by The Helicopter Heist- A Novel Based on True Events (retail) (epub)
If the staff were still inside when they made it in, their plans would fall apart. Gathering them together and making sure they stayed calm wouldn’t be a problem; Nordgren was sure of that, it wasn’t a risk. But it would take time.
The Kaknäs tower flashed away in the distance.
A large boat covered in colorful lanterns was on its way through the channel between Lilla Värtan and Saltsjön.
But the fact they might run out of time wasn’t the thing worrying him most.
* * *
—
He went back to his desk and plugged in the soldering iron. The plan was to prepare four phone bombs. Two would be placed in the police helicopter on Värmdö and two would be kept as backups. The risk of the Stockholm police’s other helicopter turning up, the one currently on loan to Gothenburg, wasn’t particularly high, but neither was it impossible. Meaning they would also need to be able to place two phones in that one, if necessary.
But as Nordgren moved the tip of the iron to solder the casing together, he realized that it was this that was causing him to hesitate.
The idea of putting the phones in the police helicopter and then, while they were heading toward Västberga, blowing the thing to pieces by activating the charge.
Would there be a pilot behind the controls?
Would there be anyone else in the hangar?
Would this plan, meant to prevent anyone from following them, turn into a bloody massacre?
There was no way to ensure it didn’t happen.
Through the living room wall, he heard “The Time of My Life” from Dirty Dancing, probably being used as the soundtrack to Patrick Swayze’s life for the customary retrospective of his career.
Nordgren nodded to himself. In the documentary of his life, no one would be able to say that he had killed anyone. That line was as clear as it was unwavering. He was a criminal, he was a robber, but he wasn’t a killer.
He looked down at his explosive phones.
44
Hjorthagen sports complex was just behind the gas tanks in the neighborhood tucked away beyond Östermalm and Lidingö, built at one time to give guest laborers somewhere to live. It was thanks to soccer that Michel Maloof had first gone there, and he had realized just how perfect Hjorthagen was for meetings that needed to stay secret. Though the area had its own subway station, it was still one of the city’s most forgotten neighborhoods. A professional soccer team used the sports complex to train, but at one in the morning, it was guaranteed to be empty.
On his way to the meeting, Maloof had changed trains several times before he felt confident enough to sit down on the red line toward Ropsten.
Walking toward Hjorthagen from the station, he thought about how quickly the bright summer nights had turned into something more like autumn. Though the trees were still green and the lawns looked as though they thought it was midsummer, the darkness had returned at night. It wouldn’t be long before it was time to dig out the hats and gloves, he thought.
Or maybe six months in Thailand would be preferable to winter in Sweden.
If everything went according to plan, that wouldn’t be unthinkable, and he was sure Alexandra Svensson wouldn’t have anything against going with him.
* * *
—
Maloof crossed the parking lot and kept to the edge of the woods as he moved around the fence surrounding the soccer field. Someone had cut a hole near the very middle, and it had gone ten years without being fixed. He pushed the fence to one side, squatted down and sneaked in, then he hid in the shadow of the changing rooms, right next to the entrance.
Sami Farhan appeared on Artemisgatan five minutes later. Maloof saw him from a distance and shouted gently. Sami took the same route via the woods and the hole in the fence.
“Tell me everything’s sorted,” was the first thing he said.
Maloof recognized the tone of voice.
That aggressive and expectant tone.
“I don’t give a shit what this is all about,” Sami said. “Let’s go. I can’t wait any longer.”
“Wait till Nick gets here.”
Nordgren appeared from the long shadows of the trees. Maloof saw the movement before he saw the person, and he jumped.
“Sorry,” said Nordgren. “Didn’t mean to scare you. I got here a bit early. Just wanted to make sure you weren’t being followed.”
Maloof nodded. He liked Nordgren’s caution, he always had. Sami, on the other hand, was annoyed.
“What the hell is this?”
“Can’t be too careful,” said Nordgren.
They walked toward the northern end of the field, by Gasverksvägen. The trees were tight around them. All three men were wearing dark clothes and talking quietly. It would be impossible to see them unless you got very close.
“I don’t get why we always have to meet on soccer fields,” Sami muttered grumpily, gesturing to the eerie, empty field.
Maloof laughed. “Soccer’s…a team sport, Sami,” he said. “Maybe you could try it sometime.”
They stopped on the goal line. It was a cool, clear night, and Maloof knew that it was one he would remember.
It was time to make a decision.
“We’ve got a pilot,” he said.
The relief of the others was greater than their joy. Sami did a quick pirouette.
“Finally!” he shouted. “Let’s do this!”
Maloof told them what he knew about the American, what his qualifications and references were. He added, “But it was Zoran they were tailing, not me, and not by mistake. They’re on him twenty-four seven. They put microphones in his apartment, in the restaurants. And a couple in the car.”
His words dampened the mood.
“OK,” Sami eventually said. “So they suspect your friend? What’s that got to do with us? You know? Nothing.”
“Lay off,” Nordgren mumbled.
