Panaxia was on the verge of moving some of its business activity away from Bromma. In exactly one week’s time, on Wednesday. September 16, the move was scheduled to finish, but until then, the company would be more vulnerable than usual, from a security point of view. As a result, it was “positive that the police are showing an appropriate level of interest,” as Panaxia’s security chief put it.
Thurn, who hadn’t known about the move in advance, nodded in agreement.
They had gone over the flow of the building in detail, and when Thurn eventually got up on her long legs to shake hands with everyone in the room, she thought she had found the answer to the question they had been searching for.
She knew where the helicopter robbery would take place.
The car was parked directly outside the entrance. As Thurn sat down behind the wheel and fastened her seat belt, the feeling that Panaxia was some kind of provincial cousin to the international G4S welled up. On the one hand, its staff did their best, but on the other, their best wasn’t enough. There was something that didn’t seem right about the country’s second-biggest secure transport company, but Thurn couldn’t put her finger on exactly what that was.
Maybe the robbers had made the same observation?
She started the Volvo and pulled out into the road.
The figure the Serbian informant had mentioned to the police, a haul of up to €10 million, could be found in only three places in Stockholm. The central bank and the two cash depots, Panaxia in Bromma and G4S in Västberga.
It was unlikely that anyone would attempt to rob the central bank. It was one of the few buildings in Sweden that even Caroline Thurn dared call secure, and there was no way you could land a helicopter on the roof.
Of the two remaining depots, only Panaxia in Bromma matched the description of a four-story building with a flat roof.
Today, Thurn had learned that the company had been planning to move parts of its business for some time, and that the move was scheduled to begin on the fourteenth of September. The robbers had chosen the fifteenth, which had to be seen as the optimal time, given that the company would be particularly vulnerable then.
Whoever was planning the robbery had to have someone on the inside of Panaxia, Thurn thought; otherwise, they would never have found such a perfect opportunity. She wondered whether she could ask for lists of employees now, without raising suspicions. She turned left onto Drottningholmsvägen and headed back toward Alvik and Kungsholmen.
On the way up to her department in police HQ, Thurn passed the colleagues responsible for listening in on Zoran Petrovic.
They had microphones hidden in Petrovic’s restaurants on Upplandsgatan, in the bedroom and living room of his apartment and in the headrest of his BMW. The resources that had been put at the disposal of the investigation were wastefully large, and Thurn knew that this was partly because of the personal involvement of the minister for foreign affairs in the case.
But she also knew that the national police commissioner’s plan was to defend the increased costs at the end of the year by going public with the international success their efforts had led to.
And that success was something she held Caroline Thurn responsible for.
Thurn stuck her head around the door into a room full of electronics. “Nothing?” she asked.
Two technicians wearing headphones turned to the doorway and stared at her like they had just woken up. Their eyes were red and they didn’t look like they had changed their clothes in weeks. A couple of empty white cartons on the desk made the place stink of Chinese food.
“You kidding?” one of them said.
“You’ve always been a real joker, Caroline,” said the other.
“No,” the inspector said with a friendly smile. “Not joking at all.”
The technicians sighed.
Bugging Zoran Petrovic was a bit like pointing a microphone toward a soccer stadium during a derby and then hoping to hear someone whisper. Words poured into the ears of the police officers who, in increasing confusion, allowed hard drive after hard drive to fill up with talk of great deals and boasts about conquests of impossibly beautiful women.
Though Petrovic didn’t appear in any of the police databases, the officers listening to him were certain that someone had taught him to speak like a seasoned criminal. He never named names, and whatever he did say usually lacked a time and a place.
The police now knew that Zoran Petrovic was active in the building trade, but he also seemed to have a finger in the cleaning and restaurant trade, the beauty world, the import and export branches. Exactly what he did, owned or spent his time doing in any of these areas remained unclear, however. It was possible that he was just a silent partner, some kind of adviser, or maybe the businesses were run by dummies and Petrovic himself was ultimately in control. In all likelihood, it was a combination of all those things, but since Petrovic’s phone conversations were vague and elusive, never naming names or exact amounts, this was all guesswork on the part of the police.
During an ordinary day, he might have upward of twenty meetings, and they took place all over Stockholm. He could send fifty text messages and make a similar number of calls, half of them in Montenegrin, a language closely related to Serbian. Since the police interpreters weren’t always available, there was a chance they would find something more useful in the conversations that weren’t in Swedish, but judging by the conversations they’d had translated so far, the content seemed to be exactly the same.
They weren’t getting anywhere. The only reference to the helicopter robbery came when Petrovic uttered that he was planning something on September 15. But that was something the Serbs had known from the beginning.
Caroline Thurn struggled on up the stairs and down the corridors of police headquarters. She was just passing Mats Berggren’s room, heading for her own office farther down the corridor, when he saw her and shouted.
Thurn stopped. The sun was so low in the sky during the morning that she was no more than a silhouette in his doorway.
“How did it go?” he asked.
“It’s going to be Panaxia,” she said.
The information about their upcoming move had convinced her.
She had her left hand high on the doorframe, meaning that the sleeve of her blouse had slipped down her arm. If the light had been different, he never would have noticed it. But the smooth skin of the scar shone straight across Thurn’s wrist, and Berggren immediately recognized the type of wound.
He had been on the verge of asking something else about the cash depot in Bromma, but he lost his train of thought. If it had been anyone else, the discovery wouldn’t have hit him nearly as hard.
“What are you thinking, Mats?” Thurn asked. She had noticed something had happened to her colleague.
“No, no… nothing,” he mumbled.
She shrugged and left his doorway.
36
Zoran Petrovic was sitting in Café Stolen, and he felt restless. It made him a bad listener. He glanced down at his watch. He was meeting the potential new helicopter pilot in an hour, but until then he was stuck listening to a vegetable grower from Poland who was trying to establish himself in Årsta. The Pole needed help with both contacts and cash, and he was bragging about his biodynamically grown carrots and beetroot. Petrovic, who was relatively familiar with the vegetable trade after a few attempts to break into the market himself, knew that the care the farmer put into the quality of his produce would never be compensated for in price. He hated meetings that ended on a bad note.