The Carrier

6.01

The flight to Palermo was delayed, like all the others here at Charles de Gaulle, security checks having been stepped up ferociously at all airports after the incident at Dulles International Airport in Washington. Probably Code Orange, maybe even Red.

But in practice it had probably been LILAC, the highest level of alert, ever since Ingrid and I had fled from the Team at the start of September. “Large-scale nuclear attack with critical consequences for global security.”

It was December 23—but there was little sense of Christmas in the air. Most passengers in transit were tensely following C.N.N.’s live transmission on the T.V. screens, trying to make sense of it all, as were we. Just standing here in the bar, staring.

About nine hours had passed since the gigantic explosion. Speculation in the studios swung between a massive fuel leak from storage tanks to a planned terrorist attack. Shots of the mushroom cloud, taken by several passengers on different departing or arriving flights, were played over and again in slow motion. Yet the commentators, the “terrorism experts”, were dismissive and said that too much was being read into them: that they were just a trick of the eye. They compared them with the photographs posted across on conspiracy theory websites after 9/11, which seemed to represent the Evil One in a cloud of smoke and dust.

All the while the death toll on the news crawl at the foot of the screen—the body count—rose with merciless arithmetic. At 1.12 p.m. it was seventy-two dead and 412 injured. Fourteen minutes later seventy-five dead and 409 injured.

Then my cell phone rang. It buzzed deep inside the hybrid, and even though the ring tone must have sounded as many as ten times before I pulled it out, the caller had not rung off.

I stared at the display. Edelweiss.

Eventually I pressed the green button as if in a trance and, by way of greeting, said:

“You’re still alive…?”

“So it would seem, my friend. I thought you might want to know that.”

“But no-one survives something like that, within such a small radius… It was a nuclear explosion,” I said.

“Let’s just put it like this, Erasmus: you saw that we’d taken certain precautions here in the sealed wing since you started at West Point. After the eleventh of September, the invasion of Afghanistan, the war in Iraq… the logic of the suicide bomber has to be countered in some way. Elementary game theory basically, nothing remarkable, risks, opportunities, pluses and minuses. So both the Interview Room and the Office can now, after the latest renovations, withstand a shock wave of 220 psi and a direct hit of up to 44 psi. And this explosion wasn’t actually that powerful, in absolute terms—although it was certainly impressive for a microcharge. Unparalleled, I’d say. We certainly felt it!”

I listened, waited.

“On the other hand, it did knock out most of the rest of the airport. The whole international departure hall, just after you’d passed through it, I assume, parts of arrivals, duty free, the food court. In that sense the force of the blast was a scientific mystery. Which was explained—and at the same time increased exponentially—after we had the results of our first quick analyses. But I thought that you could perhaps shed some light on all of this for us.”

I didn’t give an inch, managing to hide my own curiosity. Let him keep going in his own good time.

“Because there were traces of californium both inside the restroom and in the fallout. Not only the usual microscopic residue you’d find after a nuclear explosion, but significant amounts. As if the entire charge had consisted of isotope Cf-251 or perhaps even Cf-252.”

“Californium?” I said out loud.

Ingrid started.

“Californium?” she repeated.

I looked around at all the other passengers standing among the bar tables, to see whether any of them had overheard what we had said, that word. None of them had reacted at all. Edelweiss waited before continuing. Maybe he had heard Ingrid in the background, was waiting to hear if she would have anything more to say.

Then he swallowed audibly, that curious gurgling sound, and took up the thread:

“Otherwise it’s relatively clear to us what happened. The surveillance cameras inside the restrooms have a form of black box which makes it possible for us to reconstruct the course of events, second by second, freezing the picture and spooling backward and forward, taking advantage of the blessings of modern technology—and that’s what we had to do to get a better understanding. At first it seemed like some kind of complex mating ritual. In the end, though, there was not much left of either of them. I think you can probably imagine it all, broadly speaking, my dearest Erasmus.”

I shut my eyes, pushed away the thoughts. For all those years Zafirah had tried to convince me of the blessings of ultra-violence, get me to discover its special power and cleansing effect, the catharsis of brutality. Said that it was her only relief after her mother had simply left them in their little village in Bahrain to join the mujahideen fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. She would sit there as a little girl with her father all night, watching boxing galas on some foreign television channel, leaning toward him in their wordless grief.

But still I never succumbed to the temptation: had always regarded brute force as a means and not an end. So I said nothing. Just waited for the last piece of information, even though I already knew.

“But finally they managed to consummate the act, the thing which mankind is, after all, created to do. And this resulted in his last little futility triggering the mighty apparatus she was carrying. A neat little piece of construction, I have to say, evidently with the world’s most expensive element as its active substance. The going rate for a gram of californium is upward of $80 million. I had to check that with our experts.”

A short pause.

“But as one of them added: ‘However one’s supposed to get a hold of that much!’”

6.02

On the flight to Palermo I once again took my dissertation out of the pocket of my combat pants. I found the part dealing with californium straight away. Here too my style was peculiarly essayistic, light years from what was current in academic circles. I still could not quite fathom how it had managed to pass the Bulgarian examiner’s sullen filtering.

The heading to Chapter Three was “THE ELUSIVE TRAIL OF THE TRANSURANIC ELEMENTS”. I began to read, was drawn in, pulled back in time.

6.03

I closed my dissertation, tried to get some sleep for the first time in more than a day, just as Ingrid was doing in the seat next to me.

But the questions would not stop buzzing around in my head. Why had Ingrid agreed to return to D.C.? Why had Edelweiss let us run free? What had actually happened in the restroom at Dulles, causing that massive explosion? Who had won and who lost? What was the relevance of californium in it all?

And still I did not think of putting any of the questions to Ingrid—since she so rarely answered them in a way which made sense to me.

When finally I started to fall asleep, I kept being woken by a series of flash-like dreams of the mushroom cloud outside the airplane window. That unfathomable power, billowing outward slowly and mercilessly like a colossal thunderstorm. Something so far beyond human scale and yet so near. I felt totally drained, depressed and bewitched, like a drug addict after his first kick.

It may well sound particular to me, personal, perverse. But this longing for the forbidden, the worst thing imaginable in human history, was a universal symptom. To the extent that our psychologists even had a name for it, a diagnosis: the “Doomsday syndrome”.

Yet what I had experienced was such a tiny part of what would happen in the actual moment. Edelweiss had done his best to make us understand how high the stakes were. The weight and importance of our assignment. The enormous difference between the atomic and the hydrogen bomb, fission and fusion, nuclear and thermonuclear weapons. That the first ever hydrogen bomb, on just its first test, had an explosive force of 10.4 megatons: one thousand times more than the atom bomb over Hiroshima.

He kept reading out the stories in his frighteningly gentle voice, from my very first time at West Point, the attempts at descriptions, the eyewitness accounts.

“I could have sworn that the entire world stood in flames. The heat rays burned my back even though our ship was thirty miles from ground zero. The blinding ball of fire had a three-mile diameter, seemed to hover motionlessly before slowly rising toward the heavens, like a gigantic gas balloon, a foreign planet, another sun”.

This from a marine, a former Harvard literature student, in a letter home after his first experience of a hydrogen bomb test.

Edelweiss then turned to actual footage and simulations in the Team’s headquarters. Hour-long sessions four storeys below ground, the lecture hall’s lights dimmed as the giant screen lowered softly from the ceiling. Always starting with what it would have looked like if the “Bikini Baker” atom bomb, with an explosive force equivalent to the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, had exploded directly above Manhattan.

The cloud spread out gradually, as if in slow motion, with a final width of a few hundred yards hanging over our slender island. When the shock wave came, the soundless picture just trembled fractionally, before the fires and destruction. Soon the simulation faded out and the room fell into total darkness. Leaving us in suffocating silence.

