The Carrier

2.01

We moved through the labyrinth of the tunnel system as fast as we could, Ingrid and the Nurse in the lead while I fell further and further behind, like a dead weight. The anesthesia flowed through my body, heavy as mercury, contributing to my nausea, at best dulling the pain. The Nurse had all but ruptured my scrotum, though she had left me able to walk. Feverish, I vomited in the darkness.

At regular intervals Ingrid Bergman paused to check that I was still in touch. Just a glance back so she would not lose contact with either me or the Nurse ahead of her, searching for a way through the passages like a tracker dog. All that energy, even though she had so recently been unconscious. Maybe she had just put on an act. She had certainly managed to absorb the impact with Zafirah and Kurt-or-John better than should have been possible.

In the glow from the light-emitting diodes in the floor—which Ingrid Bergman had lit from the control panel inside the fallout shelter, as effortlessly as she had then opened the doors—everything turned blood-red and dream-like. We were in a dark womb. The diodes showed us the way through the vast tunnel system: the one, the only right choice among all the false paths.

It must have taken years to carve out the bed-rock, maybe even decades. Large numbers of personnel and materials could have been moved around within the system without problems, entire units, medium-weight armaments.

I could feel in my stomach that we kept going deeper, and the altimeter reading on my wrist-watch registered 260 feet below. The tunnels were narrow and claustrophobic: my head was inches from the roof, but we had been trained to master the elements. Through air and fire, deep in the earth and under water, we had prepared ourselves for everything that was unnatural. Ultimately, for the end of the world.

The system was similar to our own—top secret links between strategic points tens of miles apart, correspondences far below ground. Whole cities growing downward, like stalactites, civilizations beneath the earth’s surface, unknown to all but a tiny number of people with the highest security clearance. But this complex went deeper and wider than anything I had experienced before.

I breathed more heavily with each step. The anesthetic hung like a lump of fat around my heart, my entire musculature aching and cramping. Soon small dots seemed to appear along the tunnel walls. When exhaustion reaches the threshold of oxygen starvation, one simply begins to hallucinate, tries to escape reality in any way possible.

So I knew that the little dwarf spider—which was soon growing to the size of the walls, finally beginning to engulf the whole tunnel system, like a deluge from an invisible source—only existed in my imagination. Though that was not a great comfort.

I had no choice but to stop and get some liquid inside me and take one of our crunch crackers. From the start, Edelweiss had rejected the normal self-heating field rations and instead got our physiologists to develop a new type of nourishment, to a degree inspired by the space program. Highly concentrated, tasteless nutrition. Thin discs, grayish sacramental wafers, which took up no room and could be eaten whatever your condition. Except if unconscious or dead, as Edelweiss had said when he first presented them to the Team.

“When it’s crunch time, all you need is a crunch cracker. And for you, my little lambs, it’s always crunch time.”

Time 09.41, depth negative 289.4 feet. Had we not been heading downward, I would hardly have made it much further. Ingrid Bergman turned and said, “not much further to go now”. My hearing had also started to fade, with each step it became harder to take in the physical world around me. I had often to step sideways, as if my feet were skis and I were trying to clamber across the rough slope of the tunnel floor, just to stop myself from falling headlong. The reflexes from my years of training were all that enabled me, in my current state, to keep a hold on the briefcase.

Without warning, the two women came back up to me. Put themselves, as I was now, with their feet on either side of the steep tunnel. If anything, it was even harder to stand still like that: Ingrid Bergman had also planted herself next to me, lest my legs gave way. Muttered something overblown about needing to make arrangements for security, to put us beyond the reach of angels.

And in those circumstances it was not difficult to let them take the briefcase from me.

When Ingrid Bergman reached toward my left hand, I tried at first to put up some resistance. Then I gave in, put my blind trust in her: my lecturer, supervisor and mentor.

She took the briefcase in her left hand, slid down gently like a skier, until she found a position where she could put it on her knees. Used the combat pack on her back as a cushion against one rough wall, boots braced against the other. Then she reached over her right shoulder and took out a wrinkled piece of paper from one of her pack’s outer pockets.

The light-emitting diodes on the tunnel wall cast a weak red sheen over the sketch. Yet even from this distance, about fifteen feet now that she had slithered down, I could see on the paper an outline of the inside of the briefcase—but covered in thin, penciled lines, arrows and strokes in different directions.

I wondered why she did not light her headlamp, but got my answer a moment later.

“It’s easier to do this if the light’s better. But I don’t think we want to illuminate ourselves more than necessary,” she said.

The Nurse and I positioned ourselves as Ingrid Bergman had, backs against one wall and legs against the other: my upper body throbbed with the effort. Then we both pushed forward from the walls to be able to see as much as possible. As close to her as we could—without coming too close to each other.

“I’m not sure that we need to be doing this already. Whether the Test Rooms remain connected to the outside world. But let’s assume so in any case, as a hypothesis, which will force us once and for all to cut off contact with our old friends.”

Ingrid Bergman held up the paper in the light from the diodes. Tilted it in my direction, away from the Nurse.

“Have you seen, Erasmus? Quite the piece of handicraft from hell!”

I began to make out what the lines and arrows on the sketch represented. The wiring itself inside the briefcase, the thing that would always allow them to know the briefcase’s position. It had been kept secret even from me. I could never find it, however much I had, over long hours, fiddled about with the innermost parts of the briefcase.

I had supposed it to be a single point—most likely the usual G.P.S. transmitter, which our technicians forever managed to make smaller—rather than this elegantly constructed pattern. According to the sketch in Ingrid Bergman’s hand, the wires ran into and out of the heart of the apparatus, resembling a medieval tapestry: there seemed to be no possibility of removing them without setting off both an alarm and a local explosion. Which would expose and obliterate whichever enemy had somehow managed to come by the briefcase and attempted to remove the tracking system. At the same time, it would destroy the briefcase, rendering it unusable. Just as they had assured us.

Now Ingrid Bergman put the sketch between her teeth and, leaning forward over the precipitous pathway of the tunnel, flipped open the briefcase. She seemed to have mastered the hand movements at least as reflexively as I had, the waltz of the little fingers, the ritual for revealing the keyboard. Then she held the drawing up in the dark red glow of the diodes.

“What do you reckon?” she said.

I could not find an answer, did not know what she wanted me to say. Then I heard the Nurse’s dark voice.

“Like, impossible. Two optic fibers, twisted hard around themselves, so thin that you’re meant to think they’re a single fiber. I know there has to be a way. But do you really want me to try, Ingrid?”

“What happens if you don’t succeed? Hell-fire?”

“Apart from the fact that alarms will instantly go off at Centcom and we’ll be sending smoke signals for everybody who wants to know where we are? No fucking idea. I just followed the drawing the technicians gave me, like a sewing pattern. But those lunatics can think up pretty much anything.”

Ingrid Bergman seemed to hesitate for a moment before nodding at the Nurse. There was so much we did not know. A cloud of secrets among us. Nobody wanted—or was allowed to have—the whole picture. Not even Alpha.

With great care, the Nurse lifted the open briefcase off Ingrid Bergman’s lap and set it on her knees and then took three sizes of scalpel from her medical pack. I looked at my wrist-watch as she started: 10.24, September 6, 2013. Perhaps, I thought, this was as far as our escape and our lives would go.

The Nurse opened and closed the briefcase a few times, all the right hand movements, her little fingers each on the correct points. Kept feeling around the leather cover of the metal case. Leaned forward, listened, as we were trained to do: trying to catch the mechanism’s own breathing.

I glanced at Ingrid Bergman. She was following developments with as much apprehension as I was, her nervousness seemed genuine. The Nurse picked up one of the scalpels and tested it on the outside of the briefcase—before she chose a second one with a thinner blade. Then, with infinite care, she slit open the leather from the outside never more than a hair’s breadth at a time, her tongue in the corner of her mouth. The light from her headlamp revealed pearls of sweat strung across her upper lip.

In the end she slit the rest of the briefcase’s lid in one long straight cut. Two ultra-thin optic fiber threads were now visible under the leather. She pulled the full length of them out, let them fall onto the ground with a casual flick of her left hand, like surgical thread.

“Shit, I hate working backward,” she muttered, “trying to work out what the hell you were thinking.”

Then she lifted open the top, felt with similar care inside the lid, in the foam rubber filling between the pockets and the different parts of the mechanism, parts which I had never myself thought of as being significant. I noticed all our futile bits of information proudly in their places. The Black Book, the list of our underground bases, the information folder, “the biscuit”. Knew that the essential parts were still concealed: the keyboard that covered half of the lower part of the case. The screen inside the lid.

The Nurse made two straight vertical incisions into the underside of the lid, at the point where the screen ended. I felt my body cramp, the static electricity over my scalp, just waiting for the explosion. Shut my eyes, the evolutionary, albeit pointless, reflex that we all learn.

When I opened my eyes, I saw the Nurse picking out with extreme delicacy the thin optic fiber threads which had been wound around each other, separating them one by one, fraction of an inch by fraction of an inch, with the finest of her scalpels. Each moment lasted an eternity. I glanced at my watch: barely two minutes had passed since the Nurse started to take out the tracing mechanism.

The fiber threads in the underside of the case seemed if possible even more complicated. According to what I could make out from the sketch, they appeared to have been bound together with the threads in the lid to form one single intricate pattern, in which it was impossible to identify which was beginning and which was end. Yet the Nurse was still switching rapidly between outer covering and the insides. The next time I opened my eyes, more threads were discarded beside her—and the briefcase was back in my left hand.

I swallowed, blinked. Breathed. Let the air rush out of my lungs.

“Thanks,” was all I could say.

But it was not the Nurse answering.

“Thanks to you too, my treasure. The secret is to find the right assistants,” Ingrid Bergman said.

2.02

The dreams, through the chemical haze, came back more viciously than ever.

I had endured terrible nights for so many years. Ever since I started my research work in the ’90s.

I thought it must be because of the stress. The endless threat of being unmasked. Not just academically, with a supervisor who demanded so much, but in my whole double—or maybe even triple—life. The apparently incompatible identities which in some way came to meld like an alloy: family man, moral philosopher and Carrier. All of that has to seep out in one way or another, even with a person like me.

From the start, the dreams were of violence. Flashes of hyper-realistic visions of me doing the most appalling things to friends or family, those I held most dear. First to my mother. Soon to Amba, even to the children.

As I began to study the history of atomic weapons, my academic work became woven into these brutal scenes. Images of burning buildings, cities crumbling, bubbling with cooking asphalt and human remains, as if out of a documentary: sleeping hallucinations rather than ordinary dreams.

I was always the one playing the main character—even though my identities in the dreams changed. The only thing they had in common was the savage acts which ended them, often carried out in similar fashion. I could not tell a single other person about this. Not my supervisor, Ingrid Bergman, not Amba. And never, ever, our team’s psychologists.

The series of macabre images this particular night—the last dream, the one which woke me up: the only one you can ever remember with any sort of precision—ended with me once again being Robert Oppenheimer. In the most classic scene of them all.

The nuclear test went by the code name “Trinity”. A small group of researchers gathered outside the little town of Alamogordo on July 16, 1945: for the first time able to see the effects of my creation, little more than three weeks before testing it for real over Hiroshima. The result of our combined efforts. In a little more than three years, more or less around the clock.

The setting was as high-tension as the experiment itself. Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, the Destiny Symphony, boomed through the concrete bunker from an old-style portable gramophone, while the thunder outside rumbled along with the music. I waited, impatient, sulking, keeping myself apart from the other researchers and senior military until the storm had passed overhead. Kept scribbling until the last moments, noting down my speculations as to how strong the explosion was going to be—pure guess-work—on the little notepad with squared paper. When the time came, I walked slowly out of the bunker to observe the miracle in the desert with my own eyes.

And for an instant it seemed as if all my calculations inside the secret laboratory had been underestimates: as if the atmosphere itself had caught fire.

The landscape was bathed in a glowing light many times stronger than the midday summer sun. The color was at once and in some incomprehensible way both golden and purple. The reflection lit up every mountain top, each ridge, the smallest crack in the surrounding peaks, with a clarity and beauty which nobody could later capture in words. I reflected that this is the awe the poets have sought to describe throughout the millennia.

Thirty seconds later came the pressure wave and straight after it the indescribable roar, a resounding premonition of Doomsday. An event of extreme violence which only the Almighty could have created before. When the whole sequence of events began to ebb—even at my distance it felt as if some low-pressure area were sucking everything from us, like waves washing out from a beach—we started to pump each other’s hands. Slapped each other on the back, laughed like children, giggled in relief, almost in a state of hysteria.

The mathematician with whom I had made a bet as to whether or not the experiment would ignite the universe asked for his ten dollars, a boyish smile on his lips. I smiled back, a little ashamed. In part because I never thought that anything of that sort would indeed occur—that I was the one chosen to cause the world to end: Ragnarök itself—but rather had assumed that his more or less playful bet had been some sort of incantation to protect us. And in part because I had no money on me.

So I asked if I could instead pay by giving him a quotation, which I had come to think of while all this was happening. He looked at me, skeptical, with his childish mathematician’s face, not understanding. Then he slowly nodded.

The words are from The Bhagavad Gita, I told him, the Hindu scripture that as a spiritual seeker I always had close to my heart. They describe how the god Vishnu tried to frighten the Prince into doing his duty. I intoned them for the mathematician: Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

He looked bewildered, as if he had expected more, but then seemed satisfied. Started to say that the quotation could well be worth ten dollars, as strange as that was!

But then he got no further—before I started to tear off his head, taking great pains in doing so, the same way one twists and pulls at a root to extract it from the soil. And only when I had got this close to him did I discover that the mathematician bore a striking resemblance to my youngest child.

Who, furthermore, had the same name as the prototype of the bomb. The one which an unfathomable chain of events had just detonated, without igniting the universe after all.

Trinity. The light of my life.

2.03

I could not stop fiddling with the bandages, despite the excruciating pain, trying to work out what she had done.

The whole area between the upper part of my cheeks and my hairline burned like the fires of hell. The Nurse had made what seemed to be her biggest intervention around the eyes, had no doubt changed both their size and shape. That tends to have the greatest impact. Changing the look, the expression, the whole personality with the help of the “mirror of the soul”. Then continued up over the forehead. Made it bigger or maybe smaller, lifted, smoothed, put in wrinkles. Taken away or added a number of years.

For hours I had lain and waited for the woman in the bunk next to me to wake up, Ingrid Bergman, Alpha, so that she could tell me who I was. What I had become. I had the cannula in the back of my left hand, and over the same wrist the security strap of the briefcase which, thanks to the Nurse’s first bravura performance, was without its tracking mechanism. Now, for sure, we were “lost to the world”, as Ingrid Bergman had told us.

My watch indicated 19.52, September 9, 2013, depth negative 307.7 feet. I stuffed the notebook back into the very bottom of my combat pack. Put aside my chronicle for you in posterity, my account of everything that had happened since we left the fallout shelter three days ago. The night lights in the roof of the enormous rock chamber, sixty-five feet up, had been just enough for me to keep working on my chronicle as I peered through the minimal slits between the bandages covering my eyes.

I lay on my back in the stone-hard bunk. Tried to find a position in which I was comfortable. And, at that moment, Ingrid Bergman woke up.

Sat upright, cast her eyes around, ran her hands over her face. Then looked straight at me. Even she was covered in bandages, all the way down over her throat. But her voice was intact—although her lips too must have been modified. The melody floated out through the narrow opening where the mouth was, seemed to fill the whole rock hall, all the way up to the roof.

“You don’t make a very convincing mummy.”

I waited for her to continue.

“Quite a few people are better dead than alive. But you’re not one of them, Erasmus.”

In the silence that followed I saw another dwarf spider move over the back of my hand. I pinched my arm hard in an attempt to work out if this too was a hallucination—but the only result was an uneven red patch on the skin, while the little creature clambered over my wrist-watch.

“Who are you?”

It was only with difficulty that I was able to form the question, moved my lips as little as I could. The stitches cut like barbed wire into the corners of my mouth and around my eyelids. My whole face flared, as if covered with hot wax under the bandages.

“As I said, my treasure: your Alpha.”

“And before that?”

“The Carrier of the briefcase immediately before you. While I was your supervisor, working on your dissertation, before NUCLEUS was created.”

I tried to keep my mouth steady, but it seemed to have a life of its own. My voice sounded slurred and frightening—even to me.

“And before then?”

“Your lecturer. She who taught you everything.”

“And before then?”

Ingrid Bergman did not answer, brought the quiz to an end and turned to face into the rock chamber. I followed her look: the movements of the bandaged head. In addition to our two metal bunks and the moveable surgical lamps, I could make out a number of undefined bits of apparatus further away in the dark, like gigantic bugs now extinct. It seemed to be some kind of technical equipment which time had left behind. Manual microscopes, gauges with big displays, computers with mounted, open-reel tapes and light bulbs, all made of metal and covered with a thin, red-gray coating.

Turning my head, first to scan the shorter side of the rock chamber and then the longer one, I was able to get an idea of its size, despite my limited vision through the eyeholes in my bandages. I decided that it must be at least two hundred feet by two hundred, like two running tracks next to each other, with a total surface area of almost one and a half square miles. In other words, the size of a modest hangar. At most a quarter of it was illuminated by the emergency night lighting in the roof, a further quarter lay in semi-darkness—while at least half of the rock hall was plunged in darkness.

