Game: A Thriller

by Anders de la Motte

  Make a decision, Normén! the voice inside her head was screaming.

  But she was completely paralyzed.

  Just as they passed below the bridge Wikström swerved sharply to the left. She leaned unconsciously in the same direction to avoid the projectile.

  Then they were past, and a couple of seconds later the car behind had followed their maneuver.

  Nothing had happened.

  And instantly Rebecca knew what the person up there had been holding in their hands. A cell phone.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The room was empty, not a single thing inside. To judge by the layer of dust on the windowsill, no one had cleaned in there for months, maybe even years. A quick look through a few of the other doors gave the same result.

  The whole floor seemed abandoned, without so much as a single cardboard box or trash bag of left-behind garbage. The only thing that gave away the fact that the place must have been inhabited at some point was a weird poster he found pinned up on the wall in the last office. It looked familiar, a man in a black coat and a bowler hat with his face hidden by a green apple. Behind the man the horizon was slowly filling with dark clouds, as if a storm were approaching.

  For some reason the picture made him shiver.

  This place was actually pretty damn creepy!

  Rehyman had stopped at the door at the far end of the corridor and pulled out his laptop once more. He held it against the wall and tapped a few more commands into it with his free hand.

  “Reception’s on the other side of this staircase,” he said to HP, who was carefully closing the office door behind him.

  “The guard will soon have finished his round, so we need to get up there before he gets back in front of his screen. The system lists which readers are activated and who by. With a bit of luck he won’t check too carefully when he gets back from his round, but even if he does it will just look like he opened the same door twice. It could easily be the system messing with him, that sort of thing sometimes happens. But if he gets back before we’re in, we’ve had it. No matter how stupid he is, he’ll realize that he can’t very well be sitting in his box and opening doors somewhere else in the building at the same time. You get it?”

  HP nodded, trying to shake the feeling of unease. Time to pull the stops out!

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The delivery at the Grand had gone without a hitch. A quick stop, unload, then back to Police Headquarters.

  But even so, the T-shirt she was wearing under her bulletproof vest was soaked with sweat. The panic was still there, bubbling just below the surface, and she had to use all her strength to stop it from breaking out.

  Why the hell would anyone be standing on that bridge taking pictures at this time of night? Right there, at exactly the same spot where Henke had stood?

  For a crazy moment she had actually believed it was him standing up there. That for some bloody insane reason he’d decided to carry on with the Game and had been ordered to repeat an old favorite.

  Then, once she’d understood that it wasn’t Henke hanging over the railing, her agitated brain had switched track. What if the Game was carrying on without him, only now she was the one they were playing with?

  And that Micke was involved somehow?

  And there was the whole business of the notes and phone calls. All the loose ends were starting to drive her mad.

  The whole thing was completely mad, unreal, deranged!

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  They took the flight of concrete steps in a few strides, then, another outwitted palm reader later, they were standing in a new corridor. Along the left-hand side ran the same row of anonymous brown doors as on the floor below, but the right-hand wall looked completely different. To start with it was considerably more recent than its counterpart, and it contained just one single door. A proper one at that, probably both sound-and fireproof.

  The reader also looked different. Almost like a little peep show at face height.

  “Retina scanner,” Rehyman declared. “Reads the pattern on the cornea with the help of a laser,” he explained. “More secure than palm and fingerprints. Basically, it can’t be fooled.”

  “What d’you mean, it can’t be fooled? Have we got this far just to give up?” HP hissed.

  He glared at Rehyman, who was hunting through his bag, entirely unmoved. After a few seconds he hauled out what looked like a pair of extra-thick glasses with extremely thin frames. He put them on and then stuck his head in the box on the wall.

  HP watched as a light on it started to flash.

  He held his breath and felt his pulse thudding against his temples. Rain Man evidently didn’t even have the sense to be scared. A pair of joke-shop glasses, then shoving his head in to confront a laser. So how in the name of holy fuck was the genius going to pull this one off?

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  It was the note that finally made her blow her top. She was certain she had pulled it off, crumpled it up, and chucked it on the floor of her locker before she started her shift. But now there it was again.

  Picked up, smoothed out, and back in place, it shrieked out its message and all of a sudden it was as if the whole world around her collapsed. Okay, that’s enough of this shit, was the only coherent thought she was able to make out in the chaos in her head.

  Enough of this shit!

  She slammed the locker door shut and took a couple of long strides to get out of the changing room. When she’d got far enough down the dark corridor she pulled out her cell and scrolled through to get the number.

  The answering machine clicked in.

  “You’ve got to stop!” she screamed to the machine at the other end. “Okay, I’m a murdering little whore, you’re right! It was me who pushed Dag. Me, not Henke! He took the blame, sacrificed himself for me. But I was the one who killed him! If it wasn’t for me, Dag would still be alive today. I might even have been able to save him. There was a chance, a slim chance. But I didn’t take it, and you know why! Because I’d never have got away! I was trapped with him. Till death do us part.”

  She composed herself for a moment before going on.

