by The Helicopter Heist- A Novel Based on True Events (retail) (epub)
Thurn wasn’t the missionizing type. Everyone could do as he or she liked, and if her new colleague didn’t manage to lose any weight, that wasn’t something she had any opinions on.
“Maybe we just got the wrong night?” Berggren said.
He had a rough voice, which definitely wasn’t improved by only just having woken up.
“Wrong night,” she agreed. “Or day, or date, or time? Or maybe they’ve just managed to move somewhere else.”
Berggren mumbled something inaudible, and then added,
“Jesus Christ, I’m tired. Just the thought of making my way home…”
He was the whining type, she had realized that the very first day.
“I live around the corner,” she replied. “If you want, you can get a few hours’ sleep on my sofa before you go back to Hägersten.”
In Caroline Thurn’s world, not making the suggestion wasn’t even an option. That kind of good-mannered consideration had been drummed into her from a young age; it was a reflex, like breathing. Being kind was also risk free, because the answer was always no.
“Yeah, sure,” said Berggren, who hadn’t grown up in the same kind of social environment.
* * *
—
They drove into a garage on Väpnargatan, around the corner from Strandvägen, and took the elevator straight up to the top floor, where Caroline Thurn lived. As Mats Berggren stepped into the hallway and looked around, he had to fight to hide his surprise.
The words that popped into his head were straight out of an estate agent’s ad: “Grand apartment at the city’s most exclusive address.”
The dawn light cast a warm glow through the windows, and the fishbone parquet flooring in the suite of rooms seemed never to end. But as Berggren peered around, he saw that the apartment was in need of renovation. There were cracks in the ceiling, though hopefully just in the paint. Someone had started to take down the yellowed wallpaper in the hallway and given up before he or she finished the job, and the parquet was almost black in places. But what made the greatest impression on Berggren was that the place was almost completely empty.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” he mumbled, not knowing what else to say.
Berggren had been working for the National Criminal Police for only a week when he was asked if he wanted to be Thurn’s new partner. He had been equal parts terrified and curious. Thurn had a reputation. She kept her distance. She was respected because she rarely failed, she was approachable and obliging, and yet none of her colleagues could be counted among her friends.
Mats Berggren had done some research on his new partner before their first meeting. He hadn’t needed to go any further than the details in the police’s own database.
Caroline Thurn was born on February 16, 1977, meaning she was thirty-two years old. Berggren couldn’t see where she had grown up or gone to school, but she must have enrolled in the police training academy straight after high school, because she had been given a position with the Stockholm police force as early as autumn 1998. After that first year on the beat, she was recruited to a group that had been given a good deal of media coverage back then, part of an international exchange. Berggren remembered it well; his own application to the program had been unsuccessful.
That initial year abroad had turned into several for Caroline Thurn, but in 2005, she had moved back to the National Criminal Police, and after that there was no information about exactly what she had been doing. Berggren had needed only to ask a couple of his new colleagues in the department for the picture to emerge: Caroline Thurn was someone who worked day in and day out, and who couldn’t handle failure. Still, Berggren was congratulated by everyone he asked. Thurn was the kind of person you wanted on your side.
The first time they met, Mats Berggren had been shocked. After everything he had heard and read about her, the tall, slim woman wasn’t at all what he had been expecting. Her profile, with that narrow, beaklike nose and those high cheekbones, was certainly razor sharp, but Thurn turned out to be both warm and empathetic. Berggren would even go as far as to say soft.
* * *
—
He took a step into the room off the hallway.
“Have you just moved in?” he asked.
The suite of five rooms stretched along Strandvägen, a street that was home to Stockholm’s rich and powerful, with views out onto the whole of Nybroviken and Blasieholmen on the other side of the water. There was no furniture, no rugs, pictures or curtains, just creaking wooden floors.
“Mmm,” she eventually said, “my parents bought this place just after the war. I…haven’t got round to dealing with the decoration yet.”
“Haven’t got round to it?” Berggren said, going over to the window. “Which war are we talking about?”
“I have a sofa where you can sleep,” she replied, waving him away from the view out onto the calm waters.
They passed through another couple of empty rooms on the way into a smaller room with a door. Inside, there was a deep, worn sofa.
“Do you live alone?” Berggren asked.
Men had long since fulfilled their role in Caroline Thurn’s life. That wasn’t a bitter fact, she assumed her experience of relationships was no different from other people’s. Still, she had made the decision to live on her own. She didn’t like talking about it. In other people’s eyes, choosing to live alone took on political or philosophical dimensions.
Instead of replying to Berggren’s question, she said,
“Get a few hours’ sleep. You need it.”
“Looks comfy.” Berggren nodded toward the sofa, suddenly remembering how tired he was.
She smiled. “You can make coffee in the kitchen when you wake up,” she said. “I don’t have much china, but if you can’t find anything you can wash one of the cups in the dishwasher.”
