Either they didn’t quite trust him and wanted to know whether he was on board before sharing their ingenious plan with him.
Or, much more likely: these amateurs didn’t actually have a plan . . .
♦ ♦ ♦
Two years ago he had broken into a similar establishment, but that one had been considerably smaller, much less protected, and he’d also had the help of Rehyman the genius to get past all the obstacles.
“Well, what do you think?”
He saw the expectant looks on their faces and for a moment he wondered whether he should hold back slightly to soften the blow. But there was no point. These idiots needed to hear the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
“Seriously? You’re all fucking mad!” He shrugged. “Do you really think you’re going to be able to get in there?” He put his finger in the middle of the control room. “And even if by some miracle you do manage to get through, what are you going to do there, and—maybe even more important—how are you planning to get out again?”
“Never mind about that,” Muscleman Jeff said in a way that made HP’s alarm bells ring even louder. He’d definitely seen the guy before, but where?
“If you help us get inside, we’ll take care of the rest,” Nora said.
“The Source said you’d be able to do that, he said you’ve done stuff like this before,” Hasselqvist added. “That you’re some sort of expert in this area . . .”
HP nodded.
“Maybe . . .” He turned it all over in his head for a few moments. Sure, it was tempting, and certainly felt very familiar. But, to start with, he already had a shitload of his own problems to deal with, and, what’s more, he trusted this little trio about as much as they trusted him.
The horse doctor seemed more or less okay, but Hasselqvist was a slippery fucker, and the gorilla made him feel uneasy in more ways than one.
But at the same time they had something he might be able to make use of, something that might actually help him understand his own situation.
He took a deep breath.
“Okay, if I’m even going to consider helping you, I want something in return first . . .”
“You mean apart from us saving your life . . . ?” Nora said before either of the others had even opened their mouths.
HP shrugged his shoulders. A vein was starting to throb in the mountain of Muscles’ forehead. They glared at each other for a few seconds.
“This ‘Source’ of yours . . .” HP drew a pair of weary quotation marks in the air. “I want to talk to him directly—”
“No one talks directly to the Source,” Hasselqvist interrupted.“We’ve only met him once, all communication is done—”
Nora raised her hand and he fell silent at once.
“So what does he look like?” HP did his best not to sound too curious.
There was a brief silence, then Nora shrugged.
“Ordinary . . .” she said, and held up her hand again, this time to stop the other two from protesting. “Short hair, average height, not quite forty. A typical suit, I’d say . . .”
HP nodded.
“Do you know what his role is in the Game?”
“Not exactly, but Kent and Jeff have a theory . . .”
She turned to Hasselqvist.
“Well . . . it’s just a feeling. Some of the phrases he uses. I think he’s involved in the technical side of it. Communication, servers, something like that. The plans contain a whole load of technical details. Don’t they, Jeff?”
The mountain of muscle hesitated for a moment, then nodded slowly.
“These plans are like the ones we use at work for IT projects. If he was involved in construction, there’d be ventilation ducts, plumbing, stuff like that, but there’s nothing of that sort on these plans. Only details of the IT infrastructure . . .”
“So you think the Source is some sort of IT guru? Someone who was involved in setting the whole thing up?” A tingling sensation was slowly spreading from HP’s stomach.
The two men nodded.
“And how do you know you can really trust him?”
“We’re not stupid, HP . . .” Nora replied. “Obviously we were suspicious as well to start with, but the Source has delivered on everything. He brought us together, he’s supplied plans, information about Sentry and PayTag, and—not least—he helped us locate and get hold of you before you managed to do anything really stupid. He’s taken big risks for our sake, and it doesn’t feel like he’s lying. All of that put together means that we’ve decided to trust him, even if we’re still wary. But, like Kent said, we only met the Source once, right at the start. So we couldn’t take you to him even if we wanted to . . .”
“I see . . .” HP looked down at his lap for a few seconds while he tried to sort out his poker face.
He needed to look a bit disappointed, make it seem like he was backing down.
“I need to think about it,” he said. “Just for a couple of days. How can I contact you?”
“Here!”
Jeff took out a cell phone and put it on the table.
“Pay as you go, can’t be traced. Call the number for dry cleaning in the contacts and leave a message.”
“Okay.”
HP picked up the phone, then stood up and headed toward the door.
“Hang on,” Hasselqvist shouted, and he stopped. “Don’t forget your medicine.”
Hasselqvist tossed a white plastic container to HP.
“Well done, Kent,” Nora said. “I’d forgotten that. Take two a day for five days, HP.”
“Okay, thanks.” He waved the pills in farewell and tried to keep a straight face. “I’ll be in touch!”
♦ ♦ ♦
She was sitting outside one of the meeting rooms in the main building, slowly turning a bottle of water in her hands.
The press had left, leaving just a few of the politicians and various managers from both the Fortress and Sentry.
