too short, it’s all over. They won’t have any choice but to wave back the helicopter and leave.

Foot by foot, the ladder disappears through the hole in the broken window. With just six inches of the full thirty-six feet to spare, it hits the floor.

Maloof leans forward and looks down.

“I think it’ll work,” he says.

Getting the ladder into place took twenty-five seconds.

It felt more like twenty-five minutes.

Nordgren grabs the shorter ladder and swings it onto his right shoulder. He grabs the bag of explosives in his other hand.

“You holding?” he asks Maloof.

He starts climbing without waiting for an answer.

Maloof holds on to the ladder as tightly as he can. It shakes. Nordgren is only halfway down when it starts to bend as though it were made of bamboo.

But it doesn’t collapse.

Maloof asks Sami to hold it while he grabs as much as he can and then sets off as the second man. Sami climbs down last of all, the Kalashnikov hanging from a strap around his neck.

73

5:18 a.m.

“Do you think you could turn down the radio a bit?” Claude Tavernier asks as diplomatically as he can, though he already knows the answer will be a long, difficult telling off.

Ann-Marie always has the radio on when she’s working. She manages to find channels on frequencies no one else even knew existed. Right now, she’s enjoying Swedish hits from the sixties, nonstop without any ads. Of the fourteen people working this shift, five have brought their own headphones to avoid Ann-Marie’s canned tunes, but the others have been forced to endure vintage Swedish hits for hours now.

They’ve made it through the night without any conflict so far, but, as usual, patience starts to wear thin as dawn approaches. Tavernier has a theory that it’s linked to the bad air, and he has raised the problem with management. Every night shift is the same. Tonight, on top of the usual workload, they’ve also had to handle two additional secure transports from Panaxia. The smaller company hasn’t had the capacity since its move the week before.

It means the tempo is higher than usual.

After being received and registered down in the vault, the cash is sent up to Counting through the internal tube system. On the sixth floor, the staff don’t just have to count and package up the money, they also have to weed out any notes that are too old or damaged to return to general circulation. Once that’s done, they register the deposits and send everything back down to the vault.

The room is big and gently U-shaped, which means that the people working at one end can’t see those working at the other. Also meaning, in theory, that it is possible to keep your distance from Ann-Marie and her radio, but Tavernier still has to ask her to turn down the volume. Like always. And, as usual, Ann-Marie, who has both been on the local union board and has held the position of shop steward, explains precisely which rights she has.

One of these rights is to listen to music.

Tonight, Claude Tavernier has much less patience than usual. He doesn’t quite know why. But it’s the reason he raises his voice and interrupts Ann-Marie before she even has time to start protesting.

“Just turn it down, Ann-Marie,” he barks. “Or I’ll do it.”

Ann-Marie is so taken aback by his change in attitude that she reaches out and turns down the volume on the old radio. It’s not her device, it belongs to the company.

As the languorous strings grow quiet, they all hear it.

The sound coming from outside.

Colleagues elbow workmates wearing headphones so that they can hear it for themselves.

“What the hell’s that?” someone asks loudly.

Counting, on the sixth floor, has no windows. But it’s obvious that the clear thudding sound none of them can identify is coming from outside.

“That’s not the air-conditioning, is it?”

“We’ll have to ask the big boss what we should do,” Ann-Marie says, dripping with irony, as though to point out how dumbstruck Claude Tavernier looks, standing in the middle of the room with all eyes on him.

Like many who have driven a secure transport vehicle or worked for a company dealing in them, Tavernier has personal experience of being robbed. That’s why his first thought is that it must be a robbery. It’s an automatic assumption. But six floors up, in one of Stockholm’s most secure depots, with a police station just a stone’s throw from the entrance, Tavernier brushes off the thought. It seems so unlikely.

“Keep working,” he says. “I’ll go and check.”

“What a hero,” Ann-Marie mumbles.

A low giggle can be heard as Tavernier leaves the room.

He comes out into a corridor, the elevators and stairs to his right. He turns the other way, to the left, and passes a couple of locked doors that he opens with his key card. He’s heading for the break room, where there is a window out onto the atrium. His plan is to take a quick look at the lower floors, to see whether anyone down there has noticed the noise.

But as he steps into the break room, the first thing he sees is two black-clad men climbing down a ladder from the roof with bags on their backs.

It takes a few seconds for Tavernier to process what he is seeing.

He runs back to his department, but not so fast that he doesn’t have time to make sure that every door he opens is locked properly behind him.

His leadership qualities are about to be put to the test. It’s time for him to prove that he’s capable, that he’s strong.

When he reaches his department, everyone falls silent and turns toward him. The man that has just stepped through the door isn’t the same one who left a few minutes earlier. Tavernier’s pale face and wide eyes reveal that something serious has happened, he doesn’t need to ask for their attention. From Ann-Marie’s radio, a deep male voice is singing quietly.

“Secure the cash,” Claude Tavernier says.

No one protests or asks any questions, not even Ann-Marie. Time after time over the years, they’ve practiced this very drill. It’s a case of moving the bundles of notes to the lockable, bar-covered cages in the middle of the room as quickly as possible. There’s probably over 100 million kronor in Counting that morning. Most of it in 500-kroner notes, but also in lower denominations.

Tavernier makes a point of moving as slowly as he can. Adrenaline is pumping through his veins, and he would rather be running between stations, making sure that everyone is doing his or her job quickly and effectively. But he knows that if he shows any sign of panic, it will spread through the room like an echo.

He moves over to his desk and tries to find the number for Skövde. His instructions are crystal clear. There are procedures, a well-thought-out plan that he is expected to follow. Every fourth month, Palle Lindahl, the G4S security chief, stages a run-through with all the company’s middle managers.

The first thing to do in situations like this is to call the alarm center in Skövde.

But Skövde changed its number a few weeks earlier, and Tavernier can’t find the piece of paper with the new details. He knows it’s on his desk somewhere, and while his staff assiduously and silently continues to secure the money, Claude Tavernier feels the panic rising. He has only one job to do, one call to make, but he doesn’t seem to be able to manage even that.

He resists the urge to tear the drawers from his desk and throw them to the floor. Eventually, he is forced to accept that the number for Skövde isn’t where it’s meant to be. He picks up the phone and calls down to Valter, on the ground floor.

“Valter?” he says. “Claude up in Cash. There are people in the building.”

He doesn’t want to say too much, because all around him, the others have their ears pricked. He strains to speak without any hint of his French accent.

“Reported,” Valter replies. “I’ve already called Skövde.”

Tavernier nods. He breathes out. That’s better. Skövde has already been informed. No one can blame him for not having done it.

74

5:19 a.m.

It’s just turned twenty past five in the morning when County Police Commissioner Caisa Ekblad is woken by the angry sound of the phone. She is no stranger to being woken in the middle of the night, and when she picks up, her voice is clear and steady, as though she had been sitting by the phone waiting for the call. Only last spring, Caisa Ekblad was Dag Månsson’s colleague; he was one of the district chiefs behind her nomination.

“We’ve got an unusual alert,” Månsson says.

He’s panting into the phone. He is just leaving home, on the way down the stairs in his building.

“A possible robbery ongoing in Västberga. We’ve got reports of a helicopter landing on the G4S cash depot roof.”

“A helicopter?” Ekblad repeats.

“The building’s practically next door to the police station.”

Månsson has reached the garage, and he climbs into his car.

“The robbers arrived in a helicopter?” Ekblad repeats. She doesn’t want any misunderstandings.

“Apparently. This is no ordinary alarm.”

“I’ll call Olsson,” the county police commissioner says, instinctively sensing that robbers in helicopters aren’t something that should be handled by the local police force.

“Do it,” Månsson agrees.

“I’ll call you again as soon as I can,” Ekblad says.

“Same.”

Månsson ends the call as he pulls out onto the Essingeleden highway.

The relationship between the chief commissioner for Stockholm County and the national police commissioner operated as the circumstances demanded. They kept their distance from one another. Two female police officers in a male-dominated environment, two careerists surrounded by bureaucrats, two experienced officers now in primarily administrative roles, the women did actually have quite a lot to learn from one another. But Ekblad’s and Olsson’s fields of power weren’t compatible. It was more a case of personal chemistry than it was of women competing more with one another than with the men on the force.

“Shit,” is the national police commissioner’s first reaction.

The county commissioner notices the complete lack of surprise in Therese Olsson’s tone; she detects only anger.

“You knew about this?” she asks.

“This is ours, Caisa,” Olsson says, dodging the question. “We’ll take it from here. Ask your people to cut off the exits. Get a couple of patrol cars out there, with the lights on, and we’ll take care of the rest.”

“Sorry, but I don’t know… This is happening now, and it’s happening practically on the doorstep of Söderort station. It’ll probably be quicker if we carry on than if you try to take over.”

