The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (45 page)

And now he met his worst nightmare.

There was a big hole in the floor just beyond the threshold. More than half a metre wide. The rebars that had once sat within the concrete had been cut, forced up, like a broken ribcage.

One of the men in uniform grabbed hold of the wooden box that sat on top of the stack closest to the door, with
KSP 58
stamped on both sides, and lifted the lid. Empty. He opened the next. Empty. The next – empty. The next – empty. His colleague chose one from the pile on the far wall, opened one after another.

A total of twenty-four empty boxes.

‘Everything … everything’s gone!’

Now they looked at him.

‘You’ve been here every night since the last inventory.’

Suddenly, he wished he had a cigarette.

‘I …’

‘Every night!’

The inspector rarely felt afraid. At this age, there wasn’t much left that scared him. But now he was, because he didn’t understand, and what you don’t understand scares you.

‘It’s … it’s intact on the outside. You can see that for yourselves! And yesterday, it was—’

‘You must have fucking well seen
something
!’

‘You went along with me. You saw the same thing. You—’

‘Somebody’s been in here, and they’ve taken every single weapon with them! Two whole companies’ worth of weapons …
gone!
’

The inspector sat down on one of the empty crates and looked around the confined space.

‘It must have happened late last night. I haven’t …’

The expressionless soldier had got down onto his knees, and was bent over the hole, shovelling away the porous concrete debris and gravel. He grabbed hold of a broken rebar, rubbed his thumb along where it had been cut, letting loose a great deal of rust.

‘This was cut a long time ago.’

EVERYTHING HAD GONE
to plan since the beginning of the year.

February: the renovation of an apartment in Old Town, a week and a half, 37,000 kronor excluding the cost of materials; then a robbery in a small town, Rimbo, about sixty kilometres north of Stockholm, that was different from the others: they’d dressed in jeans, cheap bright jackets and trainers with Velcro straps, black stockings pulled over their heads, had used fake guns, and only Leo and Vincent went inside the bank. It was an experiment in changing their identity and breaking patterns, in
case variations in their behaviour and performance should eventually become necessary, 556,000 kronor.

March: the installation of heating coils and parquet flooring in a basement in Älvsjö, one week, 10,000 kronor; then a bank robbery in Kungsör, a smaller city 140 kilometres west of Stockholm. Thirty-four minutes after their escape, the police had located the getaway car on an unmade road through woodland, but there all leads ceased. They’d continued on foot in the dark, compass and map in hand, towards a hole they’d dug in the ground earlier, stocking it with food and sleeping bags, covered with hardboard reinforced with studs and insulated with foil, and layered with dirt and moss to blend in with its surroundings, simultaneously serving as protection from the cold and from helicopters with infrared cameras. The next day they’d walked to a petrol station and rented a car, and when the roadblocks were removed, they drove home with 812,000 kronor, excluding the cost of materials.

The latest job was a 1930s house a few kilometres from Leo’s home in Tumba. He’d put in a bid low enough to undercut any other firms. Gabbe had probably wondered why, but didn’t say anything. Not much profit in it, but it wasn’t about that; with each new bank robbery their cover became more important.

The two banks had given them 1,368,000 kronor to finance their next robbery – the biggest one so far.

Now it was 4 April: inspection day. The day Leo been living with since that dark night spent pressed against the moss and bilberries. The night everything had changed.

The police would discover the missing piece of the puzzle that linked together a series of robberies, a gang whose arsenal was bigger than all the other gangs in Sweden combined.

Leo drove slowly past fields dried out by the sun after the winter. New grass was sprouting in the verge, and in a few weeks it would push away everything yellow and lifeless.

After a long, sweeping bend, he came to the military area and the locked barrier.

He slowed down a little. And then he recognised it: the car he’d watched night after night, a beaten-up Volvo, owned by an elderly inspector who usually stood in the dark smoking a couple of cigarettes. But he recognised another vehicle too – a van with military licence plates.

