by The Helicopter Heist- A Novel Based on True Events (retail) (epub)
“Right, right,” Maloof agreed. “Or…anything?”
“When I get home, it’ll take me five minutes to check,” Petrovic swore. “Five minutes.”
“Right, right. Five minutes.”
Maloof dropped off the tall Yugoslavian on Upplandsgatan. Petrovic nonchalantly crossed the street, trying to use his body language to show that he had the situation under control, but the minute the door swung shut behind him he ran up the stairs.
He found his Montenegrin phone on the desk in his office and called his uncle in Podgorica. He got straight to the point, setting out the situation for him.
It was his uncle’s responsibility to track down Filip Zivic, since it was through his contacts that the pilot had been signed up in the first place.
The uncle promised to look into it. When Petrovic said he needed answers that same evening, his uncle laughed and explained that it wasn’t going to happen. He was going to a soccer match and then planned to go out for a beer. It was Sunday.
Petrovic didn’t have the energy to argue. Instead, he made a few more calls to Montenegro, and by evening he had five different people trying to find out what had happened to Filip Zivic.
* * *
—
But no one he put on the job managed to get ahold of Zivic that night. Petrovic grew more and more anxious. It wasn’t a feeling he was used to.
He fell asleep around dawn and was woken by the sound of his Montenegrin phone ringing the next morning.
Without getting out of bed, he fumbled for his phone and answered without opening his eyes.
“Mmm?”
“He’s gone.”
It was his uncle on the line.
Petrovic sat up in bed. He was wide awake.
“Did you hear me?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s gone. Filip’s missing. Him, his family, wife and boy, the lot of them are gone.”
Rage rose up inside him. He stared straight ahead, the blood pounding in his temples.
“What do you mean, gone?”
“Their place is empty. No one saw them leave. No one knows where they are. It’s a few weeks since anyone saw them.”
Zoran Petrovic threw the phone across the room. It broke into a thousand pieces against the radiator beneath the window. His shout woke the people living in the apartment above his.
31
It was five in the morning when Niklas Nordgren and Sami Farhan climbed out of the car Michel Maloof had parked on Malmskillnadsgatan, just around the corner from Mäster Samuelsgatan. They were only a stone’s throw from the absolute center of Stockholm, but it was so quiet that they could hear their own breathing.
Maloof hadn’t told Nordgren and Sami about the missing helicopter pilot yet. Petrovic had said there was still a chance he would turn up, and without definitive answers, Maloof didn’t want to worry the others.
The city center was deserted. Other than the odd summer temp, the office buildings around Sergels Torg would be empty all day. Sweden had slowly adapted to European practice, and August was now one long, drawn-out run-up to autumn. During summer, native Stockholmers fled the inner city; if you could afford to live in the center of town, you could also afford a summer house in the archipelago or one last charter holiday to Greece. Behind them, they left closed, dug-up streets that the authorities took the opportunity to repair when there was no one but German trailer campers, American cruise passengers and families with small children from the south of Sweden to annoy with the traffic jams and chaos. In a week’s time, normality would resume, the roadwork would end and the summer temps would be sent home, but so far the summer calm was still holding sway over the capital.
Nordgren went to fetch his huge rucksack from the trunk.
The bag was full of plastic explosives, batteries and detonation cables. Like always, he kept the detonators themselves inside his vest.
Together, the three robbers walked toward Jakobsbergsgatan. The sun had risen, but it was hidden behind a haze of white cloud. The smell of chlorine and old beer lingered in the air, and a confused gull was flying between the buildings up by Oxtorget, but they couldn’t hear any of the nightlife that probably was still going on around Stureplan. A street sweeper passed by with its brushes spinning, and the sound of its industrious swishing faded as it turned the corner.
They spotted the police car at the same moment.
It was driving straight toward them, no faster than five miles an hour.
The police were looking for someone or something.
Without having discussed how they would handle a situation like this, Niklas Nordgren stopped, squatted down on the sidewalk and pretended to tie his shoelaces. Sami Farhan sped up and sneaked around the corner onto Jakobsbergsgatan, and Michel Maloof continued heading straight for the police car.
Rather than being three men in a group on Malmskillnadsgatan at five in the morning, they now looked like three strangers with different agendas. They seemed less threatening.
* * *
—
The reason Maloof, Nordgren and Sami were on Malmskillnadsgatan that early August morning was that Nordgren was worried. The plan was to blow a hole straight through the roof of the cash depot where Alexandra Svensson worked. They would have ten minutes in total, and Nordgren had promised that the explosion wouldn’t take more than a couple of those precious minutes.
But earlier that week, he had learned from Ezra’s sister Katinka that the roof of the cash depot in Västberga consisted of three layers. Concrete on the very top, joists beneath that and then the sheet metal protecting the inner ceiling. Blowing a hole in the sheet metal with a U-channel was possible. The joist layer was nothing but wood and insulation, and he could manage that with a saw and a crowbar.
