The Complete Game Trilogy: Game, Buzz, Bubble. Литагент HarperCollins USD

voice and she leaned over the counter.

      She waited until he met her gaze again:

      ‘What’s my idiot brother dragged you into this time?’

       14

       White bear

      Okay, he’d just have to accept the truth – he’d got the whole thing on the brain.

      Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory, Gene Hackman’s character, Brill, in Enemy of the State, that’s what he was turning into. The obsessive, the lone lunatic, the conspiracy nutter who lived his life in discussion forums and saw intrigues round every fucking corner. He might as well get his own homepage, a cottage in the woods and a wall covered in newspaper cuttings, then everything would be perfect!

      True, that idea about the Palme murder was maybe a bit far-fetched, but on the other hand as a theory it was no crazier or worse than any of the other so-called lines of inquiry. Kurds, the ‘baseball’ police squad, his wife Lisbet, or a drunk acting on his own?

      All aboard the Crazy Train!

      Doors closing, next stop Looneyville!

      There was a vast flock of weirdo theories out there in cyberspace, like shrieking harpies, each one crazier than the last. So why not his?

      Just think about it!

      How else could you fuck up the largest police investigation in the world so spectacularly? Forgetting all common police sense, breaking any number of laws and rules by appointing an amateur to lead both the police work and the preliminary legal investigation? And, as if that wasn’t enough, setting up a Social Democrat political stooge with his own miniature version of the security police to run a parallel investigation directly sanctioned by the Justice Minister …

      The whole thing was a cascade of peculiarities, and the case threw up loads of questions to which there were no logical solutions, exactly as Erman had warned him. There just weren’t any good explanations, or at least none that were better than the one he was beginning to accept more and more.

      Besides, he could think of another political murder where, even though the killer had been caught, the case was a good match for the profile ‘single perpetrator with no good motive’. Not to mention the so-called Laser Man back in the early nineties. There was something methodical about the progress of his criminal career, something that made you think of computer games. As if he had been working his way through different stages of difficulty, taking greater and greater risks. Almost as if he was clambering up some sort of league-table …

      According to the clips HP found on the Swedish Television website, the culprit had blown the money he took from his victims in a German casino, so he evidently liked gambling. Was he actually a player, in two senses of the word? It made perfect sense, but at the same time it sounded completely insane! What about the Kennedy assassination? The sinking of the Estonia? 9/11?

      Yes, he’d got it all on the brain.

      Big time!

      He was scouring the news websites several times an hour, and even though they were mostly about Sweden’s presidency of the EU, he imagined he could see signs of the Game everywhere.

      A well-known financier who had vanished into thin air, a load of dynamite that had gone missing from a secure store, a petty-criminal in Portugal who suddenly got it into his head to blow up an empty luxury yacht, and himself with it …

      It was all out there, if you only knew what you were looking for. Things that couldn’t be explained, no matter which way you approached them. That’s to say, if the explanation wasn’t the fact that Erman was right. That the whole thing was just a huge fucking Game!

       I’ve opened your eyes and now you can see …

      The weirdest thing was that he could see how crazy it sounded. But he still couldn’t let it go. ‘An awareness of illness doesn’t mean you’re well,’ as one of his mum’s alcoholic friends used to say.

      There was a lot in that! But unlike the idiots out there, he had actually been caught up in it himself. An inside man, just like Brill. He knew that the Game existed, he had seen with his own eyes what they were capable of doing, or – to be more accurate – getting other people to do …

      It was actually the manipulation that stung most.

      The way they’d pressed his buttons and got him to play along willingly. Humiliating him just for the fun of it, then dropping him quicker than a flask of Russian thallium. But also the fact that he’d actually enjoyed being the centre of attention, getting loads of cred. For the first time ever, a team player, part of something bigger than himself, even one of the stars of the team.

      Christ, he’d loved the kick from that! Loved it so fucking much that on one level he still couldn’t help dreaming, in spite of all the shit that had happened, that he could get back in the limelight … he’d do pretty much anything. Like some mangy dog that was so desperate for approval even after it had been beaten by its master that it was willing to shag more legs – any legs – to get another pat on the head. One question itched like a massive great scab and no matter how he tried, he couldn’t help picking at it: if he’d known that Becca was in the cop-car that evening, that she would be or could have been injured by the stone he was going to drop from the bridge, would it have made any difference?

      He honestly didn’t know.

      Even now, after so many hours thinking, he still couldn’t answer that bastard question with a simple Yes or No.

      Totally fucking sick!

      It had taken a day or so to work out the deal with the flash-grenade attack on the horse-guards’ cortège. Who would get any pleasure from some bolting horses and a pair of shitty royal underpants? Obviously it could just have been that they wanted to test him or get some cool pictures. But then he read about a break-in at a gentlemen’s outfitters on Östermalm, and how it had been preceded by a false bomb threat. An attaché case with the word bomb in white paint on the side, left outside the Iranian Embassy, and suddenly half the police force were over on Lidingö and thus out of the game. And that’s where he got the idea.

      After checking on the police’s own website, he found what he was looking for. At the same time as Kungsträdgården was filling up with galloping horses and all available police units, including the helicopter which was sent to circle above the city centre, someone had stolen a container-load of Viagra from a company out in the western suburbs. They had coolly driven past security with a truck, waving what had looked like the right documentation, then calmly hooked up to the container and driven off with it, without having to worry about being pursued by the police helicopter before they had time to unload the pills, because HP had seen to that.

      So had he been a decoy, sent out to lure the dogs into sniffing around in the wrong place?

      ‘Look up the word Game and you’ll see what I mean!’ Erman had said, and halfway down the page Wiktionary backed up his theory.

      – Distraction or Diversion

      He could perfectly well have been both! And suddenly all those weird occurrences assumed yet another crazy dimension. Diversionary tactics, decoys and smokescreens, all to get the authorities and the general public to look in the wrong direction?

      In that case, what was the main event, what were the things they didn’t want to show, and who was behind them?

      The Freemasons?

      The WHO?

      The Bilderberg Group?

      Or was he taking it too far …? Was his brain messing with him, showing him things that didn’t actually exist just because he wanted to see them?

      Was the