“Welcome, Henrik,” the Game Master said when he stepped into the clearing.
“Would you like some coffee?” Mange held out a plastic cup toward him, and he took it without saying a word.
“Who are they?” He nodded toward the four people in masks.
“Don’t you know?” the Game Master chuckled.
“Two of them are completely uninteresting, but the other two could turn out to be vitally important.”
The first of them took a step forward and held out his hand. In spite of his bulky winter clothes, it was possible to make out the square, muscular body. They shook hands.
“Friend?” HP asked, but received no answer.
The next person stepped up.
“Enemy?” he asked.
Still no answer.
The third person was a woman, he was sure of that.
“Friend?” he asked again.
For a moment he thought she shrugged her shoulders.
He held out his hand toward the fourth figure, but the person leaned toward him instead and whispered something in his ear. The voice was so familiar, so sad, that it actually felt painful.
“The Luttern labyrinth,” she whispered. “You have to save us. The Carer . . .”
A raven croaked in the distance. Twice, in an ominous way that sent a shiver down his spine. The shadowy figures among the trees suddenly began to move. They stumbled toward the clearing like dark-clad zombies. And all of a sudden he realised who they were . . .
“More,” they hissed.
“MOOOORE!!!”
A moment later he was running. Snow was flying around his feet, his heart pounding in his chest.
The lights from the road lay far away on the horizon.
“See you in the Luttern labyrinth, number 128 . . .” the Game Master called after him. Unless it was actually Mange’s voice that he heard . . . ?
♦ ♦ ♦
Rebecca emerged on the steps and took a few deep breaths.
The fresh air made her nausea subside and after a couple of minutes she felt considerably better.
One by one the pieces of the puzzle seemed to be falling into place. The UN mission, the nuclear weapons program. Dad and Uncle Tage. The passports, the secret courier jobs. Then the betrayal of the Palme government. Dad’s violent rages. The safe-deposit box in Sveavägen, set up in 1986. The wide-bore revolver with its two fired cartridges that made Uncle Tage so uneasy. Which mustn’t be traced to . . .
Events in the past . . .
Sveavägen.
1986.
Dad’s rages.
The revolver is an OPW, an Olof Palme Weapon.
♦ ♦ ♦
She took her cell phone out of her bag. Her fingers didn’t seem to want to do as she told them, and it took two attempts before she managed to tap in the correct PIN.
The email from Uncle Tage arrived almost at once, but it took another minute for the attached file to download. A black-and-white recording from the bank vault, lasting thirty-two seconds, which must have come from one of the cameras in the corridor.
The man walking down the corridor before turning off into the room containing her box was wearing sunglasses and had a baseball cap pulled down over his face.
But she didn’t have any problem recognizing him.
It was Mange.
♦ ♦ ♦
Damn it, he’d been having some creepy fucking nightmares. Last time they’d been caused by the snake venom, and this time by the pills, if he had to guess. They were meant for horses, not people, which probably explained quite a lot.
The long wait in the flat was driving him mad. No Xbox, PlayStation, or any other games console to while away the time with, and all he’d managed to come up with by way of television was a huge old box with just the basic channels. He couldn’t handle any more Emmerdale or Days of Our Lives, and he’d already had two anxiety-driven jerk-off sessions, and a third was guaranteed to give him friction burns on his joystick. But, as luck would have it, at least he had a decent supply of cigarettes.
He lit yet another Marlboro and set off on his little stroll around the flat. Living room, kitchen, hall—then back again.
A few seconds’ respite, to give him time to think.
One of the gang was supposed to be a traitor, if he was to trust the mysterious A.F. who had sent him the message—through Nora’s smartphone.
A.F.
Friend?
No one outside their little group knew that Nora’s phone had been in the flat he was borrowing. So, logically, A.F. should also be one of the group.
A friend.
An enemy.
The problem was that no one could be ruled out.
Jeff had hated him since the incident in Birkagatan, and their relationship had hardly improved over recent days.
Hasselqvist with a Q and a V may have declared that bygones were bygones, but that could very easily be a complete lie. He had demolished the guy out on the E4. Sprayed teargas in his face, humiliated him, and snatched his End Game away from him.
You didn’t forget an injustice like that, not even if you were an obsequious little Kent.
Nora was harder to make out. She had evidently been behind the fires, probably both the one that almost killed him up in his flat, and the smaller one in Mange’s shop.
And he hadn’t entirely dropped the idea that she might have poisoned him with those pills.
The last name on the list was his old friend Farook Al-Hassan, aka Magnus Sandström.
Good old mythomaniac Mange, who, with the blessing of the Game Master, had stuffed him so full of lies that he couldn’t even begin to work out how much of everything he had experienced over the past two years was actually real.
All in all, not a bad collection of suspects—good luck with that case, Columbo!
So, why not just stay at home? Why take the risk of getting involved in this lunatic project? Yep—another two questions that he had no good answer to . . .
Peter Falk would obviously have to put in a bit of overtime.
