Leo adjusted the binoculars and moved slightly to one side to see better; thick pines stood in the way now that they’d started digging. He lay comfortably in soft moss at the highest point of the forest, sheltered by shrubs and two large rocks. He had picked out both sites with care – the one where he’d buried the weapons, and where he’d have a good view without taking any risks.
Broncks seemed to be ten, maybe fifteen years older than Leo. Thirty-five, maybe forty. He walked vigorously, might have been an athlete at some point, but not any more. His clothes resembled Leo’s own, jeans, leather jacket, formal shoes; typical plainclothes cop, inappropriately dressed for both a forest walk and for digging holes.
He knew he was taking a chance coming here, but he felt calm. He watched without being seen. He planned without anyone knowing. And this, the cop digging up the weapons, who would soon be reading more instructions, was just the next stage of the sale.
Three AK4s and two submachine guns. All well-oiled and wrapped in plastic.
Broncks still didn’t know if this was serious or if he was the victim of an elaborate prank.
‘There’s something in there.’
The inspector had unpacked the last weapon and turned it over. A string was attached to the trigger guard, with an envelope tied at the other end. It was the same size and style as the previous one, but this time with flowers and hearts drawn on the outside, and a red circle around the address.
Broncks opened it. And read.
Dear Mr Broncks
We are pleased that you have now seen some of our samples.
Taking into account what the sale of our stock to other potential buyers would mean for you, we’ve set the price for the entire consignment at 25 million SEK.
Please indicate your acceptance of our offer by inserting the following message in the Daily News under the headline MESSAGE and PERSONAL on May 4:
I miss you, Anna-Karin
‘Anna-Karin,’ Broncks muttered to himself. ‘They have a sense of humour.’
‘Humour?’
‘I lost an old girlfriend yesterday. Now I’ve apparently got a new one.’
‘Oh wait, Anna-Karin!’ said the inspector with a sudden smile. ‘Ingenious!’
‘Pardon me?’
‘That’s what they call them in certain Swedish regiments. You know? AK4. Anna-Karin.’
John Broncks looked around.
A strange feeling of being watched.
He spun around again, but there were only trees and the hoot of an owl.
63
NOW – NOT a soul around. Now – a small clearing in another beautiful wood, 140 kilometres northwest of Stockholm, in an area between two small towns named Sala and Avesta that he’d chosen on the map. The last dwellings he’d seen were a couple of ramshackle summer houses he had passed half an hour earlier as he crossed the lake in a small rubber boat. This was where the police service would give him twenty-five million kronor.
Leo pushed nails into bark. It was easier than he’d imagined; they stayed in place as if sucked into the tree. He took a step back in the soft moss and looked at a bent sheet-metal case that contained screws and plastic explosive, wrapped in brown masking tape and with a short piece of cord sticking out at the bottom.
A homemade landmine. About half a kilo of scrap metal and explosives. He’d built fifteen of them in the garage and stored them in the Skull Cave.
He looked around again. The trees should be standing neither too close together nor too far apart. From inside the helicopter, they’d have to be able to see the signal flare Leo would fire, and then the slowly sinking light would lead the pilot to four more light sources on the ground – where the bag of cash should be dropped.
The cops would have to wait for a last letter of instruction and would therefore be unable to plan their countermove. Only when he had twenty-five million kronor in his hand would they gain access to the weapons.
The helicopter would have to fly round and round using the given coordinates of a circular 200-kilometre route. He’d drawn that out on the map too. The circle consisted of five small airfields where the helicopter could refuel. He would choose both the departure time and the speed of travel, and would thus know when the helicopter passed this location.
They wouldn’t know where or when the drop was to happen, but he assumed that every fucking cop in central Sweden would be on call and in position near the route. And the moment he chose to shoot the red flare into the night sky and signal the helicopter in this direction, they would all go into action.
Sunlight streamed through the treetops and the transparent fishing line glittered as he gently threaded it around the spring percussion detonator. The mine was ready to go. He walked backwards, gradually releasing more line, stopped after ten metres and tightened it. He was truly alone. But with a weapon that could kill ten, twenty, maybe even thirty people.
He’d been alone for three days, sleeping under the stars. No one to talk to or laugh with. No brothers to share the excitement.
He tightened the line a little and the detonator resisted, like a fish taking the bait.
Tomorrow the paper would arrive. The answer. The enemy had an unremarkable face and name, John Broncks, and in a few lines he’d express his desire for Anna-Karin.
He was convinced that they would go through with it. And that it wasn’t just due to their fear that other criminals could be armed. There was another carrot – himself.
They would do anything they could to arrest him. So he was preparing himself for everything.
The police would send their best. Their elite anti-terrorist force.
Twenty trained Jaspers.
And he could beat them all with a network of fishing line.
He put on ear protectors and pulled lightly on the line attached to the test mine hanging on a pine tree ten metres away. The sudden bang was enormous – it smashed through anything alive a metre up from the forest floor, and even a glade of birches sank to the ground with a creaking wail.
An even greater effect than he’d bargained for.
Now it’s up to you, Broncks. Do you want peace or chaos?
