The Game Trilogy (50 page)

He made a face that HP had trouble interpreting.

‘Over the next few weeks the company is going to be facing some serious challenges. I’m afraid I can’t share all the details with you, but one thing that’s very clear is that the demands on each and every one of us are going to increase considerably. It’s a whole new ballgame, as the Americans would say … As you might have noticed already, there are certain people who haven’t quite kept up with developments. Who no longer match our profile, if you understand what I mean …?’

HP nodded. His heart was suddenly racing with expectation.

‘Obviously this is just between the two of us, but as soon as we’ve got past Anna’s funeral, there’s going to be a reorganization. I’m thinking of moving Frank to the Laundry, which will mean that we need a new team leader in the Troll Mine. I don’t suppose you can think of anyone who might be suitable for the job …?’

‘I can probably think of at least one candidate,’ HP replied with a broad grin.

She realized she was clutching at straws, but in her situation she hardly had anything to lose. If nothing happened soon, she’d be both out of a job and a convicted criminal.

Besides, there was something about the old man that appealed to her, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. But that was probably mostly just rubbish … Tage Sammer reminded her of her dad, that was obviously it, and that was probably why she’d decided to email him.

‘Well, like I said. This flat is practically unique. The view, the location and not least the original features …’

The blonde estate agent gestured towards the brick wall in one corner of the room, then at the exposed beams in the ceiling as if she were a museum guide in the middle of a tour.

The flat was undeniably impressive. An old loft, renovated to make a spacious three-room apartment at the top of Stigberget on Södermalm, with a magnificent view of Djurgården and the entrance to Stockholm harbour. The previous owner must have been an architect, because it looked like it came straight out of one of the design magazines HP usually found at the barber’s. From his point of view, he couldn’t really understand how people could get so excited about Danish design from the fifties, Teppanyaki grills or imported Italian limestone. But design was the fetish of the twenty-first century. You only had to compare the feeble little shelf of shame reserved for porn mags with the massive display of interior design magazines in any petrol station to realize that. Everyone who was anyone evidently fucked on colourful Carl Malmsten sofas instead of a sturdy old Klippan covered in sweaty fake leather from Ikea … And speaking of the F-word: Rilke seemed completely blown away by interior design porn. She soaked up every cliché that fell from the estate agent’s mouth, giggled in a false way at the right places, and at one point he got the impression that the two women were flirting with each other. Ordinarily he would have found the whole scenario a bit sexy. But for some reason the adult-film director who usually lived inside his head seemed to have gone to lunch, because the giggling and the little intimate touches were actually making him more annoyed than excited. He glanced at the time. It was almost
an hour since they left the office, and they hadn’t even had lunch yet.

He didn’t have time for this sort of nonsense – he actually had a job to do, and so did Rilke, especially if she was going to be able to afford a place like this …

Rilke seemed to pick up on his irritation, because she concluded her discussion with the estate agent, exchanged air-kisses, and then came over to him with a key-ring dangling teasingly from her finger.

‘Mette’s letting us have a look on our own for a while,’ she said as the front door closed. ‘What do you say about starting in the bedroom?’

She read through the email more times that she needed to, and for some reason she couldn’t help smiling. She liked his tone, and even if the message was short, it still felt strangely reassuring.

A dream.

That was what it felt like.

For the first time in his life he had an exciting job with a good salary, and he seemed to be the boss’s favourite. As well as that, he had met a girl, a real ten-pointer who was as attractive as she was smart.

Money, career and love. This was what life was supposed to be like!

There was just one problem. It wasn’t his dream.

It belonged to Magnus Sandström; the fake one, though, not the original.

But ever since that lunch with Philip, he found himself toying more and more with a rather pleasant thought. Dumping the phone in the nearest drain, moving into that flat with Rilke, forgetting all about Anna Argos and the Game, and making a normal life for himself.

Difficult – of course! But not impossible.

Most of it seemed to be going brilliantly – if it weren’t for what Nox had told him the other evening.

It wasn’t really that dramatic. But Nox had taken his surveillance duties very seriously, and had seen two lads, eighteen to twenty or so, hanging around for several hours in a doorway on the other side of the street from the hotel. Nox recognized everyone who lived in the whole block, and these two definitely didn’t fit in. They were well-dressed and polished, and had seemed nervous.

Nox hadn’t seen any mobiles or cameras, he was definite on that point, but HP still found himself increasingly uneasy about the two men.

If the Game, against all expectation, had found out that he’d come back home to Stockholm, he couldn’t see any way that he could be traced to the Hotel Hopeless. It would have been far more likely for them to send their spies to his old flat in Maria Trappgränd, or to Becca’s place out in Fredhäll, but he’d been careful to steer well clear of both of those. Okay, so he’d popped into Manga’s
shop briefly, and in hindsight that could be seen as an unnecessary risk. But he hadn’t been able to resist the temptation to see a friendly face, and the shop was only a few blocks from the hotel, and he had disguised himself well. Unfortunately his visit had been in vain, seeing as Manga hadn’t even been there, just his pimply stand-in.

Could they have been watching the shop and followed him back to the hotel?

