Red Wolf: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

after one job and cries, “Get me a picture byline, because tonight I’m immortal!”’
    Annika burst out laughing. She had actually seen someone do precisely that. She thought it might have been Carl Wennergren, one of the former newsroom morons.
    ‘Well then, young lady, what exactly are you looking for?’
    ‘Benny’s series about terrorism, especially the article on F21 that was published the other day.’
    The archivist looked up, his eyes twinkling. ‘Aha. So a nice young girl like you is interested in dangerous things?’
    ‘Dear Uncle Blomberg,’ Annika said, ‘I’m married and I’ve got two children.’
    ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Feminists . . . Printouts or cuttings?’
    ‘Copies, preferably, if it isn’t too much bother,’ Annika said.
    The man groaned and got up again.
    ‘This business with computers,’ he said, ‘everything was going to get so much easier, but it hasn’t. Twice the work, that’s what computers have meant.’
    He disappeared in amongst the cabinets, muttering ‘T . . . T . . . terrorism . . .’, opening drawers and huffing and puffing.
    ‘Here you are,’ he said a few moments later, triumphantly holding out a brown envelope. ‘Terrorism à la Ekland. You can sit over there. I’m here till six o’clock.’
    Annika took the envelope, opening it with sweaty fingers as she went over to the desk he had indicated. Cuttings were infinitely superior to computer printouts. On screen all the headings were the same size, all articles the same size, every picture just as small. On the page the articles could live and breathe beneath noisyor subtle headlines: the typeface alone could tell her a lot about what the editors were hoping to achieve, what signals they wanted to send. The number of pictures, their layout and technical quality told her even more: how important the item was deemed to be, but also how important this picture or article was in the general torrent of news that day. The skills of an entire profession of editors had been wiped out by the electronic archive.
    But she had serious stuff to study here.
    The clips were arranged in date order, oldest at the front. The first text had been published at the end of April and provided tasty details from the history of Swedish terrorism, including the story of the inventor, Dr Martin Ekenberg from Töreboda, who really only succeeded with one invention: the letter bomb. She paused when she recognized several phrases she herself had used in articles on the same subject published just weeks before. She concluded drily that Ekland had evidently allowed his colleagues to inspire him in a very direct way.
    She leafed through the pile of cuttings. A lot of it was old padding, but some of it was new to her. She read with growing interest about the fuss on the Norrbotten islands in the spring of 1987 when the military spent days searching for submarines and Spetsnaz brigades that had been landed on the skerries. A stubborn, fifteen-year-old rumour had it that a Russian frogman had been shot in the leg by a Swedish officer. The officer’s dog picked up a scent and started barking, and the officer dashed into some bushes, where bloody tracks were later found, leading to the water. Benny Ekland had been more interested in retelling the rumour as entertainingly as possible than in getting to the bottom of what had really happened. There was a brief quote from military command in Boden, to the effect that theatmosphere was completely different in the late eighties, that everyone misjudges things sometimes, even the Swedish military, and that it had never been ascertained that there had ever been any submarine encroachment in northern Swedish waters.
    At the bottom of the pile was the article she was interested in, and it contained information entirely new to her.
    Benny Ekland wrote that during the late sixties the old Lansen planes of the Norrbotten air defences were being switched for more modern Drakens, for search and reconnaissance