Buzz: A Thriller

by Anders de la Motte

  She could actually be a suspect—theoretically, anyway . . .

  Whatever, at least he had found out a few more things.

  One: Anna’s big sister had worked for the company but had left because she didn’t see eye to eye with Philip. Okay, so no one had actually said that, but the vibes had been pretty obvious.

  Two: his suspicion that Anna’s death had something to do with the business had grown even stronger. Why else would they seemingly choose to hide the truth about how she really died?

  Three: it looked as if Monika would be inheriting Anna’s shares in ArgosEye. If Philip had planned to get rid of Anna to get control of the company, then obviously he should have done so before the divorce went through, while he was still her principal heir.

  Which meant that HP should be looking around for a new prime suspect.

  Possibly even a woman . . .

  21

  THE PR OF E

  Pillars of Society forum

  Posted: 8 December, 21:56

  By: MayBey

  Innocent citizens only exist until the moment they’re uncovered. Guilt or innocence is mostly a question of timing.

  This post has 59 comments

  “MICKE.”

  “Hi, it’s me.”

  “Hello.”

  His voice sounded reserved, which was perfectly understandable.

  “How are you?”

  “Fine . . .”

  There was a short silence on the line. Obviously he wasn’t going to make this easy for her.

  “Listen, I know I haven’t been much fun lately . . .”

  More silence.

  “ . . . not exactly very good company.”

  Still not a sound from him. Had he hung up?

  “Are you still there?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay . . .”

  She had prepared what she wanted to say, had even written down a few key words, but she had lost her thread already.

  She took a deep breath and skipped to the last line of her notes.

  “I need help with something, it’s to do with everything that’s been going on over the past few weeks. Work, my behavior—everything. I know it’s asking a lot, but I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t important . . .”

  More silence, as she held her breath and waited.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  More evening work—but this time sadly nothing to do with any new special job. Instead his Internet training was continuing with an evening in the Laundry.

  It had taken him a week or so to realize that ArgosEye never blinked.

  Nights, weekends, Christmas—there were always a few people working in each department, with at least one section head on duty in the office.

  “But you don’t have to be awake.” Beens grinned, opening a door that HP had only ever walked past before.

  “Cool, eh?”

  The room was actually a small lounge. A comfortable sofa and armchairs grouped in front of a large flat-screen television with surround sound. Toward the back of the room was a small pantry with an espresso machine, microwave, and fridge, then, beyond that, a closed door.

  “The bedroom,” Beens said with a grin. “But don’t worry, darling, it’s got bunk beds.”

  HP smiled back, sticking his thumb up to show just how impressed he was.

  Beens might have been a section head, but he definitely wasn’t cool. Even if his suit had probably come from the same smart Östermalm tailor as HP’s, it didn’t quite seem to fit him. It almost looked like his pale, chubby body was trying to shrug it off.

  “So, what, do we spend all night hanging out in here, then?”

  “Nah, we’ve got to do some work first. Or at least look like that’s what we’re doing . . .”

  Beens winked at HP.

  “New guys don’t usually get to know more than they have to, but you seem to have taken over from Stoffe as Philip’s new favorite. Either way, I’ve been told to show you how everything works, so we may as well start over in our section, then take a look at the Filter, and then cause a bit of trouble for the Strats before we settle down . . .”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “Great, stay close to me and I’ll let you in. Your card won’t work on all the doors, only the chosen few get that honor . . .”

  Once they had made it into the Laundry, where the night shift was already in full flow, Beens said:

  “Okay, it’s like this. Here in the Laundry we deal with a sort of reverse top-list optimization, if you see what I mean?”

  HP did his best to look as if he did, but evidently Beens still felt that he had to offer an explanation.

  “Our clients pay us to keep their search results neat and tidy. The Filter scans their trademarks and domains on the most common search engines—Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and so on—and if the hits throw up any crap, then we’re the ones who get to wash it off.”

  He walked over to his overflowing desk, pulled up an extra chair for HP, then sat down.

  “Ninety percent of the people searching on Google never go beyond the first page, and another five percent fall away on the second page. By the time you get past the third page, there’s only a hard core of people left.

  “Our job is basically to make sure that the first two pages of results for our clients are kept clear of negative buzz. That might be blogs dissing them, competitors spreading cybergossip, or even obsessives who start up whole sites to put people off using Volvo or Telia, for instance.”

  He waved one hand in the direction of a projector screen at the far end of the room.

  “So how do you go about cleaning things up?” HP asked.

  “Oh, there are plenty of different ways, but I’ll give you a couple of examples.”

  He counted on his fingers.

  “One: you fill the hit lists with your own information, often by splitting your main site into different links. If you try looking up Microsoft you’ll see that almost all the hits in the first few pages are variations on microsoft.com. The basic principle is the same as filling up a bulletin board with your own posters so that no one else gets any space. Are you with me?”

  HP nodded.

