The Carrier

3.01

It seemed as though the atomic winter had started just north of Gävle. The branches in the never-ending pine forest were weighed down to the ground with the constant snow, a fine powder which fell like radioactivity but was its exact opposite. The picture of innocent, virginal white.

So far from what fell over the Japanese fishermen after the tests at Bikini Atoll in 1954, covering both them and the catch in their nets. Just days later the disintegration of their organisms was in full progress. Bleeding from mouths and stomachs, then their hair fell out, long strips of skin came off their backs.

We passed Bollnäs, Ljusdal, kept heading north. At regular intervals I carefully raised the roller blind and looked out. It had stopped snowing, but the drifts were piled up against the platforms like solidified ocean waves, frozen and bewitched in mid-movement. Ånge at around midnight seemed enclosed in ice. The birches around the station looked silver-dipped, stiff with hoarfrost. We were being transported through a tunnel of deep winter. I tried in vain to sleep, that typical yellow station light filtering in under the blind. The squealing of the carriages as they were laboriously connected to or uncoupled from the train.

It could have been peaceful, graceful. As magical as the endless night trains of my childhood to my grandmother’s. My mother trying to teach me about the history of art, I her about cryptography. The aroma from her unconventional picnic, often some sort of Indian lentil stew with cumin and ginger, spread its way through the corridors where we spent the nights sitting on small fold-out seats, since neither of us wanted to or could sleep.

That is what it could have felt like now: momentary compassion, some sort of respite. If the feeling had not been the very opposite.

The memories were seething in my mind. How we had rushed through the darkened surroundings of the houses, the street lights cut off. Yet the light from the massive blaze behind us—explosive as in war-time, napalm, fire bombs—allowed me to lead us to the bottom of the yard as the heat from the fire burned like a blow-dryer on the back of my neck. Along the paths of the wooded area beyond, our three silhouettes cast distorted shadows that chased with us between the trees.

I had tried hard not to look into the windows of the other houses, with all those families. Especially not the ones with teddy bears and little lamps shining all night long. Where I knew that children would be lying in deep and trusting sleep. Yet images of my own children flickered for a moment, from when they were very small.

Our youngest, Trinity, so cheeky from birth, insisting on sleeping in her own bed even as a toddler. Duality, our middle child, a gifted boy, anxious and a little lost: a copy of his father. Had never been able to fall asleep before I had read three stories to him or precisely fourteen pages of his book, always so deliberate. And then our daughter Unity, the oldest, first born and cherished, who in typical big sister fashion demonstratively blocked her ears as the stories were being told over and over again to her small brother in the same room.

Amba too flashed through in my consciousness, forcing herself up through layers of suppressed memories. Of her standing there in the doorway—invisible to the children—and later just shaking her head at my concessions to them, how I pandered to their every whim. And how she herself then, on some other evening, could do exactly the same thing while I stood there invisible to her. Engrossed in her own very special way.

With an effort I managed to close down each of the images again, almost one by one, calling on all my willpower. As I had trained myself to do before leaving, before my escape, after I realized that there would be no possibility for me to bring along Amba and the children. I extinguished the recollections as I rushed through the woodland—until my mind was black and nothing was left but flight, the smell of the fire behind us somewhere, the very intense present. Which was still much easier to bear than the buried images which had seeped up.

Then Ingrid picked up the path to Stockholms Centralstation. Since she no longer knew if the tunnel system was safe or accessible, we had to take the external route, above ground, under the cover of the dense trees next to the motorway. For once, Jesús María was last in our column. But in spite of her heavy medical pack, and the fact that according to Ingrid she had been largely inactive for more than a month, she had no difficulty in keeping up with us.

I knew nothing of Sixten and Aina’s fate. I tried to picture in my mind’s eye whether or not they had got to their feet again on the lawn, like two burning torches, but had no memory of it.

I lifted the blind again, made a note of the temperature on some advertising display alongside the tracks. Seven degrees, and it was only the end of October—and as far south as this, relatively speaking. Ingrid had said that there were record low temperatures this fall and that it was certain to become worse further north. As the train sped on, I kept writing in my notebook: described all of these events, from when we emerged through the hatch to celebrate Aina’s birthday.

My pen made a soft scraping noise in the notebook, Ingrid sat and clicked away at her computer in the top couchette. In the mirror I could see her face in the bluish light from the screen: that new look I still could not get used to. Jesús María, unhappy with the middle couchette between Ingrid and me, was somewhere in the corridor, outside our locked door. The conductor had already passed by—clipped our tickets, looked at the false passports which Sixten had organized through some acquaintance at the relevant authority, without passing any comment—and would probably not return during the night.

To judge from the silence, there were not many others in our carriage. I turned off the light and paused until Ingrid too had switched off her computer, lying there under the matted gray woollen blanket: waited for the false sense of familiarity that darkness brings. Then I started to ask my questions, my voice low enough not to be heard beyond the door.

“Was it Sixten that gave us away? Offered up both himself and Aina, so that we would burn in hell?”

“Is that a serious question, my treasure?”

The silence that followed, Ingrid’s surprise, felt genuine.

“Sixten was devastated when he rang. As usual he was mostly worrying about us, about others,” she said.

“So he survived, miraculously?”

“Sixten has at least nine lives. Aina made it, according to the message he sent, also with quite bad burns.”

The corridor outside was quiet. No sign that Jesús María might be trying to hear what was being said, not the least movement beyond the door.

“I saw him with another woman when I was out running the other evening,” I said.

“Sixten?”

An exhalation in the dark.

“Let me guess: tall, blond pageboy cut, very fit. Figure to die for. At least twenty years younger than him.”

“I wasn’t looking that carefully.”

“It was his daughter, Lisa.”

“Daughter?”

“She should of course have been at Aina’s party—had apparently come home for the first time in a long while—but that’s where I drew the line. I’ve after all only seen a picture of her, didn’t dare to allow any more people into our circle.”

I lay quietly, calculating.

“O.K…. so that leaves Jesús María. Who was still in the bathroom when the attack came.”

“She’s my blood sister, Erasmus. Besides, she’ll never betray us. She hates Kurt and John more than she hates you.”

I tried to imagine the Team’s bodyguards in front of me. So very distant and yet at the same time imprinted in our minds for ever.

“Kurt and John… they’re animals, in every way. But why does she hate them more than me—even though I used her as a sledgehammer when we were escaping?”

“Because they did things to her that she will never forget.”

Ingrid’s voice floated through the sleeper compartment. Melodious even at low volume.

“Then she did things to them, in turn. So that they shouldn’t forget her either. And since both Kurt and John were equally guilty, identical in their rotten souls, she made them identical on the outside too. A grim and bitter-sweet little joke. Very much in Jesús María’s spirit.”

I heard coughing in the corridor outside. Maybe the smoke from the roll-up, the drug, had caught in her throat. Ingrid lowered her voice once more.

“This was long before you yourself got so deeply involved, Erasmus. Actually a routine although relatively comprehensive piece of surgery, advanced camouflage in preparation for a major covert operation. One of our two guards—I can no longer remember which—was dark and good-looking, brown eyes, and the other blond and with a much slimmer face, without that dimple in his chin. I think five or six interventions were needed before Jesús María was satisfied. Edelweiss let her have her way. Since then she has just reinforced the likeness with each new surgery, down to the smallest birth mark, until no-one can distinguish them any longer. I wonder if even Jesús María knows. Certainly not Kurt or John themselves.”

Another cough outside the door. In my mind’s eye I could see the conductor doing his night rounds, smelling Jesús María’s cigarette, making a quick call. How the police would then board the train before it had left the platform and arrest us all. There were mass murderers who had been caught because they happened to drop a piece of chewing gum in the street—but that woman in the corridor simply had to test all boundaries.

“So it was Aina who reported us?”

“Mmmm. Or why not you, my treasure?”

The yellow station light leaked in over Ingrid’s duvet cover. But her face was still in darkness: there was no way of seeing her expression.

“Me?” I said.

Once Ingrid had fallen asleep, I took the hybrid and opened the sliding door to the compartment as carefully as possible. Had to make what Edelweiss called an “Unreality Check”: even in surreal situations some things are still more real than others. Jesús María was sitting pressed against the window, her eyes closed to the beautiful dawn, hardly seeming to notice me—until she took a powerful grip on my arm.

“Got tired of the Witch’s tales, Erasmo?”

“She said it was you who turned Kurt and John into twins.”

“And you trust any shit she comes out with?”

Jesús María took a last drag on her cigarette and quickly squeezed it out, between finger and thumb, showing no sign of pain. Then she started writing with her sooty finger in the condensation on the train window.

It took me only a few seconds to decipher the sequence D19 N19 15R 212 319 N5N 316 121 NG, with the help of my key sentence. The one which for most of my life I was convinced nobody else knew about—apart from me and my mother. Before first Ingrid and now Jesús María proved me wrong.

Clearly it said: “DO NOT RELY ON ANYTHING.”

3.02

The sun is the strongest thing we know. The warmth which brings life to earth through constant nuclear explosions, fusions. Here even the sun had no chance.

As we slid into Kiruna station, the thermometer showed negative 26.7 at 11.00 a.m. when the sun should have taken the edge off the worst of the cold. There was still some time to go before it disappeared completely below the horizon. A month and a half, according to the calendar.

Ingrid led us alongside the railway tracks, in the direction the train had been traveling in, and then turned off onto a road. There were no people walking in front of us or behind, even though there seemed to be no other way into town. It felt as if the temporary station—more like a barracks building—had been lowered into the wrong place by a crane, left in the middle of nowhere.

Since we all needed to get some fresh air, we decided not to take the bus downtown. The snow creaked under our boots, the cold made the balaclavas from our combat packs stick to our mouths. The road was so narrow, without any sidewalk, that it required full concentration to keep out of the way of the traffic. When the biggest trucks drove by, we had to press ourselves against the snow walls.

“The mine,” Ingrid said, continuing enigmatically, “it giveth and it taketh away.”

Neither Jesús María nor I said anything in reply, we just walked on through the razor-sharp cold. It was almost a quarter of an hour before we approached something approximating a town center. I mouthed my way silently through the names on the direction signs, memorizing them for a possible exit route. Ingrid gestured toward the enormous square, containing more parked cars than people. The only movement came from the occasional solitary businessman on his way into or out of the Hotell Ferrum.

“O.K., co-ordinates… 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The world’s largest town measured by surface area, at least on the basis of the old municipal system. And beneath us is the abyss. We’re moving on the thinnest of ice—central Kiruna is cracking up, bit by bit, being swallowed whole by the mine. The treasure chest of iron ore which financed our great leap, from primitive farming economy to leading industrial and welfare nation. Most of the Swedish social and economic model.”

Ingrid pointed toward the mighty black silhouette, covering most of the horizon.

“I’ve called it Mount Doom ever since I first read Lord of the Rings.”

I squinted into the sun, tried to grasp the scale of the mine: the monster which Ingrid said was consuming itself. In the other direction lay the idyllic old parts of town, which were soon going to be torn down—like a movie set—when the town center would be forced to move a mile east. Demolished, I thought, like the fake towns which we had put up in inaccessible places. For the sole purpose of bombing the hell out of them during our nuclear weapons tests.

Ingrid turned toward me. You could see the breath from her mouth, even though it was covered by her balaclava, seeping out like gas.

“Do you recognize where you are, Erasmus?”

I shook my head.

