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

“We need to raise the alarm,” Sofi Rosander repeats. “And call the district commissioner.”

“I can’t ring Caisa fucking Ekblad and wake her up,” Dahlström protests, terrified by the thought. “I’ll call Månsson instead. He’s in charge of Söderort. It’s his problem.”

It takes a while for Dag Månsson to answer. He sounds muddled, newly woken and annoyed. Dahlström introduces himself and repeats the information that has just come in. Månsson reacts with the same degree of surprise.

“The cash depot in Västberga? But it’s right next to the station?” he says.

Dahlström has to repeat the information several times before Månsson finally understands that the robbers have landed a helicopter on the roof of G4S.

“I’m on my way in,” he says. “I’ll call the commissioner en route. You raise the alarm.”

5:16 a.m.

The helicopter is in the air, hovering just to the right of the building, far enough away not to hinder the three men working on the roof.

Maloof had run over to Sami when he realized something wasn’t right. Together, they squat down and study the pane of glass close up. Thanks to the lights below, they can see a small crack, thin but long.

Maloof knows that it could have been there before, but he decides not to mention that.

“Keep going, keep going,” he says instead, returning to Nordgren, who has started to screw together the ladders.

The longer of the two seems inconceivably long, but it does need to reach all the way to the fifth floor.

“Let’s move everything over to the window,” he says to Nordgren.

It’s more a type of therapy than anything else. They need to keep themselves busy while Sami lets the sledgehammer do its job.

Sami strikes the glass. He strikes it again. The movement reminds him of a condemned prisoner in a chain gang in some film from the early sixties. Every time the sledgehammer hits the window, it makes the same dull thud, the same anticlimax, and after the fifth or seventh or eleventh strike, once Nordgren and Maloof have moved all the bags, ropes, ladders, tools and explosives over to the window, his patience starts to wear thin.

Maloof had planned on them being out of there in quarter of an hour. Fifteen minutes. It can’t take any longer than that.

Three of those fifteen minutes have already passed, and they haven’t even managed to smash the window.

“I’ll blow it open,” Nordgren says quietly to Maloof, who nods.

Nordgren bends down to prepare a charge, but as he does so, they finally hear the sound of the hammer breaking the glass into thousands of tiny pieces.

With Nordgren’s help, Maloof lifts one end of the longer ladder above his head and they raise it vertically in the air. Next, they carefully lower it through the hole in the skylight. The balcony on the fifth floor is directly below them, little more than a ledge.

Slowly, they lower the ladder down through the building. It has to be long enough.

Afterward, Michel Maloof will look back at those few moments and think of them as having been the longest of the morning. If the ladder is too short, it’s all over. They won’t have any choice but to wave back the helicopter and leave.

Foot by foot, the ladder disappears through the hole in the broken window. With just six inches of the full thirty-six feet to spare, it hits the floor.

Maloof leans forward and looks down.

“I think it’ll work,” he says.

Getting the ladder into place took twenty-five seconds.

It felt more like twenty-five minutes.

Nordgren grabs the shorter ladder and swings it onto his right shoulder. He grabs the bag of explosives in his other hand.

“You holding?” he asks Maloof.

He starts climbing without waiting for an answer.

Maloof holds on to the ladder as tightly as he can. It shakes. Nordgren is only halfway down when it starts to bend as though it were made of bamboo.

But it doesn’t collapse.

Maloof asks Sami to hold it while he grabs as much as he can and then sets off as the second man. Sami climbs down last of all, the Kalashnikov hanging from a strap around his neck.

5:18 a.m.

“Do you think you could turn down the radio a bit?” Claude Tavernier asks as diplomatically as he can, though he already knows the answer will be a long, difficult telling off.

Ann-Marie always has the radio on when she’s working. She manages to find channels on frequencies no one else even knew existed. Right now, she’s enjoying Swedish hits from the sixties, nonstop without any ads. Of the fourteen people working this shift, five have brought their own headphones to avoid Ann-Marie’s canned tunes, but the others have been forced to endure vintage Swedish hits for hours now.

They’ve made it through the night without any conflict so far, but, as usual, patience starts to wear thin as dawn approaches. Tavernier has a theory that it’s linked to the bad air, and he has raised the problem with management. Every night shift is the same. Tonight, on top of the usual workload, they’ve also had to handle two additional secure transports from Panaxia. The smaller company hasn’t had the capacity since its move the week before.

It means the tempo is higher than usual.

After being received and registered down in the vault, the cash is sent up to Counting through the internal tube system. On the sixth floor, the staff don’t just have to count and package up the money, they also have to weed out any notes that are too old or damaged to return to general circulation. Once that’s done, they register the deposits and send everything back down to the vault.

The room is big and gently U-shaped, which means that the people working at one end can’t see those working at the other. Also meaning, in theory, that it is possible to keep your distance from Ann-Marie and her radio, but Tavernier still has to ask her to turn down the volume. Like always. And, as usual, Ann-Marie, who has both been on the local union board and has held the position of shop steward, explains precisely which rights she has.

One of these rights is to listen to music.

Tonight, Claude Tavernier has much less patience than usual. He doesn’t quite know why. But it’s the reason he raises his voice and interrupts Ann-Marie before she even has time to start protesting.

“Just turn it down, Ann-Marie,” he barks. “Or I’ll do it.”

Ann-Marie is so taken aback by his change in attitude that she reaches out and turns down the volume on the old radio. It’s not her device, it belongs to the company.

As the languorous strings grow quiet, they all hear it.

The sound coming from outside.

Colleagues elbow workmates wearing headphones so that they can hear it for themselves.

“What the hell’s that?” someone asks loudly.

Counting, on the sixth floor, has no windows. But it’s obvious that the clear thudding sound none of them can identify is coming from outside.

“That’s not the air-conditioning, is it?”

“We’ll have to ask the big boss what we should do,” Ann-Marie says, dripping with irony, as though to point out how dumbstruck Claude Tavernier looks, standing in the middle of the room with all eyes on him.

Like many who have driven a secure transport vehicle or worked for a company dealing in them, Tavernier has personal experience of being robbed. That’s why his first thought is that it must be a robbery. It’s an automatic assumption. But six floors up, in one of Stockholm’s most secure depots, with a police station just a stone’s throw from the entrance, Tavernier brushes off the thought. It seems so unlikely.

“Keep working,” he says. “I’ll go and check.”