He didn’t think so, but on the other hand you could never be entirely certain …

One good thing about his impending promotion was that his passcard suddenly worked on all the doors. That meant he could move about unhindered between the Filter at one end of the office and the Laundry at the other.

Beens didn’t appear to have noticed that his days were probably numbered, because he was still making just as little effort as before. He loitered in the staffroom, hovered around other people’s desks and kept coming up with ‘jokey’ little pranks.

It was hardly surprising that Philip wanted to replace him with Frank. The other night Beens and his mates had
come up with the idea of reprogramming the speed-dial buttons of the phones in the Troll Mine. HP had nothing against practical jokes, quite the opposite, in fact. But this was all a bit nerdy and studenty, to put it mildly. Twenty minutes of his valuable time wasted deleting the speaking clock, Horny Veronica and the Samaritans from his phone, and then reinstalling the numbers he needed in order to be able to do his job.

As if that weren’t bad enough, HP had managed to press the wrong option on one of the menus and inadvertently deleted one of the universal speed-dial numbers shared by all the phones in the office …

In the end he had been forced to grasp the nettle and ask Åsa in reception for her help sorting everything out. Her silence had cost him a round of takeaway lattes, but there was no way he was going to let the rest of the office get hold of that little titbit. He had his reputation to think of, after all.

Unlike certain others …

When the day of departure finally arrived, Frank was going to have a hell of a job tidying up after Beens. But that was hardly HP’s problem. Even if he couldn’t help getting wound up by the retarded idiot who didn’t seem to have realized that things had changed.

During their cosy night together Beens, aside from his high-school pranks, had also managed to demonstrate the tools they used in the Laundry. In principle it was nothing more than a list of negative search terms and where they stood in relation to the terms they were trying to keep clean. The hits came from the Filter, passed through the Strategy department and finally ended up on the projection wall in the Laundry.

The list on the wall contained only posts that needed to be cleaned away, and they dropped off whenever the
Laundry’s elves managed to deal with them, to be replaced by new ones. The whole thing basically happened in real time, and it was practically impossible for an outsider like him to pick up anything that might be of any use.

But as luck would have it, Beens had been quick to show him the little Access database he’d put together himself to keep tabs on everything, whilst simultaneously helping him keep his own workload to a minimum. The lazy sod even sat there boasting about how he had designed the program a long time ago, when no-one had a complete grasp of the system, and that the application wouldn’t be regarded as kosher by Philip.

If HP’s suspicions were justified, and if ArgosEye really was what kept the Game secret, cleaning up and cutting off enough information threads for the Game Master and his followers to be able to stay hidden way down in the darkness, then the evidence ought to be there in Beens’s unauthorized little database. All he had to do was get hold of it.

But really he ought to think about it, lie low for a while until things had calmed down. There was a lot going on, and this definitely wasn’t the right time to take any risks.

The only problem was that the fat lady was already waiting in the wings … The funeral was on Saturday, and the much-vaunted Stoffe was coming back on Monday. Considering how tightly Philip ran this ship, Beens’s database would be history the moment his scuffed size tens made their last exit on Friday afternoon, and with that his hottest lead would be lost. In other words, he didn’t have a lot of choice.

He might as well drop the whole undercover act at once if he wasn’t going to try to get hold of that database.

It was now Wednesday, it was almost half past eleven,
and he could practically hear Beens’s stomach rumbling on the other side of the office door.

He tapped his passcard against the reader and was instantly granted access to the Laundry. A few heads looked up, but a moment later their hands were once again flying over their keyboards in their respective cubicles.

‘All right, Manga?’

‘Hello, you lot!’ he said loudly in response to the mumbled greetings, as he swung round the corner into Beens’s larger cubicle, set slightly apart from the others.

‘Hi Beens, time for lunch? Carbonara down at the corner, my treat!’

‘Great, okay! I’m up for that.’

‘Good, but you need to shift your arse.’

HP pretended to look at his watch.

‘I’ve got a meeting at quarter past twelve, so we need to be quick.’

Beens quickly stood up and grabbed his padded coat from the hanger dangling from the side-wall of his cubicle.

‘Okay, I’m all done,’ he panted as he struggled with the sleeves.

‘You sure are,’ HP grinned, slapping him on the back.

The computer screen was still showing a YouTube window, and HP hurriedly positioned himself in the way. He put one hand on Beens’s shoulder and steered him swiftly out of the cubicle without giving him a chance to lock his computer.

He still hadn’t quite made up his mind …

‘You’re not upset about that thing with the phones, are you …?’ Beens grinned as they headed off towards reception.

‘God, no, that was a good laugh …’ HP said, doing his best to sound like he meant it. ‘Fuck you if you can’t take a joke, as I always say …’

‘Quite right! Sometimes this place gets a bit too uptight with Philip and his control mania. I mean, for fuck’s sake, the phones have even got 112 on speed-dial. Check number one for yourself if you don’t believe me!’ Beens grinned again, and once more HP felt obliged to smile back.

Oh yes, he knew perfectly well what speed-dial number one was, seeing as he had managed to erase it when he was trying to clean up the mess caused by the prank.

