Литагент HarperCollins - The Complete Game Trilogy - Game, Buzz, Bubble

‘What the fuck, you crazy or what, Normén?’ he squeaked as he stared at her, sounding simultaneously suspicious and accusing.

She didn’t quite know what to say.

‘I …’ she began uncertainly, but Peter Pain interrupted her.

‘Damn fine work, Normén, that’s the way to bring them down! Savic, you were asking for that so you’d better take yourself off to the nurse to get yourself patched up. Wikström, do you need to go too?’

Stefan waved his hands dismissively as he got heavily to his feet.

‘Just lost my breath, nice hit, Normén.’ He nodded towards her.

Rebecca blushed, feeling simultaneously guilty and pleased. Maybe Dejan’s nose was a bit unfortunate, but on the other hand he had been asking for it with his stupid macho posturing.

She’d done her job, managed to get free on her own. She hadn’t been some helpless victim.

Not like then.

Absolutely not like then!

She was different now, stronger, better, braver. A completely different person.

When she eventually dared to glance up at Vahtola, she saw a faint smile on the other woman’s face.

Birkagatan 32, be there at 18:00.

It wasn’t exactly a difficult instruction, but this time he had at least prepared himself better. In spite of the heat he had dug out an old army jacket that someone, he couldn’t remember who, had left in his flat after a party ages ago. The jacket had loads of pockets which he stuffed with various useful things, and it had straps on the front which would be perfect for holding the phone.

The clip of number twenty-seven had finally made him realize where the camera ought to be to get the best pictures. No more rubbish bouncing at waist-height like on the train or at NK, from now on nothing but head-shots.

The viewers, or fans as he was calling them more and more often, had been impressed with the NK stunt.

Even if he didn’t know who they were, he felt increasingly sure that they were his kind of people, solid guys that he’d be happy to share a chilled beer with if the opportunity arose.

He’d actually tried to find a way to get into the community. He’d tried to find an entrance portal where you could sign up as a member and then play, watch and maybe even chat to the fans. Find out a bit more about who they were and why they liked him in particular.

But he’d failed. The search terms he had used didn’t come up with any links that worked, so membership seemed to be by invitation only. Which was a bit crap, because seeing other players’ clips would have been fucking cool, not to mention the direct contact with the fans, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it.

The Game was more impartial this way, he reluctantly accepted that.

After his second task he had strolled intentionally slowly along the quayside of Skeppsbron, walking backwards at least half the way so he could enjoy his handiwork as long as possible. By the time he got home to Maria Trappgränd the Game had already put up a professional montage. First his own shaky footage from the inside interspersed with external shots of the clock. Then a split screen with the countdown in the middle. His hand and the buttons on one side, the rotating clock on the other. Three, two, one, click, and time stopped above the centre of Stockholm.

Five hundred lovely points, a personal message of congratulation from the Game Master and a load of new comments, as well as clambering a few notches up the high score list.

To say it was cool didn’t even come close! He’d been forced to wank not once but twice before he could get to sleep.

Up out of the underground at St Eriksplan, into Tomtebogatan and then right at the corner. As he approached the address he could feel his pulse rate go up. He decided to cross over Birkagatan to be able to observe his target in peace and quiet from a doorway almost opposite, and to have a well-deserved fag.

There wasn’t anything odd about the address.

A perfectly ordinary residential building built sometime in the early twentieth century or so, at a guess. Four rows of windows plus the skylights on the roof gave five floors in total. From the look of it, the ground floor seemed to be mostly shops and offices, and presumably the top floor was some sort of luxurious loft apartment.

So what now?

He pulled the phone from the strap on the left shoulder where, after much deliberation, he had decided to attach it, and swept it across the building, zooming in on the front doorway, then out to give the big picture again. When he was finished he noticed the little red light start to flash.

Behind the telephone box next to the Co-op

was all it said, and HP frowned unhappily as a minute or so later he fished out a plastic bag that had been stuffed behind the grey telecom engineers’ box on the other side of the street.

Had he come all the way out to Birkastan to pick up a lousy package?

What sort of shit assignment was this?

But before he had time to look in the bag the light flashed again and when he had read through the third message of the evening he felt his heart starting to race with excitement again.

This was more like it!

He checked that the camera was working, then fastened the phone in its place.

Then he tapped in the door-code he had just been given and heard the lock click.

Lights, camera, action! he thought excitedly as he opened the door and slid in.

The first target spun round like a flash!

‘Off to the right’ her brain registered as her instincts did the rest. She pushed her jacket open with her right hand, pulled her pistol from the holster and as soon as the barrel was free she aimed it in front of her.

She brought her left hand up to meet the gun, put her hand over the casing as she continued to raise her pistol-hand, which made the mechanism feed a bullet into the chamber. The moment her right arm was fully extended, with her left hand supporting the three fingers on the barrel, she fired off two quick shots at the centre of the target.

The entire movement hadn’t taken much more than a second.

Rebecca backed away slowly, still with the Sig Sauer ready to fire, her eyes sweeping in both directions above the barrel. When she had retreated ten metres from her mark, the next target suddenly popped up, this time way off to the left.

She quickly spun round and without even thinking she fired off another two shots halfway through the movement.

Bang, bang!

Another five-metre retreat, then the final target appeared, low and in the centre, not much bigger than a head. Half a second later this target too had two neat nine-millimetre holes acceptably close to the centre.

‘Stop, cease fire, cartridge out!’

‘Cease fire, cartridge out!’ she repeated back to the firing instructor, took her finger off the trigger, pulled out the magazine and then released the seventh bullet which was already in the chamber.

Once that was all done she put the gun back in her holster, took off her ear-defenders and protective glasses to await the judgement.

‘Nice shooting, Normén, you need slightly better tempo on the first series and less of a pull on the second, but generally, like I said, nice shooting!’ the instructor told her.

Rebecca nodded appreciatively at the critique, she had fumbled slightly with her jacket, lost a fraction of a second and then tried to make up the time on the second series.

‘Squeeze the shot off, don’t pull!’ she told herself as she taped stickers over the holes in the second target, ten centimetres or so higher than she had intended.

She had had trouble with her shooting when she started at Police Academy. The weapon and, above all, the bangs frightened her, and to begin with she had shut her eyes before she fired. Fortunately the academy ran an extra class for anyone not used to guns, and after a few evenings of intensive practice her fear had changed into something entirely different. Once she had got over her distaste and mastered the basic technique, the pistol made her feel safe. As if no-one in the world could get at her as long as she had the Sig in her hand. The size and strength of any opponent suddenly didn’t matter at all for someone holding a firearm.