The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (46 page)

There was a large hole in the ground at Sanna’s feet.

‘Just like here. Everything looked intact.’

Sanna nodded towards the civilian with anxious eyes.

‘He’s been inspecting this bunker every evening and hasn’t spotted anything. From the outside.’

She strained against the heavy security door as she opened it. She moved slightly to the side to let Broncks look in.

‘This is how the perpetrators got inside. A tunnel underneath the building. It was completely filled, we’ve just dug it up again now.’

She went inside and he followed her into the cramped, sealed space. He thought of his big brother.

‘They did a good job.’

Olive-coloured boxes, all opened and stacked on top of each other along the walls. On the part of the floor that was still whole, the lids had been stacked in a high pile.
AK4, submachine gun m/45, KSP 58
in black, slightly sharp type.

‘They made efforts to hide what they’d done, and they succeeded.’

‘So this is where it began,’ he replied. ‘The unknown variable.’

‘What variable?’

He crouched down, a layer of cement and dust on the knee of his trousers.

‘Farsta. Svedmyra and Ösmo. Rimbo and Kungsör.’

‘What variable, John?’

He put his hand against the edges and bottom of the hole. The starting point. For the late nights, early mornings and long weekends, and always he was still running behind, arriving too late. With his arm deep in a void of damp gravel, he was just as impressed as he was pissed off.

‘If you’ve never been to jail, if you have no weapons, nor any criminal ties to get weapons through, but you want to build your own criminal operation – what do you do? You simply get them from an arms dump.’

‘Never been to jail? John, did you visit him?’

John Broncks didn’t respond. He didn’t need to. They knew each other in a way that made hiding something like that impossible. And they smiled, quickly, at each other, before he broke away and went outside.

According to the forensic investigation of a total of five aggravated robberies, the group had never fired any weapon more than once. Broncks had been assuming that after each bank robbery their weapons had been scrapped and replaced by new ones so that the crimes they committed would never be linked technically, and so
if
the perpetrators were arrested none of them would be linked to more than one robbery.

But now he had the missing variable: 221. If they continued using an average of two automatic weapons for each new robbery, they would have enough weapons to commit 110 bank robberies.

That is unless someone caught them.

A beautiful, arched ceiling. Infinity. Leo always got the same feeling when he found himself in a vaulted stone hall like that of Central Station – the feeling that it went on for ever.

He proceeded towards platform seven, where trains came in from the north, and made his way under the sheltering roof. He’d always felt most at home in buildings that echoed and stretched out, buildings with open spaces, and he often stopped and leaned his head back to look upward, something people rarely did. Every time he did, he thought of the very first time – when they’d visited Stockholm Cathedral. Mamma had wanted them to see the statue of St George and the dragon, but he’d already discovered the vaulted ceiling, and was standing on tiptoe, trying to touch it even though Mamma kept pointing to the large pedestal of St George in shining armour, a sword raised above his head and a roaring dragon under his horse’s hooves. A moment frozen in time. The moment before it was all over. When the dragon might still wriggle away and tear down the weakling hiding behind his armour and horse.

He’d also frozen for a moment.

He’d stopped time, right here, in Central Station. Travellers had been kept waiting behind wire fences, while most of the police in the Stockholm
region manned the barricades and guarded the bomb robots. A moment that had stretched out for several hours, as the system shuddered to a halt both before and after an explosion that should never have happened. And now it was as if it never had.

He wasn’t sure that Jasper hadn’t actually taken out the safety ring, but he’d decided not to ask again. He didn’t want to risk getting the wrong answer. He wanted to keep the ever-widening fissure between Felix and Jasper from growing any further. He’d stepped in between them and stayed there, forcing them to treat each other professionally while simultaneously minimising the number of occasions they needed to work together.

In the distance a train rolled in and came to a stop. All the doors opened, and the passengers swarmed out with suitcases and buggies. He could see her, a woman in her fifties, with strawberry-blonde hair that had grown a little greyer and a step that wasn’t quite so light. He waited there watching her, and after a moment of searching she looked at him too. But didn’t keep walking. Instead, she took out her phone, and his rang.

‘Where are you?’ she asked.

He smiled.

‘I’m standing here. Right in front of you.’

‘I can’t see you.’

There are people between us. But I’m here, I can see you. And you can see me.

‘I’m waving.’

He raised his hand until she saw it, lowered her phone and walked towards him. They hugged. Then she took a step back to study him.

‘Dear lord, how strange! I didn’t recognise you.’

‘It’s only been a year.’

‘More like, I recognised you, but I didn’t see you. It was as if … I was looking for someone else.’

‘Mamma.’

He hugged her again, and she examined him again.

