“But there was also a policeman in my hometown. The type who wore his pants stuffed into a pair of dirty leather boots. His hat with the unpolished police badge was too large and his shirt was as wrinkled as a morel. He was strong, had the strength of two men but a very small man’s willpower. So we children could trick him. We laughed at him. He chased us with his baton. He wanted to give us a beating, but we were too quick. We ran and threw ourselves into the river like flying fish. He stood there waving his fucking baton . . . Dive in, dive in, we shouted from the water, you don’t dare to, just dive, dive from the tree, like us.”
Another slight step forward and his father came up alongside him.
“So, one day, Leo, he had enough. He took off his wrinkled uniform but kept his dirty leather boots on and then he climbed high up in the proudest tree and out onto the thickest branch and stretched out over the water like a giraffe’s neck.”
His father extended his long arm, slanted upward.
Him and his damn stories. They were merely intended to mirror underlying truths. His father had always done that back when the three brothers were children, when he tried to get at the falsehood—wrap it up with what resembled fairy tales, allowing the remarkable images to confuse and peel away the resistance, and then drill deeply in and expose it.
“When the policeman had crawled all the way out on the branch, he became scared. We could see that. But we kept on shouting—swimming around in the water and shouting that he should dive in. We shouted that he didn’t dare to, that he was just as cowardly as he was stupid.”
Ivan grew silent and looked at Leo, a look that was completely sober.
“Finally he dove in. Without bending, he hit the water. The lousy boots stood straight up in the river like two periscopes. He broke his neck like a small chicken even though he was so big and so strong. The idiot had no will. He listened to the children and didn’t follow his own will—he followed the children’s.”
Leo felt his cell phone buzzing in his jacket pocket. For a moment his father’s voice ebbed away out of his mind, pushed away by the eagerness to carefully sneak his phone out and check whether what he thought must have happened had actually happened.
“Leo—are you listening to me? I am not that policeman. Do you understand that?”
The app connected to both security cameras had signaled. Camera A. The one sitting on the fence at the beginning of the gravel road, about a half a mile away.
“Leo—I am not stupid.”
And there. Not particularly clear, and captured by a single lens, he saw on the cell phone’s display a car passing by with the front headlights dimmed.
Perfect.
They were all here.
“So when you tell me to dive in, you have another thought along with it. Don’t you, Leo?”
His father’s eyes pursued his own, but he couldn’t meet them.
“Leo—are you using me?”
“What?”
“A simple question—are you using me?”
His voice needed to be composed and directed to his father; that was all Leo was thinking of.
“Dad, it was you who came to me. It was you who said that if you could change, I could change. Now I’m trying to do that.”
Their eyes met now.
He needed to deliver the words.
Only that.
“Even Felix. Even Vincent. They’re also in on it.”
His father’s energy, so filled with doubt, stopped blazing forth so angrily for the first time since they had opened the barn door.
“What did you say? Felix too?”
“Yes.”
“And . . . Vincent?”
They were still looking at each other. Leo managed to direct his gaze. He managed to face his father with a lie.
“Yeah. I’ve asked them both—and both agreed.”
It was so much easier now. What he’d come here for was perhaps already partly achieved. The person he hoped would follow them probably had followed and would soon see the father and son from the Dûvnjac family step out of a desolate and mysterious barn in the middle of nowhere. If his father said yes—swallowed the bait and became the bait that he was here to become—then the false lead would continue tomorrow.
“So that would mean . . . all four of us? Father and sons in the same construction company?”
“Yes.”
“Leo, I don’t know. Do you mean what you’re saying?”
Leo hesitated, but only briefly. Then he held both of his arms out and did what he was not sure he had ever done before—taken the initiative and embraced his father.
“Yeah. I mean what I’m saying.”
And the chest he touched felt so thin.
His father had become smaller during his prison term.
“You don’t need to decide now, Dad. Think about it when we’re driving home.”
Or was it the fucking lie that had diminished him?
If Dad seemed smaller, was he perhaps also easier to get to?
Leo looked at the man who had once taught him to dance around and defeat the bear, while he forced himself to swallow what was in his throat.
FROM HIS POSITION in the wooded area, protected by trees and bushes and evening darkness, he watched father and son as they came out of the large barn standing next to the main house on the fair-sized courtyard. They had spoken in low voices. In confidence, without John Broncks catching any of the words before they got in the car and drove away.
A deserted farm visited by one of Sweden’s most notorious bank robbers and his father—after a short, cryptic telephone conversation.
“I’m going to show you something.”
“What?”
“Our future.”
