The Game Trilogy (36 page)

Wonder if Armani make volleyballs …?

Fuck, this place could easily go twelve rounds with Vegas for the heavyweight title in tastelessness.

A few days ago he had heard a sunburned family with mum, dad and 2.1 kids talking Swedish a few tables away, and suddenly he felt like bursting into tears over his breakfast egg. It took him a couple of minutes to realize why.

Fuck, he was homesick!

For Sweden, Stockholm, Södermalm, his sister, Manga, the Goat, open-air singing at Skansen, ‘eight carriages to Ropsten’,
you fucking name it
!

But probably most of all – for himself.

Because even though he had pretty much everything your average Swede could ever want – money, freedom, and the bare minimum of responsibility – the bitter truth was that the only thing he really wanted was what he couldn’t have.

To be HP again –
correction, the new, improved HP
–back in his own tiny little duck-pond.

The thought that he was doomed to drift around all the tourist hotels of Asia for the rest of his life until he could no longer remember his name was enough to make him seriously depressed.

He needed something, anything, that reminded him of who he really was, to make him feel even a tiny fucking bit alive again.

Not even the Kung Fu legend himself had been able to handle the vagabond lifestyle in the long run, and had ended up as a washed-up drag-queen in a hotel
closet with the cord from a window-blind as his farewell necktie.

And who could blame him?

The government plane landed exactly according to schedule at the little airport of El-Fasher, the two jet engines whipping clouds of dust towards the waiting vehicles.

Apart from their own group, the UN’s local representative was also there to meet the plane, and Rebecca had exchanged a few words with their security staff.

The door of the plane opened and Malmén looked out. Rebecca waved the all-clear to him and he nodded in response.

The Minister for International Development smiled at her in recognition as she came down the steps from the plane.

‘Welcome to …’ Rebecca began, but Gladh had already pushed between them.

‘Welcome to Africa, Minister, I hope you had a good journey? Allow me to introduce the local representative of the United Nations, Mr Moon, and his deputy, Mrs Awaga. Our first stop, as you are doubtless already aware, Minister, will be the refugee camp at Dali where we will meet the Sudanese Interior Minister and the Governor of Darfur. After that we will continue to the children’s home in Kaguro …’

Rebecca stepped aside and held the car door open for the minister, who obediently took her seat. Gladh went round the car and waited, but Rebecca ignored him. The minister was her charge, Gladh could take care of himself. Surely the old sod could manage to open a car door for himself?

A couple of minutes later they were ready to leave. The
minister and Gladh were in the car behind the first military jeep together with Rebecca and Karolina Modin. Esbjörnsson, Malmén and Göransson were immediately behind them in the Landcruiser, and the rest of the group was in a third car driven by a local driver. Then came the three UN vehicles and finally another jeep from the Sudanese military. All entirely according to plan.

Her mobile phone buzzed.

They were halfway to the refugee camp, nothing but desert savannah alongside the potholed dirt roads, so she couldn’t see any reason not to check her inbox. It was actually pretty incredible that there was any signal out here in the middle of nowhere – but Africa was apparently the latest goldmine for mobile phone manufacturers.

She smiled, then turned her head. In the back seat the minister and Gladh were still engaged in a discussion she had stopped listening to several minutes before.

Through the rear window she could just make out the vehicles following them, and the dark silhouettes of their passengers. From this distance it was impossible to tell which shadow was whose.

Just as she pressed send she noticed that Modin was looking at her.

‘From home,’ she said quickly, and Modin muttered something in reply.

She checked the time.

‘Ten minutes to go,’ she said into the radio-mic on her
wrist. She got a double click in her earpiece to indicate that Malmén had understood what she had said and had nothing to add.

Good.

But really she didn’t need his approval. She had to get used to the fact that this was her team now, her four plus one.

The crowd of people was visible from a distance.

The military jeep out front had pulled off to the side and an arm waved them through, but unlike the day before the road leading up to the buildings was blocked off.

‘Doesn’t look like we’re going to get any further,’ she said, and Modin nodded.

‘Change of plan,’ she said into the mic on her wrist. ‘The road’s blocked so we’re evidently going to have to walk the last bit. Esbjörnsson and Modin, wait with the cars unless you hear otherwise. Got that, over?’

