The Game Trilogy (31 page)

Evaluating glances, short nods of acknowledgement between colleagues. No time for small-talk, everything was already planned, checked and agreed.

The pickup would take place out on the apron, then they’d head out through Gate 1 and take the 273 towards the E4 motorway. They would enter Stockholm at Norrtull, follow Sveavägen to Sergels torg, turn left into Hamngatan then right into Kungsträdgårdsgatan all the way to the Grand, where Alpha Four and another group from the RRU would take over.

Pretty much the whole of Blasieholmen surrounding the Grand Hotel had been cordoned off for the past few hours, and the dogs from the bomb squad must have done a couple of circuits on overtime to get the area secure in time.

According to Vahtola, the visit had been confirmed a couple of days before, but the information had been kept within a very limited circle for security reasons.

The Stockholm Police and thus also the evening tabloids had been kept at arm’s length until the last minute.

The Regional Police Chief evidently wasn’t happy, but what could he do? He just had to make the best of it and open his coffers. That night’s roadblocks alone would require something like two hundred officers from
the regular police. The question was: would that be enough?

They were taking the long western loop around Solvalla, heading towards Rissne. HP glanced at the fuel gauge. Half a tank left, and he wondered exactly how far that would get him?

He was starting to have trouble keeping up, and the police van was now a couple of hundred metres ahead of him. He had to lie almost bent double over the handlebars to squeeze every last bit of speed from the moped. The Rissne junction was coming up. If Hasselqvist turned right onto the E18 motorway, that would probably be the end of it.

Fuck it, he should have brought the car after all!

They had thirty minutes to wait, and she took the opportunity to go to the toilet. When she was done she spent a few minutes with her mobile.

She had tried calling Henke on his new number just an hour or so after he left. She had been thinking of apologizing for her outburst, making an attempt to patch things up as best she could. But of course he hadn’t answered. Now that she’d had time to think about it, she wasn’t sure she wanted to talk to him after all. If he had seemed a bit crazy before, that had been nothing compared to today’s little performance. Clearly he still had that damn game on his brain, because he certainly wasn’t in Thailand. But how the hell did he know about Micke, and what was all that stuff about a stolen police van?

No, she’d had her fill of miscellaneous lunacy for the day, and she had to focus on her job. She decided to replace the phone call with a dutiful text message.

There, she’d done her job as big sister. Nice to get it out of the way, anyway.

She took the chance to call Micke, but he didn’t pick up at home. She’d have to try his mobile.

They didn’t turn off onto the E18, just carried straight on, before making an unexpected stop at the petrol station below the shoeboxes lining the heights of Rinkeby.

Hasselqvist filled up the police van and HP took the chance to do the same with the moped. So, what next?

Nothing, it turned out. Fifty-eight bought a paper and settled down to wait in the carpark.

HP toyed with the idea of creeping over and getting the bastard. Playing a round of twenty questions, like he’d been planning to do in the bloke’s flat. But this wasn’t the right place. Too many people and far too well-lit. Besides, if anyone saw them fighting in a police van, the place would be crawling with cops within minutes, and that wasn’t exactly his dream scenario …

He’d just have to sit it out.

She had tried calling Micke several times now, and had texted him to call her, but without any response. For the first time ever. Micke was the sort of person who always had his mobile on him, as if he had some sort of obsessive need to be reachable all the time. So why was he suddenly not answering?

Of course there could be loads of reasons. Poor reception, empty battery, maybe he was in the cinema …

So why not just let it go?

Okay, it was hard to admit it, but even though she had already rejected the whole idea, she couldn’t quite shake the thought that Micke might be mixed up in the Game.

Maybe it was because of the notes? Their message was
pretty clear – someone like her didn’t deserve to be happy. And maybe they were right?

Henke’s story didn’t exactly contain any firm evidence, but there was at least one thing she could check out. She dialled the number of the Norrmalm Police Station and this time she was in luck. The call was picked up by Mulle.

‘1710, you say?’ he muttered once she’d explained why she was calling.

He leafed through some papers, then the phone clattered and she heard him call to someone down the corridor.

