Bubble: A Thriller

by Anders de la Motte

  A car swept past dangerously close and the driver blew his horn. He didn’t even have the energy to gesticulate back.

  Erman, the little bastard, hadn’t come back from the dead with a plan for revenge in his back pocket. Instead he seemed to have got absolution from the Game Master . . . which was actually completely logical. After all, Erman’s only crime was that he wanted to be an active participant in everything. To carry on messing about with his beloved servers. And he was one of the best in the world at what he did, which had obviously helped his case. PayTag must have been crying out for experts in servers for their massive project.

  Supply and demand, and, just like magic, Erman was suddenly forgiven and back from the cold. Capitalism rules!

  So why the hell had he gathered together that bunch of losers? And why goad them into breaking into the jewel in the Game’s crown? There was obviously some sort of plan behind it all, a plan that also included him and Becca.

  But, just like with everything else that had happened to him in recent days, it was no longer possible to make all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. His brain had gone into overdrive, and the jog had got his pulse racing at a dangerous level, so he aimed for the nearest park bench.

  This was so totally fucked up he couldn’t handle it anymore. The very thought that he had once dreamed of getting back into that whole crazy circus made him feel sick. The Game was obviously out to get him, and the same went for the cops . . .

  All he wanted right now was to take off, get a very long way away and crawl into a hole somewhere until it had all blown over.

  But Rebecca was still stuck in the shit, literally led by the nose by the Game Master, with Erman, the treacherous bastard, scuttling along behind.

  Obviously that was no coincidence; nothing the Game Master did was a coincidence.

  He leaned his head in his hands and struggled with another coughing fit.

  His skin felt hot, not just because of the exertion, so his fever was probably back.

  That was all he needed.

  He needed grub, then a bit of cash to settle down somewhere quiet where he could gather his strength and try to make sense of this mess.

  If that was even remotely possible.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “As I said, good to meet you, Rebecca,” Colonel Pellas said as he shook her hand in farewell. “And if you do hear from your brother, or get the slightest idea of where he might be, we’d be extremely grateful if you could let us know immediately.”

  He handed her a business card, which she tucked away mechanically.

  “We’ll be in touch, Eskil,” he said to Stigsson as he got into the backseat of the large Volvo.

  The door closed, the driver put the car in gear, and just as it was about to pull away Pellas gave her a quick look through the side window. She tried a tentative smile, looking for the slightest sign of acknowledement. His face didn’t move.

  The car glided around the corner and disappeared, its tires rattling on the cobblestones of the slope.

  “Oh yes, Normén . . .” Stigsson said just as she was about to walk off. “We’ve found a safe-deposit box belonging to your brother . . .” He left a meaningful pause, and she almost walked into the trap. But at the last moment she stopped herself.

  “Do you happen to know anything about that?” he continued when she didn’t respond.

  She shook her head.

  “Henke and I haven’t had much contact recently . . .”

  “No, so you said at Police Headquarters, yet here you are at his flat just as we go in to search it . . .”

  Once again she refrained from answering. As long as she didn’t say anything, he couldn’t claim she was lying.

  The tactic didn’t seem to bother Stigsson in the way she had hoped it would.

  “You’re listed as sharing it with him, Normén, so I presume you knew what was in it?”

  She shook her head.

  “Nothing, Normén. The box was empty.”

  “Oh . . .” She tried to look as unconcerned as possible.

  “Fortunately the bank has an advanced security system . . .”

  She felt her heart beat faster.

  “Loads of cameras, much like over in Police Headquarters . . .”

  He paused again, trying to lure her into saying something, but she just stared down at the cobblestone instead. What date had she visited the vault? She thought about the cameras, counting them in her head. Seven, eight, nine . . .

  “Is there anything you want to tell me, Normén?” His voice suddenly sounded rather more friendly. “According to Runeberg, you’re a very good bodyguard, an asset to the department, I’m sure those were his words . . .”

  She looked up and met his gaze. Stigsson had tilted his head.

  “Obviously we stick up for our own. Help colleagues who find themselves in tricky situations . . .”

  Another pause.

  She opened her mouth to say something, then hesitated for a few seconds.

  “Yes . . . ?” he said, to prompt her.

  “Seven,” she said.

  “W-what?” At last his composed expression seemed slightly shaken.

  “Seven days, that’s how long the banks usually store recorded material, isn’t it? At least that was the case when I worked in crime . . .”

  His mouth closed like a trap. His almost paternal expression from a minute ago had vanished completely. Not that that mattered. His bluff had failed, and they both knew it. There were no pictures, nothing that could tie her to the vault. It had all been erased several days ago.

  “Did you want anything else?”

  Stigsson didn’t answer, so she waved at Runeberg, who was standing a short distance away, then turned to go.

  “We’ve requested the list of pass cards from the bank . . .” Stigsson said when she’d taken a few steps. “It will be a couple of days before we get it, but I’m guessing we’ll soon be speaking again, Normén.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  HP woke up with his whole body shaking like a pneumatic drill.

