Game: A Thriller

by Anders de la Motte

  But if he split the story into two, it worked better. If he bit the rotten apple and accepted that he’d merely been a crazy puppet leaping happily into action whenever the Game Master pulled the right strings, and if he bought all the stuff about betting and the way the Game was set up . . .

  If he did that, then the first part of what Erman had told him pretty much explained everything he had been through.

  Even if it stung badly to accept that he had been a sort of court jester in some casino, the explanation made sense, unlike the rest of the story. At least it kept more or less on the right side of the crazy line.

  But he was still having trouble buying the conspiracy theory.

  The idea that the Game spanned the whole world, took on all manner of dirty jobs, and also had ears and eyes everywhere—that was impossible to take in.

  Erman himself had said that those were conclusions he had reached all on his own, not based on anything he had seen or experienced directly. Possibly one result of too many lonely hours spent out in that cottage with no contact with the civilized world. You really had to feel sorry for the poor bastard. Even if he’d practically scared the shit out of HP out there in the forest, he still felt some sort of weird connection with Erman. They actually had quite a lot in common. The Game Master hadn’t exactly been particularly lenient toward either of them. Tracking them down, making them feel special, and then, once the Game had had enough of their talents, dropping them like they were yesterday’s news.

  So what if Erman had lost some of his marbles? To be honest, HP was actually really fucking grateful that the poor reclusive bastard had helped him along. Opening his eyes, and possibly even giving him a way of accessing the Game.

  Whatever, he was feeling considerably calmer now. The nausea had almost gone and he was starting to feel hungry. Some Heinz baked beans was all he managed to find, and he ate them straight from the can.

  So what about the plane, then, the guy who’d tried to get him? How the hell could you explain that?

  No one had followed him out there, he was absolutely certain of that, so what the fuck had happened?

  Okay, in theory it could all have been a mistake. He and Erman were roughly the same height and had the same color and length of hair. From a distance you might get them mixed up, and from a height of a couple of hundred meters it was probably impossible to tell the difference.

  The nut lived alone out there, so maybe the pilot simply assumed that the person emerging from the trees had to be Erman, especially when the description seemed to match?

  That’s what must have happened!

  Whoever it was in that plane, he must have had some beef with Erman, not him.

  Maybe some angry neighbor or inbred local who had run into the psycho in the co-op? And decided to scare the shit out of the crazy fucker, Alfred Hitchcock–style, when the opportunity unexpectedly arose. Stuff like that happened sometimes, you just had to take a look at TV3. Christ, there was a whole fucking series about people who did shit like that . . . !

  The more he thought about it, the more likely it sounded. Some sort of sick neighborhood dispute that had got out of hand. It was a considerably easier to accept that explanation than the alternative.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Global conspiracy, my ass,” he muttered to himself. “Yeah, right!”

  He’d never even been close to falling for that.

  Relieved, he leaned back in the kitchen sofa and turned on his laptop. There was nothing like a bit of television to make you forget your problems. You could always find some poor bastard out there who was in a worse state, and made you feel better about things. Once everything had calmed down a bit, he’d think about what to do next.

  Even before he heard the voice coming out of the speaker he grasped what had happened. The local television news pictures were enough on their own for him to get it—the burning house, flashing blue lights, and fire engines parked among the nettles.

  For the past hour firefighters have been trying to extinguish a fierce blaze in an agricultural property just west of Sigtuna. It is not currently known if anyone was in the building when the fire broke out. The property is listed as uninhabited since the death of its last occupant, but according to witnesses there have been one or more people living in the house in recent months. The police would like to contact a man in his thirties who was involved in a minor collision with a local bus at a nearby bus stop earlier in the day . . .

  Half-digested baked beans all over Auntie’s sink. HP was vomiting like a champion.

  “Fucking fuck! Fucking fuck! Fucking fuck!” was all his brain was able to come up with.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  It had taken him several days to recover. He must have picked up some sort of virus or some other crap, he had a fever, and the projectile vomiting didn’t let up until there was nothing left but bile.

  As usual, it was Mange who came to his rescue, when he turned up to see why he hadn’t been in touch and found him flaked out on Auntie’s rib-backed sofa. Totally fucking embarrassing, but Mange had shown he was a true friend. He’d taken him off to the Eriksdal pool so he could get cleaned up, then conjured up some clean clothes and rose hip soup, and he hadn’t even minded cleaning up the disgusting kitchen.

  Yep, Mange was a true friend, a BFF actually. And from now on HP would actually treat him like one. To start with, he’d call him Farook. If the name was important for Mange, then he’d use it from now on and stop ridiculing him.

  He’d had loads of dreams while he was sick, fevered dreams about all sorts of things. He was pretty used to weirdo dreams anyway; they almost came as standard a few days or a week after a decent trip. He’d read that the THC in grass got stored up in the fatty tissues of the brain, and sometimes made its presence felt afterward, a bit like a bomb on a timed detonator. Often his dreams were spaced-out Lord of the Rings affairs with giant butterflies and talking trees, which was pretty cool.

  But these dreams were different, far darker and less pleasant than his hash fantasies.

