“Kindly back off. Out. Now.”
“Yesterday. That Broncks cop. And you—together in a fucking visitors’ room. What did he want to learn from his little prison rat? Where the guns are? How he should search for the booty from the bank robberies he couldn’t get us for?”
Put any of the other prisoners in this section, in the entire facility, in the same situation, in the same cell, and there’d be blood flowing out of the walls.
“Hey, you listen!”
“What?”
“I think it is . . . well, rather unfortunate that you don’t respect the string and you come into my cell without knocking. I had thought better of you. You fooled him, that Broncks cop, for quite a long time. A couple of years. And I liked that.”
It was as if it was already at that point of some sort of extraordinary meeting. In the middle of hate, of threats, they somehow belonged together.
“You know, his mother died too.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
Leo heard, but hadn’t understood at first.
“He is your . . . brother?”
“Yes.”
“The cop who came to visit—the one we’re talking about? Broncks?”
“Yes.”
“Broncks—your brother? You have different last names, but you are the brother of the fucking cop who got me?”
“Yeah. Police officer. But also my brother. Police officer, brother. You know how it can be with brothers, Leo, if anyone does. Our mother was the link we still had. The only one. Now that she’s dead, John and I never need to speak to each other again.”
There and then, with that conversation, began to grow something that over time would slowly become friendship, then deep trust. They certainly had a lot in common.
They both hated the cop named Broncks.
They were both locked up in a high-security prison.
They both had grown up as the oldest brother in worlds built around the same structure—a mother who held the family together, a father who broke it apart.
———
Two winding miles, even more beautiful if that was possible, even more of a country idyll. He drove through thick forest, open fields, past the thirteenth-century church and the manor house and the fort from the seventh century, and turned—as Sam had instructed him—at the curve by the old school that at another time had been full of noisy, playing children but was now empty, echoing. Leo slowed down when he glimpsed the water again and then the red fence. He made his way across the whole island to a little, similarly red house, which hid behind five spreading, unpruned apple trees.
And there he was. Just as big, a goddamn heavyweight, crossing with powerful steps over the lawn to the car. They hugged each other just as everybody did in prisons, sort of a habit that stayed. Two and a half months. They hadn’t seen each other since Sam’s release. After, Leo realized how much he valued it, had taken it for granted, and how much and how deeply you could miss a true friend behind walls and locked doors. After twenty-three years, Sam had had his life sentence commuted, the time was set, and he was released.
A few deep breaths. Forest air. It had a stronger taste. A fly, buzzing insistently, crisscrossed his face. Birds of prey, a pair, circled high above. Otherwise, calm. Not a single human.
“And completely cop-proof?”
Sam smiled. They both knew who he was referring to.
“The most cop-proof place in the country. My brother hates this house. You can figure out why, of course, since you know a lot about me. About us.”
He slung his trunk over his shoulder and they walked over the grass toward the wildly growing apple trees and the wooden cabin, which seemed even smaller now that he came close to it. The door was ajar and Sam showed him in to a bedroom, then another. They’d clearly come in from the back.
“The bathroom’s in there. There’s the tiny living room. And there’s the kitchen. One-hundred-fifty square feet.”
Sam pointed to the two bedrooms.
“It’s cramped, like two cells. Mama and Papa in that room, John and me in a bunk bed in there. Every summer until I was eighteen, when I switched to another cell. Then the summers had a little less sun and swimming.”
Leo lingered a little, his eyes on what had been the parents’ bedroom, on the unmade double bed.
“You sleep there?”
Hesitation. As if Leo had nothing to do with that.
“There aren’t any more beds here.”
“You should be the one to hate this house, for God’s sake, not your cop brother.”
“I thought I did when I first came here after being released, but instead I felt . . . enormous peace. Understand?”
“No. Not at all. I would never go back to my childhood.”
The sitting room was small—armchair, table from the ’60s, TV—the sort of room a visitor just passes through on the way to the kitchen with its slanted cabinets, Windsor-style chairs, and black woodstove. And the kitchen table—which had been laid with one year’s worth of robbery planning: the rolled-up map on 11 x 17 paper; the moving box with masks, boots, bulletproof vests; the driver’s license, with a photo of Sam but someone else’s name, John Martin Erik Lundberg; the two work overalls, one blue, one black.
And on the sofa in the kitchen, there was something that would be used in a couple of days, on the final job: the first half of the police identifications with photos of himself—with a shaved head, taken on leave from prison nearly a year ago—and of Sam. Next to these stood the 3D printer for metal alloys, ordered in Shanghai and slipped through to Sweden via customs in Leipzig, the prerequisite for being able to produce the other halves of the identifications.
“And the milk truck?”
“Jari is parking it behind the unloading bay right now.”
“And we trust him? Still?”
“Look, someone who gets things like these, he’s taking it seriously.” Sam fished out the driver’s license and held it out to Leo, who slid his thumb over the plastic surface.
