The Game Trilogy (87 page)

‘The Americans?’

‘That’s the logical answer. Even if the politicians might have liked to suggest the opposite, there had been strong military ties between Sweden and the USA ever since the war. The American OSS, the forerunners of the CIA, for instance, financed secret military activities along the northern part of the Norwegian border. The main purpose wasn’t to fight the Nazis, but to have troops ready once the Germans had withdrawn. To prevent any potential Soviet annexation of Norway,’ he clarified. ‘The operation would never have been possible without the help of the Swedish military and intelligence services …’

He broke off mid-sentence and smiled apologetically.

‘I’m sorry, my dear, I’ve wandered off the point once again, but I was trying to show that Swedish and American militaries had been cooperating, albeit unofficially, long before our project began … and it would never have been possible in the first place without the help of the Swedish military and intelligence services …’

She nodded.

‘Do you know what happened to the I-Group later, after 1972?’

He paused for a few seconds as he drank his coffee.

‘Like I said, the project was shut down, and the military personnel were transferred to other duties. Those of us who were civilians had to try to find work elsewhere. Very sad, of course, so many dedicated colleagues, so much work just abandoned. All in vain …’

He sighed.

‘I myself moved to Västerås and got a job at ABB as an automation engineer. I was there until I retired. They were a fantastic company to work for, so you could say that it turned out for the best in the end. You see, we developed processes that …’

He carried on, but she was no longer listening to what he was saying.

She had been right. Uncle Tage
had
worked on the nuclear weapons programme, handling the exchange of information with the Americans.

‘Now, let’s see …’

Thore Sjögren took out an envelope and spread its contents across the desk. Photographs, most of them black and white, but a few in colour. Judging by the clothes and hairstyles, most of them were taken in the sixties and seventies.

‘My wife, Maj-Britt,’ he muttered, putting down a photograph of a smiling, sun-burned woman in a sundress sitting at a table in a restaurant.

‘She passed away three years ago …’

‘I’m sorry …’

He went on looking through the pictures.

‘Here!’

He laid out several black and white pictures. Typical group shots that could have been from any business. Lots of sombre men in suits, some in white coats. Sixty or seventy of them in total, lined up in three rows on a broad flight of steps.

‘That picture was taken in 1966 or 67, I seem to recall … That’s me.’

He pointed to a young man with a side parting in the middle row. The resemblance was striking.

‘Young and fashionable,’ he laughed. ‘These days I’ve only got the
and
left …’

He ran his finger across the rows of faces.

‘There,’ he said, but she had already spotted him.

Back row, third from the left. Suddenly she felt sick.

‘Colonel Pellas,’ he said, pointing, but she was staring at a different face altogether.

Her father’s.

They were standing in a clearing among the trees. Even though it was dark and he was a long way off at first, he had no trouble recognizing them. The old man with the stick, straight-backed.

Beside him Manga’s slouched silhouette. Steam was rising from their coffee cups.

As he approached them through the snow he gradually noticed more people in there among the trees. Dozens, possibly even hundreds of silent silhouettes that seemed to be watching him. He could feel the snow crunch beneath his feet, but oddly enough there was hardly any sound. The two men now had company in the clearing. Four more figures, all in white Guy Fawkes masks, with painted, curling moustaches and goatee beards.

‘Welcome, Henrik,’ the Game Master said when he stepped into the clearing.

‘Would you like some coffee?’ Manga held out a plastic cup towards him, and he took it without saying a word.

‘Who are they?’ He nodded towards the four people in masks.

‘Don’t you know?’ the Game Master chuckled.

‘Two of them are completely uninteresting, but the other two could turn out to be vitally important.’

The first of them took a step forward and held out his hand. In spite of his bulky winter clothes, it was possible to make out the square, muscular body. They shook hands.

‘Friend?’ HP asked, but received no answer.

The next person stepped up.

‘Enemy?’ he asked.

Still no answer.

