The Game Trilogy (58 page)

Time to do what he did best: run for his life!

Philip had evidently heard the cry. He spun round, and reached out with his arms. But HP had already built up speed. He feinted left, then swerved round Philip’s right side.

He set off for the escalator leading up to the underground platform, taking the steps two at a time the way he usually did, but he could feel his body protesting. When he reached the top he glanced quickly over his shoulder, only to discover that both Philip and Elroy were already hot on his heels.

Fuck!

He flew out onto the platform, choosing the right-hand side which was completely deserted.

His body felt weak and he was having to make a huge effort not to trip over his own feet.

A handful of passengers were waiting on the left-hand side of the platform, but obviously none of them was going to help him. Instead he took aim at the far end of the platform, and the long tunnel that led up to Hjorthagen.

Another glance over his shoulder made his heart-rate change gear into panic mode. His pursuers were gaining on him, already close enough for him to see the clenched expressions on their faces. Plumes of breath were puffing from their mouths and noses.

Fucking hell!

He could usually outrun pretty much anyone, but he was still injured, and these guys seemed to be pretty phenomenal runners.

He could forget the tunnel, they’d have caught up with him before he even reached the entrance, and even if by some miracle he did make it, a two hundred metre uphill slope was the last thing he needed right now.

For a second he thought about crossing the empty track and jumping the fence down towards Värtavägen, but the viaduct the platform was built on must be a good fifteen metres up, and there was no way he’d survive a fall like that.

He needed a new plan, fast as fuck!

Another glance over his shoulder, they were even closer now.

His muscles were aching, his lungs and throat burning and he could clearly feel his movements getting slower. They were going to catch him, he realized. Then he saw the sign announcing an approaching train light up on the left-hand side of the platform, and felt the familiar gust of air.

A chance …

A tiny, fucking dangerous little chance. But he didn’t exactly have much choice …

He swerved sharply to the left, changing platform and cruising between a couple of lethargic passengers.

He heard their angry cries as his pursuers knocked them flying.

He veered right and carried on down this new platform. Then he saw the lights of the train emerging from the tunnel, heading straight towards him. His pursuers had almost caught him. He could feel their hands grabbing for his jacket and staked his last reserves of energy on a final, violent burst of speed. The train’s brakes were squealing as he saw it getting closer. Hands brushed his back again.

His lungs felt like they were about to burst, his legs were on the point of giving out, but he forced them out over the edge of the platform. He felt a millisecond of weightlessness as he hung in the air in front of the train.

Then he heard someone scream, a long, drawn out scream that merged with the shrieking of the brakes.

Then ground, tarmac, metal and, finally: darkness …

The pocket under the platform wasn’t particularly big. Not quite seventy centimetres across, and maybe half as deep. Just enough for an average-sized person to be able to take cover there.

The wheels of the train were still rolling just a few centimetres away, and the shriek of the brakes made it almost impossible to think.

He did a quick check. His body ached, both from the run, the landing and his dive into the cubby-hole, and his heart was pounding like the bass at a death metal concert.

But to his immense relief he couldn’t find any amputated stumps spurting cascades of blood. All his limbs seemed to be intact, even if they were badly battered. He tucked his arms under his body and tried to snake his way forward.

Not very easy …

His mate Vesa had once pointed out the protective pocket to him a long time ago. The guy clearly had a serious train fetish, but you didn’t know about that sort of thing when you were fifteen. He’d eventually met a tragic fate, ending up as charcoal down in Älvsjö. He’d been riding on top of a carriage but hadn’t realized that the power cables sometimes hung lower in the depot than they did out on along the tracks …

But they’d had fun back then.

They started hitching rides between the carriages, and other low-level stuff. They went on a tunnel safari at the abandoned station at Kymlinge. That was where HP tried out the safety pocket for the first time. One of the trains on the blue line had thundered past at almost eighty kilometres an hour, and for a few seconds the pressure wave and the ear-splitting noise almost made him crap himself. After that they tried the same stunt in other places, seeing as every station has the same little safety pocket. It was really more of a groove than a pocket, seeing as it ran the entire length of the platform. So he ought to be able to snake his way to the opening of the tunnel while the train stopped anyone seeing what he was doing from above. At least that was the theory …

The train had stopped and he could hear a buzz of agitated voices from the platform.

‘No, no, for God’s sake, you can’t go down onto the track …’ an authoritative male voice was saying. He guessed that was the train driver.

‘The current has to be switched off before you can do that … We’ve got set routines for this sort of thing, we get almost one jumper each week … The police and fire brigade are on their way, so can everyone please take a step back?!’