♦ ♦ ♦
Rebecca reached the bottom of the escalator just as the warning signal went off, and she made it inside the jam-packed subway train seconds before the doors closed.
Sweaty tourists, most of them with fanny packs, caps, and bottles of water, so they were probably Americans. She found herself in the middle of a group of people, with nothing to hold on to.
Someone pushed into her from behind and she tried to move as far to one side as she could.
To judge by the noise, at least the air-conditioning seemed to be switched on, but, together with the sound of the train, it made it hard to hear what anyone was saying.
The person behind her pushed again, and she was just about to turn around and explain that she couldn’t move any further when she heard a familiar voice in her ear.
“Don’t turn around!”
“Mange, what the f—”
She glimpsed a baseball cap and pair of sunglasses from the corner of her eye.
“No, no, for fuck’s sake, don’t turn around . . . !” He put his hand on her back.
“Okay.” She went on staring in the opposite direction.
This was ridiculous, to put it mildly, and if he hadn’t sounded so worried, she would have ignored his plea.
“I’ve sent you something,” he whispered. “Read it and you’ll understand how everything fits together . . .”
“Really, Mange, this is completely . . .” She turned her head.
“No, no, you mustn’t turn around. They’re watching you, he’s watching you!”
“Who is, Mange? Who’s watching me?”
“Sammer, of course!” His voice sounded scared.
“And why would he be doing that, Mange? As far as I can work out, he’s got his hands full looking for you. I daresay he’d be quite pleased if I brought you together . . .”
The car lurched and she almost fell, but the tightly packed bodies around her helped her stay upright.
“Don’t make jokes about that, Becca,” he said quietly.
“I’m not joking, Mange. Henrik’s already tried to convince me that Uncle Tage is the Game Master, so now it’s your turn. But, unlike the two of you, Tage Sammer has actually helped me, he’s saved my skin a couple of times . . .”
The loudspeaker announced a station that she didn’t catch the name of, and the train began to slow down.
“Besides, you’ve got something of mine, Mange,” she said.
“W-what?”
“Don’t act all innocent. The bank vault on Sveavägen. You stole a metal box that belonged to my dad out of my safe-deposit box. I saw a clip of you . . .”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Becca,” he said, a little too quickly. “Let me explain . . .” He leaned closer to her ear. “The Game is like a Rorschach test, those ink stains, you know? The brain comes up with its own interpretation and then fills in the gaps itself. You only see the things you want to see, Rebecca . . .”
The train pulled in at the platform, braking sharply, and once again she almost fell.
The doors opened and people pushed past her in all directions.
Once she’d regained her balance and looked around, he was gone. It was several minutes before she discovered the cell phone he’d slipped into her pocket. A smooth, silvery thing with a glass touch screen.
23
SPHERES OF REALITY
SHE HAD MOST of the puzzle worked out now.
Or at least she thought she did. Her dad, André Pellas, the nuclear weapons program, the safe-deposit box, Tage Sammer . . . Everything was connected, and the chain could be made even longer if you added the unthinkable: the revolver, Sveavägen, and Olof Palme . . .
But for the time being she was trying to keep a grip on her galloping imagination. She went on reciting the chain that she had started putting together a few days ago:
Dad and André/Uncle Tage work for the UN together.
Dad is unfairly dismissed for an action he believes is justified.
Uncle Tage employs Dad on the secret nuclear weapons program. Sends him on secret missions to the USA to exchange information with the Americans. This carries on for years, even after the project was officially shut down. Until a newspaper starts snooping about in the mid-1980s. Then everyone panics, the project is buried once and for all, and without warning Dad is shoved out in the cold again while everything he and Uncle Tage believed in and worked toward for all those years ends up in the garbage.
And it’s all the fault of the Palme government . . .
The nausea that had been stalking her from Thore Sjögren’s claustrophobic little office wouldn’t go away. She got up from the sofa and went over to open the window. The street below was dark, no movement at all. The crowns of the trees opposite made it impossible to see more than ten meters into the park. For a few moments she imagined she could see someone standing down there in the shadows, someone watching her. She knew it was just her imagination, but she still couldn’t help drawing one of the curtains before she went back to the sofa and her laptop.
It only took a minute or so to dig out the description of the suspect on Wikipedia:
A man, acting alone and suffering from a personality disorder, who is driven by his hatred of Palme. He has probably had difficulty forming relationships all his life, particularly with anyone in positions of authority. He is introverted, lonely and mentally unstable, but not psychotic. His condition is closely connected to the fact that he feels he has “failed” in life. Adversity makes him depressed, and this has developed into paranoia. When and if people of this sort begin to commit violent crimes, they are usually between 35 and 45 years old . . .
In 1986 Dad was forty-five years old. Motivated, disappointed, a failure, and paranoid. And the sort who never forgot an injustice, real or imagined.
Never, ever . . .
All that was needed was a gun, an OPW. And a bit of help . . .
Because what if he wasn’t alone? What if he got a gentle shove in the right direction from someone he trusted? A phone call, information about a time and a place. Maybe that was all it would have taken? Maybe Dad thought he was being given another chance? That he was going to be part of something bigger once more, where his services were still in demand. That he was still a Player.