  “He always cried afterward, that was the worst thing. Sobbing that he was sorry and how much he loved me. That the love between us was so strong that sometimes he couldn’t handle it. And that was why he lost control. As if love had anything to do with it . . . !

  “But I forgave him, even though I was sometimes so badly bruised I could hardly stand. I comforted him and promised never to make him so angry again. Like everything was my fault . . . God, how pathetic! I loved him, and I hated myself for that. For what I let him do to me!”

  She had to pause again to regain control of her voice.

  “He changed me, remade me—into someone I recognized less and less. As if I, his fiancée, was no longer me but someone else. A stranger, with no will of her own, without any control. A passive bloody victim!”

  She took a deep, tremulous breath, closed her eyes—then let it out.

  “That evening was the worst of my life,” she said slowly. “But at the same time also the best. Dag wasn’t the only person who went over the edge of the balcony, at least not the way I see it. He took the old Rebecca with him. And that’s why I let them fall, the pair of them! Self-defense, survival instinct, call it what you like. They died down there—so that I could survive! So how dare you start fucking haunting me now!”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Suddenly the red light went out, Rehyman pulled out his head from the box and a moment later the mechanism of the door began to whirr.

  “H-how the hell did you do that?” HP gasped.

  “Nothing to it if you know how the database is constructed. A 3-D plastic model of someone else’s cornea—you can order them off the net. Add a pair of cheap glasses and it’s ready.”

  Rehyman pulled at the handle and the door slid open silently.

  “B-but hang on a moment!”

  HP was trying in vain to fit everything together in his head. It did
n’t make sense, there was something missing.

  “How the hell could you know which eyes were in the database, I mean . . . How could you know whose cornea to copy?” he explained slowly, so that the muppet could understand.

  “Easy,” Rehyman said with a shrug of the shoulders. “I just took a copy of the database when I installed the system.”

  Before HP had time to recover, Rehyman swung the door open.

  19

  INSIDE MAN

  HE HAD DEFINITELY expected more than this. A huge room with loads of workstations in front of a fucking great screen. Kind of  “Ground control to Major Tom . . . Houston, we have a problem . . .” Something like that.

  Okay, so his earlier surveillance hadn’t exactly backed up that theory, but this?

  A little windowless room with one single desk at the right-hand end. White walls, gray plastic floor, not even a bloody coffeemaker. There was a hefty-looking double door opposite with a little window showing rows of computer cabinets. A distant rumble from the servers in there, mixed with the hum of the air con.

  And that was pretty much it.

  The place even smelled of antiseptic . . .

  “Why the hell didn’t you mention that you installed the security system?!” he hissed at his own little nimrod.

  Rehyman shrugged.

  “You didn’t ask,” he replied as he pulled out his laptop again.

  You didn’t ask!! Of course, I should have asked . . . Note to self: remember to strangle this prize retard as soon as you get out of here intact! HP thought as he approached the little work station.

  Considering this was Ground Control, it really wasn’t much to write home about. A double screen, a keyboard, and a mouse.

  And that was it.

  It took a while before he got it. Erman had never actually said the Game was physically run from here; that had been HP’s own poorly thought-out conclusion. Whoever was in charge of the purely physical work, sending out assignments, editing the clips, managing the Ant farm and all the rest could obviously do that from anywhere in the world. All you needed was strategically positioned servers like this one to keep the whole thing rolling. And if Mission Control could be anywhere, it would be pretty stupid to put it in little old Sweden, and he felt almost ashamed of being stupid enough ever to have thought differently.

  This was an outpost, a silent partner that looked after itself, and the little room he was in was no more than an ordinary service station in case you had to adjust the servers.

  Whatever, it still meant a way into the Game, Erman had been crystal clear on that point.

  Time to get going. He cast an anxious glance over his shoulder, but to his relief his partner in crime didn’t seem bothered about anything but his own laptop. The guy deserved a bit of credit for his discretion, at least . . .

  He touched the mouse with his hand and the screens woke up at once.

  Unfortunately what they were showing was pretty much as interesting as the rest of the room. A perfectly ordinary NT log-in window—Username and Password.

  He pulled Erman’s note from his back pocket.

  Now to see if any of the old administrator accounts still worked.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  She could hardly remember how she got home. But she must have made it somehow. Because now she was standing in her dark hallway with her keys in her hand. The light on the answering machine was the only source of light. But she couldn’t be bothered to listen to it. She knew perfectly well what was on the tape . . .

  Silence . . .

  Just a faint noise of traffic over on the Essinge expressway. She could certainly do with a bit of peace and quiet, but not like this. A cacophony of thoughts was bouncing around in her head so loudly that she could hardly bear it. Like a mental Ping-Pong match from hell.

  But she knew how to get all the crap to shut up. The bathroom cabinet, a little white envelope. Four knockout pills, brush teeth, piss, good night!

  Everything was bound to look much clearer in the morning, she muttered to herself as her bedroom faded into a gray fog.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  He had three different sets of usernames and passwords to choose from. They may have been grouped in pairs, but in theory he had nine different possible combinations.

