The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (73 page)

John Broncks had seen eyes like those before.

You. Or me.

But these eyes, which Broncks now met, belonged to his own side, embedded in a black face mask.

The national SWAT team. Sixteen elite police officers deployed in the snow and taking cover behind thick fir trunks, with automatic rifles and sniper rifles.

The search area had finally shrunk to nothing.

Four heavy vehicles, at Broncks’s request, had left headquarters and fifty-seven minutes later rolled down the country road just a few kilometres northwest of town, cars rebuilt and reinforced until they were almost like small tanks. Meanwhile, a K9 unit had followed the trail from a getaway car to the house they’d just surrounded. Tracks all the way up to the front door. Six feet, three pairs, and he now knew that they belonged to a father and a son and his son’s childhood friend, armed with Swedish AK4s and with plenty of ammunition. She’d finally told them, the woman who had pretended to be confused, right down to the exact number of magazines each of them wore in their homemade vests.

‘How much longer – if you were to guess?’ Broncks asked the squad leader.

‘We’re in no hurry,’ he replied.

‘The dog handler estimates they’ve been there about thirty minutes.’

‘We’re waiting for the right moment.’

It had stopped snowing. The chill had subsided. John Broncks was looking at a scene from a beautiful Christmas card. That’s how it looked. Peaceful. A brightly lit cottage, snow soft as cotton along the gutters and on the fruit trees, smoke coming from the brick chimney.

It was no Christmas card.

The light in what was probably the kitchen had been lit by armed robbers, who on their way there hadn’t hesitated to shoot at the pursuing officers. And who in the course of ten aggravated robberies had fired more shots among living people than any previous Swedish criminal gang.

The SWAT team had already tried to call them once.

Now he dialled the number of the house’s landline. They could hear it ringing inside through crevices and windows. It was an attempt to urge the people inside to come out voluntarily, with their hands up. A repeated ringing that eventually ended without anyone picking up the phone.

Either way, they got their answer. All the lights were extinguished simultaneously.

They wouldn’t be giving up.

THREE AND A
half million kronor is less than you’d think. It doesn’t even fill up a duffel bag. And when you push bundle after bundle of it into crackling orange flames, they turn to ashes that hardly take up any space at all.

Ivan lay down on the living room floor.

‘Leo?’

His son passed close to his head as he crawled towards the window, so close that he could have grabbed on to his boots. His whole body hunched over, tense, as he gently unlatched the windowpane and pressed it outwards, until the snow on the ledge was pushed away.

A small gap. Their way out.

‘I know what you’re up to.’

Ivan got up on his knees beside his son.

‘Leo, don’t do it.’

Weak light outside in the clear cold. Scattered stars, the waning half-moon. And in the window, he could see the reflection of their four eyes, just as they’d once looked at each other in the narrow space at the top of a graffiti-covered mirror, riding up in the lift. He’d run downstairs in his bare feet, down seven storeys, convinced he had lost him.

‘
Don’t do it
.’

The reflection of four eyes in the glass. They were just as clear to Leo. And he knew what he saw in two of them.

Doubt.

‘They’ll use tear gas, Dad. That’s always how they start. They
think
they can surprise us. That’s when we get out. Here. Through the window.’

This man, older and weaker than the one he’d once hung on to while he threw punch after punch, the only time he’d embraced him and understood how powerful that body was.

‘That’s when we get our opening, like right after the first few shots in a bank robbery, when only we know and can act. Maybe the fuckers think they’ve figured out what guns we have – but they don’t know shit about the hand grenades. That’s how we strike. How
we
attack
them
.’

He’d hung around that neck once, hugging him away.
Don’t do it
. This wasn’t the same body; now it was exhausted, its power drained.

‘If we don’t act when we get our opening – then it’s too late. We’ll never get out of here.’

Doubt. That’s what he saw. As only someone who is powerless has doubt.

