She sighed.
Had there been a leak at police HQ? It wasn’t impossible, the leaks there sometimes resembled a Chinese river delta. Maybe the robbers knew it had been a trap, and that was why they had canceled.
But it was equally likely that some part of their plan had failed at the last minute. With so many people involved, anything could have happened.
When the clock struck six thirty, Caroline Thurn was sure.
It wasn’t her job to dismiss Carlbrink, and so she called the commissioner instead, on her direct line.
“Hi, it’s Caroline,” she said, using her normal voice rather than whispering for the first time in hours. “It’s a nonstarter,” she continued.
Hertz woke in the passenger seat.
Thurn listened in silence for a moment while Berggren and Hertz looked searchingly at her.
She put down her phone and started the engine.
“They’re sending Carlbrink home,” she said. “They’re moving the helicopter back to Myttinge. The political version will be that with the help of our Serbian colleagues, we managed to prevent one of the biggest robberies in history.”
“Did we?” Hertz asked, newly woken. “Did we stop the robbery?”
“What do you think, Lars?” said Thurn. “What do you think?”
46
“I feel pretty crappy,” Niklas Nordgren said to Carsten Hansen.
“Yeah? But you hardly ever get sick.”
“I guess it was something I ate yesterday. My stomach’s kind of churning.”
“Shouldn’t you go home then?”
“I just got here,” Nordgren protested.
It was nine in the morning on Friday, September 18.
“But,” he added, “I really don’t feel right. Shit. You sure you’ll cope?”
“Go home and rest,” said Hansen. “It’s more important you’re OK than that the locksmith’s microwave works.”
“Yeah,” Nordgren agreed. “Yeah, I guess. Thanks, Carsten. It’s good of you.”
Nordgren packed up his things, thanked Carsten again and pulled on his coat. But as he turned the corner, he didn’t head for home. He headed for the station instead. He took the Lidingö line to Ropsten, the subway to Slussen, and from there a bus to Stavsnäs. When the Waxholm ferry docked at the quay and Nordgren stepped on board, he calculated that it had been five years since he last made this journey.
It was lunchtime when he stepped off the boat on the island of Sandhamn. The season was short in the archipelago, and by that time of year, mid-September, the only people to get off ahead of Nordgren were a couple of handymen in overalls. No more than a hundred or so people lived permanently on the island, and for that reason seeing strangers was unusual. Nordgren passed the hotel with determined steps, and then headed up the hill toward Trouville. He too was wearing overalls and was carrying a tool bag. If anyone noticed him, they would just assume he was on his way to repair something in one of the houses that lay empty at this time of year, along the road toward the island’s southern cape.
In summer, the beach in Trouville offered seclusion to any tourists wanting to swim, at least if they moved away from the more built-up area. But by September, the area was completely deserted.
Nordgren turned right when he reached the water, and walked along the narrow beach. He clambered over piles of damp seaweed that had washed ashore. It didn’t take long for his shoes to be soaked through.
He was looking for the rowboat he had dragged onto land five years earlier. He had pulled it up to the edge of the trees and tied it to a trunk. You couldn’t see the boat from the water, and barely even from land unless you got lost in the woods and tripped over it. It belonged to an old childhood friend of Nordgren’s parents, who had sold their place on Sandhamn and bought another on Runmarö. But the little boat had been left behind, and it wasn’t in anyone’s way.
He went too far at first, but Nordgren eventually found the little plastic boat exactly where he had left it. The oars were still inside, as was the bailer. He couldn’t manage to undo the knot he had tied around a tall pine, and he had to cut the rope with a knife instead. He pulled the boat down to the water, pushed it out and jumped in. His shoes were already soaked anyway.
Thanks to the southerly wind, it took him no more than two hours to row over the strait to the edge of Runmarö. That was where his parents’ friends had bought their new house, and there was a playhouse with a bed in their yard. Nordgren had slept there before.
47
Just as Niklas Nordgren was rowing ashore on Runmarö, the referee blew his whistle to start the match at Råsunda Stadium in Solna. The arena had been built as the national stadium for the Swedish soccer team, and it could hold almost forty thousand fans. Tonight, with AIK playing Trelleborgs FF at home, roughly half that number of paying spectators were in the seats. It was AIK’s year, the team was heading for victory in the Allsvenskan league, and that fact made Michel Maloof neither happy nor sad. He didn’t have a favorite team in the Allsvenskan; he thought English league soccer was far superior to Swedish, and was much more interested in the Premier League. On top of that, Trelleborg were one of AIK’s least entertaining rivals, sitting midtable and with a game that could sympathetically be described as defensive.
But there was no denying that the nearly twenty thousand spectators that evening were giving the boring match a relatively grand feeling. The terraces were lively, and though the score was 0–0 at halftime, it was going to be the home side’s night; you could feel it in the air. Maloof bought a hot dog and a Coke Zero in a soft plastic cup that was difficult to hold, and he went back to watch the second half, still not feeling particularly engaged.
Sure enough, the home team sent a ball into the back of the net at seventy-five minutes, and a quarter of an hour after that, Maloof got up and pushed his way out of his row. He was carrying a sports bag in one hand. It wasn’t unthinkable that the lukewarm cola had forced him to go to the toilet with just injury time to go.
Next to the enormous men’s restroom and its many cubicles and urinals, there was a separate disabled restroom with a door you could lock behind you. That was where Maloof headed.
With just a few minutes of the game left to play, the corridors of the stadium were practically deserted. This was when everything would be decided out on the field, it wasn’t something you wanted to miss.
Still, Maloof was careful to make sure no one saw him open the door to the restroom.
He locked it carefully, hung the bag on a hook on the back of the door and pulled out a sleeping mat and pillow. The room reeked of urine, but he had seen worse. He put everything on the floor in the corner opposite the toilet and sat down on the mat. He had a book with him, a thick Stephen King paperback, but he wouldn’t read any of it. It was more a ritual; he always brought a thick book that he wouldn’t read.
It took almost ten minutes before the noise outside the restroom door gradually increased to a roar. Desperate soccer fans who didn’t want to wait in the long lines for the normal toilets started pulling at Maloof’s door.
But the lock held, and Maloof remained sitting on the floor.
After fifteen, possibly twenty minutes, the stadium fell quiet again. All that remained now was to wait. The cleaning staff wouldn’t arrive until the next morning, it was a way for the company to avoid paying overtime. Zoran Petrovic had been running a successful cleaning company for ten years, and he knew how things worked at Råsunda.
But not even Petrovic knew where Michel Maloof was at that moment.