The Helicopter Heist

by The Helicopter Heist- A Novel Based on True Events (retail) (epub)

  “I don’t mean anything other than that the more people who know, the greater the chance of leaks,” Caroline repeated.

  She could no longer hide her irritation. She looked up, straight into the commissioner’s eyes.

  “This is our case, Therese. We have it under control. Don’t you think we can manage without their army boots and rocket launchers? You’re our boss. Don’t you have any faith in your own staff?”

  “Are we talking about the entire Task Force?” asked Berggren.

  “Fully armed,” Olsson confirmed. “And with orders to shoot down a helicopter, if necessary.”

  “This is a robbery we’re talking about,” Thurn pointed out. “It might be spectacular, possibly better planned than anything we’ve ever seen on Swedish soil. But it’s still just a robbery, not a coup. The police force has the resources to be able to handle this. We don’t need help from—”

  “The Serbian police aren’t the only ones following this case,” Olsson interrupted. “Interpol is being updated continually. And the minister for foreign affairs has a personal interest in it too. If we let him down, then the minister for justice won’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to discussing resources at the next budget.”

  Politics. There were few things that interested Caroline Thurn so little that could also make her quite so agitated. But she could see that this wasn’t a simple matter of police work, that it was about the ministers’ egos and the way the state distributed resources.

  She got up.

  “Fine,” she said. “So let the National Task Force handle it.”

  The prosecutor got to his feet too. He nodded stiffly, and Thurn got the sense that somehow he had also been involved in the decision.

  “We know where and when they’re going to strike,” said Berggren, who also got up from his chair with a labored groan. “By this stage, with everything handed to them on a silver plate, even the Task Force should be able to manage this.”

  “They will be ready outside the Panaxia premises in Bromma from twenty-three hundred hours on the fourteenth of September,” Olsson replied. “But let us be clear about one thing. Until then, it’s you who are responsible.”

  40

  There was a balcony on the fifth floor.

  Michel Maloof spotted it after his deathly boring visit to the Moderna Museet. He had parted ways with Alexandra Svensson outside the Grand Hotel and headed straight home to his drawings. He hadn’t given the fifth floor the same manic attention as the sixth, where Counting was located, but he spotted it among the drawings on the floor by his dining table. One sheet had been covering another, and when he pushed it to one side, there it was.

  A small balcony sticking out from the fifth floor above the open atrium.

  It meant they could go in through the glass ceiling.

  If they smashed the glass and used a long ladder, maybe they would be able to reach all the way to the balcony.

  Alexandra had been right, he thought. He wasn’t someone who gave up. He found new ways forward.

  Maloof pulled out his phone and called Sami.

  “There’s a balcony,” he said. “Looks like a little ledge. We could use ladders. One to get down and one to get back up to the sixth floor.”

  “You sure?” asked Sami. “About the balcony?”

  “Definitely, definitely,” Maloof replied. “I’ll check with Nick.”

  “This is Plan F, I can feel it,” Sami said defiantly, adding, “Is Nick any good with ladders?”

  “He’s good with everything,” Maloof mumbled.

  “Maybe he can work out how long the ladder needs to be?” Sami continued. “It’s gonna take a damn long ladder. You know what I mean?”

  “I’ll talk to Nick.”

  Maloof hung up. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest, feel himself literally sitting taller. He was himself again.

  * * *

  —

  That evening, Niklas Nordgren spent hours in his hobby room, studying the drawings from Vreten 17. Once he knew what he was looking for, it didn’t take long for him to find the balcony on the fifth floor.

  All night, and long into the early hours, Maloof, Sami and Nordgren called one another from different phones with different SIM cards. They spoke without mentioning any key words, using broken sentences and repeated euphemisms, just to make sure that if anyone happened to be listening to their conversation, they wouldn’t understand a thing.

  Nordgren agreed that it shouldn’t be impossible to smash the glass on the roof and lower a ladder down to the balcony.

  The wall out onto the atrium on the sixth floor was made of bulletproof glass. It was there to let light into what would otherwise be an entirely dark floor.

  “What the hell do we do about that?” Sami asked.

  Nordgren reassured him. The words “bulletproof glass” implied something more impressive than the reality. Using a shorter ladder to climb up from the balcony on the fifth floor and blow a hole in the glass on the sixth wouldn’t be a problem. But the explosion would cause glass to rain down onto the balcony, meaning that the only place they could take cover would be up on the roof.

  They would have to climb down to the balcony, apply their explosives to the strengthened glass, and then climb back up to the roof. They would also have to make sure the detonation cable was long enough to reach up to the roof with them.

  All of this meant a hell of a lot of climbing, Sami declared.

  “We’ll manage it,” Nordgren said drily. “The doors’ll be worse.”

  Once they made it through the armored glass on the sixth floor, they would end up in the room directly next to Counting. All that divided the two rooms was some kind of fire door and a security door.

  “What the hell’s a security door?”

  “Made of steel. Thicker kind. Fire doors are easy. Security doors are…worse.”

  “Worse? But, can you do it?”

  “It’s fine,” Nordgren was firm. “It’ll be fine.”

