Now there were just a few minutes left.
He taped the short fuse to a detonator, which he then attached to the plus and minus on an electrical cable, before moving as far away as he could, across the gravel and the ditch and back into the woods. Then he connected a wire on the other end of the cable to the positive terminal on a motorcycle battery.
‘Felix? Vincent?’ Leo said into his microphone.
‘Yeah?’ replied Felix.
‘Have you got a clear view?’
‘Clear view.’
‘Ten seconds …’
Felix and Vincent lay next to each other under a tarpaulin covered with leaves and moss and grass, near a red and yellow barrier bearing a metal sign that said NO ACCESS FOR UNAUTHORISED VEHICLES.
‘… then I’ll let it rip.’
Vincent was holding tight a pair of bolt cutters nearly a metre and a half long.
Felix raised his upper body and checked his watch, rubbed his finger across the glass of the dial; the damp had turned to mist.
‘Nine.’
He rubbed it until he could see the second hand and then nodded towards Vincent, whose breathing was short, intense, brittle.
‘Eight.’
‘Are you OK?’
‘Seven.’
Vincent didn’t answer. He didn’t even look at his brother.
‘Six.’
Even the heavy tarp across their backs shook.
‘Five.’
‘No one’s coming, Vincent. We’re all alone out here.’
‘Four.’
He moved his arm from shaking shoulders to the hands clutching the bolt cutters.
‘Three.’
‘Vincent?’
‘Two.’
‘Leo’s up there. He has this all planned. It’ll go fine. And this is better, right?’
‘One.’
‘Vincent? It’s better to be involved than sitting at home on the sofa not knowing.’
The explosion roared, louder than Leo had expected. The bunker acted like the sound box of a guitar, a shell amplifying the sound of half a kilo of plastic explosive. And when the floor was blasted into the single room of the building, the sound box amplified the next sound, too – concrete chips being flung against a ceiling.
They’d agreed to wait for five minutes.
That didn’t happen.
Leo slithered across the wet gravel with the folding shovel in his hand. He laughed out loud, not even realising at first that he was, laughing in a way he seldom did, as he crouched down on his knees and stuck his right arm under the bunker’s security door and felt … Nothing. There really was a hole! He unfolded the shovel, scooped away more gravel, inserted his headlamp and turned it on.
‘Jasper!’
He turned towards the woods and shouted way too loud.
‘Come here! Come and see this!’
The headlamp flooded a windowless room. And there. When he stretched inside, he could see it clearly, the very first letter.
K.
Oh my God. Oh my God!
He pressed his head further into the hole – slowly the next letter appeared.
S.
Ohmyfuckinggod.
A little further. White letters on a green background.
KSP 58
‘Felix? Vincent?’
‘Yeah?’
‘The padlock?’
‘We’re working on it right now.’
‘Good. When you’re finished drive up here.’
Jasper’s shoulder was against his as they dug their way towards the hole in the floor, like an escape tunnel. They dug until he was able to squeeze his head, shoulders and arms inside, and clip with a pair of heavy pliers the rebars that formed the cement’s grid-shaped skeleton. He prised it open, braced his back against the ground, and pushed his hands against the edges of the hole to heave himself up and through.
He adjusted his headlamp, which had slipped down slightly on his sweaty temples, and looked around. It was small enough for him to touch both walls and ceiling, two metres by two by two metres. Along the walls were stacks of green wooden boxes.
‘How many?’
Jasper’s voice came through the tunnel.
‘A lot.’
‘How many?’
Leo counted out loud.
‘A platoon. Two platoons. Three platoons. Four …’
A total of twenty-four military-green boxes.
‘… two whole damn companies!’
It was now Jasper’s turn to squeeze his long body through the dirt tunnel, laughing the whole time. Like Leo, he couldn’t help himself. They stood beside each other in the cube-shaped room, the concrete dust undulating in the light that streamed from their lamps.
‘Open them now? Or later?’
‘Now, of course.’
A cautious hand on top of the wooden box. A rough, almost rugged surface.
It was easy to dislodge the pins and prise back the lid.
A machine gun. Leo picked it up, handed it to Jasper, who bent his legs slightly and his upper body forward in order to brace for an imaginary recoil, going through the motions they’d learned during their military service. They looked at each other like two people at the end of a long journey trying to understand that they’ve finally arrived.
‘How many do you think there are? If you were to guess?’
Leo was just about to open the next box. But stopped. Behind Jasper’s shoulder, partially covered by white dust, the answer was hanging right there.
‘I don’t need to guess.’
A piece of paper in a plastic pouch hanging on a hook on the wall just to the left of the locked door, a ballpoint pen hanging on a string next to it.
‘First row: 124 submachine gun m/45. Second row: 92 assault rifle AK4. Third row: 5 KSP 58.’
They opened up and checked the contents one box at a time. Metal bodies side by side. Well-greased and carefully packed.
‘Damn, can you believe it, Jasper?’
Under the typed, detailed text about rules and routines, at the very bottom.
‘This place was inspected …’
He leaned closer, headlamp on the white paper. It had been written by hand under somebody’s illegible signature.
