The Game Trilogy

by Anders de la Motte

  For a moment she felt he could see straight through her.

  ‘Two minutes to landing,’ a voice said over the speakers.

  ‘Right …’ she said, giving Black a quick smile.

  But he didn’t smile back.

  He was slipping in and out of consciousness.

  He heard voices several times, conversations going on above him.

  ‘He’s in very bad shape …’

  ‘How much has he had?’

  ‘A triple dose. I daren’t give him any more …’

  ‘Have you spoken to the Source?’

  ‘Mmm …’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He says we have to bring him back to life. That there are no other alternatives …’

  ‘Okay … So what do we do now?’

  ‘We wait …’

  ‘Do we know anything else about the place?’

  The sound of paper rustling somewhere to his left.

  He must have been awake for five minutes now, but he was keeping his eyes closed. There was a rhythmic bleeping close to his left ear, which he guessed was a machine keeping a check on his pulse. Best to lie low and take slow, deep breaths.

  There were two other people in the room, a man and a woman. He seemed to be lying on some sort of bunk or table a few metres away from them.

  He felt a vague pressure in the crook of his right arm, which he guessed was from the needle of a drip, but other than that his body felt surprisingly okay.

  There was an odd smell, ether and something musky that he couldn’t identify.

  ‘To start with, it’s much, much bigger that we thought. Take a look at this!’

  The woman’s voice again, then more rustling which HP guessed must have been from some sort of plan.

  ‘Right, so these red marks, are they …?’ The man’s voice sounded familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it.

  ‘Red is for guards, blue for security cameras, and yellow is different types of alarm …’

  ‘Okay … And all this comes from the Source?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you trust him?’

  ‘He’s never given me any reason to doubt him. Everything he’s given us so far has been one hundred percent accurate, just look at that poor sod …’

  It took HP a few seconds to realize that the woman meant him.

  ‘I’m still not sure. About him, or the whole thing.’

  The male voice again, a bit whiny, in a way that still sounded extremely familiar. He fought the urge to open his eyes and turn his head.

  Suddenly he noticed the bleeps speeding up.

  Shit, he had to relax.

  Deep breaths, nice and easy.

  He wanted to hear more, try to work out what the fuck was going on.

  ‘Six floors, then,’ the woman went on.

  ‘Thirty metres into the rock, each floor consisting of a hub with five tunnels leading off it like spokes, each of them fifty metres long. Five times fifty is two hundred and fifty, multiplied by six floors …’

  ‘One and a half kilometres. That’s a hell of a lot of space …’

  ‘And each one of the spokes is ten metres wide, which means they might have several rows of server racks in them. Say, two passageways for maintenance in each tunnel. Each rack is, what, one metre deep? That makes …’

  ‘Five kilometres, maybe more. Five kilometres of servers … That’s a fuck of a lot of capacity!’

  The man’s voice sounded agitated.

  ‘That’s enough to supply …’

  ‘… pretty much the whole of Europe’s requirements for secure data storage.’

  The site manager paused long enough for the statement to sink in. The hundred or so visitors seemed impressed. As for her, she was only really half-listening to the press conference.

  Details of the site’s capacity flickered past on the large screen, interspersed occasionally with pictures of its construction. She stretched discreetly and took the chance to check her phone for messages. But the inbox was empty and the calls she had missed in the lift at the Grand didn’t seem to have been registered by the phone. Weird.

  In contrast to the summer heat outside, the air in there was cool, and even though they were above ground, she thought she could detect a faint smell of the rock, a bit like in the underground in Stockholm. Which wasn’t really that strange …

  During the Cold War this had been the site of an underground command base – she’d read that in the papers. And just as Kjellgren had said, there was a long tunnel which acted as both an emergency exit and a conduit for all the communication cables to the artillery bunkers on the coast a couple of kilometres away.