‘When the tear gas gets here we’ll throw two grenades out, right away. They’re not counting on that. You and I get out first while Jasper holds them back with as many magazines as he needs. We take cover and do the same thing until Jasper’s made it out. We have plenty of ammunition. You can do it, Dad, dance and hit, dance around the bear. It’s bigger, but we can win, we can take it, if we dance and hit well. Right?’

Ivan stood up. He wanted to take hold of his son’s shoulders, hold them tightly, shake him and scream until he listened.

‘If we dance around them, we can win. If we strike when they think they have the upper hand. Pull your mask on, Dad, and get ready!’

‘Win?’

Ivan didn’t hold him, that would end in disaster. And he didn’t scream. But he was finally able to speak.

‘Why did you burn the money if you thought you could get away? If
we meet them out there with guns, it’ll go to hell. It’ll go black. It’ll rot. Death spreads upwards.’

As Leo was listening to him, he wasn’t getting ready. And if he wasn’t getting ready, he couldn’t rush out there, to the people surrounding them preparing to shoot.

‘That guy there, who thinks he’s a ranger, running around talking about “no masks” and “front pages”! Leo? How the hell can you listen to that shit? Felix and Vincent, do they have to see you dead on the fucking front page, is that what you want?’

‘And since when did you give a shit about them? Put on your fucking mask now!’

Leo pulled the black fabric over his face, obliterating his facial features.

‘I told you. I’m never sitting there again! Opposite some fucking cop!
Never!
Put your mask on now, Dad! Otherwise I’ll leave you here!’

His son was on his way. Out. Away. He wasn’t listening any more.

And that power, whatever remained, an echo of someone else in another time, of another man, that power disappeared completely now, and he did the one thing he still could.

‘Leo, I know you didn’t snitch on me.’

Snitch
.

‘I’ve always known.’

Snitch
.

‘I mean what I say, Leo. You didn’t snitch on me. I know the police lied to me. That you didn’t talk. I saw the bandage on his hand.’

A black mask on his face. A cocked gun in his hand.

It didn’t matter.

Leo wasn’t preparing for war any more – it had worked. As long as Ivan got him to listen, he could also keep him alive.

‘Then why the hell did you say it?’

‘I thought it was better that way.’

‘You thought it was … better?’

‘Yes.’

‘How the hell … first you smash everything, then you just give up and wait for the police to arrive. And then you blame me!’

His father was now looking up at him from the floor.

‘You’ve kept on with that,’ Leo continued. ‘Kept on and on!
Snitch
. It never fucking stopped! And you thought it was … better that way?’

The others, out in the dark, were in position for an attack.

And Jasper, who was crawling across the floor behind him with a hand grenade, put his finger through the pin as he approached the other living room window.

‘Leo – if we don’t leave now we’re going to die!’ said Jasper.

‘Wait,’ hissed Leo.

He saw Jasper push the curtains aside and stick up his head, peering out.

‘I see them! We have to get out! They’ll shoot the shit out of us!’

‘Shut up!’

‘Now, Leo! Before it’s too late!’

‘Jasper? Shut up! I’m talking to my father, can’t you see that!’

He’d already cocked his gun.

‘Better … that way? Dad?
Better?
’

Now he raised it.

‘It’s you I should fucking shoot! Not them! You!’

Leo breathed in, held the barrel of the gun steady, and he felt utterly calm. There was no shaking. Not in him or his father.

THAT WAS WHEN
the first window shattered.

They’d chosen the kitchen.

A spinning tear-gas grenade spread its white vapour cloud from the warm kitchen into the living room. Then they were running, all three, into the bedroom as the next tube smashed the window and started to spin. And when the two gas clouds met, they turned into a gas avalanche.

‘Lie down!’

Leo threw himself on the floor. Ivan threw himself down beside him, while Jasper stood in his black mask.

‘Damn it, lie down! Jasper, you have to …’

But he couldn’t have heard the end, as it was drowned out by three shots fired from somewhere inside the white cloud. He had time to think that, in all that light, Jasper’s blood looked redder than he expected as it fell on him.

That was when his eyelids started to twitch, convulsively, and the tears gushed out of him as ducts and mucous membranes ceased to function.