  “Two: if that’s not enough, Rilke’s bloggers get to work and add a bit of positive buzz around the client, or one or more of their trademarks. Twitter’s good, it generates loads of traffic, especially if it comes from people who are in at the moment. But the principle is exactly the same . . .”

  “ . . . piling on as much positive buzz as possible so that the negative hits slip beyond the second page,” HP concluded for him.

  “Exactly, Mange, you’ve hit it right on the head! There are other variations on the same theme: YouTube clips and Wikipedia articles, for instance. The search engines almost always promote that sort of thing to the top ten.”

  “What if that doesn’t work? If you don’t manage to suppress the negative buzz with your own message?” HP interrupted quickly. “Suppose there’s a persistent little nut out there, beavering away to stop his hate site ending up on the sidelines . . . ?”

  “Erm . . . that doesn’t actually happen very often . . .”

  Beens was already holding up a third finger, but seemed to have lost his thread.

  “Well . . .” he muttered after a few seconds’ pause, “we hardly ever get it wrong, maybe once a month at most, something like that.”

  He looked around in both directions, then leaned closer to HP.

  “But seeing as you asked . . .” he said, almost in a whisper. “The very few cases that we don’t manage to fix get sent upstairs.”

  He gestured with his head toward the ceiling.

  “To the top floor,” he added when HP evidently didn’t respond in the correct way.

  “Ah—okay! To the twin detectives, you mean?” HP hazarded.

  “Exactly! It works every time. A couple of days there and, hey presto, it’s clean . . .”

  Beens raised his eyebrows and nodded in a conspiratorial way. HP had no choice but to join
in.

  “So they’re some sort of computer geniuses, then?”

  “I doubt it,” Beens snorted. “I can’t imagine any of their desktops contain anything beyond the basic Office package, even if they do have unlimited access . . . But they’ve got contacts, fucking good contacts. The sort who seem to be able to fix anything!”

  He glanced quickly over the edge of his screen at his section of the office, then leaned closer to HP again.

  “We’re talking code, Mange . . .”

  “Code?”

  Beens gave him an irritated look.

  “The code, the spiral, the syntax, the PR of E? Does that ring any little bells?”

  HP shook his head slowly.

  “Shit, Mange, and you’re supposed to be our new hotshot.” Beens sighed.

  “PageRank, Google’s search algorithm!”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Sure, of course . . .” he replied after a few seconds. “Just tell me what you need.”

  His voice no longer sounded quite so hostile. She breathed out.

  “I need help checking out a website. Someone’s writing loads of stuff about me on there.

  “Lies,” she added when he didn’t respond. “Whoever’s writing them seems to be out to hurt me, and I’d like to try to find out who it is. I’m starting to think it must be someone I know . . .”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The leather sofa in the overnight lounge, 23:48.

  Beens was already snoring away on his half, which wasn’t really that surprising considering the turgid Monty Python film he had put on.

  HP should have headed over to the bunk beds and tried to get some sleep, but he already knew he wouldn’t be able to. Not after what he’d just heard . . .

  Last year, when he was caught up in the Game, he had tried to dig out some more information about it. Searching with all manner of different parameters: “Game,” “The Game,” “Alternate Reality Games,” and so on, but never found anything more exciting than Wikipedia articles about mind games, or various book and film sites.

  During his long exile, on the rare occasions when he felt completely safe and didn’t think anyone would be able to trace him, he had tried a few more times. But the end result had always been the same.

  Not a single hit. Not the slightest buzz, rumor, or even a whisper about everything he had been through. It was as if the Game had never existed.

  But after listening to Beens’s explanation, the pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place and the whole of his undercover mission suddenly started to pay serious dividends.

  The perfect hiding place.

  Deep Internet!

  He’d heard the phrase before but had always thought it sounded most like a myth: that part of the Internet was hidden from the rest of the world, that you couldn’t see it because all connections to the surface had either been cut or were so well hidden that search engines couldn’t find them.

  But now that he tried to make sense of his evening with Beens, everything appeared in a completely different light. Because what was the fundamental business idea of this company? Identifying and then burying things people didn’t want anyone to see . . .

  Beens actually seemed a bit too excited about the idea that the gang upstairs had once worked in military intelligence. He had gone on about them probably working for the National Defense Radio Center, the National Security Agency, and other similar organizations, and that they could get Google and Co. to change their algorithms and make certain hits just disappear.

  To begin with he hadn’t really been listening—Beens just seemed to have watched too much television. But the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that the whole idea of secret contacts probably did have some truth in it. But this wasn’t a matter of a few old spy friends scratching each other’s backs. That sort of thing was far too easy to uncover, and no way would Google and Yahoo! with their armadas of lawyers ever buy a story about the NSA wanting to get rid of a stroppy blog post from Katla in Kungsängen . . .

