she couldn’t help saying something, anything, so as not to feel so alone.
‘Hello …’ a voice suddenly answered, and her heart skipped a beat before she heard it continue and realized that she was listening to her own voice.
‘… you’ve called Rebecca. I’m not home right now, but leave a message and I’ll get back to you.’
She threw herself at the phone and just picked up the receiver before the answer phone bleeped, but whoever it was who had called had already hung up.
Hell! She’d put the phone on mute while she was doing yoga the previous evening and must have forgotten to reset it.
Oh well, they’d call back if it was important.
The odds were fairly short that it would be a call from work about some overtime, something which for once she didn’t feel inclined to do.
The intense training of the past few days had left her worn out and tonight she just wanted to sleep. She might do a short session in the gym tomorrow, but she was planning to spend the rest of her day off catching up on a bit of well-deserved rest.
She went through her messages. The following were all reminders from herself:
‘Rebecca, remember to book a time in the laundry-room and pay the Nespresso bill, it’s due on the twenty-fifth.’
‘Step up the training regime with the Sig, Normén.’
‘This evening there’s that documentary about serial killers that you ought to watch. Discovery, eight o’clock.’
She gave a wry smile at her own orders as she deleted the messages. It was odd how strange her own voice sounded when she heard a recording of it. Almost like another person on the tape. A distant relative with a few common features, but more stern and cold. But then the sound quality wasn’t very good. She actually thought it was rather a silly habit to use the machine like this. Maybe it was time to get a new mobile? Then she could type up her reminders instead of carrying on with all these endless calls. A suitable project for the next time she had a few days off.
She picked up the phone and reset the ringtone, and fought a sudden impulse to call Henke. She actually missed him, more than she cared to admit. But that would have to be tomorrow now, or sometime over the next few days, she promised herself before she put the phone down and switched on the television.
A few minutes later she was lost in a deep, dreamless sleep.
The clip exceeded all expectations! It looked as if someone had set up a camera on the landing, because he couldn’t see a single movement that suggested a human hand behind the images which had been posted alongside his own under his profile. Even though the events had only taken place an hour or so before, everything actually seemed even more dramatic than he remembered it.
The door shaken by the gorilla’s shoves, the terrified girl poking her face out, and not least his own masked figure tagging the entire door. He looked at least as cool as twenty-seven had done when he sorted out that cop-car!
And the text on the door looked pretty damn good:
REMEMBER
RULE
NUMBER
ONE!
That was a message the grass inside was guaranteed never to forget. A little reminder from the Game Master about what the rules were, basically. Silence is golden …
Bloody hell, he was a body-builder or something, because he looked pretty fucking solid when he came storming out onto the landing.
The sequence from the yard was almost as good. Because he’d only been half-lying on top of the wall, the camera had been pointing in the right direction and he could get a better idea of the effects of his kicking.
You could make out a powerful lower arm and parts of a furious face sliding in and out of shot, then his own size forty-three Nike landing in the middle of the gorilla’s face before everything became a mess of sky and soil when he fell down the other side of the wall.
At a guess, the orc had been too pumped up on steroids to get over the wall.
Too bad, sucker!
Time to cut back on the anabolics.
He grinned broadly and pressed repeat one more time.
The fans liked it when you fried rats. The comments had already started to appear and his average rating had crept closer to four stars. With a bit more exposure he should have passed the boundary to ‘good’ by the morning.
And why not? After all, he was pretty much born for this. A hitman in the service of the Game Master!
The jacket had been a stroke of genius, the new clip was a hell of a lot better than the previous ones. You could even watch the run down Karlbergsvägen without feeling seasick, and he made a note to remember to pull off the balaclava sooner next time. It wasn’t until a couple of old women had screamed in terror somewhere near Hälsingegatan that he had remembered that he still had his face covered.
He’d make sure he did better next time.
Because there was definitely going to be a next time!
From: Talent Acquisition
To: Game Master
Subject: Candidate Evaluation 128
Name: Henrik Pettersson
Alias: HP
Age: 31
Height: 179 cm
Weight: 72 kg
Build: Slight
Hair: Medium blond
Eyes: Blue (see attached passport photograph)
Status: Unmarried
Family: One sibling (a sister with whom he has only sporadic contact)
Both parents deceased
Profession: Various, currently unemployed
Address: Maria Trappgränd 7, Södermalm, Stockholm, a two-room flat which he inherited from his mother
Number of completed assignments: 5
Total points: 2200
Current
