Buzz: A Thriller Read online

  But the idea of being a police officer again, if only to scare the crap out of a couple of little hooligans, felt strangely cheering. A few seconds of complete control in the midst of the chaos surrounding her.

  She felt in her pocket for her police ID, closed her hand around the rectangular leather holder, and headed off across the grass toward the car. She was jogging lightly, trying not to let the loose grit on the road give her away.

  She couldn’t see any movement inside the car.

  With a bit of luck the people inside were sharing a fix and wouldn’t see her approaching until she banged on the window.

  She was midstride when the car’s headlights suddenly went on.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  He hadn’t been in the downstairs corridor of the hotel before. It was, if possible, even narrower and darker than upstairs. Old bicycles, plastic bags, and other clutter were piled against the peeling walls, like a corridor in some run-down student hostel.

  A couple of the lights in the ceiling were out, and the remainder cast a feeble, low-energy glow that was so weak he had to screw his eyes up to read the numbers on the doors.

  The rooms down here must have their own little kitchens, because the corridor smelled of food, ingrained cigarette smoke, and some other musty smell that he couldn’t quite place. Somewhere up ahead a radio was playing and as he got closer to the noise he realized that he recognized the song.

  Nacka Skoglund, the football player, singing, “We’re all with you.”

  Talk about a golden oldie! In fact this whole place felt pretty Stone Age . . .

  He pulled out the carton of cigarettes he had bought from 7-Eleven and headed to the far end of the corridor.

  As he got closer to Nox’s flat he saw that the door was ajar. The music seemed to be coming from inside, and a scratchy trumpet fanfare signaled that the song was starting up again.

  Truu dutteduttduttedutt dutteduttduttedutt tuutt!

  A few other players, and little old me . . .

  HP knocked on the door and it slid open until the safety chain caught it from inside. The room was dark and all he could make out were a couple of little green diodes farther in the room that must belong to the stereo.

  He looked around in the corridor, but there was no one in sight. For a few seconds he contemplated going back upstairs to his own room.

  But Nox had sounded pretty keen on the phone. One last try, then he’d give up . . .

  He tucked the carton of cigarettes under his arm, squeezed his head through the gap, and peered into the room. It really did smell musty—a sweet, nauseous smell that reminded him of a festering garbage can.

  A little of the weak light from the corridor crept in through the crack and as his eyes got used to the gloom inside more details emerged. A full bag of trash, a broken chair on its side, and something large and square that had to be the end of the bed.

  “Nox?” he hissed.

  Nacka replied:

  We’re all with you—we’re all with you . . .

  I don’t know why, but we’re all with you . . .

  Suddenly HP realized someone was lying in the bed. A pair of waxen, pale, inert feet were sticking out from under the covers. His stomach was first to understand, and had time to lurch before his brain worked out what he was staring at.

  What the . . . ?

  The phone!

  The stupid fucker must have tried to get it going. Breaking his instructions and sticking a charger into it.

  Which meant . . . ?

  Truu dutteduttduttedutt dutteduttduttedutt tuutt!

  They’d found him!

  The hairs on HP’s neck stood up. He took a step backward and dropped the carton of cigarettes. Suddenly he felt a pair of hands grab him by the shoulders.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  She stopped dead, fighting against the law of gravity as her shoes slid on the grit on the road. The car’s engine revved hard and for a fraction of a second she was caught in the light from the headlamps—blinded, paralyzed like a rabbit on a country road while the car came roaring straight at her.

  Then instinct took over, her feet finally got a grip, and she threw herself at the pavement. In midair something struck the bottom of her leg, making her body change direction, and she hit the frozen ground with her face and shoulder.

  Battered and bruised, she got to her knees and watched as the car’s rear lights disappeared in the direction of the Dagens Nyheter skyscraper. The driver didn’t appear to have slowed down at all.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Dammit, don’t wake the Chief!” a voice hissed.

  HP spun around, only just managing to suppress the urge to swing his arms wildly.

  It was Nox.

  “What? Wh-who?”

  Fuck me, Amadeus, he was so shocked he’d practically shat himself!

  “The Chief . . .”

  Nox nodded toward flat number 24, where Nacka Skoglund had just started up again.

  “I usually let him stay at mine for a while when things get a bit rough for him. He’s nice enough, but his top floor isn’t properly furnished, if you get me? Can’t sleep if he isn’t listening to that fucking song. Says it reminds him of when he was little. Happy street and all that . . .”

  “Dammit, it smells like something crawled in there and died!”

