Red Wolf: A Novel (4 page)

Annika could hear voices in the background, people working in the police station demanding the inspector’s attention.

‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘Were you working in Luleå in November nineteen sixty-nine?’

The man gave a short laugh. ‘Well, I’m old enough,’ he said, ‘so I could have been. No, I missed the explosion at F21 by a few months. I was in Stockholm at the time, didn’t start up here until May nineteen seventy.’

The main office of the
Norrland News
was in a three-storey office block between the Town Hall and the County Governor’s Residence. Annika looked up at the yellow brick façade, estimating that it had been built in the mid-1950s.

It struck her that it could have been the
Katrineholm Post
. It looked just the same. That impression only grew stronger when she leaned against the glass door, shielding her eyes from the lamp above with her hands to get a look at the reception area. Gloomy and deserted, just an illuminated emergency exit sign casting a dull light on green newspaper racks and chairs.

The speaker above the doorbell crackled. ‘Yes?’

‘My name’s Annika Bengtzon, I’m on the
Evening Post
. I was supposed to be seeing Benny Ekland this evening, but I’ve just found out that he’s dead.’

The silence radiated out into the winter darkness, accompanied by some crackles of static. She looked up at the sky. The clouds had cleared and the stars were out. The temperature was falling rapidly now, and she rubbed her gloved hands together.

‘Oh?’ the voice from the newsroom said, suspicion clearly audible over the poor connection.

‘I was going to give Benny some material; there were a few things we were going to discuss.’

This time the reply came immediately. ‘In return for what?’

‘Let me in and we can talk about it,’ she said.

Three seconds of static hesitation later the lock clicked and Annika opened the door. Warm air smelling of paper dust enveloped her. She blinked to get used to the low green light and let the door click shut behind her. The stairs up to the newsroom were to the left of the door, worn grey linoleum with rubber edges.

A large man with his white shirt hanging out met her by the photocopier. His face was flushed, his eyes painfully red.

‘I’m really very sorry,’ Annika said, holding out her hand. ‘Benny Ekland was a legend even down in Stockholm.’

The man took her hand and nodded. He introduced himself as Pekkari, the night manager.

‘He could have got a job at any of the Stockholm papers whenever he wanted. He turned them down often enough, preferred to stay up here.’

Annika tried to smile to compensate for her white lie. ‘So I gather,’ she mumbled.

‘Do you want coffee?’

She followed Pekkari to the staff room, a tiny windowless cell containing a small kitchen unit.

‘You’re the one from the tunnel, aren’t you?’ he asked, sounding confident of his facts.

Annika nodded quickly, taking off her coat as he poured thick tar-like liquid into two badly washed mugs.

‘So what were you two going to talk about?’ Pekkari asked, handing her the sugar.

She waved it away.

‘I’ve written quite a bit about terrorism recently. Last week I spoke to Benny about the attack on F21, and he said he was on the track of something new, something big – a description of what actually happened.’

The editor put the sugar bowl on the table, digging among the lumps with nicotine-stained fingers.

‘We ran that last Friday,’ he said.

She was shocked. She hadn’t heard anything about new revelations in any of the media.

Pekkari dropped three lumps in his mug.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘But you’re on one of the biggies; you don’t know what it’s like for locals. The agencies only care about Stockholm. As far as they’re concerned, our scoops are worth less than cats’ piss.’

Not true
, she thought to herself,
it depends on the quality of the material
. She suppressed the thought and looked down at her lap.

‘I started out on the
Katrineholm Post
,’ she said, ‘so I know exactly what it’s like.’

The man stared at her, eyes wide open. ‘Then you must know Macke?’

‘On sport? Of course I do. He’s an institution.’

An o
ut-of-control alcoholic even when I was there
, Annika thought, smiling at Pekkari.

‘What did you have for Ekland?’ the man said, slurping his coffee.

‘A few historical summaries,’ she replied quickly. ‘Mostly archive material from the seventies, pictures and text.’

‘Must all be online,’ Pekkari said.

‘Not this.’

‘So you weren’t trying to get his story?’