“Look over toward the mountain, beyond the mine. You’ve been there a number of times. Been flown in at night to train, clearing up operations after a simulated drone attack at N.E.A.T., the ‘North European Aerospace Test Range’, by far the largest aboveground military training terrain in Europe. Nine thousand two hundred fifty square miles, as big as Belgium, just sixty-two miles straight out into the countryside from here. Belongs to Kiruna Municipality, technically speaking. But is nowadays managed by the Swedish Defense Materiel Administration and Swedish Space Corporation together.”

Suddenly I could see everything. The constant darkness, the same above ground as below, crawling and slithering through inhumanly narrow tunnels, occasional glowing points, winter warfare. How we had been kept in the dark about the co-ordinates, had no clue as to our whereabouts, training to operate in this ignorance. We called it “No-Man’s-Land”.

Now we left the square behind us, kept to the edge of the soon-to-be former town center, passed charming wooden houses from the early twentieth century, which according to Ingrid—doubling as guide—dated from when the town was founded. The engineer’s dream which led to the pioneer town being established so far from everything other than the raw material itself. Then we came into a residential area which seemed already to have been abandoned, with boards as makeshift cover for broken windows. Continued onward to the destination which was still a mystery to me. I had no idea what we were going to do here in Kiruna, had not asked: was trained not to do so.

So I kept on memorizing street names, Lars Janssonsgatan, Konduktörsgatan, Gruvvägen, noted every last detail. After some steep downhill stretches with snow packed hard underfoot, Ingrid pointed up to the left, in the direction of the hill: the area showed bare white among the low trees.

“Luossa Ski Hill. Created when the mine on this side of the mountain began to peter out, just a few years ago. So I’ve never actually skied there,” she said.

After a brief pause, while Ingrid gazed up at the pistes, mesmerized, we kept moving forward for several hundred feet until we stopped in front of the substantial wooden building on the final slope down toward the mine.

Even here the windows had been boarded up, the facade had peeled making the plain wood visible in places, icicles three feet in length hung from the roof like needle-sharp weapons. You could only just make out the text on the frosty signboard: HOTELL SNÖFLINGA.

“Hotel Snowflake. The perfect hiding place. Officially closed many years back, already sacrificed to the powers of the underworld,” Ingrid said—before the barred door suddenly opened.

“Inko, my dearest friend… you seem hardly a day older than when we finished secondary school, even with your new look. Come in so I can lock up behind you!”

Ingrid and the large woman, probably of the same age as her, but youthful and cool, with shocking pink hair and tattoos over her bare arms, gave each other a warm embrace. Then the woman solemnly turned her attention to the rest of us, switching into English, somewhere between Sixten’s and Aina’s.

“Erasmus… Jesús María… wonderful to meet you. But you’re several weeks earlier than I was expecting, Inko.”

“Yes, well, it was hard to be more precise.”

“And I guess you still don’t want to say what you’re up to here.”

“No, I’m sorry, Bettan. But as I told you, it’s an extremely good cause.”

“I like those, Inko. You know that.”

I looked around the eerie darkness inside: not one sliver of light found its way through the blocked-up windows. From the crystal chandelier in the lobby one could tell that this must once have been a fine hotel. With the help of the man-high, cracked rococo mirror I started to map out escape routes, hiding places, the likelihood of a surprise attack from various directions.

Bettan laid three heavy metal knobs on the counter. A big key for the room and two smaller ones for the padlocks on the front door.

“I should say that it’s pretty much safe for you to move around in this neighborhood, even in daylight. And nobody will recognize you anyway, Inko.”

Although the whole hotel seemed to have been abandoned, I noticed that there were no other sets of keys on the hooks.

“In here it’s probably mostly the ghosts you’ll notice. There’s sometimes a hell of a lot of squeaking at nights, as if furniture were being moved around up on the old conference floor, or somewhere in the middle of the sauna. Even though it’s nearly three years since we had our last group booking.”

“And the Girls?”

“Oh, they’re used to keeping out of the way. It’s doubtful you’ll see any sign of them.”

Then more quick embraces—before we started up the stairs, Ingrid first, Jesús María last, before Bettan warned us about one more thing.

“By the way, there’s blasting in the mine every night. At exactly 1.30 a.m.—to give time for the gas to disperse before the morning shift clocks on. It makes the beds shake, trust me. Pretty much all of the town trembles like my old grandmother’s aspic.”

It was hard to climb the creaking stairs without making a sound. Not even I—with all my practice, even as a child—managed it. Just above the staircase was a faded lounge. Worn-out Chester-field armchairs in oxblood leather, heavy red curtains in front of the high, boarded-up windows, a bulky old T.V. on a rickety stand by the southern wall. Above the seemingly preserved bar—which still had an impressive range of alcohol—hung a yellowing sign which I had no problem in understanding. “The Ice Queen. Always open, honor system in operation.”

We followed Ingrid into her room, which she said had the best view. She pulled open the curtains and removed one of the boards from the window.

Then we just stood there in silence, observing the remarkable organism of the mine. It seemed to be breathing, hissing and belching smoke, coloring the snow at the top a threatening iron-ore black. From there on down to the very bottom, the rock sides had been layered like farming terraces. At ground level, the mine then continued on down in a confusion of railway tracks, overhead wires, lamps, winches, relays.

After a certain time—maybe five minutes? ten?—Ingrid replaced the board with care, closed the window and pulled the curtains shut again.

“Not that it’s necessary. But belt and suspenders, as they say.”

On our way from the station, Ingrid had insisted that we would be safest here, nearest to the mine. Locally, the area was only ever known as the “Valley of Death”. The hotel and surrounding buildings would be the first to be dragged down into the depths: so they had been declared uninhabitable some years ago, sealed up, and had become an excellent haunt for people who, for different reasons, wanted to go underground. Here, nobody would ask—and absolutely no-one would answer.

“Dearest Jesús María, would you mind leaving us alone for a little while? Perhaps make yourself at home in your room, change for dinner?”

“Sure, I can do that. I’ll pull out my fucking quinceañera dress.”

As soon as Jesús María had left the room, Ingrid took out her portable command terminal, left the set of keys in the lock, barricaded the door with a chair pushed under the handle. Sat down on the squeaky four-poster bed and gestured for me to install myself next to her. There was a faint smell of skin and soap about her.

Soon the map of the world could be seen on the screen, the correspondences. I let my eyes run from east to west, between our nuclear weapons bases on home soil. Followed the solid red lines between yellow triangles, then switched my look to the corresponding installations on the European continent.

“In case you’re wondering what we’re doing up here, my treasure.”

She zoomed in on northern Europe, over Sweden, toward the little cross on the map. It could not be too many miles away. Step by step she clicked her way in on Kiruna, the old city center, and put a marker on Hotell Snöflinga. The distance from here to the destination was given on the screen as twenty-six miles. Estimated time to get there on foot: 8 hours, 32 minutes.

“You know about Esrange Space Center, the rocket range—but hardly its full extent. Not many do. Or are aware that Sweden has actually got something of universally strategic value. At least as important as the iron ore in Narvik during the war, or the heavy water in Rjukan. A good enough reason in itself to occupy this whole country.”

On the screen, the security gates looked as neutral as at any space center or nuclear weapons facility. The basic rule was, the more valuable, the more low-key. When Ingrid tried to zoom in further, everything became pixelated: the global digital security setting for top secret installations.

“This, Erasmus, is the world’s leading connections center for the enormous mass of information streaming down from all satellites at any moment. The hub itself, the main exchange. To begin with, the rocket center was mostly focused on weather forecasts and other innocuous things. Then they started getting orders for navigational data, concrete geopolitical mapping, more and more specific with each year. Nowadays our drones could not get too far without Esrange.”

She zoomed out again. Moved along the dotted blue lines leading from the cross here in the northernmost part of Europe, back and forth over the map of the world.

“And I think this might interest you, my treasure.”

The screen image now traveled over the Atlantic and on toward the missile base at Minot in North Dakota. I had recognized it without having to check on the map. Could distinguish this particular anonymity from all the other anonymities since decades back.

When we had zoomed in sufficiently, the display split as usual into smaller split-screen images. One showed the missile itself: its grayish matte surface, like a mighty underground whale. Two others depicted the above-ground exterior. Forested terrain, mountain scenery in the background, a light haze. The largest image was in the middle of the screen and showed the command center itself. The control console, the panels, the forced stillness.

Routinely I checked the co-ordinates at the foot of the screen. Time, temperature, other weather conditions, the pressure inside the missile. All the metrics which the command center needed, including the alert level. And only then did I notice that the launch counter was rapidly spinning down.

The green numbers first turned yellow and then red, before starting to flash frenetically. The command center sent out calls, fully in accordance with regulations—but still nothing stopped. The launch phase too seemed to go according to plan. The smoke and heat development were immense: even the most distant trees on the exterior images had started to burn. I stared at the counter furthest down to the right, what was called the “Body Count”. Was rooted to the spot. Could do nothing at all about it, stop the process, overpower Ingrid.

And it was, of course, already too late. Once everything has gone this far, the security system is designed to ensure that the process is not interrupted, stopping the missile from falling on populated areas in friendly territory instead.

“More or less like that,” Ingrid said.

With a click on the control console she got the entire operation to stop—before it was rapidly rewound. The counter spun back to the beginning with equal speed, the alert level returned to yellow then green. In the end she clicked away the images from the base, as well as the world map, and closed the lid of the command terminal.

An ice-cold drop of sweat ran down my forehead.

“Isn’t it amazing? Most of the conceivable scenarios are already on my computer, from our intensive training exercises around the world. And after our unofficial field trip out there to Esrange, the Magic Mirror will be complete: then I will be able to use this little gizmo to connect to the image streams from each one of the satellites and after that tinker with them to my heart’s desire. From that point on I can simulate any course of events I want, wherever I want. Our pursuers will no longer have the slightest idea what is happening. Or whether they can even believe their own eyes.”

When the drop of sweat ran down the ridge of my nose, I finally flicked it away. Tried to get up from the sunken four-poster bed, which was squealing and creaking, like a drowning cat. Ingrid waited until it was quiet again in the room.

“And above all, my treasure, after that you and I can burn out our entire global nuclear weapons system, from the inside—without anything untoward appearing on the monitors. Guaranteed not one trace. However hard you look.”

3.03

That night I dreamed, not for the first time, that I was the little Japanese girl at an international conference for survivors.

Bashfully I told them how I had been in a tram and saw something like a flash of silver and threw myself onto the ground. Everything became black as ink, so dark that people were running into each other everywhere, like the blind rats which I had seen in the cage at the home of my friend.

When it grew fractionally lighter, I began to walk through the town, by now strange to me. I met a woman with bleeding eyes and a girl who must have been about the same age as me and who was shouting out the same thing all the time: “Help me, help!” Her back was burned to shreds, just ashes and soot, was still glowing like dying embers, the skin hanging down on her hips in strips. Crowds of people were making their way along the river bank. Jumped in and were immediately scalded to death by the boiling hot water.

I met an older woman, ancient, who was crying in the same way as the girl I had seen: also calling out for her mother—though she must have been dead for many years. It was so strange, I told the conference. But the only answer she got was: “Everybody else is in just as much pain as you. Try to put up with it.”

In the end I found my own mother, but hardly recognized her swollen face and her closed eyes. The skin on both her hands was hanging loose, like rubber gloves. She died before the end of the war, I said in my account, and I never saw my father again.

After I had finished—“My thanks to you, I’m called Yukiko and I’m seven years old!”—everybody broke into long applause and then it was time for lunch. Reconvening at 13.15, the conference chairman, the American, said.