‘You don’t think we might all be needed, it looks messy up ahead, over?’

Malmén’s radio voice was clipped and abrupt, and she noticed Modin imperceptibly raising her head as if in expectation of her reply.

Rebecca took a deep breath.

Four plus one or four against one? It all depended on how she answered.

Malmén was an experienced bodyguard and he certainly had a point, but if she backed down now it would be clear to everyone who was the real boss of this group.

But if she slapped him down too firmly it might look like she felt threatened and that she wasn’t going to listen to his ideas in future out of principle, however sensible they were. That sort of leadership was not only poor, but could even jeopardize the safety of the group.

Rebecca raised her left hand to her mouth, took a deep breath and pressed the broadcast button.

‘I can see the way you’re thinking, Malmén, but right now I’d prefer to be ready to leave. Esbjörnsson and Modin, stay in the vehicles for the time being. I’ll make a new assessment before we unload. Over and out.’

The last three words marked a definite end to the exchange. Rebecca glanced at Modin, but she was sitting completely still, her expression unchanged.

They rolled into the small turning-circle and she opened the car door.

The first round appeared to have gone to her, but for some reason she got a feeling that the game had only just begun.

He really ought to be sleeping like a corpse. But not even a bout of sheet-wrestling of that calibre was enough to get him to sleep.

Oh well. He was pretty used to lying awake by now.

The woman beside him shifted in her sleep and he turned his head to look at her.

She was lying with her back to him and had kicked off enough of the covers to reveal half of her suntanned body.

So, Anna Argos – presumably from one of the posher parts of London to judge from her upper-class English.

He’d seen her down by the pool.

He had been lying there admiring her miniscule bikini
and wondering if he could be bothered to make a pass at her when she waved him over to her. The next moment he was rubbing suntan oil into the tattoo on her back, and ten minutes later, practically without any conversation at all, she was sitting astride his hips.

Isn’t this a non-smoking room?

Christ, he was such a fucking dickhead …

He raised his head from the pillow to get a better look at Miss Argos. What he could see of her face was smooth as a baby’s bottom, and probably just as natural as her tits. She’d tucked her blonde hair behind her ear and as he leaned over her he caught a glimpse of a little white scar behind her earlobe that confirmed his suspicions.

He slowly ran his finger over the back of her neck, continued across her shoulder and down her arm, then suddenly stopped at a dark little bruise that he hadn’t noticed before. Curious, he ran his finger around it and carried on down her lower arm.

His touch made other similar marks begin to appear very faintly.

He turned his hand over. There were clear traces of flesh-coloured skin cream on his fingertip.

Carefully, and suddenly feeling uneasy, he leaned further forward to see the inside of her biceps.

‘Are you still here?’

Anna was staring at him with a look that was anything but friendly.

‘Er … yes,’ he managed to say, sitting up.

‘Then get the hell out, I don’t remember asking you to stay – did I?’

‘Er … No …’

Shit – he really did have the gift of the gab today.

Okay, so she didn’t want to spend the morning curled up together – that was fine by him. He slid out of bed
and started looking for his clothes, but evidently not quickly enough.

‘Didn’t you hear me? Get – the – fuck – out – of – here!’

She kicked out at him and managed a glancing blow to one of his buttocks.

‘Okay, okay – take it easy!’ he muttered as he hopped on one leg, trying to pull his bathing trunks on.

Two seconds later he slammed the door shut behind him.

Shit, what a fucking bitch!

What the hell was her problem?

But he already had the beginning of a theory …

The air was tense back at the embassy after Rebecca aborted the minister’s visit with Sudan’s refugee problem. The old villa was big, at least six hundred square metres if you counted both floors – yet the atmosphere still felt claustrophobic.

She would actually have preferred to evacuate at once, stuffing everyone and everything in the government plane and leaving immediately. But the plane had only recently landed and the pilots had used up all their flying time. They needed at least eight hours rest before they could fly again, which meant they’d have to wait until early the following morning. Assuming the authorities let them go, of course …

She was talking on the phone to her Sudanese liaison officer every ten minutes, and Runeberg every hour. The liaison officer was trying to persuade them to stay, claiming that the disorder was ‘a regrettable incident’ caused by troublemakers who wanted to disrupt the relationship between Sudan and Sweden, and that the Sudanese government could ‘guarantee their safety’.

