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

It was lunchtime when he stepped off the boat on the island of Sandhamn. The season was short in the archipelago, and by that time of year, mid-September, the only people to get off ahead of Nordgren were a couple of handymen in overalls. No more than a hundred or so people lived permanently on the island, and for that reason seeing strangers was unusual. Nordgren passed the hotel with determined steps, and then headed up the hill toward Trouville. He too was wearing overalls and was carrying a tool bag. If anyone noticed him, they would just assume he was on his way to repair something in one of the houses that lay empty at this time of year, along the road toward the island’s southern cape.

In summer, the beach in Trouville offered seclusion to any tourists wanting to swim, at least if they moved away from the more built-up area. But by September, the area was completely deserted.

Nordgren turned right when he reached the water, and walked along the narrow beach. He clambered over piles of damp seaweed that had washed ashore. It didn’t take long for his shoes to be soaked through.

He was looking for the rowboat he had dragged onto land five years earlier. He had pulled it up to the edge of the trees and tied it to a trunk. You couldn’t see the boat from the water, and barely even from land unless you got lost in the woods and tripped over it. It belonged to an old childhood friend of Nordgren’s parents, who had sold their place on Sandhamn and bought another on Runmarö. But the little boat had been left behind, and it wasn’t in anyone’s way.

He went too far at first, but Nordgren eventually found the little plastic boat exactly where he had left it. The oars were still inside, as was the bailer. He couldn’t manage to undo the knot he had tied around a tall pine, and he had to cut the rope with a knife instead. He pulled the boat down to the water, pushed it out and jumped in. His shoes were already soaked anyway.

Thanks to the southerly wind, it took him no more than two hours to row over the strait to the edge of Runmarö. That was where his parents’ friends had bought their new house, and there was a playhouse with a bed in their yard. Nordgren had slept there before.

Just as Niklas Nordgren was rowing ashore on Runmarö, the referee blew his whistle to start the match at Råsunda Stadium in Solna. The arena had been built as the national stadium for the Swedish soccer team, and it could hold almost forty thousand fans. Tonight, with AIK playing Trelleborgs FF at home, roughly half that number of paying spectators were in the seats. It was AIK’s year, the team was heading for victory in the Allsvenskan league, and that fact made Michel Maloof neither happy nor sad. He didn’t have a favorite team in the Allsvenskan; he thought English league soccer was far superior to Swedish, and was much more interested in the Premier League. On top of that, Trelleborg were one of AIK’s least entertaining rivals, sitting midtable and with a game that could sympathetically be described as defensive.

But there was no denying that the nearly twenty thousand spectators that evening were giving the boring match a relatively grand feeling. The terraces were lively, and though the score was 0–0 at halftime, it was going to be the home side’s night; you could feel it in the air. Maloof bought a hot dog and a Coke Zero in a soft plastic cup that was difficult to hold, and he went back to watch the second half, still not feeling particularly engaged.

Sure enough, the home team sent a ball into the back of the net at seventy-five minutes, and a quarter of an hour after that, Maloof got up and pushed his way out of his row. He was carrying a sports bag in one hand. It wasn’t unthinkable that the lukewarm cola had forced him to go to the toilet with just injury time to go.

Next to the enormous men’s restroom and its many cubicles and urinals, there was a separate disabled restroom with a door you could lock behind you. That was where Maloof headed.

With just a few minutes of the game left to play, the corridors of the stadium were practically deserted. This was when everything would be decided out on the field, it wasn’t something you wanted to miss.

Still, Maloof was careful to make sure no one saw him open the door to the restroom.

He locked it carefully, hung the bag on a hook on the back of the door and pulled out a sleeping mat and pillow. The room reeked of urine, but he had seen worse. He put everything on the floor in the corner opposite the toilet and sat down on the mat. He had a book with him, a thick Stephen King paperback, but he wouldn’t read any of it. It was more a ritual; he always brought a thick book that he wouldn’t read.

It took almost ten minutes before the noise outside the restroom door gradually increased to a roar. Desperate soccer fans who didn’t want to wait in the long lines for the normal toilets started pulling at Maloof’s door.

But the lock held, and Maloof remained sitting on the floor.

After fifteen, possibly twenty minutes, the stadium fell quiet again. All that remained now was to wait. The cleaning staff wouldn’t arrive until the next morning, it was a way for the company to avoid paying overtime. Zoran Petrovic had been running a successful cleaning company for ten years, and he knew how things worked at Råsunda.

But not even Petrovic knew where Michel Maloof was at that moment.

Maloof slept in intervals of fifteen minutes, the floor was too hard and the mat too thin for any longer than that. When he eventually got up at four thirty in the morning, he was stiff and in a bad mood.

He opened the door to the disabled restroom and found Råsunda Stadium quiet and deserted.

Maloof walked slowly down its dark corridors, past the shutters on all the food stalls. It was impossible to think that just last night, tens of thousands of people had been shouting, cheering, drinking and laughing on the now-empty terraces; right then, it felt more like the day after a nuclear holocaust.

There were turnstiles at the exits. They turned only one way, so there were no locks. Maloof left Råsunda in the early-morning darkness, taking the train out to Kårsta. From there, he would take a bus to Norrtälje.

The likelihood of him bumping into anyone he knew in any of those places was tiny.

Sami Farhan waited another day, until Saturday, September 19. If Michel Maloof had found it easy to disappear and Niklas Nordgren slightly harder, the task was by far the most difficult for Sami.

He did what he usually did. He booked a flight leaving late in the afternoon. This time, he had chosen Hamburg as his destination. The return journey was booked for a month’s time, but the seat back to Arlanda would be empty. When he landed, there would be a car waiting for him at the airport, and he would drive it back to Stockholm that evening and night.

He was doing someone a service, the car had been bought in Germany and would later have to pay duty in Sweden. But that wasn’t his problem. He would leave it in a parking garage in Östermalm and then make his way through the city unnoticed, heading for an apartment in Södermalm where no one would either think to look for or be able to trace him.

Abracadabra, and Sami Farhan would have disappeared.

No, that wasn’t the problem.

It was the farewells that were impossible.

That Saturday morning had followed its usual, chaotic pattern. The baby had woken and started screaming at four, and before he had been fed and gone back to sleep, he had managed to wake his older brother. Sami had walked around and around the kitchen table with John in his arms, loop after loop after loop, listening to his sniffles eventually grow quieter and cross over into sleep.