The hunch-backed man at the Intelligence Unit had also continued to help after Broncks’s visit to the ninth floor. In spite of the lack of a formal request, after a little persuasion, the detective with the friendly face had followed the movements from the cell phone in Ivan Dûvnjac’s pocket, all from his seat in front of the electronic map. Broncks was guided from the E4 exit at Norsborg past Botkyrka church and then onto unfamiliar roads. It seemed so strange to drive around in the genuine countryside among isolated estates only a little more than six miles from Sweden’s capital. This same hunch-backed detective had also investigated the farm’s ownership and found out that it belonged to a convicted hitman who did his time at Österåker. That was how Dûvnjac had found his way here to a guaranteed uninhabited property.
When he was sure that the men he was tailing had really left, he exchanged his hiding place in the woods for his equally hidden car and made his way to the barn. In the back seat he had a bag packed for times like these when the network of police technical skills he usually had access to was no longer an option.
It seemed strange, as if he were going behind his own back, unfaithful to his own professional role.
But he had no choice—he couldn’t tell Elisa or other colleagues, not yet. Not before he knew how his brother was connected to Leo Dûvnjac.
He fished a flashlight out of the trunk of his car, switched it on, and lit up the barn’s long side, toward the door sealed up with a padlock. Then the beam of light caught a piece of rusty rebar lying on the ground a couple of yards from the foundation.
It was easier than he imagined. With the rebar he broke the latch that held the padlock and opened the door. Afterward he would push it back into the wooden façade to mask his trespass.
A small truck. That’s what he saw first, since that was about the only thing he saw. A giant room with a vehicle and a small workbench and a folding chair and nothing else.
The truck’s flatbed was covered with a thick plastic tarp. He removed three rubber straps and lifted up the cover so he could see into the cargo space.
There they were.
Row after row, on top of each other, next to each other.
And in the middle of the pile of stolen automatic weapons was something that made him want to let go of the plas
tic and step back. But he stayed there. In spite of being well aware of what the three cables connected to a red cell phone on a small box meant.
A bomb.
That would be triggered if and when Leo Dûvnjac decided.
Broncks had seen this before in connection with business deals of considerable worth between hardened criminals—the seller’s insurance forcing the buyer to pay for both the goods and for the password or code protecting it.
So that was what he was up to. He had a buyer. The guns would change hands.
Broncks pulled a pair of thin rubber gloves out of the bag.
He was standing before a unique opportunity. He would be able to arrest the bastard at the moment of the sale and tie him to both that deed and the original theft. And for this kind of extremely aggravated theft of weapons—if it could be interpreted as an act of terror according to the law—Leo Dûvnjac would be sentenced to life imprisonment, with a little luck. In other words, an even longer sentence than he would have received if they succeeded in getting him convicted of all the bank robberies. Broncks was nearly certain that a couple of hundred automatic weapons from the Swedish government, which were to be sold at an arms market controlled by madmen, would most likely match formulations in the law book such as . . . inspiring serious fear among the people.
He propped the flashlight against the edge of the truck’s floor and carefully lifted the gun lying furthest out on the top—an AK4—and set it on the oblong bench behind the vehicle. Then he took a zephyr brush out of the bag and also a box of fine fingerprint powder blended with a little soot. He hit the brush several times on the edge of the bench. It was important that the fibers on the tip be separated before he dipped the delicate brush in the soot powder and rubbed it over the butt, stock, and barrel of the rifle. Rings stood out clearly in the grayish black powder, not just from one finger, but from several. With the rubber glove flat, he pressed down pieces of plastic wrap. Fingerprints were duplicated now and in about an hour they would be compared at the forensic technician’s lab with patterns from more than one hundred thousand fingerprints taken earlier from suspects in criminal investigations and registered in the A file.
He put the gun back in the exact place he had taken it from. He pulled down the plastic cover and fastened it to the truck’s floor and took a few steps backward to memorize the registration plate’s three letters and three numbers.
You don’t have a clue, Dûvnjac, how close I am.
A JOURNEY IN silence.
They drove from the small gravel road to a somewhat larger gravel road, to an even larger gravel road, wide enough so that it was not necessary to stop every time you met a car going the other way. And finally to the paved, four-lane European highway, number 4, which would take them back to Stockholm.
They remained silent, side by side in the front seat of the car until Leo turned off at a rest stop that took them into a service area.
“Why are we stopping here?”
There were no people, but it was quite nice. Well lit, with a very small concrete building with public toilets, and a lot of benches and tables and trash cans right at the edge of the forest.
“The bathroom, Dad. I need to piss. Be right back.”
He managed to get halfway between the car and the building when Ivan rolled down the window and called after him.
“Leo?”
And he stopped, turning toward his father, who stuck his head out the window to hear better.
“Yeah?”
“Did you mean what you said at that barn?”
“Dad, let’s not talk about it anymore. If you don’t want to, you don’t want to.”
“But I’d like to.”
Leo was standing too far away and it was too dark for his father to be able to see the satisfied look on his face right now.
“I knew you would, Dad.”
“Together, Leo. We’ll renovate the goddamn farm. You and me. And Felix. And Vincent.”
His father’s head was now more outside than inside the window. Eager, that’s what he was.
