Liza Marklund - Red Wolf

He shrugged, braked at the opening of the narrow track with the no vehicles sign, craned his neck and peered through the windscreen.

‘I wanted to try things out,’ he said. ‘At our training camp in Melderstein in the summer of sixty-nine the Dragon appointed me his supreme commander. I was the one who would lead the armed struggle. All summer we practised different forms of attack, different ways to take a life. Over the years I kept up my interest and my education. How far do we drive?’

‘To the viaduct,’ Annika said, glancing in the mirror again, the light was closer now. ‘Margit Axelsson received a warning after the Dragon disappeared. Did you get one as well?’

The archivist laughed again, louder this time.

‘But dear girl,’ he said, ‘I was the one who sent them. They all got one.’

‘Whose fingers were they?’

‘A little boy who had been killed in a car accident,’ Hans Blomberg said. ‘I broke into the mortuary and cut them off. There’s no need to worry, he didn’t miss them.’

She looked out of the window until she could talk again.

‘But why start killing them now?’ she said, looking at him. ‘Why did you wait so long?’

He glanced back at her and smiled.

‘You’re not listening,’ he said. ‘The revolution is here. It was going to start when the Dragon returned. He promised that before he left, and now he’s back.’

‘Göran Nilsson is dead.’

Hans Blomberg shrugged. ‘Ah well,’ he said with a sigh. ‘All false authorities die sooner or later.’

He pulled up, put the car in neutral and put on the handbrake, leaving the stolen car running. He turned to look at Annika, suddenly serious and thoughtful.

‘The Dragon promised that he would come back, and I knew it was true. I waited all those years. Of course I’ve had moments of doubt, but I’m the winner in the end.’

‘Do you really believe that?’ Annika said.

He slapped her across the face with the flat of his hand.

‘So now we go out and find the box,’ he said, reaching over her to open the passenger door, his hand pausing on her stomach.

She heaved herself out, taking a quick glance backward.

Not yet time.

She turned towards the box and pointed. ‘There.’

‘Open it.’

She walked slowly forward, lead weights round her feet.

It won’t work , she thought. I can’t do it .

She listened behind her, thought she could hear the dull rumble. Not yet, but soon . She took hold of the handle, tried to twist, pulled, used both hands, pulled even harder, braced her feet on the ground, and groaned loudly.

‘I can’t get it open,’ she said, letting go.

The light was close now, the whistling sound was very clear, merging with the distant rumble of the steelworks. Soon, soon, soon .

Hans Blomberg walked over, annoyed. ‘Get out of the way.’

Holding the pistol in his right hand, he grabbed the handle with his left, gathered his strength, then pulled. The door flew open, the man’s eyes opening wide as he leaned over and stared into the darkness, and Annika shrugged off her heavy jacket and ran.

She threw herself down onto the track, slipping on the sleepers, running though her legs felt like lead, unable to hear amidst the panic.

A bullet flew past her left ear, then another, and then she was bathed in the full glare of the diesel locomotive’s headlight. The driver pulled the whistle but it was too late, she was already across. She collapsed on the other side and the train thundered past her with its endless cargo of ore-truck after ore-truck after ore-truck, forming a wall of iron one kilometre long between her and Hans Blomberg.

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.

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.