Game: A Thriller

by Anders de la Motte

  After checking on the police’s own website, he found what he was looking for. At the same time as Kungsträdgården was filling up with galloping horses and all available police units, including the helicopter that was sent to circle above the city center, someone had stolen a container load of Viagra from a company out in the western suburbs. They had coolly driven past security with a truck, waving what had looked like the right documentation, then calmly hooked up to the container and driven off with it, without having to worry about being pursued by the police helicopter before they had time to unload the pills, because HP had seen to that.

  So had he been a decoy, sent out to lure the dogs into sniffing around in the wrong place?

  “Look up the word game and you’ll see what I mean!” Erman had said, and halfway down the page Wiktionary backed up his theory.

  Distraction or diversion

  He could perfectly well have been both! And suddenly all those weird occurrences assumed yet another crazy dimension. Diversionary tactics, decoys, and smokes creens, all to get the authorities and the general public to look in the wrong direction?

  In that case, what was the main event, what were the things they didn’t want to show, and who was behind them?

  The Freemasons?

  The WHO?

  The Bilderberg Group?

  Or was he taking it too far . . . ? Was his brain messing with him, showing him things that didn’t actually exist just because he wanted to see them?

  Was the Game really as advanced as Erman had claimed, or was it all just for fun? Something they did just because they could? A game, basically? Just a way of passing the fucking time?!

  All these questions were starting to drive him mad. His brain was getting completely overloaded and his head ached like it was going to burst from all the junk flying around up there. He couldn’t even come up with a single damn paracetamol; he’d long since hunted through Auntie’s drawers and cupboards.

  He lit a cigarette, one of the last few. A deep drag, then out floated all the tensions along with the smoke.

  Phew . . . !

  Meditation by Marlboro.

  Almost always worked.

  So what was he going to do now?

  That was the million-dollar question. He hadn’t left the cottage for several days and had hardly even eaten anything. He’d just been smoking, scanning the Internet, and picking away at that huge damn mental scab.

  Mange had looked in briefly and topped up the essential supplies of cigarettes and cans of army-ration bean soup, but he’d had the sense not to ask any questions, which was just as well, seeing as he wouldn’t have got any answers.

  HP could have killed for a spliff, but his stash was long since used up. Since the grass ran out he’d tried to find other ways of easing his anxiety. He’d jacked off so much that he had friction burns on his cock; then in the end he took a cautious walk around the allotments to try to reboot his brain with a bit of fresh air.

  That was when he discovered the van.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The car was rolling in slow motion, twisting on its own axis before its front end hit the ground. Then it flew up again, rear end toward the sky, and did a complete roll before landing on its roof and disappearing out of shot.

  The next film sequence showed a smoking wreck, but by that point she was already bent double over Mange’s filthy little toilet.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck, screamed a little voice inside her throbbing head as she threw up most of an undigested chicken salad.

  What in the name of hell was going on?

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  A white van with a blue logo, parked a bit farther down the narrow track. ACME Telecom Services Ltd.

  Seriously?

  ACME—just like every dodgy company in cinema history, from Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner onward?! It was a bit too obvious!

  Okay, so there was a telecom distribution box and a manhole alongside the van, but so far he hadn’t seen a soul anywhere near it. And there didn’t seem to be any work going on, so what was the van doing there, parked in the middle of Tantolunden?

  He went back inside the cottage and looked up the number on the license plate, but all he got was a rental car company out in Solna.

  ACME Telecom Services had their own website, a phone number, and an email address for inquiries. “ACME Telecom Services—A proud member of the PayTag Group.”

  On the other hand, there was no terrestrial address, but that wasn’t so unusual, there were a lot of companies like that. “Feel free to contact us by email or telephone.” A good way of avoiding difficult customers.

  He went out again to take a closer look at the van. Still no one in sight, but the engine felt fairly warm, so it couldn’t have been standing there for long.

  So where was the driver?

  He walked around the van, but was none the wiser. The rear windows were tinted, and even though he cupped his hands around his eyes he still couldn’t see in. The driver’s cab was a bit easier.

  A jacket on the front seat, neon yellow with loads of pockets, and when he looked closer he saw that something was sticking out from under it. An oblong silver object. And suddenly he realized what it was! A phone, of course, just like the one he’d left in the computer shop. Which could well mean that the bastards had found him!

  He wandered around to get a better view of the cell, but it was mostly covered by the jacket. He had to know for sure, and tugged hard on the door handle.

  Locked, obviously.

  He glanced quickly around, then picked up a stone from a nearby flower bed. He raised his arm to strike.

  “Hey, you, what do you think you’re doing?!”

  The man had appeared out of nowhere, a thickset fifty-something in overalls and an orange Bob the Builder helmet.

  Manual laborer, model 1A.

  “Nothing,” HP muttered and let the stone slide down his leg. “Just wondered why you’re parked here?”

  The man looked at him suspiciously.

  “Working for Telia, broken cable. Broadband’s out across half of Södermalm, haven’t you heard?”

  “No,” HP muttered, moving slowly away from the van. “Okay, see you, then!”

  The man shrugged in farewell, then went around the van and unlocked the rear door.

  After poking about for a minute or so he emerged with a toolbox, cast a quick glance in HP’s direction, then carefully locked the door before disappearing between two cottages.

  HP breathed a sigh of relief. The man seemed genuine—false alarm, in other words.

  He was getting brainstorms in broad daylight.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Finally out in the fresh air! It may still have been boiling hot, but anything was better than that claustrophobic little computer shop.

  She took several deep breaths, then pedaled hard on her bicycle and felt the nausea gradually subside as oxygenated blood started to circulate around her body. After just a hundred meters or so she was feeling considerably brighter.

  She wasn’t really much the wiser after her conversation with Mange.

  Once he’d finally given up his feeble attempts at excuses and agreed to tell the truth, he started by locking the shop door, turning the sign to CLOSED, then, just to make sure, pulled her right to the back of the shop.

  Mange had never been one of the more courageous of all of Henke’s deadbeat friends, and certainly not one of the coolest, but unlike most of the others he was one of the few who was still left from the old gang.

  Vesa had decided to climb up on top of some railway carriages out in Älvsjö when he was high as a kite, and fried himself to death. She remembered Jesus pretty well too; hadn’t he won loads of money and disappeared to Thailand? Yes, that was him. Henke had talked about going with him, but as usual with him it never got further than a lot of empty talk. The rest of the gang had drifted away, and Henke wasn’t exactly the sort of person whose company or reliability anyone would really miss.

  But for some reason Mange
had always stuck in there, even when things had been at their worst. He was the only one of the gang who showed up at the trial, and as far as Rebecca knew he was the only person apart from her who had visited Henke in prison. One of the few who had cared.

  Mange was okay, really, a decent guy who meant well, and she felt a pang of conscience at having been forced to resort to interrogation tactics to get him to talk. But at least it had worked, and after making sure not once but twice that they really were alone, he had finally told her everything, or at least as much as he knew.

  She was left wondering exactly what it was he had told her.

  The whole story about a mysterious cell phone that allocated assignments and a secret reality game with rewards and punishments sounded crazy, and her initial reaction was that Mange had fallen for yet another of Henke’s bullshit stories. But then he had shown her the video clips on the computer and everything had emerged in an entirely different light.

  The business with the door, the car wheels, and the royal cortège had been bad enough, but when she saw her own car slowly rolling off the Drottningholm road, it had all got to be too much for her.

  Evidently Mange hadn’t known that she was sitting in the Volvo, because he’d hovered outside the toilet door worrying anxiously if she was okay. She only just managed to hold it together, splashing a bit of water on her face and blaming it all on the heat, which he had accepted without comment.

  Once she had composed herself again she had asked to see Henke’s cell phone, and when Mange reluctantly pulled it out of a locked cupboard she had quickly inspected it and then put it in her bag. For a moment it had looked like Mange was going to protest, but he thought better of it and let her take it without a word.

  Before she left, he had also given her the address of Aunt Berit’s allotment cottage, and she was looking forward to a fresh, more detailed conversation with her brother in just a few minutes’ time.

  This time she was going to twist the little sod’s arms until he told her the truth about what was really going on!

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  She cruised through the cars, crossed Ringvägen, and a few minutes later she was in among the trees of the park. She was feeling considerably brighter by now, and was enjoying the cool shade. Mange had said it was about fifteen minutes’ walk from the shop, so five minutes or so by bike seemed about right.

  When she turned into the right road she had to swerve to avoid a white van pulling away at speed and roaring past her way too fast.

  Bloody idiot! she thought as she struggled to keep her balance. For a moment she considered making a note of the license plate; the speed limit here was actually only thirty. But she didn’t bother; she hadn’t seen the whole number anyway. Some sort of company van with a blue logo on the side.

  At that moment she caught sight of the right cottage.

  She knocked on the door three times but there was no answer. Maybe he was asleep? It may have been well into the afternoon, but it would hardly surprise her if Henke was taking a little siesta.

  She felt the handle and discovered that the door was unlocked, but for some reason she stopped in the doorway. She didn’t really know why, but something was making her feel uneasy. She examined the door more carefully and soon found what she was looking for. A small, almost invisible mark in the wood just above the lock. Admittedly, it could have been old, but a quick check of the step revealed some flakes of the right color paint.

  Someone had broken into the cottage, and recently. The question was, were they still there?

  Rebecca held her breath and listened for any sound from inside.

  Quiet as the grave.

  She stepped silently through the door and into the hall. The stench of cigarette smoke and hash almost made her eyes water. She put her hand on the frame of the door to the kitchen and leaned around it quickly to get a look inside.

  The movement was too fast for any attacker to have time to react, but still enough for her to register the contents of the room. She repeated the procedure with the little bedroom to the right of the hall.

  The results were unambiguous; the cottage was empty.