‘Windahl, 1710, do you know where it is?’ She couldn’t hear the answer, then the phone clattered again and Mulle was back.

‘The lads here say it’s in the workshop, but it looks like the keys have gone missing from the cabinet.’

This was seriously shit. They’d spent almost two hours hanging around. It was way past midnight and he was starting to get pissed off with this particular game.

The tension he’d felt earlier had long since evaporated and he was getting cold from sitting for so long without moving in the damp night air.

So what should he do now?

Either give up on the whole thing and turn back, wait until tomorrow and pay another house-call to Hasselqvist. Or carry on waiting until his arse took root on the seat of the moped.

He’d give it another thirty minutes, then try to come up with a new strategy.

The Boeing 757 landed five minutes early and taxied over to the private part of the airport. A couple of minutes later the plane had come to a stop and the dark-coloured vehicles were heading over to pick up its eminent passengers.

Rebecca and most of the escort waited outside Gate 1. They’d watched the plane land and one of their
colleagues kept them informed of progress on the transfer to the cars. But in spite of the anticipation around her, she couldn’t quite shake a sense of unease. She needed to get hold of Micke, find out what was really going on.

‘Alpha one-zero-two, loaded and ready. We’re rolling.’

‘Understood, Alpha One,’ the operator back at headquarters said.

‘Okay, let’s move,’ Wikström said, putting the car in gear and pulling off behind the marked police-car that was to lead the convoy.

Five minutes left until his deadline. He had just started to stretch his legs, getting ready to set off, when the lights of the police van suddenly came on. Seconds later it pulled away and HP hurried to get the moped started.

It took the Kymlinge link-road towards Kista, and for a moment HP wondered if fifty-eight had been ordered home to the mother-ship on Torshamnsgatan. But he drove past the slip-road and carried on towards the E4.

‘Shit,’ HP muttered inside his helmet when he realized where they were heading.

Once the police van set off along the motorway he’d be fucked. A whole evening completely wasted.

They had already reached Märsta. Not a single car anywhere, they were able to race along. One hundred and thirty was the agreed speed, and the patrol car in front of them was following orders to the digit.

Wikström eased off the accelerator slightly to let the marked car get a hundred metres ahead. That would give him enough room to manoeuvre and make it easier for Rebecca in the passenger seat to keep an eye on the road in front without being constantly blinded by the patrol car’s flashing blue lights.

Stora Wäsby, then Upplands Väsby.

As they swept on she could see the light of the flares the police had let off on the slip-roads to stop the traffic. The patrol car, then Rebecca and Wikström, then a van full of Rapid-Response Unit troops. Behind that one Suburban and both the BMWs, then the rest of the convoy, scarcely even visible in the rear-view mirror.

Bredden, Rotebro, not long before they hit the outskirts of Sollentuna.

When he first saw the flares he was confused. Red sparkling things that reminded him of fireworks, spread out across all the lanes. And in the middle of it all stood a cop-car parked up with its blue lights flashing.

Had there been an accident?

But fifty-eight didn’t let that put him off, he rolled up to the roadblock, flashed his lights and was waved through by the cops.

HP rode up as close as he dared and braked sharply, in an effort to see at least which direction Hasselqvist was thinking of heading in. But to his surprise 1710 turned sharp left and headed down the exit slip-road from the southbound carriageway of the E4. What the hell was the stupid fucker playing at?

He was heading the wrong way, against the flow of traffic!

The van carried on slowly down the slip-road towards the motorway, but just as it was about to disappear from sight it seemed to stop.

HP waited for a minute or so, but seeing as the van was just sitting there he quickly took a decision. Something was going on, he was convinced of that now.

The motorway looked like it had been blocked off, and not just at this junction. He hadn’t seen a single vehicle
go past on the E4 in the minute or more he’d been standing up above it. Fifty-eight hadn’t so much as nudged the brakes when he saw the cops and the roadblock, so evidently he had been expecting them.

Whatever the Game had in mind for five-eight and that cop-van, it was obviously connected to whatever was going on with the motorway, and the only way HP was going to find out what was happening was to get down there himself.

