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

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.”

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 under 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.