“Okay, boys, everyone grab the weapons you need. There’s forty-five minutes to go. We’ll change now and go through it one last time once everyone has their gear on.”
They looked like a secret task force, he thought a moment later as they were crouching in a circle around Zoran, studying the map he had drawn in the sand with one index finger. All in black, masked, heavily armed.
“The truck will arrive just after ten. We’ll get there fifteen minutes before then at the earliest, so we don’t attract too much attention. The truck’s most recent stop will have been Södertälje, so it’s coming from the south, and it will drive in this way . . .” His finger marked a cross in the sand. “The loading dock is here. The truck will drive into the area behind the security door, where it will be under camera surveillance, so we have to lie really fucking low right then. Jorma and I will be here, thirty meters from the door, in the Audi. Lindros, you’ll park across from us and come from the other direction on my signal. When the door opens, which ought to be within five minutes, you’ll drive up here and block the exit. Jorma and I will move up behind it so they can’t go anywhere.”
The scent of pitch and damp sand. Like in Finland when he was little, on the holidays Harri always managed to ruin.
The rain was falling harder. Zoran’s voice had turned into background noise. He gave them further instructions: who should call whom . . . the exact moment they would strike . . . who would get the guard and the driver out of the front seat . . . who would keep them under control . . . when the plastic explosive should be applied . . .
“Questions?” he asked.
“Hell no, let’s just get going! Everyone, come on now, dammit!”
“Good. We’ll get in the cars in ten minutes.”
The commuter traffic had lessened. They went in a convoy, keeping fifty meters between each of the cars.
Gårdnäs exited at the Statoil station; Jorma could see him slowing down and stopping on a rise with a view of the traffic. He felt his arms grow numb as he leaned back. He slapped them lightly and realized that he was freezing.
The tail lights of Fredén’s Saab vanished down onto the exit for northbound traffic. He turned at the intersection by Skärholmen city center and stopped his car in front of a bus shelter. It was a no-stopping zone, but it was the best place to lay out the caltrops.
Two cars were left in the convoy. Lindros’s Volvo and their own Audi. They were approaching the multi-story carpark, passing the first entrance. There was a camera mounted on a pole, three meters up. But with its fake plates, the car was safe.
Then they were inside the multi-story. Strange sounds were coming from the engine, sounds that shouldn’t be there . . . A figment of his imagination, he thought as he fingered the pistol in his pocket.
Lindros turned off toward the loading dock. Zoran stopped across from it. He turned the key in the ignition. The engine went quiet with a sigh.
“Ten minutes until the truck is here. We’ll hold off on the masks so people walking by don’t wonder what’s going on.”
It had happened too quickly, he thought; they ought to have worked out some attention-diverting tactics, set off a bomb a few kilometers away so any patrol cars would go that way. But there hadn’t been time.
“Everything okay, Jorma?”
Those bad vibes were still in the background, like faint tinnitus.
“I don’t know.”
“You sure as hell can’t back out now.”
“I just have a really bad feeling about this . . .”
“It’s like I don’t know you, man . . . Here, have a drink!”
He took the mineral water Zoran handed him, drinking half the bottle and burping through his nose. Zoran’s phone gave a faint buzz. Gårdnäs was reporting that everything was quiet on the police scanner.
At 10:15, Fredén let them know that the truck was turning off at the shopping center. There were more people around by now, families on their way to the supermarket, regular shoppers, a dad on paternity leave with a new-born in a baby carrier, passing their car slowly on his way to the stairwell.
The surroundings crowded in on them. The odors of exhaust and warm car engines. The footsteps of a woman walking across concrete in high heels. The beeping of car locks. Shopping trolleys clattering as they were pushed across the floor.
His eyes danced this way and that over the parking level. The two cars over there by the shorter wall and the van over in the far corner . . . had those been there the whole time?
He fumbled for the handgun in his pocket, nudging the Uzi on the floor at his feet. Its barrel was aimed at his stomach.
