The Carrier

4.01

That night was one long stream of visions, hallucinations, images. Lucid dreams. Beyond reality.

I was waterboarded five times in succession in the water of the wishing well, a fraction above freezing. Then I was skewered by the unicorn’s three-foot-long horn of ice—before my innards were slowly rolled up on it.

The experience of having died, if only temporarily, made the dreams worse than ever.

Not even Edelweiss had allowed us to take our practice sessions all the way. We could after all not be totally sure that the resuscitation exercises would be as effective as the killing methods. “And once you’re dead you’ll never be the same again,” he had proclaimed without a trace of a smile.

As I regained consciousness, I dreamed that I was our most lauded president and was making a speech at a top-level meeting about nuclear weapons during the early years of the Cold War.

“Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable,” I began.

“Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us. The mere existence of modern weapons—ten million times more powerful than any that the world has ever seen, and only minutes away from any target on earth—is a source of horror, and discord and distrust.

“I speak of peace because of the new face of war. If only one thermonuclear bomb were to be dropped on any American, Russian, or any other city, whether it was launched by accident or design, by a madman or by an enemy, by a large nation or by a small one, from any corner of the world, that one bomb could release more destructive power on the inhabitants of that one helpless city than all the bombs dropped in the Second World War.

“A full-scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than sixty minutes, with the weapons now in existence, could wipe out more than three hundred million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere. And the survivors, as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, ‘the survivors would envy the dead’. For they would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot even conceive of its horrors.

“In an age when both sides have come to possess enough nuclear power to destroy the human race several times over, the world of communism and the world of free choice have been caught up in a vicious circle of conflicting ideologies and interests. World order will be secured only when the whole world has laid down these weapons which seem to offer us present security but threaten the future survival of the human race.

“So let us turn the world away from war. Let us make the most of this opportunity, and every opportunity, to reduce tension, to slow down the perilous nuclear arms race, and to check the world’s slide toward annihilation.”

The applause which greeted the end of my speech would not die down. I bowed, gestured to the president of the other superpower, my opponent and new partner in the dreams of disarmament.

When the congenial formal dinner was over, I met the military advisors in my room for a final polishing of our plans for a full-scale and irreversible nuclear weapons attack on the other superpower.

I took one last close look at the calculations for the devastation. Felt a warmth through my body, like endorphins after a run.

4.02

And that was my frame of mind as finally I woke up, with a smile on my lips.

It did not take too many seconds before my mouth stiffened into a grimace and the warmth in my body was replaced by freezing cold. The lit-up ice figure of Jesus on the cross was staring me in the face, paralyzed with agony, just like me.

I tried to lift my naked back. But just the first inch of movement gave an indication of how bad the pain would be when my body tried to free itself from the bluish block of ice. Although I would be largely anesthetized by the cold.

The smell of Zafirah’s heavily spiced scent—enough to provoke headaches even under normal conditions—was still hanging in the air, or maybe just in my memory. The steel-gray short wig, as well as Sixten’s turquoise shell jacket, lay discarded beside the ice bed. As dysfunctional as my brain was, this made me realize that he had probably never been here.

I managed to get up after a number of unsuccessful attempts. It was like tearing off a Band-Aid. Except that it covered my entire back—and that it was my own efforts which were ripping open the wound.

I staggered around among the objects which had been spread across the suite. The hybrid was still there, but without the briefcase. My weapon, field knife, and the medical pack containing the treasured anesthetics and things far worse which could bring an end to everything at once, were also gone. As well as my notebook, the crunch cookies, the cell phone from the playground, my watch: everything that could keep me oriented. And the key which Sixten had given me.

But they had left most of the contents of the pack, including my field glasses, latest passport, currency, the matching credit cards in one of the hybrid’s secret pockets. Probably hoping to keep me under electronic surveillance, waiting to see where the tracks would lead. Or they had simply been in a hurry.

My sweater and down vest lay just inside the hybrid’s upper lid. I put my clothes on incredibly slowly, a few inches at a time, adding layer after layer with infinite care as if I were made of cracked glass. With some effort I also managed to get my winter boots on as well as the black snowmobile suit with the words “THE INNER STATION. Niklas’ Adventures” on the breast pocket. I strapped on the noticeably lighter hybrid as loosely as I could, opened the unlocked door to Suite 325, “The Martyrdom of Christ”, and went down into the sparse night lighting of the Ice Lobby. Scanning the area, I looked for some sign of either Ingrid or Jesús María. When the receptionist informed me they had checked out, I thanked her, turned, and—without a backward glance—made for the cover of the Polar night.

Our psychologists had told us that nobody could really explain how our will to live functions. Why it could suddenly stop. Or why it did not.

So I walked away from the hotel, reflexively, instinctively, although I could have headed down into the river instead. The clock outside the souvenir store showed 05.01, December 12, 2013. Everything was crystal clear and unreal. The area surrounding the hotel in power-save mode, the transfer buses like giant bugs sleeping along the main road.

But the vast restaurant on the other side, scaled to accommodate mass tourist assault, was still open at this time of night: for the most part as a gesture to a few individual truckers who had slept in their vehicles. One of them was sitting at a table inside, finishing his breakfast.

“Are you headed near Kiruna station?” I said.

“Certainly am, but I’m leaving right now.”

“Do you have any alcohol in the truck? I can pay you for it.” I showed him money. He nodded, got slowly to his feet and I followed him out to the biggest eighteen-wheeler on the road.

When I jumped down at the station he handed me a small, transparent, plastic bottle without a label. It could just as easily have been home-distilled spirit or face cleanser—an impression which downing the bottle in the bathroom on the train did nothing to dispel. But it did to some extent deaden the pain, and the effect of feeling frozen solid began to wear off.

