Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [151]
And she got to her feet and ran and ran and ran towards the noise, towards the glowing red eyes at the top of blast-furnace number two. She scrambled up a steep slope and over a mountain of coal, knives tearing at her lungs; in the distance the sign, West Checkpoint.
Tuesday 24 November
51
Thomas put the evening papers down on the desk before he took off his coat and hung it up on a hanger. He glanced at the desk over his shoulder as he hung the hanger on the back of the door. Annika’s solemn face stared up at him from the front page of the Evening Post, the new photo she had taken after the business with the Bomber, with her looking older and sadder.
Evening Post Reporter CRACKED TERRORIST GANG, the headline screamed, and his pulse started to race as he sat down and ran a finger over her face.
His wife, the mother of his children, was unique, and not only in his eyes.
He opened the paper. Articles about how Annika’s investigations had cracked the Norrbotten terrorist cell took up half the paper. Across the first news-spread inside, pages six and seven, there was a night picture, taken from a plane, of the Gulf of Bothnia, with someone running within an illuminated circle of light, and the caption: Terrorist hunt at sea tonight – serial killer tracked by helicopters with thermal cameras.
A long article described how a single man from Luleå had murdered at least four people in just the last few weeks. Journalist Annika Bengtzon had sounded the alarm at the West Checkpoint of Swedish Steel, the police had sealed off the Lövskatan district, forcing the man out onto the ice. Fortunately police helicopters were already fitted with thermal-imaging cameras, because they had been searching for a missing three-year-old the year before. He glanced through the article, then moved on.
The next spread described how Annika had been locked in an abandoned compressor shed beside the railway in Luleå with members of the terrorist cell, the Beasts, and how she had managed to alert the police before she was captured, and how she had saved the life of pensioner Yngve Gustafsson by keeping him warm with her own body-heat.
Thomas felt a jolt at that sentence, and had to swallow. He stopped reading and looked at the pictures.
A nice picture of Annika in the newsroom. Below that was a photograph taken with a flash, of a little red brick building. His wife could have died there.
He ran a hand through his hair and loosened his tie.
Annika had escaped the killer by throwing herself in front of an iron-ore train, and had run for a kilometre to Swedish Steel and sounded the alarm at the West Checkpoint. The article had been written by a reporter, Patrick Nilsson. Annika herself was interviewed and just said she was fine and that she was glad it was all over.
He breathed out hard. She was mad. What on earth was she thinking? How could she put herself in such a dangerous situation when she had him and the children?
They had to talk. She couldn’t carry on like this.
The following pages were full of Minister of Culture Karina Björnlund’s story of how she was lured to join the Beasts, a Maoist group in Luleå in the late 1960s. After Björnlund left the group it went to pieces and turned to violence, something she deeply regretted. The minister tried to describe the spirit of the times, a desire for justice and freedom that span out of control. The Prime Minister welcomed her honesty, and was giving her his full backing.
The truth about the story of the attack on F21 filled the next two pages. The serial killer now in custody had thrown one of the military’s own flares into a container of surplus aviation fuel and thereby caused the explosion.
He skipped the article once he’d read the introduction and captions.
The next two pages covered the hitman Ragnwald, one of ETA’s most ruthless terrorists, who had evaded the world’s police and security services for three decades. He had frozen to death in the compressor shed while Annika and the others had looked on, powerless to help.
He looked at the grainy photograph