Bubble: A Thriller (20 page)

All the criteria were in place for firing directly at the target. But in the crowd it was impossible to shoot at the attacker without risking hitting innocent bystanders as well.

That was it, obviously.

She looked down at her hands, grabbing her knees in an attempt to keep them still.

Suddenly she realized that Black was still looking at her. He was studying her face intently in a way she didn’t like, then he dropped his eyes to look at her trembling hands.

“Adrenaline,” she said. “It’ll soon pass . . .”

For a moment she felt he could see straight through her.

“Two minutes to landing,” a voice said over the speakers.

“Right . . .” she said, giving Black a quick smile.

But he didn’t smile back.

♦  ♦  ♦

He was slipping in and out of consciousness.

He heard voices several times, conversations going on above him.

“He’s in very bad shape . . .”

“How much has he had?”

“A triple dose. I daren’t give him any more . . .”

“Have you spoken to the Source?”

“Mmm . . .”

“And?”

“He says we have to bring him back to life. That there are no other alternatives . . .”

“Okay . . . so what do we do now?”

“We wait . . .”

“Do we know anything else about the place?”

The sound of paper rustling somewhere to his left.

He must have been awake for five minutes now, but he was keeping his eyes closed. There was a rhythmic bleeping close to his left ear, which he guessed was a machine keeping a check on his pulse. Best to lie low and take slow, deep breaths.

There were two other people in the room, a man and a woman. He seemed to be lying on some sort of bunk or table a few meters away from them.

He felt a vague pressure in the crook of his right arm, which he guessed was from the needle of a drip, but other than that his body felt surprisingly okay.

There was an odd smell, ether and something musky that he couldn’t identify.

“To start with, it’s much, much bigger than we thought. Take a look at this!”

The woman’s voice again, then more rustling, which HP guessed must have been from some sort of plan.

“Right, so these red marks, are they . . . ?” The man’s voice sounded familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it.

“Red is for guards, blue for security cameras, and yellow is different types of alarms . . .”

“Okay . . . and all this comes from the Source?”

“Yes.”

“And you trust him?”

“He’s never given me any reason to doubt him. Everything he’s given us so far has been one hundred percent accurate, just look at that poor guy . . .”

It took HP a few seconds to realize that the woman meant him.

“I’m still not sure. About him, or the whole thing.”

The male voice again, a bit whiny, in a way that still sounded extremely familiar. He fought the urge to open his eyes and turn his head.

Suddenly he noticed the bleeps speeding up.

Shit, he had to relax.

Deep breaths, nice and easy.

He wanted to hear more, try to work out what the fuck was going on.

“Six floors, then,” the woman went on.

“Thirty meters into the rock, each floor consisting of a hub with five tunnels leading off it like spokes, each of them fifty meters long. Five times fifty is two hundred and fifty, multiplied by six floors . . .”

“One and a half kilometers. That’s a hell of a lot of space . . .”

“And each one of the spokes is ten meters wide, which means they might have several rows of server racks in them. Say, two passageways for maintenance in each tunnel. Each rack is, what, one meter deep? That makes . . .”

“Five kilometers, maybe more. Five kilometers of servers . . . That’s a fuck of a lot of capacity!”

The man’s voice sounded agitated.

“That’s enough to supply . . .”

“. . . pretty much the whole of Europe’s requirements for secure data storage.”

The site manager paused long enough for the statement to sink in. The hundred or so visitors seemed impressed. As
for her, she was only really half listening to the press conference.

Details of the site’s capacity flickered past on the large screen, interspersed occasionally with pictures of its construction. She stretched discreetly and took the chance to check her phone for messages. But the inbox was empty and the calls she had missed in the lift at the Grand didn’t seem to have been registered by the phone. Weird.

In contrast to the summer heat outside, the air in there was cool, and even though they were aboveground, she thought she could detect a faint smell of the rock, a bit like in the subway in Stockholm. Which wasn’t really that strange . . .

