Bubble: A Thriller

by Anders de la Motte

  Then they stood aside and HP was able to squeeze past.

  As they passed, one of the men in black slapped HP on the back.

  “Take him out through the front to the others . . .”

  HP carried on through the hallway, shoving the handcuffed Jeff ahead of him like a shield.

  He pushed his way past firemen, paramedics, and an assortment of other people who were talking into radios or cell phones.

  He was aiming for the main entrance, where he could already see the floodlights out in the yard shining through the glass doors.

  Suddenly someone grabbed him from behind. A thickset, square guy with cropped hair, wearing a suit and loafers.

  “Is this one of them?” the man said loudly in English.

  “Yes,” HP barked, and tried to move on, but the man kept hold of him.

  “Good work, man. What’s your name?”

  “Andersson,” HP shouted through the mask, and tried again to pull free of the man’s grasp.

  “My name’s Thomas, I’m head of security for the PayTag Group. Come and find me once you’ve got him locked away, I want to hear more. You’re exactly the type of colleague we want in the business!”

  “Yes, sir!” HP shouted.

  The man let go and HP and Jeff carried on out through the main doors.

  The traffic circle was full of vehicles. Police cars and vans, ambulances, fire engines, and several black minibuses with tinted windows.

  There were lights shining from all directions, floodlights from the buildings, car headlights. People walking around with flashlights, even though the summer night was hardly dark. A gang of black-clad police in full riot gear were talking together but stopped when they caught sight of HP.

  “Another one caught!” he barked. “Where are you holding the others?”

  “Over in the van,” one of the police officers said, nodding toward a vehicle a short distance away. “We’ll take care of this one now. Nice work!”

  Two huge policemen stepped forward and grabbed Jeff’s arms.

  As they did so HP turned the key and unlocked the handcuffs.

  Jeff shot off like a rocket. He knocked the two officers in front of him flying, and carried on across the yard. His legs were pumping like pistons, sending the gravel flying around his feet.

  “He’s making a run for it!” HP roared, and, just as he had hoped, the cops all took up the chase immediately.

  “Get him, for fuck’s sake!”

  “Stop! Stop, you bastard . . . !”

  Jeff tore off along the road with what must have been at least ten police chasing him.

  HP waited a couple of seconds, then ran over to the van the officer had pointed out, a big, dark thing with double doors at the back, just like the one that had been parked outside his building.

  He put his hand over the back window and peered in through the mesh. Nora and Hasselqvist were sitting inside, opposite each other, both with their hands behind their backs. Fucking good job he’d kept hold of the handcuff key . . . He resisted the urge to tap on the glass and jogged around to the driver’s side instead.

  The cop in the driver’s seat was halfway out of the van when HP jabbed the taser into his stomach. In contrast to the two men down in the bunker, the officer just let out a sigh of surprise before collapsing. Presumably the taser was running out of juice . . .

  HP dragged the man between a couple of other vehicles, then jumped into the driver’s seat.

  It wasn’t worth trying to take the backpack off. Anyway, he wanted to keep it close at hand, just in case.

  He put his hand to the ignition.

  Shit! No keys, and nothing tucked in the sun visor either.

  The cop must have had them on him, he should have checked. But he didn’t dare get out to check the man’s pockets. He ducked down under the wheel and yanked the plastic molding off. He searched out the right leads as his heartbeat thundered in his ears.

  This was the second van he’d stolen that day. Practice makes perfect . . .

  Somewhere far off in the darkness beyond the floodlights he heard a roar, followed at once by several more.

  The cops had probably caught up with Jeff and were now trying to wrestle him to the ground. Good luck with that . . .

  His hands were twitching from the adrenaline, but he forced them into submission. He found the right leads, wound them together, then connected them to a blue one he’d already identified. A little spark, then the starter motor began to click. He pressed the accelerator pedal, once, twice . . .

  The engine spluttered into action.

  When he looked up, the square security chief was running straight at the van. He was closely followed by a whole pack of black-clad cops. HP revved the engine, then looked around, trying to work out the quickest way out of there.

  To his left two fire engines were blocking the way, to the right another cop van.

  The only way out was forward. Straight toward the pack.

  His heart felt like it was going to burst out of his chest.

  Here goes!

  He put the van in gear and slammed the accelerator pedal to the floor. The square man stopped abruptly and stood there quite still, right in HP’s path.

  The van’s engine roared as the distance between them shrank rapidly.

  Twenty meters.

  Ten.

  The man didn’t move.

  HP hugged the wheel, looking for another way out but failing to find one.

  He moved his left foot above the brake pedal.

  The square man wasn’t showing the slightest sign of moving.

  Fuuuuck!!

  Just as HP took his foot off the accelerator, two of the cops threw themselves at the square and dragged him out of the way. The path was suddenly clear.

  “Chicken!!” HP yelled as he floored the accelerator again.

  He felt sudden exultation beginning to bubble in his chest, and the taste of adrenaline was stinging his tongue.

  This might actually work!

  This might actually fucking work!!

  The van flew up the ramp and hurtled toward the gate.