Back in the game.
History repeats itself . . .
But there was something that wasn’t right, a little piece of the puzzle that didn’t quite fit. The only problem was that she couldn’t work out which piece.
♦ ♦ ♦
The white van climbed over the brow of a hill, then pulled up in a small paved yard surrounded on two sides by a ramshackle L-shaped farm building.
“This is it.”
Nora gently put her hand on HP’s shoulder, but he’d woken up a while back, when the van turned off the tarmac and onto the narrow gravel track.
The sliding door of the barn was already open and Hasselqvist backed the van in with millimeter precision. Mange’s little red Polo was already parked inside.
Jeff jumped out quickly and closed the barn door behind them. HP took his time getting out of his seat. He double-checked the lock on the sports bag he had put on the floor, then stretched and breathed in the ingrained smell of cows and old hay.
It took a while for his eyes to get used to the gloom.
In one corner of the barn he could see several large white plastic sacks, and beside them a row of pallets full of old tires, a couple of oil drums, and random clutter. A bit farther away stood a bit of rusty agricultural machinery. The place looked like it hadn’t been used for the past ten, fifteen years.
Maybe longer than that.
“Hello, and welcome!”
“Hi,” he muttered, without looking Mange in the eye.
“Follow me . . .”
Mange skirted around a couple of stalls to reach a door at one end of the barn. The others followed him, with HP bringing up the rear.
“Just mind your feet, the floor isn’t that great.”
Mange opened the door and they headed down a short corridor to a small kitchen.
The room smelled of fresh coffee and damp.
HP had a sudden flashback to Erman’s little cottage out in the bush. But that had been in a considerably better state than this place. Old wallpaper was peeling off the walls, and in a couple of places water had come through the yellowing ceiling. Here and there the floorboards had given way, revealing dark holes. A camping table with five folding chairs had been set up in the middle of the room.
“So this is where you’ve been hiding,” HP muttered, pointing at the camp bed and sleeping bag in one corner. “Has Betul chucked you out then, or what?”
Mange shrugged his shoulders.
“Right now it’s safest like this . . .” he said. “There’s coffee, if anyone wants any . . .”
He took a paper cup and got himself some coffee from the thermos in the middle of the little table. While the others followed his example Mange sat down. He took out a small laptop, opened it up, and then turned it so that everyone could see what was on the little screen.
“Okay, everything’s ready. Operation Puncture starts in exactly . . .”
He looked at his watch.
“. . . nine hours, twenty-seven minutes, and eleven seconds . . .”
Everyone except HP adjusted their watches.
“We’ll take the van and leave my car here.”
“No, we’ll need both . . .” Jeff interrupted him in an authoritative voice. “I did a bit of a recon the day before yesterday. The last bit by the cliffs is just a soft forest track, and the van will get stuck. Unless we want to carry everything the last five hundred meters, we’ll have to load it all into the Polo. It’s a lot lighter, and it’s front-wheel drive, so there shouldn’t be any problems there.”
“But, er . . .” Mange sounded like he was trying to protest, then changed his mind. “Okay, that’s what we’ll do. Good thinking
!”
He nodded at Jeff, who smiled with satisfaction.
“Let’s go through the whole thing one more time,” Mange went on. “Then I suggest that we get changed and make sure we’re familiar with everything for half an hour before we set off. It’s an hour-and-fifty-three-minute drive from here, then twenty minutes to unload, which means that we’ve got plenty of time to kill. If anyone wants to take a walk, there’s a lake around the back. And there are sandwiches and cold drinks in the fridge over there . . .”
He pointed to one corner.
“The toilet doesn’t work, but there’s an old outdoor privy behind the farm.”
“Ah, old-school shithouse . . .” HP grinned, but got no response.
Humorless idiots!
But what the hell . . . He had seven hours to work out who in here was a friend and who an enemy. It would be just as well to make a start.
♦ ♦ ♦
The letter was lying on her doormat beside the morning paper.
A window envelope with her name on it, and at first she thought it was a bill. So she didn’t open it until she had poured a cup of coffee and sat down on the sofa. But when she opened the envelope she found that it contained something very different. The sheet of A4 with her name at the top consisted of just two lines. The first was the address of a web page. The second contained two sad smileys.
Mange. It could hardly be anyone else.
Taking the letter with her, she went and sat in front of the computer, typed in the web address, and pressed Enter.
A log-in window with boxes for username and password appeared. After a bit of hesitation she typed in her full name in the top line. But she had no idea what password the page wanted. She turned the envelope inside out but couldn’t find any clues.
Mange, she finally wrote, and pressed Enter.
Wrong password, the site informed her.
Shit!
She tried again, this time with Henke as the password.
Wrong password, one attempt left.
Only one more chance.
She went out into the hall to check that she hadn’t received another letter containing the log-in details. But there was nothing there.
Just to make sure, she read the letter again, holding both it and the envelope up to the light in an attempt to see whether there were any hidden messages.
Bubble: A Thriller Page 27