  It may have been the middle of the summer, but taking an evening nap outdoors on a boat under a fucking tarpaulin hadn’t exactly been his smartest move, in hindsight.

  He needed to get warm, right away. But his body didn’t seem to want to obey him. His head ached, his mouth was dry, his arms and legs felt like overcooked spaghetti. When he tried to roll onto his stomach he suddenly noticed the wet lump in his underwear.

  At first he thought it was the bundle of notes he had dug out of the glass jar buried a few hundred meters up in the woods. But then he remembered that he’d stuffed it into one of the front pockets of his jeans.

  It took another few seconds before he realized.

  Fucking hell!

  He reached for the railing and tried to get to his feet. The stench from his trousers caught in his nose, and his stomach cramped. It took a huge effort just to stand up.

  The deck swayed beneath him, making his knees buckle.

  He fell forward, hit his chin on one of the benches, and ended up lying there on the deck.

  Food poisoning, how fucking ironic. He hadn’t eaten properly for weeks and had basically lived off canned sardines and baked beans. But now that he’d finally managed to get hold of a kebab, it turned out to be a staphylococcus bomb with extra garlic sauce . . .

  His stomach cramped again, making him curl up into a ball.

  Damn it to hell!

  He tried to crawl to his feet but it was hopeless. All the energy had drained out of him and he couldn’t stop shivering. But he had to get away from there at once, otherwise it would be autumn before Nisse or whoever owned this bastard boat found his freeze-dried corpse.

  It was late in the evening, and the stretch of Pålsundet where the old boat lay was hardly a busy place even during the day.

  The fall had knocked most of the strength out of him, but if he didn’t want to end up like Ötzi the Iceman, he had to get away from there.

  His st
omach cramped again, making him pull his knees up around his ears. The cold lump of clay in his underwear moved slightly up the base of his spine.

  Fuckingbastardnonsense . . .

  He waited for the attack to pass, then gathered what little strength he had left and forced himself up onto his knees. The jetty was no more than half a meter away.

  He planted one foot in the bottom of the boat, tensed the muscles in his thigh, and got up onto his feet. His legs swayed but he stayed upright. One step forward, then another. He lifted one foot and took aim at the jetty.

  But the leg he had all his weight on suddenly collapsed and he fell backward into the dark water.

  He churned his arms like mad and swallowed several liters of water as he tried to turn the right way up. For a brief moment he was back on the prison bunk in Dubai where the cops had tried to drown a confession out of him. But then the tips of his toes touched the bottom and his panic subsided somewhat.

  He dragged himself laboriously up onto the shore, crawled up into a sitting position, and leaned his back against a tree. He gasped for breath a few times, then let loose a fountain of green water from Lake Mälaren. Over and over again, through both his mouth and nose, until his stomach was exhausted. He too, come to that . . .

  Goddamn it . . . !

  But, oddly enough, after a while he started to feel a bit better. As if the little swim and involuntary stomach pump had rebooted his body.

  Besides, he’d had an idea. The youth hostel on Långholmen, in the converted prison. Why hadn’t he thought of that before . . . ?

  Using the tree trunk as a support, he got to his feet and felt automatically in his pockets for his cigarettes. He found a soaking-wet stub that he tried in vain to light.

  Then, with the unlit cigarette between his lips, he staggered carefully up toward the path that led to the old prison.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  His office door was closed, but she didn’t even bother to knock.

  “I’ve been fired,” she said before he even had time to turn around.

  “Er, yes . . . so I heard.”

  He stood up but made no attempt to move closer to her.

  “Oh, so the rumor’s already out. How much do you know?”

  “Not much, we had a conference call with Anthea a little while ago . . .”

  “And?”

  He shrugged his shoulders and seemed to be studying a mark on the wall behind her.

  “She just said that you’d been dismissed with immediate effect.”

  He met her gaze for a moment, then looked away again.

  “Something about ill-considered behavior that had put the company at risk. That you had therefore lost the confidence of those in charge . . .”

  “You don’t buy that, do you?” She fixed her eyes on him.

  “No, of course not . . .”

  “You don’t sound very convincing . . .”

  “Stop it, Becca, I actually tried to defend you. I said what a hard time you’d been having lately, with the sleeping pills and all that . . .”

  “You said what?!”

  He held his hands up in front of him.

  “Nothing, just that you’d been having trouble sleeping. That’s true, isn’t it. Lack of sleep can have a serious effect on people’s judgment . . .”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this . . .” She covered her face with her hands for a moment.

  “Well, I was only trying to help . . .” he muttered.

  She took a couple of deep breaths and resisted saying the first thing that popped into her head, then the second as well.

  “I have to empty my desk straightaway,” she said, as calmly as she could. “Then I’m going to contact a lawyer. They’re not going to get away with this.” She glanced at her watch.

  “We can talk more at home.”

  “Erm.”

  He seemed to be plucking up courage all of a sudden.

