Buzz: A Thriller

by Anders de la Motte

  This time he tore the lining open with his fingers.

  That was more like it!

  But the little rectangular object he fished out wasn’t a lighter . . .

  “Elite GPS 311,” it said in tiny letters on one side of the flat little rectangle. Well, that explained a whole lot. They had tagged him with a transmitter, tracking him like some damn harbor seal! So that was why they had been able to locate him without him spotting them . . .

  It was a smart place to put it. The jacket was thick and had enough zips and Velcro fasteners for him not to notice even a hard little gizmo like that.

  But there was one thing he couldn’t make sense of. How the hell had they managed to plant it?

  The jacket was brand-new, he’d grabbed it from Becca’s shopping bag just before he set out. Which in turn meant . . . well, what, Einstein?

  A new factor in the equation . . .

  Damn.

  Damn.

  DAMN!

  He needed to get hold of her, find out who she’d been in contact with recently. Try to stop her getting even more involved than she already was.

  But first he had to get out of here . . .

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Tobias Lundh had obviously been a mistake, an error of judgment on her part, and one for which she was paying the price in more ways than one. Even though she never dated colleagues, unlike a lot of female police officers, she had suddenly thrown herself into an affair with a notorious ladies’ man like Tobbe. Who just happened to be best friends with her boss, as well as his neighbor . . .

  What the hell had she been thinking?

  But of course that was the whole problem. Just like with John, she hadn’t been thinking at all, just following the first impulse that popped into her head. After everything that had happened last year with Henke, and the attack she had managed to avert at the last minute, and not least the parcel containing those bolts, she had promised herself that she would try to relax a bit more. Lower her standards and give herself a chance to be more human . . .

  Well, that had turned out really well.

  Clearly she should have rectified the Tobbe Lundh mistake a long time ago, then she would have escaped his pathetic clinginess, jealousy, and constant text messages. She already had a boyfriend. A nice, considerate one, who maybe wasn’t all that exciting, but at least he’d never cause this sort of mess. So why had she deceived Micke, betraying him for a bit of meaningless sex with a man she didn’t even like? She had no good answer to that question. Or rather, she had far too many . . .

  36

  OUT OF THE HOLE AND DOWN THE SLOPE

  LOCATION: HOTEL HOPELESS

  Date and time: Christmas Day, 13:48

  Clothing: In-room casual, which meant underpants and vest

  Status: Bruised and hacked off

  Droning.

  That was what the phenomenon was called, he’d seen it on Discovery. Sleeping while you were walking. Well, sleeping? That definitely wasn’t the right word for it. He’d been in a sort of trance, awake enough for his legs to carry on moving forward, but with his brain still way off in damned la-la land.

  The tunnel itself hadn’t actually been all that long, maybe a kilometer or so. But seeing as it formed a broad curve under Hjorthagen it hadn’t taken more than about ten meters before the light from the end of the tunnel at Ropsten had disappeared. The impenetrable darkness had certainly contributed to the experience.

  He had seen things, terrible fucking H. P. Lovecraft things that had made the hair stand up on the back of his neck and arms. Rats, bats, and even bigger shapeless creatures tucked away in corners and side tunnels. Things that had hissed at him as he staggered past, scratching at his back with shitty, clawlike, down-and-out hands.

  And the voices. Dad, Dag, that poor incinerated bastard, Erman. They had all whispered to him out of the darkness. Demanding answers from him.

  Do you want to play a game, Henrik Pettersson?

  Do you want to?

  Are you completely sure?

  Yes or no?

  His lunch had just been delivered, a Royale with Cheese that cost him double the usual rate, seeing as Burger King was a couple more blocks for the receptionist to walk. But it was worth it. The dressing dribbled out between his fingers and he greedily slurped up every last, greasy drop.

  He had staggered out of the ghost tunnel at Gärdet, actually carrying on almost another hundred meters before realizing that the lights and fresh air were real and not just more hallucinations.

  Then he had managed to get a taxi outside the TV4 building, and even if the driver had given him a funny look he had still agreed to drive his dirty and battered body home to Södermalm.

  He had slept for almost twenty-four hours, then dragged himself up to shower and shave. After a bit of food he had logged on to the computer.

  He had to find a way to contact Becca. Explain why he hadn’t come back. She was bound to have been both pissed off and worried. But he didn’t dare call her at home or try her cell. If they could plant a GPS in his clothes, then they could certainly bug her phones as well. His adversaries weren’t just anyone.

  The whole thing was much bigger than he had thought, he realized that now, and a bit of good old googling had quickly reinforced the idea that he had started to develop out on Lidingö.

  He had to find a different way to contact her. To keep her safe.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Christmas made everything twice as depressing.

  She was almost as angry with herself as she was with Henke. First he quite literally drops from the sky, naked and battered, with some ridiculous story. Then a couple of days recovering while his nice big sister brings him food and looks after him, then he suddenly vanishes again without a word of explanation.

  And she’d got Christmas food sorted, had even dragged some decorations out of storage in the attic, and he never showed up. Naturally she had called her cell, only to find it tucked away on the hat rack.