On the way out, just as the American had moved to try to hug me, I pulled him down and thumped his head hard into the floor.

Then I ripped out his tear-filled eyes: first one, then the other. Because in any event he could never see what I had seen.

3.04

I worked on it all, on the situation I found myself in, in the only way I knew. The first mornings, short intervals: five reps of 10 × 150 yard sprints just behind the hotel, on the small path where the snow had been cleared to make way for the garbage truck. A resting walk back between sprints and a minute’s recovery between reps. The extreme cold crackled in my nose as I breathed in. Negative twenty-two before the sun rose. Then mid-intensity strength training in my room and an ice-cold shower.

Slowly but surely I also dared to venture further afield, so early that few others had reason to be about. The third morning my wrist-watch showed 04.45 as I unlocked the front door. Warmed up with a few relaxed strides: 5 × 85 yards in the tracks left by the garbage truck. Then I followed the unlit ski track straight in-between the gnarled dwarf birches, silvery with frost, small shining ghostly figures twisted in pain and dread. The snow made my headlamp superfluous. After a few hundred yards my eyes had adjusted. My spikes also held perfectly on the icy surface, my steps unexpectedly light. Despite the cold I was able to maintain 6.9 minutes per mile without too much effort.

The track followed the edge of town, even further down into the sink-hole, in the direction of the mine. Yet I resisted the temptation to try to penetrate further into the area. Didn’t dare to allow myself to be sucked in, dragged down. After three laps—my watch showed just over seven and a half miles—I adjusted the straps on the hybrid and increased my speed to six and a half minutes per mile. It was my benchmark. The indicator that I was at last back in fighting shape after the surgery in Ursvik.

I took the hotel stairs to the conference level in four big steps. The meeting room had been built as a kitschy Lapp hut with low lighting, and it backed onto the sauna and a small gym which time had forgotten. I turned on the aged treadmill and ran another seven and a half miles, at fast distance pace, before I finished off with a hard set of strength intervals.

Only then did I start to approach that state of white exhaustion, dizziness, the absolute limit. The near-unconsciousness which had been my elixir of life for so long. Which had made me able to endure.

Because sooner or later we all become addicted to something in this world. Soldiers in wartime have always been stoned: on drugs, political rhetoric, religious fanaticism. But research showed that even in peacetime a quarter of all military personnel in the U.S. regularly took drugs, not just hash but also cocaine and L.S.D. On a number of occasions hundreds of people had even been arrested after crackdowns at our nuclear bases.

In the sauna I let the key lie in the palm of my hand, burning me. Wondered about showing it to Ingrid after all. Telling her that I was given it by Sixten: that the key to Meitner’s secret underground laboratory had not after all disappeared. And that he had given it to me—not to her.

But I did not, for that very reason. That it was me and not her he seemed to trust.

So the days went by in their curious way, even here. Between meals Ingrid mostly stayed in her room, barricaded behind her locked door. Claimed to need every waking hour—and that was a long time, she told us, most of the day—to complete the process. Connecting all our nuclear weapons around the world.

Jesús María I never even glimpsed. The first days after we came here, to this strange hotel with its meandering corridors and stairs which somehow never seemed to connect, I had on a few occasions tried to find her. Knocked on her door during both day-time and night to ask her how she could know my “Key Sentence”. The basis for my most secret book cipher, which I had shown only to my mother, there by the kitchen table as a prematurely adult thirteen-year-old.

But Jesús María was never in her room—and it took me more than a week to trace her. She had joined the so-called “Girls”, a number of young women without residence permits whom Bettan had taken pity on. One early morning, on my way from the sauna, I caught sight of one of them walking down the next staircase to prepare breakfast in the kitchen area. So I followed the trail to Jesús María, and found her in their midst, as busy as the rest.

That also helped me to solve the mystery of the food. How for breakfast alone they could serve cold poached salmon, reindeer sausage, potato salad with thick home-made mayonnaise, scrambled eggs, Kalix bleak roe and fresh-baked rusks with cloudberry jam. The lunches and dinners were even more lavish: as if they had been meant for many more than just Ingrid, Bettan and me. Which they obviously were.

And soon we found ourselves in November. The passing time was measured by the blasting: at 1.30 a.m. each night everything shook. I had to carry out my checks—even though the briefcase, according to our technicians, was constructed to withstand a direct hit. Take it out of the hybrid, open the lid, continue the ritual up to the point where the electronic eye, the iris recognition, appeared. Then I started closing the case again. Carried out all these complicated commands, pressed long three-letter sequences on the keyboard, in the exact opposite order.

That was my routine, identical in every way, by the light of a single candle which was meant to neutralize the bluish glow from the screen in case anything seeped out through the boards covering the window. In case somebody was keeping me under observation. I ran an eye over the apparatus, looked to see that everything seemed in order after the blasting, and in some way it looked back at me. Everything exactly the same way—until November 2, 2013.

Just before closing the case that night, noticing the timer showing 02.07, I saw a terrifying reflection in the screen. Despite the fact that I had as ever locked the door, with the set of keys still in place, wedged the chair under the door handle, someone had managed to steal up behind my back. Pin my arms and bend my head sharply backward.

Then I felt the warm little kiss on my throat.

“I obviously came in the nick of time, my treasure. On the way to taking matters into our own hands, were we? Completely lost patience?”

There was a smile on Ingrid’s grotesque skeletal face: a mixture of war-paint and Halloween makeup, as if she had been playing around in front of the mirror. But her voice sounded purposeful and crystal clear.

“It’s All Saint’s Day here in Sweden. Yours, Erasmus, and everybody else’s.”

She took out her costume make-up, and in the reflection on the screen I could see how my face was quickly being transformed into a devil’s mask. How her eyes pierced right into me as I slowly answered:

“Yes, Ingrid… I was starting to think there would never be any action up here.”

Then it did not take many minutes before we were out on the main road, taking the narrowest streets through the sleeping town. Not a soul anywhere, not the smallest light in any of the cottages. Just snow, the drifts, the thick forest reasserting its mastery as soon as we left the enchanting little wooden quarter behind. The mountain of doom which hung brooding over the area. Through the silence of the night I thought I could hear the town cracking up inch by inch.

The mine gave and the mine took away, as Ingrid had said. In many ways it was the only thing capable of supporting life up here. Yet she said that there were also many who had high hopes for Esrange. For space tourism, Virgin Galactic, Spaceport Sweden. During weekends and holidays, the Swedish Space Bureau’s megaphones blared about free ice cream and movies in Folkets Hus, the People’s House.

The freezing air fizzed in my nose, which I kept free of my balaclava so I could breathe more easily. The extreme cold had returned after a brief pause: a thermometer decorated with neon reindeer on the front of a house showed closer to negative forty, even though the Arctic nights were more than a month away. On December 10, the sun would disappear below the horizon for three endless weeks.

The computer had shown the distance to be almost exactly the length of a marathon, just under 26 miles. We kept up a suitable speed, about seven minutes per mile, despite the hybrid slowing me down by about 10 per cent. It meant that we ought to be at Esrange at 05.30 at the latest, before the night shift finished, according to Ingrid’s information—and with strength remaining for the assignment itself. We could then reasonably be back at the hotel before they cleared away breakfast.

Ingrid ran with a free and springy step, kept up her pace, hips straight and upright, all the way until we stopped a mile or so from the installation. Saw the characteristic light in the sky: the reflection of the searchlights was always at least as revealing as the satellite dishes. At that point we turned off straight east into the forest. The snow was lying feet deep, Ingrid measured the weight of her steps exactly right, not breaking through the frozen crust.

Although we had never once trained together, every one of our movements was synchronized. Ingrid must have carried out similar assignments for decades before my own training began. We stole forward toward the seemingly unmanned north-east gate, the moon remaining behind the clouds. It would not be easy for anyone to spot us through this barely half-open terrain. When we reached the gates, I memorized the co-ordinates: E.S.-1219-V. While Ingrid got to work on the code lock, the security system itself, I stood in the dead angle of the surveillance cameras and kept watch, my weapon drawn under my non-reflective black running jacket.

The seconds passed extremely slowly, as they do at times like this—before there was a click from the lock. The upper red lamp lit up for a moment, but by the time we ran through the gates Ingrid had managed to short-circuit the security system. It was silent and excruciatingly cold all around. Our slip-on boot spikes were light-weight and flexible, designed not to betray our steps, no matter what the surface.

And it is hard for an outsider to understand how easy it is to break into an installation, even if it is guarded around the clock. How quickly human psychology falls victim to routine.

Even after years of training, long theoretical rehearsals of security measures, it is different in practice. Card games get in the way, or intense discussions in the middle of the night while sitting in front of screens—about money for the children’s education, the latest baseball games, maybe an imminent divorce, sicknesses and deaths. The inevitable result is brief periods of inattention.

After lengthy searches through his enormous database, Edelweiss had concluded that those periods were generally between 8 and 29 seconds long. “One never has more than half a minute,” he said. “But with the right training, that’s oceans of time.”

Which is why we now moved in quick intervals, randomly interspaced, before finding a new camera shadow and waiting for a few minutes. All the while I expected us to be discovered. Because there is no way of knowing when the periods of inattention occur: at any moment we could run into a couple of sleepy guards. Or maybe some super-professionals called in from N.E.A.T., the world’s largest military training ground, just minutes away by car, in response to an alarm being triggered.

And it had been so long since the adrenaline last pumped through my body in this way. I enjoyed that feeling of being on edge, the watchfulness even while moving at top speed. How this natural drug made me reckless and incredibly strong.

Ingrid was in the lead, I followed her light steps. We passed through some interior doors with unexpected ease. Despite the strategic importance of the center—the other evening, Ingrid had said, Swedish television news revealed that Esrange had made possible our latest spy satellite over the Middle East—the security personnel here too seemed to be neglecting some of their routines. After all these years without incident it was so easy to ignore, or simply forget, to seal all doors fully in accordance with regulations.

Edelweiss had compared it to brushing one’s teeth: if you begin to neglect one single ritual, others will soon follow. He would therefore sometimes ask us to breathe on him, even in the most tense situations. In his book bad breath justified as hard a punishment as more concrete breaches of regulations.

Most surveillance centers were also wrongly built from the start, something one only noticed if one thought offensively—like an attacker, not a defender. The guards would look out into the night, toward the gates, up into space, at all their screens. But rarely right behind their backs.

“I’m ready,” Ingrid whispered only a few feet from the control board. Her skeletal face turning toward my devil’s mask and the guards still with their backs to us.

“Are you, Erasmus?”

I nodded—and in the next moment she dashed toward the hard discs, the storage center for all the launch footage the satellites sent streaming down, while I took care of both guards more or less at the same time. I pressed lightly on the soft spots behind the ears of the first one and his chin immediately sunk onto his chest, as if he had fallen asleep at his post. The second one just had time to defend himself. As he raised his hands to his head, to protect against direct blows from behind, I pinned them together and thumped his head lightly onto the control board. It does not take much to knock somebody out.

After a few minutes, Ingrid stuck the U.S.B. into her jacket and we set off at top speed in the direction we had come. When other guards appeared with drawn weapons from a sliding door in the wall, we both stopped in mid-movement. It was Ingrid they wanted: they hardly looked at me. I stood stock-still, registering the scene around me. The flashing bright red lights, two heavily armed special guards, the alarm pumping straight into my brain.

Edelweiss had preached that no human being can know exactly how he will react in the most critical situations. An entire life of training can’t make us absolutely sure of ourselves. “Not even you, Erasmus,” he had said. “Not even me.”

