The Father

by Anton Svensson, Elizabeth Clark Wessel

Genres: Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

How does a child become a criminal? How does a father lose a son?

An epic crime novel with the excitement of Jo Nesbo's Headhunters and the depth of We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Father is inspired by the extraordinary true story of three brothers who held Sweden to ransom, committing ten audacious bank robberies over just two years.

None had committed a crime before. All were under 22 years old. All of them would be changed forever.

In this intoxicating, heartbreaking thriller, the fourth brother, who was not involved in the real robberies, tells of three boys who grew from innocent children to become public enemy number one - and of the man who made them that way.

Release date: April 5, 2016

Publisher: Quercus

Print pages: 496

Sample

Leo held his breath. The intense, white light of a flashlight swept over him, and he pressed his face against damp moss and straggling sprigs of bilberry, pushing his entire body harder against the ground. Lying there—just a few steps inside the woods—it was easy to follow the inspector’s routine.

First, he pointed the light at the lock on the security door, searching for signs of a break-in.

Then he walked around the cube-shaped building with his flashlight directed at the surface of the concrete walls.

Finally, he stood with his back to it and had a smoke, apparently taking a break until he was sure everything looked just as it had the night before.

Leo started breathing again. He’d been lying just like this at the same time for seven nights in a row, beside a large, square gravel yard surrounded by forest and with a small, gray concrete cube in the middle—the bunker. The night was motionless. Just the wind, an owl hooting incessantly, and the occasional insect.

It was a peculiar feeling, lying a few yards away, watching every movement of a man convinced that he was completely alone—a man in uniform taking deep drags on a cigarette, responsible for all the military storage facilities in what was called Stockholm Defense Area 44.

Leo adjusted the microphone on his collar, raised his head above the bilberry bushes, and whispered, “Cancerman is leaving the site.”

———

The ditch between the forest and the gravel yard was filled with water, and the coarse soles of Leo’s boots slid on the grass as he took a run up and jumped over it, a heavy bag in one hand and a square of Masonite in the other.

Jasper approached from the other direction, with moss and pine needles in his hair and an equally heavy bag in his arms.

They didn’t speak to each other. They didn’t need to.

Leo placed the sheet of hardboard—exactly 23 by 23 inches—on the ground in front of the bunker door.

He’d been pondering these walls for a long time. Blasting them would show up later in the beam of the inspector’s flashlight and would make too much noise.

Then he’d analyzed the roof. It would have been easy to remove the metal sheet that protected the building against rain, penetrate the six inches of concrete from above, and then put the metal back on again. A blasted roof wouldn’t show up in the inspector’s flashlight. But that too would be heard.

One way left: the floor. With the hard ground providing counter-pressure, the force of the explosion would be redirected upward; fewer explosives could be used and less noise would result.

Leo lifted a pound of heavy plastic explosive out of the bag.

He sank to his knees and kneaded it, shaped twelve balls in the light from the lamps on their heads.

“It’s not enough,” said Jasper.

He placed them one at a time on the hardboard, like a clock fitted with forty grams of plastic explosive for each hour.

“It’s enough.”

“But according to the table—”

“The army always uses too much. They’re trying to kill people in battle. I’ve halved it. We want to get in—not destroy what’s inside.”

Leo watched Jasper unfurl a folding shovel from his bag with a flick of the wrist and start digging. With each movement the hole in front of and below the safe-like door grew.

One piece of dough to mark each hour. A circle of time, linked by a length of brown, twine-like penthrite.

He knew it was silly, but he lived with the clock—Leo always knew what time it was, even when he wasn’t carrying a watch. Time ticked inside him, and always had.

“Ready.”

Jasper was sweating, stooped over, kneeling with the shovel deep inside the hole under the door—and the floor of the bunker. Leo crept closer, their eager arms getting in each other’s way as he pulled out with cupped hands whatever the shovel couldn’t reach.

“Now.”

They held on to either side of the hardboard and gently pressed it inside, bit by bit, making sure the twelve balls of plastic explosive didn’t get stuck to anything and that the fuse ended up exposed. When they were sure that the square had gone under the door, beneath the small, one-room building, they pressed gravel into the hole and around it until it was completely sealed.

“Satisfied?”

“Satisfied.”