  One dream he remembered particularly clearly involved him running naked through the Klara Tunnel. Erman’s charred, blackened corpse was chasing him on the flatbed moped, at the head of hundreds of stampeding, riderless horses.

  The tunnel exit on Sveavägen was getting closer and closer, but his pursuers were gaining on him. His steps were getting heavier and heavier as the slope got steeper and steeper, and he knew that he wasn’t going to make it. The moped’s engine rose to a rattling falsetto, along with the clatter of hooves.

  They’re everywhere!! It’s all a fucking Game!! The corpse’s charred mouth howled, but the last word was distorted and bounced around him like an echo off the walls of the tunnel.

  Game

  Game

  Game

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  He woke up with his heart pounding in his chest just as the moped was about to smash into the back of his knees.

  But now he felt better.

  No fever, clean again, and he’d eaten his fill. Maybe his legs felt a bit stiff, but that would pass.

  The question was: What was he going to do now?

  He wouldn’t be able to move back into his flat for another week or so, evidently there was some sort of delay with the new door. In a way he was almost glad. There was no point denying it really; he wasn’t looking forward to moving back home. The fact was that after what had happened out near Sigtuna he was . . . frightened.

  Yes, he’d admitted it. Henrik “HP” Pettersson, the man, the myth, the legend—was scared.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  So the Game wasn’t just some sort of low-level anarchist pay-per-view YouTube rip-off like he’d originally thought, but something completely different, something considerably more unpleasant. The whole betting aspect was worse than he’d thought at first, he understood that now. Pushing people gradually to shift their limits of what was okay, consciously seeking out people who were easily manipulated, and then pushing them just to see how fa
r they were prepared to go.

  And all that, just because it was cool!

  But the second part still seemed too incredible to be true. That the assignments weren’t just thought up at random but consciously designed to satisfy some anonymous customers? If that was true, and he emphasized the word if, then it meant that he and all the other players were being screwed over twice. They weren’t just jackasses on speed or Internet tarts whoring themselves out for a few comments and virtual thumbs-up. They were also total fucking puppets!

  Unconscious hitmen who knew nothing and were therefore easy to dispose of if the shit hit the fan. A load of patsies, stooges that no one gave a damn about, even if they tried to tell the truth. Because who was going to believe them?

  The thought made him both angry and more than a little shaky.

  The implications of a scenario like that were so massive he could hardly imagine them. But wasn’t it more likely to be Erman’s paranoid brain finally crossing the fine line between quaint rural eccentric and total fucking lunatic?

  Right up until he had seen the cottage going up in flames, and doubtless Erman along with it, he had been prepared to believe that, but now he was seeing it in a very different light . . .

  There was really only one way to find out for certain, so he decided to start with a bit of research.

  One of the many Unemployment Service training courses he’d done his best to forget had been in the very subject that he needed to remember now. With a decent search engine you could take the world by surprise, he remembered that much at least . . .

  Farook had helped him to set up the laptop, routing it through a number of anonymized servers that had popped up in the days before the IPRED law came into force. From now on he’d be invisible on the net, a ghost rider.

  He opened one of the search engines and got to work. Erman’s note left him none the wiser.

  “Torshamnsgatan 142” was all it said, apart from a few nerdy passwords that just might, or might not, work if he ever managed to get in. The poor flame-grilled fucker could have added a bit more information, like what the company was called, or what floor it was on? Was that really too much to ask?

  The address certainly matched a street in Kista, but didn’t really give him much more than that. It was a perfectly ordinary office building close to the E4 highway, but that was all the satellite pictures had to offer. He found a list of small telecom companies that either had been or were still based in the building, but none of them seemed to have the slightest thing to do with games or computers.

  He didn’t really know what he had been expecting. Some sort of walled fortress maybe, or a secret address that couldn’t be found on any map? A bit like the National Defense Radio Establishment out on Lovön? But this seemed completely halal, with not the slightest hint of a mysterious organization or a secret server farm. So either Erman had decided to give him a dud address for some reason, or, more likely, the Game had upped sticks and moved somewhere else.

  Disappointed and without any great expectations, he decided to carry on looking into the rest of Erman’s theories anyway.

  He tried typing in a few search words, like “inexplicable,” “failed investigation,” “unknown,” and got a few thousand hits immediately. He filtered out anything to do with UFOs, which reduced the number to about three hundred, then added “perpetrator” as an option, which brought the total down to a more manageable quantity. A bit more clever clicking and he had a decent collection of incidents listed on the screen in front of him.

  He scrolled quickly through them.

  It turned out to be the right mixture of stuff, and for a few seconds he felt almost relieved. But then he started looking more carefully. And gradually things began to pop up that were, to put it mildly, disconcerting . . .

  To start with he found a number of minor occurrences that he had never heard about but that still had the right vibe: cars whose brakes had stopped working, computer systems that had packed up in the middle of the payroll, inexplicable power cuts, and politicians getting shit through their letter boxes.

  But there were a number of other, considerably more familiar events that had been picked up by the search.

