The Tunnel Read online

  In the end he had said yes, and he knew why. Because he missed it. Because life had grown boring. It was so banal. He missed the excitement, planning the minute details of a job, the feeling of being in control in the midst of a chaotic situation.

  What about Zoran? he thought. What were his reasons? The dream of the perfect heist? Money troubles? Or was he bored and in it for kicks just like Jorma?

  A man walked in from Värtavägen to stand by one of the soccer goals on the field. The middleman. He recognized him: Hillerström. He had contacted him about robbing a cash depot last summer. But it had never come to fruition because Jorma had decided to pull out.

  A dot in the distance started moving toward them from Lindarängsvägen. He could tell by the way it moved that it was Zoran. Confident, but still on guard. There were a certain number of chickenshits in the business, people who lost it when things got hot, but not Zoran. He would rather take a bullet.

  “I have an insider at a cash-in-transit company,” Hillerström said after they’d made it through hellos. “The guy seems dependable and the job has to be done soon for various reasons. The way I see it, it’s a great opportunity. The haul is somewhere between five and eight million. 10 percent goes to me, as a fee.”

  Neither Jorma nor Zoran said anything, and Hillerström seemed to know what they were thinking.

  “I know. People claim it’s not worth the risk these days. The new trucks have immobilizers and security cams, bags are better at self-destruction. But this is going to work . . . The company is called Trans Security. It’s been around since 2002 but hasn’t made much of a splash. They deal with the same sort of thing as Loomis and Falck, but on a smaller scale. They handle cash and they pick up and deliver night deposit boxes. Apparently they’ve never been targeted in a robbery, but there’s a first time for everything.”

  One month earlier, the company had suffered a garage fire. The owner had been sloppy with fire prevention regulations. Two vehicles were completely destroyed and the company would have to rely on old trucks until mid-September, when new vehicles would arrive from Germany.

  “The cash boxes are the old kind: they have an inaccessible GPS. But it’s possible to break through the lock with a regular old ax, if you hit it in the right spot. We’ll have to transfer the cash to our own bags on the scene. The dye packs won’t destroy more than twenty percent of the bills, if they go off at all, and some of them will be washable. What can they do?” Hillerström went on, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke out of his nose in two columns. “Call their customers and say, ‘We accidentally burned up our trucks and unfortunately we can’t pick up your night boxes until the middle of next month’? Doesn’t sound very confidence-inspiring to my ears.”

  “Where did they get the old trucks from?”

  Zoran’s question. As detail-oriented as in earlier years.

  “They belong to the same company. They’re ones they used to use years ago. Apparently they were just left sitting around in a garage somewhere.”

  Hillerström glanced at the grove of trees two hundred meters away. There was a slight bulge in his jacket at his chest and back, as if he were wearing a Kevlar vest underneath.

  “And who’s the insider?” Jorma asked.

  “A logistics guy at the company. A real square. A former security guard turned office drone. This guy plans the transport schedules. The drivers don’t find out which routes they have until they get in their trucks in the morning. But this guy knows . . . and he’ll make sure that at least one of the older vehicles is loaded with cash. The man is in debt. He wants a third of the haul, he says, but he’s not gonna get it. I’ll renegotiate with him once the job is done. This deal is yours, if you want it. But don’t wait too long. I have a couple of other interested parties.”

  Hillerström looked at them. The sleeve of his jacket had slid up a bit; a watch worth somewhere in the ballpark of one hundred thousand kronor clung to his wrist.

  “We’ll have to meet this guy before we can make a decision,” said Jorma.

  “That’s fine with me. When?”

  “Tomorrow evening.”

  “Sure. Just name the place, and I’ll make sure he’s there.”

  Five minutes later, they separated, heading in two different directions across the sports fields.

  “What do you think?” Jorma asked as he and Zoran walked toward the old industrial neighborhoods above Värtahamnen.

  “Sounds almost too good to be true. But I believe in this deal. Just have to check a few things with the insider.”

  The Helsinki ferry was visible far away in the channel. When this job was finished, it would be time to go on a trip, Jorma mused. Maybe to Finland. Take Katz along to see if he still remembered the language. Jorma had taught it to him when they were teenagers in Hässelby. Katz was like a sponge when it came to languages: he could absorb them in no time.

  “With any luck the meeting will happen tomorrow. Hillerström was going to check and let us know within the hour. Just one thing, Zoran: why are you doing this?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “You have two kids at home, a perfectly decent day job, and you haven’t been in the business for a long time.”

  “I need the cash. And Hillerström showed up with this tip at just the right time.”

  Zoran was giving him an odd look.

  “It’s just that it might not be the right thing to do,” Jorma went on. “What’ll happen if we get nailed?”

  “We won’t. What the hell is up with you?”

  He looked away.

  “Nothing. I’m going home now. See you later.”

  A rollerblader whizzed by on the pavement. Jorma felt like he was being observed from a point behind him, but when he looked around there was nobody there.

