by The Helicopter Heist- A Novel Based on True Events (retail) (epub)
When you were planning a job, the first rule was that you never allowed the group to be seen together so close to the deed. But they hadn’t had any choice.
“You’re sure?” Sami had asked.
“I’m sure.” Maloof nodded. “Absolutely.”
“I trust you,” Sami swore. “I trust you. It’s your friend I don’t know. I’ve never even met him. You know what I’m saying? You can’t trust someone you don’t know. And the fact he has a tail…”
“And it’s definitely him with the tail?” asked Nordgren. “Not you?”
Maloof nodded. After the incident in Skärholmen, he had spent the rest of the week reassuring himself that no one was after him. He had hunted for bugs, searched for shadows, but nothing. He’d had no contact with Petrovic, so he had no idea how things were on that front.
“I’m clean,” he said. “So that thing with the car…it’s not something else. It isn’t the first time they’ve tried the scare tactics.”
“Easier to cut him out than risk it, maybe?” Sami suggested. “Maybe? You know? I don’t know if—”
“No. We need him,” Maloof interrupted. “He’s in.”
Sami didn’t reply. He pulled at the neck of his T-shirt, trying to make it looser; maybe he needed more space to breathe.
“That’s not the issue anyway,” said Nordgren.
He met their eyes from beneath his cap.
“It’s the roof,” he explained.
“But we need to work something out?” said Sami. “You know? After plan A, there has to be a plan B. That’s how it works. Something happens, we move on to plan C. Then D, then E, then F?”
They nodded. But what was plan F?
* * *
—
Maloof had gone home after that, and taken out the drawings of the building in Västberga. He had spread them out on the living room floor. The answer had to be there somewhere. If you couldn’t go through the roof, if that wasn’t possible, maybe they didn’t need a helicopter and a pilot after all?
But how could you get up onto the sixth floor any other way?
On Saturday, he had sent a message saying he couldn’t play in the soccer match that had been planned for that afternoon. On Sunday, he had called his mother and said he felt lousy, and rather than going for Sunday lunch with his parents and siblings, he’d gone up to Kungens Kurva, bought food from McDonald’s and then returned to the drawings, which had to contain the key. Breaking the glass skylight would be easy enough, but what would they do then? There was nothing beneath the dome, just six floors of free fall.
* * *
—
“No, no,” he now replied to Alexandra Svensson, not looking her in the eye. “I think I’m just getting a cold, that’s all.”
She shook her head. Women were always complaining that Maloof was hard to understand, that he was hard to read. He didn’t react the way they expected him to, he remained calm until the day he ended things. He rarely got angry, never showed any weakness, and that was why Alexandra’s intuition confused him. He hadn’t behaved any differently with her than he had with the others.
The waves were foaming beneath the bridge. The wind was strong, and they hurried over to the island on the other side.
“A cold? Really? You never said anything about that yesterday?”
Alexandra had called early on Monday morning. By then he had already decided that his strategy of staying locked up in his apartment in Fittja wasn’t sustainable. Maloof wasn’t really the giving up type, and setbacks tended to make him more determined to prove the opposite. But he did admit that it felt tough.
“Sometimes,” she said as they continued up the hill on the other side of the bridge, “things can feel, like, hopeless.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s true.”
“So let’s say something’s happened,” she continued.
“I think it’s just the start of a cold,” Maloof insisted.
“But say it’s not that,” she said firmly. “Say it’s like I said, something tough’s happened, and that’s why you look like you want to hang yourself or something?”
Maloof didn’t reply. He was staring straight ahead and continued to plod up the hill toward the museum building that the original Spanish architect, after all the political modifications, no longer wanted to be associated with.
“That’s when you’ve got to find that extra bit of strength, Michel,” Alexandra continued. “That power we’ve got, the thing that’s made us come this far. You know?”
He couldn’t help but smile and run his hand over his beard. Every time things felt too much, she was there to support him. But as nice as it was to have her support, he also felt a pang of guilt.
Maloof was used to living a double life. During all the years he’d worked at the youth center in Fittja, his family and friends had thought that was how he earned his money. As a youth leader. No one knew that at night, he pulled a balaclava over his head, or that in parallel with his law-abiding life, he’d also found himself another career, a profitable kind of moonlighting. But that was how he had wanted it, and it wasn’t something that had bothered him.
But now, with Alexandra, things felt different.
He felt less and less comfortable lying to her.
They had reached the open space by the museum entrance, and Maloof stopped.
“Right, right,” he agreed. “You’ve got to be strong. But you’ve gotta be a realist too. Being an optimist can’t mean that…you’re a dreamer?”
“Find a new solution,” Alexandra said firmly. “That’s why I like you, Michel. You’re like, the happiest person I’ve ever met. It’s like there are no barriers for you, you know? Like, you fix them.”
“No,” said Maloof. “Well…”
“Come on, Mickey,” she said, laughing, using the nickname he hated.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said with a smile. “I’ll sort it out.”