Hours of calculations. Days spent obtaining the materials. Weeks spent in rubber boots, tramping through one forest after another, a mushroom-picking basket under his arm, surveying Swedish military storage facilities, and when he’d found this one, in an area called Getryggen about nine miles south of Stockholm, he’d known he could stop looking.

Now there were just a few minutes left.

He taped the short fuse to a detonator, which he then attached to the plus and minus on an electrical cable, before moving as far away as he could, across the gravel and the ditch and back into the woods. Then he connected a wire on the other end of the cable to the positive terminal on a motorcycle battery.

“Felix? Vincent?” Leo said into his microphone.

“Yeah?” replied Felix.

“Do you have a clear view?”

“Clear view.”

“Ten seconds . . .”

———

Felix and Vincent lay next to each other under a tarpaulin covered with leaves and moss and grass, near a red-and-yellow barrier bearing a metal sign that said NO ACCESS FOR UNAUTHORIZED VEHICLES.

“. . . then I’ll let it rip.”

Vincent was holding tight a pair of bolt cutters nearly a yard and a half long.

Felix raised his upper body and checked his watch, rubbed his finger across the glass of the dial; the damp had turned to mist.

“Nine.”

He rubbed it until he could see the second hand and then nodded toward Vincent, whose breathing was short, intense, brittle.

“Eight.”

“Are you OK?”

“Seven.”

Vincent didn’t answer. He didn’t even look at his brother.

“Six.”

Even the heavy tarp across their backs shook.

“Five.”

“No one’s coming, Vincent. We’re all alone out here.”

“Four.”

He moved his arm from shaking shoulders to the hands clutching the bolt cutters.

“Three.”

“Vincent?”

“Two.”

“Leo’s up there. He has this all planned. It’ll go fine. And this is better, right?”

“One.”

“Vincent? It’s better to be involved than sitting at home on the sofa not knowing.”

———

The explosion roared, louder than Leo had expected. The bunker acted like the sound box of a guitar, a shell amplifying the sound of a pound of plastic explosive. And when the floor was blasted into the single room of the building, the sound box amplified the next sound, too—concrete chips being flung against a ceiling.

They’d agreed to wait for five minutes.

That didn’t happen.

Leo slithered across the wet gravel with the folding shovel in his hand. He laughed out loud, not even realizing at first that he was, laughing in a way he seldom did, as he crouched down on his knees and stuck his right arm under the bunker’s security door and felt . . . Nothing. There really was a hole! He unfolded the shovel, scooped away more gravel, inserted his headlight and turned it on.

“Jasper!”

He turned toward the woods and shouted way too loud.

“Come here! Come and see this!”

The headlight flooded a windowless room. And there. When he stretched inside, he could see it clearly, the very first letter.

K.

Oh my God. Oh my God!

He pressed his head farther into the hole—slowly the next letter appeared.

S.

Ohmyfuckinggod.

A little farther. White letters on a green background.

KSP 58

“Felix? Vincent?”

“Yeah?”

“The padlock?”

“We’re working on it right now.”

“Good. When you’re finished drive up here.”

Jasper’s shoulder was against his as they dug their way toward the hole in the floor, like an escape tunnel. They dug until he was able to squeeze his head, shoulders, and arms inside, and clip with a pair of heavy pliers the rebars that formed the cement’s grid-shaped skeleton. He pried it open, braced his back against the ground, and pushed his hands against the edges of the hole to heave himself up and through.

He adjusted his headlight, which had slipped down slightly on his sweaty temples, and looked around. It was small enough for him to touch both walls and ceiling, two yards by two by two yards. Along the walls were stacks of green wooden boxes.

“How many?”

Jasper’s voice came through the tunnel.

“A lot.”

“How many?”

Leo counted out loud.

“A platoon. Two platoons. Three platoons. Four . . .”

A total of twenty-four military-green boxes.

“. . . two whole damn companies!”

It was now Jasper’s turn to squeeze his long body through the dirt tunnel, laughing the whole time. Like Leo, he couldn’t help himself. They stood beside each other in the cube-shaped room, the concrete dust undulating in the light that streamed from their lamps.

“Open them now? Or later?”

“Now, of course.”

A cautious hand on top of the wooden box. A rough, almost rugged surface.

It was easy to dislodge the pins and pry back the lid.

