The Carrier

5.01

She had been drugged to the eyeballs. It was surprisingly easy for us to make our way, with Ingrid in the borrowed wheelchair, through Zaventem airport, where Edelweiss had been pulling strings. The key word was “narcolepsy”, that strange epidemic throughout Sweden which Ingrid had mentioned. According to some, the side effect of the mass vaccinations against swine flu some years ago.

Those who were curious and knew what the word meant needed no further explanation—gave me a compassionate look, some succinct words of advice, a medical tip or two. Those who did not, did not need one either. They avoided Ingrid’s ghost-like sleeping figure: assumed a case of substance abuse.

That was of course Jesús María’s specialty. But on the way to Zaventem, and so far as I could tell during the subsequent flight, she did not smoke a single cigarette. Made not the slightest attempt to break the rules, no quick puff in the restrooms, no risk of everything for the sake of the drug’s temporary solace. So for her, too, the stakes appeared to have been raised dramatically.

For my own part, I was suffering from existential vertigo, the floor swayed, my worlds were colliding. I had made a pact with the Evil One. I was playing for high stakes with the grand master himself—and even kidded myself I could win. Or at least that he would keep to the rules, let me and my family loose in the way we had agreed.

That after they had been given their freedom again, or whatever situation they found themselves in—I hardly dared to think about it—I should be granted safe conduct to the destination of my choosing, and might sink deep under the continental ice. Quite simply let the world of nuclear weapons take its course. Allow you to pass your judgments, should you ever get the chance.

Edelweiss had worked quickly after my call, set up the necessary logistics. When the staff at the check-in desk for the night flight to Washington saw my passport, we were immediately shown to the last counter in Terminal D. From there further underground to Terminal X, that secret domain where we were given first-class tickets and new identity documents, each set within its own padded envelope.

According to my new passport I was now Desmond Kern. Yet another witticism from the grand master. He had so often spoken about this during our strategy classes: that we should always identify the main character in the intelligence tangle we were to unravel. Only when all the roles had been assigned would we be able to choose an effective strategy. You have to identify the core of the poodle, he said over and over again.

And the name on my new passport left no room for doubt. What Edelweiss was saying, in coded form, was that Ingrid no longer had the lead role in the complex drama that had been playing out since our escape—rather that it was me. Out on the street Desmond Kern was Des Kern. But it came from the German expression des Pudels Kern, The Core of the Poodle. From Goethe’s “Faust”.

Once our flight had taken off, Jesús María ordered three shots of tequila straight up, no ice, no lime. We had yet to reach cruising altitude. Here in first class nothing seemed impossible. I did the same, hoping to be able to sleep a while, disappear for an hour or two, not have to think. A momentary escape.

Ingrid continued to sleep as deeply as before, and according to Jesús María her pulse would not start to climb until we were closer to landing. So it was the perfect opportunity for Jesús María and myself to rest, stretch our legs in the space the first row afforded—or for me to ask questions.

“What actually happened at Kleine Brogel?” I began.

“Well, whatever it was, it sure as hell wasn’t what Ingrid said. For a while I felt like leaving her stuck down in there, in the collapsed store room: let the Witch burn on her pyre… but then I changed my mind. I’ve got some unfinished business. It’d be fucking hard to do it without her.”

Jesús María fell silent, took another mouthful to finish her first shot.

“Twisted, all the same,” she said.

I looked across at her, this opaque woman with a burn on her forehead, now that I looked, as I took my first sip. We had put Ingrid in the window seat, leaning her against the wall—and the cabin crew seemed sufficiently well informed not to ask questions.

“I always thought I’d take John out first. But that’s not how it turned out.”

“How can you be sure of that?”

“That it was Kurt on the slope there? For real, Erasmo? Don’t you think I’ve known who was who, ever since this whole shit started, however hard I tried to make them look the same? Seen their birthmarks there before me last thing at night and first thing in the morning. All fucking night long. Each and every day.”

As she paused I glanced at Ingrid’s watch. A little more than seven hours until landing. So I had time to wait.

“Can you imagine, Erasmo, that it was Kurt’s mentor who once saved my life?”

I think I shook my head.

“He killed my boyfriend Enrique in the most grotesque way you can imagine, I swear to you.”

She took a big gulp from her second shot.

“That man was the very best security guard at the base, outstanding and brutal. Then he took two gifted young men under his wing and turned them into something even better, or worse, than himself, their mentor. They stepped into his shoes completely when he retired.”

Silence again while she emptied the glass and started on the third.

“Including the handling of me. Did fucking everything that their mentor had done, just as Enrique once had. Only better—and worse. Even hell has its nuances.”

I stared at her.

“That’s an awful story,” I said.

Jesús María stared back. “Don’t pity me, Erasmo.

Don’t ever do that.”

I shook my head, or did I nod? Waited for the rest—and then it came, almost in one long breath.

“My first job was in some shithole beauty salon at the back of nowhere. The worst kind you can imagine: eyebrows and cuticles, verrucas, the pits. Then a friend from school joined me and used her inheritance to buy the woman out. We shifted the direction of the whole damn business, changed all the signs and the interior, started offering body modification. My friend had been a textile artist too, gifted as hell. So we knew how to sew—and skin was no more difficult than leather or canvas. We were young and pretentious, massively inspired by ORLAN, that French artist. Money came in from people who started to travel to our little place to redo themselves: rich suckers wanting to look like movie stars. We exploited them so we could work at the other end of the scale. Stitch together those who were already in pieces, who’d been blown inside out, I swear to you, Erasmo…”

Jesús María gave me a searching look, considering my new blond beard. Trying to gauge if I believed a word.

“Then Enrique got wind of what we were doing. I had to leave my friend there, run for my life. Finally managed to get over the border to the army base—just as they dumped Ingrid there, ripped up after her violent delivery. So I fixed her. Did about the same thing I had always done: mended torn women. After that, Ingrid wanted to become my fucking blood sister and they couldn’t very well let me go. Someone who was so useful to have around, in such a number of different ways. But I had to stay behind the scenes even at the base. Enrique could still sniff me out anywhere. He’s a bastard, I swear to you, Erasmo.”

She knocked back her third tequila, I kept sipping on my first.

“All of that medical crap I had to learn afterward. Which gave me the chance to do a ton of different things, anesthetic optional, but in the end someone always managed to get in the way. A whole posse by the operating table just to stop me from doing what we all actually wanted. Even when I put the chip into Kurt, so we could keep track of John too since they always moved in pairs, Ingrid was standing there cheering me on—but she never let me go any further. Went on about how she was saving me for some bigger assignment, that she didn’t want to waste me in that way, always messing about with her witchery, you know. Erasmo, you know, don’t you, all those fucking mind games.”

She looked at me again, seemed to be driving at something specific. I stared into my glass, downed my second shot while she pressed the button to summon the steward. Her story was almost finished. Only its climax remained.

“I stumbled in on her, Erasmo. As she was digging around in the medicine cabinet, to which only Ed and I were meant to have the key, the one with the really heavy stuff. She was probably thinking of doing the interventions herself. Just imagine: you two wouldn’t have turned out very pretty. But now I made her promise me I could join the flight too. Take down John and Kurt, in that order, when the opportunity arose. Granted me that in the end, after half a fucking life—in return for my silence.”

I sank my third tequila at this point too, so I could order more when the steward came.

“And that must have been why she went skiing on that mountain the other day, like she was offering herself so I could take down Kurt. For my fucking sake, Erasmo. To keep her promise.”

Then she reached into her pocket and brought out the syringe that we always had in our packs: pre-loaded with whatever was necessary to stop us from ever revealing any secrets to the wrong people. With a practiced movement she gave herself a shot in the thigh.

I had no idea what it contained. If it was something instantly lethal or perhaps the opposite: for casual enjoyment or maybe longer-term escape from reality. Whatever it was, Jesús María fell asleep immediately. Leaving me with the rest of my questions.

About her, about Ingrid, Sixten, Lise Meitner. The whole story.

5.02

5.03

I was woken by voices very close to me. Not just Jesús María’s—but also Ingrid’s. She looked at me, rosy about the cheeks, miraculously restored as so often before.

