by The Helicopter Heist- A Novel Based on True Events (retail) (epub)
He started immediately, eating the pizza he had been carrying rather than delivering it.
They gave him more and more night shifts, and after a year or so he started working during the day.
That was what everyone there wanted; no one feels like sabotaging their circadian rhythms.
* * *
—
Like always, they pause outside the gas station for a while, chatting before they head home. His gym bag is on the floor between his feet. It’s pretty big, an overnight bag, but he often has it with him, so no one thinks anything of it.
It’s Tuesday evening and nothing much is going on, there’s nothing worth watching on TV. Someone invites the others over to watch a film; The Girl Who Played with Fire came out in theaters on Friday, but it’s already up on Pirate Bay.
Ordinarily, he likes their film nights, but this time he says no.
The others laugh and make fun of him. Does he have something secret on the go? Someone secret?
He laughs with them and says there’s no secret at all, he’s going to work out. He gestures to his bag.
As a joke, one of the other guys bends down to grab it and remove the obstacle to their film evening.
But when he takes the handles and tries to lift the bag from the ground, he’s completely unprepared for the weight of it. He can’t even make it budge.
“What the hell?”
Inside the spacious gym bag is a long, thick chain. One that has metal barbs soldered onto it and which will be stretched across Elektravägen at the crossroads with Västbergavägen in a few hours’ time.
He swings the bag up onto his shoulder.
He’s keen for it to look like a simple motion.
Then he laughs at how heavy it is and starts making his way toward the bus stop.
He has a job to do. He takes out his phone and makes a call.
50
5:01 p.m.
The minute the phone rings, everything gets under way. Months of planning, years of dreaming about the building in Västberga.
It’s time.
Michel Maloof gets up from his chair and goes over to the kitchen counter. He picks up and hears his chain man say that he’s on the way. His task for the night is to stretch the string of caltrops across Elektravägen at the crossroads with Västbergavägen, and also across Västberga Allé by Drivhjulsvägen, to put a stop to any police cars which might come racing out of the station on Västberga Gårdsväg.
Maloof quickly confirms and then hangs up.
He returns to his chair by the window. It has rapidly become his favorite spot in the newly built, sparsely decorated apartment in Norrtälje that Zoran Petrovic swore no one would be able to link to them. Petrovic knows the guy who installed the HVAC when the apartment were built a few years earlier, who’s the one who got them the key.
Maloof has been staring out that kitchen window for four days now, and there’s one thing he’s sure of: He’ll never move to Norrtälje.
His mind turns to Alexandra Svensson. He hasn’t missed anything more than her soft body over these past few days. The scent of her skin has filled his dreams. He can’t remember that ever having happened before.
Soon, he’ll be able to look her in the eye without having to worry that she can see straight through his pupils and into his soul, finding him out. Over the past few weeks, he was worried she would be working tonight, that for some reason he would bump into her in Västberga in the middle of it all. But a week or so ago, he learned that Alexandra’s night shifts didn’t start until Thursday, meaning she would be at home in Hammarby Sjöstad tomorrow morning. That was an enormous relief.
Soon, everything will be different.
Soon, he won’t have to lie to her about what he’s doing anymore. Never telling her what he did won’t be a problem for him; it’s the basis for every relationship Maloof has ever had.
He sinks into daydreams and mentally ticks off the list of things that could go wrong tonight and tomorrow morning. There are so many that he no longer has the energy to care. He hears Sami talking about his “plan F” and smiles. When reality gets its teeth into their plans—as it always does—it’s the ability to improvise that separates the pros from the amateurs. That’s why he’s working with Sami Farhan and Niklas Nordgren: they both know how to improvise.
All three set up filters earlier that week. Went underground. Nordgren calls it “ducking.” A week or so before a big job, you vanish from the radar. Then you find somewhere to lie low, alone, for a few days.
It’s not just because of the police, it’s also because of their own families and friends. If no one knows where they are, no one can give them away or accidentally reveal anything important.
Maloof sighs. It’s as much a sigh of satisfaction as it is of fear. He hates these last few hours of passive waiting ahead of a job. During the planning phase, he’s always calm and methodical. He makes lists in his head and ticks off the points one by one. And once things get started, it’s as though he transforms. With a mask covering his face, it’s like he rediscovers his true identity. His senses are heightened, he breathes more calmly and thinks more clearly.
But this period of limbo between planning and action is unbearable.
He throws his phone onto a cloth on top of the dishwasher, tips the last of the cold coffee out of the pot and refills it with water to brew a fresh batch.
Petrovic isn’t coming until one. Maloof smiles at the thought of his tall friend and the way he made the Swedish police think the robbery would be taking place on the fifteenth.
Petrovic enjoyed doing that, and he spoke extensively about how he did it. He said it’s hints that are reliable, not loud statements.
And he was right.
51
10:50 p.m.