Then the Manhattan skyline once again came hovering out of the darkness. The clock in the bottom corner of the image was counting in thousands of seconds. But now the heavens above the skyscrapers were entirely, blindingly white. The ball of fire covered Manhattan’s width. Then came the devastation itself, whole skyscrapers being snapped off like matches.

The first time none of us had said a word, we were just trying to fathom what we had seen. After a minute or so of absolute silence, Edelweiss explained—still through loudspeakers with the lights down and not making the slightest effort to create any comfort zone—that this was the clearest way to illustrate the difference between an atom bomb and a hydrogen bomb.

The first simulation, he went on, showed an old atomic bomb; the second represented the scenario for an early model of the hydrogen bomb, the first ever tested, codenamed “Mike”. Even that would have wiped out the whole of New York’s downtown in one single moment. The greater part of the city.

Then came all the secondary effects: the fires, the asphalt bubbling on the streets, melting together with the human masses into some sort of new organic composition. The water starting to boil in New York harbor. The unimaginable levels of radiation.

What Edelweiss was doing, as I now see it, was to imprint the whole situation visually onto us. How vulnerable the world had become with effect from the first test of the first atomic bomb—when the technology showed itself, against all odds, to be possible. How very much more so with the hydrogen bomb.

And that there was always a small human being sitting deep within the system, carrying out the rituals or even pushing the button. The last link in the chain. So susceptible to temptation, the whole scope of his own humanity.

Out of the loudspeakers in the jet-black lecture hall, Edelweiss then proclaimed that the “Balance of Terror” was no longer a question of states, military alliances or political or religious ideas. That in peacetime it lay more within each individual person who came sufficiently close to nuclear weapons. That those of us who are furthest within the system first and foremost have to stand up to ourselves. At any given moment.

Then he had started to run the actual footage. First with “DOG, 81 kilotons, Enewetak atoll, April 1951”. Still not a thermonuclear weapon, but the final test of what came to be called the Mark 6 atomic bomb, which was kept in storage for almost a decade longer. In the foreground about thirty V.I.P. visitors were lined up in white deckchairs on the Officers’ Beach Club on some small Tahitian island paradise, just outside the security zone. In accordance with regulations they were all wearing their dark protective spectacles as they watched the ball of fire light up the sky, like at an outdoor cinema.

After that came the hydrogen bomb tests. “ERIE, 15 kilotons, Enewetak atoll, May 1956”: Edelweiss used to freeze the picture at the exact moment when the group turned away to protect their eyes. “STOKES, 19 kilotons, Nevada desert, August 1957”, like a jelly-fish with tentacles of sand and fire stretching all the way down toward the dunes. “OAK…”, in the same constantly blown-apart atoll, “…8.9 megatons, May 1958”: the soldiers sitting like schoolchildren at a picnic on the edge of a cliff, just far enough away according to the safety regulations of the time. And on he went, onward through the history of nuclear tests—right up to the comprehensive ban in 1996.

So we really did try to understand, each time Edelweiss showed us these scenes, at least once a week during my almost twelve years in NUCLEUS. All these shifting yet very similar expressions of our most unimaginable invention. The thermonuclear weapon which could not just split the nucleus of atoms but get them to melt together. Manipulate nature itself, simulate the sun’s inner processes, the very pre-condition for life—and from now on also for extinction.

To comprehend the incomprehensible.

6.04

By the time we landed in Palermo, Ingrid had also woken. As elegantly evasive as ever, she answered my hushed questions, again in Swedish and for safety’s sake on our way out through the arrivals hall, in the buzz of the crowd. Kept side-stepping until once again I gave up.

But so far as I could understand we were now meant to be in the very final phase of her Plan A., likely on the way to the resolution itself. The moment when I and this deranged woman would so literally be holding the fate of the world in our hands. The inhuman weight on our shoulders alone as the circle—the correspondences, the Nuclear Family, all these imperfect metaphors—came to be closed. When the picture on her screen was finally complete, all those triangles and crosses were joined up once and for all. Our entire global nuclear weapons system either short-circuited or launched.

For some reason I had followed her all the way here, to this very last stop. Maybe so that I could prevent something from happening. Maybe only, as in a movie, because I had to see how it all ended.

I followed her like a dog on a leash, or a puppet his master. Nothing that Ingrid did was ever predictable. So instead of the airport train we took the bus in from Falcone-Borsellino, named after the two lawyers who fell victim to the Mafia in the early 1990s, blown sky high and at the same time becoming secular martyrs.

Again we chose to hide in plain sight, among crowds of people. Standing up, in a packed bus, in the firing line, where anyone at all could have picked us off through the windows. And what’s more on the way into the heart of the city, in infernal traffic, right at the start of the riposo.

I assumed that Ingrid too had counted on us being watched, in one way or another. That one or more people would have followed us—were waiting for us here. That the only possible reason why Edelweiss had let us go was that we were both now to be “spools of thread”. That they would wait, possibly until the resolution itself, to see how far up and how deeply the conspiracy had penetrated. The work which, according to Ingrid, she had been pursuing across the world for decades.

I looked at her as she stood pressed tightly against me with the bulky pack between her feet. Looked at her new face: more Garbo than Ingrid Bergman. The woman who had been my guide and mentor throughout my adult life. First spell-binding lecturer, then supervisor for my dissertation, eventually Alpha for both me and the whole Team. After that some sort of cicerone. Someone who did not lead you out of things, but rather only further inside. Deep into myself, the heart of the entire system. We two against the world.

She did not look back, kept staring out through the window: hungry, inquisitive, like a charter tourist. I soon took my eyes off her and did the same. I had been here so many times before, had landed directly at Sigonella in the south-eastern region, take-off point for not only our bombers but also the unmanned drones heading for the Middle East. Our fort facing the Muslims.

I had never before taken the airport bus, and had this ground-level view of the island. It all now became both more and less frightening. From miles up in the air, or on the screen simulations, there were no people to be seen—no-one to be defended or exterminated. Here they were everywhere. On the bus and outside, swarming, sweating, yelling, sounding their horns. The human factor.

When we got off at Palermo Centrale, Ingrid chose the first person we came across, in an Italian which sounded flawless. It seemed that it was not far from the station to the Palazzo Abatellis she was trying to find. But there was a strangely hot wind blowing through the alleys as we hurried with our heavy bags and, even though there were fewer than forty-eight hours until Christmas Day, I soon found myself sweating. The Mediterranean lay glittering at the end of a few streets, a picture-postcard scene.

I did not realize where we were going—until we stopped outside a brown-walled building, the Palazzo Abatellis, housing the regional art museum. I had not been there before, but now knew exactly where we were. She had given me a reproduction of that painting on one of my uneven birthdays, a very good miniature to hang in my office next to Bruegel’s better-known version. The one which I had taken out of its frame and hidden away in my combat pack before the flight.

“16.48. We’ve got twelve minutes, my treasure,” Ingrid said.

We cut across the breathtakingly beautiful courtyard and walked straight into Hall Two. And there it was. Mighty, imposing, overwhelming.

Even though I had studied most of what there was to be read about the twenty by twenty-foot fresco, which had to be split into four sections so that it could be moved from the Palazzo Sclafani during the war, and thought that I was prepared for it, it took my breath away. The immense power in this burlesque vision of Doomsday from the mid-fifteenth century. One of many models for Bruegel’s own version, inspired by the Black Death which started to run rampant in Europe during the fourteenth century and, according to the sign next to it, painted by an unknown artist.

What this version of “The Triumph of Death” was missing was the Fleming’s strangely nuclear sense of doom, the sickly yellowish background, everything burned out and bare. Instead, the skies were full of small out-of-place flowers—and none of the people depicted around the edges were being loaded into what could be seen as railway carriages or other modern death transports, as in Bruegel’s masterpiece.

