Three days have passed since Sami went underground and vanished from the police and his friends’ radars, heading for Arlanda. He hasn’t spoken to Karin since, he hasn’t been in touch with his mother, Michel Maloof or Niklas Nordgren; he hadn’t touched a cell phone in a week.
Throughout his thirty-year life, Sami has involuntarily had plenty of experience of loneliness and inactivity, both in custody and in prison. But lying low means that the boredom is self-inflicted, which makes things only slightly better. The closer to the finishing line he comes, the harder it is to keep his cool.
His lift won’t arrive until twelve thirty. He has, in other words, just over an hour to kill.
He thaws a couple of square chunks of fried chicken in the microwave and then stares at them on his plate, completely uninterested. Ketchup won’t make them any more appealing. Even food requires planning. He knows how much he can drink every hour without having to go to the toilet. After having spent days and weeks planning the helicopter route and the strength of the explosives, it would have been idiotic not to chart his own body’s processes. He knows he shouldn’t eat any more solids after a quarter past eleven.
He leaves the kitchen after throwing away the remains of his meal, turns off the light in the living room and sits down in an armchair. He tries to focus.
53
11:15 p.m.
Niklas Nordgren takes the last boat to Stavsnäs at dinnertime. He is the only person waiting on the jetty on Runmarö, but it doesn’t matter if the captain can point him out at a later date. Having been on Runmarö isn’t incriminating evidence.
With each day that has passed, he has become increasingly stiff from sleeping in the slightly too-short bed in the playhouse on Runmarö. He has flipped his normal routine upside down, and spent his days asleep. Though the house is on the east of the island, and dangerous reefs off the coast prevent any boats from getting too close, he didn’t want to move around on the plot of land during the day. At this time of year, there are barely any tourists left in the archipelago, and the boats that do pass belong to the year-round residents, people who keep an eye on where there are guests and where there should be empty houses in the middle of September. Instead, he took quick runs in the woods after midnight, constantly afraid of stepping on a snake or coming face-to-face with a badger. But he knew that he needed to keep moving, otherwise he wouldn’t be ready when the time came.
On Tuesday afternoon, when he woke and realized that his short vacation in the archipelago was over, he felt great all the same. His back wasn’t aching in the slightest, and the cold he thought he could feel developing when he went to bed at dawn seemed to have vanished.
After catching the connecting bus directly to Danvikstull, he kills a few hours in an Espresso House before arriving at Kettola’s place at midnight, as agreed. He had been fantasizing about a cup of hot coffee and a muffin during his time in the playhouse, when his only sustenance came from warmed-up cans.
54
11:30 p.m.
She gets a fare out to Bromma and has to wait only half an hour before she gets another back into town. That’s the good thing about working for one of the big taxi firms, there are always plenty of new customers. This time, it’s a businessman with flushed red cheeks who probably couldn’t have said no to an extra bottle of cognac on the plane.
If they still served alcohol on domestic flights?
She doesn’t know, it’s been years since she last flew anywhere.
The businessman is headed for Östermalm, he gives her the address. The man stares out the window the whole way there, he’s too good to talk to her. Just a few minutes into the drive, she already knows that he won’t leave a tip. That type never does.
She drops him off and checks the time. She makes trips to Östermalm often enough to have become hooked on the specialty hot dog kiosk on Nybrogatan. Does she have time to try out one of his Turkish lamb sausages and then squeeze in one more fare? But before her conscience has time to give an answer, her stomach directs her onto Kommendörsgatan, down to the old post office where the kiosk is. There’s a parking space right next to it, which she takes as a sign.
The sausage is just as spicy as she hoped.
When she gets back behind the wheel, it’s already a little past twelve, and she has two, three hours before it’s time. She isn’t really meant to clock off before morning, but she will shut down the system at three, making herself both unavailable and invisible. In the trunk, she has the chain with the caltrops welded onto it, the one she is meant to stretch across Västberga Allé. She assumes it will take her a while; according to Niklas Nordgren, the chain needs to be fastened on either side, but he couldn’t explain how to do it, he just gave her two padlocks.
She’s an imaginative woman, she’ll work something out.
She drives downtown and passes the long line for taxis outside the restaurants there. In a way, it feels good to be avoiding the fight for yet another fare that night, even though her job of stretching the chain across the road won’t pay much more than a few trips to and from Arlanda.
She takes out her phone.
55
11:31 p.m.
Niklas Nordgren feels the buzz of his phone in the inner pocket of his jacket. He fishes it out and answers with a grunt.
It’s his chain woman. She has no idea that she’s part of a bigger plan. She has no idea that she’s one of many. She’s calling to say that she knows what she has to do. Nordgren answers monosyllabically and then hangs up. He hopes she finds somewhere solid to fix the chain at either side of the road.
He reaches the doorway on Rosenlundsgatan at ten past twelve, five minutes earlier than planned. The building is where Jan Kettola lives. Kettola sometimes helps out at the electricians’ where Nordgren works, and he’s the one who has promised to drive Nordgren out to the meeting place in Stora Skuggan Park. The two men aren’t close friends. They’ve done a couple of jobs together, a few years ago now, but there’s a certain loyalty between them. Nordgren isn’t worried. All Kettola knows is that they’re driving out to Stora Skuggan. Even when he hears the news about what happened on the radio tomorrow morning, there’s no way he’ll join the dots.
Rather than ringing the buzzer, Niklas Nordgren starts to worry. He thinks about the huge rock at the gravel pit in Norsborg where they’ll land once it’s all over. Without the patience or the sense to use pulleys, the rock is impossible to shift, it weighs almost a ton. But it should work, he instructed the team in Norsborg himself.
Then his thoughts turn to the police helicopter.
When he told the others what he had eventually worked out, how he was planning to keep the helicopter—or helicopters—on the ground, he did it with a certainty that immediately convinced both Maloof and Sami. They asked questions afterward, particularly Sami, since it’s one of his teams who will do the job there in a couple of hours. But neither of them had doubted the idea itself.
But now Niklas Nordgren has second thoughts.
Would it really work?