The Helicopter Heist
Page 9
The atmosphere at Täby Racecourse was nothing like that.
On the way in, there had been far more horse paddocks and stalls than he had expected, but once they reached the main building, he couldn’t hide his disappointment. There was barely anyone around, and the whole place was in disrepair. It was a gloomy, abandoned scene.
“Where is everyone?” Sami asked.
“At home in front of their computers,” Toomas Mandel replied. “They built these grandstands before you could gamble online. They thought thousands of people would come to the races. Tens of thousands. But now you’d be lucky to see a few hundred.”
It seemed incredible. If you watched daytime TV in Sweden, harness and traditional racing seemed to be two of the country’s great interests. How many times had Sami seen cute girls with huge microphones asking short men in colorful clothes whether the track was heavy or not? Where were all the TV cameras today?
They went into the restaurant. It took Sami a moment to realize that the restaurant was Täby Racecourse. There was nothing else for the spectators.
“I don’t know,” he said as they each ordered a tomato salad from an old, bored waiter. “If it’s this empty, surely there can’t be any money here? You know what I mean?”
“No,” Mandel said. “There isn’t. Three hundred and sixty-four days a year, you’d get no more than small change. That’s why they reduced the number of security guards and got rid of the police. These days, they only have surveillance around the tracks and the stalls. They’re not worried about anyone stealing money, they’re just worried someone’s going to…mess with the horses.”
Sami nodded. He knew people who had made money on harness racing. People he had grown up with, but others too. People from the pub. Half celebrities. Mafia.
“OK,” Sami said. “So tell me the plan again?”
“The Diana Race is the exception. It’s the same day as the Jockey Club’s Jubilee Race. Always in early summer. I’d guess there’d be up to ten million in cash here then. Maybe more? Still no police or guards though.”
“Ten million?” Sami repeated.
He was disappointed. Like always when you were planning a job, people had a tendency to overexaggerate. Toomas Mandel was trying to sell this opportunity, and it was clear he was exaggerating. Meaning the ten million was probably more like five. Which would be split among several people.
“It’s not that much,” Mandel agreed, “but it’s relative to the risk. It’s a small amount of money, but it’s low risk.”
“Riding down to the boat club afterward? Low risk? That’s not low risk.”
“I told you, the riding thing is just one of several ideas,” Mandel replied, sounding annoyed. “Forget that. I’ll think of something else.”
Their salads arrived. Sami could say with confidence that the restaurant kitchen at Täby Racecourse wouldn’t be the future of racing. And that, despite having had several weeks, Mandel still hadn’t come up with anything better than riding off with the money. Like a couple of cowboys.
* * *
—
Sami called Michel Maloof that same afternoon, and they agreed to meet in Skärholmen the next day. He had thought he would be able to sneak off for a few hours around lunch, but Karin woke with a migraine and he had no other option than to take the baby with him. They hadn’t decided on a name yet, but it had taken a while last time too. Karin was relieved when he left. It meant she could pull down the blinds in the bedroom and wrap herself in darkness; the only way to dull the pain. Her mother was taking care of John.
Sami left the stroller at home, as it was impossible to get around with one on the subway. And so, with a warmly dressed baby in his arms—though it was the second week in May, the temperature still hadn’t made it above 50 degrees—he walked down to Slussen and took the red line out to Skärholmen. Sami didn’t know what the baby could see through the dark windows in the tunnels, but it must have been fascinating enough to keep him captivated the entire way. When they finally arrived, he was so tired that he had fallen asleep.
They met outside a Foot Locker.
The baby lay like a bundle over his father’s shoulder, and Sami effortlessly greeted Maloof with his right hand.
Maloof laughed and nodded. “That alive…or what?”
“You bet your ass,” said Sami.
Maloof laughed again. “Right, right. But you know…Pacino probably wouldn’t—”
“I’m not Al Pacino,” Sami interrupted him.
“No, no, not even Al Pacino is these days,” Maloof agreed.
They started walking. It was just before lunch on a Thursday, and the shopping center wouldn’t be setting any new sales records that day. But there were still enough people around for no one to pay any attention to the ill-matched pair, the short Lebanese man and the big Iraqi with a baby on his shoulder.
Sami had peeled back the baby’s outer layers of clothing like a banana skin. They were now hanging from his feet.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said.
Maloof nodded. He had too. He didn’t know if he wanted to call it a plan. It was more like jigsaw pieces scattered around his head, waiting to be put together.
“Yeah?”
“What kind of money are we talking about? Do you know?” Sami asked.
“Yeah, yeah. More than any individual bank in Sweden. You want the exact amount?”
“Roughly?”
“Half a billion?” Maloof suggested.
Sami nodded. He absentmindedly patted the baby’s diaper through his trousers. It was as he had thought. There was no comparing it with the Täby Racecourse job.
“How do we move forward?” he asked.
“The first step…” said Maloof, “is to find a helicopter.”
Because if they were going to pull off the job in Västberga, they were going to need a helicopter.