On the other hand, the fresco which now filled our vision had an even stronger focus. You could not take your eyes off the skeleton riding in the center of the painting, or avoid being drawn in by its maniacal smile. Not least because it was precisely the central part of the image which had been the most damaged by its hasty transport during the indiscriminate bombing of the city. It really looked as if someone had set out to destroy its central portion—with some kind of acid.

“Isn’t this insanely beautiful?” Ingrid said, her hand on my shoulder.

“Yes, insanely,” I said.

Then, after some time—impossible for me to assess or even comprehend—she led me across the courtyard again. All the way back to the station, just in time to buy tickets and board before our train pulled out, heading south.

And it was not until we were approaching Sigonella, some hours later, that I woke up properly again. After sunset the darkness had quickly become like a wall outside our window. Since the moon was hidden behind the clouds, not even the contours of all our radar installations up on the mountain ridges were visible.

Officially we had never had to admit that there were any American military bases at all on Italian soil, not even here at Sigonella, since here too all of the garrisons lay within the walls of the N.A.T.O. bases. But according to Edelweiss’ strategic presentations, in Italy alone we had sixty-four of our own installations. In total more than ten thousand American soldiers, upward of a hundred nuclear warheads.

What is more, the dream of perfect synchronization of all of our combat forces, not just in Italy but throughout the world, was to be fulfilled after the last step here in Sicily.

The objective was that nobody should be able to hide from us any longer—and the key to it all was a new creation by the name of M.U.O.S., “Mobile User Objective System”. Not many people knew what its exact function was. Why we spent such huge sums on the gigantic parabolic antennae, which demonstrably caused high levels of harmful electro-magnetic radiation inside the security zone, throughout more or less the whole of Sicily. Or devoted such extravagant efforts to suppressing local opposition to them.

The system was to consist of five satellites and four enormous ground installations to house the antennae. Soon the last satellite would be ready to be launched from Cape Canaveral—and sometime soon, at the beginning of 2014, the fourth and last base was to be formally inaugurated here in Sicily. The last point on the line around the globe from Western Australia, via Virginia and Hawaii.

Nowhere had the dishes encountered such protests as in Sicily. In and around the small town of Niscemi, thirty-seven miles south of Sigonella. For that reason we had not even been told the date for the opening of this last M.U.O.S. base.

So we passed through Sigonella and it was in Niscemi itself that we stepped out onto the platform. The evening breeze was still warm, my wrist-watch showed 68.4 degrees, at 19.39, December 23, 2013.

The final countdown had begun.

6.05

There are levels of believing and knowing. The only thing I believed was that I could never know. Not even what it would occur to Ingrid to do in the very next moment.

This time she led us hurriedly across the square outside the station. It was filled with festive decorations. We passed a blue neon-lit Christmas tree and went into a supermarket. Homed in on the meat counter. She asked for the pre-ordered turkey in her perfect Italian—and then let the boy manning the vegetable section load the trimmings into the shopping cart. Potatoes, fresh Brussels sprouts, ordinary yellow onions and small white globe ones. Then she picked up some kind of preserve that could have passed for cranberry, butter and flour, onion and seasoning for the gravy, white bread and dried sage for the stuffing. I recognized it all so vividly from my mother’s Christmas arrangements. Also one box of panettone from the huge piles of them, filled with pistachio nuts and chocolate chips, and a few bottles of matured grappa.

“For our first few week or so,” she muttered half to herself, “so we don’t have to show our faces outside any more this year. Just until the Jesús María business has blown over.”

Well after closing time, with a sullen young girl in a Santa Claus outfit letting the last customers out, we crossed the square again with an even heavier load. Most people did not spare us a look—despite our voluminous backpacks—as Ingrid took us further into the poorer quarters around the via Dante Alighieri. Our disguise seemed good enough: the son with most of the Christmas shopping. Plodding along with all that weight in his hands, a few steps behind, while his mother scurried along in front with her significantly lighter carrier bag.

Even though Ingrid was not only taller than me, but at least four inches taller than anyone else we came across. The short Sicilian men in their made-to-measure suits, on the square, on their way home after the stores had closed or maybe after a round or two with colleagues at their bar after work had finished for the Christmas break. The old ladies inside the stores—who were buying things before the weekend in a frenzy—but not to be seen in the street. As if swallowed up by the darkness.

Step by step Niscemi closed in, drew down the shutters, doused the lights across whole neighborhoods. The Christmas decorations grew scarcer, the presence of neon trees more sporadic.

But banners remained hanging from balconies in tight succession, as they had been all the way from the square, rainbow-colored, saying “NO M.U.O.S.”. As I put down the grocery bags to rest my arms and check the time, 8.42 p.m., I could see the first aerosol graffiti on the crumbling facades: “MAFIOSO + U.S.A. = M.U.O.S.” Then another message a few feet further on: A SINGLE SPARK CAN IGNITE A REVOLT AS BIG AS A BLUE WHALE, as Ingrid translated it, in the same ominously dripping blood red. Followed by an ever-increasing number of dark messages along the steep via Dante Alighieri.

Since a couple of years earlier, direct confrontations between the demonstrators and our own security forces had become the rule rather than the exception. After arousing mostly local media interest, the issue then spread to the national media and from there onto the radar of certain strategic military commands—and for the first time NUCLEUS became aware of the local resistance.

The activists naturally knew how to achieve the greatest impact. In addition to the sprayed slogans on the walls and the banners hanging from the balconies, the well-known graffiti artist Blu had come here, to the small mountain town of Niscemi in this remote corner of the world, and created two enormous murals.

Ingrid now stopped in front of one of them. It had rapidly become a signature piece, not just for the opposition here but also for the whole carnival-like and escalating peace movement. Amba had a reproduction on one of her tote bags.

The painting was confrontational, exaggerated for effect. A grinning Death, playing the M.U.O.S. system as if it were a xylophone, with the bars sending off missiles instead of tones. It was General LeMay’s Cold War dream—and seemingly also Ingrid’s and maybe Falconetti’s too. To be able to control all these separate command centers as if they were one instrument. Fire off, or short-circuit, all of our nuclear weapons in one historic moment.

Even senior military figures had speculated aloud as to the exact purpose of the M.U.O.S. system. What could lie behind these vast investments? Why our reaction to the young anarchists’ opposition had been so extreme, almost personal. It was not only the so-called “defense analysts” in trade journals who had concerned themselves with the question, but also editorials in the mainstream media who would normally have left us alone. Even within the military apparatus itself there seemed to be a surprising number who had little more than basic information.

What seemed clear to most people was that M.U.O.S. would in due course replace G.P.S. as the world-encompassing communications network. That this new system would, as with so many other day-to-day technological functions, start as a high-tech military application and then be made available to the public. G.P.S. had, after all, been developed by our defense authorities during the ’70s, even if it was not brought into operation until 1994. That network was therefore twenty years old—and still we found it as ridiculously hard as ever to communicate with our most dangerous units.

Because the entire nuclear weapons system was, behind the scenes, a patchwork of barely functioning connections, even nowadays controlled by floppy discs and other out-of-date technology, often without any backup whatsoever. Our heavily armed submarines were the worst example, something which was regularly raised by analysts and commentators as justification for their diametrically opposed opinions: an argument for comprehensive disarmament or for a much needed arms build-up.

These modern sea monsters, U.S.S. Rhode Island and our seventeen other “Ohio Class” atomic submarines invisible deep beneath the world’s oceans, now rarely rose to the surface. Each had the capacity to wipe out whole continents. But if we needed to communicate with them when they were cruising at depth in stealth mode, their stand-by position at times of high alert, it could take up to fifteen minutes to transmit three encrypted letters from sender to recipient, with the help of antennae at two eighteen-acre communications bases in Michigan and Wisconsin.

