Buzz: A Thriller (34 page)

Then when the Game had done its thing, the victims could choose—become a client of ArgosEye, and we’ll make sure your secrets are safe. A good old protection racket—Cosa Nostra goes cyberspace, basically. Their business would grow exponentially, and PayTag would be crying tears of joy over their profitable new acquisition.

An increase in revenue would mean the Game could continue to grow, recruiting more Ants and Players, and thus increasing both its power and its client base. And a growing Game would require more effort to keep itself hidden, which would all be handled by the bigger, stronger ArgosEye, and then everyone was back at Go again.

The circle was closed, the pieces of the puzzle fell into place, and the chain of logic held.

But as with all conspiracy theories, you had to ask: Who benefited?

And in this case the answer was simple:

Everyone!

But then Anna Argos decided to be difficult.

A way to stop them,
Monika had said.

Anna was a competitive person, and she would surely rather have destroyed her life’s work than look on as Philip and the treacherous section heads took it over.

Maybe she had even tried and failed?

Was that why she had fled the country?

But there was far too much at stake for them to just let her get away. As long as Anna was out there somewhere, she would constitute a serious risk.

And risks had to be eliminated, as far as possible.

So: enter Vincent the Lady Killer.

Hell, what a story!

Only one piece of the puzzle was missing . . .

Henrik HP Pettersson.

How did he fit into the picture?

♦  ♦  ♦

Her fury was back, all of a sudden. For several weeks she had imagined what MayBey looked like, sitting there in front of his screen. She had almost come to think of him as some sort of monster in a black cape with a deformed face. Instead MayBey was an overtanned gym junkie with a neat little goatee, sitting on a Turkish divan in a room that looked like something out of
The Thousand and One Nights . . .

His pretense of being surprised wasn’t going to work on her . . .

“You’re a cheeky bastard, Peter! Storing up a load of rubbish that Uncle Sixten and your poor, spurned boss have unloaded onto you. Then you make me your target and spend weeks throwing all sorts of shit at me, just to get a bit of attention for your nasty little gossip site. And now you want us to act like nothing’s happened, so that nothing comes out at work . . . ? Clearly you’re not as brave IRL as you are in front of your keyboard, are you, MayBey?”

Gladh stared at her hard for several seconds. Then he took a deep breath and opened his mouth.

At that moment Pierre came back into the room. He waved a little white box with a red cross on it.

“Here it is. Sorry, Rebecca, my beloved partner must have put it back in the bathroom cupboard instead of in the right place.”

He sat down on the sofa next to Rebecca and started to take out what he needed with a practiced hand.

“Sorry, I interrupted. What were you talking about?”

Gladh leaned forward slowly toward her.

“Yes, I was just wondering that . . . What the hell are you talking about, Normén?”

HE HAD A
fleeting sense that someone was watching him.

He looked anxiously around the carriage, but apart from the man with headphones in front of him, the train was empty.

Nothing to worry about.

He shut his eyes, took a deep breath through his nose, then let the air out slowly through his mouth. The whirlwind of thoughts in his head was gradually slowing down.

Anna, Vincent, Philip, Monika, Rilke, and all the others. And, finally, him. What a goddamn story . . .

The train stopped at AGA, but no passengers appeared to get on.

His cover had held up to the evening after the funeral, so everything he had found out up to that point had to be true. Then something had happened. Some external event that had changed the game. Stoffe. It couldn’t really be anyone else. Now that he’d had time to calm down a bit, the idea that Rilke had blown his cover, or that he’d slipped up somehow, no longer seemed terribly likely.

No, Stoffe was the only new factor that had been added
to the equation, the only difference from the earlier scenario. With the possible exception of his sister . . . But that thought worried him more than he was prepared to admit.

“Good evening, Henrik!” a soft voice suddenly said behind his shoulder, and HP froze to ice.

Philip Argos.

♦  ♦  ♦

“Peter, a phantom blogger? You’re joking . . .”

Pierre burst into chuckling laughter, which under normal circumstances was probably very contagious. But she definitely wasn’t in the mood for laughing. And Gladh didn’t seem as amused as his partner.

