When the managing directors’ secretaries called to book a helicopter for their bosses, Manne was the one who looked after the calendar. Zoran Petrovic knew many secretaries at that level.
The overexcited caretaker was waiting impatiently next to the unlocked hangar doors.
“Come on, come on!” he shouted.
There was a strong smell of gasoline and metal inside the hangar. The helicopters were lined up in rows in the darkness. Like sleeping horses, Maloof thought, not that he had ever seen a sleeping horse. There was something solemn about the scene. Powerful. Excessive. Rich. And the fact that Manne was running back and forth, babbling constantly, was extremely annoying.
“Here it is,” he shouted, waving them over. “Here it is, this is the one I thought you could take? A Bell 206 JetRanger. Nice, right?”
The distinguishing feature was that the helicopter was white, but otherwise Maloof thought that it looked just like all of the others.
Manne moved around it, pointing out features and telling them stories that seemed increasingly incoherent.
“You borrow it, you bring it back. I’ll take payment in advance. You know that, Zoran, I always take the money in advance. That’s how it goes. Money first.”
“Feels like you’ve already been paid,” Petrovic replied.
“Right, right,” Maloof agreed.
“No joking, boys, no joking,” Manne begged them. He looked like he had been wronged. “I’ll get my money. And I’ll make sure she’s ready with a full tank whenever you need her. You just make sure it looks like you’ve stolen her. Everyone’s happy. OK?”
Maloof didn’t answer, but he nodded.
They had found themselves a helicopter. Now they just needed to find someone who could fly it.
19
Blood had been spilled.
The knife, whose razor-sharp blade had cut the entrecôte into strips, was still lying next to the chopping board on the kitchen counter. Sami Farhan never tidied up while he was cooking. The browned meat had been simmering away in the stew for over an hour now, but there was still blood on the counter. There were dirty bowls on the kitchen table, pots stacked up in the sink; knives, wooden spoons and whisks were everywhere, dripping onto the floor and the counter. If he had been asked to re-create the whole process again afterward, explaining what he had used each of the tools for, he would have found it impossible. He cooked the same way he did everything else in his life: with a restless, physical energy.
The aromas of his cooking filled the kitchen. Sami had started the day by making a vegetable stock. There was nothing wrong with cubes, but if you had the time, then real bouillon was better.
He added some finely chopped fresh red chili, cinnamon and sambal oelek to the stock in the stew. Onions and garlic were frying in the pan next to that. He would later mix the softened onion into the couscous with some apricots and orange.
Karin had taken the kids to her mother’s house a few blocks away on Sankt Paulsgatan. The idea was to give Sami an afternoon to himself and his stew, and it was the best present she could give him. There were people who emptied their minds by running mile after mile on the treadmill. Others had sex or got drunk. But Sami’s preferred method of soothing his soul and bringing new ideas to life was cooking.
When he tasted the bouillon with a teaspoon, he didn’t give a single thought to the recurrent anxiety he had been feeling at nights lately. Rumors about how he had been screwed over with the frozen prawns seemed to be growing, and soon there wouldn’t be anyone in the whole of Stockholm—suburbs included—who didn’t already know the story. Whenever he bumped into people he hadn’t seen for years in the supermarket, they would lower their voices and sympathetically ask how much money he had really borrowed from his brothers. Then there were the young men from the suburbs who, just a few months earlier, would have barely dared look him in the eye. Now they laughed behind his back.
There were no more clean knives in the drawer, but he found one on the windowsill, with no idea what it was doing there. He gave it a rinse and then chopped the apricots into smaller pieces. That took all his concentration, which meant he could avoid torturing himself with all the questions he still needed answers for, even if Maloof and his friend said they had sorted out a helicopter.
Sami peeled the skin from the oranges with a knife as sharp as the one he had used on the meat and continued to work at the same high tempo. Karin and the boys would be back at five, but Sami finished preparing the food by two. The stew could bubble away under the lid for a while. He didn’t plan to mix in the couscous until the last minute.
He glanced around the kitchen.
He needed to tidy up, but this was about using his own time for something more valuable than washing bowls. He took off his apron, threw it onto the kitchen table and went out into the living room.
Several years earlier, Sami Farhan had read a long article about online footprints, and ever since he had been worried about what Google and Facebook could reveal about him. The less he used computers and phones, the better. Being called a technophobe was a low price to pay.
He went over to the bookshelf and took down a trusty old telephone book. His children, he knew, would never understand why someone had printed these enormous stacks of paper and delivered one to every home in Sweden, much less why anyone had ever opened them.
The first pages of the yellow section contained maps of Stockholm’s suburbs, Västberga included.
Sami leafed forward to the right spread and studied the map. He put his finger on the building at the crossing of Västberga Allé and Vretensborgsvägen. Vreten 17, the G4S cash depot. He used a pencil to mark a thin line on each of the access routes.
The plan was to spend less than ten minutes inside the building.
In other words, they needed to hold the police off for the same amount of time.
The usual approach was to scatter so-called caltrops across the road, sharp steel spikes that puncture car tires by embedding themselves in the rubber. The problem with that method was that once they had been discovered, they could simply be swept away. They would provide a few minutes’ distraction, but no more.
Michel Maloof had told Sami that the Serbs did things differently. They soldered the caltrops onto a chain that they then pulled tight across the road, fastening it on both sides. Car tires would be ripped to shreds without taking the tacks with them, which meant that the following car’s tires would also be punctured. You couldn’t just sweep them away, you had to cut the chain with pliers instead.
Rather than delaying the police for two to three minutes, the chains would add roughly the same amount of time. Assuming it would take a few minutes once the alarm went off, and another couple before the police reached wherever the chains had been stretched, that was all they needed.
Sami marked the access route from the north, from the highway and via Västberga Allé. Then he drew another line over Elektravägen, since that was the road the local police would take from their station. Just to be on the safe side, he drew a third line across Västberga Allé by Drivhjulsvägen, in case anyone tried to approach from the south. The question was then whether they also needed chains across Karusellvägen and Vretensborgsvägen. The likelihood was pretty small, Sami decided, plus those were both detours that, in themselves, would take more time.