by The Helicopter Heist- A Novel Based on True Events (retail) (epub)
“Did you hear that?”
He hissed, his voice reaching a falsetto. Thurn had thought that Berggren was asleep. But she had heard it too. It wasn’t his imagination this time. The clear sound of movement in the grass not far from the road.
Thurn glanced at her watch. Five past four.
“It’s not far away. Should we let Carlbrink know?” Berggren whispered from the backseat.
Thurn nodded. She didn’t know where Carlbrink had positioned his men, but there was a risk that none of them were stationed along the road.
The detective silently closed the window, picked up one of the walkie-talkies and pressed the button.
“We can hear something,” she whispered into it.
“Understood,” came the immediate reply, followed by silence.
Thurn gently placed the radio in her lap and lowered the side window again. The three of them listened carefully. Hertz and Berggren nodded almost simultaneously. Someone, or perhaps several people, was out there in the darkness.
Movement. Silence. Movement. Silence.
It was heading straight for them.
“Are they moving away?” Hertz whispered.
His observation was correct. The sound was heading away from the Panaxia building.
“But that’s impossible,” Berggren said, equally quietly. “Carlbrink has a ring around the building. No one could’ve made it inside and back out again already.”
A few seconds later, they spotted the dog.
It was big and black, a cross of several breeds, and it wasn’t wearing a collar. It was thin and hungry; its ribs were clearly visible.
“Stay here,” Thurn instructed, possibly to stop Berggren from getting out of the car.
She picked up the walkie-talkie.
“False alarm,” she whispered.
They heard a crackling on the other end, which Thurn took as a confirmation.
* * *
—
The realization that nothing would happen, that the robbery wouldn’t be taking place, didn’t dawn on them until Berggren informed the others that it was quarter past six in the morning and that the sun was coming up.
It began as a joke.
“The Serbs said it would be a night flight,” said Berggren, “but I think it’s getting a bit late.”
Thurn muttered something incomprehensible. Her body was stiff. Her mouth as dry as paper.
“The one thing I’m worried about,” Berggren continued when neither of his colleagues replied, “is that if Carlbrink doesn’t get to set his army on the robbers, he’ll take his disappointment out on us.”
Hertz had dozed off in the front seat. He was sleeping deeply, his breathing calm, and neither Thurn nor Berggren wanted to wake him.
For some reason, the robbers had changed their plans.
Suddenly, Thurn jumped. One of the radios in her lap buzzed.
Was it Västberga?
Was G4S the target?
She picked up the walkie-talkie and held it to her ear, but it wasn’t Västberga. It was Carlbrink trying to get ahold of her.
“Nothing,” his tired voice said down the line. “And nothing in Västberga either. Over there?”
“Nothing,” she replied.
Caroline knew it was over.
She thought about the commissioner, about the minister for foreign affairs. Then she thought about all the police officers who had been involved in the investigation; those hundreds of hours of Zoran Petrovic’s inane chatter they’d had to listen to.
She sighed.
Had there been a leak at police HQ? It wasn’t impossible, the leaks there sometimes resembled a Chinese river delta. Maybe the robbers knew it had been a trap, and that was why they had canceled.
But it was equally likely that some part of their plan had failed at the last minute. With so many people involved, anything could have happened.
When the clock struck six thirty, Caroline Thurn was sure.
It wasn’t her job to dismiss Carlbrink, and so she called the commissioner instead, on her direct line.
“Hi, it’s Caroline,” she said, using her normal voice rather than whispering for the first time in hours. “It’s a nonstarter,” she continued.
Hertz woke in the passenger seat.
Thurn listened in silence for a moment while Berggren and Hertz looked searchingly at her.
She put down her phone and started the engine.
“They’re sending Carlbrink home,” she said. “They’re moving the helicopter back to Myttinge. The political version will be that with the help of our Serbian colleagues, we managed to prevent one of the biggest robberies in history.”
“Did we?” Hertz asked, newly woken. “Did we stop the robbery?”
“What do you think, Lars?” said Thurn. “What do you think?”
46
“I feel pretty crappy,” Niklas Nordgren said to Carsten Hansen.
“Yeah? But you hardly ever get sick.”
“I guess it was something I ate yesterday. My stomach’s kind of churning.”
“Shouldn’t you go home then?”
“I just got here,” Nordgren protested.
It was nine in the morning on Friday, September 18.
“But,” he added, “I really don’t feel right. Shit. You sure you’ll cope?”
“Go home and rest,” said Hansen. “It’s more important you’re OK than that the locksmith’s microwave works.”
“Yeah,” Nordgren agreed. “Yeah, I guess. Thanks, Carsten. It’s good of you.”
Nordgren packed up his things, thanked Carsten again and pulled on his coat. But as he turned the corner, he didn’t head for home. He headed for the station instead. He took the Lidingö line to Ropsten, the subway to Slussen, and from there a bus to Stavsnäs. When the Waxholm ferry docked at the quay and Nordgren stepped on board, he calculated that it had been five years since he last made this journey.