“We’ve been working on this for a month, Caisa. It’s too big for you.”

“A month?” the county commissioner exclaims, sounding surprised. “Without informing me?”

Olsson is silent for a moment, and then she says: “It had nothing to do with you.”

Ekblad explodes. With suppressed rage, and with a level of clarity she would usually reserve for talking to a five-year-old, she explains that a robbery being planned in the Stockholm area is very much to do with the Stockholm County commissioner. If Olsson can’t understand that, then perhaps the Police Authority should be made aware at the next meeting that its commissioner is illiterate.

“Caisa, I—” Olsson begins.

But Ekblad ends the call without listening to Olsson’s excuses. She is still in bed, but she angrily tears back the covers and heads into the bathroom. That’s when she hears her cell phone ring, followed shortly afterward by the house phone. She doesn’t answer. By the time she makes a quick trip to the bathroom and heads down to the garage, the worst of her anger has abated.

She calls Månsson for an update from the car. He confirms what the guard reported; the robbers are still in the building. He has set up a liaison unit in a police van by the Statoil gas station opposite G4S.

“We’ve already got enough people here. Should we go in?” Månsson asks.

It’s a good question.

The display on her phone flashes, indicating an incoming call. Ekblad realizes she has to take it.

“Hold off,” she replies.

It’s Therese Olsson.

“We made a mistake, Caisa,” Olsson immediately says. “We misjudged the situation. Of course we should have kept you informed. But it is what it is, and we can’t afford to lose any more time. You know Caroline Thurn, don’t you? With the Criminal Investigation Department? She’s been working on this for a month or so, she knows who’s in the building in Västberga. She has the best chance of being able to handle this.”

Ekblad sighs.

“OK,” she replies, resigned. “I was just talking to Dag Månsson. He’s set up a liaison unit outside.”

“Then I’ll ask Thurn to get in touch with Månsson and the people at the scene.”

Ekblad sighs again. She goes back to Månsson to tell him the bad news.

75

5:21 a.m.

The buzzing of her cell phone is transmitted through the thick cushions in the alcove. Caroline Thurn can’t hear anything, but she can feel the vibrations. She pulls off her headphones, Zoran Petrovic’s droning stops and she glances down at the display. It’s the national police commissioner, Therese Olsson.

Thurn feels her adrenaline levels spike as she answers.

“Good morning,” she says.

“They pushed it back a week,” she hears Therese Olsson’s dogged voice say. “It’s happening as we speak.”

Thurn understands immediately. She can still hear the echo of Petrovic’s voice in her ears.

The fifteenth of September. That was why he slipped up. That was why he planted that particular date several times. It was the only mistake he made.

Only, it wasn’t a mistake.

He had tricked them.

“The situation is ongoing,” Olsson repeats. “Get out to G4S in Västberga. Call me from the car.”

Caroline Thurn is on her way out.

“Wait!” she shouts down the line.

“What?”

“Is our helicopter airborne?” Thurn asks as she opens the door into the stairwell.

The silence on the other end tells her everything she needs to know.

“Get it in the air!” Thurn shouts at her boss. “Now!”

76

5:22 a.m.

It went better than he expected.

On the way from Frescati to Västberga, there had been two moments when he’d had to blink, concentrate and fight back the sense of panic he could feel welling, ready to spread through his body as quickly and easily as a drop of blood in a glass of water.

Both times had worked.

Since then, everything has been calm.

After dropping off the robbers and the equipment, Jack Kluger takes the helicopter up to a high altitude again. Bands of thin clouds float across the sky, their edges sharply defined by the moonlight. Far below him, to the northwest, the Essingen Islands and southern Alvik glitter at the far edge of the dark waters of Lake Mälaren. To the northeast, he can see the Liljeholmen industrial area and the deserted office buildings that have been plastered with brightly lit company logos.

Kluger has no goal other than to save fuel. They have agreed to be back on the roof in ten to fifteen minutes, and though he set off with less than a full tank, that gives him good margins.

He lowers the helicopter slightly when he spots the first police car. Its flashing blue lights seem to glide forward over the ground.

Just as Maloof and Sami predicted, the car is approaching from the station on Västberga Gårdsväg. It swings up onto Västberga Allé, followed closely by another car. Kluger watches them from the heavens, two blue will-o’-the-wisps in an otherwise black night. When the first car suddenly skids, spins sideways and comes to a stop, Kluger knows why. Petrovic had told him about the chains, about the caltrops. The American watches the second car slow down, but he can’t tell whether its tires have also been ripped to shreds.

Just then, he spots a string of blue lights approaching on the highway from Stockholm. They’ll take the exit by Midsommarkransen and drive straight into the chains stretched across the road.

Once nine minutes have passed since the drop-off, Kluger allows the helicopter to sink farther, meaning he is now hovering right alongside the building. The chains with the caltrops have delayed the police, but judging by the stream of new cars and blue lights flickering in the darkness, they’ve dealt with the problem. The cars are coming from the north, from the south. He’s lost count. They’re keeping their distance from the building, and it seems to Kluger as though they’re forming some kind of base over by the gas station on the hill, three hundred or so feet away from the entrance to the building.

He feels comfortable in the helicopter, behind the controls. He can’t understand why he was so nervous about it now. It’s like riding a bike. He hasn’t forgotten a thing; in fact, he’s forgotten too little. Flying with the dark sky as a backdrop, it’s as though he never left Afghanistan.

And then he notices the sinking feeling his stomach.

He blinks it away. Once. Once more.

He doesn’t want to remember.

He flies a loop around the building, just for something to do.

He feels a vague sense of unease that the police will open fire. After almost two years in Sweden, he knows that weapons and force are the exception, but he’s still an easy target. That’s why he’s keeping close to the building. He assumes they won’t dare shoot if there’s a risk of him crashing into the cash depot.

The next time he glances at his watch, it’s 5:23. Jack Kluger feels relieved. It’ll soon be over. He peers down at the roof and expects to catch sight of them any moment now. He’s aware that they said ten to fifteen minutes, and it hasn’t even been ten yet, but he just wants to get away. The pulsing blue lights on the ground are making him nervous, but it’s toward the horizon that he keeps glancing anxiously.

If he catches sight of another helicopter, he doesn’t know what he’ll do. Landing on the roof to pick up the robbers would be pointless if that happened. He’d never be able to take off again. The police helicopter would make sure of that. Nothing is stopping him from simply flying off. He decides that if he sees anything coming toward him in the sky, he’ll have to make a run for it.

77

5:23 a.m.

It’s exactly twenty-three minutes past five when Caroline Thurn pulls out of the garage on Väpnargatan in her Volvo. A white layer of frost covers the ground on Strandvägen, and as she drives toward the red lights on Hamngatan, she grabs her phone, pushes the white headphone into her ear and dials Berggren’s number.

He answers immediately.

“They shifted it back a week.”

She doesn’t need to be any clearer than that.

“Where are you?” he asks.

“It wasn’t Bromma, it was Västberga.”

“Where are you?” he asks for a second time.

“The situation’s ongoing. County police are involved. Local are outside the building with the lights flashing.”

“Where the hell are you, Caroline?” Berggren shouts.

By now, Thurn has made it to the Gallerian shopping center, and she turns left.

“Excuse me,” she says into the earpiece.

She comes close to hitting a homeless woman pulling a shopping cart across a crosswalk.

“I’m on the way,” she says. “To Västberga. Five, ten minutes. Might make it before it’s all over.”

“What the hell’re you going to do there, Caroline?”

She doesn’t have a good answer to that, she’s just obeying orders.

“Get hold of Hertz, Mats,” she says. “Tell him to get in touch with the military.”

Berggren doesn’t know what to say. The military? The robbery is ongoing? Had Bromma never been the target, or did the plans change?

“The military?” he repeats.

“They wanted to sabotage the police helicopters,” Thurn says as she passes city hall. “I don’t know if they stuck to their original plan, but… the military has helicopters out in Berga, doesn’t it? Or up at the Air Combat Training School in Uppsala?”

“Uppsala? I have no idea…”

“Ask Hertz to requisition the military helicopters. Make sure they get airborne.”

Thurn ends the call before her colleague has time to protest. Norr Mälarstrand is narrow, and she’s driving at almost sixty miles an hour. If she passes any newspaper delivery boys on bikes, or retirees out walking their dogs, she’s going to have difficulty avoiding them. Her fingertips are on the wheel, ready to make the maneuver that could save a life.

But when she reaches Rålambshovsparken, she still hasn’t seen another soul.

And in her head, she can hear Petrovic saying that he has something big planned for the fifteenth of September.

That bastard.

Caroline Thurn has made it onto the highway when her phone rings. Olsson again. She accepts the call by pressing the button on her earpiece’s microphone, whose white cable is hanging next to her face. There still aren’t many cars around.