‘… Friday, October 4th.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Less than two weeks ago!’
‘And?’
Leo waved the paper so high it hit the ceiling.
‘The guards only open the security door to check inside once every six months. Are you with me? That means they won’t figure out what’s happened here for more than … five months!’
‘Felix to Leo!’
Felix’s voice emerged with a crackle.
‘I repeat! Felix to Leo! Come in!’
‘Yeah?’
‘It’s about … the lock. We have a problem.’
Leo pressed his body through the hole in the floor of the bunker and back out onto the gravel. He hadn’t counted on this. If they couldn’t get the barrier open, then all this would be for nothing. He ran downhill on the rough forest road towards his two little brothers, who were sitting on either side of the barrier, which was padlocked with a steel shackle a centimetre and a half thick.
‘I’m so fucking sorry.’
At some point during that warm, light-filled summer he and Vincent had become the same height. But still, a seventeen-year-old body was quite different from that of a twenty-four-year-old.
‘Leo … it’s not working. I can’t do it.’
Vincent shrugged his slender shoulders and threw open his arms, which seemed too long for the rest of his body.
They looked at each other until Vincent moved aside.
‘Felix – you and I’ll do it.’
Leo sat down in Vincent’s place and opened the bolt cutters with arms longer than a man’s. He held onto one arm with both hands while Felix, on the opposite side of the barrier, held onto the other.
‘Now, brother.’
They both pre
ssed their bodies against their side of the bolt cutters. The teeth bit into the padlock, two rowers pulling their oars to their chests, pulling, pulling, pulling, until suddenly – with fingers and hands and arms and shoulders shaking, cramping, crying out – the teeth of the bolt cutters cut the thick steel in two.
The first net was attached to two lonely birches, and the second hung between the dense branches of a patch of young spruces. They had been practising in the garage in Skogås in the evenings, and one last time in darkness outside Drevviken, so it was easy now to pull off the camouflage nets that hid the trucks, roll them up and throw them onto the empty flatbed. Two red Mitsubishi pickups, the kind of vehicles that someone who owned a contracting firm might drive.
While Leo ran back up the hill, the other two started the pickups and drove through the moss and bilberry shrubs to the open gate.
Jasper knelt inside the bunker, passing one gun at a time into the tunnel, Leo kneeling outside to receive them; Felix stood just behind him, and Vincent was up on the truck bed. A long chain in which every transfer between sets of hands took a second and a half.
‘Two hundred and twenty-one automatic weapons.’
Each object that left the concrete cube would be on the platform in six seconds.
‘Eight hundred and sixty-four magazines.’
Leo looked at the red hands of his wristwatch. They’d be done in half an hour.
They swept away the explosive residue, filled the hole outside and under the door with gravel, packed it hard, stamped on it, packed it again. They changed into blue jumpsuits and workmen’s shirts, and put on black jackets with the construction company’s logo on the sleeve. They opened the gate and passed through, the two engines idling as Felix jumped out with a padlock in his hand identical to the one they had just cut – it was important that the key should slide in smoothly, even though it would be impossible to turn. The following evening, around nine o’clock, when the inspector arrived in his dirty Volvo to listen to the tawny owl, smoke his cigarette and walk around the military armoury at the top of the hill, everything would seem completely intact. The meticulously prepared inventory had confirmed it would be almost six months until the inside of the armoury was inspected again, when it wasn’t going to look quite so untouched.
2
LEO HADN’T REALISED he was singing. He was taking Horns Street to the bridge at Liljeholmen on the E4 motorway, heading south away from the inner city in the rain, when he first heard his own voice enveloping him in the pickup.
He’d bought a coffee and a sandwich at a café, and then crossed the street to the Folk Opera’s wigmaker. He was the first customer of the day and watched in curiosity as dancing fingers wove a few strands of brown hair at a time onto the back of a plastic head, while the young woman explained she was using real hair, purchased in bulk from Asia, bleached and then dyed. Then he’d gone to the Eye Centre on Drottning Street and picked up the contacts he’d ordered, both with STRENGTH + -0.
A glance in the rear-view mirror. Blue eyes and fair hair. Leo had always been the one who resembled their mother the most. Her fair complexion, strawberry blonde hair. And he had her nose – small, angular, cartilage as hard as granite. He’d never be mistaken for a foreigner, not even second generation. A small, sharp Swedish nose had always meant less attention – and if the wigmaker or the optician he’d visited this morning were to provide descriptions of a customer who’d paid in cash, they’d be describing somebody who looked just like everybody else.
He left the motorway at Alby, where three lanes turned into two, passed the Shell station and the beautiful twelfth-century church where the high-rises and asphalt gave way to meadows and forests.
He slowed down.
There.
The barrier on which Felix had changed the padlock just seven hours ago, and next to which just ten hours from now a man in his sixties would park his Volvo, put out a cigarette and stroll on by.
The rain that had started late last night was getting worse, wipers beating against droplets that turned to rivulets. The rain would also be falling onto their war tunnel under the concrete. He’d pass it, Cancerman, his rubber boots standing on the gravel that covered the hole. They’d packed and stamped and smoothed it over, but if this rain continued, it would slowly sink and become noticeable in the inspector’s torchlight.