Nowhere was there a sign of the Nurse. I let my eyes search further around the visible quarter: past shelves fixed onto the rough bed-rock wall, fume cupboards with rows of flasks which looked as if they had never been touched, crystallization bowls and graduated glasses. Empty, aged climatic chambers. A man-sized X-ray spectrometer, which might have seemed miraculous in the mid-1960s. An M.S.E. centrifuge which was at least as bulky.

“Where the hell are we?”

Ingrid Bergman gave no answer to that either, still facing away from me, staring into the room.

“What do you know about the others… the Team, Edelweiss, the President himself?”

She started, turned her bandaged head with caution to me: as if I had woken her. Had to clear her throat before she could answer.

“So far as Kurt and John are concerned, I know where they are. And I would guess that all the others are in about the same place, back at the starting point. Sitting there on the other side of the Atlantic, trying to determine where we have vanished. How the bed-rock can have gobbled us up.”

“How can you be so sure: how do you know they’re not on our trail?”

“Because you can’t search for something which doesn’t exist. Which never has existed.”

“And yet here we are.”

“True, my treasure. Here we are.”

Just as I had begun to get to my feet and to go off to investigate where we might be, Ingrid Bergman broke the silence. Started to tell the story. Feeling her way at first, then picking up pace.

It was a strange scene, a filmic moment. Two mummy-like figures in metal bunks in a vast rock hall, illuminated by a weak, bluish glow seeping from the night-light of the neon tubes. Some sort of melody flowing out of the hole cut into the bandages around the mouth of one of the mummies.

And it took an hour before she was done. Afterward I had no idea if any of it was true, even so much as a single word of it.

Her real name, she said, was Ingrid Oskarsson. I had continued to stare unblinking at the white of the bandaged head until a register in the voice—“so, call me Ingrid”—drew me back. She had been a promising science student, with peculiar side interests in cultural history, hand-picked fresh out of high school to work in the top secret Swedish nuclear weapons program, managed by the mighty Swedish National Defense Research Institute, the F.O.A. At the end of the 1950s, the project was divided into an “S.” program and an “L.” program, the names characterized by the genius for security policy euphemisms which were preferred by the young social democratic government of the time. “S.” stood for “shelter”—and its primary function was to conceal what was being carried out by “L.”, as in “loading”.

The process was concealed under a similar, ponderous use of bureaucratic terminology. Aided by the expression “Extended security research”, one could at a measured pace take all the steps necessary for making a finished atom bomb, while the general public was none the wiser.

According to Ingrid, “Freedom Of Action” was another of those coded expressions. The official meaning was that, in case of war, the country could change course and begin production of a Swedish atom bomb. But in fact a number of those weapons should have been finished by then, the work completed behind a veil of secrecy. Ingrid referred to it as dupery of the public and the politicians on a grand scale over a number of decades. Awareness of the Swedish atom bomb project was kept within a tight group of people.

“It was also during the first half of the ’60s, that we began to build this sprawling tunnel system. It just kept growing—and soon we started to refer to the whole construction as the Inner Circle. I wasn’t the person managing the project, not in practice, we had so many engineers, after all. People who loved dead ends, chutes, gizmos, hidden lighting systems, technological finesses. You know, Erasmus, boys. Like all the technicians behind the scenes of NUCLEUS.”

I looked into the holes that were her eyes: could see that her eyelids were shut. As if she could picture it all whilst telling her story.

“And even before that, the whole of central Stockholm was riddled with holes, like a mature cheese. We could fit eight thousand civilians plus the entire government into the Klara air-raid shelter alone, and the atom bomb-proof one at Katarinaberget was the world’s biggest when it was completed in 1957. Besides that, there were the years of what was referred to as “city transformation” and renovation of the center of town. The demolition of the old heart of Stockholm, the newspaper district, the destruction of cultural historical sites, the expansion of the district heating system after the war. Vast modernistic projects above and below ground—which at the same time served as a cover for all the construction which was going on deeper in the bed-rock. So we linked the existing facilities, creating nodes within our own navigation system: the new geography, in which we blasted out the most secret installations further below the district heating construction, so that nobody who was not authorized would have any business being down at that level. And spread out this underground landscape as far as we could. Wider than the city itself, in fact.”

She opened her eyes again, behind the slits. I felt her looking straight at me.

“We took our inspiration from the building of the underground train system in Moscow, all that monumental energy. Even this took its time, of course, years, half a decade of day-to-day work for many secret bus-loads of explosives experts and mining engineers from Kiruna: the most skilled of workers. And the basis for it was already there. A number of world-class facilities deep in the Scandinavian bed-rock, perfect for secrets and protection, not even the angels could reach there. All that was missing was a person with the right kind of spirited imagination. Or rather, two.”

Beyond her, I could make out parts of the apparatus, the out-of-date laboratory equipment. Everything seemed to be there as before, abandoned in a controlled flight, left neat and tidy. Or as if somebody had been there not long ago to clean up.

“But even all of this—years of tunnel construction, detonations every night, as far below the surface as a human being can bear to spend time without losing their senses—was just a means and not an end. The Inner Circle nothing more than a transportation system with a number of connected laboratories. As well as a way of making everything disappear, if that should prove necessary. Including ourselves and all our discoveries, the whole topography of secrets, the halls of mirrors. Into the same invisibility in which it had first been created.”

She shivered in the chill of the rock chamber. I handed her my blanket, which she at once wrapped around her own one. A cloud of breath rose toward the roof, like smoke from a dragon, as she continued.

“You understand, Erasmus, we had come a long way. Much further than the rest of the world realized. Sweden as a territory had, after all, been asleep: it had kept itself off the battlefield for more than 150 years. But during and after the Second World War, we had acquired hidden strengths. Real superheroes. Prominent nuclear physicists. Not just Lise Meitner and Manne Siegbahn, our own Nobel Prize winner, but also Glenn Seaborg—who was of Swedish descent and who retained a deep love of this country. All civilized countries have had scientific golden ages. That inexplicable accumulation of knowledge and talent in some lucrative field during a specific historical period, whether it be navigation or the petroleum industry. And this field was very much ours. But you know all that, my treasure. At least in theory.”

I thought I saw her playful eyes behind the bandages. It was the first hint since our unexpected reunion: that she and I had worked so closely, for so long, on my elusive dissertation. She acknowledged that I knew about the broader Swedish context. Nevertheless I did not react, let her lead on.

“I myself never really made the grade on the scientific side. But I had one god-sent gift: I could pull the wool over people’s eyes, society as a whole and the politicians, public opinion, whoever. My specialty was in that mental side of things. So I suppose my biggest contribution lay in keeping the secret secret.”

A sound came from the unlit part of the rock chamber, someone was moving in the darkness. My body tensed—but Ingrid kept going, regardless.

“For safety’s sake, we kept the management of the project not just within the Inner Circle, but to its very core. So there weren’t many who themselves knew the tunnels by heart. Had the entrance codes to the different sections, could follow the light-emitting diodes through the mass of the bed-rock, were aware of the structure of the whole labyrinth. Who didn’t just have instructions to follow—but knew the full scope of the project, both the tunnel system and the secrets within.”

Although a shape was emerging from the gloom, she wanted to finish what she was saying. And that needed just one more sentence.

“I should say there were two of us.”

When the Nurse joined us in our dimly lit part of the hall, she too was heavily bandaged. Not in one series of dressings over the whole of her head, like us, but in three separate bits. On the forehead, where the glass splinters from the lamp had penetrated. Under the eyes and around the mouth. The three sections were distinct from each other—I assumed because she still needed to be able to work without having her head draped in bandages, to make a series of incisions on herself, always maintaining some freedom of movement. Or perhaps because this particular Nurse seemed to do everything her very own way.

“I know, you should have got more rest. But Ingrid says that we don’t have the time. So this sure as hell isn’t going to be much fun, unless of course you’re funny that way.”

She ran a quick check on pulse, temperature, oxygen supply. Then the Nurse asked us to hold up our drips ourselves while she wheeled our bunks across the rock chamber, toward an almost invisible door. When one came right up to it, a small line could be discerned in the rough rock wall. I didn’t see the door handle at all until the Nurse pressed it down and I heard a muffled click. I gripped the briefcase harder, the cannula tight over the back of my hand. I felt my pulse quicken from that minimal exertion.

The chamber that we now came into was approximately fifteen feet by fifteen, and at least as high. I made out another metal bunk, X-ray equipment, an unwieldy defibrillator, needle destroyers, four portable spotlights, a hydraulic operating table, a full-length mirror and something that looked like an autopsy table made of tiles. Everything covered in the same red-gray coating as the equipment in the larger chamber. The atmosphere was heavy with the 1960s, the Cold War, the passage of time.

“What do you think, my treasure?”

I did not answer, didn’t even turn toward Ingrid. Tried with my limited field of vision to observe the Nurse on my other side: what she was going to do with us this time. Saw her start to dig around in her gigantic medical pack, while Ingrid picked up her story again.

“In these two laboratories, at the deepest point in the bed-rock, negative 308 feet, we studied the effects. On the dead and the living, humans and animals, short-term and long. The instant and eternity. Everything was so new for us, you see—and for the rest of the world. That’s the sole mitigating factor in our defense. We called them ‘Test Rooms’. What we thought of as military humor, Erasmus. You know: keeping things at arm’s length. Keeping them relative.”

Our psychologists always stressed how important it was, after our operations, to be as few as possible when the bandages were removed. Not to do the rounds, not to have unauthorized people about. In an ideal scenario only the doctor and the patient. To get over the shock of being confronted with someone different staring back at you from the mirror. And the whole monstrous side of it. The stitches like rails across your face, the seeping wounds, large bluish areas.

But now I was lying here in the bunk in front of the mirror, together with someone I knew nothing about, even what she was doing here, and wondering what she had made of my face. And with another person who could just as easily have been telling me fairy tales as telling me the truth.

She—Ingrid Bergman, or maybe Oskarsson, Ingrid—was the first one out. The Nurse maneuvered her higher against the bedhead, so she could see herself in the mirror. Undid the bandages, like a Christmas present, from the bottom up: chin, mouth, nose, eyes, forehead. I was already gaping far too much when the lower part of her face was uncovered. Felt the tear in the corners of my mouth as my stitches came undone under the dressings, one by one.

At least twenty years had been lifted from her. Under the grotesque bruising, there was little left of the mature Ingrid Bergman. No round face, no full mouth, nothing soft or spirited left at all. Instead she had acquired heavy eyelids and even higher cheekbones, thin lips, the mouth a straight line. The whole face had become younger, but also more severe.

I understood right away, of course, what the Nurse had been after: whom she had wanted to bring out. But I said nothing.

Then it was my turn—while Ingrid lay there and stared straight into the mirror, saying not a word, trying to piece together herself and her new face. I laid the briefcase on the bunk. Braced myself against both sides with my knees, prepared for all eventualities. When the Nurse removed the bandages, loop by loop, it felt as if she were pulling pieces of barbed wire out of my skin.

You can never be prepared for the unguessable. However much you train to do just that.

So I had to put one foot on the floor, and try to fend off the feeling that I was falling not just forward but inward, even though I was propped against the bedhead of the metal bunk. Took a succession of deep breaths when I saw myself, or whatever I was supposed to call it, in the mirror. Transformed beyond recognition.

My nose was the most striking thing. A large meaty lump in the middle of my face, still swollen, blue-red. Even my mouth had become thicker, coarser, because my lips had been made much fuller. But the totality of the change was most noticeable. Not just in certain parts of my face—but in everything that had been me to this point. It was the work of a master.

The Nurse, the master herself, stood between my bunk and Ingrid’s. Put her hands on my shoulders and looked, with me, in the mirror.

“Lionel Barrymore. Don’t you think?” she said with a meaningful smile.

I made no reply, did not even know if it was a question or an answer. Some sort of code.

“You know, Erasmo: ‘Malaya’, ‘You Can’t Take It With You’, ‘Mata Hari’, ‘Grand Hotel’, ‘Sadie Thompson’.”

The list of movie titles sounded like a badly encrypted message. I combined them in my mind to make a conceivable yet incomprehensible message. Mata Hari in the Grand Hotel in Malaysia tells Sadie Thompson: ‘You can’t take it with you’.

“‘Mata Hari’ is probably the only one I’ve seen… But that one I’ve seen a great many times.”

She said nothing, just wheeled me and Ingrid away from the mirror, the drip stands along with us. When we had got back to our places in the larger rock chamber, the Nurse changed our drips and tucked us in—so tight that we would, in our current state, not be able to get out.

“O.K., sweet dreams. And fucking keep still for the next few days. Anything beyond breathing and blinking is at your own risk.”

2.04

After precisely thirty minutes, Ingrid wobbled ahead of me toward the door opposite the one leading into the operating theater, where I imagined the Nurse was. Long enough for her to have fallen asleep.

My whole body felt like jelly, pain was burning all over my face. I heaved my weight after her through the darkness, up to the concealed entrance. Just as Ingrid opened the door—it sounded like the exact code that she had used to get us both out of the shelter and into the Test Rooms: eight beeps, in the same rhythm—all of a sudden my legs folded under me. I keeled over to the side. Fell straight onto the razor-sharp edge of the last fume cupboard along the rock wall.

Ingrid helped me into the tunnel system, now coal-black. Carrying her headlamp, she switched it on and directed the beam at my hip. A large patch on the uniform jacket, about four inches by six, was red-brown with blood. I stopped myself from checking in on my body: knew that adrenaline can suppress the pain of even the worst injuries.

“It’s O.K., I can hardly feel anything. We can stitch it later. Just take us where we’re meant to be going,” I said.

“Absolutely, my treasure. We’ll soon be in a safe haven.”

She switched off her headlamp again and went down the spiral staircase at astonishing speed. That woman—whoever she might be—must have phenomenal basic fitness. I clung to the handrail, concentrated on keeping up through the pitch-black, not losing the feeling of her proximity.

“Besides, you don’t even have a scratch.”

I heard her voice from somewhere down the stairs, stopped and waited. Knew that the follow-up was on its way, after the artificial pause; just held on for that melodic voice. Her seductive little tales.

“What you’ve got on your jacket isn’t blood, Erasmus, but a compound of gunpowder and rust—which has covered most of the metals in there for decades. Gunpowder accelerates corrosion, as you probably remember: not even stainless steel remains rust-free when enough test charges have been detonated, small prototypes for bigger things. So there were a number of reasons why we called that place the Test Rooms.”

Proceeding down the spiral staircase, I tried to recall Edelweiss’ lectures on this very topic, check whether any of it might be true. Still I said nothing. As soon as my feet touched level ground, the L.E.D.s in the tunnel floor came on. Ingrid was standing a few feet ahead in the middle of the passageway; as far as I could see, without having contact with any controls along the wall.

“How did you do that?” I managed to say before running out of breath.

Without replying, she set off again at an even faster pace—all but breaking into a run—along the shining red line which extended as far as the eye could see. And even though I could not remember the last bit to the Test Rooms at all well, with the anesthetic still humming through my body, I was almost certain that the diodes were showing us a different route to the one before.

I breathed in as deeply as I could, trying to oxygenate myself down here in the close and humid tunnel system, and set off after her. For some reason Ingrid seemed to have recovered better than I had, even though I had devoted the whole of my adult life to preparing myself physically for just this sort of challenge. Maybe it was the paradoxical effect of her age: the twenty years which separated us had given her much more time to train.

Whatever the reason, there was nothing to suggest that the woman who was half running ahead of me was close to seventy years old. No evidence, other than scant biographical details which as students we had found in the university’s registers—after taking bets as to her real age.

Her backpack—a combat pack which seemed a replica of my own—was my navigational beacon: the only thing I had to steer by, that I needed to keep in my sight. Underneath it one could also see something smaller, flatter. It looked like a normal case for a normal laptop. But it couldn’t be.

After half a mile or so heading straight, the L.E.D.s along the tunnel walls began to show the path leading up a steep gradient. Here again we placed our feet on either side of the steep passage, crosswise to the fall line, braced ourselves against the walls, allowing us to keep going, albeit at a slow pace. I kept an ever tighter hold on the briefcase as we climbed. Wound the security strap around my wrist, until my fingers began to grow numb and my knuckles bled from scraping against the rock walls.

Ingrid was now panting. As she turned regularly to check where I was, the blue of her bruised face appeared even stranger in the red glow of the diodes.

My wrist-watch showed how fast the tunnel passage was rising to surface level. At 22.54 the depth was 247 feet; at 23.08, 167.7 feet; at 23.21, 107.9 feet—and at 23.46, 26.9 feet. Then, on a small ledge at the foot of yet another winding spiral staircase, Ingrid drew up. Looked at her watch and turned around.

“Fourteen minutes left. That’s more than enough.”

She reached toward my combat pack, and took something out of an outside pocket before I had time to react. Then, leaving her own backpack on the tunnel floor, she disappeared into one of the system’s passages.

I had nothing else to do but remain standing there in the light from the diodes, peering into the tunnel where I had last seen her. Had no other place to go: abandoned in this strange underground landscape. I wasted no energy trying to guess where she had gone, why, or for how long. A few moments or an eternity. I just counted the seconds and then the minutes for myself.

At 23.51—after the five longest minutes of my life—she came back into the red glow with a quiet little smile.

“I sank them, Erasmus. We’re not going to have any more use for our field cell phones, neither yours nor mine. Quite the opposite. The telephones are their only live link to us, spreading fairy dust throughout the universe, even though we’ve taken the batteries out. So they had to vanish into the chasm of hell. Take this one instead.”

