The Game Trilogy

by Anders de la Motte

  That was close, fucking close, even …

  But now he had a problem.

  He had counted on being able to get out to the fire escape through the emergency exit in the Troll Mine, but now that way was blocked. Those stairs were his best hope of getting up to Philip’s office and the server room, but now he’d have to find another way to get to them.

  He jogged back to reception, ducked down behind the desk and pulled out the plan he had stolen from the fire cupboard on the ground floor.

  The fire escape was the emergency exit for all nineteen floors, and ran all the way down to the basement. That was a hell of a lot of stairs to clamber up, but he didn’t have much choice.

  He would have to try the route through the basement.

  Her mobile phone rang. Number withheld, and for some reason she hesitated for a couple of seconds before answering.

  ‘Hello, Rebecca Normén,’ she said as calmly as she could. There was a man’s voice at the other end.

  It was fucking creepy down there.

  The garage started right outside the lifts, and because it was a holiday, and night as well, only something like one in every four lights was lit. It was bound to be some stupid green scheme to save energy. But at least the weak lighting was enough for him to see where he was going.

  He slipped between the few cars parked down there and double checked on the plan than he was going the right way.

  A sudden noise made him jump. He took a couple of quick steps and dodged down between two cars, then put his head up slowly and tried to see through the car windows. Nothing, not the smallest movement out there in the gloom. Maybe a fan, or some other bit of service machinery coming on? Just to be sure, he waited another minute or so.

  But everything was quiet.

  He stood up and carried on to the corner where the staircase ought to be, but couldn’t help glancing back over his shoulder a few times.

  He found the door almost exactly where he expected it to be. Unfortunately it was locked. It could probably only be opened from the other side, which was perfectly logical considering that it was only supposed to be used by people going in one direction. But there was a card reader beside the door. A silver-coloured box with a keypad, like the one on the main door upstairs. He tried Rilke’s card, and got a double bleep in response. The little light flickered between green and red, and it took him a couple of seconds to realize. The passcard was fine, but the reader was waiting for him to tap in some sort of code.

  Shit!

  The main door had never asked for any sort of fucking code, a card alone was enough.

  He tried four zeros but got a firm red light in reply.

  Come on – think!

  It was Rilke’s card, and presumably they all picked their own individual pin number. Four digits, most likely. So what would she have chosen?

  Her birthday, the battle of Lützen, the French Revolution?

  He tried all three, without success.

  But what if that wasn’t how the reader worked? Maybe there was just one code for this particular box, and you could get in as long as you had a card for the building and the shared code?

  In which case there was a chance that …

  Suddenly everything went pitch black.

  For a few panic-stricken moments he had to fight the urge to drop everything and run back to the lifts. But instead he felt in his bag for his torch.

  He heard a faint rustling sound somewhere off to his right and the noise made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. It could have been a rat …

  Unless it was something else, a dark, shapeless figure creeping up on him, reaching out its clawed hands and …

  His fingers touched something cylindrical and he yanked the torch out so hard that several other things flew out with it. His sweaty fingers felt for the switch, then …

  The beam of light put a stop to his racing imagination and he moved it round in every direction just to be sure.

  There was nothing there, nothing but parked cars and the things he’d just dropped on the floor.

  He crouched down and put everything except a little spray-can back in his bag. There was the flask containing the ballistic gel, which he planned to use to fool the fingerprint reader, just like Rainman Rehyman had taught him out in Kista; the little crowbar for breaking open the door to the server room; and the earmuffs that would make it possible to put up with the noise from the intruder alarm.

  He took a quick look at the time.

  Almost an hour left until midnight, when the streets would be full of drunks watching fireworks who’d make life bloody difficult for any security guards and cops trying to make their way to a tricky central address like this.

  Plenty of time, in other words …

  He gave the keypad on the card reader a quick spray with the aerosol, waited a moment, then pressed the button on the torch. The light switched from white to violet and when he shone it at the keypad big white stains showed up on four of the buttons. 1350.

  He held the card up again, then pressed the keys in numerical order.

  Red light.

  He stopped to think for a moment. Then he tried the more symmetrical 0135. A green lamp came on and he head the lock whirr.

  YES!

  The moment he touched the handle a burst of pain flashed through his body and for a few seconds his limbs shook uncontrollably. Then everything went black.

  41

  Capture the flag

  ‘Yes, hello, can you tell me, whose number is this?’ the man at the other end of the line said.

  ‘Rebecca Normén’s …’

  ‘In Palace admin, or …?’ The man sounded hesitant.

  ‘Sorry … I don’t understand. Who am I talking to?’

  ‘My name’s Sandberg, Captain Sandberg of the LifeGuards. I’m in charge of the guard up at the Palace tonight and we’re standing in front of a door we suddenly find we can’t open. If you change the locks, normal procedure requires that you inform …’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ she interrupted. ‘Where did you get my mobile number?’

  ‘There’s a sticker on the lock. What … don’t you work in Palace admin? I thought …’

  ‘Wait there, Captain, I’m on my way!’