Yet it did not take many seconds before I knew. The guards who just before had seemed so invincible, beasts straight up from the underworld with their automatic weapons pointed at Ingrid’s temples, were now more like two pitiful small beings in a terrifying medieval painting out of one of her lectures. It could have been Caravaggio, Bosch, or maybe Bruegel’s eternal struggle between heaven and hell.

It was a moment of white fury, violence which was both uncontrolled and fully focused. First one, then the other. And I managed to tie both their arms together behind their backs, creating an impossible creature, a kind of physical paradox, so it was not clear where the one began and the other ended. It must have been a torture for them, their screams cut through my head like knives, until I managed to close the heavy and thick protective door behind us. Silence once more as we rushed out onto the enormous asphalt area, heading toward the gates.

“You didn’t have to take them down in that way, Erasmus. Their cries alone must have activated every guard post in Norrbotten County. There was no need for an alarm,” Ingrid said when we got back into the cover of the pine trees beside the main road.

I both nodded and shook my head. Out here you could not hear a sound from the installation, no flashing red lights could be seen, nothing to interrupt the serenity. The alarm had only gone off behind the scenes. After one mouthful of drink each, Ingrid led us a much more remote way back. One could already make out the first signs of dawn. Gradually we got our speed down to under 7 minutes per mile so as to be back in good time.

It did not take long before the nausea washed over me. After vomiting twice in quick succession, and covering the result with snow like a dog, things improved: the ultra-violence cleared from my mind. We were back at the Snowflake by 08.43. I had time to take an ice-cold shower, rinse away the last few mental images, before we went down separately to the dining room for breakfast.

3.05

The day passed without any reference on the local news, either radio or T.V., to an incident at Esrange. Which was only to be expected.

This type of break-in at a highly classified site rarely became public. Neither intruder nor those in authority had any interest in spreading information about it. Those who were called “Our new principals” on Esrange’s homepage, and who had already put a stop to the Tourist Office’s guided tours at the base, definitely did not want that.

Come evening there was still no leak, even on encrypted specialist blogs. During dinner Ingrid said that we should celebrate.

“With whom were you thinking?”

I looked around the spacious dining room, at the crystal chandeliers and the murals with local motifs. As usual only she and I were sitting at the table; the Girls and Jesús María presumably came only when we had left.

“Bettan must have gone to bed. She’s an early bird: says that the blast at 1.30 a.m. is her alarm clock. But I’m going to fetch a special guest,” she said.

We were still standing in the Ice Queen, when Jesús María came in, like a reluctant teenager. Without a word she went behind the bar and started to mix margaritas.

“And what are we celebrating?” she said.

“Go on, Erasmus, tell her! Excuse me, I have to make a call,” Ingrid said and disappeared.

Yet again: I’d been trained in all sorts of mind games, since decades back. But I still could not see through Ingrid’s strategies. I assumed that even this was some kind of test. That she would later learn from Jesús María what I had said, how much I revealed. If I really was someone worth holding by the hand as the world was ending.

“It’s my birthday today. Fifty-one.”

“Sorry, my poor Erasmo. You’ll have to contain yourself a few months more before celebrating. To be precise… 104 days, isn’t that right?”

Jesús María must have known pretty much everything about me even before our escape. Now the two of us were alone together for the first time since she had written her message in the condensation on the train window, more than a week ago. She crunched on an ice cube from her glass, raised her eyes from her drink and looked me straight in the eye.

“Feel nice to be able to fight a bit? This morning?”

I kept quiet, followed my usual tactic. Let the opponent lead. Show their cards.

“What else has the Witch said about me?”

“Not much… that you have terrible memories from home.”

“That I have a forked tongue?”

“As distinct from Ingrid?”

“No, seriously, Erasmo, I’ll show you.”

As Jesús María put out her tongue, I looked down into my glass—but still managed to catch sight of a deep groove: full of glitter that might have been diamonds, but more likely cheap bling. Then I emptied my drink and put the question.

“How come you knew my key sentence?”

Now it was her turn to wait, to divert.

“Did you know that some researchers see weaving as the first binary system, nine thousand goddam years ago?” she said at last.

“That the weft thread which goes over and under the warp threads, up and down, can quite easily be transformed into digital stuff, you know: on and off, one and zero? And that’s why the loom was so perfect for industrialization—punch cards could easily communicate with them. And why machines can knit but not crochet.”

“So what you’re saying is that even someone like you could master coding and decryption.”

“Exactly. And even someone like you.”

She looked at me, long enough for it to begin to mean something.

“But no-one can escape, Erasmo, however fast one runs. Neither you nor me. Not even Ingrid.”

She took a piece of paper and the weed—or whatever it was—out of her pocket, put her glass down, started to roll a cigarette.

“Ingrid’s and my paths crossed, our destinies as she would say, at an Army base on the Mexican border. There was only one other woman there at the time, in the late ’60s. Damaged goods, just as I was. Had to sew her up from inside out.”

I looked at this strange little figure, with her cloven tongue, who could not possibly have turned forty.

“But you can’t have been at the base at that time. You’d be at least sixty-five by now.”

“Didn’t the Witch tell you what a good craftswoman I am?” Jesús María said as she walked out, leaving me alone in the Ice Queen.

It must have taken at least half an hour, maybe more, before I made my way to Ingrid’s room. Knocked three times, short pause, then twice more—and finally one loud knock. The usual signal. Yet Ingrid still only opened when I whispered her name, pressed tightly to the door.

“What did Sixten say?” I said.

Ingrid went back to the bed and her computer, kept tapping away at the keyboard, did not seem surprised by my question.

“They have been harassing him since our operation out at Esrange. Poor Aina too. Even Lisa.”

Ingrid still had her eyes fixed on the screen.

“So they’re on their way here now.”

“Sixten and Aina?”

“No, the others, those who are after us.”

The bed squeaked as she got up and crossed the floor toward me, still standing just inside the door. Looked me straight in the eye.

“Sixten is also on his way. He’s finally been given permission by Aina to become more directly involved in the cause. He’ll be here as soon as he can.”

Perhaps I did put up some resistance when Ingrid then gently lifted the hybrid from my shoulders, took out the briefcase, laid it with the lid open on the bed next to her computer and made all the necessary preparations. Perhaps not. In any case the images appeared on the screen again: the same as when Ingrid showed me the trick a few weeks ago. Exterior and interior scenes from our intercontinental missile base at Minot. Four smaller scenes from the surveillance cameras—and one larger one in the middle, from inside the command center itself.

Everything seemed to be normal, according to the indications at the bottom of the screen. Pressure inside the missile, humidity, alert level.

“So now it’s our move, my treasure.”

When Ingrid began to enter commands on her keyboard, I fell in with her rhythm, like a musician. At the same time I keyed 122 129 on the keyboard in my briefcase: the code which I had shown my mother there at the kitchen table, at the dawn of time. Which clearly became “HELP” by way of my strange key sentence.

Our little four-hands piece had immediate effect. The green markings quickly turned to yellow, then red, as they had before. Everything felt at the same time terribly heavy and unbearably light. A soft murmuring in the deepest recesses of my mind, as if from something electric, a fan perhaps, a humming refrigerator. The launch counter was quickly spinning down to zero. The exterior images showed the wide expanses to the north, west and south of the base beginning to vibrate as the hatches in the ground opened up revealing our silos with the hundreds of ageing Minuteman-3 missiles, dinosaurs from the Cold War; as if a minor earthquake had struck. The ground shook, smoke from the ignition engines billowed over the surface.

And despite the indicators blinking with apparent anger, the desperate warning cries which could be heard crackling through the base’s loudspeaker system, this time the events just continued to unfold. The missiles really were launched—even if they all then exploded still deeply embedded in their silos.

The smoke spread all the same, the gas and flames quickly broadening out through the support tunnels. The missile operators in Global Strike Command ran for their lives. The body count in the screen’s bottom right-hand corner had risen to eighteen in less than a minute.

Then Ingrid closed down the image on her portable terminal, all with a single command, which made the same happen on the screen in the lid of my briefcase. I felt her watching me—and turned to meet her gaze: that ice-gray challenge.

“I don’t think we can cope with seeing more for now. Forgive me, my treasure. But it was in the heat of the moment.”

3.06

There was a painting. I had never seen it. And yet I had seen it, before my own eyes, day and night. Always carried the reproduction hidden in my combat pack.

I had never been able to experience the original, at the Prado Museum in Madrid, because it had been to all intents and purposes impossible for me to get security clearance for private visits overseas. I knew that it was a relatively small painting—like so many other truly great works of art: not more than four feet by five and a half. Yet he had managed to include so many terrifying details in it.

I brought it out again, the night after Ingrid’s simulated attack on Minot, to comfort me or mark my despair. There were no nuclear wars at the time of Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the middle of the sixteenth century, we must assume, so he may have had second sight. The painting showed exactly what the aftermath of the big bang would look like. Scorched earth and bare trees, the feeling that nothing at all had survived, could survive, wandering skeletons milking the soul out of the few things remaining to be plundered, driving around a cart full of skulls, piles of dead bodies. Everything moreover steeped in a sickly yellow-brown tone. This was what Bruegel called “The Triumph of Death”.

But the strangest things of all were in the painting’s bottom right-hand corner. The terror-struck people, the few still living, who together with phantoms and corpses seemed to be being herded—or themselves fleeing—into what looked very much like a railway cattle truck. And outside the open door one could see something resembling an iron cross.

Bruegel’s painting was truly prophetic. And not just about nuclear war—also the Holocaust, the transports to the concentration camps, the killing toward the end of the Second World War.

You must understand. But you won’t.

Just as we had never understood, before it was too late.

3.07

For the weeks that followed, I remained convinced that the incident at Minot must have been simulated. Digital conjuring with the help of the footage Ingrid had managed to take away with her from Esrange, manipulated images streamed from the satellites. Another test of my determination and loyalty.

I never asked her directly—since things never became any clearer when I did. And there was no sign from our pursuers, not even now. No reaction, no counter-move.

Until Edelweiss called.

I knew it had to be him as soon as I heard the ring tone—at 4.00 a.m.

In Edelweiss’ universe, nothing happened by chance. The time of his call fell precisely in the middle of the hour of the wolf on my side of the Atlantic. When we had learned that all people with a normal daily rhythm were at their most vulnerable, the body’s activity level, temperature, blood pressure at its lowest—and the melatonin at its highest. That is why attacks just before dawn had become so popular, since our military researchers discovered the effects of melatonin. Especially because our night-combat technology was so superior to that of the impoverished states which we invaded: Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again.

But I had been awake for a while. Had not been able to fall asleep again this time either, after the night’s blasting in the heart of the mine, once I had completed my check of the status of the briefcase. I lay there listening to the ghost furniture squeaking against the floor on the conference level above me. Stared at the spiders finding ways in everywhere, in spite of the cold that should have frozen them all solid before they came in.

Yet I let the ring tone cut through the room: the “Dallas” theme tune. Four, five, six times… Then I just did it. Pressed the green button, waited out Edelweiss’ heavy breathing.

“Ah, Erasmus… did I wake you? Sorry, one really should hang up after the phone has rung more than four times. But my mind must have wandered for a moment. No doubt feeling a bit lost in spacetime.”

I did not manage to get a word out. It was such a long time since I had last heard Edelweiss speaking live. The voice of that person who awakened in me such strong and confused feelings: intense hatred and something bordering on admiration. Not warmth certainly, but heat.

