Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [160]
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
Author’s Acknowledgements
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