“That’s actually true, at most I can send emails and check the news websites.”

“But . . .” she said. “Tobbe said that . . .”

She paused, trying to think of a way in.

“Okay, I think I’m starting to get it now. So, Tobbe Lundh put you onto me . . . ?”

He looked at Pierre, who stopped laughing at once.

“Okay, it’s like this, Normén.” Gladh sighed. “I’ve always kept quiet about my sexuality. The force might have got a lot better officially, but if you’re in the Rapid Response Unit and compete in the TCA, it doesn’t really fit the image if you also happen to be . . .”

“A poof!” Pierre said, quick as a flash. “Peter and I don’t entirely agree on this, but even if I think he’s wrong, I respect his decision . . .”

Gladh gave Pierre a grateful look.

“Up until a couple of months ago everything worked pretty well,” he continued. “A number of other officers must
have known, or at least suspected, but no one really seemed bothered.”

“But then something happened . . . ?” Rebecca was still trying to sort out her thoughts, and added, “Something to do with Tobbe Lundh?”

Gladh nodded.

“He bumped into me and Pierre at a private party. His daughter was working as a waitress, and, being a bit of an overprotective dad, he picked her up just before the end . . .”

“A gay party,” Pierre said. “A perfectly ordinary party, no drag or feather boas, no Eurovision theme, but it was still pretty obvious. You can imagine the rest . . .”

She could. Tobbe was rabidly homophobic, which was just one of the many characteristics that had really started to annoy her once the physical attraction had begun to wear off.

“So he started spreading shit about you . . . ?”

“Well,” Gladh muttered, “he’s probably a bit too smart for that, I mean, he is in charge, and we did used to be mates. If he did start spreading shit about me, some of it would have landed on him, so he steered clear of that . . . But he did start to treat me differently at work, which pretty much amounted to the same thing. In a close-knit group like ours, everyone notices at once if there’s something wrong, and all of a sudden he was taking any chance he could to get me out of the van. Keeping me at arm’s length, sending me on secondment to other units that were short-staffed. It didn’t take long before the rest of them started joining in. I got the hint and applied for a transfer at once, before the gossip had time to really build up. For the past three weeks I’ve been working with the Youth Unit out in Roslagen.”

“And Sixten . . . ?”

She had pretty much worked out the answer for herself. Those comments about the lack of morals in the force had suddenly taken on a whole new meaning.

“Uncle Sixten? He’s as homophobic as Tobbe Lundh, if not worse. We haven’t spoken for years . . . What’s he got to do with anything?”

♦  ♦  ♦

His first instinct was to run, run for his life. But as he attempted to stand up he felt a heavy arm on his shoulders.

“Take it easy now, lad,” Elroy muttered in his ear as he pushed him back down onto his seat.

“You’ve certainly been busy tonight, Henrik.”

Philip sat down opposite him. Their knees were so close they were almost touching.

“So, what exciting stories did my former sister-in-law have to tell you? Let me guess! I tormented her little sister, forced her out of her own company, and now I’m planning to sell the whole lot to the devil. Right so far?”

HP nodded mutely. All of a sudden he felt nauseous. He was sure he hadn’t been followed. He’d even left the house by the terrace door, cutting through the hedge into the woods.

So how the hell had they found him?

Someone must have blabbed.

But who?

He glanced quickly toward the front of the carriage. The man with the headphones was still there. As long as there was an outsider in the carriage with them, they probably wouldn’t dare to harm him.

At least he hoped not . . .

Philip smiled amiably.

“I’m afraid our last meeting was rather unfortunate, Henrik, and I take full responsibility for that.”

He felt in his coat pocket and HP stiffened.

“Throat lozenge?”

Philip held out a little red box and for some reason HP obediently took one.

“Makes people talk,”
Philip said with a chuckle, mimicking the advert. HP heard Elroy join in behind his neck. He couldn’t help grinning nervously. His stomach lurched again and he swallowed a couple of times to get it under control.

