Life Deluxe (12 page)

Past the guest room. Patrik wasn’t there. Then through the hallway. There he was, Patrik. Waiting, watching. She walked past the TV room. She peered down the stars into the rec and safe rooms. Goran was standing at a window, looking out.

She walked toward the kitchen. Wanted to talk to Mom. Wanted to drink a cup of tea. Wanted to find out where Viktor’d disappeared to.

She opened the door. Stefanovic was sitting in there, talking to a man she’d seen before. Big build, mouse-colored hair, Swedish. According to Dad, he was a former cop. The man got up, offered her his hand.

“Good morning, Natalie. Do you recognize me? My name is Thomas Andrén. I’m sorry that we had to drive your boyfriend home.”

His grip was firm—but not in that exaggerated way that many of Dad’s employees used.

“What’s going on?” she asked. “I thought there’d been enough people in this house lately.” The comment was directed at Stefanovic.

Thomas Andrén smiled. Said, “Your dad is coming home in an hour.”

*

Those who are best in my domain are the ones who are able to discern patterns the quickest. I thought I was one of them
.

Humans are creatures of habit. A creature that functions in accordance with structures. Every person’s way of moving and living their life becomes a pattern, a structure that must be dissected and analyzed
.

It was a failure. I acted like an amateur, a rookie, a B-player who tried to
go through with the attack without proper insight. I didn’t even get in touch with my employer. I was ashamed, like a child who gets his knuckles rapped
.

I tried to reconstruct the sequence of events in the days that followed. Why did things end up the way they did? I went through my notes. Looked at my surveillance photos, cleaned and checked my weapons. Reached the same conclusion over and over again. First of all: I know that he almost always wears a protective vest. Still, I chose a distance that demanded shots to the body. Second of all: I know he usually has a bodyguard. Still, I chose a location where it was easy to protect him
.

What’s more, when he’d exited the elevator and was about to step into the line of fire, Radovan’d veered to the right instead of to the left, where his car was parked. He’d arrived in one car but decided to leave in another. I should have aborted the mission at that point
.

I thought about the hit that I executed against Puljev in 2004, at that discothèque in St. Petersburg. I made my way past four bodyguards and shot him at a distance of sixteen feet. I knew he wore a bulletproof vest. One shot to the forehead was all it took, I could handle it at that distance
.

But Radovan wasn’t stupid
.

I admit to myself that I underestimated him. I thought that little Serb would be more naïve and less vigilant than his peers out in Europe just because he was the king of peaceful Sweden. But I was the one who was naïve. I was the one who was unvigilant
.

My client obviously knew that I’d failed. The Swedish newspapers apparently loved to hate Radovan Kranjic. I saw pictures on news bills, understood fragments of headlines, flipped through page-long special features
.

But I knew an opening would arise somewhere
.

All I had to do was wait. In the end, my client would get what he wanted
.

Jorge was sitting at one of the surf computers at a 7-Eleven.

7-Eleven: colorful signs about special deals. Coffee and a bun for only fifteen kronor—these were the kinds of places that seriously tripped up real café owners. J-boy drank a Red Bull instead.

His duffel bag was at his feet. In the duffel: a gat. Walther PPK. The police’s old model. Plus four full magazines. The thought that was burning in his head:
What if something happened?
At the same time: nothing could happen. He was just sitting here, surfing—chill, nothing suspicious. Drop the paranoia,
huevon
.

He needed to concentrate. Repeated one of the Finn’s rules to himself: no surfing on your own computer. Always left a trail. IP addresses, stuff on the computer’s hard drive. Jorge was no hacker, but he understood this much: the five-oh always managed to dig shit up, even if you deleted it. So 7-Eleven was perfect—he could do his surfing on public waves.

The research for the day: places on the Web that sold jammers.

The Finn’d given him a few addresses he thought would work. Jorge was even prepared to head to Poland and pick up a jammer on the spot.

He gulped some Red Bull. A sweet artificial taste. Still good.

He needed the energy. The past couple of days: he’d worked 110 percent with the CIT plan. Never dropped the hit. Endless planning and shit to take care of. Constantly on his mind. The café had to run itself for a while—they gave Beatrice more responsibility.

He glanced away from the computer. The evening papers were screaming out the latest global headline:
YOUR COUGH COULD BE A FATAL ILLNESS
. That was standard news in those shit papers. Some headlines Jorge’d seen over the past few years:
HEADACHES: A LETHAL AFFLICTION. STOMACHACHES ARE EXTREMELY SERIOUS. STUBBLE CAN BE AN INDICATION OF DEATH
. According to those rags: Jorge should’ve
been deader than Michael Jackson and 2Pac combined ten years ago at least.

Still: today was the first day they weren’t going on about the attempted murder of Radovan the Cock Kranjic. Too bad—Jorge liked the fact that someone’d tried to pop that fucker.

Back to the plan. The keys to a successful hit, according to the Finn: advance planning, serious preparation, tight players. Jorge called it his
mandamientos
. Every part: a commandment. A foundation. A pillar. Every
mandamiento
: a law that CIT kings followed.

Detailed breakdown: advance planning, necessary for any pro. The Finn never let up about that: it was truer than all Scorsese films combined. Didn’t matter how ill your plans were—if you started scheming too short before the hit, you were gonna run into trouble. Without good lead time, the pigs’d be able to trace your tracks back in time. They were like fighting dogs: once their jaws clamped down, they didn’t release their grip. Cracked your excuses like an egg against a frying pan.