“Yeah. Genuine. Even the embossed S. And the UV coating. That’s exactly what they’ll do, Sam, when the milk truck needs to go through the roadblocks. The police do it unconsciously, running their thumbs over the driver’s license. And with the truck ready to go and already in place . . . whatever happens, even if they block off the entire shopping center, it will be able to drive off. After the transformation, the magic, the camouflage. When the cops start screening the idiots who are desperately trying to get out, if the guy sitting in the front seat isn’t wearing a mask anymore and doesn’t fit the description, then a milk truck will sail right through. Especially with a cargo space that’s easily checked since it contains only . . . milk.”
Leo had put the trunk down on the kitchen floor. Now he opened it. Inside were two thoroughly cleaned and newly greased AK4s and enough ammunition should the robbers be forced to shoot their way out. He handed one to Sam and kept the other for himself.
“We have time to check two points on our list at most.”
“I don’t understand why we have to be in such a hurry. We’ve been planning this for a year, Leo, in detail. And now we don’t even have the time to run through the entire first robbery.”
One year. All the meetings taking place in Sam’s cell, with the red string clearly wound around the door handle. That was how a prison worked, the surfaces of contact were multiplied and the only thing they all had in common was crime—a greenhouse for criminality with the meeting’s participants already in place, locked up together. They had met almost daily, sitting on the bed and the single chair in Sam’s cell. They drilled each part into their heads. They had ticked off times, guard routines, escape routes, vehicles. But after Sam’s release, they had spoken not a word of it because of the risk of being bugged. It had become Sam’s mission alone, therefore, to complete the part that could only be prepared out in the world.
“I get what’s going on here, Sam. You have been in jail a lot of fucking years and be
en classified as a high-risk prisoner, but you’ve never robbed a bank. You’re nervous. Trying to put it off.”
Leo reached for the rolled-up map, pushed off the rubber band, and unfurled the picture of the place that would be visited soon.
“Right? But you know why we’ve been in a hurry. And that robberies work if I plan them. And that if we don’t do it now, it will be too late, for good.”
Sam didn’t answer, he didn’t need to—Leo knew, of course, that he understood it.
Their joint plan: four stages over four days.
The first, which they had given the name “the milking stool” during the course of planning, would be in just a few hours. The second, “the house call,” tomorrow. The third, “the test,” in two days and the fourth, “the police station,” as the conclusion. It was then, at 14:00, that the transport departed. On the last Thursday of every month, normally carrying small sums. But this time was unique. It would be several years before the next time it would carry anything even approaching this volume.
Take back what didn’t exist. In the greatest heist ever. And at the same time, bring down the fucking cop that locked him and his brothers up. Then vanish forever.
“Here. The first point to go over.”
Leo had placed a glass on each corner of the map to keep it from stubbornly rolling up again.
“We are still expecting six cash cassettes with banknotes. Only five-hundreds. Around five or six million kronor—exactly as much as we need.”
He pointed to a cross in a square inside a bigger square at about the center of the map. Then he held up his gun, aimed at something, and patted the gun barrel lightly.
“Our very own master key. The moment the ATMs signal ‘temporarily out of order,’ that means the guards have opened them on the inside and it’s time to use it, Sam: the fat master key. To open the security door while they are standing there with their pants down and the safe, with its alarm disabled, wide open. They’re most on their guard when they’re carrying the money in. When they close the door, they feel safe. That’s when we start shooting for the first time. You in blue overalls—the Blue Robber. But we shouldn’t shoot straight in, the bullets would wound or, in the worst case, kill someone. So it’s best to shoot away the lock at an angle. Then the bullet won’t ricochet; it will get stuck in the concrete wall. That’s why we’re using Swedish army ammunition—it has a thicker and harder casing. That’s why we are using Swedish army guns, to avoid shooting straight like you have to with a Russian AK47, and then there’s just a damn mess on the inside.”
The unfurled map also hid two green rings among all the crosses and arrows. Leo pointed to them now, his fingertips fitting precisely inside the circles.
“Next point. The moment when everything is decided. The vehicle exchange—the transformation when the robbers cease to exist. This is what amateurs don’t plan—the moment you have to own if you don’t want to give the cops the upper hand.”
That’s what the green rings meant: vehicles 1 and 2.
“A vehicle change that happens right before their eyes.”
He had talked about that in particular so many times. Yet it was just what Sam wanted and needed to hear. All they had rehearsed and memorized was no longer a distant plan—it was reality.
“Once before a bank robbery I parked two identical cars, one at each exit of a small town, same color and model and number plates. The tips came flooding in to the cops from two different directions and that forced your goddamn cop brother to set up two search routes while we got away. Another time, I changed the first getaway car just a couple of hundred yards from the bank we had just robbed while people were walking by eating hot dogs, and your brother didn’t get that we had parked the car next to one like it, already there—two delivery vans pointing in different directions—and that we were able to go from one vehicle to the next without it being seen from the outside. But, Sam, I’ve never been in on this before, switching the getaway car at the very scene of the crime, while the cops are watching. And nobody else has done it either.”