  “I mean, Becca, I like the company. A lot, actually. I’ve been here pretty much from the start, and now that PayTag has pumped money in . . .”

  He looked her in the eye. For a few moments neither of them said anything.

  “To be honest, Becca, you and me, it hasn’t been working for a long while. Not since . . .”

  She opened her mouth to say something, to cut him off with some biting remark.

  But instead she stood there in silence.

  “Now or in two months’ time, the result will still be the same, so why drag it out . . . ?”

  He shrugged.

  The lump of ice she had had in her chest all morning suddenly felt twice the size. She wanted to protest, scream at him that he was wrong, that he was an idiot. That all this could be fixed . . .

  But instead she slowly turned around. Then gave him a weary look over one shoulder.

  She left the room, closing the door carefully behind her.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Her things fit in a plastic bag.

  A couple of files with her pay stubs, employment contract, and various other formal papers. The old police cap that she’d kept hanging on the wall, along with a couple of framed photographs from the time she was training to become a bodyguard. She threw in the trash the potted plant Micke had given her when she started, then changed her mind and put it back on the windowsill.

  All of her guards were out on jobs, and the office staff had long since gone home. She picked up the bag and headed downstairs.

  First to the vault, where she locked her gun away, then she emptied her locker. All that remained was leaving her keys and pass card in the personnel department’s pigeonhole. But instead of going back upstairs, she went onto the street through the basement door and started to walk off toward the subway station.

  She felt in her pockets for her travel card and found it in her inside pocket. But when she pulled it out the business card that Uncle Tage had given her outside the flat came with it. A rectangle of thick white card with a large royal coat of arms in gold, red, and blue on one side of it.

  COLONEL ANDRÉ PELLAS

  Office of the Marshal of the Realm

  Royal Household

  Followed by a telephone number and an email address, but, oddly enough, no cell phone number.

  Then, on the back, written in blue pen:

  070—43 05 06

  / Uncle T.

  For some reason the short message put her in a slightly better mood.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  He followed the brick wall for a while until he came to an opening.

  Even though the place hadn’t been a prison for more than thirty years, the old institutional buildings still looked really creepy, especially now, in the middle of the night. There was an Arkham Asylum vibe that was hard to shake off. The large, walled gravel yard he was standing in had once been the prison courtyard. Somewhere way ahead he could hear music mixed with the sound of traffic on the Western Bridge high above.

  A few weary streetlamps in the parking lot over in one corner had company from a couple of lights in the windows of the low buildings straight ahead, which was where the music seemed to be coming from.

  But all the windows of the huge building to his right were dark, and when he walked up to the door he discovered why.

  The youth hostel is closed for refurbishment.

  See you again in the autumn!

  Shit! He’d been looking forward to a shower and a night in a proper bed.

  But he wasn’t entirely out of luck. He’d spotted a portacabin and a couple of toolsheds at one end of the building, and when he went around the building he found a temporary plywood door.

  Two metal catches and a simple padlock were all there was to keep trespassers out, and he forced them open easily with the help of a brick.

  Inside the door was a pitch-black corridor that smelled of brick dust, but at least his trusty lighter gave him a bit of light.

  A few meters in he reached the large cell block. It looked almost exactly the way he had imagined.

  The
faint light of the summer night was falling through the skylights high up in the roof. It had to be twenty meters high. In between were several open landings lined with cell doors.

  To the right was a metal staircase, and he briefly considered climbing up to look for a bed straightaway. Then he realized that he really did have to clean himself up first.

  His stomach was still cramping, and in spite of the involuntary bath he could still smell the shit in his trousers. In other words, a shower was priority number one.

  He carried on through the ground floor, holding the lighter high enough to get a better idea of where he was.

  Obviously the building was now a youth hostel. But they had retained the prison atmosphere, and in the darkness that feeling was intensified many times over. Hundreds, presumably thousands of poor bastards must have done time here over the years.

  Cramped cells, thick stone walls, heavy bars over the windows. Hard labor six days a week on a meager diet of bread and water.

  Fuck, this was a long way from his own experience of prison, and that had been bad enough . . .

  A sudden sound made him jump. A metallic clang from somewhere in the darkness off to his right.

  He stopped for a moment, trying to move the lighter so he could see better. But the room was far too large and the flickering patch of light was quickly swallowed up by the thick darkness.

  He gulped and couldn’t help shuddering. Hardly surprising, really, seeing as the place really was fucking creepy, and given that he was soaked through and had shat himself.

  The sound must have come from a fuse box, something like that.

  Just to be on the safe side he waited another minute, but everything was quiet.

  Time to find that shower . . .

  A couple of meters away he could just make out the shape of a metal sign sticking out from one of the thick walls. He raised the light to read what it said:

  Washroom

  Yes!

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  She put her bags down inside the door and went into the living room without switching the light on.

  It smelled dank.

  Last winter they had talked about whether she should get rid of her flat. Micke’s two-room flat was both bigger and closer to the city center, and with the money they made from the sale they’d be able to buy the one-room flat next door and knock through.