The Carrier

1.01

I had been so very close to the President. Never more than a few feet away during official duties, always with my briefcase prepared. Even when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. When he gave that damned speech about a world without nuclear weapons.

You must understand. But you won’t.

How we had been consumed, taken in, seduced yet again by the fire. Not so much through our guilt as our innocence. My own diabolical innocence.

We called it “The Nuclear Football”, as if it was some kind of game. And talked about “Pressing the Button”, but there was neither a button nor anyone who did any actual pressing. To me it was more like an occult ceremony, a magical-technological transformation trick. Carrying out a series of procedures in the correct sequence, with the help of the codes, to render insecure the one thing in our entire civilization that should be the most secure of all.

The contents of the briefcase had been so highly classified that few apart from us knew about them. From the start there were only four primitive objects there. The Black Book with every possible operational option for retaliation or attack; a folder listing the underground bases to which the President could be taken at times of maximum alert; a note summarizing the structure of our nuclear weapons system. And then the square plastic counter with the codes the President was to use when identifying himself to Centcom. We called it “the biscuit”.

During the Cold War, it was more or less understandable. As soon as the briefcase was opened a signal was transmitted to Centcom. After the President had used “the biscuit” to confirm his identity, he and the Carrier of the briefcase faced a number of choices according to the war plan then in place. The last step was for Centcom to follow the President’s order and carry out the launch itself.

But things had become complicated with the developing wizardry of digital technology, as well as our own much-altered war plan. We were assured that the guiding principle was still “Always-Never”. The nuclear weapons should always be ready for launch within half an hour, but never capable of being dispatched in error.

Yet over the last decade the boundaries had been extended with each new technological advance. Once both circuits and microprocessors had become small enough, it was possible to integrate parts of the detonation mechanism into the briefcase itself. Centcom now seemed more or less superfluous. Everything merged into a single whole. The difference between “always” and “never” began to dissolve. In the end it became impossible, even for me, to distinguish between safety measures and launch procedures.

That is when the thought of escape came to me.

1.02

Our gigantic sortie took off into a clear blue morning sky, like a lumbering bumblebee defying gravity. As usual, our first leg was to Andrews Air Force Base—and from there we went on over the Atlantic. We were more than seven hundred people, an entourage worthy of the Sun King himself three centuries ago. Air Force One, five other more or less identical Boeings, twenty-nine cargo planes, forty cars, 250 security staff, three hundred advisors and members of the White House press corps, two more Cadillacs.

And the Nurse was sitting so close. Monitoring my every movement.

I was saddled with her from the start of our journey, after I had collapsed in the culverts under the air base as our aircraft was being refueled. Which was the only way I could interpret the last message from Alpha: “CREATE MORE TIME. PLAY SICK!” It was naïve to imagine that my own little moment of weakness would have any effect whatsoever on our vast convoy. That it would be able to hold up the immense machinery involved in a state visit.

Yet in my overheated imagination, right there and then, I believed it. So I let myself fall headlong into the cement tunnel leading out to the helipad. Screwed my eyes shut, while some of the medical orderlies carried me into the examination room.

It is easy to believe that one is irreplaceable. If anyone, then me, the Carrier of the briefcase, the man with the world’s most critical assignment. Before my little collapse, I had no idea about our backup plan either. But as the doctor was talking to our logistics people, I found out that even I would be swapped for a substitute.

From the outside, nobody is meant to be able to tell whether the helicopter is, in fact, Marine One, with the President and myself on board, or just another of all our look-alike helicopters. If the airplane is Air Force One out of the many in our armada. From whichever airport we touch down at, we are always transported behind smoked glass in Cadillac One, also known as “The Beast”, with a five-inch-thick floor of reinforced armor. With another limousine, identical from the outside, traveling just in front or just behind.

But in these times of sweeping cosmetic change, of doubles and false identities, no-one is irreplaceable.

And because I suddenly became aware that somebody else in the Team would take my place, I had to blame it on a passing fever. When my preliminary readings turned out to be in perfect order, I was given clearance to travel with the Team. I had no earlier mark on my record, no contrary indication, not from all those years. But I was forced to accept the Nurse as a personal escort. For safety’s sake, as they put it.

As she sat down next to me in the helicopter, in the row behind the President and the First Lady, I could not help feeling that this was meant to be. That the Nurse, in one way or another, was part of the plan.

The state visit to Stockholm was mysterious, written into the President’s calendar at the last moment. In strict terms, it could only be referred to as an “official visit”, since there had been no invitation from Sweden’s head of state. The only plausible reason for traveling to this particular corner of the world was that our government wanted to make a diplomatic point to Russia, the country we were scheduled to visit. If Edward Snowden had not just been granted asylum there.

Our security people had not been happy about these late changes. Priority in Stockholm would be given to external security and would tick all the right boxes despite the short notice. The advance party had been sent out as soon as the date was fixed. But what was called “internal security” was an altogether more complex matter.

In the weeks before our departure, we were warned to increase our vigilance. There were rumors about moles within the organization. In the Team we kept a close eye on each other, watched every move. And on this occasion we were not given our final instructions until on board Air Force One—and only after we had taken off and could no longer communicate with anybody who did not have clearance.

Our team consisted of four special security agents, not counting Edelweiss. He was our operational boss and the one giving our daily briefings. He was the one the rest of us followed, admired, respected—but above all feared. His body was monumental. Like an entire foreign planet with folds and pockets, craters, deep secrets. He would stroke his chins as he pondered one of our questions. Then deliver the answer with his surprisingly soft, clear voice: often saying things that no-one else would even think of. Still less say out loud.

We were told that it was Edelweiss who had hand-picked each of us on the basis of our specialist skills, in the desperate days following 9/11, when all other available structures had failed.

We also gathered that he had been given a free hand. That often requires a filter, a layer which both empowers and conceals, relieves the decision-makers of responsibility for their decisions. Sometimes numerous, almost invisible sheets: like a vast millefeuille in which the bottom level always protects the upper one, complex sequences of knowledge and not knowing, none of which can do without the other.

In our own cases, camouflage was the beginning and the end. It was referred to as a “military approach to precautionary security measures”. After our training in the sealed wing at West Point—which continued in parallel with our university education, allowing us to practice our abilities to lead double lives and to deceive—we started putting our new-found skills to use. For the most part, I was sent out on short solo missions of increasing ardor. At first small, and then bigger sabotage operations, designed to ensure that our country should not be exposed to the same thing, resolving or setting off almost invisible conflicts in countries which many people had never heard of, unleashing domestic political turmoil elsewhere in the world.

In my other life, I completed my doctoral thesis in moral philosophy. Interminable sessions with my mesmerizing supervisor went on throughout the remainder of the 1980s and all through the 1990s, in parallel with my special duties in the security world. I took my doctorate in September 2001, five days before the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Some weeks after that, on November 4, we were brought together in a windowless lecture hall two stories below ground. Like silhouettes, shadows, ghosts from earlier times: some of us maybe even on the same special forces training course at West Point. But we had all been through cosmetic surgery at least once since then. I did not recognize anyone in this select group.

And not one of us understood the implications of our having been brought together. We had answered the encrypted summons, from which could be gleaned that the formation of the Team would be the beginning of our new life and the end of the old. An invitation which we had felt unable to resist.

There were more of us than I would have expected for what had to be a very special assignment. That meant that the core would be smaller—and everything around it much bigger. The Team itself might not consist of more than eight to ten people, and the rest would make up the support functions.

It became apparent that the Team—Edelweiss called us “NUCLEUS”, as in the center of a cell or atom—would consist of six chosen ones, including himself and someone unknown, who went by the name Alpha.

And after more than a day’s wait without food or drink, no doubt intended to make us more malleable from the start, Edelweiss appeared. That enigmatic figure with his enormous silhouette. Floating and formless, like an apparition in the ill-lit room. He who had been my main teacher at West Point, maybe for the others too, and who would be in charge of our lives.

Edelweiss began with the official version. The vague formulation that defined the Team’s place in our new war plan, transformed by the shock-waves from 9/11: “A small, mobile unit acting as a separate protection squad in times of peace, side by side with the President’s own command, and which in case of crisis and war can operate with full autonomy.”

Then the unofficial version. Edelweiss had been given a free hand to create something new. A phoenix from the ashes of the World Trade Center, from the ruins of our old security system, from what in every way was a “Ground Zero”. Now that all our existing structures—the security services, the surveillance system, our counter-terrorism efforts—had proved to be inadequate.

His idea was that our team should be the spider in the web. Or rather, both web and spider. An amorphous structure binding together all the existing functions: the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the N.S.A., the Secret Service… But which could also operate in the gaps between them.

Edelweiss told us that he had no idea who had given him the task. He only knew that someone using the pseudonym Alpha had written him credible e-mails, with sufficient encryption in place to have convinced him that the orders came from the very top. There was no doubt one more layer or filter between Alpha and the President, but perhaps no more than one. And that layer, in turn, must have been given a free hand by the President.

Our goal seemed simple. Edelweiss’ orders were expressed in broad terms, and the person who had given them did not want to know the details of their execution. Everything had one focus: stop something like this from happening again, anything like a hostile airplane flying into the World Trade Center in broad daylight. The idea was for us to take all necessary preventive measures outside the scope of conventional intelligence work. The end would justify the means.

What he described in the ensuing three or four hours—with Edelweiss, time in some way acquired another consistency—was at first sight a defensive assignment. Our team should stay close to the President and his own security detail during state visits and other official public duties. Should become a sort of floating security layer, flexible and adaptable, ready for any conceivable situation.

In short, it was meant to be what one now calls “hybrid warfare”. To combat hidden sabotage, digital attacks, advanced psychological warfare, political destabilization, ever more ingenious assaults on our infrastructure. And be able to strike back—using the same weapons.

In the case of serious crisis, the strategy was turned on its head. The Team could then be transformed into a raw strike force, focused on the enemy’s weakest points, with methods at least as unthinkable as their own. Its nature could be altered, as Edelweiss expressed it in one of his elaborate yet precise metaphors, in the same way that an amphibious vehicle operates both on land and water.

When the global security threat stood at its highest level—LILAC—reserved for the one thing that could destroy the world at a few minutes notice: a nuclear threat from another state or from terrorists—the President himself should be placed under protection. Until the threat was neutralized, the Team would take over covert command of the whole military apparatus. Including the nuclear weapons system.

“You have to be ready for every conceivable attack on the country’s security. And more than that—for every inconceivable one too,” Edelweiss said.

“First and foremost, this requires our imaginations to be greater than the enemy’s. Which is what we will have to work on, our creative ability, our impulsive intelligence. Each one of you is an exceptional agent already. But once we’ve been through this together, you should see yourselves more as artists.”

He ran his hand over his chins.

“But what distinguishes our assignment is that it’s to do with nuclear weapons. Things which you can’t compare with anything else throughout military or even human history, because by their nature they were so far outside our experience. The only meaningful difference between them and other fantasies, say the lightsabers in ‘Star Wars’ or Superman’s X-ray vision, is that nuclear weapons became reality.”

Another pause for effect, as Edelweiss peered around him in the half darkness.

“There has never yet been a full-scale war using battlefield nuclear weapons. Nobody knows how that might affect us, how we would all turn out in a situation like that. That’s also what we are going to explore together, my little lambs, under more or less controlled conditions.”

The extent of our authority under those conditions seemed astonishing, even to me. The briefcase would of course be the jewel in the piece. Our innermost and outermost secret, our last resort, the chained beast. First, the thing we were most of all tasked to protect, then our ultimate offensive weapon.

“The most important object in the world,” Edelweiss called it—before handing it to me at the end of that first meeting. With this small gesture turning me into both savior and destroyer. The center not just of the Team, his NUCLEUS, but of the universe.

From that point on he called me the Carrier. As if it were some sort of virus.

Around me were the few others: at a respectful yet inquisitive distance. Zafirah, who tried to persuade me of the blessings of ultra-violence. Her interest in everything that had sufficient striking power, as she put it, was pathological. According to her own account, it had started with heavyweight boxing, the never-ending shows night after night with her father in Bahrain, and had then just escalated. Martial arts, M.M.A., military close combat. She was the one whom Edelweiss always sent into the thick of things during training. Often alone and unarmed against a number of opponents.