His voice sounded just as pleased and certain as he felt—aiming to calm the other man, who in a couple of hours was going to shoot automatic weapons at other people for the first time, and to get him to understand that, if a robber of security vans acts during that gap that violence creates, he freezes time for both those who are lying down to take cover on the floor and for those who are radioing a message through that robbers are shooting wildly. A free zone. Time for the robber to act without hindrance.
“And it’s you, Sam, who’ll sit behind the wheel at the crucial moment—when the car approaches the police roadblock. It’s you they’ll look at. If you are calm, the cops will be calm. They’re going to be looking for robbers, not milk cartons. They’re going to be looking for black and blue overalls and automatic weapons, and if the driver and his assistant are wearing green-and-white uniforms and have proper driver’s licenses and don’t act nervous . . . then when the cops run their fucking thumbs over the identification information, they’ll be relieved and state that ‘the vehicle seems okay, a regular milk truck, drive through, we have more interesting vehicles to inspect.’”
On the floor next to the woodstove was a rusty metal box filled with carefully cut and chopped firewood in white birch bark with a bit of moss on it. Leo picked up two logs and then felt around with his fingers at the bottom of the metal box, looking for kindling to start the fire with until he found three straggling, sharp birch chips.
“Does it work properly?”
He opened the cast-iron doors of the woodstove, which made a low creaking sound.
“Yes. Perfectly. It helps me avoid those electric heaters, and it gives off a nice warmth from the chimney that’s enough for the whole house on any winter day.”
The firewood was thrown into the square stove opening, the thin sticks beneath and between them. It took a while before the flames settled down and fell together. The familiar crackling of dry wood accompanied the conversation.
“Okay then, Leo.”
He saw Sam take one of the bottles down from the shelf over the stove. Aquavit. At least he guessed that’s what it was. The bottle had no label. Sam took two small glasses from the dish rack and poured some.
“I got this from the fellow who runs the ferry. He makes it himself. Always spiced only with plants that grow wild on the island. This run has elderflowers and something else that I haven’t been able to figure out.”
“No, thanks, not now, not before the first robbery.”
“You had the chance to talk to make me calm. Now it’s my turn to make you calm.”
“I said no thanks, Sam.”
“And I heard you. But it’s not about drinking or not drinking a few shots of alcohol. It’s about us being free now. And we can do whatever the fuck we want.”
Leo took the glass hanging there in the air in Sam’s hand and brought it toward his mouth. It smelled of elderflowers. And juniper berries, Leo was sure of it, maybe even tormentil. But he didn’t take a drink.
“No. We aren’t free, yet. When we are sitting on the boat on the way to Riga and St. Petersburg, and Sberbank Rossii, then, in the suite, we’ll drink. Fuck it, we’ll bring in a case of champagne. Then we’ll be free, Sam.”
In one motion he gestured a toast in the thin air, lowered the glass down to the sink, and poured out the herbaceous drink. Then he reached for the unfurled map, with a last glance at the cross in a square inside a still bigger square next to numerous other squares in Sweden’s largest trade area, before he opened the cast-iron door to the fire and stuffed the map in. The paper went up in flames, smoked a little, and broke down to gray ash.
NONE OF THE afternoon customers knew that a human being would be lying lifeless in his own blood on the asphalt in the middle of the parking lot in four and a half minutes. At this very moment they were just getting out of their cars and going into the shops in the huge mall.
Nor could any of the hundreds of eager shopp
ers know as they waited patiently in the business complex’s countless lines, getting ready to pay for their items and then walk out through the automatic doors with heavy bags in their hands.
Nor did a single one of the guards in the security van, rolling slowly over the asphalt, wet with April rain.
This lack of awareness of impending death also encompassed the two masked men, one in blue overalls, one in black overalls, who were sitting in the front seat of the black Audi RS 7, the current year’s model, parked right outside the shopping center’s main entrance, a vehicle the police would wrongly identify as a classic getaway car when they arrived.
16:14:10
The car doors burst open simultaneously. One guard’s back was so broad that it was pulling apart the seams of his brownish-black uniform jacket when he climbed out in front of a square in a still bigger square next to plenty of other squares—building supplies shops linked to electronics retailers, supermarkets, furniture dealers, and many other kinds of stores. And here and there in the cubist pattern they’d been placed strategically in blue-and-white shells—the ATMs, the cash machines, the prerequisite for commerce. The other guard, a woman who was wearing her work uniform more casually, held the security case in a steady grip. And despite the fact that it wouldn’t actually be a particularly big problem for a potential robber to break into the silver-gray case’s outer shell with a blowtorch, she knew it was impossible to get to the paint capsules inside the casing. They would be triggered if a robbery took place during the short walk between the vehicle and the security room.
The glass doors slid open gently and the guards went into the warm shopping center to two of the cash machines that were built into the wall. The display on the screens read INSERT YOUR CARD.
Soon, when the guards had reached the security room and started switching the cash cassettes, the message would change to OUT OF ORDER. Not just a signal for young shoppers to wait for a while, but also a signal for two armed robbers to begin.
The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2 Page 6