“Where the hell are you?” asks Therese Olsson.

“Arriving in Västberga in four minutes.”

“What the hell are you doing there? You should be here.”

“You said to…” but she doesn’t finish the sentence.

Olsson has forgotten asking her to go out to the cash depot.

“I’m no use in Kungsholmen,” Thurn says instead. “But I need to talk to our helicopter pilot. Can you get someone to patch the call through to my cell? And I want to talk to whoever’s in charge out in Västberga.”

Olsson takes a few seconds to think.

“OK,” she says, and hangs up to avoid wasting any more time.

Thurn can see the exit for Västberga when the phone rings again. She glances at the time. Only eight minutes have passed since she left home.

“Thurn,” she says into the microphone.

“Hello?”

“This is Caroline Thurn. Who is this?”

“Jakob. The pilot. I… We’re on the way to Myttinge.”

“We’ve got an ongoing robbery,” Thurn explains. “There are reports of a helicopter, a Bell Jet… being used to…”

“A JetRanger,” the pilot corrects her. “A 206. We know, we heard about it last week.”

Thurn doesn’t know whether she should feel pleased or annoyed. She is on the line with an unknown person who knew about the robbery a week ago. Is this a case of another damn leak from police headquarters, or is the pilot one of those who was on standby in Solna last week?

She makes an irritated mental note.

“If I understand correctly,” she says, “the robbery is happening right now. So you need to hurry.”

“We’ve got the coordinates,” the pilot answers. His voice sounds like a young boy’s. “But this isn’t Bromma?”

“Västberga.”

The pilot takes a moment to think.

“Good,” he says. “That’s better. We’ll fly over the park in Årsta. We’ll be in the air in ten minutes.”

Thurn checks the time. It’s 5:31. The helicopters will be in the air by twenty to six.

“If they’re still inside when you arrive, you need to stop them from taking off,” Thurn tells him, slowing down to turn into the industrial area via Västberga Allé. “You shouldn’t intervene. If they still manage to take off, just follow them and let us know where they land.”

“Intervene?” the pilot repeats with a brief laugh. “Do you think we’ll be flying some kind of assault helicopter?”

“Did you understand the instructions?”

The pilot mumbles a yes as a new call flashes up on Thurn’s display.

“Report back once you’re in the air,” she says, switching her conversation partner.

“Månsson.” Thurn suddenly hears a deep, calm voice in her ear. It doesn’t tell her anything about the police officer’s decision-making abilities, of course, but it still sounds reassuring.

“Task Force Leader Caroline Thurn,” she says. “Give me an update.”

“Well, nothing’s happening right now. Maybe that’s why the helicopter flew off?”

“It’s gone?”

Thurn is confused. She had always assumed that the robbers were planning to get away in the helicopter.

“We can still hear it,” says Dag Månsson, “but we can’t see it. Wait… is that you?”

At that very moment, Thurn catches sight of the police van parked by the gas station, and she ends the call, leaving the earpiece in her ear.

She parks up next to the van and opens the door.

“Where’s Månsson?” she asks as she climbs out of the car.

A tall, well-built officer in uniform jumps out of the van and comes forward to meet her.

“Dag Månsson,” he introduces himself, shaking Thurn’s hand.

“Have you requested backup?” she asks.

There is a sea of blinking lights outside the G4S depot, but Thurn can see only ordinary patrol cars, no specialists.

“Backup?” Månsson asks. “What do you mean?”

“Are the riot squad on the way? Did National confirm?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Månsson replies in his deep voice.

“OK, make sure you check,” Thurn says.

“We haven’t had time,” Månsson mutters, sounding annoyed. “We were clearing crap from the access roads so you’d be able to make it over here with your wheels intact.”

78

5:25 a.m.

Everything has been carried down from the roof to the balcony on the fifth floor, and Nordgren is busy setting up the ladder to the floor above. He leans it against the reinforced glass, but he can barely get any angle, the balcony is too shallow.

Still, up he climbs. He has one of the explosive frames in his hand. Balanced on the ladder, he fixes the frame to the glass, fills it with explosives, pushes in the detonator capsule and attaches the long detonation cable.

Once Maloof and Sami see that Nordgren has everything in place, they start to climb the long ladder back up to the roof. Nordgren has made it down to the balcony, but he holds the ladder steady for the others before he makes the ascent himself.

They won’t need much of a charge to break the glass, but considering the shards will rain down onto the balcony on the fifth floor, the three of them have no choice but to climb out of the way.

Back up on the roof, Nordgren gets to work with his cable and the motorbike battery. As a result, he doesn’t notice what Sami has already seen.

Down on the street, there is a police van and a sea of cars with flashing blue lights. They’re already here. Sami decides to take no notice of it. There’s no other way to handle it.

A second later, the explosion cuts through the atrium.

“Quick now,” says Nordgren.

He’s already on his way back down the long ladder.

79

5:26 a.m.

“What was that, Claude?”

Everyone in Counting hears the explosion, and Ann-Marie isn’t the only one to look questioningly at Tavernier.

But when nothing happens after the first blast, they return to bundling and locking the notes into the cages in the middle of the room.

Everyone but Ann-Marie. She is staring expectantly at Claude Tavernier, demanding an answer.

“What was that?”

“I don’t know,” says Tavernier.

He dials the number for the guardroom on the second floor, and Valter answers immediately. The guard is following the unfolding events on his CCTV monitors.

“Have the police arrived?” Tavernier asks.

Valter doesn’t know. But he does have around eighty video cameras watching over the majority of areas inside the building, and he tells Tavernier what he knows. That a helicopter landed on the roof, that the robbers have smashed a window in the skylight. He can’t see where they are right now, and he hasn’t heard any explosions from where he is on the second floor.

Valter falls silent, as though he is deliberating with himself, but then he says:

“They’re heavily armed. But the police will probably be getting here any moment,” he adds, in an attempt to dampen the drama.

Tavernier hangs up.

“The police will be here soon,” he tells Ann-Marie, something that has an immediate calming effect on her.

The fear in her wide eyes seems to lessen slightly.

“They got in through the roof, didn’t they?” she asks.

Tavernier nods. It’s something everyone working at G4S in Västberga has discussed. The new information spreads across the room. They knew it. That damn glass skylight is like a beacon for all the country’s would-be criminals at night.

They get back to work.

“Anyone who’s finished, come over here,” Tavernier says.

He is already standing in the area of the room that could be described as the center. The so-called safety position where they’re meant to gather to wait for the police or guards. All in line with the instructions of Security Chief Palle Lindahl, instructions that he took from one of the international conferences G4S holds for its security chiefs every year. At these events, the combined experiences of over a hundred different countries come together. Stay in the room until help arrives, that’s the message. Don’t start running around a building full of armed criminals. They’ll be searching the corridors and won’t appreciate any surprises in the shape of confused staff members trying to find a way out.

Everyone knows the drill.

One by one, they finish their work and move over to Tavernier and Ann-Marie, who are already standing in position.

All that’s left now is to wait until it’s over.

It seems obvious to Tavernier that the robbers will be making their way toward the vault on the second floor.

80

5:28 a.m.

The hole in the reinforced glass is big enough for Nordgren to use the crowbar to break an opening they can get in through.

On the other side is a room that seems to be used as some kind of storage area, but right now it’s empty. The door is open, meaning they are now wall-to-wall with Counting.

Maloof points to the fire door they were expecting. Nordgren goes over and studies the frame. The door is on a metal runner, meaning it can automatically move to one side if the fire alarm sounds. At the very top right, tucked in beneath the ceiling, he spots the cable controlling the door. He doesn’t have any wire cutters with him, but a powerful tug is all it takes to pull it from its connection. Then they just need to push the door to the side. It moves smoothly in its tracks, revealing a steel-clad security door behind it.

It’s the last barrier between them and the money.

Nordgren pulls a Coca-Cola can from his backpack. It’s been cut in the middle, filled with explosives and a magnet has been attached to the bottom. He pushes the detonation capsule into the explosive putty and fixes the can to the door, an inch beneath the handle. With one hand, he gestures for Sami and Maloof to go back into the storeroom by the reinforced glass. The concave base of the can will direct the explosion inward and away. It’s something Nordgren has done many times before.

He deliberately chooses a smaller charge. He doesn’t know how much it will take, and he doesn’t know what’s on the other side of the door. Where the money is located, where the workstations are.

Nordgren clamps the long detonation cable onto the capsule and joins Maloof and Sami in the storeroom. He moves quickly and confidently. He touches the cable to the poles of the battery, the charge explodes, and he runs back out to the door.

There’s barely a scratch on it.