To see her at a distance, that compact little woman with her shimmering headscarves, one could never guess what Zafirah was capable of. What she and I had done together to the Taliban in Afghanistan and Iraq, deep inside hostile territory. That is how it is with genuine specialist skills. There is no need to advertise them—until there is no alternative.

Apart from us two, the Team’s operational core consisted only of two identical security guards, whom we alternately called Kurt and John. They looked after everything to do with personal protection, both in theory and in practice, as well as most of our technical equipment. Always surrounding me, of course, bedding in the Carrier with their mighty bodies, exuding latent violence. Committed to laying down their lives for me at any moment. Or rather for the briefcase.

Behind the scenes, however, the apparatus was larger. All of those we never or seldom got to see: strategists, observers, technicians, psychologists, medical staff and other support functions. And in addition doubles, decoys and substitutes. These strange functionaries who together make up the security world’s extras.

We were not permitted to mix with any others in NUCLEUS outside work. We were instead encouraged to refine our civilian identities, to lead a full double life, the preference was for a family. Edelweiss spoke about having been inspired by none other than Kim Philby. He said we would increase our operative capability, keep on our toes, be ever ready, by forever manipulating our surroundings in that way. Besides, not being stationed together would reduce our exposure to elimination at a single stroke.

So after almost twelve years I still knew nothing about the others in their civilian lives: had no knowledge of their “real” or “alternate” existences, no idea who they were, these camouflaged people handpicked for our camouflaged assignments. Not Edelweiss, nor Zafirah, John or Kurt.

And least of all Alpha.

None of us knew who or what that was, even whether man or machine, some sort of digital function. Edelweiss himself after all these years claimed that he had no idea. That he got his orders from this mysterious signature in the form of double-encrypted messages on his screen: protection assignments, transfers, the scope for our next training scenario. Nothing had persuaded him that Alpha was a living individual. Many of our training maneuvers also seemed so haphazard, in terms of both objective and significance, that they might as well have been generated at random.

Yet it was the training which tested and hardened our team, fused us together like glass in the heat of the moment, transformed us into artists. Early on in our history we took part in two regular military invasions. Afghanistan was first—November 13, 2001, nine days after we had met in that windowless headquarters below ground—and then came Iraq, on March 20, 2003.

But it was in situations during training that we could be confronted with the most extreme challenges. The sorts of thing that we had been created for.

Not least a simulated full-scale nuclear attack based on our strategy document “Global Strike and Deterrence”. The gravest threat to the survival not only of the nation but of the whole world, the extinction of mankind, Ragnarök. The sort of moment in history which a paleontologist alone can grasp.

And so now we were sitting there at the walnut table in the conference room inside Air Force One, going through the routines for the official visit to Stockholm from September 4–5, 2013. After all our years in the Team, the challenges posed by our assignments were still a paradox. Building the same state of high alert, being prepared for anything to happen, at any time, required us to act with extreme precision, to follow our training without deviation. Every little routine had to stand out like some sort of prelude to Doomsday.

Edelweiss had his way of going about it, always getting us to pay full attention, to sit bolt upright in our chairs. Just his way of opening with “Good morning, my little lambs” chilled us to the core. After his first few lectures in West Point’s sealed wing, I had nightmares for weeks. So when he now opened his eyes and fixed his look at the projection screen in the conference room, we all did the same, as if spellbound.

The decisive difference between this official visit and earlier ones was that something would now be happening. An incident at least as grave as those we had faced during the most serious of our maneuvers—and this time, what is more, for real. The run-through carried much more significance than all of our earlier rehearsals.

And no-one other than me knew anything about it.

As usual, the three-dimensional animation began with our intended escape route in the most critical situation. Alert level LILAC, when the President was to be taken under protection and our team would assume command of the whole military apparatus. It showed POTUS and FLOTUS surrounded by our fast-paced escort, in which our Team had been mixed up with the President’s own handpicked security detail. With me never more than fifteen feet away from him, the briefcase in my grasp, ready to use.

Now I saw all the strictly classified information I had never been able to get at during my research: details of the path we were to follow. If the need arose, our escape route would run from our quarters at the Grand Hotel to the assembly point at the helipad in Stockholm’s Gamla Stan. The secret emergency exit on this occasion turned out to be a narrow little hatch to the left of the last set of stairs, down toward the goods entrance of the hotel on Stallgatan 4.

But from then on the escape route became less narrow, in the form of a gigantic tunnel system deep in the bed-rock, stretching under the whole of central Stockholm and its outer edges.

This system was unknown to the public, according to Edelweiss. I tried to find the best place to split off from the Team—but the number of possibilities seemed almost endless. On the sketches, the system looked like an enormous terra incognita, in which our escape route was marked in red and most of the rest was a morass of dotted lines and shaded areas: like a map of the world before it was known to be round. According to the observers in our advance party, we would also have to depend on headlamps down there, because none of the tunnels had light sources.

The escape route started off heading northward, through passages running under the Blasieholmen peninsula. Once we were level with the platforms of Kungsträdgården Tunnelbana station, we would turn sharp west and then immediately south, passing through underwater tunnels. Then we would continue further south, deep under the Parliament, the Royal Palace and the oldest parts of the city, rising to the surface again at the helipad at the edge of the water on Riddarfjärden. From there, the airborne forces would take over, leading POTUS and FLOTUS to safety escorted by an alternate non-NUCLEUS Carrier of the briefcase while the Team would muster for a counter-attack.

Edelweiss froze the animation at an immense verdigrised copper gate. It originated, he said, from the ruins of the seventeenth-century Makalös palace, according to him one of the most beautiful and talked-about buildings of the time, and had been installed in the walls of the underground system as a part of its artistic decoration. He made a point of saying that the gate had not been opened since it was put there in 1983, and that it could likely not be budged so much as a fraction of an inch without the greatest difficulty.

Yet the observers in our advance party had felt uncomfortable with even that minimal risk: of somebody making their way in from the passages of the blue Tunnelbana line directly beneath the President’s quarters. The whole Kungsträdgården station had therefore been sealed off in preparation for our visit.

Every time Edelweiss played the animation through again, so we could learn the escape route by heart, my first impression became clearer. Next to the copper gate you could see something set in the rock wall, more regular than the rough pattern of the stone: a paler, small square. The similarity to the control panel outside our own secure facilities—reminiscent of an ordinary, innocent electrical box—could not have been a coincidence.

So having no idea how I might be able to realize my crazy dream, I determined that the copper gate from the Makalös castle would be the invisible crack in the wall.

The starting point of my and Alpha’s impossible escape out of the Team. “We two against the world.”

1.03

A natural cloud can weigh five hundred tons. A mushroom cloud so much more.

Before I was given my assignment, I used to wonder how all that weight would affect a person. How it would feel to exercise control and power over the nuclear weapons system, to be the finger on the Doomsday button. The man with the briefcase. The Carrier.

When I came to the Team in November 2001, I had for some time harbored doubts. My doctoral thesis had in essence been one long questioning of the justification for nuclear weapons. I tested the limits, challenged, pushed and tugged at the issues. At first I had even thought of calling it “The Atom: A Moral Dilemma”, but I was persuaded by my supervisor to change the title to “Lise Meitner’s Secret”.

My home life revolved around a family who knew nothing about my other existence. I played the roles of researcher and family man—with a well-educated wife, two girls and a boy aged eleven, nine and seven, a house in the suburbs and drinks on a Friday with our middle-class neighbors—in the same faithful way as that of “The Man with the Briefcase”. Everything had been false and true in equal measure.

And there’s nothing to say that one’s feelings become weaker while leading a double life. Rather the opposite: this intense heat, the intricate interplay within a life which all the time had to be manipulated, just made everything more intense. Even though I was play-acting on all fronts, for many years I was able to be both passionate and professional across the board. Until the briefcase’s inherent weight, the absurd load of my assignment, began to be too much for me to handle.

But I still went along with it for a few years more, while doubt and hesitation grew. I was like a Hamlet within the nuclear weapons system. Then, out of the blue, I was contacted by Alpha. I came to realize that I had an unusual ally.

And the time had now come. Tense, I waited for the signal, even though I still had no idea what it might look like. Peered through the tinted windows as we sped through empty streets into Stockholm.

Over the years we had got used to never seeing city centers other than just like this. The same the world over, wherever we came. The most vibrant and sprawling cities, empty and sealed off, devoid of natural life. The buildings intact, the people gone. As in the aftermath of the big bang, the detonation of a “neutron bomb”.

The briefcase was on the floor between my legs, in accordance with the regulations which governed movement by transport, the security strap fastened over my left wrist. The President and the First Lady exchanged small talk on the rear seats of our car, speaking softly so that none of the rest of us could make out what they were saying.

I unclenched my right fist, squinted at the print-out and recited under my breath the allocated sleep times for myself. Zafirah 00.00—02.13, Edelweiss 02.13—04.55, Erasmus 04.55—06.00. Kurt and John never slept at night during our shorter state visits, but still seemed to get enough rest while we crossed the Atlantic, when they shared guard duty equally.

Yet again, Zafirah had drawn the winning lot. Edelweiss assured us that the sleep times were allocated at random—but once again I had ended up with the last and shortest slot. They must have had suspicions about me for such a long time.

Now my allocated sleep time would only let me have sixty-five minutes, with a marginally reduced level of internal surveillance, before Kurt or John came to wake me. And the Nurse would no doubt follow me all the way into the bedroom, ready to sound the alarm at the slightest unnatural movement, even though she did not figure anywhere on the roster.

She was slumbering beside me in the car, to all intents disengaged, even though we had almost reached the hotel. I ran my eyes over the Nurse’s face, her heavy make-up, the dyed-blond hair, the short, compact figure. Tried to get a feeling for who she was. To understand why just this person had been allowed to accompany me here, been given this assignment.

A dull day then passed, as if in slow motion. The spare itinerary showed the extent to which this official visit had been thrown together in haste. Our reception at the Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan was a disappointment. There was no sense of history at all, no experimental reactor R.1, no glimpse of the rooms in which Lise Meitner might have worked. Only the dull exhibition halls and a number of sterile display cases with a variety of “environmental innovations”.

The First Couple had played their roles, as usual, nodded and said this and that, asked all the right questions. They had even had a short time to rest before the dinner while we installed ourselves in the temporary surveillance center, a grandiose two-storey high corner room on the upper floors, with bracket lamps fixed to the walls and a thick blue carpet covered with small yellow crowns.

From this vantage point we could keep watch over all of the entrances to the hotel, as well as large parts of the surrounding terrain facing three points of the compass. On the other side of our wall, with connecting doors, was the Presidential couple’s lavish seven-room suite, laid out over four floors, including the luxurious little bedroom on the top level of a cupola which had been added to the building. But since the observers in our advance party had failed in their efforts to have the hotel install bullet-proof glass in the room’s panoramic windows, it could be used now only as a relaxation room for the bodyguards.

As usual it would not take me many seconds to reach the President’s side if the alarm was sounded. Or, in this case, leave his side.

The Winter Garden banqueting hall also lay but a few doors from our space. It was there that the dinner was going to be held, starting in about an hour and continuing until just before midnight, when official events always ended. Protocol dictated that the President’s own detail was in charge of physical personal security, but Kurt and John began to set up our own portable monitors along the longest wall of our corner room. In the meantime, I made myself comfortable in the heavy marble window frame, from where I had the best vantage point.

The view was like a fake. A piece of theatrical scenery, a picture postcard, as artlessly idyllic as the whole of this neutral little country. I stared out at the sun, the light, the sky, a whole illuminated world which I would soon have to leave. When Alpha gave the signal, it would at the same time be the starting gun for a new existence for us both. Forever on the run, like some quarry, prey, rats underground. Yet I had no idea what I was waiting for. What kind of sign.

I let my gaze sweep on, across the throng of people outside the hotel not just hoping for a glimpse of the President—they were after the scent of some accident, maybe even a terrorist attack: people, just like sharks, are attracted to blood. As the time passed, the light from the setting sun started to filter through the houses along Skeppsbron, on the opposite side of the water. The scene darkened with the light, the baroque facades lost their earthen colors, ocher and umber, and the sun sailed behind the stately but lifeless buildings like an enormous red balloon.

My watch showed 19.31. Ten minutes till sundown. So often it had been the secret signal to launch an attack, with our superior night-combat technology. Operation Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom, or full-scale nuclear weapons training. The aim was often to start at the very moment when the sun dropped like a mysterious piece of space rock straight down into the sand and the desert night fell in an instant.