The third person was a woman, he was sure of that.

‘Friend?’ he asked again.

For a moment he thought she shrugged her shoulders.

He held out his hand towards the fourth figure, but the person leaned towards him instead and whispered something in his ear. The voice was so familiar, so sad, that it actually felt painful.

‘The Luttern labyrinth,’ she whispered. ‘You have to save us. The Carer …’

A raven croaked in the distance. Twice, in an ominous way that sent a shiver down his spine. The shadowy figures in amongst the trees suddenly began to move. They stumbled towards the clearing like dark-clad zombies. And all of a sudden he realized who they were …

‘More,’ they hissed.

‘MOOOORE!!!’

A moment later he was running. Snow was flying around his feet, his heart pounding in his chest.

The lights from the road lay far away on the horizon.

‘See you in the Luttern labyrinth, number 128 …’ the Game Master called after him. Unless it was actually Manga’s voice that he had heard …?

Rebecca emerged onto the steps library and took a few deep breaths.

The fresh air made her nausea subside and after a couple of minutes she felt considerably better.

She could think. About the nuclear weapons programme; the betrayal of the Palme government. Dad’s violent rages. The safe deposit box in Sveavägen, set up in 1986. The wide-bore revolver with its two fired cartridges that made Uncle Tage so uneasy. Which mustn’t be traced to …

Events in the past …

1986.

Dad’s rages.

The revolver is an OPW, an Olof Palme Weapon.

She took her mobile out of her bag. Her fingers didn’t seem to want to do as she told them, and it took two attempts before she managed to tap in the correct pin-code.

The email from Uncle Tage arrived almost at once, but it took another minute for the attached file to download. A black and white recording from the bank vault, lasting thirty-two seconds, which must have come from one of the cameras in the corridor.

The man walking down the corridor before turning off into the room containing her box was wearing sunglasses and had a baseball cap pulled down over his face.

But she didn’t have any problem recognizing him.

It was Manga.

Bloody hell, he’d been having some creepy fucking nightmares. Last time they’d been caused by the snake venom, and this time by the pills, at a guess. They were meant for horses, not people, which probably explained quite a lot.

The long wait in the flat was driving him mad. No Xbox, Playstation or any other games console to while away the time with, and all he’d managed to come up with by way of television was a huge old box with just
the basic channels. He couldn’t handle any more
Emmerdale
or
Days of Our Lives
, and he’d already had two anxiety-driven wanks, and a third was guaranteed to give him friction burns on his joystick. But, as luck would have it, at least he had a decent supply of cigarettes.

He lit yet another Marlboro and set off on his little stroll round the flat. Living room, kitchen, hall – then back again.

A few seconds’ respite, to give him time to think.

One of the gang was supposed to be a traitor, if he was to trust the mysterious A.F. who had sent him the message – through Nora’s smartphone.

A.F.

Friend?

No-one outside their little group knew that Nora’s phone had been in the flat he was borrowing. So, logically, A.F. should also to be one of the group.

A friend.

An enemy.

The problem was that no-one could be ruled out.

Jeff had hated him since the incident in Birkagatan, and their relationship had hardly improved over recent days.

Hasselqvist with a Q and a V may have declared that bygones were bygones, but that could very easily be a complete lie. He had demolished the guy out on the E4. Sprayed teargas in his face, humiliated him, and snatched his End Game away from him.

You didn’t forget an injustice like that, not even if you were an obsequious little Kent.

Nora was harder to make out. She had evidently been behind the fires, probably both the one that almost killed him up in his flat, and the smaller one in Manga’s shop.

And he hadn’t entirely dropped the idea that she might have poisoned him with those pills.

The last name on the list was his old friend, Farook Al-Hassan, a.k.a. Magnus Sandström.

Good old mythomaniac Manga who, with the blessing of the Game Master, had stuffed him so full of lies that he couldn’t even begin to work out how much of everything he had experienced over the past two years was actually real.

