Bubble: A Thriller (35 page)

SHE HAD MOST
of the puzzle worked out now.

Or at least she thought she did. Her dad, André Pellas, the nuclear weapons program, the safe-deposit box, Tage Sammer . . . Everything was connected, and the chain could be made even longer if you added the unthinkable: the revolver, Sveavägen, and Olof Palme . . .

But for the time being she was trying to keep a grip on her galloping imagination. She went on reciting the chain that she had started putting together a few days ago:

Dad and André/Uncle Tage work for the UN together.

Dad is unfairly dismissed for an action he believes is justified.

Uncle Tage employs Dad on the secret nuclear weapons program. Sends him on secret missions to the USA to exchange information with the Americans. This carries on for years, even after the project was officially shut down. Until a newspaper starts snooping about in the mid-1980s. Then everyone panics, the project is buried once and for all, and without warning Dad is shoved out in the cold again while
everything he and Uncle Tage believed in and worked toward for all those years ends up in the garbage.

And it’s all the fault of the Palme government . . .

The nausea that had been stalking her from Thore Sjögren’s claustrophobic little office wouldn’t go away. She got up from the sofa and went over to open the window. The street below was dark, no movement at all. The crowns of the trees opposite made it impossible to see more than ten meters into the park. For a few moments she imagined she could see someone standing down there in the shadows, someone watching her. She knew it was just her imagination, but she still couldn’t help drawing one of the curtains before she went back to the sofa and her laptop.

It only took a minute or so to dig out the description of the suspect on Wikipedia:

A man, acting alone and suffering from a personality disorder, who is driven by his hatred of Palme. He has probably had difficulty forming relationships all his life, particularly with anyone in positions of authority. He is introverted, lonely and mentally unstable, but not psychotic. His condition is closely connected to the fact that he feels he has “failed” in life. Adversity makes him depressed, and this has developed into paranoia. When and if people of this sort begin to commit violent crimes, they are usually between 35 and 45 years old . . .

In 1986 Dad was forty-five years old. Motivated, disappointed, a failure, and paranoid. And the sort who never forgot an injustice, real or imagined.

Never, ever . . .

All that was needed was a gun, an OPW. And a bit of help . . .

Because what if he wasn’t alone? What if he got a gentle shove in the right direction from someone he trusted? A phone call, information about a time and a place. Maybe that was all it would have taken? Maybe Dad thought he was being given another chance? That he was going to be part of something bigger once more, where his services were still in demand. That he was still a Player.

Back in the game.

History repeats itself . . .

But there was something that wasn’t right, a little piece of the puzzle that didn’t quite fit. The only problem was that she couldn’t work out which piece.

♦  ♦  ♦

The white van climbed over the brow of a hill, then pulled up in a small paved yard surrounded on two sides by a ramshackle L-shaped farm building.

“This is it.”

Nora gently put her hand on HP’s shoulder, but he’d woken up a while back, when the van turned off the tarmac and onto the narrow gravel track.

The sliding door of the barn was already open and Hasselqvist backed the van in with millimeter precision. Mange’s little red Polo was already parked inside.

Jeff jumped out quickly and closed the barn door behind them. HP took his time getting out of his seat. He double-checked the lock on the sports bag he had put on the floor, then stretched and breathed in the ingrained smell of cows and old hay.

It took a while for his eyes to get used to the gloom.

In one corner of the barn he could see several large white plastic sacks, and beside them a row of pallets full of old tires,
a couple of oil drums, and random clutter. A bit farther away stood a bit of rusty agricultural machinery. The place looked like it hadn’t been used for the past ten, fifteen years.

Maybe longer than that.

“Hello, and welcome!”

“Hi,” he muttered, without looking Mange in the eye.

“Follow me . . .”

Mange skirted around a couple of stalls to reach a door at one end of the barn. The others followed him, with HP bringing up the rear.

“Just mind your feet, the floor isn’t that great.”

Mange opened the door and they headed down a short corridor to a small kitchen.

The room smelled of fresh coffee and damp.

HP had a sudden flashback to Erman’s little cottage out in the bush. But that had been in a considerably better state than this place. Old wallpaper was peeling off the walls, and in a couple of places water had come through the yellowing ceiling. Here and there the floorboards had given way, revealing dark holes. A camping table with five folding chairs had been set up in the middle of the room.

“So this is where you’ve been hiding,” HP muttered, pointing at the camp bed and sleeping bag in one corner. “Has Betul chucked you out then, or what?”

Mange shrugged his shoulders.

“Right now it’s safest like this . . .” he said. “There’s coffee, if anyone wants any . . .”

He took a paper cup and got himself some coffee from the thermos in the middle of the little table. While the others followed his example Mange sat down. He took out a small laptop, opened it up, and then turned it so that everyone could see what was on the little screen.

“Okay, everything’s ready. Operation Puncture starts in exactly . . .”

He looked at his watch.

“. . . nine hours, twenty-seven minutes, and eleven seconds . . .”

Everyone except HP adjusted their watches.

“We’ll take the van and leave my car here.”

“No, we’ll need both . . .” Jeff interrupted him in an authoritative voice. “I did a bit of a recon the day before yesterday. The last bit by the cliffs is just a soft forest track, and the van will get stuck. Unless we want to carry everything the last five hundred meters, we’ll have to load it all into the Polo. It’s a lot lighter, and it’s front-wheel drive, so there shouldn’t be any problems there.”

“But, er . . .” Mange sounded like he was trying to protest, then changed his mind. “Okay, that’s what we’ll do. Good thinking!”

He nodded at Jeff, who smiled with satisfaction.

