The Game Trilogy (44 page)

Shit, it still felt weird not recognizing yourself … Short, cropped hair, clean-shaven, Buddy Holly glasses with clear lenses perched on his nose.

When they were little some people used to think he and Manga were brothers.

Sometimes they actually pretended that they were.

That was where he got the idea from.

Obviously it had been a total shot in the dark, emailing his CV, but ArgosEye had taken the bait at once. Manga’s CV was pretty solid, and with a bit of tinkering and a basic course in Photoshop you could knock the world
dead. Throw in his own winning personality and the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

Bearing in mind what the company did, he had coolly calculated that they would Google him, so he had opened accounts on Facebook, MySpace, Spotify and LinkedIn.

Each profile was adorned with a slightly distorted picture of his face, so that no-one could tag his photograph.

The real Manga Sandström was far too paranoid to appear anywhere out there with his actual name and picture. And besides, as luck would have it Mangalito just happened to be out of the office – according to the spotty youth in his computer shop, the little convert was on a pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia with his father-in-law.

He didn’t actually have the faintest idea what he was hoping to achieve with this little charade. The only thing he knew with anything approaching certainty was that Anna Argos’s death was connected to her company – why else would Moussad have given him the business card and asked him to keep his eyes open?

Her ex-husband was obviously top of the list of suspects. But things weren’t always the way they seemed. There were no simple truths – you couldn’t take anything for granted.

Especially not if the Game was involved …

Half an hour on Google had so far left her none the wiser. MayBey seemed to be a play on the English word
maybe
, and she was fairly sure the misspelling was intentional, which seemed to suggest that the name had some sort of significance.

Sadly Google hadn’t been much help. The first few hits on the search list were people who had simply got their spelling wrong, followed by a removals company in Albany, New York, then a few people on Facebook whose surname
really was MayBey. None of them was Swedish, as far as she was able to tell.

She switched to Wiktionary and looked up the word
maybe.

You could also rearrange the letters to make three other words:

So she really wasn’t any the wiser …

‘Say hello to Manga here – he’s our new troll.’

Three heads looked up from the around the coffee table and nodded in greeting as his new boss introduced him.

‘Dejan is in charge of the Filter – that’s the gang with all the screens and the wall-projector over in the glass room.’

HP’s boss gestured over his shoulder with his thumb towards the right-hand end of the office.

‘Hi, good to meet you,’ Dejan said. He was a short bloke with thinning hair, around thirty.

‘Rilke’s in charge of the Blogs, and Beens looks after the Laundry.’

HP shook hands with them both. His mouth felt incredibly dry and his heart was still pounding with both fear
and excitement, but he did his best to appear cool and relaxed. The gang sitting round the table in front of him were hardly anything to be frightened of.

Beens both looked and behaved like a chubby little computer nerd. A greasy parting, military issue glasses and a coffee mug with a Blade Runner quote on it. But oddly enough, he was wearing neither a washed-out t-shirt nor jeans that were too short for him. In this place everyone seemed to wear the standard business uniform. Suit, tie, neatly ironed shirt for the gentlemen, something along the same lines for the ladies. There was a bit of a Jehovah’s Witness feel to the whole thing.

HP would have much rather had Rilke as his boss instead of the grinning pretty-boy who had met him at reception. Olive-coloured skin, dark eyes and matching hair.

Her handshake was soft and her voice slightly teasing.

‘I hope Frank hasn’t put you off too much already …’ She smiled, nodding towards HP’s boss. ‘Life as king of the trolls sometimes seems to go to his head …’

They all grinned, and HP did his best to look as though he got the joke.

‘Okay – the short version of how it all works,’ Frank said as they headed off down the glass corridor towards the part of the hyper-modern office that was evidently known as the Troll Mine.

‘Our clients employ us to protect their trademarks – but of course you know that. We make sure that they know everything that’s being said about them out there, and help deal with any problems …’

He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb again.

‘Dejan and his team over in the glass bubble work with a program we call the Filter. The program sweeps all known search engines looking for hits that contain our clients’ names, as well as various combinations of negative buzz.’

‘Like Nestlé and monkeys’ fingers, or BP and environmental disasters …?’

‘More or less,’ Frank smiled. ‘But of course the Filter is much more sophisticated … You’d have to check with Dejan, but I’m pretty sure that the program now contains several thousand different combinations of negatively loaded comments, and his team update it on a daily basis as new expressions crop up.’

They reached a door and Frank tapped his passcard against a reader.

‘This is the Strategy Department. Stoffe’s usually in charge of this lot, but he’s on holiday at the moment so Milla over there is covering for him.’

Frank waved at a deathly pale Goth girl who was so deeply absorbed in her screen that she hardly seemed to have noticed them.