During the last minute of daylight I stared as much at my watch as at the view outside the window, counting down to myself. At 19.41, exactly on time according to the calendar, the fiery globe’s last contour dipped below the horizon: as if swallowed up by the enormous tunnel system under the platforms of Kungsträdgården station.

But still no sign of Alpha. No signal from the one person who could help me.

Time passed. Just before midnight, Zafirah also disappeared, the first one on our roster heading up the stairs to the bedroom floor. Every half hour throughout the night the Nurse laid two warm—almost sweaty—fingers against my wrist, checking my pulse. She had taken up position next to me in the window frame. Stroked my forehead, making sure that my body temperature had not started to race away again.

I myself peered ever more often at my watch, soon at intervals of only a few minutes. The briefcase seemed to burn at my feet.

At 04.50, a few minutes before it was my turn to sleep, Zafirah pushed herself between me and the Nurse. With a serious look she told us that she had received new orders, now that the results of my medical tests taken just before departure were available. That she should also take her rest with me and the Nurse, for safety’s sake.

So when Edelweiss came down from the bedroom level, still drowsy and with the many folds in his face creased from sleep, Zafirah got to her feet and led me up the stairs while the Nurse fell in at the rear of our little column.

I was allowed first into the bathroom. Through the walls I could hear Zafirah moving her sofa-bed until it blocked the bedroom door from the inside. With her almost inhuman ability to master her small, muscular form, to focus her whole force onto one tiny point.

For the benefit of the Nurse, Zafirah said that she very much wanted to be able to look out through the window on the opposite side of the room, “to lose myself in the pale northern darkness”. I never heard any answer. Maybe the Nurse had fallen asleep.

I put the briefcase—never once out of reach—down next to the toilet and relieved myself while standing up, with the black security strap still around my left wrist. I splashed outside the bowl as much as I could, marking the gold mosaic which must have cost hundreds of dollars per square foot. When I emerged, the Nurse was lying snoring on the outer side of our double bed, a dark sound with some lighter overtones. I eased myself over her and pressed myself hard against the wall.

The trick of course is never to let yourself sink below the surface, either mentally or physically. Beneath me, the sheet creased, like wrinkles blown by the wind on the ocean surface or the desert sand. But time raced on, as it does when it is running out. First 5.11 a.m., then 5.23 a.m., barely before I had time to blink. Light started to leak up over the facades of the city, from below the horizon, ocher and umber returning from the earth’s core. The screeching of gulls sounded like vultures through the triple-glazed windows.

And then there was no more than half an hour left for me to get some sort of indication of how I was going to get myself out, to solve the classic riddle of the locked room, find the invisible crack in the wall.

I slid myself backward in the bed, tried to find a position from which I could observe as much as possible, both inside and outside the bedroom, find a lead. My wrist-watch showed 05.57. Three minutes left until Kurt or John would come to wake us up.

At that moment, the alarm went off. The howling sirens drowned out the cries of the seagulls, cut right into my brain.

At last: the signal from Alpha.

1.04

The field cell phone showed the highest possible alert level, LILAC. Large-scale nuclear attack with critical consequences for global security.

Without thinking, I tried to turn on the bedside light, but nothing happened: the power must have been cut. Yet the light of dawn shining through the windows was strong enough—it hardly made any difference when we turned on our headlamps, leaving our hands free. Our movements were lightning quick and yet dreamlike, despite the deafening shrieks of the alarm, making it impossible for me to communicate with either Zafirah or the Nurse.

We went at top speed down the stairs from the bedroom level to join the rest of the Team. Touching base with the President’s own security detail, checking our combat packs and the briefcase, taking up our positions, out through the doors of the surveillance suite. In my case, at most five feet from the President. Apart from the alarm, everything was calmer than usual. Quietly counting our steps, as if choreographed, while we made our way toward the emergency stairs at the far end of the corridor.

I kept a firm grip on the briefcase in my left hand. With the alert level at RED or above, the security strap could no longer be attached to my wrist, so as not to delay any possible use of the Doomsday weapon. We could hear the chaos of the mêlée of people behind the safety doors in the stairwell, the panic of the hotel guests, desperate cries, a baby’s piercing yells. Fear ran like a bass tone underpinning the alarm.

Some of the President’s own security detail were in the lead, just as in the animations, with the First Couple immediately behind. I fell in between them on the way down the stairs. Zafirah pushed her way in just ahead of me, with Kurt or John behind. The Nurse was right beside me and all of a sudden stuck her small but surprisingly strong left hand in my right one. So I would have to shake it off to be able to draw my weapon.

Once I had squeezed through the little hatch in the wall by the last set of stairs and was standing close to the hotel goods entrance on Stallgatan 4, one foot on the first step of a long and rusty spiral staircase, I glanced back at the Nurse. Even with her bulky medical backpack she followed me nimbly through the small opening. She too must have been hand-picked and specially trained.

After forty-three rotations in the narrow spiral stairway—never losing control, always keeping a close eye on the situation, the First Couple and our lines of retreat—we reached ground, as in the animations, the even floor of the mystifying tunnel system.

But not one lamp could be seen along the rough rock walls, no cabling, not a trace of anything which would make it easier for those needing to move around inside the immense tunnel system at normal times. For those who had built it. For whatever reason anyone might even have thought of devoting so much effort to something like this, here—in this neutral country, at peace for more than two hundred years.

The Nurse squeezed my hand so tightly that it was impossible to tell if she was wanting to protect me or to be protected. In fact I had not much more information than she did. From level RED and up, all technical details were classified at least one layer above me. All I knew was that I, or rather the briefcase, was regarded even in those situations as both the ultimate counter-strike weapon and the most important thing to be protected—after the President.

And that Alpha had to be somewhere in the vicinity. Had to be the one pulling the strings, letting the whole plan unfold, step by step. Our escape together from the Team.

In contrast to the appalling din up in the hotel—the alarm, the rippling panic of the guests—the sudden silence here within the bed-rock was unreal. We were breathing in short bursts through our noses, to reduce the noise coming from the group. Although our speed was equivalent to high-intensity short interval training, I had a dream-like feeling that we were standing still while the enormous tunnel system was rushing back past us, like a tsunami of stone. It seemed as if there were constant new passages on either side of our path, appearing in the circular gleam cast by our headlamps: a myriad of alternate tracks leading out into the darkness.

The President now passed me to the left to be next to the First Lady, so that only Zafirah was between the First Couple and me. The President had never devoted much attention to any of us in the Team. To the country’s Commander-in-chief, we were for the most part faceless figures, functions rather than human beings, pretty much seamlessly mixed up with his own security people. Even I was probably no more than “The Man with the Briefcase”. The unknown person who would always be close.

Our formation hurried forward. The Nurse was right behind me, holding my hand in a grip which tightened for every turn in the labyrinth, with an astonishing strength for somebody so small. My pulse increased, I could now feel it clearly in my chest, not because of the exertion—I had never been fitter—but with the insight that I would have to take the next step all on my own. Alpha had given the signal, fired the starting pistol. The rest was up to me.

Yet I had no idea how it was going to happen. I knew nothing beyond the short encrypted messages sent to the cell phone at the playground, and beyond the fact that I would only have a few seconds to act. Not enough for me both to get out of the Nurse’s grip and to draw my weapon, however fast I did it.

I saw Edelweiss’s animations before me. The verdigrised copper gate would soon come into view on our right-hand side. I heard something beating. There was an intensive ticking, like a timepiece, a clock-work mechanism. My eyes passed over the rock walls, looking for some form of detonation device—before I realized that it was my own racing pulse.

So I improvised.

Just before the last bend I gripped the Nurse’s left hand even harder. I could have bent it right back and broken it, snapped her wrist like a biscuit. She cannot have weighed more than 110 pounds, but that ought to be enough.

When I caught sight of the small symmetrical installation in the rock wall—it was a control box, no question about it—the Nurse suddenly gave my hand a squeeze back. It must have been a signal. But I still followed my instincts and improvised: I braced myself against my left leg and swung her around my left shoulder with my right hand.

Kurt-or-John fell headlong, not only because of the force behind the human sledgehammer but also from sheer surprise. Blood and glass splinters from the headlamp spattered across the rock.

The Nurse let out a shrill sound as I swung her around again—this time aiming in front of me. Zafirah hardly had a second in which to turn before the Nurse’s head, sticky with blood and covered in razor-sharp shards, hit her straight in the face.

Still there was an unreal silence, as if everything was muffled. Only a weak whimpering from the Nurse, not a sound from Zafirah or Kurt-or-John. With blood running over their faces, they were all fumbling for their weapons, which the impact of the Nurse had knocked away from them, trying hard to understand what had happened. What had got into me. The First Couple had already been bundled away among their own security detail and continued at full speed, while a few others separated themselves from them.

That was how they were going to try to solve the impossible puzzle: to be able to protect the President and at the same time neutralize the Mole. And also take care of my briefcase.

But my thoughts were already several steps ahead. Before any of the President’s men had got back to Kurt-or-John, still less passed by his enormous figure blocking the narrow tunnel, I had flipped open the lid to the control box and uncovered the buttons on the panel under it.

I did not need to think, my fingers moved automatically as I keyed in the only thinkable code. The first message which Alpha had sent to me, artfully encrypted, the start of our whole elaborate communication over the course of twelve long years. The long sequence was 102 115 101 922 G52 0N6 161 512 211 019 R2D. It became, once deciphered: WE TWO AGAINST THE WORLD.

There was an audible click from the lock. The mighty copper gate swung open with a piercing screech.

I tightened my grip on the Nurse’s wrist—she was now almost unconscious—and stepped through, dragging her in just before the gate closed again. The salvo of gunshots from the Team and the President’s men smattered like muffled keystrokes on a computer console as they hit the surface of the thick metal. We were alone, in the sealed-off underground station.

I wish I could say this was a sign that I was still capable of empathy. To show how it had survived all these years, my entire transformation; that something of the real me remained deep inside. But even the decision to take the Nurse with me was purely a tactical one.

I would be forced to go significantly more slowly, since I would be carrying a full combat pack and also the Nurse like a broken doll by one hand, the briefcase by the other. Besides which she would leave a trail of blood along the floor, which our pursuers could not possibly miss. Before I tested the elevator which led down to the platforms I therefore considered leaving the Nurse there. Like wounded prey, for the others to pick up or not, perhaps delaying them for critical moments.

But I did not do it. The Nurse’s hand had given a squeeze in the tunnel just before we reached the control box, clearly some sort of signal. And since I still knew nothing at all about Alpha’s wider plans, I did not dare to rule out the possibilities: that maybe the Nurse would turn out to be useful. Or the Nurse might even be Alpha. So I laid her across my shoulder and started to run down the first escalator.

The elevators from the station’s next level had been shut down. There were also man-high barriers at the ticket gates, like a wall of toughened glass, but I managed to get over them with all of my load by shifting the briefcase, the Nurse, my combat pack and myself one at a time. Then I ran on as fast as the weight would allow, down the dizzyingly steep second escalator leading to the platforms. It was heavy, but no worse than on one of our desert training maneuvers with two simulated wounded men to carry in at least forty degrees of heat.

In my intense research before our departure—when I still had no idea what use this was all going to be, if any—I had read that the escalator was one of the longest in all of Stockholm. The sound of rubber soles against metal, my rhythmic and controlled breathing even at top speed, were the only sounds penetrating the silence of the bed-rock. I counted my footsteps… 148, 149, 150, 151.

Then I was down there: in the cabinet of horrors on the way to the platforms, the artistic and historical installation in the station which I had studied during my days and nights of research. But I was still not prepared for it. The lighting was spare and theatrical, as in a museum, the emergency illumination seemed not to be working all the way down here. The sealed-off station was only lit up in places by the old-fashioned street lamps, with their flickering ice-blue neon spirals and the weak sheen from the gargoyles built into the rock walls. With the help of my headlamp I was still able to hurry on through this weird underworld. It seemed to me as if I were already dead.

I also saw that there were black and white radiation symbols in the naïve paintings on the ceiling. I had not noticed them during my research, maybe none of the photographs had been taken at the right angle. For a moment I felt myself sway. The briefcase seemed to be sending out its spell, but I kept going, crossing the checkered floor in hard, short bursts on my way to the platforms.

I looked at my watch. Almost five minutes since we passed through the copper gate, and no sound of our pursuers.