He turned the moped and headed back towards Kista. After a hundred metres or so he cut the lights and pulled to a stop on the hard shoulder. A quick glance back to check that the cops at the roadblock weren’t looking at him. Then he headed right into the dark forest.

Norrviken passed by on the right, and there were no junctions for a long while. The motorway was completely empty, there was no sign of movement anywhere apart from the reflections from the flashing blue lights, and she suddenly found herself thinking of the words of a song she used to listen to years before.

Branches were whipping at his face as he stumbled through the trees.

‘Brilliant fucking idea, this, HP, going for a little walk in the woods in the middle of the night,’ he muttered to himself, just before he fell flat on his face over a protruding root.

He got up, brushed the soil and pine-needles from his clothes and carried on, swearing quietly, towards the E4. Suddenly the forest opened up into a corridor cleared for
some power lines, and on the far side, through the narrow strip of remaining trees, he could see the lights of the motorway.

Almost there, he just had to grit his teeth and carry on.

He found a track and followed it across the clearing, then ducked in among the trees again, aiming for the blue lights he had just seen off to his left. He couldn’t be more than fifty, max seventy-five metres from the E4 now. But apart from the squeaking sounds from his soaking wet sneakers it was almost completely silent.

The traffic had been stopped completely, so whatever was going on was pretty fucking massive.

The trees thinned and he was getting closer and closer to 1710. The van had rolled almost to the bottom of the slip-road and seemed to be parked close to the edge of the actual carriageway. He could see fifty-eight sitting inside, leaning forward and staring at a glowing object that he was holding above the steering wheel.

HP realized what it was at once.

His mobile phone.

she hummed to herself. Damn good song, that, what had she done with the CD?

He climbed out of the ditch in three quick steps. The spray-can in his right hand, his left hand on the door-handle.

A quick jerk, door open, then he let off a serious squirt of tear-gas in the face of the unsuspecting Mister-A-number-fucking-one.

Say hello to my lil’ friend!

The spray blew every-bloody-where and he got a cloud of it in his own face. He shut his eyes in reflex.

Fuck, it stung!
His eyes were burning, so it had to be a hell of a lot worse for fifty-eight Hasselqvist. The bloke was squealing like a stuck pig, rubbing his face in panic with his lower arms.

Even though his eyes were stinging, it was no problem grabbing hold of fifty-eight’s clothes and pulling him out of the seat and onto the tarmac, then into the ditch. HP was blinking like mad, his eyes were still stinging, but he remembered something he’d learned at a Reclaim the Streets demo a couple of years ago.

Because tear-gas isn’t actually a gas but a powder, the last thing you should do is rub your eyes, because that only made things worse. Instead he turned his head into the wind, blinked quickly a few times and regained enough of his sight to be able to give fifty-eight a good kick in the guts where he lay on the ground.

‘Now we’re going to have a little chat,’ he muttered through clenched teeth, pulling out the sock with the billiard ball inside it.

‘I recognize that,’ Wikström smiled. ‘That’s Kent, isn’t it?’

‘Mmm …’ she muttered in agreement, even though she hadn’t actually been able to think of the group’s name until he said it.

Kent – yes, of course it was!

‘Kent!’

‘Y-yeah,’ fifty-eight snorted.

‘You’re telling me your name’s Kent?’

Another whimper of confirmation.

This wasn’t quite right.

‘So who the fuck’s Micke, then?’ HP roared.

‘What?’

Hasselqvist, whose first name was apparently Kent, was blinking madly as various bodily fluids gushed from his face.

HP took a deep breath. He felt like smashing the drooling little shit’s head in, but that would have to wait. He had more questions he wanted answers to before he could get shot of the Game Master’s pathetic Golden Boy.

‘The girl in that clip of yours, she calls you Micke?’

Hasselqvist looked uncomprehending as he lay there crying.

‘Tall, dark, in pretty good shape. Looked like it was shot in a café, doesn’t ring any bells?’

Finally a sign of life.

‘Not me, she’s talking to her boyfriend. I just had to film them, it was a really easy assign …’

Suddenly five-eight seemed to remember rule number one, and his jaw snapped shut like a mousetrap.

HP shrugged his shoulders, then gave him a kick in the balls. After allowing a few seconds for Hasselqvist to recover, he leaned over him.