‘We call her Lisbeth,’ he whispered. ‘But only when she can’t hear us …’

HP nodded, trying at the same time to keep his head down.

Even if the risk was small, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was about to be unmasked at any moment.

‘Whenever the Filter comes across any sort of buzz that could be damaging to our clients, it’s the Strats’ job to work out what we should do to handle the problem, so to speak,’ Frank went on.

HP nodded mechanically.

‘Everything gets fed into the risk management model that Philip designed. Depending on the outcome of the modelling, information is passed on to us in the operational sections …’

‘Right, yes, of course … what were they again …?’ HP muttered.

Frank gave him a disgruntled look.

‘The Trolls, the Laundry and the Blogs … By the way, Manga, the way you’re dressed …’ He glanced at HP’s badly fitting suit and brightly patterned tie.

‘What?’

‘Remind me to give you the address of our tailor before Philip catches sight of you …’

They left the room and carried on along the steel-grey carpet of the corridor towards another locked door. Just like the last one, Frank touched his passcard against a discreet reader and then opened the door.

‘Well, we’re home. Welcome to the Troll Mine, Manga!’

The alarm on her mobile started to bleep and she sat up with a start.

It was one o’clock at night, and high time to make her way home.

She glanced at his solid body, listened to his heavy breathing for a few seconds, and tried to summon up some sort of feeling for him. But all she felt was distaste. For him, for herself, for the whole situation.

She got up from the mattress and gathered her clothes together.

A quick wash in the bathroom to get as much of his smell off her before she made her way home.

Just as she was pulling her jacket on she heard a noise from the front door. At first she thought it was the paper being delivered, then she remembered where she was. Obviously no papers got delivered to Henke’s empty flat.

She listened again.

There was a faint metallic clicking sound from the door, almost as if someone were messing about with the lock. The lights inside the flat were all off, so she ought to have been able to see a point of light from the peephole in the door. But it was completely dark.

She took a few steps out into the hall.

One of the new floorboards creaked beneath her foot and she stood still.

The clicking had stopped.

She padded carefully over to the door and tried to look out of the peephole.

But the stairwell was completely dark.

Then she suddenly heard quick footsteps on the stairs, and a moment or so later the front door of the building opening. She ran over to the window, peered down into the alley and managed to catch a glimpse of a dark figure disappearing round the corner.

‘Wossup?’ he muttered sleepily from the mattress.

‘Burglar,’ she replied without taking her eyes off the street.

But for some reason she didn’t feel entirely sure about that …

He’d sat through thirty different slides about the company’s ‘core values’, ‘mission statement’ and ‘code of conduct’, and he and the two other new employees had been obliged to sign a hefty bundle of papers covering all manner of confidentiality regulations.

The worst of his nerves had settled but the feeling of joining a sect had definitely not subsided.

But at least the personnel manager’s evangelical presentation seemed to be almost over now.

‘Well, if no-one’s got any more questions, that’s it from me. Now for a few words from our MD … As I said earlier, he would have spoken first, but Philip’s just got in from the airport so we’re having to work around his schedule.’

Eliza Poole opened the door and muttered something to the girl out in reception.

The other two new employees instantly pulled out their smartphones, but HP used the pause to fill his water glass instead. His mouth was dry and his head was throbbing with a tension headache.

He had zoned out a couple of minutes into the
presentation and was gradually starting to wonder if this project was really such a good idea. Maybe he should have thought it through a bit better, come up with some sort of plan instead of just jumping at the first thing that popped into his head, as usual?

What did he actually think he was going to be able to achieve, anyway?

The door opened and a sinewy man with cropped hair, probably somewhere in his early fifties, stepped into the room. His pin-striped suit looked like it was glued to his extremely trim body, his shirt was silky smooth and his tie impeccably knotted. A precisely measured and no doubt genuine suntan made him look healthy and relaxed.

‘Almost as if he’d just got home from a long holiday,’ HP thought, and felt his heartbeat speed up.

Energetic Eliza, who was actually about the same height as mister pin-stripe, and definitely a couple of weight-classes above him, suddenly seemed rather submissive.

‘Allow me to introduce our managing director – Philip Argos,’ she said, a little too loudly.

She tried to instigate a round of applause, but stopped instantly after a quick sideways glance from her boss.

‘Thank you, Eliza.’

He nodded at the personnel manager, who blushed bright red and backed away quickly.

‘Welcome to ArgosEye,’ Philip Argos began, in a surprisingly soft voice. HP leaned forward so as not to miss anything. He suddenly realized there was something familiar about the man, but he couldn’t quite work out what.

MayBey was obviously the website’s big star.

No-one else’s threads had anything like the same number of comments, and his or her readership appeared to be constantly growing.

The last post was pretty good.

The post had thirty-six different comments; another four had appeared since she last checked half an hour ago. Practically all of them knew exactly what had happened.

