by The Helicopter Heist- A Novel Based on True Events (retail) (epub)
* * *
—
Berggren continued his moaning; he wanted to bring Petrovic in, and Thurn felt a certain sympathy for his desire to actually get out there and do something. But it wasn’t time yet.
Prosecutor Lars Hertz was standing at the front of the room, next to a huge whiteboard. He was wearing light, well-ironed clothes, something that distinguished him from the crumpled, ashen police officers around the table. He had taken command of the meeting, and he loved the role. His blue eyes shone. The board next to him was covered with notes. Names, dates and arrows drawn in both red and green marker. Though they would use the special cleaner to rub it all out at the end of the day, faint traces of the ink would be left behind.
Berggren got up. He paced back and forth along one wall of the room, making everyone else nervous. His breathing was strained.
“Maybe you should sit down, Mats,” Thurn said. “Even though I do understand your frustration.”
It was still Wednesday, September 23. The day had been drawn out and endless since the alarm was first raised at a quarter past five that morning. Thurn had stopped off at her apartment to take a shower and change her clothes earlier in the day, and she had since tied her unruly ponytail up into a soft bun that sat low on the nape of her neck.
During the morning, it would have been quicker to count the Stockholm police officers who weren’t working on the robbery in Västberga than the other way around. Representatives from practically every department and unit within the National Criminal Police force were gathered around the meeting table in police headquarters. Since the national police commissioner had been forced to stay at the Ministry of Justice, explaining to various ministers why hundreds of police officers outside G4S had stood by while the robbers flew away with their loot, Hertz was leading the meeting.
“But we know who he is,” Berggren whined stubbornly, though he did as Thurn told him and sat down.
Even early on that morning, the evidence they had been collecting ahead of the fifteenth—among it the recordings of Zoran Petrovic—had been revisited. Her colleagues may not have known quite how much Thurn had been listening to the tapes, but it was clear to each of them that she knew the material better than anyone else. She was also the only one to know with certainty that there were no direct references to the helicopter heist.
Hertz talked about Serbia, terrorist organizations and criminal networks in Europe.
“Which fucking network? We know who he is,” Berggren interrupted for the third or fourth time.
“If we bring in Petrovic now,” Hertz said, “then everyone else we want to talk to will disappear within a few hours. That’s how it works. And we don’t want to make it that easy for them.”
The police officers around the table would have nodded in agreement if Hertz hadn’t been so inexperienced.
“He’s probably right,” Thurn eventually said.
“If we have the name of the main suspect before twelve hours have even passed,” Hertz continued with a conciliatory smile, “then I suggest we keep working on this for another twelve. Maybe that way we’ll find them all?”
* * *
—
The meeting ended and people disappeared in different directions. There were mountains of leads to work through. Back in Thurn’s office, she and Berggren continued to rifle through the material from the earlier surveillance operation. They focused on the huge number of names and people Zoran Petrovic had been in contact with.
They produced two separate lists. The first was of known criminals, and the second of those without criminal records. But all the damn nicknames and code words made the lists difficult. There were over a hundred people in each.
Their work wasn’t made any easier by the constant interruptions by people from other departments who wanted to discuss their findings. Thurn was considered some kind of expert on Petrovic by that point. She wanted nothing more than to fob them off and finish working on the lists, but as usual she couldn’t be rude. She patiently made time for every single person who stuck his or her head in the door to ask for help.
But eventually, midway through a monologue by a young colleague from the Suspect Profile Group, Thurn got up from her desk, grabbed the thin jacket that had been hanging over the back of her chair, and left the office. She just left. Enough desk work now. It was after eight, and darkness had fallen over Kungsholmen.
101
“How was the conference?”
Annika Skott shouted from the hallway, and Niklas Nordgren heard the outer door close a moment later. Then she noticed the smell.
“Hey…what are you doing?” she shouted.
A few seconds later, she came into the kitchen and found Nordgren by the stove. The huge pot bubbling away smelled incredible, garlic and bay leaves. It was just after seven in the evening, but the sun was still shining in through the window.
“We finished around lunch, and I didn’t think there was much point going back to work,” he explained. “So I stopped off at Östermalmshallen and bought some lamb.”
He said nothing about having walked most of the way home to Lidingö from Östermalm, a distance of over six miles. Which, in turn, was just a fifth of the total he had walked that day.
The endorphins were refusing to leave his body, he couldn’t stop smiling. In his attempts to go back to being the ordinary Niklas Nordgren, the calm and slightly sulky man who liked to keep himself busy, the exact opposite had emerged. He felt even more wound up than he had that morning.
“That smells incredible,” said Annika. “God, I’m hungry. I’m just going to get changed. Then you can tell me everything.”