Ingrid put something plastic in my right hand, folded my fingers round it, as if it were a surprise. But of course I knew in an instant what it was. Had so often weighed it in my hand. I had felt how heavy yet light it was, the seeming impossibility of our possible flight—until the old-fashioned cell phone had one day disappeared from the bushes by the hut. After the last encrypted message from Alpha, which read “CREATE MORE TIME. PLAY SICK!”

“I bought them in a small store off the beaten track many years ago, while this type was still available. They’re not connected to the net and there’s no built-in tracking system. I got them when people could still rely on technology and each other. Three for the price of two, the exact number we need.”

Ingrid looked at her watch—and I did the same. It was 23.55. She put her combat pack down and took out four crunch crackers and a bottle of water. With a certain formality she gave me two of the crackers even though I still had rations of my own and, after taking a few big mouthfuls herself, handed me the bottle.

“From now on everything that’s mine is yours, Erasmus. Food and water. The flight and the plan. We share the divine solitude of the savior.”

2.05

At exactly midnight we were helped through the hatch, Ingrid first, by a man’s powerful hand. From my worm’s-eye view, lying on the white clinker floor looking up into the glare of the ceiling spotlight, I could barely distinguish his outline. He looked to be six and a half feet tall. Almost eight inches more than Ingrid, and as upright, slim, showing the signs of hard training. Military through and through.

Their relationship was evident at once. I observed the ease of brothers-in-arms, and from the intensity of their first embrace, it was clear that they shared more.

Although I could not pick up enough of what they were saying—it was now more than ten years since Ingrid had taught me the basics of Swedish—the scene was almost too clear: the reunion left neither of them unmoved. In spite of all their years of practice, they could not hide the weight of the moment. Nor their efforts to conceal it.

Perhaps it was because I was lying there, silently observing them. Or maybe, more likely, because one other person was standing a few feet away in the tiled room. A woman who, to judge from their gentle choreography, was likely his wife. How tenderly he brought her forward—so she too could give Ingrid a long, loving hug.

As my eyes adjusted to the blinding white light of the room, the details became clearer. At first I assumed this was yet another sort of laboratory from the old days, but then I saw that it was a laundry room. The tall man pushed the dryer back over the opening through which we had come, without obvious effort and using only one hand, while picking up Ingrid’s backpack in the other.

I tried to memorize the face. His eyes were at least as ice blue as Ingrid’s, hair cut to less than an inch, and he was going gray at the temples. A fine-looking if anonymous Scandinavian that could have played the hero in a B-movie. The woman was shorter, well below average height. She looked almost small beside her husband and Ingrid. Her hair had a tinge of gray and had been put up in a tight chignon.

The woman stumbled over me in the shadows, but caught herself. Only then did they seem to realize I was there on the floor. Ingrid made a sweeping gesture in my direction and the tall man reached down to me. It was a degrading position to be put in, as if to disarm me.

“So this is Erasmus,” he said in perfect English, giving my hand a hard and determined shake. “Sixten Lundberg. Good to meet you at last. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Erasmus Levine, sir,” I said, as distinctly as I could given my flabby new lips.

“And this is my wonderful wife,” he said, executing an elegant side-step in the narrow laundry room—like a dancer—to allow her to shake my hand.

“Aina Lundberg. It’s a miracle that you’ve managed to make it here!”

Her thick accent made me think again of Ingrid Bergman, the actress. Images from the past telescoped forward to the present. When Sixten had pulled me to my feet, again with one hand, treating my loose-limbed body like a child’s, his look flicked from my swollen face to the briefcase lying on the floor next to me.

“So, the man with the briefcase… Imagine, that such a thing still exists.”

As he led us out of the laundry room, Aina behind us, his words rang in my ears, “that such a thing still exists.”

As we went up the white-glazed pine half-flight of stairs into the hallway, I tried to get some sort of grip on the situation—although my strength was ebbing after the surgery and then the journey here to Sixten and Aina, when I should have had a few days at least to recover. I looked around for surveillance equipment, places where people could break in or attack from the outside, possible escape routes.

I saw no trace of concealed microphones, cameras, hidden alarms. In fact no distinguishing features at all: the whole of the newly built house seemed to have been standardized to the point of extinguishing all character.

Only someone with something to hide lives as impersonally as this.

The one break in all of the white was a pale-blue rag mat, and a natural-pine key-cupboard with a small red heart painted on the front. When we got to the kitchen—where the cupboard doors and shelves were also white—Sixten swung around and said we should go ahead. He would bring drinks right away.

The living room was colorful, almost strident, in comparison. Ingrid took a seat on the mustard-yellow sofa. I more or less fell into the matching armchair opposite and looked around to get a sense of who these people might be. Ingrid met my eyes with a soft smile.

But the room betrayed nothing special. The curtains and the deep-pile rug were in exactly the same shade of yellow as the sofa and armchair. Three marine watercolors hung on the walls in white plastic frames: sea and sun in a mildly naïve style. An illuminated display case contained rows of the best glasses, apart from those which had been set out on the glass sofa table—large ones for beer, small for spirits. I swallowed heavily. The smell of honey from the scented candles on the serving trolley made it hard to breathe.

I looked at my watch. It was perhaps significant that the curtains had been drawn, shutting out life outside on a Monday around midnight. And that they were lined with heavy black cloth on the inside. I got to my feet, legs unsteady, and went to touch the fabric.

“Like our blackout curtains, Erasmus?”

I could not hide my surprise, or rather consternation, at how close Sixten had come to me without my noticing. He was barely two feet behind me, carrying three Bloody Marys on a tin tray. He must have had the same training as Ingrid. They had no doubt made a fantastic couple—for those who were on their side.

“This weight probably vanished from our military stock decades ago: it was designed for use during war and in times of peace. I picked up a few bolts when I had the chance, thought that they might come in handy. And when Ingrid contacted me after all these years, they found a natural home here. From a distance, if by chance anyone should have the idea of spying on us, it looks as if we’ve already turned out the lights and gone to bed. Gives the full illusion, I’d say.”

“Nice.”

Since I knew absolutely nothing about either the man or his wife—even whether they were indeed called Sixten and Aina—I had to keep him at a distance. But it was not easy. With each passing minute he put me more at my ease, with his natural manner, his old-fashioned, almost boyish charm. Before he placed the glasses down on the table in front of us, he twirled the tray on his fingertips, as if it were a basketball, spilling not a drop.

“Aina will be ready in just a moment. But try her patented Bloody Mary in the meantime, it’s got a kick in it, I can tell you. My wife doesn’t drink a drop herself—she has her principles, that woman—but she doses up both the tabasco and the alcohol like there’s no tomorrow. I don’t think you’ll find a better painkiller this side of the medicine chest.”

Ingrid nodded, closed her eyes and raised her glass. Muttered a “skål”. I followed her lead. In my fragile state, the alcohol went straight to my head and I lost focus rather than regained it. Yet a sense of gentle well-being settled across what had been, only moments ago, my very sore face. Almost from a distance I heard Sixten’s voice as he raised his own glass—“There’s only me left then, so, skål to you all!”—and he too knocked it back.

When Sixten led us out to the kitchen, to the table which Aina had laid for us, she said “only Swedish specialties” to me in her endearing accent. With the first course, toast with fresh shrimp, she filled our glasses with aquavit and beer. Meatballs and mashed potato came next. The meal closed with “Ambrosia cake”, its white icing bright against the brandy and coffee she served with it.

I managed to stay sober, thanks to Sixten on my right. He showed himself to be an excellent conversationalist. Managed to keep my feet on the ground, always finding new things to engage me with—even in this situation, after our escape, with the briefcase settled between my legs under the kitchen table. Nothing which could in any way put our position at risk. Just enough easy and entertaining differences between Swedish and American culture, food here and there, the particularly difficult “sje-“ and “tje-“ sounds in the Swedish language. In other words: everything except what we should have been talking about.

The alcohol was a diversion, an evasion, flight as maneuver. Something which made things easier and harder in one and the same mouthful.

Because what I was witnessing was a high-drama reunion, celebrated with liquor and conversation. Not that Sixteen and Ingrid were impolite or had eyes only for each other. Strictly speaking it was Aina and Ingrid who were more absorbed in one another. They sat there holding hands, exchanged long, wandering sentences in Swedish which I had no possibility of deciphering because Sixten was keeping me fully occupied.

Nevertheless Ingrid and Sixten kept watch over each other with small stolen glances. Things that would never normally be noticed—except by someone whose life-long job has been to observe.

If I had kept drinking the alcohol, instead of pouring most of it into a bushy weeping fig next to where I was sitting, I’m sure I could have asked them myself, let all inhibition go. Even in Aina’s presence, I could have wondered about Ingrid and Sixten’s common history. What exactly they had together.

But I did not ask it. Not even when Aina stayed in the kitchen to take care of the dishes, she said, and the rest of us went back to the living room, shut the door and sat down next to each other on the mustard-yellow sofa; Sixten still with a brandy balloon in his hand. I in the armchair opposite.

While Ingrid took her “computer”—the same sort of portable command terminal that I had only seen Edelweiss use before—out of its small case and started it up, Sixten began his questioning. It became increasingly tough, like some sort of lie detector test without the detector.

“Tell me, Erasmus… you had a family, right? And left them, just like that. Because of the cause?”

His gaze was like veiled hypnosis: gentle and yet razor-sharp. I tried to catch Ingrid’s attention—she hardly looked up from the screen before answering my implied question.

“He’s snow white, Erasmus. Had the highest security clearance of us all. Including me. Only the Lord himself was more blessed.”

Ingrid continued to stare into the screen. I sensed the static in her gaze, she was on edge, like a hand grenade with the pin pulled, capable of saying anything.

I sat and said very little, hesitant. Then I went for it. Since I now had nothing else to cling to, nothing whatsoever in the entire universe—and since this man invited trust. It felt like a confession. I spoke as slowly as I could without becoming incomprehensible.

“Yes, a wife and kids. Two girls and a boy between seven and eleven. My wife gave them slightly unusual names: Unity, the boy Duality, Trinity.”

“And you’ve been deceiving that woman for all these years? Kept her in the dark as to what you were doing, even that you were in the military, living a double life? Used your research post at university—moral philosophy, wasn’t it—as your cover?”

“Yes, sir. Fully in line with regulations.”

“Of course, of course… But still, what a thing to have to deal with.”

Sixten looked at me again, I felt the heat of his proximity on my face. I was not sure if he meant me or Amba—but did not want to ask. In the silence, all you could hear was Ingrid clicking away at her keyboard. After what must have been a minute, Sixten poured brandy into Ingrid’s balloon and then into his own. Slowly he took a sip.

“But then you left all that behind? Wife, children, the Team, your job as Carrier of the briefcase? In the middle of this official visit to Sweden?”

“That is correct.”

“And what is your plan now?”

That was as far as I could go. Partly because I did not know how far our trust in Sixten should stretch in the present context. Partly because I had no idea myself.

Apart from the summons to meet Alpha in a fallout shelter 253.3 feet down in the bed-rock in the course of our trip to Stockholm, I had not received one single concrete detail. The rest had been an unresolved puzzle. Circumstantial evidence, some leads, more or less educated guesses.

In the end I had placed my life in Alpha’s hands. Maybe everybody’s lives, the whole of mankind’s. We two against the world.

I began to formulate an answer for Sixten. Something which would be vague enough, and not betray the fact that I knew no more than he did himself. There was a taste of blood in my mouth. Without thinking I raised my glass to my wounded lips, only to discover it was empty. Sixten poured a generous measure of brandy into his balloon and pushed it over to my side of the table. I drained it in one, felt the warmth spread through my chest, and was ready to break the silence.

If Ingrid had not got in ahead of me.

“He knows as little as you do, Sixten. I hadn’t wanted to lead any of you into temptation. Until now.”

She made a small gesture to me—and I squeezed next to her on the sofa. There was just enough room there for the three of us. She smelled of skin, and something else, maybe disinfectant following the operation. We all stared into the screen.

“This is our most satanic work of art. The only thing created by man which is a constant threat to all of his other creations. No-one can imagine its possible uses, the full consequences. Not the military. Not the politicians, the general public, not the individual. Not even me.”

Ingrid squinted at Sixten on her left, then at me, and then she looked straight ahead.

“And that is the only reason this work of art still exists. You can’t fathom its proportions: neither calculate its effects in any understandable way, nor present it to the public—without seeming alarmist or unseemly. That nobody really knows anything about the real effects of the present-day nuclear weapons system. Whether mankind could survive a world war using those means. Now that not only we, but the enemy too, have access to them.”

I blinked, my eyes tearing up from the bright light of Ingrid’s portable command terminal, and I searched my memory. The image was well-known and at the same time totally strange, as if from another era. Before the escape.

I had seen it so many times in those days, as part of Edelweiss’ repellent scenarios, the simulated nuclear weapons attacks designed to eradicate mankind; had them welded into my consciousness for more than a decade now. The warheads neatly distributed all over the globe—every one of them more powerful than the one that fell on Hiroshima. No longer just fission, splitting the atom, but now fusion too: atomic nuclei molten together in what were called “hydrogen bombs” or “thermonuclear weapons”.

And behind these neutral-sounding scientific expressions was the same process as in the sun’s incessant internal explosions. With immeasurably high temperatures and very real Doomsday potential.

Not even we in NUCLEUS had been allowed to know the exact number of our own nuclear weapons. The official figure was 7,700 of those separate, apocalyptic suns. It was reckoned the Russians had 9,500, but in our training we counted on them having significantly more. Roughly two thousand of the world’s warheads were thought to be at the highest state of alert, ready to be connected and co-ordinated in one way or another, with or against each other.

For us the real number made no difference. It was in any case far more than we needed to simulate absolutely anything.

When Ingrid pressed the keys on the terminal, red lines appeared one by one between the yellow triangles covering the world map. They showed the over-arching structure: how connections ran from or to our nuclear weapons bases, which nodes should be protected and where, and how. I tried to recall the details. It felt like a lesson from an earlier life. My head was bursting with alcohol, pain and exhaustion. Soon the whole surface of the world was covered in red lines and yellow triangles—in some places so thickly that the countries under them could hardly be seen.

Then Ingrid zoomed in on the U.S. All places I knew in my sleep, every foot both above and beneath the surface. The tunnels we had run, crept and wormed our way through. Trained all day long to prepare for what was called “Unauthorized nuclear weapons launch”. First to protect, and then to counter-attack, with our own Doomsday tools.

There were now no longer any names on the screen, but they were not necessary: just a number of angry yellow warning triangles. During our first week in West Point’s sealed wing we had to learn by heart everything about our seven nuclear weapons bases. Rattle off their geographical locations, mark them on a skeleton map, learn everything about manning and threats and alarm systems, so we would be able to recite it all, as Edelweiss put it, even when unconscious.

So the letters popped up automatically in my mind. It tended to arrange everything in sequences of three, just like the nuclear weapons codes or the sets of genes in living organisms. From east to west the initials of the active bases’ names and states produced SJN CWM BLM NDW WMM KW—standing for the air force bases Seymour Johnson in North Carolina, Whiteman in Missouri and Barksdale in Louisiana, the missile bases Minot in North Dakota, Warren in Wyoming and Malmstrom in Montana and the Kitsap submarine base up in the north-west corner of Washington State. From north to south the sequence was MND KWM MWW WMS JNC BL.

Then Ingrid zoomed out from the map, followed the red lines from one continent to the next. When she zoomed in again, on Europe, the names of our active nuclear weapons bases there came to my mind as readily.

Running from the south, the initials of the bases and countries hosting nuclear weapons for us read ITG TIA IRG BGK BBV HLU K. In other words Incirlik in Turkey, Ghedi Torre in Italy, Aviano in Italy, Ramstein in Germany, Büchel in Germany, Kleine Brogel in Belgium, Volkel in Holland and Lakenheath in the United Kingdom. From the west, LUK KBB VHB GRG GTI AII T.

When Ingrid had zoomed in far enough, I could see that some of the lines on her map were dotted. Two of them ran from Kleine Brogel in Belgium to each of Volkel in Holland and Büchel in Germany.

The rest of these lines went to two places which I did not know of as nuclear weapons bases—altogether different locations, marked on the map with black crosses. One in the southernmost part of Europe, on the tip of Italy, in this resolution perhaps Calabria, possibly Sicily. The other in the far north of Norway, possibly in Sweden: in any event, a long way inside the Arctic Circle. From each cross, a thin dotted blue line connected to the yellow triangles all over the world, all of our nuclear weapons bases.

I had never seen that link—and had absolutely no idea what it could represent. To judge from Sixten’s reaction, he too was in the dark. At last she started to explain:

“So, I’ve been tampering with our own global system. Pushing the nodes around. Reprogramming the system of connections. Day and night, over many years, whole decades. Baudelaire would probably have called them correspondences, all these secret underground linkages. I prefer to call it all the Nuclear Family. In any case, it’s now impossible for those back home, on the other side of the Atlantic, to tinker with the structure. There’s quite simply no longer any living being who can work out what will happen when one goes into the nuclear weapons system at any particular point: for example, tries to disconnect your briefcase, Erasmus. Not those who are pursuing us, not the President, not you, scarcely even me. But the risks of trying it are far greater than the upside. That’s the only thing I can guarantee.”

In the silence, I could hear Aina bustling about in the kitchen, the gentle clatter of dishes, the dishwasher being started up. Doors in modern houses are rarely well sound-proofed—although these ones might have been reinforced. Ingrid lowered her voice further.