The load over my left shoulder must have weighed at least 165 pounds, including the Nurse’s bulky medical backpack. With my own combat pack, the total must have come to more than two hundred pounds. Sweat ran from every pore, mixing with the Nurse’s blood to form sticky trickles down my back. Just as I was making my way to the platforms, I was at last forced to stand and catch my breath, gasp for oxygen. My mind needed it, as much as anything. And I had an idea, a hypothesis. Not much more.

The gold-colored cross on the rock wall looked exactly as it had in the photographs. To the left of it stood the God of War with the dead wolf over his arm, everything was as it should be. As I put down the briefcase and carefully laid the Nurse next to it on the checkered terrazzo floor, I could clearly hear the dull thump all the way down here. Our pursuers—parts of the Team, maybe some of the President’s own men, those who were not needed to lead the First Couple through the tunnel system away to the helipad—must have forced the copper gate with a powerful and probably excessive explosive charge. They would not have had time to make an exact calculation.

The alarm immediately went off. The underground platform was bathed in a yellow, rhythmically flashing light. My pulse fell rather than increased. What had felt impossible during the early part of my training, to achieve anything at all with such a powerful adrenaline rush, quickly became addictive.

My watch showed 06.03. Eight minutes since the alarm sounded at the hotel, my escape seeming both lightning quick and endlessly drawn out. It should take at least two minutes before they managed to make their way through the remains of the gate, which would probably be obstructed by rockfall from the explosion, and to get down the two escalators. Then it would be about fifteen seconds before they had us within range of their guns—and a few moments more for them to assess the situation. To weigh the alternatives.

I began to run my fingers around the base of the statue of the God of War, methodically searching. The decrypted message to the cell phone at the playground had read “around mars”. At first it had meant nothing to me—until I studied the photographs from the underground platforms. Then my eye lit upon the statue. The God of War, Mars.

Liquid was slowly seeping out along a vaulted niche behind the statue, like a tiny artificial waterfall. Close up like this, one could even see the thin yellow runnels in a narrow gap between the rock wall and the floor. Maybe it was part of the statue’s design, maybe not. Just to the left of the statue there was something on the ground that could have been taken for the cover of a well, about three feet in diameter, and it too went in under the base of the statue. So there must be something under it.

Only when I could feel the small control box on the back of the God of War, did I glance at the watch: already 06.05. The pursuers must now be on the lower of the escalators, on the way down to the cabinet of horrors.

It was not easy to key in the twenty-nine numbers and four letters from that position, lying half-curled around the statue. Even to be able to fit one’s arm between its base and the uneven rock wall by the platform was hard, not least to move one’s fingers nimbly enough to press the correct buttons in the right order. But on the other hand: it was not meant to be easy.

When I had managed to register the same sequence as at the copper gate, the cover of the well shifted reluctantly. It was weightier than I had thought, reinforced with lead or steel. The mechanism juddered and rattled. Soon a small staircase could be seen, swinging down to the right, in under the statue itself, into the darkness.

I drew the Nurse close to me and thought that I could see her mouth move a little through the grimace on her face, but I could not hear anything against the piercing noise of the alarm. I lifted off my combat pack and took out the rescue harness—and after wrestling for a few seconds with the semi-lifeless form, I managed to secure the Nurse to me with her face buried in my chest. During the struggle she seemed to come to life a little and began to wave her arms weakly. When she realized that I was going to carry her off, maybe even deeper underground, her helpless flailing increased.

Out of the corner of my eyes I thought I could see our pursuers some tens of feet away, one or more of them with drawn weapons. But it could just as well have been the magnified silhouettes of my own movements in the light of my lamp: an illusion playing against the rock wall.

The cover of the well started to close. Time seemed to be up. I put my foot in the gap and hoped for the best—and after an eternity the cover did after all stop, half-shut. Despite the Nurse being harnessed to me, the briefcase and my full combat pack, I was able to push my way through the opening and start down the spiral staircase, with the cover of the well closing above us.

Then we plunged headlong. Deep down into the bed-rock.

1.05

We managed a more or less controlled landing. I landed first on my back, then the Nurse, harnessed to me, her face on my chest. We had trained jumps and landings so many times, for so many years, with every sort of complication, finally from considerable heights both with and without parachute. Learned to roll on pretty much every kind of material. The ground down here felt as even as in the tunnel system we had fled through, maybe here too it had been covered with spray cement. If we had fallen on untreated, sharp points of the bed-rock instead, we would have been much worse off.

Everywhere was pitch-dark with an ominous quiet. I checked my watch: 08.11, still September 5, 2013. The impact must have knocked me unconscious for a time. Then I switched the watch into altimeter mode. Negative 252 feet, almost to the measure that Alpha’s encrypted messages had indicated.

I tossed my beret out into the darkness and carefully drew my hand over my shaved head. I expected blood and splinters, maybe even brain tissue—but it stayed dry. I felt raw and bruised, but not cut. My left hand locked onto the briefcase. I traced the lamp with the fingers of my free hand. The glass was intact, despite everything. I tried pressing the on/off button—and my immediate surroundings were bathed in light again. The impact of the fall had switched it off.

I let the beam illuminate first the briefcase, which remained intact, undamaged, then the Nurse, and I examined her head to toe as I had been trained. No external signs of damage, apart from the bloody mess on her head. Her pulse was low but stable. As I leaned over, I could feel a weak, warm flow of air coming from her mouth and nose.

Then I looked up and let the glow from the lamp play over the area around me, trying to orientate myself, understand what had happened. We were in the middle of an enormous chamber detonated out of the bed-rock, perhaps some sort of rest area for the users of the tunnel system. The rough ceiling must have been at least sixty-five feet above me, and the metal spiral staircase stopped about fifteen feet up. In the light of my lamp I could now see the rusty ladder we should have taken to lower ourselves the rest of the way—if I had not assumed that the staircase continued all the way down.

My whole body gave a sudden shudder. During my research I had read that the tunnels at Kungsträdgården Tunnelbana station were home to the dwarf spider, Lessertia dentichelis, whose habitat was otherwise in mines and deep caves. It had appeared as an uninvited guest at the inauguration of the northern entrance of the station in the late ’70s. Now one of its kind was crawling over my left hand, over the security strap of the briefcase. I closed my eyes. Looked away. Breathed deeply. Although I had a horror of spiders, this one was tiny, not much larger than a tick.

I shook myself until I could no longer feel it and resumed my search along the walls. Somewhere there had to be a concealed lighting system, something that would also give me an idea of what awaited us further inside. I could not believe that a tunnel network as advanced as this would have been built without one.

As if working inside a diver’s bell, I moved my head to examine section after section of wall, without seeing any sign of wiring or lamps. Not even when I got to my feet—my battered body swaying, my black, tactical combat uniform ripped—for a closer study of the rock walls, could I see anything which stood out from their natural contours.

In each of the lower corners of the vast rock chamber there were cavities, small caves which were even darker. I shone my lamp into them, one after the other. But the light reached only a few short feet before the darkness took over.

So, for the moment I left the unconscious Nurse and the two packs behind, to make a closer inspection of the tunnels and try to gain some sense of where they might lead. The first one was so narrow that right from the opening I had to crawl. And then it just got narrower. Everything vanished into darkness behind me, since my body soon blocked the beam from my forehead lamp. The briefcase remained in my left hand, my drawn weapon in my right hand, while I wriggled forward on my elbows.

Soon both of my shoulders scraped against the tunnel walls, even though I was moving pretty much in a straight line. Just a few feet into the tunnel I could no longer turn around—the only way to get out would be to crawl backward, scrabbling like some sort of crustacean. Without warning my left elbow hung free and I lost my grip on the briefcase as it fell. The security strap alone stopped it from plummeting into the void. When I looked down to shine the light into the darkness, I could see no bottom.

Reversing out took more than twice as long as it had done to crawl in. The next tunnel too, working clockwise around the chamber, turned out to be the same sort of dead end. After perhaps sixty feet into an increasingly narrow passage, my lamp revealed an even darker oblivion. A different sort of structure than the level spray cement on the floor of the tunnel system suggested that this too would drop down into the underworld. With effort, I once again backed out. The palms of my hands became boiling hot in the attempt and blood appeared in the cracks of my knuckles. I was drenched in sweat, even though my watch showed that the temperature down here was only a few degrees above freezing.

The whole tunnel system seemed like a labyrinth of dead ends and hidden chutes. These were not natural geological hollows: the same people who had constructed the passages had also built in an intricate web to block anyone who did not know the correct route through them.

But two openings remained. Just as I had lain on my belly, my legs stretched behind me to start making my way in again, this time into the third tunnel, I felt something cold and smooth against the front of my right thigh. I crawled back out with caution and angled my light down.

At first I saw nothing—except that it was not blood, as I had at first thought and feared. Then I spotted the line, flush with the surface of the spray cement. A straight line of extinguished light diodes ran along the floor and disappeared into the tunnel. I ran my fingers over the glass I had felt through a tear in my combat pants.

Once again I lay prone and followed the line with my fingers. After just a few feet the diodes swung off in a semi-circle, around yet another abyss, before the tunnel continued on. I could not help nodding to myself in satisfaction. I had never before seen the problem of underground lighting solved in this way, high-tech and yet so old-fashioned at the same time.

I’d had no idea who or what I would find inside the tunnel, but certainly not this.

When I had wormed my way some hundred feet into the cavity, and carefully made my way around the abyss, the first bright red door appeared like a mirage in the gleam from my headlamp. Unlike the other cavities, this one gradually broadened out until I could stand up by the time I reached the control box, perfectly concealed inside one of the folds of the rock wall.

I opened the lid of the box—another replica of those outside our own underground facilities—and punched in the same code as before: twenty-nine numbers and four letters. One by one, the massive protective doors opened.

I made a quick tactical calculation. Tried to evaluate alternatives in a situation where most of the variables could not be quantified. I had to work with “the unknown”, as Edelweiss had taught us.

A tunnel remained to be explored, one which could lead us further. But for now the code had worked. Had let me into the fallout shelter: as good a signal as any. On the other hand, the idea of shutting myself up in here, inside a minuscule dug-out deep down inside the bed-rock, was not easy to accept.

In the end, the thought of threats from outside—from the rest of the Team, from the President’s own men, or even from the people who had once built this enormous system—decided things for me. With difficulty I first dragged the Nurse and then the packs in through the tunnel. When I had pulled shut the last of the security doors, a normal gas-lock door with a pressure seal, I tried again to enter the code on the control panel just to the right, inside the entrance. The five diodes spun around for an eternity before stopping on “ERROR”. However much I tried pressing the buttons, tearing at the handle of the security door, heaving and yelling.

That was when, for the first time, I vomited, into a drain on the floor. In part because of the extreme violence, using the Nurse as weapon; after all my years of service, nausea often washed over me at times like these. In part from physical exhaustion, from the exertion of fleeing with such a heavy load for such a long time. But also because of the predicament I found myself in: locked behind monstrously thick doors in this tiny fallout shelter.

I had been all alone above ground. Now I found myself alone again, except for the unconscious Nurse—but this time precisely 253.3 feet down in the bed-rock.

1.06

So I just sat there and waited for Alpha, hoping against hope that this place was where we were to meet, at the exact depth given in the encrypted message. I had no choice but to believe.

After a while I took a notebook from my pack and started to scribble, to sketch out my story for you to read in posterity, the chronicle which you now have in your hands, which you must have stumbled on or managed to track down. My account of how it started, and perhaps how it ended.

When it was past 18.00, and I had managed to get some way into my record, the Nurse was still lying there, more or less unconscious. I tried to coax some water into her—at the same time I myself drank as much as I dared, without having the slightest idea how long we would be stuck down here, and ate the first of the crunch crackers from my pack. Most of the water I tried to feed the Nurse ran off her closed lips. When I tried with care to prize open her mouth, to get at least something down her throat, she had a violent coughing fit, although she remained unconscious. Maybe I would have to open the Nurse’s own medical pack and put a drip in her, although I was not sure it was worth the trouble.

Everything felt shut off, as if already part of history. The briefcase stood next to me, never more than two feet away, but now seemed more than anything like a dead weight. All this advanced technology had lost its meaning in this long-abandoned shelter, where it would be impossible to have it connect.