  “We only have ten minutes,” Maloof reminded him.

  “Impossible,” Nordgren replied. “Ten minutes won’t be enough. Maybe if we had fifteen? We’ll have to count.”

  “No longer,” said Maloof.

  “OK, let’s say fifteen,” Nordgren said.

  Sami was happy.

  The question now was how long the ladder from the ceiling to the balcony would need to be. Judging by the plans, the fifth and sixth floors looked like they were a normal height, and according to Maloof, Alexandra Svensson had suggested that the ceiling height definitely wasn’t any more than ten feet.

  “How the hell could you ask her about that?” Nordgren wondered.

  “She talks more than Zoran,” Maloof said. “I don’t ask, I just listen.”

  “Ouch. How d’you manage that?”

  “Exactly, exactly. That’s a better question.”

  All of this meant that in total, there were nineteen or twenty feet between the floor of the balcony on the fifth floor and the ceiling on the sixth. A thirty-six-foot ladder would leave them with sixteen feet to spare once it was through the skylight.

  Those weren’t huge margins, but they would be enough.

  When Maloof eventually fell into bed at dawn that morning, it was with a wide grin on his lips. He was convinced things were about to turn around now, that they were overcoming their problems.

  Late the next afternoon, when he woke, he realized Petrovic had been trying to get in touch with him several times, to tell him both the good and the bad news. The good news was that they had a new pilot.

  “But I’ve got half the police force on me.” Petrovic sighed. “It’s not a mistake, they haven’t got me mixed up with someone else. It’s me they’re after, but the one thing I don’t know is why.”

  41

  Caroline Thurn wasn’t the type of police officer to leave things to chance. On Wednesday afternoon, the decision had been made to allow the National Task Force to keep the Panaxia cash depot in Bromma u
nder surveillance during the night of the fourteenth of September.

  But by Friday afternoon, Thurn had started to have doubts.

  Most of what they knew pointed to Panaxia, but she suddenly felt unsure.

  What exactly suggested that the G4S depot in Västberga wouldn’t be the target of the helicopter robbery?

  Thurn was at the gym, and with every mile that passed on the rowing machine, the feeling grew. Eventually, she had to get off, go into the changing room and call Berggren.

  He was still at the office in Kungsholmen, and he sighed loudly when she told him about her hunch.

  “And you’re aware that it’s three thirty on a Friday?” he said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “People are heading home, Caroline,” Berggren explained. “It’s the weekend. They want to spend time with their families, eat chips and watch some TV show with an overexcited host who laughs at their own jokes.”

  Thurn didn’t watch TV, she wasn’t even sure whether there was one in the apartment on Strandvägen.

  Before she moved into the nine-room apartment with views over the water, she had instructed the auction firm Bukowski’s to sell everything that might be of value. Anything left behind had been stashed in one of the rooms looking out onto the courtyard. That was almost six years ago now, and Thurn still hadn’t opened the door. She would deal with it one day, but not quite yet.

  “Plus,” Berggren continued, “G4S doesn’t fit the information we have. The building in Västberga has six floors. And we know that Panaxia’s starting a big move the day before, meaning there’ll be people running all over the place and that security’ll be lower.”

  “That’s what the tip we have said,” Thurn replied. “Which isn’t the same thing as knowing it. I just want to check one last time.”

  Berggren was careful not to sigh audibly again.

  Thurn’s need to be in control was about as big as Berggren’s appetite.

  “Do you want me to do anything?” he asked.

  “No need,” Thurn replied. She wanted to add that it was Friday afternoon and that he should prioritize his family, but then she realized that she didn’t even know if Mats Berggren had a family.

  Caroline Thurn never asked her colleagues personal questions. It meant she could avoid being asked the same kind of thing in return.

  * * *

  —

  On that overcast Friday afternoon, the task force leader drove through town toward Västberga. Like always, there was a lot of traffic heading south, and she had to join a long convoy of trucks. But Västberga Allé, the street that cut straight through the industrial area, was deserted.

  Work at the loading docks often finished early in the afternoon ahead of the weekend, and the offices there were already empty. Thurn drove slowly past the deserted buildings and then slowed down further as she approached the G4S building at the corner of Vretensborgsvägen. Work there went on seven days a week, but even cash depots were quiet on Friday afternoons.

  Thurn glanced out of the side window. The six-story building was like a fortress on the inside, and the cash depot’s vault was in a completely different league from the Panaxia safe in Bromma.

  No, Thurn thought, it was reasonable to assume that this wasn’t the building the robbers were planning to attack. Besides, Thurn could practically see all the way to the police station on Västbergavägen. Given the choice, Panaxia was better in every respect.

  She drove on.

  Rather than doing a U-turn, she turned right at Vretensborgsvägen. She sped up and was just about to take another right onto Drivhjulsvägen, looping the block and continuing north, back toward the highway, when she glanced in her rearview mirror.

  She slammed on the brakes.

  It was sheer luck that there were no cars behind her.

  From where she was sitting, she could see the G4S building from behind. It had to be built into a hillside, or at least a steep slope.

  From this side, it looked like the building had four stories.

