“A requisition for . . .”
Leo unfolded the paper on the counter.
“. . . property reference number 2017-0310-BG4743.”
The senior police officer had been wearing his reading glasses perched on his balding pate. Now he moved them to the bridge of his nose and studied the requisition Leo had filled in.
“Identification?”
The uniformed visitor held out his black leather case with the service card Jari had gotten manufactured and the shield he had made himself in an empty apartment in Sickla.
“We haven’t met before, have we?”
The leather case remained in the older man’s hand as he alternately looked at the photo of someone named Peter Eriksson, according to the service card, and then at the same face in reality.
“I don’t think so. I came straight from Örebro.”
“Örebro? Then maybe you know Zacke?”
“Zacke?”
“Yeah.”
Leo was weighing his answer to a question, which if asked in an interview room, would have had the aim of exposing a lie.
“Zacke’s about your age, right?”
But here between two colleagues it was only about being friendly, passing the time between brown envelopes, distinguished only by different reference numbers.
“Yeah, we patrolled a lot together in the eighties.”
The police officer, who had moved down from patrolling streets and people and lives, to a concrete room in a basement without windows, disappeared into the aisles between the rows of shelves. Leo assumed it was also in that direction that the Rosengrens safes stood lined up against the wall, safes that held valuable seized property. One of them appeared less valuable; one that could only be picked up during a ten-minute time window the next day.
“Yeah, well, there isn’t much in this.”
The old man turned the envelope up and down, his open hand like a fine-tuned scale, before he lay it down on the counter.
“And then your signature.”
He gestured to a form with fine lines in a grid. Date and property reference number to the left, rank and signature to the right. Leo quickly glanced at the lines above, of earlier retrievals signed by real police, to be certain he did the same. He handed the pen to the storage manager.
“If I run into Zacke again . . .”
“Yeah?”
What was friendly conversation to pass the time for some was friendly conversation to be remembered for others.
“. . . who should I say hello from?”
“Hell no, no greetings. I don’t want him to know I ended up down here.”
“Okay—who shouldn’t I say hello from?”
The storage manager held out the brown envelope, light as a feather, with a bulge in the middle.
“Oscarsson.”
“Have a nice day, Oscarsson.”
According to the cell phone’s stopwatch, it had taken four minutes and twenty seconds to pick up a confiscated article without anyone in line in front of him. Then it took a minute and ten seconds to move back down the corridor—this time with no encounters—to the underground entrance to the courthouse. And an additional two minutes and thirty-five seconds to walk along Scheele Street to Kungsholms Square and reach the parked rental truck.
There was a trash can just outside the door to the driver’s seat and there he opened the envelope and pulled out what was bulging in the middle—a pair of Versace sunglasses. He dropped them in the garbage and they landed between a couple of beer cans and a banana peel. Evidence in an ongoing investigation he picked out at random on the computer from the Albanians, which only had value in connection with the last checkpoint.
Everything had worked.
Now he could begin the second stage of the plan—laying out false leads, steering Broncks far away from here, in order to collect the seized property he really wanted tomorrow afternoon at ten minutes to two.
TUMBA 1:21.
The results on the computer screen were as simple to read as they were difficult to interpret.
But that was all Broncks found after searching for a couple of hours in both public and protected records.
He had visited Sam, who lied at first and then went on the attack using guilt. He had knocked on the ferryman’s door and charted movements synchronized with an aggravated robbery that had had a fatal outcome. And—when he had decided that biological ties were subordinate to a police investigation—he assumed that Sam and Leo Dûvnjac’s shared criminal journey must have already begun in prison. After Sam’s release, one of them had been planning inside the walls while the other made preparations on the outside. Anyone preparing for such a long time out in the world leaves a trail sooner or later.
And there it was on the screen: the trail.
The document out of the land registry that he was staring at without comprehending.
A plot in Tumba, about six miles south of Stockholm, linked them.
He was aware that Sam owned a house on Arnö. But not that he owned another house. And this one, Tumba 1:21, he had acquired when he was in prison.
BUYER: Sam George Larsen. SELLER: the Swedish Enforcement Authority.
And if Broncks flipped back through the pages of the transaction:
PREVIOUS OWNER: Leo Ivan Dûvnjac.
It wasn’t simply the home address for Dûvnjac during the series of bank robberies. The plot with the small house and the big garage had been the brains and heart of the entire operation, where the crimes were planned, behind the façade of the construction company.