‘You’re older.’

‘I
am
older.’

‘It’s not a bad thing. I don’t mean it like that. It’s just … I don’t know, maybe just time.’

He tried to take her bag, but she held it up to show she could manage by herself and set off along the platform, through Central Station, towards his car outside – when she stopped.

‘Was it here?’

In the middle of the arrivals hall. In front of the long row of lockers.

‘I saw it on TV. There was police tape all across the hall, and people waiting for their trains.’

She looked at him, remembering other police tape, fluttering in the air around a much smaller house after a different kind of bomb. A basement and her father running back and forth as the flames grew, and in the midst of everything her ten-year-old son had looked at her through the window, so scared.

‘Fucking idiots!’

She put her hand on Leo’s arm. He couldn’t look at her, so he took hold of her bag and wouldn’t let go until she let him carry it.

‘The idiots were lucky, Mamma. No one died.’

The company truck was waiting for them not far from the exit, a parking ticket under one wiper. He tore it up and dropped it on the asphalt, while his mother walked around both the vehicle and him, nodding proudly at the logo on the door:
CONSTRUCTION LTD
.

‘You built this, Leo. Just you. You made sure you had a job. And that Felix and Vincent had jobs, too.’

She hugged him again.

They drove south through Stockholm. He hesitated for a moment at the exit after Hallunda with his mother in the seat next to him, but then switched to the right-hand lane and left the E4 for the old main road – he wanted to drive past, to slow down just before the barrier.

The shabby blue Volvo and the military van were still there. And beside them, four cop cars. Three in official livery and one unmarked. Blue-and-white police tape hung like another gate and two armed police officers stood on guard in front of it.

‘Something’s happened.’

His mother had noticed him glancing in that direction, and she knocked on her window and pointed.

‘Leo, do you see it? That plastic tape … that always means something bad has happened.’

He increased his speed again and the cars, the uniforms, even the police tape faded away in his rear-view mirror.

Now everyone knew.

Broncks looked at the growing crowd, which still consisted mostly of policemen and soldiers.

‘That guy there, Sanna, in civilian clothing. Who did you say he was?’

‘The inspector. He’s followed every step I’ve taken. As if this was … personal.’

Broncks zigzagged between uniforms and walked his way with his hand extended.

‘John Broncks. City Police. We met briefly when I arrived.’

‘Joachim Nielsen. FO 44. And I know what you’re thinking.’

The smell of cigarettes was stronger when he stood closer to him.

‘And what am I thinking?’

‘That I should have seen it.’

‘Should you have?’

‘I have followed protocol to the letter. All the instructions that are part of my job description.’

He stopped. From the woods, just behind them, two people were approaching. A woman and a man with a camera in hand. Broncks recognised the woman. A journalist. A pretty good one. They must have made a wide circle around the roadblock. But she shouldn’t be here, not yet, it was too early.

‘So much for secrecy.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Always somebody who tips off the media to make an easy ten thousand.’

They waited while the journalist and the photographer were shooed away, not roughly, but firmly.

‘So who was it? Whose hands are the weapons in?’

Broncks shook his head slightly.

‘I don’t know who they are. But I know what they’ve been using them for.’

The crowd was getting larger. Another four men had climbed up the steep hill and onto the gravel. Two in suits and two in uniform. From the National Bureau of Investigation and the security department of the Commander-in-Chief. They nodded to the inspector, who seemed much less anxious, as if this was what he’d been waiting for.

Broncks shook the inspector’s hand – he would probably be redeployed very soon – then went back to the empty storage space and the smell of gunpowder.

They’d broken in sometime between the fourth and the nineteenth of
October, between the previous inventory and the hijacking of a security van in Farsta.

Nearly six months ago.

Where the hell do you hide a whole regiment’s worth of weapons for that long?

Late morning light lit up the spacious garage. The floor was stained with oil and paint, and the large workbench on which they’d sawn apart a safe and built a bomb was now covered by cardboard boxes filled with nails and a small pile of tools under a couple of metres of rounded oak mouldings. Leo let his mother step in first, walk down the strip of light in a room that never seemed to end.

‘We do quite a bit of preparation here,’ he said.

‘Preparation?’

‘Structures, models, that sort of thing.’

She looked proud.

‘I’m so glad you’re doing well. And that you’re taking care of Vincent and Felix. And all this is yours?’

‘Ours. We need a lot of space, Mamma. The company is expanding.’

She pushed the oak mouldings aside and picked up a hammer, twisted and turned it, a screwdriver, a wrench, and then picked up what was underneath – a packet of cigarettes.

‘What’s this?’

‘You can see what it is.’

‘Do you smoke?’

‘Sometimes.’