The Game Trilogy (10 page)

Rebecca was sitting beside him in the passenger seat. She glanced up at the extra rear-view mirror on her side. The entire convoy was driving in close formation down the left-hand carriageway, at a speed of about a hundred, exactly as agreed. No problems.

‘Crossing Traneberg, heading for Lindhagen,’ she reported to Control over the radio.

If she looked out to the right and tried to see past the trees, she’d soon be able to see her own little house up ahead on the right.

The flyovers of the Essinge motorway were coming closer and closer. She squinted at their layered dark silhouettes. It almost looked like there was someone standing up there on one of the lower bridges.

Pull up the bag
, the message said.

So he did.

A blue-striped PE bag, it turned out. Tied to the outside of the railing, and almost exactly the same as one he had made many years ago in sewing-class. Even the colour of the cord was the same.

It was a pretty neat coincidence, really. He seemed to remember that his was hanging in his wardrobe at home. Weren’t his old football boots still in it? They must have been there a couple of years by now, he could hardly remember the last time he’d used them. Maybe the summer before last, something like that?

He felt the bag. It was heavy. He undid it, full of anticipation.

Yes, there was definitely someone standing on one of the lower bridges, and there certainly shouldn’t be anyone there!

They were all motorways up there, no pedestrians
allowed. Kruse didn’t seem to have noticed anything, but he was mainly concentrating on the traffic in the right-hand lane. She raised the microphone to her mouth but stopped halfway. The bridge was approaching fast and she could see the person up there moving. Her instincts were screaming at her to sound the alarm, order the convoy to halt and turn back.

But what if she was wrong?

A stone, a big one, maybe three or four kilos. Sharp edges too. Black, with a slightly rough surface that still felt warm against the palm of his hand. A patch of something sticky almost made his fingers slip. He moved the stone to his left hand and wiped off whatever it was on his jeans.

His heart was pounding in his chest. So what happened now?

When he saw the blue lights coming towards him along Drottningholmsvägen he knew in his gut this was what his task was all about. With the stone back in his right hand he leaned cautiously over the railing.

The light flashed again. He had guessed right.

Lights, camera, action, he thought excitedly before he dropped the stone from the bridge.

Either Kruse didn’t hear her or else the warning came so late that he simply didn’t have time to react. Because suddenly there was a crash as if lightning had struck the windscreen and the world ahead of them turned milky-white.

Glass sprayed into the car and she felt her face stinging.

‘Shit!’ she heard Kruse roar. ‘Fucking shit!’

He rammed his heavy foot instinctively on the brake-pedal and wrested the car to the right so they wouldn’t be hit by the escort vehicle behind them.

By the smallest possible margin the car behind them got past, but Kruse’s swerve was so sudden that they slammed into the concrete barrier on the right-hand side. The Volvo rebounded out into the left-hand carriageway where the Prime Minister’s BMW was just manoeuvring to get past. The driver swerved wildly to the left to escape what looked like an unavoidable collision.

‘Shit,’ Rebecca managed to echo before Kruse did what any bodyguard in his position would have done. He let go of the brake, put his foot down on the accelerator and wrenched the wheel to the right. The front wheels regained their grip on the road and they shot away from the Prime Minister’s car like an arrow, missing by a hair’s breadth the metal arrow marking the turn-off to Lindhagensplan, and ploughed straight into the railing facing the park.

A violent smash, then a feeling of floating. A second of weightlessness when all that could be heard was the roaring engine.

Then everything went black.

What a fucking circus!

The stone hit perfectly in the middle of the windscreen and when he looked over the other side of the bridge he saw the Volvo swerving violently between lanes, its blue flashing light streaking. It almost rammed another car with a blue light flashing in the left-hand carriageway, but suddenly lurched sharply to the right before shooting through the side railing and carrying on, rolling wildly, into the park where it finally came to rest upside down.

He quickly kicked the moped into gear and crossed the carriageway, then, stopping on the other side of the bridge, he pulled off the camera and zoomed in on the smoking wreck in amongst the trees. The Volvo was completely still now and there was no sign of movement from it at all.

But who the hell cared about that!

Because now he was the new number one, the Master of the Game!

Mission accomplished, he thought ecstatically. Three thousand fucking points and almost twenty-five thousand nice new kronor in his account, apart from anything else. He wondered who the fuck had been in that car? At a guess, some big-shot, but who? Oh well, he’d probably find out as soon as he switched on his computer. Now he had to get home and gratefully accept the adoration of the masses!

He put the moped into gear, glanced quickly over his shoulder and did a tearing start out into the carriageway.

The car came screeching out of the shadows. The collision was so hard that he bounced back into the railing, then the moped’s front wheel, which had suddenly been smashed into a shapeless lump, locked instantly and he just had time to put his hands up to protect himself as he flew head-first onto the tarmac.