Nordgren nods. He knows what he needs to do. He applies a new charge in the same place. He tries to stop himself from feeling any stress, doesn’t doubt for a moment that he’ll manage, works methodically. He’s back in the storeroom with the others in less than thirty seconds, and the next charge goes off.

This explosion is considerably more powerful than the last. The smell of burned gunpowder fills the room when the three go in to see whether it worked. The smoke and dust quickly settle.

The door is still barely damaged.

“What the hell are you doing?” Sami whispers.

81

5:29 a.m.

They hear the next explosion at almost the exact moment the last bundle of notes is locked in the cage. The sound makes them jump; it’s louder than before, it seems closer.

“We can’t just stand here, Claude,” Ann-Marie whispers.

It’s unclear whether she is whispering so that the robbers won’t hear her, or because she doesn’t want to worry her colleagues.

“The instructions are clear,” Tavernier replies unnecessarily formally.

“We can’t just stand here,” she repeats, shaking her head.

“Can someone turn off that damn radio?” Tavernier snaps.

He doesn’t see who does it, but a few seconds later the device finally falls silent.

“Don’t worry,” he says aloud. “When the robbers make it into the vault, they’ll realize it’s pointless.”

But just before Tavernier has time to continue, they hear the third blast, and it’s worse than those before it.

“Shit,” he swears.

“It’s the security door!”

The voice comes from someone standing by the bend in the room, and they can see what Tavernier can’t.

“Everyone stay here,” Tavernier orders.

82

5:30 a.m.

If things had been different and they were sitting around a kitchen table, talking about this, Sami Farhan’s frustration would have known no bounds. He would have gotten up, moved around the table and talked nonstop. Gesturing wildly, he would have reminded the others what he had been through, stories he’d heard about cautiousness and a lack of decisiveness, and he would have pointed to Niklas Nordgren and said, “Fuck whatever’s on the other side of the door, just blow the damn thing open.”

But not now.

Not now that they’re on the sixth floor of the cash depot, staring helplessly at the steel-clad security door as their helicopter hovers overhead.

Now Sami says nothing. He trusts Niklas Nordgren because he has to trust him, and he assumes that Nordgren knows better than anyone what needs to be done.

“OK,” says the explosives expert. “Third time’s lucky. Take cover.”

He says it quietly. Without any hesitation, without apologizing. And while Sami and Maloof resolutely return to the storeroom, Nordgren pulls out an explosive frame rather than another can. He fixes the frame to the door, and this time he primes it differently. He knows there’s a risk he’ll take out half the wall with it. He knows there’s a risk that the money on the other side will be buried by plaster and dust and splinters.

Not to mention what might happen to the people working there.

But he has no other option. Though he hasn’t looked at his watch since they got onto the sixth floor, he knows they’re running out of time. Every stage has taken longer than it should have. This has to work now.

83

5:31 a.m.

Tavernier quickly goes over to inspect the steel door. It’s the emergency exit out to the atrium, and even from a distance he can see that there’s a dent in it, right beneath the handle, as though someone had taken a battering ram to it from the other side.

He takes out his phone and calls Valter.

“Can you see them?”

“No. But they must be up with you somewhere, they haven’t appeared on any of the cameras by the elevators or the stairs.”

“They’re trying to blow their way in here,” says Tavernier.

He doesn’t have time to say any more.

The third blast is more powerful than those that came before it, and it feels like the walls are about to come crashing down. Plaster, splinters and dust swirl through the air, and Ann-Marie starts screaming. No one tries to stop her.

Tavernier has had enough.

“Follow me!” he shouts, breaking into a run.

He is still holding his phone to his ear, and he rushes over to the opposite door, toward the stairwell.

Finally, he has become the leader he’s always wanted to be. They follow him, all of them, without any hesitation. The moment they make it into the stairwell, his phone loses the signal, but Tavernier continues—the stairs will take them down to the security doors outside the vault—and the others follow.

I’ll create a new secure position, he thinks. Because real leaders make smart decisions in difficult situations.

84

5:32 a.m.

This time, it takes a while for the dust to settle.

Maloof’s ears are ringing when he steps out of the storeroom. The relief he feels when he sees the battered door is indescribable. The gap is more than wide enough. Nordgren is already moving past him with one of the crowbars. He grabs the other.

With the larger of the two crowbars, they manage to force the door open. It falls into Counting with a thud.

Sami already has his gun raised, and he enters the room ahead of the others. He scrapes his hand on the half-destroyed wall on his way in.

He doesn’t expect there to be any staff left in the room, the bank world always instructs its employees to evacuate the premises as soon as they can. But nothing is guaranteed.

With his machine gun at hip level, he searches the room. It’s empty.

Maloof is close behind him. He glances at his watch. They’ve already taken over five minutes, and they still haven’t seen the money.

He starts the angle grinder. He does it by hand. It’s gasoline driven, so it’s a bit like starting an outboard motor or a lawnmower from the sixties. The engine starts with a loud roar. He moves over to the cages where the notes have been stashed and uses the grinder to cut the locks. A shower of sparks cascades beautifully to the floor. The smell of two-stroke gas fills the room.

Nordgren realizes that the staff has managed to lock everything in the cages. Yet more proof of how long it took them to get in. He banishes the thought. He doesn’t want to think about how many police officers are currently waiting outside.

As Maloof cuts open the cages, Nordgren and Sami fetch the mailbags.

The money is bundled up in red plastic boxes. They search for the 500-kronor notes and throw the boxes containing the 100- and 20-kronor notes to the floor.

Maloof moves on to the next cage. He puts down the angle grinder without turning it off, and it spins on the floor as though it had a life of its own. He tests the cage door. It won’t open. He grabs the angle grinder and cuts through the last bit.

The second cage contains the larger denominations.

They get to work.

As soon as one bag is full, they drag it out to the next room, into the storeroom by the reinforced glass window, and then throw it down to the balcony on the fifth floor.

All this takes time.

Each of them knows that they can’t spend much longer inside the building, but they continue anyway. They’ve been in a rush since they first stepped out of the helicopter, but they now know that they’re in an extreme rush. Once it looks like there’s no more room for mailbags on the little balcony on the fifth floor, they decide that they’re done.

85

5:35 a.m.

Task Force Leader Caroline Thurn climbs into the police van serving as the liaison center parked outside the Statoil station directly opposite the G4S cash depot. The station is on a slight elevation, which means it has a good view of its surroundings. The blue flashing lights from the patrol cars in the distance lend a cinematic quality to the scene. The sound of the robbers’ helicopter adds to that. Thurn had spotted it earlier, but it now seems to have disappeared into the dark night sky.

She has two options: either send people into the building immediately, risking shots being fired and a possible hostage situation, or wait until the robbers are back in their helicopter and attempting to make their getaway. She has a few more minutes to make her decision.

There are two uniformed police officers sitting in the front of the van, and several other people in the back. One of them is in plainclothes, and he has a laptop computer open in front of him. On the screen, Thurn catches sight of the green, pixelated images typical of live CCTV cameras.

“Who is that?” Thurn asks the nearest police officer.

“No idea.”

“What’s a plainclothes officer doing here?”

“Ask Månsson,” the officer suggests, referring her to the commanding officer.

The officer crouches back into the front seat. Thurn moves toward the back of the van and the stranger with the computer. The man seems to be in his early middle age, and he has a ruddy complexion and thick glasses.

“I’m Caroline Thurn,” she introduces herself. “I’m taking over command out here. Who are you?”

The man looks up at the tall police inspector and nods.

“Palle Lindahl,” he replies. “G4S security chief.”

Lindahl pulls out a business card and hands it to Thurn.

“You got here very quickly,” Thurn comments.

“I live just over there,” Lindahl replies.

He points out of the window and then continues:

“The manager in Counting, Claude Tavernier, raised the alarm with the on-duty guard. That was”—Lindahl checks the time on his phone—“twenty minutes ago. The guard called Skövde, which is where we have our control center. Skövde called me, as they’re meant to. I pulled on some trousers and… walked over. You lot were already here.”

Thurn nods. “Is there a risk of a hostage situation?”

That’s her most pressing concern.

“There’s no need to speculate,” the security chief replies, turning his computer so that she can see the screen.

On it, two men dressed in black are standing in front of what look like tall, bar-covered cages. They are lifting boxes out of the cages and then dumping bundles of notes into fabric bags. One of the men has an automatic weapon, probably a Kalashnikov, hanging from a strap over his shoulder.

“We have over eighty CCTV cameras in the building,” Security Chief Lindahl explains, “I can bring them all up on screen.”

“Impressive.” Thurn nods approvingly. “But sadly that doesn’t help.”

“The cameras aren’t meant to prevent crimes,” Palle Lindahl replies, sounding offended. “No number of cameras or vaults will keep skilled criminals away for particularly long. Our reasoning is that the perimeter security should stand up to attack for fifteen minutes. That should be enough time.”

