The Tunnel

by Carl-Johan Vallgren, Rachel Willson-Broyles

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

A fast-paced and intricate thriller from one of Sweden's most popular writers, perfect for fans of Jo Nesbo and Lars Kepler. Private investigator Danny Katz is trying to track down his former drug dealer. Ramón and his girlfriend Jenny have both vanished leaving behind a lot of unanswered questions. How come Ramón suddenly found himself in possession of the mother-load of drugs? And is Jenny really who she claims to be? Katz's investigation leads him to the darkest corners of Stockholm's porn industry and once again his old addiction threatens to control him. Ultimately only one thing seems certain - someone is willing to do whatever it takes to keep Katz from discovering the brutal truth.

Release date: October 20, 2016

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 293

Sample

He was sitting on a bench in Midsommarparken, hyper-aware of every movement around him. Nothing suspicious since he’d left the apartment half an hour earlier. A few nursery school children in yellow reflective vests were making a racket in the playground. He shifted position, moving into the shadow of a tree. He rubbed at a stain on his trousers. No idea where that came from. Lunch, when he fried two eggs in oil?

On the corner of Svandammsvägen was the pub he liked to go to. Tre Vänner, it was called – Three Friends. The chairs inside were upside down on the tables. The pub wouldn’t open until evening; he could go there later and think through the middleman’s information. He liked the place. He had a glass of Murphy’s Irish Stout there on occasion, but his visits were irregular and he never went more than once a month. He didn’t want people to recognize him.

That was one of the difficult things about his job, he thought. You could never tell anyone what you were working on. The fewer people who knew, the less risk of trouble. That was why he’d only had to pay for a fraction of all the stuff he’d done.

His eyes roamed towards the metro entrance. A woman walked out of the doors: the Thai girl who’d moved in with his upstairs neighbour a few months earlier. She was black and blue and her right eye was swollen shut. He ought to do something about it. Their fights had escalated in recent weeks. The other neighbours were afraid of the guy. And his girlfriend seemed so helpless – she didn’t speak a word of Swedish and hardly seemed to know which country she was in.

He looked at the clock. One hour and ten minutes left. Time to take off, if he wanted to be on the safe side.

*

He bought a sandwich at the kiosk before heading down to the tracks. He swiped his SL card across the reader and passed through the turnstile as he ate. The green tile walls around the escalator reminded him of prison . . . Zoran would be executing a similar manoeuvre, but up in Tensta, on the other side of the city. Zoran had been out of the business for nearly a decade. He had taken classes to become a massage therapist, married a woman who didn’t take any shit, and settled down on the straight and narrow. Two little kids at home. Six and three. Crime was no longer his thing – he changed nappies. Fried up falukorv for dinner. Had a real life.

Jorma had known him for over twenty years, since his days as a bouncer at the underground nightclubs in Hammarbyhamnen. They had done break-ins together, dealt in stolen vehicles, robbed four armoured trucks. But that was a long time ago. Zoran had vanished suddenly, and he hadn’t heard from him again until three weeks ago. Zoran had called to pass along the middleman’s idea.

He had reached the tracks. He took a right, heading towards the platform for northbound trains.

As he waited, he discreetly studied the other travellers. He was being paranoid for no reason. An old woman with a cane was reading the timetables on the wall. Further along, a teenage couple were kissing. On the bench closest to him, a Finnish man in a pinstriped suit was talking on the phone. He could hear fragments of the conversation, something about a meeting with an IT firm and a business lunch later that day.

He shuddered as he suddenly thought of his father, Harri. How he had spent his time boozing on park benches throughout the last few years of his life, before dying of a heart attack at barely fifty. A stereotypical Finn. Jorma had run into him now and then in Vällingby city centre, with his sheet music and a bottle of dessert wine next to him on the bench, so smashed that he didn’t even recognize his own son.

The train towards T-Centralen thundered onto the platform. He walked up to the first carriage, looking over his shoulder even though he knew everything was fine. No one was tailing him. The doors opened and he stepped into the half-empty carriage. One minute later, the train had passed through the tunnel to Liljeholmen.