“But I didn’t manage to finish all the preparations before we were forced to leave. So you see that some of the lines are still dashed or dotted. What we now need is some peace and quiet, here in our safe haven, plus a few field trips sooner or later. Then with Erasmus I can conclude the work.”

I turned to her. Saw how she licked the corners of her mouth: her stitches too must have broken open.

“The idea therefore,” she said, “is first to link up each of these points and lines, our hellish charges across the globe, to complete the circle—and then to disconnect them all at one and the same time. To short-circuit the whole damned Nuclear Family in one blessed moment.”

I closed my eyes, could clearly hear Aina humming. Unless it was my imagination.

“And that will be the end of the system. Every single circuit burned out from the inside. Can you imagine how complicated it would be to reconstruct? No politician would be able to push anything like that through, given what it would cost, given the ethical complications. For nearly half a century now this has been like a secret little movement. A number of people in the know have been involved from the ground up, contributed their little bit to ensure that the system appears watertight from the outside, but with significant cracks within. Waiting for someone to have the technology one day to bring all these invisible weaknesses together: to come as a savior. Or as several saviors.”

Sixten gave a little cough. Poured the last of the brandy into his balloon glass. Took a swallow before putting his question.

“But doesn’t that sort of… linkage exist? Isn’t it possible now to fire off America’s nuclear weapons all over the world? I reckon that quite a few of us were under that impression. But we’ve been imagining it?”

“No—and yes. Never before have the connections been put together in this way: fully mobile-driven. Beyond their control, without any of the networks passing through Centcom.”

“And the other briefcases? The Vice President’s, the Secretary of Defense’s?”

“Already disconnected, Sixten. The moment Air Force One became airborne on the way here, to your and my little promised land. Only the angels on high were watching it happening.”

Ingrid turned from the screen and gave each of us a triumphant look, as if expecting applause.

“That will bring to an end the era of nuclear weapons. The first epoch in mankind’s cultural history in which it could have destroyed its own species unopposed.”

Sixten seemed as dumbfounded as I was. He emptied his brandy glass before asking the obvious question.

“But what did you have in mind for the rest of the world, Ingrid? Russia? North Korea? Iran? It seems to me that America would be a lame duck if your plan really were carried through. Open goal for the first long-range ballistic missile that comes along, if I understand you.”

“We’ll deal with that as soon as we’re done with the U.S. and its European allies: the rest of the global contact net has already been rigged. The future has to begin somewhere, after all. In any case, everything’s going to look perfectly normal on the screens, like a magic mirror—we’ve spent decades building up a parallel fictitious system. Not even the most realistic training exercises will reveal anything out of the ordinary. Not until we’re about to fire off nuclear weapons for real, in a crisis, for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And at that point it won’t be possible.”

I swallowed, with some difficulty. Ingrid’s plan was insane, of course. Grandiose, deadly dangerous for us all, for the whole of mankind. I had known nothing about what lay ahead, what sort of plan Alpha had made for us following the escape. Yet I did not believe even her about all this. I could feel how she was looking at me from the side, scrutinizing me, trying to read me.

“And then we’ll all have to say our very best prayers that no-one manages to capture our souls. To make us do the exact opposite in that lonely little moment when everything is to be unplugged—and fire off the whole system instead. Because all of the weapons have to be put online for them to be short-circuited, all of our thousands of warheads across Europe and the U.S. The weight of all creation will be on our shoulders alone. Do you think you can cope with that, Erasmus?”

She could sense my doubt even though I said nothing. The smell of adrenaline, fear, which people say dogs can sniff through thick walls.

“I know, my treasure. It’s a high-risk plan. The most dangerous since the dawn of time. But to get rid of the nuclear weapons system you unfortunately need the same conceptual madness as for its introduction. Banish pain with pain.”

Again silence, thick as the velvet in the blackout curtains, these reinforced doors. I looked furtively at my watch: the time was close to zero four hundred. It had taken so long, or so little time, to understand who was leading this operation. The wide reach of just one person. Ingrid’s unimaginable impact.

Sixten cleared his throat, seemed to be having trouble keeping his voice steady.

“And what role had you envisaged for me, Ingrid? Beyond being your safe haven, as you described it?”

“That’s more than enough, Sixten. The gods are already singing your praises. There’s nowhere else in the world where we can vanish like this, as if swallowed up by the bed-rock.”

“And you know that I don’t want to become any more involved than that, Ingrid: I’ve done my bit. This is critical for me. And it’s even more important for my wife.”

“You don’t need to say that, dear friend.”

The silence which followed was even denser, if that was possible. The noise coming from Aina out in the kitchen had stopped as well. I tried to say something, if only to break the mood—but could not find any words. In the end, Sixten continued with his questions.

“But you had somebody else with you, didn’t you? A nurse, who you nevertheless chose not to bring with you here tonight?”

“Correct. She’s very good to have along, gets things done in her own unique way. But not everybody has to know everything.”

“You’ve referred to her as just ‘J.M.’ in our contacts, Ingrid. Is there anything in the way of a real name?”

“Possibly. They say she was originally called Jesús María, a promising textile artist from some nowhere town in Mexico. But she’s been with us for ever, behind the scenes. Can transform whomever into whatever, heal and cut, likes working with human skin, but she also produces miracles out of other materials. I tend to think that textile warfare is her specialty. Mostly she tries things out on herself, is the undeclared U.S. champion of body modification. I managed to get her to come along. It wasn’t easy: Erasmus had to put on a bit of amateur theatricals on departure, simulate a sudden, momentary collapse—and you’re not exactly the most talented actor, my treasure, if you don’t mind me saying so. But in the heat of the moment, just on the way out to the helicopters, the security people did after all follow my orders that Jesús María needed to come along too, to keep Erasmus under close observation. So she got foreign travel permission. For the first time ever.”

“So she doesn’t have clearance, you mean?”

“Are you kidding me? Jesús María is like a wounded animal, lives on old injustices, which is the only reason I managed to get her along here. But she’s never let us down in action. And if it hadn’t been for her, I wouldn’t be sitting here today. She and I are blood sisters. Literally so.”

I turned to face Sixten, since I could not bear to keep looking at the world map, all the lines, triangles and crosses: Ingrid’s whole crazy plan. He was practically upright now. Seemed to be taking on more and more of his old military persona, I thought, despite the alcohol. He had to be a seasoned drinker, may have spent decades as a fringe alcoholic.

“And do you know the current locations of the others? Have you got any co-ordinates for them?”

Ingrid tapped away at the keyboard. A blue ring appeared on the Eastern Seaboard, level with D.C., the White House, our own headquarters. Remained there motionless.

“That is?”

“Kurt, no less. One of the Team’s two, nowadays totally identical, bodyguards. Jesús María put a chip in his neck during surgery—as you do to a cat—many years ago, when the technique was brand new. So she would always know where he was. Only Jesús María and I knew about it. Now it’s very useful, pure gold.”

“Looks like he’s back at the starting point.”

Sixten knew more than he had let on. Ingrid must have given sufficient information for him to accept his role in what was going on, be willing to take the risk of hiding us away from the world’s most advanced surveillance apparatus.

“Is your thinking that the rest of the Team must be close to… Kurt? That they’re working in that kind of tight formation?” he asked.

“Edelweiss gives the impression of being predictable: he’s usually parked at the other of our two portable command terminals, except when we’re on official duty. He prefers not to move more than a few feet from headquarters. Rarely does. But it’s impossible to foresee where the power of his imagination will take him, even for me. Zafirah’s probably at the sharp end of things now, she’s always the one to throw herself into the thick of things, together with Kurt or John. But right now they won’t have the least idea where we’ve got to.”

“And the other outfits? The administration, Secret Service, C.I.A., special forces? The global search that must be under way for such high priority targets as you two?”

For the first time Ingrid turned directly to me.

“Hardly anyone knows that we even exist. Isn’t that right, my treasure?”

I felt the strength of her glare, so I turned back to the screen. Still without being able to get out a single word.

“Hardly anyone has an idea who we are, or where, you see. Or of the Team’s existence. And the few who do will keep on doing whatever they can to stop anybody from finding out—now more than ever. Finding out that we’ve had this type of experimental crack unit, contrary to all procedures, even at certain times with full operational responsibility for the most dangerous weapon in the history of mankind. So their goal will be to envelop us in the same silence from which we first emerged. Melt us back into hellfire, like a pack of tin soldiers.”

“And how many would you say know the whole story, Ingrid?”

“If you mean that we ever existed, then the innermost circle which Edelweiss called NUCLEUS, and I would say about twenty or so in addition to us. If you mean that I and Erasmus have broken away with both his briefcase and my portable command terminal still in hair-trigger alert, you’d have to reckon half that number. The President, inevitably, as well as the rest of the Team and a very small number of our most senior commanders. All the others who were here with us in Stockholm will probably have been told that we were taken down some days ago. Rendered harmless, in terms both of existence and function.”

A last little pause for effect.

“But as we always used to say, Sixten: ‘What is essential is invisible to the eye.’”

2.06

I could only blame what happened next on my exhaustion.

The fact that it was closer to 5.00 a.m. by the time we came back to the Test Rooms. My having been knocked off course by Ingrid’s plan. My lack of physical training for nearly four days—while at the same time having been on the receiving end of a number of anesthetic injections. My body’s reaction following the surgery.

But it was purely a beginner’s mistake. The sort of error I had not made in decades, hardly at all after beginning my special forces training at West Point as a new cadet, little more than twenty years old.

We could not find Jesús María, not in the large rock chamber where Ingrid and I had our bunks or in the smaller one, where she had carried out the surgery and then gone to lie down for a rest. We searched frenetically, splitting up so that we could cover a larger area, searching with the help of our headlamps far beyond the circle of light thrown by the night lights. Maybe Ingrid really was anxious that something might have happened to her “blood sister”. As for me, I was worried about where she might pop up next: like the time in my youth when a gigantic hairy spider had simply disappeared among the sleeping bags during a scout trip.

The darkness, the bed-rock, the plan, everything being so unreal—all of it probably increased the tension. And also the feeling from the two largest display cases furthest in toward the western long wall, which I had not studied closely before. I shone my headlamp into them, one at a time—with rising fascination and alarm.

In the right-hand case were a number of stuffed animals, packed tightly together, in lamentable condition. A zebra on which most of the beautiful coat along one side seemed to have moldered away. A tiger in an attacking pose with its head laid bare: only a thin white membrane protected the cranium. A mighty rhinoceros, with parts around the eyes and the horn which were white. A troop of monkeys of different sizes and in varying states of decay.

The left-hand display case was even more nightmarish—with a number of skeletons neatly lined up. First humans, everything from tall adults to very small children, after that animals by turn, based on what seemed to be their genetic proximity to mankind. More monkeys and apes, and in addition pigs, dogs and many smaller skeletons which I could not identify.

Here too everything was in a terrible condition. The skulls on several of the humans had crumbled, as if eaten away, all the monkeys and apes were missing body parts and each of the skeletons had some marked damage.

My own condition still being fragile, I had difficulty in bringing down my pulse. So I became amateurishly keen when I suddenly sensed something inside the man-high glass display case with the stuffed animals. A tiny suggestion of movement between the chimpanzees and the gorillas, right in front of the tiger. So lightning quick that you could hardly register it: just a fraction of a second.

When I took a couple of steps into the unlocked case, shone around with my headlamp among the crumbling animals, I felt the chill of some sort of silk around my throat. Twisted many times to make it as thin as possible. To cut properly into my larynx.

“Where the hell have you been?”

With her free hand, Jesús María pulled the door of the display case shut again—and switched off my lamp. As I gasped for air a sickly sweet smell streamed in through my nostrils. I tried to work out if it was moth-proofing for the stuffed animals, or some sort of knock-out drug. In the end I decided it must be something for Jesús María’s private needs. Something she was heavily dependent on.

Jesús María relaxed the pressure around my throat for a brief moment before tightening again. That was the usual strategy. Let the victim think he might escape—only then to make him lose hope again. Psychological destabilization as well as physiological. I began to cough. Partly because I had to, partly to play for time.

“Checking things out. Where our pursuers might be,” I finally said.

She kept up the pressure with the noose around my throat. Possibly pulled it a fraction tighter.

“I don’t take prisoners, Erasmo, I promise you that. You’ve got exactly three seconds. What the hell are we doing here?”

Torture training is just theory, however realistic the exercises are said to be. It is always harder to hold out in actual practice. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

“We were up with someone who calls himself Sixten. He seems to have worked with Ingrid in the Swedish program, in the old days.”

“That much I know… that guy. More.”

Yet again Jesús María relaxed the noose, maybe half an inch—before she pulled it tight again. Soon I would be able to hold out no longer. I could see small dots in the air: the first sign of serious oxygen starvation.

“His wife is called Aina.”

Jesús María loosened the noose, half an inch, three quarters, an inch. Probably realized that I would not be giving her any more information, would follow regulations by giving her details which were correct but without significance. I heaved for breath, tried to get in as much air as possible—and just then she tightened up again. Harder than before.

“Now you’ve got one second, Erasmo. For real.”

I did not have enough oxygen for more than a few words at a time. The syllables crept like fat caterpillars over my swollen lips.

“They had blackout… curtains in the… living… room.”

“Half a second!”

The blood was draining away from above my throat, as if my whole head was being cut off. I tried shaking my body, to communicate that I knew nothing more of value, but could not move. My legs started to fold. My grip on the briefcase loosened. It fell to the floor of the display case, the security strap starting to cut deeply into the flesh of my wrist.

Yet I made one last attempt. Nearly everybody wants to be admired, most of the time.

“She said… you had been… textile… designer… Mexico. You make… beautiful… thig… things.”

Jesús María hesitated for a second, let go a little, tightened again—before finally releasing. But probably not thanks to my flattery. More likely because she had realized what so many torturers had before her: a dead informant loses all meaning. His value falls from one hundred to zero.

“True. You can check for yourself, Erasmo. Follow the pattern and even someone like you should be able to understand.”

Some kind of fabric suddenly enveloped me, until I was covered closely in it from head to toe, like a body stocking. I could probably have freed myself, especially someone skilled like me. If Jesús María had not also tied me to both the gorilla and the chimpanzee.

So eventually Ingrid had to free me—once she had found me in the dark, among all the decaying stuffed animals. First she tried to undo the impossible knots. Then she cut them open, before putting the briefcase back in my hand and helping me out of the display case.

Long before that, Jesús María had given me a piece of advice. I only just heard it through the thick glass, her voice whispering as she closed the door of the display case on me, on her way back into the smaller of the rock chambers.

“But don’t believe a single goddamn word that witch says, Erasmo. Take my word for it. She can pull the wool over anyone’s eyes.”

2.07

I had spent days and nights reading the reports. Tested myself again and again, against those who did suffer breakdowns. Edelweiss also insisted that we must have the essential parts of the report in our combat packs. That we should never forget those hidden risks. That we, or someone else in our immediate surroundings—even within NUCLEUS itself—could be the very one the report anticipated. The Chosen One. The Destroyer. The carrier of the disease.

The initials of the classic 1958 report, “On the Risk of an Accidental or Unauthorized Nuclear Detonation”, seemed to be a play on the name of the research institute, the R.A.N.D. Corporation, and described at least one case of great importance. A heavily intoxicated officer managed to overpower the guards at a nuclear weapons base and started to make his way in among the rockets at the launch pad. The intruder was stopped in time, and no details of what had happened had leaked out.

The type of incident that went on all the time, and hardly anyone was aware of it. Our world of secrets, that strange little snow globe.

At that point, more than half a century ago, the American air-force alone had twenty thousand personnel who worked more or less directly with nuclear weapons. Not even a medical diagnosis of “occasional psychosis” was a bar to recruitment. Each year a few hundred were transferred to other duties on the grounds that they had exactly those symptoms—and according to the report an estimated ten to twenty people involved in managing nuclear weapons suffered psychological breakdowns every year.

The case notes were graphic, like literature, a horror movie. I still knew them by heart. One 23-year-old pilot, for example, was delusional. Some hours after speaking to a senior officer he was “overwhelmed with fantasies of tearing that person apart. He enjoyed the violence of the judo class. He felt like exploding when in crowded restaurants, though the feeling lessened when hostile fantasies of ‘tearing the place apart’ came to him.”

Flying warplanes became the ultimate liberation for him. Having the potential to hold the necessary power in his hand.

I read these case studies again, in a new light, horror-struck after Ingrid had presented her delusional plan at Sixten and Aina’s. Saw not only myself, but certainly her, in these psychological profiles.

Nor were the R.A.N.D. Corporation reports on “Deliberate Actions as a Cause of Unauthorized Detonation” comforting: “We are here concerned with unauthorized acts that are done more or less deliberately with an intent to bring about the detonation of a nuclear weapon. By and large, intentional acts will not be prevented by the safety measures that are effective against human error, such as the requirement for several independent steps in the arming process, safeguards which prevent inadvertent manipulation, and training personnel to maintain safe procedures.

“The borderline between an inadvertent mistake and a deliberate unauthorized action is vague. On the one hand, subconscious motivations may contribute to certain apparent errors; on the other hand, they may lead to actions that seem to be deliberate. An intent to cause destruction may be perfectly clear to the person who performs a certain act, or it may be concealed from him in his subconscious; it may be persistent and lead to a long-range plot, or it may arise as a fleeting impulse. For some seemingly deliberate acts, no motive at all can be discovered.”

I read on, put the neutral leaflet that Edelweiss had made of the central pages of the report down on the blanket and then my notebook over it, hiding any sign of what I was reading. Trying not to glance at Ingrid in the bunk beside me.