  He read them through once, then again, and slowly a very uncomfortable feeling began to settle over him.

  The first item was pretty much in his own backyard:

  On the night of 17 May 1990 Katarina Church on Södermalm in Stockholm was destroyed by fire.

  The church tower collapsed into the nave, leaving just the external walls standing. However a number of valuable textiles and the church silver were rescued. In spite of a major inquiry, no explanation for the fire was ever established, which has led to speculation that it was caused by everything from an electrical fault to arson.

  If arson was indeed the cause, no motive has ever been identified.

  He also remembered the second one very well:

  On Sunday 3 September, 2006, at 20:41:51, the National Police Board in Stockholm received a report from the Security Police that the internal computer network of the Social Democratic Party, the SDP.net, had been hacked. The perpetrator was at that point still unknown. Late that same evening the Social Democrats called a press conference to announce that they had reported members of the Folk Party to the police for hacking. The report maintained that computers, which to judge by their IP addresses belonged to the Folk Party, had been used to gain illegal entry to the most sensitive areas of the SDP network, to which only 26 senior party officials had access. This access was supposed to have been gained with the help of log-in details that had inexplicably leaked and had given their political opponents unlimited access to the most confidential information in the Social Democrats’ internal computer network.

  This was major-league stuff! Both of these on their own were exotic enough for some serious betting.

  Could you persuade someone to set light to something as sacred as a church? What were the odds on that?

  Of course you could, no question. But what about the next step, if you were to believe Erman’s theories?

  Who would have commissioned a job like that?

  Someone who would dearly have loved to have the honor of rebuilding a famous Stockholm landmark? A politician, a company, or a wealthy businessman with a dodgy reputation to clean up?

  A quick look at the foundation that was responsible for the restoration listed a whole load of heavyweights who had opened their wallets. They’d even got Parliament to cough up some money, although this was strictly a local Stockholm issue. Anyway, didn’t the Swedish church have more than enough money stashed away to pay for the whole thing themselves?

  A conspiracy?

  Well, you couldn’t exactly rule it out. Plausible, in other words. A bit of a long shot, but certainly possible if you had a bit of imagination and dared to think outside the box. A bit like the Da Vinci Code, basically.

  But what about the Social Democrats’ and Folk Party’s own little Watergate, then?

  That took a bit more thought.

  A well-placed Ant inside the Social Democrats could easily fix the log-in details. Most people were stupid enough to scribble them down on a Post-it note stuck under their desk so they could get back into the system after their summer holiday.

  But who would have wanted it to happen?

  Who benefited?

  Short-term, obviously the Folk Party, so they were potential customers.

  But surely the whole thing favored the Social Democrats in the long term?

  A bit more clicking seemed to support that angle. The Folk Party was reduced almost by half in the parliamentary election a few weeks later, and their collapse almost sank the entire shift of power from left to right. So there were at least two possible conspiracy options here.

  Someone on the blue side wanted to get at confidential information, and someone on the red wanted to catch the blues red-handed, so to speak.

  The result?

  Plausible, certainly, and actually less far-fetch
ed than the first. Christ, what a story this was turning into!

  Worst of all was the very last item he stumbled upon. He read it a couple of times before it sank in properly. Once it had, he came close to shitting himself.

  The description of the perpetrator that was presented in the 1994 inquiry concluded that the murder was carried out by a person acting alone, an individual with a personality disorder, driven by hatred or anger. He had probably had problems with relationships throughout his life, and particularly with any form of authority. He was introverted, isolated, and narcissistic, but not psychotic, and probably lacked close family and friends. His condition was connected with a feeling of having “failed” in life, the perception of being “an outsider” whose abilities had never been appreciated or allowed to reach their full potential.

  The profile could perfectly easily have been written to describe him!

  Okay, it wasn’t exactly easy to admit, and navel-gazing wasn’t exactly a favorite pastime of his. But after everything that had happened, his near-death experience in the flat and the whole business out in the sticks, he had started to look at himself in the mirror in a new way.

  And what he found wasn’t exactly an attractive sight . . .

  If he was honest, his life wasn’t really much to write home about. In general terms, he was a pretty good match for that description. Acting alone, outsider, few close relationships, egocentric, it all fitted pretty well.

  A bit too well, really . . .

  But it wasn’t actually his fault that everything had gone to hell. He had had opportunities, prospects, the same as anyone. He could have been someone, someone important!

  A fucking contender!

  He had done one genuinely unselfish thing in his life, and what had he got for it? How had the world thanked him, rewarded him for his heroism? Yep, ten months in prison, straight to jail without passing Go, thank you very fucking much! Because in the land of semiskimmed milk, obviously no good deed must go unpunished.

  And, after his stretch inside, suddenly all the opportunities were gone. The doors were all closed and the future royally screwed. Low-level hustling or some shitty McJob were pretty much the only options. So maybe it wasn’t so weird that you didn’t give a damn after that sort of let-down, and just focused on number one. And according to Erman, people like him were exactly the sort that the Game sent the Ants out to look for. Guys who fitted the list of prerequisites. Or, to be more accurate, the profile . . .