The old man in the hat walking northward toward Karusellplan in Västberga could, without doubt, have lived in one of the three-story buildings in the area, and though it was approaching eleven at night, he wasn’t drawing any attention to himself.
Nor had he done so earlier that day, when he spent just over an hour tending to his car at the gas station overlooking the G4S cash depot. Or when he sat down on the grass behind the depot reading a book in the still-warm sunshine. He just looked like an old man taking care of his old car, someone who liked to read old books.
He turns off into the Västberga industrial park, a place people don’t tend to go for a late-night stroll.
He isn’t worried about being seen. He isn’t doing anything illegal, he has no criminal record, and tomorrow morning he’ll head back to Åkersberga, where he lives.
In his jacket pocket, he has two cell phones. One of them is his, and the other has been loaned to him. Only one number has been saved in that phone, and his job is to call it and report on the situation.
If he sees anything out of the ordinary.
Police officers out on patrol, guards that don’t seem to belong in the area. Or any unusual activity around the building itself.
He’s even meant to call if everything seems fine.
Just to report that.
52
11:05 p.m.
The phone rings.
Though he has been waiting for the call, the sound still surprises Sami. He jumps up from the sofa and runs into the kitchen. He has four phones, lined up in a perfect row on the table, each loaded with a brand-new SIM card. The vibration from the ringing phone makes the others tremble in anticipation. He had programmed the numbers he would need that night and early morning the previous Sunday.
TEAM 1, he reads on the screen. That’s how he’s labeled them, with different numbers, and that’s what he’s planning on calling them. Nordgren had pointed out that a “team” needs more than one member. Sami explained that this isn’t some grammar exercise.
He picks up the phone and answers.
“Still quiet,” says Team 1.
“Good.”
That’s all.
* * *
—
T
he afternoon has been a long one. It felt endless. Sami Farhan has been in the apartment on Kocksgatan in Södermalm for three days now, two floors up, facing the courtyard. This is where he has been lying low ever since driving back from Hamburg.
He hasn’t been out during the day. Instead, he has watched TV, slept and eaten. His sister had left food for him in the fridge and the freezer; the apartment belongs to one of her friends, currently traveling around Asia. The friend has no idea that her place is currently being used by a robber who, for the past few days, has turned his sleeping patterns on their head in order to be able to perform at his best during a night that has been six months in the planning.
Three days have passed since Sami went underground and vanished from the police and his friends’ radars, heading for Arlanda. He hasn’t spoken to Karin since, he hasn’t been in touch with his mother, Michel Maloof or Niklas Nordgren; he hadn’t touched a cell phone in a week.
Throughout his thirty-year life, Sami has involuntarily had plenty of experience of loneliness and inactivity, both in custody and in prison. But lying low means that the boredom is self-inflicted, which makes things only slightly better. The closer to the finishing line he comes, the harder it is to keep his cool.
His lift won’t arrive until twelve thirty. He has, in other words, just over an hour to kill.
He thaws a couple of square chunks of fried chicken in the microwave and then stares at them on his plate, completely uninterested. Ketchup won’t make them any more appealing. Even food requires planning. He knows how much he can drink every hour without having to go to the toilet. After having spent days and weeks planning the helicopter route and the strength of the explosives, it would have been idiotic not to chart his own body’s processes. He knows he shouldn’t eat any more solids after a quarter past eleven.
He leaves the kitchen after throwing away the remains of his meal, turns off the light in the living room and sits down in an armchair. He tries to focus.
53
11:15 p.m.
Niklas Nordgren takes the last boat to Stavsnäs at dinnertime. He is the only person waiting on the jetty on Runmarö, but it doesn’t matter if the captain can point him out at a later date. Having been on Runmarö isn’t incriminating evidence.
With each day that has passed, he has become increasingly stiff from sleeping in the slightly too-short bed in the playhouse on Runmarö. He has flipped his normal routine upside down, and spent his days asleep. Though the house is on the east of the island, and dangerous reefs off the coast prevent any boats from getting too close, he didn’t want to move around on the plot of land during the day. At this time of year, there are barely any tourists left in the archipelago, and the boats that do pass belong to the year-round residents, people who keep an eye on where there are guests and where there should be empty houses in the middle of September. Instead, he took quick runs in the woods after midnight, constantly afraid of stepping on a snake or coming face-to-face with a badger. But he knew that he needed to keep moving, otherwise he wouldn’t be ready when the time came.
On Tuesday afternoon, when he woke and realized that his short vacation in the archipelago was over, he felt great all the same. His back wasn’t aching in the slightest, and the cold he thought he could feel developing when he went to bed at dawn seemed to have vanished.
* * *
—
After catching the connecting bus directly to Danvikstull, he kills a few hours in an Espresso House before arriving at Kettola’s place at midnight, as agreed. He had been fantasizing about a cup of hot coffee and a muffin during his time in the playhouse, when his only sustenance came from warmed-up cans.
54
11:30 p.m.