“The most dangerous disorders are those of the paranoid group. Advance detection is often difficult because persons afflicted with such disorders can act conventionally enough to avoid arousing suspicion. There are two delusional complexes frequently observed in people with paranoia or paranoid disorders which could bring forth the intent to cause an unauthorized nuclear detonation. One is the desire to seek fame—even by a purely negative act—and to immortalize one’s name. The other complex is the idea of having a special mission in history.

“The interval between the hatching of the destructive idea and the actual attempt may last anywhere from a few weeks to several years, during which these madmen can sometimes plan shrewdly, watching for an opportunity to carry out their intentions. It is this kind of methodical plotting which is particularly serious for nuclear weapons safety.”

I had a feeling that Ingrid gave me a look, as if wanting to ask me something. I sensed her warmth and intensity. But I went on reading:

“More frequent than these paranoid acts are senseless destructive acts committed as a result of impulse disorders or psychopathy. Usually they do not have the scope and magnitude of the paranoid group, but if they involve highly destructive tools they can also lead to catastrophe. But familiarity with nuclear weapons may also breed carelessness. Moreover, people with certain impulse disorders may even be tempted by the power of the weapon and its potential destructiveness, giving them the feeling of excitement, adventure, and drama. Pyromaniacs, for example, frequently desire to see tangible evidence of their personal power on a large scale and may plan for months to obtain jobs in hospitals or even in the fire department itself.”

And then the conclusion in the psychiatric appendix, the last part Edelweiss had put in his extract of the report. The chilling fact that what was called “Unauthorized Nuclear Detonation” was the perfect fantasy for people with paranoid tendencies—and that they were often drawn to precisely this sector.

Just because nuclear weapons provided the possibility of catastrophe “of a magnitude unknown to persons who might have been similarly tempted in the past. Nuclear weapons will not only make acts technically possible that could scarcely have been dreamed of before, but they may even constitute a specific attraction for those with paranoid potentialities. In fact, in certain paranoid delusions, a nuclear detonation may seem the ideal tool for translating the fantasies into reality.”

So here I was: in the company of what seemed like at least two such lunatics, on the run, hidden from the rest of the world.

My watch showed 09.56, September 11, 2013. Twelve years since we got our blank check to do whatever we wanted, with the entire so-called international community on our side. And more than a day since Ingrid slipped into a rehabilitation-induced lethargy, after extricating me from the glass display case.

Eventually I gave up reading, had no choice but to linger in this uncertainty, and put the leaflet back in my combat pack. Instead—to distract myself—I took a closer look at Jesús María’s strange piece of fabric. Tried to understand what it was that had enveloped me in the glass case. To follow the detailed instructions which Jesús María must have written on the black fabric while she was waiting for us the other night, with arrows and dashed lines in what looked like chalk.

But in spite of all my efforts, I could not bring together what Jesús María had called THE HYBRID. In enormous capital letters all the way across the long side “E”. So when Ingrid finally woke up I was forced to ask her for help. It was immediately apparent that she was familiar with the way Jesús María thought, her twisted creativity, clearly on a level with her own. After an hour or so we had managed to assemble the strange construction. A sort of combination of case and backpack—with the capacity not only to hold but also to be both.

“This is how Jesús María passes the time. The art of folding, like origami, or a traditional Japanese kimono. Clothes which can take a day to put on and which at the same time become some sort of ceremonial armament. Equipment which is indistinguishable from its structure, where surface and what lies beneath constantly change places.”

She put the empty contraption on my back, tightened the straps, found the exact balance. It was both incredibly light and surprisingly heavy. Like silk with steel or lead woven into it, a mythical hero’s armor. In some way the weight gradually spread across my back until I no longer noticed it.

Ingrid lifted in first the briefcase and then the combat pack, each in its designated compartment. Both of these bulky objects disappeared almost without trace, swallowed up by the shapeless and more or less organic hybrid. The difference between having zero and 110 pounds in there was bewilderingly small. Then she also took my weapon and put it in its dedicated place: a long narrow compartment at the side, hidden yet easily accessible.

I put the hybrid on the ground, walked around it with Ingrid to examine how it was constructed. The combat pack and my nuclear football had not exactly become one—but rather something new, a third something. There were compartments everywhere, zips, possibilities, alternatives. There was also a clever little hole for the security strap of the briefcase, so that I could still keep it over my wrist, even with the hybrid on my back.

But the decals were the cherry on top, Jesús María’s ironic nod toward this whole business. Using satire to disarm history’s heaviest weapon.

Because her experimental carrying equipment, which now held the “most important object in the world”, was covered on top with bits of fabric from foreign cities in typical ’60s and ’70s style. The name of each place plus a kitschy little textile design image—of just the kind one had on backpacks and padded jackets in my childhood.

Rich kids could buy “St Moritz” or “Chamonix” on their ski trips with their parents. Soon they added “London”, “Rome” and “Paris”, perhaps, from their solo educational trips in Europe. I was given “Aspen” and “Niagara Falls” by some distant relatives.

Now Jesús María had recreated these very decals, together with some other less usual ones, and sewn them onto the hybrid. The camouflage was perfect. Even a trained eye would not see more than a gigantic travel backpack of the old sort, plucked out of the cellar after many years.

It was still hard to talk, my whole face was too tight. My lips felt grotesque. Only if I formed my words at the very front of my mouth could I manage a sentence—but that was enough to express my unconditional surrender.

“She’s good.”

“Isn’t she just, Erasmus? The world lost out on a major artist.”

“How did she get hold of the material?”

With a sweeping gesture, Ingrid indicated the rock chamber’s south-east corner. Only when I let my headlamp light up the darkness could I see the broken office chairs which had been stacked there, higgledy-piggledy. As well as the mess next to them: tattered yellow rubber gloves for sun, torn blue hospital blankets for sea. The white stuffing from the chairs must have been the snow in the decals.

“Composite materials, you might say. Wrecked goods, like the woman herself.”

“You mean that Jesús María made the decals with her own hands?”

“Mmm… Jesús María has the memory of an elephant. Way too much so for her own good.”

I bent down and lifted the hybrid onto my back again.

“But it was I who asked her to make that for you, Erasmus, so you can disguise the briefcase and have both hands free from now on. I can guarantee you’ll need them.”

“She does what you tell her?”

“On odd days. On even ones she does different things.”

“So which was it yesterday, when she shut me in with the apes?”

“Oh, don’t take that too personally, my treasure. Jesús María gets confused between different men. She lives in her past.”

2.08

Those who have not lived through it think that sabotage, military offensive, counter-attack, not to mention war, are explosive occurrences. That everything unfolds in rapid sequences of endlessly dramatic movement. In fact, there is mostly immobility.

Edelweiss used to preach that we had to anticipate nothing just as watchfully as absolutely anything. The nuclear weapons system is based on this. The mere fact that it is there creates a sort of existential half-way house, where one is constantly as close to war as one can be, even during times of peace: however low the alert level is. The wet-behind-the-ears recruits who are sitting there furthest down in the bed-rock—in the indescribable solitude of the missile silos—have to guard the Dragon with the same vigilance at the lowest level of military preparedness as at the highest, because the system itself is by far the greatest potential danger. All day long. The whole year. Decade after decade.

And it was in just such an existential no-man’s-land, a gap in both time and space, where we now found ourselves. Ingrid said that we should take the chance to rehabilitate ourselves while we could. Before she was ready with her planning; before she gave us our marching orders.

So while she continued clicking away on the portable command terminal or practiced her yoga—the asanas which had names like “Warrior”, “Destroyer of the Universe” or “Corpse Pose”, defied description—I picked up my strength training again. Running was only a distant dream, really to be able to stretch out, lengthen my stride, push my body to the limit.

According to Ingrid, Jesús María did nothing physical: needed no training, since her fuel consisted only of dark matter. Pure vengeance. Unclouded hatred. We did not see much of her either, apart from when—once a day at most—she opened the protective doors to her inner rock chamber and came out to help herself to some of the masses of food that Sixten had put in our refrigerator. Like the rest of the machine park it seemed to have been left behind from the ’60s.

After I had done my light training session—increasing each day the number of reps, even though my body might not be ready for the intensity to be raised—I went into the shower room. The space must have had a different function in the good old days. I did not ask Ingrid about it because her answers rarely made me any the wiser. I turned the tap counter-clockwise as far as it would go. At first I had been amazed that the water started to run after all these years, and then at how icily cold it could become in the Scandinavian bed-rock. In due course I wobbled back to the metal worktop where I had left my training gear, half-paralyzed with cold.

I decided every morning that I would ask Ingrid about the next phase, and every evening I fell asleep without having done so.

On Friday the 13th a week had gone by since our flight. The day which more or less all of the western world had chosen as a symbol of ill luck. Ingrid had spoken about what she considered to be the most likely origin of this during one of her mesmerising lectures: how a number of Knights Templar had been imprisoned by Philip IV on Friday, October 13, 1307 and then tortured and executed.

It was also the day on which the curse of inactivity and uncertainty—the creeping in my body, the slow increase in my pulse: phase two or perhaps even phase three already—was finally broken.

First I heard the eight beeps from the control panel by the door. Then in came Sixten, fired off his warm smile.

“Do you fancy doing a round, Erasmus? Giving your spirits a boost?”

His running gear seemed at least as high-tech as mine, as was the clever backpack with two water bottles in pouches on the front of each of the shoulder straps. They not only demonstrated that Sixten was a committed runner, but also that he was at least as much of a perfectionist about it as about everything else.

“Ingrid has told me that you like running. So I thought it would be nice to have some company—and at the same time show you something of the surroundings. It might interest you, Erasmus.”

My watch showed 21.43. Late enough for us not to have to worry too much about bumping into anyone, early enough not to seem suspicious if we did so.

I looked at Ingrid. She met my eye, nodded.

“Have faith in your pretty new face, my treasure. You can hardly recognize yourself. So how would anyone else?”

2.09

Nevertheless, I pulled the thin, stretchy bobble hat down over my forehead further than was needed, just to deal with the temperature. The training clothes were a mandatory part of our combat pack. Edelweiss—who never himself walked more than a few feet—used to stress that keeping as mobile as possible counteracted the almost physical pain of inactivity.

The watch showed 16.1 degrees in the Test Rooms and now 7.3 up here on the earth’s surface. The air was crisp and brittle as glass. Just to be outside was dizzying. Everything was familiar and yet so unfamiliar. The same sky and the same moon as when I was feverishly waiting for the signal, looking out from the suite at the Grand Hotel, waiting for first sunset and then sunrise, before I found out who Alpha actually was and anything at all about her insane plan. Before the world was turned upside down.

Sixten noticed that I was catching my breath. Stopped and gave me a worried look.

“How’s it going, Erasmus? Is the backpack too heavy for you after your surgery? I’ll take it if you want.”

“Thank you, sir, but I can hardly feel it.”

“Good. It’s a bit out of the ordinary from the point of view of running gear. But even if we bump into someone unexpectedly tonight, or some time in the future, it’ll be fine. I prepared the neighbors for the fact that relatives from America are coming to visit. I thought that you would have a lot of equipment, stuff to carry that might look odd—so I laid it on a bit thick. Said that you were semi-professional bird watchers, that you were going to study some unique Swedish biotopes.”

Sixten took off his own voluminous backpack, large enough to conceal not just one but two telescopes. Without a word he handed over one of them, which I left protruding enough so that it could be seen clearly. The sign of a twitcher.

Then he took the lead again, running at a comfortable long-distance pace, in the range of ten minutes per mile. At that speed I could follow him relatively easily. It felt so strange to have both hands free and yet not be in civilian mode. The apparatus swayed softly inside Jesús María’s hybrid, the world’s most important object, contained within her thin and yet tough fabric, the magic she had wrought.

We left the houses and the glow of the streetlights. Steadily I lengthened my stride, felt the intoxication of freedom. As we passed the last windows before the wooded area I could not help having a quick look in. Small red lamps in the children’s bedrooms, blue moons with gold stars, cuddly toys. I let the memories come, wash over me, like blood, before I erased the images from my mind.

Then the darkness took hold. Tall trees, roots and rocks on the ground. Sixten was obviously used to moving in unlit terrain. When we had got far enough in, he stopped and waited. Here we were surrounded by fir trees, as in a chamber in the forest, I could hardly see the sky through the dense branches.

I glanced at the weakly illuminated numbers on my wrist-watch: 22.49, September 13, 2013. I was now in Sixten’s hands. This was a man it was easy to rely on. Yet I tried very hard to keep my focus—tensed all over when I heard through the darkness how he started to move in some way, the rustling of his windcheater, the situation changing. I readied myself to draw my weapon from the hybrid before he had time to get much further.

But Sixten was quicker than me. In the next moment I felt the cold of his bottle against the back of my left hand, just above the security strap. I raised it to my mouth and took a little of the sports drink, even though neither of us really needed it after running for such a short time at a light long distance speed. But he was not attacking, he was reaching out to me. Making a gesture.

“All the same it’s odd, you know,” he said.

I waited, watched, listened to the heavy silence. Until the pulse had subsided in my still delicate frame. Until Sixten at last said:

“How the lies just came. Almost by themselves, when I was going to talk to the neighbors about your arrival—and suddenly made up all that stuff about bird watching. That the machinery could start up again like that, with turbines and drive belts going full tilt, the whole business. After forty-five long years.”

I had to fight to keep down the sticky sweet aftertaste of the drink. Could hardly have said anything, even if I’d wanted to.

“Can you imagine it was Aina who wanted to move out here? That she, who hated everything to do with nuclear weapons from the first day, had seen a brochure about this nice new area in Ursvik and suggested we come and have a look. As soon as we stepped off the bus she began to sob like a little girl over her memories. Couldn’t stop telling me how fantastic the sense of solidarity had been during the so-called Ursvik March in 1961: the first large-scale protest against the Swedish nuclear weapons program. That it was this which got her into studying jurisprudence at Lund University, to choose a life in the law, this which was the starting pistol for the whole of her pretty formidable engagement.”

Still no sound. Save for Sixten’s gentle past tense and the soft hum of night-time motorway traffic.

“And you understand that I felt incredibly uncomfortable. Nya Ursvik was going to be built bang on top of our most secret installations from before. The Plutonium Laboratory, the Metallurgy Section, the Test Rooms. Even if they were impressively deep down I was worried that someone would stumble upon the network of the old system during the construction of the houses.”

A shock, like a shivering fit, ran through me. Partly because the temperature had dropped to four below and I was dressed for movement. Partly because Sixten’s intimate old man’s voice got right to me.

“I hadn’t been entirely honest with Aina either, saying only that I was involved in highly classified research out here. And as soon as the Swedish program was axed I was transferred to the disarmament section—which at first felt peculiar. But I was by no means alone. The fact is that Sweden’s delegations at the international conferences included many other unofficial advisors, who had earlier been active in our own nuclear weapons efforts. I could even say that we became a power in disarmament because we never became one in rearmament. Because of our history at the time, circumstances, you know how it is, Erasmus. The power of destiny.”

Sixten fell silent, seemed to hesitate. His outline had started to become visible through the darkness.

“So when Aina brought me along to some out-and-out activists’ meetings, in the early ’70s, I had not got around to telling her what I had been up to in the old days. And then after that the timing somehow never seemed right. A pathetic excuse, admittedly.”

When a moped puttered along somewhere nearby, Sixten fell silent again. Even though it was far away, he did not go on with what he was saying until the rider had stopped and had ample time to get indoors.

“So it was impossible for me to agree with what she wanted. We had a spacious house with a proper yard, and we weren’t in any need. Even though Aina pointed out the rather nice-looking small lawns which had been drawn in the brochure at the back of the houses here, as well as the wooded area close by—she even went so far as to find out that there were places nearby with relatively rare species of birds for me to study—I should say that I never got into serious negotiations over it. And that’s how the situation remained for a quite a long time. A sort of ceasefire, so as not to let the battle over our future home crush our wonderful marriage, just when we had both retired. Until Ingrid called, forty years to the day after she and I had separated.”

I recognized the sound now. The little swish when one sort of plastic brushes against another. I took the bottle from Sixten’s hand and emptied it in one go. I suddenly felt overwhelmingly thirsty. His story seemed to consume as much energy as a proper long run.

“Ingrid said that she had discovered my wife’s name in the record of some minor action. That your people had registered her presence among all the others, in what must clearly have been an extremely systematic mapping of your ideological opponents, all the way down to and including little Aina Lundberg in neutral little Sweden. That Ingrid had seen the first name and the family name and simply put two and two together. Just as she herself was beginning to plan your flight in earnest, and needed a safe haven to start out from. A whole succession of circumstances, I should say. The rather strange ironies of history.”

Sixten took a swig from the other bottle.

“And after that the situation was the direct opposite. In other words impossible for me not to do what Aina wanted, to move out here to Ursvik. She would otherwise have interpreted my reservations as if I wanted to avoid memories of Ingrid—when she got in touch I had felt compelled, despite everything, to tell Aina—and of course this would be the most perfect hiding place on the globe. In my humble opinion the only underground tunnel system in the world which is so extensive and at the same time so unknown. Or what do you say, Erasmus? You who are much more up-to-date than me?”

I did not answer, glanced at my watch. Not long to go till midnight.

“It took about a year before we moved here. For that I will always be grateful to Ingrid: that she brought me and Aina together again in this way. To the end of time.”

The hum from the motorway had as good as dried out. Silence crept in, you could feel it through your clothes.