A machine gun. Leo picked it up and handed it to Jasper, who bent his legs slightly and his upper body forward in order to brace for an imaginary recoil, going through the motions they’d learned during their military service. They looked at each other like two people at the end of a long journey trying to understand that they’ve finally arrived.

“How many do you think there are? If you were to guess?”

Leo was just about to open the next box. But stopped. Behind Jasper’s shoulder, partially covered by white dust, the answer was hanging right there.

“I don’t need to guess.”

A piece of paper in a plastic pouch hanging on a hook on the wall just to the left of the locked door, a ballpoint pen hanging on a string next to it.

“First row: 124 submachine gun m/45. Second row: 92 assault rifle AK4. Third row: 5 KSP 58.”

They opened up and checked the contents one box at a time. Metal bodies side by side. Well greased and carefully packed.

“Damn, can you believe it, Jasper?”

Under the typed, detailed text about rules and routines, at the very bottom.

“This place was inspected . . .”

He leaned closer, headlight on the white paper. It had been written by hand under somebody’s illegible signature.

“. . . Friday, October 4th.”

“Yeah?”

“Less than two weeks ago!”

“And?”

Leo waved the paper so high it hit the ceiling.

“The guards only open the security door to check inside once every six months. Are you with me? That means they won’t figure out what’s happened here for more than . . . five months!”

“Felix to Leo!”

Felix’s voice emerged with a crackle.

“I repeat! Felix to Leo! Come in!”

“Yeah?”

“It’s about . . . the lock. We have a problem.”

Leo pressed his body through the hole in the floor of the bunker and back out onto the gravel. He hadn’t counted on this. If they couldn’t get the barrier open, then all this would be for nothing. He ran downhill on the rough forest road toward his two little brothers, who were sitting on either side of the barrier, which was padlocked with a steel shackle half an inch thick.

“I’m so fucking sorry.”

At some point during that warm, light-filled summer he and Vincent had become the same height. But still, a seventeen-year-old body was quite different from that of a twenty-four-year-old.

“Leo . . . it’s not working. I can’t do it.”

Vincent shrugged his slender shoulders and threw open his arms, which seemed too long for the rest of his body.

They looked at each other until Vincent moved aside.

“Felix—you and I’ll do it.”

Leo sat down in Vincent’s place and opened the bolt cutters with arms longer than a man’s. He held on to one arm with both hands while Felix, on the opposite side of the barrier, held on to the other.

“Now, brother.”

They both pressed their bodies against their side of the bolt cutters. The teeth bit into the padlock, two rowers pulling their oars to their chests, pulling, pulling, pulling, until suddenly—with fingers and hands and arms and shoulders shaking, cramping, crying out—the teeth of the bolt cutters cut the thick steel in two.

———

The first net was attached to two lonely birches, and the second hung between the dense branches of a patch of young spruces. They had been practicing in the garage in Skogås in the evenings, and one last time in darkness outside Drevviken, so it was easy now to pull off the camouflage nets that hid the trucks, roll them up, and throw them onto the empty flatbed. Two red Mitsubishi pickups, the kind of vehicles that someone who owned a contracting firm might drive.

While Leo ran back up the hill, the other two started the pickups and drove through the moss and bilberry shrubs to the open gate.

———

Jasper knelt inside the bunker, passing one gun at a time into the tunnel, Leo kneeling outside to receive them; Felix stood just behind him, and Vincent was up on the truck bed. A long chain in which every transfer between sets of hands took a second and a half.

“Two hundred and twenty-one automatic weapons.”

Each object that left the concrete cube would be on the platform in six seconds.

“Eight hundred and sixty-four magazines.”

Leo looked at the red hands of his wristwatch. They’d be done in half an hour.

———

They swept away the explosive residue, filled the hole outside and under the door with gravel, packed it hard, stamped on it, packed it again. They changed into blue jumpsuits and workmen’s shirts, and put on black jackets with the construction company’s logo on the sleeve. They opened the gate and passed through, the two engines idling as Felix jumped out with a padlock in his hand identical to the one they had just cut—it was important that the key should slide in smoothly, even though it would be impossible to turn. The following evening, around nine o’clock, when the inspector arrived in his dirty Volvo to listen to the tawny owl, smoke his cigarette, and walk around the military armory at the top of the hill, everything would seem completely intact. The meticulously prepared inventory had confirmed it would be almost six months until the inside of the armory was inspected again, when it wasn’t going to look quite so untouched.