There were a number of different ways of getting onto the roof, but only one realistic way to get off it. Since his conversation with Petrovic, Maloof had looked into how fast a crane could drive, and then banished the thought. He had even learned about using climbing equipment, bolts and ropes, on mortar. It was too complicated. Elegant solutions like hot air balloons and gliders looked exciting on film, but they were unthinkable in reality. Jet packs, on the other hand, those small flying motors you wore on your back, were a possibility. But if you could afford to buy a couple of jet packs, you didn’t need to rob a cash depot.
No, it had to be a helicopter, or else they could forget the whole idea.
“OK,” said Sami. “A helicopter.”
They continued through the shopping arcade. Over the years, the men had perfected the art of strolling. They knew how to walk slowly, without drawing attention to themselves. They stopped at every third shop window and absentmindedly looked in at the spring coats, headphones, bikes and sofas.
Thanks to this way of meeting, they could talk freely without worrying about being overheard.
“I don’t know,” Sami continued, “who do we know with a helicopter? Who has a helicopter just sitting in the garage?”
“There’s…” Maloof replied. “It’s no harder than getting hold of a boat.”
“It’s harder,” Sami argued. “Plus, anyone can drive a boat. I can drive a boat. You can drive a boat. You know what I mean? Neither of us can fly a helicopter. Maybe we can steal one, but we won’t be able to get it to lift off.”
The baby on his shoulder was slowly waking up. Sami assumed that Maloof wouldn’t appreciate sitting down with a bottle, so they started walking again, Sami in a bobbing motion he hoped would send the baby back to sleep.
“Right, right,” said Maloof. “We’ll have to…find someone. A pilot.”
“I don’t know,” Sami said again. “Do you know anyone?”
“I don’t know anyone,” Maloof said with unexpected firmness. He laughed briefly. “Or actually…I know someone who can sort something out.”
“Your friend? Tall? Petrovic?”
“Seems difficult. And her, the girl…”
“Alexandra.”
“You’re completely sure about her now?”
“Definitely.”
“I don’t know. Why would she tell you so much? You know? She must be wondering.”
“Nope,” Maloof replied. “We talk…you know. I’m not the one asking. She just talks.”
“OK…Maybe…” Sami said hesitantly. “So what do we do once we’ve landed the helicopter on the roof?”
Maloof nodded and smiled. “We’ll have five minutes…There’s a police station two blocks away. Maybe ten minutes? Max. We blow a hole in the roof…we find someone who can blow a hole in the roof. Below that’s the room where Alexandra works. Cash. Counting. She calls it different things. On Tuesdays and Thursdays they take in…a few hundred million in cash.”
They were standing outside a secondhand shop, studying the strange objects in the window. Sami was rocking gently to keep the baby asleep.
“Money into bags…” Maloof continued, “back up onto the roof…using a ladder? And then we fly off.”
“And the police helicopters?” Sami asked. “Where are they? You know what I mean? If we’re on the roof and there’s a swarm of police helicopters just waiting for us above?”
“Right, right,” said Maloof. “No. We’ll have to make sure the police helicopters never get airborne.”
“How do we do that?”
“We’ll work something out.” Maloof laughed confidently.
Sami nodded. Then he shook his head. He felt the tiny body on his shoulder wake and stretch, the prelude to a loud protest that could be stopped only by giving him something to suck on.
“What you’re saying is,” Sami quickly tried to sum up, “that we need to find a helicopter. And a pilot. Then we’re going to blow our way in through the roof and climb down a ladder to grab the money. And that all this can take ten minutes max. And at the same time we need to make sure the police helicopters can’t take off.”
“Exactly, exactly.” Maloof nodded. That was roughly what he had envisioned.
“It sounds…you know how it sounds, right?” Sami asked. “You know what I mean?”
Maloof laughed, but it was with pride. He thought the plan was full of possibility, challenges, grandeur.
People were mad, Sami thought. Horses and helicopters.
He quickly said goodbye to his friend and headed into an Espresso House, where he could ask the staff to warm a bottle of breast milk for him.
It sounds crazy, he thought with a wry smile.
Hundreds of millions?
JUNE–JULY 2009
16
Zoran Petrovic, sometimes called Tall by his friends, was sitting in Café Stolen on Upplandsgatan. The restaurant was only a powerful stone’s throw from the building where he lived. He had ordered a glass of lukewarm water, and it stood on the table in front of him. The place was almost empty, but he had still chosen a table far enough toward the rear that he wouldn’t be visible from the street.
He was speaking on the phone, in Montenegrin.
It was an agitated conversation, and he used his left hand to paint a wide arc through the air as the words poured out of him. His right hand had a tight grip on the glass of water. Zoran Petrovic was a storyteller. He spoke both as he inhaled and exhaled; he wasn’t going to let language, objections or reality get in his way. It was that which had taken him to the top.
Over the years, Petrovic had bought up all the places he liked to visit on Upplandsgatan, from his building down to Norra Bantorget. That had left him with a handful of restaurants, Café Stolen and Mandolin among them, and a beauty salon, where he liked to sit down in the comfortable chairs for manicures and pedicures—he flashed his vanity, it was the best way to avoid being accused of it—and he had also stepped in as a financier for a framing shop and a secondhand-clothes boutique.
