Buzz: A Thriller

by Anders de la Motte

  “Sit down!” he repeated, louder this time, but she still didn’t move from the spot.

  Her boss let out a deep sigh.

  “Please, sit down, Becca,” he said in a considerably friendlier voice, and this time she did as he asked. She sat down exaggeratedly slowly on the chair.

  Runeberg returned to his side of the desk.

  “You look tired. Do you want anything, coffee, tea . . . ?”

  She shook her head.

  “Okay . . .” he said. “What have you heard, and who from?”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Three, two, one. GO, GO, GO!!”

  Ten keyboards began to clatter at almost exactly the same moment. The tame trolls were set loose and gradually began to roll out the artificial turf over the pitch. Twenty different discussion forums were the targets. Eight newspapers, five political websites, and seven general discussion boards. All the trolls were supposed to post short comments that either supported lowering the rate of tax, or attacked their opponents’ arguments.

  HP was in his element. He’d worked out that a special program bounced their comments off a load of different servers out in cyberspace, spreading their posts out among a mass of different IP addresses so that they all looked genuine. As if the grassroots really had risen up to push this particular issue. The blog gang would join in over the next few days, and probably a couple of the newspaper columnists that had been bought and paid for. Then they just needed the radio and television news to pick up on it, and the game would become reality and their artificial turf would be transformed into a real grass pitch.

  This is the nine o’clock news. In the past few days an increasing number of voices have been raised calling for the VAT rate to be lowered. Now the government has responded with a proposal . . .

  He hadn’t had this much fun since . . . Well, he didn’t actually know how long it had been.

  What he and the others in the office were engaged in was nothing more than a massive scam, a manipulation of huge proportions that he was absolutely delighted to be part of. That feeling of having the upper hand, not just over your average Svensson, but the whole media elite. Being part of something bigger, something smarter, that only a few select individuals were aware of.

  Such a familiar feeling, but still so damned sweet!

  He let his fingers dance over the keyboard, sending out troll after troll to grab their part of the turf. Making comments and contributions according to the script Frank had handed out.

  If VAT on restaurants was lower, more people could afford to eat out . . .

  Enter, bang, switch windows, and on to the next troll.

  I’d be able to employ at least three more people if we had lower tax . . .

  Send, then Alt+Tab.

  My employer couldn’t afford to take me on full-time after my probationary period . . .

  “Calm down, Mange,” his boss called from his desk.

  But HP wasn’t listening. He opened new cages, letting more tame trolls loose, and sending them out into the fray at once.

  “Erik Hagström,” “Millan S,” “50cParty,” “L Berntsen,” and “Benjyboy” all made their cybervoices heard before he quickly rushed to the next cell block.

  “Hatta42,” “Stefan Johnsson,” “TronGuy,” and “VAO.”

  Setting them all free.

  “Mange, slow down, the rest of us can’t keep up . . .”

  Beads of sweat began to form on his brow but HP didn’t notice. His fingers were flying over the keyboard. Another set, even more voices added to the crowd. He’d long since given up following the script.

  Down with VAT on bars!

  Send!

  It’s the small businesses that keep our economy afloat . . .

  Post!

  Completely agree with the previous post . . .

  Comment!

  Nurture, not neuter!

  Add!

  Time to fight the tax monster . . .

  Enter!

  Then back to the stable for reinforcements. New recruits he had created himself specifically for an occasion like this.

  “Knotty,” “Lisel8,” and “DPtr0t.”

  Their voices melded together in his head, becoming a single carpet of noise. Sweat was pouring off him, tickling his eyebrows, but instead of stopping typing he leaned his head forward and wiped his brow on his shirtsleeve.

  There, done!

  New window—new voices. Hell, this was cool! He was the Lord of Astroturf. The buzziest bee in the hive. Troll handler with a capital T. Peer fucking Gynt, that was who he was . . .

  “MANGE!!”

  HP looked up from his screen reluctantly. The room was completely silent and Philip Argos was standing in the doorway.

  “My office in ten minutes,” he said abruptly, pointing at HP.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “It really isn’t as black and white as you seem to think,” Runeberg muttered. “Therese and I had known each other since Police Academy. We used to flirt back then, I suppose you could say. But nothing ever came of it.”

  He looked at her as if he were expecting some sort of reaction, but when he got none he went on.

  “In the second term she got together with Per and we used to hang out together. Not that we were best friends or anything . . .” Another look that went unanswered.

  “Either way,” he continued, “after the Academy Per and I were allocated to the same law-and-order unit. I would bump into Therese every now and then, and the flirting never quite stopped even though we both got married eventually to other people. A couple of years later we ended up on the same UN mission, and . . . well . . .”

  He shrugged.

  “When you’re a long way from home and experiencing a whole load of shit together, it’s easy to get close to someone. A bit too close, maybe . . .”

  He shifted uneasily on his chair, as if the seat were chafing against his massive body.

  “When we got home Therese wanted us to carry on, she wanted us to leave our partners and move in together, but I didn’t want to. My kids were small, and to be honest . . .”

  He sighed.