Nevertheless I decided to give it a try. Seen from the outside, the briefcase was not much to look at. The shell was made from tough aluminum encased in black leather and its spacious interior was surprising. But it was human nature to draw comparisons between things, to use metaphors whenever possible. So the briefcase was to this day still known as the nuclear football, even though the war plan codenamed “Dropkick”, from which the nickname came, had been scrapped decades earlier.

The first step, just to be able to open the briefcase, had its own ritual. Not only the correct biometric information, but the correct way of handling the thing. You were supposed to apply simultaneous pressure, firm but light, with eight fingers plus a thumb to the invisible points on the front of the briefcase, splay your hands as unnaturally as a concert pianist. The classic combination lock was a dummy. Designed to tempt unauthorized persons to put their fingers in the wrong place, which would send the briefcase into lockdown mode at once. In other words: impossible to open even for me. After each time we practiced dealing with enemy attempts to take the briefcase, it always reset itself with different codes and pressure points.

There must after all have been some sort of network in the fallout shelter, something which allowed the briefcase to connect with the database—because the briefcase now opened with its usual soft whining sound.

With reverence I stared into the briefcase, for the first time since my escape from the Team. The world’s most important object: torn from its habitual surroundings.

Everything was in its place despite my heavy fall down into the chamber. The four analog documents in their cut-to-measure foam-rubber compartments. Sacred, surrounded by myth, but hopelessly dated even decades ago. The book with the wax-cloth cover containing the out-of-date operational options for use in case of extreme crisis, thumbed by ten Presidents before the current one. The plastic-covered folder with the typewritten list of underground bases to which our Commander-in-chief could be taken when the alert level was at RED or LILAC. The faded note of information from 1965 describing the structure of the nuclear weapons system. The plastic counter with the secret codes the President was to use when he identified himself to Centcom—“the biscuit”.

The thinking was that they would only be used if he lost the chip with the codes which he was meant to always carry on his person. But since every one of our heads of state had managed to mislay that object on some occasion, even as one sock always vanishes in the washing machine, we had had to keep “the biscuit” until the present day.

According to our current war plan, this digital technology side-by-side with fading paper and a plastic counter would make the briefcase even harder for an enemy to understand, if seized.

Much of the hidden lower level of the briefcase consisted of the matte-black metal keyboard. Not even that was particularly noteworthy: a classic standard model conforming to M.I.L-S.T.D.-810 G tests including Explosive Atmosphere, Pyroshock and Freezing Rain.

What distinguished the keyboard was its inside, its functionality and capacity. Everything it was able to control.

To get at the keyboard, I folded up the hooks in each of the four corners of the foam-rubber layer and with care lifted it and our analog information out. You could not see anything underneath, just a leather covering, as if the briefcase ended there.

And few parts of our body are as hard for us to control as our little fingers—which was why it was only thanks to them that I managed the next step. It had taken years to control them in the same way as index fingers, to make that evolutionary leap. It needed months of effort to work up my strength there, in an exercise as demeaning as it was refined; Edelweiss called it “The Waltz of the Little Fingers”.

So I now pressed eleven three-digit sequences, using both little fingers at the same time with measured movements on the nodes on what appeared to be the bottom of the briefcase. The protective panel slid to the sides and revealed the keyboard. Once I had keyed in the rest of the initial codes, the metal screen on the inside of the lid also slid to the right, with a vivid red circle appearing on the screen. I looked straight into it. The iris recognition system was the last step in the security procedures: they had become more elaborate with time, as the briefcase became a kind of autonomous command module.

When the text “READY FOR COMMAND” appeared on the screen, I went no further with the ritual. Instead, I began closing the briefcase down again, each step in reverse, so that it would not go into lockdown.

All the functions were in order, it seemed. But without Alpha, whoever or whatever it was that controlled the whole chain, I would not be able to get further. So I stayed there and waited, in what was both shelter and prison, locked in behind ten-inch-thick ramparts of welded sheet metal.

I let my eyes scan around me. Everything in here followed the regulations to the letter. The floor, the walls and the ceiling were covered with the same metal. The edges of the outer doors sealed with copper plate, so as to minimize the electro-magnetic pulses. The whole room was also mounted on springs, so that it would sway rather than be crushed when the big bang came.

It looked just like any one of our top secret shelters under the bases in the endless plains of the Mid West. Yet I had never seen anything like it. Here, of all places: a doll’s house-like hideaway built to withstand a direct hit of the strength of the Hiroshima bomb. In this insignificant country, midway between Moscow and Brussels.

Even the color-coding of the different small sections followed the international standard. The section of the wall behind the control panel with the light-emitting diodes had been painted purple for “Command/communication”. The border of the wall around the inset cupboard was pale yellow, indicating “Stores”. Continuing clockwise, facing the doors, the wall was first orange for “Passageway” and then blue for “Restroom/hygiene”.

This last consisted of two parts. First there was the decontamination area, not much bigger than ten square feet: you were meant to screen yourself off with a lead-lined plastic curtain and rinse away what you could of the radioactive fallout using a hand-held shower. Behind the same curtain there was also a sort of electric waste grinder sunk into the floor, surrounded by the same welded steel plate and copper plate. But this state-of-the-art toilet seemed to have stopped working.

The fallout shelter had already become an unbearable place. The drain in the floor near the hand-held shower was blocked by the last of the vomit which I had spewed out after the extreme violence of our escape. There were more bodily fluids some hours later. The usual reaction to an extreme adrenaline rush, however much you train, try to prepare. The stench made me catch my breath, inhale as little as possible through my nose, inside this strange little space.

The rest of the shelter was brilliant red, the color for “Emergency Exit”, which was ironic given that I was locked in with little chance of escape. Only the lower part of the wall, directly opposite the entrance, had been painted green for “Sleeping Quarters”.

On the floor the Nurse drew my attention again, the sound of her occasional whimpers. She must have been one of the “support functions” behind the scenes. I had seen her for the first time only a few days ago, I could not recall having so much as heard her voice. Yet I had inflicted severe injuries on her. The scent of her perfume—cloying, penetrating—was overwhelmed by the stench of blood and urine. Her uniform was also now more red than green, her garish, dyed-blond hair a mess of blood and dirt and glass splinters from the headlamps, the shards looking like a crown of thorns. Her whimpering grew a little louder, she almost seemed to be coming to, before falling back into her darkness. Once I had my own strength back, I would be her nurse, carrying out the emergency surgery which we had been taught in the sealed wing at West Point.

For now, exhaustion began to wash over me. It was two days since I had had even a brief sleep, in addition to lying mostly awake during the period just before our departure. Another dwarf spider came creeping along my left arm, in the direction of my wrist, climbing over the security strap of the briefcase. It moved with science-fiction-like speed given how small it was. As it reached the skin over my artery, I killed it with my pencil. Felt my skin freeze, shivered, as if I had a fever.

But I had to get a grip on myself, not let panic carry me away. The complete lack of activity in here became harder to bear with each passing hour. I had no information. I checked the depth meter on my service watch once more: it was a normal altimeter, but our technicians had adapted it to provide underground readings. And it did say 253.3 feet, just as in the encrypted message Alpha had sent to the cell phone at the playground. Twelve hours had now passed since I broke away from the Team and took the Nurse with me—and I still had no idea where everyone else was. All of our pursuers. Or rather: the chosen few.

According to instructions, no search bulletin would have been sent out, no digital message about my escape, not even in the most encrypted form. A very small circle would have been kept informed, and that would be it. Apart from the Team, I guessed only the President himself—unless Edelweiss had decided just to inform him that the alarm had turned out to be false, a minor technical hitch, as with so many other supposed nuclear weapons attacks in the course of the decades, and that the situation was now back to normal. Plus, a couple of our most senior military commanders. Probably not even the First Lady—and certainly not my own family.

So if Alpha did not come for me, fetch me from this escape-proof underground prison, nobody would ever know what had happened.

Tiredness continued to creep through me, like a drug. I shook my head and stood up to take a look at the Nurse. She felt chill, as if already dead, even though her pulse was ticking weakly in her wrist. I huddled up close to her, my pistol in my right hand and the briefcase in my left, the security strap on my wrist. I had to get a few minutes of rest.

Over the years, it had become increasingly difficult to distinguish dream from reality, step by step they had slid into and out of each other. So I did not really know if I slept at all, or if I was still doing so when the diodes in the control panel by the door started to whirr. I noticed no difference when I pinched myself in the arm. The message on the panel really did say “OPEN”.

I got to my knees, using the Nurse’s more or less lifeless form as a shield, and tried to steady my weapon. I pointed it at the height of the heart. The mean height of men in the U.S. is five feet ten, here in Scandinavia presumably a bit more. The door handle began to be pressed down. There was a mechanical click. I undid the safety on the gun.

I heard the voice before I saw the face, that melodic intonation which had made me sweat through sleepless nights. It was also the voice that caused me to release my index finger from the trigger.

The surprise made me recoil against the green wall. That it should have been her, of all people. Through all those years.

1.07

She had wanted us to call her “Ingrid”, but among her students she was only ever referred to as “Ingrid Bergman”. Even though she did her best to hide her beauty—with her long straggling hair, even then graying, falling to her shoulders—the Swedish movie star’s classic looks were etched into her face. At night we used to watch the movies over and over. Always in the same order, from light to dark: “The Bells of St Mary’s”. “Notorious”. “Spellbound”. “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”.

You must understand. But you won’t.

That even I had once been an ordinary young person with no clear direction, pretty much the same as anyone else, with deep but not yet incurable wounds from my childhood. That I became obsessed with mathematics and physics at an early age, ciphers, numbers theory. But that I then, for one reason or another, felt that I needed an overview of the history of ideas, of mankind’s thinking throughout the ages, and some optional courses in moral philosophy. Constructive thought as some sort of compass, a map out into the world, maybe even as therapy.

Instead, I met Ingrid Bergman.

After her first lecture I had a blinding headache. And then it got worse. She challenged everything we had thought or believed in, the uncertainty spread far beyond the lecture hall, the slightest detail sometimes meant life or death for me. How long I brushed my teeth. The interval between red light for cars and green man for pedestrians. The choice between taking the steps up to the university library one or two at a time.

I counted seconds, interpreted signs. Everything stood on edge. Absolutely nothing was settled or fixed any longer.

Just then, I also received my first “approach”, as we called it. By that stage, they could have got me to do just about anything. We knew that other students had already fallen for the recruiters’ spiraling promises: they were said to come back at least once with guarantees of even bigger scholarships and increasingly adapted courses. Assurances that in future even the world of business would be crying out for our specialization.

At first I supposed that they had confused me with someone else, or that somebody in my corridor had given them my name as a joke. That I would be recruited by them did not seem likely. A fundamentally useless young man, pacifist since his teen years, unable even to decide which way to walk over the campus lawn, at this stage with unruly brown curls and apparently good-looking in a melancholy sort of a way. A lost, contrary student who could as easily have prepared a massacre at the university as study its moral consequences.

But the recruiters would not give up. Ran down the list of names with their index finger and found my name. Checked the spelling and date of birth. After they paid me a second visit I decided to try out after all, went along as if sleep-walking, counted the steps up the spiral staircase in the unused part of the university building leading to the helipad. Interpreted random parts of graffiti as signals addressed to me.

West Point was an hour away. I stared down at the shadow of our helicopter as it raced above the surface of the Hudson, but the military academy could as well have lain in another galaxy. On arrival there I vomited my entire former life out into a waste paper basket and then started, to my own great surprise and probably theirs too, to score top in the tests, one after the next. After only the third session I was selected for special training.

The requirements were clear from the start. Those of us in the special training group should at all costs continue our studies, in parallel with our course at West Point, and finish them in style, as if nothing had happened. We were to start working up our first alternate identity. The double life was demanding but manageable. I was furiously driven, a fire in my belly, wanting, it seemed, to take some sort of revenge: on existence in general, the meaninglessness of life, my father.

Since we did not have supervised studies more than three days a week, and the training at West Point mostly took place outside office hours—often late, sometimes in the form of repellent interrogation training sessions long into the night—the logistics were possible. No-one was waiting for me in my dorm. The corridor lay desolate and dark when I returned, and in the mornings I would spin the latest yarn about my fictitious girlfriend Sarah, with whom I said I was more or less living. The smoke-screens soon became an integral part of my existence.

Everything ran through my mind more or less in the same way, slid into and out of my being. Military life and moral philosophy, lectures, the Middle Ages, the violence, the ideas.