Jorge knew even more. Buddies who’d been busted told stories you couldn’t trust. They were always
soo
smart. But J-boy was smarter. He read up on things on his own. Got help from Tom Lehtimäki to order a bunch of court records. Courts all over Sweden sent fat stacks of paper to a P.O. box he’d rigged under a false name. The heli-robbery, the Akalla robbery, the Hallunda robbery. Jorge studied hard, sat with paper and pen in hand. Learned the mistakes others’d made. The clowns who’d fucked up—hadn’t had tight alibis, babbled like bitches in the police interrogations, hadn’t clocked that the cops might’ve had wiretaps, lived it up like billionaires in the days immediately following their hits. He understood how the police traced the steps you’d taken. How they questioned you on the spot when you were picked up. Pressured you in interrogations at the police station. Pulled fast ones on you in the courtrooms.

“We can see here that all of you put new SIM cards in your phones on the day before the event.”

“It has come to light that you purchased two magazines for an assault rifle two days before the event.”

“There is evidence that you were ten people in a studio apartment the week before the robbery. Why?”

Why?
That question should never even come up.

Planning: The Finn’s second rule. Honestly: most of the people who attempted hits weren’t exactly the sharpest tools in the shed. Classic: boys with top-shelf confidence overestimated themselves more than the Svens overestimated the national soccer team in the World Cup. The jackpot every
hombre
thought would come rattling in at some point in their lives. Flip the script and make Sweden shake. Seemed so easy to do something so hard. Tightly packed dollar bills in briefcases. No, that was a
fugazy
.

Actually: planning meant mad research. Above all: a fat headache. Jorge never would’ve been able to do it without the Finn, and it was still gonna be tough. But all the same: in the end, the responsibility rested on his shoulders—a heavy burden to bear. How the fuck would it work? The answer was clear. Spelled p-l-a-n-n-i-n-g.

And last but not the runt, the most important rule. The rule that you must never forget. The Finn’s third pillar. Repeated again and again.

Team members who were 100 percent.

The Finn nagged: “Are your bros trustworthy?”

J-boy understood.

One single rat—and it could all go to hell. Some cunt couldn’t take the pressure, caved to the cops’ promises about reduced sentences, personal protection, a new identity, money, a house in the country somewhere, a discount on their punishment. Slippery interrogators played nice. Cop swine served pizza in the jail cell and brought a porno over at night. One single canary sang, and that was it. One single cunt’s cowardly confession. It could be enough for a prosecution. Worse: it could be enough for a conviction.

And that was why you had to know that you were surrounding yourself with ass-tight bros. Not just ones that wouldn’t ordinarily snitch—no one did that. They had to be built to handle more pressure than that. Had any of them ever collaborated with an authority? Had any of them been in jail for months with full restrictions? Max one hour per day outside in fifty-square-foot rec cages—the only time in the day you could smoke. No contact with other inmates, no TV. No phone calls or letters to the outside world, not to their
amigos
or to their mama. Just by themselves. Alone.

How had they acted? Talked? Handled the five-oh?

He thought of the forms that the Red & White Crew and other gangs had their prospects fill out—like a fucking application to continuing ed or something. Maybe Jorge should do that too.

But he knew Mahmud, Javier, and Sergio inside out. Tom was 100 percent. Mahmud swore on Robert. Tom swore on Jimmy and Viktor.

They were tighter than the gangs with their vests and made-up regulations—the heaviest hitters never rocked idiot shit like that: that was like attracting the cops’ attention on purpose. The heaviest hitters operated without being seen.

Still: the third pillar—if you compromised with that, you deserved to do time.

He thought about the progress he’d been making over the past few weeks.

He’d searched on Google Earth like a freak. Satellite photos over Tomteboda: mad
Enemy of the State
shit. You could see everything: cars, fences, the control booths by the entrances, the train tracks, the loading docks. You could even angle the images in 3D. Move back and forth like in a computer game. Jesus—it was so awesome. He tried to order blueprints of the reloading facility—got shot down. Apparently classified. He wondered why WikiLeaks only released documents for terrorists but nothing for robbers.

The Finn got hold of hand-drawn blueprints instead. Jorge studied them as if he’d just been admitted into a program for security room architecture. The Finn drew lines on the paper:
This is how we get out
.

He lifted a digital camera from Media Markt. A small piece: Sony, three hundred grams. He and Mahmud let an old drunk rent a car for them and headed out to Tomteboda. Drove around half the afternoon. Ill espionage setup. Learned the roads. Got acquainted with the signs, the roundabouts, the number of lanes. Got closer, bit by bit. Taped the camera to the instrument panel with duct tape. Wrapped a T-shirt around it. Boom: hidden recording device.

Spring for real now: small white flowers in the lawns, leftover sand on the roads, defrosted dog shit on the sidewalks.

Tomteboda glimpsed in the distance. A huge building: two thousand feet long. Outer shell of sheet metal. Glassed-in rooms that jutted out, pillars and elevator shafts on the outsides of the walls. Thick pipes,
air-conditioning ducts, awnings, drainpipes, chimneys, and lots of shit everywhere. The place looked like a spaceship.