The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (38 page)

Leo ran out into the snowless winter cold after 170 seconds, with ten seconds to spare. A woman’s cries followed him, full of agony and
fear and panic. Just as his mother
should
have screamed back then.

Why hadn’t she?

Leo straightened his shoulder strap, threw his bag in the boot and nodded to Felix, who was waiting in front of the car.

He’d fired six shots at each camera. He had eight left.

That was when everything stopped.

First he noticed the frightened but fascinated gazes of the people behind the supermarket window. Then the frantic barking of a German shepherd bound to one of the lamp posts in the middle of the square, throwing herself back and forth with slathering jaws. Gazes and sounds that seized him, just like a woman’s eyes and screams, making it hard to breathe.

All she’d had to do was lie down, be still and stay quiet.

He’d prepared himself for some idiot male customer or staff member to play the hero, or for a showdown with the local police – prepared himself to take aim and fire to prove to them he was willing to use violence. He had sometimes imagined a life and death situation involving heavily armed police intervention. But this, a woman breaking down and crying and just wanting to get out, he’d never even considered that.

A woman protecting herself from a man using violence.

‘Two minutes and fifty-five seconds! Fifty-six!’ barked Felix, standing beside the Beetle. ‘Fifty-eight! Fifty-nine! And out … out … out!’

Jasper and Vincent ran out of the other bank’s door, threw one full bag each into the boot and themselves into the back seat. Felix jumped into the front seat, pushed the clutch and revved the engine, ready to drive.

But Leo stood there, completely still. On the square. Next to the car. He didn’t hear Felix shouting.

‘Black One – it’s been three minutes!’

He was surrounded. Everything pressed in on him. The weapon around his neck. The screaming inside the bank, her cries replacing those he hadn’t heard as a child because they never came.

A cursory glance at the roof in the distance.

He started walking back.

Felix hit the gas, without letting up on the clutch, and shouted after him.

‘Black One – it’s time, damn it!’

But Leo kept walking.

His black-clad body disappeared into the bank.

Leo’s gun lay steady in his hands when he took aim.

When he fired into the room.

Eight shots.

He hit his target with extreme precision.

When his gun was empty, Leo lowered it and turned back to the door, and stepped outside.

It was silent. Just as he remembered it back then.

Nothing surrounding him, nothing pressing in on him.

No one was screaming and screaming and screaming.

He didn’t hear the child running in fear from the tobacco kiosk across the square, nor the dog at the lamp post gnashing her jaws, nor the birds that landed on the roof, nor even the scrape of his own boots as they hit gravel and asphalt.

He moved in silence.

And now he felt what he’d felt before, that calm, peaceful breathing from deep within.

JOHN BRONCKS RAN
through the tired corridors and dark staircases of the police station, over yellow plastic carpets and grey cement floors, past the pale-green metal door that led to the garage.

At 14.52:15 a civilian operator working on the front lines in the vast hall of the municipal emergency call centre had received an alert that a robbery was underway at Handels Bank in Ösmo Square.

At 14.52:32 another operator a couple of chairs away had received an alert that another bank, SE-Bank, was being robbed, and at exactly the same location.

At 14.53:17 Karlström had stepped into Broncks’s office without knocking to say that what they’d predicted had now come to pass. Four robbers in black masks. Extensive gunfire. Swedish military weapons. Exactly three minutes.

It’s you.

Broncks kept running through the underground garage. In the past month there had been three bank robberies in the Stockholm area, and he’d been on call for every one. The Savings Bank in Upplands Väsby – three men in an Opel with a gun and an axe, arrested the same evening at an illegal club. The Cooperative Bank at Norrmalmstorg – an armed, middle-aged man arrested only an hour later in his childhood room at his parents’ home, with both the loot and a converted starting pistol under his bed. A security van on its way to the main post office – two men armed with shotguns, still at large.

But none of them had given him this feeling.

It’s you.

He started the car and passed the crime tech cage, where just a few weeks ago he’d seen something on a computer screen that didn’t make sense – a bank robber whispering, shielding his colleague, taking responsibility, on his way to one of Europe’s most violent bank robberies. The garage door automatically slid open, and Broncks drove up the incline towards the lowered barrier and the daylight.

Two brothers.

And now they’d struck again. This time it was two banks at the same time. They were taking bigger risks and would take even more.

Every time you rob a bank, I get a little closer.