A gray car drove in and took a right down the ramp. A few pigeons were picking at the filth in front of the loading dock. He could hear music from a car stereo.
Then he saw the armored truck. It turned up ahead of them, passed at a distance and stopped at the steel door. No escort vehicle, which was a relief. Their insider had managed to prevent that.
The sliding door opened slowly. The brake lights flashed epileptically as the truck slowed down at a ramp. The door closed again, creaking sharply.
A few minutes passed. The roar of traffic on the E4. A strange silence until the door opened again.
“Put on your mask. It’s time.”
The vehicle rolled out slowly, as if its driver had become suspicious. The lights of Lindros’s car flashed on. Zoran looks like an insect with his mask on, Jorma thought as he fumbled for his own; he pulled it over his face and took out his pistol.
It was happening too fast; they weren’t even up there yet and Lindros had already blocked the truck and was out of his car. The door was open and he fired five or six shots at the ceiling from his Uzi as he screamed like a madman. Jorma fumbled for the plastic bag of explosive and heard the tires squeal as Zoran put the pedal to the metal.
The guards tumbled out of the cab with their hands up. One younger guy who seemed to be in shock. One middle-aged man with tears in his eyes. It felt like time stood still even as everything continued to happen, all at once, with no chronological order, with no rhyme or reason.
They had come to the truck. Zoran’s jaws grinding in the rearview mirror, the Rohypnol glaze of his eyes; it was like he was frothing at the mouth. More shots were fired. People were screaming, in full panic mode. Jorma saw a family with small children run for their lives toward the stairwell . . . He saw the headlights of a van flicker on in the distance, sirens blaring very close by, the blue lights on two unmarked cars.
“Go!” he screamed at Zoran. “Get out of here!”
His neck snapped back with the sudden acceleration as Zoran drove against traffic, toward the entrance ramp, roaring as he leaned on the horn.
He managed to roll down his window and toss the dummy bomb out. Half-jacketed bullets struck the trunk of the car. In the rearview mirror he could see Lindros being overpowered by cops, and he watched as the unmarked car following them slammed on the brakes in front of the dummy bomb and backed straight into a concrete pillar at high speed. Harri’s voice in the back of his head: Finnish curses about how everything was about to go to hell.
It was raining harder. His mother’s old neighborhood flew past the car windows at one hundred and forty kilometers per hour. People stared after them in surprise. Sirens in the distance. It was total chaos at Kungens Kurva.
He grabbed his phone and tried to call Fredén as he vacillated between sweating and freezing. The call went through, but there was no answer. Same with Gårdnäs. Must have been caught.
His heart was pounding violently, as if a terrified animal were trying to kick its way out. He had been right from the start. Something wasn’t quite right about this.
“Satan’s goddamn fucking cunt!”
They passed a truck on the wrong side of a traffic island. An oncoming Volvo swerved straight into a ditch.
Zoran made another insane pass before turning left onto a smaller road. The ABS kicked in just before the car went into a skid.
&nbs
p; Silence. Someone had turned off the volume. He could no longer hear Zoran, he could only see that he was saying something, his mouth moving like a fish behind the glass of an aquarium.
Jorma’s window was still open and raindrops were lashing his face. Suddenly the volume returned. “That fucking cunt ratted us out. That pencil pusher changed his mind and went to the cops. I’m going to fucking murder that asshole.”
The sirens were getting louder. Jorma peered at the rearview mirror: blue lights five hundred meters away.
A motorcycle was coming straight at them as Zoran cut another curve. He managed to swerve at the last second, slowing down as they approached the intersection in Vårby.
“Get out of the car, for God’s sake!”
Zoran was holding a hand grenade in one fist and the Uzi in the other. He was waving them around like a madman. There was a strange noise in the distance; Jorma recognized it but couldn’t place it and looked around in confusion as Zoran started pouring petrol from a plastic can all over the upholstery.