“Erasmus, my treasure, wonder of wonders, you can’t imagine how happy I am to see you! That you managed to survive, after everything you must have been through up in Jukkas… what happened? What did they do to you, my friend? You must tell me everything, in your own good time.”

I stared at her: this superwoman with her ability to endure pretty much anything and then rise from the ashes. I looked around the plane. Glanced behind me, across the aisles, toward the sleeping passengers in the dimmed light of the cabin. Checked for the air stewards who could still appear at any moment. Looked at the clock, still a few hours to go before our scheduled arrival.

“Yes, in my own good time…” I said.

“Then I can also tell you what we’ve been through. How we managed to catch up with them there in the forest, the whole commotion, before Jesús María and I escaped and made our way to Kleine Brogel in time for Spotter’s Day.”

Ingrid must have seen my anxiety, how I was still looking over my shoulder toward the economy class section, and in front of me toward where the cabin crew would be coming from. Yet she just kept on going—having switched into Swedish and lowered her voice significantly but still not enough.

“And I must really thank you for all your care on the way here. I could scarcely have been in better hands.”

On Ingrid’s fold-out table, as on Jesús María’s, stood an almost empty glass. It did not appear to be her first tequila either, which might explain the flush on her cheeks. The sudden recovery. The miracle cure.

“Jesús María has told me about your wild plan. To take out John as well, right there in the lion’s den, play with the fire. Show Ed who has the upper hand: the finger on the button. How big the risks we’re prepared to take, both for ourselves and for the world. And then to vanish again, like the wind.”

I nodded cautiously, tried not to look at either of them.

“That’s it. That’s the idea.”

“I’m impressed, my treasure.”

She stood up, got her new black bag out of the overhead compartment, and laid it on the floor in front of me. Continued in little more than a whisper in Swedish. It came back to me, everything she had taught me of this too, the language, during our dissertation sessions. Jesús María was showing no interest at all—had fallen asleep again, now assisted by the alcohol as well as the effects of the injection—seemingly like everybody else within earshot. The stewards were still somewhere else, the whole plane dimmed and in night-flight mode.

Ingrid seemed wholly reliant on Edelweiss’ arrangements. Was content for him to keep pulling the strings, making sure nobody stopped us from walking into his lair.

“By the way, you might like to have this back…”

She gave me a strangely amused look and nodded at the black bag—so I leaned down and opened the zipper half-way. Saw the briefcase lying there. At least from this distance it looked the same as it had when taken from me in Suite 325.

“It’s still functional. Retrieving it was top priority. We caught up with them in the forest, after fighting them off in the room of your martyrdom, Erasmus, and we were persuasive in our methods that led to its surrender. But they escaped. Not only Zafirah, also John. And the poor hotel guide, their dupe for Sixten. Whatever they paid him, it was not enough, my treasure. We chased after them in the snow—he was tired, struggling—Zafirah was not kind to him in the end, our weaver of unicorn tales.”

She bent and opened the bag a bit more. Just so I could see more of its contents: my field knife, cell phone, watch, crunch cookies, notebook, medical pack and my weapon.

But no key. The one that Sixten had given me in Ursvik: to Meitner’s laboratory under the red trap-door.

“You see, it’s all here!” Ingrid said triumphantly.

I zipped the bag shut, let it stay there at my feet, under my watchful eye. Had another sip of the tequila. Took a deep breath—and asked yet another of my questions.

“So why did Sixten give us away?”

Ingrid looked at me first, then gazed out of the window, into that black void.

“Did he?” she said. For a second she did not move. “They had Lisa, his kryptonite. Evidently took her as some sort of hostage after our swoop at Estrange.”

The answer was like so many others with Ingrid. Little more than something leading to new questions, new inadequate replies. I tried another tack.

“And what happens now?”

“You’ve no doubt seen the headlines, my treasure: THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS SCANDAL?”

She turned from the window, looked into my eyes. I nodded.

“So Ed’s therefore been made harmless for the time being. I’ve instructed my informants to release what we know to the media bit by bit, only as much as is necessary at each stage so that heads will roll—as in a medieval painting. Today, for example, the Secretary for Defense is going to have to go. And Ed knows that we still hold the trump card. That the next step is to disclose the existence of NUCLEUS, his own role, the unbelievable secret of our hidden mandate.”

Ingrid paused. Continued in English.

“And even after that we still have an ace up our sleeves. Because the day you and I go public, my treasure, not even the President will survive for long. That two individuals, the Carrier himself and somebody who calls herself Alpha, had the entire nuclear weapons system in the palms of their hands for so many years—and have now taken off with their finger still on the button. That the future of the world is literally in the balance.”

Jesús María woke up again, yawned, while Ingrid kept whispering in my ear. Her warm voice right into my mind. Her deepest secrets. Whispering, but still in a melodic voice that someone close by could detect.

“Besides that, Ed now knows that I’ve planted everything necessary—codes, structure, instructions down to the tiniest detail on how to complete the arrangements with a normal computer—with one unknown person. In case something should unexpectedly happen to us. Chosen one single person out of the seven billion who still populate the earth. And Ed will never be able to find that one small person, my ‘Needle in the Haystack’. I call it Plan B: our common insurance policy.”

Jesús María gave me an odd smile.

“No need to worry, Erasmo. I’m not the Needle. Me you can kill whenever you want.”

I stared at Ingrid.

“Yes, Jesús María is the only one who knows. She helped me with the practicalities, in Ursvik. Tattooed all of the information in coded form onto Aina’s body, a place where nobody looks: not even somebody who loves you more than anyone. That was why it took us such a long time in the main bathroom, if you remember. And that was why Aina had to pour so much champagne into herself so quickly. To cope with the pain—and on her birthday too: she who never otherwise drinks a single drop! But she didn’t hesitate for one second to sacrifice herself for the cause.”

I was overrun by a cascade of bad memories. The messages from Edelweiss that I picked up while inside the smaller bathroom, that image of Zafirah with the jerry can, the fire, our escape.

“So we’ve got Jesús María to thank for that. And for what happened out at the base this evening. She had to play your part, in the heat of the moment.”

“Yeah. Hot as hell it was,” Jesús María said.

“Yes, I simply don’t understand what went wrong. The assignment, nothing more complicated than a distraction, had been perfectly set up by my helpers—did you notice the nuclear symbol on the dummy bomb?—and Jesús María helped me to get everyone looking in completely the wrong direction for a moment. But with the pyrotechnics—”

“Oh, give me a break. We’ll all be dead and buried soon anyway.”

Jesús María cut off the discussion and the mood turned tense, stifling. So I broke the silence with another of my questions.

“And why did you sacrifice Falconetti first?”

Ingrid turned away, stared out of the window into space. As if looking back in time. Then leaned even closer to me and revealed everything in one long-whispered fairy-tale.

“For a long time he was my only playmate. Eventually the one who gave me the job of creating an entirely new security unit after 9/11, free hands. That was when I contacted your old teacher from West Point, Ed—who else?—and asked him to put together a tight little team which would be unlike anything under the sun. But the whole time it was Falconetti, our four-star general, the most senior operational commander of the nuclear weapons system, who was the missing link between the President and me.

“He was so inspired by General LeMay in the 1950s, you see, that whole Cold War mentality. For Falconetti too we were always on a war footing. He insisted that we had to be ready at all times both to strike and to strike back, in full scale, have the tools to hand.

“And to be honest it was Falconetti, not me, who first formulated the vision of being able to direct the whole nuclear weapons system even when Centcom and the Commander-in-chief had been knocked out. On the run, fully mobile. But also in a situation like that we had to follow the basic outlines of our rigorous security arrangements: “No Lone Zone”. Insure ourselves against a single madman—so that no-one would ever be alone with the decision, the ceremony for launching our weapons.”

Ingrid paused, perhaps for effect, and Jesús María got up and went to the bathroom, just a couple of feet from the front row. I could hear her violent vomiting, the result of the drug she had injected herself with, or the tequila or both. Then Ingrid said: “But for two madmen we left the field open.”

I swallowed, felt the nausea welling up. Possibly from having heard the sounds from Jesús María in the bathroom. Or because of the situation we all found ourselves in.

“So when the time came I needed you, my treasure. And had to throw Falconetti to the wolves—as well as Goldsmith, who always defended him. A few well-placed calls and some leaked e-mails was all it took. I let it all trickle out after their attack in Ursvik, as a small revenge.”