The question was how thick the concrete was.
To avoid any surprises on the day, Nordgren had started looking for buildings that had been built in the same way, so that he could carry out a test. The partially completed building on the corner of Jakobsbergsgatan and Regeringsgatan in central Stockholm was the result of his search.
Its roof was constructed in the exact same way as Västberga’s. Over the summer, the builders had managed to lay the foundations, construct the load-bearing outer and inner walls and build the floors and ceilings on each of the eight floors. There was an entire skeleton for Nordgren to practice on, with no risk of anyone getting hurt. But since the building was still under construction, they had been forced to get up at dawn to beat the builders to the site.
* * *
—
Maloof was just a few steps from being able to turn the corner onto Jakobsbergsgatan, a pedestrian street, when the police car rolled up next to him. Nordgren was ten yards away, still busy tying his shoelaces. He heard how close the police car was, but managed to stop himself from looking up. It was the most careful knot he had ever tied.
A moment later, out of the corner of his eye he saw the blue-and-white car roll on. He made sure not to get up. As Maloof disappeared around the corner, out of sight, Nordgren took the opportunity to tie his other shoe, and then he got up.
He resisted the urge to turn and check whether the police car had stopped at the crossroads of Mäster Samuelsgatan. Instead, he rushed to catch up with his friends, who were already some way down the steep slope of the pedestrian street.
“Puts you on edge,” Sami said.
“With a bag full of explosives in the middle of town, we’ve got reason to be,” Nordgren added.
They reached Regeringsgatan without meeting anyone else. Farther down the street they could see a young couple making out furiously; the girl was pushed up against the wall and was practically climbing the man’s leg. They could hear the sound of the street sweeper in the distance.
* * *
—
The iron gate outside the building was locked with a chain and padlock. Nordgren pulled out some clippers. That was all he needed to cut the chain. He opened the gate and they sneaked inside. Nordgren put
the chain back in place, with the cut-off section hanging inward. To a passerby, everything would look normal.
“Should we use the elevator?”
Just the thought that the three of them might get stuck in the slow, creaking, rickety building elevator, fully visible from all directions and with a rucksack full of explosives, was completely idiotic.
And it felt no better a minute or so later when they actually stepped inside it.
“This is insane,” Sami said.
“Right, right,” Maloof agreed.
Nordgren didn’t say a word. In just a few minutes’ time, he would be trying to blow a hole in a concrete roof in the heart of Stockholm. He didn’t want to admit it, but the idea was starting to seem doubtful to him. Though at the same time, the alternative was worse: not having done his homework and being forced to realize that it was impossible at a more critical moment.
The elevator seemed to take forever, and when they finally made it up to the roof, the view wasn’t what they had expected. They had been talking about it in the car, how they would be able to look out across the entire city, but the neighboring buildings blocked their line of sight. The haze in the sky suggested it would be a warm day.
Nordgren glanced around. He pointed to a big pile of timber.
“We can use that to shield ourselves,” he said.
And with that, he started to prepare the explosives. Like always, he would try a small charge to begin with.
Sami read his thoughts.
“We can’t do that now,” he said. “You know what I mean? We’re on a roof. In the middle of town. The police are driving around right below us. You know? We can’t be testing and testing and testing. We’re not out in the woods anymore.”
“No…” Nordgren began hesitantly.
Caution was a virtue he was reluctant to give up.
“Right, right,” said Maloof. “One time only. No more. One charge to…see if it works. Then we run.”
Nordgren heard what they were saying.
“OK,” he mumbled, bending down to dig deeper into his rucksack.
They were right, of course. In a few weeks’ time, when they were standing on the roof of the cash depot, they wouldn’t need to be discreet or precise, it would be a simple matter of blowing a big enough hole to be able to get down to the joist level. And that was the morning’s task. To see whether it was possible.
* * *
—
Niklas Nordgren took a small yellow plastic cone from his bag. It was the type soccer teams used when they practiced moving laterally. The shape of the cone was perfect, given that the aim was to aim the explosion directly downward.
Nordgren filled the cone with explosives. He was using red plastic explosives with a detonation velocity of twenty-five thousand feet a second. He wanted to create a concentrated explosion so that he could guarantee a hole. Semtex would have managed the same task, but the explosives used by the military were both more expensive and more difficult to get ahold of. He pressed a detonator into one edge.
“OK,” he said. “One try. No more, no less.”
He clipped the detonation cable onto the loose wires of the detonator, and the three ran behind the pile of wood and squatted down.
“It’s going to be a hell of a bang,” Nordgren said matter-of-factly.
Maloof and Sami got onto their knees. They had their hands over their heads, and Nordgren touched the exposed metal of the detonation cable to the poles of the motorbike battery.
The explosion was deafening.
But what came next was worse.
