Game: A Thriller (23 page)

HP shook his head doubtfully. He’d rather take a few deep breaths from the moped’s exhaust than live the rest of his life like this. No TV, no Internet, not even electricity! All alone in the dark in the middle of nowhere. Throw in what the Game had done to him, and it wasn’t so strange that the man seemed to be teetering on the edge.

“This farm,” he said cautiously. “Where exactly is it?”

Erman snorted.

“Where the fuck do you think? Where do you put a server farm of that size? Where are the best connections, the most stable transfers, and the best environment for computer traffic? Think! Where are all the big players up here? Northern Europe’s very own Silicon Valley!”

It took a few seconds before HP’s overworked brain made the connection.

“Kista,” he whispered, almost devoutly.

“Bingo!” Erman replied with a smile. “You’re not completely thick after all!”

♦  ♦  ♦

“Nilla, there’s something I’d like to sort out with you, something important and I’d really appreciate it if you had a couple of minutes to talk.”

Good speech, entirely in line with her preprepared script.

Still silence, but at least Nilla hadn’t hung up. She could hear the other woman breathing down the line. Heavy breaths, as if she’d been running to answer in time. Rebecca interpreted the silence as a sort of encouragement.

“I’d like to explain to you what happened that evening, and
why. How everything ended up the way it did. But I’d rather not do it over the phone. Is there any chance we could meet for a chat somewhere?”

She was trying her level best to sound calm and collected. As if what she was asking was no big deal, just a conversation between two adults to sort a few things out.

“I thought I’d made myself clear in my email, Rebecca.”

Nilla’s voice was ice-cold.

“Neither I nor anyone else in my family has anything to say to you. Please don’t call me again!”

“B-but . . .” she began, before she realized that the conversation was over.

♦  ♦  ♦

“So if you were me, a relatively low-tech guy who wanted to cause a bit of trouble for the Game and the Game Master. Give them a bit of payback for all the shit they’ve thrown at the two of us. What would you do?”

Erman nodded thoughtfully.

“Interesting question, hmm . . .”

He thought in silence for a few seconds.

“Obviously, the best thing would be to blow the whole thing sky high, but maybe that’s a bit over the top . . .”

“Really, you think so?!” slipped out of HP, but Erman didn’t seem to have noticed.

“If I were you, I’d probably focus on the money,” he went on.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, you already know how the rewards work, a foreign bank card linked to an anonymous account. Pretty much like the charge card for a cell. You just take out the money, and it’s impossible to trace who’s got which card.”

HP nodded impatiently.
Get to the point, mofo!

“All their payments work the same way, in principle. Wages for the functionaries, the Ants, and the subcontractors, it’s all done by cards, and those in turn are fed from an anonymous account in a bank somewhere in the Caribbean. The mother account is always loaded with cash to keep the whole thing rolling. If I seriously wanted to fuck with the Game Master, I’d try to get hold of the account number and make a few withdrawals. That would paralyze the whole Game for weeks, maybe months, and you’d end up with enough money to hide yourself away pretty damn well in some distant but agreeable place.”

“Would that really work?”

“Yeah, probably.” Erman shrugged. “The point is that because the Game is damn careful to keep everything anonymous, there are no individuals linked to the account. All you need is the numerical combination that’s currently being used. I’d guess that they change the number all the time, so you’d have to be pretty smart, and pretty quick. I never got to see any of the numbers myself, I just organized the setup itself. The guys they flew in used to type them in whenever it was necessary. But it’s all inside the farm. I’m sure of that.”

“Is it possible to hack into it?”

“No, like I said, I tried that, and if I can’t get into it when I was the person who set the whole thing up, then I guarantee you that no one else would be able to either. We’re talking IT security that’s better than the Pentagon and NASA combined . . .”

Sure, HP thought skeptically, but either way, hacking didn’t look like an option. “So how would you get hold of the account number?”

He had already guessed the answer.

“You’d have to get inside the farm. There’s a control room, and once you got inside there it would be possible to extract whatever you needed, as long as you knew where to look. If they so much as guess that the account has been blown, they’ll change the code instantly.”