I removed the jumpsuit and pulled on the neutral, black gear which I had taken out of the combat pack in the hybrid. I stared at the face in the mirror, still strange to me. The new lips, the fleshy nose: Jesús María’s attempt to make me look like General Shubin. The face in the mirror looked back at me, searching for some trace of the man before the martyr. I saw the wreckage of a person—not only after the trials of the night, my temporary death. But also the psychological warfare.

By the time we arrived at Luleå, after not many hours’ journey, the locomotive succumbed to the cold. While we were waiting, I went to the station store and bought a ballpoint pen and a notebook. Then eventually I sat down in the restaurant car of the new train, put the hybrid under the table and ordered an inedible Pyttipanna with cream sauce, sliced beetroot and two fried eggs. Carefully noted down in the new notebook everything that had happened since we left the Snowflake, barely two days ago.

When I was finished, my left temple started to burn with pain, as well as much of my back—I needed something else to concentrate on. I began a comprehensive analysis of the situation in my new notebook.

I made the basic assumption that the core team was now up and running. If not immediately after the launch at Minot, then in any case since the Ice Hotel. Apart from Zafirah and Kurt-or-John—together or separately—Edelweiss was presumably as ever at headquarters in Washington. On top of that, elements of the President’s own forces had presumably been assigned to take us down. But in accordance with the directives, few, if any others at all, would be informed: not even the Vice President.

The remaining authorities, all of our jumble of more or less rival agencies, would probably have no idea either. Likely not the C.I.A. Presumably neither the F.B.I. nor the N.S.A. Almost certainly not the Secret Service either—or the S.S., as Edelweiss sometimes used to label them, the meaning hidden yet clear. They would only be thinking that NUCLEUS were away on yet another top secret training maneuver somewhere around the globe.

Even I was no longer aware of much more than pieces of the puzzle. I had no idea who had my briefcase or Ingrid’s portable command terminal. Who were the hunters, who the hunted.

So I wrote down the names of the people in chronological order, without specifying their respective roles. In order of appearance during our flight: first Jesús María, then Ingrid, Sixten, Aina, Lisa, Bettan, Niklas. After that I added my ageing senile mother, as well as Amba and the children.

Then I put a cross underneath those who might be dead. That made at least half, maybe all of them. Eliminated in silence, as always during our classified assignments overseas. Later there would be talk of accidents and illnesses, chance fateful encounters: only we would know the whole picture, had sufficient numbers of paid informants.

Finally I added our nuclear weapons bases, both at home and in Europe, as well as other strategic targets—and began to sketch in the connections. Solid arrows between the squares represented movements which had already taken place, ones with dashed lines meant upcoming ones, double lines between people indicated that they trusted each other while single lines suggested fundamental uncertainty. And soon it all became one solid cloud of ink.

But come Stockholm, I had abandoned the analysis. There was only one way to clarify the situation, and that was empirically. At one particular place, and one only, on just one particular date. It was a guess. But an educated one.

After purchasing a night-train ticket costing an arm and a leg, I got some headache pills, water and a copy of the New York Times from a kiosk. There was still a quarter of an hour before departure, so I sat down among the businessmen who were smoking on the bench furthest along the platform, beyond the glow of the light. The newspaper was a day old: from December 11. I found what I was looking for, even though it had only been given one small square at the very bottom of the front page—so I leafed to the foreign pages and read on. The award of the Peace Prize in Oslo seemed once again to have passed without incident. And the views expressed about the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons were as effusive as ever.

Mobilizing public opinion against chemical weapons had been much more successful than in the case of nuclear weapons, since they never represented any direct threat to our own military power. Nerve gas had therefore already been banned long ago, even in wartime.

I laid the newspaper on the bench in order to take a few painkillers and rinse them down with the water. Only then did I catch sight of the article.

The entire top left-hand corner of the first page was covered with General Falconetti’s picture. Edelweiss’ most important playmate, in dress uniform, with a chest full of shining medals. A small column on the first page of the home news section listed all of Falconetti’s areas of responsibility: full operational charge of our nuclear weapons submarines, aircraft and land-based launch ramps. Highest supervisory authority over the military space program, as well as the entire digital war effort.

I pinched my arm and closed my eyes. But the article was still there when I opened them.

The most senior person responsible for the nuclear weapons system—at least officially, outside the Team, and therefore our nearest colleague—had been caught red-handed manipulating digital one-armed bandits.

A background article listed all the other incidents which had apparently come to light in the American nuclear weapons system during this fall alone. An entire unit of missile operators at the Malmstrom base had been failed during a security spot check, and the joint commander of two other unnamed nuclear weapons bases had recently been dismissed after similar controls.

In the article the Commander-in-chief talked of moral failings among personnel who had constantly to be at full readiness without ever being “deployed”, as he put it. A psychoanalyst agreed in an interview that people who are “deprived of purpose” in the end also lose their judgment.

At the foot of the page there was a timeline of the revelations. As I read it, I was stunned. Because it was not now—as news of this unthinkable incident was becoming public—that General Falconetti had been dismissed from the military.

It had happened on October 24. The day after Aina turned seventy, the attack during her birthday celebration, our escape from the window of the burning house. It could be a coincidence—but probably not.

4.03

I had been to Bruxelles-Central only once before. During an exercise in the heart of the city, simulating a terror attack, the President’s stand-in had taken shelter in the grand old station awaiting orders for evacuation. I had stood right next to him.

After sitting around in painful idleness, he had suggested we see who could be the quickest at counting the number of panes in the enormous barred windows running all the way from the doors of the front entrance up to the roof. I nodded: a stand-in should be obeyed in the same way as the President himself.

“231!” he said eagerly, after only about a second. He had obviously already counted them. “Simple mathematics. Seven sections times eleven rows times three panes in each!” he went on.

“Exactly,” I answered. “Less the two missing panes at 3:7:2 and 5:2:1. So: 229 in total.”