The entire building shook. Nordgren got to his feet, and a second later it was as though the ground had been snatched from beneath them. He hadn’t been prepared for that. The pile of timber they were behind fell to one side, and again the noise was incredible, even louder than the initial explosion. Maloof fell over.
“Shit!” Sami shouted.
In a compact cloud of dust, the floor where they had been crouching collapsed onto the one below. Two or three different alarms started ringing simultaneously.
“Sami!” Maloof shouted.
He couldn’t see a thing.
“I’m here. Where’s Nick?”
“Here!” a voice shouted from the cloud of dust.
They could hear one another, but a few seconds passed before they could see anything.
“We need to get out!”
Nordgren started running toward the elevator, which, unbelievably, seemed to have survived the blast unscathed. Sami and Maloof followed him. As the dust started to settle, they studied the damage around them.
Sirens from emergency vehicles could be heard in the distance.
They ran into the elevator and Nordgren pushed the button. The motor started with a jolt, slowly winching them toward the ground. Down on the street, a crowd of people had already gathered.
“What the fuck happened?” asked Sami.
His forehead was damp, his eyes bright. He shook his sweater. Flapped it here and there.
“Bad workmanship,” Nordgren replied. “We took down the entire roof.”
“Shit!”
Maloof started to laugh. Sami’s mouth twitched.
“You two are insane,” Nordgren snapped. “It’s not funny. The place’ll be crawling with cops any minute.”
After what seemed like an eternity, they reached the ground. The alarms on the building site sounded even louder down there. A TV van pulled up by the sidewalk at roughly the same time as the first fire engine from the station on Malmskillnadsgatan arrived. The explosion had even set off three or four car alarms.
People were pouring in from all directions.
The three men responsible for the chaos discreetly left the former eight-story building as the firemen stormed inside. Nordgren, Sami and Maloof sneaked quietly past the spectators on the sidewalk, all of whom were desperate to get a glimpse of what was going on.
“This is insane,” Sami said as they moved quickly down Jakobsbergsgatan.
None of the three turned as the police cars began to arrive, their sirens blaring. They headed back to the car without saying a word, and only once they had climbed inside and shut the doors did Nordgren break the silence.
“Fuck,” he said. “It didn’t even make a hole. We’re not going to be able to get in through the roof.”
32
On Karlavägen, just around the corner from Skeppargatan, there was an elegant candy store called Karla Frukt. It had been there since the midsixties, supplying the neighborhood’s praline-eating residents and sugar-starved students with sweet treats. Its pretty neon sign, shaped like a peeled orange, lit up the front of the building. The front windows of the shop angled into the building, giving Caroline Thurn space to stand in the shadow of the overhanging roof by the entrance. Tucked away there, she could be completely invisible, despite the streetlight illuminating the sidewalk just a few yards away. It was two thirty in the morning, a clear summer’s night, and Karlavägen was quiet.
Karla Frukt was diagonally opposite the door Thurn and Berggren had been keeping under surveillance, the door to the supposed brothel. Thurn knew she should drop the case, but she didn’t want to. The National Criminal Police had been brought in because the case involved ambassadors, foreign citizens committing crimes on Swedish soil. The information they had was from a reliable source, and the vice squad also supported their theory of a brothel.
The traffic along Karlavägen was separated by a wide footpath in the middle of the road. Lawns, leafy trees and thick bushes had been planted along the gravel path on which dogs were exercised in the evenings and children walked to school in the mornings. Thurn had been standing in the entrance to Karla Frukt since midnight, and nothing had happened. No one had either entered or left the building opposite.
She hadn’t bothered to ask Berggren whether he wanted to come with her. Right now, he was completely focused on the cash depot robbery, and he would have just told her to hand the case over to their colleagues in vic
e. In all likelihood, the supposed brothel probably had as many visits from Swedish dignitaries as it did foreign ones, and her colleagues at Stockholm Police also needed something to do.
Thurn smiled to herself. She could just hear Berggren’s argument.
And then she saw him.
* * *
—
On the other side of Karlavägen, a lone man was walking along the street. Thurn had noticed him as he passed Artillerigatan, he was on his way toward Karlaplan. Almost immediately, she had taken in his unusual walking style. He limped, as though one leg was shorter than the other, and every step he took involved pushing his right hip forward with a slight twist.
It took Thurn a few seconds to retrieve the relevant information from the rich archive of her subconscious. She knew exactly who the man with the limp was.
On the opposite sidewalk, at two thirty in the morning, in the middle of one of Stockholm’s sleepiest neighborhoods, a recently retired headmaster from the deepest forests of Värmland was out for a walk. Jan Löwenheim.
And given everything Caroline Thurn knew about Headmaster Löwenheim, the chances that he was heading for the brothel the police had long been trying to uncover were good.
Thurn was halfway over the road when Löwenheim reached the building she had been watching. But rather than stopping, the limping man continued past the door and turned the corner onto Grevgatan, just before the roundabout by Karlaplan’s fountains. Thurn started to run.