The voices grew fainter as he snaked away from them.

He was making slower progress than he had hoped.

The rough stones beneath him were scraping his knees and elbows, and his thick jacket was making it harder to move. In the distance he could hear sirens approaching. He needed to be a fair way inside the tunnel before the fire brigade shut off the current and got down onto the track.

He paused for a few seconds, then laboriously wriggled out of his jacket. It would be cold without it, but he didn’t have a lot of choice.

A quick double check of the pockets to make sure he didn’t forget anything.

Wallet, keys and cigarettes.

All present and correct, and he stuffed them all into the pockets of his jeans. Only the lighter left, and he ran his hands over the jacket until he found it in one of the many little side pockets.

It was ridiculously difficult to pull out, it seemed like it had slipped inside the lining and for a moment he considered abandoning it. But then he realized that the walk through the tunnel to the next station at Gärdet would be fucking long without a fag, so he tried again.

This time he tore the lining open with his fingers.

That was more like it!

But the little rectangular object he fished out wasn’t a lighter …

Elite GPS 311
it said in tiny letters on one side of the flat little rectangle. Well, that explained a whole lot. They
had tagged him with a transmitter, tracking him like some fucking harbour seal! So that was why they had been able to locate him without him spotting them …

It was a smart place to put it, the jacket was thick and had enough zips and velcro fasteners for him not to notice even a hard little gizmo like that.

But there was one thing he couldn’t make sense of. How the hell had they managed to plant it?

The jacket was brand new, he’d grabbed it from Becca’s shopping bag just before he set out. Which in turn meant … well, what, Einstein?

A new factor in the equation …

Fuck.

Fuck.

FUCK!

He needed to get hold of her, find out who she’d been in contact with recently. Try to stop her getting even more involved than she already was.

But first he had to get out of here …

Tobias Lundh had obviously been a mistake, an error of judgement on her part, and one for which she was paying the price in more ways than one. Even though she never dated colleagues, unlike a lot of female police officers, she had suddenly thrown herself into an affair with a notorious ladies’ man like Tobbe. Who just happened to be best friends with her boss, as well as his neighbour …

What the hell had she been thinking?

But of course that was the whole problem. Just like with John, she hadn’t been thinking at all, just following the first impulse that popped into her head. After everything that had happened last year with Henke, and the attack she had managed to avert at the last minute, and not least the parcel containing those bolts, she had promised herself
that she would try to relax a bit more. Lower her standards and give herself a chance to be more human …

Well, that had turned out really well.

Clearly she should have rectified the Tobbe Lundh mistake a long time ago, then she would have escaped his pathetic jealousy and constant text messages. She already had a boyfriend. A nice, considerate one, who maybe wasn’t all that exciting, but at least he’d never cause this sort of mess. So why had she deceived Micke, betraying him for a bit of meaningless sex with a man she didn’t even like? She had no good answer to that question. Or rather, she had far too many …

Droning.

That was what the phenomenon was called, he’d seen it on Discovery. Sleeping while you were walking. Well, sleeping? That definitely wasn’t the right word for it. He’d been in a sort of trance, awake enough for his legs to carry on moving forward, but with his brain still way off in fucking lala-land.

The tunnel itself hadn’t actually been all that long, maybe a kilometre or so. But seeing as it formed a broad curve under Hjorthagen it hadn’t taken more than about ten metres before the light from the end of the tunnel at Ropsten had disappeared. The impenetrable darkness had certainly contributed to the experience.

He had seen things, terrible fucking H P Lovecraft things that had made the hair stand up on his arms and the back
of his neck. Rats, bats and even bigger shapeless creatures tucked away in corners and side tunnels. Things that had hissed at him as he staggered past, scratching at his back with shitty, claw-like, down-and-out hands.

And the voices. Dad, Dag, that poor incinerated bastard, Erman. They had all whispered to him out of the darkness. Demanding answers from him.

His lunch had just been delivered, a Royale with Cheese that cost him double the usual rate seeing as Burger King was a couple more blocks for the receptionist to walk. But it was worth it. The dressing dribbled out between his fingers and he greedily slurped up every last, greasy drop.

He had staggered out of the ghost tunnel at Gärdet, actually carrying on almost another hundred metres before realizing that the lights and fresh air were real and not just more hallucinations.

Then he had managed to get a taxi outside the TV4 building, and even if the driver had given him a funny look he had still agreed to drive his dirty and battered body home to Södermalm.