“I’m serious,” Sami continued. “It’s his business.”
“Right, right,” said Maloof. “Except…Zoran knows everything. Him and us…we’re doing this together.”
“Yeah, I know,” Sami said, unable to stand still any longer. “But he hasn’t been involved in any of the details. You know what I mean? He must have a tail for some other reason. We’ve been working round the clock for months. He’s…done a load of other stuff. You know? He’s got his business, we’ve got ours.”
“You think he’s said anything?” Nordgren asked. “That they’ve heard?”
It was the question they had to consider. The reason Petrovic was being watched and listened to so intently had to be because of something else, or had the police heard something about Västberga on one of their microphones over these past few weeks?
Maloof shook his head.
“Don’t worry. He’d never name names. Never say anything which…”
“So why’s he got a tail?” asked Nordgren. “That kind of surveillance. Sounds really fucking weird.”
Maloof shook his head again. He didn’t know.
“Can’t be a leak,” said Sami, “because no one knows. No one. It’s us four and only us.”
“The pilot knows now too,” said Maloof. “Zoran had to tell him. There’s no time left.”
“But when did that happen?” Sami asked. “Yesterday? A few days ago? It’s not him.”
Maloof shook his head. He didn’t know any more than that.
“So…what do we do?” he asked, his calm smile making his face impossible to read, like always.
No one replied. Nordgren’s cap was casting a dark shadow over his face. Sami was digging the toe of his shoe into the grass. His mind was on his brothers, his investors. But above all, he was thinking about Karin. And the boys. He wasn’t planning to let them grow up with a dad who was away every night, doing the occasional job and being sent away at regular intervals. A dad they would be embarrassed of, one they would never get to know. He needed this to work.
“What do you mean?” he asked. “What do we do? We do it.”
>
His words were followed by a long silence.
“I agree it sounds weird,” Nordgren said when Maloof didn’t reply. “We’re going to steal a helicopter and fly it to a cash depot where there’s a police station just down the road. We climb down ladders and blow open doors and carry out the biggest robbery in Swedish history. And all while we know the police have unlimited resources, that they’ve been listening to Petrovic for a month while we’ve been working on the details.”
“This is a job everyone will hear about,” Sami tried to convince his friends. “You know? Across the whole world.”
“Right, right,” said Maloof. “Or…at least the whole of Sweden.”
“I guarantee you,” Sami said, “this is bigger than Sweden.”
His gesture was directed out into space, as though their fame would reach far out into the universe.
“Are we really doing it?” Nordgren wondered.
Silence again. This time, it was Sami who broke it.
“I’ll say it again. It’s a go. We’re doing it. What do you think, Michel? You in?”
Maloof laughed. He glanced at Sami, standing there with a wry smile and drumming his hand against his leg while he waited for an answer. He thought about the months of planning, the drawings spread across the floor in his dark apartment in Fittja, and about Alexandra. Could a life with her be awaiting him? Would it be enough money? In his head, he turned over the question: If this wasn’t enough, what would be? His serious face cracked into a wide smile.
“Definitely,” he said. “Yeah, definitely. I’m in. We’re doing it.”
“OK,” said Nordgren. “Then we’re doing it.”
45
Prosecutor Lars Hertz and Detective Chief Inspector Caroline Thurn were sitting in the front seats of Thurn’s newly washed, dark blue Volvo. It was parked in the shadows between a couple of wheelless wrecks outside a tire-fitting company at Linta Gårdsväg 25. Hertz looked unashamedly alert, his blond fringe bobbing like a thick cloud above his forehead, and he seemed tangibly excited to be involved in a huge police operation. The difficult scent of Mats Berggren’s aftershave enveloped them both, and it was something Hertz would forever associate with that night in the car.
Berggren was in the back. He leaned forward between the seats and said that memories of family car trips in Europe were coming back to him. Were they nearly there yet?
In the front seat, the reaction to his joke differed. Thurn smiled kindly. The idea that her parents might have ever taken her on car trips when she was younger was about as unlikely as it was bizarre. Herz blushed in the darkness, thinking that he wouldn’t have anything against starting a family with Caroline Thurn.
Since the moment she had stepped into his room a few weeks earlier, the prosecutor had found it difficult to look her in the eye. She had the kind of appearance that made him shy. He assumed it was her lack of flattery and her clear unwillingness to please that appealed to him.
And embarrassed him.
They sat and waited in the darkness. The fourteenth of September had crossed over into the fifteenth a few hours earlier. The anticipation they had felt as they drove out to Bromma had passed, but the minutes still felt endless. Thurn’s breathing was heavy and regular. She had fallen into a microsleep a couple of times, but for no more than ten minutes in total. She had also wound down one of the side windows to prevent them from fogging up with condensation. The crickets were all that broke the silence, and the clouds that had rolled in an hour earlier filtered the moonlight into narrow stripes on the flat land on the other side of the road.
“It’s two o’clock,” Berggren informed them.
