by The Helicopter Heist- A Novel Based on True Events (retail) (epub)
In other words, the guillotine would be able to cut the dye ampoules straight off the bag in one fantastic clean sweep.
“It’s beautiful,” he said with a sigh, happy as a small child, staring at the unlikely machine.
“What the hell is it?” asked Svenne Gustafsson.
Petrovic sent Gustafsson and his men out. His own amateur engineers would be arriving soon, two of the kids who usually worked in the container and in whom Petrovic had developed a special confidence over the past few months.
He moved around the guillotine, admiring its razor-sharp blades and brilliant steel construction. Basking in his own genius.
* * *
—
During the afternoon, it transpired that they would need more cables and connections before everything worked like it should. It wasn’t until nine that evening, under the glow of the bright ceiling lights in the container, that they were finally ready to put one of the blue bags onto the guillotine for the first real test.
The six video cameras that had previously been on tripods facing each of the workstations had now been turned to face the guillotine. From six different angles, they would capture the moment the blue security bag from G4S was freed of its edges and Petrovic’s financial future was secured.
The idea of selling the black bags to the security firm through a new company, a legitimate tax-paying company that submitted annual reports registered with the Patent and Registration Office, seemed particularly appealing to Petrovic. The profits would be big enough that he and Maloof might as well share it with the state. As only wealthy people could afford to do.
Petrovic switched on each of the six cameras himself. Then he took a few steps toward the door. He nodded gravely, and one of the two assistants placed a bag on the plate. Petrovic nodded again, and the other assistant pressed the button.
The guillotine motors exploded into life.
The razor-sharp titanium blades fell at rocket speed toward the security bag, but in Petrovic’s eyes, everything happened in slow motion. He saw the blades gliding down the two poles, and the cameras captured every tenth of a second.
The titanium forced itself into the edge of the bag and ate its way into the steel. Petrovic grinned.
Then it stopped.
Everything stopped.
Something was putting up a fight.
And just a second later, they heard the sound of the dye ampoule exploding inside the bag.
Petrovic and his engineers jumped at the familiar noise.
Their disappointment was mute, and time seemed to come to a standstill.
“WHAT THE HELL?”
The young men were on their way out of the container before Petrovic even had time to say another word. They knew that the easygoing nonchalance the tall man radiated, those streams of words that usually entertained them, was masking something else.
Something hard and black.
And they had no intention of staying to witness that.
“Shit,” Petrovic mumbled quietly, without even noticing that he was alone beneath the bright strip lights.
The expensive, wrecked machine stood in front of him, a hope that had cost months of his time and hundreds of thousands of his kronor, and which had proved to have no value at all.
It was over.
The idea of replacing the blue security bags with the black briefcase from Slovenia had lived for almost five years. But that night, it died. He tried to calculate how much it had cost him, but the figures quickly grew so large that he gave up. It was far too depressing.
Maybe he could sell the container to Gustafsson and the scrapyard?
Maybe the titanium in the blades would be worth something if he took it apart?
Petrovic slumped onto a stool by one of the six workstations. He fished his phone from his inner pocket and dialed Michel Maloof’s number.
Maloof answered immediately.
“Did you say you needed help?” Petrovic asked.
“Right, right,” Maloof’s voice came down the line. “It was that thing we talked about last time…getting off the ground?”
Petrovic thought for a moment. He was used to riddles of this kind, you could never talk plainly over the phone. After a few seconds, he remembered what Maloof meant. The cash depot in Västberga, the helicopter.
“Sure,” he said. “I remember.”
“Do you know anyone with…one of those machines?” Maloof asked.
“Consider it done,” Petrovic replied.
He shoved the phone back into his pocket. He had found himself a new project. But how did you get hold of a helicopter?
17
“You locking up, Niklas?”
Carsten Hansen was standing by the open door, and without waiting for Niklas Nordgren’s answer, he let it swing shut behind him.
Nordgren continued his soldering. He was used to locking up and setting the alarm, and he usually got more done once the others had left. The working hours at the electricians’ were flexible. Carsten, who owned the business, preferred to arrive and leave early. Nordgren thought that was good, better than staying on and surfing the tabloids’ websites instead of going home to the family.
The reason Nordgren often stayed longest in the evening was that his partner, Annika Skott, rarely got home from work before seven. That meant he might as well work a few extra hours before leaving for the day. He fully accepted that the overtime might not always be reflected in his monthly paycheck. In a way, he had a permanent job, but the company had only four employees, and if there wasn’t much work around, you couldn’t expect any extra pay, no matter how many hours you worked.
It had started as a simple repair job on a couple of electrical circuits in a food processor from the sixties, but Nordgren had soon taken the entire device apart. He couldn’t help it. People brought in all kinds of strange objects to be fixed, and nine times out of ten it would have been better to say no from the outset. But Nordgren liked fixing old things. Modern mixers couldn’t compete with the quality of the past; these days, a particularly thick dough could blow the fuses, a tough nut could knock out the power in an entire house. But the bulky food processor lying in pieces in front of him had once been able to knead stoneware clay without overheating.