It was because of those sorts of things that I had become the Carrier and he was still a stand-in. Because I—and not he—understood that the picture always consists of millions of pixels, that it is the details which define the whole rather than the other way around, his military career would always be stuck in amateur dramatics and party tricks.

Otherwise we usually arrived in Brussels directly with the helicopter, Marine One. Only Kurt-or-John and I, together with the President, and a few select members of his own security detail in a separate little group sitting furthest forward. We would land on the roof of the grayish and anonymous N.A.T.O. headquarters building, far enough away from the center along the motorway, then go straight into the office of the Supreme Allied Commander Europe while the guards gave even me subservient nods.

The latest Admiral was amiable and relaxed. Had taken up his post at the same time as the President and was about the same age—which meant they had more in common than just their jobs: they could loosen up with some banter before the agenda for the day took hold, about acquaintances shared, someone’s old girlfriend at university, the sports results. Occasionally about the nuclear football. Sometimes the President made as if to pass it to the Admiral, to take it out of my left hand and throw it across.

I had not moved a muscle, hardly even blinked. Through all these years.

During exercises we would instead land at and depart from the closed-off parts of Zaventem airport, called “Terminal X”. Enormous, fully armed columns for the regular joint maneuvers with our European allies. One of many full dress rehearsals, physical and psychological preparations for the unthinkable, with or without nuclear weapons.

But now I had come here to Belgium, a man without a briefcase or a weapon. I got onto a local train, picked a seat in the center of an empty carriage and took out the newspaper I had bought at the station kiosk. The clock at the first stop, Leuven, said 14.12. That vague time after lunch on a regular working day. A perfect moment to strike—or to be anonymous.

And there was at least as much in the Washington Post as there had been in the New York Times the day before, an entire spread. The headline read AMERICAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS SCANDAL, the layout unusually brash for the newspaper.

According to its so-called defense policy expert, astonishing new revelations were continuing to emerge from the nuclear weapons program. For example, the majority of the operative personnel at yet another of our most important missile bases—Minot—had been suspended for security reasons.

But the expert wrote that this was still small beer in comparison with the latest, as yet unconfirmed, rumor. That another of the three most senior officers responsible for the whole of the American nuclear weapons system had been suspended pending the outcome of an investigation. The main reason was said to be that he had behaved inappropriately at an international nuclear weapons conference, had become intoxicated and bragged about how he saves the world from destruction every day, each second, just by not pushing the button. He had also, in the course of the conference, ended up at the homes of a number of women with doubtful security status. “Like in a James Bond movie!”, the military political expert wrote.

I was not surprised: sooner or later our true personalities have a habit of emerging. And I had never had any time for General Goldsmith.

And yet—all this synchronicity. Everything coming out at once.

I stared out the window, trying to gather my thoughts. Sat bolt upright, so as not to let the raw parts of my back touch the seat.

Flanders rolled by like a newsreel from the First World War. The same special clay which made the unusually deep and durable trenches possible, the deadlock, the same unceasing rain. It spattered ever harder against the window as the train took me further into this featureless part of the world, as if made to house in the greatest secrecy one of our key nuclear weapons bases in Europe. The sort of thing that we never confirmed, however strong the indications were.

I ticked off the names of all the artistically decorated station buildings on the Post-it note the woman in the ticket office at Bruxelles-Central had given me. Tienen, Landen, Sint-Truiden, Alken… And oddly enough there was a taxi available outside the station in Hasselt. Despite the rain, on this day of all days.

“Spotters’ Day?” the driver asked. “To the base?”

“No,” I said, “first a good night’s sleep at the hotel. I’ll take the risk of waiting till tomorrow to get myself there.”

The driver hardly spared a glance at the kitschy decals on my enormous black backpack, which I lifted into the car with me. He spoke English as well as most people do around our overseas bases, knew that it was worth making that little effort. And that he should not ask any more questions than necessary.

So it was mostly him telling me. About what was obviously the reason Ingrid had been expecting Sixten on that particular day in Kiruna, so as to have enough time to come down here for this very occasion. The moment when everybody would be gazing in the wrong direction. “Misdirection”, as magicians call it. When aircraft enthusiasts from the entire town, country, continent would be gathered for the one time in the year when one can see the airplanes in action at really close quarters. Our propaganda machinery in full swing.

“And it’ll be especially spectacular this year, as you know! The whole area is super excited that this time they’ll not only be allowed into the N.A.T.O. base, but the real one, right inside, so that the Americans can show everybody there are no nuclear weapons there. People are also speculating that something completely new is going to be demonstrated. The spotters have been standing in line for days—and the activists for even longer. Even though the gates won’t be opened until seven tomorrow evening.”

I glanced at the clock on the taxi dashboard: almost 4.00 p.m., the day before. Immediately before the first sign, VLIEGBAS, I began to recognize where I was, even as a car passenger. To kill some time I asked the driver to take a swing around the base. The area by the placard which read Kiezel Kleine Brogel Spotters Corner was for once totally empty. The enthusiasts who normally stood there for most of the day, gazing into the sky, since our fighters’ take-off and landing times were classified even during training, must have moved over to the base itself.

Through the taxi window I looked at the encampment outside the gates. The rain had stopped, and enormous pools of water lay mirror-like. The tents of the demonstrators and enthusiasts stood not too far apart, united by a common interest. In the calm before the storm.

Then I let my eyes travel further: across the sentry box; the high walls; the razor-wire fence which had been developed for Guantanamo and continually refined for our nuclear weapons bases around the world. I had been here so often, very recently, in another life. The Kleine Brogel nuclear weapons base was one of our central locations in Europe for exercises. As well as one of the keys to our complex intercontinental system of attack and counter-attack, in case events turned real. What went by the name “Global Strike” in our current war plan.