She disappeared into the bedroom, as always, to take off her tax adviser clothing and put on something more comfortable.
Nordgren continued to stir the pot.
It was going to be tough to tell her about the conference he’d told her he was attending when, in fact, he had actually been sleeping the days away in a too-short bed on Runmarö. He wasn’t a good liar to begin with, but a conference of hundreds of electricians would—as Nordgren imagined it—be an unbearably boring story.
But the real problem was that his body was still singing.
That was how it felt. As though his muscles, synapses and connective tissues were celebrating in secret.
They had done it.
102
Thurn took the elevator down to the garage, and as she climbed into her car she knew she wouldn’t be going home.
She still wasn’t sure. In her new-smelling Volvo, she could no longer avoid the questions that had been bothering her all day. How could someone who had planned a robbery involving at least twenty people, requiring thousands of hours of careful planning, manage not to give anything away for an entire month? Especially someone like Petrovic, who had said plenty of other revealing things, suggesting he hadn’t been aware of the microphones until, perhaps, the end.
How could her colleagues in police headquarters be so sure that this previously unknown man was the brains behind the spectacular helicopter heist?
It didn’t add up.
She turned left onto Scheelegatan, drove over the Barnhus Bridge and then took another left.
Zoran Petrovic lived no more than five minutes from police headquarters.
* * *
—
Caroline Thurn had never seen him in person, but she knew where he lived. When she parked her car outside his door, it was almost eight thirty in the evening.
She had to see him.
She wouldn’t know until she saw him.
She had spent so many nights with him, with that incessant voice in her ears, that self-confident tone, the way he placed himself at the center of the universe. She couldn’t help the fact that she was equal parts impressed and annoyed with him. But she had to supplement everything she knew with a real person’s gaze, movements and presence. It was the only way to be sure.
After half an hour, a young woman came out of the building, and Thurn took the
opportunity to sneak in. She climbed the stairs to Petrovic’s apartment and rang the bell, not quite knowing what she would say if he answered. But there was no one home, and when she picked the lock and went in, she didn’t see anything that gave her a particular feeling either way.
With a sigh, she returned to the street and waited on the sidewalk.
* * *
—
He appeared just after ten, walking down Upplandsgatan in a short, thin jacket. She spotted him from a distance and immediately knew it was him. Tall and slender as a flagpole. She took a step out into the middle of the sidewalk just as he was about to reach the door, and he had no choice but to stop.
“Sorry,” she said, “but you don’t know what time it is, do you?”
Zoran Petrovic glanced at her with a wry smile. Thurn allowed him to look her up and down, to value and judge her. There was a certain timidity to him, she thought, but for a few seconds he brushed that to one side, stood up straight and went onto autopilot.
“Not too late for a drink,” he replied.
She must have passed his first appraisal, but she couldn’t sense any concrete conviction behind his invite. Despite the mocking smile, which she assumed was meant to pique her interest, he seemed more tired than anything.
She smiled.
“Thanks,” she said. “But I don’t think so.”
She looked him deep in the eye, utterly indifferent to whether he had misunderstood her.
“OK,” he replied, with a certain sense of relief. “That’s fine. It’s been a long day, but there’ll be others. Do you live around here?”
She smiled. Studied him. The uncertain flash in his eyes when she replied with a laugh: “I work nearby.”
And then she turned and walked away.
She felt better.
She was sure.
It was him.
103
Work in police headquarters was complicated on Thursday, September 24, by the sheer number of crime scenes that had to be examined. The forensic resources they had at their disposal simply weren’t enough.
To begin with, they had to go through the robbers’ entry route into the cash depot in Västberga. From the roof to the balcony on the fifth floor, and then up to Counting on the sixth. The helicopter had been found early on Wednesday, and along with it a good deal of abandoned equipment that could yield traces of DNA. By lunch, a pair of gloves and a balaclava had been found in a trash can by a bus stop a few miles away from the launch site on Värmdö. These had been sent for analysis along with the two bomb devices that had been placed outside the hangar.
The investigations of the various crime scenes were taking place more or less simultaneously, which meant that on Thursday morning, neither the prosecution authority nor the National Criminal Police had a good overview of what was actually known or expected. Paradoxically, information was also leaking out of police headquarters like a surging spring river. The Swedish media seemed to be completely up to date with the investigation, and by afternoon, Hertz realized that it was quicker to read the online version of the evening papers than it was to wait for internal updates.
The content was identical.
* * *
—
On the morning of Friday, September 25, Detective Chief Inspector Caroline Thurn was called into a meeting at the prosecution authority on Fleminggatan. Since the walls of police headquarters seemed to have ears, they had given up holding meetings there.
