The white helicopter pulls up into the dark night sky. The wind from the rotor blades tears at the mailbags full of equipment still lying on the roof.
Sami has made it to the skylight.
He lowers the heavy end of the sledgehammer to the roof and gets a good grip on the wooden handle. Then he gets ready. Bends his knees; finds a low, stable position. He raises the sledgehammer and, in one fluid motion, swings it in an arc above his head. He can feel the weight of it in every inch of his body, can feel the power of the movement take over and help him follow through.
The hammer crashes down in the middle of one of the square, three-foot-wide windows. The vibration travels up the handle and into Sami’s hands. It couldn’t have been more perfect.
He stares at the glass.
There doesn’t seem to be a scratch on it.
71
5:14 a.m.
The night has been relatively uneventful so far. Kalle Dahlström, the duty officer on shift at the police force’s regional communication center, has barely had anything to do. Tonight’s night shift is his second of the week, the time sheet has him down for three in a row followed by one day off before he goes back to ordinary hours. The phones are quiet and his colleague Sofi Rosander is sleeping on the uncomfortable couch that some sadistic person brought in to stop the staff from taking naps. When she wakes up, it’ll be with a back that feels like it’s been welded straight.
Kalle is playing Tetris on his phone. He’s secretly proud of how good he is, but he won’t share his high score. Despite the hours, weeks and days he has spent with those blocks and squares, he’s still an amateur compared with the real pros.
When one of the phones suddenly starts to ring, Dahlström jumps. He answers by pressing a button in front of him. He doesn’t even need to look up from his smartphone.
It’s 5:14. The man on the other end of the line is a security guard, and he’s speaking in broken, almost incomprehensible Swedish.
Eventually, Dahlström manages to work out that he’s talking about a robbery on a cash service in Västberga.
“Secure transit robbery?” he replies; he isn’t surprised.
Secure transit vehicles were the new banks. Six out of every ten robberies these days had something to do with guards either carrying or transporting cash. All that surprises Dahlström is the time. Who could be out collecting money at this time of night?
“It’s the G4S cash depot,” the guard says down the line. “They came in a helicopter.”
Dahlström looks up from the blocks and squares. He stares blankly at his computer’s blue home screen as though it might give him the answers, and then he asks the guard to repeat what he just said.
“It’s a helicopter,” the guard insists.
“A helicopter?” says Dahlström.
“It’s taken off again. It’s hovering above now.”
Dahlström can’t believe what he’s hearing. A helicopter attacking a cash depot in Västberga? He knows the area, the Söderort district station is on Västberga Gårdsväg, less than a quarter of a mile from the secure transport company’s offices. He’s been to the station himself, as recently as a month ago.
“Are you sure about this?” he asks.
“Are you stupid?” the guard replies.
Sofi Rosander has woken up on the sofa. She’s heard the conversation, their phone calls play automatically over the loudspeaker.
“We need to call someone,” she whispers.
“Stay on the line,” Dahlström orders the guard, ending the call.
“We need to raise the alarm,” Sofi Rosander repeats. “And call the district commissioner.”
“I can’t ring Caisa fucking Ekblad and wake her up,” Dahlström protests, terrified by the thought. “I’ll call Månsson instead. He’s in charge of Söderort. It’s his problem.”
It takes a while for Dag Månsson to answer. He sounds muddled, newly woken and annoyed. Dahlström introduces himself and repeats the information that has just come in. Månsson reacts with the same degree of surprise.
“The cash depot in Västberga? But it’s right next to the station?” he says.
Dahlström has to repeat the information several times before Månsson finally understands that the robbers have landed a helicopter on the roof of G4S.
“I’m on my way in,” he says. “I’ll call the commissioner en route. You raise the alarm.”
72
5:16 a.m.
The helicopter is in the air, hovering just to the right of the building, far enough away not to hinder the three men working on the roof.
Maloof had run over to Sami when he realized something wasn’t right. Together, they squat down and study the pane of glass close up. Thanks to the lights below, they can see a small crack, thin but long.
Maloof knows that it could have been there before, but he decides not to mention that.
“Keep going, keep going,” he says instead, returning to Nordgren, who has started to screw together the ladders.
The longer of the two seems inconceivably long, but it does need to reach all the way to the fifth floor.
“Let’s move everything over to the window,” he says to Nordgren.
It’s more a type of therapy than anything else. They need to keep themselves busy while Sami lets the sledgehammer do its job.
Sami strikes the glass. He strikes it again. The movement reminds him of a condemned prisoner in a chain gang in some film from the early sixties. Every time the sledgehammer hits the window, it makes the same dull thud, the same anticlimax, and after the fifth or seventh or eleventh strike, once Nordgren and Maloof have moved all the bags, ropes, ladders, tools and explosives over to the window, his patience starts to wear thin.
Maloof had planned on them being out of there in quarter of an hour. Fifteen minutes. It can’t take any longer than that.
Three of those fifteen minutes have already passed, and they haven’t even managed to smash the window.
“I’ll blow it open,” Nordgren says quietly to Maloof, who nods.
Nordgren bends down to prepare a charge, but as he does so, they finally hear the sound of the hammer breaking the glass into thousands of tiny pieces.
With Nordgren’s help, Maloof lifts one end of the longer ladder above his head and they raise it vertically in the air. Next, they carefully lower it through the hole in the skylight. The balcony on the fifth floor is directly below them, little more than a ledge.
Slowly, they lower the ladder down through the building. It has to be long enough.
Afterward, Michel Maloof will look back at those few moments and think of them as having been the longest of the morning. If the ladder is too short, it’s all over. They won’t have any choice but to wave back the helicopter and leave.
Foot by foot, the ladder disappears through the hole in the broken window. With just six inches of the full thirty-six feet to spare, it hits the floor.
Maloof leans forward and looks down.
“I think it’ll work,” he says.
Getting the ladder into place took twenty-five seconds.
It felt more like twenty-five minutes.
Nordgren grabs the shorter ladder and swings it onto his right shoulder. He grabs the bag of explosives in his other hand.
“You holding?” he asks Maloof.
He starts climbing without waiting for an answer.
Maloof holds on to the ladder as tightly as he can. It shakes. Nordgren is only halfway down when it starts to bend as though it were made of bamboo.
But it doesn’t collapse.
Maloof asks Sami to hold it while he grabs as much as he can and then sets off as the second man. Sami climbs down last of all, the Kalashnikov hanging from a strap around his neck.