The Game Trilogy (27 page)

Sturekatten, a classic old café with lots of little rooms and antique furniture. More grandma’s home-brewed coffee and almond buns than monster American cookies and latte in cardboard cups.

Blue-rinse old ladies, families with kids, teachers at the tables, and of course the obligatory twitter-cuckoo with his nose in his electronic best friend. Obviously his friends
needed to know what the coffee was like, in real-time, how would the world cope otherwise …

But the location didn’t matter much, best just to get it over and done with and move on.

Hello, kiss kiss and all that when he showed up three minutes late. For some reason they suddenly seemed almost shy with each other. Maybe because it had been so long since they last slept together?

Or was it, really?

Two or three weeks, maybe. She didn’t have time to work it out after the hellos and before the waitress came back with their order. Pasta salad and mineral water for her, a prawn sandwich and low-alcohol beer for him. A couple of bites to ease the worst of their hunger, then bang, straight to the subject.

He was keen, almost driven.

Presumably just wanted it out of the way too.

‘There’s something I wanted to talk to you about, Rebecca.’

‘Mmh, yes, you said …’

She could guess where this was going.

‘I haven’t been entirely honest with you,’ he said, squirming on his chair.

She said nothing and waited for him to go on.

‘Not that I’ve lied or anything …’ he added quickly, to pre-empt her. ‘But we’ve never really talked about relationships or anything.’

She nodded in agreement, as much to herself as to him.

Here we go …

‘It’s just,’ he began, squirming as if the seat was chafing. ‘It’s just that I’ve got … or rather … I had …’

‘You’ve already got a girlfriend!’ she interrupted, to put an end to it.

‘Yes!’ He looked relieved for a couple of seconds, then his expression changed. ‘I mean, no!’

Suddenly she was confused.

‘I’m not following now, Micke, have you got a girlfriend or haven’t you? It can’t be that hard?’

He took a deep breath and seemed to compose himself.

‘To be strictly accurate, I had a girlfriend until Monday. We’d been seeing each other since I moved up here, but we never lived together, at least not permanently.’

He looked beseechingly at Rebecca as if he were waiting for a signal to go on.

‘So … what’s this got to do with me? We never promised each other anything, did we?’

She was making an effort to keep her voice neutral. What did he mean …
had a girlfriend until Monday
? What was he trying to say?

‘No, that’s just it!’ he said with relief. ‘We’ve never talked about anything like that, and that’s why I haven’t said anything, but … Oh, I don’t know!’

He rubbed his forehead.

‘She and I, we’d sort of grown apart, but neither of us did anything about it. I really should have ended it a long time ago, before you and I met, but it never seemed to happen.’

He sighed again.

‘What I’m really trying to say …’ he began, mimicking her unspoken question, ‘… is that on Monday I finally said it, and finished it. It wasn’t too bad, it turned out she was already seeing other people, and we managed to split up and stay friends.’

For some reason her pulse was racing, and she really didn’t like that. Unless she did actually like it?

He cleared his throat and started again.

‘What I’m trying to say, not very well, is that I’m single,
properly, I mean, and I was wondering if we could maybe see each other a bit more … normally, if you get what I mean?’

He smiled, and all of a sudden she couldn’t help doing the same.

HP needed somewhere to crash. Somewhere to get his head down and work on his plans. The car wasn’t an option, to think clearly you needed to sleep, eat and shit like a proper human being.

A shabby hotel in Solna would have to do. Cash in advance, free Wi-Fi, no surveillance cameras and – even more importantly – no questions.

Manga had encountered problems. Evidently the plans of the building weren’t publicly accessible, although there were ways round that, of course. It would just take a bit longer. There was always someone with access to things like that. If the council didn’t want to help, then you could try the builders, the electricians, the plumbers, or someone else. Somewhere in public-access Sweden you could always find what you were looking for sooner or later, as long as you dug deep enough. And Manga knew people who were fucking brilliant at digging.

Almost like he had his own little Ant-farm out there in Cyberspace.

So, until his BFF came up with something, he just had to lie low and polish his plan.