It was an unspoken rule that addicts always told the police if they had needles on them before they were searched. A tiny scratch from a dirty needle meant a whole load of blood tests followed by weeks of uncertainty. Weeks when you hardly dared to be in the same room as your family, going through every possible diagnosis over and over again …

Hepatitis A, B or C? Or worse …

The rule was unconditional, which in all likelihood meant that MayBey and his unfortunate partner had given the dealer a severe beating. She would have done the same if she’d been in their shoes. Reluctantly, maybe, but still …

And a whole load of other moronic comments in the same vein.

Hardly surprising. Half the comments probably weren’t even from cops, but idiots with a fetish for uniforms who’d failed to get into Police Academy and were now stuck in their mum’s basement watching
Cops.

But on the net they could all play whatever role they wanted to.

HP clicked the send button and moments later his contribution appeared on the technology forum. He pressed Alt+tab and switched to the
Dagens Nyheter
discussion page as he glanced at the printout next to the keyboard.

The send button again, posting the contribution under the right article, then Alt+tab again.
Expressen
this time, and the comment section under a film review:

Shit, only three days into the job and he was already good at this troll business! Fucking good, even! His contributions usually got loads of feedback – mostly from people agreeing with him. He couldn’t help wondering what sort of people had the time to devote so much energy to commenting on things. Some of them seemed to live the whole of their pathetic little lives in the piss-filled gutters of the newspapers …

A quick glance at the time told him he was well on schedule and that it would soon be time for a well deserved coffee break. But first he was going to surf through one of the big travel websites and let a few different aliases tell the world what a fantastic time they’d had in a hotel he’d never heard of.

He had about fifty different trolls in his stable, and his job was to keep them all going. Maintaining their hotmail addresses and keeping their Facebook pages active, posting opinions that were in line with their predetermined attitudes on one of the many hundreds of forums out there. A few of his trolls were angry and shouty, others more reserved and sarcastic. Each one had its own little folder with a character description:

Or:

On a chart he carefully jotted down which trolls had had an outing, and on which forums. Which ones had been engaged in heated discussions in defence of which clients, and which ones were currently inactive. He couldn’t help being impressed by the whole set-up. If a client’s trademark was getting a hammering somewhere, you just had to choose a suitable troll and deploy it.

Clicking to like something, or writing a few positive contributions. More or less as he was about to do on the travel site. Evidently the hotel’s average score had fallen below an acceptable level, and needed some positive feedback to get the average up again.

Simple!

Frank had told him about a consultancy firm that got into trouble a few years ago and had been stupid enough to get its employees to write comments in defence of the company under entirely new usernames. It only took a couple of days for the blogosphere to yank the idiots’ trousers down and wreck the trademark to the extent that the company had had to change name.

It was different with tame trolls. Because they were already established out in cyberspace, no-one could call into question where they had appeared from. So they could be used to clients’ advantage without risking the indignant fury of the internet. Smart. Really smart, actually!

But if he could choose, he would probably rather work at the other end. Causing trouble and trying to get undesirable discussions to spin so far out of control that the moderator had to shut them down. Unfortunately he
hadn’t been allocated an attack troll yet, they were managed by his colleagues at the bank of desks to his right.

Not that he’d had that many jobs, but this was one of the best of them, if not
the
best.

His workmates were okay, the money was more than decent and he got on pretty well with Frank. As he found his feet his fear of being uncovered gradually subsided. The only person who still gave him bad vibes was Philip Argos. He was an imposing figure, no doubt about that, and he seemed sharp as a razor. Everyone who had spent any time working with Philip had something like admiration on their faces when they talked about him. Maybe that wasn’t so odd – Philip Argos was clearly a charismatic leader. But not just that, he was also really …

Unnerving! That was the best word she could think of to describe him.

Even though she had basically only seen his back and met his gaze in the mirror, he radiated something that both scared and appealed to her.

Control.

That was it.

This man had complete control – both over himself and over the world around him. He was usually already on the running machine by the time she arrived at the gym just after seven, which meant he was an early-riser. Her exercise sessions usually lasted just under an hour, and on most occasions the man was still there when she left. At least one and half hours on the machine, in other words, which at the speed he went must mean something like thirty kilometres of concentrated running.

Only once had she seen him interrupt his session. She had been warming up on one of the cross-trainers, and when she glanced over at him as she usually did, he
suddenly stepped off the machine. For a moment she thought he’d seen her looking and was on his way over to her. But before she had time to analyse what she felt about this impending contact, he had turned away to answer a mobile phone that had been in front of him.

It must have been an important call to make him interrupt his session, and she couldn’t help switching off her iPod and trying to listen to what he was saying. But to her disappointment he was talking quietly, almost whispering, and in a language she didn’t understand either.

It sounded like French …