“The whole family! I must admit—I feel happy. Happy, Leo!”
The odor in the abandoned toilets was heavy with the stench of misaimed urine. The walls were obscured in unadorned light. And there was a considerable draft from the small window in one corner of the concrete block.
Leo passed a filthy urinal with two standing places and went into the only stall that could be locked.
When they were in the barn, the display on his cell phone had shown a car with its lights off passing camera A—mounted on the fence at the start of the gravel road. And just a little earlier he’d heard a bleep, when his father was too close for him to check. That bleep meant that camera B had switched on. It felt good. But what he saw now on a little screen in his hand, at a reeking rest area in no man’s land along the highway, exceeded his expectations. A trap that had been tripped again. From the camera mounted high up on one of the inner walls of the barn, which thus transmitted an image viewed from above, a flashlight was seen wandering around in the dark of the derelict property. A beam of light approached a vehicle—and was shining into it. And when the person holding the flashlight moved and met his own face for a moment, Leo looked straight into the two eyes of John Broncks.
And Leo heard himself chuckling.
How his laughter knocked against the narrow walls of the stall.
Broncks wouldn’t interfere with his planning anymore. While he was dropping his father off at the Hungarian restaurant soon and then picking up Sam, the cop bastard would act like the police officer he was and prepare an operation. He’d place elite cops behind every bush around the badly painted farm buildings and wait for a crackdown on what he was convinced would be classified as the greatest Swedish illegal arms deal of our time.
But what he did not know was that the seller himself, Leo Dûvnjac, had directed him there deliberately.
The timing of the raid would be steered by a phone call to his phone-tapped father, who was convinced that the business they would talk about related to something entirely different.
At the same time the real holdup would be carried out far away from there.
VÄSTBERGA EXIT STOOD completely still, a stubborn line between the E4 and first roundabout. It was one of the few times when Broncks wished he had driven a marked police car and not the investigation division’s more discreet vehicle. But he was chasing time and so he passed the frustrated row of cars on the inside—halfway down in the ditch—to a chorus of loud honking. The gas station was the first building after the exit and he parked at one of the vacant pumps without filling up. He went in and headed directly to the checkout where there was yet another stubborn line, but this one impossible to pass on the inside or outside. There were two customers in front of him, a young man who had just picked out a movie and was now choosing at great length the perfect hot dog with the proper relish. And an elderly woman with her arms full of food for her evening and for breakfast.
His heart was pounding with impatience. To endure it, he forced himself to try to think of something other than how many people were in front of him or his haste. It didn’t work. Each new thought was an old one circling around the fact that all these years he had been wandering around on false leads after the extensive weapons robbery. He had searched for a faceless shadow that turned out to be Leo Dûvnjac. The individual who Broncks was convinced was the brains behind the operation, not least because of the direct contact they had in connection with the contemplated resale—which was labeled in the court proceedings “aggravated blackmail against the police force,” from how Dûvnjac formulated the threat at the time. If the police didn’t buy back the two hundred military automatic weapons he stole, he’d threatened to sell them to or even donate them to Sweden’s criminal organizations, thus multiplying the number of serious available guns on the market.
In the end it was a skinny hot dog with chili on it for the young man at the front of the line, who was now chewing on it. When he a
sked for more mustard for the second time, Broncks lost his patience and requested that he let the next person make her purchases. The woman between them turned around gratefully and smiled. She set down butter and cheese and bread and pâté and napkins and candles and frozen cabbage rolls. It was interesting how gas stations had changed into today’s supermarkets.
After the trial, John Broncks had continued to search for clues about the stolen weapons, now and then returning to the comprehensive preliminary investigation lying on his office floor just a few feet away. But now he had found the entrance to the hiding place where they were probably kept all this time! It had smelled like gun oil and fresh footprints trampled on each other. And just now he had been standing in an abandoned barn—and he saw them! Spread out on terra-cotta tiles in the cargo space of a rental truck. He was finally catching up. And it felt . . . hopeless. All the longing, all the zeal replaced by a big, ugly, hellish anxiety over his older brother’s involvement, over the consequences it could have for both of them. He knew now that Sam and Dûvnjac could be linked together. But not yet how extensive the connection was, how involved Sam was. That was why he stood here waiting for an elderly woman with bags of food to pay and say good evening and ask for help with the door until it was his turn.
“You filled up?”
“No. No gas. I would—”
“No? But that was you standing out there at pump four, right?”
“—just like to confirm that—”
“A hot dog then? Or a drink? We have a good price for coffee. You get a cinnamon bun for half price.”
“—that a rental truck with the registration BGY 397 is one of your vehicles.”
“Now I’m confused. Do you want to rent a car?”
“I just want to know if the truck is yours. If it was rented here.”
“I can’t tell you.”
“According to the car registry it is.”
“You must know that I can’t . . .”
The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2 Page 26