It was obvious that Nordgren would stay behind a few extra hours to fix a machine like that.
* * *
—
At six thirty, he took the bus home. He had stopped off at the supermarket on the way, to buy food for dinner. The gray sky seemed not to be taking into account the fact that the calendar claimed it was June, and Nordgren stepped beneath the bus shelter to get out of the rain, which had been drizzling down since yesterday morning. He was wearing a quilted navy jacket he had bought from H&M the previous autumn, some boots he had found on sale at Naturkompaniet, and he was holding the carrier bag from ICA in one hand. He had pulled his blue-black cap low on his head, and no one who saw him on the bus would remember him afterward.
In the public sphere, Niklas Nordgren was the anonymous man who crossed the shot as the evening news was setting up a camera in Sergels Torg, randomly filming people on their way down to the subway. He was ordinary personified, a statistician’s wet dream.
Niklas Nordgren’s mother and father had been married for almost forty years, and their love story was one of the family’s most repeated legends. The way Lars Nordgren, working for PEAB construction at the time, had traveled to Poland to build apartments, and while he was there met Ewa—who would later become Niklas’s mother. After a year living not far from Crakow, the pair had moved to Sweden, where they bought a small house in Vårby Gård.
Just in time for Niklas to start high school, the family moved to Skärholmen, somewhere Nordgren’s three-years-older sister had never learned to feel comfortable. He had suffered through school in silent protest. The way the teachers and the curriculum managed to drain such a curious young man of his thirst for knowledge was a miracle, Niklas thought today. He had barely had time to start sc
hool in Botkyrka when his parents moved again, this time north, to Solna. His sister moved with them and found an apartment in Sundbyberg, where she lived to this day, but he had taken the opportunity to fly the nest.
Like so many other people of his age, he had ventured out into the world. Today, the years he spent in Asia and Europe seemed like a dream someone else had dreamed. And when he returned to Sweden, he ended up in Lidingö. It had been down to chance, like so much else in his life.
Niklas Nordgren stepped off the bus at the stop in Larsberg and trudged eastward along empty sidewalks. The anonymous blocks of apartments that rose up from the rocks had been built in the late sixties, with an aesthetic, ambition and thrift similar to that of the infamous suburbs of Tensta and Akalla. But that evening, almost all the windows glowed cozily, and the views across Norra Djurgården were spectacularly pretty in the early sunset. To Nordgren, the large, anonymous tower block area was perfect. He wasn’t someone who liked being the center of attention. He wasn’t someone who thought that life was about collecting friends and acquaintances.
There had been a time, immediately after he returned from Asia, when he had tried to take on the role of someone who was both seen and heard. He had made an effort to become someone people pointed out, talked about.
No good had come of it.
At the entrance to his building, Nordgren entered the security code and pushed the door open with his shoulder. The empty street and anonymous buildings, the silhouettes of the industrial area: this was exactly how he wanted it.
* * *
—
When Annika got home, just after seven, Nordgren had already started to prepare dinner. He wasn’t a particularly remarkable cook. When men cooked, they often had trouble not spicing up their performance with testosterone, but Nordgren cooked everyday food. Today, it was pasta with Bolognese sauce. He fried grated carrots, onion and garlic, and then added half a jar of ready-made tomato sauce to make his Bolognese more juicy.
He was stirring the sauce when he heard the front door open. Annika took off her coat in the hallway, went into the bedroom and changed. The gray dress she wore during the day at the accountancy firm where she worked was put back onto its hanger, and she pulled on some jeans and a sweater instead. She came into the kitchen, gave him a quick hug and then got to work grating parmesan as Nordgren drained the boiling water from the pasta.
“Good day?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he replied. “You?”
She shrugged. “Scent of a Woman’s on tonight,” she said.
“Which channel?”
“Four.”
“Mmm,” he replied without enthusiasm.
He didn’t know whether he could bear to watch Bengt Magnusson deliver a half-hour news report midway through the film.
“I think I’ll watch it,” Annika said.
He nodded. To keep the peace, he would sit down next to her and start watching the film, but they both knew that he would disappear into his hobby room as soon as the news started, probably not returning when the film came back on.
Things had been worse than usual these past few days.
“Are you working on anything special?” she asked suspiciously when they sat down at the kitchen table and started to eat.
“Yeah,” he said.
It wasn’t as a conversationalist that Niklas Nordgren had built his reputation.
* * *
—
The evening unfolded as usual. Annika used the news interlude to get herself ready for bed, and by the time she returned to the living room to watch the rest of the film in her dressing gown, he had vanished. She slumped onto the sofa with a resigned sigh, but as her eyelids started to droop during the first ad break, she realized she wouldn’t manage to make it through the film tonight either.
The attractiveness Nordgren had radiated when he first met Annika had been linked to his mysteriousness. Like many others, she had been struck by the contrast between his criminal past and his down-to-earth honesty. But the things that had once attracted her now left her cold. He was no more than he pretended to be. It had come as a surprise to her, even if it shouldn’t have.
