Buzz: A Thriller (15 page)

If David Malmén really was the person who, one way or
another, had “helped” Modin to remember, then Rebecca had seriously misjudged him, clearly. Although of course it was also possible that her deputy was acting on orders from above . . .

No matter, she could remove him and Modin from the list of suspects, and with them probably the other two members of the team. Which left just the embassy counselor, Gladh. Not really much of a surprise.

She was back to square one again—but at least she no longer had to watch her back.

At least she hoped not . . .

♦  ♦  ♦

He had laid everything out on the stained bedspread. Every item neatly arranged so he could tick it off his list. He felt like some secret agent getting ready for a dangerous mission. Which might well turn out to be the case . . .

The paranoia that had followed him halfway around the world had grown stronger, which probably wasn’t that strange really. Somewhere out there, there were people looking for him, people who wanted nothing more than to get their hands on Player 128 and hand him over to the Game Master.

But he had to try to shake it off. There was no proof that they had found him, none at all. He was still one step ahead, and as long as he trod carefully and didn’t wake up any guard dogs then that would remain the case.

What he really needed to do was focus on his new mission.

He opened his laptop and started to type out a message, but stopped after just a couple of sentences.

Shit,
in the bitter glare of hindsight he could see that picking up the phone hadn’t exactly been his smartest move. Okay,
so it was switched off and drained of power. Not even the best batteries in the world would last fourteen months, so he wasn’t worried about being traced.

His problem went rather deeper than that.

Even though the phone was physically stone-dead, it was as if it were still sending out signals.

Inaudible little enticements to the part of his brain that still longed for everything the Game could offer him.

And that was presumably why he hadn’t been able to leave it where it was out at Arlanda.

Just holding it felt undeniably good. Feeling the cool metal against the palm of his hand, his fingertips sliding over the touch screen.

And for a few seconds, a few wonderful seconds, the feeling was back.

Introducing Player 128, first runner-up, the public’s favorite—the hottest guy in the Game. Hennnnnrik Petterrrssonnn!

Almost all phones could be charged up the same way these days. A little cable to one of the computer’s USB ports was all it would take . . .

But obviously he wasn’t going to switch it on, he wasn’t completely thick, for fuck’s sake!

There were plenty of other things to be getting on with, ways to keep his mind occupied and at a safe distance from that lethal track. It was just like that mental exercise.

Whenever you think about the Game, you lose!

♦  ♦  ♦

“Hi, Rebecca, this is Håkan! Håkan Berglund,” he clarified when she didn’t say anything.

“Oh, hi . . .”

She was holding the phone between her cheek and shoulder so she could pour a cup of coffee.

“I’m back in Stockholm and was wondering if you felt like having that meal we talked about. How about this Friday?”

She took a deep breath.

“I’m not sure that’s such a great idea . . .” she began.

“Oh, come on!” he interrupted. “I got the feeling we clicked pretty well, and I’d like to see you again. I can pick you up around seven . . .”

She sighed.

Evidently she’d got Håkan Berglund all wrong.

The fact that he dared to call at all was pretty surprising in itself, considering how little he’d done to support her down in Darfur. And now he didn’t seem to be the sort who could take a hint.

She really didn’t like pushy people.

“Sorry, Håkan, but I’ve actually already got a boyfriend,” she said bluntly.

There was silence on the line.

“Hello?” she said.

But he had already hung up.

♦  ♦  ♦

“Magnus Sandström?”

“That’s me.”

He got up from the sofa in the waiting area and followed the receptionist to a small meeting room.

“Welcome, Magnus, take a seat and Eliza will be with you shortly. We’re running slightly late with the interviews, but she shouldn’t be too long.”

“No problem!”

“Great. Can I get you anything while you’re waiting? Coffee, tea . . . ?”

“Thanks, I’m good.” He smiled.

She gave him a little wave as she went out, closing the door carefully behind her.

He made himself comfortable on one of the six metal-tubed chairs around the table. One wall was made entirely of glass and through it he could see straight down onto Sergel’s Square. The sound of traffic was only just audible as faint background noise. The skyscrapers of Hötorget had to be one of the best office addresses in the city.

The door opened and a solidly built woman walked in.

“Magnus?” He nodded and she marched quickly across the room.

Her handshake was limp and slightly damp.

“Eliza Poole, head of personnel. Welcome!”

She gestured at the chair he had just stood up from.

“Sit yourself down and tell me why you’re interested in working for us here at ArgosEye . . .”

He sat down, crossed his legs, and leaned back.

“Well, I’ve worked for a long time in the computer business, and questions of risk and crisis management in communications have long been a subject close to my heart . . .”

HP smiled his smoothest smile, nudged his glasses into place, and brushed an invisible speck of dust from the sleeve of his jacket.

“By the way, call me Mange. Everyone does!”

Pillars of Society forum

Posted: 21 November, 06:53

By:
MayBey

If you want something to change, sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands.

This post has
56 comments

SHIT
,
IT STILL
felt weird not recognizing yourself . . . Short, cropped hair, clean-shaven, Buddy Holly glasses with clear lenses perched on his nose.

When they were little some people used to think he and Mange were brothers.

Sometimes they actually pretended that they were.

That was where he got the idea from.

Obviously it had been a total shot in the dark, emailing his CV, but ArgosEye had taken the bait at once. Mange’s CV was pretty solid, and with a bit of tinkering and a basic course in Photoshop you could knock the world dead. Throw in his
own winning personality and the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

Bearing in mind what the company did, he had coolly calculated that they would google him, so he had opened accounts on Facebook, Myspace, Spotify, and LinkedIn.

Each profile was adorned with a slightly distorted picture of his face, so that no one could tag his photograph.

