Buzz: A Thriller

by Anders de la Motte

  Runeberg’s face had gone completely white. He opened his mouth as if to protest, but shut it again almost at once. Instead he took a deep breath and turned to Rebecca.

  “You’re relieved of duty as of now, Rebecca. You’ll be on full salary, but for the duration of the investigation I’m afraid I shall have to ask you to hand over your keys and pass card.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  They walked back to Police Headquarters together. The air was dry and cold and a few feeble snowflakes occasionally drifted down, only to disintegrate on the black tarmac. Neither of them said much.

  Runeberg grunted a few short sentences about routine procedure in internal investigations, then some clichés about being sure everything would sort itself out. She could hardly be bothered to reply.

  When they reached the department she had to hand over her pass card and her key to the weapons store.

  She was allowed to keep her police ID.

  In other words she was still a police officer—for a bit longer.

  Small mercy.

  Runeberg looked as if there was something else troubling him, but she didn’t feel like listening. On the way out she bumped into Karolina Modin, but the other woman merely said hello quickly and avoided looking Rebecca in the eye.

  The moment the gate closed behind her, the strange, dreamlike sensation returned.

  As if nothing that was happening was . . .

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  . . . actually real.

  He’d been locked up before, admittedly back home in Sweden, but the routines ought to be roughly the same. To start with, they should have interviewed him at least a couple of times by now.

  They should have told him exactly what crimes he was suspected of, and possibly also allowed him access to some sort of legal representation. You didn’t waste precious hours letting your suspect shiver in a cell; you only had to watch a bit of CSI to know the basics. Speaking of forensics and investigating the crime scene . . .

  No one had taken any blood samples or fingerprints, or even his photograph, at least not that he could recall. The hash had given him a nosebleed while he was asleep. He’d had grass nose before, and it always looked worse than it was, so he must have scared the life out of the people in the camp. But if the cops hadn’t taken a blood sample while he was unconscious, then his shirt was bound to contain all the samples they could possibly need.

  But just like the whole of this damned country, the scenario felt fake, almost contrived.

  He could hardly bear to finish the thought without his heart starting to race, and he forced himself to take several deep breaths.

  The fact was that however he looked at it, however hard he examined all the details of the past few days, he couldn’t quite shake the idea that it was all just some sort of . . . Game . . .

  7

  BOARD GAMES

  Pillars of Society forum

  Posted: 12 November, 23:18

  By: MayBey

  There are only three types of citizens—police, prisoners, and those who haven’t been caught yet.

  This post has 36 comments

  THE DOOR BANGED open and suddenly they were inside the cell. Four sweaty guards and a huge officer with an acne-scarred face and a filthy shirt.

  HP didn’t even have time to get up before they were on him.

  “Name! You tell me name now!” the pockmarked man screamed, his face close to HP’s.

  Before he had a chance to reply they had pulled his arms up behind his back, strapped his legs together, then carried him out like a parcel. It all happened so fast that he didn’t even have time to feel scared.

  The room they carried him into was slightly larger than his cell. There was a narrow table at its center and he could see straps hanging down from the sides. The table slanted down at one end, but rather than put him down with his head at the higher end, they tied him down with his feet at the top. It was distinctly uncomfortable, lying head down, and it only got worse when they strapped his arms and legs down.

  He could feel his heart pounding hard in his chest.

  “You tell me name!” Scarface hissed in his face, so close that he could smell the sour tobacco on the man’s breath.

  “T-Thomas Andersen,” HP replied, not sounding quite as cool as he would have liked. On the way in he had noticed the camera in one corner of the room, and now he was almost completely certain:

  The Game had found him!

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  He had every reason to be afraid, terrified even.

  Weirdly enough, though, it wasn’t just fear that was making his pulse race.

  Scarface nodded to one of the guard orcs, who pulled a black hood over HP’s face. Everything went dark. He heard the trolls talking to each other, but once again he couldn’t understand a word. But he did think he’d picked up one thing.

  If they really wanted to get rid of him, there was no reason to drag it out. But instead of burying him out in the desert they had put time and effort into staging this whole charade. That had to mean something.

  Suddenly he could make out the sound of liquid dripping onto the stone floor.

  What the hell were they actually up to?

  A moment later a wet cloth was pressed over his face.

  The first two seconds weren’t too bad—he could still breathe even if he could feel the hood pulling tighter as he breathed in. There was a smell of wet toweling, which was more reassuring than frightening. Then he noticed a wet gurgling sound and suddenly water was seeping through the fabric and into his nose and mouth.

  It wasn’t much—but enough to make him gasp for breath, which merely meant he sucked more water through the cloth. Some of it caught in his throat, making him choke. He coughed, then took several quick breaths out of reflex, which immediately resulted in him breathing in more water.

  More choking, breathing, coughing, and water.

  But no air . . .

  Freaking hell—these bastards were drowning him!

  His air supply was almost gone and he started to panic.

  He tried to twist his head to get the cloth off his face. But he couldn’t move at all.