“So how was it for you, Erasmus? Was it the double life, all the lies to your wife and kids, which eventually reached their natural limit? Or the cause itself? I know it’s often a combination of different factors—but still, could you pick out any one thing that finally got you to take this rather grandiose decision?”

I had been expecting the question. Knew that even genuine confidences are barter goods of sorts: you have to give in order to get. For a moment I was quite sure that I was about to say something decisive and irrevocable. About the long-faded sessions with Ingrid on my dissertation, about how the decision had grown imperceptibly, seemingly beyond my control.

Then the icy cold returned, the shivering through my whole body. He may have thought that I was only shrugging.

“It was no doubt as you say, Sixten: a combination of factors, hard to distinguish one from another. But I’m starting to get a bit cold. Can we move a little, do you think?”

2.10

I tightened the straps on the hybrid, looking for that weightlessness, and frequently had to adjust the balance as Sixten increased our pace. First to less than ten minutes per mile, then steadily nearer to eight. Maybe to test me, two runners competing with each other, to see what I was capable of, even in my current condition. Or perhaps to warm me up again.

But my body did not respond anywhere near as well as I would have liked. Even when the pressure was on, regulations prescribed at least fourteen days of rehabilitation after surgery or physical trauma, although in practice that was seldom possible.

The sentry box on the far side of the wooded area made me start, instinctively, feeling exposed. I glanced at Sixten. The area within the gates was bathed in a sharp yellow light.

“You can relax, Erasmus. The box has been unmanned for decades. The construction company puts up the spotlights, to scare away the kids who play here in the evenings—and the night watchman doesn’t start his rounds for another hour.”

I checked my watch again: just past midnight. Then we squatted to get under the bars and stopped in front of two low barrack buildings with peeling gray paint.

“So here it is: the scene of the crime. The facilities for all of those who worked on the nuclear weapons program at the National Defense Research Institute, the F.O.A., a maximum of two thousand people in the mid ’60s. On your left you have the Women’s Building and on your right the significantly bigger Men’s Building. But most of us with high security clearance were stationed deep underground.”

We walked a long curve through the area, with Sixten a step or two in front. Outside the half-collapsed fence behind the barracks there was a smaller section of forest. On the top of the slope above it one could make out a building covered in plastic sheeting. He nodded up at it.

“The Office. They’re going to turn the whole site into an independent school. You’ve come in the nick of time to see anything at all.”

Sixten ran ahead, ducked through a hole in the fence. After that the forest path became extremely steep, in fact almost too much for me to handle, more climbing than running. It cannot have been anyone’s plan that people come this way.

Once we had got up onto the illuminated asphalt-covered space, which would probably be the schoolyard when the conversion was finished, Sixten led us into the gloom beyond the reach of the spotlights. Up to the electricity box next to some flat cables by the darkened building’s emergency exit. After he had keyed in the code on the concealed set of buttons, again eight beeps, the double doors opened and the floor inside was bathed in light.

“Excuse the mess, Erasmus. They had to check the levels of radioactivity in here: how much was literally in the walls.”

What we saw, squinting against the light, was demolished offices on either side of the corridor. Rooms lay ruined to the right and left, only the most basic elements remained, plaster was splitting from the ceiling, whole sheets of it fallen, holes smashed in the partitions with a sledgehammer.

Sixten made his way purposefully through the familiar corridor—and turned around with a little smile when we had emerged into a sort of wrecked light-well with at least fifteen feet of clearance up to the ceiling.

“But there’s one thing the vandals haven’t got at yet.”

He clambered nimbly in behind a mound of debris to the enormous, white-painted wall and waved at me to follow.

“Do you see anything, Erasmus?”

I looked for the usual signs: developing cracks, uneven surfaces—or perhaps in this chaos, any sign at all of structure.

“Nothing. What are we looking for?”

Sixten took off his backpack and got out a multi-purpose tool—which he stuck straight into the bottom right-hand corner of the wall. As soon as he began to dig around in there, plaster flakes fell away in a puff of crumbs and dust.

“A trifle, of course, artistically speaking. Although Ingrid said that she had never seen anything more beautiful.”

In what had now become visible of a naïve painting, one could see four people in green protective suits busy with a decontamination operation after a radiation accident, or possibly a nuclear weapons test. Sixten continued to uncover more and more of the fresco. Large pieces, sometimes a whole hand-sized section of plaster in one go.

“So far as I know, nobody else was aware of who painted this, although the signature should have been a clue, what with all the cryptological talent concentrated here. But it was only Ingrid and I who were up so late at the Office—and it didn’t take me much more than a couple of weeks of intensive night-time work, while we still had some sort of free time. And then we disappeared down underground like mountain trolls. Lived pretty much furthest down on the laboratory levels for many years after that.”

From the time Sixten managed to pull away the first piece of plasterboard, it took no more than a quarter of an hour before the whole enormous mural was uncovered. It was at least thirty feet by ten, a highly revealing witness to a highly classified activity. In the bottom right-hand corner, the four decontamination workers in their protective suits formed their own little gray-green square—and on the left-hand side was a chemical section with flasks, bottles and molecules.

But the center of the picture was devoted to the atom bomb project. Three soldiers with pocket torches were lined up alongside an imposing, stylized green missile. At the top, along most of the width of the painting, a white mushroom cloud spread out. And in the very middle of it all you could see a couple close together. He had crew-cut dark hair and brown loafers, she wore pink flat shoes and had a blond pageboy cut. The man was handing a small black box, with “F.O.A.” written on it, to the woman.

So there was no doubt. The couple could only be Ingrid and Sixten themselves, back in the day—and it must have been a ring inside the box.

The signature in the left-hand corner was a small cryptological masterpiece. The allusion to the nuclear weapons system, the missiles in their underground cages, created simply by combining the couple’s initials in the right way: “SILO 1962”. Sixten, Ingrid, Lundberg, Oskarsson.

The artist observed me expectantly.

“What do you say, Erasmus? Not too bad?”

I kept quiet now, too: what could I say? Let my eyes continue to play across the mural.

“The new boss of the F.O.A., who came here when the program was to be buried at the start of the ’70s, was not that amused, apparently. But the work of covering the traces had to be done in a hurry, so plasterboard would have to do.”

Sixten stuffed the multi-purpose tool back into his backpack and took out a system camera.

“I’ve promised Ingrid to keep a record of the painting, before they destroy that too. We called it our ‘engagement picture’ because there was no other way for us to formalize it. Relationships of that sort were not allowed inside the organization, in theory, although we weren’t the only ones in practice.”

He walked right up to the lovers in the center of the painting, then changed to a wide-angle lens to be able to capture the whole subject and backed away as far as he could in the light-well. Then he put away the camera and took a spray canister out of the backpack. Quickly and in a matter-of-fact way, he covered up not just the lovers in the middle but also all faces in the painting as well as the signature with a thick layer of white. Then he looked at his watch.

“Right, job done. The night watchman will be starting his rounds soon. Which means we’ve got about thirty minutes from now before we have to be off the site.”

My watch showed 00.52. As best I could, since he took them two steps at a time, I followed Sixten all the way up six floors.

There was not the same scene of devastation at the top. The impression was more that it had been abandoned in great haste. The line of rusty metal desks along the right-hand wall seemed untouched since the heyday of the Swedish nuclear weapons program. Traces of the mainframe computer had been allowed to remain at the far end of the windowless corridor, beyond the two half-open, broken, electric sliding doors. Holes for the cables had been drilled into the walls.

“Well, Erasmus, here you can see the Liaison Center: the entire, rather impressive whole which we managed to put together. All of those underground laboratories with the tunnel system and then this office above ground.”

Sixten pulled a chair out for me by one of the metal tables in front of the perforated short wall. Then sat beside me and again started to poke around in his backpack. Got out two small packets, one for each of us, and a thermos of coffee. I tried hard to undo the sandwiches with the same care which had obviously gone into wrapping them, to follow the same procedure in reverse, without really succeeding. It was perfectionism, down to the smallest detail. The slices of liver paté lay in the exact center of the rye bread, the pickled gherkin not a knife’s edge out of line. And when he poured the still-steaming coffee into the plastic mugs, there was precisely the same level in both—as if he had used a pipette.

Then he went on with his account. Step by step, year for year, while we stared into the holes left behind by the mainframe computer.

“At first I mostly had to sit here and test initiation mechanisms, calculate implosion processes, long days and nights, not getting much sleep. But I was a wet-behind-the-ears engineer, don’t forget, and found pretty much all of it extremely exciting.”

I glanced at the time, tried to get him to hurry up. Fourteen minutes left until we had to be gone.

“Progress in the actual scientific work was quick, almost frictionless. The official designation of the S. program was “Research program for shelter and defense against atomic weapons”. And who would be opposed to that? To find out how one protects oneself against something of that sort? But the significant thing for us was the L. program, where the loading wash constructed. Everything under cover of the S. program’s smoke-screen.”

Sixten poured the last of the coffee, again dividing it equally between the two cups, and said that public opinion began to get too hot for them, in spite of the camouflage. As early as 1956, Sweden’s National Federation of Social Democratic Women had taken a stand against the country’s nuclear weapons program, and opposition spread rapidly. When in a newspaper interview in 1957 the head of the F.O.A. openly claimed that Sweden could have its own atomic weapon in as few as six or seven years, he was promptly sacked. Popular writers, the minister of foreign affairs, all sorts of celebrities came out against the Bomb.

I nodded with impatience, already knowing enough about all this from my dissertation.

“But just then, in the program’s darkest hour, along comes this young girl, straight from high school in Kiruna. You could say she was a godsend. The word was that she was a master cryptologist, a natural talent, at seventeen years old. Before long she proved to be not only exceptionally good at encryption—but also at pulling the wool over people’s eyes. That applied to everybody: the most senior politicians as well as our immediate superiors. Formally she started as an assistant clerk, on salary grade F.2 if memory serves, and ended up as a departmental head. In practice, irreplaceable.”

“Ingrid Oskarsson.”

“Right. I should say that she could encrypt reality itself.”

I stole another look at my watch: 01.14. Eight minutes until the time by when Sixten had said that we absolutely needed to be out of here. Yet no trace of urgency in his voice.

“And not a peep was heard for thirty-five years. Not a word about the program: that Sweden had once planned to have its own nuclear weapons. Not a word about secret tests or underground laboratories, the F.O.A.’s actual role, before a series of articles came out in 1985. I cannot say that I was innocent of the cover-up. But Ingrid was the architect behind all these magnificent smokescreens and the shell organizations.”

Then he looked at his watch. Perhaps now a touch of haste in the way Sixten gathered up the mugs, plates and thermos and put them in the backpack, even though he took time to fold up the sandwich paper. When we got to our feet, I had to ask about the strange pale rectangle on the wall to the left of where I had been sitting. It looked as if somebody had removed a painting from there too.

“Yes, that’s where the control panel used to be. The one that regulated the lighting system, the diodes in the tunnels, the sliding doors up here, everything mechanical and hydraulic, all the electronics. That too disappeared without trace when the program was buried.”

Then he pressed right there, in the very center of the empty square on the wall—which opened soundlessly. At that exact moment, when the lighting across the whole floor went out and before the wall closed behind us again, I could spot the night watchman’s torch flickering in the staircase at the far end of the corridor.

“Cool,” I said.

“Oh, that’s no big deal. Just a toy. But it is amazing how much of this still works,” Sixten replied.

He hurried on ahead through the pitch-black stairwell, his headlamp unlit. I had to keep a firm hold of the handrail so as not to lose my footing. Once on level ground—I reckoned it to be a floor below the one we had come in on—he keyed in something on another concealed control panel, to judge from the sound. A circle opened up in the floor. Underneath, the red L.E.D.s showed the way back down into the underworld. Sixten continued his secret history while we followed the path.

“The objective of the military authorities was that we in Sweden should produce at least ten nuclear charges annually by the end of the ’60s. Each one of them was to have an explosive force equivalent to that of the Nagasaki bomb, that’s to say ten to twelve kilotons, and rising a good deal higher than that. I assume you must be wondering how a small country like ours could have such economic muscle—and there I can say that only part of the funds came out of the government’s published means, or out of coded transfers to the F.O.A. from other bodies within the defense department. The biggest part came from our top secret financier.”

I did not ask any follow-up questions, or did not want to reveal either my knowledge or my ignorance. At 155.5 feet below ground, the track of diodes came to an end at a massive protective steel door. Sixten pressed in the code on the control box and we passed through the shock-wave tunnel, the blast doors. Once we had passed the last lock, he gestured at the room and shook his head.

“The Plutonium Laboratory. It was in here that our First Tier nuclear weapons program foundered.”

The rock chamber was significantly smaller than all the other corresponding laboratories I had seen. When Sixten pushed the black rubber-covered button, the neon lights came slowly on. There might have been nobody in here for decades. The laboratory looked as if it had been theatrically left to history: one clean mug; an unused notepad; a loose electric lead on a desk. A collection of props from Sweden’s dreams of becoming a nuclear weapons nation. Its new era as a great power.

“And plutonium, especially Pu-239, is a gnarly little bastard, as you know, Erasmus. Not just the alpha particles and the impressive toxicity. Also pyrophoric to such a degree that it can ignite at any time, which at first made it troublesome for us even to handle the substance. Yet all of this was only a smokescreen.”

Even now, I resisted my urge to ask questions. He rapidly opened and closed the protective doors to the different laboratories, sometimes with such speed that I hardly managed to see anything. From my dissertation research, I did of course recognize the terms on the signs, even in Swedish. CRITICALITY ROOM straight ahead of me, METALLURGY to the left, MECHANICAL INITIATION to the right and further along the same side NUCLEAR INITIATION. Beautiful capital letters in chrome, seemingly covered in the same red-gray gunpowder dust as in the Test Rooms. The march of history.

We passed the air locks at the far end of the laboratory and were suddenly out in the tunnel system again, on the far side of the Plutonium Laboratory. Sixten picked up his story, in the dreamlike glow of the diodes—as the history itself grew ever more unreal.

“And all the time we had to move ever deeper into the bed-rock. For Second and Third Tier development we needed highly specialized sites, with only the smallest number of the select few having any insight. That’s when we had the Test Rooms blasted out. 325 feet down in the bed-rock of the Fenno-Scandinavian Shield. We chose an exclusive little team of researchers, highly qualified but also sufficiently old that they would probably not be alive when the secrets leaked out, as eventually they would. So that they could never be witnesses.”

Sixten’s voice became hoarse, almost a whisper.

“And our researchers did die, as planned, one after the other—but much quicker than expected. Partly due to age and partly the secondary effects, I would guess. At first I admit I saw it more as a curse: something along the lines of what happened after Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened, and I just awaited my turn. But when nothing happened, I started to think about exposure times and realized that the researchers had spent far more time down there than Ingrid and I did. And when I then came down to the Test Rooms again, a year or two ago, for the first time in four decades, I got to see how dreadful the condition of the animals and humans in the display cases was. Then it wasn’t hard to imagine how the researchers had gone through the same process of systematic disintegration.”

He stopped, turned to me. In spite of the weak light from the diodes on the tunnel floor I could clearly see Sixten’s face twist into a grimace. How the stiff and correct mask lapsed—and suddenly he threw his arms around me.

“I’m sorry, Erasmus, but it’s just so dreadful! What we did then, without really knowing anything about the effects, and what you are still doing… so desperately looking for the formula to exterminate ourselves. Isn’t that utterly incomprehensible?”

I nodded. There was so much I wanted to ask, all these veiled remarks, stifled indications. But I knew that the mussel could snap forever shut if one was too eager to get at the pearl. That’s what Edelweiss used to say.

So I let Sixten regain his composure, lead us further down, without my having the slightest idea where we were. He kept checking his watch. After another couple of control boxes we emerged into darkness: unprepared tunnels, without either light diodes or floors being covered with any sprayed concrete. Then he got his headlamp out of his backpack and led me over the raw bed-rock, holding me gently under my left elbow because I did not take my own lamp out of the hybrid. It was a way of showing confidence. Giving back something in the exchange game.

“Where are we now?” I said, not least to underscore his authority as pathfinder.

“In the furthest outer edge. The idea was to make the area impressive. In total, 215,000 square feet of ground, many miles of tunnels just to connect the living quarters with the different laboratories.”

“But it didn’t end up like that?”

“No.”

A short pause for effect.

“It ended up many times larger. An almost exponential growth in the original plan—and not at all how it was first intended. I should say that in the end it was only Ingrid and I who had an overview and could work out precisely where one thing began and the other ended. Over time at least half of Stockholm was burrowed out and tunneled through. A complex system in which inside and outside somehow began to swap places, like a logical paradox, an impossible picture by Escher. And even though we called it all the Inner Circle, nothing down here was really circular or symmetric.”

After a few minutes of watchful walking—even Sixten stumbling every now and then despite his headlamp—he stopped and bent forward, mumbling:

“S.T.33, S.L.143… just after the bend… I’m sure it was somewhere here…”

Then I saw it, maybe before he did. A red trap-door in the ground, blasted into the uneven bed-rock, with the same type of chrome capital letters as in the Plutonium Laboratory. I could read “F.E.” in the light of Sixten’s lamp.

“So what’s under there?”

“Haven’t got the faintest idea.”

“You haven’t looked? Seriously?”

“Dead serious, Erasmus.”

His tone darkened. I stood, waited for him to continue.

“Aina isn’t too happy about my digging in history—so I promised her never to find out. But eventually I came to think that you could do it, Erasmus. There isn’t anyone better suited.”

“And why don’t we just open the hatch now, Sixten?”