She gets a fare out to Bromma and has to wait only half an hour before she gets another back into town. That’s the good thing about working for one of the big taxi firms, there are always plenty of new customers. This time, it’s a businessman with flushed red cheeks who probably couldn’t have said no to an extra bottle of cognac on the plane.
If they still served alcohol on domestic flights?
She doesn’t know, it’s been years since she last flew anywhere.
The businessman is headed for Östermalm, he gives her the address. The man stares out the window the whole way there, he’s too good to talk to her. Just a few minutes into the drive, she already knows that he won’t leave a tip. That type never does.
She drops him off and checks the time. She makes trips to Östermalm often enough to have become hooked on the specialty hot dog kiosk on Nybrogatan. Does she have time to try out one of his Turkish lamb sausages and then squeeze in one more fare? But before her conscience has time to give an answer, her stomach directs her onto Kommendörsgatan, down to the old post office where the kiosk is. There’s a parking space right next to it, which she takes as a sign.
The sausage is just as spicy as she hoped.
* * *
—
When she gets back behind the wheel, it’s already a little past twelve, and she has two, three hours before it’s time. She isn’t really meant to clock off before morning, but she will shut down the system at three, making herself both unavailable and invisible. In the trunk, she has the chain with the caltrops welded onto it, the one she is meant to stretch across Västberga Allé. She assumes it will take her a while; according to Niklas Nordgren, the chain needs to be fastened on either side, but he couldn’t explain how to do it, he just gave her two padlocks.
She’s an imaginative woman, she’ll work something out.
She drives downtown and passes the long line for taxis outside the restaurants there. In a way, it feels good to be avoiding the fight for yet another fare that night, even though her job of stretching the chain across the road won’t pay much more than a few trips to and from Arlanda.
She takes out her phone.
55
11:31 p.m.
Niklas Nordgren feels the buzz of his phone in the inner pocket of his jacket. He fishes it out and answers with a grunt.
It’s his chain woman. She has no idea that she’s part of a bigger plan. She has no idea that she’s one of many. She’s calling to say that she knows what she has to do. Nordgren answers monosyllabically and then hangs up. He hopes she finds somewhere solid to fix the chain at either side of the road.
* * *
—
He reaches the doorway on Rosenlundsgatan at ten past twelve, five minutes earlier than planned. The building is where Jan Kettola lives. Kettola sometimes helps out at the electricians’ where Nordgren works, and he’s the one who has promised to drive Nordgren out to the meeting place in Stora Skuggan Park. The two men aren’t close friends. They’ve done a couple of jobs together, a few years ago now, but there’s a certain loyalty between them. Nordgren isn’t worried. All Kettola knows is that they’re driving out to Stora Skuggan. Even when he hears the news about what happened on the radio tomorrow morning, there’s no way he’ll join the dots.
Rather than ringing the buzzer, Niklas Nordgren starts to worry. He thinks about the huge rock at the gravel pit in Norsborg where they’ll land once it’s all over. Without the patience or the sense to use pulleys, the rock is impossible to shift, it weighs almost a ton. But it should work, he instructed the team in Norsborg himself.
Then his thoughts turn to the police helicopter.
When he told the others what he had eventually worked out, how he was planning to keep the helicopter—or helicopters—on the ground, he did it with a certainty that immediately convinced both Maloof and Sami. They asked questions afterward, particularly Sami, since it’s one of his teams who will do the job there in a couple of hours. But neither of them had doubted the idea itself.
But now Niklas Nordgren has second thoughts.
Would it really work?
56
11:35 p.m.
Claude Tavernier’s mother had always said that he was a natural leader.
It wasn’t something he quoted, he wasn’t stupid
, he knew how it sounded when a man in his thirties referred to his mother’s opinions. But for Tavernier, those words had taken on lifelong meaning. His mother had given him the self-confidence, which had given him the conviction, which had given him the courage. He wasn’t much of a scholar and he definitely wasn’t an athlete; he had studied economics at college in Lyon, but he still had his dissertation to write. He had moved to Sweden and learned the language because of a love that had turned out to be more fragile than he had imagined, but since he had already organized both a job and a place to live, he remained in Stockholm when it all fell apart. He still wasn’t sure whether that was just a temporary detour, or whether it was the path he would take in life.
Deep down, he knew he was the kind of person other people followed. He was a leader. That was what his mother had predicted, and that was how he had always thought of himself. Despite the setbacks and limitations.
He usually ate out when he worked nights. Then he would hang around in a bar somewhere until it was time to go. The alternative was spending the evening at home, checking his watch every five minutes. Night shifts started at midnight and ended at eight the next morning. They worked to a rolling schedule, two nights in a row, one day off, and then three day shifts from nine till five.
Just over four years after he was first hired, he had been called to the top boss and asked whether he was ready to take the next step in his career. It hadn’t come as a surprise. On the contrary. Tavernier had calmly asked about the pension terms, taken the weekend to make it seem like he was thinking about it and then signed the contract.