5.04

When at last I managed to fall asleep in my seat, after another straight tequila, both women sleeping in the seats on either side of me, I dreamed that I was the last survivor of the crew of the Enola Gay and had suffered a serious heart attack while on a holiday in Tokyo. Beside me in the little hospital room sat my very old doctor—a woman long past retirement age—and she wanted to tell me before it was too late how it had actually been. Because she did not give me many more days to live.

She began by saying that there was nothing special about her story. That she had seen that light like all the others, the silver flash, the ghostly glare. That she was in other words not one of the seventy thousand people who died on the spot, which she had regretted for the rest of her life, every minute, she said. Nor one of the same number who died from the secondary effects, which meant that half of the city’s inhabitants were killed by the bomb.

Instead she became one of the many hibakusha, the tens of thousands of survivors who after the war had become invisible. “Most people can neither see nor hear us,” she said. “Can you?” she asked with a serious look, curious and determined. As if she really did wonder.

I countered with my experience of the event. That as the plane’s navigator I had been responsible for getting us to the exact place that was selected just prior to take-off, more or less by chance, one of several possible targets. The random choice prevented information from leaking out. The choice happened to fall on her city and her life.

I also told her that I could still remember how the plane lurched, and that special metallic click when the Bomb was released, and how the sky was then covered by the mushroom cloud. When the pillar of smoke eventually sank away we could see that the place where the city had turned into a black, formless mass, like a cauldron filled with boiling tar. A sight nobody had prepared us for.

The very old doctor sat totally still as I told her this, like a beautiful statue. Then she nodded and continued with her story. Said that it had been an unusually beautiful morning in the city below our aircraft, that she was lying out in the yard dressed only in her underwear, more or less knocked out after a long shift at the hospital. “One always recalls irrelevant details like that,” she said, “with such precision.” She had, for example, wondered if it really could be a spark from a passing tram which suddenly lit up that ornamental stone lantern with such magical light. An instant later all shadows in the yard vanished. The sun, which had been shining so strongly just a moment ago, could no longer be distinguished against the sharp white glare of the whole sky.

Gradually she became more and more consumed by her account, started to spin around on her stainless-steel stool, wave her arms about. Tried to convey how the air had been filled with smoke and dust in the same instant, that the only thing which she could see of their old house was a lone beam sticking up crooked and twisted from the ground a little way off. When she then looked down at her own body she saw that she was naked. Being a scientist, she began—“funnily enough,” as she now expressed it—to muse over where her underwear might have gone, how it could have vanished without she herself being at all damaged. Then she felt her face and realized that her mouth was just an open hole. That her lower lip was hanging down in a long flap and a five-inch shard of glass was poking out of her shoulder.

With the same peculiar absent feeling, as if she had seen all this in a movie, she called out for her husband and children. After hearing no answer from them, she took her place in the long lines which led to the hospital, as if sleep-walking. Many were walking with their arms sticking out strangely from their bodies, making them look like human scarecrows, which also puzzled the medical student in her. Until she understood that they held them like that to avoid touching their own burned bodies.

But the most striking thing, she recounted, was how they had all walked along in silence. How nobody screamed in pain and anguish or yelled out for their lost lives. Just this ghostly, deathly silence—from that moment on, ever since.

I said to the very old doctor that I still regarded the Bomb with a certain relief, since it had in my opinion ended the war and in that way saved many hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ lives, both American and Japanese. That I would soon be closing my eyes for ever certain that what we did was merciful.

She nodded again, otherwise as still as before. Then she got up and walked to my bunk. Kneeled, kissed my forehead lightly, said that she forgave me. That she had already forgiven us all.

At that I took hold of her head—so very like Amba’s: even the shape of her skull—and smashed it against the bedhead. It split at once, spilled out over my pillow and bed linen. Like a soft-boiled egg.

5.05

At midnight we landed at Dulles, after circling for fifteen minutes before being given permission to descend. Edelweiss no doubt wanted to demonstrate his power. That he held everything in his hand. Our escort appeared just to the right of the line for passport and visa control: on his sign it said “MR KERN” in handwritten capital letters. As if we were just any business group.

And it all seemed illusory. Edelweiss had his operatives among both the personnel and passengers. In front of us and behind us, shoes and clothes had to be removed, demeaning rituals behind half-closed curtains, people taken aside for regulation body searches. But we did not even have to place our enormous luggage on the conveyor belt. Because we had made a pact with the grand master, the very inventor of the concept of “war games”.

While Ingrid and Jesús María then went to the women’s restroom together, to assume their new looks, I walked up to the man with the sign. His appearance was familiar even though I could no longer recall his name. There were so many, after all, so interchangeable. And this one was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. His age suggested that he belonged to the ranks of the unpromotable, but he was probably perfectly suited for this assignment. Sufficiently skilled not to mess it up. Sufficiently limited not to understand what was really happening.

He gave me a regulation powerful handshake, looked at the hybrid. He did not seem to recognize me through the disguise and my new look from the cosmetic surgery in Ursvik. Then I stood chatting with him for a while, waiting for the “ladies”, as he put it. Touched on the obvious topics of conversation, weather, football, gossip. Everything but politics. Somewhere beneath the tense surface of the situation—I could not imagine the extent of it, that I might even get to see my family, for a moment at least, before they were all snatched away from me again—there was still my depth of experience and training. Everything we had done to ready ourselves for a moment like this. For all that could conceivably happen. And more—for the inconceivable.

When Ingrid and Jesús María emerged from the restroom, after an absurdly long time—Jesús María with an intensely red wig, Ingrid with silvery-gray hair and a darker face color, to cover the burn marks from Kleine Brogel—guards appeared from nowhere and asked them to follow along to the security check. The escort and I could only stand and watch. I knew that this was no more than another power move by Edelweiss, that he wanted to demonstrate that at any moment he could crush us like small spiders under his indescribable weight.

Yet my heart was in my mouth when the metal detector gave out a sound. A dull rhythmic buzzing which stabbed through the arrivals hall. Jesús María seemed uncomprehending, waved her arms about in her now exaggerated Irish way, tossing her curly red hair: according to her passport she was now called Scarlett O’Hara.

After some brief theatricals, the mistake was quickly and seamlessly put right and Jesús María was let through, with a cursory body search for the sake of appearances. But I still found it hard to get my pulse back under control. The moment was closing in on me. I had assumed that the entire exchange would take place in separate corridors, hidden passageways, without any of us noticing each other. Amba and the kids set free and Ingrid in custody at last. Me handing her over with the briefcase to Edelweiss—and in return getting his guarantee that they would never harass my family again. At the same time releasing me to the freedom of determining my own fate, deep down under the eternal ice.

But this too would no doubt play out entirely differently from what I could ever have imagined. No-one, except for Edelweiss—and maybe Ingrid herself—could foresee that.

When she approached our escort, whose expression had not altered one iota during the incident at the metal detector, the now much older woman with her silver-gray hair in a topknot shook his hand so strongly that she almost seemed to be making a point. Ingrid probably wanted to show both him and me that she had her strength back. Seemed to have hardly a trace left of either the heavy anesthesia or the incident in Belgium. My plan already felt weak and uncertain. I had an uncomfortable feeling that it was all an elaborate set-up by Edelweiss. That everything in some way revolved around me and not Ingrid. Desmond “Des” Kern, the Core of the Poodle.

After Jesús María had joined us, still gesticulating wildly over the slight to her as an unofficial guest—she too showed herself to be a reasonably good actor—we started moving. Our escort turned off in the direction of the visa line but, without drawing any attention to himself, led us surprisingly smoothly through the enormous mass of passengers who had just landed.

Then we were swallowed up into nothingness. Only the merest pencil-thin line in the wall betrayed where the opening was, before the hidden door closed soundlessly behind us. Once we were past the air lock, everything was silent and sterile, as if someone had switched off the chaos and the racket out in the arrivals hall. We were now in the sealed wing of the airport, named after John Foster Dulles, of all people. Our Secretary of State during one of the most intense phases of the Cold War, in the middle of the ’50s when the hydrogen bomb went from prototype to usable weapon. And the man behind one of the most important concepts of nuclear war, “massive retaliation”, as well as the systematic deployment of our intercontinental missiles.