I need time.
You mustn’t discover it now just because we’ve done a bad job, you have to discover it in five months when you open the door.
I need time to implement a new way of working, a way of maximising profits without increasing risk. I should get out, walk through the rain, and check to make sure the hole isn’t visible.
Which was precisely what he mustn’t do.
Only a fool spends months designing a plan, secures his loot, and then returns to the scene of the crime the next morning.
He stepped on the gas.
Neighbours and passers-by called the site the Blue House, a large metal cube that had once been the Gamla Tumba Woodworking factory. Leo parked as he’d parked last night, far away from the wide highway and next to a locked container painted black.
They’d unloaded weapon after weapon without being disturbed, hidden from the view of the main road and any nearby houses.
He rolled down his window and listened to the familiar sounds coming from the large building site – loud music from a paint-spattered radio, short bursts from the air compressor of the nail gun. He did up the last button on his blue shirt, pulled up his blue braces, stretched, and got out.
The Blue House had long been an empty shell, and they’d spent several weeks removing all the old fittings. Then they’d reinforced two floors with beams, insulated them, laid flooring, and partitioned it with walls. Space by space, the building had been transformed into the premises of small independent businesses, a place some entrepreneur was trying to open as the Solbo Centre.
‘Did you take care of everything?’
He’d never thought about what Felix looked like when he walked until now. His brother, three years younger, was walking towards him across the makeshift car park, and he looked more like their father with every step. He took up space, feet angled sharply outwards, broad shoulders, thick forearms that he swung as if he were stretching as he walked; he looked idle, like him.
I look like Mamma. You look like Pappa.
‘Did you get it, Felix? Take care of it?’
‘I think Gabbe’s trying to shaft us on that last payment.’
Felix made him feel calm in a way he couldn’t explain. It should have been the opposite, with those similarities; they should have made him feel worried, hunted.
‘He’s inside counting every damn nail.’
‘Did you … take care of it?’
His younger brother began unhooking the plastic hood that covered the bed of the second company truck.
‘Gabbe and his freaking nagging. As if he has the right to refuse to pay just ’cause we’re not on schedule. As if it says that anywhere in the contract.’
‘I’ll take care of him. But did you take care of your part?’
‘Section Eighty-three. Orthopaedics, I think,’ said Felix, taking off the white plastic cover. ‘I rolled it out and Vincent’s legs suddenly started hurting like hell.’
A wide wooden toolbox with a shiny metal handle stood in the middle of the flatbed. And next to it, under a couple of yellow blankets bearing the logo of a hospital, was a folded-up wheelchair.
They pulled the two pickups a little closer and opened the padlock on the black container – the kind that every construction company sets up at a building site to store tools and equipment. When the vehicles’ doors were thrown open, visibility was obscured on all sides, and they were able to lift the empty box and carry it in.
Broad daylight in a residential area, just a few metres from a busy road, and they stood there – in front of piles of automatic weapons.
‘Where the hell have you been, Leo?’
G
abbe’s high-pitched voice cut through the October day. He was in his sixties, wearing a blue tracksuit that had once fitted well but now sat tight over his expanding belly, a cup of coffee and a bag of cinnamon buns in his arms. ‘How the hell are you going to finish all this today?’
He was outside, approaching the container.
‘Have you even been here at all in the last week?’
Leo took a calm breath, and whispered to Felix, ‘Close this up again. I’ll take care of him.’
He left the container and went to meet the red-faced, snorting foreman.
‘Leo! You weren’t here yesterday! I called you several times! You may be working on something else, but whatever the hell it is, it’s not this building!’
Leo glanced quickly over his shoulder. Felix was closing the heavy container doors. The sound of a heavy padlock snapping shut.
‘But we’re here now. Aren’t we? And it’ll be finished today. Just like we agreed.’
Gabbe was so close that he could have touched the wall of the container. Leo put his arm around Gabbe’s shoulders as he pushed him back towards the Blue House, not so firmly that it was uncomfortable, but insistently enough to ensure that they moved away from what no one else should see.
‘I don’t give a damn if you’ve taken on other jobs! Do you understand that, Leo? You have a contract with me!’
Gabbe was audibly panting as they walked into the building. There, on the first floor, right inside, there’d be an Indian restaurant next to a flower shop next to a tanning parlour. On the floor below a tyre company, a print shop, a nail salon, and there, near the inner walls that would frame Robban’s Pizzeria, Jasper and Vincent were screwing together a plasterboard partition.
‘You see! You aren’t done, damn it!’
That foreman’s fucking shrill voice. Shrill and overweight and old and hotheaded.
‘We will be.’
‘I’ve got a fucking tenant moving in tomorrow morning!’
‘And if I say we’ll be done, we’ll be done.’
‘If not, I will be keeping the final payment.’
Leo was thinking he’d like to slug that little foreman – a single blow. Right on the nose. Instead he put his arm around him again.
The Father: Made in Sweden Part I Page 2