  When he arrived at Lill-Jans Park he turned on his phone. He hadn’t wanted it to be on during the meeting or his trip there. The cops were ahead of the game when it came to phone surveillance. But Zoran had gone home, and so had Hillerström.

  He called his sister as he turned onto one of the riding paths that led over to Östra station. He listened to the phone as it rang, knowing exactly what it sounded like at her end: the Sopranos theme song. Fitting, he thought. Leena had always stood by him. She had kept mum each time the cops came by to ask questions about her brother. She had covered for him, hidden things for him. The safe deposit box in Huddinge where he kept his savings was in her name.

  He let it ring eight times before hanging up. She was probably at the school where she worked helping students with concentration problems. Or in the community garden that she had made her life’s work. Or, as he hoped, at her son’s place, with her phone on silent. Kevin was nineteen and had just moved out. And Leena would not have been the sister Jorma knew if she didn’t spend every free hour at Kevin’s new apartment helping him.

  He thought about calling his mother, Aino, instead. The nearly eighty-year-old woman lived at a Finnish retirement home in Nacka, had been wheelchair-bound for the past few years, and had “a touch of the Alzheimer’s,” as she herself put it. But it was lunchtime, and he knew she would be in the cafeteria with a hundred other half-demented elderly people, unable to talk to him until she was back in her room.

  He turned off his phone again. He thought about the life he had lived and wondered why he’d never felt any remorse.

  The late eighties, working as a bouncer at the underground nightclubs in Hammarbyhamnen, the network he had started to build, only twenty years old. He had worked as a torpedo for older criminals, beating people up until they barely survived, and back then he hadn’t been ashamed—he’d thought they deserved it.

  Later he had started working as a debt collector. Same thing there—no remorse. Those he extorted money from were no law-abiding citizens, they were criminals trying to screw other criminals out of their money.

  He remembered the days after his first bid—he’d been a new member of the Hell’s Angels; he had just started working as a bouncer a
gain and reported two men to the police for threatening him with a sawed-off shotgun in the queue for a bar. Two prospects from a competing motorcycle gang. He had to pick them out from a photo line-up at the station, and once the papers came in from the prosecutor he had their names and personal ID numbers and could bide his time. Just as he’d planned, the preliminary investigation was closed when he withdrew his report. He looked up their addresses in the national register . . . and served his revenge up cold a few months later. One of them still couldn’t walk.

  He had stuck with his life of crime because it suited him, wasn’t that so? Because he was equipped for it. Good at it. He lacked a conscience. He’d made enemies, of course, but at least as many friends. He had drifted in and out of various networks, but still he had retained his freedom of movement. His most enduring affiliation had been two years with the Hell’s Angels—the longest he had gone along with taking orders from other people. He had been nosing around a position as sergeant-at-arms before he left the club in good standing. In fact, he was one of the few to manage that trick. Because he had lost his taste for it, and because the president knew he could be trusted: he would never reveal anything, never breathe a word of what he had seen, heard, or done to an outsider, not even Katz.

  Regret? He had never allowed himself to feel anything like it.

  And now, suddenly, a cluster of memories demanding the opposite: Aino’s despair when she picked him up from the police or social services, just thirteen years old. The fear in the people he’d threatened, men who were fathers, siblings . . . children themselves. The pain of a person whose leg he’d broken or whose jaw he’d smashed. The victims he’d robbed, pissing themselves in fear. He hadn’t dared to look at what he’d done through their eyes. He had thought that something would burst inside him.

  It was eleven at night and they found themselves in a forested area on the island of Ekerö. The insider was already there, in his own car. This was the only direct contact that would occur between them, and the less the insider knew about them, the better. No names. No faces. The guy looked terrified when he saw them coming down the gravel path in ski masks.

  “Jesus, you scared me,” he said. “Is it Halloween or something?”

  “Come on. Let’s take a little walk.”

  They walked into the forest and stopped in a glade ringed with birches. Faint moonlight filtered through the treetops.

  The guy spontaneously began to tell them about the vehicles, giving them info about times and the guards’ routines, his nerves causing him to stammer as he suddenly started talking about the haul.

  “With a little luck, we’re talking eight million. But I want a third of it . . . or else I’m out. After all, I’m risking a lot here, like my job, for example.”

  A snitch type, Jorma thought as he handed him a cigarette. Ratting people out for money, betraying his colleagues; he didn’t know the meaning of honor.

  He let him light the cigarette before boxing his ear. The guy’s hand flew to his cheek.

  “What the fuck did you do that for?”

  He didn’t respond, just hit him again, and harder.

  The guy was trembling all over. He looked like he wanted to run away.

  “You don’t get to make demands in your position. You can work out your deal with our mutual contact. And starting now, you will not back out. It’s too late. You’re past the point of no return, got it?”

  The guy nodded.

  “Good. Then we’re going to ask you some questions, and you will answer them in as much detail as you can, is that understood?”

  He began to relax as they grilled him. He seemed to have swallowed down his reaction to being struck. Maybe he’d even realized that he deserved it, that he needed to be more alert from now on.

  “What kind of transports does your company do?”