  There was a pile of black-clad cops halfway up the hill, but they seemed to be far too busy trying to wrestle Jeff to the ground to pay any attention to the van as it veered around them.

  HP felt with his hand over the dashboard and found some switches toward the top that seemed promising. He pressed as many of them as he could.

  The blue lights above the windshield began to flash, and the gas-driven siren joined in a moment later.

  The gate had already begun to swing open before he actually caught sight of it.

  The bubbling in his chest rose up and reached his mouth just as the van drove through the gate, and he burst into hysterical laughter that almost deafened him.

  Elvis has left the goddamn building!

  29

  INFORMATION IS POWER

  “HELLO?”

  “Good evening, my friend, or, to be more accurate, good morning. But I daresay that you don’t think it particularly good. I can imagine that you might be a little upset . . .”

  “Upset isn’t the word!”

  “I understand, and obviously I deeply regret that things didn’t go according to plan.”

  “You . . . regret?”

  “Of course, I’m as mortified as you are, but at the same time I would like to assure you that we’re doing our utmost to reclaim the stolen information.”

  “Your assurances are worth very little right now. As soon as we get this situation under control, you’ll be our top priority. If I were you, I’d shut down the entire operation and find somewhere to hide, a very long way away. Because when we’re done . . .”

  “Let’s not be too hasty, Mr. Black. You are angry at the moment, which is entirely understandable. But don’t allow that to make an enemy of a friend. After all, it is impossible to know in whose hands the hard drive will finally come to rest . . .”

  “You mean if you manage to get hold
of it first?”

  “If that scenario were to occur, I can put your mind at rest already, Mr. Black. Naturally, I would personally guarantee that the information would remain secure. And that you and PayTag would be in no danger . . .”

  “Ah, now I get it . . . And your guarantees would obviously come at a price?”

  “Nothing in the world is free, Mr. Black, and you of all people should know how valuable information can be, don’t you think?”

  “I’m warning you . . .”

  “Think very carefully, Mr. Black. If I were you, I would be weighing my words with the utmost precision. So, what was it that you were about to say?”

  “. . . Nothing.”

  “Good. It would seem that we understand each other. I shall be in touch again shortly, when I hope to have rather better news for you. But, for now, good-bye.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “How the hell could you possibly have known . . . ?” Hasselqvist was rubbing his wrists. “That they were expecting us, I mean?”

  It was starting to get light, and the birds in the trees around them had already kicked off with “Now That’s What I Call Pine Forest” . . .

  HP shrugged, pulled on his hoodie, and spit into the nettles.

  “Just a feeling, really. There always seemed to be someone one step ahead of us. First down in the tunnel, then that helicopter. Like they always knew where we were, keeping an eye on us. Besides, I got a tip-off . . .”

  “Who from?”

  “Oh, let’s just say from a friend . . .”

  He bundled up the technician’s urine-stained uniform, stuffed it under one of the seats, and pulled out a cigarette. The violent adrenaline rush that had given his hands Parkinson’s for the whole of the past hour seemed to have subsided for now. Hasselqvist still didn’t seem entirely satisfied.

  “But where the hell did you get everything from, the taser, the hard drive with all the ID numbers . . . ? When did you find the time to sort all that out?”

  “I’ve got an old friend who lives out near the Woodland Cemetery . . .” HP cupped his hands around the cigarette.

  “He can get hold of pretty much anything if you’re prepared to pay,” he muttered from the side of his mouth while he struggled to get his lighter to work. “All I had to do was turn up, see if he was in, and ask nicely. You did ask me to come up with a backup plan . . .”

  He finally got the cigarette lit, took a deep drag, and then blew the smoke up toward the treetops.

  Sweet!

  “What about Jeff?” Nora this time.

  “No need to worry, he’ll be fine. Unlawful threats, trespass, a bit of resisting arrest combined with violence against a public official. If he hasn’t got any previous convictions, he’ll get away with a fine. Two months’ prison max . . . Open prison, at that . . .” he added, when she didn’t seem quite as relieved as he had hoped.

  Why could he never learn just to keep his mouth shut?!

  “I still don’t see why . . .” Hasselqvist whined. “Why didn’t they pick us up ages ago? Why let us get anywhere near the Fortress?”

  “For fuck’s sake, just think about it, Kent!” Nora snapped. “What better PR could PayTag dream of than catching a group of Internet terrorists red-handed? A chance to show the world how effective their security apparatus is, and simultaneously how desperate and evil we, their opponents, are? ‘If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists’—that trick’s worked before. Shit, how come I didn’t see this coming . . . ?”

  She picked up a stick and began to draw some lines in the grit on the track.

  “The EU Data Retention Directive would have swept through every parliament in Europe, just like antiterrorism legislation did after 9/11. Then PayTag could sit back and rake in the profits. The Game Master came up with a suspected terrorist and fixed him up with a few other suitable scapegoats. People who had already outlived their usefulness . . .”

  She scratched over the lines she had drawn, turning them into crosses.

  Four of them . . .

  No one spoke for a while.

  Then Hasselqvist opened his mouth again, but Nora beat him to it.

  “It must have been him. You get that, don’t you?”