  “Therese was fairly brittle right from the start, and that UN mission hadn’t made things any better. I suppose I’d . . .”

  “ . . . got bored,” she finished, in a surprisingly firm voice.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Philip’s office was on the nineteenth floor.

  Even though that was only one floor above theirs, the lift journey seemed to take forever.

  He and Frank were leaning against opposite walls, each of them doing his best not to meet the other’s gaze.

  This really was a mistake of biblical proportions. What in the name of holy hell had he been thinking?

  Dressing up and applying for a job under a false name so that he could single-handedly try to solve some blasted murder mystery? Seriously, who the hell did he think he was? Nancy fucking Drew?

  Didn’t he have enough problems already without actively trying to add a few more?

  And he didn’t even have the sense to keep a low profile either . . .

  Great work, HP!

  The lift doors opened, they got out, and Frank pointed at a glass door with the company logo, exactly the same as on their own floor.

  There would usually have been a receptionist sitting there, but at this time of evening the door was locked and Frank had to knock.

  “Our pass cards don’t work up here,” he hissed at HP. “Only Philip, his secretary, and the twin detectives have access.”

  “The twin what?”

  “Shh, for God’s sake, not so loud! You’ll see . . .”

  The door was opened by a man with short red hair, also dressed in a suit that clung to his large body like a glove.

  “Hi, Elroy. Philip asked us to come up.”

  Frank took half a pace forward but was almost left with his foot in the air when the red-haired man made no sign of moving.

  “Not you, just him,” he muttered, nodding at HP.


  Frank opened his mouth to protest, but stopped himself.

  “Well, good luck . . .” he said quietly from the corner of his mouth as HP walked past him.

  The reception area looked the same as the one on the floor below. A small, stylish waiting area with a few leather and tubular-steel chairs, plus the usual selection of lifestyle magazines. Then a reception desk made of sand-blasted glass and, behind that, a couple of small meeting rooms. But apart from that, this floor looked very different. Instead of an airy, open-plan office divided only by glass walls, here there was just a locked steel door with a card reader at one side.

  The discreet little spherical camera was similar to those on the floor below, but because the ceiling was lower here, it was so prominent that HP almost imagined he could see its lens adjusting as it followed their movements.

  He gulped hard a couple of times, but his mouth still felt horribly dry.

  Instead of taking out a card, the red-haired man simply raised his right thumb to the reader. The little red lamp switched to green and HP heard the lock whirring. For some reason he couldn’t suppress a shudder.

  17

  THE HIVE

  “THE COMPLAINT, THEN, what about that?”

  “I don’t quite understand what you mean, Becca . . .”

  “The official complaint about misuse of office, do you know who’s responsible for that?”

  He squirmed again.

  “Of course I know.”

  “So who was it, then? Sixten Gladh?”

  “No, in purely formal terms it was actually me . . .”

  She stood up from her chair.

  “Hell, that’s low, Ludvig . . . !”

  “Calm down, Becca, for God’s sake!”

  He held his hands out.

  “It’s nothing personal, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  She glared at him, without sitting back down.

  “Okay, just think about it, Becca, and try to forget that we know each other. Paragraph nine of the Police Act, does that sound familiar? If a police officer becomes aware of a crime that is liable to prosecution, he or she is obliged to report it . . . Does that ring any bells? To be honest, I thought you already knew this, but you don’t seem to be quite yourself . . .”

  She carried on glaring at him.

  “Okay, try this: after your incident in Darfur my phone was ringing constantly with people from the foreign ministry claiming that you were guilty of all sorts of things. So what do you think I should have done? Put a lid on it? Pretend nothing had happened? A couple of days later Gladh and the foreign ministry gang would have had us both swinging from the gallows . . .”

  He looked at her, once again as though he were expecting her to say something.

  “Go on!” she said curtly.

  “The conclusion I came to, and I still believe it was the right one, by the way, was that if a police officer is suspected of a crime, then a report has to be filed and the ensuing investigation will determine what happened. That’s the normal procedure for incidents of this nature, and anything else would have looked very strange. So I asked Ann-Margret to raise a brief preliminary report, officially instigated by me.”

  He gestured toward the area outside his office, where the department’s civilian secretary had her desk.

  “It wasn’t until much later that I discovered that the case had ended up on Per Westergren’s desk, and realized what a tricky situation I’d inadvertently landed you in. Having my name on the report was hardly going to help, and obviously it was stupid of me to suggest coming in as your witness. I realized that just a couple of minutes into the interview. But by then it was already too late . . .”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  A large open-plan office with subdued lighting. But unlike the floor below, which was a hive of activity, this one had just two desks in the middle of the room. The contrast between the vast, darkened room and these two illuminated workplaces made everything look very odd, almost surreal.

  At one of the desks a tall, broad-shouldered woman was bent over a computer screen. HP was taken aback and almost came to a stop. He didn’t know if it was the suit, her sharp features, or her back-combed hair that fooled him, but the woman at the desk actually looked like Rebecca.

  The illusion lasted no more than a second. As he got closer he realized that the woman’s hair was much fairer, and she was actually much more like the red-haired man walking ahead of him. He guessed that they were brother and sister, and to judge by Frank’s nickname, probably twins.

