Game: A Thriller (31 page)

It was a hell of a relief and made everything a bit easier to cope with, now that she knew who had thrown the stone through the windshield, and possibly even why. But obviously she couldn’t tell anyone that whole story about the Game. Not even Anderberg would manage to stay quiet about something like that, she was sure.

So she’d just have to deal with her demons the way she always had. With shock therapy.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and all that macho bullshit . . . If you were terrified, you ought to join the police. If you felt insecure, you should become a bodyguard, and if you had a car crash you just had to jump back in the driving seat as soon as you could. Take the bull by the horns and put your foot hard on the pedal.

Yippee ki-yay!
as Henke would have put it.

She wondered what he was doing now.

He ought to have arrived in Thailand by now, but she hadn’t heard anything.

Not that that was much of a surprise.

♦  ♦  ♦

They’d hidden themselves away well, he had to give them credit for that. The building looked completely normal at first glance. An ordinary brick office building, standard Swedish design, nothing fancy. Just like all the others along the road. Two stories, a main entrance, underground parking, and a
small, glassed-in security booth. A couple of tatty pennants drooped in front of the entrance, their cords whipping rhythmically in the summer breeze.

Bang-bang-bang-bang.

Fucking smart move, actually, hiding in plain sight like this, where everyone could see, but no one did. Much better than some secret fortress, which would only arouse a load of questions.

The best trick the devil ever pulled . . .

♦  ♦  ♦

Getting a car hadn’t been a problem. A Saab 900 from the long-stay parking lot at Arlanda. You could start those with a lollypop stick if you knew what you were doing. The barrier of the parking lot was just as easy. Mr. Sensible had naturally left the ticket in the ashtray to make sure he didn’t lose it while he was getting drunk in Mallorca. HP just had to pay a bit of cash into the machine, then drive out entirely legally. Two hundred and fifty kronor for a car with a full tank that wouldn’t be reported stolen for at least six days. And that was a fairly decent price, a hell of a lot less than Hertz, and a lot less hassle, particularly for someone who didn’t want to be seen. And who didn’t actually have a driver’s license . . .

His conscience didn’t give him much trouble either. Car theft didn’t actually feature in the law code under its own heading. “Wrongful procurement of transport” was a useless offense, pretty much on a par with crossing the road when the red man was still showing. Not the sort of thing Big Brother really cared about. So neither did HP.

He drove past the place a total of three times, taking pictures with his new cell each time he passed. Then he settled
down to wait a few blocks away, staking out the building for a couple of hours.

Once he’d settled down: plug the USB cable into the laptop and open up the media player.

And roll the film!

If you could sit and concentrate in peace and quiet, it was much easier to pick up anything unusual. The discreet cameras covering every angle of the building, the roller shutter on the slope leading down to the underground garage. The guard manning the barrier, rather than Lisa-the-receptionist-from-Bredäng. All of them small indications that he was in the right place.

He didn’t notice the biggest thing for quite a while. It wasn’t actually anything at all, but rather the opposite.

Apart from the orc on guard occasionally doing a circuit around the building, nothing was happening in or around the building.

Zippo, nada,
niente
!

No clients, no visitors, not even a gaggle of nicotine-starved employees huddled by the side door.

Zero traffic, no deliveries, and not a single car in or out of the garage even though he had been watching at both four and five o’clock.

In other words, there was no one working inside the building. Not a soul, apart from the guard. But presumably a server farm pretty much ran itself? Everything could be done remotely. Unless there were people living in there to look after the control room? Pasty little technicians who never saw daylight?

Either way, he was feeling more and more sure. This was
the place
!

This was where it was all controlled from: the Ants, the functionaries, the Players, and the assignments. Reality as a game, and the Game reality, all in one single, seamless app. Hidden behind those anonymous walls was Mission Control, and it was him, Henrik “HP” Pettersson, who had found it.

The Houston of Fucking Cyberspace!

And he was sure of one more thing.

He had to get inside.

♦  ♦  ♦

Rebecca opened the front door and sniffed carefully at the hall, but the only smell she could detect was paint. She’d picked the key up from the housing association and been given a ten-minute lecture about “how seriously we take this incident.” As if Henke was somehow responsible for someone trying to set fire to his flat?

That wasn’t an entirely unreasonable conclusion, but that wasn’t something she felt like discussing with a total stranger. At least the old man had seemed relieved when she said she was there to empty the flat before they sold it, and hurried to get her out before she had time to change her mind. Maria Trappgränd was considerably more desirable now than when they had bought the flat in the mid-nineties.

Really, the street had been completely unsuitable for Mom, with its cobblestones and narrow steps.

But as soon as Mom saw the flat and the area, she fell for a romantic dream based on an old film,
Anderssonskans Kalle
, and wouldn’t be shaken. Dad’s life insurance had been just enough for the down payment and a bit of new furniture.

Personally Rebecca thought the area was more
The Third Man
than anything. As if some unknown danger were lurking
in among the gloomy alleyways and dark courtyards. She had never liked coming here, and today was no exception.

The door was new, the hall repainted and the parquet floor repaired, but otherwise everything in the flat looked the same as usual. The same old Henke mess. And, the same as ever, she was playing at being the cavalry, helping him sort it all out.

She maneuvered the folded moving boxes into the kitchen and started to put them together. It only took half an hour or so to clear the kitchen. Most of it had evidently got broken during the fire, which at least saved her having to do any washing up. The fridge and freezer were, with the exception of some moldy cheese and a pack of frozen pies, basically empty, so she moved on to the living room. The high-tech stuff in there turned out to be pretty straightforward. The boxes were all in the corner, presumably because Henke couldn’t be bothered to carry them down to the bins. She couldn’t help wondering where the money for all these toys had come from. Computer, flat-screen TV, home cinema, and games console: altogether they must have a shop value of at least forty thousand. But then Henke probably hadn’t bought them over the counter . . .