Leo hadn’t realized he was singing. He was taking Horns Street to the bridge at Liljeholmen on the E4 highway, heading south away from the inner city in the rain, when he first heard his own voice enveloping him in the pickup.

He’d bought coffee and a sandwich at a café, and then crossed the street to the Folk Opera’s wigmaker. He was the first customer of the day and watched in curiosity as dancing fingers wove a few strands of brown hair at a time onto the back of a plastic head, while the young woman explained she was using real hair, purchased in bulk from Asia, bleached and then dyed. Then he’d gone to the Eye Center on Drottning Street and picked up the contacts he’d ordered, both with STRENGTH + -0.

A glance in the rearview mirror. Blue eyes and fair hair. Leo had always been the one who resembled their mother the most. Her fair complexion, strawberry-blond hair. And he had her nose—small, angular, cartilage as hard as granite. He’d never be mistaken for a foreigner, not even second generation. A small, sharp Swedish nose had always meant less attention—and if the wigmaker or the optician he’d visited this morning were to provide descriptions of a customer who’d paid in cash, they’d be describing somebody who looked just like everybody else.

He left the highway at Alby, where three lanes turned into two, passed the Shell station and the beautiful twelfth-century church where the high-rises and asphalt gave way to meadows and forests.

He slowed down.

There.

The barrier on which Felix had changed the padlock just seven hours ago, and next to which just ten hours from now a man in his sixties would park his Volvo, put out a cigarette, and stroll on by.

The rain that had started late last night was getting worse, wipers beating against droplets that turned to rivulets. The rain would also be falling onto their war tunnel under the concrete. He’d pass it, Cancerman, his rubber boots standing on the gravel that covered the hole. They’d packed and stamped and smoothed it over, but if this rain continued, it would slowly sink and become noticeable in the inspector’s flashlight.

I need time.

You mustn’t discover it now just because we’ve done a bad job; you have to discover it in five months when you open the door.

I need time to implement a new way of working, a way of maximizing profits without increasing risk. I should get out, walk through the rain, and check to make sure the hole isn’t visible.

Which was precisely what he mustn’t do.

Only a fool spends months designing a plan, secures his loot, and then returns to the scene of the crime the next morning.

He stepped on the gas.

———

Neighbors and passers-by called the site the Blue House, a large metal cube that had once been the Gamla Tumba Woodworking factory. Leo parked as he’d parked last night, far away from the wide highway and next to a locked container painted black.

They’d unloaded weapon after weapon without being disturbed, hidden from the view of the main road and any nearby houses.

He rolled down his window and listened to the familiar sounds coming from the large building site—loud music from a paint-spattered radio, short bursts from the air compressor of the nail gun. He did up the last button on his blue shirt, pulled up his blue suspenders, stretched, and got out.

The Blue House had long been an empty shell, and they’d spent several weeks removing all the old fittings. Then they’d reinforced two floors with beams, insulated them, laid flooring, and partitioned it with walls. Space by space, the building had been transformed into the premises of small independent businesses, a place some entrepreneur was trying to open as the Solbo Center.

“Did you take care of everything?”

He’d never thought about what Felix looked like when he walked until now. His brother, three years younger, was walking toward him across the makeshift parking lot, and he looked more like their father with every step. He took up space, feet angled sharply outward, broad shoulders, thick forearms that he swung as if he were stretching as he walked; he looked idle, like him.

I look like Mama. You look like Papa.

“Did you get it, Felix? Take care of it?”

“I think Gabbe’s trying to shaft us on that last payment.”

Felix made him feel calm in a way he couldn’t explain. It should have been the opposite, with those similarities; they should have made him feel worried, hunted.

“He’s inside counting every damn nail.”

“Did you . . . take care of it?”

His younger brother began unhooking the plastic hood that covered the bed of the second company truck.

“Gabbe and his freaking nagging. As if he has the right to refuse to pay just ’cause we’re not on schedule. As if it says that anywhere in the contract.”

“I’ll take care of him. But did you take care of your part?”

“Section Eighty-three. Orthopedics, I think,” said Felix, taking off the white plastic cover. “I rolled it out and Vincent’s legs suddenly started hurting like hell.”