  As they walked past, the woman looked up from her screen. HP gave her a short nod but she made no attempt to return the greeting. Instead she just stared at him.

  There was something about the way she looked at him that made him feel uneasy, and he took a couple of quicker steps to catch up with his guide.

  The red-haired man whom Frank had called Elroy pressed his thumb against another reader to let HP through the frosted-glass door leading to the corner office.

  “Wait here,” he said tersely.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Surely you see that you can’t treat me like this?!!

  Oh yes, she certainly could, and right now she was finally angry enough to dump him once and for all.

  Maybe it wasn’t nice, but a quick end was best for both of them. Anyway, what was there to talk about? They were each being unfaithful, they each had a partner they were lying to. And what for?

  Love?

  Hardly—at least not from her side.

  All they had shared were a few sweaty orgasms on the floor of an empty flat.

  Secret meetings that made life more bearable, but which neither of them was really prepared to pick up the tab for. And besides, she had started to get bored.

  Recriminations, jealousy, and wounded feelings were the last thing she needed . . .

  Just stop it! We’re both adults.

  It’s over—full stop!!

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The two exterior walls of the corner office were basically huge windows offering a fantastic view over the Stockholm city center. The red lettering on Kulturhuset, blue from the Sergel arcade and the square far below him, and, high above to the left, the illuminated clock of the NK department store.

  The hands said it was exactly seven o’clock, and for a moment HP’s heart almost skipped a beat.

  But it took him just a couple of seconds to regain control of his racing imagination.

  The hands were showing seven o’clock—not because anyone had stopped the clock, but because it was actually seven o’clock in the evening.

  He took a couple of steps into the room. Philip Argos’s desk was almost entirely empty. Two linked computer screens, a keyboard, and a wireless mouse—that was all. The same almost clinical state applied to the rest of the room. There wasn’t a single loose sheet of paper, a single Post-it note or abandoned coffee cup that showed any sign of habitation.

  The left-hand wall was covered with framed certificates, hung in laser-straight rows, and the white wall-to-wall carpet must have been washed regularly seeing as it showed not the slightest trace of brownish yellow coffee stains or marks from scraped shoes.

  In one corner was a set of white leather sofas. Five leadership magazines were laid out in a perfect, Zen-like fan on the little coffee table. The top one had Philip Argos himself on the cover. “The Man in Control,” declared the caption. The precision of the room made HP feel even more uncomfortable, and he couldn’t resist the temptation to nudge at the magazines, just a bit, to make the room seem slightly more human.

  As he was doing that, he noticed two small, framed photographs above the sofa. The first was black and white, and showed Philip Argos with the man whose name was evidently Elroy. They were both wearing berets and camouflage uniforms, crouching down with their arms around each other’s shoulders, smiling at the camera.

  The other photograph was of a chalk-white beach, the outlines of a few dark palm trees, and a bloodred sunset that—apart from the ma
gazines—appeared to provide the only splash of color in the monochrome room.

  The picture intrigued HP, and he walked around the coffee table to take a closer look. The photograph actually looked like . . .

  “Marmaris,” a dry voice said behind HP, making him jump.

  “Wh-what?”

  Philip Argos pointed at the picture.

  “That’s the view from my villa in Marmaris. In Turkey,” he clarified. “I go there as often as I can to unwind. It’s a good place to fill your soul with positive energy . . .”

  “Aha, okay! I—I was just admiring the colors,” HP muttered.

  “Sit yourself down, Magnus.” Philip gestured toward the leather sofa. “Would you like anything to drink? Water, tea?”

  HP realized his mouth was bone-dry.

  “Water, please.”

  He glanced up at Philip, but the expression on his face gave no clue about what was to come.

  Philip pulled out his cell phone from a holster on his belt, but instead of dialing a number he just pressed a button on the side, then spoke into it as if it were a microphone.

  “Sophie, would you mind bringing in some mineral water for me and Magnus.”

  He let go of the button and waited a moment. The cell let out two distinct bleeps.

  Philip returned it to its holster and sat down in the armchair opposite HP. He adjusted the journals on the table, crossed one leg over the other, and leaned back. Then he smiled, and for the second time that evening HP couldn’t help shivering.

  “Magnus . . . that is your name, isn’t it?”

  18

  OH, WHAT A TANGLED WEB WE WEAVE . . .

  DAMMIT TO HELL—his cover was blown!

  “Er . . . what?!” he mumbled, trying to win a bit of time.

  Philip Argos smiled again—an unsettling, reptilian leer that made the hair on the back of HP’s neck stand up.

  “I said, your real name isn’t really Magnus Sandström, is it?”

  “Er . . . N-no . . .” HP managed to say as he desperately ran through his options.

  He’d been found out and he was stuck on the nineteenth floor. The door was closed and outside stood the society of redheads. Both siblings looked like they would be capable of causing him a fair degree of physical harm—not to mention Philip Argos himself. The man looked like a rattlesnake working out how best to attack an unusually stupid desert rat . . .