Buzz: A Thriller (25 page)

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 . . .

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 . . .

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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.

“Shit, I forgot to finish an email I promised to send before twelve!” he groaned, slapping his forehead in true drama school fashion.

“It’ll only take five minutes, max. You go on ahead and get a table . . .”

He herded Beens out through the door, watched him long enough to see him get in the lift, then jogged back toward the Laundry.

A quick glance at the time. Only a minute left before the screen saver automatically locked Beens’s computer. This was going to be damned tight . . .

♦  ♦  ♦

In spite of the rumbling aches in her body she decided to take a walk.

She looked around carefully as she stepped out into the street, and stopped a couple more times to check.

But she couldn’t see anyone following her, and after twenty minutes or so out in the cold she went back home.

On the stairs on the way up to her flat she saw that something was different.

There was something hanging from her door, and as she got closer she saw what it was. A bouquet of dry, dead roses.

♦  ♦  ♦

No one reacted as he carefully slid back into the Laundry. Beens’s screen was just fading as he slipped into the cubicle. He quickly pressed the space bar and the YouTube window reappeared. Five seconds later and the computer would have locked him out.

He moved the mouse to an icon of two angry, staring, predatory eyes.

The computer whirred.

Wake up—time to die!

A quick double click and suddenly the database was open.

He felt in one of his jacket pockets and pulled out his new USB memory stick. Ten gigabytes—that ought to be more than enough for Beens’s little extracurricular project. He put the stick next to one of the USB ports, but suddenly hesitated. Was he absolutely certain this was a good idea?

Maybe not, but he was sure he’d never get another chance like it.

He really didn’t have any choice at all.

He pressed the memory stick into the slot and waited a few seconds.

Once the computer had finished thinking, he opened Explorer, then clicked and dragged the pair of eyes toward the symbol for the external memory.

No response.

He tried again. Still nothing.

Shit!

He tried a different way, going back to the database and selecting “Export to,” with the external memory as the destination.

Suddenly there was a warning bleep, and then a dialogue box appeared in the middle of the screen.

Unauthorized external memory found. Continue?

He clicked the icon for Yes.

Nothing happened.

Shit!
He only had a few minutes before Beens the carbonara king would start to get impatient. He tried once more, but got the error message again.

Evidently there was some sort of program that blocked anyone from saving files to an external memory.

Balls
—he should have guessed!

Lex Wikileaks, dammit!
It was obvious that Philip would have done his homework.

Okay, time for a different plan, and PDQ!

He couldn’t copy the database and look through it at home in peace and quiet as he had hoped. He’d just have to check it there and then, really fast!

So how did it work?

After a bit of random clicking he brought up a search box and quickly typed in “Game.”

The database responded instantly, and HP’s pulse shifted up a gear.

Six hundred and twelve results!

He checked the first, only to realize that it had nothing to do with what he was looking for. Same thing with the second and third.

He glanced at the time. He only had another minute, two at the most, before he had to go.

He tried searching for “game” + “game master.”

One hundred and nineteen results—much better.

Just as he was moving the cursor onto the first result he heard the office door open quickly.

“Hi, Elroy,” he heard someone call out, then some indistinct chatter that he couldn’t make out.

Shit!

No matter what the reason for Elroy’s visit down there was, he mustn’t find him at Beens’s computer, that much was freaking obvious.

But this was his last chance to get a look at the database.

He cautiously raised his head above the screen and the sight of the back of Elroy’s closely cropped head made him duck down again at once.

“External memory? No, for God’s sake, see for yourself. That’s against company policy,” he heard one of the Laundry guys say.

Damn!

The bastard memory stick must have triggered some sort of alarm. He ought to have realized that a company like ArgosEye would have cast-iron procedures to stop people downloading and taking any information home with them. Suddenly he remembered that one of the many pieces of
paper he had signed on his first day at work had dealt with that very issue.

Christ, how stupid!

He had something like fifteen or twenty seconds before Elroy blocked him off inside the cubicle and he was toast.

He yanked out the USB stick and took a last look at the screen.

What exactly is the Game?

was the heading of the first search result, and it took every last bit of his self-control not to click on it.

Fuckingbastardballs!

The voices were getting closer. With excruciating reluctance he hammered at the Escape key and then quickly pressed Ctrl+Alt+Del. Just as the screen locked he threw himself under the desk.

He could see movement through the cracks in the cubicle walls.

Hurry up, hurry up!

He snaked into the narrow cable run that led between the panels, pressed down against the floor, and pulled the desk chair in behind him. A moment later a pair of well-polished size tens appeared in his field of vision, so close that he thought he could smell the polish.

There were a few seconds of silence.

Then he heard Elroy’s voice.

“I’m in position, but there’s nothing here. Whoever it was, he must have been smart enough to give up—over!”

“Understood,” Philip’s voice said over the radio. “We need to keep our eyes open. It looks like we’ve got a rat . . .”

Pillars of Society forum

Posted: 20 December, 16:56

By:
MayBey

An eye for an eye—is that really such a bad idea?

This post has
76 comments

IT WAS MICKE
who emailed the link to the Facebook page. Regina Righteous evidently had her own profile on there. The date of birth, education, and workplace all matched hers, but the rest was a complete fabrication. The two companies listed under “Activities and Interests” turned out to be sites for people wanting affairs, and her status was given as “in an open relationship.” That, and the fact that she had turned him down, presumably explained why his email had been so short and to the point.

But worst of all was the photograph.

A picture of her in her running gear, and it took her a matter of moments to work out where and when it had been taken.