To start with, he had to decide exactly what he was going to do once he was inside.

The meeting hadn’t been anything like she had been expecting. But what the hell, this was much better. For a little while she was almost … happy.

They had sat there grinning at each other. Clichéd
nonsense, the sort of thing she usually hated. Without answering his question directly she had managed to do so just by smiling.

So what exactly did it mean?

That they were in a relationship, a proper relationship?

She thought so, but wasn’t entirely sure. It felt simultaneously nice, and troubling.

And, on the subject of things that were troubling …

When the bill arrived he had to empty his jacket pockets before he found his wallet.

For a few confused but rather entertaining moments he thought he had lost it, then of course it turned up in the last pocket he checked.

That was when she saw the mobile phone: silver, shiny, no buttons, and she remembered that she’d seen it once before, on his desk a few weeks ago. And suddenly she realized something else – that it reminded her of another phone she’d encountered recently, one which was now in the police lost property office.

Their design was very similar, possibly even identical. But just as she was about to put her hand out and turn it over to see if there was a number on the back, he picked it up and put it back in his pocket. She couldn’t work out if he’d done it on purpose, or just as part of putting everything back to normal.

But the whole thing had left her feeling uneasy.

And then there was the business with the most recent note …

it screamed from inside her locker, and once again she couldn’t really argue with it.

She was angry. No, angry wasn’t the right word, more like furious. In spite of her attempts to be honest, to take responsibility for what had really happened that evening, the notes kept coming. The same white post-its with the police force logo, the same familiar handwriting in red ink.

No fewer than four accusing exclamation marks this time, as if the message itself wasn’t already crystal clear. Okay, enough of this crap now!

So what should she do?

The only thing she could think of was to try to get to the bottom of the whole wretched mess again. Try to get it all out, once and for all, with no excuses or evasion.

She’d tried a couple of times, dialling the number but always chickening out at the last minute once the answer machine clicked into action.

But it would have to wait until after work.

They were spending most of their time these days shuttling between Arlanda and the city centre. EU bigwigs were coming and going most of the time as the EU Presidency rumbled on. Agriculture and fisheries already sorted, the
environment ministers were in full flow at the moment, and in a few days’ time the threat level would be going up significantly when the foreign ministers met up.

Vahtola had already flagged up that someone really high up would be coming, presumably from either the US or Russia. Maybe both?

Pulling up outside the Grand Hotel, quickly out of the car, sweeping the quayside through sunglasses, then a quick nod to the static team who were waiting at the entrance.

Everything calm, in with the VIPs, then quick-march to the next pick-up. No time to waste, and not much time to think. Suited her perfectly!

HP heard the ping from his laptop and flew up from the bed.

‘You have no idea how right you are, Manga,’ HP muttered through gritted teeth.

Five days, and still not a peep from Henke. He’d promised to get in touch as soon as he got there. Okay, so he’d said something about not taking the shortest route, but five days without a word? Clearly cause for concern.

Something else that was worrying her the more she thought about it was those mobile phones. There was no question that they were pretty damn similar. So what did that mean?

At best, nothing. Maybe you could buy mobiles like that in the shops, and Micke just happened to have bought one. Or maybe she’d just seen wrong.

The phone didn’t have to mean anything. Micke and Henke had never met and neither knew of the other’s existence. As far as she was aware, they didn’t have a single thing in common.

So what did she really have to worry about?

Manga did have a point, undoubtedly, he thought after he’d looked through the plans.

Torshamnsgatan 142 was a total Fort Knox. He wasn’t sure, but if he’d interpreted all the abbreviations correctly, the building was equipped with pretty much every sort of security there was. Motion-activated cameras with night vision, infra-red alarm detectors, sensors that picked up sound and vibration, and biometric readers on every door. You needed the right fingerprints to get in, so there went his idea of somehow getting hold of a passcard.

Shit!

He just had to hope that this Rehyman character knew what he was doing, because he had no idea.