One one two is hard to do …

He had to make up his mind, take a decision.

Safe or all in?

As they passed reception Åsa waved at him.

‘Thanks for the coffee, Manga!’

‘My pleasure,’ he muttered, giving the back of Beens’s head the evil eye.

Okay, he’d made his decision. No matter what happened afterwards, he couldn’t pass up the chance of getting hold of the joker’s little homemade database.

‘Shit, I forgot to finish an email I promised to send before twelve!’ he groaned, slapping his forehead in true drama school fashion.

‘It’ll only take five minutes, max. You go on ahead and get a table …’

He herded Beens out through the door, watched him long enough to see him get in the lift, then jogged back towards the Laundry.

A quick glance at the time. Only a minute left before the screensaver automatically locked Beens’s computer. This was going to be fucking tight …

In spite of the rumbling aches in her body she decided to take a walk.

She looked around carefully as she stepped out into the street, and stopped a couple more times to check.

But she couldn’t see anyone following her, and after twenty minutes or so out in the cold she went back home.

On the stairs on the way up to her flat she saw that something was different.

There was something hanging from her door, and as she got closer she saw what it was. A bouquet of dry, dead roses.

No-one reacted as he carefully slid back into the Laundry. Beens’s screen was just fading as he slipped into the cubicle. He quickly pressed the space bar and the YouTube window reappeared. Five seconds later and the computer would have locked him out.

He moved the mouse to an icon of two angry, staring, predatory eyes.

The computer whirred.

Wake up – time to die!

A quick double-click and suddenly the database was open.

He felt in one of his jacket pockets and pulled out his new USB memory stick. Ten gigabytes – that ought to be more than enough for Beens’s little extracurricular project. He put the stick next to one of the USB ports, but suddenly hesitated. Was he absolutely certain this was a good idea?

Maybe not, but he was sure he’d never get another chance like it.

He really didn’t have any choice at all.

He pressed the memory stick into the slot and waited a few seconds.

Once the computer had finished thinking, he opened Explorer, then clicked and dragged the pair of eyes towards the symbol for the external memory.

No response.

He tried again. Still nothing.

Shit!

He tried a different way, going back to the database and selecting ‘export to’, with the external memory as the destination.

Suddenly there was a warning bleep, and then a dialogue box appeared in the middle of the screen.

He clicked the icon for yes.

Nothing happened.

Shit! He only had a few minutes before Beens the carbonara king would start to get impatient. He tried once more, but got the error message again.

Evidently there was some sort of program that blocked anyone from saving files to an external memory.

Bollocks – he should have guessed!

Lex Wikileaks
, for fuck’s sake! It was obvious that Philip would have done his homework.

Okay, time for a different plan, and PDQ!

He couldn’t copy the database and look through it at home in peace and quiet as he had hoped. He’d just have to check it there and then, fast as fuck!

So how did it work?

After a bit of random clicking he brought up a search box and quickly typed in
Game.

The database responded instantly, and HP’s pulse shifted up a gear.

Six hundred and twelve results!

He checked the first, only to realize that it had nothing to do with what he was looking for. Same thing with the second and third.

He glanced at the time. He only had another minute, two at the most, before he had to go.

He tried searching for
game + game master.

One hundred and nineteen results – much better.

Just as he was moving the cursor onto the first result he heard the office door open quickly.

‘Hi Elroy,’ he heard someone call out, then some indistinct chatter that he couldn’t make out.

Shit!

No matter what the reason for Elroy’s visit down there was, he mustn’t find him at Beens’s computer, that much was fucking obvious.

But this was his last chance to get a look at the database.

He cautiously raised his head above the screen and the sight of the back of Elroy’s closely-cropped head made him duck down again at once.

‘External memory? No, for God’s sake, see for yourself. That’s against company policy,’ he heard one of the Laundry guys say.

Damn!

The bastard memory stick must have triggered some sort of alarm. He ought to have realized that a company like ArgosEye would have cast-iron procedures to stop people downloading and taking any information home with them. Suddenly he remembered that one of the many pieces of paper he had signed on his first day at work had dealt with that very issue.

Christ, how stupid!

He had something like fifteen or twenty seconds before Elroy blocked him off inside the cubicle and he was toast.

He yanked out the USB stick and took a last look at the screen.

was the heading of the first search result, and it took every last bit of his self-control not to click on it.

Fuckingbastardbollocks!

The voices were getting closer. With excruciating reluctance he hammered at the escape key and then quickly pressed Ctrl+Alt+Del. Just as the screen locked he threw himself under the desk.

He could see movement through the cracks in the cubicle walls.

Hurry up, hurry up!

He snaked into the narrow cable run that led between the panels, pressed down against the floor and pulled the desk chair in behind him. A moment later a pair of well polished size tens appeared in his field of vision, so close that he thought he could smell the polish.

There were a few seconds of silence.

Then he heard Elroy’s voice.

‘I’m in position, but there’s nothing here. Whoever it was, he must have been smart enough to give up – over!’

‘Understood,’ Philip’s voice said over the radio. ‘We need to keep our eyes open. It looks like we’ve got a rat …’