“I still don’t understand what we’re doing here. What you’re up to. What kind of fucking police work is this?”
“The best kind. When you even have evidence and can lock up the criminal.”
“Listen, if you want to interrogate me at a fucking farm, I can go along with it, if it gets you going. But do it, dammit! So I can get back. I have dinner plans this evening.”
The late daylight seeped in through the many cracks that time had carved out, but, in spite of the play of light, the barn was nearly dark in places and Broncks switched on the makeshift ceiling light.
“Come on now, Vincent, aren’t you at least a little curious about what’s on the floor of the truck? That’s what we came here for. That’s what I wanted to show you.”
“Do you think I’m stupid? I don’t fucking plan to put my fingerprints there.”
Broncks smiled as he loosened the plastic rope alone and threw up the back part of the plastic tarp. A curtain was lifted and a scene revealed. Since Vincent was in the line of sight, with a clear view of the truck, it was easy to read his reaction. He understood exactly what was lying on the floor of the truck stacked in a pile.
“Nearly two hundred automatic weapons, Vincent, that you and your brothers stole but were never charged for. So they’re lying . . . here. And can you imagine? When I randomly chose one of them and dusted it with my zephyr brush, it showed traces from you! So you don’t need to worry at all about fingerprints. We already have them.”
Quiet. Not a word.
Vincent’s body seemed entirely at rest, if it were not for his eyes, pupil and iris, which conveyed information when he realized what he saw. The weak odor, which he smelled already as he stood at the barn’s doorway: guns oiled to protect them against moisture and time.
“And now, Vincent, we are going to pose the questions we came here for. But not to you. To your brother.”
———
Leo turned the volume down on the police radio—the voices running around tunnels he had directed them to, even more lost than they had a clue about. And when he went onto a new inspection of the webcams monitoring the other false lead, he saw that camera A registered a vehicle. Heading to the barn. He played the sequence again. Broncks’s car. Broncks in the driver’s seat. And next to him—another person.
Another cop.
Broncks, for fuck’s sake—it doesn’t fucking matter how many colleagues you take there. You’ve already lost me. And now you’re going to lose your weapons trove.
With the cell still in his hand, he dialed the eight-digit number that didn’t reach another subscriber but rather the telephone in the barn. It was coupled to a battery that would release a thermite bomb. One key left. The green phone icon. But before he pressed it, before the explosion, he took one last look at camera B for a clear image of exactly where the two cops were moving so as not to risk injury.
Broncks was standing next to the truck and had just loosened a rubber rope and revealed its bed. He was talking to someone. It wasn’t possible to see the other cop, but for some reason they were lingering at the doorway beyond the reach of the lens.
Broncks was standing too close to the bomb.
Leo rested his trigger finger in the air. He had to wait for him to move. Which happened only a couple of seconds later, as Broncks started to walk toward the other cop on his way out of the picture.
Now, Broncks, you’re going to experience how it feels when five thousand degrees melts two hundred automatic weapons down to metal paste.
His thumb was hovering over the final button—when the telephone rang.
On the display the image from the security camera changed to the name that shouldn’t be there.
You?
He could almost feel a long embrace in a newly renovated apartment with someone who had hit his knuckles until they were bloody.
“Vincent?”
Breathing.
“Vincent . . . little brother? Hello? Well, say something . . . Why are you calling now?”
“He’s not the person calling.”
That voice. On Vincent’s phone?
“I told you . . .”
The voice belonging to John Broncks.
“. . . if you get my brother involved, I’ll get your brother involved.”
Leo saw Broncks come into the picture again, a black pistol in his hand. He was pressing it against the back, between the shoulder blades, of someone who was also on the way into the picture.
Vincent.
“As you perhaps see on your camera, Leo, I’m standing here with your brother. I just arrested him for a crime of terror with a probable life sentence.”
A dozen feet, if Leo were to guess. From Broncks and Vincent to the truck.
Sufficient safety clearance for detonation.
“You understand, Leo, that his fingerprints are on every single weapon. Yes, like yours. As are your middle brother’s.”
In ten minutes there’ll be no evidence left.
“No other police officers at all are aware of this place. Or that we are here. So I can imagine, Leo, removing both your brothers’ fingerprints and only keeping yours.”
Because now, Broncks, I’m holding my fingertip above the icon again.
“If you also come here, that is. If you give yourself up.”
“Hey, Broncks, you bastard?”
“Do it and I’ll let your little brother go.”
“You know there’s a bomb in the car, right?”
“Yeah. And I’m certain you won’t set it off as long as I’m standing here with your little brother.”
I’ll press it down now. The tip of my finger. And, Broncks, it’s no ordinary bomb like you think. It’s a stationary melting furnace. A bomb to live through—not to be killed by.
He pressed the green phone icon down.
He watched the image on the cell phone’s display.
And—nothing happened.
He pressed it again. And again. But the truck remained, still intact. No biting light from hot thermite raining down over the guns out of the container on the roof.
The only change in the picture was when Broncks came close to the camera lens and looked right into it.
