“To what do we owe the minister’s interest?” Thurn asked as they climbed the wide stone staircase to the second floor.
Olsson made some kind of dismissive gesture that indicated that she would like to explain, but not right now. Therese Olsson was consumed by her professional role, and she would rather be accused of being boring than unclear. Climbing your way to the top of the envious ranks of the police hierarchy wasn’t something you did with straightforwardness and a cheerful temperament.
The police officers were ushered into the minister’s room behind the secretary, and they sat down on a sofa and waited in silence. When the minister appeared, they got to their feet.
The energetic minister greeted each of them with a firm handshake and asked them to sit down.
“I understand,” he said, and Thurn wondered whether it was his coarse dialect that made the Swedish language sound forced coming from his mouth, “that we are continuing our cooperation with Belgrade?”
“That is correct,” Olsson replied.
“As you know,” the minister continued, “I still have good relationships with the majority of decision makers in the Balkans. I just wanted to point out that if you need any help, I’m at your service.”
“That’s very kind, Minister,” Olsson replied, “but I think we have the situation under control. While the initial contact was at the ministerial level, our Serbian colleagues have also provided our liaison office in Belgrade with extremely detailed information that they seem to have stumbled on by chance.”
“Well, stumbling is rarely deliberate, is it?” said the minister.
Berggren laughed, and the minister flashed him an appreciative glance. Caroline Thurn smiled reflexively. She wasn’t much of a fan of jokey word games. A wave of weariness washed over her, and she closed her eyes and fell into a microsleep. She opened her eyes a few seconds later, without anyone else in the room having noticed what had happened.
Sleep was Thurn’s greatest enemy and challenge. She had always slept badly, but she couldn’t remember exactly when her nights had turned into drawn-out nightmares. At some point during her late teens, she would guess. It had begun as a sleeplessness, an inability to get any rest. The nights had become one long torment, the days a hazy fight to stay awake until it was time to repeat the whole process again.
She had experimented with everything she could think of. Eaten a lot or very little in the evenings, worked out or avoided working out after a certain time of day. She had bought mattresses of varying firmness, humidifiers and sound effects—rain and wind. She had started meditating and taken a long list of concoctions and drugs that both ordinary doctors and therapists had prescribed to her. Things had become more and more dramatic.
It was after only a few years, once she stopped fighting it and managed to find the right dose of medication, that her days became tolerable again; when she decided to stop trying, and didn’t even bother going to bed at night. Instead, she would sit in the dark and allow her thoughts to come and go, without any resistance and with the aim of saving as much energy as she could for the day ahead, before it was time to function in a social context once again.
The microsleep she had hated in the past—because it made promises and always broke them—became her best friend.
But she also knew she was different and that different wasn’t good. When Mats Berggren later asked where her bedroom was, she would lie like she always did and mention a fold-down bed hidden in the wall.
When Caroline Thurn and Mats Berggren left the office of the minister for foreign affairs thirty minutes later, they weren’t much the wiser. Commissioner Olsson had repeated over and over again that they had received a tip of great importance. She had even used the word “unique,” which was why Serbia’s foreign minister had contacted his Swedish counterpart. To win political points at the highest level.
The crime being planned would be the biggest robbery in Swedish criminal history. And thanks to their foreign colleagues, the Swedish police suddenly had a real lead, Olsson said.
But when Caroline Thurn tried to find out exactly what that lead was, the commissioner failed to answer. She didn’t know the details, she said. But she knew that this was a unique chance to show organized crime in the Balkans what the Swedish Criminal Police could do, what international cooperation could achieve. For the minister for foreign affairs and the government, it meant a debt of gratitude to the Serbians.
“I’ll call Björn Kant when I get back,” Thurn said as they were leaving the building. “He can fill me in.”
She hadn’t seen Kant since Henrik Nilsson’s arrest in one of the Hötorget buildings a few months earlier. Nilsson had barely made it into police headquarters before his lawyers and contacts had seen to his leaving again. When Thurn heard about that, she had gone out to Djurgården and run three loops of the canal to work out her anger. Men like Nilsson always got off, despite Sweden’s best prosecutor having been involved in the case. If Henrik Nilsson ever crossed her path again, she swore she would send him down.
“Björn Kant wasn’t available,” the police commissioner said in a neutral tone. “The International Public Prosecution Office appointed someone else to this case. Lars Hertz.”
“Lars Hertz?” Thurn repeated, racking her memory. “Is he from Gothenburg? I don’t think I know who…”
“This will be Hertz’s first criminal case,” Therese Olsson replied.
Caroline Thurn stopped dead.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t think I understand. We’re meant to be working with a prosecutor who’s never tried a criminal case before?”
“I’ve heard he’s very competent,” said the commissioner.
A black car pulled up to the sidewalk. Olsson opened the back door and climbed in without another word. Thurn and Berggren were left standing outside the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
Thurn was furious, but she managed to force a mild smile.
“I guess it’s up to us to give Lars Hertz a crash course in international criminality,” she said.
27
Through the half-drawn curtains, Michel Maloof could see down to the soccer field, the high and, farther in the distance, the dense forest. There always seemed to be an open box of pizza from the night before within reach, and he grabbed one of the leftover slices he had been managing to resist since lunch.
He didn’t know how long he had been staring at his computer screen. He hated Google Earth. The afternoon was slowly drawing to a close, and this was what he was spending his time doing. Searching for something he would never find. On the table beneath the pizza box, he had the printout of the map Niklas Nordgren had given him. Maloof had methodically split it up into squares, and he still had as much of it left to go over as he had already checked.
His one consolation was knowing that to the north of the city, in Lidingö, Niklas Nordgren was doing the exact same thing.
It was six thirty in the evening when, as he was staring three days later at the pixelated version of reality provided by Google, Michel Maloof found the dolly. Over the past week, the light from the screen and the terrible resolution of the images had given him headaches, so when he first spotted it next to the two small buildings in the middle of the forest on Värmdö, he was sure he was imagining things.
He leaned back and stared and stared, but he couldn’t come to any other conclusion: the picture, taken by chance by an American satellite, really was what he had been looking for.
Helicopters had no wheels, and that was why they landed on a metal plate that did—a so-called dolly—meaning they could be pulled, either by hand or using a vehicle, in and out of the hangar. What Maloof was staring at in the fuzzy image in front of him looked just like one.