What is more, there was no technical possibility for the commander on board the submarine to acknowledge receipt, confirm whether he had understood the message correctly: whether for example he should surface—or fire off all his warheads.

These defects were used to justify the new communications solution. Certain training exercises in both the Arctic and the Antarctic had indicated that M.U.O.S. ought to be able to take care of these problems, using the new system’s spectacular ability to establish contact with areas which had previously been unreachable. Not only beneath the world’s oceans, but also below the pack ice at both poles, which in itself would permit a new colonization of these regions.

Yet as usual they were missing the crucial point. Certainly, M.U.O.S. would replace G.P.S., give rise to new communications possibilities, dramatically greater operational capacity. But the inner meaning of the system was, according to Edelweiss, something more important.

Everything is very obvious once you know. How perfectly this system fitted into our nuclear build-up, the “Revitalization”. Edelweiss had compared it to our superior night-combat technology, developed in time for the first Iraq war. He said that M.U.O.S. would be the same sort of game-changer. Allow us to exploit the advantages of the coming generation of nuclear weapons, synchronizing all these minor miracles with each other, justifying the trillion-dollar investment. The radar-guided B.61-12 hydrogen bomb. Our new generation of nuclear weapons submarines, with a dramatically improved striking power and precision. Missiles with previously unthinkable levels of performance.

So here we were. At the place for the fulfilment of this worldwide system, in a godforsaken town next to our last M.U.O.S. base: the missing link. Marching up the steep streets with the groceries and our luggage filled with Doomsday potential—and the graffiti along the way like whispering reproaches, pointing fingers, an almost audible murmur.

At a deserted square, in what seemed to be the town’s outer edge up on the mountain ridge, Ingrid led me off on a small path to the right of a baroque church. In the shelter of a pine tree she took out her torch and shone it onto the laminated map which somebody had mounted on a gatepost: a calculation of how far the radiofrequency radiation from the system’s mighty antennae would extend. The red area covered most of Sicily.

This was one branch of the opinion ranged against the installations. When the army doctor at the M.U.O.S. base died of leukemia, a fact which only emerged because activists and the local media began informally to exchange information, the protests against the health risks of the system began to attract support from international doctors’ associations and humanitarian groups. Mothers of soldiers serving at the base soon joined forces with them.

The other branch of the protests was opposition to war in general—not least this type of military communications system, which more effectively facilitated warfare. Which in turn created a link between the protests here in Niscemi and the worldwide peace movement.

So Ingrid would presumably wait for just the sort of massive uproar which the graffiti promised, the moment itself: a revolt as big as a blue whale. She would synchronize our move with the inauguration of the last M.U.O.S. base, just as with the protests at Kleine Brogel. When everybody was paying maximum attention in the wrong direction.

The problem was that none of us in the Team, not even our own Alpha, had been able to find out precisely when the formal opening was to take place. The date had been shrouded in impenetrable secrecy for several years. Maybe there was nobody who knew yet. Maybe even the person responsible, whether it was Edelweiss or the President himself, was waiting for a purely random date. Simply improvising. To keep the anarchists at bay.

After several minutes immobile in front of the map, no doubt reflecting on the scale of the radiation’s red zone, Ingrid hurried us on again. Led the way up into what was to become our rudimentary safe house.

Instinctively I mapped out escape paths, red and green zones. Not one strip of light seeped out through the building complex’s drawn blinds, even though it was no later than half past nine. The dirty yellow facade was full of cracks, covered in graffiti. Only one set of entrance stairs had functioning lights—and it was not ours. Once inside the stairwell, Ingrid dared to light her torch again, since all of the doors on the landings seemed to be closed.

And even if one door were to be opened, against all the odds, it would hardly make any difference. These were places where you did not ask questions. Where neighbors would at best stare silently at strangers like us—soldiers, plainclothes policemen, American agents?—from their darkened hallways.

Up in the corner apartment itself, everything was very much to type. The first stifling smell of mold, two mattresses nibbled by bugs, or possibly mice, lying directly on the floor in the one large room, an open kitchen which in true Mediterranean style had been half moved out when the entire process must have been interrupted. Oven and refrigerator were functioning, even if the latter was buzzing like an engine on the point of breakdown, while one half of the sink had simply been removed. An ancient black-and-white T.V. stood next to the mattresses on the floor—with another on top of it. One with a functioning image, one with sound.

In short, here was the bare minimum needed for an assignment. Walls and ceiling, remote location, views in three directions.

That view through the broken windows made me catch my breath. The barely distinguishable contours of the mountains against the black of the sky, single lights along winding streets leading down to the sea, the stars blinking like coded messages to us, the long path of the moon across the water. The world over which the final battle was soon to be fought. The only one we had.

Again I considered whether to escape, run hard in one single burst to the sea, travel north to the eternal ice and the rendezvous with my conscience—but I did nothing. Perhaps because I wanted to see how everything would play out. Perhaps because I could still prevent something from happening, play a part.

Ingrid put the turkey in the refrigerator and turned on the T.V., the volume low.

C.N.N. was reporting ninety-seven confirmed deaths and about the same number again of serious injuries from the explosion at Dulles, which according to the commission of enquiry had been caused by a leak in the airport’s fuel storage facility. Heads had begun to roll among those responsible. Two of the most senior members of staff had been forced to resign. An expert in the studio was saying that the head of the airport itself could not remain in his job much longer.

The fact that other people had reported feeling seriously unwell after the accident had found an easy explanation. Members of the inquiry team were quoted as saying that aircraft fuel exploding in such large volumes could cause those sorts of unpleasant, but nevertheless temporary, secondary effects.

Such, then, was the situation just before Christmas. Everything hidden, artificial, distorted: awaiting some kind of resolution. Both heavy and light, suspended, unpredictable, yet in some way predestined.

6.06

On the evening of Christmas Day—after we had spent two days checking the hybrid, the portable command terminal and the news, and I had updated my notes, all of it some kind of paradoxical peace—Ingrid poured herself some more grappa by the oven and said that the turkey was ready.

“Just go and wash your hands, my treasure.”

I went into the bathroom, bolted the door as well as I could, let water run into the basin. Looked at my wrist-watch. 21.29 here in southern Europe, high time for the turkey to be ready even at home—or whatever I was to call it—on the other side of the Atlantic. I keyed in Amba’s number. Waited, hesitated, before pressing the green button.

Then I hung up after just two ring tones. I had promised myself. Never again listen to Amba’s voice, not even her voicemail.

Instead I went ahead with the other call. The woman who answered was very friendly, knew at once who I wanted to speak to, and went to fetch her. When she came to the telephone her voice was as upset as it was every year.

“Hello? Is it you?”

“Who else would it be, Mom? It’s that time of year. A really Happy Christmas to you! And in case you were wondering, I’ve won again this year.”

I heard her hesitate, some unspecified fear, anticipating something terrible.

“Won our bet! I was the first to call this Christmas too, Mom.”

If I had not heard her breathe, I would not have known she was still there. The silence was dense and seemed almost brittle.

“We’re just about to eat the turkey, your great recipe as always. The simplest possible stuffing, you know: sage, onion and breadcrumbs.”

“The turkey…?” she said slowly, before that irrational rage surfaced: “I never made turkey, Erasmus. I hated poultry!”

I let her anger subside. As well as that eerie feeling I always got when she spoke about herself in the past tense.

“I’ve got to go now, finish things off here, Mom. But a really Happy Christmas to you.”

She had fallen silent. Probably wondering which of her stock of standard expressions she should now use. Phrases from the past.

“I understand… And the same to you, my darling. Look after yourself and the whole of your wonderful family,” she said.

“Absolutely. They send their warmest Christmas greetings to you too. We’ll speak again soon, Mom.”

“Of course we will, Erasmus. And don’t forget now, give everyone my love.”