HP nodded as he stubbed out his cigarette on his shoe.

This was all sounding a bit
Mission: Impossible.

But what the hell, he hadn’t come all the way out here just to go home empty-handed. Too much information was better than too little.

“Can you tell me what I’d have to do?” he said, tossing the butt toward the nearest tree.

Erman chuckled.

“Sure, Double O Seven, no problem!”

He turned on his heel and went back inside the house.

HP took the chance to light another cig. This whole thing was starting to sound like a fucking blockbuster video. He wasted a couple of minutes trying to work out which one came closest.
Conspiracy Theory
maybe, or
Enemy of the State
? It was like a mixture of all of them, some kind of tribute thing. He took a couple of deep drags. High above he could hear a familiar droning.

Farthundra Airline’s afternoon flight. He grinned to himself.

Erman came back out onto the porch with a folded piece of paper in his hand.

“This is all you need: the address of the farm and a few old user names that might still work. I’ve written down the bank’s website as well, in case you make it that far. Now you just have to figure out a way of getting into the building, because I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.”

HP took hold of the piece of paper, but Erman didn’t let go.

“Promise me one thing, HP. ”

“What?”

“You’ve seen how I live, what the Game did to me.” His stare was starting to get to HP again. “Promise me that you’ll use this information to give them one hell of a fucking kick in the balls, just promise me that!” Erman’s face was starting to change color again.

“Sure, mate, no problem, take it easy!” HP muttered uncomfortably, snatching the note.

He’d got what he wanted, and it was pretty much time to get away from there.

The address was the only thing he’d get any real use out of; the rest was more or less meaningless. No matter what he’d promised this hillbilly, he was hardly going to break into a damn server farm, all he needed was a way to get to the Game Master and now he’d got it. A visiting address, no less. All he had to do was head out there and knock on the door, if he still felt like doing that after everything he’d heard.

The buzzing sound above them returned and Erman twitched. He stared anxiously around the treetops trying to catch a glimpse of the plane.

“Take it easy, Erman, it’s just Farthundra’s very own airline doing its daily flight.” HP grinned nervously. “Nothing worth crapping your pants over.”

“What-did-you-say?!” Erman spun toward him and HP saw that the crazy look had suddenly made a full-blown comeback.

“I said it was just a plane towing an advertisement for some fucking farmers’ market in Fjärdhundra next week. Nothing to get steamed about.”

He was speaking slowly on purpose, the way Erman had
done to him half an hour or so ago, but he could hear how worried he sounded.

“You’ve seen the plane before?”

Erman’s face had gone completely white.

“Y-yes, it flew past just before you picked me up in your hicksville limo; just take it easy, okay!”

Erman didn’t seem to hear him. He stood completely still for a few seconds.

“Go!” he finally managed to say through gritted teeth.

“What?” HP didn’t understand anything.

“Go, get lost, fuck off, are you thick or what?!”

He spun his arms and took a step toward HP.

HP backed away instinctively and held up his hands.

“Okay, okay, calm down, I’m going, I’m going!”

Christ, the guy had really lost it this time.

“It’s only a damn plane, Erman, there’s no need to get so worked up!”

♦  ♦  ♦

So much for that brilliant plan.

Nilla still hated her, she’d understood that much. Which wasn’t really so surprising, seeing as it had been her adored big brother who had gone through the balcony railing.

Nilla and Dag had always been close, and she’d never accepted the investigation’s conclusions that the whole thing had been at least in part an accident. The company the housing association contracted to renovate the façade had cut corners when they were fixing the balconies back on, and several bolts had evidently been missing.

“An unfortunate circumstantial coincidence,” it had said in the verdict.

For Henke that meant ten months for causing another person’s death instead of manslaughter. If the balcony railing had been correctly fitted with all its bolts in place, Dag would probably have been okay.

But it was difficult to know for sure. The shove had been pretty hard, maybe hard enough for him to have tumbled
over
the railing? That couldn’t be ruled out, at any rate, or so the court had reasoned.