The heat of four adult bodies trapped in a cold metal shell had turned into a milky fog covering the interior of the car windows as everyone breathed quick and heavy all around Felix, still with their black ski masks pulled down.

‘What the fuck was that?’ he asked Leo, not taking his eyes off the road, hands gripping the wheel tightly. A constant speed of eighty kilometres per hour.

‘You saw for yourself.’

‘No, I did not! What the hell were you up to?’

Leo also stared straight ahead. Facing the trees, which multiplied as the houses became more sparse.

‘You’re the one with two fucking watches on your arm and six separate timelines! You’re the one who’s always preaching about time, time, time!’

Leo’s shoulder collided with Felix’s as the car left a narrow road for
an even narrower one: a rugged, bumpy track fit only for tractors. His knees knocked against the bottom of the dashboard at each new bump. His jumpsuit was soaked with sweat by the time they stopped at a mound of stones at the end of a snowless path.

‘I had time.’

They all knew the drill. Out of the Beetle. Open the boot. Lift out three bags full of cash.

‘You went back!’

On to the next car, the Mercedes.

‘You went back into that bank and started shooting like a fucking idiot. You put us all at risk!’

Open the boot. Drop three bags inside. Jump in. Take the track out again towards a country road.

‘We’re sitting here. Aren’t we, Felix? If you want to whine, you can do it when we get home.’

Leo turned round.

‘And
now
, masks off.’

The fabric was pulled off, revealing four young men with damp hair glued to damp foreheads. In an oncoming car, a woman with a baby in a car seat drove by without reacting.

Jasper leaned forward from the back seat, tapped Leo’s shoulder lightly and whispered.

‘Front page.’

Felix turned towards the back with a jerk and the car swerved across the line. He didn’t whisper.

‘You shut your mouth back there.’

Leo continued to stare straight ahead, gun on his thighs, ski mask ready.

Five kilometres to the next bank.

The car in front of John Broncks stood completely still, as did the car in front of that. When he drove up onto the pavement to try to get a clearer view,
all
the cars were standing completely still, blocking every metre of asphalt from the City Hall to Central Station.

He rolled down his window, searched under his seat and grabbed a bubble-shaped light – the magnet stuck to the car roof and a blue light started spinning as his siren ricocheted between the buildings. He forced
his way out, scraping bumper after bumper, crossed the solid line, zigzagging between oncoming cars trying to find space that wasn’t there.

The whole of Stockholm’s inner core was off balance.

The streets around Central Station were either cordoned off or carrying heavy, redirected traffic. According to his radio, someone had planted a bomb in the heart of Stockholm – initially suspected to be a dummy, they had just upgraded it to a live bomb, and the bomb squad, bomb dogs, and a remote-controlled bomb robot had just arrived. Microphone in one hand and steering wheel in the other, Broncks made sharp turns as he passed the City Hall and drove out onto the equally backed-up Central Bridge.

‘I’m driving in the direction of Ösmo. How many officers on site?’

‘One.’

‘One?’

‘Another unit on its way from Nynäshamn.’

‘Two.
Two
patrol cars?’

There were multiple lanes in both directions on the short Central Bridge, but with oncoming traffic separated by a concrete ramp, he was forced, despite his blue lights and siren, to slow down as car after car tried to move aside for him.

‘That’s all we have … So far.’

‘That’s not enough. We need a SWAT team, dogs, helicopters … we’re talking about two fucking banks – at the same time!’

Old Town and Slussen and then, somewhere in the Söderled tunnel, the traffic finally started to ease up.

‘Did you hear what I said?’

A commanding officer in Nynäshamn’s precinct came back.

‘I heard you. And who – to use your own words – the hell are you? And why exactly are you heading here?’

‘John Broncks, City Police.’

‘That says nothing to me about who you are or why you’re on your way to a district you don’t have anything to do with.’

‘The bank in Svedmyra, the security van in Farsta … this is the same group. I’ve been investigating them for almost three months.’

The tunnel traffic was much more spaced out. He increased his speed slightly, towards the daylight and the long bridge in the distance.

‘They’re heavily armed – and prepared to use their weapons. Two patrol cars? You need backup!’

‘There isn’t any. The rest of the police force in this county are all crowded into a few blocks close to where you’re coming from. And you know very well why they’ve been ordered there. But there are more on their way from other districts.’