We had trained in here so often, simulated questioning which became progressively rougher over time, starting at West Point and continuing to the Team’s most realistic simulations of total terror attack with nuclear weapons. But there had been significant changes since then. The walls seemed thicker than I remembered, the doors half open to the empty interrogation rooms heavily fortified even since our escape three months earlier. Or maybe in preparation for our arrival, the forthcoming exchange. “The Prey” in return for “The Hostage”.

Without a word our escort led us away down the long corridor, past one interview room after the next. I counted the doors in order to keep myself oriented in the otherwise nondescript row: nineteen, twenty, twenty-one… Felt the lightness of the hybrid on my shoulders, the whole apparatus swaying in its cradle. Tried not to look down at the optically bewildering wall-to-wall carpet with the pattern of the deconstructed American flag. I already knew where he would stop. Yet I continued to count, as a way of meditating, processing, keying myself up. Thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six…

At last we arrived at what officially went by the unremarkable name of the “Interview Room”. Only used for our fiercest interrogation training sessions, with or without torture, and real life questioning of suspected global terrorists. Before they were then sent on in due course to Guantanamo or one of our top secret locations around the world.

We ourselves always called it “Fort Knox”—because the walls were said to be at least as thick. It was hermetically sealed, escape-proof, stifling. Even before the improvements.

With a small bow our escort opened the protective doors: I noted that they had acquired yet one more layer since I had last seen them, were now quadruple thick, before he closed them behind us from the outside. Left us alone with the one other person sitting in here. He was even larger than I remembered. More than 6.5 feet tall, at least 290 pounds of muscle, total control of his body when he finally got up to shake our hands with his enormous paw. Just him against the three of us. If we three had still been on the same team.

“Hi there. Welcome to my little den,” John said.

Quickly he went to our packs, took out our liquids, knew exactly where to find them. Literally poured out our whole supply into the drain in the tiled floor. Paid no attention to our weapons, the apparatus inside the hybrid, anything else—and we let him do it. Because in that situation we had no choice at all.

Then John sat down on the bench again, turned in on himself, eyes on the floor and fingertips together. Waited for the surprise which then came.

I had believed Edelweiss capable of a lot. Of most things; essentially everything.

But honestly not this.

5.06

I have read that a spider hears the sound of the prey in its web as tones: that the taut threads function like the strings of a guitar. That the spider can sense what sort of quarry it has caught from the frequency of the signal.

So as we sat locked inside Edelweiss’ lair, the Interview Room, in the spider’s web, he could very well have heard our music on the screens in his office. A soft tone rising to an atonal chaos as our group of visitors was brought in. One after the other, at short intervals, by the same escort that had brought us here to the sealed wing.

I closed my eyes, kept them shut, listened to the abrupt movements in the room, the rustling of clothes, the determined protests. The sounds of Jesús María, Ingrid, me.

And that of my former family.

Slowly I opened my eyes. Glanced hesitantly at Amba, under the cover of my new face. Her heavy make-up did not disguise the deathly pallor. She looked dogged, you could see the wild struggle going on inside her, holding all too few of the keys she needed to unlock the situation. Ever since I had vanished she had probably tried, in her usual way, to “interpret” everything, to get some idea of what might have happened, to make sense of it all, without being able to understand even the first premise. That we never had been that perfect academic couple: she an art historian, a specialist in the detection of fake baroque paintings, I a moral philosopher with a particular focus on the dilemma of nuclear weapons. That I had been living two parallel lives since my first year at university—which was in no way to say that I had not put my heart and soul into them both.

It was a masterly performance on Edelweiss’ part. Directed at me and me alone: a thrust straight into my heart. A sublimely fiendish way of reminding me of the range of his talents. That he would stop at nothing, had mastered all the arts. Of how high the stakes were. In case I might have doubted it, or forgotten.

And this was only the beginning.

Edelweiss’ act of bringing me and my family together now—more than three months after my flight, when things might have been starting to settle—was only his first move. Ripping the wounds open again, the grief, the sense of loss, the stitches. Placing us directly opposite each other to maximize the drama. John with Amba and the children on one side of the room, on the bare bench which ran the length of the wall and had the word INTERVIEWER burned onto it. Myself, Ingrid and Jesús María on the opposite bench, marked INTERVIEWEE, with the hybrid and all our other packs tucked under the bench. And thin mirrors running at eye level from one end of the opposing walls to the other.

It had been in here, during the West Point advanced course, that Edelweiss for the first time used his expression “the Theater of the Body”. Said that it was this and this alone which unfolded in the mirror facing the interviewee’s bench. And that they just could not help watching themselves, hastening their breakdown.

I continued to observe Amba, since I could not bring myself to look at the kids—and since for a long time she hardly seemed to notice my eyes on her. She was formally dressed, as if going to a party, with yet another newly bought sari, bright red, the sparkling end of the cloth draped over her head. She could easily have come straight from some event, or maybe just the Friday gathering of our neighbors in the academics’ housing complex where Volvos from the 1990s stood sloppily parked in front of the hawthorn hedges trimmed without care.

Her clothes nevertheless gave me some comfort, if one could talk at all of comfort in this situation. The sari did not look like prison clothing at least. Although Edelweiss could have dressed his pawns in whatever costumes he chose.

It was clear that her thoughts were racing. Soon she too, without ever letting the children out of her sight, watching closely for the slightest reaction beyond their strange calm—the apathy of deadly fear—looked back at us as we sat along the opposite bench. Our anonymous little delegation.

A very short woman with the red hair of the Irish and a pleated skirt. A tall woman with gray hair and a certain likeness to Greta Garbo. A super-fit man with a big blond beard.

I assumed that Amba probably saw us much as was intended: as criminals of sorts, perhaps spies, maybe even terrorists, with no connection to herself and the children other than that we had now been bundled together in the same room. That she hardly knew who was going to question or be questioned. She would get no further than that now, with so many unknowns. Not even she.

That woman who would otherwise always cut through layer after layer, find the exact deviation from standard pattern in art forgeries, seemed able to uncover everything except my own double life. Whose default setting was bloody-mindedness, especially in her dealings with authorities. Who loved to contest everything, from her perpetual parking tickets to the proposed construction of an activity center at the old playground, which was of some cultural-historical interest. And who had been the one to push for our children’s names.

“Unity” was our first, little more than nine months after we had first met at the welcome party for new teachers at my small Catholic university. Amba was not a member of staff and came along as somebody else’s guest—otherwise the absurd logistics of what I was trying to do would have been impossible: the lies, the excuses, the invented study trips or conferences requiring nights away. Instead, immediately after her exams, she got a job as a forgery expert at the American office of Christies. With Amba’s obvious lack of interest in “talking shop”—because according to her there were so many more important things to talk about—she was also able to accept rapid changes to our plans, without delving too deeply into why. My sudden need at puzzlingly short notice to head out and fetch or drop off something. So long as in return I would cover reasonably often for the unexpected changes in her own schedule. Because some old friend had got in touch, or just her constant overtime at the auction house.

After the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, my double life began to be less demanding, since we were no longer involved in what was referred to as “direct warfare”. Instead it became increasingly indirect with each passing year. The state visits shorter, sometimes barely twenty-four hours, in this digital age when our physical presence was no longer such a priority. Edelweiss’ extravagant maneuvers often took place during one single long day, in which the world could just as well succumb to nuclear weapons attacks as be saved at the last moment.

On coming home from those simulations I had thrown myself straight into bed, unable to relate to the real—or unreal—world, had hardly the strength to kiss the children goodnight. For Amba’s benefit I blamed the fact that the students’ constant moral-philosophical paradoxes during our evening seminars had taken it out of me. How they just loved to twist and turn everything, always challenging their poor teacher. In fact I had never had any students. But I knew that Amba would not check that: that she reserved her suspicion, her well-known ability to see through almost everything, for her professional life.

As Amba began to get closer to glancing at my face, circling steadily, as if she were trying to recall something long forgotten, I looked straight at Unity for the first time. She was sitting closest to Amba. Still seemed cheeky, but afraid. Never before had I seen such an expression in her eyes: the very opposite of a spark, something which had gone out forever.