I pressed the red button, filled the sink with ice-cold water and took as much oxygen into my lungs as I could. Then I dunked my head in the water. Counted to myself—thirty seconds, forty, fifty, sixty—before coming up for air, flushing the toilet as I bawled out my pain.

As I came out of the bathroom, Ingrid put down her cell phone by the oven.

“I took the opportunity to make a call, since you were in there for a while.”

Her movements were strangely heavy. Maybe it was the grappa. Maybe more than that.

“Sixten sends his Christmas greetings to you too, Erasmus.”

“Sixten?”

“He said he’ll be coming here when it’s time. For real, he said, no alias this time. He’s got Aina’s full approval to join in the final battle between good and evil. Perhaps get himself crucified, become a martyr along with us, my treasure. That is what he told me. Aina will stay at home. That pure little angel.”

“And Lisa? Is she safe?” I said.

She did not answer, but bent to take the turkey out of the oven: at least seven pounds just for us. Said nothing, focusing on getting it onto the table—and then disaster struck. First she swayed, her balance failing her, which in turn caused the fat to drip from the oven tray. Then she slipped on the greasy floor. The turkey flew in a gradual arc, as if in slow motion, bounced a few times on the floor and came to rest with its legs sticking up in the air.

I would probably have started to roar with laughter, for the first time since our flight in September, if Ingrid had not begun to cry. Like a little girl, shaking and trembling.

I went to her, tried to put my arms around her, console her. She just shook her head violently and shut her eyes tight. When she opened them, they were blurred from the alcohol and some sort of sorrow, like a misty mirror.

“I’m sorry…” she managed to say.

“For what?”

She did not answer, just squatted down and tried to pick up the slippery bird, dropping it on the floor once more. Only when she had managed to put the plate with the turkey on the table did she turn to me.

“For spoiling our Christmas dinner.”

She kept fiddling about with the plates, straightening the cutlery. Seemed to take a deep breath before asking:

“But could you possibly bring yourself to eat the turkey anyway?”

I nodded slowly. “Why ever not?”

She sat down, poured water into one of our glasses and drained it in one go, blinked, opened her eyes again. The tears still covered her retinas like a layer of glass.

“Thank you, my treasure.”

I sat down opposite her, while she began to carve the bird as if she were carrying out a medical dissection.

“But to answer your question… Lisa is free and safe again, thank heavens. But she’s not coming here. Even though Sixten said she desperately wants revenge on the people who took her hostage.”

“So why isn’t she coming?”

Ingrid got to her feet again, went to one of the kitchen cupboards, opened the door and stared at its contents. Maybe to hide her expression when at length she answered:

“Sixten promised me that I would never have to see her again.”

6.07

She took the wine bottle out of the kitchen cupboard, moved the plate with the turkey aside and put the bottle in the center of the table with a certain emphasis.

“Château Latour. Already seven years old when I bought it in the ’60s, recommended by a woman in a small specialist store in Oxford. These days it’s one of the more expensive ones at auctions. Would you like a glass?”

I did not have time to raise my hand to stop her: had planned not to drink a drop until our move on the M.U.O.S. base, and I still did not know if it was to take place this evening or in one year’s time. She filled my cracked wine glass to the brim. It looked like a magic potion. Dark red, dense.

“My idea was to give it to Sixten. But it never happened.”

She poured at least as much into her own glass, raised it with a slight smile.

“I think we should try it right away. Skål, Erasmus! To the irony and deadly earnest of history.”

I raised my glass. The liquid ran thickly across the roof of my mouth. It was a divine wine—and exceptionally ill-suited to the situation we were in. Our miserable little safe house, the dreadful assignment, my state of dependence. On just this woman.

Then she began to pile the turkey and trimmings onto my plate. I just let it happen. Both white and brown meat, stuffing heavy with the smell of sage, potatoes, cooked small onions, Brussels sprouts and finally the cranberry preserve and the gravy, shiny with the turkey fat.

Ingrid treated every dish with equal precision and care. Because she wanted to dwell on the importance of each one to the whole. Handled them all like the most delicate crystal, even the potatoes which had been over-cooked in an eerily familiar way.

I took a mouthful, then more. Vanished into Christmas memories.

“Is it O.K.?” she said.

“Absolutely. Congratulations. Exactly like my mother’s!”

“Yes, you told me all about it, my treasure, every little detail. That’s why I let the potatoes cook a few minutes longer.”

When her glass was empty, Ingrid reached for the bottle to refill it. Stopped short, studied the label, leaned forward and read the text. I did the same. Grand Vin de Château Latour, Premier Grand Cru Classé… 1961.

“You see: not a scratch on the label. Even though the bottle has been through a lot, I can tell you. But there’s usually been something to hand to wrap it in. I’ve carried it round the world, through the gates of hell, close to my heart. Almost as I would a child, Erasmus.”

She emptied half of her next glass in one mouthful, but I continued to sip the wine. Stayed on my toes, fully in touch with my senses. Realized that this was the moment of truth.

“I always thought that I would give the bottle to him, when it was the right time, for some reason or another. Kept it hidden away for ages. For almost half a century, I almost forgot it. I didn’t drink a drop of alcohol from March 2, 1970 until this fall. Right up until I met Sixten again, and Aina, up there in Ursvik.”

As she paused, I could make out sounds from the apartment below, for the first time since we had arrived. Some sort of muttered prayer, music, a choir: a repeat T.V. transmission of Midnight Mass from the evening before, I hoped. Unless it was my own demons.

“But there was never really the opportunity to give it to him in Ursvik, either. So I thought that the two of us could crack open the bottle this evening. Together. I’ve always seen you as my divine son, Erasmus. The treasure sent by heaven.”

I looked down at my plate, trying to think of something to say, in response to her tipsy little melodrama. But I could not think of anything.

“We were so young, you see. I wasn’t more than seventeen when I first saw Sixten, in the tunnels which became our secret meeting places, and he only two years older. Each of us as consumed by the vision as the other. From day one we had a plan ready, taking in the whole of our lives—not just for ourselves but for the country, the continent, the world. Until the end of time.”

I glanced at her. She did not look back, but she took a small piece of turkey from the otherwise almost untouched plate. Chewed pensively, concentrating on what she was saying, trying hard to remember it all.

“And you must understand, Erasmus: the post-war period was indescribable, trumpet blasts and Doomsday fanfares everywhere. You’ve read most of what there is to read about it, but you still wouldn’t understand. All these persistent dreams about things man was never meant for. And when Sweden’s nuclear weapons program was assembled at the end of the 1940s, the thought was of course that we in Sweden should also build an atomic bomb—following the development, not leading it. Create the same sort of fission weapon that both the U.S. and the Soviet Union already had.”

She was looking past me. As if telling her story directly to my notebook, for posterity rather than for me. Then followed a monologue lasting many minutes, as spell-binding as ever.

“But we had Meitner. Our most secret weapon. Sixten actually met her once, deep in the bed-rock, while installing those red-light-emitting diodes we’d been given as prototypes. His very first assignment in the Swedish program, nineteen years old and a newly minted senior high school engineer, still wet behind the ears. Lise was then in the process of leaving Sweden and her underground laboratory. So at that important moment in history—at the start of the ’60s—they more or less ran into each other, right there by the red trap-door.

“Sixten has always described it as a short meeting, fifteen minutes at the most, but intense. Just the two of them, alone in the roughest part of the bed-rock. But Lise nevertheless had time to describe everything to him in broad outline. Probably wanted to offload it all before fleeing to Oxford.

“So Lise told him that she had been corresponding intensively with her world-famous colleagues ever since that triumphal tour of the U.S. in the spring of 1946, as the ‘Mother of the Atomic Bomb’. All those letters you and I never found, however hard I looked in the Swedish archives. To and from her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, of course—as well as Hahn, Fermi, Teller, Seaborg, even Oppenheimer himself.