“That’s correct, Mats,” Thurn replied.
“We’ve been sitting here for three hours.”
Thurn didn’t reply. She wasn’t impressed by her colleague’s mathematical abilities.
They had spent the first hour in whispered, uninspired conversation about the latest in a line of internal investigations into the organizational structure of the Swedish police force. There had been a presentation of the findings in one of the conference rooms a few days earlier, and both Thurn and Berggren had felt obliged to attend. Hertz hadn’t been there, of course; he worked for the prosecution authority and had no strong opinions on where the county police’s responsibilities started and ended. Berggren, on the other hand, had formed a whole range of opinions that he was more than happy to share with his colleagues in the front seats. Thurn knew that the conclusions of the internal reports would be compromised down to nothing, which meant that her level of interest was negligible.
Since then, they had been sitting in silence.
Thurn had made the decision to place the majority of the Task Force outside the Panaxia building in Bromma the day before, but Carlbrink had enough men lying in wait outside G4S to stop a small army all the same.
There were two walkie-talkies in Thurn’s lap. One to contact Carlbrink in Bromma, and the other to be able to quickly get in touch with the team in Västberga.
So far, both had remained silent.
The minutes passed reluctantly.
The Panaxia depot rose up like a huge dark block, high above the surrounding buildings. A few hours earlier, the contracted moving team had left the building. They had been working since the morning before, right up until midnight.
As the movers drove away in their vans, Thurn breathed out. Money was money, colorful pictures printed onto paper that could be exchanged for valuable things, services and experiences. But human lives couldn’t be swapped for anything at all.
What had been worrying Thurn most was that they would end up with a hostage situation that the National Task Force, under the leadership of the insensitive Carlbrink, would fail to handle. But now that the moving staff had gone, that risk had vanished.
* * *
—
Thurn and Berggren had taken a trip out to Solna to brief Carlbrink before his men set out at around ten thirty that evening.
The two officers from the National Criminal Police had watched the elite unit’s preparations. The amount of weapons, shields and safety equipment they packed into their vans was striking. Their arsenal even included a couple of rocket launchers, presumably in case they had to open fire on a helicopter.
“It’s like being back in Israel,” Thurn had commented, mostly to herself.
“Never been,” Berggren replied.
Thurn had given Carlbrink a good head start before she and Berggren drove back into town. She went via Fleminggatan, where she picked up Hertz, and then they headed out to the area behind Bromma airport. She had found the parking lot outside the tire fitter during an obligatory reconnaissance mission on Sunday.
Berggren suddenly jumped in the backseat.
“What was that?” he said.
They sat perfectly still, straining to hear. Even the crickets had fallen silent. After a few minutes, they started breathing normally again. False alarm.
“Still pretty impressive that Carlbrink can get his soldiers not to mess about with their weapons,” Berggren said quietly. “I thought we’d be able to hear them rattling the bolts all night.”
“Where are they?” Hertz asked.
Thurn pointed out the rear window, and the prosecutor thought he could discern the outlines of the vans.
“How many?”
“Not sure,” Thurn replied. “Was it twenty men?”
“Don’t know either,” Berggren piped up from the backseat. “Felt like a small army. They must be packed like sardines inside those vans.”
“Maybe that makes it easier to sleep against one another?” Hertz joked.
The image of those elite police officers leaning their heads on one another in the back of the vans made Berggren laugh.
Thurn hushed him.
“Are you scared they’ll hear me from the helicopter?” he snapped.
“They might arrive in a helicopter,” said Thurn, “but they could just as easily turn up in a couple of cars. Maybe the
helicopter’s just their escape plan. We have no idea.”
Berggren was about to argue, but he resisted the urge.
They knew considerably more than that, they knew an incredible amount, that was why they were sitting in this car, waiting for one of Sweden’s biggest robberies to take place.
But the minutes passed, and Mats Berggren grew more and more restless.
“Isn’t this exciting, Lars?” he said to the prosecutor in the front seat. “Finally getting to see what real police work’s like?”
Hertz gave a brief laugh and the conversation died out. The two men fell asleep, and Thurn stared out into the darkness as the hours ticked by.
* * *
—
At three in the morning, the police helicopter took off from Solna. Just like the National Task Force, it had been put at the operation’s disposal. Rather than allowing the pilots to sleep in the nearby barracks, it had been decided that the helicopter should be in the air once an hour during the night. That way, it would not only be able to help with the surveillance work, it would also be much quicker onto the scene when the time came.
There had been discussions as to whether they should try to move it to Bromma airport, meaning they would be able to get to Panaxia even more quickly, but a decision against the idea had eventually been made. The airport’s rates were, in the eyes of the government, hairraising, and the distance between the area in Solna and the airfield was only three or four minutes as the crow flies.
The agreement was that the helicopter wouldn’t fly anywhere close to Bromma until it was called in. They didn’t want to scare the robbers away.
* * *
—
“That was definitely something!”
Berggren was whispering loudly. The sound had come from some distance away, though not too far.