He felt his palms scraping over the road-surface and a burning pain shot up one arm before the rest of his body hit the ground. The helmet made a cracking sound as it shattered, then the air was knocked out of him.

But he didn’t lose consciousness, at least not properly. He could hear voices and screaming, probably from the stupid fucker who had driven into him. Where the hell had he come from, anyway?

Got to get up, he thought. Got to get away from here.

But his body wouldn’t obey. He couldn’t even lift his head from the tarmac. All of a sudden his skull seemed full of cement, impossible to move or even turn. Was he paralysed? A cripple?

Fuck, fuck, fuck!!!

Slowly he tried to open his mouth to get a bit of air. It
was like trying to breathe porridge yet everything seemed to be happening in ultra-rapid time. The voices were coming closer, getting clearer.

‘… bastard … threw something … the Volvo down there … called the cops.’

Suddenly his paralysis eased and he managed to take a deep breath.

The pain came from everywhere at once. His head, his legs, and his hands more than anything else hurt like hell, but the agony, surprisingly, made him feel better. If you could feel things, you weren’t paralysed, that seemed fairly logical.

His vision cleared slightly and from the corner of his eye he could make out several dark silhouettes leaning over him where he lay with his face embedded in the tarmac.

From somewhere in the distance there was the sound of sirens.

He tried to get up and this time it went a bit better. He raised one hand towards the men to get some help, but none of them moved. Then a flashing blue light was right alongside him.

‘It was him!’ one of the shadowy figures yelled, but HP was still having trouble focusing enough to see which one. With an effort he heaved himself up into a kneeling position. Then someone suddenly grabbed hold of his arms and a moment later he was lying across a car bonnet.

‘Take it easy, lad,’ said the voice of authority in his ear.

‘You’re under arrest on suspicion of attempted murder.’

And for a few seconds he thought he was eighteen again.

Flashing blue lights, she remembered them. But that was pretty much it.

Rebecca had only vague memories of the rescue operation. She had almost no recollection of the early part of it, when the firemen rolled the car the right way up and cut the roof off to get them out. She remembered fragments of a trip in an ambulance, probably to St Göran’s Hospital. An oxygen mask over her nose and mouth, a plastic collar round her neck. Pain in her head, chest and face. People in white and green coats. The sounds of running and urgent shouting. Occasionally she thought she could hear familiar voices among all the strangers, but she wasn’t altogether sure. She made an effort to hear what they were saying, but no matter how hard she tried the words merged together into a single monotonous mumble. The world didn’t start to get clearer until she was eventually wheeled into a room in the hospital, whichever one it was, and the doctor started to examine her.

‘Lucky’ was one of the first things that sank in properly. ‘You were lucky, Rebecca.’

She didn’t really understand what he meant.

What did he mean, lucky?

Someone had smashed their windscreen and it was only thanks to Kruse’s decisive action that they hadn’t collided with the Prime Minister’s car and everything had gone completely to hell.

Then they had crashed through the barrier and the car was so badly wrecked that they had to be cut out of it.

So exactly what did this idiot mean when he said she was lucky?

‘Concussion, but fairly mild, a couple of minor cuts to your scalp and face that will need stitches, and a few cracked ribs. But that’s pretty much it. Considering what happened, you were lucky,’ he concluded, simultaneously answering her question.

‘My partner?’ she managed to say, although it felt like her head and mouth were full of cotton-wool. ‘How’s Kruse?’

‘I’m afraid he wasn’t quite as fortunate. Sometimes it isn’t always a good thing to be big and heavy, and car accidents are precisely one such occasion.’

The doctor adjusted his glasses and gave her a knowing look. Her head suddenly felt like it was about to burst and for a moment she considered pulling out her Sig and asking him again, considerably less politely this time. But she bit her tongue and waited patiently for the answer.

He leafed through his notes.

‘Head injuries, broken arms and ribs are what we’ve got so far. Your partner is still in intensive care. It looks as if the roof crumpled mainly on his side.’

He looked up and smiled.

‘Like I said, you were …’

‘Lucky,’ she interrupted, and suppressed another urge to draw her gun, this time to blow his head off.

Flashing blue lights, handcuffs, then the plain-clothes arrived and it was the backseat of an unmarked police car. They must have been very close by.

He suddenly remembered that a lot of cops used to stop for coffee at the Shell garage not far away.

Typical of his miserable fucking luck!

Both of the detectives were thickset men, with shaved heads and bull-necks. One of them beside him, the other at the wheel.

‘So, you’re the sort who throws stones at police cars, are you?’ the gorilla next to him said as soon as they had set off.

HP didn’t answer, now if ever was a time to keep quiet. His head ached and he felt like he was going to be sick. The pain in his lower arm was hardly helped by the fact that his hands had been bent up behind his back.

