The Helicopter Heist

by The Helicopter Heist- A Novel Based on True Events (retail) (epub)

  They ordered coffee and tiramisu.

  It was his older brother, Ali, who had dealt out the roles in their family, in the much the same way as you would deal a pack of cards. It was him the siblings had looked up to during their teens, when they first started trying to find their own identities; he was the one they had feared and admired. But once the others had taken their cards and defined themselves, the pack was dealt, and Sami’s position between his protective older brother and explosive younger sibling was still something he struggled to define. There had been days, moments, when he thought he had finally managed to find an image of himself, but then the outline had quickly lost its sharpness and vanished. All that had been left for Sami was the Joker.

  “It has to be over for United now,” Ali said, as though it were a question. “Everything has its time, and Manchester United’s is over. Finished. Done. From now on, it’s all about Arsenal.”

  “Arsenal!” Adil shouted, pretending to look shocked. “How the hell can you say that? Arsenal? Did I miss Drogba being transferred?

  They laughed at the joke, and Sami laughed with them, though he didn’t know why. He didn’t care about soccer, never had, he was the middle brother who didn’t quite fit in. For a long time during his teens, the solution had been to wrap his hands tight, pull on the boxing gloves and punch his knuckles bloody on sandbags and balls. He had feinted and jabbed at the shadows of a father he could barely remember and who had left behind the mystery of why he disappeared. Then, damp with sweat, his brow split and his rib broken, Sami had been able to slump into the changing room after the fight and, for an hour or two, while his body recovered, experience a peace he never usually felt.

  Now, in the restaurant, Sami found himself getting lost in his thoughts. No one, neither his brothers nor the friends who had invested in his plan, had pressured him to repay the money. But he had made each of them a solemn vow that he would get it by autumn. The Stockholm underworld had been his witness. Everyone had heard him say it, and now it was already September.

  “Listen to me now, Sami,” Ali said, tasting the dessert that had been more or less dumped onto their table. “I still think you should stick with us. Screw whatever you’ve got planned, it doesn’t seem to be working anyway.”

  “We’ve come too far to drop it now,” Sami mumbled.

  “Sometimes you’ve got to spend a bit of time on something before you see the truth,” Ali said wisely, giving Adil an encouraging look. The younger brother nodded in agreement.

  * * *

  —

  Sami left his brothers in Liljeholmen at eleven and took the subway back to Södermalm. He had been away for most of the past few weeks. There were moments when Karin let him know that, but then there were evenings like tonight.

  When he got back to the apartment, both kids were asleep and Karin was sitting on the sofa. She smiled when she saw him.

  “What?” he asked suspiciously, taking a few steps into the room.

  “I watched a romantic comedy,” she said. “It put me in a good mood and I remembered why I let you convince me.”

  “Convince you? How did I convince you?”

  “I could’ve kept my clothes on, you know?” she said. “Or at least my underwear. But I didn’t. You convinced me.”

  “I’ve got the gift of the gab,” he smirked.

  “Maybe. But you’d also poured a lot of vodka down my throat.”

  “The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”

  He peeled off his coat and threw it onto an armchair. Then he moved over and sat down next to her on the sofa, but he was still on his guard. Over the past few days, he had been worried that she knew what he was planning. On a few occasions, both yesterday and the day before, she had repeated her mantra: that their relationship was built on him not doing anything stupid. And by that, she didn’t mean other women; she wasn’t worried about that. Sami had loved Karin since high school and there would never be anyone else for him. She knew that.

  “Why’re you saying that?” he had asked. “I haven’t done anything I shouldn’t.”

  “Just a reminder,” she replied.

  He hated female intuition.

  But now, he put an arm around her and pulled her close.

  “I seem to remember,” he said, his face so close to hers that he could smell her lipstick, “that you took off your bra before I even suggested it.”

  Karin smiled, wormed her way out of his grip and got up.

  “Not the first time,” she replied. “It’s every other time you’re thinking of.”

  She pulled her top up, over her head.

  35

  On the morning of Wednesday, September 9, Detective Chief Inspector Caroline Thurn left the offices of a business called Panaxia on Linta Gårdsväg 5 in Bromma. There were six days to go until the biggest heist in Swedish criminal history.

  Without letting on that the situation was critical, she had spent over an hour in the Panaxia meeting room on the third floor, going over every conceivable scenario with the management team. The room was bright and airy, and low-flying planes passed overhead at regular intervals on their descent into Bromma airport.

  For Thurn, the conversation had walked a fine line between revealing too much and making sure she wouldn’t regret anything in a week’s time. If she told them everything she knew, there was a risk the information would be leaked, which could result in the robbers changing their plans. But if she didn’t prepare Panaxia for what might happen and one of the company’s employees ended up getting hurt, she would bitterly regret her secrecy.

  Panaxia was on the verge of moving some of its business activity away from Bromma. In exactly one week’s time, on Wednesday. September 16, the move was scheduled to finish, but until then, the company would be more vulnerable than usual, from a security point of view. As a result, it was “positive that the police are showing an appropriate level of interest,” as Panaxia’s security chief put it.