  So damned typical of Henke, and so damned typical of her not to know better.

  So she’d ended up spending Christmas on her own.

  Micke had called a couple of times, but she hadn’t felt comfortable talking to him. She blamed the fact that she was spending Christmas with her brother, and kept the conversations as short as she could. She was pretty sure that he must know about her affair with Tobbe by now. Not least from reading all the gossip on the Pillars of Society forum. Her lawyer hadn’t helped to lighten the mood. Apparently the prosecutor was thinking of bringing charges against her early in January. Gross misuse of office, which meant she’d be fired if she was found guilty. Fucking fantastic, as Henke would have said . . .

  She carefully packed her gym gear and left the flat. One of the big chains had a gym at Fridhemsplan, and she was thinking of getting a ten-session pass there for the time being.

  As she emerged onto the street she looked around carefully before walking off toward the bus stop. One block away an old car started up, but the sound of the engine was almost swallowed by the snowdrifts and she didn’t notice it.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  It was the photograph of the failed suicide bomber that put him on the scent. A terrible picture that the evening tabloids were obviously making the most out of.

  Someone must have leaned out of a window and taken the picture from directly above him. The lifeless body, the dark stains on the snow, debris, and broken plate-glass windows, it was all clearly visible.

  But what caught HP’s attention was a far smaller detail. At the very top of the picture, on its own in the snow, was a little rectangular object that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He didn’t even need to zoom in to work out what it was.

  A cell phone! A shiny one that looked very freaking similar to the one in his wardrobe.

  Once his brain had made the connection it wasn’t that hard to carry on with the rest of the puzzle. First a bit of googling among the traditional media.

  The second terror
ist attack in Sweden in the last two years . . .

  It’s clear that international terrorism is here to stay . . .

  Experts in terrorism agree that there are at least three hundred potential terrorists in Sweden . . .

  The government is preparing legislation permitting the increased use of . . .

  The opposition parties, which had previously opposed increased surveillance, have now decided to back the measures . . .

  A poll of our readers indicates that an overwhelming majority of the Swedish people support a strengthening of . . .

  It was that last sentence that made him change his focus and head out into his old hunting grounds. It didn’t take him many minutes to find the right place. Some of the trolls seemed to have changed their names, but he could still recognize them by the way they expressed themselves.

  “M00reon,” “M1crosrf,” and “JabRue” were his own creations. But there were also old favorites like “VAO,” “Bosse Baldersson,” “Ljugo Juli,” and “Lasse Danielsson.” He tested every troll name he could remember, and the results exceeded all his expectations.

  From the day after the bombing, all of them—the whole lot, tutti—without one single damn exception, had posted comments that one way or another dealt with the terrorist attack. When he switched to the blogs the results were basically the same. Even the most superficial bloggers had something to say on the subject, even if it was just clichés like “Damned awful” or “My sisters best friend was like a minute from being blone up . . .”

  The conclusion was crystal clear!!

  ArgosEye was fanning the flames as much as it possibly could, and the whole opinion-shaping machinery had cranked into action precisely twelve hours after the failed suicide bombing.

  Coincidence?

  Well, of course it could be.

  But considering what he already knew . . .

  NFW!

  No Fucking Way!!!!!

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  She had a heavy bag of groceries in each hand and her gym bag on her back. She was only ten meters from the bus when the doors closed and it pulled away from the pavement with a hiss.

  She swore loudly to herself, thought about waiting for the next one, then decided to walk the two kilometers or so home from Fridhemsplan.

  By the time she was about halfway she had already regretted her decision several times.

  In spite of her gloves, the bags were cutting into her hands and making her stop more and more often to let the blood back into her fingers. And the pavements hadn’t been properly gritted and she came close to slipping over several times.

  She had just passed the park beside the teacher training college when the dark car glided up next to her. To the right of her, on the other side of the high fence, cars were streaming out of the Fredhäll tunnel, and the noise and movement of the traffic down on the E4 was probably why she didn’t react until the car had stopped and the thickset man was standing in her path.

  “Get in,” he said abruptly and opened the back door.

  “What?”

  She saw a red-haired woman, about the same age as her, get out of the driver’s seat and walk around the car.

  “Get in!” the man repeated. “There’s someone who wants to talk to you . . .”

  She leaned over and peered inside the car, which she thought was a Mercedes.

  John was sitting inside.

  “Please get in, Rebecca,” he said softly.

  She glanced quickly to her left. The woman was now on the pavement behind her.

  Like the man on the other side of her, the woman had her jacket undone in a way that Rebecca recognized, with one hand on her belt inside the opening of the jacket.

  She took a step back toward the fence.

  Suddenly she realized that she recognized the man beside her.

  “You were on my bus,” she stated drily. “But you were much nicer then . . .”

  “Are you going to get in, or what . . . ?” he replied.

  “What happens if I say no?”

  The man took half a pace forward, and the woman did the same on the other side.