  She jogged down the stairs with the phone still pressed to her ear.

  ‘Where does the door lead?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The locked door …’ she clarified as she pulled her boots on. ‘Where does it lead?’

  Someone was carrying him.

  Or more than one, surely? One under each arm, his hands tied behind his back and a hood over his head.

  Déjà vu!

  He wondered briefly if this was all just a dream. That he was still in the garage in Dubai and the orcs were dragging him off to some Guantanamo pit.

  His legs were moving, more or less, but the rest of his body still felt numb. The last few minutes were chopped into little fragments of memory. He had a feeling he had been taken somewhere, in some sort of vehicle. But that was more a feeling than a fact. As if the world around him had moved while he himself had been lying still.

  They were dragging him up some sort of staircase. He heard a door squeak. Dry, cold air, but still not outdoors. Like some sort of huge attic …

  She braked hard in the outer courtyard of the Palace and the car slid another metre or so on the slippery cobbles.

  ‘Halt,’ the downy teenager in the sentry box said, holding up one hand.

  ‘The officer in charge of the guard,’ she said quickly as she showed him her police ID. ‘Captain Sandberg, where can I find him?’

  Up another narrow staircase, and the person in front practically had to drag him.

  Cold night air, voices, city noises in the distance revealed that they were definitely outside now. Stumbling steps across a slippery, slushy surface. Then hands pushing him down into a sitting position, pushing his legs over some sort of ledge. His feet were suddenly dangling freely and a gust of cold air bl
ew up the legs of his trousers.

  Like so many times before, his stomach was quicker than his brain. A roof! He was on some sort of roof.

  Three guns in total, two automatic rifles and the officer’s holstered pistol. For some reason they made her feel uneasy. The Guard may be largely ceremonial, but she couldn’t help wondering.

  Not dangerous, dangerous?

  She guessed at the latter …

  They were jogging up what seemed, strangely enough, to be a perfectly ordinary stairwell. Captain Sandberg in front of her, and two soldiers in camouflage uniforms just behind her. There were apartment doors on the landings, and a faint smell of cooking. She would never have imagined that people actually lived in the Palace, behind ordinary brown doors with letterboxes and nameplates, just like any other address in the city.

  But on the other hand this was the western wing, a fair way from the royal apartments, the Palace church, the museums and all the other bits.

  They stopped in front of a metal door at the very top of the stairwell.

  ‘There,’ Sandberg said, pointing at a bar across the door with a padlock hanging from it. ‘We only realized something was wrong when our key wouldn’t fit.’

  On the lock was a small sticker with a phone number. It took her a fraction of a second to see that it was hers.

  ‘Are you sure we shouldn’t call the police … I mean, the uniformed police,’ he corrected himself.

  ‘Not yet …’ she replied curtly.

  She pulled the key from her jeans pocket and saw at once that it was the right size.

  She put it in the lock and tried turning it. The lock clicked open straightaway, and one of the soldiers removed the bar and opened the door. She was hit by a cold smell of old wood and dust.

  ‘Where does this lead …?’

  She pointed into the darkness.

  ‘The attic? It runs the whole length of the Palace, we use it to get to the flag …’

  ‘The flag?’

  ‘Yes, the three-tailed flag, the one that flies from the roof of the Palace when the King is in the country.’

  What the hell had actually happened?

  His brain was slowly catching up with reality.

  He had grabbed the handle, and was just about to open the door to the stairwell when he had been … well, attacked, somehow?

  Could the handle have been booby-trapped?

  But if that were the case, his hand ought to be badly barbequed now. But apart from the plastic cord cutting into his wrists, his hands felt fine.

  He moved his body gently and after a few moments thought he had identified a point at the base of his spine from where a burning pain seemed to be radiating.

  He could hear whispering voices a short distance away from him.

  Then a familiar voice that made him start.

  A narrow path of double planks led them through the darkness. The smell of tarred wood got stronger and stronger the further in they went.

  The roof was several metres above their heads, and in the glow of the torches she occasionally caught glimpses of green-glinting copper plate.

  ‘Careful,’ Sandberg said, once again shining his torch at one of the thick cross beams that interrupted their path.

  Then the path turned sharp right, into the next section of the Palace, and she realized that they must be in the north side now, the side facing the Parliament building. Ahead of them in the darkness a door slammed. Sandberg stopped and pointed the torch ahead of him. Twenty metres in front of them the outline of another staircase appeared.

  ‘This is a site of national importance,’ Sandberg said quietly. ‘No-one’s supposed to be here, and certainly not up there.’

  They reached the stairs and aimed their torches towards its top. Another metal door, this time barred horizontally.

  There was a bleeping sound from her pocket. She pulled out her mobile and read the message.

  It was from Micke.

  MayBey lives along the E18, most of his traffic passes through an exchange in Näsby Park.

  She had been right!

  MayBey wasn’t the person he was pretending to be.

  Unless that was precisely what he was …

  An imitation, a copy of someone else entirely.