The real Mange Sandström was far too paranoid to appear anywhere out there with his actual name and picture. And besides, as luck would have it, Mangelito just happened to be out of the office—according to the spotty youth in his computer shop, the little convert was on a pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia with his father-in-law.

He didn’t actually have the faintest idea what he was hoping to achieve with this little charade. The only thing he knew with anything approaching certainty was that Anna Argos’s death was connected to her company—why else would Moussad have given him the business card and asked him to keep his eyes open?

Her ex-husband was obviously top of the list of suspects. But things weren’t always the way they seemed. There were no simple truths—you couldn’t take anything for granted.

Especially not if the Game was involved . . .

♦  ♦  ♦

Half an hour on Google had so far left her none the wiser. MayBey seemed to be a play on the English word
maybe,
and she was fairly sure the misspelling was intentional, which seemed to suggest that the name had some sort of significance.

Sadly Google hadn’t been much help. The first few hits on the search list were people who had simply got their spelling
wrong, followed by a moving company in Albany, New York, then a few people on Facebook whose surname really was Maybey. None of them was Swedish, as far as she was able to tell.

She switched to Wiktionary and looked up the word
maybe
.

Maybe
[
meibi
]

Perhaps—something which might be true (adv
.)

Indicating a lack of certainty (adv
.)

Synonymous with words such as perhaps, mayhaps, possibly

You could also rearrange the letters to make three other words:

beamy
—meaning radiant

embay
—meaning to enclose, shut in, or trap

abyme
—apparently an obsolete word for chasm, abyss

So she really wasn’t any the wiser . . .

♦  ♦  ♦

“Say hello to Mange here—he’s our new troll.”

Three heads looked up from around the coffee table and nodded in greeting as his new boss introduced him.

“Dejan is in charge of the Filter—that’s the gang with all the screens and the wall projector over in the glass room.”

HP’s boss gestured over his shoulder with his thumb toward the right-hand end of the office.

“Hi, good to meet you,” Dejan said. He was a short bloke with thinning hair, around thirty.

“Rilke’s in charge of the blogs, and Beens looks after the Laundry.”

HP shook hands with them both. His mouth felt incredibly dry and his heart was still pounding with both fear and excitement, but he did his best to appear cool and relaxed. The gang sitting around the table in front of him were hardly anything to be frightened of.

Beens both looked and behaved like a chubby little computer nerd. A greasy parting, military-issue glasses, and a coffee mug with a
Blade Runner
quote on it. But oddly enough, he was wearing neither a washed-out T-shirt nor jeans that were too short for him. In this place everyone seemed to wear the standard business uniform. Suit, tie, neatly ironed shirt for the gentlemen, something along the same lines for the ladies. There was a bit of a Jehovah’s Witness feel to the whole thing.

HP would have much rather had Rilke as his boss instead of the grinning pretty boy who had met him at reception. Olive-colored skin, dark eyes, and matching hair.

Her handshake was soft and her voice slightly teasing.

“I hope Frank hasn’t put you off too much already . . .” She smiled, nodding toward HP’s boss. “Life as king of the trolls sometimes seems to go to his head . . .”

They all grinned, and HP did his best to look as though he got the joke.

“Okay—the short version of how it all works,” Frank said as they headed off down the glass corridor toward the part of the hypermodern office that was evidently known as the Troll Mine.

“Our clients employ us to protect their trademarks—but of course you know that. We make sure that they know
everything that’s being said about them out there, and help deal with any problems . . .”

He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb again.

“Dejan and his team over in the glass bubble work with a program we call the Filter. The program sweeps all known search engines looking for hits that contain our clients’ names, as well as various combinations of negative buzz.”

“Like Nestlé and monkeys’ fingers, or BP and environmental disasters . . . ?”

“More or less.” Frank smiled. “But of course the Filter is much more sophisticated . . . You’d have to check with Dejan, but I’m pretty sure that the program now contains several thousand different combinations of negatively loaded comments, and his team update it on a daily basis as new expressions crop up.”

They reached a door and Frank tapped his pass card against a reader.

“This is the Strategy department. Stoffe’s usually in charge of this lot, but he’s on holiday at the moment, so Milla over there is covering for him.”

Frank waved at a deathly pale Goth girl who was so deeply absorbed in her screen that she hardly seemed to have noticed them.

“We call her Lisbeth,” he whispered. “But only when she can’t hear us . . .”

HP nodded, trying at the same time to keep his head down.

Even if the risk was small, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was about to be unmasked at any moment.

“Whenever the Filter comes across any sort of buzz that could be damaging to our clients, it’s the Strats’ job to work
out what we should do to handle the problem, so to speak,” Frank went on.

HP nodded mechanically.

“Everything gets fed into the risk-management model that Philip designed. Depending on the outcome of the modeling, information is passed on to us in the operational sections . . .”

“Right, yes, of course . . . What were they again . . . ?” HP muttered.

Frank gave him a disgruntled look.

“The trolls, the Laundry, and the blogs . . . By the way, Mange, the way you’re dressed . . .” He glanced at HP’s badly fitting suit and brightly patterned tie.

“What?”

“Remind me to give you the address of our tailor before Philip catches sight of you . . .”

They left the room and carried on along the steel-gray carpet of the corridor toward another locked door. Just like the last one, Frank touched his pass card against a discreet reader and then opened the door.

“Well, we’re home. Welcome to the Troll Mine, Mange!”

♦  ♦  ♦

The alarm on her cell started to bleep and she sat up with a start.

It was one o’clock at night, and high time to make her way home.

She glanced at his solid body, listened to his heavy breathing for a few seconds, and tried to summon up some sort of feeling for him. But all she felt was distaste. For him, for herself, for the whole situation.

She got up from the mattress and gathered her clothes together.