Buzz: A Thriller Read online

  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 treadmill. 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 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 bulletin 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 . . .”

  He made a face that HP had trouble interpreting.

  “Over the next few weeks the company is going to be facing some serious challenges. I’m afraid I can’t share all the details with you, but one thing that’s very clear is that the demands on each and every one of us are going to increase considerably. It’s a whole new ball game, as the Americans would say . . . As you might have noticed already, there are certain people who haven’t quite kept up with developments. Who no longer match our profile, if you understand what I mean . . . ?”

  HP nodded. His heart was suddenly racing with expectation.

  “Obviously this is just between the two of us, but as soon as we’ve got past Anna’s funeral, there’s going to be a reorganization. I’m thinking of moving Frank to the Laundry, which will mean that we need a new team leader in the Troll Mine. I don’t suppose you can think of anyone who might be suitable for the job . . . ?”

  “I can probably think of at least one candidate,” HP replied with a broad grin.

  24

  MUD

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Dear Uncle Tage,

  Thanks for your kind letter.

  I would be happy to accept your offer, right now I could do with all the help I can get.

  Best wishes,

  Rebecca Normén

  SHE REALIZED SHE was clutching at straws, but in her situation she hardly had anything to lose. If nothing happened soon, she’d be both out of a job and a convicted criminal.

  Besides, there was something about the old man that appealed to her, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. But that was probably mostly just rubbish . . . Tage Sammer reminded her of her dad, that was obviously it, and that was probably why she’d decided to email him.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Well, like I said. This flat is practically unique. The view, the location, and not least the original features . . .”

  The blond estate agent gestured toward the brick wall in one corner of the room, then at the exposed beams in the ceiling, as if she were a museum guide in the middle of a tour.

  The flat was undeniably impressive. An old loft, renovated to make a spacious three-room apartment at the top of Stigberget on Södermalm, with a magnificent view of Djurgården and the entrance to Stockholm Harbor. The previous owner must have been an architect, because it looked like it came straight out of one of the design magazines HP usually found at the barber’s. From his point of view, he couldn’t really understand how people could get so excited about Danish design from the fifties, teppanyaki grills, or imported Italian limestone. But design was the fetish of the twenty-first century. You only had to compare the feeble little shelf of shame reserved for porn mags with the massive display of interior design magazines in any gasoline station to realize that. Everyone who was anyone evidently fucked on colorful Carl Malmsten sofas instead of a sturdy old Klippan covered in sweaty fake leather from Ikea . . . And speaking of the F-word: Rilke seemed completely blown away by interior design porn. She soaked up every sales cliché that fell from the estate agent’s mouth, giggled in a false way at the right places, and at one point he almost got the feeling that the two women were flirting with each other. Ordinarily he would have found the whole scenario a bit sexy. But for some reason the adult-film director who usually lived inside his head seemed to have gone to lunch, because the giggling and the little intimate touches were actually making him more annoyed than excited. He glanced at the time. It was almost an hour since they left the office, and they hadn’t even had lunch yet.

  He
didn’t have time for this sort of nonsense—he actually had a job to do, and so did Rilke, especially if she was going to be able to afford a place like this . . .

  Rilke seemed to pick up on his irritation, because she concluded her discussion with the estate agent, exchanged air kisses, and then came over to him with a key ring dangling teasingly from her finger.

  “Mette’s letting us have a look on our own for a while,” she said as the front door closed. “What do you say about starting in the bedroom?”

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Dear Rebecca,

  You’ve made an old man very happy.

  I’ll write again as soon as I have any relevant information to give you, probably within the next few days. Try not to worry, my dear, this will all work out, you’ll see.

  Best wishes,

  Uncle Tage

  She read through the email more times than she needed to, and for some reason she couldn’t help smiling. She liked his tone, and even if the message was short, it still felt strangely reassuring.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  A dream.

  That was what it felt like.

  For the first time in his life he had an exciting job with a good salary, and he seemed to be the boss’s favorite. As well as that, he had met a girl, a real ten-pointer who was as attractive as she was smart.

  Money, career, and love. This was what life was supposed to be like!

  There was just one problem. It wasn’t his dream.

  It belonged to Magnus Sandström; the fake one, though, not the original.

  But ever since that lunch with Philip, he found himself toying more and more with a rather pleasant thought. Dumping the phone in the nearest drain, moving into that flat with Rilke, forgetting all about Anna Argos and the Game, and making a normal life for himself.

  Difficult—of course! But not impossible.

  Most of it seemed to be going brilliantly—if it weren’t for what Nox had told him the other evening.

  It wasn’t really that dramatic. But Nox had taken his surveillance duties very seriously, and had seen two lads, eighteen to twenty or so, hanging around for several hours in a doorway on the other side of the street from the hotel. Nox recognized everyone who lived on the whole block, and these two definitely didn’t fit in. They were rather too well-dressed and polished, and had seemed rather nervous.

  Nox hadn’t seen any cells or cameras, he was definite on that point, but HP still found himself feeling increasingly uneasy.

  If the Game, against all expectation, had found out that he’d come back home to Stockholm, he couldn’t see any way that he could be traced to the Hotel Hopeless. It would have been far more likely for them to send their spies to his old flat in Maria Trappgränd, or to Becca’s place out in Fredhäll, but he’d been careful to steer well clear of both of those. Okay, so he’d popped into Mange’s shop briefly, and in hindsight that could be seen as an unnecessary risk. But he hadn’t been able to resist the temptation to see a friendly face, and the shop was only a few blocks from the hotel, and he had disguised himself well. Unfortunately his visit had been in vain, seeing as Mange hadn’t even been there, just his pimply stand-in.

  Could they have been watching the shop and followed him back to the hotel?

  He didn’t think so, but on the other hand you could never be entirely certain . . .