He had slept for almost twenty-four hours, then dragged himself up to shower and shave. After a bit of food he had logged on to the computer.

He had to find a way to contact Becca. Explain why he hadn’t come back. She was bound to have been both pissed off and worried. But he didn’t dare call her at home or try her mobile. If they could plant a GPS in his clothes,
then they could certainly bug her phones. His adversaries weren’t just anyone.

The whole thing was much bigger than he had thought, he realized that now, and a bit of good old googling had quickly reinforced the idea that he had started to develop out on Lidingö.

He had to find a different way to contact her. To keep her safe.

Christmas made everything twice as depressing.

She was almost as angry with herself as she was with Henke. First he quite literally drops from the sky, naked and battered, with some ridiculous story. Then a couple of days recovering while his nice big sister brings him food and looks after him, then he suddenly vanishes again without a word of explanation.

And she’d got Christmas food sorted, had even dragged some decorations out of storage in the attic, and he never showed up. Naturally she had called her mobile, only to find it tucked away on the hat-rack.

So fucking typical of Henke, and so fucking typical of her not to know better.

So she’d ended up spending Christmas on her own.

Micke had called a couple of times, but she hadn’t felt comfortable talking to him. She blamed the fact that she was spending Christmas with her brother, and kept the conversations as short as she could. She was pretty sure that he must know about her affair with Tobbe by now. Not least from reading all the gossip on the Pillars of Society forum. Her lawyer hadn’t helped to lighten the mood. Apparently the prosecutor was thinking of bringing charges against her early in January. Gross misuse of office, which meant she’d be fired if she was found guilty.
Fucking fantastic
, as Henke would have said …

She carefully packed her gym gear and left the flat. One of the big chains had a gym at Fridhemsplan, and she was thinking of getting a ten-session ticket there for the time being.

As she emerged onto the street she looked round carefully before walking off towards the bus stop. One block away an old car started up, but the sound of the engine was almost swallowed by the snowdrifts and she didn’t notice it.

It was the photograph of the failed suicide bomber that put him on the scent. A terrible picture that the evening tabloids were making the most of, obviously.

The picture was taken from directly above – someone must have leaned right out of a window to look down. The lifeless body, the dark stains on the snow, debris and broken plate-glass windows, it was all clearly visible.

But what caught HP’s attention was a small detail at the edge of the chaos. At the very top of the picture, on its own in the snow, was a little rectangular object that stopped him dead. The hair on the back of his neck stood up just like it had in the H P Lovecraft tunnel. He didn’t even need to zoom in to work out what it was.

A mobile phone! A shiny one that looks very fucking similar to the one in his wardrobe.

Once his brain had made the connection it wasn’t that hard to carry on with the rest of the puzzle. First a bit of googling among the traditional media.

It was that last sentence that made him change his focus and head out into his old hunting grounds. It didn’t take him many minutes to find the right place. Some of the trolls seemed to have changed their names, but he could still recognize them by the way they expressed themselves.

‘M00reon’, ‘M1crosrf’ and ‘JabRue’ were his own creations. But there were also old favourites like ‘VAO’, ‘Bosse Baldersson’, ‘Ljugo Juli’ and ‘Lasse Danielsson’. He tested every troll name he could remember, and the results exceeded all his expectations.

From the day after the bombing, all of them – the whole lot,
tutti
– without one single fucking exception, had posted comments that one way or another dealt with the terrorist attack. When he switched to the blogs the results were basically the same. Even the most superficial bloggers had something to say on the subject, even if it was just clichés like
‘Fucking awful’
or
‘My sisters best friend was like a minute from being blone up
…’

The conclusion was crystal clear!!

ArgosEye was fanning the flames as much as it possibly could, and the whole opinion-shaping machinery had cranked into action precisely twelve hours after the failed suicide bombing.

Coincidence?

Well, of course it could be.

But considering what he already knew …

NFW!

No Fucking Way!!!!!

She had a heavy bag of groceries in each hand and her gym bag on her back. She was only ten metres from the bus when the doors closed and it pulled away from the pavement with a hiss.

She swore loudly to herself, thought about waiting for the next one, then decided to walk the two kilometres or so home from Fridhemsplan.

By the time she was about halfway she had already regretted her decision several times.

In spite of her gloves, the bags were cutting into her hands and making her stop more and more often to let the blood back into her fingers. And the pavements hadn’t been properly gritted and she came close to slipping over several times.