The same small house with the same big garage that Broncks could see now if he leaned forward and looked out through the restaurant window. The reality corresponded with the downloaded land registry file on the computer screen. The coffee cup next to him was untouched. He didn’t sit down in Robban’s Pizzeria in Tumba because he wanted a cup of coffee; he wanted to be reassured that no one was in the house right then. And forty-five minutes of reconnaissance from the opposite side of the main thoroughfare made him virtually certain—no movements in the dark inside the curtainless windows, no vehicles arriving at the property. Broncks closed his laptop, put thirty kronor down on the table for an untouched cup of coffee that cost fifteen, and walked out to the parking lot by the little shopping center housed in a building made of blue sheet metal. He placed the computer under the front seat of the car—a police computer in the wrong hands was a more valuable weapon in the criminal world than a fully loaded gun—and waited for a short break in the heavy traffic long enough to be able to sprint across the road. A short walk past the beautiful turn-of-the-century home with green timber cladding and in through the barbed wire gate to the asphalt drive. It looked the same as it had many years before when he was there in connection with the arrest of the Dûvnjac family. The door of the giant garage was locked and when he jumped up on a pile of tires to be able to look in through an oval window on the side, he saw a space large enough for five vehicles, empty and unlit. Exactly like every other room when he peered into the house, which was completely unfurnished except for an out-of-place sofa bed in front of a cooker in the kitchen. It was obvious—no one had been living there for quite some time.
So why are you listed as the owner, Sam?
The daylight gleamed in a long crack on the front door’s diamond-shaped window. He picked up a stone in his hand and used it to break the glass. Two more blows and he got rid of most of the sharp glass shards, then he put his arm in and reached for the door handle.
Surprisingly, the narrow hall showed traces of visitors.
The several prints from damp rubber soles seemed reasonably fresh. Patterns from at least two different pairs. The tracks led in one direction—the guest room immediately to the left off the hall.
Broncks switched on a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling on a knotted cord. He saw it before he went in. The gap. One of the floor tiles not quite in place.
He bent down, moved it, and discovered that the one next to it was loose too
. And the two across from them. He coaxed up all four—two white squares and two black.
Underneath were two metal loops stuck in the concrete. He grabbed them and pulled upward. He held a concrete block the size of the four tiles in his hands.
He looked down.
A door to a safe.
Someone had cemented a safe into the floor.
It had not been here the last time. Or had they simply not discovered it?
He felt the handle.
Unlocked.
He opened it. Empty.
He ran his fingertips over the flooring of the safe and the walls covered with black velvet. Then he heard a noise from below. A brief humming that seemed to be coming from a basement, although this was a house that didn’t have a basement.
Broncks knocked the safe floor with his fist. His knocking became pounding, but nothing happened. He pressed both outstretched arms downward using the force of his upper body. Still nothing.
Until the humming started again.
It was a mechanical sound ending with a short, grating cough.
There was something down there.
The little house must be hiding a secret entrance somewhere. A door to a basement that shouldn’t be there. And when Broncks headed toward the guest room to look for it, he saw in the corner of his eye two loose cables hanging out of the electrical box on the wall above the window. To avoid an electric shock, he was careful to hold the plastic as he moved them to the side and investigated whether there was anything to them.
No answer there either.
But when the bare copper wires of the two cables happened to touch, he heard a mechanical sound again. This was clearer: a buzzing more than a humming. A noise that stopped the second he separated the wires.
The buzzing had come from the safe.
Broncks hurried over there and observed that the bottom of the safe seemed a little lower. Two, maybe three inches. He stuck his hand in and felt empty space. So he went back to the electrical box and put the wires together again.
The buzzing came again, and the safe sank even farther down into the darkness.
The first thing he thought about was the smell. Gun oil, he was sure of it.
He aimed the flashlight from his cell phone toward the hole and caught a glimpse of an aluminum ladder. And at the top of it, something was hanging. Broncks stuck his hand in and caught it. A plug for a standard wall socket. He fished it out and dragged it to the socket in the guest room.
An angry light.
It guided him seven steps down to an underground floor where for a long time he just stood still and looked around.
The four walls were lined with wooden shelving all the way around. A bit above the shelf there were two strips divided by milled grooves repeated every inch. Groove after groove, hundreds of them.
He slowly realized what he actually was looking at.
A gun rack.
They had stood here all along: AK4 next to AK4, leaning against the upper strip; automatic weapon next to automatic weapon, leaning against the lower strip, with their barrels in the grooves.
Under our feet as we searched.
Broncks thought about the smell of fresh gun oil. And the equally fresh tracks of two pairs of rubber-soled shoes in the hall.
Here he was in a secret room that had recently been emptied of automatic weapons, enough to equip a small army.
What the hell are you going to do with them?
TERRA-COTTA. A THOUSAND-YEAR-OLD shield of earth and clay protecting against heat and fire. Each brown—or maybe orange—tile had been placed side by side, row after row, to protect the truck floor, side walls, and back hatch. What lay on the tiles—the guns that at one time were the basis of the bank robberies he was indicted for—would melt in thermite’s sizzling flames, but not the truck’s cargo space.
He would destroy the past, so that the past would not destroy his two brothers once he himself was gone.