  But if he took off his conspiracy-theory hat and tried to think about it sensibly, and then added it to everything he already knew, he soon ended up at a new and considerably more believable conclusion. The thought alone was enough to make the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He had already suspected that Anna Argos was involved in the Game in some way. There had been Game vibes there, he was pretty certain about that. And he was still having trouble swallowing the idea that his role as the scapegoat was just a complete coincidence.

  And now the pieces of the puzzle were slowly falling into place.

  The reason why he hadn’t been able to find any information about the Game out on the net was because someone was filtering it out, cutting all the threads, and making sure they could stay hidden way down there in the depths. Hidden beneath layer upon layer of more or less meaningless buzz . . .

  And this someone would presumably be able to inform the Game Master about anyone out there in cyberspace breaking rule number one, trying to post confidential information, or asking difficult questions.

  What happened next wasn’t too hard to work out. As soon as they had a name and address, a Player would be dispatched to pay a little home visit. Some attention-seeking little nobody who didn’t have the faintest idea of the real reason behind their task, and who in actual fact didn’t give a shit as long as they could go on getting their kicks.

  Hell, he’d even done a mission like that himself, out in Birkastan! Spraying a threatening message from the Game Master on someone’s door, about the importance of keeping quiet.

  Maybe some of his other tasks had actually been ways of plugging leaks? Getting people to shut up when they started blabbing about the wrong things?

  He ran through them in his head: the lawyer whose car he had sabotaged, the television presenter he’d called and threatened . . . Damn, this really could explain all that!

  Piece by piece everything started to slot into place, as the lines joining the dots began to build up more of a picture. A damned unsettling picture.

  The air in the little lounge suddenly felt stagnant and difficult to breathe. HP flew up from the sofa, pulled his shoes on, and dashed out through the door. He followed the corridor that ran the length of the office, not stopping until he reached the metal door over in the corner of the Troll Mine.

  Emergency Exit Only, the luminous green sign said—but he really didn’t care a flying fuck about that. A quick shove of the hip on the bar locking the door, and then he was out on a dimly lit landing in the stairwell, breathing in long, cool gulps of air.

  He had guessed that everything fitted together somehow, but hadn’t been able to put his finger on it before now.

  ArgosEye was working for the Game!

  22

  IN FOR A PENNY

  Pillars of Society forum

  Posted: 11 December, 20:03

  By: MayBey

  Big and strong always beats small and weak . . .

  This post has 67 comments

  SHE PULLED ON her running gear, headed through the grounds of the teacher training college, over toward Rålambshov Park, then followed the water back under the three bridges on the south side of the island. The circuit was probably five kilometers over uneven terrain, one that she had run plenty of times before.

  Only a handful of people were defying the winter darkness and cold to get some exercise on the footpaths, which suited her fine. Just her and her thoughts—and her iPod, of course.

  On the way back she headed up across the ridge of Atterbomsvägen, then set off down toward her own little street. The downhill slope made her legs move a bit faster than she really wanted.

  She was so tired that she forgot to stop and look before crossing Rålambshovsvägen, but it didn’t really matter. At this time of day there tended to be very little traffic, and the speed limit was so low that she’d have plenty of time to react.

  But when she’d taken a couple of strides onto the traffic lane she suddenly noticed a ca
r out of the corner of her eye.

  The vehicle was parked about twenty meters away, so she could just carry on across the road.

  But just as she reached the opposite pavement her police brain suddenly kicked in.

  There was something about the car that didn’t make sense and she slowed down, switched off her iPod, and jogged in place for a moment.

  The car was parked on its own, presumably because it was in a no-parking zone. Now that she was looking properly, she saw that it was actually parked across the T-junction with her own street, and that most certainly wasn’t permitted.

  It was a Mazda, not the latest model at a guess, but it was hard to tell seeing as the grille and front bumper were missing, which was probably what had set her alarm bells ringing. A typical hooligan’s car: rusty, no license plate, probably not insured, and not even roadworthy.

  She looked around.

  So where were its occupants?

  Considering how cold it was, the most likely option was that they’d gone into one of the doorways.

  She’d just made up her mind to go and check her own door when she noticed something else about the car. The windows were misted up. There was someone inside it.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Hollywood, Nox here!”

  “Hi!”

  HP stood up from his desk and walked to a quieter part of the office.

  “You’re not very easy to track down, man. I knocked on your door but you weren’t home. I was out of credit so I couldn’t call earlier. A road game?”

  “Work,” HP replied curtly.

  “Okay, yeah. Call in and see me. There’s something I want to tell you, but I don’t want to do it over the phone, if you get me?”

  “Sure,” HP muttered.

  “How are you, Hollywood? You sound a bit weird . . .”

  “I’m fine, just been working a lot. Doing nights,” he added, but the call was already over.

  What the hell was all that about, and what did the guy mean, calling him Hollywood?

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Really she ought to just let it go. Head back home to a warm bath and let the uniforms deal with it. She had more than enough to think about, and it wasn’t impossible that MayBey had posted something else while she’d been out.