Red Wolf: A Novel (48 page)

‘It won’t work,’ he said quietly.

She gave a thin smile. ‘Yes it will. And you know why? Because it’s true.’

‘It isn’t worth the risk,’ he said.

‘If this isn’t,’ she said, ‘then what is? What are we for? To provide a dividend on our proprietors’ shares, or to protect democracy?’

‘It’s not that simple,’ he said.

‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘It’s precisely that simple.’

She stood up, picking up her bag and hanging it on her shoulder.

‘I’m going now,’ she said.

‘But it was only a crap American commercial channel,’ he said.

‘That doesn’t make any difference,’ she said.

She saw the air go out of him as he slumped back.

‘Wait,’ he said, holding up one hand. ‘Don’t go yet. You’re not serious?’

She swayed a little.

‘Yes I am,’ she said.

Silence spread out around her, large and heavy and dark. She stood there, halfway to the door, and looked at him, saw the doubts and various alternatives coursing through him.

‘The owners would have the whole edition withdrawn,’ he said.

‘True,’ she said.

‘This mustn’t leak out,’ he said.

‘No, it mustn’t,’ she said.

‘So we can’t run it through the newsroom.’

She didn’t reply, allowing the dizzying conclusions to settle in his head.

‘All the work will have to be done in here,’ he went on. ‘That means you and me. Can you do layout?’

‘More or less.’

He shut his eyes, and covered them with his hands for a few seconds.

‘How many pages are we talking about?’

‘Four spreads,’ she said. ‘Plus the front and the leader.’

He sat silent, thinking, for an infinitely long minute before he spoke.

‘I’ll call the printers and tell them to shift half the news section.’

‘Extra pages?’

‘Two plates is enough,’ Schyman said, ‘eight pages.’

‘Is there anyone we can trust to keep quiet at the printers?’

‘Bob. He can set the plates. How quick are you with Quark?’

She dropped her bag on the floor.

‘Not very.’

She looked at his eyes. Concentration had drawn a veil of decisiveness and determination over them.

‘It’s going to be a long night,’ he said.

‘I know,’ she said.

THE END

I spent several years wondering how to set a novel in the northern Swedish region of Norrbotten. I wanted to show the unique isolation and majestic strangeness of the place. You really are on the roof of the world up there, and that was the feeling I wanted to convey. I was born there, in a small village called Pålmark, between the tiny towns of Piteå and Älvsbyn. (Pålmark actually isn’t even a village; just a dozen houses spread out along three kilometres of road leading to the thorp of Holmträsk.)

In many ways it turned out very well.
Red Wolf
was probably my best novel up to that point. It became an international success, and was actually the twelfth best-selling book worldwide when it was first published.

But there was one group of people who didn’t appreciate the book quite as much: the inhabitants of Norrbotten itself. They said I had portrayed the people there as provincial, the landscape as bare and tundralike, and they definitely didn’t agree with me describing the location as cold and dark.

I thought that was a perfectly understandable reaction. Someone was finally describing their corner of the world in a novel – a medium that could cross national boundaries – and the people of Norrbotten wanted a
description taken from some tourist brochure: a nice, shiny picture of how great everything was. But here I was, telling things the way they really were.

The people of Norbotten came to the conclusion that I didn’t like them, so they were certainly not going to like me. To their great irritation, I had already been granted a plaque and an engraved portrait on the main street in the town of Piteå, and there was a lot of discussion about digging it up and getting rid of it; after all, in their eyes I had slandered my hometown. Eventually the fuss died down, though, and a year later I was awarded the finest accolade an author could wish for – the cultural prize of Piteå District (pretty much the equivalent of the Nobel Prize).

But the truth is that I love Norrbotten and its people. They’re my context, my backbone. I grew up there, my first daughter was born there, I started working as a journalist there.

In the mid eighties, I lived in a two-room apartment on Lövskatan in Luleå, in a block that was right next to the railway line. All night long the trains carrying iron ore from the mines to the north would rumble past my bedroom window on their way to the blast furnaces at Swedish Steel, a few hundred metres down the line. I thought the area I lived in was incredibly . . . well, I was going to say beautiful, but most people would probably disagree. Maybe fascinating is a better word – powerful, overwhelming. Swedish Steel in Luleå is one of the most modern and imposing plants in the world. It’s practically alive, breathing and pulsating right round the clock. Blast furnace number 2 looms like a huge, illuminated monster over the Gulf of Bothnia: you can see it from anywhere along the coast around Luleå.

I used to go for long walks with my little daughter along the railway track. The other mothers would go
to the playground, but I would take my poor daughter in her pushchair all the way out to the West Gate, just because it was so impressive. For a change we would sometimes go the other way, down to the iron-ore harbour to look at the cranes.

My daughter grew up to be a very independent young woman. (She also just happens to be called Annika, and she has kindly lent her name to the heroine of this book. Her surname comes from my favourite boss on the
Expressen
newspaper, Bengt Bengtzon, the most brilliant, capricious and unnerving boss I’ve ever had.)

I first got the idea for
Red Wolf
back in December 1996. I was editor-in-chief of a newspaper called
Metro Weekend
, a morning paper published on Saturdays and Sundays. The first issue had appeared just three months earlier, and in only twelve weeks we had gained more than 60,000 subscribers. It was a great success, in both marketing and sales terms. Then came the fatal blow.

The Minister of Culture, Marita Ulvskog, pushed through a government proposal that came to be known as the Metro Weekend Law. It meant that my paper could no longer be distributed along with the other morning papers. She was using her power to close down a new, successful paper. I couldn’t believe it. I thought things like that only happened in dictatorships. The fact that something like this could happen in a democracy like Sweden came as a huge shock.

