Buzz: A Thriller Read online

  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!”

  13

  RAISING THE STAKES

  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 deathl
y 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.

  A quick wash in the bathroom to get as much of his smell off her before she made her way home.

  Just as she was pulling her jacket on she heard a noise from the front door. At first she thought it was the paper being delivered, then she remembered where she was. Obviously no papers got delivered to Henke’s empty flat.

  She listened again.

  There was a faint metallic clicking sound from the door, almost as if someone were messing about with the lock. The lights inside the flat were all off, so she ought to have been able to see a point of light from the peephole in the door. But it was completely dark.

  She took a few steps out into the hall.

  One of the new floorboards creaked beneath her foot and she stood still.

  The clicking had stopped.

  She padded carefully over to the door and tried to look out of the peephole.

  But the stairwell was completely dark.

  Then she suddenly heard quick footsteps on the stairs, and a moment or so later the front door of the building opening. She ran over to the window, peered down into the alley, and managed to catch a glimpse of a dark figure disappearing around the corner.

  “Wossup?” he muttered sleepily from the mattress.

  “Burglar,” she replied without taking her eyes off the street.

  But for some reason she didn’t feel entirely sure about that . . .

  14

  DEATH BY POWERPOINT

  HE’D SAT THROUGH thirty different slides about the company’s “core values,” “mission statement,” and “code of conduct,” and he and the two other new employees had been obliged to sign a hefty bundle of papers covering all manner of confidentiality regulations.

  The worst of his nerves had settled, but the feeling of joining a sect that he had picked up on earlier had definitely not subsided.

  But at least the personnel manager’s evangelical meeting seemed to be almost over now.

  “Well, if no one’s got any more questions, that’s it from me. Now for a few words from our MD . . . As I said earlier, he would have spoken first, but Philip’s just got in from the airport so we’re having to work around his schedule.”

  Eliza Poole opened the door and muttered something to the girl out in reception.

  The other two new employees instantly pulled out their smartphones, but HP used the pause to fill his water glass instead. His mouth was dry and his head was throbbing with a tension headache.

  He had zoned out a couple of minutes into the presentation and was gradually starting to wonder if this project was really such a good idea. Maybe he should have thought it through a bit better, come up with some sort of plan instead of just jumping at the first thing that popped into his head, as usual?

  What did he actually think he was going to be able to achieve, anyway?

  The door opened and a sinewy man with cropped hair, probably somewhere in his early fifties, stepped into the room. His pin-striped suit looked like it was glued to his extremely trim body, his shirt was silky smooth, and his tie impeccably knotted. A precisely measured and no doubt genuine suntan made him look healthy and relaxed.

  Almost as if he’d just got home from a long holiday, HP thought, and felt his heartbeat speed up.

  Energetic Eliza, who was actually about the same height as Mr. Pinstripe, and definitely a couple of weight classes above him, suddenly seemed rather submissive.

  “Allow me to introduce our managing director—Philip Argos,” she said, a little too loudly.

  She tried to instigate a round of applause, but stopped instantly after a quick sideways glance from her boss.

  “Thank you, Eliza.”

  He nodded at the personnel manager, who blushed bright red and backed away quickly.

  “Welcome to ArgosEye,” Philip Argos began, in a surprisingly soft voice. HP leaned forward so as not to miss anything. He suddenly realized there was something familiar about the man, but he couldn’t quite work out what.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  MayBey was obviously the website’s big star.

  No one else’s threads had anything like the same number of comments, and his or her readership appeared to be constantly growing.

  The last post was pretty good.

  Picked up a lowlife dealer today. Found him at the top of a stairwell. During the search my partner stabbed himself on a syringe in one of the fucker’s jacket pockets. The dealer got it straightaway. Went completely white and started to cry. He’d broken the rules. Whether he meant to or not. The punishment was still the same . . .

  The post had thirty-six different comments; another four had appeared since she last checked half an hour ago. Practically all of them knew exactly what had happened.

  It was an unspoken rule that addicts always told the police if they had needles on them before they were searched. A tiny scratch from a dirty needle meant a whole load of blood tests followed by weeks of uncertainty. Weeks when you hardly dared to be in the same room as your family, going through every possible diagnosis over and over again . . .

  Hepatitis A, B, or C? Or worse . . .

  The rule was unconditional, which in all likelihood meant that MayBey and his unfortunate partner had given the dealer a severe beating. She would have done the same if she’d been in their shoes. Reluctantly, maybe, but still . . .

  Hope you castrated the fucker!

  Hit him till your baton bends.

  Semper Fi—do or die!

  And a whole load of other moronic comments in the same vein.

  Hardly surprising. Half the comments probably weren’t even from cops, but idiots with a fetish for uniforms who’d failed to get into Police Academy and were now stuck in their mom’s basement watching Cops.

  But on the net they could all play whatever role they wanted to.

  @Applelover 672

  Your well wrong there, mate. Everyone knows Android’s way better. Why spend a shitload more money on a phone that every fucker will have in six months?

  @lost—get an Android, fella! You won’t regret it!

 
; HP clicked the Send button and moments later his contribution appeared on the technology forum. He pressed Alt+Tab and switched to the Dagens Nyheter discussion page as he glanced at the printout next to the keyboard.

  It hasn’t been proven that GMO products are in any way harmful to people. On the contrary, a number of tests show that the human body actually finds it easier to absorb nutrition from this type of product . . .

  The Send button again, posting the contribution under the right article, then Alt+Tab again. Expressen this time, and the comment section under a film review:

  Can’t understand what the reviewer means. Saw the film yesterday and it’s way better than the first one!!

  Shit, only three days into the job and he was already good at this troll business! Damned good, even! His contributions usually got loads of feedback—mostly from people agreeing with him. He couldn’t help wondering what sort of people had the time to devote so much energy to commenting on things. Some of them seemed to live the whole of their pathetic little lives in the piss-filled gutters of the newspapers . . .

  A quick glance at the time told him he was well on schedule and that it would soon be time for a well-deserved coffee break. But first he was going to surf through one of the big travel websites and let a few different aliases tell the world what a fantastic time they’d had in a hotel he’d never heard of.

  He had about fifty different trolls in his stable, and his job was to keep them all going. Maintaining their Hotmail addresses and keeping their Facebook pages active, posting opinions that were in line with their predetermined attitudes on one of the many hundreds of forums out there. A few of his trolls were angry and shouty, others more reserved and sarcastic. Each one had its own little folder with a character description:

  Male, 50 years old, self-employed, votes to the right and reads thrillers. Likes Swedish sitcoms, boxed red wine, and spending Friday evenings on the sofa. Dislikes: the leftwing in general, environmental cars, traffic restrictions and taxes on wealth and property. Angry, loud and often spells things wrong. Usually supports category A3 clients.

  Or:

  Female, 25 years old, student, votes to the left, reads Nobel prize-winners, likes world music, Apple, fair-trade products and Iranian films. Dislikes: rightwing politics, 4x4s, meat, designer clothes and the USA in general. Expresses herself in a controlled, articulate way. Mostly supports category A6 clients.