  “All sorts. Mostly cash. Class four—that is, a minimum of two million in each vehicle.”

  “For banks?”

  “No, for businesses. Furniture stores, superstores, appliance chains. We pick up their daily cash and transport it to our vault. The larger secure-transport companies more or less have a monopoly on ATMs.”

  “What do the trucks’ cargo areas look like?”

  “There are control panels for the alarms and time locks right at the back. Safes that can be opened with codes. Space for the bags. The money is sorted by denomination: thousand-kronor bills and five-hundred-kronor bills are in gray bags, and they’re in the right-hand safes.”

  “How many people ride in the truck?”

  “Two. One is trained in valuable-goods transport, and the other is trained as a security officer.”

  “Is there an escort?”

  “Sometimes. A security officer in an unmarked car will follow them and keep in radio contact with headquarters. But I think I can avoid having one.”

  They nodded, jotting everything down in their mental notebooks.

  “We need photos,” Zoran said. “Of the truck interior. Can you arrange that?”

  “I’ve already taken care of it. I secretly took pictures last week; they’re in the glovebox. You can have them later on . . . I’m pretty sure I’ve thought of everything. Including where the suspicions will fall if the boss gets it into his head that an employee is involved. I’m going to make sure a certain guy is driving—Göran. This guy visits Polish whores. At an apartment bordello in Huddinge. He told me about it once when he was drunk at a staff party . . . he wondered if I wanted to come along. The police will believe that he’s involved, that he was blackmailed or something.”

  The first thing the cops would do was check out who planned the run, Jorma thought—that is, the logistics guy. That poor, stupid devil was going to go down for this; he wouldn’t last two minutes in an interrogation. But by then they would have vanished with their spoils, and he wouldn’t be able to identify them.

  “There’s just one problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The job has to be done within the week. The new vehicles are arriving from Germany earlier than expected. The boss managed to rush the supplier. If you want to get at the big money, it has to be Monday, right after the payday weekend.”

  He looked at them like a little kid expecting praise.

  “I’ll make sure that Göran gets the run in one of the old trucks. There will be night deposit boxes from Södertälje, among other places, cash from a large vegetable market and from the shops at Kungens Kurva. They’ll go in the same load. The truck will make its final stop in a secluded spot by the shopping center in Skärholmen city center. You can get it as it’s driving out.”

  “There’s a police station around the corner there,” Jorma said.

  “I’ve checked that out too. It’s closed for three months due to a flooded basement—a broken pipe or something. They’ve moved to a temporary location in Älvsjö.”

  Have to double check that, he thought. Four days to work with; the window of time has shrunk . . .

  He gave the security guy an expressionless look. The kid was sweating, even though it was chilly out. He was thin, Jorma realized, rail-thin. His face was gaunt. He’s sick, he thought, though maybe he doesn’t know it yet himself. He wondered how he had ended up in debt . . . Gambling? Drugs?

  A twig snapped in the forest behind them, and once again he had a bad feeling.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  He felt like an idiot as he walked toward the sound. Cop paranoia. And apparently he couldn’t control it.

  He stopped after thirty meters, next to a cairn. He heard something run off through the trees. Nimble steps. A deer, he thought; there were plenty of them outside the city.

  Then he walked back to the glade. It was always like this at the start of a plan. You saw cops and problems where there were none, imagined things because your subconscious wanted you to. Being suspicious was about minimizing the risks. Both he and Zoran were good at that.

  Early morning, and they were sitting in a car in the multi-story
carpark in Skärholmen city center. His anxiety had finally started to dissipate. His gut was telling him that this job would go just fine.

  “Should be a piece of cake,” Zoran said, handing him the binoculars. “We’ll stop the truck when it drives out, block its way between the pillars. Someone can come up behind it so it can’t back out.”

  The loading dock was a hundred meters away. Ordinarily they would have done recon at least a month in advance because security camera footage was only saved for four weeks, but this time they had to improvise. The Toyota they were sitting in had fake plates. Jorma had been lying on the floor in the back seat since they’d left the city to avoid being seen by the traffic cams.

  “We need one more driver. And a man to keep an eye on the guards while we open the truck. Another person to take care of the escort car in case our insider doesn’t manage to avoid having one. We’ll use plastic explosive on the door, break open the security cases, and repack the bills into our own bags. We’ll give ourselves a max of four minutes to do the whole job. We can concentrate on the bags with thousand- and five-hundred-kronor bills, pack the money, and get out on my signal, even if we haven’t got it all.”

  “What about the escape route?” Jorma asked.

  “We’ll check it out in a bit.”

  At least the police station was really closed, just like the insider had told them. They had driven by to check. If the cops came from the city, they would take the Kungens Kurva exit. So it would be best to scatter the caltrops there and make their getaway to the southwest, away from the motorway.

  “How are things on the family front?” Jorma asked. “The kids . . . are they good?”

  “I think so. I’m not really sure. I’ve been staying at friends’ places for a while.”

  “Problems with Leyla?”

  “Not really. It’s a long story.”

  Zoran wouldn’t look at him.