If I can find the kitchen, Berggren thought.
He had grown up with his parents in a small apartment on Hantverkargatan in fifties and sixties Stockholm, back when the city had been full of hope for the future and what would later come to be called “honest hard work.” His childhood had been a struggle. Being fat had meant he was always an outsider. He hadn’t played sports, never got invited to parties. His ambitions had always been bigger than his abilities, which meant that his schoolwork had been one long torment. He had inherited his pathos, his passion for solidarity and justice, from his father, a metalworker who had moved to Stockholm from Falun. From his mother, the academic from Kungsholmen, he had learned that a just, democratic society had to be built on the principle of equality in the eyes of the law. From both of them, he had learned not to believe that he was better than anyone else. He had always known he would be a police officer, and the one time in his life he had managed to shed some of his excess weight for a few months was ahead of his entrance examination to the National Police Academy.
But he had never lived anywhere bigger than that childhood apartment.
“How many square feet is this place?” he couldn’t stop himself from asking.
“More than I need,” Thurn replied. “You’ll be OK?”
“What?” he asked. “Are you…leaving?”
“I just remembered something,” she said. “I wanted to check if there was some other way into that building on Karlavägen. Through the building next door, or the garage. We never checked.”
“Now?” Berggren was taken aback.
“I don’t need much sleep. You get some though.”
Berggren knew he should protest, but he didn’t have the energy. Instead, he nodded and lay down on the sofa, which was even more comfortable than he could have imagined. He fell asleep immediately.
25
During the Second World War, Montenegro’s capital had been flattened by the sixty or more bombing raids the city was subjected to. It sounds absurd, some kind of gross overexaggeration of Podgorica’s importance, but that was how many times the bombers had swept into the beautiful valley and unloaded their cargo, an evil rain
, onto the once pretty town where the two rivers met.
By the end of the war, there was nothing left.
When the Communist Party got to work rebuilding the city during the fifties and sixties, it did so following the same model as everywhere else in the new Eastern Europe: it created a kind of budget variant of brutalist modernism. Like Stockholm, Podgorica became a city where the buildings were never allowed to be taller than five or six stories. But unlike Stockholm, Podgorica became homogeneous, planned, cheap and soulless.
Filip Zivic, the helicopter pilot, loved Podgorica, but not because of the city’s beauty. Lots of positive things had happened to the overall look of the town over the past twenty years, but Zivic would play no part in how it continued to develop over the next few decades.
It was with sorrow in his heart that he loaded his bags into the trunk of his car.
“Shall we go?” his wife asked. She was already sitting in the passenger’s seat.
Their son was in the back, focused on some kind of game on his phone. As far as the boy was concerned, there was no real difference between Montenegro and Serbia, and the thought made Filip Zivic all the more depressed.
“Yes,” he said. “Let’s go.”
* * *
—
The Serbian justice minister, Nebojsa Have, assumed that the meeting straight after lunch would involve a new negotiation of some kind. But unlike the other meetings he suffered through during his long days in the government offices at Nemanjina 11, a beautiful corner building, he wouldn’t have to conceal it. He was a minister in a Serbian government that, beneath the surface, sprawled in all directions and built on compromises.
He heard a knock at the door, and a moment later one of his secretaries appeared, a young man with a straight back and ambition in his eyes.
“Filip Zivic is here to see you,” he said.
“Good,” said Have. “Ask him to come in.”
Have knew what kind of impression his office gave to someone visiting for the first time. Ceilings almost thirteen feet high, with decorative stucco, tall windows out onto the street and heavy, pale velvet curtains. He had a cluster of antique armchairs and a glittering crystal chandelier above a coffee table, and the walls were covered in oil paintings of famous Serbian men. It was impossible not to be impressed.
Filip Zivic stepped into the room. The two men’s friendship was so old that golden pen holders and Persian rugs should have had no impact on it, but Zivic still reacted to the elegance of the place.
“We can sit here,” the minister suggested, pointing to a more modern cluster of chairs near one of the windows.
They sat down opposite each other.
“I was slightly surprised by your call, Filip,” Have began. “I didn’t even know you were in Belgrade.”
“No,” Zivic replied, “that’s deliberate. No one knows I’m here. But I think I have something which might finally bring our negotiations to a close.”
The justice minister nodded, but he said nothing.
Have was sure his room had been bugged, and he assumed that whoever was listening wished him well. All the same, he had made it a habit not to say anything on tape that could be turned against him in future. Regimes toppled one another, after all; it was practically a national tradition.
“I have information,” Zivic said, “about a robbery. The people involved are from Montenegro. And the whole thing is…spectacular…”
Nebojsa Have continued to nod.
“I can’t use information based on rumors,” he explained. “We’ve already talked about this, haven’t we, Filip?”
“This is more than just rumor.”
“And this robbery is going to take place here in Belgrade?”