“Let’s go through the whole thing one more time,” Mange went on. “Then I suggest that we get changed and make sure we’re familiar with everything for half an hour before we set off. It’s an hour-and-fifty-three-minute drive from here, then twenty minutes to unload, which means that we’ve got plenty of time to kill. If anyone wants to take a walk, there’s a lake around the back. And there are sandwiches and cold drinks in the fridge over there . . .”

He pointed to one corner.

“The toilet doesn’t work, but there’s an old outdoor privy behind the farm.”

“Ah, old-school shithouse . . .” HP grinned, but got no response.

Humorless idiots!

But what the hell . . . He had seven hours to work out who
in here was a friend and who an enemy. It would be just as well to make a start.

♦  ♦  ♦

The letter was lying on her doormat beside the morning paper.

A window envelope with her name on it, and at first she thought it was a bill. So she didn’t open it until she had poured a cup of coffee and sat down on the sofa. But when she opened the envelope she found that it contained something very different. The sheet of A4 with her name at the top consisted of just two lines. The first was the address of a web page. The second contained two sad smileys.

Mange. It could hardly be anyone else.

Taking the letter with her, she went and sat in front of the computer, typed in the web address, and pressed Enter.

A log-in window with boxes for username and password appeared. After a bit of hesitation she typed in her full name in the top line. But she had no idea what password the page wanted. She turned the envelope inside out but couldn’t find any clues.

Mange,
she finally wrote, and pressed Enter.

Wrong password,
the site informed her.

Shit!

She tried again, this time with
Henke
as the password.

Wrong password, one attempt left.

Only one more chance.

She went out into the hall to check that she hadn’t received another letter containing the log-in details. But there was nothing there.

Just to make sure, she read the letter again, holding both it and the envelope up to the light in an attempt to see whether there were any hidden messages.

But the only unusual thing she found was that the sender had spelled her first name with
ck
instead of
cc.

Surely Mange of all people ought to be able to spell her name?

Unless . . .

She typed
Rebecka
into the password box and pressed Enter. The window changed color and suddenly she was in.

The site looked like a Wikipedia page, in fact was so similar that it was hard to see the difference. But she was pretty sure this particular page wasn’t available on the online version.

The Game

also known as the Circus, the Event, or the Performance—is the name of a secret military project that was set up in the USA, probably sometime during the 1950s.

The Game was originally a subordinate part of the so-called MK-ULTRA Project, which was established to conduct research into various forms of brainwashing and mind control (see also
Manchurian Candidate
).

Unlike the MK-ULTRA Project, which used different types of drugs and compulsion to force its subjects to act in certain ways, the researchers involved in the Game applied a diametrically opposite methodology.

By using various forms of powerful positive stimuli, including affirmation, praise, and idolatry, researchers successfully encouraged many of their subjects to carry out actions that they had declared at the outset of the experiment that they would never do.

In the Game, the research subjects—who all demonstrated narcissistic personality characteristics—
were placed in different types of scenarios suited to their individual psyches.

Some were led to experience the feeling of taking part in a sporting occasion, others of being in a film or a significant political event. What all the subjects had in common was that they were treated like stars, and that they were manipulated into believing there was a large audience watching and admiring their actions and following every step they took.

By enhancing the test subjects’ exaggerated self-image in various ways, and making them the central characters in a larger context, the researchers soon managed to persuade many of them to shift their boundaries voluntarily and carry out numerous dramatic actions.

Some members of the military personnel connected to the project even began to bet on how far each test subject would be prepared to go, hence the origins of the name the Game.

Both MK-ULTRA and its subsidiary projects were shut down in the 1970s, but there is evidence to indicate that the Game escaped and developed a life of its own.

This evidence suggests that the Game, led by an individual known as the Game Master, has used various forms of advanced psychological manipulation to persuade apparently ordinary people to carry out inexplicable and occasionally drastic tasks. The same sources indicate that the Game has recruited a cadre of assistants, so-called Ants, to provide information and carry out simpler tasks. They prepare the ground for the more active participants, who are known as Players.

There are several well-known events that are occasionally attributed to the Game, including murders,
arson, sabotage, and theft, but, as with most other conspiracy theories, there is a lack of conclusive evidence . . .

This absence of proof is believed to be the result of the Game devoting much of its energy to ensuring that it remains hidden. As a result, this very lack of evidence is—paradoxically—taken by some as an indication in itself of the existence of the Game.

Rebecca read the page three times, then did a screen dump and printed out several copies.

It all fit perfectly with Henke’s fragmentary descriptions and her own observations, but also with the information that Uncle Tage had confided to her.

There really was a Game, which manipulated people into carrying out various acts. Which could incite people to do completely insane things.

Poor, self-obsessed fools who didn’t think the world properly appreciated their unique talents and significance and were prepared to do almost anything to get a bit of approval.

People just like Henke.

And her dad . . .

But whose version of the story was the right one?

Uncle Tage had helped her, in the aftermath of events in Darfur when she was under suspicion of gross misuse of office, but also with the weapons license and, most recently, the recording from the bank vault.

He had told her about her dad’s dark past, and—even though she’d had to drag it out of him—he had finally revealed more confidential information to her than he should have.

On the other hand, she had known Mange all her life, and the idea that he might be a criminal mastermind still felt un
real, to put it mildly. But Mange had demonstrably lied to her face and had admitted as much himself. All he had given her was the information on the web page, information that didn’t actually prove anything.

So whose version was true?

Who could she trust?

Which of them could help her rescue Henke?

She leaned back in the sofa and went through everything that had happened in the last few days once more, but she still couldn’t shake the feeling that she was missing something.