Leo looked around one last time at the vast forest that had already swallowed one explosion. He was surrounded by birdsong and a breeze. Time to go home and change out of his camouflage clothes into jeans, jacket, and a shirt with light brown coffee stains he’d made on purpose, the occasional spot you would expect on the white shirts night-time taxi drivers wore.
He walked through the empty glade, heading towards the company of those who never slept, to wait for the answer to a personal ad.
64
AT FOUR O’CLOCK in the morning most of Stockholm is asleep – the last customers heading home from the bars and the morning commuters still in bed. But not here. An all-night café on the edge of Gullmars Square filled only with taxi drivers. Loud conversation, coffee in plastic mugs, ink-stained fingers flipping through the newly arrived morning papers.
Leo was sitting in a corner booth, and had spread out the Daily News across the pine table. He wasn’t interested in the news, culture or sport sections. Just the classifieds. He hurried past the ads for cars, houses, buggies, then leaned in close enough that he could smell the fresh paper. There. ANNOUNCEMENTS. And a bit further down, Personal. Inger and her children Fanny and Mia. Please contact us immediately. Anita. There were only two ads today. I’ll be waiting for you at the ferry. B.
Someone named Anita. And someone who was meeting someone else at a ferry.
That was all. That was all!
He tore up the paper.
No brothers. No group. No more robberies. A house that Anneli hated, with more than two hundred weapons in its cellar.
And that fucking bastard didn’t respond!
He ran past the Taxi Stockholm and Taxi Courier drivers dressed in blue, out of the café and into the chilly dawn. There was a telephone booth out on the square, the one they’d used to make the bomb threat, one he’d hoped to avoid callin
g from again. He stepped into the glass booth and dialled the number of a mobile phone. Six rings. Then he was sent to the answering machine.
He called again. Six more rings. And then – six more.
‘Hello …?’
‘The sample.’
‘What?’
‘Wasn’t it to your satisfaction?’
‘Who … is this?’
A voice that was almost naked, that had just been asleep.
‘The woman in your life.’
John Broncks heaved himself over to the edge of the bed, put his feet on the cold floor and walked towards the window. He wanted to make sure no one was watching him.
‘Who?’
‘Your very own little Anna-Karin.’
A man’s voice. Not old, but hard to say how young. Neither high nor low, somewhere in the middle register.
‘And you want … Anna-Karin?’
‘This morning’s paper. You didn’t answer.’
‘I don’t look for women in the personal ads.’
Broncks left the window, rushed towards the hall and the tape recorder in his jacket’s inner pocket, pushed its cord into the phone.
‘If you don’t buy them. If you don’t take them off the market … there are others who will.’
‘I dug up your sample. And I’ve examined it. They were indeed stolen from a bunker in a place called Getryggen south of Stockholm. But there’s no way for me to know that you stole them.’
‘If you don’t buy our stock, it will end up in other hands. In the hands of other criminals. Who might not be as … disciplined as my little group. You know, that organised crime you’re always talking about. Platoons of Hell’s Angels armed to the teeth.’
‘Your sample doesn’t prove that you have the rest of them.’
‘It shows that I replaced the barrier’s padlock with an identical one that had the same serial number. It shows that I saw the inventory list dated October the fourth, so I knew it would still be hanging there six months later, because I did such a good job covering my tracks that that sixty-year-old inspector in his decrepit blue Volvo never saw a thing. Do you want any more details that only the person who stole the weapons would know?’
Broncks stretched in order to see the kitchen clock. Ten past four. He wouldn’t be going back to bed.
‘In that case, Anna-Karin, I just want to know one thing.’
‘Twenty-four hours.’
‘I want to know … why are you doing this?’
‘You have one day if you want to buy them.’
‘Have you really decided you won’t need those weapons again?’
‘Twenty-five million.’
‘Anna-Karin, my dear … you’ve made a terrible mistake. You should never have contacted me. You should have buried those weapons in a field, thrown them into a lake, but you should never have contacted me. If you’d just let it be, you would have been able to keep whatever you’ve stolen so far, and you might even have managed to get away with it.’
The tap on the sink jammed at first as it always did, and the water was lukewarm. Broncks let it run – he wanted it cold.
‘And by the way, if your name is Anna-Karin—’
‘What the hell are you up to?’
‘I’m getting a glass of water. If your name is Anna-Karin, what do you call your brother?’
He drank, filled it again, drank half a glass more.
‘Your brother. You know, the one you rob banks with.’
‘An answer in the next twenty-four hours. A personal ad. Same place. That starts with “Dear Anna-Karin”.’
‘I have a brother, too. So I know how brothers look at each other, touch each other. Even when I see it on the black-and-white film taken by a camera on a bank wall. And you … you’re the older one. So you whisper into your younger brother’s ear right before he fires a weapon in the middle of a crowd for the first time.’
‘And then, on the next line, it should say “I miss you and want to see you again.”’
A grey hoodie hung over a chair in the hall. It was still cold on this spring morning, so Broncks pulled it over his bare chest.
‘Listen, Anna-Karin. I don’t like violence.’