The cops grinned and exchanged knowing glances in the rear-view mirror. They turned off the motorway and headed into Kungsholmen. Next stop, Police Headquarters in Kronoberg.

Bollocks!

Everything had gone completely to hell. He’d been careless and not looked round properly. And had missed that fucking idiot who rammed him. How stupid could you be?

He gulped a couple of times to suppress the urge to throw up. Now he had to keep quiet and ask for a lawyer as quickly as possible. He knew the routine. There was no point talking to the orcs in the car, they didn’t have any say in anything.

‘What’s the matter, can’t you speak?’ the same gorilla said in a mocking tone which for some reason made HP feel even more uneasy.

He stuck to his strategy and kept quiet.

‘No problem, lad,’ the cop chuckled, giving his colleague in the driver’s seat another look in the mirror.

The blow came out of nowhere, it must have been a left-hook and he had no way of defending himself. Wham, right on his cheekbone, and his head thudded into the side-window.

‘What the f …!’ he managed to say before the next blow struck. A right-hook this time, straight at the middle of his face, and he felt his nose crack.

‘This can’t be happening, this only happens in films!’ he managed to think before the third punch blurred his vision.

When he came round they were already down in the garage, and they were dragging him out of the car. Metal doors, a lift, a couple of blue-shirts hurrying past, then a long, brightly-lit corridor with beige plastic flooring. Doors, voices, a lot of rushing about, and finally a small interview room.

The handcuffs were removed and the belongings that they had taken off him when he was arrested were emptied onto the table. House-keys, ID card and a few crumpled twenty-kronor notes, as well as the mobile, of course.

Blood was trickling from his nose and one of the gorillas tossed him a wad of paper tissue before sitting down on a chair opposite.

HP managed to pull himself together and regain some of his devastated self-confidence.

‘I want a lawyer,’ he said, but the last word sounded more like ‘doyer’ because of his swollen nose.

The gorilla grinned.

‘Didn’t you hear, I want a lawyer.’ This time slightly less nasal as he rubbed the red marks on his wrists.

The gorilla stood up quickly and HP twitched instinctively on his chair. The cop saw his fear and grinned. He wagged a fat, hairy index finger towards HP.

‘I think you should shut up, my friend,’ he said exaggeratedly slowly, and there was no mistaking the underlying threat.

HP decided to heed his advice and revert to his original plan. Besides, the lead interviewer ought to be along soon, then all this shit would be over.

Sure enough, the door opened a couple of minutes later and another man came in, also in plain-clothes. This one was shorter, wore glasses and was considerably skinnier than the two gorillas, and it was immediately obvious who was in charge.

He glanced at HP’s swollen face and then gave the hairiest ape a disdainful look.

‘You can go now, Wiklander. Haven’t you and Molnar here got a report to write up?’

The gorilla muttered something but went out at once, giving HP the evil eye on the way.

HP nodded happily. This bloke was more to his taste.

‘Bolin, duty officer,’ he said by way of introduction. ‘And you’re Henrik Pettersson, known as HP, is that right?’

HP nodded again.

‘I’m going to turn on the tape-recorder now and we’ll do the introductions once more, but this time I want you to answer verbally, have you got that?’

HP shrugged. He wasn’t planning on saying more than just one sentence.

Bolin started the tape-recorder that was on the table in front of them.

‘Interview with Henrik HP Pettersson concerning suspicion of attempted murder and grievous bodily harm against a public official at the junction of Drottningholmsvägen and the Essinge motorway. Lead interviewer Detective Inspector Bolin, interview commenced at 23:12. Right, Henrik, can you tell me your response to our suspicions?’

HP sighed. Now that the apes had been driven out, the normal order was restored and he was back on familiar territory. His head was starting to clear and the sharp pain in his arm had shifted to a rumbling ache.

‘I’m innocent and want a lawyer present,’ he said as clearly as he could, leaning over towards the tape-recorder to make sure that it didn’t miss a single syllable. ‘I want a lawyer, and I want to report that I was beaten up by that gorilla, the one you called Wiklander.’

He gently touched his swollen nose demonstratively. He still had some tissue-paper stuffed up one nostril. Bolin gave no sign of having understood HP’s request.

‘A lawyer, I said,’ HP clarified once more, seeing as what he had said evidently hadn’t sunk in. Were all cops this slow?

Bright-spark Bolin was still staring at him across the table. Then the police officer slowly smiled and there was something reptilian about the smile that scared HP considerably more than the two trolls in the car had managed to do. He suddenly remembered a Discovery documentary he had seen about poisonous snakes. How they sometimes settled down quite coolly to wait once they had bitten their prey as it used up the last of its energy in a meaningless attempt to escape.

