Zoran Petrovic unfolds himself from the driver’s seat. It’s a new BMW, it looks black from Maloof’s window, but it could just as easily be dark blue. The passenger’s side door opens. It’s the American, Jack Kluger. This is the first time Maloof has seen him. The man on the sidewalk reminds him of a quarterback from an American football team, he’s knock-kneed and his upper body is oversized in relation to his lower half. In all likelihood, he has no real idea where he is right now.
Petrovic and the American step into the building, and a few seconds later the buzzer rings. Maloof opens the door.
“Been a while,” Petrovic says, stepping into the apartment.
Maloof grins. “Right,” he says. “Been a while. Hi, hi.”
He shakes the American’s hand. Kluger’s grip is strong and dry. Reassuring.
“Where’s the food?” Maloof asks.
“Shit,” says Petrovic. “I forgot it.”
“You forgot it?” Maloof repeats, unable to hide the disappointment in his voice. He scratches his cheek. “But, I can’t… you can’t have forgotten it?”
They’re speaking Swedish. The American doesn’t seem to care what they’re talking about. Or maybe he understands Swedish but isn’t letting on. According to Petrovic, Kluger has been living and working in Sweden for a few years now.
“Sorry,” Petrovic says again.
Maloof struggles to seem indifferent. He smiles and shrugs. All the same, he can’t understand how Petrovic can have forgotten to drive by McDonald’s. They’ve been working together for so long now that he should know better.
“No, no,” Maloof says. “No, it’s OK. No problem. We can go now instead.”
He glances at the helicopter pilot and adds, in English: “We need some food.”
Maloof doesn’t wait for a reply. He goes out into the hall and pulls on his shoes and coat.
“You’re not serious?” Petrovic says.
“He’s coming. The weapons are in the bedroom. We can’t leave him alone with the weapons…”
When Maloof took the bus up to Norrtälje a few days earlier, he had walked past a McDonald’s on Stockholmsvägen. It was one of the few places that stayed open until one in the morning. They didn’t have much time.
“Come on, come on,” he says when he notices that the American is hesitating.
Maloof wouldn’t call himself superstitious. He’s not even religious. But there is also no point tempting fate.
He always eats a large meal from McDonald’s before a job.
It’s nonnegotiable.
61
1:15 a.m.
In the end room in the apartment on Strandvägen, there is a deep alcove, and it is in this alcove that Caroline Thurn has placed an enormous armchair. It isn’t visible unless you actually step into the room. The soft embrace of this armchair is where Thurn sometimes spends her nights, her legs on the matching footstool or her knees drawn up to her chin, staring out across Nybroviken. She can either turn to face the roof and masts of the Vasa Museum, next to the silhouettes of the roller coasters of Gröna Lund, or else the other way, toward the center of town and the heavy stone facades of Nybrokajen leading up to Raoul Wallenbergs Torg.
Over the past week, she has found it unusually easy to banish certain thoughts and keep her worries at bay.
She’s wearing a pair of big, white headphones, and the incessant chatter saved on the hard drives she copied and brought home with her, hard drives that are now piled up on the kitchen counter next to her Nespresso machine, is fascinating her. Listening to Zoran Petrovic’s monologues is like watching waves roll ashore; there’s a kind of uniformity to them which has her spellbound.
Despite the hundreds of hours they have recorded, they still haven’t found a single clue relating to the aborted helicopter robbery.
Their surveillance has now stopped, but Thurn had wondered whether they should go back to the beginning and listen to the tapes without specifically trying to spot anything linked to the aborted raid on Panaxia. If they listened with an open mind, without any preconceptions, what might those hours of phone calls reveal? Petrovic’s address book was overflowing with criminal contacts, after all.
That was the original thought behind copying the hard drives and bringing them home. But the more Caroline Thurn listens to Zoran Petrovic’s insufferable torrent of words, the constant flow of noise aimed at promoting himself, making himself seem more interesting, emphasizing his importance, sharing his experiences and moving himself higher up the hierarchy, the bigger the knot of anger grows in her chest. The man Thurn had spent her nights focused on just one week earlier is as obsessed with himself as he is full of disgust for the society which gave him his chances in life. No matter how humble Petrovic tries to make himself appear, he is actually ruthlessly arrogant toward his countrymen and -women, all toiling away so that people like him can sail through life with the least possible resistance.
Injustice, Thurn thinks. She hates it. She knows how it feels when it strikes.
And the task force leader’s initial long shot has evolved into increasingly manic behavior. She starts to methodically write down the clues Petrovic throws around during conversations in his car and in restaurants. Nothing is enough to send him down on its own merit, but if they cross-reference Petrovic’s insinuations with real events that autumn, Thurn is increasingly convinced that they’ll find something.
She hears his confident tone in her ears, it fills her consciousness, and she wonders what he will sound like when she is finally in front of him, her service weapon drawn and an arrest warrant in hand, pushing him into her car on the way to Bergsgatan and remand prison.
Much more pathetic, she guesses.
62
1:16 a.m.
It’s a cool, crisp night. The scent of moss and pine in the air. In the glow of Ezra’s flashlight, Sami Farhan and Niklas Nordgren go through the equipment. They check that the ladders can be easily extended and secured. They count the number of mailbags, feel the ropes, open the toolbox to make sure everything is there and then put it into one of the mailbags along with the crowbars and the saw. All of this happens in silence, and Ezra shines his flashlight wherever Sami points.
Nordgren and Sami arrived at roughly the same time. It’s ten days since they last saw one another, in Hjorthagen. Nordgren had pulled on his balaclava at the very moment he arrived, he doesn’t want Sami’s friend Ezra to be able to identify him.
Sami has told him that the police helicopter isn’t in Myttinge, but Nordgren takes that information in his stride. He’s counting on problems arising, and that’s easy enough to handle. They can’t do the job if they don’t have the police helicopters under control. It’s that simple. All they can do is keep working and hope for the best.
Nordgren continues to go through the equipment, paying particular attention to his own items. He has already prepared the cut-up Coca-Cola cans with silver tape packages at the bottom. The packages are full of neodymium magnets. He has prepared six cans, but he hopes he’ll need to use only one of them.
He also has four U-channels, similar to an upside-down train track, cut into short pieces. They’re heavier and more cumbersome, which is why the number is smaller. He’s also hoping to use only one of them. He goes through the explosive putty and the detonators and worries about moisture.
“I should test one,” he says, mostly to himself.
Sami has no objections. They’re miles from the nearest built-up area.
Nordgren gets to work. It takes him only a few minutes to discover that the long detonation cable isn’t with the detonators and the battery.