‘And once you’ve answered, then Anna-Karin will reply again with a new personal ad that will tell you exactly how we can continue to have a good relationship – how you’ll make payment, and how we’ll deliver the rest of the goods.’
‘And do you know why I don’t like it? I grew up with it. I know how it works – you either choose to hate it or you repeat it. Right?’
‘Twenty-four hours.’
‘A day is too short.’
‘That’s all you’re getting.’
‘Then you won’t get anything from us. I need time to run this past the Commissioner.’
John Broncks walked through the small apartment, listening to the silence. The caller was still on the line, it wasn’t that kind of silence, he could clearly hear the sounds of the street and someone breathing – thoughts were being weighed, maybe re-evaluated.
‘OK.’
And the voice on the telephone grew deeper, articulated more clearly.
‘A week. May the eleventh. The Daily News. If you don’t want to date Anna-Karin any more after that … all hell will break loose.’
Then it truly was quiet. Whoever had called had hung up.
65
JOHN BRONCKS YAWNED. He hadn’t gone back to bed. Instead he’d had a cup of tea in his kitchen, bare feet on the cold wood floor, before going for a walk along the northern shore of Södermalm and around the island of Långholmen.
He’d made the right decision in not sending a personal ad telling Anna-Karin how much he longed for her, treating her as he’d once treated Sanna. It had worked. Better than he hoped. He had forced out a voice – for the first time he’d made direct contact.
Now he had seven days to make the next decision.
That was why he was now in the police station’s huge, dank underground garage, waiting for Karlström. He didn’t want to disturb him at home again, or wait until he was sitting in his office, and he knew his boss’s routines. Every weekday Karlström drove his younger daughter to nursery school, then his older daughter to school, and finally his wife to work, a slow farewell to the family he’d return to a few hours later. He arrived at his designated parking place never earlier than eight fifteen, never later than eight forty-five.
Broncks wasn’t hiding, but Karlström didn’t notice him waiting by a rough pillar, and jumped when, the moment the car stopped, the detective opened the rear door and climbed in.
‘I’ve made contact with Big Brother. He called me early this morning.’
It took Broncks ten minutes to walk his boss through the story, and it was another minute before Karlström spoke.
‘When exactly did you dig up these five weapons?’
‘Eight days ago.’
‘And now you jump into my car and decide to tell me everything?’
‘I wanted to be completely sure how he would react. If I’d told you before, more investigators would been called in, and there would have been more agendas in play. We wouldn’t have reached this point. Do you understand? Now he’s made contact with me personally. It’s just us two.’
Chief Superintendent Karlström stared at the grey wall and the sign that bore his name.
‘OK. So why do you feel you need me now? What can I do for you that you can’t do by yourself?’
Twenty-five million kronor.
‘John, did you hear what I said?’
Pay. Leave Big Brother without any weapons. Make sure Sweden’s most violent bank robber of all time never robs again. And at the same time – be the kind of police service that after months of hunting, gives them the chance to pull back, disappear for ever, to become a faceless chapter in the history of Nordic crime.
‘John. What do you need from me?’
Or don’t pay. Force Big Brother to keep going, robbing more banks, hurting more peopl
e. But also have the opportunity of capturing him someday.
‘I need something that only people with their own parking spaces have access to.’
‘I’m not sure I follow.’
‘Twenty-five million in cash.’
66
‘YOU’RE NOT MY dad.’
Trapped as he was between sleeping and waking, Leo’s reaction started as disbelief, but quickly transformed into the most recognisable emotion – fear. The words burrowed inside and took over, like the shrieking whistle of a runaway train or an air-raid siren.
But what he heard, deep within, was no whistle. No siren. It was a voice, calling out across the distance of time, yet still so clear.
‘You’re not my dad.’
He shouldn’t have said it. It wasn’t right. But the words came again, this time seeming to fill his own mouth, causing disgust to well up from his stomach, forcing him back to the present, to realise that what he’d experienced had been and gone.
This isn’t Felix, and the words are not his.
Far from having Felix’s dark hair, this figure is blond and dishevelled, almost angelic, his tone playful rather than accusative.
‘You’re not my dad!’
Sebastian.
And the feelings of disgust and fear turn into annoyance. He’s spent five days in the woods planning escape routes and placing his homemade landmines – just three hours of sleep a night all week, and now he has been woken by this teasing.
‘You’re not my dad.’
‘No … but I could be your extra dad,’ said Leo, raising himself up groggily.
‘No!’
‘Yes! That’s what you call someone you see once every six months, you little hoodlum!’
Leo lifted him up, threw him over his shoulder. Sebastian shook his head and laughed until his curls got tangled.
‘Didn’t your mum tell you it’d be only porridge for you, if you wake King Leo without his permission!’
‘I hate porridge!’
Down the stairs and into the kitchen, and Sebastian laughed and screamed that he didn’t want, didn’t want, didn’t want any porridge, until Leo dropped him and he ran out into the hall and hid in one of Leo’s jackets, pretending to be afraid of being served porridge.
The Father: Made in Sweden Part I Page 38
