Bubble: A Thriller

by Anders de la Motte

  “The Highways Agency, the Tax Office, the police, customs, three different bio databanks, one of which already has over five hundred thousand DNA samples in its register. Dental records, the National Population Register, the electoral roll, and a whole load of smaller official bodies. Pretty much all telecom and Internet providers signed up before the EU directive was passed, which means that all telephone records, and all IP addresses and text messages are already stored in the Fortress.”

  “Okay, that’s more or less what I thought . . .” HP mumbled.

  “What?”

  “A few weeks ago they replayed all my computer records, as well as all my texts to you and Becca. A little warning, just to let me know they were keeping an eye on me. I couldn’t quite work out how they got hold of everything so quickly from so many different sources. But now I get it. All they had to do was press a couple of buttons . . .”

  Mange nodded.

  “Go on . . .” HP waved one hand.

  “Okay, so you’ve already worked out the basics, but before too long the big supermarkets will be joining in, followed by pretty much every other company that runs a loyalty card scheme. They’re all terrified that their information is going to leak, with the ensuing loss of customer confidence. But what’s most interesting is probably what’s hidden right at the bottom of the bunker . . .”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Hi, Ludvig, it’s Rebecca, sorry to call so early . . .”

  “Er, no problem. I was awake anyway . . .”

  She could tell he was lying and gave him a few seconds to come around.

  “So, what can I do for you, Normén?” he said, in a slightly less sleepy voice.

  “I want to come back to work.”

  “Er, okay. That shouldn’t be a problem. Call the personnel department after nine o’clock and they’ll help you. It’ll probably take a couple of weeks to sort out . . .”

  “No, no, I haven’t got time for all that. I want to come back now, right away. The wedding’s tomorrow, and you told me yourself that you needed every bodyguard you could get hold of.”

  “Of course, yes. But surely you can see . . .”

  He cleared his throat.

  “Well, as long as this business with your brother is still going on, I can’t take you back, no matter how much I might want to. Stigsson would go mad if I so much as suggested it . . .”

  “Ask!”

  “What?”

  “Call and ask him!”

  “I’m not quite with you, Normén . . . ?”

  “I’m asking you to call Stigsson and ask him if it’s okay for me to return to duty. Please, will you do that, straightaway?”

  There were a few moments of silence.

  “Sure,” he muttered eventually. “But I already know what the answer’s going to be.”

  Me too, she thought.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “The lowest level of the bunker is reserved for one particular client. The whole thing’s top secret . . .”

  Mange looked over his shoulder, as if he was worried that someone was listening.

  “To be honest, I think this particular client is more than just an ordinary customer. It could be that the secret tenant in the lowest level is actually behind the whole PayTag Group. But instead of risking their own valuable brand they’re using PayTag as a front, a windshield for the insects to smash themselves to death on, while those with the real power are sitting nice and safe in the passenger seat on the other side of the glass.”

  “And who might they be?”

  Mange shrugged.

  “Who do you think? Which companies have the most influence within the information-gathering industry? Which ones are constantly designing new services to tempt us into saying what we’re doing right now, where we are, which search terms we use most often, or even—what we’re thinking?”

  HP thought for a moment.

  “There are plenty of candidates. Search engines, social media sites . . .”

  “You’re on the right track, young Padwan . . .”

  Mange closed the laptop.

  “Google, Facebook, Twitter, and a few more have worked out what we’re too stupid to realize.”

  “Which is . . . ?”

  “That information is the new currency. If you can get hold of enough information, in the end everyone will want to do business with you. Just look at Facebook’s stock-market valuation. It may be lower than they were expecting, but it’s still three or four times the value of Ericsson.

  “But do you know what their assets are, HP? Have a guess! What do you think? Not telecom systems, or years of research, or tens of thousands of patents. What Facebook owns, and what makes it worth all those billions, its very greatest asset, is . . .”

  “Its users,” HP muttered.

  “Exactly! Or, to be more precise, the information that its users volunteer. Everything gets stored—comments, shares, pictures, games, likes . . .”

  Mange’s face was starting to go red.

  “How do you predict the future, HP? By looking back at the past, that’s the starting point for any forecaster. The more information you have about the past, the more reliable your predictions for the future will be. Just think . . .”

  Mange paused for breath for a moment.

  “What if the past, everyone’s past, was stored in one and the same place? State databases, medical records, patterns of consumption, social networking and search engine preferences. All of it in one massive database? All you’d have to do is collate the information. Then all you have to do is type in a search word, anything you like, and you’d be able to watch the trends. How many people had cancer in a particular year, how many people prefer white cars to blue ones, what age groups are most likely to commit crimes, or look for particular brands, are most active on Twitter, where they live, what music they listen to, what books they read, and what they usually buy in the supermarket on the last Wednesday before payday . . .”

  He paused for breath again.

  “ ‘He who controls the past controls the future,’ Orwell wrote in 1984, and he certainly had a point. Although I’d have to say that the PayTag project is even more refined than that . . .”

  He paused again, and HP couldn’t help leaning closer.