All in all, not a bad collection of suspects – good luck with that case, Columbo!

So, why not just stay at home? Why take the risk of getting involved in this lunatic project? Yep – another two questions that he had no good answer to …

Peter Falk would obviously have to put in a bit of overtime.

Rebecca reached the bottom of the escalator just as the warning signal went off, and she made it inside the jam-packed underground train seconds before the doors closed.

Sweaty tourists, most of them with bum-bags, caps and bottles of water, so they were probably Americans. She found herself in the middle of a group of people, with nothing to hold onto.

Someone pushed into her from behind and she tried to move as far as she could to one side.

To judge by the noise, at least the air conditioning seemed to be switched on, but, together with the sound of the train, it made it hard to hear what anyone was saying.

The person behind her pushed again, and she was just about to turn round and explain that she couldn’t move any further when she heard a familiar voice in her ear.

‘Don’t turn round!’

‘Manga, what the f …?’

She glimpsed a baseball cap and pair of sunglasses from the corner of her eye.

‘No, no, for fuck’s sake, don’t turn round …!’ He put his hand on her back.

‘Okay.’ She went on staring in the opposite direction.

This was ridiculous, to put it mildly, and if he hadn’t sounded so worried she would have ignored his plea.

‘I’ve sent you something,’ he whispered. ‘Read it and you’ll understand how everything fits together …’

‘Really, Manga, this is completely …’ She turned her head.

‘No, no, you mustn’t turn round. They’re watching you,
he’s
watching you!’

‘Who is, Manga? Who’s watching me?’

‘Sammer, of course!’ His voice sounded scared.

‘And why would he be doing that, Manga? As far as I can work out, he’s got his hands full looking for you. I daresay he’d be quite pleased if I brought you together …’

The carriage lurched and for moment she almost fell, but the tightly packed bodies around her helped her stay upright.

‘Don’t make jokes about that, Becca,’ he said quietly.

‘I’m not joking, Manga. Henrik’s already tried to convince me that Uncle Tage is the Game Master, so now it’s your turn. But, unlike the two of you, Tage Sammer has actually
helped
me, he’s saved my skin a couple of times …’

The loudspeaker announced a station that she didn’t catch the name of, and the train began to slow down.

‘Besides, you’ve got something of mine, Manga,’ she said.

‘W-what?’

‘Don’t act all innocent. The bank vault on Sveavägen. You stole a metal box that belonged to my dad out of my safe deposit box. I saw a clip of you …’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Becca,’ he said, a little too quickly. ‘Let me explain …’ He leaned closer to her ear. ‘The Game is like a Rorschach test, those ink stains, you know? The brain comes up with its own interpretation and then fills in the gaps itself. You only see the things you want to see, Rebecca …’

The train pulled in at the platform, braking sharply, and once again she almost fell.

The doors opened and people pushed past her in all directions.

Once she’d regained her balance and looked round, he was gone. It was several minutes before she discovered the mobile phone he’d slipped into her pocket. A smooth, silvery thing with a glass touch screen.

She had most of the puzzle worked out now.

Or at least she thought she did. Her dad, André Pellas, the nuclear weapons programme, the safe deposit box, Tage Sammer … Everything was connected, and the chain could be made even longer if you added the unthinkable: the revolver, Sveavägen and Olof Palme …

For the time being she was trying to keep a grip on her galloping imagination. She went on reciting the chain that she had started putting together a few days ago:

Dad and André / Uncle Tage work for the UN together.

Dad is unfairly dismissed for an action he believes is justified.

Uncle Tage employed Dad on the secret nuclear weapons programme. Sent him on secret missions to the USA to exchange information with the Americans. This carried on for years, long after the defence project was officially shut down. Until a newspaper starts snooping about in the mid-1980s. Then everyone panics, the project is buried once and for all, and without warning Dad was shoved out into the cold again, like he’d been shoved out of the UN … everything he believed in ended up in the bin.