She was unexpectedly pretty, in a red dress that must have been bought after my flight. And even though she was sitting hunched up, resigned but ready to hit back, she looked to have grown at least two inches since I saw the kids for what I thought would be the last time. When on the night of September 4, 2013 I had peered into each of their rooms, held their doors ajar, and whispered a simple “Bye!” at them. Seen Unity lying there covered in sweat, entangled in her sheets, with that strange inner warmth which would not have lessened now with the onset of puberty. I clearly distinguished the drops standing out on her forehead, with the temperature being turned up here in the Interview Room: we had called her the “Steam Engine” when she was really small and the center of attention. During the two years that she was our only child.

Then, suddenly, it all became crystal clear. Why my entire former family was so smartly dressed. And how quickly one can forget the most central of things.

I checked my wrist-watch. The time was 01.14 the night following December 21—the winter solstice as well as Unity’s twelfth birthday. They had been celebrating that evening, in their finery, with the house full of people and only Daddy permanently absent. This is what they had so abruptly been pulled away from. Probably at the exact time when the cake was carried in, given Edelweiss’ unfailing sense of the dramatic.

Once again the memories came welling back, even though they were the last thing I wanted now. The first birthday had been at least as trying as the delivery. Unity had just been given her name, having simply been called “Miracle” during her first year. A group of reasonably intimate friends came to celebrate. Close enough to be invited to our home for the first time, distant enough not to ask any questions which were too difficult. Neighbors, some few chosen colleagues of Amba’s from the auction house, none from my murky existence as a researcher at the university. No family at all, whether mine or Amba’s.

I felt the eyes in the back of my neck, from several of Amba’s female colleagues. I must have puzzled them with my contradictory appearance: the hard-as-steel body and the post in moral philosophy, the lure of my faintly melancholy air. Things which seemed impossible to combine in one and the same person.

When the guests arrived, it felt like the introductory psychological tests I had undergone at West Point’s sealed wing. A glass fell onto the floor, the crash must have been audible all the way out in the dining room, a cloud of small shards, fine splinters. But when I went to clear up there was no longer any trace of the accident. Amba called from the living room, wondered where I had disappeared to, when the drinks would be coming.

Then I saw the glasses. They were on the tray, lined up perfectly as if in an interior design magazine, full to the brim with crushed ice and decorated with garish plastic umbrellas. I put them out on the table and the guests applauded enthusiastically. “What a man,” one of the women said, “might I be allowed to borrow him from time to time?”

The child herself, little Unity as the main character in her party best, the odd little dress which Amba had had made. Neither then nor later did we ever manage to arrange a party for any of our children which actually pleased them. When they were a bit older I tried with treasure hunts. Did my best to pitch them to the lowest possible level, but the games were still far above their heads: with the exception of Duality, the children immediately became whiny and impatient, started to bicker, gripe for ice cream. Then I had to give up organizing them because our friends and neighbors began to talk, the children’s questions spreading to their parents. A father who was a moral philosopher—yet put together such advanced ciphers that not even the grown-ups could work out where the treasure lay buried…

Maybe it had all changed now, even the parties. Since I was no longer there.

Duality was wearing a nice blue suit and seemed as introspective as ever, with that sparkling talent which never quite found its way out. He who was able to solve the simpler cryptic crosswords long before he started school. Was unfailingly the first to find the hiding place during my increasingly complex treasure hunts, before I was forced to stop. Here, today, he was giving nothing away.

Trinity, our youngest, was the antithesis of Duality and was sitting closest to John in her new purple dress. Seemed totally unafraid, as ever, although of course tired and nonplussed about the situation. She had always been a little rash for her age; not many seven-year-olds were prepared to take the risks she did. I was struck by the fact that she kept her left hand stuffed into a pocket in her dress. I couldn’t help wondering if she had hurt it in some way, and began to worry the way a parent does.

Amba had still allowed our youngest to sit closest to the enormous John, like some sort of shield. And surely nobody who saw all that innocence and naïvety, Trinity’s childish belief that she would soon conquer the world, that everything lay open before her despite her father’s disappearance, could touch a hair on her head. Or maybe one person after all.

That man was almost touching the seven-year-old’s fair head with his swelling muscles, crammed into his tight white T-shirt, already transparent with sweat. John put me in mind more of a torturer than a bodyguard. Which of course was the intention.

Time passed, as oppressive as everything else. I tried to stop myself from looking at my watch, could not allow the repetition to drive me out of my mind. Edelweiss knew better than anyone how to exploit the fact that waiting can cause severe psychological damage in itself. That awareness that something is going to be done—but not what, not how, not by whom to whom, nor why.

At short intervals my family began to look up, one after the other, to fix their eyes on us on the opposite bench. Seemed to be gaining some sort of courage, or perhaps it was the reverse: a collective sense that it was already all too late. That resignation which, according to our psychologists, could travel from person to person in roughly the way yawning does. Between individuals, members of a social group, even in a room full of strangers, proof of how empathic human beings are. So we were trained not to yawn when others started. To be able to resist our empathic instinct.

In the mirror along the opposite wall I saw Jesús María, sitting to my right, staring straight ahead. At the group on the other side of the room—or rather at John, from the very first moment. With a dull hatred that could almost be heard vibrating in the room. Ingrid too looked right across the room, let her eyes travel back and forth across the group.

So in the end I had to do the same. So as not to stand out, reveal my identity in a way which could prove fatal: not only to myself, but more importantly to my former family. Because naturally I had no idea what John and Edelweiss now meant to do with them. Who was prey and who hostage—and who would be sacrificed on the altar.

Which was the next phase in Edelweiss’ devilish piece of theater. The very fact that he had made the arrangements so overwhelmingly complex—that none of us knew who in the room was a prisoner and who some sort of witness. Whether we, or they, came here freely, or were on the run, or in custody. What was going to happen, even in the next few moments. Who knew what about whose arrangements.

That there was no possibility for me, or actually any of us here on this bench, to make our positions clear to the others with the necessary speed.

Because even if I suddenly decided to change course, to try to get myself and my family out of this escape-proof space, how could I make them trust me? Reveal both myself and my intentions swiftly, to make them want to follow me? Explain the intricacy of the situation, with my unknown face beneath its heavy disguise—before John or maybe Ingrid took down both me and my family, either together or one by one?

The only way to loosen the knot was through violence. I would even have to neutralize my family, temporarily, first Amba and then the kids, before I could get them out of here. And that would be way too complicated even for me.

This was nothing less than a live exam in Edelweiss’ favorite game: “Everybody against everybody”. The exact thing we had trained for in narrow tunnel systems deep below our nuclear bases or in desert landscapes, the sky black with smoke from fires and explosions, with no clear view in any direction.

It invariably ended in furious violence, since mankind had never yet been able to find any other solution to insoluble problems. That was why we did not need more than a single guard in here, although in this case it was John. Because mutinying prisoners seldom act together but usually kill each other first, like scorpions in a small glass jar. And because there was in any case no chance of getting out of “Fort Knox” alive.

Soon we found ourselves in the next phase, following the usual pattern, when the reality of the situation started to sink in for my ex-family as well. One after the other they came to realize that in all likelihood none of us would be able to get them away from here: that we who were sitting on the benches opposite were just as much prisoners as they themselves, maybe more so. So each of them gradually deflated, in roughly the same way. Finally even Amba, and little Trinity, until recently so rock hard.

It was still quiet in the room. I glanced at my watch again, despite myself, and with increasing frequency, not least to get some momentary relief from the unbearable sight of my former family breaking apart opposite us. One moment it might be 01.53 and the next—after what seemed like an eternity—only 01.58. Then barely three minutes passed before I found myself looking at my watch again. It was a classic psycho-physiological effect. Time passed increasingly slowly in the locked room. In the end it more or less stood still.

Having no alternative, I kept doing what Edelweiss had always recommended for situations one did not comprehend: waited for the next move. In the worsening heat—that too presumably part of the game—my intake of breath began to burn at the back of my throat. At 02.26 my wrist-watch told me the temperature in the room had risen to 102.7 degrees. My family’s movements became ever slower. Unity and Duality were whimpering softly, Trinity kept on nodding off, in the almost drugged way of someone in an overheated bedroom.