Apart from the electronics, the furnishings in the flat weren’t much to write home about. A sagging sofa bed, a couple of rickety Billy bookcases, and a small coffee table. All things they bought when they moved in.

The bedroom still contained Mom’s creaking old pine bed. The covers and sheets were on the floor. She couldn’t quite believe he’d kept it. Okay, Mom had died in the Ersta clinic, but still . . .

An old poster from a computer games fair was the only adornment on the otherwise bare walls.

“DreamHack -07, the Biggest Game-Fair in the World,”
she muttered as she gathered together the heaps of clothes and stuffed them into various bags. Even her goodwill had its limits, so most of this could go to the nearest charity bin.

The bookshelves contained a load of DVDs, many of them clearly burned copies.

She ran her fingers along their dusty spines. There seemed to be a preponderance of gangster films, closely followed by American action films, with an impressive collection of adult material in an easy third place. But there was also a fair number of old classics, and for a moment she thought about taking some home with her. But when would she find the time to watch them?

There were quite a few books on the shelves as well, which didn’t really surprise her. Henke liked reading, had done ever since he was little.

She had helped him to start with, but he soon got the hang of it and was reading as well as her by the time he was six. Dad had had a load of old illustrated classics in a box at home, and Henke had plowed through them more than once. The cartoon versions of
Robinson Crusoe
and
Moby-Dick
had rescued his marks in Swedish pretty much the whole way through school. Ten minutes with the illustrated version from
Reader’s Digest
and he looked like he was well read.

So utterly typical of Henke!

The master of cutting corners.

Rebecca couldn’t help smiling. Despite his obvious failings, at least no one ever had a dull moment in her little brother’s company. She used to take him to the library when they were a bit older. They would hang around there instead of going home. She used to bribe him to do his homework before he could look at the comics. The library had been a refuge, a safe
haven where they could dream away a few hours, especially after Mom got ill and everything started to escalate. She still associated the smell of books with security.

Often they would sit there until the library closed and the friendly librarians had to shepherd them out.

It felt like a hundred years ago.

The photograph album was on the bottom shelf. Brown plastic sleeves, with pages that had stuck together. She’d seen the yellowing pictures many times before, but even so she couldn’t help leafing through them. It hadn’t been all bad. Sometimes life had been almost normal. Like the camping holiday in Rättvik, with her, Mom, and Henke all wearing traditional wooden clogs and squinting at the camera. The other two were blond and happy, while she had dark hair like Dad, and a more serious demeanor. Obviously he was behind the camera, the long shadow the only thing that betrayed his presence. She was pretty sure that was the closest Dad would come to being in any of the pictures in Henke’s album.

She realized that that particular summer photograph from the early eighties actually said quite a bit about their family. Henke and Mom had always been close, whereas she was more Daddy’s girl. Like Mom, she had done all she could to keep him happy, even though he usually ignored them. Dad was a serious man who did a lot of thinking, and usually preferred his own company. He seldom smiled, almost never laughed, at least not as she remembered it. Work was probably the only thing that really interested him, some sort of sales job that she couldn’t remember much about, except that he traveled a fair bit. Sometimes they’d get a postcard, and very occasionally his duty-free bags would contain something apart from bottles of spirits. Sweets, perfume, or maybe some cheap plastic toy
from the souvenir shop at the airport if the trip had gone particularly well and he was in a good mood.

On the rare days when Dad was at home he never wanted to be disturbed. He usually locked himself away in his little cubbyhole with a book and a bottle of some sort. The rest of the family simply didn’t interest him. A necessary distraction that he was obliged to tolerate, mostly for form’s sake. During his last years he got increasingly bitter at the way his life had turned out. How he had never been appreciated the way he thought he should have been.

He had started some sort of memoir project that was supposed to prove him right, but instead it just seemed to make him feel even more badly treated, especially when no one was interested in publishing it. They burned the whole lot once he was dead. They drove all the way out to Lida and threw the fat bundle of papers on one of the open barbecue fires out there.

It took just a few minutes for all those close-written pages to burn up.

None of them—not even Mom—had read a single word.

But no matter what Henke might think, Dad wasn’t actually a bad person—far from it! It wasn’t until she was grown up that she understood his behavior was a sort of handicap. That some people simply lack empathy and are therefore incapable of showing love.

Poor Mom had probably done her best. Obeying his slightest command and tiptoeing around him in an effort to keep him in a good mood. Then illness and comfort drinking took over Mom’s world and it was suddenly down to her to see that the home functioned the way Dad wanted.

It really wasn’t so strange that Rebecca fell in love with Dag. When it came down to it, he was nothing but a younger
version of her father. A bit of interest from his side was all it took. Unlike Dad, Dag could be extremely sensitive when he was in the right mood. Turning up with flowers and presents, telling the whole world how wonderful she was, and excelling in the role of devoted boyfriend. Obviously she had fallen head over heels, and he had proposed after just a few months. And so she had acquired a new authority figure to fit in with, someone whose love she would once again have to try to earn through self-sacrifice.

As if there were actually something wrong with her.

Damn it, it was easy to be wise in hindsight . . .

Henke, on the other hand, had been fairly noisy and lively when he was little. He liked playing wild games that would sometimes take their toll on the furniture, and that sort of thing didn’t go down well with Dad, especially not if he’d already had his after-work drink . . . Sometimes the belt would come out, and Dad wasn’t the sort to hold back. He’d hit over and over again, even though she and Mom begged him to stop. Until one of them got between him and Henke, to protect him, to put a stop to it all.

She remembered the hospital all too well. The look in the eyes of the doctors and nurses, and how she had held Dad’s hand tight.

His feigned calm: