“That smells incredible,” said Annika. “God, I’m hungry. I’m just going to get changed. Then you can tell me everything.”
She disappeared into the bedroom, as always, to take off her tax adviser clothing and put on something more comfortable.
Nordgren continued to stir the pot.
It was going to be tough to tell her about the conference he’d told her he was attending when, in fact, he had actually been sleeping the days away in a too-short bed on Runmarö. He wasn’t a good liar to begin with, but a conference of hundreds of electricians would—as Nordgren imagined it—be an unbearably boring story.
But the real problem was that his body was still singing.
That was how it felt. As though his muscles, synapses and connective tissues were celebrating in secret.
They had done it.
102
Thurn took the elevator down to the garage, and as she climbed into her car she knew she wouldn’t be going home.
She still wasn’t sure. In her new-smelling Volvo, she could no longer avoid the questions that had been bothering her all day. How could someone who had planned a robbery involving at least twenty people, requiring thousands of hours of careful planning, manage not to give anything away for an entire month? Especially someone like Petrovic, who had said plenty of other revealing things, suggesting he hadn’t been aware of the microphones until, perhaps, the end.
How could her colleagues in police headquarters be so sure that this previously unknown man was the brains behind the spectacular helicopter heist?
It didn’t add up.
She turned left onto Scheelegatan, drove over the Barnhus Bridge and then took another left.
Zoran Petrovic lived no more than five minutes from police headquarters.
Caroline Thurn had never seen him in person, but she knew where he lived. When she parked her car outside his door, it was almost eight thirty in the evening.
She had to see him.
She wouldn’t know until she saw him.
She had spent so many nights with him, with that incessant voice in her ears, that self-confident tone, the way he placed himself at the center of the universe. She couldn’t help the fact that she was equal parts impressed and annoyed with him. But she had to supplement everything she knew with a real person’s gaze, movements and presence. It was the only way to be sure.
After half an hour, a young woman came out of the building, and Thurn took the opportunity to sneak in. She climbed the stairs to Petrovic’s apartment and rang the bell, not quite knowing what she would say if he answered. But there was no one home, and when she picked the lock and went in, she didn’t see anything that gave her a particular feeling either way.
With a sigh, she returned to the street and waited on the sidewalk.
He appeared just after ten, walking down Upplandsgatan in a short, thin jacket. She spotted him from a distance and immediately knew it was him. Tall and slender as a flagpole. She took a step out into the middle of the sidewalk just as he was about to reach the door, and he had no choice but to stop.
“Sorry,” she said, “but you don’t know what time it is, do you?”
Zoran Petrovic glanced at her with a wry smile. Thurn allowed him to look her up and down, to value and judge her. There was a certain timidity to him, she thought, but for a few seconds he brushed that to one side, stood up straight and went onto autopilot.
“Not too late for a drink,” he replied.
She must have passed his first appraisal, but she couldn’t sense any concrete conviction behind his invite. Despite the mocking smile, which she assumed was meant to pique her interest, he seemed more tired than anything.
She smiled.
“Thanks,” she said. “But I don’t think so.”
She looked him deep in the eye, utterly indifferent to whether he had misunderstood her.
“OK,” he replied, with a certain sense of relief. “That’s fine. It’s been a long day, but there’ll be others. Do you live around here?”
She smiled. Studied him. The uncertain flash in his eyes when she replied with a laugh: “I work nearby.”
And then she turned and walked away.
She felt better.
She was sure.
It was him.
103
Work in police headquarters was complicated on Thursday, September 24, by the sheer number of crime scenes that had to be examined. The forensic resources they had at their disposal simply weren’t enough.
To begin with, they had to go through the robbers’ entry route into the cash depot in Västberga. From the roof to the balcony on the fifth floor, and then up to Counting on the sixth. The helicopter had been found early on Wednesday, and along with it a good deal of abandoned equipment that could yield traces of DNA. By lunch, a pair of gloves and a balaclava had been found in a trash can by a bus stop a few miles away from the launch site on Värmdö. These had been sent for analysis along with the two bomb devices that had been placed outside the hangar.
The investigations of the various crime scenes were taking place more or less simultaneously, which meant that on Thursday morning, neither the prosecution authority nor the National Criminal Police had a good overview of what was actually known or expected. Paradoxically, information was also leaking out of police headquarters like a surging spring river. The Swedish media seemed to be completely up to date with the investigation, and by afternoon, Hertz realized that it was quicker to read the online version of the evening papers than it was to wait for internal updates.
The content was identical.
On the morning of Friday, September 25, Detective Chief Inspector Caroline Thurn was called into a meeting at the prosecution authority on Fleminggatan. Since the walls of police headquarters seemed to have ears, they had given up holding meetings there.
Therese Olsson was already waiting when Thurn arrived, as were Berggren and a couple of other colleagues. There was a tangible sense of excitement in the room. Traces of blood had been found at G4S during the previous day. And not in just one place, but several, most clearly by the damaged door into the cash depot. As the computers in the basement raced to find a clear match in the extensive Swedish crime register, bets were currently being made.
Names from the investigation flew through the room.
“One hundred on Zoran Petrovic.”
“I’ll bet two hundred,” said Berggren.
“Three fifty on Michel Maloof,” said the youngster from the Suspect Profile Group.
Maloof was one of hundreds of names in Thurn and Berggren’s list of criminals who had been in contact with Petrovic during August.
Thurn didn’t take part in the betting. It wasn’t how she thought police work should be done.
They spent a few minutes discussing their surveillance options and how the day could best be spent, but everyone fell silent when the phone on Hertz’s desk started to ring. Breathlessly, they stared at the prosecutor as he listened tensely, noted something down and then nodded.
He hung up and said: “Sami Farhan?”
It was a question.
“Sami Farhan?” Caroline Thurn repeated, astonished. “That’s the middle brother.”
“You know who he is?” Hertz asked. He sounded surprised.
But Prosecutor Lars Hertz was the only person in the room with no idea who the Farhan brothers were.