‘Now I want what’s in the other trunk.’
Leo took both the submachine gun and the AK4 through the hole in the floor, wrapped red tape around one of their barrels and placed the weapons on the bottom shelf.
‘Leo?’
‘Yeah?’
Vincent wanted to say it too. But it felt so strange. He’d never said it before.
‘Just so you know …’
Leo took the last machine gun, which was much larger and weighed more, marked the barrel with red tape as well, and placed it next to the others that would never be fired again. Then looked around. Two hundred and eighteen automatic weapons left.
‘What?’
It was so hard to say, it might sound false or artificial, even though it wasn’t.
‘… I love you too.’
35
JOHN BRONCKS OPENED the computer and clicked on the file labelled SVEDMYRA. It contained two documents. He put his cursor on the first, named CAMERA 1 – the surveillance camera above the entrance door. He clicked and slid a thin timeline to a sequence at 17.51, the time at which the three bank robbers in black masks had entered the building.
A total of five seconds of film. No sound, no colour. And jerky, as moving surveillance images always were.
The back of a head. That’s what the camera sees first. A black head with a larger bulge at each ear, and which after the next step turns into a black neck.
Broncks moved forward one frame at a time.
The black head makes a half turn of his upper body, looking for the camera, raises his weapon, aiming.
Frame by frame. You see me. Moment by moment. I see you.
And in the eyes – no anger, fear, stress.
Pia Lindhe (PL): They smelled. The boots. Like shoe polish. You know, petrol and toffee, they smell like that straight after you’ve polished them.
The woman who had just gone up to the counter to be served, holding a plastic bag in her right hand and her number in her left. Then the shooting.
PL: They were so shiny. When I stared at them, I could see … myself in them.
It’s as if all of her bones and joints are gone. She goes down in the shortest possible time and lands flat on the floor. And even though she’s so scared she can’t understand what’s going on, she turns her head again, up towards the masked face, because she wants to know.
John Broncks clicked on the timeline, froze the image.
Throughout the interview she’d sat in front of him leaning against the window of the bank, bleeding from one ear, from at least one burst eardrum. And afterwards she’d collapsed, her last resources exhausted, still weeping. They’d approached like a firing squad, carrying out an execution without considering who stood blindfolded in front of them – terrifying everyone into obedience.
‘John?’
Sanna, at his door, like last time. Despite how late it was, she was still in the building.
‘I’ve finished my analysis. Altogether a total of eighty-one cartridges were fired inside the bank. Which means, according to the available statistics, this was one of Europe’s most violent robberies. Ever.’
She shifted, now leaning against the doorframe. She was going to stay there.
‘FMJ, 7.62 calibre. Manufactured by the Swedish military. Karlsborg, 1980.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I can’t determine whether or not it was the same weapon, the same suspects as in the security van robbery.’
‘But you can’t rule it out?’
‘An investigator might see patterns indicating as much, John. But no facts.’
‘You mean that we could have two groups equipped with Swedish military weapons, committing robberies in the same neighbourhood, in the same autumn?’
‘That’s not what I mean. But the forensic evidence doesn’t rule it out.’
‘Farsta almost forty shots. And now … eighty-one? First they shot up a security van, now a bank. Something must have come from the same weapon!’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘Nothing has been used twice. I’ve checked everything I can.’
‘There is a pattern. Their behaviour.’
‘Yes. But no facts.’
He looked at her.
‘And if I wanted to hear one more time what Sanna thinks, not what the forensic scientist has been able to establish?’
‘There are … movement patterns that recur. Camera Two. The moment before it was shot down.’
He turned his computer screen to her as she spoke.
‘Legs bent. Low centre of gravity. Those were the security guard’s words exactly, when you questioned him next to the security van. And now – see? That’s exactly how the gunman is standing here too.’
Jerky and silent. But clear.
‘And then, his finger, if you make the picture a bit bigger there … it’s clearly above the trigger guard, perfectly straight along the barrel – as if he’s pointing it at us.’
A few more frames, then Broncks stopped time again and zoomed in on a gloved hand. Sanna leaned in to look.
‘Discipline, John. Never expose your men, every shot should be secure. This is a robber who doesn’t put his finger on the trigger until right before firing – he thinks about weapons safety – so he’s not self-taught. He’s been educated. He’s assumed the firing position thousands of times. He’s been drilled.’
Just four kilometres between crime scenes. Just seven weeks between crimes.
Still – the forensic evidence showed something else.
These could have been carried out by different perpetrators.
Ten past five. Still a long time until dawn. If he tried, he could hear Anneli snoring softly upstairs, and he knew she’d be asleep for many more hours; he was doing the opposite, avoiding sleep so he could fully absorb what had happened yesterday and prepare for the final phase of the robbery.