The man’s eyes stared fixedly at her over the edge of the mug, and she calmly met his gaze.

‘I have many good qualities,’ she said, ‘but mind-reading isn’t one of them. Benny called me. How else would I know what he was up to?’

The editor took another lump of sugar, sucking on it thoughtfully as he drank his coffee.

‘You’re right,’ he said, once he had swallowed with an audible gulp. ‘What do you need?’

‘Help to get access to Benny’s articles on terrorism.’

‘Go down to the archive and talk to Hans.’

Every newspaper archive in the whole of Sweden looks like this
, she thought,
and Hans Blomberg looks like archivists have always looked
. A dusty little man in a grey cardigan, glasses and a comb-over. Even his noticeboard contained the anticipated prerequisites: a child’s drawing of a yellow dinosaur, a noisy ‘Why aren’t I RICH instead of BEAUTIFUL?’ sign, and a calendar counting down to an unspecified goal with the words ‘NEARLY THERE!’

‘Benny was a stubborn bastard,’ the archivist said, sitting down heavily behind his computer. ‘Worse than a mule, never gave up. Wrote more than anyone else I’ve come across, sometimes at the expense of quality. You know the type?’

He looked at Annika over the rim of his glasses, and she couldn’t help smiling.

‘Not to speak ill of the dead,’ the man went on, conducting a slow waltz on the keyboard with his index finger, ‘but we might as well be honest.’

He batted his eyelashes at her.

‘His death seems to have affected people here badly,’ Annika said tentatively.

Hans Blomberg sighed. ‘He was the star reporter, the darling of the management team, the union’s hate-figure, you know? The boy who dances into the
newsroom after one job and cries, “Get me a picture byline, because tonight I’m immortal!”’

Annika burst out laughing. She had actually seen someone do precisely that. She thought it might have been Carl Wennergren, one of the former newsroom morons.

‘Well then, young lady, what exactly are you looking for?’

‘Benny’s series about terrorism, especially the article on F21 that was published the other day.’

The archivist looked up, his eyes twinkling. ‘Aha. So a nice young girl like you is interested in dangerous things?’

‘Dear Uncle Blomberg,’ Annika said, ‘I’m married and I’ve got two children.’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Feminists . . . Printouts or cuttings?’

‘Copies, preferably, if it isn’t too much bother,’ Annika said.

The man groaned and got up again.

‘This business with computers,’ he said, ‘everything was going to get so much easier, but it hasn’t. Twice the work, that’s what computers have meant.’

He disappeared in amongst the cabinets, muttering ‘T . . . T . . . terrorism . . .’, opening drawers and huffing and puffing.

‘Here you are,’ he said a few moments later, triumphantly holding out a brown envelope. ‘Terrorism à la Ekland. You can sit over there. I’m here till six o’clock.’

Annika took the envelope, opening it with sweaty fingers as she went over to the desk he had indicated. Cuttings were infinitely superior to computer printouts. On screen all the headings were the same size, all articles the same size, every picture just as small. On the page the articles could live and breathe beneath noisy
or subtle headlines: the typeface alone could tell her a lot about what the editors were hoping to achieve, what signals they wanted to send. The number of pictures, their layout and technical quality told her even more: how important the item was deemed to be, but also how important this picture or article was in the general torrent of news that day. The skills of an entire profession of editors had been wiped out by the electronic archive.

But she had serious stuff to study here.

The clips were arranged in date order, oldest at the front. The first text had been published at the end of April and provided tasty details from the history of Swedish terrorism, including the story of the inventor, Dr Martin Ekenberg from Töreboda, who really only succeeded with one invention: the letter bomb. She paused when she recognized several phrases she herself had used in articles on the same subject published just weeks before. She concluded drily that Ekland had evidently allowed his colleagues to inspire him in a very direct way.