Only Amba remained braced. Ready for the fight, still watchful. Sometimes she would stare right into my face. Again that look, as if searching for a name that was on the tip of her tongue, some celebrity she had no personal connection with. As if she had vaguely recognized me from a newspaper photograph, under the heading “Wanted”.

When my watch showed 02.43 and 107.8 degrees, I felt the blessing of fatigue for the first time. The sounds of dozing throughout the silent, hot room—all three children had now fallen asleep—were hypnotic. Even Amba’s eyelids were drooping. It was impossible not to follow, and in the mirror I thought I could see how Ingrid too was struggling to keep awake. Only Jesús María still stared straight ahead, unbending. At John, who was in the same position as earlier: stock still, eyes turned down, fingertips together. The only sound which could be heard, softly but with increasing frequency, was that of John’s heavy drops of sweat landing on the tiled floor, like Chinese water torture.

My next glance at the watch showed 02.57. I became more and more convinced that there would be no initiative at all from Edelweiss. That he wanted to let us melt into one single piece, like a grotesquely deformed tin soldier, here in the hellish heat.

And just at that moment, of course, came his next move. Just on the stroke of 3.00 a.m.

That was also when I first realized why he had arranged for us to be placed just like this. Amba and the children on the bench with the word INTERVIEWER burned into the wood, we on the opposite bench with the word INTERVIEWEE. Because John slowly got to his feet. Turned his head toward my family, tapped the children on the shoulder until they had woken out of their deep sleep, broke the now nearly three-hour-long silence.

“Listen up, ladies and gentlemen, or rather: lady, girls and boy. You now have the chance to put your questions. To the only ones who, based on our research, know anything about Erasmus Levine’s disappearance. So I think you should take this opportunity, kids. You too of course, Mrs Levine.”

They looked so terribly confused, all of them, Amba included. Probably just like all of us on the bench opposite. Me above all.

When Amba then looked straight at me in a different way, deep into my eyes: as she used to once upon a time, I fell over backward even though from the outside I remained sitting upright. Because her eyes beamed like X-rays at the disguise and my new face. Through successive layers, hidden strata, as sharp as few others in her increasingly frequent hunts for forgeries. That strangely penetrating gaze I had fallen for that very first evening.

She must have recognized me—but if she did, she gave nothing away. Seemed to be allowing me the chance to run free for a while longer, as much as she was in a position to do so. Then she turned to John with tired resolution.

“No, I don’t think we have any questions, Mr…?”

“Smith. Peter Smith,” John said.

I breathed out for a second or two. Even though this probably wouldn’t advance my cause by more than a fraction. Then another thunderbolt, as Amba continued. They say lightning doesn’t strike twice—which is mere superstition, of course.

“And to be honest, Peter, I don’t care. The explanation which that police inspector with the funny name—Edelweiss, I think—gave me seemed good enough… that Erasmus had just run off with his old academic supervisor. That she’d bewitched him. And you could tell it was going to happen from the way Erasmus used to go on about that woman: I always regarded her as our ghost from the past.”

I sat very still, shut my eyes. Paralyzed by the power in the room. The charge from the thunderbolt. But what Amba said next may have come as a surprise even to Edelweiss, who would surely be following all this minutely via the monitor in his office.

“And anyhow we’d stopped relying on him a long time ago. All of us.”

When I was able to open my eyes again I saw the children nod. Well-mannered but perhaps with a little melancholy.

Then I saw something glint by Trinity’s pocket as she turned and the spotlights in the room fell on it. I realized immediately what she had been clutching throughout this whole unbearable session. The last part of the trinitite, the glassy residue left by the first nuclear weapons test—when the desert sand in New Mexico encountered the blast, destruction and creation—which became a kind of rarity among collectors. I had given her a small piece on each of her birthdays, fragments from what Edelweiss had once given me. When I fled, in that last goodbye, I left all that remained of it in a gift box under her bed.

I tried not to look into Trinity’s eyes as my family got to their feet from the bench opposite, Amba and then the children, from youngest to oldest. Closed my eyes as I listened to the last I would ever hear of Amba’s voice.

“So if you’ll excuse us, Peter, we want to go now. Get on with our lives. We have a twelfth birthday party to finish. A cake to polish off, bowls of candies just for us, piles of potato chips left—isn’t that right, kids?”

5.07

As they were led out of the room by two escorts, one in front and one behind, there was a change of scene. A number of other guards came in and stood just in front of us, by our bench. Six of them in that small room, “Fort Knox”: two for each of us. A man and a woman in each pair. Staring us right in the eye, trained even to blink as little as was physically possible, not one movement in their faces.

I tried so hard not to wonder where they were taking Amba and the children. Whether back into some sort of custody, maybe worse—or really back out to the suburbs, home, free, in a normal civilian car, where they might resume Unity’s party with as much enthusiasm as they could muster the next day.

Had Amba played her role perfectly? Or rather broken every imaginable rule, and improvised, thought for herself, usually a prisoner’s worst offense. Or had she articulated their genuine feelings about me? Real, deep hatred following my sudden escape.

One by one, I managed to shut down my thoughts of Amba and the children. Put into practice all the things I had so long trained for, never dreaming that this ultimate challenge would be where I would make use of them most. Not in my worst nightmares.

I looked past the guards toward John, who had assumed the same position as before on the bench opposite us: eyes on the floor and fingertips together, as if meditating. I had never before seen him like this. While Kurt was alive they had been indistinguishable, rarely speaking with anybody except each other, as only they were sufficiently receptive to each other’s brutal humor. As far from being meditative as it was possible to be.

But perhaps this was John’s way of mourning his life-long partner. Or brooding, stock-still, over the next phase in his revenge.

As I leaned further to my right to be able to see the whole of him, my two guards—cheap Secret Service types, pawns on Edelweiss’ board—followed the movement and reached for their weapons. Then they swayed back into position, since this was not turning into any incident. I stayed in the same crooked and uncomfortable position, watching for John’s next move.

His T-shirt was now so wet and rank from the heat in here that every ripple of his mighty chest and stomach muscles had become visible. After a few more minutes he started to carry out a certain movement with mechanical precision. Seemed preoccupied with the small pool of sweat which was forming in the crook of his elbow, just below his sculpted biceps, and he dried it at regular intervals with a tiny ball of cotton wool. On the other hand he appeared not to care at all about the floods of sweat which simply ran down his bald scalp, continuing like tears over his face, and then onto the floor with a soft plop.

The next time I permitted myself to look, when I could no longer stop myself, my wrist-watch showed 03.56 and 108.9 degrees. My brain was calculating slowly in this heat. We were ten people in this low, long and narrow room, about ten by twenty-five feet with barely seven feet of headroom, which meant little more than a twenty-one-square-foot area totaling 141 cubic feet of air per person—and that was gradually but surely being consumed by us all. And humans breathe in 21 per cent oxygen and 0.03 per cent carbon dioxide—but exhale 16 per cent oxygen and 4 per cent carbon dioxide. It’s an equation which cannot hold for long. Not here in “Fort Knox”.

I could feel it in my head, in my sluggish thinking, how the oxygen was beginning to run out. And slowly, so slowly, it dawned on me why Edelweiss had called the guards, the pawns, into the game. Probably none of them had the slightest idea who we were. How much we were wanted, how seriously and covertly pursued. And they were not meant to guard us in any real sense, because that was still not necessary, given all of our multiple and partly contradictory agendas.

Their only role was to consume the oxygen, drive up both the heat and the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere. All of the pressure in the room.

Once again I pressed my heel back against the hybrid, needed to feel that the briefcase was still there: the most important object in the world, the ace up my sleeve. Everything else had slipped through my fingers. My mission, my family, my life. My only remaining role was to save the universe. In some way deliver Ingrid to Edelweiss, put an end to her crazy idea once and for all, both Plan A and Plan B. Then be given safe conduct to my next and final destination—hoping against all odds that he would keep his end of the bargain. Would tell my family, once all the cards had been played, the true story of my flight. How I had been duped all along by Ingrid.

But how this was all meant to happen, the endless complexity of the exchange, was something I could not calculate. That had to be Edelweiss’ problem.

And still the other two kept their silence. The expressionless Ingrid to my right, and Jesús María on my left, still staring at John. Intent on translating Ingrid’s agreement to take him down into an end as macabre as Kurt’s.