  Thurn, who hadn’t known about the move in advance, nodded in agreement.

  They had gone over the flow of the building in detail, and when Thurn eventually got up on her long legs to shake hands with everyone in the room, she thought she had found the answer to the question they had been searching for.

  She knew where the helicopter robbery would take place.

  * * *

  —

  The car was parked directly outside the entrance. As Thurn sat down behind the wheel and fastened her seat belt, the feeling that Panaxia was some kind of provincial cousin to the international G4S welled up. On the one hand, its staff did their best, but on the other, their best wasn’t enough. There was something that didn’t seem right about the country’s second-biggest secure transport company, but Thurn couldn’t put her finger on exactly what that was.

  Maybe the robbers had made the same observation?

  She started the Volvo and pulled out into the road.

  The figure the Serbian informant had mentioned to the police, a haul of up to €10 million, could be found in only three places in Stockholm. The central bank and the two cash depots, Panaxia in Bromma and G4S in Västberga.

  It was unlikely that anyone would attempt to rob the central bank. It was one of the few buildings in Sweden that even Caroline Thurn dared call secure, and there was no way you could land a helicopter on the roof.

  Of the two remaining depots, only Panaxia in Bromma matched the description of a four-story building with a flat roof.

  Today, Thurn had learned that the company had been planning to move parts of its business for some time, and that the move was scheduled to begin on the fourteenth of September. The robbers had chosen the fifteenth, which had to be seen as the optimal time, given that the company would be particularly vulnerable then.

  Whoever was planning the robbery had to have someone on the inside of Panaxia, Thurn thought; otherwise, they would never have found such a perfect opportunity. She wondered whether she could ask for lists of employees now, without raising suspici
ons. She turned left onto Drottningholmsvägen and headed back toward Alvik and Kungsholmen.

  * * *

  —

  On the way up to her department in police HQ, Thurn passed the colleagues responsible for listening in on Zoran Petrovic.

  They had microphones hidden in Petrovic’s restaurants on Upplandsgatan, in the bedroom and living room of his apartment and in the headrest of his BMW. The resources that had been put at the disposal of the investigation were wastefully large, and Thurn knew that this was partly because of the personal involvement of the minister for foreign affairs in the case.

  But she also knew that the national police commissioner’s plan was to defend the increased costs at the end of the year by going public with the international success their efforts had led to.

  And that success was something she held Caroline Thurn responsible for.

  Thurn stuck her head around the door into a room full of electronics. “Nothing?” she asked.

  Two technicians wearing headphones turned to the doorway and stared at her like they had just woken up. Their eyes were red and they didn’t look like they had changed their clothes in weeks. A couple of empty white cartons on the desk made the place stink of Chinese food.

  “You kidding?” one of them said.

  “You’ve always been a real joker, Caroline,” said the other.

  “No,” the inspector said with a friendly smile. “Not joking at all.”

  The technicians sighed.

  Bugging Zoran Petrovic was a bit like pointing a microphone toward a soccer stadium during a derby and then hoping to hear someone whisper. Words poured into the ears of the police officers who, in increasing confusion, allowed hard drive after hard drive to fill up with talk of great deals and boasts about conquests of impossibly beautiful women.

  Though Petrovic didn’t appear in any of the police databases, the officers listening to him were certain that someone had taught him to speak like a seasoned criminal. He never named names, and whatever he did say usually lacked a time and a place.

  The police now knew that Zoran Petrovic was active in the building trade, but he also seemed to have a finger in the cleaning and restaurant trade, the beauty world, the import and export branches. Exactly what he did, owned or spent his time doing in any of these areas remained unclear, however. It was possible that he was just a silent partner, some kind of adviser, or maybe the businesses were run by dummies and Petrovic himself was ultimately in control. In all likelihood, it was a combination of all those things, but since Petrovic’s phone conversations were vague and elusive, never naming names or exact amounts, this was all guesswork on the part of the police.

  During an ordinary day, he might have upward of twenty meetings, and they took place all over Stockholm. He could send fifty text messages and make a similar number of calls, half of them in Montenegrin, a language closely related to Serbian. Since the police interpreters weren’t always available, there was a chance they would find something more useful in the conversations that weren’t in Swedish, but judging by the conversations they’d had translated so far, the content seemed to be exactly the same.

  They weren’t getting anywhere. The only reference to the helicopter robbery came when Petrovic uttered that he was planning something on September 15. But that was something the Serbs had known from the beginning.

  * * *

  —

  Caroline Thurn struggled on up the stairs and down the corridors of police headquarters. She was just passing Mats Berggren’s room, heading for her own office farther down the corridor, when he saw her and shouted.

  Thurn stopped. The sun was so low in the sky during the morning that she was no more than a silhouette in his doorway.

  “How did it go?” he asked.

  “It’s going to be Panaxia,” she said.

  The information about their upcoming move had convinced her.