With the thirty-kilo case on his shoulder, Leo crossed the yard through the first snow of the season. Just a few centimetres of fluffy powder, and his shoes were covered with white without getting wet. A pleasant feeling in his chest. His deep breaths turned to clouds of steam. Several times during the night, he’d got out of bed to read Teletext and listen to the radio news – there were no leads. His plan and its execution had been perfect.
He unlocked the garage and turned on the lights. It was just as cold inside, and he pulled two heaters towards him, then grabbed the circular saw to start splitting the broad plank of plywood lying on the workbench into equal-sized pieces.
A car drew up outside. The garage door glided open and one of the company’s cars drove inside with its windows down.
‘Every single year!’ yelled Felix. ‘Fucking idiots don’t change their tyres! It’s chaos out there!’
Felix, dressed in work clothes, his hair messy, tired eyes avoiding the glare, climbed out of the car and went straight over to the compressor and the nail gun to fit together five equally long pieces of plywood into square boxes.
‘Felix?’
Leo had learned to recognise the irritation, the dramatic gestures. Waiting was usually the best strategy, so he opened the trunk instead and took out three weapons marked with red – two from Svedmyra and one from Farsta – and started taking them apart, a total of forty-eight separate pieces.
‘Come on? Felix? We robbed a fucking bank yesterday!’
Felix filled the mixer a third full with water and picked up a lumpy bag of cement, a wall of dust rising as he poured it.
‘Felix? I can damn well see that something’s the matter.’
‘He needs to cut it out.’
‘Who?’
‘Just cut it out!’
‘Who?’
‘Jasper.’
Felix grabbed the bucket and emptied the mixed cement into the newly built boxes.
‘He needs to just fucking stop picking on Vincent. All the time! Every single little mistake! If he stands wrong on the shooting range or stops for a few shitty seconds outside the bank. O
r when we practise in here, he starts fucking shouting like he’s Ivan.’
While the boxes were half filled, Leo flattened out bolt after bolt with a sledgehammer, and then pushed them down into the cement along with pieces of pistons and bolts.
‘We’re a team. And I’m trying to hold us together.’
‘And he just talks so damn much. Running around in that leather jacket he dropped five thousand on and those damn boots he always wears, Fly High, or whatever the hell they’re called, and …’
‘Hi-Tec Magnum.’
‘I don’t give a damn about what they’re called! He runs around in that fucking cop outfit, talking about how he’s in the SWAT team or …’
‘What did you say he did?’
‘One beer in a bar, and after two fucking sips starts Jasper telling anyone who’ll listen that he’s working on some task force and …’
‘In the same boots?’
The last box – weapon parts drowned in liquid cement.
‘Felix? In the same boots as inside the bank – and in the security van?’
‘In the same boots.’
Leo carried the heavy boxes to the truck bed, put the cover on, closed it again. And then looked up through the skylight into the morning darkness. It wasn’t enough to plan meticulously – the seconds, disguises, movements, voices, getaway cars. Afterwards, without instructions or rules, when normality returned, he hadn’t continued to control them. The only tracks that exist, that should exist, are the ones I choose to leave. He had to be clearer, require even greater devotion.
The air was crisp. The sparse snowflakes twinkled.
The good feeling was gone, and he had to get it back.
John Broncks hurried out of the building he’d lived in for so long, where he knew everyone’s faces but nobody’s names, a ground floor one-bedroom flat in western Södermalm. Cold, damp morning air. He passed the Italian café, as always nodding through the foggy window to the owner, who was grinding coffee beans behind the counter.
Seven weeks between robberies. Four kilometres between crime scenes.
And military equipment.
He’d reviewed every open case related to weapons theft at military installations again. This time he’d included an even heavier armament, the KSP 58, a machine gun that was extremely rare on the black market – the theft of a weapon that powerful always caught the attention of the police.
Nothing. In any of the records.
The crossing at Långholms Street. Thirty thousand cars per day. Broncks usually tried to hold his breath as he hurried over, until he reached the snowy slope on the other side.
Three hours of sleep and despite that, he was still wide awake.
He had got home around three thirty a.m., lay down immediately, but kept his bedside lamp lit, comparing the five- and twelve-second loops of surveillance video from the bank with the twenty minutes it had taken to hijack the security van. Seven weeks ago, supposedly Middle Eastern men. Yesterday a disciplined group, military in appearance. It wasn’t until he turned off the lamp that he’d realised that only one witness would be able to say if they were the same – and that witness spent his days in an apartment just a ten-minute walk from his own.
He headed down the hill, past a constantly red stop light and across the bridge towards Reimersholme, a sleepy and forgotten corner of Stockholm, where 1940s buildings stood on the edge of the canal. Swans were circling in front of two elderly ladies who held plastic bags of stale bread. Broncks appreciated all the many guises of the city – here, just three hundred metres from a major road so choked with exhaust fumes he’d felt the need to hold his breath, nature still reigned.
A small kiosk stood on the other side of the bridge, operated by a young man who’d grown up in Kuwait. He opened early every morning and was always friendly. Broncks stopped, purchased his breakfast of a Coca-Cola, a candy bar and a few newspapers.