“Because we don’t have the key.”

Once again: there is a time for follow-up questions, just as there is for answers. I continued to let Sixten dictate the pace.

“Besides which, we’ve got to get back up now, pretty quickly—so we’ll have to take the shortest route. Don’t let me out of your sight.”

The time was 02.38, the depth 195. My whole body was aching as we moved steeply through the dark, raw tunnels with Sixten’s headlamp shining the way, our breath growing heavier. I was drained after the run and the sight-seeing tour. After Sixten’s story.

By 03.13 we had come up to level negative 18.4 feet. Then I recognized where I was: this was the last spiral staircase up to Sixten and Aina’s house. We must have taken some sort of dark short cut, one of a myriad alternatives through the tunnel system.

Sixten entered the code on the box in among the crevices in the rock wall—and the concealed trap-door hatch above the staircase slid aside. He crawled up first, then helped me through the hole with my enormous hybrid, and glanced at his watch.

“We’ll have to get a bit of a move on.”

He pushed the washing machine back over the trap-door and started to move the dryer, revealing what seemed like another ordinary but somewhat oversized drain. I thought it must be another way down into the tunnel system, possibly an emergency exit from the house in case the first one became blocked. He got this trap-door to open.

What this revealed was a metal panel with a muddle of tiny controls and abbreviations lying flat under the floor. Most of them began with “T”, from 1 to 191 in symmetrical rows from left to right. There were also longer abbreviations such as “T.R.C.1”, “T.R.F.C.6”, “N.I3”, “T.232” and “O.G.F.4”.

“So here it is,” he said with a satisfied little smile.

“Yes: the control panel from the Liaison Center up in the Office,” I said.

“Spot on, Erasmus. I took it with me when everything was to be removed: thought it might come in handy. And I’ve worked for a long time, I’d like you to know. Prepared for your arrival down to the tiniest detail, even though Ingrid kept me waiting so long for an exact date.

“The hardest part was the initial work. To connect our house—we were still able to choose this very one, since it didn’t have the best view but was perfect for my needs, logistically and geologically—to the system. I knew that the thickness of the surface layer out here varied between ten and fifty feet and that this part had the softest clay. Yet it took time to dig down the necessary thirty-six feet or more before striking one of our old tunnels. Then to break through into it, synchronizing with the construction company’s night-time work so that no-one would notice the racket, and at the same time avoiding tunneling through into their own network.

“But I got to know the developer out here, decent guy, who was happy to show me all of the plans. Then there was a rather extensive bit of electronic installation. New control boxes along the whole system, new code, new network down in the Test Rooms.”

While Sixten was telling me this, interesting as it was, I was studying the designations on the control panel. It offended the cryptologist in me that I did not understand. So in the end I had to ask for a clue.

“T.R.C.1, for example, Sixten? O.G.F.4? Or T.232? Just so I understand the idea.”

“Yes, yes. The first ones are quite easy. The lighting in Test Rooms Case 1, furthest in on the eastern short wall. The Office Ground Floor Switch 4. But then it gets less straightforward. The ‘T.’ designations stand for the L.E.D.s in the floors of the relevant tunnels. Counting from the surface downward, in a rather complex cross-section system referring to the relative level where the particular connection ends: T.232, in other words, is tunnel number 232 from above, seen in cross-section, within the Inner Circle.”

I just stared at him. All this elaboration. All these efforts to hide. Something.

“There is of course a lot more I could explain about this, but now’s not the time. Using this control panel, however, we were able to turn the lights on and off at pretty much every point in our vast system. And you can imagine how I was amazed when the entirety of this machinery—the diodes in the ground, the illumination in the laboratories, basically all of the hatches and doors except for the ones up in the Office—still functioned.”

“The display case furthest in along the short eastern wall—the one with the stuffed animals, the gorilla and the zebra?”

“Correct. I’m illuminating it there now: a bit of night lighting for you and Ingrid.”

He flipped up the switch marked T.R.C.1, gave a quick smile and looked at his watch. I did the same: almost 04.00.

“I don’t have time to explain more. Eventually I’ll tell you about it all, before our day of reckoning. But I can say that we needed to know more about the long-term effects of certain particular substances—so I managed to get hold of those animals and skeletons, which back then were in magnificent condition, and which would otherwise have ended up in some store room at the Natural History Museum. And when I returned to the Test Rooms after four decades, and was so shaken by their condition, my first intention was to get rid of them before your arrival. But then I thought they would be a kind of witness to all this horror, what the fight is actually all about. Hopefully be some kind of inspiration for your imminent mission.”

Then Sixten pressed on the edge of the control panel, which hummed around in a half circle. What now appeared was a seemingly complete sketch of the Inner Circle. Not only all the connecting passages but also the chutes—marked with black blobs—and side passages shown as dashed lines through the bed-rock.

“We needed a detailed plan of this underground landscape: the cartographers produced a minor miracle. Don’t you think, Erasmus?”

I nodded, waiting for more.

“But this wasn’t actually what I wanted to show you.”

Sixten began to search with his fingers behind the map, between the paper and the metal plate itself. Had to reach around the whole control panel before he managed to get the object out.

“It was this.”

He put a key in my hand—it bore the same letters as on the red trap-door: “F.E.” The double-sided sticky tape, which had been used to attach the key to the back of the map, stuck to the palm of my hand.

“It’s as if it’s been lying here, waiting for you. Erasmus Levine, of all people. What were the odds of that, do you think?”

I could have asked what sort of key it was, what there might be under the trap-door in the unlit tunnel, why I was the chosen one. But I did not—because everything about Sixten said that there was no time now. He looked at his watch and took a deep breath, before covering up the control panel with the dryer and pushing the washing machine aside again. I dropped the key into the zipped pocket of my waterproof pants and followed him through the hole leading back underground.

“Time to deliver you into Ingrid’s care, so I can return here before Aina wakes up, always on the dot of five. As I said, she doesn’t like me digging around in history. And certainly not at this time of night.”

2.11

I had a hypothesis, but not much more.

As soon as Sixten had left me, closed the last protective door from the outside, I took my dissertation from the pocket of my combat pants. Ingrid was fast asleep: she did not seem to have woken up to register the fact that I had returned.

My watch showed 04.41. The display case with the crumbling apes was lit up thanks to Sixten’s control panel. The gorilla seemed to fix its one good eye in the direction of my bunk. It would not be easy to get any sleep—but I was not even trying.

I had not leafed through my dissertation for more than a decade. Not since Ingrid had without warning left the university and I became a part of NUCLEUS, was moved to the little Catholic University and buried myself in Sister Jane’s dark library, met Amba, started the family, had the children, one after the other, as if following a model set up by someone else. I could hardly recall anything of what I had written.

I turned the pages, intently examining the sentences in search of one particular thing—though I could no longer remember if I had mentioned it in the dissertation.

2.12

I got no further before I fell into a kind of stupor. The following night, once Ingrid had fallen asleep, I read on—and the night after that. Yet I found no trace of what I was looking for.

When I had gone through the whole dissertation, after two or three similar nights with the staring gorilla my only waking company, I was exhausted. Every night I fingered the key which Sixten had given me, locked myself in the shower room and weighed it reverentially in my hand. Felt all of its symbolic load. Carefully studied the engraving: “F.E.” Following the third of those nights, I decided to ask Ingrid about it as soon as she woke up, to tell her all about Sixten’s tour, the red trap-door in the tunnel floor with the same inscription. And then I never did.

Sixten gave me no lead either. He came down to fill the refrigerator a couple of times a week, greeted me warmly—in the same way as before our long talk. As if it had never taken place, with all the secret history he had shared with me, all this trust. As if he had never given me the key to a space few others could have ever seen, maybe no-one had.

One evening, just before he had finished filling up our supplies and while Ingrid was in the shower room after yet another yoga session, I confronted him. Started gently, so the mussel would not close.

“We couldn’t go for another run, could we, Sixten? It was great to be able to stretch my legs, breathe fresh air.”

He gave me a sympathetic look. Almost pitying.

“I wish we could. It must be hard work for you here in the bed-rock, I do see that.”

Sixten stopped, seeming to concentrate on getting the last of the meatball sandwiches with beetroot salad and a slice of orange into the fridge next to the tubes of cod’s roe paste, which Ingrid appeared to be emptying with regularity.

“But I’ve promised Aina not to head out like that again. She was beside herself with worry when I got back to our bedroom after our little tour. Poor thing had lain awake all night—and that hadn’t happened since Ingrid made contact a few years ago. She had even started to imagine that I’d gone off with you lot.”

He managed to fit the broad sandwich in beside the tubes, as precisely as he did everything else.

“So at least until Aina’s jubilee, which will be trying enough for her as it is—not to be able to invite any guests apart from you, because we don’t dare tempt fate at the moment—I don’t want to disturb her more than I can help. But I can let you out to go running on your own, Erasmus. As long as Ingrid is happy with that.”

As Sixten packed the empty containers into his backpack, I wondered whether I could ask about the key. In the end I held back. I suppose I did not want to trouble either Aina or him any further.

“That would be great, Sixten. I’ll check with Ingrid.”

It took time. Each initiative started to feel ever heavier, as if we were under water. Edelweiss would say we must now be in the fourth stage of the curse of tranquility. So I did what I could. Methodically built up the level in my strength training on the floor beside the bunk. Checked the briefcase, its contents, the mechanism, the functions, over and over again. Repeated the rituals. Mumbled the different steps for launch, as if they were prayers for myself. Kept writing in my notebook. Trained, showered, trained, in an unending wait for Ingrid to give us our orders.

Just after my return from the long tour with Sixten, she had said that we would be ready to regroup soon. Proceed to our first stop, one of the few places which had still to be connected up to the whole, before her plan could be set in motion. By the time she said “soon” to me again, a month had passed: we were deep into October.

There was now also a sweetish smell around the Nurse, whenever she momentarily abandoned whatever it was she was doing in her smaller rock chamber and passed by Ingrid’s and my bunks on her way to or from the refrigerator. It was as if she did not have much to do with us.

Nor was there the slightest peep from across the Atlantic. Not from the Team, nor from Edelweiss, nobody was put forward to negotiate with us, not even the President himself. Nothing.

That too was entirely in accordance with the directives: our escape had to be concealed by them as by us. In some of our training exercises, public opinion had swung in favour of the terrorists. Even if they were threatening to blow up the world, having commandeered the means to do so, sooner or later the tide could turn against us. The fact that the U.S.’s proud system for mastering The Weapon—all these dual controls and double checking, piles of proclamations and international documents to stop it spreading to other nations—also involved something like our strange little team.

The silence, unlike in our training, was ghostly in the extreme. Finally I asked Ingrid if I could go for that run around the area on my own. Perhaps not so much for the sake of the exercise, the oxygen, the sky. But to see if the world above ground really was still there.

“Absolutely, my treasure. So long as Sixten is happy with it.”

Once more her confidence—in both him and me. When Sixten next came down to fill up the refrigerator, he was aware of his other task: to follow me to the surface and let me out of the house at about the same late hour as the first time.

Aina had already gone to bed.

“I’ll set the egg timer to one hour. After that I’ll call the police,” he said with a straight face.

With some ceremony, Sixten turned off the house alarm—they seemed to use it even when they were at home.

“And keep to the forest, Erasmus. The security company looks to have increased their patrols after the mysterious demolition of a wall up in the new school development.”

Only then did he give his warm little smile. Looked at me with his deep-blue eyes and opened the door.

“Bye, my friend. Please take care.”

Out on the sidewalk everything swam before my eyes for a moment. I took a few unsteady steps before I got into my stride. My whole compromised state. Solitude, freedom, captivity, all at once. The air felt fragile and ice-cold. It crackled in my nostrils as I lengthened my stride toward the wooded area, the thermometer on my watch showing below zero. Ingrid had said during our rare conversations that it was unusually cold for the time of year.

Naturally this was another test set by her. To let me run free, literally speaking, with the primitive cell phone my only lifeline. To see if I came back. The Nurse had certainly put some sort of tracer in the hybrid I took with me, no doubt as hard to find as the one that was in the briefcase.

And where was I supposed to go to? Back to my family, which I had been betraying for so long? The rest of the Team? To a court martial, a death sentence?

When I got to the place to which Sixten had taken me, the hollow of dense trees, I did not turn back again as I had said I would, but went further on the path which I had memorized since our tour together. Once I caught sight of the yellow surveillance light, I followed the fence around the area. The sense of being able to choose my own route, simply pull a little at my chains, was intoxicating.

Up by a massive white wooden building I stopped to drink, to breathe. My heart was pounding. The timer on my watch showed that I still had twenty minutes until Sixten’s deadline: I must have run faster than I had calculated. Thoughts raced through my mind as I looked at the facade of the building. The sign seemed to be newly made from an old original: “Gunpowder Railway. Ursvik stop.” The laminated images on the building showed train enthusiasts gathered around an electric engine which looked to be from before rather than after the Second World War.

Then I started to run again, as if by remote control, following the rusty rails. I found myself on a narrow path between the structures and the forested rock wall to my right. Five substantial metal doors appeared further along. Probably one of the upper entrances to the Inner Circle that I had seen on the plan in the laundry room.

That was when I saw them: outside the fifth and last metal door, counting from where I was standing. Instinctively, I tried to find somewhere to hide, before realizing that would only seem even more suspicious. Instead, I increased my speed to get past them as quickly as possible.

It would have been striking enough with any two adults standing in an embrace just there and then. But since the couple consisted of Sixten and an unknown woman, it was even more remarkable.

It was instead the couple who took cover when they saw me, stepping up toward the dark, wooded area with long strides, but I was able to catch a clear sight of the woman in the construction company’s surveillance lights. Short blond hair, almost as tall as Sixten, certainly more than five feet nine. And at least twenty years younger.

After that I ran a long loop back to the house, so that he would have enough time to return before I knocked on the door. My timer—and his egg timer—buzzed at the exact moment Sixten opened the door. He gave nothing away. Just asked the usual questions runners ask: about speed, how it had felt, clothing versus temperature. I answered briefly but comprehensively as he led me down through the tunnel system, back to the Test Rooms. Our safe haven.

Ingrid was sitting in front of her screen as usual, only looking up quickly to note my return. I sat down next to her on the bunk and stared into the map of the world. All these triangles, crosses and lines.

“I’ve been thinking,” I said.

Ingrid turned to me: that long, absorbing look.

“Yes, my treasure?”

“Sixten… what do you actually know about him nowadays?”

“More than I need to. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I was only wondering about him when I was out just now. A fascinating person, imperturbable and yet sensitive. There must be a lot beneath the surface.”

“There’s no surface, only depth. Sixten is all solid.”

“But can he handle the pressure?”

“It just makes him even harder, tough as a diamond.”

“And temptations?”

“If you mean women, my treasure, they’ve of course always flocked around him. But trust me: Sixten can withstand anything and anybody. There’s no-one I would sooner trust with our lives.”

2.13

One week later, on October 23, it was time for what Sixten called Aina’s “jubilee”. In other words, her seventieth birthday.

As we were helped up through the hatch, Ingrid first and Jesús María last, I heard a strange sound, some sort of distorted music. I looked around the laundry room. The next time I caught it, on the half-flight of stairs on the way up to the hallway, I recognized it very well: like an echo from another time. The cheerful theme tune from “Dallas” the T.V. series in the late ’70s—and it seemed to be pouring out of the hybrid.

Nobody had ever called my cell phone. Its only function had been as a transmitter and receiver of encrypted messages between Alpha and me, while it had lain hidden in the ruins of the hut for half a year. Yet the tune could not be coming from anywhere else.

The others were a step or two ahead of me in the hallway, on their way into the living room. Yet they did not seem to hear the ring tone at all. It was the first time Sixten and Aina would be meeting the third person in our company, and we had now been kicking our heels 328 feet under their house for more than six weeks so everybody’s attention was probably focused on this awkward encounter. The mood was charged. Festive, however. All of them—but neither Jesús María nor myself—were laughing too loudly.

We had also arrived extremely late, since the preparations had taken much longer than expected. We had been given a selection of Aina’s old clothes, from the time when she had been a lot thinner, and Jesús María was given permission to unstitch and redo them as she wished. Out of these she had managed to make a tight mauve dress which fitted her paradoxical shape—everything that was artificial: a wasp waist, enormous breasts, and something that looked like a hump on her back—as well as a bottle green party dress for Ingrid. I had been lent a dinner jacket by Sixten.

Jesús María had also equipped us with disguises. We had decided to play it safe, even though Sixten insisted that we would be the only guests and that the blackout curtains would make the house look empty and unlit from the outside. As if Sixten had taken Aina out for a surprise birthday dinner, which was apparently what the neighbors had been told.

So I was blond and curly, with hair to my shoulders. Besides that, I was wearing ice-blue lenses in roughly the same shade as Ingrid’s—or rather, as she had been wearing earlier, before becoming a brunette with a neat bob and chocolate-colored eyes. Jesús María had a thick red wig and intense green lenses.

Best-looking was Aina herself. She must have devoted hours to her make-up. The sort of discreet elegance that first has to be chiseled out with great care and then filed down again just as scrupulously. The diamond ring had been taken out in honor of the day and sparkled alongside her slightly too-broad smile. She was wearing a black pleated skirt, a pigeon-blue angora sweater and matching high heels.

Aina really deserved more guests, I thought: a much larger gathering. But she had had to accommodate herself to the cause, as she and Sixten called it, because our paths happened to cross around the month of her seventieth birthday.