She leafed through the pile of cuttings. A lot of it was old padding, but some of it was new to her. She read with growing interest about the fuss on the Norrbotten islands in the spring of 1987 when the military spent days searching for submarines and Spetsnaz brigades that had been landed on the skerries. A stubborn, fifteen-year-old rumour had it that a Russian frogman had been shot in the leg by a Swedish officer. The officer’s dog picked up a scent and started barking, and the officer dashed into some bushes, where bloody tracks were later found, leading to the water. Benny Ekland had been more interested in retelling the rumour as entertainingly as possible than in getting to the bottom of what had really happened. There was a brief quote from military command in Boden, to the effect that the
atmosphere was completely different in the late eighties, that everyone misjudges things sometimes, even the Swedish military, and that it had never been ascertained that there had ever been any submarine encroachment in northern Swedish waters.

At the bottom of the pile was the article she was interested in, and it contained information entirely new to her.

Benny Ekland wrote that during the late sixties the old Lansen planes of the Norrbotten air defences were being switched for more modern Drakens, for search and reconnaissance purposes. The airbase was subjected to numerous acts of sabotage against the new planes, mostly in the form of matches being inserted in the planes’ pitot tubes. These tubes sat like small spears at the front of the planes, and were used to measure airspeed, pressure, and so on.

It was thought fairly obvious that left-wing groups from Luleå, probably Maoists, were responsible for the sabotage. No damage was ever done, and none of the match-wielders was ever caught, but the article cited anonymous sources in F21 claiming that these acts were the basis of the more serious attack that followed. The Maoists were believed to have discovered something that had catastrophic consequences.

After each flight, when the plane was on the tarmac, absorbent material had to be spread on the ground, or a stainless-steel container placed behind the plane. Not all of the fuel in the engine was burned off, so it had to be drained after the engine had stopped. On the evening of the attack, the night of 18 November 1969, the whole base had been involved in a large exercise. Afterwards the planes remained on the tarmac, and that was when the terrorists struck.

Instead of sticking the match in the pitot tube as
usual, they lit it and tossed it into the bucket of surplus fuel behind the plane. The explosion was instant, and massive.

Ekland wrote that considering the air group’s lamentable history, it was easy to conclude that it was the local leftists who were behind this act of sabotage as well, even if it did have fatal consequences this time.

He writes like an idiot
, Annika thought; but the theory was very interesting.

‘Can I have a copy of this one?’ she asked, holding up the article.

Not looking up from his screen, the archivist responded, ‘You found it readable then?’

‘Of course,’ Annika said, ‘I haven’t seen this information before. Might be worth looking into.’

‘The photocopier’s out by the stairs. If you give it a knock it might work.’

The man glided soundlessly through dark streets. The pain was under control, his body vibrated with energy. His thoughts echoed between the frozen walls, giving answers that were alien to him.

Luleå had shrunk over the years. He remembered the town as big and brash, full of self-confidence, rolling in glitter and commercialism.

Tonight the self-confidence was gone, way out of sight. It had probably never really existed. The place felt impotent. The main street had been closed to traffic and turned into a long, windswept playground, lined with sad little birch trees. This was where people were supposed to make their living; this was where they were meant to consume their way out of depression.

The curse of freedom
, he thought. The bastard Renaissance man who woke up one morning in twelfth-century Florence and invented capitalism, sitting up in bed and realizing the possibilities for his own ego, realizing that the state was an organism that could be controlled and manipulated.

He sat down on a bench outside the library to let the worst of the morphine rush leave his body. He knew it wasn’t good to sit still in this sort of cold, but he didn’t care. He wanted to sit here and look at the cathedral,
the building where he had founded his dynasty. The ugly extension on the corner of ‘nameless street’ was one of his old haunts. The lights were still on. There were probably meetings going on right now, just as there had been all those years ago.

None of them like ours, though
, he thought.
There’ll never be any like ours
.

Two young women were on their way out. He saw them stop in the lobby and read the notices of cultural events on the board.

Maybe it’s unlocked
, he thought vaguely.
Maybe I can get in
.

The girls glanced at him as they passed each other a few metres from the door, the sort of unfocused glance that you only get in small, narrow-minded places: we don’t know him, we’ll ignore him. In larger towns no one noticed anyone at all. That suited him much better.