‘Drop your weapon!’

Muffled voices coming from gas masks above him, in the midst of the gas avalanche, and they were screaming.

‘Lie the fuck down and don’t touch your weapon!’

Leo was blind. His tongue burned and his chest was like a balloon that needed to burst and he threw up, from deep, deep within. Someone pushed him to the floor, screaming and constraining. Someone else bound his legs, kicked him several times in the side. And someone else held his hands. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, but the hand that held him felt familiar, big, the callouses where they’d always been.

His father had talked and talked, deliberately delaying, throwing him off balance, and he hadn’t had time to run outside.

And suddenly it was real, what could never happen. Being arrested had never been an option.

But now it was the only one left.

CHRISTMAS EVE MORNING
. Or dawn. Or late night. John Broncks had no idea.

He knew it was dark outside and that the city was still asleep. And here he sat, a detective alone in his office, staring at a taped-up cardboard box with his door open to the silent corridor. And it didn’t feel like it should. Even though a fourteen-month investigation – theories, frustrations, hunting, hopelessness, anger, and sometimes even hatred – was over. Even though Big Brother now sat just a few hundred metres away in a cell somewhere else in the police station, and the Soldier had been transported to the Karolinska hospital’s intensive care unit. Even though Little Brother and the Driver had been found in a rented apartment in the centre of Gothenburg, with detectives in place outside and a SWAT team ready to go in. And even though two of them had never before featured in the investigation – the older man now in a local Uppsala prison and the woman in the female section of Kronoberg jail, one floor below Big Brother.

Even though he now knew this had all been about a family.

Three brothers. A childhood friend. A girlfriend. And a father.

An entire family.

He should be celebrating, laughing, cheering. But he wasn’t. Fourteen months – and nothing.

Maybe he should never have called her. Maybe that was why.

It had felt so right.

He had gone out to the car that was outside Heby’s small police station and found it completely covered in snow. He’d retrieved the shovel from behind the front door of the police station and thrown half a metre of snow from the road onto the pavement, then pushed even more from the roof and windows and bonnet with his arms, and finally scraped down the membrane of ice that clung to the windscreen and refused to let go. A slow trip back through the chaos caused by the snow. He’d just made it to Enköping when he first called. They hadn’t spoken to each other for a long time. In the last few months they’d only seen each other in the company of their colleagues on opposite sides of square tables in conference rooms, or quickly said hello on their way in opposite directions down the corridor. He’d called, but hung up after only one ring. After another ten or twenty minutes, he’d called again. And hung up when she answered. Twenty or thirty kilometres later, near Jakobsberg, it rang four times before she answered, and her voice had been sharp, and he’d sat silently with the phone in his hand.

‘John? I can see it’s you.’

He held the phone to his left cheek and ear.

‘John, what are you doing?’

Pushed it hard.

‘John, you, it—’

‘It’s over.’

‘Over?’ Sanna’s voice changed, no longer so sharp. ‘I’ve been trying to explain that to you for so long! I’m so happy to hear that, relieved, that you understand, John, I—’

‘No, I mean,
they’re
over now.’

‘Pardon?’

‘We got them. Tonight. Heby.
It’s them
. Three brothers and their childhood friend. The youngest had just turned eighteen. None with a record. We were chasing a bunch of brats, who’ve turned Sweden upside down. Fourteen months – and it’s over, Sanna.’

It had been quiet for a while after that, because neither of them really knew how to carry on. And it had been possible to hear two lives. She had recognised the sound of someone sitting in a car, going somewhere. He had recognised the buzz of voices in a home, someone surrounded by people.

Children’s voices. One crying a little, one asking for Mummy.

‘John?’

‘Do you have … are those children?’

‘You woke us up.’

‘You’ve got kids?’

‘Two. A girl, she’s four. A boy, almost two.’

‘You never said anything.’

‘Why would I?’

The hum was clearer now, as if she’d turned the phone to more directly capture the sound of the two children who’d just woken up.