“Enough time for what?” the inspector asks.

“Enough time for the police to get here. That fifteen minutes has passed, and you’re here. I can open and lock the doors and elevators throughout the entire building from my computer. You have a lot of people here. I can lead you up to the robbers, if you want.”

Thurn nods thoughtfully and peers out the police van window.

The many uniformed officers are standing outside their blue-twinkling cars, talking to one another in small groups. The reason none of them seem to be hurrying, or expecting orders of any kind, is that none of these officers have been trained for a situation like this. These were men and women who could chase down vandals and muggers, who could keep drunks away from public places, overpower men who abused their wives in apartments in the southern suburbs and in the best case also hit the target during their annual shooting exam. But they had no experience tackling international organized crime.

Ordering these men and women to storm the cash depot would be extremely risky.

And with civilians inside the building over the road, it would be a risk in which lives would be at stake.

Thurn is staring at the computer screen, struck by how calmly the robbers seem to be working. She watches them methodically fill their mailbags with cash. When one sack is full, they swing it up onto their shoulders or drag it across the floor and out of the room. Since they’re coming and going, all dressed alike, it’s difficult to tell how many of them there are. Four, she would guess, but it could just as easily be three or five.

“Where are they?” she asks. “In the vault?”

“No, no,” says Lindahl. “No one gets into the vault. That’s where the big money is. No, they’re up on the sixth floor. We call it Cash. Counting. It’s where we send the notes to be counted. Then they’re sent back down to the vault. We never have more than a few hundred million up there.”

“A few hundred million?” Thurn repeats, amazed.

“Right now, we have over a billion in the building,” Lindahl points out, to put those hundreds of millions in context.

“And there’s no one else there?” Thurn asks, nodding toward the screen.

“The room should be manned…” Lindahl eventually replies. “We have a dozen or so people working in Cash at this time of day. And their orders are to stay put if something happens. But I can’t see them. I don’t actually know…”

“So even with your eighty CCTV cameras, you can’t tell whether your staff are in harm’s way?”

Palle Lindahl shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I can’t.”

“No,” Thurn says.

“But what I can say, and unequivocally,” the security chief continues, without any attempt to hide his sense of wronged irritation, “is that if you storm that building and arrest the robbers, our staff—wherever they are—will be much better off.”

The headphone in Thurn’s ear starts to ring, and she presses the button on the cable around her neck. The pilots have finally taken off, she thinks.

But it isn’t the young helicopter pilot’s voice she hears in her ear, it’s Mats Berggren’s.

“I just spoke to Hertz,” he says. “There won’t be any helicopters from Uppsala or Berga.”

“There aren’t any?”

“Hertz is at Police HQ. I don’t know what’s happening, but the message from the military authorities is that we’ll have to handle this ourselves.”

“Politics.”

“They’ve promised to watch the radar. They can see everything in the air, they say. Apparently they’ve already seen our robbers’ helicopter a few times. Both when it took off and when it got to Västberga.”

“Politicians,” Thurn repeats.

“Hasn’t our helicopter taken off?” Berggren asks.

“No,” Thurn says, glancing at her watch. “But the pilots should have made it to Myttinge by now.”

“The Task Force is getting ready,” Berggren tells her.

“Getting ready?” Thurn is dismissive. “By the time they get here, there won’t be anyone left.”

But then the inspector spots something that puts her in a better mood. Two riot vans are approaching the gas station. The robbers’ white helicopter has also just dropped down toward the roof. It’s hovering just above the cash depot now. There’s no doubt about it: the pilot has also seen the riot vans.

Thurn nods to herself.

These are the type of officers she’s willing to send into the building.

“Finally,” she says in the direction of the frustrated security chief.

86

5:40 a.m.

The riot vans drive up to the gas station and come to a halt next to Thurn. An enormous police officer climbs out of one of them, he has to be over six and a half feet tall, with a crew cut and shoulders like a bodybuilder. He’s the commanding officer.

“Who’s in charge here?” he barks.

Thurn points to herself. The man nods uninterestedly and glances over to the building and the helicopter hovering above it.

“You want us to take him down?” he asks.

“Take him down?”

“We can shoot the bastard down,” the uniformed officer says with a confident nod.

Thurn looks up at the helicopter. The beefed-up policeman is insane, she thinks. Shooting down the helicopter while it’s hovering above the roof could cause it to explode and fall onto a building full of people. What is he thinking? But before Thurn has time to say anything, Palle Lindahl sticks his head out of the police van.

“The robbers seem to be on the move,” he shouts.

He has his laptop in one hand, prepared to prove his words by showing them the images from the CCTV cameras.

Thurn turns to the riot squad leader.

“Storm the building,” she says to him. “Now. Get them before it’s too late.”

It’s time for Palle Lindahl to prove that being able to open doors from his computer wasn’t just talk.

The riot squad leader is already striding back toward his van. Thurn glances at her watch. Why hasn’t the helicopter pilot called?

87

5:41 a.m.

Jack Kluger is breathing too quickly. He’s hyperventilating. And because his body isn’t getting enough oxygen, his hands are shaking. He’s been through this before. Many times. He knows he needs to calm down. He needs to breathe more deeply, draw air into his lungs.

But it’s impossible.

Nothing is happening. The green light from his watch is glowing fiercely on his wrist. Almost thirty minutes have now passed. Thirty minutes. Something must have happened. How long should he wait, how long should he just sit in position above the roof, waiting for them? Would it be better to just leave?

He has no way of communicating with the robbers inside.

What are they waiting for?

And right then, the fuel-warning light starts to blink. In the darkness inside the helicopter, the red light pulses with unrelenting arrogance. The countdown is serious now. The light’s blinking matches the pounding of the blood in Kluger’s temples. Beneath him, on the dark ground, the flashing blue lights of the police cars cast long, licking beams of light onto the cash depot, which lies heavy and calm. The building’s powerful brick walls and dimly lit windows give no indication of anything in particular going on inside.

In the bright glow of the light on the roof, Jack Kluger is at no risk of making a mistake. He gently tilts the helicopter forward a fraction and stares down at the ladder that is still sticking up through the broken window.

No movement, no shadows, nothing.

The roof is empty.

The red fuel-warning light illuminates his face. His blue eyes reflect the blue light from the police cars over by the gas station. It’s getting more and more crowded down there, new cars keep arriving all the time.

The helicopter pilot doesn’t notice that he’s sweating. He is no longer thinking about his breathing being too quick or too shallow.

Suddenly, something new happens down by the Statoil station. Kluger spots it out of the corner of his eye, and he turns the stick to the right so that the helicopter twists in the air. He sees the two riot vans arrive.

Having done small jobs for Balik in Södertälje for over a year now, Jack Kluger knows that riot vans are a bad sign. They’re full of the kind of police officers he remembers from Texas. People who aren’t afraid of firing a weapon, people who don’t care.

Again and again, Kluger stares toward the southern horizon. He expects to see the police helicopter approaching at any moment, and he makes up his mind: If it appears, it’s over. He’ll fly away.

But maybe that has to happen sooner.

They took off from Norrtälje with less than a full tank of fuel to avoid being overweight. He realizes now that that was a mistake. The indicator has been at the bottom for a minute or two now.

He swears loudly.

His breathing is quick.

One more minute, he thinks. Then I’m off.

88

5:39 a.m.

Jakob Walker is behind the wheel.

He’s sticking to forty miles an hour, he doesn’t dare go any faster through the dense forests of Värmdö. He also doesn’t want to admit how tired he is. They landed at two, managed to get a couple of hours’ sleep and then the call came in.

The car’s headlights cast a bluish glow onto the pines and spruce. They pass low, rocky outcrops and suddenly appearing fields. Jakob has driven between the station and the hangar hundreds of times before, but at night he’s always surprised by the many tight bends.

“Maybe we could go a bit faster?” says Larsson.

Jakob turns his head. He has never really got to know Conny Larsson. They’re too different. Larsson is a quiet, solitary man in his sixties, from the far north of the country, while Jakob was born and bred in Stockholm.

“Better to make it there in one piece than end up with an elk through the window,” he says.

As expected, Larsson doesn’t reply.

Last week, they had been stationed at the National Task Force base in Solna, taking the helicopter up into the air once an hour despite the fact that absolutely nothing was happening. Jakob has never done military service, but he imagines that his night in the army-like police department is as close as he’ll ever get. They had been given a quick briefing about the robbers’ plans the night before; how a helicopter would land on the roof of the Panaxia cash depot in Bromma and then, in all likelihood, be used again for the getaway.

The night had been an emotional roller coaster. The mood in the briefing room was tense, serious, and it had felt as though all the men with the powerful jawlines around him were preparing for war.