“You have a decision to make, Leo. Your little brothers—or you.”
———
“Leo?”
A dud.
“Leo—what the fuck are you doing?”
Sam was able to catch up with him in the short hallway, just before the hotel door.
The bomb should have detonated. A chemical reaction between aluminum, hematite, and iron oxide should have given off heat sufficient to eliminate the false lead.
Something had gone really fucking wrong.
“Hey, Leo? We agreed to stay here until the ferry’s departure.”
“I have to go there, Sam.”
They had both seen and listened to the same sequence of images—nothing of what just happened needed to be explained.
“I have to go there and detonate the bomb manually.”
Mama wanted them to tear apart the bonds. He had done that and said farewell, but all the same it didn’t happen.
They were never broken.
“Otherwise my brothers will get life.”
“You can’t leave here!”
“I’ll make it in time.”
“I understand how my fucking brother thinks. Fuck you. Fuck you with the guns. Fuck you with the guns when you escape with the loot from the Robbery of the Century. He’ll exchange it for your brothers every day of the week. If you go now, Leo, it will go to hell! And you won’t come back!”
Leo looked into the hotel room, past Sam’s broad body. He’d placed what he needed there on the table.
“You’re right, Sam.”
A few rapid steps and he picked up the ticket and the pistol.
“You go on board the ferry when they let down the bridge. I promise I’ll come knocking on the cabin door.”
He left and Sam no longer tried to stop
him. That’s why he turned around in the hotel corridor. It seemed as if he was obliged to say it.
“Sam?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry. But I can’t guarantee your brother will be alive when it’s over.”
LEO STOPPED FOR the first time to check the cameras when he had come so close that he could see the abandoned farm from the gravel road. Camera A, mounted on the fence, showed nothing. So no police reinforcements had arrived via the entrance for cars. Camera B, from inside the barn, was black. Broncks had taken it down or covered it over. The head start had been lost the moment Vincent was put on display.
He left the car to travel the last section on foot. In a wide circle he passed through surrounding forest and approached the barn from the back, making certain that no police reinforcements had arrived from that direction either.
He would destroy the past so that the past would not ruin his brothers.
The final stretch, to the area of the barn without windows and doors. He was now certain that Broncks was acting on his own. Not just because there was no sign of other people here—but also a decision, taken by the Swedish police command, that legitimized an arrest built on his younger brother being used as blackmail material, could never happen.
It was quiet outside, and when he laid his ear against the wooden wall, quiet in there too.
This operation was 100 percent John Broncks’s own. And alone, man to man, Leo was convinced that he would win every time, with or without weapons. But with Vincent as Broncks’s life insurance, and a bomb that would have to be triggered manually so that no traces would remain, all under the same roof, the outcome was not as obvious as he let Sam believe. Also, as the clock was ticking toward the ferry’s departure, there was no time for rational plans. That’s why he simply walked around the barn and opened the door.
“I’m here now, Broncks.”
It looked just as it did when he left the place for what he had assumed was the last time. A single enormous space with a small loft at the very back and a truck parked in the middle.
“And I am here—behind the truck.”
That really was the cop’s slightly cheerful voice coming out from the other side of the vehicle’s body. Leo pulled his arm back, his hand under his jacket, fingers against the pistol’s grip. And while he slowly moved forward, the bead, the sight post sticking up a little at the tip of the barrel, was chafing against the skin of the curve of his back.
“Where is my brother?”
“You’ll see him if you walk around the truck.”
He let go of the gun and the front sight continued to chafe. He must take in the whole picture. Vincent’s position. Orient himself and then act.
He walked cautiously around the vehicle.
He saw Broncks first, sitting in front of the simple workbench that he himself had sat at while making the thermite bomb. As he kept on for a few more feet and went around the front of the truck, he also saw Vincent standing next to the passenger door, unnaturally still.
A chain ran between his little brother’s right hand and the handle of the truck door.
Locked.
Near the truck and the evidence Leo had come to destroy.
“Just do as I say. Then everything will be fine.”
Broncks spoke calmly, with even breathing. He had the upper hand so far. Vincent was staring, bent forward toward the barn’s worn floorboards. He didn’t meet his eyes and was showing no emotion.
“Put your hands behind your head, Dûvnjac. Then walk slowly toward me.”
The pig held the service revolver in the hand he raised above his head. A clear gesture to instruct and at the same time note that the visitor should give up any potential plans to do anything not well thought out.
“Vincent, brother . . . how’s it going?”
Leo tried to make contact with Vincent’s evasive eyes. They left the floor and met his.
“Listen, Vincent—you’ll soon be out of here.”
Visible anger. Anger, not fear.
“I promise, Vincent.”
Leo turned again to Broncks.
“Hey you, John—how the fuck were you imagining this would go?”
While he was waiting for an answer, he glanced cautiously at his little brother and the truck. Cutting the chain of handcuffs would be difficult without the right tool. It should be possible, on the other hand, to simply pry loose the truck door’s handle with the appropriate weapon.