  “He who controls the future, HP, without any shadow of a doubt . . . is actually the person who owns the past. And that’s exactly what the whole PayTag project is about!”

  HP lit a cigarette. He deliberately took his time, to give himself a chance to think.

  All of this was pretty hard to digest. Besides, it was hardly the first conspiracy theory he’d ever heard. Last time it had been Erman going on about the Game, and now it was Mange and PayTag.

  But if there was one thing he had learned over the past two years, it was that no theory, no matter how far-fetched it might seem, could be written off entirely. No smoke without fire, at least not where the Game was concerned.

  And everything Mange had said fit in pretty well with the little demonstration he had been given on the computer in the library. Moreover, it also fit with the little backup plan he’d been working on. In fact it actually made it even better . . .

  He took a deep drag, then slowly exhaled the smoke.

  “Okay, Mange, I get what you mean, but to be honest I don’t give a shit what PayTag’s up to. All I want is to deliver a decent kick in the balls to the Game Master, Anna Argos, and Black. And that’s where our interests seem to coincide. It looks like we’ve got a mutual enemy . . .”

  He took another drag, then stubbed the cigarette out on a cracked old saucer on the draining board.

  “It’s like this, Mange: if you want my help, I need a favor in return. I need to get hold of Rehyman, preferably straightaway. I need to talk to him with no one else listening . . .”

  Mange looked up from the laptop.

  “W-what? Why?”

  “I’d rather not say right now. You asked me to trust you, and the same applies here . . . But, for the sake of a
ppearances, I suppose we could call it my price for taking part in all this . . .”

  He gestured toward the yellow ceiling with one hand.

  Mange gave him a long look as he seemed to consider the proposal.

  “Okay, I suppose that’s fair enough . . .” he muttered.

  He tapped at the computer, then dug out a pen and paper and wrote down a number.

  “Here, he’s online so you can call him right away. There are some pay-as-you-go phones in that box over there. When you’ve finished, smash the SIM card and scatter the pieces out in the woods, okay?”

  “Sure, no problem . . .”

  Mange gave him another long look.

  “You do know what you’re getting into, don’t you, HP? This isn’t a game. If it goes wrong . . .”

  “Sure, don’t worry, I’ve got everything under control. This isn’t the first time I’ve gone up against the Game Master . . .”

  “Well, I guess that’s true. But it is the first time you’re doing something that doesn’t suit the Game’s plans . . .”

  “Good job I’m not on my own, then.” HP grinned. “If it goes to hell, then we all get fucked at the same time!”

  25

  QUESTS

  “HERE.”

  He handed her the key to her gun cabinet.

  “I presume you’ve got your ID and pass card in there as well?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay, get your stuff out and then head straight down to the firing range. You’ll need to do the test again before we can let you out on duty. You soon lose it if you don’t practice . . .”

  “That won’t be a problem, Ludvig.”

  “Okay, good.”

  “Was there anything else?”

  He nodded.

  “Before you go, Normén, I just have to ask. How the hell did you get Stigsson to agree to reinstate you?”

  “Oh, you could say I had a bit of help from a mutual friend.”

  She smiled and he gave her a long look.

  “And is that something you’d like to explain to your boss?”

  She took a deep breath.

  “Not right now, Ludvig. But sometime . . .”

  “Okay . . .”

  He was still looking at her hard.

  “You do know what you’re doing, Becca?” he finally said in a low voice.

  “Don’t worry, Ludvig. You wanted me back and now I’m here. Just be happy with that for the time being.” She smiled.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The target turned when she was ten meters away, and long before the conscious part of her brain had registered the fact she had gone into action. Clawing her jacket open, both hands down to her holster.

  Gun out, left hand on the bolt. Then push forward and up, feeding a bullet into position. The steadying hand coming up beneath the barrel. Then the sights, and the target.

  Two rapid shots.

  The target turned away.

  She released the hammer with her left thumb and continued to move forward. A new target turned, this time far off to her right. She squeezed off a shot, not even thinking about the result. Quickly released the hammer and carried on. Two targets began to turn at the same time, and she’d already shot a hole through the first before they stopped turning.

  Then her gun clicked.

  She hit her left hand against the base of the magazine, then performed the bolt action to release the trapped cartridge onto the floor. Three quick shots.

  The targets turned away.

  “Stop, cease fire, unload!” the instructor yelled.

  “Unloaded!” she said.

  She pulled out the magazine, flipped the bolt, and caught the cartridge that was ready to fire. Then she let go of the bolt, holstered the gun, and took off her ear protectors. All the targets popped up with a loud hiss, but she didn’t look at the results. The shooting instructor walked past her, did a quick check of the targets, then came back. She heard him whistle.

  “Well, Normén, that went pretty well. What do you say?”

  “Yep,” she said.

  “I didn’t actually time you, but I’m guessing you were somewhere close to the record for the course. I’ll call Ludvig straightaway and tell him your shooting is . . . approved. Can you sort them out yourself?”

  He handed her a roll of little black stickers.