“And no-one had understood what she was working on. Nearly all of those most closely involved thought it really was to do with the atomic bomb project. That that was the secret which needed to be protected from the public, even from certain government ministers. And in fact it all stayed secret for thirty-five long years—until some technology magazine fancied that it had exposed the Swedish nuclear weapons program in the mid ’80s.

“But that was just a red herring, my treasure. Because according to Sixten that was what Lise told the people who arranged it all for her, this top secret, fully resourced laboratory under one of the deepest tunnel links in the bed-rock. That we in Sweden could simply skip the fission weapon, the atomic bomb, and move straight to the second step and fusion technology.

“So when America detonated its first hydrogen bomb in 1952, there was apparently dismay in the Inner Circle. That anyone else had managed to get there first! But even the hydrogen bomb had been a red herring, because Lise was way beyond that. Her hidden research under the red trap-door in Ursvik was not about the hydrogen bomb either, not about fusion techniques—but rather transuranic elements. The third and maybe final step. The field she had started to look into with Otto Hahn in Berlin, already in the mid ’30s, long before the war broke out.”

Then Ingrid went on to talk about things I had known for decades: details, dates, scientific struggles. I recalled from our dissertation sessions that strange sleepwalking feeling. The next time I stole a look at my watch it was 22.49. It took more than an hour of historical circumstances before she was back with her own story.

“…but just before I myself came into the Swedish program, in 1960, Lise all of a sudden moved to Oxford. The Inner Circle suspected that it was because she had failed in her research. That this super-brain simply could not handle the shame.”

She paused momentarily, met my look for the first time.

“But in actual fact it was the precise opposite. As Lise confirmed to me when she and I met for the first and only time, many years later. She fled not because the experiments had failed—but because they had succeeded.

“Because it had indeed shown itself to be possible to create the ultimate weapon, with the help of transuranic elements. And because she did not want that fact ever to come to the world’s attention. So Lise’s thought was to take herself and her findings off to her relatives in Oxford and bury them there for all time, without any other living person hearing a peep about it.”

She kept her eyes pinned on me, as if she were talking about me rather than them.

“That was why Sixten and I devoted almost all of our time together in the program to trying to understand what we called ‘Lise Meitner’s secret’. To following in the footsteps of her work, since she never responded to our efforts to get in touch with her. With the help of a small group of researchers, old enough to be likely to die within a few decades, if we did not succeed.

“So we too worked on a sort of Kinder egg: three secrets, one inside the next. Within what Sixten and I called the First Tier development activities—which essentially all of those involved were engaged with, the dream of producing a Swedish atomic bomb—there was a tight little group to whom we had given the impression that we were in fact planning a Swedish hydrogen bomb, what we referred to as Second Tier work. We told them that Lise had been doing just this, and that was the reason we were so desperately trying to follow her tracks.

“But in actual fact Sixten and I, like Lise, were devoting all of our efforts to a Third Tier development project. The ultimate weapon. As we saw it, transuranic elements were going to bring Sweden to a new era as a superpower. The first since the death of Karl XII at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

“That was why the tunnel system became so peculiar and so extensive: because we needed to hide it as it was being built. New emergency exits were forever required. Secret spaces like the fallout shelter where we met up after our flight, my treasure, strange little play areas where Sixten and I let our chosen few scientists test the short- and long-term effects of those elusive transuranic elements. Like the Test Room.”

A moment’s silence, a faint smile. Then she noticed my empty plate.

“Would you like some more?”

I nodded, had my plate filled up again. Began to eat. Alert as she continued.

“One day we just came to a standstill. Our huge appropriations via hidden accounts, which had made all of this development work possible, boxes inside boxes, together with this meandering tunnel system designed to conceal the left hand from the right, all the night-time bus loads of explosives experts and mining engineers to and from Kiruna, the massive logistics, slowly but surely started to run dry because our secretive little group never managed to produce concrete results. Not just the coded transfers from the Swedish state, where those arranging the money movements were under the impression that we were still working on the fission weapon: the atomic bomb, the First Tier development project. But also the largest part of our funding—which came directly to Sixten’s bank account. From a mysterious financier with the signature J.E.

“Once I had met that peculiar Edelweiss a few times, after a couple of years in the U.S., he revealed that he had been the name behind the initials. That most of the support for the research Sixten and I were organizing had in other words come from the American nuclear weapons program. Via him, of all people, as a front.

“Eventually Edelweiss explained to me that Sixten’s and my Swedish development project had been a relatively large expense even by their standards. And that the Americans too had been wondering what a super-brain like Meitner might have been up to over there in Sweden during all those years, why she had always turned down their invitations. And since they never got to the bottom of it at the time—despite what was apparently a major espionage effort, Stockholm’s addresses crawling with agents, even at Tekniska Högskolan—they felt they needed to find out what she had actually achieved. Before anybody else did.

“So Meitner’s name was all it took to justify these magnificent allocations from the U.S. to Sixten’s account, a number of heavily encrypted transfers among many others, right across the globe.”

She paused and I looked up from my plate, which was empty again. She must have sensed some sort of doubt.

“You must understand, Erasmus, that nearly a decade had passed since the invention of the hydrogen bomb by the time Sixten and I came into the program at the beginning of the ’60s. So both superpowers were thirsting for yet another Doomsday weapon, to keep up the pace: as few as seven years had passed between the birth of the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb, from 1945 to 1952. So the transuranic elements had to be the next step. Both sides did whatever it took to get to the apocalypse first. Cared nothing about either the financial or the ideological burden, every layer in the process had only to demonstrate to the one above that it was actually doing something.

“And Edelweiss himself was one of those most actively involved in the search for ‘Lise Meitner’s secret’. That man was to become my direct boss for thirty-three long years—before our roles were reversed and I became his superior, as Alpha in our newly created Team. But he never found out that I was the one in that position. Until our magnificent flight from NUCLEUS, my treasure.”

I took a deep breath. I had come into the story, been addressed, given perhaps the biggest supporting role. She looked past me, into the darkness, out through the window. As if back in time.

“Be that as it may… at the same time as our funds were drying up came the news that Lise was dying at her home in Oxford. So this was in October 1968, as you know. Sixten therefore asked me to go there before it was too late and try to get the missing piece of the jigsaw, The Holy Grail. The Philosopher’s Stone. Whatever was needed to allow us to create the third generation of nuclear weapons. He was convinced that Lise still had the secret with her, perhaps just in her head, and that I was the only one capable of getting it out of her. That I had the gift. To persuade and manipulate, the sort of thing I’d mastered since my childhood.”

She began to waggle her foot, I heard the soft rustling of her best mufti trousers under the table. Not even Ingrid could keep the mask in place as she approached the seat of her pain.

“In fact I did not want to travel abroad at the time. I was already five months pregnant—filled with dreams and terror, in equal proportions—even though I was hardly showing. You know I have always been good at hiding things. I was almost as slim as normal in the middle of my pregnancy, didn’t say a word about my condition to Sixten. But I’ve never been able to say no to him. So I took myself off to Lise, all the way to her sickbed, introduced myself as one of her students from the guest lectures at K.T.H. A real admirer.

“And it took its time, it really did, a whole day and night of meandering discussions. But in the end I managed to persuade her that I was just as much for the cause as she was, that peace was mankind’s natural state. So finally Lise sat up, reached in under her pillow and gave me two objects. First, the key to her underground laboratory. Secondly, the tiny black case which Seaborg handed over to her, together with the diploma and the Fermi medal, when he visited her home in 1966.

“I recognized the case at once, from the photograph I had seen in the newspapers: the one which we put into your dissertation many decades later. But it was significantly heavier than I had supposed. Just an inch or so wide, at most two inches long—and weighing as much as lead or refined gold.