“As you might have noticed, my sister-in-law is a rather unusual person,” Philip went on. “Monika’s focus is more on the supernatural plane, which means that she sometimes has difficulty accepting reality the way that it actually is. Unfortunately Anna’s tragic death seems to have done nothing to help that . . .”

He pulled a sad face.

“As in every broken relationship, the fault is shared by both parties . . . But as far as ArgosEye is concerned, everything I have done has been strictly by the book, I can assure you. Well, enough of that . . .”

He flashed a glance at Elroy, then looked over his shoulder toward the man a few seats farther forward.

“I thought we might continue our discussion in a more private setting, Henrik. We’re still very interested in who sent you to us, and what instructions you were given. Besides, we have plenty more to discuss . . .” He held his hand up to stop HP from saying anything.

“No, no. No need to say anything now. We’ll deal with all that when we can speak without fear of being disturbed . . . Sophie’s waiting with the car in Ropsten, so my advice to you
would be to take the chance to consider which direction you would like our impending conversation to take.”

“Easy or difficult, little Henke, you decide,” Elroy whispered in his ear. “It’s all the same to me!”

♦  ♦  ♦

The train made one last stop before the bridge, but before HP had a chance to think about trying to run, Elroy had once again laid a hand on his shoulder. The young man with the headphones stood up and walked past them. HP tried to catch his eye, but the guy wasn’t even looking in his direction. Then the train creaked into motion again and started the long sweep up toward the Lidingö bridge.

Philip took his cell from the holster on his belt and put it to his ear.

“Yes, hello . . . The situation’s under control . . . We go ahead as planned.”

HP looked out of the window. They were up on the bridge now, dark water far below on either side of them.

“Good,” Philip said into the phone. “You have permission to proceed. We’ll start phase three at midnight . . .”

Maybe he could make it. If he leaped to his feet, jumped on Philip, and clambered over him . . .

No, even in the unlikely event of him getting his battered body away from both Philip and Elroy, he had no inclination at all to dive twenty meters into ice-cold water. It was a long way to shore, far too far, and there was no way he would survive a swim like that, certainly not in his current state . . .

Philip seemed to have ended the call. He sat with the phone in his hand for several seconds and then pressed a button on one side of it before raising it to his mouth.

“Sophie?” He released the button.

“I’m here!” her voice crackled over the little speaker.

“We’re on the bridge, will be there in a couple of minutes. You can drive up now, over.”

“Understood!”

The other end of the bridge was getting closer and closer, and HP felt the train start to slow down.

“Well, Henrik, we seem to have reached the end of the line . . .”

♦  ♦  ♦

Her head was still spinning as she walked slowly back toward where she had left the rental car.

Peter Gladh wasn’t MayBey, unless he and his partner were extremely good actors. But she doubted that. They had both seemed genuine, and that whole story about Tobbe seemed to come from the heart.

Tobbe . . .

It was quite obvious that he’d tried to mislead her.

He probably didn’t have a clue about MayBey, and had just given her Gladh’s name to get her out of the tennis hall before little Jonathan could pick up the vibes.

But she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that Tobbe was involved, one way or another.

Not just because MayBey seemed to know about them using Henke’s flat, or that several of the events that had been described matched the sort of thing Tobbe had told her. The whole situation had also escalated at about the same time that she finished with him. But Tobbe wasn’t MayBey, she’d worked that out early on. He simply wasn’t good enough at expressing himself, not by a long shot. Besides,
he didn’t have the IT skills needed to keep MayBey anonymous.

But there was still something about the tone of the posts. It seemed so personal. As if MayBey knew exactly who she was, and genuinely didn’t like—hated her, even.

♦  ♦  ♦

He was terrified.

They had been watching him somehow, letting him off the leash for a while to see what he’d do. Anyone smarter than him would obviously have taken off. Packed his bag and got the hell out of Dodge, making them believe he was out of the Game and no longer any threat to them.

But not him. Oh no . . . Instead he had merely demonstrated that he had no intention of giving up. That he was still a threat. The question he had asked himself in the flat was still waiting for an answer. Had they managed to see past Henrik Pettersson and realize that he was also Player 128? Did they even know that it was him that Vincent had framed for Anna’s death?