The task was, and still is, Jakob assumes, to obstruct or possibly pursue a Bell JetRanger helicopter. He knows the model well. The 206 was the first in the series, a type of helicopter originally developed for the Americans and then successfully marketed to the civilian population once the US Air Force changed its mind and decided not to order any.

Both the Swedish military and police had used the model, or variants of it, anyway. It was actually a JetRanger II in which Jakob had taken his helicopter pilot’s license. These days, they tended to fly the ordinary Airbus Eurocopter. To an outsider, the only visible difference was the encased fantail, Eurocoptor’s pride and joy, for which it held the global patent.

In the distance, they finally spot the lights illuminating the hangar at Myttinge, and Jakob steps on the accelerator for the last quarter mile. Conny Larsson sighs. What he means by that remains to be seen.

Last week, they had discussed the risk that the robbers might open fire and came to the conclusion that if they hovered above the robbers’ helicopter, only an idiot would risk bringing down a police chopper on top of himself.

And, as Jakob understands it, the robbers are far from idiots.

He pulls up by the fence in the darkness, a short walk from the entrance. They climb out into the dark night and move quickly toward the gate. With just a few yards to go, and Jakob already fumbling with the key for the padlock, Larsson shouts. A second later, Jakob spots the same thing.

On the other side of the fence, just outside the doors into the hangar, there are two square, black boxes with blinking red lights on top of them.

Bombs.

“Stop, for God’s sake!” Larsson shouts.

But Jakob is already still. “What the hell are those?”

The two on-duty pilots stare at the bombs. It feels so strange, to be in such a familiar place, radiating a sense of peaceful stillness, and to be staring at something straight out of an American action film.

“This was what they meant,” Larsson says as he slowly backs away from the fence.

“What?”

“It’s why we were moved to Solna last week. It’s a way of making sure we can’t get into the air. Those damn things are probably on a timer. They’ll go off any moment.”

The pilots continue backing up toward the car.

“What the hell do we do?”

89

5:43 a.m.

“Are you in the air?”

Thurn is standing next to the gas station with Dag Månsson and the G4S security chief, Palle Lindahl. The riot vans are making their way toward the cash depot. For the first time since she got into the car that morning, Thurn feels in control. In just a couple of minutes, the riot squad will storm the building and the helicopter from Myttinge will arrive to block the robbers’ getaway.

But that isn’t what Jakob Walker has to tell her.

“We’re not in the air, we’re still on the ground,” the pilot says into Thurn’s earpiece.

Thurn is listening, but she doesn’t understand. “Could you repeat that?”

“There are two bombs outside the doors into the hangar,” the helicopter pilot continues. “We don’t know how they’ve been constructed. We’re waiting by the gates until help arrives.”

“Bombs?” Thurn says. “Is it—”

“My colleague is just calling it in to Control,” Jakob interrupts, glancing at Larsson, who, sure enough, has the control center on the line. “They’ll have to send someone who knows how to handle this. We need to wait until the danger is over. If it happens quickly, maybe we can—”

Thurn rips the headphone from her ear and starts running. Straight over the grass toward the riot vans and the G4S depot. Her hands cut through the air like knives, her long legs pound the ground. She runs quickly.

She shouts out as the riot vans draw closer and closer to the building.

“Abort! The buildings might be booby-trapped!”

90

5:43 a.m.

Nordgren is climbing the longer of the two ladders, up toward the roof. He’s carrying a thick rope that loops back down to the balcony on the fifth floor. The first thing he sees when he steps out into the dark dawn is the sea of blinking blue lights on the ground below.

The second thing he sees is the helicopter hovering above him.

It feels like hours have passed since he was sitting in it.

He starts pulling on the rope. Maloof has hooked one of the full mailbags to it. Nordgren backs up, backs up, backs up. It’s not quite as heavy as he expected. When he stops to catch his breath, he turns around to check where he is.

He’s an inch from the edge of the roof.

No time to get scared or to think about that now.

With the mailbag acting as a counterweight, he moves back over to the broken window and quickly hauls it up the last part of the way.

Behind him, the helicopter lands.

While Maloof holds the ladder, Sami climbs up to the roof to help Nordgren with the bags. Maloof stays behind on the balcony on the fifth floor, fastening a couple of bags at a time to the rope, to make things go more quickly. He feels exposed on the tiny ledge. He knows that the police could storm the building at any moment, if they aren’t already inside. He’s visible from every floor below, and the ladder is his only escape route, making him an even easier target.

He glances at his watch.

The fifteen minutes they had planned have turned into thirty.

It can’t take any longer. He decides to leave the last few bags they still haven’t managed to haul up and starts climbing.

Up on the roof, Sami runs over to the helicopter to throw the money into the cabin. When he opens the door, he’s met by a furious pilot.

Jack Kluger is shouting loud enough to overpower the sound of the engine.

“You said fifteen minutes! Where the hell have you been? We’re out of juice!”

The fuel warning is still blinking away with its ominous red light.

91

5:44 a.m.

If the robbers had placed bombs outside the helicopter hangar in Myttinge, the chances of their having done the same at the cash depot in Västberga were high. And Caroline Thurn didn’t want to be responsible for ordering a police officer to open a door that then exploded in his or her face.

Shouting and gesturing wildly, she manages to get the riot squad to stop before they make it to the entrance. The enormous commanding officer climbs out of the first van. He’s wearing a bulletproof vest and a helmet, and he is furious. He strides toward Thurn and stops dead right in front of her. He’s standing so close that he is actually looking down at her. The muscles in his neck are taut.

“It’s probably best if you back off,” he hisses. “We’re going in now.”

The sound of the helicopter hovering directly overhead is now so loud that they have to raise their voices.

“It might be booby-trapped!” Thurn shouts.

She imagines she can smell gasoline. It could be coming from anywhere: the helicopter, the riot vans, the gas station.

The heavily armed commanding officer looks suspicious, and then he turns to look at the entrance. One floor up, in the CCTV room, the guards are sitting in front of screens showing the same images that Palle Lindahl has on his laptop. Could they have missed someone planting bombs in the building?

“Booby-trapped?” the aggressive officer repeats, sounding like he doesn’t believe it. “I can’t see anything.”

“We have reason to believe so.”

“You do? Meaning we shouldn’t go in?” he asks, sounding incredibly disappointed.

“We need to make sure that—”

But before Thurn has time to finish her sentence, the sound of the helicopter becomes deafening, and a second later they see it lift off.

“They’re leaving!” Thurn shouts, feeling the panic rise. “They’re getting away.”

Two police officers carrying rocket launchers throw themselves out of the van. They run onto the grass, squat down with the weapons on their shoulders, and point them up at the helicopter.

The commanding officer stares at Thurn. “Give the order!” he hisses.

Thurn looks up at the helicopter.

“The order!” the riot squad leader barks. “Give me the order!”

Other than the robbers, she has no idea who is inside the helicopter. Is the pilot being forced, or is he complicit in the robbery? Do they have hostages on board?

“Give the order!” the officer screams at her. His face is red, a vein bulging on his neck.

Thurn stares at the two officers squatting down with their weapons ready. Then she looks up into the air and realizes it’s already too late, the helicopter has made it too far.

“Shit!” the officer shouts as he realizes the same thing, and he starts running back toward his vehicle, closely followed by the two men who had been on their knees on the grass.

“Follow them!” Thurn shouts to the riot squad leader, and she starts running in the opposite direction, back toward her car up by the Statoil station.

As she’s halfway there, her phone rings. She answers the call without slowing down.

“Caroline? Caroline?” Berggren shouts into her ear. “It’s me. Hertz got in touch. The military says they have two fighter jets in the air, roughly where you are.”

Thurn tries to gather her thoughts.

“The robbers just flew off,” she shouts. “I’ve got a riot van following them. Could you make sure I can keep in touch with the van, Mats? Fighter jets? How would they help?”

“I don’t know,” Berggren replies. “Could they shoot down the helicopter?”

Thurn has made it to the parking lot. Without knowing who is on board, she can’t even think about shooting down the helicopter. Could the answer be in Lindahl’s CCTV cameras? Did any of the cameras capture who went on board?

“Give me a minute,” she pants down the line.

“What should I say to the jets?”

“Tell them to stand by,” Thurn replies. “Stand by.”

She runs over to the police van, but before she manages to speak to Lindahl, Berggren calls back.

“Counterorders, Caroline,” he says.

“What does that mean?”

“Olsson found out about the fighter planes. It’s illegal.”

“What’s illegal?”

“The military’s not allowed to get involved in police activity. There’s a law… Olsson gave the counterorder. The planes have gone back to their original course.”

“Politicians,” Thorn says with a snort, but she feels a certain relief at not having to take responsibility for a Swedish combat fighter attacking a private helicopter within the capital’s airspace.

“Is the helicopter showing up on any radars?” she asks.