Zoran Petrovic had been born in Lund, but he’d barely had time to learn to walk before a moving van brought the family up to the capital. Once in Stockholm, the Petrovics bought Benny Andersson’s old house in Tumba. This was a few years into the seventies, and the former owner naturally became more and more interesting to mention as the popularity of his band grew. A few years after ABBA’s success with “Waterloo,” Petrovic’s parents divorced. He and his brother moved with their mother to Hallunda, and later to Norsborg; by the time Petrovic began school, he had lived at six different addresses.
After he’d been thrown out of his first school just in time for Christmas, and the second during second grade, Petrovic’s parents decided to send him to Montenegro, where discipline and respect for adults were built in to the system. However, their hopes that a tougher school system would tame him turned out to be futile.
In the playground on the very first day, Petrovic had been given a taste of the forbidden fruits that he would never be able to get enough of going forward: the power of manipulation and the force of provocation. He had realized that he could make people do what he wanted, sometimes in exchange for nothing but flattery, praise or a smile. Other times, using threats of violence as persuasion. People reacted in different ways, and discovering what worked for each individual in his class was a challenge he could spend days, weeks and months on.
Until he had learned to control them all.
Unfortunately, this was at roughly the same time that the school decided to expel him. Norsborg or Podgorica, it made no difference.
The best thing about the two years he spent with his maternal grandparents in Montenegro was that he had learned a new language. Plus, he’d made friends for life. He returned to Sweden and continued his education in Fittja, but by then it was more like the school had adapted to Zoran Petrovic than the other way around.
His mother would often blame the school system for the career her son later chose. But what made his parents most bitter, both of them dyed-in-the-wool Communists, was to see their son grow up to be a full-fledged capitalist.
Money was Zoran Petrovic’s first great love.
And it was a love that would never fade.
* * *
—
The new waitress changed the radio station and carefully turned up the volume. Petrovic gestured for her to turn it down again. He was working. It was just after lunch, and the afternoon clientele who usually sat playing with their beer coasters still hadn’t turned up.
Petrovic had barely finished the call with Montenegro when his phone rang again. A typical day for him. A never-ending stream of phone calls.
“Yes?” he said into the phone.
“It’s Svenne,” said Gustafsson from the scrapyard in Lidingö. “Something’s arrived for you. Damn dodgy thing. Big as hell. Should we try to set it up? There are drawings and stuff with it.”
A powerful feeling of joy filled Petrovic. Finally.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said breathlessly down the phone. “Set it up! Put it in the container. Drop everything else and assemble the bastard. I’ll be there in fifteen!”
Without another word, he got to his feet, bumping the table and knocking over his glass. The water ran across the tablecloth and dripped to the floor, but he didn’t notice.
He was finally about to defeat those damn secure bags.
Zoran Petrovic could smell the money.
* * *
—
The idea was neither original nor difficult, and it was, as usual, the implementation that had caused him problems. Petrovic took a right up by Tegnérlunden Park and crossed Sveavägen just as the lights turned red. He was driving a BMW he had borrowed from a friend who owed him money, a fast car built for Germans with long legs. Neither Ferrari nor Maserati seemed to realize that people could be taller than six and a half feet.
The plan was to film how to break into one of the G4S bags without causing the dye ampoules to explode. A bit of basic editing, some cool music, and then the film would be uploaded to YouTube. Would-be robbers across
Europe—and the rest of the world—would be able to watch it, meaning that G4S would have to scrap the blue bags within a few hours, binding contract or not. That was when Maloof would return to the security firm’s head office and remind them that there was another, better bag that they could order now that the secrets of the blue bag had been revealed.
If Petrovic had calculated the production and distribution costs and the business tax correctly, a company with an exclusive contract to sell security bags to G4S could make a profit of a million or so during the very first year. After that, you could probably maintain a sustainable level of earnings of a few million in Sweden alone.
The BMW flew over the Lidingö Bridge.
* * *
—
He parked badly outside the scrapyard and ran on his long legs through the building, out the back and across the labyrinthine car cemetery to the container. There were three men inside, all studying the masterpiece that had been sent over from France, and which they had just managed set up in line with the instructions.
“Move, move!” Petrovic demanded.
The machine was worth veneration.
It was a guillotine.
What could be more French? A guillotine with huge titanium blades, so sharp that they could cut a strand of hair. Or a brick.
Or a steel bag.
But not just that. The blades—there were two of them—weren’t reliant only on gravity. The manufacturers had helped nature along by installing them onto two steel posts with a chemical rocket engine on each bracket. The blades’ short journey toward their goal was an explosive one. Petrovic had seen the machine in action a couple of times, and the force was incredible.
Zoran Petrovic had asked the manufacturers of the magnificent rocket guillotine to construct two titanium blades that came down onto a rectangular plate. The measurements of the plate were the same as the blue security bags’ minus seven millimeters on the short sides.