No evidence would be left. That was why he needed the terra-cotta tiles. They not only constituted the shield that resisted extremely high temperatures, but they also formed a vat for the hot thermite, at a temperature of five thousand degrees, to run down into. AK4s and machine guns and submachine guns were lying in the vat now. Nearly two hundred automatic rifles stacked in piles that filled the entire truck floor.
Leo went around the truck he had parked inside a barn that smelled of hay and something else that made him think, as he worked, of old gauze bandages.
His cell phone lay on the folding chair next to a bench that served as his workbench. It had given off two short beeps a few minutes apart and he hoped to catch it this time. A person. Not the same fucking bird that triggered the sensitive camera during the night.
He examined the first sequence playing up on the little screen.
It was a person.
A lone policeman. John Broncks was peering in through the kitchen window of the little house in the moving pictures taken obliquely from above. The house where these very guns had been hidden in a secret room, until Leo moved them here. Broncks tried the front door and when it became apparent it was locked, he looked for a stone, broke the diamond-shaped window, and reached in to unlock the bolt.
The next camera showed the cop inside the house, as he discovered the little clues left behind: the loose floor tiles revealing the safe and the electrical box on the wall that opened it.
Broncks had found the empty room exactly as he was supposed to.
They were there the whole time, you bastard, right under your feet.
Leo paused the picture to look around the barn instead.
Two cameras had been sufficient to cover the main angles at the old weapons cache. Two should be enough here at the new one also. One would be disguised and placed inside, above the barn’s doors. The other would be set up somewhere at the entrance. If the house was the starting point for Broncks, the barn was definitely the endpoint.
In the middle of the truck’s floor, in the middle of the enormous pile of guns, was a gray-and-red package—gray tape wrapped around a shoebox fastening a red cell phone to it. Leo leaned into the cargo space of the truck as far as possible without actually climbing up into it and he checked the three cables—a yellowish green, a red, and a blue one. They ran from the back of the telephone into the box where they were connected to a battery via a relay.
On the outside it looked like a homemade bomb, but it was actually an adapter activated when someone rang the right number. Then the relay became connected and the current ran from the box to the container on the truck’s roof.
A couple of seconds, and a ball of heating filament would be heated up, setting fire to what was in the container—fifty-five pounds of a thermite mixture.
He had conducted a test with just a pound of thermite to be certain it would work—and the result was almost comical. He picked out two submachine guns and put them in the terra-cotta vat. Before he even managed to sit down, they had been transformed into a soft, bubbling mass of metal. When the heat spread, it was as if a huge sparkler had been lit. The white light dazzled momentarily, harmless.
He looked at the truck and the two hundred automatic weapons. The thermite powder would rain like liquid fire and force the forensic technicians to step into a nightmare of fused metal, completely free of fingerprints.
This wasn’t a bomb that would explode and kill—it was a bomb that would be lived through.
AN UNDERGROUND ROOM.
Broncks had sat down on one of the rungs of the aluminum ladder in the concealed space for almost an hour. Chilly, damp, stuffy. But he didn’t notice. He tried to figure out how he would handle the realization that Leo Dûvnjac had stored more than two hundred automatic weapons down there for several years. The house had passed into John’s own brother’s possession, and Sam and Leo probably emptied the shelves together recently. When he finally decided to avoid getting a formal preliminary investigation started—to be able to act on his own until he clarified what Sam’s involveme
nt looked like—he began to call his contacts at the largest phone companies.
I’d like you to triangulate the telephone I’m speaking on now. The third try yielded the answer he was looking for. And when you have determined my position, I want to know if any more calls have registered from the same place over the last couple of days. He had gotten a hit—an outgoing call from the same exact point where he was now, a mobile without a service contract. In contrast, the recipient’s phone had a service contract. Someone who was, according to the register, named Ivan Dûvnjac. And according to the three towers his phone was connected to, he had answered at a location that corresponded to the Hungarian restaurant in the neighborhood around Skanstull.
Ivan Dûvnjac.
Leo Dûvnjac had called his father—the man he robbed his last bank with—at the same time he was going around and emptying Northern Europe’s largest private guns cache.
It was no coincidence.
They had contact. They were linked. They were on their way somewhere, and Sam was on the way there with them.
Broncks was certain—tap the father’s phone. Through him, map out Leo’s and Sam’s movements concerning the weapons trail. He would continue like this for a while, to avoid involving colleagues.
After three informal contacts at phone companies, he made yet another call. I want you to do it like you did the time before, sign a warrant for the tapping, without stating the degree of suspicion and without stating the offense. The prosecutor’s office and the prosecutor, whom he had persuaded some years earlier to tap the telephone of a female security guard with responsibility for transports from the federal bank’s main branch. You did it then, you trusted me, and it yielded 103 million and quite a few career pats on the back, right?
Broncks got up from the aluminum ladder and stretched as best he could with his hands on the hidden room’s ceiling while he waited for the prosecutor to call back.
The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2 Page 24