“Not even when it took off,” says Berggren. “The military’s looking. Us too. No one can see a thing.”

“They’re flying too low.”

“Exactly. They’re flying too low. But surely that means the riot squad should be able to see them from the highway?”

Thurn nods. Berggren is right. Since the robbers aren’t only choosing to fly low, but also have probably turned off all communication equipment, they’ll have no choice but to stick to well-lit roads for navigation. Thurn can see daylight approaching on the horizon, but it’s no more than a thin line against the dark sky. From her own experience, she knows that through the thick windowpanes of a helicopter, the world seems even darker.

“Let me talk to the riot squad,” she says to Berggren. “Patch me through. Maybe I can help them.”

92

5:35 a.m.

Tor Stenson yawns and runs his hand over his stubble.

The night shift was always long and boring. His had started at midnight, as usual, when the intensity of the newsroom is at its worst. Deliveries to the printers have begun, and the next day’s paper is starting to take shape. People run down corridors, phones ring, articles are added and taken away, and discussions about the front-page headlines, kickers and puff boxes reach frantic levels. Tor Stenson has nothing to do with any of that. He is one of the younger members of the staff, and is employed by one of the recruitment companies owned by the paper. There has been a freeze on any new reporters in the newsroom since 2001; its current employees enjoy job security, but things are different for the people hired by the recruitment company. Though Stenson’s work focuses on the Web—in the tabloid world, everyone under the age of thirty-five is an online guru—he never knows whether his job will exist from one month to the next.

Stenson always begins his shift by exchanging a few words with his colleagues on their way home. Is there any Hollywood gossip to follow up on? He goes through their competitor’s site. Do they have anything he’s missed? All around him, the newsroom empties out, and after an hour or so the rows of desks in the open-plan room fall quiet.

When the phone rings, it’s already after five thirty. Stenson jumps. In the early hours, the flow of news is minimal, meaning the call is unexpected.

“Stenson,” he answers

It’s someone calling in a tip from the police command center.

What he has to say is incredible. Sensational, even.

Stenson’s pulse picks up as he listens. Robbers in a helicopter. Breaking into a cash depot through the roof. And making their getaway—with an unimaginable sum of money—in the same helicopter.

Stenson immediately knows that this is front-page news. He can feel his heart pounding in his chest. This is his chance to bag that permanent position.

“Pictures?” he asks. “Do you have any pictures?”

The police officer gives him the number of the guard who called in the robbery from Västberga.

“Shit,” Stenson swears to himself as he dials the guard’s number and waits for the call to go through. “Shit.”

He swears aloud, though he doesn’t know why.

Yes, the guard has taken pictures of the white helicopter lifting off from the roof of the G4S building and disappearing into the black night sky. Deep down, Stenson is celebrating, but he tries to sound as indifferent as he can when the guard begins to negotiate on price.

It’s 5:48 when Tor Stenson uploads the first fuzzy images to the website. He quickly checks whether the paper’s rivals have done the same, but he can’t see anything yet.

After that, Stenson calls the paper’s news editor at home, waking him up. Stenson repeats his name a few times to begin with, making sure the editor is perfectly clear about exactly who has broken the story. And then he tells him about the helicopter.

The news editor mumbles something, hangs up and then calls the deputy editor, who reluctantly calls and wakes the editor in chief.

“Were you asleep?” the deputy asks.

“I never fucking sleep,” the editor in chief slurs, clearly emerging from some kind of pleasant dream. “I’m the editor of a tabloid. I don’t get paid to sleep.”

The deputy quickly explains what has happened.

“A helicopter robbery?” the editor in chief sums up, already sitting on the edge of his bed, pulling on his underwear. “Is there a more concise way of saying that? Whatever, doesn’t matter, we’ll see. I’m on my way in. Send people out to Västberga to interview the police at the scene. Are there any hostages?”

The deputy has no idea about hostages, but the Web editor Tor Stenson, the one who got ahold of the pictures they now have online, claims the witness heard pops coming from inside the building.

“Pops? What the hell does that mean? Were the robbers making popcorn?” the editor in chief hisses, grabbing a half-stale cinnamon bun from a plate in the kitchen and heading for the door. “We need details!”

93

5:47 a.m.

The fuel-warning light continues to blink. It’s all Kluger can see, all that exists in that moment; the red light fills the dark cabin like a constant, fateful reminder that they’ll soon run out of fuel.

“Where the hell were you?” he shouts as he angles the rotor blades forward a few degrees, allowing the metal bubble to cut through the air, away from the glowing glass pyramid on top of the building at Västberga Allé 11. “We said fifteen minutes?! It’s been… thirty-four. This isn’t going to fucking work!”

The sweat is running down his forehead, and the drops that don’t get caught on his eyebrows roll down into his eyes. He tries to blink them away. No one can hear him, the loud thudding of the machine is overpowering everything else, and they can’t communicate using their headsets, because they have chosen not to put them on. All nonessential electronics have been switched off. They don’t want to be caught on the military or police radars. They’re flying dark, with a red blinking warning light constantly reminding them of reality.

“Fucking idiots!” Kluger shouts again, though no one hears him.

Maloof is in the seat behind Jack Kluger. He leans forward with his eyes closed. Waiting for the explosion. He tries to tell himself that if the police had been given orders to shoot them down, it would have already happened by now. But still, he’s waiting for the rocket. The sound of the blast, followed by the sensation of falling. Weightlessness. Emptiness.

But there is no blast, there is no explosion. Maloof slowly sits upright. He opens his eyes. Nordgren is half-lying across the seat next to him. Diagonally in front, he can see the outline of Sami’s face beneath the anonymizing polyester of his balaclava. The blood is still pounding in Maloof’s neck, but the stillness around him comes suddenly. Is it over? He looks out the window. The sky is grayish black, he’s flying.

Is it over?

Niklas Nordgren is on his stomach on top of one of the mailbags. He had thrown himself into the helicopter, onto the seat behind the pilot and next to Michel Maloof. The way he landed means he can see out through the window in the door, and down on the ground a swarm of swirling blue lights continues to search for opportunities. There are several dozen emergency vehicles on Västberga Allé and Vretensborgsvägen, gathered in three distinct groups.

It looks like a still life, Nordgren thinks, as though someone had placed the cars there to create drama in an otherwise sleepy business park.

Along the streets crisscrossing the Västberga industrial area, the sharp white light of the streetlamps is painted like street crossings on the ground. The six-lane highway alongside it is still relatively empty. And with each second that passes, the helicopter takes them farther and farther away from the looming tower and its glowing glass pyramid on the roof.

It’s over, Nordgren thinks, but he still can’t take it in. He can feel the cold metal of the ladders beneath his palms, in the arches of his feet, but his muscle memory is clearer than his other senses.

Did we do it?

We did it, he thinks.

Despite the stubborn blinking light, Kluger carries out the planned diversionary maneuver. He makes it shorter, tighter, saving them just over a minute. His powerful jaw muscles seem to be chewing something, possibly a piece of gum that has long since lost its taste. Not once, despite his cursing, has he given his three passengers as much as a glance.

He cuts across the park in Årsta. They’re barely a hundred and fifty feet off the ground, and each of them gasps when Stockholm’s southern neighborhoods suddenly loom up in the distance, the illuminated Globe Arena—an enormous, abandoned golf ball—a clear navigation point in the foreground. Right beside it, Kluger spots the rows of red buses in Gullmarsplan. Waiting for the first departure of the morning. He takes in the proud arc of the Johanneshov Bridge, allowing the cars to roll dramatically down toward the gaping mouth of the South Way Tunnel, and higher up, to the left, the huge hospital complex like a cluster of dark, gloomy blocks. He puts the helicopter into a sharp right turn and the bright city lights disappear from view. Along the road toward Älvsjö, all that is beneath them is forest.

Sami is next to Kluger, and is staring out the window. The sky is still dark. It’ll be another half an hour before daylight starts to reveal the thin strips of cloud that are currently no more than gray shadows high in the sky, but Sami can already make out a faint glow on the horizon. The helicopter sweeps across the treetops. The Gömmaren nature reserve sweeps by beneath them in dark silence; a spellbound world of trees, paths and thickets hiding wild animals and abandoned cars.

Sami turns on his phone. It has been off since before they went into the building. He calls Team 2 at the gravel pit in Norsborg, but he can’t hear a thing, the roar of the helicopter drowns out any sound from his phone. He glances at the display. The call seems to have gone through.

“Turn on the lights!” he shouts.

He can’t hear whether anyone answers. He ends the call and tries again.

“Turn on the lights!”

If the team on the ground doesn’t turn on the headlights, it’ll be impossible for the helicopter to land in Norsborg. The gravel pit might be big, but the forest around it is dense.

“Turn on the lights!” he shouts.