  “Let’s all take this nice and calmly,” John said from the rear seat. “I’m sorry about our little misunderstanding the other day, I really am, Rebecca . . . I was tired and had had too much to drink, and as a result I misjudged the whole situation. I hope you can accept my apology, and I can assure you that I have no intention of seeking revenge in any way at all.”

  He pointed to the Band-Aid on his nose.

  “If you’d be so kind as to get in, we’ll drive you home. It’s only a few hundred meters, but those bags look heavy . . .”

  As he finished his sentence the big man repeated his gesture from the bus, holding out one hand to take her bags. But still she hesitated. The man and woman were almost imperceptibly closing in around her. Slowly she put the bags down on the ground and took a step backward.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  It had taken several days for the penny to drop. ACME Telecom Services Ltd.—that was the company listed at the office bunker he and Rehyman the Boy Wonder had stealth-raided, the place they discovered that the Game was being steered from. Until he had blown the whole place sky-high, that is . . .

  So, ACME Telecom Services.

  “A proud member of the PayTag Group,” it had said on their website.

  If he had been even the slightest bit doubtful about his mission before, then all considerations were now totally Scarlett O’Hara’ed.

  PayTag owned ACME, and ACME hosted the Game.

  And your conclusion, Sherlock?

  PayTag was the Game!

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Suddenly the pavement was lit up by the lights from another car, albeit a considerably more scruffy one.

  It stopped in the middle of the road for a few seconds, then pulled in and parked behind the Mercedes. A scrawny little man in a leather jacket, cowboy boots, and pilot’s sunglasses jumped out of the passenger’s side.

  “What’s all this, then?” he said, taking several authoritative steps toward them.

  The man and woman on either side of Rebecca exchanged glances.

  “What do you mean?” the man from the bus replied, lowering the hand he had been holding out toward Rebecca.

  “Renko, surveillance,” the man in sunglasses said, waving a little black wallet. “No stopping here, and that applies to Mercs as well, yeah . . . ?”

  “We were just leaving,” the man from the bus muttered. “Just wanted to give this lady a lift . . .”

  “Off you go, now, my partner and I can drive Normén home.”

  The man in sunglasses gestured over his shoulder with his thumb toward the ramshackle car. The driver’s door was open now. A man in a green army jacket got out with some difficulty and straightened up to his full height. Rebecca saw the woman to her left unconsciously take half a step back, and was close to doing the same herself.

  The man was huge, at least 2.10 meters tall, and almost a meter across the shoulders.

  His long hair hung down on both sides of his head, and what with that and a large fur hat, most of his face was hidden. Not that you really felt you wanted to see it.

  “Okay, off you go, unless you want an A penalty . . .” the man in sunglasses chattered, waving with one hand. “Normén, you hop in the back, the rescue patrol is ready to depart.”

  He pulled his sunglasses down onto the tip of his nose and winked at her.

  Rebecca took a step toward the car. The woman was still standing in her way.

  For a few seconds they just stared at each other.

  Then the red-haired woman slowly stepped aside.

  A few moments later Rebecca was sitting in the surveillance car. It was full of rubbish and smelled odd, almost as if something had died in there. The driver’s seat was pushed so far back that the huge man at the wheel might as well have been sitting beside her on the backseat. The car radio was playing some old song she vaguely recognized.

  The Mercedes per
formed an angry U-turn and drove off quickly in the direction of the Western Bridge.

  “Okay!” she said, taking a deep breath. “First: if you two clowns are going to play at being police officers again, it’s an O penalty, not A . . . And second: Where’s my idiot of a brother, and what the hell is he up to?”

  37

  BLAME GAMES

  Pillars of Society forum

  Posted: 28 December, 18:06

  By: MayBey

  So what’s it to be?

  Do you want me to get him?

  Thumbs up, or down?

  Time to cast your vote . . .

  This post has 231 comments

  THE MORE HE thought about it, the more sense it all made. The takeover of the company and Anna’s murder had been just the preamble. The real match had only started with the failed bombing.

  The guy had been loaded with various explosives and other horrors, and had been just fifty meters from one of the busiest parts of Stockholm. Yet somehow he had still managed to mess the whole thing up.

  Even though he must have run the entire length of Drottninggatan, and presumably passed hundreds of Christmas shoppers tipsy from mulled wine, the bomb had gone off in a place where basically no one but him had been hurt.

  Obviously it could be a miracle, or the poor idiot might have panicked. Changed his mind or simply been a bit too heavy-handed with his home-brewed Internet explosives.

  But there was also another possibility.

  That someone had detonated the bomb remotely so that it got maximum attention but did minimum damage. Pretty much like his own little adventure out in Kista last year. He had thought long and hard about why the Game had made the call that would detonate the explosives so long before the cortège containing the US secretary of state was due to get there. If he hadn’t been smart enough to see through the Game Master’s bullshit, he’d probably have been the only victim of the blast, just like the bomber in the city center.

  But it was all about shifting people’s focus. Creating an event that was both spectacular and simultaneously raised enough questions for the media and all the so-called experts to be able to argue about on every news channel available.