He put the plans down and suppressed the urge to go out onto the fire-escape for a late-night fag. Instead he opened another Jolt and pulled out his notepad. A couple of days doodling had left him with a halfway decent idea of what he wanted to achieve with his home-visit out in Kista.

It was actually fairly straightforward.

But his feelings about the Game were still ambivalent, to put it mildly. On the one hand he was seriously pissed off at the way they had treated him. The set-up at Lindhagensplan with his sister, the stone, Bolin the fake, and all the rest. They had set fire to his flat and sent a couple of losers to do the same to Manga’s shop. Not to mention the nightmare with Erman, the plane and the blaze out there in the sticks. He couldn’t help wondering if the cops had ever managed to piece together the poor nutter’s well-done remains?

The last straw had to be the bomb they’d planted under Auntie’s sofa, which was obviously intended for him, but could just as easily have blown his sister into atoms. Revenge was a pretty strong motivation.

Fucking strong, actually!

He took a couple of deep swigs from the can of cola.

On the other hand – that part was nothing like as clear, in fact it was almost verging on the sick.

But the items couldn’t be ignored.

If he managed to get into the Game’s holy of holies, past all their advanced security systems and alarms, and managed to get hold of information that they had done everything to protect – wouldn’t that prove what a remarkable talent he was? That no-one could stop him, not even the Game itself, and that he was worthy of another chance?

Was he really so fucking desperate for approval that he was prepared to get back in the saddle again, even though he had started to work out how mega-nasty the journey could be?

Another couple of days with the conspiracy theorists of the internet as his only company had given him plenty of food for thought. This could seriously be absolutely massive!

There were several websites that seemed to suggest, in all seriousness, that swine-flu came from a lab. That someone had taken a bit of Spanish flu, a bit of pig disease, and diluted it with the same amount of bird-flu, and all to start up a global pandemic.

It was an interesting idea. According to that theory, the pharmaceutical industry was behind it, and the Game could very well have made it happen.

For two hundred points, inject yourself with this syringe and spend the next week on public transport, not covering your mouth when you sneeze. Touch as many surfaces as you can, and make sure you don’t wash your hands more than necessary.

A couple of hundred assignments like that in carefully selected cities, and suddenly sales of Pandemrix, Tamiflu and Alcogel would go up by about a million per cent …

There were other people in cyberspace who doubted that the disease existed at all, and thought the whole thing was a scam to give the epidemiologists more money, or scare people into staying in and watching more television.

And what was really behind Climategate?

Who dug out the emails in which the climate change scientists decided, with touching unanimity, to exaggerate the threat of global warming? Were they even genuine, and if so, who benefited?

How did Princess Diana die, who made the spy
Litvinenko glow with radiation, who turned out the lights on the King of Pop, assuming Jacko was actually dead and not just faking …?

How many points would something like that get you?

And that was far from all …

By this point he had a laptop full of events and interpretations which all, one way or another, fitted the crystal clear conclusion that his overworked brain eventually spat out.

Regardless of whether the conspiracy nutters out there blamed the CIA, the WHO, the KGB, or some other exciting combination of letters, one fact remained which everyone seemed to want to ignore.

In spite of budgets worth billions and political protection from the highest authorities, the list of failed cover-ups was still horrifyingly long: Watergate, the IB affair, Echelon, Lillehammer, Iran-Contras and Abu Ghraib were just a few examples. The bigger the organization, the more leaks, and bad luck always seemed to be lurking round the corner. It wasn’t just a matter of getting the muscle to do the work, but, possibly more importantly, managing to keep a lid on it afterwards, now and forever.

And who could guarantee anything of the sort? Just look what happened to the Stasi, and that was before whistle-blower legislation and Wikileaks. The risk of global conspiracies seemed to exceed the rewards in most cases – by a clear margin!

But what if there was a shady operator dressed up as an exclusive social diversion which was prepared to take on pretty much any task? A set-up which in turn employed even more anonymous figures to do the dirty work, a Sirhan or a Mark or a Lee Harvey. Eager little patsies who would hardly be able to explain what they were doing even if they got caught. Anyway, who on earth would believe them?