Now that he has given the instructions three times, he feels satisfied. They’ve been waiting for his call, and he knows it went through. That’s enough.

Sami unbuckles his seat belt and turns around. Maloof is diagonally behind him. He nods, pulls his balaclava up over his nose, scratches his beard and grins.

Sami turns again and glances at Niklas Nordgren. His black balaclava doesn’t reveal any expression, but he nods too.

Sami turns back to face forward.

He can no longer hear the noise of the rotor blades.

They did it.

They did it.

Thoughts of how his brothers will react when he throws the bundles of cash at them fill his mind. Payback. He can already feel people’s eyes on him in town, everyone knowing that he has fulfilled his promises. He can just see them coming over to say hello without looking him in the eye as he’s eating a meal at some fancy restaurant. And Karin. She’s in front of him, with John clinging onto one leg and the baby on her hip at the other side. He won’t need to say a word. Their eyes will meet and she will know it’s all over. He’s the man who kept his word.

Jack Kluger is flying low, no more than 100 or 120 feet above the treetops. He assumes they have six or seven minutes of fuel left. As the forest comes to an end and the water begins, the blinking fuel light is replaced by a steady red glow. He flies straight above the treetops on the south side of Lake Alby and continues north, toward the glittering lights of the E4 road.

94

5:51 a.m.

Detective Chief Inspector Caroline Thurn drives out of the industrial area in Västberga, leaving the sea of blue flashing lights behind her. She isn’t responsible for the fact that Central Command seems to have directed all the patrol cars in the county to G4S. Thurn’s initial order not to shoot at the helicopter has now become the official line—meaning that the only thing the fifty or so frustrated and slightly bored officers at the scene have done is to stand and watch as the robbers lifted off and flew away.

Thurn is still experiencing an adrenaline rush when she reaches the entrance ramp to the highway. She brakes and hesitates. She still hasn’t heard from the riot squad and has to guess where the helicopter might be heading.

The question is whether she should go north or head south on the E20. There are plenty of exits and on-ramps around Västberga, so whatever she decides, she can quickly change her mind.

No Swedish police officers have experience chasing helicopters at night. But after all the years Caroline Thurn has spent hunting robbers, she has developed a keen sense of intuition. And the minute her hands grip the wheel as hard as she can, swinging up the on-ramp heading north, back into Stockholm, her intuition tells her that it’s too late. It’s just a vague feeling, she hasn’t even formulated the thought, but there’s no ignoring the emptiness burning in her stomach.

She hears a ringing sound in her ear, and accepts the call.

“Thurn?” It’s Berggren. “I have Olsson here. She wants to talk to you.”

Before she has time to protest, the national police commissioner’s voice comes on the line.

“Have we lost them, Caroline?”

At first, she doesn’t reply.

“We’ve got a riot squad chasing them,” she eventually says.

The line is silent.

“Is that a flying riot squad, Caroline?”

Thurn hates sarcasm. She passes the turnoff to Årsta and blindly continues along the Essingeleden. The helicopter full of robbers could just as easily be heading south, toward Södertälje.

“Caroline, I have Ekblad ringing me every third minute. The papers have already published pictures of the helicopter, and it’s not just our own damn broadcasters we’ve got camped out there in Västberga, we’ve got people from all over the world. Der Spiegel, the BBC. We’re not going to get away from this one, Caroline. It reeks of official statements and press conferences.”

Thurn dislikes press conferences even more than sarcasm. The traffic into Stockholm is still sparse, but in just a few hours’ time it’ll be at a standstill.

“Ekblad will explain that the police made a unique effort, as always,” Olsson continues, “which is something people should remember when we need increased funding for the police force in general and Stockholm in particular in the next budget. You know the script.”

Thurn isn’t listening. She isn’t stupid. She knows that Olsson is asking her to prepare for the inevitable questions. How much they knew in advance, why they didn’t manage to stop it.

“Caroline?”

Berggren is back on the line. Olsson falls silent. She can hear him too.

“I have the riot squad leader on the line. Want to take it?”

A second later, the call with Olsson has been ended and reality fills Caroline’s ears.

“Thurn here,” she says when she hears the static of the riot van’s communication equipment. “Give me an update.”

“We’ve lost it.”

The detective swings into the right lane and pulls in behind a slow truck with Estonian plates. She passes the exit for Gröndal.

“What happened?” she asks.

“We were following it toward Årsta,” the voice replies. “Then it turned across the park. We couldn’t follow, so we lost it.”

“Which direction did it turn?”

“South. Down toward Älvsjö.”

Thurn nods. She swings back into the left-hand lane and steps on the accelerator. It isn’t far to the next exit. But as she reaches ninety miles an hour and her knuckles turn white, she can’t fool herself any longer.

It’s over.

“Caroline? Are you still there?” Therese Olsson’s voice has reappeared in her ear. “What’s happening?”

95

5:51 a.m.

Kluger holds up a finger.

They are less than one minute away from the first meeting place, he signals. He has a GPS unit in his hand.

Sami brushes his fantasies to one side. He turns around. Nordgren and Maloof have already managed to tie the mailbags to the rope. There are five bags in total, but there’s no way of knowing how much money they grabbed. Didn’t they haul more than five bags out of Counting?

Sami doesn’t have time to think any further than that before the pilot slows down and allows the helicopter to move even closer to the ground. They are now flying lower than the treetops around them, across the north end of Lake Alby. Along Masmovägen, running parallel to the beach, there is a row of simple wooden cottages. Summer houses to some, something to be torn down to others.

Zoran Petrovic had docked the boat by the jetty, as agreed, a few days earlier.

It wasn’t a particularly spectacular vehicle. A typical metal archipelago motorboat with a cabin at the front, big enough to hide ten or so mailbags full of money. The two outboard motors at the stern would be able to keep anyone following them at a distance, if necessary. Going at a speed of ten knots, no more, you passed through two narrow straits, first beneath the Botkyrkaleden Bridge and then beneath the E20, and that would bring you out in the Vårbyfjärden Strait. From there, you could either choose to go northward, toward Stockholm, or turn south, toward Södertälje. It would all depend on the movements of the police.

Maloof opens the side door of the helicopter, and the cold wind forces its way into the cabin. The helicopter is hovering directly above the boat.

Together, Nordgren and Maloof lower the mailbags with the rope they just used on the roof in Västberga. Once they are sure that the first has landed in the middle of boat, they let go and allow the remainder of the money to fall from the heavens.

Before Maloof has even closed the cabin door, the boat has pushed off from the jetty and started its journey north. Kluger quickly guides the helicopter higher, and they continue toward Norsborg.

96

5:53 a.m.

It’s barely two minutes from Lake Alby to the gravel pit in Norsborg. They are still flying low, and now the American is checking his GPS every ten or so seconds. Sami, sitting next to him, doesn’t need to ask about the red light.

After about a minute, they spot the lights of the cars. They’re arranged in a triangle, just like the flashlights at the takeoff site in Stora Skuggan a few hours earlier.

Sami points and the American nods.

The landing happens quickly, without any drama.

Ezra comes running from one of the cars with a couple of gas cans. He puts them down next to the helicopter, whose engine has just been turned off, and Sami then runs back to the car with him.

They drive away without saying goodbye to anyone.

Nordgren quickly hugs Maloof. The feeling of having succeeded has started to creep through his body, no matter how much he tries to fight it. He isn’t back in Lidingö yet, he’s still not out of the woods.

But he’s close.

He runs over to the car where Jonas Wallmark, one of his childhood friends, is waiting. It’s not the first time Wallmark has been the driver in this kind of situation.

Maloof and Kluger are left alone by the helicopter. The American is busy refueling from one of the cans, and he nods. He’s calmer now.

“It felt good to be up in the air again,” he says.

Maloof nods. He doesn’t know what the pilot means, but he doesn’t care. When Kluger lifts off in the white helicopter a few minutes later, disappearing toward a horizon that is slowly turning blue, Maloof knows he will never see or hear of the man again.

He goes over to the lone car left at the gravel pit in Norsborg. He glances at his watch. It’s just turned six. They’re almost half an hour behind schedule. He’ll probably get stuck in the morning traffic heading for Södertälje.

He opens the passenger’s side door of the BMW and climbs in.

The shock renders him speechless.

Petrovic is sitting behind the wheel.

“But…” Maloof stammers. “What the hell… are you doing here?”

“You texted me and told me to come.”

Petrovic had been confused when he got the message after tricking the police to the north of Täby.

Up until that point, the plan had been for him to drive the boat and the money.

“Texted?” Maloof asks. He can’t believe this is happening. “Wait… so who the hell’s driving the boat?”

Petrovic looks at him. At first, he doesn’t seem to understand. “What?”

“If you’re here, who’s driving the boat?” Maloof repeats. “Someone drove off with the money. If it wasn’t you…?”