“Perhaps you’ve felt the same way lately, my dear friend. Ever since the incident at Minot? That reality has shifted a tiny bit, sunk out of sight, like a sand dune. Have you seen a six-eyed sand spider try to climb out of a deep pit in the desert? How it struggles, fights for its life, even though it’s made for just this biotope.”

I did not want to follow him to any of the strange places where our dialogue often wandered.

“You know that the missile attack wasn’t real.” I said.

“Not real?”

I gave nothing away, wasn’t going to fall into the trap. Just let him continue in his gentle voice.

“I would guess that the relatives of those who died at Minot do see it as perfectly real, not to mention the fourteen seriously injured, and their relatives, to the extent that we humans can determine that. On average twenty-one dead makes about eighty-four nearest and dearest. On top of that the same number again of not so close relatives, like rings spreading in the water: brothers and sisters, cousins, grandparents, stepchildren maybe. I’d say you’re talking about three hundred people more or less directly affected. We do of course try to stress the importance of their not disclosing anything about what happened, because that would prejudice the longer-term possibilities, both for us and for you. And that doesn’t come cheaply. But if we were also to pretend that it was all just one big fiction, even their dead relatives… I don’t think that even our whole military budget would be enough to pay all of them off. People are extremely sensitive about the genuineness of their sensory impressions, as you know, my dear friend. Can take it pretty badly if that’s questioned.”

He fell silent, let me dangle in the uncertainty. Which of these two less than wholly credible people was the more believable. Ingrid or Edelweiss. The devil or the deep blue sea.

“But I understand exactly how you feel, Erasmus. How one can evolve after a long time in the vicinity of that woman. I know what you’ve been through earlier, many years ago—but not in a situation like this, as quarry on the run, with all the psychological pressure. And there’s a lot I could tell you about Oskarsson.”

Then, in that very moment, I began to speak.

First he listened, but eventually a conversation of sorts unfurled. Some kind of dialogue. A transaction took shape. Time vanished, as it so often did with Edelweiss. When he hung up at last, it was 6.00 a.m., November 20. And nothing had become easier. Rather, very much harder.

I pulled the curtains aside, removed one of the boards, observed the mine in the yellowish artificial light. There were still three hours and nineteen minutes to go until sunrise. Three weeks until the Polar Night, beginning December 10. The day when the sun sank beneath the horizon here in Kiruna—not to reappear until the New Year.

I knew that that ought to be the signal. The one symbolic point in time, the starting pistol for our move away from here: to the next stop after our apparently successful intervention out at Esrange.

So the days went by in the same nerve-racking stillness. Jesús María usually behind the scenes with Bettan and the Girls. Ingrid less and less with her computer in her room and increasingly often in front of the T.V. or in the Ice Queen—which in itself was a sign that she would soon have finished her business here. Often practicing advanced yoga while watching the game shows she seemed passionate about: the more mindless, the better. Extended her body out of the Chesterfield armchair, in whichever direction, at times straight up into the air with no apparent support.

I tried to keep some sort of control. Training, showering, suppressing doubts, anxieties, dreams. Going through that technical-occult ceremony of the briefcase day and night. Counting the number of hairy spiders as they made their way into my room, every night trying to convince myself that their sheer number indicated they could not be real.

And the person we were waiting for was Sixten. For whatever it was that he could add to Ingrid’s lunatic project: this ex-engineer from Sweden’s former nuclear weapons program. But once you had met him—experienced his reserved warmth, how calmly he gave and received confidence—you were no longer sure you could manage without him.

By lunchtime on December 10, the first day of the Polar Night, he had still not come. I was passing the time with Ingrid in front of the T.V. After yet another game show, she switched channels to a midday re-run of a documentary about a presumed Swedish mass-murderer who, after years in a psychiatric hospital, had turned out to be entirely innocent.

I could not stop myself, was sucked right into the story. This man had seemingly been influenced by his therapist into confessing to actions he had never carried out, by recovering his own “repressed memories”. Guided into a world of mirrors in which he himself could determine the rules and show the investigators evidence which had already been written about in the media. In this way the man was able to dupe the Swedish judicial system, the police force and a number of the country’s best lawyers.

From my dissertation work, with all the Swedish source material, I had learned enough of the language to be able to follow what was going on in this documentary. Large parts consisted of a subtitled interview with an American psychologist. Her theories about “false memory” had become the film-makers’ key to understanding what had happened. The historic breakthrough for the theories had come when the psychologist managed to get several subjects in an experiment in the ’90s to recall, in exactly the same way, having been lost in a shopping mall as children, something which had never happened to any of them. During the interview the psychologist called this process “implantation”. Fictitious memories which are deliberately implanted deep within an individual’s mind.

We did not say a word to each other while the documentary was playing. Only when the credits started to roll did Ingrid turn to me.

“She looked much younger with her new hairstyle.”

“Who do you mean?”

“The psychologist, of course. She became my best friend during those first fragile years of study, at Columbia, when I was starting to build up my own double life: in the same way as you yourself some decades later, my treasure. She and I were studying two quite different subjects, but in the academic world there’s a lot of important stuff that crosses over between them, bridges over dark waters.”

At that moment—when I was presented with an unsought opportunity to ask follow-up questions, to try to make some sense of Ingrid’s life story, logistically as well as chronologically—she suddenly got up from the sofa.

“It’s time, Erasmus. A little over two hours before he’s due to collect us. Less than an hour till sundown.”

3.08

Then Ingrid led the three of us, with full packs, in among the low line of trees and up toward Luossa Hill. She had managed to track down Jesús María in the hotel. Now she was in front of me and I could hear her breathing. Not because there was anything wrong with her fitness—far from it—but she sounded like a predator out for the hunt.

Once we reached the slope we saw that there was an impressive Saturday crush, low-level chaos. But Ingrid did not hesitate and made her way through the line. Seemed to trust entirely in her new face, confident that no-one would recognize her even here.

“These are my last rentals, ma’am… but everything looks about right for you.” The young blond man in the rental store tested the length of the skis against Ingrid’s height, assessed the bindings. She inverted the poles, placed her hands in the baskets and measured their height in line with her forearm and elbow. “Just to warn you, the lifts close as soon as the sun has gone down, that’s our tradition for the day, for the Polar Night après-ski. The party goes on until midnight…” Ingrid paid him no attention, looked through the window at the mountain. “You’ll have half an hour at the most on the slope, barely ten minutes without sun and twenty with. At 11.45 a.m. it’ll be gone for the year.”

“That will be more than enough,” she said.

“And these two won’t be skiing?” he said, gesturing to me and Jesús María.

“Oh, they’re just my fans.”

“O.K. Got it.” The young man smiled in our direction. “Have you been here before?”

“On top of the hill centuries ago, my friend. But I’ve never skied the slope.”

“So, in that case you won’t have experienced our sun ritual either. It was meant to be a bit of fun when we opened a couple of years ago, on Polar Night, to try to get people in. It turned out to be such a success that we’ve kept it going. It’s our third year now. And the same clear sky as before.”

“What’s this ritual about, then?”

“I think you should wait and see, ma’am. It’s pretty cool, even if I say so myself.”

The young man went out and closed the door while Ingrid put on the boots. I leaned forward and whispered to her:

“Seriously? Ski here, now, among all these people?”

“Have you ever known me not serious, my treasure? I simply can’t leave without trying the piste, can I? And Bettan said that this would be the best day of all. We’ve got enough time before we’re due to be picked up, just after lunch. Only a few runs, before the lifts close.”

As she got into the lift line—she had given me her large backpack but kept her small one—Ingrid fired off her most irresistible smile.

“Besides, I just wanted to show off a bit of my former magic for you, from the good old days. If you just spread out a bit and keep an eye open, I’ll feel completely safe here. This is my natural element, I’m almost on my home turf. And the bigger the crowds, the lower the risk.”

Without further discussion—about who should stand where out of the two of us, any strategic considerations—Jesús María started to half-run up the steep lower part of the slope, stopping just below the tree line. I remained where I was, by the side of the lift line, with not only the large hybrid but also Ingrid’s pack at my feet, which limited my ability to move and intervene. Yet my reflexes kicked in as I began to survey the crowd. Any suspicious-looking individuals or groups, conceivable threats, potential escape routes.

But for the most part it all seemed peaceful. Among the other skiers some, especially the teenagers, appeared to have stolen a march on the ski hut’s planned après-ski party. Their shouts to their friends waiting in line were loud and shrill, but at least the group was preoccupied. Nobody seemed to be taking any notice of Jesús María, who now stood a few hundred feet above me, looking out over the masses. Nor of Ingrid.

Except for me. I could not take my eyes off her. How she let her seventy-year-old body dance and play, dominating the whole piste, at once relaxed and theatrical.

As she took the lift up again, having slid to an elegant stop at the tail of the lift line, my eyes resumed their scan across the people who filled most of the piste. Using the usual profiling. One possible risk group was four men in their fifties. Most of the skiers were in pairs, except for one bunch of six young people. Eight pairs were single-sex—five only men and three only women, who all seemed much younger—and six were mixed.

It was not easy to identify any particular characteristics among them: not when they were all wearing helmets and goggles, with their faces protected against the extreme cold by balaclavas, and the same sort of clothes. They were more or less indistinguishable from each other, except for their height. Even Jesús María and myself.

Only three sets of skiers stood out. The first was a couple who seemed to be absorbed in each other further up the slope and not far from Jesús María. Even at a distance one could see the intensity of their embrace. The woman almost disappeared within the man’s frame.

The next was of course Ingrid, who cut through the swarm of people with the ease of a razor blade. She made a number of turns on her way down, with an expertise which showed us that she could have done as many more or less as she would have liked. She appeared spellbound by the snow and the sun and the skiing, unaware of what was going on around her, buried deep within herself.

When the third conspicuous skier, an enormous man on his own, swung in to the lift line again, I thought I should watch him closely—which was becoming more difficult because an increasing number of people poured in by the minute, some coming up from below. Non-skiers, they stepped off the T-bar, about half-way up. The skiers coming from higher on the slope also stopped at the same point. Within moments it had become nearly impossible to make one’s way through the mass of people just below the point where Jesús María was standing. Two snowcats, each towing a refrigerator, braked suddenly in the crowd—whereupon the drivers jumped off and started to hand out bottles of beer.

At that precise moment the sun rose above the hill opposite us, at an angle which allowed the lowest of its rays to fall just where the people were all gathered. From where I was, suddenly alone at the bottom of the lift—which was still running but was now not being used by anybody—I saw the faces in the crowd all turned toward the light, gazing at the pale disc of the sun. I could not help thinking about our early nuclear weapons tests. How the spectators had been sitting in rows, some with sunglasses, some without, admiring the ball of fire as it hovered half up in the sky, before the throng here raised their bottles and shouted “Skål!” to each other and to the now so distant star.

Then the music began to boom through enormous speakers at the base area, while people who seemed to be total strangers hugged and kissed, as if on New Year’s Eve. I looked at my watch: 11.21.

So this was the sun ritual—which instantly made the security situation much more fluid, so much harder to calculate. Ingrid was now almost the only person still skiing, and she had a clear view to both sides of the slope. But to navigate the crowd of people in the middle of the piste she needed to carve a sharp turn far out to the right, about where Jesús María seemed to have hidden herself away in the trees. Then she descended, carving giant turns around the lift pylons.

Only one other person could be seen on the piste. The solitary giant of a man, who became, in an instant, so recognizable. That terrifying pattern of movement, conspicuous even on skis.