  “What? Oh that, nah . . .”

  Nox grinned.

  “He’s got some weird illness that makes him smell a bit funny. It’s got some Latin name, but don’t ask him about it, for God’s sake, or he’ll get seriously fucking angry. The Chief’s actually pretty hygienic, which isn’t something you can say about most people in his position.”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Whatever, he ends up in a bloody bad mood if he gets woken up. Totally blasted loopy, you could say, and the Chief doesn’t always remember how damned enormous he actually is. One time he threw Eskil—you know, the bloke in reception—against the wall so hard that the plasterboard cracked. The poor idiot fainted and broke three ribs.”

  Nox scratched his neck.

  “I had to keep the Chief away from here for six months until things had calmed down. Is that for me, by the way?”

  He pointed at the carton of cigarettes that was still on the floor.

  “Sure, here you go.”

  HP picked up the box of Marlboros and handed it to Nox, who immediately tore off the plastic and fished out a packet.

  “Want one?”

  HP took a cigarette and pulled out his trusty Zippo to light them both.

  His hands were still shaking and he pressed his elbows to his sides to steady them.

  “That thing I asked you to look after . . . ?” he began.

  “The phone? Don’t worry, man. It’s in a safe place, just like you told me . . .”

  “Good, but I’m going to have to ask for it back . . .”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  She had a serious black eye, she could hardly raise her left arm above her shoulder, and she had a rectangular bruise in a nasty shade of reddish blue on her right shin. One of the car’s side mirrors had probably caught her in midair. She might have a tiny hairline fracture, but nothing serious, according to the weary duty doctor.

  All in all, a whole night wasted in various waiting rooms just to get a couple of painkillers and a “come back if it doesn’t get any better.”

  She kept replaying the incident in her mind, without finding any more details.

  But she was getting more and more convinced that she hadn’t almost been run down by a couple of louts high on amphetamines.

  When she got home from seeing the doctor she even limped back up to Rålambshovsvägen. Just as she thought, the place where the car had been parked was ideal if you wanted to keep an eye on her flat but still be able to make a quick getaway.

  If you put together everything that had happened over the past few weeks, it all seemed pretty obvious.

  The car had been there because of her.

  23

 
; TRUST IS GOOD

  From: Holmblad, Eva

  Subject: Lunch

  Date/time: Today, 13:00

  Place: Eriks Bakficka, Fredrikshovsgatan 4

  Participants: Sandström, Magnus; Argos, Philip

  Accept?

  Decline?

  FOR A COUPLE of seconds his panic at being unmasked flared up again, but he quickly got it back under control again. Eriks was a 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 humor, 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 humor 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 behavior . . .

  . . . a cocky little teenage joyrider in a tracksuit trying to play tough. Refused to say what his partner in crime’s name was—spat at my partner.

  Al Pacino in an oversized tracksuit . . .

  So we cuffed him and put him in the car. Then the dog handler let go of his dog in there and I shut the door. A couple of minutes screaming and crying, then little baby Al sang like a bird about anyone and everything.

  And he was polite too—didn’t say a word, even though we made him scrub the piss off the seat himself back at the station. You’d probably have liked our instant justice, Regina?

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

  ROFL—you’re the man, MayBey!

  Ought to be more like you in the force.

  Have been grinning about this all day.

  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 comments 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 quite shake the feeling that it was all somehow connected.

  Darfur, her suspension, Ludvig Runeberg, and Westergren, the hooligans in the car, and not least the uncomfortable sense of being watched the whole time, a sense that was only getting worse. Whoever MayBey was, he or she was trying to say something—tell her something. And she had to work out what it was.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  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 nonalcoholic 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’re going 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. People who are 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 damned 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 messed up severely . . .

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

  “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 favorite 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 was reminiscent of what we do today at ArgosEye, but the difference there was that 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 after that documentary 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 key words that had anything to do with the film. The title, the filmmaker’s name, the chemical compound of the poison—
you name it.”

  He gestured toward the ceiling.

  “If anyone searched for any of those words, they always got Dole’s corrected version of the story three centimeters 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 use a tool that was managed by the National Defense Radio Center, a sort of search matrix for monitoring communications, looking for certain loaded terms, like bomb, terrorist, explosion, and so on . . .”

  “The famous National Defense Radio Center 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 Defense Radio Center 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 than using a supermarket loyalty card . . .”

  “Exactly!” HP agreed. “So that was where you got the idea? A National Defense Radio Center, 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 . . .”