During the Cold War this had been the site of an underground command base—she’d read that in the papers. And just as Kjellgren had said, there was a long tunnel that acted as both an emergency exit and a conduit for all the communication cables to the artillery bunkers on the coast a couple of kilometers away.

Now that same tunnel brought cool water from the Baltic to service the air-conditioning down in the underground chambers. That and the cool Swedish climate, the unlimited and secure supply of electricity, and the extensive broadband network were evidently the main reasons why the whole installation had been located in Sweden, blah, blah, blah . . .

Obviously she ought to have been more interested, because this was her employer they were talking about here, after all. But she was having trouble concentrating on the details of the presentation. She couldn’t shake the gnawing feeling that something was seriously wrong. Really she ought to be trying to call Thomas again.

Black was bound to be safe in there. All the visitors had been registered and checked out in advance, and had been
made to undergo a security check more rigorous than at any airport. All electronic gadgets except the photographers’ cameras had been locked away out in the security lodge. Naturally she had been spared these security procedures and still had both her radio and cell phone on her.

But she already suspected there was no point to the call she was thinking of making. Just as before, Thomas wouldn’t answer. Besides, he would be there in an hour or so.

Kjellgren was driving, and according to the text she had received a few minutes ago, they had already passed Uppsala. She wasn’t looking forward to the meeting.

But she wasn’t the one who had made a fool of herself, she wasn’t the one who had drawn an illegal handgun . . .

“Our site basically works the same way as an old-fashioned bank vault . . .” the site manager went on as the video projector faded neatly into an image she recognized.

The bank vault on the screen was practically identical to the one she had been in a few days before. Thick concrete walls, polished marble floor, and long rows of little brass doors . . . Could it be the same vault?

Rebecca straightened up in her chair instinctively. She had been trying not to think about the safe-deposit box and Tage Sammer’s story, hoping to set the whole thing to one side for a few days until Black’s visit was over.

“A thick shell to protect against attack from outside,” the site manager went on. “Then separate compartments inside, each one isolated from the others to allow entry only to those authorized to access the contents. But here the size of each compartment can be varied with a few simple commands from the control room. In other words we can adapt to our clients’ requirements instantaneously. The compartments become bubbles whose size can be constantly adjusted.

“Any demand to store ten, one hundred, or even a thousand times more information would be no problem at all, the changes can be made instantly. What server room can compete with that level of capacity?”

He left another deliberate pause as he let the rhetorical question hang in the air for a few seconds. The projector replaced the bank vault with an image of a spacious underground chamber containing row upon row of identical server cabinets.

“Everything gathered in one location. Simple, cost-effective, and—above all—secure,” the site manager went on.

The projector laid a new picture at an angle on top of the current one. An almost identical underground room, then another, and another . . . Rows of shiny server cabinets, so many that she had already lost count. Thousands, millions of secrets, all stored in the same place.

All of a sudden she felt rather unwell. It must have been the aftereffects of the adrenaline rush. But at least her hands had stopped shaking.

The site manager resumed his speech as the vaults went on multiplying on the screen, but she was no longer listening.

Like shiny little bubbles, all of them doomed to burst sooner or later . . .

♦  ♦  ♦

“Are you awake, HP?”

For a moment he wondered about carrying on pretending to be unconscious, in the hope of finding out more about what was going on.

But something in her voice made him open his eyes before he had actually made up his mind.

It took just a matter of seconds for him to recognize her.
Her platinum blonde hair was now dark, but the nose piercing and overblown eye shadow were the same.

The emo girl with the headphones he had seen in the subway.

“Good.” She nodded to him. “How are you feeling?”

He tried to say something, but all that emerged from his lips was a sort of dry croak.

“Here.” She handed him a bottle of water and he raised himself up on one elbow. Deep, wonderful mouthfuls . . .

“Your fever’s gone down,” she said, looking at a screen beside him. “But it’ll be a few days before the infection’s disappeared completely. You’ve been dosed up with enough penicillin to treat a horse. Quite literally.”