I tried to remain vigilant, once again running the alternatives through my mind, focused, dazed, absent, when the alarm went off. At 04.54, just as the temperature was passing the 111 degree mark, my watch, and Ingrid’s, emitted a faint synchronized buzzing. The warning signal that the heat had now risen to a level where movement and mental functions were being affected. In fifteen minutes the watch would signal again, to remind us that human operational capacity reduces by 1 per cent every quarter of an hour at such high temperatures.

This was the sort of refinement technicians loved, intended for the army at the time of the desert invasion in 1993: our first war in really unbearable heat. All those involved had disabled the function, regarded as not just superfluous but at times deadly dangerous. One single buzz from the watch could after all be the difference between being able to move forward unobserved or giving away one’s position.

That was why Edelweiss had picked it up off the scrapheap of history and insisted that we should never switch off the signal function. Not because he thought it could be useful to know where the other members of the Team might be—but rather as yet one more challenge, another handicap, for us to cope with.

In order not to attract the attention of the guards and make them suspect that I was planning something, I turned off the watch’s signal mode. Collected the saliva my glands were still producing, swallowed when there was a decent volume of it. Behaved just as we had been taught for desert environments. Limit all functions, keep movements to a bare minimum, think of cold. The blessings of the eternal ice.

The thirst was the worst part, now as ever. Sometimes humans too stretch out their tongues, like dogs, in an ancient reflex from the age of cavemen. Our psycho-physiologists said that this was the ultimate warning sign. If you see one of your unit doing that, they said, you have to give as much as possible of your own liquid to them.

Now I had no liquid, neither for myself or anyone else, nothing at all after John had emptied out all of our bottles. So I could only observe in the mirror how Jesús María opened her mouth and stretched out her cloven tongue, cautiously yet still visibly. The diamonds or bling glittered in her mouth. So it was she—who from earliest childhood must have been well accustomed to extreme heat, the baking temperatures of Mexico’s interior—who was the first of us three to weaken.

But then I realized that showing the tip of her tongue had merely been a signal to John. And at that point Jesús María finally took action.

“Excuse me, sir… Mr Smith…” she said.

“Yes ma’am?” he said.

“I need to use the bathroom.”

John got up heavily and theatrically, like a statue rousing itself from centuries-long immobility. Came a few steps closer to us and laid his enormous hand on the shoulder of one of the female guards.

“This here is Mrs Jones. And she would love to accompany you to the bathroom.”

Jesús María looked first at her, then back at John.

“Honestly… and no offense, Mrs Jones, I would feel more comfortable if someone like you were to come with me, Mr Smith. In this situation.”

It took a few seconds before John answered. I counted, one technique for surviving unbearable situations: six, seven, eight… Then John went in an instant from being a psychological riddle—that eerily silent creature—to an open book. In two short sentences.

“Well, now. Of course I’ll come with you, if that’s what you want, ma’am.”

And then his predictable minor addition:

“What wouldn’t one do for a lady in need?”

5.08

The asymmetry in asymmetrical warfare rarely represents anything specific. Mostly it is the fact that things do not follow patterns, regularity, norms. That is to say: the expression can cover more or less anything that one does not understand. The trick is to operate strategically even when everybody’s motives—both on your own side and the enemy’s—seem obscure or simply unreasonable.

So here we were, me and Ingrid, without both John and Jésus María. And a new female guard came into the room with food for us all.

I tried to re-interpret the situation according to its new unfathomable premises. The next step had to be the exchange: an attempt to deliver Ingrid to Edelweiss in some way. Despite the fact that the guards in the room, now numbering seven, would hardly be sympathetic to that, likely would not even understand what I was trying to achieve. So first I would have to overcome them and then “Fort Knox” itself. And then whatever else was waiting outside the four-inch-thick walls.

But I had no choice. Somewhere deep inside I still felt a basic moral sense, some sort of world conscience. Maybe it was for the sake of my former family, which only an hour ago had been sitting here opposite me; maybe for everybody else’s sake too. Under layer upon layer of toughening and steeling myself, my conviction had grown that Ingrid’s ideas would jeopardize mankind’s future more than anything else throughout history. With the help of the one weapon which had been built, deliberately, for our own annihilation.

I watched her in the mirror opposite, peered between the guards to see her sphynx-like expression, totally blank. Perhaps she was not following our training. Or she was still affected by the drug, had not recovered as miraculously as I had first thought. Small drops of sweat had begun to trickle down her face too, as she began to eat the yellow-brown sludge which had come in on the female guard’s trolley.

It was hard to make out if this was meant to be breakfast, lunch or dinner: or what it was at all. Whether the revolting smell of rancid fat was meant to add to the situation. To the heat and the tension.

Yet we needed the food, as well as the liquid contained in it. Ingrid had emptied her plate—as had all the guards apart from the woman who came with the trolley and knew what this mess really consisted of—before I had my first mouthful. This was why our physiologists had chosen the concentrated crunch cookies for our combat packs. Because everything else could, under certain conditions, be impossible to eat.

I managed in the end to down half of my portion, despite the smell from our plates, the heat, the unbearable atmosphere. My wrist-watch showed 06.01 and 115.4 degrees. Ten minutes since John had left with Jesús María. I awaited Ingrid’s move, had to let her go first, assumed that she was not incapacitated by the drug.

The clock crawled forward while the temperature approached 122. The hypothesis that this was really all about me and not Ingrid seemed more credible by the minute. That I was in one way or another the Core of the Poodle and the entire situation had been set up so that I and not she would be handed over to Edelweiss.

That the arrangements from and including Jukkasjärvi, in all their complexity, had in fact been designed precisely to lure me back into his lair. That they did not see Ingrid as the main threat to the world’s survival, mankind’s fragile future, our whole civilization—but rather me, Erasmus. The Carrier and not Alpha. That it was Ingrid who had first sealed an alliance with the Master of Darkness, Edelweiss, long before my own pathetic little efforts.

I kept staring at the tallest of the female guards: tried to remember where I had seen her before, the set of her shoulders, that icy look. Then my recollections came to a sudden stop. When my wrist-watch showed 6.10, she spoke. After a slight reaction, as the message sounded in her earpiece:

“Director Edelweiss will receive you now. Follow me!”

There was not really anything else we could do. Before we left the room, one of the guards cuffed his right wrist to my left and my right to Ingrid’s left—while one of the other guards was secured to Ingrid’s right. It was the classic formation. Two prisoners in the middle, one guard on either side. To break free would require a very advanced maneuver, a veritable Houdini exploit, huge raw strength and sublime timing. And with the bulky packs once more on our backs.

There were of course solutions even to this problem. The easiest one we referred to during our training as “Croquet”, where the two prisoners swung their respective guards in toward the middle. The most spectacular results came if their two heads crashed into each other.

But it was all made much more difficult by the fact that there were five other guards, the crew-cut female one in front of us and four behind, even if we managed to pull off the trick perfectly. And last but not least: each prisoner was no longer on the same side—certainly I was no longer on Ingrid’s.

The corridor was empty and cool, it felt as if we were taking a dip in the ocean after the extreme heat in the packed Interview Room. I stole a look at Ingrid next to me, her face still expressionless and impenetrable, like a mask. The female guard in front of us walked with determined steps without ever turning around. Seemed to be relying blindly on the fact that the six guards behind her would be able to keep matters under control.

I listened in the direction of the bathrooms, straining for some sort of sound—literally any sign of life—from Jesús María. But nothing could be heard and with each foot we drew further away. The wall-to-wall carpeting swallowed our footsteps. Everything was deathly quiet and ominous. Focused on something indeterminable. Entirely logical in all its lunacy. The pieces of the puzzle no longer fitted, the figures on the chessboard weren’t the right ones, even the rules of the game made no sense.

When we had reached the office—a white door with no name on it, no outward sign at all—the female guard brought our formation to a halt.

“We’re here now, Director!” she said into the minimal microphone, invisible to anyone not in the know.

There was a click from the lock and the heavy door swung open. I noted that it too had been strengthened since I was last here: seemed to have gone from a tolerance of 14.7 psi of overpressure, the only standard for the unthinkable that we had been able to imagine, to at least double that. Roughly speaking, a direct hit from a smaller nuclear weapon.

