Without another word, he got to his feet, bumping the table and knocking over his glass. The water ran across the tablecloth and dripped to the floor, but he didn’t notice.
He was finally about to defeat those damn secure bags.
Zoran Petrovic could smell the money.
The idea was neither original nor difficult, and it was, as usual, the implementation that had caused him problems. Petrovic took a right up by Tegnérlunden Park and crossed Sveavägen just as the lights turned red. He was driving a BMW he had borrowed from a friend who owed him money, a fast car built for Germans with long legs. Neither Ferrari nor Maserati seemed to realize that people could be taller than six and a half feet.
The plan was to film how to break into one of the G4S bags without causing the dye ampoules to explode. A bit of basic editing, some cool music, and then the film would be uploaded to YouTube. Would-be robbers across Europe—and the rest of the world—would be able to watch it, meaning that G4S would have to scrap the blue bags within a few hours, binding contract or not. That was when Maloof would return to the security firm’s head office and remind them that there was another, better bag that they could order now that the secrets of the blue bag had been revealed.
If Petrovic had calculated the production and distribution costs and the business tax correctly, a company with an exclusive contract to sell security bags to G4S could make a profit of a million or so during the very first year. After that, you could probably maintain a sustainable level of earnings of a few million in Sweden alone.
The BMW flew over the Lidingö Bridge.
He parked badly outside the scrapyard and ran on his long legs through the building, out the back and across the labyrinthine car cemetery to the container. There were three men inside, all studying the masterpiece that had been sent over from France, and which they had just managed set up in line with the instructions.
“Move, move!” Petrovic demanded.
The machine was worth veneration.
It was a guillotine.
What could be more French? A guillotine with huge titanium blades, so sharp that they could cut a strand of hair. Or a brick.
Or a steel bag.
But not just that. The blades—there were two of them—weren’t reliant only on gravity. The manufacturers had helped nature along by installing them onto two steel posts with a chemical rocket engine on each bracket. The blades’ short journey toward their goal was an explosive one. Petrovic had seen the machine in action a couple of times, and the force was incredible.
Zoran Petrovic had asked the manufacturers of the magnificent rocket guillotine to construct two titanium blades that came down onto a rectangular plate. The measurements of the plate were the same as the blue security bags’ minus seven millimeters on the short sides.
In other words, the guillotine would be able to cut the dye ampoules straight off the bag in one fantastic clean sweep.
“It’s beautiful,” he said with a sigh, happy as a small child, staring at the unlikely machine.
“What the hell is it?” asked Svenne Gustafsson.
Petrovic sent Gustafsson and his men out. His own amateur engineers would be arriving soon, two of the kids who usually worked in the container and in whom Petrovic had developed a special confidence over the past few months.
He moved around the guillotine, admiring its razor-sharp blades and brilliant steel construction. Basking in his own genius.
During the afternoon, it transpired that they would need more cables and connections before everything worked like it should. It wasn’t until nine that evening, under the glow of the bright ceiling lights in the container, that they were finally ready to put one of the blue bags onto the guillotine for the first real test.
The six video cameras that had previously been on tripods facing each of the workstations had now been turned to face the guillotine. From six different angles, they would capture the moment the blue security bag from G4S was freed of its edges and Petrovic’s financial future was secured.
The idea of selling the black bags to the security firm through a new company, a legitimate tax-paying company that submitted annual reports registered with the Patent and Registration Office, seemed particularly appealing to Petrovic. The profits would be big enough that he and Maloof might as well share it with the state. As only wealthy people could afford to do.
Petrovic switched on each of the six cameras himself. Then he took a few steps toward the door. He nodded gravely, and one of the two assistants placed a bag on the plate. Petrovic nodded again, and the other assistant pressed the button.
The guillotine motors exploded into life.
The razor-sharp titanium blades fell at rocket speed toward the security bag, but in Petrovic’s eyes, everything happened in slow motion. He saw the blades gliding down the two poles, and the cameras captured every tenth of a second.
The titanium forced itself into the edge of the bag and ate its way into the steel. Petrovic grinned.
Then it stopped.
Everything stopped.
Something was putting up a fight.
And just a second later, they heard the sound of the dye ampoule exploding inside the bag.
Petrovic and his engineers jumped at the familiar noise.
Their disappointment was mute, and time seemed to come to a standstill.
“WHAT THE HELL?”
The young men were on their way out of the container before Petrovic even had time to say another word. They knew that the easygoing nonchalance the tall man radiated, those streams of words that usually entertained them, was masking something else.
Something hard and black.
And they had no intention of staying to witness that.
“Shit,” Petrovic mumbled quietly, without even noticing that he was alone beneath the bright strip lights.
The expensive, wrecked machine stood in front of him, a hope that had cost months of his time and hundreds of thousands of his kronor, and which had proved to have no value at all.
It was over.
The idea of replacing the blue security bags with the black briefcase from Slovenia had lived for almost five years. But that night, it died. He tried to calculate how much it had cost him, but the figures quickly grew so large that he gave up. It was far too depressing.
Maybe he could sell the container to Gustafsson and the scrapyard?
Maybe the titanium in the blades would be worth something if he took it apart?
Petrovic slumped onto a stool by one of the six workstations. He fished his phone from his inner pocket and dialed Michel Maloof’s number.
Maloof answered immediately.
“Did you say you needed help?” Petrovic asked.
“Right, right,” Maloof’s voice came down the line. “It was that thing we talked about last time… getting off the ground?”
Petrovic thought for a moment. He was used to riddles of this kind, you could never talk plainly over the phone. After a few seconds, he remembered what Maloof meant. The cash depot in Västberga, the helicopter.
“Sure,” he said. “I remember.”
“Do you know anyone with… one of those machines?” Maloof asked.
“Consider it done,” Petrovic replied.
He shoved the phone back into his pocket. He had found himself a new project. But how did you get hold of a helicopter?
17
“You locking up, Niklas?”
Carsten Hansen was standing by the open door, and without waiting for Niklas Nordgren’s answer, he let it swing shut behind him.