Game: A Thriller (35 page)

HP decided to rephrase his question.

“Would you mind explaining what you’re doing, Rehyman?”

“The spray makes the guard’s palm print stand out, then I cover the screen with a ballistic gel, which has the same consistency and temperature as human skin. The reader detects warmth, texture, and the pattern of the object presented to it, and if these match anything in its database it opens the door.”

The same emotionless tone of voice, without the slightest hint of nerves or excitement. The guy was obviously a complete retard! This was never going to work!

A loud click from the lock quickly made him change his mind.

“I’ll be damned, you’re a genius, Rehyman!” HP grinned as they stepped through the door.

Another camera was staring down at them and HP raised a questioning eyebrow at his partner in crime. Obviously the genius didn’t pick up on such a subtle gesture but HP didn’t bother asking. That one must have been running on playback as well. Sending old pictures of an empty stairwell, over and over again.

Say what you like—Rain Man might have zero awareness of social niceties, but when it came to technology he was obviously Harry-fucking-Potter.

♦  ♦  ♦

As they approached Lindhagensplan she could feel her pulse rate go up. The VIPs had flown into Bromma this time, so the drive in was a repeat of an old favorite.

Or not . . .

By the time they reached the Traneberg Bridge she was already scanning the overpasses ahead on the far side of the water. Squinting, she tried to see if there was anyone standing up there waiting. But the distance and darkness made it impossible to tell if there was any danger waiting for them.

As they got closer she saw him. A lone figure up there on the same bridge where Henke had been standing.

And abruptly her pulse started galloping in panic.

“There’s someone standing on the bridge,” she managed to say, in a remarkably calm voice.

“Mmm,” her driver, Wikström, agreed, and eased up on the speed.

“Alpha 101, slow down. There’s someone up on the bridge,” she said into her microphone.

She was still surprised that her voice could sound so composed. Inside she was a wreck. She wanted to scream to Wikström
that she couldn’t breathe, that he had to stop and let her out, at once!

“Alpha 102, understood,” the VIP car behind them said, dropping back. “Be careful, 101.”

The overpass was coming closer.

The figure was leaning over the railing, completely motionless. As they got closer she was able to make out more details. It looked like he was holding something in his hands.

♦  ♦  ♦

They made it past another door and camera, and suddenly they found themselves in a long corridor. Gray linoleum floor and some faint fluorescent strip lights were all they could see. No howling alarms, flashing lights, or heavy steps from a troop of guards. This was going like clockwork! HP couldn’t help opening one of the identical brown doors that lined both sides of the corridor.

Just a sneak preview!

♦  ♦  ♦

The figure up above raised its arms over the railing, its fingers clasping a black object.

A weapon! she thought, panic stricken, and moved her hand to the butt of the pistol by her right hip.

They were close now and she saw Wikström take a tighter grasp of the steering wheel. Rebecca still had the microphone in her left hand, her knuckles white against the black plastic.

Make a decision, Normén!
the voice inside her head was screaming.

But she was completely paralyzed.

Just as they passed below the bridge Wikström swerved
sharply to the left. She leaned unconsciously in the same direction to avoid the projectile.

Then they were past, and a couple of seconds later the car behind had followed their maneuver.

Nothing had happened.

And instantly Rebecca knew what the person up there had been holding in their hands. A cell phone.

♦  ♦  ♦

The room was empty, not a single thing inside. To judge by the layer of dust on the windowsill, no one had cleaned in there for months, maybe even years. A quick look through a few of the other doors gave the same result.

The whole floor seemed abandoned, without so much as a single cardboard box or trash bag of left-behind garbage. The only thing that gave away the fact that the place must have been inhabited at some point was a weird poster he found pinned up on the wall in the last office. It looked familiar, a man in a black coat and a bowler hat with his face hidden by a green apple. Behind the man the horizon was slowly filling with dark clouds, as if a storm were approaching.

For some reason the picture made him shiver.

This place was actually pretty damn creepy!

Rehyman had stopped at the door at the far end of the corridor and pulled out his laptop once more. He held it against the wall and tapped a few more commands into it with his free hand.

“Reception’s on the other side of this staircase,” he said to HP, who was carefully closing the office door behind him.

“The guard will soon have finished his round, so we need to get up there before he gets back in front of his screen. The
system lists which readers are activated and who by. With a bit of luck he won’t check too carefully when he gets back from his round, but even if he does it will just look like he opened the same door twice. It could easily be the system messing with him, that sort of thing sometimes happens. But if he gets back before we’re in, we’ve had it. No matter how stupid he is, he’ll realize that he can’t very well be sitting in his box and opening doors somewhere else in the building at the same time. You get it?”

HP nodded, trying to shake the feeling of unease. Time to pull the stops out!

♦  ♦  ♦

The delivery at the Grand had gone without a hitch. A quick stop, unload, then back to Police Headquarters.

But even so, the T-shirt she was wearing under her bulletproof vest was soaked with sweat. The panic was still there, bubbling just below the surface, and she had to use all her strength to stop it from breaking out.

Why the hell would anyone be standing on that bridge taking pictures at this time of night? Right there, at exactly the same spot where Henke had stood?

For a crazy moment she had actually believed it was him standing up there. That for some bloody insane reason he’d decided to carry on with the Game and had been ordered to repeat an old favorite.

Then, once she’d understood that it wasn’t Henke hanging over the railing, her agitated brain had switched track. What if the Game was carrying on without him, only now she was the one they were playing with?

And that Micke was involved somehow?

And there was the whole business of the notes and phone calls. All the loose ends were starting to drive her mad.

The whole thing was completely mad, unreal, deranged!