  Whoever had broken in was gone now, and it didn’t look like anything had been stolen. A laptop, screen saver on, stood untouched on the little kitchen table. There were a few dirty mugs and glasses here and there, most of them containing cigarette butts, and the little sink was overflowing with dirty dishes and empty food tins.

  There was a shabby green sleeping bag in a heap at one end of the rib-backed sofa, and a filthy T-shirt and a pair of tattered Cheap Monday jeans were hanging untidily over one of the two kitchen chairs.

  Smoky, filthy, and untidy: rather different to how Aunt Berit usually kept it, she imagined.

  It looked like Mange had been telling the truth; all the signs were that Henke had taken up residence . . .

  So, where was he now, and how long would he be gone? The best thing she could do was sit down on the little sofa and wait.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  What the fu . . . ? !

  A quick trip up to the Ring Road to stock up on cigarettes and Gorby pies, that was the plan.

  He ended up getting falafel and an ice cream as well, because there wasn’t really any hurry. He’d almost made it back to the cottage when he saw the flashing blue lights.

  Two patrol cars and an unmarked van with a trailer, all lined up in front of Auntie’s little cottage. The trailer looked weird, a bit like an outsized milk churn with its lid open. One of the cops seemed to be in a hell of a hurry to set up a police cordon at the end of the road, but as luck would have it, HP saw him first.

  He stopped abruptly and turned in to one of the little side paths to find a good observation post.

  A couple of minutes later he was sitting on top of a rocky outcrop surrounded by lilac bushes.

  So what the hell was going on down there?

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  For some reason she hadn’t just sat down.

  Afterward she couldn’t really explain why, but it was as if the feeling that something was wrong wouldn’t let go of her.

  It took just a few seconds before she realized what was troubling her. The sofa she had been about to sit down on was slightly out of position. She could clearly see the marks on the cork matting where the leg of the sofa usually sat, but now it was a few centimeters out. Okay, so the sofa was pretty old, but it was solid pine and to judge by the deep indentation in the floor it would take a fair bit of effort to shift it. So why had someone done so?

  Instead of sitting down, she got down on her knees and looked underneath.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  He could see some of the cops talking with serious expressions, then another man showed up wearing a protective suit and a helmet that made him look like a green astronaut.

  The man wobbled inside the cottage and the cops quickly moved to the far side of the cars; it looked almost like they were taking cover. After a couple of minutes the spaceman came out with some sort of object in his hands. He lurched toward the trailer and put whatever it was he was holding inside it.

  Even though he was sitting some distance away, HP had no trouble noticing how relieved the cops looked when the lid closed.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  She didn’t really know what she had been expecting to find. But it was perfectly clear that the object under there wouldn’t have been on her top-ten list of things she was likely to find, if anyone had asked her to come up with such a list.

  A set of keys, some loose change, maybe a cell phone someone had dropped?

  But not this . . .

  It took her a few seconds to know what she was staring at, and why it was there; then she very slowly got to her feet, picked up the laptop, and exited the cottage.

  She left the front door open.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  It wasn’t until he’d been sitting there for a few minutes that he recognized one of the cops. To start with he thought it was just another plainclothes officer. Khaki s
horts with lots of pockets, an untucked short-sleeve shirt, baseball cap, sensible sneakers, and all the other things that were supposed to help them fit in.

  But their cops’ posture and that way they had of moving their heads almost always gave them away.

  He had been concentrating on the men around the trailer, and it wasn’t until the lid closed that he looked more closely at the rest of the gang and realized that the plainclothes cop was actually Becca. She was standing there talking to the man in the astronaut outfit.

  What the fuck was she doing here?!

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Definitely viable,” the bomb-disposal expert said. According to the patch on his suit, his name was Selander, and evidently he liked talking in clipped sentences.

  “Two sticks of dynamex. Pressure trigger mounted under the sofa cushion. Sitting down would be enough. More than enough to blow the cottage sky-high. Damn lucky you had your wits about you, Normén . . .”

  He paused to put in a dose of chewing tobacco.

  “Won’t know for sure if it would definitely have gone off until we get it into the lab and take it apart,” he went on, this time slightly more expressively. “I’ll get back to you. I presume the Södermalm Crime Unit will be in charge? You said this was your brother’s cottage?”

  “Something like that,” she muttered.

  Her head was spinning. Flash grenades, chucking stones at police cars, and now a damn bomb!

  What in the name of holy hell had Henke got himself caught up in?

  “I daresay our colleagues in Crime will be pretty keen to have a word with him,” Selander concluded as he wiped the tobacco from his fingers on the bomb suit.

  Rebecca just nodded in response.

  Welcome to the club! she thought.

  15

  ARE YOU REALLY SURE YOU WANT TO EXIT?

  REBECCA WAS EXHAUSTED when she got home. She had spent most of the afternoon with the Södermalm Crime Unit telling them what had happened out in Tantolunden. Or rather the parts that she deemed suitable to reveal.