  He coughed again, but his gag reflex merely sent down more water and his screaming turned into gurgling.

  Suddenly the cloth was removed, then the hood. He coughed, bringing up little splashes of water, then finally managed to take a ragged, liberating breath.

  Then another one.

  His panic slowly subsided.

  Then Scarface’s voice in one ear.

  “Who . . . are . . . you . . . ?”

  He tried to shake his head but was interrupted by another fit of coughing, so he tried again.

  “Take it easy, for fuck’s sake . . .”

  Several hands pushed him down, the hood was pulled over his head, and the towel stifled his protests.

  More water, more choking. He was jerking his body like mad, trying to kick, but he was held tight in an iron grip. He let out a roar—only to breathe in even more water.

  His vision started to turn black. His panic was raging. These bastards really were about to kill him!

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The bar over her shoulders, one yellow fifteen-kilo weight on either side, her feet wide apart. She took a deep breath, sank down until her knees were bent at a ninety-degree angle, then, as she pushed up, she blew the air from her lungs.

  “Eight,” counted Nina Brandt, standing behind her. “Two more, Becca!”

  She could feel the lactic acid burning in her thighs, but not even a tough series of knee thrusts could stop her thoughts.

  Relieved of duty—or a bit of free holiday, if you were inclined to laugh it off. Unfortunately she wasn’t.

  So, who had filed the complaint?

  The list of candidates ran to at least three names. Gladh was obviously number one. When they left him, Berglund, and the interpreter at the dusty little airfield in Darfur, he had looked capable of murdering her. She had wrecked the whole of his lovely official v
isit, and presumably dealt a serious blow to his reputation and self-image.

  She breathed in, bent her knees, and then pushed once more. The lactic acid stepped up a couple of notches but she hardly noticed.

  Number two on the list was her own deputy, David Malmén.

  He definitely didn’t seem to have accepted her as his new boss, and here he had a golden opportunity to get rid of her. This idea that neither he nor Karolina Modin had seen their attacker made no sense at all, to put it mildly. Like a story concocted to undermine her own credibility.

  In the short term Malmén was actually the only person who appeared to have benefited from her suspension, seeing as she assumed he had been put in charge of the group again.

  “T-ten.”

  With some effort she completed the last lift, then got help putting the bar back on its support. She jogged quickly around the gym to shake off the acid and finish her thoughts.

  Third place on the list was rather more dubious, but after some consideration she decided it might well be shared by Karolina Modin and her colleagues Esbjörnsson and Göransson. They all had a master they wanted to keep in with, and even if she and Modin had got on fairly well to start with, neither she nor any of the others had backed her up when it mattered.

  So what was she to do now?

  The investigation was bound to take at least a month. Everyone involved would have to be questioned, and they would have to extract information from the Sudanese authorities.

  She was only “officially under suspicion,” the lesser degree, so evidently the investigators didn’t have sufficient evidence yet for the prosecutor to want to raise a case against her.

  It was her word against theirs—the only question was how unanimous the other testimonies were. Maybe it was time to get hold of a lawyer after all, to show that she wasn’t going to take any more shit? But she still felt reluctant.

  She hated this type of . . .

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Game!

  A fake arrest, a mocked-up interrogation, and a load of actors playing Midnight Express, just like last time.

  They had cracked him on that occasion, and even though he had made up his mind to stick it out, they were well on the way to doing so again.

  Fear of dying had him in its iron grip—his heart was beating double time and he was throwing up like a fountain across the stone floor.

  They had torn the hood off again, loosened the straps, and sat him up.

  “You tell me name,” Scarface said, more as a statement than a request as he scratched his stubble.

  HP could only nod between the fits of coughing. He was sobbing like a little kid. His tears burned on his cheeks—the vomit was burning in his throat and he was prepared to tell them everything. The Kennedy murder, the Lindbergh baby, who framed Roger fucking Rabbit—he was prepared to confess the whole lot as long as he could escape that bastard towel!

  “Pettersson,” he sniffed. “Henrik Pettersson, Player 128.”

  “Tenk you!” Scarface nodded happily. “Next question . . .”

  HP stiffened. They’d cracked him, he had lost. So what more was there to say?

  Then he got it . . .

  Suddenly he started to cry again.

  He’d got it wrong—fucking wrong!

  This wasn’t a trial, it wasn’t an evaluation or a second chance, the way his little brain, desperate for affirmation, had almost managed to convince him. No, this was all about money, nothing else. The Game wanted the money back, that was all.

  Bank account number, user IDs, passwords—he’d give them the lot if it meant he could get down from this fucking table.

  What then? After all this, he was pretty sure the Game Master wasn’t just going to let him go . . .

  “The money, yes?” he sniffed.

  Scarface gave him a strange look and threw his hands out.

  “No money, no, no!”

  For some reason the man looked almost insulted.

  “Next question,” he repeated, glaring angrily at HP as he pulled a notebook out of one of the pockets of his grubby shirt.

