The Game Trilogy (49 page)

For a couple of seconds his panic at the idea of being unmasked flared up, but he quickly got it back under control. Eriks was a smart restaurant in Östermalm and Philip would hardly have chosen it if he wanted to discuss anything unpleasant. Besides, he thought they connected pretty well the last time they met.

So what was this about, then?

There was only one way to find out.

She had parked her aching body in front of the computer so she could go through all the posts again.

The first few times she had read through them she hadn’t really noticed anything special.

But as she kept digging away at it, she became more and more convinced that there was actually some sort of pattern.

Well, pattern was probably the wrong word …

It had all started fairly gently. MayBey’s first seven or eight posts were fairly jokey. Black humour, certainly, but still very funny. They were about a Superintendent Superstud, someone female colleagues ought to watch out for if they found themselves paired up with him. Then there was Police Commission Chairman Completely-Stuffed, who on more than one occasion had been pulled in for drunkenness and had had to spend the night in the cells, and County Police Commissioner Teflon, to whom no shit ever stuck, and plenty more in the same vein …

But as the number of readers grew, MayBey’s posts slowly began to change character. The humour had been gradually replaced by cynicism, and the tales of various types of arrests had become darker.

The readers didn’t seem to have noticed anything, though, or else they simply liked MayBey’s new style, because the number of comments kept growing with each new post – and there actually seemed to be more of them whenever MayBey did or described something that was right on the boundary of acceptable behaviour …

That post had attracted more than fifty comments, all of them positive.

The strange thing was that for some reason – she didn’t really know why – she had got the impression that MayBey wasn’t writing about these incidents to make other people laugh. Just like the other posts, she got a feeling that MayBey wanted to say something, but that the message had got lost, drowned under all the comment and cheering. She also got the feeling that she recognized the incident, that she might even be able to remember who had talked about it.

She had spent an hour thinking about it. Looked at purely objectively, obviously the whole thing was completely ridiculous!

She had plenty of things to sort out, considerably more important than some internet phantom.

But still she couldn’t shake the intuition that it was all somehow connected.

MayBey, Darfur, her suspension, Ludvig Runeberg and
Westergren, the yobs in the car, and not least the uncomfortable sense of being watched the whole time, a sense that was only getting worse. Either MayBey was part of it, or he or she was trying to say something – tell
her
something. She had to work out what it was MayBey was trying to say and go from there.

He was five minutes early but Philip Argos was already there.

‘Take a seat, Magnus. I took the liberty of ordering for us both. What would you like to drink with the meal? I’m having a South African red.’

‘Then I’ll have the same,’ HP replied, then suddenly noticed a subtle change in the other man’s face.

Shit, of course, he was supposed to be a devout Muslim!

‘Do you have any non-alcoholic wine?’ he quickly asked the waiter who had appeared the moment HP sat down.

A minute later he was sipping the unfamiliar drink, smiling at Philip Argos and trying to look relaxed.

‘So, Magnus,’ Philip began, ‘how have you been getting on over the past few days?’

‘Fine, thanks!’ HP replied, as he tried to swallow the grape juice.

‘You’re being rather too modest, aren’t you …?’ Philip smiled. ‘I’ve heard that you’ve gone from strength to strength. Your section head is already letting you handle attack trolls, and that’s usually a job reserved for people who’ve been with us for a while.’

HP nodded and tried to adopt a humble expression.

‘Like I said at our last meeting, you’re exactly the sort of person we need at ArgosEye. Someone who is prepared to do whatever it takes to be successful …’

HP extended his humble nodding. He noticed that his
heart was beating faster for some reason. As far as he could remember, this was the first time he had ever been praised for his work. It certainly wasn’t an unpleasant sensation.

The waiter arrived with their main courses, some sort of fish dish with wheat germ and fresh vegetables. It tasted superb, even for a carnivore like him. He was bloody lucky that he hadn’t been able to order for himself, seeing as he would almost certainly have ordered that day’s meat dish, pork fillet, and thereby fucked up severely …

But after a couple of minutes of pleasure the silence began to feel oppressive. His boss was focusing entirely on the meal, as if eating demanded all his concentration, and still hadn’t given any clue as to what this meeting was actually about.

‘Sooo, how did you get the idea for all this, Philip?’ he managed to say after a few moments’ thought. ‘For ArgosEye, I mean,’ he added, just to be clear.

Philip Argos slowly finished his mouthful, then put his knife and fork down.

‘An excellent start, Magnus. I’m sure you have many more pressing questions, but it’s always best to take things from the beginning.
He who controls the past controls the future.
George Orwell, one of my favourite quotations, actually.’

He dabbed at his mouth with his linen napkin.

‘I daresay I’ve had the idea within me ever since my time in the Military Intelligence and Security Service, but it wasn’t until I started at Burston that it started to firm up. We worked in a way which at least in part prefigured what we do today at ArgosEye, with the difference that Burston’s clients only came to us once the crisis was a fact. A company in an acute crisis is a grateful client in many respects, not least when it comes to being able to charge liberally for your services …’

He took a sip of his wine and HP took the chance to take another mouthful of grape juice.

‘Among other things, we handled the situation that arose with Dole when that documentary was released claiming that they were poisoning their employees in South America. They were using a banned insecticide on their bananas – maybe you remember it?’

HP nodded.