When I felt that I had reconnoitered enough, I asked the driver to take a detour past the fighter plane on the roundabout on the way to Peer. Our old F-16, one of our longest-lasting models, part of the classic old weapons system which was gradually going to be replaced as part of the “Revitalization”. According to current plans, with effect from 2023.

As we approached the hotel, I had a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach: even I was not immune to it. There was no way of knowing what would be waiting for me there. If Ingrid and Jesús María could have survived the attack in Suite 325. Whether I had been spared just to act as what we call a “spool of thread”. Somebody one allows to run free, under constant surveillance, to see where the leads run and how many people are involved. How deep it all goes. How high up, so that everyone is identified—even myself.

“Will you fetch me tomorrow late afternoon, at 6.30 p.m.?” I asked the driver.

“Of course, sir.”

The facade of the hotel was the same as ever, a piece of cultural history, military memorial, frozen time. The neon sign said “1815”, the name of the hotel honoring the battle at Waterloo—one hour from here by the main road. Where even Napoleon was defeated.

The woman in reception looked the same too. Her name badge identified her as Valeria—in our military way we had called her Valkyria behind her back, because of her long blond hair and luxuriant figure—and she had clearly had some more work done to her face since I last saw her.

Yet when I handed over my passport she hardly looked up. Maybe because she simply did not recognize me after my own surgery. Or because she had a lot on her hands.

The lobby was packed with spotters. In many ways hard to distinguish from the various sorts of spies, not least our own, who always turned up when bases around the world opened their gates.

But in one respect the two groups differed markedly. The enthusiasts’ binoculars were enormous, and stuck out of their backpacks, a status symbol of sorts: the bigger, the better. This was in stark contrast to the spies’ smaller models, chosen in order not to arouse attention.

In some ways therefore I blended in among the enthusiasts with my large black hybrid, even my kitschy tourist decals had their equivalent on some backpacks—but in one decisive respect I did not at all. Valeria pounced on this like a hawk when she finally looked up from her computer.

“But where are your binoculars, Herr Gustafsson?”

“Oh, I was robbed on the way here, unfortunately. In my sleeping compartment. But I’ll able to borrow from a friend. He’s been here for a few days already, to get a good place in line because of the rumors about something spectacular tomorrow evening.”

“And you think you’ll be able to find each other among all the people waiting to get in?”

“It usually works out, with a bit of ingenuity. It’s not our first time.”

She gave me a searching look, could very well have been paid by our military command, to keep an eye on things. Then she gave me my room key.

4.04

I checked out just after 9.00 a.m., before having breakfast. Valeria still showed no sign of seeing through my new face, just nodded and hummed into the computer. The dining room was empty, all the spotters up with the dawn to stand in line at the base. There was a chance that Ingrid might be among them. If, that is, she was still alive. I picked up a couple of newspapers and loaded my plate with sausage, bacon and potato pancakes, knew I needed the nourishment since I had not had a proper meal for more than twenty-four hours.

I left the plate half empty, or half full. When the tourist bureau next to the hotel opened, I showed them my passport and in return was given my own key to the Bruegelhuis and a bulky black audio guide.

“So you like Bruegel, Herr Gustafsson?” the young girl at the counter asked in a broad Flemish accent.

“Actually not. He scares the living daylights out of me.”

The girl stiffened. She did not know how she should handle this response, what to do with herself in her traditional outfit from this province, Limburg: the strange white kerchief and appliqué fabric flowers, the black blouse and lilac striped skirt with orange fabric sewn onto it. With her studied politeness, her language skills, her training in tourism at the local university.

Before leaving I bought a box of Bruegel pastilles, some postcards of his most gloomy works, and I reached for a magic Bruegel cube, with which one could switch between ten or so famous paintings: for example change the tranquil “Hunters in the Snow” into the macabre and violent “The Fall of the Rebel Angels”. As I walked out I could hear the young girl sigh with relief.

The rain fell heavily again, cascaded over the medieval square like a great flood. As I stepped through the entrance to the Bruegelhuis, Peer’s exhibition dedicated to its most famous son, the drops from my rain suit streamed onto the creaking floorboards. My legs felt shaky and unreliable on the dizzyingly steep stairs. Not only because I had wanted to come here for so long, the place where, according to the experts, Pieter Bruegel the Elder was born. Apart from the base, it seemed to be the only thing which justified Peer’s existence. And I had always thought of getting away for a free hour during one of our training visits, although the opportunity had never arisen.

Once I got into the exhibition upstairs at the Bruegelhuis, I was alone. This would be the obvious rendezvous in Ingrid’s mind. She had been fascinated by him first. Started her opening lecture to us with “The Triumph of Death”—and concluded our final dissertation session with “The ‘Little’ Tower of Babel”.

It was in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, 2001, our world had been turned upside down. Ingrid did not seem to want to talk about my dissertation at all. Instead she showed me the viral images on the net, with Bin Laden or the Evil One’s face in the cloud of smoke caused by the aircraft crashing into the World Trade Center. Then she opened an image of “The ‘Little’ Tower of Babel” on her computer. Clicked to zoom closer and closer in, highlighting how the black clouds in the top right-hand corner of Bruegel’s painting really seemed to be coming out of the building: in the form of smoke or soot. As if something had crashed into that work too, from the side, before exploding against Babel’s tower.

Here in front of the reproduction of that painting I switched on the audio guide. But the meditative voice did not say a single word about it, hardly referred to the strange black clouds.

I moved on and found myself standing there, my legs trembling under the weight of my body. Somewhere behind the thick velvet curtains I could sense the sounds from the square, life at lunchtime on St Lucia’s day, Friday the 13th, in this small Belgian village with Bruegel and a nuclear weapons base as its claims to fame. I put the headphones back on. “Pling. Number 23. ‘The Triumph of Death’. Bruegel’s prophetic masterpiece…” Stood stock-still in the dark room, just let myself be sucked in. For one minute, three, maybe longer.