A wide wooden toolbox with a shiny metal handle stood in the middle of the flatbed. And next to it, under a couple of yellow blankets bearing the logo of a hospital, was a folded-up wheelchair.

They pulled the two pickups a little closer and opened the padlock on the black container—the kind that every construction company sets up at a building site to store tools and equipment. When the vehicles’ doors were thrown open, visibility was obscured on all sides, and they were able to lift the empty box and carry it in.

Broad daylight in a residential area, just a few yards from a busy road, and they stood there—in front of piles of automatic weapons.

“Where the hell have you been, Leo?”

Gabbe’s high-pitched voice cut through the October day. He was in his sixties, wearing a blue tracksuit that had once fit well but now sat tight over his expanding belly, a cup of coffee and a bag of cinnamon buns in his arms. “How the hell are you going to finish all this today?”

He was outside, approaching the container.

“Have you even been here at all in the last week?”

Leo took a calm breath and whispered to Felix, “Close this up again. I’ll take care of him.”

He left the container and went to meet the red-faced, snorting foreman.

“Leo! You weren’t here yesterday! I called you several times! You may be working on something else, but whatever the hell it is, it’s not this building!”

Leo glanced quickly over his shoulder. Felix was closing the heavy container doors. The sound of a heavy padlock snapping shut.

“But we’re here now. Aren’t we? And it’ll be finished today. Just like we agreed.”

Gabbe was so close that he could have touched the wall of the container. Leo put his arm around Gabbe’s shoulders as he pushed him back toward the Blue House, not so firmly that it was uncomfortable, but insistently enough to ensure that they moved away from what no one else should see.

“I don’t give a damn if you’ve taken on other jobs! Do you understand that, Leo? You have a contract with me!”

Gabbe was audibly panting as they walked into the building. There, on the first floor, right inside, there’d be an Indian restaurant next to a flower shop next to a tanning parlor. On the floor below a tire company, a print shop, a nail salon, and there, near the inner walls that would frame Robban’s Pizzeria, Jasper and Vincent were screwing together a plasterboard partition.

“You see! You aren’t done, dammit!”

That foreman’s fucking shrill voice. Shrill and overweight and old and hotheaded.

“We will be.”

“I’ve got a fucking tenant moving in tomorrow morning!”

“And if I say we’ll be done, we’ll be done.”

“If not, I will be keeping the final payment.”

Leo was thinking he’d like to slug that little foreman—a single blow. Right on the nose. Instead he put his arm around him again.

“My dear Gabbe—have you ever been disappointed in me? Have I ever done a bad job? Have I ever been late?”

Gabbe wriggled his outraged body out of Leo’s overly tight grip and ran toward the other corner of the metal building.

“The wall here! The hair salon! A layer of plaster is missing! Do the old ladies have to get their perms without a fire wall around them?”

He ran out into the parking lot and the rain that had gently started falling again.

“And . . . that damn container—you were supposed to move that. In a few weeks this is supposed to be customer parking!”

Gabbe slapped his palms several times against the container that took up so much space in the parking lot. The sound was muted because the storage unit was filled up to the brim.

“Calm down—we don’t want you to have a heart attack, OK?” said Leo.

The foreman’s face was even more flushed after running around, but now his whipped-up anger started draining out of him and flowing away in the rainwater.

“It will be done by midnight,” said Leo. “I need this firm, Gabbe—I don’t think you really understand how much I need it. My construction firm, our collaboration, it’s absolutely necessary for me to be able to . . . expand.”

“Expand?”

“Maximize profit. Without increasing risk.”

“Now you’ve lost me.”

“You’re breathing pretty heavily. I’m worried about you. You should go home and rest. We’ll be done by midnight. You can depend on me.”

Leo stretched out his hand and held it aloft between them.

“Right?”

Gabbe’s hand was small and moist and soft when it met his. Leo nodded.

“Good. The job will be done today if I say it will. And then I’ll treat you to some cinnamon buns. OK?”

Leo waited between the container and the car as Gabbe left. He had stood there beating his greasy hands on a metal box filled with automatic weapons, and he’d had no idea. Next time he might want to open it.