On the flight to West Point I would sit there, minutes after we had streamed out of the auditorium and I had taken one of my alternate routes to the helipad, trying to absorb what Ingrid Bergman had been telling us.

I turned my notebook this way and that without understanding in which direction I should be reading the letters. The insights which very recently had seemed so fantastic, were now little more than foreign symbols. Something which had cooled and solidified. In vain I tried to recall the heat of an hour before, the memory not only of Ingrid Bergman’s thoughts but her entire being. All that was left were random bullet points. Capitalized phrases, a rash of exclamation marks, the occasional question.

Slowly I read them out loud to myself, the pilot next to me enclosed in his headphones. “CLIQUES!”, “MIRRORS!?”, “VISCOSITY!”, “DUALISM!”, “THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH!”. Usually she wrote from left to right, but sometimes also from top to bottom. Before the end of the lecture she would join up the bullet points on the blackboard, like an intricate crossword or a Scrabble board.

Everything taken together seemed to form a gigantic cipher, full of hidden meanings, secret connections she called them, correspondences. Buried links between the history of art and weapons technology, eternal truths and the geopolitics of the day.

To begin with, we students had sat together and tried to interpret all this, help each other to understand what she was hoping to get across. We speculated over where her intriguing accent might have come from. Was she German or Dutch? I thought she was Swedish, like the real-life Ingrid Bergman. But as time passed, our relationship to her world became something much more personal and private for each of us. We all thought that our understanding was the correct one—and did not want to disclose this to anyone other than to Ingrid Bergman herself.

Nobody dared to contact her directly. The more that Ingrid Bergman drew us into the world of her thoughts, the more she seemed also to need to keep us at a distance. The most that she would do was to nod at those students she ran into on campus: she seemed to put all of herself into the lectures, emptying herself entirely.

I had been the exception. Although she must have been at least ten to fifteen years older than us—a time in her life when she should have had a firm base, a nuclear family according to the norm—she cast long looks back at me when we happened to run into each other in the library or on the lawns. It might have been my imagination, my heated dreams. But the other students confirmed it. Made comments.

In due course it was she who became my academic supervisor. After I had completed the basic course, with top grades in each subject, the idea was that I would write a dissertation and that they would arrange everything for the benefit of my double life.

I still sometimes wonder how they could have let me go so far, choosing the particular subject that I did. I can only speculate that even then Edelweiss saw me as a possible candidate for the world’s most important assignment. And that somebody who so intensively called the whole nuclear weapons system into question, could never be suspected of serving the ends of that system: that my research, in the standard way of such paradoxes, would be for him the optimal camouflage.

The working title of my dissertation was “The Atom: a Moral Dilemma”. At first, Ingrid Bergman suggested that it should center on Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century philosopher who was accused of heresy and burned at the stake. From him, threads also ran back to antiquity and the so-called “atomists” in southern Italy.

Bruno was a typical Ingrid Bergman figure—somebody who could get her animated, play a sufficient role in her own dramatization of world history: always lit up and theatrical.

But I wanted to go further. Right up to the fire. My first thought had been that the dissertation should center on Robert Oppenheimer, the “Father of the Atomic Bomb”, who after Hiroshima and Nagasaki pleaded for nuclear weapons never to be used again. But Ingrid Bergman dismissed that as conventional, even banal.

I next tried Andrei Sakharov. The Russian nuclear physicist who was one of the leaders of the Soviet hydrogen bomb project, the step after the atom bomb, and then became the world’s best-known dissident and pacifist. But think about the language, was Ingrid Bergman’s only response. By the time you’ve learned enough Russian, your scholarship funds will have run out.

I could not tell her that I had long since mastered that language too, after both Russian and Arabic courses at West Point. Or that I had inherited my linguistic skills—as well as my German—from my mother.

So then I suggested Lise Meitner. During my advanced course in the theory of science, Ingrid Bergman had described her as the greatest female scientist ever. Einstein had apparently called her “our Madame Curie”. An Austrian Jewish physicist, she had fled to Sweden immediately before the war, and there she was the first to comprehend the principle of nuclear fission—before being hidden away behind an obscure research post at Stockholm’s Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan.

Meitner turned down all the increasingly persuasive requests to move to Los Alamos and to join in the Manhattan Project’s work, refusing to get involved in any sort of military research. Despite that, the over-excited reports in the newspapers after Hiroshima and Nagasaki referred to her as none other than the “Mother of the Atomic Bomb”. The world’s press lined up outside the boarding house in Dalarna province where she was on holiday at this historic moment. Hollywood wanted to produce a movie about her with the title “The Beginning of the End”. She was incredibly well known at the time—and now was almost forgotten.

It was even said that Meitner had before the war worked out how one could build an atom bomb. While she was still in Germany, she had smuggled out the secret and passed it to the Americans. In the movie script, she was supposed to have fled with the bomb itself in her handbag. That was what decided her to turn down the proposal.

When I mentioned the name, Ingrid Bergman was more or less lost for words. “That’s a fantastic idea,” she said at last, “absolutely brilliant.”

Quite soon the idea appeared to be better on paper than in reality. The problem was not the German, which both Ingrid Bergman and I were able to understand more than adequately. Nor the fact that I, because of my other life as a special agent, could never get clearance for private travel overseas—and most of what was interesting about Meitner’s story seemed to be in the Swedish archives. All I had to do was to tell Ingrid Bergman that I had a pathological fear of flying, which did not appear to surprise her at all: sensitive and talented young man that I was.

That problem resolved itself easily enough because Ingrid Bergman traveled to Sweden regularly to research in the Swedish archives—sometimes she was away for the whole summer—and she copied for me Meitner’s letters to friends and scientific colleagues the world over. It was then that she told me she came from a small town in the far north of Sweden, but that she had when young mostly worked as a boss’ secretary in Stockholm. Before she happened to fall head over heels in love and follow the object of her affections to the U.S., where eventually she began her studies.

The real problem was that there was so little information about Meitner that one could get one’s hands on. Almost nothing about what she had been doing in Sweden during the war, at a time when the academic world was buzzing with rumors about extensive research within nuclear physics, and both sides thought that the other already had a finished bomb. Or what she had been involved in for all those years after the war. Who she really was. Meitner seemed to have wrapped herself in secrecy.

Even the correspondence with her nearest and dearest turned out to be ambiguous and hard to fathom. At the same time as members of her Swedish circle were giving accounts of magnificent parties at her home, she herself was sending out stifled cries for help in German or English to her friends overseas.

So hardly a week went by without my trying to abandon my project. And hardly a week went by without Ingrid Bergman, equally frenziedly, dragging me along, pushing, urging, enticing. At times it almost seemed as if she were ghost-writing my dissertation. During our supervision sessions, which I recall like dreams, she must have persuaded me to keep going more or less against my will. The while calling me “my treasure”, as if we were in a relationship.

When I had completed all the theoretical courses for my doctorate, Ingrid Bergman gave me a present, a portrait to put on my desk in the office which I was then assured. It was a photograph of Lise Meitner in the laboratory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. She is looking straight into the camera, wearing strangely formal clothing for somebody who is carrying out experiments.

But the striking thing about it was her face. Meitner’s mouth appeared a little crooked, as if she had had a stroke, which was hardly likely. She could not have been more than forty in the picture—and she was twice that age before her first stroke occurred. Yet there was something additional, a hidden membrane, which disturbed the picture. The answer to the riddle came if you covered up one side or the other. The right half was sad, undecided, almost sickly. The left one determined and open, with an audacious little smile.

That photograph provided both the title—“The Two Faces of Lise Meitner”—and the direction of my dissertation. That it should deal with the idea of having more than one side to oneself. And be-neath the surface it would be as much about myself, my double life.

But Ingrid Bergman refused to accept the idea. What she wanted—and it was impossible to resist her: after our sessions I felt drained—was for the title instead to be “Lise Meitner’s Secret”.

I could at no time bring myself to tell her that I never really understood what Meitner’s secret was, or whether there was one. Yet in the end I managed to describe it in a general enough way, to satisfy Ingrid Bergman. So the development of nuclear physics and mankind’s inability to withstand its own scientific and military potential, how the whole impossibility became the only thing that was possible, the sweeping theoretical basis for my dissertation.

Against all the odds—and even though the style was closer to that of a literary essay than it was soberly scientific, since I was always finding myself carried away by the momentum of the thing—the dissertation survived its examination by an introspective and humorless exiled Bulgarian.

Immediately after that came the attacks of September 11, 2001. And then the summons to join the newly created team which was to save the world.

They also arranged my new double life in a very elegant way. At the same time as I took my place in Edelweiss’ team, they stowed the other me away in a research post with minimal teaching responsibilities at The Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. A gloomy early-nineteenth-century castle with pinnacles and towers, no more than a couple of thousand students and some surprisingly interesting manuscripts in a dark archive called Sister Helen’s Library.

Those who thought they knew me well—a few fellow researchers from university, the odd friend I dared have and had managed to hang on to—were told that I was more or less burned out after my work on the dissertation and needed to get away on a long journey, alone. I was given a new name, a new identity and a new appearance. Two operations in little more than a month, followed by a long and painful convalescence, in the gap between my dissertation and the new job.

During the year that followed, before I met my future wife at a party and the same evening went back to her place with her, I had also tried on a few occasions to contact Ingrid Bergman. Anonymously, obviously, from telephone boxes outside abandoned training grounds or somewhere in the desert. I had not caught so much as a glimpse of her since I had defended my dissertation. Nor re-read my thesis, hardly given it a thought. But I could not forget her, however hard I tried. The faculty and the university switchboard had both given the same answer. “Ingrid” had handed in her notice and moved on. No, unfortunately, no forwarding details.

To the official visit to Stockholm and the escape, I had nevertheless brought my—or perhaps I should say our—dissertation. I was after all going to Lise Meitner’s involuntary home. The place of her long, puzzling exile.

And now we were meeting again. After twelve long years it was Ingrid Bergman—“Ingrid”—who walked into the fallout shelter. Pulled the protective doors shut, one after the other.

I tried in vain to make sense of what I was in fact seeing: my former lecturer and supervisor, in full combat gear. Ingrid Bergman seemed to be carrying exactly the same equipment as I was. A uniform with understated insignia, backpack, headlamp, her weapon drawn. In all respects her equipment was the same as my own, apart from the briefcase.

Her hair was short and jet-black, a higher forehead than when I last saw her, her nose bigger. Colored lenses and heavy camouflage completed the job for which the cosmetic surgery had prepared the way. She was changed yet not erased. Someone who knew her would still sense an Ingrid Bergman underneath it all. That quick little smile, the look.

There was so much that I would have liked to ask her. Where she had disappeared to, what had happened, why.

“What are you doing here?” I managed to say.

“I could ask you the same, Erasmus. If I didn’t already know.”

She went to the Nurse, crouched down and muttered “Jesús María… Jesús María…” over and over again, like a prayer. Fingered the glass splinters in the Nurse’s forehead with a troubled look.

And suddenly the Nurse did give a tiny start. There were some weak reflexes in the cheek muscles and the eyelids, a small movement in the left leg. Like a cat moving while dreaming.

“She’ll surface soon,” Ingrid Bergman said.

“I can carry her with me now. We’ve got to get away from here,” I said.

She stared at me.

“Erasmus, my treasure, for the moment we’re lost to the world. Yes, we have to regroup, but not right now. Nobody’s going to find us here. Hardly anyone knows that the system’s intact, that it even exists.”

“But you do?”

“Sure. Too well, probably.”

I looked at her, searching for words. My mind seemed sluggish and helpless in the face of her verbal pirouettes.

“So is it you who is our Alpha?”

“Well, was. Until this morning, when I set off the alarm.”

“Where were you during my escape, in that case, before you got here?”

“Oh, here and there, the usual thing.”

I waited out her artificial pause, hanging on for her confirmation—until it finally came:

“And now it’s we two against the world, Erasmus.”

With her hair cut short she no longer had to fight it, no brushing the fringe out of her eyes as she used to. I could not take my eyes off her.

“You still look like Ingrid Bergman,” I said.

“You think? I’m not sure that was the idea. But here’s the person you’ll soon be able to ask.”

Then she huddled up to the Nurse and immediately fell fast asleep, just like a child.

1.08

I was fumbling far back into my childhood for memories. Scratching away in my notebook while the two women lay there, very close, sharing the same languor. Little by little the picture cleared: like a half-remembered scene out of an old movie.