“No.”
“In Montenegro?”
“No, it’s going to happen in Sweden,” said Zivic.
“Really?”
“Wasn’t it an EU country you wanted?”
“Sweden is good,” Have confirmed. “Sweden is very good.”
The justice minister was keen for his country to be involved in Europe-wide police cooperation, but it was always a case of give and take. The last time he had talked to Zivic about it was over a year ago. Back then, he had been careful to stress that any agreement must be based on mutual benefit.
“I can give you detailed information,” Zivic continued. “I don’t have many names, but I have everything else. Using that, the Swedish police should be able to work out where, when and how the robbery is going to take place. Judging by the plan, this would be the biggest robbery in Swedish history.”
Have sighed.
“Everyone’s planning to carry out the biggest robbery in history,” he said. “It’s practically par for the course.”
“But I need reassurances that you can keep your promise.”
Have had made the promise to his childhood friend a year earlier. It was the sole reason the pilot was sitting in his office today.
During the war, Filip Zivic had taken part in events that had earned him enemies for life. For a few years, it had seemed as though all had been forgotten, but then these old injustices had suddenly blown up again. He didn’t know why, but for eighteen months now, he and his family had been living under constant threats of death. Zivic forced his wife and son to move at least once a week, and he slept with a weapon on the bedside table. He had also cut off all contact with the majority of his friends and family. It was a way of protecting them, rather than himself.
But that kind of existence was unsustainable in the long run.
In parallel to this, Serbia’s justice minister—in an attempt to achieve real change in a country saturated with corruption and organized crime—had created the first credible witness-protection program. A program people could trust. In exchange for information, the state could provide a new identity, a new life under a new name, and it did seem as though all government leaks had, for the moment, been stopped.
Because Filip Zivic had followed Nebojsa Have’s career since his friend first entered politics, he knew that this was his chance. Have’s ambitions and morals were greater than any other politician’s.
“I can’t guarantee anything,” he now said, being deliberately cautious. “Especially since people know that we have been friends for years.”
“Let me say this,” said the pilot. “If I had information which was so unique and relevant that it could be used as currency in conversation with the Swedish and European police, would that get me into your program?”
“Of course,” said the minister. “You wouldn’t be treated differently to anyone else.”
“OK then,” said Filip Zivic. “The man planning the robbery I mentioned is called Zoran Petrovic and he lives in Stockholm. Should I save the details for the Swedish police?”
26
It was ten thirty when the national police commissioner’s name flashed up on Caroline Thurn’s phone. Thurn was having a coffee at Villa Källhagen on Djurgården at the time. Earlier that morning, she had discovered a door leading from the garage into the property on Karlavägen, but it didn’t matter, because the location of the garage meant that she and Berggren had—unwittingly—also had it under surveillance that night.
Thurn had returned home to find Berggren still snoring away on her sofa. She had pulled on her running clothes and decided to do a lap around Djurgården. It was on the way back that she had stopped for a black, liquid breakfast.
National Police Commissioner Therese Olsson sounded agitated.
“We’ve had a tip-off,” she said down the line. “We’re considering it extremely interesting. Meet me outside the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in half an hour.”
Thurn confirmed and hung up.
After that, she called Berggren. He sounded like he had just woken up. She passed on the National Police Commissioner’s orders.
“See you there,” said Berggren. “And thanks for letting me use the sofa.”
She could hear cars in the background and assumed tha
t Berggren was no longer in her apartment.
* * *
—
It wasn’t unusual for Caroline Thurn to be called in to meetings at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, which was based in one of the oldest buildings on Gustav Adolfs Torg in the very heart of Stockholm. One of the reasons the National Criminal Police had been formed was to facilitate cooperation with foreign police authorities, and as a result there was a natural connection between the two institutions.
As Thurn parked her new-smelling service Volvo in one of the reserved spaces immediately outside the entrance to the building, she saw both Berggren and the commissioner waiting on the sidewalk.
Olsson was in uniform, and Berggren in the same clothes he had been wearing that morning.
It was the twentieth of August, and the summer heat had returned to the east coast a few days earlier. The sky was pale blue beneath a faint haze of cloud, and families wearing ugly sneakers were leaning against the railings by the water, using their phones to take photos of themselves with Norrbron in the background. It was only eleven o’clock. Late-summer Stockholm was a tourist’s paradise of hesitant cars on the roads, backpacks on the subway and pickpockets in every crowd.
Thurn climbed out of the car.
“You beat me,” she said to Berggren with a smile.
“I was just around the corner,” he said apologetically, as though he felt disloyal at having arrived before her.
Berggren wanted to ask about her bedroom, but he realized it wasn’t the moment.
When he woke that morning, he had searched the apartment for Thurn and realized that there wasn’t a bed in any of the rooms. Other than behind a locked door in the kitchen, he had looked everywhere. There was no bedroom.