But he wasn’t prepared to accept that there had been an assassin.

And he was hardly alone in that …

Upstairs Gladh was furious, roaring at his assistant, Håkan Berglund, and down the phone, so loudly that even the guards on the gate must have been able to hear him.

The minister, on the other hand, wasn’t saying much. She had shut herself in her room and was letting her press secretary deal with everything.

‘Ann-Christin is a little under the weather, she was travel-sick in the plane, and then with this …’

The press secretary nodded pointedly at Rebecca, and she could feel the other bodyguards looking at her.

‘… attempted attack …’ Rebecca filled in, in as steady a voice as she could muster. ‘An unknown assailant armed with a revolver approaching our car with the intention of firing at it. Fortunately he failed and we got away. My job is to see that we all get home in one piece, as soon as possible.’

The press secretary nodded benevolently.

‘And we’re very grateful for that, Rebecca, we really are.’

The woman glanced at Gladh.

‘It’s just that an evacuation might send out … well … the wrong signals, if you understand what I mean?’

‘No, I don’t,’ Rebecca said curtly.

Gladh flew up from his chair.

‘We have an agenda, meetings – important people we’ve been working hard to arrange to see. The ambassador has staked his entire reputation on organizing this visit, and we’re suddenly thinking of calling the whole thing off because of a little … disturbance?’

Gladh’s face was pale, and he was firing out small drops of saliva.

‘As far as I can see, the whole thing started when you,
Normén, decided that we should leave. Does anyone not share my opinion?’

He looked round the room, but no-one said anything.

Rebecca tried to catch Malmén’s gaze but he was looking down at the floor, along with the others in the team, and Håkan Berglund obediently had his eyes on his master. She took a deep breath and tried to stay calm.

‘I took the decision to withdraw because the situation was too risky. Things were radically different to how they were yesterday, and my judgement was that we couldn’t proceed in a secure fashion. Aside from the general disturbance, surely the presence of the attacker proves that I was right?’

She looked at the others, but once again no-one would look her in the eye – no-one except Gladh.

‘You mean the attacker that only you saw, Normén? Isn’t it rather odd that no-one else noticed him, not your colleagues, and not those of us inside the vehicles? Doesn’t that strike you as rather peculiar?’

He tilted his head to one side to emphasize his patronizing tone.

‘Everything happened very quickly, there were loads of people and the dust was making it hard to see …’ she began, but Gladh interrupted her.

‘But surely your driver must have seen him? What was your name again? Modig?’

Karolina Modin looked up from the floor.

‘Modin,’ she said quietly.

‘Yes, that was it … Well, Modin, did you see him, this assailant Normén describes, running towards the front of the car with a revolver aimed straight at us?’

Modin took a long look at Rebecca, then at Malmén, before replying.

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘You didn’t, you say, but your boss, who was right beside you, says she saw him clearly. Why do you think your stories don’t match?’

Modin squirmed and she gave Malmén another long glance.

‘I was mostly looking behind us, I was concentrating on reversing, so I didn’t see much of what was going on in front of the car. There were people rushing about in all directions …’

‘But a real-life attacker waving a big revolver, surely you should have noticed something like that? Or don’t you learn that sort of thing when you’re training to be a bodyguard?’

His patronizing tone was enough to make Rebecca want to strangle the miserable old bastard, but she restrained herself. No matter what Gladh thought he was getting from this discussion, the final word was still hers. She was going to win, the only question was how Gladh would react.

Modin muttered something in response and Gladh shifted his attention to the group’s deputy leader.

‘What about you, Malmén, that’s your name, isn’t it?’

‘That’s correct.’

‘Did you see any assailant?’

‘No, I didn’t, but like Modin and my own driver, I was concentrating on what was happening in the other direction. And I was trying to get the vehicle behind us to get out of the way, which wasn’t particularly easy …’

Gladh nodded and turned back towards Rebecca.

‘As I said, what we appear to have here is a riot that was triggered by our own unplanned retreat, and a presumed assailant that only you saw, Normén. The matter is perfectly clear to me. There is no reason to break off this trip and the ambassador agrees with me. The Interior
Minister has promised us a full armed escort and we will continue as planned tomorrow morning.’