  Now that same tunnel brought cool water from the Baltic to service the air-conditioning down in the underground chambers. That and the cool Swedish climate, the unlimited and secure supply of electricity and the extensive broadband network were evidently the main reasons why the whole installation had been located in Sweden, blah, blah, blah …

  Obviously she ought to have been more interested, because this was her employer they were talking about here, after all. But she was having trouble concentrating on the details of the presentation. She couldn’t shake the gnawing feeling that something was seriously wrong. Really she ought to be trying to call Thomas again.

  Black was bound to be safe in there. All the visitors had been registered and checked out in advance, and had been made to undergo a security check more rigorous than at any airport. All electronic gadgets except the photographers’ cameras had been locked away out in the security lodge. Naturally she had been spared these security procedures, and still had both her radio and mobile on her.

  But she already suspected there was no point to the call she was thinking of making. Just as before, Thomas wouldn’t answer. Besides, he would be there in an hour or so.

  Kjellgren was driving, and according to the text she had received a few minutes ago, they had already passed Uppsala. She wasn’t looking forward to the meeting.

  But she wasn’t the one who had made a fool of herself, she wasn’t the one who had drawn an illegal handgun …

  ‘Our site basically works the same way as an old-fashioned bank vault …’ the site manager went on as the video projector faded neatly into an image she recognized.

  The bank vault on the screen was practically identical to the one she had been in a few days before. Thick concrete walls, polished marble floor and long rows of little brass doors … Could it be the same vault?

  Rebecca straightened up in her chair instinctively. She had been trying not to think about the safe deposit box and Tage Sammer’s story, hoping to set the whole thing to one side for a few days until Black’s visit was over.

  ‘A thick shell to protect against attack from outside,’ the site manager went on. ‘Then separate compartments inside, each one isolated from the others to allow entry only to those authorized to access the contents. But here the size of each compartment can be varied with a few simple commands from the control room. In other words we can adapt to our clients’ requirements instantaneously. The compartments become bubbles whose size can be constantly adjusted.

  ‘Any demand to store ten, one hundred, or even a thousand times more information would be no problem at all, the changes can be made instantly. What server room can compete with that level of capacity?’

  He left another deliberate pause for the rhetorical question to hang in the air for a few seconds. The projector replaced the bank vault with an image of a spacious underground chamber containing row upon row of identical server cabinets.

  ‘Everything gathered in one location. Simple, cost effective, and – above all – secure,’ the site manager went on.

  The projector laid a new picture at an angle on top of the current one. An almost identical underground room, then another, and another … Rows of shiny server cabinets, so many that she had already lost count. Thousands, millions of secrets, all stored in the same place.

  All of a sudden she felt rather un
well. It must have been the after-effects of the adrenalin rush. But at least her hands had stopped shaking.

  The site manager resumed his speech as the vaults went on multiplying on the screen, but she was no longer listening.

  Like shiny little bubbles, all of them doomed to burst sooner or later …

  ‘Are you awake, HP?’

  For a moment he wondered about carrying on pretending to be unconscious, in the hope of finding out more about what was going on.

  But something in her voice made him open his eyes before he had actually made up his mind.

  It took just a matter of seconds for him to recognize her. Her platinum blonde hair was now dark, but the nose piercing and overblown eye-shadow were the same.

  The emo girl with the headphones he had seen in the underground.

  ‘Good,’ she nodded to him. ‘How are you feeling?’

  He tried to say something, but all that emerged from his lips was a sort of dry croak.

  ‘Here.’ She handed him a bottle of water and he raised himself up on one elbow. Deep, wonderful mouthfuls …

  ‘Your fever’s gone down,’ she said, looking at a screen beside him. ‘But it’ll be a few days before the infection’s disappeared completely. You’ve been dosed up with enough penicillin to treat a horse. Quite literally.’

  He didn’t try to answer, and just nodded as he looked round slowly. It looked like a hospital, with the only difference that everything in there was bigger. The bunk he was lying on, the lamps and straps hanging from the ceiling.

  It took him a while to work it out.