Therese Olsson was already waiting when Thurn arrived, as were Berggren and a couple of other colleagues. There was a tangible sense of excitement in the room. Traces of blood had been found at G4S during the previous day. And not in just one place, but several, most clearly by the damaged door into the cash depot. As the computers in the basement raced to find a clear match in the extensive Swedish crime register, bets were currently being made.
Names from the investigation flew through the room.
“One hundred on Zoran Petrovic.”
“I’ll bet two hundred,” said Berggren.
“Three fifty on Michel Maloof,” said the youngster from the Suspect Profile Group.
Maloof was one of hundreds of names in Thurn and Berggren’s list of criminals who had been in contact with Petrovic during August.
Thurn didn’t take part in the betting. It wasn’t how she thought police work should be done.
They spent a few minutes discussing their surveillance options and how the day could best be spent, but everyone fell silent when the phone on Hertz’s desk started to ring. Breathlessly, they stared at the prosecutor as he listened tensely, noted something down and then nodded.
He hung up and said: “Sami Farhan?”
It was a question.
“Sami Farhan?” Caroline Thurn repeated, astonished. “That’s the middle brother.”
“You know who he is?” Hertz asked. He sounded surprised.
But Prosecutor Lars Hertz was the only person in the room with no idea who the Farhan brothers were.
“Farhan?” said Therese Olsson. “But…he doesn’t have anything to do with Zoran Petrovic, does he?”
“He’s not mentioned in the investigation reports or on the tapes,” Berggren confirmed. “He’s not on our lists.”
“Who is Farhan?” Hertz asked in frustration.
“Do you remember the robbery at the National Museum?” Berggren replied. “The art heist? Just before Christmas a few years ago?”
“That was Sami Farhan and his brothers. Among others,” said Thurn.
“But there’s no mention of him anywhere in our investigation,” said Hertz.
Berggren got up.
“OK,” he said. “Let’s go and pick up Farhan.”
“No,” said Hertz.
“No?”
“No.”
Berggren looked dismayed.
“I want to find the money first,” said Hertz.
The room was silent.
“I want to find the money, then we can haul them all in. Without the cash, the media will lynch us.”
“It’s too late,” said Berggren.
“I’m afraid you’ll never find the money, Lars.” Thurn backed up her colleague. “I agree with Mats that it’s better to drop that thought.”
“Twenty-four hours,” Hertz insisted. “Let’s give ourselves twenty-four hours. If we haven’t gotten anywhere by tomorrow morning, we’ll go and pick up Farhan and Petrovic and his entire damn address book. OK?”
“Is that a promise?” asked Berggren.
“That’s a promise,” Hertz replied.
“I’d like to bring in Petrovic personally,” said Caroline.
Thurn’s colleagues turned to look at her, but no one asked why. They all knew the answer would be polite but insignificant.
104
Michel Maloof had spent Wednesday with Zoran Petrovic, trying to find out exactly what had happened. True to character, he had brushed his anger, disappointment and surprise to one side, and he worked methodically. Who had sent the text message to Petrovic’s phone during the early hours of the morning? How could Maloof’s number have been used without his knowledge? Who was behind the wheel of the boat, and where had it gone? Where was the leak, who had tricked them?
But when evening came around and he was still none the wiser—other than finding out that if someone knew his phone number, it was fairly easy to use the cellular network to make it appear on Petrovic’s display—Maloof was overwhelmed by a weariness that caused him to sleep through the night and well into Thursday.
When he woke, it was late afternoon, and he felt completely crushed.
They had done it, that was sure.
But the money was gone.
Sami and Nordgren still didn’t have a clue. In their respective worlds, everything was as it should be, and Västberga was still the perfect job. The thought of telling them made Maloof feel even more desperate. He knew what Sami would say; he would point to Petrovic and blame him. It was the simplest explanation,
but only if you hadn’t seen the surprise in the Yugoslavian’s eyes when he realized what had happened that morning.
Whoever had screwed them over had also screwed over Petrovic.
At eight that evening, Maloof called Alexandra Svensson. He couldn’t bear being alone any longer. He needed the full attention of a sympathetic woman, warm skin for the night ahead.
But Alexandra didn’t answer. Her phone rang, but there was no answering machine linked to the number, there never had been. He tried several times that evening, all without success. Something might have happened to her, but he didn’t have the energy to worry about it. Thoughts of the money, the boat and the phones were still spinning through his mind, and he didn’t have room for anything else. He fell asleep just after midnight, and dreamed he was flying low through the air.
* * *
—
On Friday, the first thing Maloof did was to call Alexandra Svensson, before he had even climbed out of bed. By eight o’clock, when she still hadn’t answered, he was starting to get seriously worried. He decided to find out what had happened. He knew she lived in Hammarby Sjöstad, but he couldn’t remember the exact address. Maloof had never been to her sublet sublet, but she had told him where it was.
