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

“If we bring in Petrovic now,” Hertz said, “then everyone else we want to talk to will disappear within a few hours. That’s how it works. And we don’t want to make it that easy for them.”

The police officers around the table would have nodded in agreement if Hertz hadn’t been so inexperienced.

“He’s probably right,” Thurn eventually said.

“If we have the name of the main suspect before twelve hours have even passed,” Hertz continued with a conciliatory smile, “then I suggest we keep working on this for another twelve. Maybe that way we’ll find them all?”

The meeting ended and people disappeared in different directions. There were mountains of leads to work through. Back in Thurn’s office, she and Berggren continued to rifle through the material from the earlier surveillance operation. They focused on the huge number of names and people Zoran Petrovic had been in contact with.

They produced two separate lists. The first was of known criminals, and the second of those without criminal records. But all the damn nicknames and code words made the lists difficult. There were over a hundred people in each.

Their work wasn’t made any easier by the constant interruptions by people from other departments who wanted to discuss their findings. Thurn was considered some kind of expert on Petrovic by that point. She wanted nothing more than to fob them off and finish working on the lists, but as usual she couldn’t be rude. She patiently made time for every single person who stuck his or her head in the door to ask for help.

But eventually, midway through a monologue by a young colleague from the Suspect Profile Group, Thurn got up from her desk, grabbed the thin jacket that had been hanging over the back of her chair, and left the office. She just left. Enough desk work now. It was after eight, and darkness had fallen over Kungsholmen.

“How was the conference?”

Annika Skott shouted from the hallway, and Niklas Nordgren heard the outer door close a moment later. Then she noticed the smell.

“Hey… what are you doing?” she shouted.

A few seconds later, she came into the kitchen and found Nordgren by the stove. The huge pot bubbling away smelled incredible, garlic and bay leaves. It was just after seven in the evening, but the sun was still shining in through the window.

“We finished around lunch, and I didn’t think there was much point going back to work,” he explained. “So I stopped off at Östermalmshallen and bought some lamb.”

He said nothing about having walked most of the way home to Lidingö from Östermalm, a distance of over six miles. Which, in turn, was just a fifth of the total he had walked that day.

The endorphins were refusing to leave his body, he couldn’t stop smiling. In his attempts to go back to being the ordinary Niklas Nordgren, the calm and slightly sulky man who liked to keep himself busy, the exact opposite had emerged. He felt even more wound up than he had that morning.

“That smells incredible,” said Annika. “God, I’m hungry. I’m just going to get changed. Then you can tell me everything.”

She disappeared into the bedroom, as always, to take off her tax adviser clothing and put on something more comfortable.

Nordgren continued to stir the pot.

It was going to be tough to tell her about the conference he’d told her he was attending when, in fact, he had actually been sleeping the days away in a too-short bed on Runmarö. He wasn’t a good liar to begin with, but a conference of hundreds of electricians would—as Nordgren imagined it—be an unbearably boring story.

But the real problem was that his body was still singing.

That was how it felt. As though his muscles, synapses and connective tissues were celebrating in secret.

They had done it.

Thurn took the elevator down to the garage, and as she climbed into her car she knew she wouldn’t be going home.

She still wasn’t sure. In her new-smelling Volvo, she could no longer avoid the questions that had been bothering her all day. How could someone who had planned a robbery involving at least twenty people, requiring thousands of hours of careful planning, manage not to give anything away for an entire month? Especially someone like Petrovic, who had said plenty of other revealing things, suggesting he hadn’t been aware of the microphones until, perhaps, the end.

How could her colleagues in police headquarters be so sure that this previously unknown man was the brains behind the spectacular helicopter heist?

It didn’t add up.

She turned left onto Scheelegatan, drove over the Barnhus Bridge and then took another left.

Zoran Petrovic lived no more than five minutes from police headquarters.

Caroline Thurn had never seen him in person, but she knew where he lived. When she parked her car outside his door, it was almost eight thirty in the evening.

She had to see him.

She wouldn’t know until she saw him.

She had spent so many nights with him, with that incessant voice in her ears, that self-confident tone, the way he placed himself at the center of the universe. She couldn’t help the fact that she was equal parts impressed and annoyed with him. But she had to supplement everything she knew with a real person’s gaze, movements and presence. It was the only way to be sure.

After half an hour, a young woman came out of the building, and Thurn took the opportunity to sneak in. She climbed the stairs to Petrovic’s apartment and rang the bell, not quite knowing what she would say if he answered. But there was no one home, and when she picked the lock and went in, she didn’t see anything that gave her a particular feeling either way.

With a sigh, she returned to the street and waited on the sidewalk.

He appeared just after ten, walking down Upplandsgatan in a short, thin jacket. She spotted him from a distance and immediately knew it was him. Tall and slender as a flagpole. She took a step out into the middle of the sidewalk just as he was about to reach the door, and he had no choice but to stop.

“Sorry,” she said, “but you don’t know what time it is, do you?”

Zoran Petrovic glanced at her with a wry smile. Thurn allowed him to look her up and down, to value and judge her. There was a certain timidity to him, she thought, but for a few seconds he brushed that to one side, stood up straight and went onto autopilot.

“Not too late for a drink,” he replied.

She must have passed his first appraisal, but she couldn’t sense any concrete conviction behind his invite. Despite the mocking smile, which she assumed was meant to pique her interest, he seemed more tired than anything.

She smiled.

“Thanks,” she said. “But I don’t think so.”

She looked him deep in the eye, utterly indifferent to whether he had misunderstood her.

“OK,” he replied, with a certain sense of relief. “That’s fine. It’s been a long day, but there’ll be others. Do you live around here?”

She smiled. Studied him. The uncertain flash in his eyes when she replied with a laugh: “I work nearby.”

And then she turned and walked away.

She felt better.

She was sure.

It was him.

Work in police headquarters was complicated on Thursday, September 24, by the sheer number of crime scenes that had to be examined. The forensic resources they had at their disposal simply weren’t enough.

To begin with, they had to go through the robbers’ entry route into the cash depot in Västberga. From the roof to the balcony on the fifth floor, and then up to Counting on the sixth. The helicopter had been found early on Wednesday, and along with it a good deal of abandoned equipment that could yield traces of DNA. By lunch, a pair of gloves and a balaclava had been found in a trash can by a bus stop a few miles away from the launch site on Värmdö. These had been sent for analysis along with the two bomb devices that had been placed outside the hangar.