And all that, just because it was cool!
But the second part still seemed too incredible to be true. That the assignments weren’t just thought up at random but consciously designed to satisfy some anonymous customers? If that was true, and he emphasized the word if, then it meant that he and all the other players were being fucked over twice. They weren’t just jack-asses on speed, or internet tarts whoring themselves out for a few comments and virtual thumbs-up. They were also total fucking puppets!
Unconscious hitmen who knew nothing and were therefore easy to dispose of if the shit hit the fan. A load of patsies, stooges that no-one gave a fuck about, even if they tried to tell the truth. Because who was going to believe them?
The thought made him both angry and more than a little shaky.
The implications of a scenario like that were so massive he could hardly imagine them. Wasn’t it more likely to be Erman’s paranoid brain finally crossing the line between quaint rural eccentric and total fucking lunatic?
Right up until he had seen Erman’s cottage going up in flames, and doubtless Erman along with it, he had been prepared to believe that, but now he was seeing it in a very different light …
There was really only one way to find out for certain, so he decided to start with a bit of research.
One of the many Unemployment Service training courses he’d done his best to forget had been in the very subject that he needed to remember now. With a decent search engine you could take the world by surprise, he remembered that much at least …
Farook had helped him to set up the laptop, routing it through a number of anonymized servers that had popped up in the days before the IP-RED law came into force. From now on he’d be invisible on the net, a ghost-rider.
He opened one of the search engines and got to work. Erman’s note left him none the wiser.
Torshamnsgatan 142 was all it said, apart from a few nerdy passwords that just might, or might not, work if he ever managed to get in. The poor flame-grilled fucker could have added a bit more information, like what the company was called, or what floor it was on? Was that really too much to ask?
The address certainly matched a street in Kista, but didn’t really give him much more than that. It was a perfectly ordinary office building close to the E4 motorway, but that was all the satellite pictures had to offer. He found a list of small telecoms companies that either had been or were still based in the building, but none of them seemed to have the slightest thing to do with games or computers.
He didn’t really know what he had been expecting. Some sort of walled fortress maybe, or a secret address that couldn’t be found on any map? A bit like the National Defence Radio Establishment out on Lovön? But this seemed completely halal, with not the slightest hint of a mysterious organization or a secret server-farm. So either Erman had decided to give him a dud address for some reason, or, more likely, the Game had upped sticks and moved somewhere else.
Disappointed and without any great expectations, he decided to carry on looking into the rest of Erman’s theories anyway.
He tried typing in a few search words, like ‘inexplicable’, ‘failed investigation’, ‘unknown’ and got a few thousand hits immediately. He filtered out anything to do with UFOs, which reduced the number to about three hundred, then added ‘perpetrator’ as an option, which brought the total down to a more manageable quantity. A bit more clever clicking and he had a decent collection of incidents listed on the screen in front of him.
He scrolled quickly through them.
It turned out to be a right mixture of stuff, and for a few seconds he felt almost relieved. But then he started looking more carefully. And gradually things began to pop up which were, to put it mildly, disconcerting …
To start with he found a number of minor occurrences which he had never heard about but which still had the right vibe: cars whose brakes had stopped working, computer systems which had packed up in the middle of the payroll, inexplicable power cuts, and politicians getting shit through their letterboxes.
But there were a number of other, considerably more familiar events which had been picked up by the search.
He read them through once, then again, and slowly a very uncomfortable feeling began to settle over him.
The first item was pretty much in his own backyard:
On the night of 17 May 1990 Katarina Church on Södermalm in Stockholm was destroyed by fire.
The church tower collapsed into the nave, leaving just the external walls standing. However a number of valuable textiles and the church silver were rescued. In spite of a major inquiry, no explanation for the fire was ever established, which has led to speculation that it was caused by everything from an electrical fault to arson.
If arson was indeed the cause, no motive has ever been identified.
He also remembered the second one very well:
On Sunday 3 September, 2006, at 20:41:51, the National Police Unit in Stockholm received a report from the Security Police that the internal computer network of the Social Democratic Party, the SDP-net, had been hacked. The perpetrator was at that point still unknown. Late that same evening the Social Democrats called a press conference to announce that they had reported members of the Folk Party to the police for hacking. The report maintained that computers, which to judge by their IP-addresses belonged to the Folk Party, had been used to gain illegal access to the most sensitive areas of the SDP-network to which only 26 senior party officials had access. This access was supposed to have been gained with the help of log-in details which had inexplicably leaked and had given their political opponents unlimited access to the most confidential information in the Social Democrats’ internal computer network.
This was major-league stuff! Both of these on their own were exotic enough for some serious betting.
Could you persuade someone to set light to a church, a sacred place? What were the odds on that?
Of course you could, no question. But what about the next step, if you were to believe Erman’s theories?
Who would have commissioned a job like that?
Someone who would dearly have loved to have the honour of rebuilding a famous Stockholm landmark? A politician, a company or a wealthy businessman with a dodgy reputation to clean up?
A quick look at the foundation that was responsible for the restoration listed a whole load of heavyweights who had opened their wallets. They’d even persuaded parliament to cough up some money, although this was strictly a local Stockholm issue. Anyway, didn’t the Swedish Church have more than enough money stashed away to pay for the whole thing themselves?
A conspiracy?
Well, you couldn’t exactly rule it out. Plausible, in other words. A bit of a long shot, but certainly possible if you had a bit of imagination and dared to think outside the box. A bit like the Da Vinci Code, basically.
But what about the Social Democrats’ and Folk Party’s own little Watergate, then?
That took a bit more thought.
A well-placed Ant inside the Social Democrats could easily fix the log-in details. Most people were stupid enough to scribble them down on a post-it note stuck under their desk so they could get back into the system after their summer holiday.
But who would have wanted it to happen?
Who benefited?
Short-term, obviously the Folk Party, so they were potential customers.