Now. Now he knew.

They were there. They were going to open the door, perhaps already had opened it. They would discover what had happened, and it would terrify them.

A few minutes past ten, still plenty of time to spare. The train from Falun wasn’t due to arrive until 10.37.

THIRTY-SIX VIOLENT ROBBERIES
in three months all across Sweden. Twenty-two banks, eleven security vans, two exchange offices and a pawnshop. A dramatic increase without precedent – and the gang
he
was trying to capture was certainly not responsible for them all.

John Broncks was standing in a brightly lit corridor, digging coins from his right back pocket. There were always more there than he thought.

Twelve bank robberies a month in such a small country created a state of constant, feverish anxiety and fear – this world was unfamiliar and as long as nothing changed, as long as there was no cure, they’d all sink further into the sickness – a crime pandemic. By mid-February the security vans were being given police escorts, but the banks, too numerous and too scattered, were impossible to protect from infection. Their work had been reduced to waiting for the next alarm and the next investigation.

Broncks pushed coin after coin into the vending machine.

A pandemic has a source. In this case, eight shots shaped like a smiley face in shatterproof glass. And he still had no leads, except for piles of cartridges that couldn’t be linked to any specific weapons and several wounded psyches that would never completely heal.

Smile, you bastard.

A time of change had turned into a time of confusion – which always happened when a new conceptual model was introduced, when a system fell apart and gave way to a new one, and this new model had spread almost instantly among those who were willing to take risks, those with nothing to lose. The four masked bank robbers had not only changed how the police protected likely targets, they’d changed the behaviour of the entire criminal world – other criminals looked up to that fucking
smile, read the newspapers and watched reports on TV and were inspired to copy, committing more robberies, using even more extreme violence as a tool to get more loot. An escalation between us and them. Violence had torn apart the moral compass of the criminal landscape. If we’re armed, you have to be armed, and then we need even more guns to stop you. In ten or twenty years researchers would say that this was when the banking system had been forced to change how it managed its cash handling and when ruthlessness became an admired tool, Broncks was sure of it.

He pressed the square buttons and waited while the metal spring released the first marzipan and chocolate cake. Then another one. Sugar and silver tea during the day and takeaway pizza at night. That’s how it had been since he’d joined this search that was leading nowhere. Long, aimless walks through Stockholm early in the morning and late at night to let off some of his restlessness and energy – then in the middle of the night, visits to the police station’s gym. Alone in a big room at three o’clock in the morning, he fought with dumbbells and barbells and treadmills and punchbags in order to avoid fighting people. He tore open the plastic, shoved in more green marzipan and chocolate, and swallowed, feeling a creeping disgust for the sweet goo in his mouth. But he had no choice, he had to fill the hollow inside to keep at bay the mirror image of a gaunt, pale, wiry body.

A homogeneous and close-knit group. No connections to the criminal underworld, and hence none to the network of informants that Broncks and his colleagues worked with. The group’s four members might not have a criminal record; if so they would be anonymous until they made a mistake, and they didn’t make mistakes.

The newly polished linoleum glistened in the bright light streaming through the office windows. Restless and so tired that he was wide awake, he headed towards the exit for his second walk of the day, even though it was only late morning. He zipped up his lined leather jacket; it was too warm for the spring sun, but he hadn’t yet had time to take down a thinner spring jacket from the attic.

He’d started to feel a different kind of anger in the last few weeks, an anger he didn’t recognise. He’d been watching him almost every day, a few seconds at a time, on jerky black-and-white surveillance films. The leader. The one who performed the countdown, who shot smiley faces into shatterproof glass, who was able to direct excessive force in order
to get what he wanted. That was probably what it was about, this anger. It wasn’t just violence. It was violence combined with playfulness, and that was what Broncks couldn’t relate to. The man in those pictures solved his problems like a child in an adult world, and that was why he was successful – thinking in ways they didn’t and getting around their roadblocks using the kind of magic tricks you’d find wrapped in a box under the Christmas tree. The police knew how to deal with adult criminals, but not this, an inventiveness as fascinating as it was unpleasant.