It was lunchtime when he stepped off the boat on the island of Sandhamn. The season was short in the archipelago, and by that time of year, mid-September, the only people to get off ahead of Nordgren were a couple of handymen in overalls. No more than a hundred or so people lived permanently on the island, and for that reason seeing strangers was unusual. Nordgren passed the hotel with determined steps, and then headed up the hill toward Trouville. He too was wearing overalls and was carrying a tool bag. If anyone noticed him, they would just assume he was on his way to repair something in one of the houses that lay empty at this time of year, along the road toward the island’s southern cape.
In summer, the beach in Trouville offered seclusion to any tourists wanting to swim, at least if they moved away from the more built-up area. But by September, the area was completely deserted.
Nordgren turned right when he reached the water, and walked along the narrow beach. He clambered over piles of damp seaweed that had washed ashore. It didn’t take long for his shoes to be soaked through.
He was looking for the rowboat he had dragged onto land five years earlier. He had pulled it up to the edge of the trees and tied it to a trunk. You couldn’t see the boat from the water, and barely even from land unless you got lost in the woods and tripped over it. It belonged to an old childhood friend of Nordgren’s parents, who had sold their place on Sandhamn and bought another on Runmarö. But the little boat had been left behind, and it wasn’t in anyone’s way.
He went too far at first, but Nordgren eventually found the little plastic boat exactly where he had left it. The oars were still inside, as was the bailer. He couldn’t manage to undo the knot he had tied around a tall pine, and he had to cut the rope with a knife instead. He pulled the boat down to the water, pushed it out and jumped in. His shoes were already soaked anyway.
Thanks to the southerly wind, it took him no more than two hours to row over the strait to the edge of Runmarö. That was where his parents’ friends had bought their new house, and there was a playhouse with a bed in their yard. Nordgren had slept there before.
47
Just as Niklas Nordgren was rowing ashore on Runmarö, the referee blew his whistle to start the match at Råsunda Stadium in Solna. The arena had been built as the national stadium for the Swedish soccer team, and it could hold almost forty thousand fans. Tonight, with AIK playing Trelleborgs FF at home, roughly half that number of paying spectators were in the seats. It was AIK’s year, the team was heading for victory in the Allsvenskan league, and that fact made Michel Maloof neither happy nor sad. He didn’t have a favorite team in the Allsvenskan; he thought English league soccer was far superior to Swedish, and was much more interested in the Premier League. On top of that, Trelleborg were one of AIK’s least entertaining rivals, sitting midtable and with a game that could sympathetically be described as defensive.
But there was no denying that the nearly twenty thousand spectators that evening were giving the boring match a relatively grand feeling. The terraces were lively, and though the score was 0–0 at halftime, it was going to be the home side’s night; you could feel it in the air. Maloof bought a hot dog and a Coke Zero in a soft plastic cup that was difficult to hold, and he went back to watch the second half, still not feeling particularly engaged.
Sure enough, the home team sent a ball into the back of the net at seventy-five minutes, and a quarter of an hour after that, Maloof got up and pushed his way out of his row. He was carrying a sports bag in one hand. It wasn’t unthinkable that the lukewarm cola had forced him to go to the toilet with just injury time to go.
Next to the enormous men’s restroom and its many cubicles and urinals, there was a separate disabled restroom with a door you could lock behind you. That was where Maloof headed.
With just a few minutes of the game left to play, the corridors of the stadium were practically deserted. This was when everything would be decided out on the field, it wasn’t something you wanted to miss.
Still, Maloof was careful to make sure no one saw him open the door to the restroom.
He locked it carefully, hung the bag on a hook on the back of the door and pulled out a sleeping mat and pillow. The room reeked of urine, but he had seen worse. He put everything on the floor in the corner opposite the toilet and sat down on the mat. He had a book with him, a thick Stephen King paperback, but he wouldn’t read any of it. It was more a ritual; he always brought a thick book that he wouldn’t read.
It took almost ten minutes before the noise outside the restroom door gradually increased to a roar. Desperate soccer fans who didn’t want to wait in the long lines for the normal toilets started pulling at Maloof’s door.
But the lock held, and Maloof remained sitting on the floor.
After fifteen, possibly twenty minutes, the stadium fell quiet again. All that remained now was to wait. The cleaning staff wouldn’t arrive until the next morning, it was a way for the company to avoid paying overtime. Zoran Petrovic had been running a successful cleaning company for ten years, and he knew how things worked at Råsunda.
But not even Petrovic knew where Michel Maloof was at that moment.
* * *
—
Maloof slept in intervals of fifteen minutes, the floor was too hard and the mat too thin for any longer than that. When he eventually got up at four thirty in the morning, he was stiff and in a bad mood.
He opened the door to the disabled restroom and found Råsunda Stadium quiet and deserted.
Maloof walked slowly down its dark corridors, past the shutters on all the food stalls. It was impossible to think that just last night, tens of thousands of people had been shouting, cheering, drinking and laughing on the now-empty terraces; right then, it felt more like the day after a nuclear holocaust.