And it’s all the fault of the Palme government …

The nausea that had been stalking her since she had seen the photograph of her dad in Thore Sjögren’s claustrophobic little office wouldn’t go away. She got up from the sofa and went over to open the window. The street below was dark, no movement at all. The crowns of the trees opposite made it impossible to see more than ten metres into the park. For a few moments she imagined she could see someone standing down there in the shadows, someone watching her. She knew it was just her imagination, but she still couldn’t help drawing one of the curtains before she went back to the sofa and her laptop.

It only took a minute or so to dig out the description of the suspect on Wikipedia:

In 1986 Dad was 45 years old. Motivated, disappointed, a failure and paranoid. And the sort who never forgot an injustice, real or imagined.

Never, ever …

All that was needed was a gun, an OPW. And a bit of help …

Because what if he wasn’t alone? What if he got a gentle shove in the right direction from someone he trusted? A phone call, information about a time and a place. Maybe that was all it would have taken? Maybe Dad thought he was being given another chance? That he was going to be part of something bigger once more, where his services were still in demand. That he was still a Player.

Back in the Game.

History repeats itself …

But there was something that wasn’t right, a little piece of the puzzle that didn’t quite fit. The only problem was that she couldn’t work out which piece.

The white van climbed over the brow of a hill, then pulled up in a small paved yard surrounded on two sides by a ramshackle L-shaped farm building.

‘This is it.’

Nora gently put her hand on HP’s shoulder, but he’d woken up a while back, when the van turned off the tarmac and onto the narrow gravel track.

The sliding door of the barn was already open and Hasselqvist backed the van in with millimetre precision. Manga’s little red Polo was already parked inside.

Jeff jumped out quickly and closed the barn door behind them. HP took his time getting out of his seat. He double-checked the lock on the sports bag he had put on the floor, then stretched and breathed in the ingrained smell of cows and old hay.

It took a while for his eyes to get used to the gloom.

In one corner of the barn he could see several large white plastic sacks, and beside them a row of pallets full of old tyres, a couple of oil-drums and random clutter. A
bit further away stood a bit of rusty agricultural machinery. The place looked like it hadn’t been used for the past ten, fifteen years.

Maybe longer than that.

‘Hello, and welcome!’

‘Hi,’ he muttered, without looking Manga in the eye.

‘Follow me …’

Manga skirted round a couple of stalls to reach a door at one end of the barn. The others followed him, with HP bringing up the rear.

‘Just mind your feet, the floor isn’t that great.’

Manga opened the door and they headed down a short corridor to a small kitchen.

The room smelled of fresh coffee and damp.

HP had a sudden flashback to Erman’s little cottage out in the bush. But that had been in a considerably better state than this place. Old wallpaper was peeling off the walls, and in a couple of places water had come through the yellowing ceiling. Here and there the floorboards had given way, revealing dark holes. A camping table with five folding chairs had been set up in the middle of the room.

‘So this is where you’ve been hiding,’ HP muttered, pointing at the camp bed and sleeping bag in one corner. ‘Has Betul chucked you out then, or what?’

Manga shrugged his shoulders.

‘Right now it’s safest like this …’ he said. ‘There’s coffee, if anyone wants any …’

He took a paper cup and got himself some coffee from the thermos in the middle of the little table. While the others followed his example Manga sat down. He took out a small laptop, opened it up and then turned it so that everyone could see what was on the little screen.

‘Okay, everything’s ready. Operation Puncture starts in exactly …’

He looked at his watch.

‘… nine hours, twenty-seven minutes and eleven seconds …’

Everyone except HP adjusted their watches.

‘We’ll take the van, and leave my car here.’

‘No, we’ll need both …’ Jeff interrupted him in an authoritative voice. ‘I did a recce. The last bit by the cliffs is just a soft forest track, and the van will get stuck. Unless we want to carry everything the last five hundred metres, we’ll have to load it all into the Polo. It’s a lot lighter, and it’s front-wheel drive, so there shouldn’t be any problems there.’