“Lise gave me both the key and the case on the condition that I should not ask any questions and as soon as possible destroy both objects for all time. The significance of the key escaped me, however. Until Sixten told me when we met again up in Ursvik, for the first time in nearly forty-five years. So I told her about Mount Doom. Promised that I was going to throw them both down there, among the mass of debris from the excavation of the new 1,770-foot level, back home in Kiruna. Right inside what we in the end started to call Pluto.”

I could feel the heat in my face, my temples were pounding—reactions which one could never really control, however much one trained. The theater of the body.

“And it was those objects which sealed my fate. The case and the key, in that order. Brought to an end that phase of my life. The program and Sweden. Sixten. Love and death.”

She gazed at the label on the wine bottle again. Intact after all years.

“I bought this so we could celebrate when I got home. One wasn’t quite so careful in those days, people both drank and smoked all the way up to delivery, just kept going as if nothing had changed. And the woman in the wine store assured me that it was the best there was. Could be stored essentially for as long as one wanted. Although that in itself was less important: Sixten and I were going to crack it open as soon as we had the chance.”

Maybe I nodded, before I stole a look at my watch. Nearly midnight. I emptied my glass, waited for the finale. And after a long pause it unfurled.

“I was stopped at customs at Arlanda airport, my treasure. Even though I had hidden the objects as thoroughly as always—in a secret compartment in my suitcase which I had designed myself—the officers went straight for them. Pulled out first the case and then the key.”

She stopped again, waited, appeared physically to be wrestling with her memories. I counted the seconds to myself. Twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five… before she felt she could continue. Edelweiss’ trick for both keeping a semblance of control and holding out, giving yourself something else to think about in certain situations.

“So I found myself facing a military tribunal. I realized that all was lost. Our lives together, mine and Sixten’s. Our common dreams about the Doomsday weapon, our love child.

“I confessed to everything straight away, every element, with some significant variations. Told them that I had stolen unimaginable volumes of the material—californium, already by then the world’s most valuable—from Professor Meitner. What else could I say? It was there in the case, all the evidence they needed. That I had in addition taken the key to her secret laboratory over there in Oxford, where I claimed the material was produced according to principles of which I had absolutely no idea. To protect Lise I said nothing at all in my own defense, my so-called lawyer hardly needed to begin playing his part.

“In return I was spared military prison—and was instead effectively exiled. They had organized it all smoothly. In the car on the way out to the airport they told me my activities could be considered part of Sweden’s contribution in kind for the ability to shelter under the U.S.’s nuclear umbrella going forward. That I would become some sort of asset to the American program instead. Which was flattering in a way, a kind of recognition of my celestial talents.

“But I’ve always wondered what would have happened if there had been a different judge, someone other than Aina, at the military tribunal that day, October 25, 1968. If they might then simply have erased me without trace: that sort of thing does happen even in civilized countries. So for this I thanked her when I finally had the opportunity to do so. In Ursvik, almost forty-five years after the event, on her seventieth birthday. For sentencing me to exile rather than oblivion.”

When she had to rest for a moment, she just stared at me with her ice-blue eyes. I felt a shiver deep inside.

“But it wasn’t hard for me to shake off my guards, even in those days. They lost me right where we stopped at the airport. I headed straight down into the underworld, the furthest extremities of the Inner Circle, our link to the construction of the new motorway all the way out to Arlanda. Which was in practice being built for use by the fuel tankers for the American bombers which were to be permitted to land there from then on. Another of Sweden’s services in return for having the protection of the U.S.’s nuclear weapons in case of war.

“For weeks, months, after that I lived like an animal inside the peripheral parts of the tunnel system. But I had an incredible stroke of luck. Met a woman, Sireen, a refugee from Jordan after the Six Day War in 1967. She had a job cleaning the construction workers’ huts in the forest and brought me food from there early each morning. Kept me alive, literally, until it was time.”

She shut her eyes, seemed to be seeing everything before her. Her eyelids fluttered, as if she were having a nightmare.

“It was a terrible delivery. Almost everything tore inside me. Sireen had helped out in the field during that lightning war, knew roughly what to do when I was in the most acute phase. After that I had no choice, you see. Was basically unconscious, torn and broken, no way out. So I left my little girl with Sireen. Begged her to do whatever she could to get the baby to someone called Bo Sixten Lundberg at the F.O.A. in Ursvik.

“Ever since my visit to Oxford I had thought that the baby should be called Lise if she was a girl. Then I began to think that it would be too obvious, too likely to arouse suspicions, I probably became a bit paranoid down there in the solitude of the tunnels. So I wrote ‘LISA’ on a label and tied it round her little throat and left her with Sireen.

“Hours later they managed to find my hiding place, far inside the most remote connecting tunnel, to which I had crawled with my remaining strength in order to die, and they took me by ambulance plane across the Atlantic and straight to the base. Jesús María had to sew me together then and there, that fallen angel, my blood sister. Restored me like a work of art. Her first ever assignment in the military.”

I took a last look at my wrist-watch. 00.37 on December 26, 2013, 65.8 degrees in our room. The co-ordinates I needed to hold on to.

“So that was the only condition I imposed, when Sixten asked me if we wanted to use Ursvik as our safe haven, after our flight. That I did not under any circumstances want to meet Lisa. That I should never see her as a grown woman.”

She got to her feet and tidied away our plates. Moved to the sink, half turned away from me, and began to unpack the dessert. The panettone with diced oranges and raisins.

“So one could understand Sixten’s actions, my treasure. Why he did as he did once they had taken Lisa.”

The last sentence also came as she had her back to me, facing straight into the kitchen cupboards, after a pause of about twelve seconds.

“And she’s my kryptonite too, you see.”

6.08

The next day I felt I was wrung dry, had no strength left. As if I had emptied the bottle of wine on my own. Anxiety coursed and tore through my body. Doubt. Hesitation.

When Ingrid went to take a shower, toward evening, pallid from the previous day, the alcohol and the emotional storm, I called Edelweiss. Not wasting a second.

“Did Ingrid have a child with someone called Bo Sixten Lundberg, in the spring of 1969?”

“A child? Ingrid Oskarsson?” he said.

I hung up right away, more uncertain than ever. The apartment was swaying. When Ingrid had finally finished—she must have been practicing her yoga in the bathroom, on the tile floor, for certain the “Destroyer of the Universe” once again—I had to ask. She sat there showered, fragrant, in her long underwear and holding an impossible yoga asana, tapping away on her portable command terminal.

“Don’t you ever have doubts?” I said.

“About what, my treasure?”

I so wanted to be able to give a sincere answer: that I had been full of doubts and still remained so, caught between trust and dread. But I could not say anything.

“Do you?” she asked me back, as I stood there silently.

“Always,” I managed to say. “From the moment I wake up until I eventually fall asleep. Which is when the nightmares start.”

She took my hand, pulled me gently down into a sitting position. I would hardly have been able to resist, even had I wanted to.

“I feel so sorry for you, my treasure.”

As soon as I was beside her, right next to her on the mattress, she changed the image on her portable command terminal. I tried to look at it rather than at her.

“And for me it’s the same,” she said. “Every single second.”

The map of the world came up on the screen, with its yellow triangles joined by solid red lines. Our seven home nuclear bases. Those initials which I knew by heart ran like a reflex through my reptile brain, three-letter sequences from east to west: SJN CWM BLM NDW WMM KW. Seymour-Johnson in North Carolina, Whiteman in Missouri, Barksdale in Louisiana, Minot in North Dakota, Warren in Wyoming, Malmstrom in Montana and Kitsap in Washington.