He looked at her big, pale pink lips, shiny with gloss; lips that never wanted to stop talking. He raised his gaze and met her blue eyes.
“Cheer up now,” she said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
He laughed again. At how easy he was to read, and at how right she was.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “You can help.”
“So tell me how?”
“You can let me off going to the museum today.”
“I can help in any way. Other than that, I guess,” she replied with a laugh, pulling him toward the entrance.
38
Jack Kluger parked his Jeep in the Royal Swedish Yacht Club parking lot and crossed the bridge onto Restaurantholmen on foot. Tucked into the cove behind him was Saltsjöbaden’s magnificent Grand Hotel Stora. Not that big, white houses impressed a man from Texas. To him, the natural world of Stockholm’s inner archipelago was far more exotic. The moss-covered rocks, the trails lined with last year’s needles and fallen leaves, the pines and spruce trees whose dense foliage created a green grotto all around him. The smell of the brackish water of Baggensfjärden blowing in over the islet.
Kluger had never been there before, but he immediately knew that the tall wooden building that rose up by the rocks at the water’s edge was the place he was looking for. Stockholm’s only open-air baths, hidden away and grand in their decay. When building work had started on the baths over a century earlier, there had been plans for an amphitheater on the slope down to the water; it would be somewhere people could sit in high galleries, watching the swimmers jump from the protruding jetties below. But the money ran out before the building was finished, meaning the jetties and high wooden walls with their narrow balconies looked less Grecian and more archipelago.
By September, the tired old outdoor baths, with their three sections for men, women and communal bathing, were abandoned for the season. Kluger found a way in and immediately spotted his contact, who was on his phone up in one of the balconies. The American climbed the narrow spiral staircase, his colorful boots echoing in the stairwell.
“Jesus, you make a lot of noise,” Zoran Petrovic shouted from a distance.
Kluger worked his way forward along the balcony. Fifty or so feet below, the waves from the bay rolled in onto the rocks. The sky was gray, and the day cold, but the closer the American got, the clearer it became that the tall, slim Yugoslavian waiting for him on the balcony was wearing a white bathrobe.
“Where the hell are your swimming trunks?” Petrovic asked when Kluger was only a few steps away. “This place is for swimming.”
Jack Kluger stared at the Yugoslavian, not knowing whether he was joking. The two men had never met before. In fact, just three days earlier, Jack Kluger had never even heard of Petrovic.
“Go and get changed first,” Petrovic now said in English. “I brought an extra bathrobe. It’s hanging in the changing room.”
“Are you kidding?” The American was genuinely shocked.
“You don’t know me, I don’t know you. What better way to build friendship than a little shared nudity?” Petrovic smiled.
Kluger stared at him, red in the face. They were the only two people there, and the weather wasn’t exactly made for bathing.
“You think I’m bugged?” he eventually asked.
“I don’t think anything,” Petrovic replied. “Just go and get changed.”
Kluger shrugged in irritation, but he went back down the spiral staircase and found the changing room. Sure enough, there was a white bathrobe hanging up inside. He took off everything but his underwear, pulled on the bathrobe and went back up the stairs. He demonstratively opened the robe to show the Yugoslavian that he had neither a weapon nor any listening devices on his nearly naked body.
“Sit, sit,” said Petrovic said, and Kluger sat down on the bench diagonally above. “You sure you’re alone?”
“Do you think I’m some fucking amateur?” the American asked.
Petrovic didn’t answer. Jason, who had helped him with the motorbike just a few hours earlier, had found five bugs in his apartment on Upplandsgatan the day before yesterday. Later that day, they also found a further two beneath the table in Petrovic’s usual booth at Café Stolen. For some reason, the police were suddenly obsessed with listening to his every word and following his every movement. He couldn’t be careful enough.
Petrovic had left all the bugs where they were. Better to let the police think he had no idea they were listening to him. There was a challenge in doing so that he couldn’t help but enjoy.
“OK,” he said with a nod. “OK. I’m Zoran Petrovic, nice to meet you.”
* * *
—
In the American’s eyes, Zoran Petrovic looked like a typical European. There was, Kluger thought, a certain kind of appearance that looked neither Scandinavian nor French, not English or Italian, just European. Maybe it had something to do with their heads being so small.
“I’m supposed to pass on greetings from Basir Balik,” said Petrovic. “I hear you’ve done a few jobs together?”
If Jack Kluger had worked for Balik, that decided things for Petrovic; the man could be trusted.
“The job involves flying at night, at a low altitude,” the Yugoslavian said.
“Heard that. I’ve done it before.” Kluger nodded with a wide smile, showing off his white teeth. “Thousands of hours in the Afghan mountains and ravines. I can do it.”
“Shit, the entire meaning of life has to be flying low and landing softly,” Petrovic said, looking out over the bay.
The waves foamed as they rolled in toward the building and broke against the jetties.
“Could be,” Kluger admitted. “Could be.”
This was the reason he was still in Sweden. One job kept leading to another. Nothing big or well paid, but he had enough money to get by.
It was a long time since he had last been behind the controls of a helicopter, and he was longing to get up in the air again.
