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

‘ Fjärdhundra Market 28-31 July ’ the banner read.

He grinned again. Fjärdhundra Market! Bound to be a load of morons in dungarees trying to guess the weight of a pig, topple cows over, or get off with their fifteen-year-old cousins. A banjo-solo, maybe? Dingelingdingdingdingsdingding ding …

It was beyond him why anyone would choose to live like that instead of in the city like a proper Homo sapiens .

‘Yeehaa, Farthundra!’ he yelled, waving at the plane as it passed overhead. But even though the pilot must have seen him as he stood there in the middle of the road among the new-mown fields, HP didn’t get a hint of a response. Not even a little dip of the wings.

‘Fuck you, then, shithead,’ he muttered. With the cigarette dangling from his mouth, he switched to other less friendly gestures as the plane disappeared from sight.

When the sound of the engine died away he heard another, angry-sounding motor coming towards him. It turned out to be a flatbed moped, and the character riding it looked like Tim Burton’s younger brother.

Long fair hair, a scruffy matching beard, all held down by one of those old leather flying-helmets with built-in goggles. Blue overalls that had definitely seen better days and a pair of old army boots completed the outfit, and yet again HP had trouble holding back his laughter.

A bit odd , yeah, right!

Fuck, this was serious Candid Camera stuff!

The moped man stopped sharply in front of him and grappled with the gears.

‘Are you HP?’

‘No, I’m just a tourist who likes cows and fields, what the fuck do you think?’ HP muttered.

‘Whassat?’ The moped muppet leaned forward.

‘Yes, that’s me. Nice with all these cows and fields you’ve got out here,’ HP replied, this time louder so the man could hear him over the noise of the two-stroke engine.

‘Erman,’ the bloke nodded in reply. ‘Jump on!’

HP hesitated for a moment, then, still grinning, jumped up onto the flatbed. Of course, a little ride on a flatbed moped was all he needed to reinforce all his prejudices about the countryside. The banjo duet in his head got even louder and he hummed along, safe in the knowledge that his driver couldn’t hear him over the clatter of the engine.

Erman followed the road for a couple of kilometres, then turned off, heading straight across the fields on an almost invisible gravel track.

As they approached the tree-line the track got even bumpier, but HP’s chauffeur made no attempt to ease up on the gas, and by the time they pulled up outside the little cottage hidden in amongst the fir trees, the whole hillbilly thing had almost stopped being fun.

While Erman parked the moped HP stretched and massaged his sore backside.

Where the fuck had he ended up now?

The house was small, maybe just fifty or sixty square metres, not much bigger than Auntie Berit’s allotment cottage. The façade had once been red but most of the planks had faded to grey, with just a few hints of pink where the sun and rain hadn’t got to them. The drooping concrete-fibre roof was green with moss and algae and the cottage was surrounded by metre-high nettles. The whole thing looked ready to collapse at any moment.

‘Go on in,’ Erman muttered, nodding towards the entrance as he closed the door of the little outhouse. HP did as he was told and discovered that the inside of the shack looked considerably better than the outside had led him to expect.

The kitchen and small living room were clean and tidy, there was a smell of detergent and in one corner there was a cosy crackle from a cast-iron stove. In spite of that the house was cool, probably because it was shaded by the surrounding firs.

‘You followed the instructions, I hope?’ Erman said abruptly as he came into the kitchen a few seconds later.

‘Yep,’ HP said. ‘No mobile, paid cash for all tickets and did a bit of James Bond stuff before catching the train, so your little paradise is safe from discovery.’

Erman grunted and tossed the flying-helmet onto a kitchen chair.

To his surprise HP realized that his host wasn’t some old bloke like he’d first thought, but at a guess was just a few years older than him.

Erman gestured to him to sit down on the kitchen sofa, then put an old-fashioned coffee-pot on the stove and started to get cups out.

‘So you’re allergic to electricity, how do you get that?’ HP began in an exaggeratedly friendly tone, but got a quick snort in reply.

‘Twenty-five years with computers, magnetic fields, radio waves and all the other shit flying around through the air. Then you wake up one day covered in a rash and can hardly breathe.’

He poured them both coffee and HP took a quick, scalding sip. Boiled coffee, he hadn’t drunk that since his grandmother had died, he realized as he managed to swallow the burning liquid and blink a tear from his eye. Apart from the temperature, it tasted pretty good.

The porcelain cup was wafer-thin and the handle so finely made that he had to hold it Lidingö style, with his ring and little fingers sticking out. The coffee-set had to be at least as old as the house, if not even older.

He swirled the coffee round, blowing on it, then took another cautious sip as he peered at his host.

‘So you want to know more about a server I installed?’ Erman said, glowering suspiciously at him across the table. ‘I don’t usually talk to people I don’t know, or with anyone at all these days, come to that.’

No shit! HP thought, grinning into his coffee cup.

‘But an old friend said you were okay and I owe him, big time you could say. If he says you’re all right, then you’re okay in my book. So what do you want to know, and why?’

HP had worked out his strategy while he was on the bus and made an effort to sound nonchalant.

‘Just who you installed the server for and where it is. I’m the art director of a small advertising agency and they’ve got some visual material I’m interested in.’

Erman gave him a long look and HP did his best to look like he thought a hard-working art director would.

Then his host grinned and threw out his arms.

‘Well I never, an art director!’

HP smiled and nodded.

‘And there I was thinking that you were a player who’d fucked up and was desperately trying to work out the identity of the juggernaut that ran over you, and why.’

Erman burst out into a roar of laughter and HP had to cough several times to get the scalding coffee out of his windpipe.

Another boiling hot day! A day in the office, which meant a bit of paperwork, reading up on current threat analysis and the preliminary programme for the next round of the EU Presidency. Plenty of time to clear stuff from her desk.

She got a glass of water from the kitchen, took a deep breath, and tried to shift the tension in her neck and jaw.

Even this early in the day, her shirt was already wet under the arms. The building may have been air-conditioned, but every reorganization of the police force seemed to require new walls and office partitions, so practically all the cool air had ended up in a few rooms at the far end of the corridor. To get at least an illusion of coolness, Rebecca had been forced to buy the fan that was now stirring up the hot air in the office she shared with three other bodyguards. She settled down behind her desk and shut her eyes, letting the blast of air cross her face a couple of times as she tried to gather her thoughts.

It had taken a while to dig out the phone number. Nilla wasn’t in the phone book and she wasn’t listed online either.

Ex-directory, of course, just like most police employees, whether or not it was actually necessary. But there were ways round that, of course. A call to a girl she knew in personnel was all it took. A white lie about her and Nilla sharing a lift to a course, and suddenly she had her work rota, home number and mobile. Who said female networks didn’t work?