  She turned to Sandberg.

  ‘Wait here!’ she said sharply.

  Then she started to head up the steps on her own.

  42

  Head to head

  ‘Welcome, Rebecca,’ the man in the balaclava said.

  The platform they were standing on was small, perhaps no more than seven or eight square metres. To her left was an ornate stone balustrade, and beyond that the drop to Lejonbacken, and on her right was a low wall, and then the gently sloping copper roof tilting down towards the inner courtyard.

  She checked the time: 23:51.

  In the distance was the sound of fireworks.

  ‘We’ve been expecting you.’

  He gestured with his head and she saw there was a person sitting curled up on the balustrade with his back towards her. For a moment she turned completely cold. His arms were tied behind his back, and he had a black hood pulled down over his head.

  Beneath his feet the building dropped away, some twenty metres or more straight down to Lejonbacken.

  She looked back at the man in the balaclava. Even if his black jacket and mask made him seem big, he was actually smaller than she had thought.

  ‘Obviously, you see the poetic justice here …’ he said.

  She nodded briefly as she followed his movements with her eyes. His voice sounded strange, as if he were doing his best to disguise it.

  ‘Your brother murdered your boyfriend by pushing him off a building …’

  Her eyes darted to the hunched figure, then back across the little platform.

  There was a black bag on the low stone wall about a metre away. She nodded again.

  ‘Yes, I get it. Your law applies here, an eye for an eye …’

  ‘Exactly …’ he said, but something in his voice revealed that she hadn’t reacted quite as he had expected.

  The sound of New Year rockets began to grow, and through them blaring sirens approaching the Palace. Sandberg’s patience had evidently run out.

  The balaclava turned and its eyes glanced quickly towards the edge.

  ‘They’re on their way,’ she said drily.

  ‘Good, then you can go back down again …’

  She took half a step towards the trapdoor again, then stopped.

  ‘You know what, MayBey …? I think I’d rather stay here, actually …’

  He started, and it looked like he was about to say something. But instead he took a step towards the seated figure.

  ‘You obviously don’t get it …’ he purred.

  ‘Oh, I get it.’ She glanced at the bag.

  The sirens were close now, at least three or four different vehicles.

  The sound of rockets was still growing.

  ‘I get the whole thing, actually. You’re planning to push my brother there …’

  She pointed at the seated figure.

  ‘… off the roof, just as you’ve promised all your fans. If it’s okay with you, I thought I might stand here and watch while you do it.’

  ‘W-what?’

  His voice cracked, and for a moment it sounded almost shrill.

  ‘I said you might as well get going and push Henke over the edge. You’ve been talking about it for weeks now, so you might as well get on with it.’

  He appeared to consider this for a moment, then took another half step towards the balustrade. She saw the seated figure squirm anxiously.

  The sirens had stopped, which probably meant that the police were already on their way up through the stairwell. Another minute to get through the attic and they’d have reached the last flight of steps.

  She slowly slid her hand under her jacket.

  ‘You don’t seem to understand, Rebecca …’ he said, raising one foot ready to kick out with it
.

  ‘No,’ she said calmly as she closed her fingers round the object attached to her belt at the small of her back. ‘You’re the one who doesn’t understand …’

  She shot across the platform in two quick strides, snatching her hand out. The baton extended to its full length and hit MayBey on the back of the thigh.

  The blow was so hard that she felt the bone crack through the metal.

  He fell backwards but she didn’t jump on him. Instead she planted her own foot against the back of the seated figure.

  He could hear voices, two, to be precise. A man and a woman. They both sounded familiar, he knew that much, but his head was still far too groggy for him to be able to identify them.

  Then he heard what sounded like rapid movements behind him.

  Then someone put their foot against his back. HP HP

  HP?

  ‘Here you go, MayBey, let me help you,’ she yelled over the screaming rockets.

  She pushed with her foot.

  ‘Noooo!!’

  The two panicked cries merged together to form one single brittle sound.

  Having scared the shit out of whoever it was, she grabbed hold of the seated man, pulled him down from the balustrade and dragged him back onto the platform next to MayBey. Then she pulled her handcuffs from her back pocket.

  Under his thick gloves and the heavy padded jacket, MayBey’s wrists were slender and she had no trouble at all putting the cuffs on him.

  ‘Time for a bit of unmasking, gentlemen.’

  She pulled MayBey’s balaclava off and looked coldly at the face.

  Then she removed the other man’s hood.

  ‘Jonathan Lundh and I have already met …’

  She nodded towards MayBey, who was still grimacing with pain.

  ‘But who are you?’

  ‘M-Marky,’ the young man who was supposed to be her brother sniffed. ‘Marcus Lillhage.’

  ‘And how do you know Lundh junior here? Is your dad a policeman as well, by any chance?’

  ‘N-no …’ he sobbed. ‘Wedge and I go to the same school …’

  She nodded slowly and then turned towards the black bag.

  ‘There’s a camera in there, isn’t there?’

  The young man called Marky nodded.