He looked around the group with satisfaction, as though the matter was settled.

‘No, we won’t,’ Rebecca said firmly. ‘You seem to be in some confusion about my role and authority here, Gladh. I have ultimate responsibility for the Minister and my team – not you, and not the ambassador. My decision is that we will return home as soon as it’s light. If you don’t like that, you’re free to make a complaint to my boss, Superintendent Runeberg.’

She stood up and went out to the kitchen.

Over and out, you arrogant, scrawny little pen-pusher!

Four plus one.

That was how those marks were described on CSI.

Four fingers on the back of the arm and a thumb on the front. He’d seen them before, In Real Life …

He took a deep toke on the joint and held his breath for a few seconds before sending a column of sticky smoke up from the bed towards the smoke-detector in the ceiling.

Anna Argos had been really angry when she woke up, but for some reason he got the feeling that her morning tantrum had more to do with his discovery of the bruises than the fact that he was still in her bed.

He took another deep drag and sent another puff of liquorice towards the smoke-detector.

Just as before there was no response from the puck-like device stuck on the ceiling, which wasn’t so odd considering that, like so many times before, he had carefully wrapped up the little killjoy with the complementary shower-cap he’d found in the bathroom.

He couldn’t deny that Anna Argos has piqued his
curiosity – so much so that he actually almost forgot his little trip into emo-land.

Apart from the bruises there was something else that seemed a bit odd.

Anna was obviously a businesswoman, and people like that always kept their mobiles within arm’s length.

He’d looked for her mobile while he was up in her suite. He checked every flat surface, both when she was dragging him to the bed and later, when she chucked him out. But he hadn’t seen it anywhere.

Obviously that could be a complete coincidence – but in hindsight he couldn’t shake the idea that she’d concealed her phone on purpose.

‘Malmén!’

He stopped in the corridor and she signalled to him to come into her room.

Simultaneously she ended the phone-call she was in the middle of and gestured to him to sit down, but he remained standing.

‘Make sure everything’s packed. Swedeforce 24 has got permission to take off at 07.00, so we’ll be setting off from here at 05.45.’

He nodded curtly. ‘What about the cars?’

‘We’ll leave them at the airport. For all I care, Gladh and Berglund can drive them back to Khartoum if they don’t want to come back to Stockholm with us.’

Malmén gave a wry smile and shrugged his shoulders.

‘Well, it’s your decision …’

‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’

The anger she had managed to keep under control up to now suddenly boiled over.

‘Nothing, calm down!’

‘I am calm!’ she snapped. ‘I just want to know what
you mean when you say it’s
my decision
? You don’t share my conclusion that we should evacuate? Don’t you think there was an assailant either?’

‘I was thinking about the cars, Normén, okay?’

She looked at him intently for a few seconds while she calmed down.

‘Okay …’

It wasn’t until he had left the room that she realized that Malmén hadn’t answered her question.

The sound of the phone ringing made him drop his spliff.

He had dozed off and spent a few confused seconds fumbling on the floor to stop the cigarette from burning a hole in the carpet.

‘Hello …?’

‘Allo Thomas, this is Vincent speaking, how are you my friend?’

It took a few moments before his doped-up brain made the right connections.

Thomas was his latest alias – Thomas Andersen, from Trondheim in Norway. He’d been in prison with a smalltime dealer from Bergen, and could gurgle enough of his incomprehensible Norwegian dialect to pass, even if they were celebrating their national day.

‘Bonjour, Vincent, how’s it going?’

‘Good, very good. Sorry we haven’t been in touch before, but we got a bit delayed in Goa. Had some trouble with the authorities, if you get my meaning …’

‘Mmm …’

HP blew on the spliff to try to get it to burn better.

‘Listen, Tommy, we’re thinking of heading out into the desert tomorrow evening. Do a bit of rally driving, have a barbeque, smoke a hookah with the Bedouins. D’you want to come?’

He took a deep drag.

‘Yeah!’

‘Great, we’ll pick you up around five. We’ve got plenty of room in the cars, so you’re welcome to bring someone if you want to. À tout à l’heure!’

HP hung up and grinned up at the ceiling.

A mysterious woman, nocturnal adventures in the desert.

Secrets waiting to be uncovered …

For the first time in ages he almost felt alive again.

Game on!