He didn’t try to answer and just nodded as he looked around slowly. It looked like a hospital, with the only difference that everything in there was bigger. The bunk he was lying on, the lamps and straps hanging from the ceiling.

It took him a while to work it out.

“A vet’s?” he croaked.

“Yep,” she replied. “Well, at least you’re not totally out of it. My name’s Nora. And you already know Kent over there . . .”

HP sat up with an effort and glanced over toward the corner where the man was supposed to be sitting.

And there he was.

“Hi, HP,” he said. “Or should I call you 128?”

It took another few seconds for his brain to fit the pieces into place.

“Hasselqvist with a
Q
and a
V
 . . .” he muttered, without really being able to take it in.

“Aka Player 58.” The man grinned. “Last time we met you sprayed teargas in my face out on the Kymlinge Link Road. In
case you’re interested, I suffered an allergic reaction and had to spend three days in intensive care . . .”

He flew up from his chair and sprang over toward HP.

“Easy now, Kent . . .” the emo girl said, stepping between them.

She was almost ten centimeters taller than Hasselqvist, and, judging by her posture, considerably more muscular.

“We haven’t got time for wounded egos . . .”

Hasselqvist with a
Q
and a
V
glowered at her for a few seconds, then threw out his arms.

“It’s fine . . .” he muttered, stepping back. “Actually, I should probably thank you.” He grinned at HP. “If you hadn’t got in the way, it might have been me sitting there.”

He nodded at the oversized bunk HP was sitting on.

HP ignored him.

“Where are we?” he mumbled at the emo, whose name was evidently Nora.

“The Life Guards’ veterinary clinic.”

“What?”

“Lidingövägen, opposite the Östermalm sports center. The guards’ stables . . . I’ve got a key to the gate so we got in the back way.”

“Okay . . .”

He drained the bottle of water and tried to make sense of his thoughts. But it was impossible.

His head ached and even if he felt a bit brighter than he had over the past few days, his body still felt like it had been dragged through a mangle.

“So which one of you is going to tell me what the fuck I’m doing here?”

“Look, HP,” Nora said as she got him a cup of coffee from the large thermos on the camping table. “We’ve been trying to
get hold of you for a while, but you’ve been playing hard to get . . . Those notes on your door?” she added when he didn’t seem to get it.

“Kent and I, and Jeff—you’ll meet him soon—have all been caught up in the Game. Just like you, we all did things we never would have dreamed of doing when we started . . .”

“But then we got kicked out,” Hasselqvist added. “Or replaced by someone else, someone more suitable. A new favorite . . .” He glared sullenly at HP.

“Something like that.” Nora nodded. “Either way, once we sobered up and got over the worst of the withdrawal symptoms from the Game, we all started to figure out not just that what we’d been involved in was wrong, but that we’d also been manipulated. That we’d been nothing but puppets . . .”

HP drank a quick gulp. The coffee was unexpectedly hot and burned his tongue, but he forced himself to swallow it.

“We each started trying to find out more about the Game and the Game Master, but as you know it can be dangerous to break . . .”

“. . . rule number one,” HP muttered.

“Exactly . . . We were all warned off, some more than others. But a few months ago we were all brought together by someone else . . .”

She exchanged glances with Hasselqvist.

“He used to work for the Game,” Hasselqvist said. “We’re not sure, but we think he—”

“No matter what we think . . .” Nora interrupted, glaring at Hasselqvist, “this person did bring us all together.”

“And now you want revenge, to give the Game Master a bit of payback for the shit he fed you? Throw a wrench in the works so you can all sleep a bit easier . . . ?”

HP shook his head and emptied the cup.

“Been there, done that . . . Thanks for the coffee, but I’ve got much bigger problems than that . . .”

“Sit down, HP!” Nora said before he’d even got to his feet. To his own surprise he obeyed her at once.

“We’re not just some bunch of losers wandering around without a plan. We’ve got a source, an insider. Someone who knows how it all fits together, and maybe even knows what’s going to happen next. And, not least, why!”