“The Serbian police aren’t the only ones following this case,” Olsson interrupted. “Interpol is being updated continually. And the minister for foreign affairs has a personal interest in it too. If we let him down, then the minister for justice won’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to discussing resources at the next budget.”
Politics. There were few things that interested Caroline Thurn so little that could also make her quite so agitated. But she could see that this wasn’t a simple matter of police work, that it was about the ministers’ egos and the way the state distributed resources.
She got up.
“Fine,” she said. “So let the National Task Force handle it.”
The prosecutor got to his feet too. He nodded stiffly, and Thurn got the sense that somehow he had also been involved in the decision.
“We know where and when they’re going to strike,” said Berggren, who also got up from his chair with a labored groan. “By this stage, with everything handed to them on a silver plate, even the Task Force should be able to manage this.”
“They will be ready outside the Panaxia premises in Bromma from twenty-three hundred hours on the fourteenth of September,” Olsson replied. “But let us be clear about one thing. Until then, it’s you who are responsible.”
40
There was a balcony on the fifth floor.
Michel Maloof spotted it after his deathly boring visit to the Moderna Museet. He had parted ways with Alexandra Svensson outside the Grand Hotel and headed straight home to his drawings. He hadn’t given the fifth floor the same manic attention as the sixth, where Counting was located, but he spotted it among the drawings on the floor by his dining table. One sheet had been covering another, and when he pushed it to one side, there it was.
A small balcony sticking out from the fifth floor above the open atrium.
It meant they could go in through the glass ceiling.
If they smashed the glass and used a long ladder, maybe they would be able to reach all the way to the balcony.
Alexandra had been right, he thought. He wasn’t someone who gave up. He found new ways forward.
Maloof pulled out his phone and called Sami.
“There’s a balcony,” he said. “Looks like a little ledge. We could use ladders. One to get down and one to get back up to the sixth floor.”
“You sure?” asked Sami. “About the balcony?”
“Definitely, definitely,” Maloof replied. “I’ll check with Nick.”
“This is Plan F, I can feel it,” Sami said defiantly, adding, “Is Nick any good with ladders?”
“He’s good with everything,” Maloof mumbled.
“Maybe he can work out how long the ladder needs to be?” Sami continued. “It’s gonna take a damn long ladder. You know what I mean?”
“I’ll talk to Nick.”
Maloof hung up. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest, feel himself literally sitting taller. He was himself again.
That evening, Niklas Nordgren spent hours in his hobby room, studying the drawings from Vreten 17. Once he knew what he was looking for, it didn’t take long for him to find the balcony on the fifth floor.
All night, and long into the early hours, Maloof, Sami and Nordgren called one another from different phones with different SIM cards. They spoke without mentioning any key words, using broken sentences and repeated euphemisms, just to make sure that if anyone happened to be listening to their conversation, they wouldn’t understand a thing.
Nordgren agreed that it shouldn’t be impossible to smash the glass on the roof and lower a ladder down to the balcony.
The wall out onto the atrium on the sixth floor was made of bulletproof glass. It was there to let light into what would otherwise be an entirely dark floor.
“What the hell do we do about that?” Sami asked.
Nordgren reassured him. The words “bulletproof glass” implied something more impressive than the reality. Using a shorter ladder to climb up from the balcony on the fifth floor and blow a hole in the glass on the sixth wouldn’t be a problem. But the explosion would cause glass to rain down onto the balcony, meaning that the only place they could take cover would be up on the roof.
They would have to climb down to the balcony, apply their explosives to the strengthened glass, and then climb back up to the roof. They would also have to make sure the detonation cable was long enough to reach up to the roof with them.
All of this meant a hell of a lot of climbing, Sami declared.
“We’ll manage it,” Nordgren said drily. “The doors’ll be worse.”
Once they made it through the armored glass on the sixth floor, they would end up in the room directly next to Counting. All that divided the two rooms was some kind of fire door and a security door.
“What the hell’s a security door?”
“Made of steel. Thicker kind. Fire doors are easy. Security doors are… worse.”
“Worse? But, can you do it?”
“It’s fine,” Nordgren was firm. “It’ll be fine.”
“We only have ten minutes,” Maloof reminded him.
“Impossible,” Nordgren replied. “Ten minutes won’t be enough. Maybe if we had fifteen? We’ll have to count.”
“No longer,” said Maloof.
“OK, let’s say fifteen,” Nordgren said.
Sami was happy.
The question now was how long the ladder from the ceiling to the balcony would need to be. Judging by the plans, the fifth and sixth floors looked like they were a normal height, and according to Maloof, Alexandra Svensson had suggested that the ceiling height definitely wasn’t any more than ten feet.
“How the hell could you ask her about that?” Nordgren wondered.
“She talks more than Zoran,” Maloof said. “I don’t ask, I just listen.”
“Ouch. How d’you manage that?”
“Exactly, exactly. That’s a better question.”
All of this meant that in total, there were nineteen or twenty feet between the floor of the balcony on the fifth floor and the ceiling on the sixth. A thirty-six-foot ladder would leave them with sixteen feet to spare once it was through the skylight.
Those weren’t huge margins, but they would be enough.
When Maloof eventually fell into bed at dawn that morning, it was with a wide grin on his lips. He was convinced things were about to turn around now, that they were overcoming their problems.
Late the next afternoon, when he woke, he realized Petrovic had been trying to get in touch with him several times, to tell him both the good and the bad news. The good news was that they had a new pilot.
“But I’ve got half the police force on me.” Petrovic sighed. “It’s not a mistake, they haven’t got me mixed up with someone else. It’s me they’re after, but the one thing I don’t know is why.”
41
Caroline Thurn wasn’t the type of police officer to leave things to chance. On Wednesday afternoon, the decision had been made to allow the National Task Force to keep the Panaxia cash depot in Bromma under surveillance during the night of the fourteenth of September.
But by Friday afternoon, Thurn had started to have doubts.
Most of what they knew pointed to Panaxia, but she suddenly felt unsure.
What exactly suggested that the G4S depot in Västberga wouldn’t be the target of the helicopter robbery?
Thurn was at the gym, and with every mile that passed on the rowing machine, the feeling grew. Eventually, she had to get off, go into the changing room and call Berggren.