When I surfaced again and switched off the audio guide, I heard an unmistakable creaking from the flooring in the next room. Somebody was there, keeping more or less exact pace with me: a few times I tried suddenly stopping in front of one of Bruegel’s paintings and the footsteps would continue for just a second or two too long. I breathed calmly through my nose. Almost inaudibly, as we had been trained.

But the person shadowing me, or at least keeping me under observation, always from one of the adjoining eerily dark rooms in the Bruegelhuis, seemed to be well trained. So nobody gave themselves away—and neither did I. It could just as easily be Zafirah, Ingrid or Jesús María.

Then I heard a soft, for most people imperceptible, click from the entrance door lock on the ground floor. The careful tread up the stairs revealed neither the person’s gender nor their weight. Could have been a compact little woman with perfect control over her center of gravity or a large man. What I knew was that this was someone who had been trained to move with stealth in tight situations: presumably at the same school as me.

Back at the tourist bureau, after triple-locking the door to the Bruegelhuis—neither the hunter nor the hunted revealing their play—I asked the young woman:

“Are there more sets of keys to the house?”

“Of course, sir, why do ask?”

“Who was it who picked up the other ones? Sex, age, any distinguishing marks? Could I possibly see a copy of their passport?”

She stared at me, terrified, as if this were a police interrogation.

“Nobody’s been here. Not a living soul since you. Not in this weather!”

She managed a little smile.

“Maybe it was our house ghost you heard. We call him ‘the Spirit of Bruegel’.”

I gave her a long look, this naïve young woman, hardly more than a teenager, in her Limburger folk dress. I knew that everyone could be bought—or threatened.

“I can believe that,” I said.

4.05

After a long and late lunch—I tried to get through a gigantic entrecôte cut from a Belgian Blue—and then a tedious wait after that, in and out of shops, the taxi came and collected me outside the hotel.

The rain was once again beating against the windows of the taxi, and only got worse as we approached the base. I stared out at the volumes of water biblically drenching the sidewalks along the roadway. Focused, meditated, with the key sentence as my dark mantra. “I love you… just as senselessly as my pretty weird and hellish father, for the time being and onward into eternity, Amen.”

The driver got an excessive tip just for not asking any more questions, even though I was arriving later than almost everyone else. Once he had driven off, I put on a wig, mustache and beard in the shelter of the crowd. Despite the heavy rain there were more people outside the base than I had ever seen at similar events: tens of thousands, perhaps even reaching the dream target of one hundred thousand. Ordinary families with balloons twisted into the shape of F.16s with the words “SPOTTERS’ DAY. Kleine Brogel 2013” on the wings. Enthusiasts and spies equipped with similar rainwear and tall rubber boots.

The activists, on the other hand, rarely had any equipment apart from their signs and streamers. So far they were being allowed to do much as they wanted. Even scribble all over the posters for the event on the perimeter fencing: “BOMB Spotters’ Day”, “NUCLEAR Spotters’ Day”.

Any signage relating to nuclear weapons had been tidied away prior to the event. By granting the public and the media access to the American base for the very first time, our military administration would meet two objectives: “proving” that there were no nuclear warheads on the base while keeping the activists one additional barrier away—the entrance had been set up by the outer gates, where anyone without a ticket would be stopped. According to the information signs, security procedures would be more stringent than at a civilian airport. Scanning and body search for everybody, no exceptions.

I stood still in the pelting rain, tugged the hood over my head while the lines wound their way forward, and pondered how I was going to make my way past the guards. Even the morass of activists were closer to the fence. A bizarre set piece, as necessary as it was mad, began to unfold.

The P.R. balance was delicate. Public opinion was usually our best friend—especially for the last ten years or so during which time the media hardly reported anything about the ongoing nuclear escalation, our new generation of weapons and carriers, the “Revitalization”. But at any time the balance could tip the other way, as happened during the Vietnam War.

The guards could have bundled up this many activists in a few short minutes, and without for using anything heavier than batons. “But there is also a balance between common sense and sensibility,” Edelweiss used to preach. A quick move against the idealistic youth around the perimeter fence, many of them still teenagers, would result in too much negative publicity. Destroy the P.R. value of the event in one go.

The instructions were therefore almost certainly that the guard force should refrain from escalation. Stand in their rows with automatic weapons at the ready. Let themselves be taunted by the songs and the chants, the obscene gestures, without batting an eyelid—until the activists moved first and tried to storm the base.

Somewhere on or around the base Ingrid and Jesús María could be waiting for the same decisive moment. A ripple through the crowd—disorder, ideally some violent scenes—would create the best opening for the mission, whatever it might be, because chaos is the best camouflage. An opportunity, in one way or another, to obtain root access to the base’s servers which Ingrid needed in order to connect Kleine Brogel to the Nuclear Family: our network of warheads around the world. One of the final pieces in the jigsaw of her demented plan.

And it seemed possible that Ingrid might specifically have chosen this occasion. Spotters’ Day. Friday, December 13. St Lucia’s day, the Sicilian martyr she had told me they celebrated in such a big way in Sweden.

I scanned the crowds, but saw no sign of anybody who might be Ingrid or Jesús María. Nor of our main pursuers: the compact Zafirah or the vast Kurt-or-John, whichever had survived. None of those who had been keeping track of me—or maybe of each other—at the Bruegelhuis before lunch.

So once all those in line had finally passed through the checkpoints and the clock by the entrance to the base—the illuminated atomic clock which was yet another of our propaganda weapons—had whirred over to 19.30.00.00, I started to walk toward the sentry box.

It was going to be almost impossible to get in. The sort of task which was routine for me.

“Are there any tickets left?” I asked with a marked Swedish accent.

The guard in the box gave me a long look, without saying a word. I was so hard to place, with my wig and the trim false beard—somewhere along the continuum of spotter, spy, hipster—the enormous backpack covered in decals, the absence of conspicuous binoculars. He had often seen me here before and could not disguise the effort of the search through his memory. But he was not able to identify my new face.