Suddenly the Audi was burning before him. It crackled as plastic and fabric melted. The wall of heat forced him to back up. He tossed the Tokarev through the open window. There were too many cops; they would never be able to shoot their way out.
That noise again—and this time he realized what it was. He raised his eyes and saw it, five hundred meters away: the hovering police helicopter.
Time was chopped up into tiny little pieces. He hadn’t known it was happening, but they had run to the getaway car in the car park. Its tires had been slashed.
“No fucking way! We have to get out of here!”
The odor of burning rubber. Flames from the intersection, where the car was burning. People in nearby buildings were throwing their windows open to see what was going on.
“Move, for Chrissake!”
Zoran tugged at him and made him run for the woods and the rocky hill. A police van had stopped at the intersection; he heard dogs barking, German shepherds, he thought. How the hell had they managed to dispatch a K9 unit so quickly?
They made it to the woods. He looked for a way around the hill but couldn’t find one. Just a narrow path, straight over the rocks. He heard the sickly sound of his own lungs panting as he went uphill; he fought his way through the half overgrown path as branches and brush hit him in the face.
More barking. Cops calling through megaphones in the distance . . . They ought to split up; it would be better for one of them to get away than neither of them.
Twenty-five meters on there was a fork in the path. Zoran went to the right, toward a valley. He threw down his Uzi and the hand grenades before he vanished among the trees. Jorma was flooded with relief; they wouldn’t shoot unarmed robbers.
He made it to the crest and continued along a ridge. This was a sparse beech forest. He found himself in something like a bower, where the light filtered down in thin columns. He could tell that the helicopter was above the treetops further off, but the pilot couldn’t see him.
He sank to the ground to catch his breath. Lake Mälaren was about a kilometer to the west. A boat, he thought. If he could steal a boat . . .
He couldn’t hear the dogs anymore, just the helicopter moving across the forested area.
Then he heard Zoran’s voice in the distance—a sudden scream.
He jogged in the direction of the sound and found himself in a passage between some juniper bushes. He stopped short and took shelter. He was gasping for breath, suddenly terrified, though he didn’t understand why.
He heard a faint mewling sound twenty meters off. He leaned forward.
He saw a tall man in a bulletproof vest.
A robber, he thought at first. The man was wearing a black cap and a mask with holes for the eyes; he adjusted it with the back of his hand as if it didn’t quite fit. He was wearing gloves and dark clothing just like their own.
He was aiming a silenced handgun at Zoran. In his other hand was the Uzi Zoran had just ditched.
Zoran was on the ground, bleeding from his thigh. Shot.
The man in the mask ejected the magazine from the Uzi and calmly emptied the ammunition. He stuck the bullets in the pocket of his dark jacket and replaced the magazine. Then he aimed the weapon into the woods and fired the remaining bullets in quick succession before handing it back to Zoran.
The silence seemed unreal. The man nodded, almost politely, Jorma thought. He pulled off one glove and stretched his hand.
It was as if Jorma were living thirty seconds in the future, as if he were experiencing everything just before it happened. Something about the man’s hand bothered him. Zoran looked in surprise at the unloaded Uzi the cop had given him.
The man shot him right in the forehead. The smacking sound as his skull crushed in, the halo of blood that spread out in an almost perfectly round pool, the grayish-red clumps of brain matter on his clothes.
Zoran’s expression of surprise—the last he would see of him.
Gone. It was inconceivable.
The man placed one of the hand grenades in Zoran’s lifeless hand and the other in Zoran’s pocket. Then he walked calmly back toward the hill. Stopped. Turned around.
They were directly in one another’s line of vision. They looked at each other for a split second before Jorma darted for cover and started running.
He rounded a pond and followed a path straight west. Cold sweat was running down his back. He felt a wave of nausea come over him and swallowed the sour liquid back down.
This is not happening, he thought. And yet it was happening.
