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

On Tuesday afternoon, when he woke and realized that his short vacation in the archipelago was over, he felt great all the same. His back wasn’t aching in the slightest, and the cold he thought he could feel developing when he went to bed at dawn seemed to have vanished.

After catching the connecting bus directly to Danvikstull, he kills a few hours in an Espresso House before arriving at Kettola’s place at midnight, as agreed. He had been fantasizing about a cup of hot coffee and a muffin during his time in the playhouse, when his only sustenance came from warmed-up cans.

11:30 p.m.

She gets a fare out to Bromma and has to wait only half an hour before she gets another back into town. That’s the good thing about working for one of the big taxi firms, there are always plenty of new customers. This time, it’s a businessman with flushed red cheeks who probably couldn’t have said no to an extra bottle of cognac on the plane.

If they still served alcohol on domestic flights?

She doesn’t know, it’s been years since she last flew anywhere.

The businessman is headed for Östermalm, he gives her the address. The man stares out the window the whole way there, he’s too good to talk to her. Just a few minutes into the drive, she already knows that he won’t leave a tip. That type never does.

She drops him off and checks the time. She makes trips to Östermalm often enough to have become hooked on the specialty hot dog kiosk on Nybrogatan. Does she have time to try out one of his Turkish lamb sausages and then squeeze in one more fare? But before her conscience has time to give an answer, her stomach directs her onto Kommendörsgatan, down to the old post office where the kiosk is. There’s a parking space right next to it, which she takes as a sign.

The sausage is just as spicy as she hoped.

When she gets back behind the wheel, it’s already a little past twelve, and she has two, three hours before it’s time. She isn’t really meant to clock off before morning, but she will shut down the system at three, making herself both unavailable and invisible. In the trunk, she has the chain with the caltrops welded onto it, the one she is meant to stretch across Västberga Allé. She assumes it will take her a while; according to Niklas Nordgren, the chain needs to be fastened on either side, but he couldn’t explain how to do it, he just gave her two padlocks.

She’s an imaginative woman, she’ll work something out.

She drives downtown and passes the long line for taxis outside the restaurants there. In a way, it feels good to be avoiding the fight for yet another fare that night, even though her job of stretching the chain across the road won’t pay much more than a few trips to and from Arlanda.

She takes out her phone.

11:31 p.m.

Niklas Nordgren feels the buzz of his phone in the inner pocket of his jacket. He fishes it out and answers with a grunt.

It’s his chain woman. She has no idea that she’s part of a bigger plan. She has no idea that she’s one of many. She’s calling to say that she knows what she has to do. Nordgren answers monosyllabically and then hangs up. He hopes she finds somewhere solid to fix the chain at either side of the road.

He reaches the doorway on Rosenlundsgatan at ten past twelve, five minutes earlier than planned. The building is where Jan Kettola lives. Kettola sometimes helps out at the electricians’ where Nordgren works, and he’s the one who has promised to drive Nordgren out to the meeting place in Stora Skuggan Park. The two men aren’t close friends. They’ve done a couple of jobs together, a few years ago now, but there’s a certain loyalty between them. Nordgren isn’t worried. All Kettola knows is that they’re driving out to Stora Skuggan. Even when he hears the news about what happened on the radio tomorrow morning, there’s no way he’ll join the dots.

Rather than ringing the buzzer, Niklas Nordgren starts to worry. He thinks about the huge rock at the gravel pit in Norsborg where they’ll land once it’s all over. Without the patience or the sense to use pulleys, the rock is impossible to shift, it weighs almost a ton. But it should work, he instructed the team in Norsborg himself.

Then his thoughts turn to the police helicopter.

When he told the others what he had eventually worked out, how he was planning to keep the helicopter—or helicopters—on the ground, he did it with a certainty that immediately convinced both Maloof and Sami. They asked questions afterward, particularly Sami, since it’s one of his teams who will do the job there in a couple of hours. But neither of them had doubted the idea itself.

But now Niklas Nordgren has second thoughts.

Would it really work?

11:35 p.m.

Claude Tavernier’s mother had always said that he was a natural leader.

It wasn’t something he quoted, he wasn’t stupid, he knew how it sounded when a man in his thirties referred to his mother’s opinions. But for Tavernier, those words had taken on lifelong meaning. His mother had given him the self-confidence, which had given him the conviction, which had given him the courage. He wasn’t much of a scholar and he definitely wasn’t an athlete; he had studied economics at college in Lyon, but he still had his dissertation to write. He had moved to Sweden and learned the language because of a love that had turned out to be more fragile than he had imagined, but since he had already organized both a job and a place to live, he remained in Stockholm when it all fell apart. He still wasn’t sure whether that was just a temporary detour, or whether it was the path he would take in life.

Deep down, he knew he was the kind of person other people followed. He was a leader. That was what his mother had predicted, and that was how he had always thought of himself. Despite the setbacks and limitations.

He usually ate out when he worked nights. Then he would hang around in a bar somewhere until it was time to go. The alternative was spending the evening at home, checking his watch every five minutes. Night shifts started at midnight and ended at eight the next morning. They worked to a rolling schedule, two nights in a row, one day off, and then three day shifts from nine till five.

Just over four years after he was first hired, he had been called to the top boss and asked whether he was ready to take the next step in his career. It hadn’t come as a surprise. On the contrary. Tavernier had calmly asked about the pension terms, taken the weekend to make it seem like he was thinking about it and then signed the contract.

He was in his third year in a leadership role now, and felt like it would soon be time to move on. Remaining an anonymous middle manager among hundreds of others wasn’t what his mother had meant when she saw the leader in him.

All the same, he was in no hurry to leave. The work itself might have been monotonous, and it was a struggle to convince himself he was doing something meaningful. But whenever he scrolled through the job listings in either Stockholm or Paris, he felt certain that things would be no different anywhere else. Neither in terms of working conditions nor career prospects, neither in Lyon nor in Malmö.

When it came to colleagues, Tavernier assumed that in any group, there would always be those that people liked, and those that people liked less.

In his current workplace, there was an older woman, Ann-Marie Olausson, who drove him mad. She was sixty-one, had worked for the company her entire life, and acted as though she owned it. She was the type of person who, without an ounce of irony, would say, “But that’s how we’ve always done it.” Tavernier assumed that his youth must antagonize her, but there wasn’t much he could do about that.