Right now they were having lunch further along the corridor, and a short while ago Black and the Ice Queen had both left the gathering to hold a conference call in the small room behind her.
She glanced at the time. Kjellgren and Thomas ought to be there any minute now.
For the third time in the past five minutes she took out her cell.
No new messages, from either Kjellgren or Micke.
She pressed the Call button again, but just like last time was put straight through to Micke’s voice mail. Not that that was particularly unusual . . .
For the last week or so she’d hardly had time to talk to him at all, maybe even longer than that.
Often neither of them got home till late, and then they just crashed on the sofa.
She hadn’t told him about her meeting with Uncle Tage, and only selected details about the safe-deposit box. She’d said it contained a few old papers: marriage and birth certificates, a few worthless shares. He hardly ever asked her about what she got up to these days. He was probably trying to prove that he trusted her. And she was repaying the confidence by lying to him again . . .
She looked at the time, then took a little bottle of pills from her bag, checked they were the right ones, and fished out one tablet. She glanced around quickly before swallowing it down with a swig from the bottle.
Using antidepressant medication is nothing to be ashamed of, Rebecca . . .
Yeah, right!
That statement might make sense in the reality her doctor lived in. But in her world you couldn’t show the slightest sign of weakness.
But at least her shaky relationship wasn’t her fault alone.
She had actually changed her job for Micke’s sake and had done her best to understand what he was involved in, but it wasn’t entirely straightforward trying to follow all the technical ins and outs. A whole load of different companies and official bodies were having problems with various targeted hacker attacks, she had understood that much.
DDoS—Distributed Denial of Service—was something sh
e knew about from the time the police website had been attacked. Someone, or several people, had managed to get hundreds, and possibly thousands, of different computers to fire a mass of requests at the same server at exactly the same time, so many that it eventually stopped working.
And she understood viruses as well.
But there were loads of other security threats.
DoS attacks were related to DDoS, and then there were trojans, worms, spyware, and a whole load more whose names and functions she had already forgotten.
Hacker attacks had been going on for years, but according to Micke they had become much more intensified. Most companies were worried about viruses and other hostile attacks that could affect their day-to-day activities. But what really scared them, and what made them turn to Sentry for help, was the risk that outsiders might gain access to their customer details: dates of birth, credit and debit card numbers, medical records, insurance history, purchasing patterns, criminal records, bank account information. The list of information hidden away in supposedly secure databases was practically infinite. And if any outsider got hold of that information, the company or official body in question would suffer a massive loss of public confidence.
One large bank had already lost several hundred thousand credit and debit card numbers, and a gambling site had thrown in plenty of other details, including email addresses and IMS IDs.
Installations like the Fortress were supposed to be the solution to problems like that. All information stored in one place, protected by the very latest technology and guarded around the clock by thirty experts in IT security. What company or official body could offer anything like that?
She heard a door close further along the corridor and shortly afterward she saw Thomas marching along the corridor with Kjellgren at his heels.
Thomas didn’t look happy.
♦ ♦ ♦
I’ll be in touch!—Not fucking even!
He already knew who the Source was, and even where he was hiding.
And there he was, thinking he’d seen a ghost and was going mad. But the pieces of the puzzle were starting to fall into place.
There was only one person who fit that description, both physically and in terms of what he knew. The server king, the computer genius, the crazy backwoodsman, the outcast—the man, the myth, the legend:
Erman himself!
So he had survived the blaze in the outback. Managed to get himself a new identity, and then gradually returned to civilization while he finessed his plan. First finding a new hiding place, and then setting about gathering information.
Two years was a long time. Erman may have been pretty soft-boiled when they met, but there was no doubt that the guy was smart. Something of an IT genius, at least according to his own testimony. And once Erman had got himself and his head sorted, and got back in front of a keyboard, there was probably no end to the stuff he could dig out. Tasks that had been carried out, Players who had failed . . .
Shit, HP had actually given the bloke the idea of wiping out the server farm because of what he’d managed to do out in Kista.
And PayTag’s Fortress was obviously a hundred times bigger. The new, improved Death Star . . .
The Source said you’d done stuff like this before. That you’re some sort of expert . . .
Ha!
The evidence was watertight.
Erman was the Source!
Or rather, the new, improved version of Erman was.
Slimmer, clean-shaven, short-haired, and with less of an allergy to electricity than the last version. Those idiots at the vet’s seemed to think he was still working for the Game. Maybe that was part of his plan to seem credible. The truth about his real background, the nervous breakdown and the time he spent holed up in the woods, was hardly likely to inspire confidence. Better to pretend he was still part of the Game.
Now it was just a matter of finding the bastard’s hiding place, and he had a feeling he’d already solved that one. It was actually ridiculously simple. After all, the guy had said it himself out there in his cottage when he was going on about the Game. The best hiding place was where no one would ever think of looking.
What was the most visible place in Stockholm, the most talked about, the most overpopulated?