At about the same time as my ring tone started up again—whoever was calling must have been keen to get hold of me—Ingrid leaned forward.

“Forgive me, dearest Aina. But your pearls seem to have got tangled up in your chignon, just there at the back of your neck. You can’t see it yourself. Let’s step in here for a second. Can you help out, Jesús María?”

And the next moment all three of them were gone, vanished into the bathroom. Then came a short vibration from inside the hybrid: definitely audible in the silence around me.

“Is there another bathroom?” I asked Sixten.

“Of course. There on the other side of the passage,” he said. “And take it easy. I can wait a bit with the champagne. A few seconds at least.”

I managed to get the cell phone out. The display showed five missed calls from No caller I.D.—one this morning, which must have been when I was in the shower, and four in the past hour—as well as two voice messages and a text. I sat on the toilet lid and listened to the first message. Did not dare to stand in case it was going to knock me off my feet.

It was not Amba and the children, which I had hoped as much as dreaded. Rather the opposite.

“Erasmus, my little lost lamb…”

I switched off the message, cutting into Edelweiss’ gentle voice, stared straight ahead. Then I played it again, my eyes closed: pressed the cell phone tighter to my ear so that no sound could escape.

“…as you well know, I’ve always had a particularly soft spot for you. Even worried about you, in many ways looked on you as a son, ever since you came to us.

“And now I really do have reason to be concerned. Because news has reached us that you’ve taken yourself off the formation, and what’s more with the briefcase in active mode. Which shouldn’t even be possible.”

He smacked his lips, gave a heavy, audible sigh. It was hard for Edelweiss to speak for so long at a time.

“All of this is serious enough, although it could still be put right. But we’ve also found out, through the same reliable sources, that you’re now in a group together with Ingrid Oskarsson: our former Alpha.

“And I’m aware that you know her from before, Erasmus. Better than most of us, apart from myself perhaps. That you think you’re pretty well acquainted with her.

“But what really troubles me is that however much you know about her, or you may think you know, she will always know more about you. Which means that she’s going to exert a strong influence over you. Very strong.

“Since we also know about Oskarsson’s plans, which presuppose your own participation because of our rigorous security measures—the impossibility from a pure technical point of view of doing anything like that on one’s own—I’d advise you to call me as soon as you hear this. Help us to render this woman harmless.”

The first message ended. I played the second.

“I’ve already tried to call you a number of times, Erasmus, now that we’ve received definite confirmation of what we previously only suspected. Maybe you’re still asleep. But as soon as you wake up, I would ask you from the bottom of my heart, with all of your and my care for the world—everything we’ve fought so hard for together—to get back in touch with me. We do not have a minute to lose.”

He must have exerted himself to get out the last bit, before he would have had to drink, rest, breathe.

“Because I can guarantee you that a nuclear explosion of the sort Oskarsson is planning would not only extinguish all life in those parts of the globe where the bases lie. The consequences would also be that the ozone layer disappears for ever, for all time, in the same way as over Mars once upon a time; permanent drops in temperature of twenty to thirty degrees worldwide, before the U.V. rays burn up the entire surface of the earth once and for all. Only a fully fledged apocalypticist would do something like that.

“But you know all of this—at least in theory. So call me, Erasmus, my dear friend, that’s all I’m asking. A brief moment of cool, calm reflection: I’m giving you ten hours with effect from now.”

When the message ended, I just sat there with the cell phone in my hand and my head between my knees in an effort to get some blood back to my brain. Then I filled the basin with cold water and dunked my head, as if I were being waterboarded, five times up and down. Then I dried my face and hair with their pink towel and sat down on the toilet lid again, steeled myself. Opened the little envelope on the cell-phone display.

It was not an S.M.S., as I had thought, but a media message. I did not even know it was possible to receive something like an image on such an old cell phone. The picture was also hard to make out, due to the low resolution. The only thing I could see was a large white surface in the foreground, some sort of long stick with a darker top and a blurry figure in the background.

The image was incomprehensible—until I suddenly realized what it must have represented.

Although my head was still cold from the water, I felt the heat rise up over my hair as if I were already in flames. The content of the picture was simple, almost stylized, like the message. A plastic jerry can in the foreground, a matchbox beside it. And Zafirah in the background. She who was always sent into the thick of things.

I clicked on the timing information. The picture, the almost over-explicit message saying, “WE ALL BURN SO FAST AND FOR SUCH A SHORT TIME”, was received at 17.33—when Edelweiss’ ultimatum of ten hours from the day before, when he recorded the messages, ran out. And immediately after, he had tried to call me four times: as I was making my way through the secret hatch under the floor drain up to the hallway.

Without even having to check, I also knew that his first call and the picture message must have been sent at precisely the times of sunrise and sunset in Sweden at this time of year. That Edelweiss, like Ingrid, favored symbolic time, as he called it.

I checked the actual time: my watch showed 18.16. Only then did I hear sounds from the hallway. The three women coming out of the bathroom opposite, Ingrid chatting away as she moved toward the living room—“Now just knock back the whole glass, Aina, you really need it!”—and Jesús María saying nothing. They had been taking their time in there too.

I managed to get to my feet, my body seemingly moving on its own. As soon as I came into the living room, Sixten forced a champagne glass into my hand.

“At long last, Erasmus. I have to admit I was wondering what on earth you were all up to in there, in your various bathrooms. But it’ll have been worth waiting for…”

Aina interrupted, her smile even broader than Sixten’s if that were possible.

“Long hair really suits you, Erasmus.”

“Yes, you should have seen him when he was a student, in his first year…” Ingrid said—before she and Aina started giggling like schoolgirls.

I was trying to get a grip on the situation, my expression giving nothing away. The champagne must have gone straight to Aina’s head. She who never drank a drop.

While I took a careful mouthful of the alcohol, I let my eyes travel across the walls, the marine paintings, the mustard-yellow curtain arrangement: all this intense normality. Trying to find the ways which Zafirah and perhaps Kurt-or-John would get in. As well as the hidden emergency exits through which we would soon have to escape.

Sixten emptied the champagne bottle into our glasses, cleared his throat and began his speech.

“O.K., everybody, it’s time. The moment I never thought would arrive. When Aina at last becomes older than me!”

Small roses flushed Aina’s cheeks, Ingrid gave her a sisterly hug. I looked around for the potted plant, had to stay sober. Sixten cleared his throat again before going on.

“Be all that as it may… as it may…”

When he looked down at the floor, a little too long for it to have been merely for effect, I thought I could see tears in his eyes.

“…for our many long years together, my darling Aina… for the fact that Providence brought us together. Skål to you—and to us!”

“Amen to that!” Jesús María said.

An awkward silence followed: this may well have been the Nurse’s first utterance in this group. I noted that she too had emptied her glass. Everyone except Jesús María then turned their gaze toward me. It was my turn next.

“To Aina!” I said.

Ingrid awaited her turn, a practiced speaker. Then she too raised her glass and caught everyone’s attention. Let her look slowly and theatrically move between Sixten, Aina and me.

“Für Elise!” she said at last.

I jumped as if hit by a shock wave, could not stop myself. Ingrid’s two small words had confirmed my hypothesis. It was Beethoven’s best known piano sonata, the one which Lise Meitner used to play as a four-handed piece with her nephew and fellow researcher Otto Robert Frisch. Maybe not least because Lise’s real first name was none other than Elise.

Besides which, the first letters in the name of the sonata were the same as on the key Sixten had given me: “F.E.”

My thoughts swirled chaotically. What I simply could not understand was what Aina could have to do with any of this. Until Ingrid addressed the birthday girl, now all of a sudden pale.

“It was in many ways Lise, or Elise, who shaped even your destiny. Made my and Sixten’s relationship impossible—and at the same time allowed you two to live your wonderful lives together. In one magical instant. Almost exactly forty-five years ago, on October 25, 1968, just after 4.00 p.m.”

The silence became like a vacuum: we were all gasping for breath.

“And not even I, with my galloping imagination, thought that I would ever get to see either of you again.”

A new artificial pause, and I stole a look at Jesús María. Even she was staring at her feet.

“But in the end, that’s how it turned out: at your home in Ursvik, of all places. And at long last I want to take this opportunity to thank you for the fact that you too, in turn, have made it possible for me to be standing here today. That you have indirectly played your part in what we are now on the way to accomplishing. So skål and a hugely happy birthday, dearest Aina! Your place in history is secure.”

Sixten refilled our glasses once more before we clinked them in toast and were about to take our places at the table. I picked up my hybrid again and fingered the key in the right-hand trouser pocket of my dinner jacket. Held back a little as we made our way to the kitchen.

“Yet there’s not a single word in my dissertation about any underground laboratory,” I said, as quietly as possible.

Ingrid leaned closer. Her breath carried the fruity aroma of vintage champagne.

“No, I promised Lise that, my treasure. That she could take the secret to the grave with her.”

Then she put her mouth to my ear: her warmth burned on my skin.

“But in practice it makes no difference, since the key has been lost without trace for decades. So no-one other than the angels knows what’s under that trap-door.”

2.14

It was impossible to concentrate. However much Aina asked, however hard she pushed me. Because I was thinking about the key, the trap-door, the laboratory, what Ingrid had said. And the two messages to my cell phone. Edelweiss’ gentle voice. The photograph of Zafirah with the jerry can.

So there I sat, looking for alternatives, emergency exits, while Sixten placed the first course and then the main course on the table. Toast Skagen with fresh shrimp and Kalix bleak roe, filet of beef with Hasselback potatoes and morel sauce.

But Aina would not give up. From somewhere far away—although she was only on the other side of the table—she kept questioning me in her strong Swedish accent. She had a firm grasp of English terminology, all the technical terms: seemed to know most of what there was to know about even our own nuclear weapons. The whole expansion which the rest of the world had long since interpreted as disarmament. All of those damned speeches.

It was more reminiscent of an interrogation training session than a conversation. Aina’s sharp look, her fiery, or maybe implacable, side. Her narrowed eyes which could surely see through anybody. The rest of the company—the birthday dinner party—slowly but surely faded away around us.

And in the end I could not resist. Talking as ever on a general level, no classified information, but still, I told Aina that our so-called “Revitalization” would cost us at least 350 billion dollars in the coming decade. And that the total cost for the world’s nuclear weapons arsenals at the moment was estimated to amount to a trillion dollars per decade.

Because those in the humanities are often mathematically illiterate, I felt I had to clarify the amount. A one and twelve noughts. One million million. This before the vast world-wide rearmament, phase two, which would be the secondary result of our own efforts, I said.

Aina nodded eagerly. She reminded me so much of my mother before she vanished into herself: the same warm acuity. I gave her more to nibble on. Details of how much we were spending on nuclear weapons research right now, without the media bothering very much about it—at the same time as we were using all our negotiation skills and rhetoric to stop more countries from starting their own little Doomsday kits.

I took a deep breath and rattled off information. Told her that in the last financial year 433 nuclear weapons projects had been carried out at the Sandia National Laboratory, with a total budget of 2.5 billion dollars. Los Alamos had 293 projects costing 2 billion, Lawrence Livermore 159 projects for just over 1.5 billion, Y-12 seventy-six projects for 800 million, Kansas City 102 projects for 600 million, Nevada forty projects for 400 million, Pantex nineteen projects for half a billion and Savannah River ten projects for 150 million dollars.

“It’s so incredibly difficult to take you seriously,” Aina said.

I did not answer—because I did not know if Aina was being dismissive about us here now, our wounded little team, or about the entire nation.

“And yet we have to. Every second.”

I said nothing. Listened for sounds from outside, any sign from the attackers, somewhere beneath Sixten and Ingrid’s restrained conversation about the old times. Jesús María was not there at all, she must have gone to the bathroom.

“How do you mean, Aina?”

“Where to begin? Perhaps with your sporting talk: about the nuclear football, or the ‘baseball’ cards?”

Then she began questioning me about the briefcase and the cards, which reminded her of the collectors’ cards from childhood. On the front there was a photograph of the possible terrorist. On the back, succinct facts: name, home town, relationships, suspected crimes, the basic necessities for those who ordered our drones into Pakistan, Syria or Afghanistan. So as to be able to lock the sight on that specific person’s cell phone—regardless of who might be holding it at the moment of impact.

“What we’re talking about is a death sentence which is completely unjustifiable from any legal point of view,” Aina said.

Then she went on about how vulnerable the system was. The fact that around one thousand of our warheads, and about the same number of Russian ones, are incessantly online, fully primed to be launched at any moment.

“Isn’t it strange, Erasmus, that everybody talks about this as if it were in the past, in the imperfect tense: joking about the Cold War—without realizing that the situation is unchanged today. And, with extinction, there are no nuances. Even if the number of warheads ready to be fired off during the worst years was perhaps three times as high as now, it’s still more than enough. The combined explosive force of the American missiles alone can wipe out mankind—and make the globe uninhabitable for all time. In addition to disturbing the equilibrium of the universe, what with the effect of the sun through all those dust clouds rising high into the atmosphere and the cold emanating from the then desolate Tellus, well, you know…”

Aina emptied her glass, and kept on talking to me as if I had no role in the current events.

“And imagine if, or rather when, all of this is hacked. It is after all more than twenty years since Kevin Mitnick was said to be able to start a nuclear war simply by whistling into a pay phone…”

I naturally said nothing about the fact that, at that moment, our entire nuclear weapons system appeared to have been both hacked and encrypted by a lone individual. Out of the corner of my eye I saw how precisely that woman was leaning further and further over the table, ever closer to Sixten. As if lost in their common history.

Aina did not spare either of them a look.

“Recently I also heard a lecture on what are called autonomous weapons systems: war launched without us being involved. The academic said that man is more and more being regarded as the weak link in the chain. That we will soon find ourselves outside the ‘decision loop’, as she put it.”

A scent wafted from the other side of the table, so distant and yet so familiar. Chanel No. 5, the most classic of perfumes. My mother’s party perfume. I thought about remarking that Aina and she used the same fragrance. But I could not get a word in edgeways.

“And it’s certainly not only you, Erasmus. The lunacy is spreading all over the world again. North Korea, Iran, this appalling Islamic State which could get its hands on a warhead, and Russia obviously. Did you know that the Russians practiced offensive nuclear weapons attacks on us as recently as last Easter, on Good Friday, as if nothing were sacred? The targets were in part the National Defense Radio Establishment on Lovön island, which would have destroyed our early-warning system, and the air base at Haghult. I assume you picked it up on your screens.”

I gestured palms up, non-committally, so many incidents had occurred and I had no idea how much Aina knew—since Sixten had said that she expressly asked not to be kept informed of what we were doing. In case she got to hear anything at all about Ingrid’s crazy plan.

“And do you know what really annoys me, Erasmus?”

I shook my head. Felt Aina’s warmth, that paradoxically intense energy from this prim and proper person.

“That you Americans think you’re pretty special. As if the U.S. could never go the same way as so many other dominant powers in history, often when they’ve been spouting about freedom of expression and human rights or have been culturally the most prominent. France under Robespierre, the Soviet Union after the Revolution. I suppose I don’t have to say anything about Germany.

She reached for water.

“And if the worse comes to the worst, it won’t need much in your case either. One single mad ruler—for example that billionaire clown who the other day threatened to run in the next presidential elections. Imagine someone like that with his finger on the button.”

I held my hand over my glass to stop Aina from giving me a refill.

“Yet we can never know if a dangerous president represents a bigger risk that missiles will be fired off, if it couldn’t just as easily happen with the most reasonable ruler. Because the nuclear weapons system is a kind of regime in itself. Lives its own life, with or without safety measures, calculations.”

She paused, gave me an enquiring look. “You’re very quiet, Erasmus… don’t you agree?”

I met Aina’s eyes. How could I remind her that that was precisely why I now found myself here in her home in Ursvik—and not with my own family, on the other side of the Atlantic. But my direct look must have been enough.

“But of course you do, my God, how silly of me.”

Aina got up to start tidying things away, to make room for dessert. But Sixten gently ushered her back to her chair. Laid out side plates and cups, put the presents on the table in front of her, placed the princess cake in the middle of the tableau.

At that moment I clearly detected the smell of burning, perhaps even of gasoline, but thought it came from the candles which Sixten was lighting on the cake. Seventy of them neatly arranged in the green marzipan. The whole ritual took a while. First to light them, one at a time, with the elegant lighter which Sixten produced from the waistcoat of his dinner jacket. Then to let Aina have a total of five goes before she blew them all out.

Only after the applause died down did I hear the noise. The crackling sounded cozy, as if it came from a log fire—except that there was no fireplace in the house. It quickly grew to a roar, before the stench of fuel and smoke really hit us. When we came into the living room the blackout curtains were already in a burning heap on the floor, the discarded jerry can lying among them.

It took only a few seconds before the heat and the smoke became explosive. The modular construction of the house was as if designed for a pyromaniac: the flames spread through the rooms with lightning speed. I hoisted the hybrid onto my shoulders and drew my weapon. The Nurse came rushing out of the smaller bathroom as Sixten, with Aina tightly clutching his hand, led us through the smoke-filled hallway, where our outdoor gear was kept at the ready, toward the laundry room. More gasoline-soaked blackout curtains formed a ring of fire around the dryer and the drain in the floor. Effectively sealing off our only emergency escape route, down underground.

There was only one other way. Sixten rushed ahead up the stairs, the flames beginning to lick up the walls and the ceiling, in the direction of their bedroom. Unlatched the security locks, flung the window wide open and threw out the burning curtains—before jumping out with Aina held tight within his arms.

Then we threw ourselves after them. Straight out into the night.