A weakness. That’s what he was looking for now.
The weakness that always reveals a clear possibility in the moment and that you don’t know you have before it arises.
“You promised that my little brother would go free. Can you guarantee that?”
The policeman raised his pistol, still without speaking, and pointed it right at Leo’s chest.
“Broncks, what the hell—are you going . . . to shoot me? Well, you’d have to shoot Vincent too. You already have quite a lot here you’re going to have a problem explaining. Are you going to add two corpses to that?”
John Broncks seemed to smile a little as he got up and pulled another pair of handcuffs out of his jacket pocket.
“There won’t be any shooting here at all—if you just kindly put one cuff around your right wrist.”
He tossed the cuffs through the air in a wide arc.
“You’ll fasten the other cuff to the door handle I have locked Vincent to.”
Two brothers chained to a vehicle containing an unexploded bomb. All that was needed for everything to go to hell was an electrical impulse, which in turn would set off a chemical reaction that generated heat—an incredible amount of heat that melted down iron and burned skin and tissue. A white shock of several thousand degrees.
“If you want to get me alive, Broncks . . .”
Leo let the handcuffs fall and they thudded lightly on the soft wooden floor.
“. . . let my brother go, and explain to me how you thought you’d hold him outside the investigation.”
Broncks moved closer and stopped when he reached Vincent.
Halfway.
“When you are handcuffed too—then I’ll let him go. But he can’t go directly from here. First, he’s going to help me unload all the guns. Then he and I, together, are going to wipe down barrel after barrel, stock after stock, trigger after trigger. Except for the very last one, which you’ll leave your fingerprints on. You have my word, Dûvnjac.”
“Your . . . word?”
“My word. And my brother. Right? You know I’m alone here. And you’ve likely figured out why. Because right up to the end I thought I could prevent Sam from working with you. And so I have committed a shitload of violations.”
“Mistakes, you mean?”
“Call them whatever the fuck you want.”
“Mistakes that could cost you your job and that now you want to exchange for my brother? My silence for your silence?”
Leo bent down to pick up the handcuffs.
“So you think that’s fair, Broncks? That I’ll be doing life while you keep your job?”
He tossed the cuffs and chain back to Broncks, not in a wide arc, but rather in a straight line. A projectile at the face. In a reflex motion, Broncks raised his hands up to protect himself, enough of a distraction for Leo to get the chance he had waited for since he stepped into the barn.
He crouched like a predator to hurl his body against the policeman’s legs, with his strength gathered. All the force, all the weight and all the explosive power would hit the target, overthrowing the man who stood in the way of his escape plan, while he himself was in the line of fire during the whole process.
The subsequent motions came automatically.
He struck the gun out of the policeman’s hand and pounded his head against the floor until he lost consciousness. Then he got up and pulled his own pistol out of his waistband and pressed it against Broncks’s unconscious brow.
He had decided. He would shoot.
“No!”
&n
bsp; Vincent jerked his own body back and forth like a tethered dog, while the chain between the handle and wrist rattled.
“Stop, for fuck’s sake!”
“He has to be out of the way, Vincent! He’ll never give up. Never! I don’t plan to do life for his sake!”
Vincent tugged and pulled to get to his brother.
“Leo—it doesn’t matter what you do! This shit will always find us! Me and Felix and Mama and even Ivan! Your fucking actions always find us, and if you run, they’ll come to us instead—do you still not get that? Everything will still be there! Nothing vanishes, everything will still be there. You aren’t going to shoot! Then you force me to be a part of it and I don’t want to be anymore!”
Vincent pulled at the handle, kicked with his shoes, tugged and yanked until the whole truck shook.
“Come on now, Vincent, I haven’t forced anyone!”
“We were born into the same fucking family! No one forced us then either! No one!” Tears were running down Vincent’s cheeks. “I try to wash away the shit, don’t you get it? I do it every day, a little at a time. But, Leo, it wouldn’t be possible to wash this away. Not if you shoot him.”
His little brother pulled at the chain without coming free.
It was the last time.
At that moment a vibration made its way from the door handle through the vehicle until it reached two cables connected to the terminals of a small battery.
A simple ringtone to a relay earlier should have caused the cables to make contact with each other. For some reason the signal didn’t work. But Vincent’s anger and grief, as he kept on jerking the chain, did.
Leo didn’t hear it at first. The filament was heated up in the thermite mixture of iron sulfate and aluminum, which lay in the container on the roof. The intense, bright white light whirled and gobs of fire were spat out that vaporized the thick plastic in just a few seconds. The crackling sound increased at the same rate that the thick, pale-yellow shower of fire struck the stack of weapons below.
Leo threw himself away from the tsunami of heat coming at him.
After the first wave, he looked up.
Vincent’s body was hanging, heavy and without any motion in his arm and wrist. Chained to the door handle, like a bag full of organs.
The heat abated just as quickly as it had started, but was still crackling among the gun parts lying on the thin bed of the truck between thermite and gasoline.
The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2 Page 34