It was my thirteenth birthday. I was sitting at the kitchen table with my mother. Cryptography already captivated me. I was trying to teach her the basis of book ciphers, even though she was a humanist through and through. To share with her my obsession.

The key to the disclosure of the top secret principles of the atomic bomb, which the Russian spy Theodore Hall had smuggled out of the Manhattan Project, was contained in one of our most famous collections of poetry, which I thought might interest her. Operating at a distance from each other, Hall and his courier Sax had used the same edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass for their cipher. The numerical codes indicated which pages, rows and letters of the book should be used to decipher a message.

It was a simple method, which both appealed to and could be understood by someone just into his teenage years—and also, so I supposed, by my mother. Yet it was a significant help in allowing the Soviet Union to detonate their own nuclear test charges much earlier than we had thought possible. Only four years after the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So I picked out an old paid—or maybe it was unpaid—bill from one of Mom’s chaotic piles of paper, turned it over and started to work away in my neat handwriting, explaining as I went along. First we choose a key sentence, I said, for example: “I love you”. Then we give a number to the first letter in each of the three words in the sentence. So 1 stands for I as in “I”, 2 for L as in “Love” and 3 for Y from “You”, right?

But the drawback in using such a short sentence as key, the lost and prematurely middle-aged youth in me continued, is that it gives you so very few numbers and therefore so few possibilities. Because if I write 123 in a cipher which has I love you as its key sentence, that only leaves us with “ILY” in clear. And you can’t encrypt any proper words with such a short key sentence. The code 213 gives you “LIY”, 132 “IYL”, 231 “LYI”, 312 “YIL” and 321 “YLI”.

And it does not have to be some sentence from a book, I said. So long as both sender and recipient—and ideally nobody else in the whole world—know which key sentence they are using.

My mother was staring at the paper, seemed absorbed by it.

“But let’s say that I keep writing,” I said with enthusiasm, “adding to that sentence a little bit at random while we’re sitting here at the kitchen table anyway, for example like this: I love you… just as senselessly as my pretty weird and hellish father, for the time being and onward into eternity, Amen. Then the number of possibilities becomes so much greater. Besides, there’s only you and me who know that this sentence even exists: it can become our own little secret which we’ll never reveal to anybody, can’t it?”

Her faint smile encouraged me to keep going.

“Let’s use that key sentence to decrypt the cipher 122129, for instance. Do you want to have a go, Mom?”

She nodded and put her spectacles on while I gave numbers to all the words in the new sentence, as neatly as before on the back of the bill.

“So let’s begin”, I said, “by taking the easiest interpretation. Let’s read it as 1-2-2-1-2-9. That gives us the first letter in the first word of the key sentence: which is I. Then we have the first letter of the second word, which is L from ‘love’. Then another L, another I, another L and finally the first letter in the ninth word: P from ‘pretty’. But that doesn’t make up a real word—only ‘ILLILP’.”

“But if you read some of the numbers as two-digit numbers, like this: 12-21-2-9, we get something different. The first letter in the twelfth word in the key sentence is H from ‘hellish’. Then you take the first letter from the twenty-first word, which is E from ‘eternity’, the first of the second word which is ‘L’ from ‘love’ and then the first letter of the ninth word: ‘P’. Do you want to read it out for me, Mom?”

She shook her head. So I read out loud, in my clear little voice: “The book cipher 122129 with this key sentence gives you the clear text HELP.”

I looked proudly at my mother—until I saw her twisted grimace. Then she shut her eyes and put her hands over her ears. Scrunched up the paper. Started to rock back and forth.

That was the moment when I realized that she was sliding into her own world, far beyond my reach or that of others. That key sentence, concocted at random, also became my own dark mantra. I love you just as senselessly as my pretty weird and hellish father, for the time being and onward into eternity, Amen.

For nights on end I rattled off the words as I tried not to fall asleep, since the dreams were worse than reality. Used the sentence as a key in my own restless search for hidden signs. I applied it to everything, from car license plates and telephone numbers to stock market figures and sports results: even though the clear text hardly ever produced a single comprehensible word.

My mother had been in an institution ever since, so I was convinced that I alone could possibly know our key sentence. Until the day when the packages started to arrive.

The first brown envelope was lying in the mailbox outside my office on December 22, 2001, just before the Christmas break. It was a month after I had joined the Team, a few weeks after our return from Afghanistan: what I had pretended both at home and to my colleagues to be a guest lecture tour in the Mid West followed by a fictional week’s backcountry skiing to explain away my cuts and bruises.

At the very top it said “MERRY CHRISTMAS!” in green ink. Then my name and workplace, in the same anonymous capital letters.

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR ERASMUS LEVINE

SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY

THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA

WASHINGTON D.C.

The envelope bore neither stamps nor a zip code, somebody must have delivered it by hand. Which might have meant that it came from one of my colleagues, though envelopes like that could be left at the ground-floor reception. Security at the university, even after 9/11, was not impressive.

I followed the routines with care before opening the envelope. Felt it with my fingertips for irregularities, smelled it for any trace of chemicals.

Inside were a dozen articles cut out of newspapers and magazines. They all dealt with the fact that the nuclear disarmament talks between ourselves and Russia were on the point of collapse, an historic moment at which the media was more taken up by global terrorism, the Muslim threat, in fact. I had read all these articles and columns. Their common theme was that we in the U.S. were on the point of unilaterally withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which had been one of the cornerstones in the balance of terror since 1972. This was a development that would lead to a dramatic worsening in the climate for nuclear weapons negotiations.

The clippings had underscores in green ink, in some cases of long passages, sometimes the odd sentence in which a few words had also been circled. At first sight they conveyed no clear meaning. Presumably there was more to them than met the eye.

Having without success tried the most obvious methods—from assembling the underscored words into functioning sentences, to combining the first letters of the words in different ways, or the last ones, those with an even number, those with an odd number, following the Fibonacci sequence, every imaginable series of numbers, forward and backward—I finally had a go at different variations of dates. A classic yet long-forgotten means of teasing out a hidden message.

I started with the day’s date: December 22, 2001. Shuffled the twelfth, twenty-second and first circled words in every possible way—but without the smallest sense coming from it. Then I took the next most obvious date. My birthday was February 14, 1963. So I put together the second, fourteenth and sixty-third circled words in different combinations.

Suddenly the sequence of words “against the world” appeared. And if instead I wrote out the year of my birth, 1963, in full, taking it as indicating the first, ninth, sixth and third circled words—There it was: “WE TWO AGAINST THE WORLD”. Against, not on the side of.

That preposition could have been the difference between a lunatic and a pacifist. Yet all I did was pile the articles up in my broad marble window bay, on top of one of the piles which was spilling out in all directions. In that way, whoever had left me the articles would be able to see through the window and know that I had read them. A small signal that I had engaged with them. That I was willing to join in, test the boundaries, until things started to go too far or get out of hand.

The cleaners seemed not much interested in the papers, perhaps because they did not stand out from the rest of the piles. My office was one entire analog mess.

What had started out as a number of unsorted heaps had over time come to resemble a rolling tide of paper with no beginning and no end, no visible boundary between insignificant and meaningful, dog-eared newspapers and books filled with underscores in red ink or neon-green highlights, classic volumes of scientific history treated any which way, reports from inspections of nuclear weapons bases, dissertations in the field of natural sciences of which I did not at first understand one iota, D.V.D.s and old broken V.H.S. cartridges, drafts of some earlier ideas of mine—some significant, some less so—incomplete lines of reasoning, papers which had got stuck in the printer and just been laid in the mess by a colleague, cutaway diagrams of submarine designs, designations of different missiles, cassette tapes of interviews with researchers which I had never got around to listening to, table after table listing the efficacy of thermonuclear weapons, unsorted minutes of disarmament talks going back more than sixty years, ever since the invention of nuclear weapons, strident pamphlets, counter-arguments.

The entire shapeless research project which I called “The long chain reaction” staggered on, under and across my own desk.

Which is why the envelopes could keep coming, once a month or more often, with none of those around me seeming to notice or care. Jammed together with everything else in the mailbox—with my persistent ordering of new research material I took advantage of my curiously unlimited budget—the evidence could then lie in the window bay for all the world to see.

And so it went on for a decade, while my doubts about everything that I was doing in my military guise increased. When the articles arrived—even though I had often already read them—these feelings grew. The absurdity of the nuclear weapons system became ever clearer to me. The rhetoric was being peeled away, the arguments crushed.

From 2010 on, the articles also began to confirm what the Team, the inner circle, had known for years. For example, a Russian military analyst expressed the view that the risk of nuclear conflict had not been so great since the height of the Cold War thirty years earlier. But, he argued, the global disarmament mechanism had no time to deal with the issue.

An American peace researcher pointed out that the top-level meetings about nuclear safety which were still taking place were chiefly dealing with political instability in the smaller nuclear nations, and the risk of the spread to other states like Iran and North Korea. But nothing at all about the arsenals of the two nations who dominated the scene—Russia and us, the United States.

As one famous peace researcher put it in an article which arrived in my office in March 2011: “The world’s most powerful leaders have now met three times in the last eight years to discuss 17 per cent of the global stock of nuclear weapons. The remaining 83 per cent have not been discussed at all.”

In the same way that the articles were a theme with variations, the cipher system also changed each time, while adhering to the same core principles. Each time the key to decryption required the arrangement of a number of words which had been circled in accordance with a certain system. Each time the message in clear was “We two against the world”.

And then it was February 2013.

I was going to celebrate my birthday, in peace and quiet as usual, with a simple dinner at home with my family. On the morning of that day yet another brown envelope was in my mailbox. But this time the outer appearance was different because the envelope creased around the contours of a hard, flat object within and it had been carefully taped.

At the top I read “HAPPY 50TH BIRTHDAY!” in the same neat hand as ever. Under it was the usual address. I sat there for a long time before I pushed the D.V.D. into my computer, fingering it, inspecting the plastic, trying to weigh the risk, judging whether our little game was going to end like this—with a banal explosion in an office in D.C.’s Catholic University. But I ran it through my own private anti-virus program, obviously not the university’s inadequate one, and started to play the movie.

I had seen “Mata Hari” once before, at the university’s film club during my student years. But it had not left much of a mark. Seeing it now, I was surprised by how powerful the movie was. From the first scene—the firing squads executing the spies, its sudden brutality—all the way to the dark ending. When Greta Garbo as Mata Hari is led away to her end, head held high, her back to the camera: the spy who was said to have bewitched the whole of France.

After the end of the movie I felt extremely unwell. I went out, drank a few mouthfuls of water from the fountain, took some deep breaths in the dead end of the corridor where I had my room. Nothing helped.

So I lowered my head between my knees and small symbols seemed to start spinning inside my closed eyelids. I opened my eyes, shut them again and sat down at my desk with a pen in my hand. Tried to wait out my twitching muscles, the interplay between my brain and my reflexes, but without success.

I pushed the disc in again, did my best to relax, make myself as receptive as possible. A little more than half-way through I again felt my sub-conscious being stirred in that peculiar way. Now I was convinced.

In the Team we had tried out steganography. The old art of concealing the fact that a secret message exists at all, as distinct from cryptography which only hides the message itself. The classic example was Histaios, the tyrant of Miletus in the late sixth century B.C., who had his slave’s head shaved and inscribed on the bald scalp an important dispatch about an impending war. He waited for the slave to grow his hair back before sending him off.

Even that technique had its shortcomings. To begin with, the one thing that is rarely described in the story: how to convey to the recipient what needs to be done to get at the message, for example shave the messenger’s head. If you make that too clear—in the old days by writing, more recently with a telephone call or yet another dispatch using a different technique—the information becomes too vulnerable and easy to crack. And if not clear enough, how would one know that there was even something being transmitted?

I ran the movie from the start a second time, and waited for that strange feeling to grow again. This message would presumably be double-encrypted. Partly with steganography—some kind of message hidden within the file, being the movie—and partly with some subliminal technique. The hidden message can only have been shown for a tenth of a second or so, at the most a few frames, something which our normal perception would not pick up.

That is why I had felt so ill. When my conscious was trying to catch at something which by its nature was out of reach.

After watching the movie again, its symbols remaining insufficiently clear, I downloaded the steganography programs which we had tested in the Team. SteganPEG, Secret Layer and QuickStego, which could both hide intelligence and crack the codes.

