Red Wolf: A Novel Read Free Page A

then
, he thought.
    ‘So who did it?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Who blew up the plane?’
    ‘The Russians, probably. That’s the conclusion the armed forces came to, anyway. The situation was completely different then, of course. We’re talking about theheight of the arms race, the deepest freeze of the Cold War.’
    He closed his eyes for a moment, conjuring up images and the spirit of the time. ‘There was a huge debate about the level of security at military bases,’ he suddenly remembered.
    ‘Exactly. Suddenly the public – or rather the media – demanded that every single base in Sweden had to be guarded better, which was completely unrealistic, of course. It would have taken the whole of the military budget to do it. But security was certainly stepped up for a while, and eventually secure zones were established within the bases. Dirty great fences with video cameras and alarms and what have you around all the hangars and so on.’
    ‘And that’s where you want to go? Which one of the editors have you spoken to?’
    She glanced at her watch. ‘Jansson. Look, I’ve got an open plane ticket for this afternoon. I want to meet a journalist on the
Norrland News
up there, a bloke who’s found out some new information. He’s going off to south-east Asia on Friday, away until Christmas, so I’m in a bit of a hurry. I just need you to give the okay.’
    Anders Schyman felt the irritation rising again, maybe because she was excusing herself so breathlessly.
    ‘Couldn’t Jansson do that?’
    Her cheeks started to go red.
    ‘In principle,’ Annika Bengtzon said, meeting his gaze. ‘But you know what it’s been like. He just wants to know that you’re not against it.’
    He nodded.
    She closed the door carefully behind her. He stared at the space she had left, understanding exactly what she meant.
She works without boundaries
, he thought.
I’ve always known that. She hasn’t got any instinctfor self-preservation. She gets herself into all sorts of situations, things normal people would never dream of doing, because there’s something missing there. Something got lost long ago, yanked out, roots and all, the scar fading over the years, leaving her exposed to the world, and to herself. All she’s got left is her sense of justice, the truth like a beacon in a world full of darkness. She can’t do anything else
.
    This could get really messy
.
    The editorial team’s euphoria over the sales figures for the Christmas holiday had come to an abrupt halt when it emerged that Bengtzon had got an exclusive interview with the murderer while she was being held captive. It had been typed on the murdered Olympic delegate’s computer. Schyman had read it, it was sensational. The problem was that Annika, like a real pest, had refused to let the paper publish it.
    ‘That’s just what the bastard wanted,’ she had said. ‘And because I’ve got copyright I can say no.’
    She had won. If they had published without her consent, she had promised to sue them. Even if she might have lost the case, he wasn’t prepared to challenge her, considering the amount of good publicity the story had already got them.
    She’s not stupid
, Anders Schyman thought,
but she might have lost her bite
.
    He stood up, went over to the graphs again.
    Well, there would be further cutbacks in the future.

3
    The sunset was spreading a fiery glow in the cabin of the plane, even though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon. Annika looked for gaps in the whipped-cream clouds beneath her but found none. The fat man next to her drove his elbow into her ribs as he spread out his copy of the
Norrland News
with a sigh.
    She closed her eyes, shutting herself off. She pulled the shutter down against the hiss of the plane’s air-conditioning, the pain in her ribs, the captain’s reports on the temperature outside the cabin and the weather in Luleå. Let herself be carried at a thousand kilometres an hour, concentrating on the pressure of her clothes