“Would you be so good as to show me your passport, first, sir,” he said at last.

I was ready to leap into action. Had already worked out my next step and the one after that, depending on what ensued: the positions of the guards relative to each other, the time needed to make my way through the outer and then the inner gate. But my passport only elicited a friendly peep from the computer. Both scanning and body search rendered unnecessary.

“A warm welcome, Herr Gustafsson. Here is your ticket!”

At our own base, like a pocket within the surrounding N.A.T.O. compound, everything was organized for Spotters’ Day. Ministers and military commanders in the control tower, together with members of the media. Attachés and other authorized observers formed the innermost ring, interspersed among them were a few lucky enthusiasts who had won a V.I.P. package by ballot. Then increasing numbers of people in concentric circles, each marked out by yellow lines in the asphalt. The outermost, at least three hundred feet wide, contained thousands of people.

I had been given a ticket at the center of the action. And it seemed that everyone was waiting for me.

Because just when the guards had escorted me to my place—a few enthusiasts having to move a fraction to the right before the mass of people flowed together again like liquid—three F.16s took off with a terrible roar. I had said no thanks to the earplugs offered to me on the way across the base, yet another detail which distinguished observers from enthusiasts.

Through my field glasses I saw the F.16s perform a “barrel roll” in close formation and then a neat “co-ordinated roll”. When the engines were at enough of a distance, the aircraft lights forming luminous bars against the black storm clouds, one could hear the exhilarated cheering of the fans in our inner base. With a few seconds’ delay came the response of the activists outside the gates, catcalls and howls.

This was only the warm-up. Although the show continued with “cartwheels” and “split ‘S’s”, impressive in themselves, everybody seemed to be waiting with impatience and even trepidation for “The New Trick”. According to the taxi driver it had been the subject of speculation for weeks, even months. Something which had never before been shown anywhere.

I glanced at an official’s watch next to me: 8.10 p.m. Some people were no doubt beginning to think, like me, that the rumors had been a way to try to match the world record for spectator numbers. The legendary Miramar Air Show in California usually attracted about seven hundred thousand visitors during the course of three days. Here they must have let in a hundred thousand people—for a single hour of flying stunts.

And that’s when it happened.

The spectators were herded outward by the guards, everybody, starting with us right in the middle out to the widest of the concentric circles. Then the ground opened up right where we had just been standing, in the middle of the asphalt. Two luminous circles became visible a couple of yards below the surface. The one on the left had a diameter of about eighty feet, the right-hand one at most thirty.

I knew that marketing was becoming an ever more important part of the military machinery. That the cost of everything was growing, requiring more and more external financing since our Federal military budget was no longer sufficient—even though it was now 50 per cent bigger than before 9/11. That even the astronomical cost of our new generation of nuclear weapons was presumably again a gross underestimate. And that all of our current primary investors were gathered around me in the V.I.P. circle here at Kleine Brogel—as well as media and military dignitaries in the padded spectator seats in the warmth of the control tower.

That, of course, was why the opportunity was being taken to demonstrate our new guidance system: the advantages must have been calculated to outweigh the disadvantages. But with the enormous number of people gathered, it was as big a P.R. risk as an opportunity. Especially bearing in mind that the system had never before been tested outside strictly controlled conditions.

Conventional weaponry was more precise than nuclear warheads and missiles, which usually needed to be no more than approximately on target, because of their enormous explosive force. But during recent decades the accuracy of nuclear weapons had improved.

And soon the new B.61-12 bomb would be operational. Our most expensive nuclear weapon to date.

The bomb was not going to be more powerful than other nuclear weapons currently in existence—rather significantly less so: no more than three times the force of the Hiroshima bomb. Yet most external commentators agreed that this would be the most dangerous weapon man had invented.

By using the unique radar-based guidance system, it was thought that the margin of error for the B.61-12 would be reduced from on average three hundred feet for nuclear bombs to at most one hundred. The technicians had as usual been even more optimistic. Not more than sixty-five feet in acceptable weather conditions, perhaps fewer than thirty if operated with special skill, so they said. In this way, according to the rhetoric, we would be able to reduce the number of civilian casualties.

The critics saw this differently. With the B.61-12, they claimed, we found ourselves back in the 1960s, at a period in our history when the evolution of mankind appeared to have halted for good. With Cold War-era dreams of tactical nuclear weaponry so compact that it might be carried in one’s pocket.

According to reports, which remained unconfirmed, the Russians had at the time developed a small pistol with californium for nuclear ammunition. Officially, we never got further than our experimental “Davy Crockett”, a rifle with nuclear capacity.

So as the F.16s banked sharply over Kleine Brogel and flew back in our direction, they brought with them the moment of hidden truth. Even though there would be no official comment after the event, however much the peace researchers might blog about the fact that we had demonstrated the guidance system for our future and much-debated nuclear bomb.

I was therefore not surprised when the General jumped down and took his place in the left-hand red circle. I knew what efforts were needed nowadays to get the P.R. machinery humming, the aces that we had to throw into the game.

Hughes was the only one remaining of our three most senior official nuclear weapons commanders—since both Falconetti and Goldsmith had been dismissed. The man in the right-hand circle was also immediately recognizable. R.R. Maine, the hurried replacement for Falconetti, seemed to have put on hardly two pounds since his time as an American football superstar when I was young. The article in the Washington Post had not wasted the opportunity to joke about it: that the nuclear football too was now within his field of responsibility.

I suddenly realized what Ingrid might have in mind. There could be no better opportunity than here and now to allow a live nuclear charge to detonate. The result would not only be upward of a hundred thousand civilian deaths, together with two more of our most senior military officers, ministers, observers and crucial financiers. But also the worst possible publicity for the entire nuclear weapons system.