For her own part, she doubted that conclusion. Dag was big and heavy, almost ninety kilos of muscle, and he had good balance. If the railing hadn’t given way, he wouldn’t have fallen, and their lives would have looked very different. Henke would never have ended up in prison and she would never have been released from hers. His imprisonment and her freedom—each one was dependent on the other.

The problem was just that it shouldn’t have been like that. That’s what she had wanted to tell Nilla. What had really happened that night. And why . . .

♦  ♦  ♦

“Only a plane? Only a plane?!!!” Small drops of saliva were getting caught in the yellowing beard around Erman’s mouth.

“You don’t get any of it, do you, you stupid fuck?! They’ve got ears everywhere, absolutely every-fucking-where! Didn’t you understand what I said about the Ants? Who did you talk to on your way here, the bus driver, some nice old lady on the train? Did you happen to mention it on the phone to some friend, or were you stupid enough to write the directions on your computer?”

His voice had hit falsetto again.

“None of that, I promise . . .”

HP was slowly backing toward the wheel tracks that led toward civilization. This was getting really creepy now. He had to get away from this psycho, straightaway. God knew what would happen otherwise.
In the forest no one can hear you squeal
.

♦  ♦  ♦

Erman took another couple of steps forward, clenching his fists, then abruptly stuck out one of his index fingers.

“Google!” he managed to spit. “You Google Mapped the address, admit it!”

“No, I didn’t!” HP replied instinctively, then realized at the same moment that that’s exactly what he’d done.

Erman must have noticed the change in the look on his face, or else he guessed that HP was lying.

Either way, he leaped a couple of strides toward HP.

“You stupid fuck!” Erman roared. “I gave you one simple instruction. Don’t talk to anyone, don’t use anything electronic. And you go and Google Map me! You might as well have been working for the Game Master directly, Christ, I ought to kill you on the spot!”

“Sorry!” HP muttered, now too terrified to even try to lie properly.

For a moment he thought he was going to end up buried like the fucking Bocksten Man. Dug up in two hundred years’ time to get his perfectly preserved backside put on display in a glass case in Farthundra’s local history museum. The thought almost made him crap his pants.

Erman took another few steps in HP’s direction, then he momentarily stopped.

He stood there for a couple of seconds, apparently thinking.
Then without a word he turned on his heel and disappeared inside the house.

HP didn’t hang around to find out if he was going to come back out with a shotgun. Instead he turned and fled along the path back toward the road as fast as he could. Above him he could still hear the drone of the airplane. It sounded like it was circling.

After a couple of hundred meters he reached the edge of the forest. There was about a kilometer of gravel track through the open fields before he could reach the relative safety of the road. He looked anxiously over his shoulder. Shit, obviously he should have nicked the flatbed moped, or at least pulled the sparking plug out or something. Now he’d just be an open target out there.

Oh well, no point worrying about that now.

He couldn’t hear anything like a moped engine, but that was mainly because of the damn plane that was still circling overhead. He noticed that the advertising banner was gone. So what was the idiot doing up there, then?

He left the shade of the forest and set off toward the road. Every ten meters or so he glanced behind him. Still nothing. He was starting to get his fear back under control. What a psycho the guy had turned out to be. Thanks a lot, Mange, that was a brilliant tip-off!

Another glance. No sign of Erman. Great!

It wasn’t until he got about halfway across the field that he noticed that the sound of the plane engine had changed. Before, it had been mainly a monotonous buzzing sound, one note higher or lower depending on where in its circuit it happened to be. But unexpectedly the sound was getting louder, both in volume and pitch, and it took him a few seconds before
he understood why. Because out of the blue, when he looked over his shoulder yet again to make sure Erman wasn’t coming after him, he discovered that the plane was diving straight at him like he was fucking Cary Grant! He could hardly believe his eyes.

It came closer and closer, but it wasn’t until the plane was more or less filling his field of vision that he had the sense to get really scared. The roar of the engine and the sound of the wind on the wings were drowning out all his thoughts. He saw the whirring propeller at the front and just beneath it the metal beam connecting the undercarriage coming straight toward him, but he was still having trouble taking in what was going on.