He was out in good time. What he called being careful, others might call a need to be in control.
He really was going to Frihamnen. But he was going there alone, not with his classmates from Kristineberg. For him, the hours behind a school desk were over, there wouldn’t be any more lectures on cooking. He would never be able to give his family the life they deserved by slicing cucumber for cold buffets or pouring béarnaise sauce over filet mignon.
Today, that morning, was the first day of their new lives. And, like always, it was luck that had given him this chance. It hadn’t been easy to find the money. He had gone in with everything he had, all the cash he’d been able to withdraw. Plus he had brought in other financiers. His brothers, first and foremost. They had mocked him, doubted him and called him “the fishmonger.” But they had still made the investment, like so many of his other friends and acquaintances. Karin’s uncle had even stepped up, and all without her knowing a thing. Clean money being placed into a lawful business.
By the time he reached Nybroplan, the city had clearly woken up. There were people walking from Strandvägen toward Hamngatan, and from Blasieholmen toward Östermalm. Stockholm’s wealthiest neighborhood had never appealed to the Södermalm resident Sami. Besides, the suburbs felt more present in the city center than they did where he lived, and he had long since had enough of the suburbs. Karin Flodin was born and bred in the streets around Nytorget, and the schools there were some of the best in town. It was in Södermalm that his children would grow up.
Sami had loved Karin for as long as he could remember. He’d always believed that one true love awaited every person, and he had been lucky. He had met his while he was just a teenager.
The moment she transformed from his unattainable, youthful obsession into his actual lover, the love he felt for her had deepened in a way he would never have been able to predict. Vague dreams became a physical reality. Crumpled tubes of toothpaste, unwashed plates and scrunched-up underwear on the bathroom floor were all points of irritation that had never featured in his fantasies. But nor had he been able to imagine how the skin of her stomach would smell in the morning, how her eyes would glitter when she looked at him, or how she would grab his hands whenever he told a story, hold them still and gaze deep into his soul, revealing things about him that he hadn’t even been aware of himself.
When she added the next role to those she had filled earlier and became the mother of his child, his love had undergone another transformation. It was most obvious when he thought about how he would feel if he lost her. That had always been his worry, but he could no longer imagine a life without Karin. The thought was too painful.
That was why Sami Farhan was in the car on that dark, early February morning. Driving along Strandvägen toward his new life.
4
“Here it is,” Michel Maloof said in English.
He lifted the black briefcase from the chair next to him and placed it on the table.
Director Anders Mild and Chairman Rick Almanza stared suspiciously at the bag.
“Your briefcase?” Mild asked. “But… I think I must have misunderstood something. I thought this meeting was about streamlining our Swedish distribution activity.”
“Exactly, exactly.” Maloof smiled, flashing his white teeth, set off by his dark beard, at the two men. “There’s no better way to put it. Streamlining. In Sweden.”
“What do you mean?” Mild wondered.
“I mean that maybe… now that we’re speaking in English anyway… this could be of interest elsewhere than just Sweden?”
The best way to deal with a bluff was to call it.
Maloof was still unsure whether the Englishman was who he claimed to be. The idea that the chairman had flown in to see him seemed absurd.
But the older man remained silent, and Maloof felt more like he was being observed than questioned.
“Let me… tell you about my briefcase,” Maloof continued. He had told Anders Mild’s secretary that he had flown up from Malmö for the meeting in Stockholm. “It was on the floor under the seat on the plane yesterday. And I had it next to me this morning when I drove over here. So… well… how many people do you think noticed it?”
It was a rhetorical question. The black briefcase on the table was as anonymous as the room they were sitting in. It looked neither cheap nor expensive, and it seemed to be utterly lacking in design. From a distance, it looked like leather, but a closer inspection would suggest it was some kind of tough plastic.
“Are you saying…” the Englishman began. He had worked out where Maloof was heading.
“Right, right.” Maloof smiled, and his grin grew wider. “This briefcase isn’t just the equivalent… it’s more secure than any other security bag on the market. It holds much more.”
He tried to prevent his pride from turning into self-conceit. But the truth was that Maloof himself was fascinated by the bag on the table in front of him.
Anders Mild seemed to have worked out what the day’s meeting was about, what Maloof was doing there. The director twisted uncomfortably in his seat and gave a short sigh. Plenty of salesmen tried to sell new security bags to G4S. A Swedish company from the north of the country, SQS in Skellefteå, was already well into the development stage and had a number of customers on the continent. Maloof was sure that SQS, like everyone else, had also tried to get a meeting. But without a Zoran Petrovic to date the director’s secretary, those doors remained closed.
It was too late now for Mild to do anything about it; Maloof’s bag was already on the table.
“Is it really possible?” Mild asked. He sounded doubtful. “For it to be that big inside?”
Without further ado, and with an infectious enthusiasm, Maloof began his detailed demonstration of the inside of the briefcase.
For years now, G4S had been using blue security bags produced in southern Germany. One of Zoran Petrovic’s Serbian contacts had been to the top-secret factory, and it was there that the idea had been born. The German bags were big and bulky, meaning the guards had to move them about using small dollies, and it was impossible to either pick up or drop off the cash without drawing attention to it. As a consequence, they had made a virtue of necessity and developed the big blue bags into portable spy centers. They contained, in addition to GPS devices capable of being tracked within a sixty-mile radius, built-in security cameras and hidden microphones. Which meant that they also registered and documented everything that a potential robber said or did. Many of Maloof’s friends had learned that very fact during trials, as prosecutors presented the court with evidence that was impossible to deny.
According to Petrovic, the bag’s greatest feature was its security-protected locking function. For one, it was impossible to pick with ordinary skeleton keys, but screwdrivers, crowbars and brute force wouldn’t work either. A couple of inexperienced kids or an opportunistic junkie would never manage to crack the lock. Even professional robbers who took the blue bag to a workshop and laid into it with real tools would fail. The bag was booby-trapped and would detonate if opened incorrectly, causing dye ampoules to explode. The money, and sometimes even the robber’s clothes, would be destroyed in the process.
The black bag Michel Maloof was demonstrating to the European division of G4S that Tuesday afternoon in February could boast all the same features as the blue bag. And since the company from Skellefteå still hadn’t managed to take out patents on its products, Maloof’s bag had also borrowed several functions from them.