The Dying Game: A Novel - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Asa Avdic is a journalist who for years was a presenter for Swedish Public Service Radio and Television and is currently a host of Sweden’s biggest morning current events program. She lives with her family in Stockholm, Sweden. The Dying Game is her first novel.

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The year is 2037, and on the island of Isola, seven people have been selected to participate in a competition for a top-secret intelligence position with the totalitarian Union of Friendship. One of them is Anna Francis, a workaholic bureaucrat with a nine-year-old daughter she rarely sees and a secret that haunts her. Anna is not actually a candidate for the position: she's the test itself. Her assignment is to stage her own death and then observe how others react to the news a murderer is among them. It's going to plan until a storm rolls in, the power goes out, and the real game begins.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Copyright ©2017 Asa Avdic 

A first step toward the Union of Friendship was taken following the Wall Coup in 1989 and the unrest that ensued. Sweden and Finland have been under a state of martial law and the alliance of defense since 1992. Norway followed later on. On February 17, 1995, the parliament of the Protectorate of Sweden declared itself a full member of the Union of Friendship. The Western bloc does not accept this declaration and many UN countries still consider the Protectorate of Sweden an independent country. The Protectorate of Sweden has de facto and de jure control over its entire territory, but it is simultaneously subject to the common laws of the Union of Friendship, which preempt local statutes.[9] The International Court of Justice in The Hague does not regard the country’s incorporation into the Union of Friendship to be a violation of international law.[10][11][12][13]

The Protectorate of Sweden is no longer a member of the UN and left the former European Communities before its dissolution.[14]

The Protectorate of Sweden is bordered to the east by the Protectorate of Finland under the Union of Friendship, to the west by the Protectorate of Norway, and to the southwest by Denmark, where the border has been closed since 1992. The capital city of the Protectorate of Sweden is Stockholm.

International Encyclopedia, 2016

Stockholm
The Protectorate of Sweden
March 2037

Anna

One afternoon, the unit secretary came into my office.

“He wants to see you on the fourteenth floor of the Secretariat Building.”

“Who does?”

“He wants to see you!”

The unit secretary looked extremely excited. Her thick glasses bobbed on the tip of her nose and she frantically shoved them back up, at which point they immediately slid down again. I could understand why she was so worked up. It was rare for those in the Secretariat Building to take an interest in our activities, much less in one of us personally. When I returned home from Kyzyl Kum for good, the Chairman had sent a bouquet of flowers to the office, with my name spelled wrong on the card, so I assumed they didn’t care. Apparently I was mistaken. This made me feel both flattered and anxious. “When?”

“This afternoon.”

She looked at my wrinkled shirt for one second too long and appeared to be weighing something. “You have time to go home and change,” she said, then turned on her heel and walked off so quickly that I didn’t even have time to pretend I wasn’t offended.

Three hours later, I was plodding through biting wind and freezing rain across the courtyard to the Secretariat Building. Great sheets of half-frozen sleet were blowing straight sideways and whipping at my face, only to suddenly change directions and attack from the other side. It was one of those March days where everything is gray and wet and cold and the light is never more than a hope. There had been many such days that winter. It was mentioned each day on the news that we had never had so few hours of sunlight as during the past year. Maybe it was emissions, maybe it was climate change, maybe it was both. Or something even worse, but of course they didn’t say that on the news. That was the sort of thing people talked about only when they were sure that no one else was listening.

The building towered up ahead of me as I ascended the stairs, as if I were walking into the maw of a giant whale, and the wind nearly hurled me through the doors. Inside the foyer, I signed in at the reception desk, received a visitor badge, was passed through various security doors, handed over my coat and purse to the guard, and was shown to an elevator. The walls and ceiling of the elevator were covered in smoke-colored mirrors, which made me feel painfully self-conscious in my brand-new jacket and bland, old-lady booties from the off-the-rack clothing chain closest to my office. The jacket fit well, but it was made of an itchy, tight material that made me start sweating even before I got off the elevator. My feet were damp and cold and my tights were sagging. I had put on makeup in the hopes of appearing less haggard than I felt, but I suspected that it had achieved the opposite effect. The rain had made my eye makeup run and washed nearly all the cheap powder from my cheeks; what was left was flaking over the eczema on the bridge of my nose and at my hairline. I felt out of place, like I was wearing a costume.

The first thing that struck me when I walked out of the elevator on the fourteenth floor was that the sound was different, more muffled. The floors were covered in thick, wall-to-wall carpeting, which made it nearly impossible to walk in heels without stumbling. This was a floor for men. Dark wood, chrome-plated steel, large green plants: scaled back, expensive. The walls, the floor, and the ceiling were imbued with power. An air-conditioning unit hummed nearby; it sounded like a distant helicopter. I didn’t quite know what to do with myself; there was nowhere to sit, no art to pretend to study. A door opened and an elegant older woman came out. She said my name and asked me to follow her. I trailed her through the corridor and noticed that despite her high heels, she moved across the soft floor with confident, quick steps. She opened a door at the end of the corridor and let me into a conference room with a dizzying view.

“Coffee? Tea? Water?”

“Coffee, please, black.”

She nodded and made a little gesture with her hand, as if to give me permission to take a seat, and then she left me on my own. There was a sucking sound as she closed the door behind her, as though a vacuum had just formed in the room. I found myself standing in the center of the room. Each detail, from the door handle to the baseboards, looked well planned. It felt like I was doing violence to the coordinated interior just by virtue of being in the room. Just as I was about to pull out a chair to sit down, the door opened again and the elegant secretary showed the Chairman in.

He was a tall man with thick hair and old acne scars on his face, and even though he wore an expensive suit, which must have been either imported or tailor-made, it looked oddly wrong on him, as if someone had dressed up a statue. I had met him once before when he came by for a tour of our unit. I remember the way we all stood lined up next to our desks, like orphans waiting to be adopted, as he walked around with the managers and inspected the work area and the staff. The mood had been tense and forced during his visit that time, and it felt more or less the same now. He took a few steps toward me and extended his large hand.

“Anna Francis, so wonderful to finally make your acquaintance!”

He looked at me, and as he did, I understood why it was that, despite all of his power, people often spoke of him so warmly. His expression was absolutely open and welcoming; it made you feel noticed, like you were the most important person in the whole world. As if he truly thought it was absolutely fantastic to meet me. I very nearly believed him.

“The pleasure is all mine,” I managed to say.

“Please, sit!”

The Chairman waved toward the chairs at the round table, and as I took a seat he walked around the table and sat down across from me.

“First off, I would like to take the opportunity to thank you for your fantastic efforts in Kyzyl Kum. Splendid, simply splendid,” he said with such emphasis that I wondered if our conversation was being recorded. He went on: “I hope you know how pleased we are with your work. The Minister sends greetings as well. Delighted ones, of course. We haven’t had such a good reputation for...