When he took the lift up again just three seats ahead of Ingrid, who was gesticulating at me with her index finger to indicate that she wanted only one more descent, I started running up the hill as fast as I could with the hybrid on my back and her pack on my front. I noticed the amorous couple to the right of the festive crowd, just near to the point where Ingrid would be passing in a minute or two, but I was still too far away to be able to shout a warning—even if she were able to hear anything at all through the music and the buzz of the throng.

So Ingrid would soon be caught in their ingenious trap, with me as nothing more than spectator.

When the young man from the rental store looked at the clock and began the countdown—from sixty, second by second, as “The Final Countdown” blasted from the loudspeakers—I managed to get a reasonably clear line of sight through all the people as they stood there with eyes screwed tight shut against the disappearing sun, shouting out the numbers in unison. Was able, as I struggled to make my way through them, to follow what was happening behind their backs.

I watched as the pair of lovers, that is to say Zafirah and Kurt-or-John, first swept up Ingrid in what from a distance looked like an awkward embrace. And how something—or rather someone—then derailed their entire plan.

The binding on one of Kurt-or-John’s skis released as Jesús María threw herself at him—and in so doing set Ingrid free to ski downhill at speed. Zafirah melted into the crowd as if her presence had been an illusion, the passing of a shadow, while the other one of Kurt-or-John let himself be carried within the shifting mass of people, beyond reach.

Only Ingrid can have seen the rest of the events unfold, while the numbers approached zero and the volume of “The Final Countdown” continued to rise, drowning out the primal roar which must have followed.

I was too far away to be able to get involved. Just watched, like Ingrid, who had swung in among the trees on the other side of the piste, as Jesús María grabbed the ski which Kurt-or-John had lost, and with it hit him across the face. He staggered, fell backward from the force of all the pent-up rage, while the blood started to gush from his forehead, nose and mouth, effectively blinding him.

Jesús María raised the ski again. Held it like a giant scalpel, standing over Kurt-or-John’s prone figure.

The steel edge of the ski was drawn straight across his abdomen, slicing it with as much fury as precision. Yet Kurt-or-John did not come apart—since there was still bone there, the skeleton itself.

The rapidly growing pool of blood glistened, as it pumped out of the body rhythmically and the year’s last rays of sunshine was reflected in it, before it began to be absorbed into the snow. I gazed at the red on the white, that remarkably beautiful contrast. And the human remains lying there, Kurt-or-John like a slaughtered animal, steadily drained of blood, or a reindeer dragged down by a wolf on the hillside. Mused for a moment over the rate at which a human body can empty.

The countdown was completed. As the crowd yelled “THREE… TWO… ONE… ZERO—goodbye, thank you for another year!” I had to turn around quickly to see the sun sink behind the hill and leave a thin yellow-red line on the horizon. I checked my wrist-watch: 11.45, just as the young man had said. Saw the crowd start skiing down to the base so as not to miss the start of Polar Night après-ski, still not noticing anything of what had happened right behind their backs.

When the sight up the slope was clear, I stared at the last of the blood, not gushing but slowly seeping over the snow—before Jesús María dragged what was left of Kurt-or-John into the trees.

3.09

Back at the hotel, Ingrid took a quick shower while Jesús María disappeared off to the service area, down to the Girls. Probably to say her goodbyes. Bettan had laid out a magnificent farewell lunch, but had not herself appeared for it. None of us ate very much, either. Not even Ingrid.

Jesús María eventually appeared at the table.

“You were a godsend,” Ingrid said. “It seems they knew a bit too much about us: someone must have been indiscreet. That was a close call. Thank you.”

“Igualmente,” was Jesús María’s answer.

Before I had time to ask any questions, trying once again to understand the relationship between these women, not least that last reply, Bettan came into the dining room.

“He’s here now,” she said.

I noticed that Ingrid did not give Bettan a farewell hug before we vanished into the Kiruna afternoon, by now pitch-dark. Small snowflakes whirled in the air, stars could no longer be seen in the sky, the wind whistled through the low birches.

The man in the snowmobile suit gave Ingrid a clumsy embrace, before reaching out his mighty right glove, first toward me and then to Jesús María.

“Niklas. ‘The Magnificent’. Was it you who ordered the sightseeing?”

“Yes, thank you, my love. I’m so grateful. Bob and Mercedes will love it,” Ingrid said, back to her playful self with incredible speed after the incident on the slope. Jesús María sat in complete silence. Did not react at all, seemed still to be up there on the mountain, with Kurt-or-John’s remains fresh in her mind. I held back too. Tried to work out what role I should be playing now.

“No problem, Inko. But I have to admit I had no damned clue that you had cousins over there.”

“I’m glad I’ve managed to keep some secrets from you. And I suddenly had the idea of showing my only American relatives our little world. Before it’s too late—and the whole lot sinks into the deep.”

“Mmm, I know: like Atlantis.”

As he steered his pick-up truck out of the neighborhood, surprisingly slowly, Ingrid turned to us in the back seat.

“Niklas will always be very close to my heart. And not only because he was my first tragic love. He and I also took care of a large construction venture in the old days, massively complex, before I decided to try my luck in the U.S. using the project as an example of my work. That’s when we began to call him ‘The Magnificent’.”

“I think you were probably alone in that, Inko. But thanks anyway.”

I stole a glance at Jesús María, who even now made no effort to join in the banter. Sat there in a sulk while Ingrid played her charades. Niklas pointed at the analog thermometer on the Norrbottens-Kuriren newspaper building. Held the steering wheel in one hand, his giant glove still on.

“At least minus 37 Celsius, isn’t it?”

“36.8 at the most,” I said.

He peered at me in the rearview mirror. It was always easy to win people’s confidence, to begin to build trust.

“Wish I had your eyesight, Bob. But where should we start, Inko?”

“Take the church. God’s work.”

Once we were in the church, she began to explain. That the exterior had been painted in Falun red and the roof covered in shingle; that the influences from Sami cots could be seen in the construction of the roof beam; how the light fell.

And it was so strange to hear Ingrid lecture again, the whole enchantment. Then we went out to the divine little park, with snow as thick as cream lying on the branches of the trees. That strange feeling of grace. At least there and then, in this particular moment.

Ingrid also told us that Kiruna Church was voted the most popular twentieth-century Swedish building in a national poll. And that this particular masterpiece would be spared destruction, since a gigantically complicated process was planned to move it in its entirety to another site in town.

“But Kiruna Town Hall is a tragedy. This will be the first and last time that you see it,” she said.

While Niklas drove us there—it was a lot safer for us in the truck than out in the streets during business hours—I tried to understand why Ingrid let us do this in the first place. Whether our sight-seeing might have some specific purpose, some connection to our assignment. Or if it was just designed, on the spur of the moment, to break the torment of our inactivity while waiting for Sixten.

But as soon as I stepped into the enormous entrance hall, feeling my eyes rise all the way up to the ceiling—I had to catch my breath at the sheer size of the space—I no longer cared which it was. I climbed reverentially up the broad stairs—and then stood there on the upper floor and slowly ran my hand over the por-phyry railings. A few feet away from me, Jesús María was doing the same. Closed her eyes, sighed, opened them again. Seemed, like me, hardly able to take in the idea. Of demolishing something like this, in peacetime, as if it had been an enemy military target.

I then went down into the basement and tried to interpret the local authority’s sketches of what was called the “Kiruna City Transformation”. Nothing really seemed to hang together. Not the dimensions, nor the scale, the size of the vast area which was to be moved in comparison with the small new center being built.

When we took the guided tour into the mine, just before it closed to the public for the day, I had the same feeling. At the Visitor Center a third of a mile down, we jostled with a group of American tourists, their cries of “Oh my God!”, “Unbelievable!”, “Fantastic!”, “Awesome!” ricocheted off the rock. I stood before the sketches in silence. Still trying to get my head around the “City Transformation”, until it was time for the tour bus to return to the surface. But despite the detailed diagrams showing how the vein ran—a one-mile tunnel of magnetite—and all these precise aerial photographs, I still did not understand why such a large part of town had to move.

I could not help thinking of Edelweiss’ “scenarios”, his false trails, diversions. Or the model communities which we threw up somewhere in the desert, only then to be able to bomb the hell out of them.

Back in Niklas’ truck we snaked our way up the mountain, increasingly on smaller tracks rather than roads, right into darkness. Until we saw the shining skulls in the trees. Heard—and felt—the music vibrating through the car.

Niklas’ camp turned out to be a crackpot hippie collective with death metal as its distinguishing characteristic. Violent music pumped out over the mountain. End of days lurked everywhere. Skulls, bones, garish posters saying “The Town of Death” or “#kirunaisdyingfight” with English text draped over the Swedish original, maybe for our sake, grotesque plastic heads stuck on poles, maybe hinting at those at the Inner Station in “Apocalypse Now”. Ingrid whispered that they represented the members of the Kiruna local government council.

We changed into jumpsuits like the one Niklas was wearing, before he led us out to the sleds. One could hardly hear the dogs’ furious barking over the music, their urge to start pulling. And soon the drift snow started whining across the camp. Through the combined din Niklas had to shout to us—even though we were standing next to him.

Jesús María helped Niklas to harness the twelve dogs, before taking her place nearest to them. I myself sat immediately behind her as we wrestled my hybrid and her medical pack down between us. Finally Niklas climbed up onto the runners at the back with Ingrid, still wearing her pack, next to him.

The dogs yelped madly before we got off to a start, uncontrolled, directionless. The back of my seat banged painfully against my vertebrae as the sled slid and bumped down the first steep hill below the camp. But after about a minute the barking had died away. The dogs forged ahead, twelve animals and one human conductor perfectly choreographed, each one with their exact place in the rigid hierarchy.

We were moving much faster than I had expected, despite the thickening snowfall. I had no idea where we were heading, was also under no illusion that I would be told if I asked. But at least we would not make ourselves visible in this open mountain terrain. “The worse, the better,” Edelweiss used to say about the correlation between weather and combat: there was no better camouflage than a sandstorm, thick fog or heavy driving snow, and Ingrid had taken this into account.

The snow lashed continuously against our covered faces, onto the balaclavas, goggles, headlamps. What little we could make out of the landscape was like sea bed rather than mountainside. The ice-tortured dwarf birches reminded me most of all of coral. Jesús María sat silently in front of me, observing the identical rhythm of the dogs, their co-ordinated instinct to run.

I closed my eyes and concentrated on trying to pick up some of Ingrid and Niklas’ conversation, in Swedish and through the howling wind. Wiggled my toes inside my boots to thaw out my right foot. Not even our winter equipment could deal with hours of sitting in what must have been negative twenty-two degrees, even though the temperature always rises when snow begins to fall.

“And are you sure you want to go all the whole way out there, Inko, in this nightmarish weather?” Niklas said.

“Absolutely. Now that we’ve come all the way across the Atlantic. It’s an adventure for us, after all, and we’re outdoors people just like you. It’s probably still your fault that I never choose the easiest way.”

“Yup, we got around, were pretty off-piste. But that was prehistory, forty-five years ago in October. I’d never have recognized you if you hadn’t called first. But I recognized the voice, naturally, same as ever.”

Niklas was quiet for only a moment. Then his curiosity got the better of him.

“And that guy Sixten… still in touch with him?”

“Not a peep since I left for the States. Ages ago.”

“Well, you were as different from each other as could be, Yin and bloody Yang. It would never have lasted.”

Suddenly the dogs turned in toward the edge of the trees and stopped at Niklas’ low command. The hut had appeared like a mirage out of the snow: even thirty feet away we had seen nothing of it.