There I was, with a newsroom full of highly skilled people who had left other jobs because they believed in the idea I was promoting, and they had done a fantastic job. And along comes a government minister and destroys us with a stroke of her pen. All of my staff had to leave at once, but they were talented enough to get new jobs quickly.

The whole episode was a bitter lesson in how power operates in Sweden.

Naturally, since then I’ve thought a lot about what might have made the Minister of Culture do something as undemocratic as closing down one particular newspaper. How it all came about is a long story, and it started when the
Metro
newspaper was first distributed free of charge at metro stations in Stockholm. The big morning papers in Stockholm,
Svenska Dagbladet
and
Dagens Nyheter
, looked on scornfully.
Svenska Dagbladet
had actually been invited to buy a part share in
Metro
, but had turned the offer down flat.

Metro
turned out to be the biggest success ever in Swedish media history – that much was apparent after only a couple of months. The smiles were soon wiped off the faces of the bosses of the more traditional morning papers, and when we (I was news editor at
Metro
) announced that we were launching another paper,
Metro Weekend
,
Svenska Dagbladet
and
Dagens Nyheter
were ready for us. The owners gave fine speeches about how their main aim was to protect freedom of speech and democracy, but their words turned out to be hollow.

The two papers presented the Minister of Culture with an offer she couldn’t refuse:
Metro Weekend
would be closed down, or else the two big papers would see to it that
Dala-Demokraten
and a raft of other small regional papers, most of them with social-democrat leanings, would no longer be distributed to their readers. The focus on
Dala-Demokraten
was well-chosen, because the Minister of Culture had herself been the paper’s editor-in-chief before she entered government. So the decision was straightforward.

Things progressed quickly. Only a couple of months later she pushed a change in the law through parliament.
Every other party apart from the Centre, who were offered some form of financial inducement, opposed the amendment.

A few days later we were closed down.

Of course this made me think about what power can be used for. Marita Ulvskog could justify her decision in political terms, and there was an ideological motivation behind it, but what if someone in a position of power was concealing a big personal secret? And what would happen if someone else found out? What sort of black-mail might then be possible? I wanted to show that power always carries with it the potential for corruption.

Annika Bengtzon makes it a personal crusade to uncover the abuse of power, but what happens if her own life is threatened? If her husband is on the point of leaving her and their children? What would she be prepared to do then? Would she be prepared to abuse her own power as a journalist in order to save her family?

This time I allowed her to do exactly that.

Liza Marklund
Stockholm, June 2010

This is fiction. I want to emphasize that all events and characters are entirely and only the product of my own vivid imagination. Like everyone else, however, I have memories, experiences and impressions that I make use of as I find necessary.

I spend a lot of time on research for my books. Even though every line is fiction, I take care that the details of places, activities and phenomena which do exist in the real world are as accurately described as possible. This means that people sometimes recognize some elements, which is entirely proper. Everything in this book
could have
happened.

However, I sometimes make use of the author’s prerogative to change details of existing bus-routes, the location of certain compressor sheds, the use of various sites, etc.

The interior of the Norrbotten Airbase, which is closed to the public and must not be photographed or otherwise documented, is my own invention.

Neither the
Evening Post
nor the
Norrland News
exist, but they bear traces of many different actual media organizations.
Katrineholms-Kuriren
(Katrineholm Post) does exist, however, but all references that my
characters make to the newspaper and its organization are completely fictitious.

A project aimed at threats to politicians, involving among others the Association of Local Councils and the Federation of County Councils and the Department of Justice, did actually take place during 2003 and 2004, but Thomas’s working group and its members, methods, discussions and consequences are entirely imaginary.

This is, in other words, a novel, and it could not have been written without Torbjörn Säfve’s incisive analysis of the rebel movement in his book
Rebellerna i Sverige
(Författarförlaget 1971; The Rebels in Sweden) – thank you, Jan, for the tip, and Matthias, for finding a copy in a second-hand bookshop in Vadstena!

Further essential reading was provided by Björn Kumm’s documentation and summary of the history of terrorism in the book of the same name (
Terrorismens historia
, Historiska media; I have editions published in 1997, 1998 and 2002).

I would also like to thank the following, without whose tolerant assistance this project would never have been successfully completed. They are:

Dan Swärdh, theatrical manager of
Teater Scratch
in Luleå, and a dormant Maoist going by the codenames of ‘Greger’ and ‘Mats’, who initiated me into both the public and the hidden activities of Maoist groups in Luleå in the early 1970s.

Mikael Niemi, author and old acquaintance from Pajala, for discussions of the backgrounds of various characters, and for an introduction to Læstadianism in the Torne Valley.

Christer L. Lundin, public relations manager of Teracom, who provided information about the technical
and political development, marketing and situation of digital television, and with whom I discussed and analysed the consequences and plausibility of various fictitious political decisions.

Stefan Helsing, public relations manager of the Norrbotten Airbase, F21, in Luleå, for facts and discussions concerning the history of the base and scenarios of possible attacks.

Anders Linnér, public relations manager for the Air Force, for discussion of the political and military complications surrounding an attack against a military target, and for information regarding flying routines and the security arrangements of airbases.

Peter Svensson, personal advisor to the Supreme Commander of the Swedish Armed Forces, for ongoing invaluable collaboration.

Thorbjörn Larsson, chair of the board of the newspaper
Expressen
and TV4, and a colleague on the board of publishing company Piratförlaget, for valuable discussions concerning media issues.

Per-Erik Rödin, chair of the executive committee of the Uppsala Student Union, for assistance with local knowledge and contacts.

Sakari Pitkänen, editor-in-chief of the newspaper
Metro
, for information regarding newspaper technology and other matters.

Peter Rönnerfalk, chief medical officer and health advisor to Stockholm County Council, for information regarding the diagnosis and treatment of ventricular cancer, frostbite, etc.