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

Of the two remaining depots, only Panaxia in Bromma matched the description of a four-story building with a flat roof.

Today, Thurn had learned that the company had been planning to move parts of its business for some time, and that the move was scheduled to begin on the fourteenth of September. The robbers had chosen the fifteenth, which had to be seen as the optimal time, given that the company would be particularly vulnerable then.

Whoever was planning the robbery had to have someone on the inside of Panaxia, Thurn thought; otherwise, they would never have found such a perfect opportunity. She wondered whether she could ask for lists of employees now, without raising suspicions. She turned left onto Drottningholmsvägen and headed back toward Alvik and Kungsholmen.

On the way up to her department in police HQ, Thurn passed the colleagues responsible for listening in on Zoran Petrovic.

They had microphones hidden in Petrovic’s restaurants on Upplandsgatan, in the bedroom and living room of his apartment and in the headrest of his BMW. The resources that had been put at the disposal of the investigation were wastefully large, and Thurn knew that this was partly because of the personal involvement of the minister for foreign affairs in the case.

But she also knew that the national police commissioner’s plan was to defend the increased costs at the end of the year by going public with the international success their efforts had led to.

And that success was something she held Caroline Thurn responsible for.

Thurn stuck her head around the door into a room full of electronics. “Nothing?” she asked.

Two technicians wearing headphones turned to the doorway and stared at her like they had just woken up. Their eyes were red and they didn’t look like they had changed their clothes in weeks. A couple of empty white cartons on the desk made the place stink of Chinese food.

“You kidding?” one of them said.

“You’ve always been a real joker, Caroline,” said the other.

“No,” the inspector said with a friendly smile. “Not joking at all.”

The technicians sighed.

Bugging Zoran Petrovic was a bit like pointing a microphone toward a soccer stadium during a derby and then hoping to hear someone whisper. Words poured into the ears of the police officers who, in increasing confusion, allowed hard drive after hard drive to fill up with talk of great deals and boasts about conquests of impossibly beautiful women.

Though Petrovic didn’t appear in any of the police databases, the officers listening to him were certain that someone had taught him to speak like a seasoned criminal. He never named names, and whatever he did say usually lacked a time and a place.

The police now knew that Zoran Petrovic was active in the building trade, but he also seemed to have a finger in the cleaning and restaurant trade, the beauty world, the import and export branches. Exactly what he did, owned or spent his time doing in any of these areas remained unclear, however. It was possible that he was just a silent partner, some kind of adviser, or maybe the businesses were run by dummies and Petrovic himself was ultimately in control. In all likelihood, it was a combination of all those things, but since Petrovic’s phone conversations were vague and elusive, never naming names or exact amounts, this was all guesswork on the part of the police.

During an ordinary day, he might have upward of twenty meetings, and they took place all over Stockholm. He could send fifty text messages and make a similar number of calls, half of them in Montenegrin, a language closely related to Serbian. Since the police interpreters weren’t always available, there was a chance they would find something more useful in the conversations that weren’t in Swedish, but judging by the conversations they’d had translated so far, the content seemed to be exactly the same.

They weren’t getting anywhere. The only reference to the helicopter robbery came when Petrovic uttered that he was planning something on September 15. But that was something the Serbs had known from the beginning.

Caroline Thurn struggled on up the stairs and down the corridors of police headquarters. She was just passing Mats Berggren’s room, heading for her own office farther down the corridor, when he saw her and shouted.

Thurn stopped. The sun was so low in the sky during the morning that she was no more than a silhouette in his doorway.

“How did it go?” he asked.

“It’s going to be Panaxia,” she said.

The information about their upcoming move had convinced her.

She had her left hand high on the doorframe, meaning that the sleeve of her blouse had slipped down her arm. If the light had been different, he never would have noticed it. But the smooth skin of the scar shone straight across Thurn’s wrist, and Berggren immediately recognized the type of wound.

He had been on the verge of asking something else about the cash depot in Bromma, but he lost his train of thought. If it had been anyone else, the discovery wouldn’t have hit him nearly as hard.

“What are you thinking, Mats?” Thurn asked. She had noticed something had happened to her colleague.

“No, no… nothing,” he mumbled.

She shrugged and left his doorway.

Zoran Petrovic was sitting in Café Stolen, and he felt restless. It made him a bad listener. He glanced down at his watch. He was meeting the potential new helicopter pilot in an hour, but until then he was stuck listening to a vegetable grower from Poland who was trying to establish himself in Årsta. The Pole needed help with both contacts and cash, and he was bragging about his biodynamically grown carrots and beetroot. Petrovic, who was relatively familiar with the vegetable trade after a few attempts to break into the market himself, knew that the care the farmer put into the quality of his produce would never be compensated for in price. He hated meetings that ended on a bad note.

After escorting the Pole to the door, Petrovic took a moment to glance up and down the street. To begin with, he didn’t spot anyone, but then he saw them. They were standing on Upplandsgatan. Over the past week, they had been everywhere. It might be the badly dressed, early middle-aged man who turned around when he left the pub late one night. Or the neutrally dressed woman pretending to stare into an uninteresting window opposite the door of his building.

The police always seemed to be able to catch the scent whenever anything particular was on the go, once the vague talk turned into concrete plans, and the stroll along the water’s edge in Gröndal was now about a security company’s routines rather than last night’s girl. Petrovic had long since stopped being surprised by the sharp nose of the police force, and he now accepted it as a fact.

Besides, that refined sense of smell had reached the same level of sophistication on both sides of the law.

Someone within the police force or prosecution authority must have suddenly decided it was worth keeping Petrovic under tabs, and he felt a reluctant sense of flattery. His relationship with his self-image was split. Just over a year earlier, his face had accidentally flashed up in a TV4 report on criminality in Farsta. He had barely been involved, but he was still the one the camera crew had caught on film. As a result, he had ended up in custody. Petrovic had sued the TV channel and been awarded a symbolic figure as some kind of sticking plaster over the wound. All the same, other than that film, the police didn’t have anything on him.

Which meant that their newfound interest both worried and amused him.

Just before twelve, Café Stolen started to fill up with lunch guests, meaning it was time for Zoran Petrovic to leave. He had to get out to Saltsjöbaden to meet the American pilot Jack Kluger, but his new followers left him with no choice but to perform an evasive maneuver first.