The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (6 page)

17.54:30.

Friday evening. Two hours left. Inside the security van, Samuelson glanced at Lindén, who he’d sat next to for almost seven years, but didn’t really know at all. They’d never had a coffee together outside work, never got a beer. Sometimes that’s just how it was – two colleagues remained just that, colleagues. They didn’t even talk about their kids. He knew he and Lindén both had the same number of kids, but nowadays Lindén’s only spent every other week living at his house, and talking to people about what they had lost didn’t usually turn out too well.

The van’s headlights followed the streetlamps as it rounded the car park. They passed the people waiting for the bus or taking the escalators down to the Tunnelbana. The security guards looked around, scanning their surroundings as always: there was the hot dog kiosk near the bike rack, three women sitting on a bench with overflowing shopping bags, a man in a wheelchair and his guardian talking to a little boy around the same age as his own son, now being jerked away by his mother, a large group of adolescents a little further away, jostling each other and trying to decide where to go – a crowd just like on any other evening.

They took the sharp bend at the bus turning area, then a small swerve, and then came the monotonous beep as the security van reversed down the sloping loading bay to the locked back door.

Lindén turned off the engine, and they looked at each other, a quick nod; they’d both read this place the same way – peaceful for rush hour in a capital city. Samuelson opened his door and took a single step towards the back door. The money was always kept two corridors away in the chief of security’s office: two cloth bags on an otherwise empty desktop – banknotes and coins and a handwritten receipt in red ink: 1,324,573 kronor.

Friday was the most profitable day of the week for Swedish exchange offices – and Farsta was the last collection for this particular armoured vehicle on this particular route. The point at which it contained the most money.

17.56.

Leo had chosen the target, the time, and the location of the attack. He knew the wheelchair would only get them as far as the ramp to the loading
bay. Aware that there would be nowhere to hide, they would have to overpower the guard during his two steps from the building’s back door to the passenger door of the van. And they would have to do it without alerting anyone.

17.57.

They waited. They squinted at the metal door down below.

Now.

The short, humming signal of a lock being opened.

Now.
Now
.

Leo and Jasper grabbed hold of their extended polo necks, pulled them up over their necks and chins and noses, and let go just below the eyes.

They exposed the AK4 under the yellow blanket and the submachine gun hanging under Jasper’s long coat.

Forcefully and simultaneously, they heaved themselves onto the wall and jumped down towards the truck in the loading bay.

Samuelson was leaning against the metal door, a green security bag in his hand.

Then he heard it – two beeps from the radio. The go-ahead.

He opened the door, went out onto the loading bay and heard a click from inside the truck, just like always, as Lindén opened the rear door to the secure area.

Lindén was sitting in the driver’s seat when he saw Samuelson exit with the security bag. He pressed the button engaging the internal lock and was about to turn towards his colleague when he saw something else. Nothing clear, more like a fragment, something you try to piece together without quite understanding it. First, he saw through the windscreen that the wheelchair he’d seen in the crowd earlier was lying overturned on the pavement above, empty. And then, in one of the wing mirrors, he saw a movement, as if someone was falling towards him from the wall embrasure, someone whose face was completely, almost inhumanly black. And finally, Samuelson opened the side door
Run!
and threw himself inside
For fuck’s sake run!
and rolled across the floor of the van seeking cover.

‘
Open door!
’

The single second he needed in order to understand.

And it gave him the time he needed to key in the first code, and the steel door to the safe slid down again, blocking the way to the money. Then the two seconds he needed to enter the second code – four digits on the dashboard in order to turn the ignition key.

‘
Jalla jalla, open door!
’

It was too late. Someone had landed on the bonnet. A black mask and staring eyes and an automatic weapon aimed at him.

Lindén didn’t raise his arms, didn’t turn towards the door.

He did nothing.

And that big metal barrel got bigger, closer.

He’d been imagining this every day for seven years, every time he scanned a crowd, but when it happened, it wasn’t at all like he imagined. It started in the chest, right in the middle, and then pushed all the way to his throat. And he couldn’t get rid of it despite his screaming.

‘You open fucking door!’

And then he understood. He wasn’t able to get rid of it because he wasn’t the one screaming. Someone else was. Next to him. And there was another one – outside his window. Another face with the same mask, black fabric over his chin, nose, cheeks, up to his eyes. But with another kind of voice. Desperate. Not meaner, not louder, but more desperate.

Someone was going to die. That’s what he felt in his chest. Death.

The window shattered, and his only thought was how harsh it sounded to have someone stand so close by shooting at you. He was aware of two shots and threw himself backwards, his back and head pressed against the seat. The third bullet struck his chin and larynx, the fourth hit the dashboard and the fifth the passenger door, while he automatically pulled the control centre alarm.

‘You open door!’

It takes three seconds to empty thirty bullets out of the magazine of a submachine gun. The five shots through the van window that Jasper had just fired took half a second, but it had felt so much longer.

‘You open or you die!’

Leo stood on the bonnet of the van with his gun aimed at the security guard in the driver’s seat, while Jasper beat the muzzle of the submachine
gun against the partially broken safety glass. Until the second guard, who was lying on floor, lifted his arms over his head.

Samuelson looked at Lindén, at his neck, at the blood flowing from it – he’d never thought about how red blood is when it’s fresh. He’d got up, arms above his head, opened the door on the passenger side and let in the masked man from the bonnet of the van, who now stood inside the cab aiming a gun against his temple and speaking in broken English, asking him to unlock the safe. He tried to explain. But he couldn’t find the words. Not in English. He wanted to explain that from now on the safe door was locked, and that it could only be opened with a code held at headquarters. He searched for words that just weren’t there, while the masked man listened and waited, so quiet and restrained, not like the other one with the desperate voice, who’d fired through the window. This was the face that made the decisions, that was clear, even as the muzzle pressed a little harder against his temple.