‘But, er …’ Manga sounded like he was trying to protest, then changed his mind. ‘Okay, that’s what we’ll do. Good thinking!’

He nodded at Jeff, who smiled with satisfaction.

‘Let’s go through the whole thing one more time,’ Manga went on. ‘Then I suggest that we get changed and make sure we’re familiar with everything, say for half an hour before we set off. But we have plenty of time to kill. It’s an hour and fifty-three minute drive from here, then twenty minutes to unload. If anyone wants to take a walk, there’s a lake round the back. And there are sandwiches and cold drinks in the fridge over there …’

He pointed to one corner.

‘The toilet doesn’t work, but there’s an old outdoor privy behind the farm.’

‘Ah, old-school shithouse …’ HP grinned, but got no response.

Humourless tossers!

But what the hell … He had seven hours to work out who in here was a friend and who an enemy. It would be just as well to make a start.

He had a whole load of mysteries to unravel, and not just concerning the gang he was with.

Who was the Carer? And what was the Luttern labyrinth, where it looked like the bomb was going to be placed? Who was it going to be aimed at?

And, maybe most important of all: how did Becca fit into all of this?

The letter was lying on her doormat beside the morning paper.

A window envelope with her name on, and at first she thought it was a bill. So she didn’t open it until she had poured a cup of coffee and sat down on the sofa. But when she opened the envelope she found that it contained something very different. The sheet of A4 with her name at the top consisted of just two lines. The first was the address of a web page. The second contained two sad smileys.

Manga. It could hardly be anyone else.

Taking the letter with her, she went and sat in front of the computer, typed in the web address and pressed enter.

A log-in window with boxes for username and password appeared. After a bit of hesitation she typed in her full name in the top line. But she had no idea what password the page wanted. She turned the envelope inside out, but couldn’t find any clues.

Manga
, she finally wrote, and pressed enter.

Wrong password
, the site informed her.

Shit!

She tried again, this time with
Henke
as the password.

Wrong password, one attempt left.

Only one more chance.

She went out into the hall to check that she hadn’t received another letter containing the login details. But there was nothing there.

Just to make sure, she read the letter again, holding
both it and the envelope up to the light in an attempt to see if there were any hidden messages.

But the only unusual thing she found was that the sender had spelled her first name with ‘ck’ instead of ‘cc’.

Surely Manga of all people ought to be able to spell her name?

Unless …

She typed
Rebecka
into the password box and pressed enter. The window changed colour and suddenly she was in.

The site looked like a Wikipedia page, in fact was so similar that it was hard to see the difference. But she was pretty sure this particular page wasn’t available on the online version.

Rebecca read the page three times, then did a screen-dump and printed out several copies.

It all fitted perfectly with Henke’s fragmentary descriptions and her own observations, but also with the information that Uncle Tage had confided to her.

There really was a Game, which manipulated people into carrying out various acts. Which could incite people to do completely insane things.

Poor, self-obsessed fools who didn’t think the world properly appreciated their unique talents and significance, and were prepared to do almost anything to get a bit of approval.

People just like Henke.

And her dad …

But whose version of the story was the right one?

Uncle Tage had helped her, in the aftermath of events in Darfur when she was under suspicion of gross misuse of office, but also with the weapons licence and, most recently, the recording from the bank vault.

He had told her about her dad’s dark past, and – even though she’d had to drag it out of him – he had finally revealed more confidential information to her than he should have.

On the other hand, she had known Manga all her life, and the idea that he might be a criminal mastermind still felt unreal, to put it mildly. But Manga had demonstrably lied to her face, and had admitted as much himself. All he had given her was the information on the webpage, information which didn’t actually prove anything.

So whose version was true?

Who could she trust?

Which of them could help her rescue Henke?

She leaned back in the sofa and went through everything that had happened in the last few days once more, but she still couldn’t shake the feeling that she was missing something.