Slussen, of course. And what was right in the middle of Slussen, surrounded by glass and granite walls in an effort to make it fit in with its surroundings?
A lift.
An innocent fucking lift for taking wheelchairs, baby carriages, and walkers half a floor down to the City Museum.
He couldn’t understand why he hadn’t noticed it the first time he checked inside the lift, but now in hindsight it was crystal clear.
He’d probably been too tired, and his brain too screwed up to take in all the details.
There were four buttons on the panel inside the lift, but only two of them had floors marked next to them.
Södermalmstorg for street level, and the entrance to the City Museum one floor below.
The other two buttons didn’t light up when you pressed them, which had made him think they were disconnected. Stupid, but on the other hand he hadn’t been firing on all cylinders at the time.
But now that he was able to inspect the lift calmly, he noticed something else. Beside the panel of buttons there was a little card reader. And you used card readers to limit access—access to doors, gates, entrances, and what else, Einstein, if there was a card reader in the lift?
Other floors, obviously!
So Erman 2.0 hadn’t just vanished, he’d simply used his card, woken up the dead buttons, and carried on down into the ground to a floor that wasn’t signposted in the lift. A secret level, to which a technical genius could surely gain access pretty easily. A dead man hiding in a place that didn’t exist . . .
You had to take your hat off to him . . .
All he had to do now was wait for Erman 2.0 to show up at Slussen again and arrange to have a little chat with him. Pump the bastard for everything he knew about the Game and Sammer, how far they’d managed to drag Becca into it, and then think of a way to get her out.
Get them both out.
Once and for all.
But first he had to make a few preparations . . .
He saw the cop car the moment he turned the corner into his street.
An ordinary Volkswagen minibus with a ladder on the roof, nothing remarkable at all. If it hadn’t been for the stubby little aerial . . .
A guy in a fleece, cargo pants, boots, and a tiny, scarcely visible earpiece was standing there talking to the driver through the window.
HP turned on his heel and went back the way he had come. He had to fight hard not to break into a run.
♦ ♦ ♦
“Hi,” she said, standing up.
Thomas didn’t return the greeting.
“Is Mr. Black in there?” He pointed to the door.
“Yes, but . . .”
He pushed past her and knocked. Without waiting for an answer he strode into the room and shut the door behind him.
“What the hell was that about?” she asked Kjellgren.
“He’s really pissed off. The police gave him a serious going-over . . .”
“Hardly surprising, is it . . . ?”
She smiled, but Kjellgren seemed to be avoiding her gaze.
Then the door opened again.
“Can you come in?” Thomas said to her abruptly.
“Sure . . .”
Black and Ice Queen were sitting on the same side of the conference table. She nodded to them but neither acknowledged the greeting. Nor did they ask her to sit down.
“Miss Normén, we won’t be needing your services anymore,” Black said bluntly.
“Sorry?”
“You’re fired,” the Ice Queen added. “Kjellgren will be taking over your job from now on. You’re to take his car back to Stockholm and empty your office. At seventeen hundred hours today your pass card will stop working, so I suggest you set off at once.”
“B-but, I don’t understand? Is this because of the Grand Hotel?”
Rebecca glanced quickly at Thomas, then back at Black.
His face was impassive.
“You fired into the air,” Thomas growled. “Instead of taking action against the attacker, you intentionally caused confusion to stop me from neutralizing him. At first we couldn’t understand your actions, but recent information has made the whole thing abundantly clear.”
Rebecca was having trouble understanding what she was hearing. Were they seriously trying to suggest that she had done something wrong? That she was trying to protect . . .
“Henrik Pettersson,” Thomas said. “That’s the attacker’s name. And apart from being a suspected terrorist, he also happens to be your younger brother, doesn’t he?”
15
DOUBLE PLAY
THE NEEDLE OF the speedometer had hardly slipped below a hundred for the past hour.
We won’t be needing your services anymore . . .
The bastards had fired her!
After all she had done, all the hundreds of hours she had devoted to getting the business set up. Putting together strategies, writing manuals, recruiting the right staff—not to mention all the sleepless nights.
None of that seemed to count for anything.
Had it been any other employer, she would have already called the union. Fighting fire with fire.
But who was she supposed to call now?
She was on leave of absence, after all, and hadn’t bothered switching unions. The police union would hardly help someone employed by a private company. Which left getting hold of a good lawyer.
But what good would that do? She could hardly force them to give her the job back, and even if that succeeded, she had no desire to stay there and work for someone like Thomas.
He’d sold her down the river, that was obvious. Let her take the hit for his own stupid behavior.
The idea that the man in the camouflage jacket could have been Henke was clearly utterly ridiculous.
Someone must have told Thomas about Henke, before or after he was interviewed by the police.
Maybe they’d even shown him a photograph? All Thomas had to say was “Yes, that was him,” and it would all be sorted.
Bubble: A Thriller Page 17