I tried to extricate myself from the crowd, but did not get very far. The voice of the American commentator crackled excitedly through the loudspeakers. “Ladies and gentlemen, children, guests of honor, ten seconds to bomb release. Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one… zero!” Through my field glasses I saw the bomb in free fall for a moment before the Kevlar parachute opened and swung to and fro as it sank toward its target. Despite the night-vision capability of my field glasses, it was impossible to tell whether this was a dummy or a real bomb—and if so, a nuclear one.

The cheers were raucous, time both running out and endless. Thoughts raced through my mind. To what the debater and former missile operator Bruce Blair had said during a visit to NUCLEUS, when asked what would be needed to carry out a successful attack at a nuclear base from the inside. By swapping a dummy bomb for a real charge, for example.

He did not have to think for long.

“I would say two to three people, given today’s security system. Obviously harder the more people you have to involve,” he had said.

General Hughes moved back and forth in the larger, left-hand circle, kept staring up at the falling object through the pelting rain. He too could not hide his excitement, or perhaps the slight concern one always feels during really complex maneuvers.

Then the bomb exploded—and an enormous bouquet of flowers cascaded across the sky and showered down on him. A phenomenal firework display, it must have cost a fortune.

General Hughes played it up a little. Looked skyward, shook his head and opened out his arms, before firing off a broad white smile for the benefit of the propaganda movies which would be sent out from here. And the message was unmistakable: that our military endeavors were all for the good of mankind. Bombs with flowers. “War is peace”, as George Orwell expressed it.

Then came the last and unbeatable escalation in the propaganda warfare. When General Hughes gestured toward the smaller, red circle to the right.

With the roar of the crowd growing by the second, Falconetti’s replacement stepped forward, theatrically placed on his head a burgundy Washington Redskins helmet from the old days, enjoying the moment to the full. When he closed the yellow visor over his face it took the commentator nearly a minute to make himself heard over the crowd.

“O.K., I know he needs no introduction, so I’m just going to say R.R….”

“Maine!” the crowd chimed in.

“…right, the man himself, one of America’s all-time famous athletes. Now responsible for all our nuclear missile submarines, aircraft and land-based launch sites. Highest supervisory authority over the military space program. Our whole digital war effort. Ladies and gentlemen, a true American hero!”

A short pause over the loudspeakers. The crackle of static.

“Now he’s ready for the decisive moment. Right, General?”

The man in the helmet nodded, gave a double thumbs up, like a pilot himself.

“And, ladies and gentlemen, children, guests of honor—are you ready too? Because here comes something that’s never been done before: a trick of the absolutely highest degree of difficulty. The first demonstration of our new guidance system for precision bombs, which minimizes the risk of human casualty in humanitarian conflicts. I just want you to notice that General Maine’s circle has a twenty-five-foot diameter and that the dummy bomb is going to be released from an altitude of almost thirty-three thousand feet. So cross your fingers, everyone.”

When the only aircraft still airborne banked steeply and headed back toward us, I could clearly see through the maximum zoom on my field glasses the three, small, stylized triangles just under one of the fins of the warhead. Our own interpretation of the international nuclear symbol. The sign indicating that there really was a live nuclear charge in there.

I looked around in desperation—and saw no-one making an effort to interrupt the demonstration, prevent the catastrophe. Maybe no-one else had noticed the tell-tale markings on the warhead. One often only sees what one wants to see, after all: seldom what one cannot even imagine.

The F.16 climbed rapidly to 31,500 feet, to drop the dummy which was in fact a bomb, accompanied by the commentator’s steady countdown. “Five, four, three, two, one… Bomb release! Watch carefully now, ladies and gentlemen, children, guests of honor… because today we’re writing military history!”

I stood there as the nuclear charge fell, slow and dreamlike through the atmosphere under its neat little parachute. Expected that it would be detonated at the same altitude as the Hiroshima bomb, 1,978 feet, as a sort of homage. Thought about Ingrid’s dark allure; how infernal the elegance of her preparation of this pacifist mass murder. Letting somebody switch out the dummy—or perhaps she had done it herself—in order to turn world opinion against nuclear weapons once and for all.

The preaching over the loudspeakers rose to the level of an ecstatic evangelist: “Friday, December 13, 2013, the American base at Kleine Brogel, Belgium. You were here! This was not your unlucky day—but the luckiest day of your lives! To be part of something like this! 3,000 feet, 2,750… 2,500… Are you ready, R.R.?”

Our two-star general, the folk hero, gave the commentator in the control tower another thumbs up. Straightened his helmet, again pulled the visor over his face. I shut my eyes for some reason, put my fingers in my ears.

But I could still hear the explosion. A low, dull rumble, loud enough to be heard, but not enough to disturb.

Confused, I opened my eyes and saw that everything was still standing. Looked over at the small red circle where R.R. performed his carefully rehearsed trick, a perfect touchdown which proved that he really had stayed in good shape. Nimbly, he rolled a half turn to absorb the impact—before he touched the dummy bomb to the ground in the exact center of the ring.

Then I turned my field glasses toward the landing strips, the aircraft, the fuel depots. The area from where the blast came. That old-fashioned, low-tech explosion, the very opposite of a nuclear charge. Thick, roiling black smoke rose toward the sky in the north-east corner of the base. As far away as one could get from the circle where R.R. Maine was now getting to his feet, after the successful demonstration of the world’s most advanced radar-based guidance system for bombs.

Maybe he had not even noticed the attack, been so absorbed in his own bubble of adrenaline and euphoria. Before he realized that the applause would not come, the sirens had started to howl across the base, the lights to flash. The voice of the commentator was replaced by a recorded loop: “All visitors are requested to vacate the area immediately and to follow the instructions of the guards. This is not a drill! We repeat: this is not a drill!”