He wanted to peer inside that head, talk to it, understand it.

He headed downstairs, through four locked doors, using first his plastic card and then the key to the gate. It was brighter outside than Broncks had expected, so he closed his eyes, breathing in the mild, spring air, and set off east, towards the city centre.

Thirty-six aggravated robberies scattered the length of Sweden had taken place since the double robbery at Ösmo, and he had examined them all carefully. He was struck by two. One that followed this group’s MO to the letter, and one that was quite different.

The first in Kungsör, a sleepy little town an hour’s drive from Stockholm, a bank robbery taken straight from their manual. The leader – Broncks had started calling him
Big Brother
– always went in first and shot down the camera above the door. Then came
Little Brother
, always armed with a submachine gun, who would either jump over the counter or run around it to empty the tills. Then the third, the
Soldier
, who moved into shooting position as if the robbery were a military engagement, urban warfare, a tactical course in which he’d been given a mission. The Soldier was always armed with an assault rifle and shot down the second camera before going behind the tills to the vault. The fourth Broncks called the
Driver
, who took them to and from the site, who guarded the bank premises from the outside, and who, according to witness testimonies, drove with restraint, neither too fast nor too wildly.

When Broncks first read the witness statements and technical descriptions from the second robbery – Rimbo, north of Stockholm – he’d put it back in the folder, dismissing it as unrelated. Only two men on the bank premises. Jeans and jackets. Stockings over their heads. And they didn’t shoot down any cameras – so he’d been able to follow the entire robbery, every movement, from entrance to exit. They’d been very calm, polite to the staff, never raised their voices. They’d walked in, shown their weapons, taken the money, and left the scene in a stolen Opel Kadett.
Nothing that resembled their earlier actions. It was only after Sanna had shown him a short sequence caught by the camera on the bank’s exterior, just as she’d done once before, that he opened the folder again. Just before going inside the first man had turned round, as if checking on his colleague, put his hand on his shoulder and said something, and they had shared a lingering look. One who protected and led.
Big Brother
. One who was protected and who followed.
Little Brother
.

‘John!’

Broncks, squinting in the intense sunlight, was nearing Scheele Street when he heard hasty steps behind him.

‘Wait!’

He’d never seen his boss run before. And definitely never here. They met each other every day, but only in the corridors, or occasionally at a crime scene, except for the evening he’d visited Karlström’s beautiful home in Äppelviken.

‘A hundred and twenty-four m/45 submachine guns!’ shouted Karlström, breathless and triumphant. ‘Ninety-two AK4 automatic rifles! And five model 58 machine guns!’

‘Yeah?’

‘Quite a few, right?’

‘Depends on which war you’re fighting.’

‘What if you’re robbing banks and security vans?’

Broncks had just started an aimless walk in order to burn off nervous energy. Now he no longer needed it.

THE FOREST ROAD
climbed sharply for a couple of hundred metres, dissolving at the top of the hill into a gravelled plateau where a crowd of people mingled – uniformed policemen, soldiers in green uniforms, some in civilian clothes, and one technician in a white jumpsuit glowing in the sun. Then he found it. A small, cube-shaped building. It was around this the crowd had gathered.

Broncks greeted his colleagues from both the City and Huddinge police, representatives from military security, and an older man smelling of cigarettes
who introduced himself as the inspector, and whose anxious eyes followed him as he continued towards the building.

The white jumpsuit. Kneeling in front of a closed door of thick metal. She heard his footsteps on the gravel and turned round.

‘Hello,’ said Broncks.

‘You noticed the lock down there? At the barrier?’ said Sanna.

‘Yes.’

‘Intact. At least, it looked intact. The original had been removed and replaced with an exact replica. Even the serial numbers were the same. The key fits, but can’t be turned.’