♦  ♦  ♦

They took the flight of concrete steps in a few strides, then, another outwitted palm reader later, they were standing in a new corridor. Along the left-hand side ran the same row of anonymous brown doors as on the floor below, but the right-hand wall looked completely different. To start with it was considerably more recent than its counterpart, and it contained just one single door. A proper one at that, probably both sound-and fireproof.

The reader also looked different. Almost like a little peep show at face height.

“Retina scanner,” Rehyman declared. “Reads the pattern on the cornea with the help of a laser,” he explained. “More secure than palm and fingerprints. Basically, it can’t be fooled.”

“What d’you mean,
it can’t be fooled
? Have we got this far just to give up?” HP hissed.

He glared at Rehyman, who was hunting through his bag, entirely unmoved. After a few seconds he hauled out what looked like a pair of extra-thick glasses with extremely thin frames. He put them on and then stuck his head in the box on the wall.

HP watched as a light on it started to flash.

He held his breath and felt his pulse thudding against his temples. Rain Man evidently didn’t even have the sense to be scared. A pair of joke-shop glasses, then shoving his head in to confront a laser. So how in the name of holy fuck was the genius going to pull this one off?

♦  ♦  ♦

It was the note that finally made her blow her top. She was certain she had pulled it off, crumpled it up, and chucked it on the floor of her locker before she started her shift. But now there it was again.

Picked up, smoothed out, and back in place, it shrieked out its message and all of a sudden it was as if the whole world around her collapsed.
Okay, that’s enough of this shit,
was the only coherent thought she was able to make out in the chaos in her head.

Enough of this shit!

She slammed the locker door shut and took a couple of long strides to get out of the changing room. When she’d got far enough down the dark corridor she pulled out her cell and scrolled through to get the number.

The answering machine clicked in.

“You’ve got to stop!” she screamed to the machine at the other end. “Okay, I’m a murdering little whore, you’re right! It was me who pushed Dag. Me, not Henke! He took the blame, sacrificed himself for me. But I was the one who killed him! If it wasn’t for me, Dag would still be alive today. I might even have been able to save him. There was a chance, a slim chance. But I didn’t take it, and you know why! Because I’d never have got away! I was trapped with him. Till death do us part.”

She composed herself for a moment before going on.

“He always cried afterward, that was the worst thing. Sobbing that he was sorry and how much he loved me. That the love between us was so strong that sometimes he couldn’t handle it. And that was why he lost control. As if love had anything to do with it . . . !

“But I forgave him, even though I was sometimes so badly bruised I could hardly stand. I comforted him and promised never to make him so angry again. Like everything was my fault . . . God, how pathetic! I loved him, and I hated myself for that. For what I let him do to me!”

She had to pause again to regain control of her voice.

“He changed me, remade me—into someone I recognized less and less. As if I, his fiancée, was no longer me but someone else. A stranger, with no will of her own, without any control. A passive bloody victim!”

She took a deep, tremulous breath, closed her eyes—then let it out.

“That evening was the worst of my life,” she said slowly. “But at the same time also the best. Dag wasn’t the only person who went over the edge of the balcony, at least not the way I see it. He took the old Rebecca with him. And that’s why I let them fall, the pair of them! Self-defense, survival instinct, call it what you like. They died down there—so that I could survive! So how dare you start fucking haunting me now!”

♦  ♦  ♦

Suddenly the red light went out, Rehyman pulled out his head from the box and a moment later the mechanism of the door began to whirr.

“H-how the hell did you do that?” HP gasped.

“Nothing to it if you know how the database is constructed. A 3-D plastic model of someone else’s cornea—you can order them off the net. Add a pair of cheap glasses and it’s ready.”

Rehyman pulled at the handle and the door slid open silently.

“B-but hang on a moment!”

HP was trying in vain to fit everything together in his head. It didn’t make sense, there was something missing.

“How the hell could you know which eyes were in the database, I mean . . . How could you know whose cornea to copy?” he explained slowly, so that the muppet could understand.

“Easy,” Rehyman said with a shrug of the shoulders. “I just took a copy of the database when I installed the system.”

Before HP had time to recover, Rehyman swung the door open.

HE HAD DEFINITELY
expected more than this. A huge room with loads of workstations in front of a fucking great screen. Kind of  “
Ground control to Major Tom . . . Houston, we have a problem . . .
” Something like that.

Okay, so his earlier surveillance hadn’t exactly backed up that theory, but this?

A little windowless room with one single desk at the right-hand end. White walls, gray plastic floor, not even a bloody coffeemaker. There was a hefty-looking double door opposite with a little window showing rows of computer cabinets. A distant rumble from the servers in there, mixed with the hum of the air con.

And that was pretty much it.

The place even smelled of antiseptic . . .

“Why the hell didn’t you mention that you installed the security system?!” he hissed at his own little nimrod.

Rehyman shrugged.

“You didn’t ask,” he replied as he pulled out his laptop again.

You didn’t ask!!
Of course, I should have asked . . . Note to self: remember to strangle this prize retard as soon as you get out
of here intact!
HP thought as he approached the little work station.

Considering this was Ground Control, it really wasn’t much to write home about. A double screen, a keyboard, and a mouse.

And that was it.

It took a while before he got it. Erman had never actually said the Game was physically run from here; that had been HP’s own poorly thought-out conclusion. Whoever was in charge of the purely physical work, sending out assignments, editing the clips, managing the Ant farm and all the rest could obviously do that from anywhere in the world. All you needed was strategically positioned servers like this one to keep the whole thing rolling. And if Mission Control could be anywhere, it would be pretty stupid to put it in little old Sweden, and he felt almost ashamed of being stupid enough ever to have thought differently.

This was an outpost, a silent partner that looked after itself, and the little room he was in was no more than an ordinary service station in case you had to adjust the servers.

Whatever, it still meant a way into the Game, Erman had been crystal clear on that point.