His words dampened the mood.
“OK,” Sami eventually said. “So they suspect your friend? What’s that got to do with us? You know? Nothing.”
“Lay off,” Nordgren mumbled.
“I’m serious,” Sami continued. “It’s his business.”
“Right, right,” said Maloof. “Except… Zoran knows everything. Him and us… we’re doing this together.”
“Yeah, I know,” Sami said, unable to stand still any longer. “But he hasn’t been involved in any of the details. You know what I mean? He must have a tail for some other reason. We’ve been working round the clock for months. He’s… done a load of other stuff. You know? He’s got his business, we’ve got ours.”
“You think he’s said anything?” Nordgren asked. “That they’ve heard?”
It was the question they had to consider. The reason Petrovic was being watched and listened to so intently had to be because of something else, or had the police heard something about Västberga on one of their microphones over these past few weeks?
Maloof shook his head.
“Don’t worry. He’d never name names. Never say anything which…”
“So why’s he got a tail?” asked Nordgren. “That kind of surveillance. Sounds really fucking weird.”
Maloof shook his head again. He didn’t know.
“Can’t be a leak,” said Sami, “because no one knows. No one. It’s us four and only us.”
“The pilot knows now too,” said Maloof. “Zoran had to tell him. There’s no time left.”
“But when did that happen?” Sami asked. “Yesterday? A few days ago? It’s not him.”
Maloof shook his head. He didn’t know any more than that.
“So… what do we do?” he asked, his calm smile making his face impossible to read, like always.
No one replied. Nordgren’s cap was casting a dark shadow over his face. Sami was digging the toe of his shoe into the grass. His mind was on his brothers, his investors. But above all, he was thinking about Karin. And the boys. He wasn’t planning to let them grow up with a dad who was away every night, doing the occasional job and being sent away at regular intervals. A dad they would be embarrassed of, one they would never get to know. He needed this to work.
“What do you mean?” he asked. “What do we do? We do it.”
His words were followed by a long silence.
“I agree it sounds weird,” Nordgren said when Maloof didn’t reply. “We’re going to steal a helicopter and fly it to a cash depot where there’s a police station just down the road. We climb down ladders and blow open doors and carry out the biggest robbery in Swedish history. And all while we know the police have unlimited resources, that they’ve been listening to Petrovic for a month while we’ve been working on the details.”
“This is a job everyone will hear about,” Sami tried to convince his friends. “You know? Across the whole world.”
“Right, right,” said Maloof. “Or… at least the whole of Sweden.”
“I guarantee you,” Sami said, “this is bigger than Sweden.”
His gesture was directed out into space, as though their fame would reach far out into the universe.
“Are we really doing it?” Nordgren wondered.
Silence again. This time, it was Sami who broke it.
“I’ll say it again. It’s a go. We’re doing it. What do you think, Michel? You in?”
Maloof laughed. He glanced at Sami, standing there with a wry smile and drumming his hand against his leg while he waited for an answer. He thought about the months of planning, the drawings spread across the floor in his dark apartment in Fittja, and about Alexandra. Could a life with her be awaiting him? Would it be enough money? In his head, he turned over the question: If this wasn’t enough, what would be? His serious face cracked into a wide smile.
“Definitely,” he said. “Yeah, definitely. I’m in. We’re doing it.”
“OK,” said Nordgren. “Then we’re doing it.”
45
Prosecutor Lars Hertz and Detective Chief Inspector Caroline Thurn were sitting in the front seats of Thurn’s newly washed, dark blue Volvo. It was parked in the shadows between a couple of wheelless wrecks outside a tire-fitting company at Linta Gårdsväg 25. Hertz looked unashamedly alert, his blond fringe bobbing like a thick cloud above his forehead, and he seemed tangibly excited to be involved in a huge police operation. The difficult scent of Mats Berggren’s aftershave enveloped them both, and it was something Hertz would forever associate with that night in the car.
Berggren was in the back. He leaned forward between the seats and said that memories of family car trips in Europe were coming back to him. Were they nearly there yet?
In the front seat, the reaction to his joke differed. Thurn smiled kindly. The idea that her parents might have ever taken her on car trips when she was younger was about as unlikely as it was bizarre. Herz blushed in the darkness, thinking that he wouldn’t have anything against starting a family with Caroline Thurn.
Since the moment she had stepped into his room a few weeks earlier, the prosecutor had found it difficult to look her in the eye. She had the kind of appearance that made him shy. He assumed it was her lack of flattery and her clear unwillingness to please that appealed to him.
And embarrassed him.
They sat and waited in the darkness. The fourteenth of September had crossed over into the fifteenth a few hours earlier. The anticipation they had felt as they drove out to Bromma had passed, but the minutes still felt endless. Thurn’s breathing was heavy and regular. She had fallen into a microsleep a couple of times, but for no more than ten minutes in total. She had also wound down one of the side windows to prevent them from fogging up with condensation. The crickets were all that broke the silence, and the clouds that had rolled in an hour earlier filtered the moonlight into narrow stripes on the flat land on the other side of the road.
“It’s two o’clock,” Berggren informed them.
“That’s correct, Mats,” Thurn replied.
“We’ve been sitting here for three hours.”
Thurn didn’t reply. She wasn’t impressed by her colleague’s mathematical abilities.
They had spent the first hour in whispered, uninspired conversation about the latest in a line of internal investigations into the organizational structure of the Swedish police force. There had been a presentation of the findings in one of the conference rooms a few days earlier, and both Thurn and Berggren had felt obliged to attend. Hertz hadn’t been there, of course; he worked for the prosecution authority and had no strong opinions on where the county police’s responsibilities started and ended. Berggren, on the other hand, had formed a whole range of opinions that he was more than happy to share with his colleagues in the front seats. Thurn knew that the conclusions of the internal reports would be compromised down to nothing, which meant that her level of interest was negligible.
Since then, they had been sitting in silence.
Thurn had made the decision to place the majority of the Task Force outside the Panaxia building in Bromma the day before, but Carlbrink had enough men lying in wait outside G4S to stop a small army all the same.
There were two walkie-talkies in Thurn’s lap. One to contact Carlbrink in Bromma, and the other to be able to quickly get in touch with the team in Västberga.
So far, both had remained silent.
The minutes passed reluctantly.
The Panaxia depot rose up like a huge dark block, high above the surrounding buildings. A few hours earlier, the contracted moving team had left the building. They had been working since the morning before, right up until midnight.