  ‘A vet’s?’ he croaked.

  ‘Yep,’ she replied. ‘Well, at least you’re not totally out of it. My name’s Nora. And you already know Kent over there …’

  HP sat up with an effort and glanced over towards the corner where the man was supposed to be sitting.

  And there he was.

  ‘Hi, HP,’ the man said. ‘Or should I call you 128?’

  The words echoed for few seconds in his brain.

  ‘Hasselqvist with a Q and a V …’ he muttered, without really being able to take it in.

  ‘A.k.a. Player 58,’ the man spat. ‘Remember? You sprayed teargas in my face out on the Kymlinge Link Road.’

  He flew up from his chair and sprang at HP.

  ‘Easy now, Kent …’ the emo girl said, stepping between them.

  She was almost ten centimetres taller than Hasselqvist, and, judging by her posture, considerably more muscular.

  ‘We haven’t got time for wounded egos …’

  Hasselqvist with a Q and a V glowered at her for a few seconds, then threw out his arms in surrender.

  Stepping back, he muttered, ‘In case you’re interested, I suffered an allergic reaction and had to spend three days in intensive care …

  ‘Actually, I should probably thank you.’ Now he grinned at HP. ‘If you hadn’t got in the way, it might have been me sitting there.’

  He nodded at the oversized bunk HP was sitting on.

  HP ignored him.

  ‘Where are we?’ he mumbled at the emo, whose name was evidently Nora.

  ‘The Life Guards’ veterinary clinic.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lidingövägen, opposite the Östermalm sports centre. The guards’ stables … I’ve got a key to the gate so we got in the back way.’

  ‘Okay …’

  He drained the bottle of water and tried to make sense of his thoughts. But it was impossible.

  His head ached and even if he felt a bit brighter than he had over the past few days, his body still felt like it had been put through a mangle.

  ‘So which one of you is going to tell me what the fuck I’m doing here?’

  ‘Look, HP,’ Nora said as she got him a cup of coffee from the large thermos flask on the camping table. ‘We’ve been trying to get hold of you for a while, but you’ve been playing hard to get … Those notes on your door?’ she added when he didn’t seem to get it.

  ‘Kent and I, and Jeff – you’ll meet him soon – have all been caught up in the Game. Just like you, we all did things we never would have dreamed of doing when we started …’

  ‘But then we got kicked out,’ Hasselqvist added. ‘Or replaced by someone else, someone more suitable. A new favourite …’ He glared sullenly at HP.

  ‘Something like that,’ Nora nodded. ‘Either way, once we sobered up and got over the worst of the withdrawal symptoms from the Game, we all started to figure out that what we’d been involved in wasn’t just wrong, but that we’d also been manipulated. That we’d been nothing but puppets …’

  HP drank a quick gulp. The coffee was unexpectedly hot and burned his tongue, but he forced himself to swallow it.

  ‘We each started trying to find out more about the Game and the Game Master, but as you know it can be dangerous to break …’

  ‘… rule number one,’ HP muttered.

  ‘Exactly … We were all warned off, some more than others. But a few months ago we were all brought together by someone else …’

  She exchanged glances with Hasselqvist.

  ‘He used to work for the Game,’ Hasselqvist said. ‘We’re not sure, but we think he …’

  ‘No matter what we think …’ Nora interrupted, glaring at Hasselqvist, ‘this person did bring us all together.’

  ‘And now you want revenge,’ HP said. ‘Give the Game Master a bit of payback for the shit he fed you? Stick a spanner in the works so you can all sleep a bit easier …?’

  HP shook his head and emptied the cup down his throat.

  ‘Been there, done that … Thanks for the coffee, but I’ve got much bigger problems …’

  ‘Sit down, HP!’ Nora said before he’d even got to his feet. To his own surprise he obeyed her at once.

  ‘We’re not just some bunch of losers wandering around without a plan. We’ve got a source, an insider. Someone who knows how it all fits together, and maybe even knows what’s going to happen next. And, not least, why!’