Digital steganography, the art of hiding secret messages within apparently innocent data files such as family photographs or YouTube clips, had become fashionable some years earlier. But in the endless race between the code setters and the code breakers, even this technique started to be hauled in. One of its drawbacks was the change in file size, noticeable however small the message.

But none of the programs helped me to uncover the information I was looking for. I sat through the entire afternoon, watching the movie over and over, without getting any further than identifying the frame in which the message must have been planted. In the scene in which Mata Hari starts to tug at General Shubin’s arm—to stop him from revealing her adored Rosanoff as a spy—that feeling in my brain started assert itself. And then it reached its climax at the precise moment when Mata Hari shoots Shubin.

Darkness had fallen outside the tall windows of my office when my right hand started to move the pen over the notebook, as if of its own accord. There were thirteen numbers and two letters there now: 161 221 192 D12 U15.

As if straight from my sub-conscious, written out automatically.

Then there was only one thing left to do, whether I wanted it to or not. The words rolled out from the back of my head. I love you just as senselessly as my pretty weird and hellish father, for the time being and onward into eternity, Amen. There was no doubt. Reading the sequence of numbers as 16, 12, 21, 19, 2, D, 12, U and 15 and using my key sentence resulted in something that simply could not be a coincidence.

The clear text was “THE OLD HUT”. And the unfathomable implication was not only that somebody other than my mother and I knew the key sentence—but also that the same person was aware of the boys’ and my favorite hiding place in the abandoned playground.

Now that I knew what I knew, I literally had no idea where to turn. I went out into the deserted corridor, but the automatic neon lights had little time to come on before I went back into my room again. Threw up into the sink. Sat on the floor with my head again between my knees, while the nausea rose and fell.

Eventually I got to my feet and walked all the way to the abandoned playground. My watch showed 19.04. If I was quick I could still get home in time for the birthday dinner.

There was nobody to be seen. I pushed my way into the dark bushes where the hut had once been. Pulled on my gloves, felt under the last of the rotting bits of plank—and immediately found the cell phone.

There was a grayish envelope symbol in the primitive display. The message was encrypted using the same key sentence. I ran my eyes over the thirty-five characters, as a musician would read a score: 615 19C K12 192 814 20V 216 219 162 181 721 R/1.

In clear, “STOCKHOLM FIVE SEPTEMBER”.

Suddenly I had a direction, a place, a goal—as well as a dispatcher. The last number was a signature as clear as anything could be in the world of cryptology. Because it was the position for the letter “alpha” in the Greek alphabet.

I no longer had the slightest shadow of a doubt. The message could only have been signed by one person—or machine.

1.09

Unblessed are the believers, Edelweiss used to say. Blessed are those who know.

So I did not speculate how Alpha could have known my greatest secret, the key sentence, the scene with Mom at the kitchen table thirty-seven years ago. Could have cracked the code to my whole life. Not then—when all I did was to delete the simple message and reply 19K, “O.K.”, before I put the cell phone back in the same place. Nor after that time, either.

Partly because I could never be sure if I was communicating with man or machine. And partly because it was all overshadowed by the realization that I had somehow managed to acquire an ally, a confidant.

I had been wondering about escape for so long, been looking for the opportunity, indeed ever since my basic training at West Point. And when I became part of the Team, that temptation had only grown. After I got involved in the nuclear weapons administration and was given my assignment, became one of the carriers. Saw how far-reaching the issue was.

The simple thought had been to just vanish, never again to reappear. Some quick changes of identity during my escape, the way we normally would, and then lower myself into the eternal ice with the briefcase.

Yet I knew that it would make no difference. Other than to me personally: that I alone would be spared my moral dilemma. But the rest of it would stay intact. They said the briefcase became unusable as soon as the system was broken. After they had altered the codes, and the whole security structure down to the minutest detail, somebody else would take my place and the whole caboodle would go back to what they called normal.

But now—with each new message to the cell phone at the abandoned playground, always synchronized with another brown envelope in the mailbox—everything became as much possible as impossible. To leave my family and my whole double life. In some way break out of the Team together with Alpha. Escape with the briefcase still fully functional, my finger on the launch button. We two against the world.

I had no idea what the plan could be, beyond the rudimentary instructions which came to the cell phone during the seven months between February and September 2013, until two days before the official visit to Stockholm. But I took it for granted that Alpha knew exactly.

And I had for so long been straining at the leash, testing the limits of my civilian identity, been stirred by the mysterious envelopes with the articles. My presence in the School of Philosophy coffee room had long since become a trial for most people. I would kick off with a simple assertion, already at the time when we withdrew from the A.B.M. Treaty in 2002: that the nuclear weapons issue was troubling me. How strange it was that so few people talked about the biggest issue of all. That here we were, as close to extinction as we had been during the Cold War.

Most of my idealistic, left-leaning colleagues gave the same answer: that there was surely no longer any nuclear threat worth talking about. Weapons of that kind had after all been taken off the apocalyptic daily agenda after the Wall fell. I had begun to argue back, with quiet determination, confining myself of course to public sources yet still getting ever closer to the line.

For more than a decade I had held forth in the coffee room, pointing out that there were still upward of twenty thousand nuclear warheads distributed across the world’s surface. That the Doomsday Clock, which a group of committed natural scientists set periodically based on their judgment of how close the world is to man-made catastrophe, had been moved to just two minutes to midnight to reflect the nuclear threat. That, according to the U.N., mankind could end world starvation by giving only one third of the global expenditure on nuclear weapons to the poorest countries. That the cost of the world’s stock of nuclear weapons had been calculated at close to a trillion dollars per decade. Yes, I clarified for these godforsaken humanists, that’s a one followed by twelve zeros.

Later, I could only recall all this as if through a haze. How I had ground on that in the U.S. alone we had produced more than seventy thousand nuclear warheads between 1945 and 1996, more than all other countries put together. In recent years, compared to those before 9/11, we had at the same time increased our defense budget by more than 50 per cent—while our national debt was greater than our G.N.P. Now we were spending five times more than China, ten times more than Russia, on our military apparatus.

Then I would go on to lecture them about the renewal. The “Revitalization”, as it was called: the coming generation of nuclear weapons. I stressed that this was what really caught the eye—and was yet rarely commented on. That the whole of our nuclear arsenal was in other words going to be renewed, at a cost of at least a trillion dollars during the coming thirty years. Once again: a one and twelve zeros.

Many commentators, I would go on, claimed those figures were way too low. That to replace the twelve Ohio-class atomic submarines would cost at least 110 billion dollars. And that renewing the B.61 atomic bomb, our faithful servant from the Cold War days which was still loaded onto F.16 aircraft at our bases all over Europe and elsewhere in the world, would cost five billion dollars per year for the next decade.

Somewhere around there, the majority of my colleagues would have taken themselves back to their offices with many a sigh. Only the most radical stayed and chimed in.

Sooner or later one of them would also take up the internal aspect. For example, say that they had seen a documentary about the fabled “nuclear code” and learned that for a long time it had consisted of just eight zeros, 00000000—because it should be as easy as possible to send off the missiles in a crisis.

I used to say that I had seen the very same documentary.

And that the lead times, according to what I had read, were still at least as short as during the Cold War. The Russians’ intercontinental missiles could reach us in half an hour—and in the continental U.S. we needed two minutes before the corresponding rockets, and twelve before the nuclear weapons on our U-boats, were airborne and counter-attacking. That would give the President between eighteen and twenty-eight minutes to reach a critical decision. Under the greatest possible pressure, dealing with all of the controls needed to ensure that the alarm was not a technical glitch, which was by no means a rare occurrence.

I could have told them that the internal scenario was more rapid. By the time it would come to light that a handful of people with the necessary level of authority had gone to pieces, or had consciously and resolutely decided to take matters into their own hands, not much time at all would be left to arrest the process.

But I never did tell them. That is where I drew the line.

I had, however, begun to refer to the books written by Bruce Blair, a former missile operator, which were published in the 1990s. According to him, during the Cold War it would have required at the most four moles to set off a full-scale nuclear attack, including two personnel at the operational level to confirm each other’s breaches of orders, thereby rendering the whole so-called “No Lone Zone” rule meaningless. Our fail-safe regulations prescribed that no one person could be alone with the critical controls and were still cited by our authorities as a guarantee that nothing unforeseen could happen within the system. Furthermore, a maximum of two personnel would be needed at a sufficiently high strategic level.

It was also Blair who had disclosed that, a long way into the ’70s, the security codes had been no more advanced than those eight zeros, so as not to slow down launch procedures. After he had lectured at one of our highly classified internal security conferences, Zafirah asked him how many moles it would take these days. How many do you yourself think, he had answered, bearing in mind digital vulnerability, mobility, the deliberate nature of our decentralized war plan? Twenty? Ten? Two?

If some of my very few Republican colleagues stayed on in the coffee room, they would be capable of defending our security routines with a strange fervor. Insist, for example, that the briefcase was always within reach of the President—according to what they had read in magazines without any “alarmist agenda”.

I could have answered that there was indeed in theory a close proximity between the President and the briefcase; also a complicated structure of bodyguards, competing security teams, the chance of lightning-fast and unpredictable things happening. The human factor. That the physical distance between the President and the briefcase could in practice change—but that it never was short enough to stop one worrying about it.

And that it had been me, and none other, who was the main Carrier of the briefcase.

1.10

Now the briefcase was lying beside me in the fallout shelter: torn from its complex context, just like me. It was now more than twenty-four hours since I had broken out, taking the Nurse with me. Half a day since Alpha had joined us in here. After I had been communicating with her for more than half a year before my escape, using nothing more than one-way messages to a cell phone at the abandoned playground, without having the least idea who she was.

I had done my uttermost to interpret the encrypted messages, whose clear text rarely became any clearer: “SIGNAL”, “AROUND MARS”, “NEGATIVE TWO FIFTY-THREE POINT THREE”, “THE SHELTER”, “CREATE MORE TIME. PLAY SICK!”

When Ingrid Bergman—Alpha—finally woke up, it was 8.13 a.m., Friday, September 6, 2013. I went straight to her, as soon as I saw her body start to move, and I asked her that question:

“How did you come across my key sentence?”

Ingrid Bergman did not answer. She just kept on stretching, seeming not to hear. I repeated the question, louder—and that woke up the Nurse. She opened her dark-brown eyes and stared right into mine. As much terrified as aggressive, like a wounded animal.

“You hate me,” I said.

I was not sure if the Nurse was able to answer, and in that case if her ability to speak had suffered temporary or permanent damage. I took what was necessary out of my backpack: scalpel, suture thread, needles, anesthetic, syringes. Ingrid Bergman was now wide awake and moved away from the Nurse when she saw my equipment. Put herself by the inner door, to give me plenty of elbow-room for the stitching.

Then it all happened with lightning speed. The Nurse let out a shrill screech, like a war cry, before throwing herself over me. I thought that the normal holds would be enough, but the Nurse matched me, move for move. Our nurses have obviously had military training: yet I parried her initial attacks without any great difficulty.

But it is all too easy, isn’t it, to let your guard drop. Even when things are moving at lightning speed, to be so sure of victory that you lean back and take it all for granted.

The Nurse suddenly dived in under my guard. Grabbed my balls, tore and twisted at them, squeezed until they felt crushed: that indescribable pain shot all the way down to my knees. I was as shocked as the Nurse had been when used as a sledgehammer on Kurt-or-John. Without letting go of my testicles, she managed to get hold of the syringe with her other hand—and plunged it deep into my chest.

It was not the strongest of drugs but very fast-acting, spreading throughout the arteries to my whole body. My legs softened at once. Slowly, I dropped to my knees, like an old elephant.

From that position I saw the Nurse pull the scalpel from my left hand. How she held it, ready to strike. Ingrid Bergman did not move from where she had retreated over by the inner door, she just sat there, observing the action.

The scalpel was raised—and then disappeared. Some of the glass shards fell onto the welded steel floor with clinking, crystal sounds. Blood flowed from the Nurse’s forehead. With quick and practiced movements she sewed the incisions herself, without an anesthetic, before tearing off some toilet paper and wiping away the blood. Finally she took some bandaging from her own pack and nonchalantly wound it around her head.

Then I heard her dark voice for the first time.

“Stay between me and him, Ingrid, every fucking inch of the way. If he tries anything again, he’s dead.”