‘I know all about the Game, my dear little fifty-eight, including rule number one. But if I were you I’d be considerably more worried about making it through the next couple of minutes than about our mutual friend the Game Master getting pissed off about you squealing, right?’

Hasselqvist just nodded stiffly in reply as he clutched his crown jewels.

‘Good! So, am I right in thinking that your assignment was to film the girl and her boyfriend?’

Hasselqvist nodded again.

‘So do you know him, this Micke?’

Hasselqvist shook his head, but not very convincingly.

‘You’re lying!’

HP raised his foot and took aim to deliver another kick.

‘Wait!’ Hasselqvist whimpered, holding one hand up to defend himself.

He cleared his throat and went on.

‘I don’t
know
him, but I
recognized
him. He only lives a couple of blocks from me. I’ve seen him on the bus, I think.’

‘Is he mixed up in the Game?’

Another shake of the head, considerably more convincing this time.

HP breathed out.

Micke and fifty-eight weren’t the same person!

They just happened to live in the same area and looked a bit similar, but that was it. Becca wasn’t mixed up in the Game. She was safe!

They had just started the sweeping left-hand bend around Sollentuna. The convoy was well spaced, the road ahead was completely clear.

This was going like clockwork.

‘So what’s this assignment all about?’ HP asked, dangling the billiard ball in the sock in front of Kent fifty-fucking-eight Hasselqvist’s face.

More sniffing. The tear-gas must have gone by now, but the bloke seemed to the world’s biggest cry-baby. What a fucking loser they’d chosen! Was this shrimp-dicked twat really the best they could come up with?

Someone who had what it took for an End Game?

HP shook his head in exasperation and bumped Hasselqvist with the billiard ball.

‘Okay, do you want to do this the easy way, or would you rather have a number eight ball on your ass?’

He swung the sock round his head a couple of times and it made a terrifying swishing sound.

‘Just park the van here and wait for instructions,’ Hasselqvist snorted. ‘That’s all, I promise!’ he howled when HP gave him a sceptical look. ‘It was just a Game, a cool thing, yeah? I’m a nobody, just an ordinary bloke,’ he said as he tried to grab HP’s feet in supplication. ‘Please, don’t kill me,’ he sobbed to HP’s already soaked sneakers.

HP spun the sock a couple more times, then lowered it.

‘Fuck off!’

‘What?

Hasselqvist looked up with his red, tear-streaked face.

‘You heard, fuck off!’ HP snarled, nodding towards the trees. ‘If you’re not gone in five seconds I’m going to smash your skull in, get it?’

He didn’t need further explanation. Hasselqvist rushed headlong into the undergrowth and to judge by the speed he was going, he probably wouldn’t slow down until he reached the centre of Kista.

What to do now?

Suddenly he heard a ringtone. He patted his breast pocket and was about to pull out his new Sony when he realized it was the wrong ringtone. The ringing was coming from inside the police van.

Of course, fifty-eight’s mobile!

It was on the floor, Hasselqvist must have dropped it when he got a face-full of tear-gas.

The screen was lit up and a short message said that an incoming call was waiting.

For some reason, he didn’t really know why, he pressed the icon for ‘answer’ and slowly lifted the mobile to his ear.

‘Hello?’

‘Good evening, my dear HP, this is the Game Master speaking,’ the voice at the other end said.

‘Alpha 101 passing Sollentuna,’ she reported to Control.

‘Understood, Alpha 101,’ the operator replied.

She glanced at Wikström. Hands on the wheel, quarter to three, eyes fixed well ahead. Speedometer stuck on 120.

He was a good colleague, a real pro, she thought.

HP opened his mouth but it was like he was chewing thin air and no words came out.

‘You’ve certainly been working hard tonight, my friend. But I’m afraid you’ve got a bit more work ahead of you before you can get some well-deserved rest.’

The voice was soft, almost tender. Swedish, with a hint of an accent. A faintly metallic note which suggested the caller was using some sort of voice distortion device, or possibly one of those translation gadgets? He’d always assumed that the Game Master was male, but this voice could just as easily belong to a woman.