  “Sure.”

  He turned his back on her and headed toward the door.

  She tore off four small stickers the size of stamps and put the roll down.

  On her way to the targets she picked up the little green blank cartridge that the instructor had sneaked into her magazine, which had caused the break in her shooting.

  All the shots were in the dead zone. Three of the pairs of holes were so close together that they were touching, and the other two had just a millimeter of paper between them.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Good, then you’ll be in touch? Thanks for your help.”

  He ended the call, opened the back of the phone, and pulled out the SIM card.

  He had just snapped it in two when Hasselqvist came around the corner.

  “Er, hi, HP. Listen, I just wanted to explain something . . .”

  “Sure.”

  He turned his back on Hasselqvist and sent one-half of the SIM card into the nearest clump of nettles.

  “That thing in the van . . .”

  “You mean the GPS?”

  He tossed the other half in among the fir trees.

  “Yep, that’s right . . . You see, I’d just found it when you appeared. I was unloading the last of the stuff and one of the bags had got caught under one of the seats. When I pulled it loose the GPS transmitter just rolled out. And that’s when you appeared at the door . . .”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Is it yours?”

  “W-what?” HP turned around.

  “The GPS transmitter, is it . . . ?”

  “Yeah, I get it, Kent. No, it isn’t . . .”

  “Okay, I just wanted to check. You were the one sitting right at the back, so I thought . . .”

  HP shook his head.

  “Nope, not mine. Maybe it belongs to the van?”

  “I doubt it . . .”

  “In that case I suggest that you get rid of it at once.”

  “Sure, I just want to check with Jeff first, in case it’s his. He’s had the van for a couple of days already, doing recon . . .”

  “Okay, you do that.”

  “See you later, then . . .”

  Hasselqvist drifted away and HP waited another minute before pulling a new SIM card from his trouser pocket. He inserted it into the phone he had got from Mange, switched it on, and tapped in his PIN.

  The text arrived almost immediately.

  Done!

  Hidden number, but he knew who it was from.

  Fuck, Rehyman was fast!

  They got changed in silence. Tight black wet suits, rubber shoes, then neoprene ski masks that made the heat intolerable, and which HP pulled off at once. Total fucking madness, on a massive scale!

  “Everything’s ready,” he heard Mange say from around the back of the Polo.

  “I still want to double-check,” Jeff said.

  “But it’s getting—”

  “We’ve got time,” Jeff interrupted. “There’s always time to check your equipment . . .”

  Mange seemed to give up, because when HP walked around the car the back door was already open.

  “Diving gear, inflatable dinghy, welding equipment, explosives . . .” Jeff was saying to himself as he moved his hand over the various black bags in the trunk.

  The word explosives startled HP. He had a sudden flashback to the E4 expressway two years before, when he had plugged his phone into a similar bag. A bag stuffed with so much explosive that it was enough to blow an entire building sky-high.

  For almost two years he had believed that he’d blown the Game’s brain to kingdom come. But, according to Mange, that had been nothing but an illusion, a very cle
ver one that the Game Master had implanted in his head. The real Death Star wasn’t located in an old office building out in Kista, but deep underground in a bunker little more than a couple of kilometers away.

  But if everything he had experienced up until a few days ago was just an elaborate mind game, then what guarantees did he have that what he was experiencing now was any more real?

  He had been wrestling with that particular dilemma for several days.

  Even if he decided to trust Mange, there were no guarantees. Mange seemed to be telling the truth, because—as far as it was possible to tell—he genuinely appeared to believe his own story. But what if it wasn’t his story?

  What if someone else was playing mind games with Mange, in exactly the same way they had done with him? That what they were heading toward now was actually nothing more than part of an even more elaborate plan?

  That was the trouble with conspiracy theories. Once you started to accept their existence, it was impossible to say where they really stopped.

  Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you . . .

  “Quiet!” Jeff suddenly said, raising his head from the trunk.

  “Did you hear that?”

  No one said anything.

  “What is it, Jeff?” Hasselqvist quacked after a few seconds.

  “There!”

  A faint humming sound was approaching from the east.

  HP realized what it was immediately. He took a couple of quick strides, grabbed the heavy sliding door, and began to close it.

  “What the hell . . . ?” Jeff yelled.

  HP ignored him.

  The sound was getting closer very fast, throbbing like a pneumatic drill in his eardrums.

  The door was almost closed, just a meter or so left, and HP was leaning his entire weight on the handle. But the door was slowing down, began to catch, and finally stopped with a loud screech.

  The throbbing noise was suddenly echoing off the buildings, amplified until he could feel the vibration in his rib cage, and only now did the others seem to get it.

  A helicopter, flying extremely low, was about to appear over the treetops any second now. HP made another attempt to close the door. But the wheel at the top seemed to have jumped its track and the door sat fast.

  He bent his knees and pulled on the handle as hard as he could, with one leg on each side of the door. Suddenly and without warning the door jolted loose and came racing toward his chest. He threw himself to the side and only just escaped getting his head caught as it slammed shut.