  “Did . . . you . . .” the police officer said, and HP nodded.

  Time to put a stop to all this.

  “Did you . . . kill her . . . ?”

  And suddenly he didn’t understand anything.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Do you feel like talking about it?”

  “Not really,” Rebecca replied abruptly.

  She was pulling a comb through her wet hair, then gathered it into a tight ponytail at the back of her neck.

  “You know most of it already, so what else is there to say? I’m relieved of duty until the investigation is over, and until then all I can do is play guess who filed the complaint against me.”

  She and Nina Brandt had met at Police Academy, then worked together for a couple of years. They were actually very different, and not just in terms of appearance. Too different to be properly close friends. But they still worked well together, at least superficially.

  In contrast to her, Nina Brandt was blond, short, and curvy. The sort that men and women alike turned around to look at in the corridor, and the sort who knew how to make the most of that.

  Nina enjoyed attention and was happiest among other people, preferably as many as possible, which was probably the reason why she worked in the licensed-premises unit.

  Rebecca couldn’t imagine ever wanting to work there.

  Pubs and bars and attention were things she felt very little desire for.

  But the advantage of the licensed-premises unit was that Nina knew the owner of every single bar and gym in the city, and it had been simple for her to sort out alternative exercise arrangements for Rebecca now that she was excluded from Police Headquarters.

  And what a place . . .

  She’d only heard about this gym before now. Which wasn’t really that odd—ordinary mortals didn’t come here. Evidently this was where celebrities hung out—proper ones, not the fifteen-minute variety . . .

  According to rumor, this was where the kids from the royal family went, and that could very well be true. The place felt extremely exclusive—more like a spa than an exercise center. The receptionist had given them both towels and dressing gowns before escorting them into the sandalwood-scented changing room and showing them to their lockers.

  Rebecca had always thought the gym in Police Headquarters was one of the best she’d ever seen. But this . . . In total the place must cover almost a thousand square meters—all of it elaborately designed and in perfect condition. Bare brick walls, spotlit steel beams, high arched windows. And naturally not so much as a single dust ball anywhere on the vast hardwood floors.

  She could only imagine what membership would really cost.

  Considerably more than a police salary could cope with, at any rate . . .

  But Nina had got them in free, so she could hardly complain.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Did you kill her?” Scarface repeated.

  HP still didn’t understand anything.

  “Kill who?” he squawked.

  His head suddenly felt like a tumble dryer.

  “Mrs. Argos, did you kill Mrs. Argos?” Scarface spelled his way angrily through the words in his notepad, then glared back at HP.

  “What, er . . . No! Hell, no!” he managed to say as the tumble dryer went up a gear. “I didn’t even know that she was . . . Okay, just listen!”

  Scarface gave one of the orcs a curt nod and suddenly the hood was pulled back over HP’s head and he was forced back down onto the table. “Noooo!” he roared, panicking and trying to pull free.

  “Nooo, for fuck’s sake, I’m innocent . . .”

  The towel muffled his cries, then the water made him shut up.

  The smell of bleach in the room merged with the smell of warm ammonia.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “It seems weird that Runeberg’s got unfinished business with the head of the investigation—Westerberg, was that his name?”
>
  Nina came and stood beside her in front of the mirror and fixed her hair. Even though the mirror was huge and the other woman a head shorter than Rebecca, it still felt as if she took up all the space.

  “Westergren,” Rebecca said, unconsciously taking a step to the side. “They were in uniform together in Norrmalm years ago. Seems like they fell out there, and then Ludvig killed off Westergren’s application to join the Security Police.”

  Nina looked up at the ceiling as she adjusted a couple of blond locks that she didn’t seem happy with. In spite of the exercise and sauna, she still looked smart enough to go straight out on the town.

  “That sounds a bit too straightforward, don’t you think?” she muttered, running a lip pencil around her mouth. “I mean, you said they almost started fighting. You don’t do that over a rejected job application and some bad memories from your time in uniform. All that must be, what, at least ten years ago?”

  Rebecca shrugged, picked her sneakers up off the limestone floor, and began to pack her bag.

  “Ludvig didn’t go into much detail, and it definitely wasn’t the time to ask.”

  Brandt abandoned the mirror and turned to Rebecca.

  “Listen, before you go, there’s something I feel I ought to tell you . . .”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  When the hood was pulled off for the third time he was done for.

  He coughed a couple of times, threw up another load of watery slime all down his front, then gasped desperately for air.

  “Wait!” he spluttered when Scarface nodded to the guards again. “Wait a moment, for fuck’s sake!”

  Scarface gave a sign and he was helped to sit up.

  “You kill her,” Scarface repeated in a tone that was almost friendly.

  There was only one answer, one word that could save him from the table.

  Red or blue?

  “Y-y . . .” HP began.

  At that moment the door to the cell was pulled open.

  “What’s going on here, Sergeant Moussad?”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Do you know about the Pillars of Society?”

  “What, the book, you mean?”

  Nina Brandt shook her head.