There were turnstiles at the exits. They turned only one way, so there were no locks. Maloof left Råsunda in the early-morning darkness, taking the train out to Kårsta. From there, he would take a bus to Norrtälje.
The likelihood of him bumping into anyone he knew in any of those places was tiny.
48
Sami Farhan waited another day, until Saturday, September 19. If Michel Maloof had found it easy to disappear and Niklas Nordgren slightly harder, the task was by far the most difficult for Sami.
He did what he usually did. He booked a flight leaving late in the afternoon. This time, he had chosen Hamburg as his destination. The return journey was booked for a month’s time, but the seat back to Arlanda would be empty. When he landed, there would be a car waiting for him at the airport, and he would drive it back to Stockholm that evening and night.
He was doing someone a service, the car had been bought in Germany and would later have to pay duty in Sweden. But that wasn’t his problem. He would leave it in a parking garage in Östermalm and then make his way through the city unnoticed, heading for an apartment in Södermalm where no one would either think to look for or be able to trace him.
Abracadabra, and Sami Farhan would have disappeared.
No, that wasn’t the problem.
It was the farewells that were impossible.
That Saturday morning had followed its usual, chaotic pattern. The baby had woken and started screaming at four, and before he had been fed and gone back to sleep, he had managed to wake his older brother. Sami had walked around and around the kitchen table with John in his arms, loop after loop after loop, listening to his sniffles eventually grow quieter and cross over into sleep.
But the minute he put the boy down in his bed, a mattress on the floor in the room Karin had previously used as her office, Sami himself had felt wide awake. He had sat down on the sofa in the living room and tried to work out what he was going to say. It was impossible.
By five, he had dozed off again, and he slept through until seven. He woke to the sound of Karin trying to make coffee as she prepared the gruel for the one-year-old. She had been up since six, and she handed Sami a bottle and pointed to the baby, who was sleeping in the stroller in the hallway. After that, she staggered into the bedroom, pulled the door shut and slumped onto the bed with the hope that a few hours’ uninterrupted sleep would allow her milk to thicken enough for the next feed.
This isn’t right, he thought.
I can’t leave her like this.
Not now, not for a week, not even for a day.
But he had no choice.
Going underground and disappearing from the system was his way of protecting Karin and the kids. Both in the long and the short term.
Sami wasn’t planning to be sent away again. He couldn’t, not now that he had created all of this. A home. A family.
His plan was to stay away for almost three weeks, but he was doing that to avoid being sent away for three years.
Or even longer.
It wasn’t that prison scared him. If you got into the game, you had to accept the rules. But for his family, things were different.
* * *
—
Sami made lunch and gently woke Karin by taking her a tray of food, a ham-and-cheese omelet and a large glass of milk. For once, both boys were sleeping.
He put the tray on the bed and sat down by her feet. He watched as she wearily sat up. She was so incredibly beautiful. Like always when he watched her without her knowledge, he knew that he could never be with anyone else.
“I have to go away,” he said.
The words came suddenly, and he surprised himself. However he had been imagining their conversation would start, it wasn’t like this.
She had just picked up the cutlery to start eating, but she put it back down.
“No,” she said firmly.
Her eyes were serious.
“Honestly, love, it’s got to wait. Whatever it is. I need all the help I can get right now.”
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
He sat perfectly still. Karin could count on one hand the times she had seen him sit motionless like he was right now. She allowed the silence to grow before she asked the question.
“Where are you going?”
“I have to
go away,” he repeated.
“Where?”
He couldn’t meet her eye. He turned to look out of the window. He pulled at his sweater, which suddenly felt tight.
“I can’t say.”
“Don’t do it,” she said. “You promised.”
She spoke quietly, so as not to wake the boys. There was no anger in her voice, just sadness. That made everything worse.
“I know,” he said. “I’ll keep my promise.”
He meant it. He wasn’t going to live a criminal life. He truly believed that.
“So you can tell me where you’re going then,” she said. “Is it overnight?”
“It’s for a few weeks,” he said.
That made her explode.
“You can’t!” she shouted.
The tray tipped. Milk sloshed out of the glass.
“You can’t just go away for a few weeks! Not without telling me where you’re going. Not when we’ve just had a baby!”
And at that very moment, the baby started crying in the hallway. Sami took it as an excuse to get up.
“Did you hear what I said!” she shouted after him.
SEPTEMBER 22–23
49
4:54 p.m.
It’s a few minutes before five. His shift ends then, when the evening and night staff take over. But it’s been quiet all afternoon, so he goes out to get changed a couple of minutes early.
He has been working at the Statoil gas station on Magelungsvägen in Bandhagen for almost two years now, and he likes his job. There’s a small gang of them that usually work shifts together, three guys and two girls, and they’ve also started hanging out after work. When he first arrived from the north five years earlier, he had trouble finding a job and making new friends. He got by, lived in sublet sublets like everyone else, and the days passed. He heard about the job at the Statoil station by chance while he was working overtime for a pizzeria in Högdalen, delivering pizzas on a moped he’d stolen from outside the Globe Arena. He had happened to stop there for gas and heard the manager complaining about how they were one man short that night.