He turned shortly beyond the kiosk and browsed the headlines as he passed – EUROPE’S MOST VIOLENT ROBBERY – the facts he’d told the press officer to release – 81 SHOTS FIRED – you have to give a little in order to keep most of it to yourself – MILITARY MACHINE GUNS – the balance between the secrecy a certain kind of police work required in order to move forward and the transparency demanded by the public who paid for that policing. After the headlines were theories on pages eight, nine, ten and eleven of both papers referring to important sources who were close to the investigation, which he knew often meant one reporter speculating with another reporter – the four robbers were mercenaries according to one source, or former UN peacekeepers, or unemployed soldiers from the former Eastern Bloc.
The house stood at the end of the street, near woodland and an area popular with hikers. Canoe racks lay covered in white under the first snow, as did the swimming and boat jetties that stretched out into the brackish water.
He entered the front door. A 1940s-style apartment building with banisters and lift original to the period. Fifth floor. Four doors in one direction, but none bearing the name he was looking for; four doors in the other direction and on the third, LINDÉN.
He rang the bell, waited.
Above the letterbox hung a stick drawing made by child in crayons and green paint. Two big circles, two small. Mum, dad, kids. Family.
He rang again.
‘Yes?’
An elderly man in his seventies answered the door. Not one of the drawings.
‘I’m looking for Jan Lindén.’
Broncks held up his badge.
‘John Broncks. City Police. It’s about—’
‘I know what it’s about. But my son isn’t feeling very well. It would be better if you came back some other time.’
A man old enough to be his own father. Friendly voice, friendly face. He could never have been John’s father.
‘I need ten minutes. Then I promise to leave.’
The older man hesitated, but not for his own sake.
‘I’ll see if he’s up to talking.’
He disappeared into what was probably the living room, where Broncks glimpsed a television and a glass coffee table. The room next to it had its door open, a children’s room – a silvery robot stood guard on a plastic stool, there were drawings on the walls, and a pinewood bunk bed with large fish swimming on the sheets and pillowcases. According to his interrogation, Jan Lindén had taken two photographs from his wallet during the hijacking. One faded colour photo of a sweet child smiling at the camera with his football socks rolled down. And another child missing two front teeth blowing out the candles on a birthday cake.
‘You can come in. But only for ten minutes.’
John Broncks took off his shoes and was about to step over the threshold to the living room when the older man stopped him.
‘I’d like to hear you repeat it.’
‘I’ll leave in ten minutes.’
‘Good. You can sit here in the meantime.’
The sofa was too low for him to sit up straight and the imitation leather made his back itch. The walls were everything that his own walls were not. Orange Dala horses next to authentic African masks made in China. He got up after a while, it felt wrong – only invited guests who’d been warmly welcomed should sit on the sofa.
Shambling, slow steps across the wooden floor.
‘Hello. John Broncks. We met in Sköndal. Immediately … afterwards.’
‘Afterwards?’
A man who two months later was still stumbling through his days, weeping, screaming, on medication. Broncks had met him before, or others like him. Some came back. Some were never again able to live a full life.
‘At the ambulance. We spoke then.’
Bottomless eyes that looked at him without recognition.
‘And now I’d like to speak to you again.’
The retired father was holding his forty-year-old son upright. His grey woollen socks were toeless, his tracksuit shapeless around the knees, there was sharp stubble on his chin, and his thin, unwashed hair hung o
ver his troubled eyes – as if he were embarrassed, didn’t want to be seen like this – the traumatised security guard.
‘He … he said it.’
Lindén sank into the spot on the sofa where Broncks had just been sitting.
‘The whole time. When he shoved the gun into my mouth.’
‘He said … what?’
‘Shoot. Shoot him.’
Darkness that turned to anxiety that turned to insomnia that turned to even more darkness. John Broncks thought he understood. At one time he’d lived like that himself.
‘Here.’
An envelope containing two black and white photographs, frozen images from a surveillance camera. Broncks lay them down on the glass table. One to the left. CAMERA 1. Taken from above, an enlargement of the eyes and mouth. The second to the right. CAMERA 2. A wider picture clearly showing them in the firing position.
‘The men you saw, did they resemble either of these two?’
Lindén pulled the black and white images closer with a trembling hand.
‘What … is this?’
‘Yesterday. At five fifty-one p.m. A bank robbery in Svedmyra. If you compare these two men with the two you met in Farsta – do you see any similarities?’
Lindén tried to pick up the two pictures, but the photo paper slipped through his damp fingers.
‘Yesterday?’
He tried pulling the pictures closer, but they stuck to the glass table, so he gave up and crossed his arms over his stomach, as if to protect himself.
‘When they were finished, one of them turned back. Not the one who took our name tags. The other one, the calm one. He wasn’t at all in a hurry, and he walked over to the front seat and …’
‘Jan …’
The Father: Made in Sweden Part I Page 21