  She had her left hand high on the doorframe, meaning that the sleeve of her blouse had slipped down her arm. If the light had been different, he never would have noticed it. But the smooth skin of the scar shone straight across Thurn’s wrist, and Berggren immediately recognized the type of wound.

  He had been on the verge of asking something else about the cash depot in Bromma, but he lost his train of thought. If it had been anyone else, the discovery wouldn’t have hit him nearly as hard.

  “What are you thinking, Mats?” Thurn asked. She had noticed something had happened to her colleague.

  “No, no…nothing,” he mumbled.

  She shrugged and left his doorway.

  36

  Zoran Petrovic was sitting in Café Stolen, and he felt restless. It made him a bad listener. He glanced down at his watch. He was meeting the potential new helicopter pilot in an hour, but until then he was stuck listening to a vegetable grower from Poland who was trying to establish himself in Årsta. The Pole needed help with both contacts and cash, and he was bragging about his biodynamically grown carrots and beetroot. Petrovic, who was relatively familiar with the vegetable trade after a few attempts to break into the market himself, knew that the care the farmer put into the quality of his produce would never be compensated for in price. He hated meetings that ended on a bad note.

  After escorting the Pole to the door, Petrovic took a moment to glance up and down the street. To begin with, he didn’t spot anyone, but then he saw them. They were standing on Upplandsgatan. Over the past week, they had been everywhere. It might be the badly dressed, early middle-aged man who turned around when he left the pub late one night. Or the neutrally dressed woman pretending to stare into an uninteresting window opposite the door of his building.

  The police always seemed to be able to catch the scent whenever anything particular was on the go, once the vague talk turned into concrete plans, and the stroll along the water’s edge in Gröndal was now about a security company’s routines rather than last night’s girl. Petrovic had long since stopped being surprised by the sharp nose of the police force, and he now accepted it as a fact.

  Besides, that refined sense of smell had reached the same level of sophistication on both sides of the law.

  Someone within the police force or prosecution authority must have suddenly decided it was worth keeping Petrovic under tabs, and he felt a reluctant sense of flattery. His relationship with his self-image was split. Just over a year earlier, his face had accidentally flashed up in a TV4 report on criminality in Farsta. He had barely been involved, but he was still the one the camera crew had caught on film. As a result, he had ended up in custody. Petrovic had sued the TV channel and been awarded a symbolic figure as some kind of sticking plaster over the wound. All the same, other than that film, the police didn’t have anything on him.

  Which meant that their newfound interest both worried and amused him.

  * * *

  —

  Just before twelve, Café Stolen started to fill up with lunch guests, meaning it was time for Zoran Petrovic to leave. He had to get out to Saltsjöbaden to meet the American pilot Jack Kluger, but his new followers left him with no choice but to perform an evasive maneuver first.

  Petrovic left the restaurant, crossed Tegnérlunden, walked down the hill toward Sveavägen and then continued straight ahead. His two tails did the same. When the Yugoslavian reached Birger Jarlsgatan, he turned right and paused outside a food shop. His followers slowed down and stopped ten yards away, pretending to be interested in the way a garage door had been constructed.

  Using the reflection in the shop window, Petrovic decided that Jason, who worked in a computer shop farther down the street, had followed his instructions. He glanced in the direction of the plainclothes police officers, smiled and waved.

  Everything happened very quickly after that.

  Petrovic ran straight across Birger Jarlsgatan. He jumped over the barriers at the bus stop and continued toward the motorbikes parked on the other side. He leaped onto a Honda whose engine was already running and, with a roar, tore off i
n the direction of Roslagstull.

  He left the two disconcerted police officers in his wake.

  Petrovic drove at high speed for a few minutes, passing Odengatan, and then turned right onto Surbrunnsgatan and parked the bike outside the building where Jason lived. He hung the keys on a forked branch on the cherry tree by the door and then walked up Valhallavägen to find a taxi out to Saltsjöbaden.

  37

  “You seem a bit low, Michel?”

  Alexandra Svensson was looking at him with concern. It was just before lunch on a Tuesday as overcast as Maloof’s mood, and they were walking across the bridge toward Skeppsholmen, trying to ignore the fact that they were freezing. Summer was definitely over, and autumn’s arrival had been abrupt. Despite that, Alexandra was dressed for summer, in a skirt and blouse with a thin cardigan on top. It hadn’t been a good choice.

  She had been nagging Maloof to go to the Moderna Museet with her for several weeks now, and he had finally given in.

  He deeply regretted that decision.

  He had experienced setbacks before. Without making any claim to be scientific about it, he would say that nine plans out of ten never came off. The criminal life was, just like all other ways of living, based on hopes and dreams. The wildest ideas were barely ever meant to come true; they were more like a box of chocolates—something sweet to savor for a moment.

  He would even say that it was quite unusual to get as far as they had with the Västberga plan. Being forced to call it off now, with just days to go, when they’d thought they had everything in place, was out of the question.

  * * *

  —

  They had met two days earlier, at the Kvarnen pub in Södermalm. Sami, Maloof and Nordgren. They had arrived early, before it filled up, and sat at one of the tables behind the bar, at the very back.