Game: A Thriller (7 page)

“Ungh . . . !” Dejan twisted loose easily with some sort of advanced martial-arts technique as he let out a loud roar.

“Nice, Savic, but drop the Karate Kid bullshit!” their instructor said from the side of the mat.

Rebecca glanced up at the glass passageway. Vahtola was still watching, and it looked like the head of the unit was focusing particularly on her trio.

“Ungh!!!” Dejan was free again, this time even more easily.

Shit, she’d lost her concentration and Pain wasn’t the sort to let it pass.

“Get a grip, Normén! If you want to belong to the elite you need to step it up!”

The third attempt, and now she knew pretty much how his tactics worked. Dejan took a quick step to the side before twisting free, so what would happen if she kneed him at the back of his knee in the middle of the step?

The answer proved to be that he fell backward into her arms, and that she and Stefan could easily spin him around and lay him out on the mat.

“Good, Normén, that’s how it’s supposed to look!” Pain clapped his hands and Rebecca couldn’t help throwing a smug glance up at the glass passageway. Vahtola’s expression hadn’t changed.

“Let’s switch!” Dejan said tersely. He was red in the face and clearly not happy about being bundled over in front of their new boss.

“I’ll take the back.”

Before Rebecca had time to react, he’d taken up a position behind her and got her in some sort of headlock. Both arms around her neck, his right arm over her throat locked onto the other arm, his left hand clasping the back of her neck.

It felt like she was in a vise.

She quickly tried to get at the arm across her throat, but Wikström, standing in front of her, caught her wrists and held her arms tight. She struggled and jerked, trying to get free, but Dejan evidently wasn’t about to let that happen.

It was payback time, and instead of loosening his grip to give her a chance, he tightened his grasp. Her feet were almost off the ground now.

“Come on, Normén,” he snarled in her ear. “Show us what you can do!”

Rebecca could feel her eyes starting to flutter. His grip was so tight that both her airway and blood supply were being cut off. She tried to get free again, this time more frenetically, but Wikström didn’t appear to have noticed that everything was on the point of spiraling out of control, and was still holding her wrists tight.

Her field of vision was shrinking and she could feel herself on the verge of panic. She was stuck, she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Immobile and in another person’s power, someone who wished her harm. Exposed. Helpless. And all of a sudden she was no longer in a gym in Kronoberg but in a flat in one of the southern suburbs and the man holding her was no longer a colleague whose pride had been wounded.

“I’m going to kill you, you little bitch,” he snarled in her ear, and she could tell from the tone of voice, the one that terrified her so, that he meant every word. This time she would die for sure!

The panic she usually kept such a firm grip on welled up and filled her head, pumping adrenaline into her fading muscles and taking command of her body. And suddenly she felt a new burst of life.

She let herself fall toward the floor like a sack, and when the grip on her neck relaxed a couple of millimeters she launched up with both feet and thrust backward and upward with such force that they almost toppled over.

Rebecca felt the back of her head hit something hard, felt something break, and when she raised her feet and kicked out in front to strike a different target, the force of the kick altered their center of gravity and they collapsed onto the mat.

For a moment everything went black, then her sight gradually came back.

She was sitting on the floor with her back against the flattened Dejan, with his legs on either side of her. A few meters in front of her Stefan was curled up, clutching his stomach. In a flash she was up on her feet, turning toward Dejan, who was still lying down. His hands were over his face, but to judge by the trickles running between his fingers, that wasn’t enough to stem the flow of blood.

“What the fuck, you crazy or what, Normén?” he squeaked as he stared at her, sounding simultaneously suspicious and accusing.

She didn’t quite know what to say.

“I . . .” she began uncertainly, but Peter Pain interrupted her.

“Damn fine work, Normén, that’s the way to bring them down! Savic, you were asking for that so you’d better take yourself off to the nurse to get yourself patched up. Wikström, do you need to go too?”

Stefan waved his hands dismissively as he got heavily to his feet.

“Just lost my breath, nice hit, Normén.” He nodded toward her.

Rebecca blushed, feeling simultaneously guilty and pleased. Maybe Dejan’s nose was a bit unfortunate, but on the other hand he had been asking for it with his stupid macho posturing.

She’d done her job, managed to get free on her own, and she hadn’t been some helpless victim.

Not like then.

Absolutely not like then!

She was different now, stronger, better, braver. A completely different person.

When she eventually dared to glance up at Vahtola, she saw a faint smile on the other woman’s face.

♦  ♦  ♦

Birkagatan 32, be there at 18:00.

It wasn’t exactly a difficult instruction, but this time he had at least prepared himself better. In spite of the heat he had dug out an old
army jacket that someone, he couldn’t remember who, had left in his flat after a party ages ago. The jacket had loads of pockets, which he had stuffed with various useful things, and it had straps on the front that would be perfect for holding the phone.

The clip of number twenty-seven had eventually made him realize where the camera ought to be to get the best pictures. No more rubbish bouncing at waist height like on the train or at NK, from now on nothing but headshots.

The viewers, or fans, as he was calling them more and more often, had been impressed with the NK stunt.

Even if he didn’t know who they were, he felt increasingly sure that they were his kind of people, solid guys who he’d be happy to share a chilled beer with if the opportunity arose.

He’d actually tried to find a way to get into the community. He’d tried to find an entrance portal where you could sign up as a member and then play, watch, and maybe even chat to the fans. Find out a bit more about who they were and why they liked him in particular.

But he’d failed. The search terms he had used didn’t come up with any links that worked, so membership seemed to be by invitation only. Which was a bit of crap, because seeing other players’ clips would have been fucking cool, not to mention the direct contact with the fans, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it.

The Game was more impartial this way—he reluctantly accepted that.

