Game: A Thriller (40 page)

♦  ♦  ♦

A police van facing toward them. Hardly the way she would have parked it for a standard roadblock. But it was considerably more troubling that there had been no other vans parked like that until now, right on the edge of the expressway. They were too far away for her to be able to see its number with her bare eye, but she remembered that they had binoculars in the glove compartment. It took a few seconds before she located the van and adjusted the focus.

♦  ♦  ♦

There was a cable sticking out of one of the bags. A mini-USB, he just had to plug it in and drive the van a few meters closer to the traffic lane, then run off into the woods. The Game Master would take care of the rest. One last call,
ring-ring
in the bag, then . . .

KA-BOOM!!

And after that?

“To the victor belongs the spoils,” according to lard-ass Bacala in
The Sopranos
. All his dreams would come true. He was going to be fucking well famous, at least if he could believe the Game Master.

The only question was: Did he?

The blue lights were getting closer.

He didn’t have much time.

The decision was really very simple. He’d been aware of that a few days ago, but it hadn’t really sunk in before now. That there was really only one alternative. The blue pill or the red? Safe or all in? Win or fade away?

Ladies and gentlemen, the clock is ticking, please place your bets . . .

He pulled out the cell phone from his pocket, plugged in the cable, and slammed the rear doors.

Then he raced around to the driver’s seat, put it in gear, and slammed his foot down hard on the accelerator.

♦  ♦  ♦

“Stop!” she yelled all of a sudden.

“What?” Wikström said, twisting his head to look questioningly at her.

“Stop, for fuck’s sake, stop the car!” she shouted, grabbing the radio mic.

The access road was getting closer and closer, and now you could read the number without binoculars, 1710, the van that was supposed to be in the workshop. The one Henke claimed had been stolen. Either way, the bastard thing wasn’t supposed to be here! Not now!

Absolutely not!

“All cars stop!” she shouted into the microphone, as Wikström slammed the brake pedal down. As the seat belt jerked and caught her, she watched as the police van began to move toward them.

♦  ♦  ♦

Blinking is supposed to be the fastest movement the human body is physically capable of.

Even so, it hardly compares to the brain’s electrical synapses.

Not now!
was the thought that flashed through his head when the light hit him.

And, from his point of view, he was absolutely right. There ought to be more time, plenty of time—that was what he had been promised. After all, he had followed the instructions to the letter, had done exactly what he had been told to do.

So this shouldn’t be happening. Not now! Absolutely not!

So when the cell phone’s screen suddenly lit up and the ringtone started, he was actually taken aback.

But not, however, particularly surprised.

♦  ♦  ♦

“Threat ahead, reverse and retreat!” she commanded, and both Wikström and the drivers of the other vehicles all obeyed her immediately.

The convoy went into reverse, rolled some hundred meters, and then, almost as if on command, the cars began to spin around all at once. They were going so fast that they never actually stopped before carrying on, now heading back the way they had come.

“Alpha 102, take the lead,” she concluded once the maneuver was complete and they were heading north again.

♦  ♦  ♦

He spun the wheel, performing a wheel-screeching U-turn, then gunned back up the access road with the engine howling. A sharp right-hander with the flares playing around the wheels, then he was back on the Kymlinge link road.

He could see the blue lights of the van flashing against the dark trees. A few seconds later they were joined by more.

♦  ♦  ♦

Her hands were shaking, but she was having no problem controlling them. They had already gone past Sollentuna.

“Control, we have a stolen police van, 1710, heading along the Kymlinge link road toward Kista. Suggest you put our uniformed colleagues onto it, but tell them to keep a safe distance, over!”

♦  ♦  ♦

The patrol car that had been guarding the roadblock was already tailing him, and soon there would be more.

But he didn’t give a flying fuck. Fifty-Eight’s cell was still ringing on the passenger seat, and the ghostly light from the screen was lighting up the whole cab. He took the turnoff into Kista on two wheels, steering furiously to avoid the grass mound at the center of the roundabout, finally regaining control before putting his foot on the floor down the straight.

The cell was still ringing.

Without taking his eyes off the road he reached for it.

The Game Master’s voice was cold.

“You’re disappointing us, HP!”

“You mean you’d rather have seen me blasted into crispy little atoms all over the E4?” he snapped. “Then that’s your fucking problem! You said you’d wait until I was clear, you promised.
Did you really expect me to believe that crap!?
Reality is a Game, someone once told me. A seamless fucking phone app where you only show me things you want me to see. Things that will get me to jump when you pull the strings. But now it’s my turn to show you something. Now it’s my turn to pull the strings. It’s time to take a bit of fucking reality to the Game, mofo! Tell the guard he’s got thirty seconds to get out!

“Oh, and one more thing,” he added in conclusion.

“Yes . . . ?”

“
Yippee ki-yay, mothafuckers!!
!
”

He stuffed the phone in his pocket, spun the wheel, and broke straight through the gate, then the grill blocking the entrance to the garage of Torshamnsgatan 142.

The collision made his forehead hit the windshield.

The air bag exploded and threw him back in the seat, the van skidded violently, and he fought furiously to regain control. The back of the vehicle hit a concrete pillar and HP was almost thrown from his seat again, saved this time by the protruding gear stick.

The van lurched in the other direction, hitting another pillar before HP finally regained control of the wildly spinning steering wheel. He slammed on the brakes and the police van screeched to a stop two floors beneath the Game’s holy of holies.

HP staggered out, ran his hands over his body, and discovered much to his relief that he didn’t have any bones sticking out nor any gushing fountains of blood.

The cops seemed to have been smart enough to stay out on the road, because no one had followed him down into the garage. He stared around wildly and discovered an emergency exit facing the patch of forest behind the building, and raced up the steps.