Flowers grew along the path, and the autumn’s last butterflies fluttered past. Birds were singing nearby; they sounded tinny, as if they were coming from a radio.
Zoran . . . He couldn’t wrap his head around it.
He fell, hardly noticing as it happened. His foot caught on a protruding tree root and he landed chest-first on the ground. There was a stabbing pain in his leg, but he didn’t realize he’d hurt his knee until he stood up.
The pain cut through the adrenaline. He bit his cheek. He limped another twenty meters down the path before stopping to remove his jacket. He tossed it in among the trees on the right side of the path, to confuse the dogs, and then he doubled back along his own trail. He stopped at a gap between two spruces on the left side and walked in between them. The branches closed behind him like a curtain.
He went on through what looked like an overgrown park, passed a few large houses in the distance, and found himself at the lake.
The trees grew all the way up to the shoreline, poplars and hazels. He looked out over the channel; it was too far to swim.
The cold penetrated his legs as he waded out, easing the pain in his knee and helping to clear his thoughts. Raindrops were sprinkling down, reproducing themselves as rings on the surface of the water. He could smell mud and damp sand.
He waded fifty meters in so the dogs would lose his scent before moving back toward the shore and continuing north.
Every time he took a step, it felt like someone was jabbing a screwdriver into the back of his knee and turning it full force.
Another bay came into view, with a caisson dock a bit further on. Right behind that was a rowboat. Homes perched on the slope above.
He approached the boat cautiously, as if it might go up in smoke if he moved too quickly. He swore under his breath. No oars. He looked around for a barge pole of some sort, hoping he could try to pole his way across the channel.
He could hear the helicopter again, but he was having a hard time judging its position. The barking was coming closer . . . men’s voices, shouting. He was sorry he’d ditched his handgun; he wouldn’t be able to defend himself if the masked cop showed up again.
He left the shore, limping up the slope toward the houses, rounded a thick boxwood bush, and stopped at a gravel path. A white Mercedes was backing out of a garage.
He spotted the helicopter through a gap in the trees, three hundred meters away, over the water. A gigantic,
metal dragonfly. The wind from the rotors was so strong that it was whipping a crater into the water.
Barking in the distance, cop voices yelling hysterically on megaphones.
He hated dogs; he’d always been afraid of them.
He picked up a rock from the ground, walked over to the garage, stopped behind the car. A woman was looking at him in fright through the rearview mirror.
“Get out, dammit!” he shouted. “Do you hear me? Get out! Now, for fuck’s sake!”
He yanked open the driver-side door before she could react, and he pulled her out and sat down at the wheel. The engine was still running. The barking was fainter. They had gone the wrong way, turning south when they lost his scent at the shore.
PART 2
The gang was standing further down Trondheimsgatan. They were up to something. They had formed a circle around a younger, dark-haired guy.
Suburb gangsters, Katz thought. Just like him, back in the day.
The one he assumed was the leader was a bit older than the others, maybe eighteen.
“Give me the phone!” he said to the kid in the ring.
The boy took a mobile phone from his trouser pocket and handed it to him.
“Do you have money?”
“No.”
“Breathe, man . . . look at your hands. Shit, man, they’re shaking.”
The older boy turned to the others. “This shunne’s pissed himself!”
The boy was crying heartbreakingly as he held his hand over his face, ashamed. Dirty fingers, black under the nails. His jeans were wet at the crotch. It seemed to be a robbery. Gangs stealing phones from little kids.
“You are our slave, got it? You’ve got more things to do for us.”
Katz put out his cigarette and walked over to them. The leader kid noticed him when he was five meters away.
“What do you want?”
“Just to have a little chat.”
“What the fuck you doing here?”
Looking for Ramón, he thought. An old junkie friend. The guy had saved his life after an overdose one time. Katz had run into him by chance in the city center, surprised to learn that he was still alive. He’d got his address, and apparently that was all it took to trigger his craving.
The Tunnel Page 4