“It’s also about being able to keep your mouth shut and be loyal,” Petrovic added.
Kluger’s face turned red again. “Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?” he asked.
The broad-shouldered man leaned forward and, in a single breath, reeled off a list of qualifications including far more than just the jobs he had done for Basir Balik. Some of what he said would be easy enough to check out. If what he said was true, there was no doubt that Jack Kluger had the experience.
They agreed on the terms of payment, and since there was so little time left, there was no point setting out smoke screens. Petrovic was straight with him, told him everything, and Kluger said he would be ready.
What the pilot failed to mention was the moments of confusion that struck him several times a week, and which had so far stopped him from setting foot in a helicopter ever since he left Afghanistan. Because he couldn’t predict or ward off these periods of confusion, he hadn’t been sure he could trust himself. But it had been so long now.
And from a purely technical point of view, the job was simple.
“I want half the payment up front,” he said.
Petrovic nodded. “No problem.”
They shook hands. Petrovic swayed as he got to his feet.
“Christ, this is high,” he said, trying not to look down toward the water.
“It’s not you I’m flying, right?” Kluger said.
Petrovic laughed. “You get changed first,” he said. “I’ll wait till you’re done and gone.”
Kluger nodded and headed down the stairs in his white bathrobe. Petrovic allowed fifteen minutes to pass before he went to get dressed himself. On the way back to Upplandsgatan, to his police tail and bugs, he felt lighter than he had in a long while.
Michel Maloof had a pilot once more.
39
National Police Commissioner Therese Olsson was sitting in a big, beautifully decorated office with views out onto the park. As yet, there was still no sign of any red or yellow in the dense green treetops outside her window. She looked up from her desk as Thurn and Berggren came into the room.
“Caroline. Mats. Come in. Sit down. Lars is on his way.”
One of Olsson’s many qualities was her surprising capacity for remembering names. She was a politician, a careerist. At some point, Thurn thought, she must have been a good police officer. But that was a long time ago, and being a good boss was now enough.
It was down to Thurn’s initiative that Hertz would be involved in the meeting. The prosecutor may have been inexperienced, but he had shown a certain sharpness. Thurn knew that he wouldn’t show any initiative himself, but she was no longer afraid he would sabotage the operation.
While they waited for the prosecutor, they made small talk about the ambassadors, the brothel on Karlavägen and how the minister for foreign affairs would react when the time for prosecution finally came around. Hertz appeared ten minutes later, and breathlessly sat down on one of the chairs in front of the desk.
“Well,” said the police commissioner, “now I’m obviously curious what you have to say.”
Thurn concisely summed up what they had found out about Panaxia in Bromma. When she finished, the prosecutor made his first request, as Thurn had instructed him to do that morning.
“We would like to move the police helicopter from the base in Myttinge,” Hertz said.
“Move it?”
“It’s cheaper to move it than to increase our surveillance out there,” Mats Berggren explained.
He knew which arguments would be most effective.
“But do you really think—” Olsson began.
“The robbery is going to take place on the fifteenth,” said Thurn, “and we have information suggesting the robbers will try to destroy the only active helicopter in the Stockholm area. Why wouldn’t we move it?”
“And where should it go?”
“Our suggestion,” Hertz took over, “is that we leave it with the National Task Force in Sörentorp until further notice.”
It wasn’t a big decision, but the police commissioner had learned to
gain points whenever she could. As a result, she looked hesitant at first, and jotted down a few words on a pad of paper on her desk. Then she nodded her approval.
“We had a similar thought,” she eventually said, studying Thurn thoughtfully. “I was planning to talk to you about the National Task Force.”
No one replied, despite the fact that Olsson had left a clear pause for them to say something.
“Yes, well,” she continued, “as you know, the preliminary investigation has, as of lunchtime, been upgraded to an extraordinary event.”
Berggren nodded.
“On my initiative,” Prosecutor Hertz pointed out, annoyed not to have been given credit. “It was my suggestion to upgrade it to an extraordinary event.”
Within the National Criminal Police, an “extraordinary event” meant that the case was now being given highest priority, with increased preparedness a result. An “extraordinary event” could be anything from the attempted murder of a high-ranking politician to an acute terror threat.
“And so,” Therese Olsson said, not paying any attention to the prosecutor’s territorial thinking, “we have come to the conclusion that we should call in the Task Force.”
A silence settled over the room. Thurn looked down at her hand, seemingly studying her nails. Mats Berggren had more difficulty being quite so subtle.
“What the hell do you mean by that?” he said. “Why bring in that pretend army to mess about in this? Don’t you think we can handle the situation?”
“It’s a decision we came to jointly,” the police commissioner said deliberately.
“Jointly?” asked Berggren.
“Within command,” Olsson clarified. “Even Carlbrink was involved.”
“Command?” asked Thurn. “Because that’s not good. The more who know about this, the greater the chance of leaks.”
“Are you suggesting that Carlbrink…that the head of the National Task Force can’t keep a secret?” Olsson snapped.