He shivered. Bolin leaned forward slowly and switched off the tape-recorder.

‘Listen carefully now, Pettersson,’ he said in a low voice. ‘You don’t seem to appreciate exactly how bad your situation is, so let me explain. You rode a moped to Lindhagensplan, stopped on the flyover above Drottningholmsvägen, and from a PE bag clearly marked with your name you pulled out a stone which you then threw at the windscreen of a police car passing below. Both police officers are now in St Göran, one of them in a pretty bad way, so with a bit of
luck you may have graduated to cop-killer before the night is over,’ he concluded with another of his unnerving snake-smiles.

HP had turned pale, but he continued to stay quiet.

Oh yes, he’d realized that he’d hit a police car, the flashing blue light had been a bit of a giveaway even before he threw the stone. What the hell, did they think he was stupid or something? It was true, on the other hand, that he hadn’t really given much thought to the consequences. But so what?

If you were a cop, you had to put up with a few risks, that much was obvious from the papers. Besides, it was hardly his fault that they were driving so fast, was it? Anyway, wasn’t the speed limit seventy along there? The Volvo must have been doing a ton, so in a way it was the cops’ own fault that things turned out so badly, wasn’t it? He glanced at the mobile phone on the table in front of him, just to one side. The screen was facing up and he was well aware of what was engraved on the other side. Number one hundred and twenty-eight, one of the chosen ones, that was who he was, and rule number one applied, no matter what world you moved in.

But what was it Bolin had said about the PE bag, he had almost missed that? His name? Bolin must have read his mind, because out of nowhere he conjured up the striped bag and tossed in on the table.

For a couple of seconds HP just stared at it, then curiosity got the better of him. He opened the bag. It was empty, apart from a bit of dirt.

Suddenly he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. There, on the inside of the lining, was a bit of fabric he’d almost forgotten. A scrap of cloth that his mum had sewn in during the short period when she was actually his mum and not just Maj-Britt the invalid and drunk. A
printed tag you could order through school from some company, the sort all well-meaning mothers sewed into all their kids’ stuff so that it wouldn’t get lost. All mothers except his, because Mum had been replaced more and more by Maj-Britt, and this bag was the only thing she ever managed to sew a name-tag into, the bag he himself had made in sewing class.

Property of Henrik Pettersson 08-6636615, it said in blue lettering.

HP went icy cold. The last time he had seen the bag it had been hanging in the wardrobe in his bedroom, he was absolutely certain of that.

‘In other words, you’re not exactly the smartest criminal I’ve ever come across,’ Bolin declared, interrupting his train of thought. ‘Besides, we’ve got the stone and it contains two perfect fingerprints in two-stroke oil, and we’re convinced they’re going to match yours.’

He leaned forward towards the deathly–pale HP.

‘So the way I see it, you’re pretty much in the frame for this, my dear Henrik. Is there anything you’d like to say about it?’ he concluded, then switched on the tape-recorder again.

HP’s head was spinning.

Who the fuck had been in his flat?

Why had someone stolen the bag and hung it up on the bridge?

The car that had rammed him had appeared out of nowhere, almost as if it had been sitting just round the bend waiting for him. And it had only hit the moped hard enough for the cops to be able to pick him up.

But who would want to frame him that badly? Okay, he had a few enemies, but no-one in that league. So who could it be? Number fifty-eight?

What if Mr Five-Eight was Swedish and had managed
to work out who it was coming up fast behind him on the league-table? And sabotaged the assignment on purpose?

No, that sounded too ridiculous …

His head was aching from the collision, the punches and all the shit that was flying round inside it. He couldn’t make sense of any of this, at least not right now.

He glanced over at the mobile again and decided to stick to rule number one, keep quiet.

‘I have no comment to make, and, like I said a few moments ago, I want a lawyer,’ he repeated, but this time his voice didn’t sound quite so confident.

Bolin sighed and slowly switched off the tape-recorder again.

‘If you like, Pettersson, obviously that’s within your rights. There’s the phone, with the phonebook next to it. I’ll be back in ten minutes.’

He gestured towards a small telephone table in the corner of the room, and stood up to go.

‘You’re damn lucky that officer Normén got away with minor injuries,’ he added as he got to the door. ‘There’s only one thing us cops hate more than a cop-killer, and that’s someone who kills female cops.’

Something suddenly clicked inside HP and he could almost feel the blood rushing from his head.

‘H-hang on!’ he called to Bolin, who was on the point of closing the door.

‘What did you say the officer was called, the woman … the one who got hurt?’

‘Normén,’ Bolin said drily. ‘Rebecca Normén.’

Fuck, fuck, fuck! a little voice in HP’s skull screamed.

Twelve stitches in total. Four in one cut, five in the other, and a few single ones on her face.