  25

  RAT

  Pillars of Society forum

  Posted: 18 December, 11:38

  By: MayBey

  If you work undercover long enough, sooner or later you start to wonder who you’re looking at in the bathroom mirror . . .

  This post has 59 comments

  ONE GOOD THING about his impending promotion was that his pass card suddenly worked on all the doors. That meant he could move about unhindered between the Filter at one end of the office and the Laundry at the other.

  Beens didn’t appear to have noticed that his days were probably numbered, because he was still making just as little effort as before. He loitered in the staff room, hovered around other people’s desks, and kept coming up with “jokey” little pranks.

  It was hardly surprising that Philip wanted to replace him with Frank. The other night Beens and his mates had come up with the idea of reprogramming the speed-dial buttons of the phones in the Troll Mine. HP had nothing against practical jokes, quite the opposite, in fact. But this was all a bit nerdy and studenty, to put it mildly. Twenty minutes of his valuable time wasted deleting the speaking clock, Horny Veronica, and the Samaritans from his phone, and then reinstalling the numbers he needed in order to be able to do his job.

  As if that weren’t bad enough, HP had managed to press the wrong option on one of the menus and inadvertently deleted one of the universal speed-dial numbers shared by all the phones in the office . . .

  In the end he had been forced to take the bull by the horns and ask Åsa in reception for her help sorting everything out. Her silence had cost him a round of takeaway lattes, but there was no way he was going to let the rest of the office get hold of that little tidbit. He had his reputation to think of, after all.

  Unlike certain others . . .

  When the day of departure finally arrived, Frank was going to have a hell of a job tidying up after Beens. But that was hardly HP’s problem. Even if he couldn’t help getting wound up by the idiot who didn’t seem to have realized that things had changed.

  During their cozy night together Beens, aside from his high school pranks, had also managed to demonstrate the tools they used in the Laundry. In principle it was nothing more than a list of negative search terms and where they stood in relation to the terms they were trying to keep clean. The hits came from the Filter, passed through the Strategy department, and finally ended up on the projection wall in the Laundry.

  The list on the wall only contained posts that needed to be cleaned away, and they dropped off whenever the Laundry’s elves managed to deal with them, to be replaced by new ones. The whole thing basically happened in real time, and it was practically impossible for an outsider like him to pick up anything that might be of any use.

  But as luck would have it, Beens had been quick to show him the little access database he’d put together himself to keep tabs on everything, while simultaneously helping him keep his own workload to a minimum. The lazy fool even sat there boasting about how he had designed the program a long time ago, when no one had a complete grasp of the system, and that the application wouldn’t be regarded as kosher by Philip.

  If HP’s suspicions were justified, and if ArgosEye really was what kept the Game secret, cleaning up and cutting off enough information threads for the Game Master and his followers to be able to stay hidden way down in the darkness, then the evidence ought to be there in Beens’s unauthorized little database. All he had to do was get hold of it.

  But really he ought to think about it, lie low for a while until things had calmed down. There was a lot going on, and this definitely wasn’t the right time to take any risks.

  The only problem was that the fat lady was already waiting in the wings . . . The funeral was on Saturday, and the much-vaunted Stoffe was coming back on Monday. Considering how tightly Philip ran this ship, Beens’s database would be history the moment his scuffed size tens made their last exit on Friday afternoon, and with that his hottest lead would be lost. In other words, he didn’t have a lot of choice.

  He might as well drop the whole undercover act at once if he wasn’t going to try to get hold of that database.

  It was now Wednesday, it was almost half past eleven, and he could practically hear Beens’s stomach rumbling on the other side of the office door.

  He tapped his pass card against the reader and was instantly granted access to the Laundry. A few heads looked up, but a moment later their hands were once again flying over their keyboards in their respective cubicles.

  “All right, Mange?”

  “Hello, you lot!” he said
loudly in response to the mumbled greetings, as he swung around the corner into Beens’s larger cubicle, set slightly apart from the others.

  “Hi, Beens, time for lunch? Carbonara down at the corner, my treat!”

  “Great, okay! I’m up for that.”

  “Good, but you need to shift your ass.”

  HP pretended to look at his watch.

  “I’ve got a meeting at quarter past twelve, so we need to be quick.”

  Beens quickly stood up and grabbed his padded coat from the hanger dangling from the sidewall of his cubicle.

  “Okay, I’m all done,” he panted as he struggled with the sleeves.

  “You sure are.” HP grinned, slapping him on the back.

  The computer screen was still showing a YouTube window, and HP hurriedly positioned himself in the way. He put one hand on Beens’s shoulder and steered him swiftly out of the cubicle without giving him a chance to lock his computer.

  He still hadn’t quite made up his mind . . .

  “You’re not upset about that thing with the phones, are you . . . ?” Beens grinned as they headed off toward reception.

  “God, no, that was a good laugh . . .” HP said, doing his best to sound like he meant it. “Go to hell if you can’t take a joke, as I always say . . .”

  “Quite right! Sometimes this place gets a bit too uptight with Philip and his control mania. I mean, dammit, the phones have even got 112 on speed dial. Check number one for yourself if you don’t believe me!” Beens grinned again, and once more HP felt obliged to smile back.

  Oh yes, he knew perfectly well what speed-dial number one was, seeing as he had managed to erase it when he was trying to clean up the mess caused by the prank.

  One one two is hard to do . . .

  He had to make up his mind, make a decision.

  Safe or all in?

  As they passed reception Åsa waved at him.

  “Thanks for the coffee, Mange!”

  “My pleasure,” he muttered, giving the back of Beens’s head the evil eye.

  Okay, he’d made his decision. No matter what happened afterward, he couldn’t pass up the chance of getting hold of the joker’s little homemade database.