Liza Marklund - The Bomber

He looked up in surprise and saw two uniformed police officers walk toward him.

"You must be Thomas Samuelsson. I'm afraid we're going to have to ask you and the children to come with us."

Thomas stared at them.

"We've been trying to get hold of you all afternoon. Haven't any of our messages reached you? Or any from the paper?"

"Where are we going, Daddy?" Kalle asked and took Thomas's hand. All at once Thomas realized something was terribly wrong. Annika! Christ!

"Annika. What's happened? Is she…?"

"We don't know where your wife is. She disappeared this morning. The officers in charge of the investigation will tell you more. If you'd be so kind as to come with us…"

"Why?"

"Your apartment may be booby-trapped."

Thomas bent down and picked up both the children, one on each arm.

"Let's get away from here," he said in a stifled voice.

The Six Session at the paper was the most tense in many years. Anders Schyman felt panic lurking just beneath the surface. His instinct told him they shouldn't be publishing a paper; they should be out looking for Annika, giving support to her family, hunting for the Bomber- anything.

"We're going to sell one hell of a lot of papers," Ingvar Johansson said as he entered the room. He didn't sound smug or triumphant; it was more a sad statement of fact. But Anders Schyman went through the roof.

"How dare you?" the editor-in-chief shouted and grabbed Ingvar Johansson so violently that the news editor dropped his mug, spilling hot coffee down his leg. Ingvar Johansson didn't even feel the burn, he was so shocked. He had never seen Anders Schyman lose his cool like this. The editor-in-chief breathed in the other man's face for a few moments, then got a grip on himself.

"I'm sorry," he said, let go of the man, and turned away. "I'm not quite myself. I'm sorry."

Jansson enterered the room last, as always, but without his usual cheerful remarks. The night editor was pale and subdued. This was going to be the hardest paper he'd put together his whole career, he knew that.

"Okay," Schyman began, looking at the handful of men around the table: Picture Pelle, Jansson, and Ingvar Johansson. The soft-news and sports people had all gone home. "How do we do this?"

For a few seconds, a tense silence filled the room. Everyone sat with his head bent down. The chair Annika normally occupied seemed to grow until it occupied the entire room. Anders Schyman turned to face the night outside the window.

Ingvar Johansson broke the silence and began talking, quietly and focused. "I suppose what we have so far must be called embryonic. There are several editorial decisions involved in this…"

Unsure of himself, he leafed through his papers. The situation felt both absurd and unreal. It was rare that the people in this room were personally affected by the business they were dealing with. Now the discussion was about one of them. And he'd just been half-strangled by the editor-in-chief. As Ingvar Johansson started going through the items on his list and giving an account of what he'd done up to that point, they did at least find a sort of strength in their routine. They couldn't get away from it; the best they could do was to go on with their work as well as they were able.

So this is what it's like to be the colleague of a victim, Anders Schyman mused and stared out the window. It might be a good idea to remember this feeling.

"First, there's the bomb at the Klara sorting office," Ingvar Johansson said. "We need one story about the victims. The man who was most badly injured died an hour ago. The others are in stable condition. The authorities will be releasing their names during the night, and we're counting on getting passport photos of them. Then there's the damage to the building…"

"Leave the families alone," Schyman said.

"Sorry?" Ingvar Johansson said.

"The injured post office workers- leave their families alone."

"We haven't even got their names yet," Ingvar Johansson replied.

Schyman turned around to face the table. Distractedly, he pulled his hand through his hair, causing it to stand straight up. "Okay," he mumbled. "Sorry- go on."

Johansson took a few breaths, braced himself, and then continued: "We've actually been inside the damaged room at Klara. I've no idea how he did it, but Henriksson managed to get in and shoot a whole roll. Normally, the room isn't open even to regular staff; it's full of special delivery mail. But we've got the pictures."

"And to that we can add something on the responsibility," Schyman said, slowly walking around in the room. "What's the responsibility of the post office in a case like this? How thoroughly should they be checking the mail? It's the classic compromise between the integrity of the general public and the safety of their employees. We'll have to talk to the director general of the post office, the union, and the cabinet minister whose portfolio it falls within."

The editor stopped by the window, looking out at the dark night outside. He listened to the sighing of the ventilation system, searching for the sound of the traffic far below in the street. He couldn't hear it. Ingvar Johansson and Jansson took notes. After a while, the news editor continued his run-through.

"There's the question of how we're affected by this at the paper, as the bomb was addressed to our crime editor. We'll have to give an account of that, the whole course of events, from when Tore Brand went to collect the parcel at lunchtime to the police attempts to trace the package."

"Annika has disappeared," Ingvar Johansson said in a low voice. "We have to face that now, and we have to write about it, don't we?"

Anders Schyman turned around. Ingvar Johansson looked uncertain.

"The question is whether we should say anything at all about the bomb being targeted at us," the news editor said. "We could end up with a flood of letter bombs, any number of copycats starting to kidnap our reporters or phone in bomb threats…"

"We can't think of it in that way," Schyman replied. "If we did, we wouldn't be able to cover anything that happened to anyone. We have to give an account of everything that has occurred, including anything involving ourselves and our crime editor. What I will do, though, is talk over with Thomas, Annika's husband, what we should write about her personal life."

"Has he been told?" Jansson asked, and Anders Schyman nodded.

"The police finally got hold of him around half past five. He'd been out of town, in Falun, all day and hadn't had his phone switched on. He had no idea what Annika was up to today."

"So we'll do a story on Annika having disappeared," Jansson said.

Schyman nodded and turned away again.

"We'll outline her work, but we have to be very careful with any details about her private life," Johansson said. "The next story will cover the police theories on why Annika was… targeted."

"Do they know why?" Picture Pelle asked, and the news editor shook his head.

"There is no connection between her and the other victims. They never met. Their hypothesis is that Annika has been digging around and found out something she shouldn't have. She's been leading the news from the first moment on this story. The motive has to be somewhere there. She simply knew too much."

The men fell silent, listening to each other's breathing.

"Not necessarily," Schyman said. "This lunatic just isn't rational. She could have sent off the bomb for reasons incomprehensible to anyone but herself."

The other men all looked up simultaneously. The editor-in-chief gave a sigh. "Yes, the police think it's a woman. I think we should print that. Annika thought this morning that the police had pinpointed her, but they hadn't told her who it was. Let's write that the police are searching for a suspect, a woman, whom they haven't been able to locate."