When he was absolutely sure that the loud-mouthed foreman was far down the road, Leo set off across the street and into the residential area, toward the solution to his storage problem—a small, two-story house, with a fenced-in yard and no lawn, right next to a major road. He’d seen the owners moving furniture out. Now it had a FOR SALE sign out the back. He walked beside a high chain-link fence toward the gate, entered the yard, and, crossing the asphalt, went up to the house, peering in through the window to the left of the entrance—an empty kitchen. Through the window to the right of the entrance he saw an empty hallway. Around the corner and into the next window—an extension and an empty room. Around the corner again and into the next window—the stairs to a second floor.

Two floors, but no basement. The entire neighborhood was built on an old lakebed. Every house was built on mud and could be extended up, but not down.

Several times in the last week he’d stopped nailing and drilling to look at the ugly little stone house that lay so close to the road. And every time he’d seen the Phantom’s Skull Cave. He knew it was a childish thought. But it was also a solution.

A house you didn’t really notice, for people without much money.

On the front door there was another FOR SALE sign. He looked at the picture of a smiling real estate agent with swept-back hair and wearing a suit, searched for the pen in his inside pocket and wrote down the phone number on the back of the receipt from the wigmaker.

The big garage was a dream. He climbed up onto a pile of used tires and wiped dirt off the window in order to see in—high ceilings and room for four, maybe even five vehicles. Perfect for the formation, the training of a group.

A door opened and closed.

He turned to the yard next door; a much larger house, with grass covered in wet leaves and a row of apple trees like craggy skeletons. A woman with a small child stood on the gravel path; she looked at him, a curious prospective buyer, and he nodded.

The blows of hammers and the drone from across the road—the uniform an observer would see. A house with a garage to its right—headquarters and a place to train. And in the forest just a few miles away—the most remarkable night of his life.

And it had been so easy.

That three brothers and their childhood friend—all around the age of twenty, all snot-nosed kids without any education—could decide to pull off the biggest arms coup of all time, equipped only with general construction knowledge, plastic explosive, and an older brother who knew the power of trust.

A starry sky, brighter than the night before. Leo and Felix squeezed into the truck and drove to a suburb of high-rise apartments, away from the now completed Blue House and a satisfied Gabbe, away from a locked container that sleepy commuters would pass on their way to the bus stop.

The two brothers got out of the truck. Each grabbed one of the brass handles of the battered wooden toolbox on the flatbed.

“It’s eleven fifty,” said Leo.

The box was the same weight as when it had held tools, despite the new contents—the new life, their other life, which was about to start.

“Eighteen hours to go.”

They carried it past some low bushes and a sparse flowerbed on their way to the block of apartments and the staircase. Leo opened the door. While they waited for the elevator, they could hear Jasper and Vincent laughing together in the basement storage rooms.

Fourth floor.

His door. Their door. DÛVNJAC/ERIKSSON. They put the wooden toolbox down while Leo searched for his keys, then took the stack of flyers crammed into the mailbox on the door and threw them into the garbage chute.

The lights were on inside.

Anneli was sitting in the kitchen on a simple wooden chair, the sound of the sewing machine her mother had given her colliding with the music coming from a cassette deck, the Eurythmics—she often played eighties music.

“Hi,” said Leo.

She was beautiful; he forgot that sometimes. A kiss and a gentle pat on her cheek. The black fabric twisted, captured, impaled by the sewing machine’s needle. He turned to the sink and the cabinet below it. They were still there. Right where he’d hidden them, far at the back behind the bottles of dishwashing liquid and bottles of floor cleaner. Three brown boxes. Not especially large, but heavy.

“Wait.”

He’d already been on his way out.

“Leo, I haven’t seen you for days.”

Last night he’d come in and, without stopping at the bathroom or refrigerator, had gone straight into the bedroom and laid down in a bed smelling of her—not her perfume or newly washed hair, just her, lying close to her and holding on to her sleeping body, the force of the explosion at the armory still reverberating in his chest. The clock radio on his bedside table had blinked 4:42, and she’d turned over, her naked body against his as she yawned and pressed herself even closer.

“And this morning when I woke up, you weren’t here anymore. I miss you.”

“Not now, Anneli.”

“Don’t you want to see what I’ve made? The polo necks? You were the one who . . .”

“Later, Anneli.”

He was just about to go down the hall to the living room where the others had already started unpacking and repacking, when he saw the empty wine bottle on the drying rack and the wet