Once he was clear he pulled out Fifty-Eight’s cell and tapped in a number. From ten meters in among the trees he pressed the dial button and in the back of the police van the iPhone suddenly came to life.

Ring-ring!

This one’s for you, Erman!
he just had time to think before the pressure wave blew him off his feet and everything went black.

THE PACKAGE WAS
waiting for her when she opened the door of the flat. A few envelopes and a leaflet from the local supermarket had landed on top of it, and it wasn’t before she gathered everything into a heap that she realized it was a bit thicker than normal.

A flat brown parcel, just the right size to fit through a letter box. Considering its size, it was also pretty heavy.

She recognized the writing at once, but didn’t hurry to open it.

Four days had passed since that night on the E4.

Four tumultuous, completely crazy days.

She had escaped the media, thank goodness. The press office had handled all their questions and her name had been kept out of the story.

The media, with the evening tabloids in the lead, had gone completely bananas.

“
Terror Attack Foiled!
,” “
It Was Al-Qaeda!
,” and her own personal favorite:

“
Five Seconds from Disaster! 
”

Even though the factual information was fairly thin, to put it mildly, as usual all the newsrooms were competing to show who knew most. But this time the experts were surprisingly unanimous.

Even the reporters who took turns conducting staged interviews with each other on television were sticking to the same basic synopsis.

The fact that an attack with potentially disastrous consequences had been thwarted at the last minute thanks to the alertness of the Personal Protection Unit didn’t appear to be under question from anyone—at least not yet, anyway. The current debate seemed to revolve around how the terrorists had managed to get hold of a police van without being caught, and then pack it with enough explosives to turn a two-story brick building into ground zero. And, more obviously, whose fault it was.

Those in positions of responsibility were as usual blaming each other, the PR consultants were working overtime, and in the meantime no one was left any the wiser.

Why the terrorist had decided, once his mission had failed, to bury himself under an office building in Kista was unclear. The owners of the building had confirmed that the premises had been empty and that they hadn’t been aware of any threat, and that was pretty much where the discussion in the media ended.

Rebecca knew that the detectives from the Security Police hadn’t got much further. It would be another few days before the diggers had cleared enough of the rubble from the crater for an investigation of the crime scene to get going seriously, but the Forensics team didn’t sound particularly optimistic.

The same uncertainty applied, in spite of the media’s unshakable
confidence, to the identity of the perpetrator. A vague description of a Swedish man in his thirties was all they had to go on, and there were very few other leads.

No one had thought to doubt her own half-true story. That she had seen 1710 earlier that evening and for some reason had thought something wasn’t quite right. And that she had called to check with Mulle and had been reassured by his explanation about it being in for repairs, but then reacted when she saw the van on the access road and sounded the alarm.

It had meant a personal meeting with the national chief of police, Runeberg, and the Secret Service’s European boss. Handshakes, praise, and gratitude, all the things she usually had trouble accepting. But this time it had proved surprisingly easy to handle the praise.

At work she was now met with respectful glances from her colleagues, even Dejan. It was an unfamiliar experience, but actually very pleasant.

She had proved to the world that she had what it took—but, far more important, she had proved it to herself.

That realization was what made the praise and the medal considerably easier to swallow.

She hadn’t said anything to Micke, not yet, anyway. But he seemed to have understood anyhow.

“You seem different somehow,” he had said when they met up in the days after the incident. “I don’t know what it is, but I like it,” he had added, giving her hand an extra squeeze.

And for a little while everything had felt good, as if it was all going to be all right and that she actually deserved to be happy.

But then she started thinking about Henke and realized that happy endings weren’t meant for people like her.

Still no sign of life from him.

Not until now.

Even so, she had never really doubted that he was okay. People like Henke were always okay. Whoever had been driving that van, it wasn’t him, she was sure of that. Henke was a lot of things, but he was no terrorist.

The question now was whether or not she wanted to know what was in the parcel?

She let it sit there for a few minutes, then she couldn’t help taking a closer look. It was postmarked in Frankfurt, and there was obviously no sender’s address. When she shook it she could hear a faint rattle.

She made a decision, took a deep breath, then tore the parcel open in a single movement, so hard that its contents spilled onto the kitchen floor with a metallic clatter.

For a few seconds she just stared down at the objects. Let her brain absorb what they were, and, more gradually, what they meant.

And once she had done that, she fell to her knees, stretched out her hands, and, with tears running down her cheeks, gathered them together, and clutched them to her chest.

Six bolts.

Six rust-brown bolts that had once been attached to a balcony railing in a suburb south of Stockholm.

In spite of the years that had passed, you could still make out tool marks on their heads. As if the person who had removed them hadn’t had quite the right tool, or had been forced to work at an uncomfortable angle.

It must have taken determination to get them out. A hell of a lot of determination, anger, maybe even burning hatred, before they came loose.

But for some reason she was still convinced that the power that had finally persuaded the concrete to let go was . . . love.

She sat on the black-and-white tiled floor for a long time, just crying.

Her tears were heart-wrenching, liberating, and unhurried.

Then, quite suddenly, she stopped.

She got up slowly, opened the bin, and carefully dropped the bolts in. Then she wiped her eyes, rinsed her face over the sink, and went toward the bedroom. On the way she stopped in the hall, pulled the wire out of the answering machine, and watched as the little red light slowly faded.

No more messages, she thought with a wry smile as she carried on into the bedroom.

In the middle of the desk lay a red pen and alongside it, right next to it so as to be close at hand, a block of white Post-it notes with the police-force logo on them.

The ink had gone through the paper and you could make out parts of the words that had been written on the sheets above.