In a grand gesture, Annika had let him take over the room next to the living room, turning it into a space for his hobbies. How he had managed to collect so many things was beyond her. He was essentially an orderly person, but it was impossible to organize chaos when it was constantly growing in scope. It was as though things were drawn to him, tools of all kinds, wood and plastic tubes, old cell phones, broken food processors, mountains of nuts and bolts, copper wire and detonators. Within their group of friends, everyone knew that rather than throwing away their worn-out stereo or old showerhead, they could just give it to Nordgren. He would appreciate it.
And so, the piles of junk in his hobby room grew.
It was almost twelve thirty when Nordgren realized he would need the screwdriver with the short handle to finish the night’s self-appointed task: installing a clock in a radio-controlled car. But he had stored the screwdriver and some other tools down in the basement last week.
Was that a sign he should finish up for the night?
He looked at the car on the table. An Opel, perhaps? It was battered and blue, and he didn’t know how it had come into his possession. But he nodded to himself. He would sleep better if he finished it off rather than leaving it until tomorrow. And so he got up, opened the door to the living room and padded silently into the hallway, past Annika, who had fallen asleep in front of the TV.
* * *
—
He found the screwdriver where he had left it, in the toolbox. Just as Nordgren was about to turn off the light, he caught sight of something black on the floor beneath the shelves. For a moment, he thought it was a rat, but then he realized what it was. The lava rock. He went back, bent down and picked it up. It was dry and porous. The reason he had once shoved it into his backpack was that it weighed almost nothing.
His eyes searched for the dark brown packing box where the stone should be. It was closest to the wall, of course, beneath a couple of other boxes. That was why, he now remembered, he had never put the stone back.
Nordgren glanced at his watch.
He decided to overcome his laziness. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes to move the other boxes to one side. But it wasn’t the physical effort that was the problem. He knew what would happen when he opened the door to his past, and on that particular night he let it happen.
In the brown box where the black lava stone was meant to be, there were four photo albums. There was also a skateboard, a bag of extra wheels and a couple of trucks that had never been used. There were two BMX pedals he had once ordered in from Germany, and a bottle of special lacquer for treating the wood on surfboards. Another small box, containing gloves, glasses and the climbing harness he had used in Thailand, lay beside it.
He stared at these hidden remnants of a forgotten life and found himself frozen to the spot, the open box on the floor in front of him.
What had happened?
Why had he given up on the skateboard, the surfboard and the bike?
Why had he swapped that kind of adrenaline for a darker, more destructive kind?
He sat down on the cold stone floor and lowered his head between his knees. Life, he reminded himself, was what went on while he fixed radio-controlled cars and food processors from the sixties. The days went by. They turned into weeks and months.
It was six months now since he had been released from prison. What had he done with his freedom? Wake up beneath a pitch-black sky, get dressed, eat breakfast, go to work and then come home as the darkness was once again descending over Lidingö. But that wasn’t living, it was just a way of passing the time.
Nordgren peered into the box and closed his eyes. These were the memories of the life he had once begun.
The waves foaming and thundering onto the beaches in Bali, the way his body had tensed completely as the water reached his chest, hand on
surfboard, looking out to the horizon to spot the waves it was worth paddling toward.
The silhouette of the Matterhorn’s dramatic peak; the thin, clear Alpine air, and the way his eyes had sought out the best way up the mountain as he stretched his aching muscles by bending his fingers backward after the morning’s stages.
The pain in his tailbone when a 360 failed on the half-pipe, and the board that had rolled away, leaving him with a friction burn stretching from his knee halfway down his leg. He still had the thin white scar today.
He could no longer explain why he had abandoned that life.
He had loved it.
But something had gotten in the way, he had found a kind of excitement that was even more intense. His criminality had been an addiction. Could he break free of it by searching for his future through his past, by following in the tracks of what was in the brown cardboard box?
He put the black lava rock into the box and folded the flaps down. Then he pushed the box back toward the wall and stacked the two others on top of it so that everything looked just like it had before.
18
“What…I mean…what is this place?”
Michel Maloof glanced around. He was in one of the nightclubs near Stureplan in central Stockholm, it was three thirty in the morning and the beautiful people had been even more beautiful a few hours earlier. Pounding house music washed over the low clusters of sofas where men bragged about their achievements to women who gave fake laughs and flashed their teeth. Lips glistened, drinks were drunk, skin sweated, hands waved and Maloof was in agony.
“Let loose, Michel!” Zoran Petrovic said, laughing at how uncomfortable Maloof looked. “You should get out more. Widen your horizons. There’s nothing wrong with Fittja, but, you know, there are people in other places too?”
The tall Yugoslavian set off toward the bar, and Maloof made sure he was hot on his heels. The nightclubs had been Petrovic’s playground since the late 1990s and early 2000s. Dressed in an Armani suit and with a pistol in a holster beneath his arm, he had been king of these places. His jacket pockets had been full of wads of notes tied with elastic bands, just like in the movies. Some months, he had probably spent more money in the restaurants and bars around Stureplan than Montenegro had in GDP.
