Jonas Bonnier - The Helicopter Heist - A Novel Based on True Events

The explosion was deafening.

But what came next was worse.

The entire building shook. Nordgren got to his feet, and a second later it was as though the ground had been snatched from beneath them. He hadn’t been prepared for that. The pile of timber they were behind fell to one side, and again the noise was incredible, even louder than the initial explosion. Maloof fell over.

“Shit!” Sami shouted.

In a compact cloud of dust, the floor where they had been crouching collapsed onto the one below. Two or three different alarms started ringing simultaneously.

“Sami!” Maloof shouted.

He couldn’t see a thing.

“I’m here. Where’s Nick?”

“Here!” a voice shouted from the cloud of dust.

They could hear one another, but a few seconds passed before they could see anything.

“We need to get out!”

Nordgren started running toward the elevator, which, unbelievably, seemed to have survived the blast unscathed. Sami and Maloof followed him. As the dust started to settle, they studied the damage around them.

Sirens from emergency vehicles could be heard in the distance.

They ran into the elevator and Nordgren pushed the button. The motor started with a jolt, slowly winching them toward the ground. Down on the street, a crowd of people had already gathered.

“What the fuck happened?” asked Sami.

His forehead was damp, his eyes bright. He shook his sweater. Flapped it here and there.

“Bad workmanship,” Nordgren replied. “We took down the entire roof.”

“Shit!”

Maloof started to laugh. Sami’s mouth twitched.

“You two are insane,” Nordgren snapped. “It’s not funny. The place’ll be crawling with cops any minute.”

After what seemed like an eternity, they reached the ground. The alarms on the building site sounded even louder down there. A TV van pulled up by the sidewalk at roughly the same time as the first fire engine from the station on Malmskillnadsgatan arrived. The explosion had even set off three or four car alarms.

People were pouring in from all directions.

The three men responsible for the chaos discreetly left the former eight-story building as the firemen stormed inside. Nordgren, Sami and Maloof sneaked quietly past the spectators on the sidewalk, all of whom were desperate to get a glimpse of what was going on.

“This is insane,” Sami said as they moved quickly down Jakobsbergsgatan.

None of the three turned as the police cars began to arrive, their sirens blaring. They headed back to the car without saying a word, and only once they had climbed inside and shut the doors did Nordgren break the silence.

“Fuck,” he said. “It didn’t even make a hole. We’re not going to be able to get in through the roof.”

On Karlavägen, just around the corner from Skeppargatan, there was an elegant candy store called Karla Frukt. It had been there since the midsixties, supplying the neighborhood’s praline-eating residents and sugar-starved students with sweet treats. Its pretty neon sign, shaped like a peeled orange, lit up the front of the building. The front windows of the shop angled into the building, giving Caroline Thurn space to stand in the shadow of the overhanging roof by the entrance. Tucked away there, she could be completely invisible, despite the streetlight illuminating the sidewalk just a few yards away. It was two thirty in the morning, a clear summer’s night, and Karlavägen was quiet.

Karla Frukt was diagonally opposite the door Thurn and Berggren had been keeping under surveillance, the door to the supposed brothel. Thurn knew she should drop the case, but she didn’t want to. The National Criminal Police had been brought in because the case involved ambassadors, foreign citizens committing crimes on Swedish soil. The information they had was from a reliable source, and the vice squad also supported their theory of a brothel.

The traffic along Karlavägen was separated by a wide footpath in the middle of the road. Lawns, leafy trees and thick bushes had been planted along the gravel path on which dogs were exercised in the evenings and children walked to school in the mornings. Thurn had been standing in the entrance to Karla Frukt since midnight, and nothing had happened. No one had either entered or left the building opposite.

She hadn’t bothered to ask Berggren whether he wanted to come with her. Right now, he was completely focused on the cash depot robbery, and he would have just told her to hand the case over to their colleagues in vice. In all likelihood, the supposed brothel probably had as many visits from Swedish dignitaries as it did foreign ones, and her colleagues at Stockholm Police also needed something to do.

Thurn smiled to herself. She could just hear Berggren’s argument.

And then she saw him.

On the other side of Karlavägen, a lone man was walking along the street. Thurn had noticed him as he passed Artillerigatan, he was on his way toward Karlaplan. Almost immediately, she had taken in his unusual walking style. He limped, as though one leg was shorter than the other, and every step he took involved pushing his right hip forward with a slight twist.

It took Thurn a few seconds to retrieve the relevant information from the rich archive of her subconscious. She knew exactly who the man with the limp was.

On the opposite sidewalk, at two thirty in the morning, in the middle of one of Stockholm’s sleepiest neighborhoods, a recently retired headmaster from the deepest forests of Värmland was out for a walk. Jan Löwenheim.

And given everything Caroline Thurn knew about Headmaster Löwenheim, the chances that he was heading for the brothel the police had long been trying to uncover were good.

Thurn was halfway over the road when Löwenheim reached the building she had been watching. But rather than stopping, the limping man continued past the door and turned the corner onto Grevgatan, just before the roundabout by Karlaplan’s fountains. Thurn started to run.

The fact that Löwenheim had passed the brothel both surprised and relieved her.

She rounded the corner at high speed, and found herself about to run straight into the older man. He was standing outside the entrance to Grevgatan 63 with one hand on the door handle, and he turned around in panic.

“I, what?” he exclaimed.

His shock was understandable. He hadn’t seen another living soul in several minutes, only to find himself being almost mowed down.

Thurn stopped dead. Her pulse was racing, her breathing heavy, and she had no idea what to say.

In the next instant, he recognized her.

“Caroline?” he said. “Is that you, Caroline? My… what a coincidence!”

She tried to compose herself.

“Headmaster Löwenheim,” she replied. “It’s… been a while.”

He held out a hand and she took it automatically, shaking it as though she was thanking him for a diploma at a graduation ceremony. His handshake was limp and damp, she remembered it well. But it wasn’t his handshake that the girls at school had gossiped about, it was the hugs that quickly became too intimate, the glances that lingered for far too long before they reached your eyes. The scandal with the matron in one of the boardinghouses was something Löwenheim could never shake off.

“I saw your father only last week, at a dinner in Nääs,” Löwenheim now said. “He seemed to be in good spirits.”

“Yes,” Thurn replied evasively. “I’m sure he is.”

“We spoke about your brother for quite some time, but we never got round to you…”

“No,” she said, “these things happen.”

Caroline von Thurn hadn’t used her noble “von” since she realized that Grefvelsta Gård in Närke, the place where she and her father, her grandfather and great-grandfather had all grown up, would be taken away from her.