It was not much to look at, either. As I scoped the building, I saw that the roof had collapsed toward the northern gable, where plastic had been riveted—although that too had started to tear due to the weather conditions. Not one window retained both panes of glass. But the doors appeared to be largely intact, so it ought to be possible to shut out the worst of the cold by stuffing extra clothing from our packs into the gaps. When I returned to the group, Niklas glanced at our packs as Jesús María and I lifted them from the sled.

“I assume I don’t need to ask if you’ve got proper gear with you. Bob’s pack is after all bloody gigantic. You can also keep the jumpsuits until you come back to the camp.”

“Awesome, thank you. And so long as you come and get us again tomorrow morning, everything will be just fine,” Ingrid said.

He turned the team of dogs around, said a coaxing “O.K.”, their simple command. A few seconds later they had vanished into the darkness and driving snow. Ingrid led the way to the hut, managed to open the warped door without too much of a problem. Let us go past her, closed the door again and stopped a few paces in, looking around dreamily.

“We used to sit in here and kiss before we could even read. Niklas’ mother had been involved in ‘Operation Sepals’ during the war, one of the most important cogs in the wheel from what I understood: the Germans let the Sami roam free as reindeer over the border, perfect couriers. Then the Tourist Association never bothered to reclaim the hut. The mineral vein runs just under here, you see, so when the company stopped its open-cast work and went underground, there was probably nobody who wanted to sit here rattling as the whole of Mount Doom was blown apart. Except me and Niklas—and eventually just me. Here you can do whatever you want without being watched, in case you’re wondering.”

Jesús María had not said a word. I waited for Ingrid to explain what we were doing out here in the wilderness. But she looked at her watch.

“We certainly wouldn’t need to keep anything from Niklas. You’ve seen what the camp looks like, right? He would never report us to any authority, not a Swedish one and even less an American one, and absolutely no way to the military.”

When Ingrid checked her watch again—no more than five minutes later, still standing over by the door—I did the same. 21.52, December 10. The beginning of the Polar Night and the date of the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies: all this symbolism. And our crumbling little cottage would be a perfect hiding place when the police started questioning everybody in the immediate vicinity of the slope tomorrow morning, like Bettan for instance.

“But by now Niklas will have stopped thinking about turning around and coming back to fetch us out of this rat-hole, he’ll have gone too far already. And once he’s back at camp, my informants tell me that nowadays it doesn’t take more than a thimbleful before he’s out for the night.”

Then she turned and opened the door, letting in the ice-cold wind and driving snow.

“So it’s time to get to the real meeting place.”

3.10

Ingrid led us, packs on our backs, headlamps lit, straight into the storm. We crouched before the wind, carefully balancing our weight so that we did not break through the snow crust. The cold stung in our nostrils with each breath. The snow kept falling—which should make it nearly impossible for anybody to spot us.

The only thing I could make out was that we were surrounded by thick forest. The dog team must have turned off sharply and headed down the mountainside, before dropping us below the tree line again. Ingrid followed a trail further and further in among the trees. The heavy snow made the branches sag: if necessary we could use the space under them as escape tunnels.

As the storm grew heavier and denser, Ingrid was several times forced to stop and retrace her steps. Counted her paces back and forth, double-checking, stopped by a tree and ran her hand up and down the bark, as if looking for some kind of markings. We kept close behind, so as not to lose sight of her.

After a few minutes she signaled us to halt in what seemed to be a more open place. She wandered here and there with her eyes fixed on the snow—before suddenly sitting down and starting to dig vigorously with her hands, like a child. Jesús María and I did the same. Our winter gloves were clumsy, but there was no doubt a reason why Ingrid chose not to use the collapsible shovel in her combat pack.

Under the snow there was at first nothing but pieces of granite, and then increasingly black composites, laden with magnetite. Only after removing the deep layer of stones on top of the bed-rock could we glimpse the control box in the light of our headlamps. That was why Ingrid had avoided using the shovel, preferred the sensitivity of her hands.

With great concentration she then set about prising open the box with some sort of tool, laying bare the control buttons. The panel was large enough to allow one to key in the code—and, as ever, small enough that one’s hand would cover the movement of the fingers, making it impossible for someone else to read. A dark hole opened up in the snow.

Against the howling wind, Ingrid had to gesture to us to lead the way down. I could see out of the corner of my eye how she erased our trail: stretching one hand up out of the hole to scrabble back in place as much as she could of the natural camouflage, small piles of gravel and diluted iron ore, while the entrance to the tunnel closed above us.

So Jesús María took the lead through the steep, unlit passage, the narrow bore allowing us to place our feet on either side of the fall line even here, almost climbing down the rock wall, like Spiderman. I shivered, pulled myself together. By the time we reached the finished tunnel floor, Ingrid had managed to catch us up. We pulled off our balaclavas and continued in double-quick time along the vehicle track which twisted steeply through the bed-rock. The stalactites hung from the roof like age-old objets d’art. According to my watch it took almost a quarter of an hour for us to reach the lock gates, the depth meter showed dizzying and steadily increasing co-ordinates. Negative 500 feet, 650, 800…

Here too the gates conformed to regulations in every way. Three red steel doors, two for the shock waves and one a gas barrier with a pressure relief valve. Ingrid slipped past Jesús María. I leaned out from our little line to see her take a few deep breaths, shut her eyes. Then she quickly pressed the code on the control box hidden in the rock wall, hurried through the decontamination rooms, past the oxygen cylinders, the changing rooms, hardly sparing them a glance. Once we reached the rest area she turned on the light, switched off her lamp and sank into the circular, flame-colored sofas from the ’70s.

I looked again at my watch. 23.03—and the depth, 1,132 feet. Almost a quarter of a mile. Far deeper than any military installation I had visited.

“Welcome to Pluto. Mount Doom’s hidden core,” Ingrid said.

With some effort she removed her boots and put her feet up on the sofa. Wiggled her toes to get the circulation going again as she started to speak.

“We thought of calling it Uranus, after the God of the Heavens. But then we thought Pluto would be better. The direct opposite: the Romans’ equivalent to Hades, the ruler of the underworld, the kingdom of the dead. And the one who gave his name to plutonium.”

Ingrid paused and began to massage her feet. I watched her breath: puffs of human warmth. The temperature was more comfortable here than outdoors, but it hovered barely above freezing. The dank underground cavern felt so familiar to me, mold and high technology, must with a note of electricity.

“We transported a lot of plutonium here, and also uranium, which at the time was collectively known as ‘atomic ash’. Every little trace of our early experiments within the program. And in due course other sorts of things—the residue from our Second and Third Tier development work. Using the same transport route as when we moved the mining engineers and blasting specialists from here in Kiruna to Ursvik, at night-time over a number of years. All those who built the Inner Circle.”

We had learned to interpret all imaginable signs, whatever information was available at any given moment. So when Ingrid broke off in order to take three crunch cookies out of her combat pack and drink three mouthfuls of liquid—which made me and Jesús María do the same thing—she simultaneously gave away the fact that we would not be staying here for very long. A few days at most, hardly a week, since we were consuming so much of our provisions in one go. Then we would in all likelihood return to some sort of civilization, at least for a short while to get real nourishment into our bodies.

“Almost no-one had the faintest idea about any of this,” she went on. “Not even our most senior commanders, politicians, ministers. It was entirely my idea: nobody else should have to take responsibility for this, come Judgment Day. When I was sucked into the program at the beginning of the ’60s—still a teenager, fresh and clear, like a mountain lake—I read Sir Claude Gibbs’ theories on how best to store nuclear waste. According to him, old coal mines, which one should then cement shut, would be safer than the bottom of the North Sea.”

Ingrid finished off her third crunch cookie, for once showing signs of needing food and liquid. Jesús María and I did the same.

“And I had after all recently been sitting in the hut up there and literally felt in my body how the open-cast mining finished and the work penetrated deeper and deeper into the bed-rock. So I thought the atomic ash could slowly but surely be covered by the debris falling down from the higher levels, all this granite and magnetite. If, that is, we were able to blast open a secret connection sideways into the lowest part of the workings: synchronizing our efforts with the work of establishing the new main level at a quarter of a mile down. And everything went to plan. We imagined that this would eventually become a really big storage space for the waste from the program. Not only plutonium and uranium, but also for everything else we would have to hide. For the whole of ‘Lise Meitner’s secret’.”

Her choice of words made me start.

“But the story took another turn, of course, as so often happens. After October 1968, for certain reasons, no more waste was freighted up here. The others involved were all much older than us, began to die off, and there was nothing recorded on paper. So Pluto became as forgotten as Pompeii had been for a thousand years, until the archaeologists started to dig it up. In the end even Sixten stopped coming here once a year to measure the values.”

Ingrid got up and led us through a long tunnel toward the red steel door. On the wall before it were gauges for humidity and the radiation level. They looked as if they had stopped functioning decades earlier.

“It’s lying in there, still: the dragon’s treasure. We began with the waste which already existed—the product of Meitner and Sigvard Eklund’s very first experiments in the mid-’50s, which officially came from experimental reactor R.1 under Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan in Stockholm. Mostly metallic uranium sealed up in aluminum, and unfortunately the aluminum turned out to react on contact with water. Then we simply filled in with what we ourselves produced. Layer upon layer, year after year, in this top secret chamber beneath the gigantic volumes of debris from the construction of the new base level.”

We returned to the rest area and Ingrid stretched out on a sofa while Jesús María and I sat opposite her. Her voice was just as engaging, even in that position. I closed my eyes and listened. Could not help but enjoy her fairy tales.

“And we really did manage to pull it off. It wasn’t until 2007, when Nya Ursvik was to be developed and the last of the radioactive material had to be removed from there, that the so-called ‘historic waste’ began to receive any attention in the Swedish media. Then Greenpeace received a tip-off and had the good fortune to find the truck on the E4 motorway.”

I opened my eyes again, saw that Jesús María was about to say something—and then held back so as to listen to more.

“But the very last of the waste from our Swedish nuclear weapons program was sent away to the States as late as last year, on March 27. Just over six and a half pounds of weapons-grade plutonium, nearly twenty pounds of naturally depleted uranium and a few other things in a top secret maneuver which had been planned for decades. As professional as if I’d done it myself—as indeed I had. But now from the other side of the Atlantic.”

Ingrid seemed to hesitate before she went on. Swallowed heavily.

“In any case… with the question of the waste having been raised in the media, in 2007 Sixten came up here for the first time in years to measure the levels: was reminded that everything was still lying in here. And what he discovered was that the situation was not as serious as he had feared—rather it was a good deal worse. The waste from the later phases of the program turned out to be more toxic than we could ever have imagined. In addition, the radioactivity had spread far out into the ground-water.”

Ingrid took another few deep drafts of liquid, cleared her throat.

“Yet we had a stroke of luck. The mine is of course owned by L.K.A.B., which in turn is owned by the Swedish state, so the connection between the nuclear weapons program and the mine could be hushed up. The vital part of Kiruna did have to be moved. But we could also bundle up our nuclear waste issue within the gigantic process which goes under the heading of “City Transformation”.

At last Jesús María reacted.

“You mean all of that crap, Bettan’s fucking tears because the hotel is having to close after being run by three generations of the same family, the fact that the town hall has to be blown all to hell, is just fake? That this is about plutonium and shit—and not the iron ore in the mountain!”

“That’s not what I’m saying, Jesús María. I don’t think anyone of woman born can work out exactly what’s what anymore. These processes have for so long been wrapped up in each other, like concentric circles, boxes within boxes.”