I tried to control my breathing, assess the situation. Kept away from the guards who were beginning to direct all the guests of honor down through the evacuation exits which had been opened under the luminous red circles and that led into the network of culverts, then up onto the abandoned fields on the other side of the main road.

Instead I waited until the activists were let in. Because those in charge of the outer gate had been forced to avoid even worse consequences—maybe some people suffocated, a few civilian deaths—when, after the explosion, the demonstrators tried to climb the fences to see what had happened inside the base. Simultaneously, the security forces stormed in to stop the protesters from getting any closer: to our sealed-off but possibly still revealing storage site for the live nuclear warheads, from which the smoke was now billowing. Soon everybody else found themselves trapped. Children, old enthusiasts, families.

And when the chaos was at its height, I made my way out of the base. Above ground, amid the throngs of people: first through the inner gate, then the outer gate. I had been training for this kind of thing for most of my adult life. Navigating even in the most difficult terrain.

So I was able to follow the tall woman and her short companion through the chaos when I caught sight of their familiar movements about a hundred feet ahead of me. I stuck to them, my eyes on their backpacks—new black ones, I noticed—as they made their way along the side of the autoroute. Until we reached the taxi which was waiting in a clearing.

“What the hell happened?” the driver said.

“Can you skip Hasselt and take us straight to Zaventem, to the airport?” Jesús María said.

“How dangerous is it going to be for me, Madame?”

“Who knows, but you’ll probably be O.K., you’ll see. Either way, you’ll get a shit load of money, you know that.”

The driver scanned our motley crew in his rearview mirror: Ingrid, propped up between us, more or less lifeless, sinking fast, and still giving off a distinct smell of burning even though her protective clothing had been fully extinguished. I remained, despite my disguise, vaguely familiar. The ever-baffling Jesús María. When he heard the sirens from the emergency vehicles approaching from the opposite direction, he drove off along the winding forest roads.

When we got to the airport we found a remote corner. Half-dragging Ingrid inside, Jesús María gave her an injection—painkiller, sedative, God knows what else—and looked at me. She seemed almost to be smiling, maybe at my rudimentary disguise with wig, beard and mustache.

“O.K. Erasmo, where to now?”

I stared at her.

“Hasn’t Ingrid said anything?”

“Zip, nada. You know her.”

Jesús María saw my hesitation, or maybe it was horror, glanced at Ingrid and shrugged.

“So. Make a decision, Erasmo. Rise to the occasion.”

I walked thirty or so feet away from her, from the café and the people, from the television screens showing the breaking news from the airbase—mostly material damage, no lives lost but some injuries among the fire fighters. This would make the Nuclear Weapons Scandal stories even harder for our military authorities to contain. I went into the telephone booth. Glanced at the huge clock on the wall outside: 21.12. Closed my eyes, went through the options, made up my mind—or perhaps followed my instincts.

“Erasmus, good Lord, you’re alive!” Sixten said.

“Yes…” I said, and immediately pressed the red button, without really knowing why.

For a few moments more I pondered—it felt like minutes but could well have been seconds—looking over toward the two women there in the dark corner of the airport. If anybody else saw them they would not understand what was going on. Two women with bulky packs: even bigger than before, with yet one more large black bag which Ingrid must have been carrying over her shoulder. One of them awake, the other in a deep sleep, just beyond one of the airport cafés outside the security zone, next to the cleaners’ storage area. A brief rest stop before the next stage on a long journey. Nobody who noticed us would begin to comprehend anything of the context.

A large hairy spider dashed across the floor. I knew it could not really be here, at a modern European airport, not that kind of species—yet my arachnophobia now seemed like the only real thing in my life. Not until the spider crept up my wrist, the artery, did I shudder: had to fight to control myself to not try to brush it off or even shout out loud inside the booth. In a cold sweat I looked around. None of the other travelers seemed to be in the least bit interested in us. Ingrid was still unconscious, her head against the wall, and even Jesús María had closed her eyes.

I took the phone, put in a few coins and dialed the number I had memorized, along with everything else.

“We’re coming in. She’s completely under, probably won’t wake up before we reach you,” I said.

Edelweiss breathed deeply at the other end of the line. I must have woken him in the middle of his obligatory 3.00 p.m. power nap.

“So you no longer believe Oskarsson’s stories? That she’s going to short-circuit the whole system,” Edelweiss said.

I heard him pant through the trans-Atlantic static. Calculating, analyzing, weighing his alternatives without exactly knowing what his opponent’s were. The art of war.

“And how can we know, my friend, that you’re telling the truth now? Will keep your own little side of our bargain?” he said.

“How can I know that you will?” I said.

He held back, waited for my next move—which followed:

“Shall I try to get Jesús María to come in too?”

“Yes, do that. That would be good. Seats will be arranged for you on the night flight.”

Silence once more, before his final remark.

“Posterity will be forever grateful to you, Erasmus. And you won’t forget to bring the briefcase, will you?”

“Don’t you have it?” I said, hanging up without waiting for an answer.

When I sat down again, with the anesthetized Ingrid as a barrier between me and Jesús María, she could not contain herself for long.

“So what’s going on, Erasmo?”

I waited, deep in thought, before her next question provided me with an opening: “What did Sixten say?”

“That Washington is the next step,” I said.

Now it was Jesús María’s turn to sit quietly. Her move.

“Why’s that?” she said.

Games of bluff are like chess, or any game of strategy actually: they depend as much on the opponent’s imagination as one’s own.

“He didn’t want to say. But we’ll get the information when we’re there, from Sixten—unless Ingrid wakes up before then.”

“O.K….” Jesús María drew out her answer. “And who’s going to be there, Erasmo?”

“Edelweiss, for sure. Probably Zafirah. Presumably Kurt-or-John.”

She drummed her fingers against the edge of the bench, desperate for a cigarette or driven by those inner demons of hers.

“To hell with it… I’m in. When’s the flight?”