He was the only passenger to get off. The train from Norsborg came in on the opposite platform. It was crammed full of people from the outer suburbs. A babel, he thought as he crowded his way onto the train: people were speaking a dozen languages. There were young guys with African roots, two women in niqabs, an older Arab man with a hookah in a plastic bag on his lap. Poor people. Like the Finns back in the day, at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

The journey went faster now. Hornstull, Zinkensdamm. Inner-city kids filled up the train, gymnasium students in super expensive brand-name clothing, or deliberately dressed down. There was hardly another city in the world where the class differences were as obvious as in Stockholm.

A man in a yarmulke was standing next to the escalators at the exit towards Mariatorget; he seemed to be waiting for something. The guy looked like Katz, Jorma thought, the few times he’d seen his oldest friend wearing a skullcap. Katz had left half a dozen messages on his voicemail in the last week, as if he sensed what was up and wanted to convince Jorma to bail out.

In the past year, Jorma had seen his friend more often than usual. Last summer’s incidents had brought them closer together again. The Klingberg Affair. Katz had been falsely accused of murder; Jorma had tried to help him. Eva Westin, their mutual friend from their days in Hässelby, had been dragged into it as well, as had her daughter. Everything had worked out in the end; everyone made it through and Katz’s name was cleared. But it seemed they had all felt a greater need to see one another since.

*

He changed trains at Östermalmstorg, peeking back over his shoulder again before he continued towards Ropsten. He made a note of the deserted platforms; no one was boarding. The only people who used public transport around here were the people who worked in the neighbourhood, the servants.

He had a bad feeling again as he rode the escalator up to the Gärdet exit. He looked around cautiously. Two men in tracksuits were following ten metres behind him. The guy closest to him had a pair of headphones around his neck. Looked like a cop. He felt his heart beat faster.

He started to walk to see how they would react. He pretended to be looking at the advertisements on the walls, and out of the corner of his eye he found that they were keeping pace with him. Police, he thought, or just a coincidence . . .

As he approached the ticket hall, he thought about calling the whole thing off, going back home and telling Zoran that someone was tailing him and it would be best to lie low.

He could see the turnstiles now, and the Pressbyrån shop on the other side. The escalator stairs flattened out; a few pigeons that had lost their way in the pedestrian tunnel were flapping up around the ceiling in fear. He took a left towards the lift and bumped into an old man with a Rollator; he mumbled an apology.

The lift door was open. Without turning around, he stepped in and pressed the ‘down’ button. As the door slid shut behind him, he turned his head. False alarm: the men in the tracksuits had passed through the turnstiles; they were laughing at something, conversing loudly, then they jogged off through the pedestrian tunnel. On their way to Gärdet, he thought, just as he was, but not to plan a robbery – to go for a run.

They had set the meeting for three o’clock. Jorma arrived half an hour early. The sports fields at Gärdet were the perfect spot. There was a good view in all directions. Nowhere for cops to hide.

He followed the pedestrian path above the fields. He was sweating when he sat down on a park bench. The enormous green below him was nearly deserted.

A few joggers ran past, young upper-class girls with anorexic role models. A bald man with a dachshund on a lead disappeared into a grove of trees. He gazed out at the brick buildings of the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration on the other side of the fields. No suspicious movements. From a distance, the cars on Lindarängsvägen looked like toys.

What was he doing here? Was he even sure that this was what he wanted?

One year earlier, he had decided to quit. He had money saved up from old jobs. He’d been thinking of going back to work in construction again, maybe starting his own company. His third talent, alongside committing crimes and playing the piano: he was a skilled craftsman. I already made my decision, he thought. No more robberies.

He had made himself unavailable: he changed addresses and no one knew where he lived. He had no home phone and could only be reached by email. He had slowly started to phase out his old life and the very thought of a continued criminal existence. And then suddenly Zoran contacted him.

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 football 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 towards 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 per cent 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 axe, 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 per cent 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 metres 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 towards the old industrial neighbourhoods 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 allotment 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 again and reported two men to the police for threatening him with a sawn-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 honour.

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 grey 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 centre in Skärholmen. . .