Ingrid took a Geiger counter out of her combat pack, our latest model, hardly bigger than a matchbox. It rattled more than ticked. Like a rattlesnake.

“So I promised Sixten to make an assessment of the radiation, since we were in this neck of the woods anyway. And as you can probably tell from your Geiger counter, we ought not to stay in here for long. I should say exactly thirty-nine minutes… until he finally comes.”

I stole a glance at my watch, which of course showed 23.21. Thirty-nine minutes until midnight: the constant chronological symbolism. Then I asked the question, even though I knew the mussel might snap shut for ever.

“You talk about your Second and Third Tier development work… Can you tell us more about it, Ingrid?”

“The short answer is ‘No’, my treasure, and we haven’t got time for the longer answer. But I can say that our dreams of an atom bomb were only the beginning. The very first circle of hell.”

3.11

When I woke up—and felt to see if the security strap of the briefcase was still lying over my wrist—Jesús María was sitting close to Ingrid on the sofa opposite. The sweetish smell and the stubs on the ’70s oval teak table revealed their tale: Jesús María had already smoked too much. Ingrid looked pale and worn.

“You could set the stars by Sixten, the entire universe, the course of the world…” she muttered.

00.51. As it turned 01.00, Ingrid straightened her face, became our Alpha again.

“O.K. Improvisation,” she said tonelessly and lifted her pack onto her back. “It’s not safe to stay here any longer.”

We moved up to the surface in silence. Everything in reverse, although it was much tougher going in this direction: up the steep tunnel, the layers of stones over the hatch. But we were soon above ground and heading into driving snow. By 02.14 we were back at the ramshackle hut.

The night passed relatively painlessly, despite the cold. Our sleeping bags were meant to be able to cope with negative thirteen, according to military regulations—and after burning a fire for about an hour in the open fireplace, the temperature at the hut’s southern gable had risen to approximately that. When I finished my shift keeping an eye on the fire, I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep, as if drugged.

At 08.30 Ingrid tapped my shoulder. Still pale, resolute, controlled.

“Niklas should be here soon. We said at dawn, whatever that may mean in this weather and on the first day of twenty-four hour darkness. But I didn’t think it was so important to agree an exact time. The plan was for Sixten to take us away from here, by snowmobile, before Niklas returned.”

Half an hour later the dogs and Niklas came into view through the cracked windows. They were at most thirty feet away, the visibility cannot have been much more than that.

“Wonderful night?” Niklas said once he had managed to force open the frozen door and the rolled-up fabric Jesús María had used to seal cracks.

“Divine. Definitely one for the memories,” Ingrid said.

“Yes, it’s been fantastic to experience the northern Scandinavian climate like this, full on,” I said.

Niklas just shook his head as he led us to the dogs. And even their impatient barking had not been enough for me to find them on my own: it was brutally hard to manage the driving snow, despite all our winter training. The special goggles had no chance against these extreme conditions, which seemed to have got heavier rather than moved on.

“And you said Jukkas… are you absolutely sure, Inko? You know that I won’t set foot inside that pile of colonial kitsch,” Niklas said somewhere in front of me in the white-out.

“You can drop us off wherever you want within walking distance, Niklas. But Bob and Mercedes would never forgive me if I didn’t give them the chance to stay at the Ice Hotel.”

We took up the same positions in the sled. Niklas and Ingrid back on the runners, Jesús María closest to the dogs and me behind her. Despite the dogs’ silence once they were allowed to start pulling—how willingly they heaved and hauled at the harness, just like me—the wind stopped me from hearing a word of what Niklas and Ingrid were saying. Whatever lies she was telling him now.

The snow covered our tracks, both sled and dogs. The landscape was like one enormous blanket. Some kind of light nevertheless seeped through low on the horizon, the world went from gray-white to white-gray while “dawn” broke and the Polar Night approached its brightest moment.

When the main road was a few feet away—and we were level with yet another wooden church which we could make out on the other side, still in the shelter of the trees—Niklas stopped the sled.

“And you don’t want us to go in there first, Inko? The priest is normally around until lunchtime. Just get it done?”

Ingrid fell silent for a moment, for once had no ready answer.

“Another time,” she said.

“O.K., give me a call when… But it should have been us, right?”

Ingrid got out of the sled, put the pack on her back and gave him a quick peck on the cheek.

“Yes, Niklas. It should have been us.”

Then both he and the sled and dogs were swallowed whole by the whirling snow, while we labored toward the Ice Hotel. Even though it was only a regular weekday, just before lunch on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, long lines straggled to the reception desk. Ingrid still managed to find a way to the front—getting hold of the last three tickets to the daily showing.

Edelweiss used to say that there were only two ways in which to hide away effectively. Either in isolation: underground, alone on an island, in the middle of the desert. Or right in the middle of the throng.

It was for that reason that Ingrid and Sixten had chosen this commotion as an alternate meeting place. When the guide arrived, fifteen minutes after the specified time, there was hardly any elbow-room left in the hotel lobby. The tourists were glaring in irritation at our enormous packs that Ingrid had secured, against the odds, permission for us to bring them in.

Even the guide cast a troubled look at the backpacks—before deciding that this group was so large, and he was himself already so late, that it was hardly worthwhile sending us to the left luggage area.

And one would think that in our current situation, nothing else would matter. Just the escape, the briefcase in the hybrid, the assignment. That the rest of our existence would fall away. But instead I was hyper-sensitive, keyed up to the maximum. Every word from our guide registered with me, everything I saw. The Main Hall reminded me of the most beautiful and terrifying stories of my childhood—the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales, Narnia, The Lord of the Rings. And later the Harry Potter stories, which I had read one after the other with the kids.

At the same time I tried to keep an eye on the other two. Ingrid seemed above all to be awaiting the signal from Sixten: usually looking in a different direction from the one the guide was pointing in. Jesús María had already left the group and begun to wander around on her own. When she thought that nobody was looking, she ran her hand over the wishing well of ice in the middle of the hall, furtively dropping a coin into the water.

Then she moved on to the mighty unicorn which dominated the far end of the hall, at least ten feet long from head to tail. When the rest of the group arrived at the sculpture—and Jesús María had already walked some distance away—the guide explained that it was made of snice. A specially balanced mixture of snow and ice for creating frozen works of art.

I came to think of the remarkable Gobelin tapestry which Ingrid devoted one of her many thought-provoking lectures to. One of the most enigmatic masterpieces of the Middle Ages, she had said, clicking slowly forward, slide after slide. Through the series which showed in the harshest detail how the unicorn was first lured and then killed. The blood flowing from its wounds, all the spears in one single body, the wild looks of the huntsmen: that beautiful white creature being sacrificed like Christ himself.

After a number of historic twists and turns, the tapestry—seven mysterious pictures in the most precious textiles—ended up at the Cloisters in New York, where my mother and I used to end our long walks.

How we then used to sit in their wonderful café under the arches, my mother with her black coffee and I with an enormous cup of hot chocolate with so much whipped cream so that it spilled over: she always insisted that it should be too much. Spoke to me animatedly about those strange paintings—with their depictions of primitive bloodthirstiness, the white unicorn being hunted and speared like any bull in an arena—ever since I had been far too young.

The final and most complex scene was called “The Unicorn in Captivity”. Which was also the title of this mighty snice statue, here in Jukkasjärvi’s Ice Hotel.

Before the Ice Bar opened, we were allowed to walk around on our own in the hotel rooms and the artistically decorated ice suites, which all had English names for the benefit of the tourists. Everything appeared frightening and incomprehensible to me, put me on edge. In the “Narcissus” suite a gigantic head of ice and snow was reflected in a huge frosty mirror. “Future Ancestors” was a labyrinth of allusions to religious rites which had not yet found their shape.

Then it got really unpleasant. I would not be able to get many minutes of sleep in “Solid Flow/Time Warps”, “It’s Alive” or “Before the Big Bang”. But the worst of all, Suite 325 in the western gable, was called “The Martyrdom of Christ”. Just a double bed—made completely of ice, like everything else—and a gigantic shining crucifix, on which a man-sized Christ figure was writhing in agony.

I kept close to Ingrid, even more so after the incident on the Luossa slope, watching everywhere for signs of Zafirah and the surviving Kurt-or-John. But there was just one other person in this terrible place: Jesús María stood stock-still and admired the work.

“I’d like to live here,” she said.

We left her in front of her namesake and went out to the Ice Bar, which was packed full of people even though only three minutes had passed since its opening at 4.00 p.m. Ingrid somehow found a place at the bar and immediately ordered a vodka cranberry. I took a Virgin Mary and as we drank slowly, I sensed a feverish energy rising in her as we waited. The wall clock of snice struck 5.00 p.m. and she stared at it, then at her cell phone.

The noise level in the bar became more oppressive with each passing minute, a strangely lustful bellowing, Sodom and Gomorrah 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle. People crowded in on all sides around our bulky packs. Played and lost crazy sums at the roulette table, cut directly from the ice of the Torne river: every time the ice ball came to a stop, there was an ear-shattering cacophony of rejoicing and dismay.

Eventually Ingrid’s cell phone did ring. Or at least it must have done—I heard nothing at all through the din. Just saw that she started, as if shot.

“Suite 325,” she then shouted in my ear with the cell phone still in her hand. Her breath was heavy with vodka cranberry.

“He’s waiting for us there. Glory be to God on high.”

When we got to the suite, there was no sign of Jesús María. On the door Sixten had put his own handwritten piece of paper over the suite’s name. It now read “ERASMUS’ MARTYRDOM”.

All these games. Sixten’s cool temperament, even in a situation like this.

I could not help but smile, recalling our first late-night dinner at Ursvik. How he, as part of his conversational performance piece, had discussed Poussin’s interpretation of the myth surrounding the saint who bore my name. How Sixten himself had apparently once hovered around “The Martyrdom of St Erasmus” at the Vatican Museum. Finally he walked away, but not being able to forget it, went back that same day. Then repeated this ritual several times during his week’s holiday. The savagery of it had made a deep impression on him. How Saint Erasmus just lay there on a bare bench while his intestines, according to the myth, were wound out of his stomach by a windlass.

Sixten was now sitting in Suite 325, in splendid solitude, facing away from us on the double bed of ice, in the darkest part of the room. He continued to play his games. Pretended to be reading a book, not even to notice our arrival.

“Ah, so there’s my knight in shining armor!” Ingrid exclaimed.

I hurried forward to take the book from his hand and gain his attention, without first studying the situation. Only close up could I make out the title: The Soft Spots. The textbook to which our instructor in extreme close combat always referred.

Then everything went haywire. People were pulling and tearing at me from different directions. Blurred contours, imprecise movements, insufficiently synchronized pressure against the spots on my temples. Confusion, some form of combat perhaps. Zafirah’s face inches above my own, the black of her eyes, without life, reflected nothing. I froze. A sharp stab to my neck as the needle pierced the vein. Slowly I started to lose consciousness, felt how the hybrid was lifted off me and my back was pressed directly onto the bare ice of the bed. I heard shouts, agitated voices, ultra-violence. Right there and yet somehow far off. As if I were under the surface, sensing everything through a tiny hole in the ice.

It took some moments before the initial numb feeling from the cold began to fade and my brain registered the pain. Just before I experienced the sensation of skin against ice, heat rather than cold, I gave Sixten another appreciative little smile. At how precisely he had managed to recreate Poussin’s painting—as a living tableau.

My own terrible martyrdom.