After his second task he had strolled intentionally slowly along the quayside of Skeppsbron, walking backward at least half the way so he could enjoy his handiwork as long as possible.
Once he’d got home to Maria Trappgränd the Game had already put up a professional montage. First, his own shaky footage from the inside interspersed with external shots of the clock. Then a split screen with the countdown in the middle. His hand and the buttons on one side, the rotating clock on the other. Three, two, one, click, and time stopped above the center of Stockholm.

Five hundred lovely points, a personal message of congratulations from the Game Master, and a load of new comments, as well as clambering a few notches up the high-score list.

To say it was cool didn’t even come close! He’d been forced to jerk off not once but twice before he could get to sleep.

Up out of the subway at St. Eriksplan, into Tomtebogatan, and then right at the corner. As he approached the address he could feel his pulse rate go up. He decided to cross over Birkagatan to be able to observe his target in peace and quiet from a doorway almost opposite, and to have a well-deserved cigarette.

There wasn’t anything odd about the address.

A perfectly ordinary residential building built sometime in the early twentieth century or so, at a guess. Four rows of windows, plus the skylights on the roof gave five floors in total. From the look of it, the ground floor seemed to be mostly shops and offices, and presumably the top floor was some sort of luxurious loft apartment.

So what now?

He pulled the phone from the strap on the left shoulder, where, after much deliberation, he had decided to attach it, and swept it across the building, zooming in on the front doorway, then out to give the big picture again. When he was finished he noticed the little red light start to flash.

Behind the telephone box next to the Co-op

was all it said, and HP frowned unhappily as a minute or so later he fished out a plastic bag that had been stuffed behind the gray telecom engineers’ box on the other side of the street.

Had he come all the way out to Birkastan to pick up a lousy package?

What sort of shit assignment was this?

But before he had time to look in the bag the light flashed again and when he had read through the third message of the evening he felt his heart starting to race with excitement.

This was more like it!

He checked that the camera was working, then fastened the phone in its place.

Then he tapped in the door code he had just been given and heard the lock click.

Lights, camera, action!
he thought excitedly as he opened the door and slid in.

♦  ♦  ♦

The first target spun around like a flash!

Off to the right,
her brain registered as her instincts did the rest. She pushed her jacket open with her right hand, pulled her pistol from the holster, and as soon as the barrel was free she aimed it in front of her.

She brought her left hand up to meet the gun, put her hand over the casing as she continued to raise her pistol hand, which made the mechanism feed a bullet into the chamber. The moment her right arm was fully extended, with her left hand now supporting the three fingers on the barrel, she fired off two quick shots at the center of the target.

The entire movement hadn’t taken much more than a second.

Rebecca backed away slowly, still with the Sig Sauer ready to fire, her eyes sweeping in both directions above the barrel. When she had retreated ten meters from her mark, the next target suddenly popped up, this time way off to the left.

She quickly spun around and without even thinking she fired off another two shots halfway through the movement.

Bang, bang!

Another five-meter retreat, then the final target appeared, low and in the center, not much bigger than a head. Half a second later this target too had two neat nine-millimeter holes acceptably close to the center.

“Stop, cease fire, cartridge out!”

“Cease fire, cartridge out!” she repeated back to the firing instructor, took her finger off the trigger, pulled out the magazine, and then released the seventh bullet, which was already in the chamber.

Once that was all done she put the gun back in her holster, then took off her earplugs and protective glasses to await the judgment.

“Nice shooting, Normén; you need slightly better tempo on the first series and less of a pull on the second, but generally, like I said, nice shooting!” the instructor told her.

Rebecca nodded appreciatively at the critique; she had fumbled slightly with her jacket, lost a fraction of a second, and then tried to make up the time on the second series.

Squeeze the shot off, don’t pull!
she told herself as she taped stickers over the holes in the second target, ten centimeters or so higher than she had intended.

She had had trouble with her shooting when she started at
Police Academy. The weapon and, above all, the bangs frightened her, and to begin with she had shut her eyes before she fired. Fortunately the academy ran an extra class for anyone not used to guns, and after a few evenings of intensive practice her fear had changed into something entirely different. Once she had got over her distaste and mastered the basic technique, the pistol made her feel safe. As if no one in the world could get at her as long as she had the Sig in her hand. The size and strength of any opponent suddenly didn’t matter at all for someone holding a firearm.

And if both parties were armed, you had to shoot first and shoot best. So she had practiced, properly down in the firing range in the basement, but just as much at home with the authentic replica of her service pistol that she had bought in a model shop.

Draw, bolt action, fire.

Draw, bolt action, fire.

Fifty times each morning, and the same again each evening.

Squeeze the trigger, don’t pull. Over and over again, until it was deeply engrained and there was no one in her class or even her year who was quicker than her. She had worn out two replica pistols so far, but it had been worth it!

Even in her current unit she was among the fastest, and when their shooting instructor checked the day’s results for both accuracy and speed, she came second, beaten only by a guy from the Western District.

Shortly afterward she called her answering machine to leave a message reminding her to increase her training that same evening.

♦  ♦  ♦

The staircase was wide, made of gray marble, reasonably worn after a century or so of use. The banister was polished teak and a small, more recent lift for two people at most had been squeezed into the center of the stairwell.

He checked out the stairwell carefully before setting off upstairs. He was heading for the second floor. The building evidently had another wing built out into the rear courtyard, seeing as there were doors off in that direction after every half flight. Single doors to the flats facing the courtyard, double doors to those facing the street, he noted before he reached the third floor.

Four doors, all of them with neat brass signs and one of them, the second from the left, with the right name combination. So far, so good. By this time his heart was pounding in his chest, and not exclusively because of the stairs.