  42

  Hans Carlbrink, the head of the National Task Force, was the type of officer who made the general population hesitate before calling the police. His career path had been through the military, which was also where his references and attitude toward the world came from. His sense of discipline was stronger than his sense of justice, and if you wanted to emphasize his positive sides, you might say that he radiated some kind of equality. He was equally arrogant toward victims and perpetrators, civilians and police officers, men and women.

  Caroline Thurn and Mats Berggren drove out to Solna, where Carlbrink’s men were stationed and the police helicopter was now safe behind walls and barbed wire. It was late in the afternoon on Saturday, September 12. Carlbrink gave the tall, fit Thurn an appreciative glance and then turned to Berggren and stared at his considerable stomach with a look of disgust. He showed his visitors into a windowless room to one side of the canteen, a room that gave Thurn the feeling that it was being used in an attempt to demonstrate how tough the conditions were for the Task Force.

  “Three more days,” said Carlbrink.

  They were in agreement that it was a frustrating and unusual experience to be counting down the days. The reason for not just bringing Petrovic in, thereby preventing the robbery, was that the information they had was already a month old. Plenty could have changed, and Thurn spared a thought for the technicians who spent all day, every day listening to the slippery Montenegrin refuse to give himself away. What exactly did they have on him?

  All the same, Thurn couldn’t deny that the excitement rose with every day that passed. Her colleagues from National Crime nodded in understanding whenever they passed her office, and with just three days to go, all those involved could feel their hearts beating that little bit quicker. Even the minister for foreign affairs had been in touch for an update.

  They sat down at a tired old conference table.

  Thurn got straight to the point and explained what she had discovered the previous evening. That the G4S depot in Västberga was also, if you chose to look at it from a certain angle, a four-story building.

  “But G4S isn’t planning a move on Tuesday,” Berggren butted in.

  His usual whininess had increased in this new environment. He felt uncomfortable under Carlbrink’s elitist gaze, and he hated the uncertainty that Thurn had introduced into the equation.

  “We don’t know that,” said Thurn. “I haven’t asked them.”

  “Come on, it’d be pretty unlikely?”

  Thurn agreed.

  “My point is that we can’t rule out Västberga. And my question, Hans, is whether we should station some of your men out in Västberga and some out in Bromma?”

  Carlbrink nodded. That was perfectly doable.

  “I’ve heard there’ll be around twenty people?” he said.

  “Involved in the preparations,” Thurn replied. “I doubt there’ll be twenty people there during the actual robbery.”

  “It’s not a problem,” Carlbrink said, smiling as though he were eating something tasty. “Let them come. Twenty or thirty. We could probably handle it. My suggestion is that we make sure to have enough men and equipment to be able to take down a helicopter in both Västberga and Bromma. But that we leave the majority wherever you feel it’s more likely to happen.”

  “Which is Bromma anyway, right Caroline?” asked Berggren.

  Thurn looked unsure.

  “If you’d asked me yesterday,” she said, “I would’ve been sure. But now I don’t know anymore.”

  43

  Niklas Nordgren was struggling to concentrate. He was sitting on the stool by his desk in the hobby room, and through the wall, he could hear the TV news from the living room. Rather than soldering the phone case in front of him, he was listening to the host’s serious voice reporting on the death of the American actor Patrick Swayze.

  He wasn’t worried about Annika coming in and seeing what he was doing. The wall between their worlds, between
a normal and a criminal life, may have been thin, but it was thick enough. Annika would never open the door to his hobby room without knocking first. And if her thoughts were elsewhere and she did happen to come in without warning, she wouldn’t understand what he was doing. She wouldn’t recognize the explosive putty he was pushing into the cell phones he was busy priming.

  How many times had she threatened him? She would leave him the minute he broke their agreement. She had waited long enough, their relationship wouldn’t survive another stint in prison. Sometimes, he still got the feeling—and it happened increasingly often—that she was actually just looking for an excuse.

  But it wasn’t the fear of her leaving him that was making it hard for Nordgren to concentrate that evening.

  Eventually, he put down the soldering iron and unplugged it at the wall. He went over to the window. The light on top of the Kaknäs tower was blinking away on the other side of the water. He stood there, the dark night in front of him, and allowed himself to get lost in the moment.

  From the minute the helicopter landed on the roof, no more than fifteen minutes could pass before it took off again. That was how long it would take for the G4S security staff to mobilize, for the police to organize themselves and make rational decisions.

  Considering how close the police station was, he would have preferred it if they had been able to do it in ten minutes.

  Getting out of the helicopter, smashing the skylight, putting the ladders into place and climbing into the building would take at least two to three minutes.

  Breaking through the bulletproof glass would take two to three minutes.

  Getting through the security door would take two to three minutes.

  Filling the bags with money wouldn’t take any less than two to three minutes.

  Hauling the bags of money back onto the roof wouldn’t take any less than two to three minutes.

  And then their time would be up.

  There was no room for error; they would have to work quickly and without any surprises. Their biggest problem would be if the staff in Counting caused any trouble. Obviously it would be best if the premises were emptied before the security door was blown open, but that type of thing was hard to take for granted.