  He guessed the system wouldn’t give him too many attempts. Three at most, possibly fewer.

  In other words, it was important to get it right first time.

  He glanced at the note, but none of the combinations exactly leaped out at him and volunteered. Typical computer nerd logins: Prince$$L3iA, Andr0!dsDnGn, MstlYHarml3$.

  The passwords were more or less the same sort of thing. Might as well have been Mange who came up with them.

  So which to choose?

  He took a chance on the Android in the middle. Usually he was pretty quick at typing, but this time he made a real effort so that all the characters were right.

  He pressed Enter and the hourglass appeared.

  That looked promising.

  Then:

  The username and password are incorrect. You have one more try before this machine is locked out.

  Shit! Only one more chance, so what should he try now?

  The Jedi princess or the Hitchhiker’s fucking Guide to the Galaxy?

  His instincts said to stick with the chick, but on the other hand it was partly a chick’s fault that he was in this mess. MILFy Mia from Märsta, she was partly to blame for this. It was her fault he was on that fucking train. So that left the nerds’ bible.

  He typed in the words, pressed Enter, and held his breath.

  The hourglass rotated a couple of times.

  Then Alice had suddenly returned to Wonderland . . .

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The moment before she fell asleep—just as the gray fog was starting to fade to black—the feeling unexpectedly hit her. That Henke somehow needed her help, that he was in danger and that only she could save him.

  If only she could stay awake a bit longer, she’d find out more, a little voice inside her head whispered. Salvation was just a few seconds away, a different voice said.

  And she really did try to resist. She struggled with her eyelids, tried to get out of bed. But her limbs didn’t seem to want to obey her. The chemical curtain in her head was falling relentlessly, silencing all the voices. Before long she was sound asleep.

  She never heard the telephone ring.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The left-hand screen was showing an interactive world map. Each country was marked in one of four colors, and it took just a few seconds for him to figure out how it worked. More than half the countries were gray, and according to the key in one corner that meant no activity. Another quarter or so were marked green, which evidently meant that recruiting was under way.

  Almost all the remaining countries, with just two exceptions, were yellow. This meant that the Game was under way, if you bought what the key said, which HP was having no problem doing.

  But most interesting were the countries marked in red, just two of them at the moment. Red meant End Game. One in the USA, and the other, surprise, surprise, in Sweden. His End Game, or what should have been his . . .

  He moved the cursor toward Scandinavia and it turned into a finger. Double click on dear old Sweden, and then . . .

  The other screen suddenly came to life, making him jump.

  A list, a high-score list that reminded him of the one he’d seen on his phone. But the design was different, more professional. Less bling and flashy banners, more sober and down to business.

  It also contained just five players. The number at the top was an old acquaintance . . .

  Good old Fifty-Eight was still in the lead, and had now scraped together twelve thousand points, almost two thousand more than the people chasing him. HP couldn’t help clicking on Fifty-Eight’s profile. Who was he, and what great deeds had he accomplished to get to number one?

  Maybe they had even met?

  When the images appeared
he was surprised. The guy seemed like an ordinary guy, round about his own age. A little goatee beard, a hint of a double chin, and his hairline definitely heading north.

  Was this a picture of a champion, Mr. King-of-the-Hill-A-Number-One? The bloke looked pretty damn ordinary, a complete fucking nobody! And his name was Hasselqvist!

  Hasselqvist, with a q and a v—like some jumped-up middle-management jerk or something. All that was missing was the mint-green Crocs and a case of oh-so-medium-strength lager.

  What a letdown!

  HP shook his head as he scrolled through Fifty-Eight’s profile. Flat near Hornstull, ordinary McJob with some IT company, liked online poker and hanging at Cosmopol and other gaming clubs.

  Boooriiing . . . !

  But a bit farther down the page things got considerably more interesting.

  There were small thumbnails indicating video clips, something like twenty in all, at a guess, Fifty-Eight Hasselqvist’s collected works.

  The first image that jumped out at him was of an expressway bridge, and he began to suspect something. One double click later and his suspicions were confirmed.

  The Essinge expressway, the overpass at Lindhagens. So Fifty-Eight really had been involved in setting him up, just as he’d thought!

  But the images didn’t quite fit, the light in the clip was different, the nuances darker. The bridge was the same, as was the view toward Traneberg. The traffic, the flashing blue lights, the cop cars racing at speed toward the camera; it all looked just like his own disaster scenario. But when the cortège reached the bridge nothing happened. He saw the cars swerve at the last minute, presumably because they’d seen the cameraman up above. But then they just swept on past the bridge, over the roundabout, and on toward the city. When the clip stopped he got an explanation.

  According to the date and time, it had been filmed that day, just an hour or so before. Why the fuck would they send such a solid player as Fifty-Eight to film a police convoy, especially in the same place where another player had already filmed a far ballsier assignment? It didn’t make any sense.

  He quickly skimmed through a few other clips and realized that he could sort them into date order with a couple of clicks.