The four of us went in, Ingrid and myself chained to our escorts, while the rest of the guards—including the woman seemingly in charge—remained in the corridor. Edelweiss was sitting at his desk facing away from us, reinforcing the impact of his presence. Heavy and mysterious as a Buddha statue. And when he spun around on his chair, I could not help but catch my breath: it had been so long since I last saw him in the flesh.

His dark persona was accentuated by the surrounding whiteness. The entire office, even the floor, had been painted in the same almost floatingly light color as everything else in the sealed wing. The vast desk was made of graphite gray metal and cast in one piece. On its surface lay a single piece of paper, some sort of document, and a black fountain pen. Edelweiss spared no look for Ingrid. Just stared straight at me and the hybrid on my back, the apparatus inside. The world’s most important object.

“Welcome, my dearest Erasmus,” he said.

I did not answer. You could almost hear him licking his lips, his words slurred with saliva. The breathing as labored as ever.

Four metal chairs in the same graphite gray were lined up in front of the desk. To sit down, the four of us had to do so at exactly the same time. Yet we managed it relatively easily: we were trained to be adaptable, both as interviewers and interviewees. We were even able to put down our packs in front of the chairs, my launch mechanism and Ingrid’s portable command terminal, the full Doomsday potential. The guards, who had taken the weapons out of our packs, now laid them on the desk, beyond our reach. That too was intended to be psychologically destabilizing. So near, and yet so far.

I glanced at Ingrid on my right. She seemed indifferent to the way Edelweiss, her long-standing brother-in-arms, was treating us. He in turn still took an interest only in me. Observed me intently, seemed to be awaiting something specific. I looked past him, at the clock over the desk. It would soon be half an hour since John had taken Jesús María to the bathroom.

Then I shut my eyes and went on rehearsing scenarios. The first assumed that Edelweiss was indeed relying on me to keep my side of the bargain, meaning that he too would do as he had promised. That my family would be released or at least no longer harassed, and that I would be given safe passage, once Ingrid had been delivered to him.

The other was similar, but the other way round. It ended with Ingrid getting safe passage—having delivered me in her place. It was based on their seeing me and not her as the main protagonist in this whole piece, the Core of the Poodle. On her having somehow laid the lion’s share of the blame on my shoulders.

And the third scenario, which appeared to be the most likely, was that neither I nor Ingrid would emerge from here alive. That they would seize the opportunity to take down both of the special agents, who had so spectacularly fled from the Team and placed the future of mankind in jeopardy, at one go. Regardless of the short-term consequences. Even the President’s resignation, if it came to that, once details of our top secret formation were revealed by the media. Or the rolling out of Ingrid’s Plan B.—which could, after all, hardly be worse than her first alternative.

But all three scenarios suffered from the same weakness. None of them took sufficient account of Ingrid herself. The scope of her fantasy, her power of imagination and ability to improvise: at least equal to Edelweiss’ own.

So I was keeping a close eye on her too—trying to be vigilant in all directions at once—when Edelweiss pushed the document over the desk toward me. To make it possible for me to sign, all four of us had to stand up, like a controlled chain reaction. And not before Edelweiss handed me the pen, and I leaned forward over the paper, could I distinguish the name “INGRID OSKARSSON” in capital letters. The document was a delivery order for Alpha.

Then I felt a movement from her, a soft pull at our shared cuffs. My whole field of vision narrowed as I heard her melodic voice.

“I’m ready.”

Intense focus on the guards, the desk, our assignment, like sunlight concentrated through a magnifying glass. Moving without thinking, reflexively. I did not even need to look at Ingrid as she continued:

“Are you, Erasmus? Then let us pray.”

She had chosen the second alternative, the one we called “Prayer”. Quickly bent her guard’s right arm behind his own head and pressed him to the corner of the desk. His face slammed against the sharp-edged metal, cracking like an egg. At the same time, perfectly synchronized, I did the same to my guard on the other corner of the desk.

In an instant the rest of the guard force burst in, five of them with heavy weapons drawn, having obviously seen everything on the surveillance footage. The piercing alarm cut through my brain. I vomited onto the floor, my lifelong reaction to ultra-violence, straight onto the immaculately polished shoes of one of the dead security guards. Instantly, Ingrid raised her right hand over her head, signaling that the game was over. And my left hand, bound by the cuffs, followed it. Edelweiss was sitting stock-still, watching us with a strangely amused look on his face.

He tossed three envelopes across the desk in my direction. Then, without a word, he took the pen back from me, leaned across and drove its needle-like tip straight up the nose of the guard nearest to the desk. The silver nib disappeared completely—and the Secret Service agent crumpled like a rag doll and fell to the floor.

Inside me, all was calm, even though the alarm must have continued to pulse. The scene was like a movie frozen on one frame. Edelweiss again immobile. And none of the remaining guards with the least idea, any more than us, of that man’s ever-complex agenda: that he was letting us both run free.

We got going, wasted no time on questions. Managed with some contortions to fish in the dead guards’ pockets for the keys to our handcuffs, and unlocked them, before retrieving our weapons and the envelopes from the desk and the bags from the floor where they had been left, again tantalizingly close. Edelweiss continued to sit there, Buddha-like, watching.

I felt his eyes burning in the back of my neck as we ran out through the security doors, down the corridor with the packs. In the stairwell we stopped and I tore open the envelopes from Edelweiss. The same passports—still the Core of the Poodle—our money and cards returned.

The courtesies of his web extended throughout the departure process, reeling us out through the checks at Dulles with the same ease with which he had reeled us in through Zaventem. The illusion of freedom spinning down the departures board. Blind eyes and broad smiles through to the gate. Even as we seated ourselves on the Paris flight.

“Skål to Ed! For never keeping to the rules of the game!” Ingrid said.

“So why on earth did he set us free?” I asked.

“God only knows. Maybe he just wanted to play a little longer. Or has flipped, to our side.”

She closed her eyes. I noticed more sweat running down her face—until I realized that it wasn’t sweat at all.

“Why are you crying?” I said.

Ingrid turned to me, opened her eyes, gave me a tearful look. Did not seem at all surprised that I’d addressed her in Swedish, using one of the many basic expressions she’d taught me during our long discussion sessions.

“I’m grieving for Jesús María,” she said, now also in Swedish.

“How do you know she’s dead?”

“She isn’t, my treasure, not yet. But there can’t be too much time.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I was the one who fitted the apparatus inside her. In the women’s restroom on arrival at Dulles.”

“Apparatus?”

“A machine from hell. I did exactly as Jesús María said: followed her macabre instructions. Because I made her a promise, before our flight to Stockholm, that she could take them both down. But not herself, never herself…”

She fell silent, dried her tears with the back of her hand. I looked around the cabin.

Then she gave a half-smile, before a last sentence in Swedish:

“And John is the one who will set it off.”

I felt ice throughout my veins, in the midst of all the heat, even though I could not fully comprehend what Ingrid meant. How the duel between Jesús María and John in the restroom would actually play out. Except that it would be a dance of death in which they would both perish.

I looked at her, tried to recall the sequence of events.

“And most of all skål to Jesús María! My blood sister, all the way to the bitter end…”

The cloud cover was still above us, like thick gray-white cotton wool, as opaque as everything else at the moment. Soon, though, the plane would break through it all and emerge into the heavenly sunshine. Penetrate the clouds and allow light to flood the cabin.

There was a sudden flash, like sunlight. But it seemed to be hitting us before we had ascended above the clouds.

And I realized that it could not be the sun—the silver-white light was coming from land, not from the ocean to the east. What had happened next I recognized from my worst nightmares. After the sharp white radiance there was the unmistakable mushroom shape, soon swallowed up by the cloud cover. Just before we lost sight of the ground, it seemed as if the entire airport was in flames far below.

Finally the pressure wave, making the aircraft rock violently, knocking the cabin crew onto the floor, and eliciting hysterical screams from the passengers.

“What the hell was all that?” I shouted at Ingrid through the chaos.

She did not look back at me. Just stared out the window, even though one could only make out a thick whitish haze. Muttered the same sentence over and over again:

“Yes… what in heaven’s name was that, my treasure… What in heaven’s name…?”