  HP didn’t answer.

  “W-who? I don’t get it!” Hasselqvist whined.

  “The Source, Mange. It must have been him deceiving us.”

  “We don’t know that,” HP muttered.

  “Of course we do . . .”

  The penny finally seemed to have dropped for Hasselqvist:

  “The whole thing was his idea! He was the one who brought us together, me, Nora, Jeff . . .”

  “And you, HP,” Nora said quietly as she went on drawing lines on the ground.

  “There could be other explanations. He might have been tricked himself, the Game Master might have—”

  “You just don’t want to see it,” Nora snapped, throwing the stick into the undergrowth. “We got fucked, properly fucked by someone who’s an expert at mind games like this. For all we know, Mange could have been working directly for the Game Master. Maybe he could even—”

  She broke off.

  “What? What were you going to say, Nora?” HP snapped back. “Let’s hear your brilliant deduction . . . !”

  “I know Mange is your friend, but you have to consider the fact that he could actually be the Game Master . . .”

  “Impossible!”

  “Why?” Hasselqvist seemed to have taken Nora’s side.

  “Because I’ve met the Game Master, I told you. His name is Tage Sammer, and he’s about seventy . . .”

  “How do you know he’s the Game Master? Did he say so?” Nora again. They were working as a team now.

  “Yes. Well, no, not in so many words . . .”

  He could hear how flaky it sounded.

  “Look, it’s like this: I met him out in the middle of a forest. He gave me a task, a totally mad one that I couldn’t possibly carry out. He wanted me to attack the royal family, okay?”

  No one said anything, the other two seemed to be waiting for him to go on.

  “They’ve been chasing me ever since, trying to make me mad . . .”

  “Was that when you decided to shoot Black?” Nora said.

  “Erm . . . yes, and no. I mean, I wasn’t really myself . . .”

  “But what did the Game stand to gain from you going mad? I mean, if they wanted you to carry out a task . . . ?”

  He had no answer to that. He had to admit that he was still missing some of the pieces before he could finish the puzzle.

  “Mange is dead,” he said bluntly. “That, if anything, proves—”

  “Do we actually know that?” Hasselqvist was sounding very agitated now. “Okay, so Nora saw the barn explode. But what if Mange managed to get out . . . ?”

  “Hmm. I’m inclined to agree with HP on that,” Nora said. “No one could have survived that, I promise you!”

  A short silence followed as Hasselqvist reflected on this.

  “Okay, how about this: the helicopter was there to give Mange a chance to escape. Create a diversion so that we’d all leave without him. But they hadn’t counted on the explosives going up, because they were supposed to be in the van. Don’t you remember how Mange protested when Jeff said we had to move everything into the Polo?”

  Hasselqvist was sounding more and more heated.

  “That must have been it. The helicopter would have given him a chance to get out, leaving the rest of us to head off to the tunnel on our own. And that fits with the GPS transmitter I found in the back of the van. They needed a way to keep track of us once we were on our own, without Mange . . .”

  Nora looked like she wanted to say something, but Hasselqvist carried on.

  “Then, when we switched vans, they lost us. So they were left staring at the tunnel while we snuck in through the main entrance. It all fits . . .”

  HP didn’t respond, just stood up and marched straight out into the forest.

>   “Where are you going?” Nora called after him.

  “Need a piss,” he muttered, mostly to himself.

  He had no desire at all to continue this discussion. Mange was dead, Sammer was the Game Master. If Mange had somehow been involved, the short-sighted little snake had in all likelihood been shafted as well, just like he and the two idiots by the van had been.

  He stopped, whipped out his joystick, and took aim at an anthill. Someone had betrayed them, that much was crystal clear. But if it wasn’t Mange, then who was it . . . ?

  Another question he had no answer to . . .

  “So what do we do now?” Nora said when he returned to the van with a fresh cig in the corner of his mouth.

  “We head back to civilization, find a computer with a decent Internet connection, and send the contents of that hard drive to every newsroom we can think of. And to the email address of every MP, of course.”

  He took a deep drag.

  “That ought to give them something to think about before the vote on the EU directive. It’s a pretty shocking experience,” he went on, “getting all of your electronic footprints thrown back in your face like that. And the papers will have a field day. Just think off all the goodies hidden away on that hard drive.”

  He nodded toward his backpack.

  “Affairs, tax fraud, all sorts of unsuitable connections. You name it!”

  He grinned and shook his head.

  “It might even lead to a new election . . . in which case . . .”

  “. . . PayTag, Black, and the Game are fucked!” Nora concluded.

  Her voice sounded a bit brighter.

  “There’s no way they could recover from something like this. Not just because the most-wanted man in Sweden managed to fool them and get in and out of their ultrasecure underground bunker . . .”

  HP muttered something, finished his cigarette, and ground the butt into the dirt.

  “. . . but because the hard drive proves that they really did have the tools to steal their customers’ information. Picking out anything of interest, then refining it into a saleable asset. Just as we suspected the whole fucking time!! There’s no way anyone would want to work with them after this . . .”

  “So it’s all over . . .” Hasselqvist sighed.