She had just passed the park beside the teacher training college when the dark car glided up next to her. To the right of her, on the other side of the high fence, cars were streaming out of the Fredhäll tunnel, and the noise and movement of the traffic down on the E4 was probably why she didn’t react until the car had stopped and the thickset man was standing in her path.

‘Get in,’ he said abruptly and opened the back door.

‘What?’

On the other side of the car the driver’s door opened and a red-haired woman, about the same age as her, got out and walked round the car.

‘Get in!’ the man repeated. ‘There’s someone who wants to talk to you …’

She leaned over and peered inside the car, which she thought was a Mercedes.

John was sitting inside.

‘Please get in, Rebecca,’ he said softly.

She glanced quickly to her left. The woman was on the pavement behind her.

Like the man on the other side of her, the woman had her jacket undone in a way that Rebecca recognized, with one hand on her belt inside the opening of the jacket.

She took a step back towards the fence.

Suddenly she realized that she recognized the man beside her.

‘You were on my bus,’ she stated drily. ‘But you were much nicer then …’

‘Are you going to get in, or what …?’ he replied.

‘What happens if I say no?’

The man took half a pace forward, and the woman did the same on the other side.

‘Let’s all take this nice and calmly,’ John said from the rear seat of the car. ‘I’m sorry about our little misunderstanding the other day, I really am, Rebecca … I was tired and had had too much to drink, and as a result I misjudged the whole situation. I hope you can accept my apology, and I can assure you that I have no intention of seeking revenge in any way at all.’

He pointed to the plaster on his nose.

‘If you’d be so kind as to get in, we’ll drive you home. It’s only a few hundred metres, but those bags look heavy …’

As he finished his sentence the big man held out one hand to take her bags, repeating his gesture from the bus. She hesitated. The man and woman were almost imperceptibly closing in on her. Slowly she put the bags down on the ground and took a step backwards.

It had taken several days for the penny to drop. ACME Telecom Services Ltd – that was the company listed at the
office bunker he and Rehyman the Boy Wonder had stealth-raided, the place they discovered that the Game was being steered from. Until he had blown the whole place sky high, that is …

So, ACME Telecom Services.

A proud member of the PayTag Group
, it had said on their website.

If he had been even the slightest bit doubtful about his mission before, then all considerations were now totally Scarlett O’Hara’ed.

PayTag owned ACME, and ACME hosted the Game.

And your conclusion, Sherlock?

PayTag
was
the Game!

Suddenly the pavement was lit up by the lights of another car, very bright, albeit the car was a considerably scruffier one.

It stopped in the middle of the road for a few seconds, then backed sharply to park behind the Mercedes. A scrawny little man in a leather jacket, cowboy boots and pilot’s sunglasses jumped out of the passenger side.

‘What’s all this then?’ he said, taking several authoritative steps towards them.

The man and woman on either side of Rebecca exchanged glances.

‘What do you mean?’ the man replied, lowering the hand he had been holding out towards Rebecca.

‘Renko, surveillance,’ said the man in sunglasses, waving a little black wallet. ‘No stopping here, and that applies to Mercs as well, yeah …?’

‘We were just offering to give this lady a lift …’

‘Off you go, now, my partner and I can drive Normén home.’

The man in sunglasses gestured over his shoulder with
his thumb towards the ramshackle car. The driver’s door was open now. A man in a green army jacket got out with some difficulty and straightened up to his full height. Rebecca saw the woman to her left unconsciously take half a step back, and was close to doing the same herself.

The man was huge, at least 2.10 metres tall, and almost a metre across the shoulders.

His long hair hung down on both sides of his head, and what with that and a large fur hat, most of his face was hidden. Not that you really felt you wanted to see it.

‘Okay, off you go, unless you want an A-penalty …’ the man in sunglasses chattered, waving with one hand. ‘Normén, you hop in the back, the rescue patrol is ready to depart.’

He pulled his sunglasses down onto the tip of his nose and winked at her.

Rebecca took a step towards the car. The woman was still standing in her way.

For a few seconds they just stared at each other.

Then the red-haired woman slowly stepped aside.

A few moments later Rebecca was sitting in the surveillance car. It was full of rubbish and smelled odd, almost as if something had died in there. The driver’s seat was pushed so far back that the huge man at the wheel might as well have been sitting beside her on the back seat. The car radio was playing some old song she vaguely recognized.

The Mercedes performed an angry u-turn and drove off quickly in the direction of the Western Bridge.

‘Okay!’ she said, taking a deep breath. ‘First: if you two clowns are going to play at being police officers again, it’s an O-penalty, not A … And second: where’s my idiot of a brother, and what the hell is he up to?’