‘Dole had tried threatening to sue the director of the film, which is basically the very worst thing you could do. You’ve probably heard of the Streisand Effect, where your efforts to conceal information only serve to increase the attention being paid to it? That was the situation when we got involved. Obviously the film couldn’t be stopped, but we found another solution which at least enabled us to bring some balance to the debate. We paid for sponsored links alongside any keywords that had anything to do with the film. The title, the film-maker’s name, the chemical compound of the poison – you name it.’

He gestured towards the ceiling.

‘If anyone searched for any of those words, they always got Dole’s corrected version of the story three centimetres to the right of their search results. The links only cost a few hundred dollars, but the invoice we presented Dole with was at least a thousand times that amount …’

He smiled and paused long enough for them both to take another mouthful of food.

‘The actual idea was brilliant. Using the mechanics of the internet to defend the interests of a client …’

He finished his mouthful before going on.

‘… but as time went on I started to get tired of having to put out fires that were already blazing. Instead I started to think of a way to discover and deal with likely fires before they had time to flare up, pretty much the way we
did in military intelligence. We used to have a tool that was managed by the National Defence Radio Centre, a sort of search matrix for monitoring communications, looking for certain loaded terms, like bomb, terrorist, explosion and so on …’

‘The famous National Defence Radio Centre filter, the one that caused all those protests? Reading people’s emails?’ HP interjected.

‘That’s the one,’ Philip nodded. ‘Which was actually all rather ridiculous seeing as the National Defence Radio Centre neither could nor would ever want to read everyone’s emails. Their filter merely picks up things that might be worth checking, maybe one email in a million, if someone used the right combination of terms. In terms of integrity, it’s no more invasive that using a supermarket loyalty card …’

‘Exactly!’ HP agreed. ‘So that was where you got the idea? A National Defence Radio Centre, but for businesses?’

He regretted his comment at once, and cursed his inability to keep his mouth shut.

Philip gave him a long look.

‘Well, that’s probably taking the comparison a bit far, Magnus …’

HP gulped.

‘… at least that’s what I usually say to the few journalists who are intelligent enough to ask the same question …’

Philip paused to take another sip of his wine.

‘But, just between the two of us, you’re thinking along exactly the right lines …’ he concluded and gave HP a wink.

Everything was connected, she was more and more certain of that now, especially once she’d spoken to Micke.

‘The IP address was concealed by one of the anonymizing sites,’ he explained. ‘But we managed to get past that. The problem was that we just got stuck in another similar server somewhere else, and my guess is that it would go on like that for quite a while. Whoever set this up knows what he’s doing, and definitely doesn’t want to be traced.’

‘Okay,’ she said, trying to write down what he had just told her so she could refer back to it later.

‘So we’re stuffed, in other words?’

‘Well,’ he said, and his tone of voice made her feel suddenly more cheerful. ‘We’re not exactly novices at this sort of thing, we’ve seen stuff like this before. Give us another week or so and we can probably get to the bottom of it.’

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I really appreciate your help with this!’

‘That goes without saying. And just so you know, I don’t believe a word of the shit that’s been written about you.’

A few seconds of silence followed, before he went on. ‘One more thing – I was going to ask what you’re doing on Saturday?’

‘Nothing special, why?’

As soon as she answered she realized that it wasn’t actually true. In a moment of weakness she’d agreed to have dinner with John, the man on the running machine. But of course she could always cancel that …

‘This is going to sound a bit odd, but I’ve got to go to a funeral and I was wondering if you’d like to come. It’s to do with work, and if you’re still considering the job offer, it would be a good opportunity for me to introduce you. Besides, I’d like to show off my beautiful girlfriend …’

The question caught her by surprise.

She’d been hoping for a meal and the cinema, a chance to patch things up. But this?

Networking at a funeral? What on earth was he thinking?

Besides, she’d already made it clear that she wasn’t interested in changing jobs.

The last funeral she’d been to had been Dag’s, when she’d rushed out after just a few minutes. She’d fought so hard to leave all that behind – make a new life for herself, far away from the person she used to be. And she had almost succeeded as well …

But the thought of standing in a church with a load of people dressed in black made her skin crawl.

‘No thanks!’

Her abrupt answer seemed to take him by surprise almost as much as her.

‘Er, what? But you said you could …’

‘Yes, I could …’ she went on. ‘But I don’t want to.’

‘So what have you managed to learn so far, Magnus?’

HP thought fast.

‘That everything is about perception …’ He glanced at Philip.

‘Good. Go on.’

‘That monopoly control of the flow of information is a thing of the past, and the only way to limit damage is to try to steer the flood of information in the right direction. Filling the notice-board with your own posters, so to speak.’

Philip opened his mouth to say something, but HP was warming to his theme.

‘Going full-throttle on loads of different channels at the same time to drown out your opponent, and if that doesn’t work, shifting the focus and getting people to look at something else until it’s all blown over. The media’s memory has always been short, and on the internet it’s even shorter.’ He stopped himself and took a deep breath.

‘People can only deal with one story at a time,’ he concluded, glancing at Philip once more.

‘Good, Magnus. Excellent, in fact. You’ve learned more than I had dared to hope, which makes it even easier to get to my point today,’ Philip said with a smile.

He wiped his mouth again, then leaned across the table as he adopted a more serious expression. HP suddenly realized he was holding his breath.

‘Kristoffer will be coming back from abroad next week and in conjunction with his return I’m thinking of changing things around a bit in the management team. I would have liked to have done so before now, but for various reasons it hasn’t happened …’