  She looked at him, waiting for the words to sink in.

  ‘With the Source’s help we can put a stop to the whole thing. Not just individual tasks, but the whole of their fucking Game plan. You get it?’

  Before he could answer there was a knock at the door.

  ‘That’ll be Jeff, I’ll get it.’

  Hasselqvist walked over to the door.

  ‘Who is it?’

  He opened the door a crack to look out, but the person on the other side yanked the handle so hard that Hasselqvist almost fell over.

  ‘Leave it out, Kent, this isn’t some fucking spy story …’ the man chuckled as he came into the room.

  He was wearing jeans and a tight t-shirt that bulged impressively over his swollen muscles.

  ‘Oh, so sleeping beauty’s woken up.’ He nodded quickly at HP as he took off his sunglasses. ‘You managed to mend him then, good work, Doctor!’

  The man – Jeff, evidently – smiled a shiny white smile and winked at Nora, but to HP’s satisfaction she ignored him completely. Not that this seemed to upset Muscleman in the slightest. He pulled a chair over towards HP and sat astride it as he scratched the back of his cropped head a couple of times, revealing a serious tribal tattoo on his lower arm.

  ‘Is there any coffee?’

  ‘I’ll get it, Jeff!’

  Hasselqvist got busy with the thermos.

  ‘So what do we know?’ Nora asked.

  Jeff shrugged.

  ‘I got rid of the revolver and his phone.’ He nodded towards HP. ‘Black’s in position up at the Fortress. They’re busy cutting the inauguration ribbon right now, at a guess. The city’s still crawling with police cars, even if they don’t seem to have a clue what they’re looking for …’

  He turned on HP.

  ‘You should be fucking grateful I got hold of you, mate,’ he said, pointing a thick index finger at HP. ‘If it wasn’t for us you’d be dead now. That big bodyguard had you in his sights, another t
wo seconds and BANG!’

  He added a cocked thumb to the index finger and demonstrated what he meant.

  Hasselqvist handed him a cup of coffee.

  ‘Anyway, how the fuck did you come up with the idea of shooting Black? That wouldn’t have solved a bloody thing …’

  HP muttered something inaudible into his coffee cup. He had to admit that the mountain of muscle in front of him had a point. As the horse medicine did its thing, he was starting to regain control of his brain. But even though he kept rewinding and playing the tape in his head, he still couldn’t really explain what had happened. It all felt very distant.

  As if nothing he had experienced over the past twenty-four hours had actually happened, and had just been a dream. Correction – a nightmare …

  ‘Have we heard any more from the Source?’ Jeff grunted.

  ‘He sent all the plans …’ Hasselqvist began, but Nora cut him off.

  ‘Not yet. First we have to find out if he wants to work with us.’

  She nodded to HP.

  ‘Okay, I am actually here, you know,’ he said. ‘Look … I’m grateful to you for helping me, but I’ve actually got a shit-load of my own prob …’

  ‘Is one of them your sister, by any chance?’ Nora interrupted. ‘The one who works for Sentry?’

  ‘What? Her job’s with the Secur … What did you say?’

  He saw them exchange a glance, and didn’t like that.

  ‘Your sister heads up a bodyguard unit for Sentry Security, to look after business bigwigs. Sentry was bought up last year by a company called PayTag. And presumably you already know a bit about them, seeing as you just tried to shoot their managing director …’

  HP opened his mouth to reply, but Nora didn’t give him the chance.

  ‘Good, then maybe you also know that PayTag is constructing a number of huge server farms around the world? Well, perhaps server hotels would be a better description. Here in Sweden they’ve built a massive installation in one of the military’s old underground bunkers just outside Uppsala. The place is called the Fortress, and it’ll soon be storing data for pretty much every company and government body across the whole of northern Europe …’

  HP nodded again, more forcefully this time, and suddenly he couldn’t help smiling.