Then over to our eight European nuclear weapons bases, the sequence ITG TIA IRG BGK BBV NLE, from east to west. Incirlik in Turkey, Ghedi Torre in Italy, Aviano in Italy, Ramstein in Germany, Büchel in Germany, Kleine Brogel in Belgium, Volkel in the Netherlands and Lakenheath in England. The first thing I noticed was that the red lines to and from Kleine Brogel were no longer dotted but solid. That what we did there must have been successful, despite or maybe because of Ingrid almost having been burned up.

Even one part of the previously dotted blue connection from Esrange in Kiruna all the way down to what I now knew to be Niscemi in Sicily, a wide arc over a large part of the world, had become solid. But the other arc in the circle, from Niscemi back up to Kiruna, was still dotted and incomplete. This was no doubt what we had come to fill in. The end of the story.

Ingrid zoomed in on the black cross on Sicily—and a square popped up on the screen, emerging from the place itself. Exactly the same scene I had watched many times during the past year, ever since my fiftieth birthday in February, when I received the D.V.D. anonymously at my office at the university. The one in which Greta Garbo as Mata Hari tries to take the telephone receiver from Lionel Barrymore as General Shubin. The two enemies who Jesús María had later tried to change us into with her surgeries, either for fun or in deadly earnest.

Ingrid started to play the scene. A new code surfaced in my subconscious: itching, nagging, a feeling one cannot fully describe. Twenty-four digits and three letters swirled through my brain. Nine sequences of three each, like the nuclear weapons codes. 151 221 621 11R 211 612 21C 19D 216.

I deciphered the message. Once again used the strange key sentence from the darkest days of my childhood. I love you just as senselessly as my pretty weird and hellish father, for the time being and onward into eternity, Amen.

And the clear text turned out to be simple, much more straightforward than I had been expecting, without any of Ingrid’s usual cryptographical refinement. “THESE ARE THE CODES” was all it said. No more, no less.

Yet I listened to Ingrid’s proud tones, like those of a child, without once looking at her. Just gazed straight ahead at the screen.

“Elegant, don’t you think, my treasure? Antiquity’s most secret art wrapped up in our most modern systems, a technological span of about 2,500 years. It took time to perfect it all. But you can’t get any more secure than this, with the R.S.A. cryptosystem likely to be cracked soon, when all our digital security will have crumbled.”

She clicked on the keyboard and the image dissolved into pixels. The code had been contained in one single frame. The sequences which had been implanted in me using subliminal techniques, in a split second, and furthermore hidden inside a classic old movie.

I was impressed, as always, but not convinced.

“You know that sooner or later even this type of advanced steganographic file will be opened up.”

“But of course, my treasure. I’ve therefore made some other arrangements. Belt and suspenders, as they say.”

Ingrid fast-forwarded, basically through the whole movie, all the way to the ending. In the very last scene, that strange feeling came back to me—as if something was itching in the furthest recesses of my mind: just as Mata Hari is being taken out to face the firing squad. Ingrid rewound, and then played the movie forward again, extremely slowly, frame by frame.

I noted yet again the strange fact that in the movie Greta Garbo never delivered the line “I am ready” to her guards. The perfect last words which the real life Mata Hari is said to have spoken when she was fetched for her execution in France on October 15, 1917, at the height of the First World War. Sentenced to death as a German spy even though she was in fact working for the French.

Then Ingrid froze the movie at the precise moment when Garbo steps out of her prison cell. I checked the figures on the single frame onto which they had been written against that same key sentence from my childhood—but got nowhere. However I tried to read the sequences, I could make no sense of them. Ingrid laid paper and pen before me on the floor and I wrote down the numbers and letters, exactly as they occurred to me in my unconscious. 111 319 172 015 151 65K 101 117 10C O31 018 412 P10 R24 151 2O1 24.

I felt the heat of her stare from beside me. My cheek began to glow, as if it were about to catch fire.

“Use your imagination, Erasmus. Your wonderful memory. Our common history. Because what was it that you wrote to me when you signed the dissertation? You must recall, surely? That sentence on the front cover which I tore out and immediately burned, just to be on the safe side, but will still remember for the rest of my long life.”

Reflexes are a funny thing, the way memory works. Suddenly I started simply to speak the sentence out loud, even though I had devoted hardly any conscious thought to it for more than a decade. To my dear supervisor and friend, who helped me enjoy the unrelenting hunt for Lise Meitner’s half-century-old secret—although I never managed to find it.

I did not even have to wait for Ingrid’s reaction, since I already knew the answer was right. I started to decrypt the code with the aid of the new key sentence. The first letter of the first or maybe eleventh of its words, in both cases a “T”. Then the first letter in the first or thirteenth word in the key sentence, again a “T” or an “H”. I scribbled down the letters and the words, rapidly found my way through to possible and less likely alternatives. What the clear text soon revealed was not actually a message on its own—it was just meant to be hooked onto the earlier one.

I read it out aloud for Ingrid, as if in class.

“THESE ARE THE CODES—THAT WILL MAKE THE CODES SUPERFLUOUS”.

Ingrid nodded calmly. Then, in a gentle, matter-of-fact tone, almost hypnotically:

“An entirely new program, my treasure. The file size doesn’t alter when new information is added, which was of course otherwise the weak point in digital steganography, as you know.”

“Yes, but what does it mean?” I said.

“Oh, I think that will become obvious when the time comes.”

She closed the window showing the map of the world, as well as Greta Garbo surrounded by guards in the frozen “Mata Hari” scene. All the sequences of numbers hidden inside one single frame of the movie.

“So this is our insurance, yours and mine, in case neither of us can remember the code at the crucial moment. As we stand there with the weight of the world on our shoulders. Now you too have a chance to learn it. In one day, two, a week, maybe a month—until it’s time for the final combat. The battle for our souls. For the future of mankind. Before then you have to know it by heart, my treasure.”

Ingrid closed the lid of the portable command terminal, folded her body together softly. I still felt her gaze burning in from the side but I kept on staring straight ahead. Tried to control my nausea, the classic side-effect of subliminal tampering on my cerebral cortex, the very depths.

“Because man thinks that it’s he who controls the nuclear weapons system. But there’s probably no need for me to remind you about computers, Erasmus, the ‘war games’ phenomenon, the entire space program, nuclear power which did not come into the picture until more than twenty years after nuclear weapons. Everything which we originally created for the sake of that system and not for ourselves. So it’s not we who control the nuclear weapons. It’s still they who control us.”

Only then did I look at her, right into her eyes, perhaps because she took my arm and turned me carefully to face her.

“And yes, my treasure, I do doubt—that we will actually rise to the challenge, you and I. Every waking moment, all through the nights. That we really will be able to stand up to our own darkest sides. The entire Doomsday syndrome.”

6.09

After that, we bided our time.

I recorded Ingrid’s story in my notebook, detailed everything she had told me. I also continued my rock-hard training sessions on the mattress and took freezing showers, while Ingrid spread herself out more and more across the room with her yoga asanas, like a spider.

At other times I clicked away with my magical Bruegel cube from Peer. Changed “The Tower of Babel”, with the cloud of smoke extending from the apertures in the building, through the other works all the way to “The Fall of the Rebel Angels” and back again. Checked the functionality of the hybrid twice each day. The keyboard’s launch mechanisms, the safety procedures, the whole process. The age-old information with the President’s options in case of a nuclear attack. “The biscuit”. And in the late evenings I went for dogged runs outside when the whole building closed down at night, tasted freedom. Listened to the sounds from the apartments below us. The clinking and the music, the soft murmuring.

At night—before the dreams took over, those terrible images—I was convinced that they had to be the sound of prayers. A sort of plea for the future of mankind.

I also began to re-read my dissertation, from cover to cover. Looked at my reproduction of “The Triumph of Death”, rolled up in my pack. Forever trying to find some sort of answer to it all: the enigma which I was facing.

And then there was the homework which Ingrid had given me. Together we watched the ending of “Mata Hari”, over and over again. Recognized the subliminal effects of the steganographic message. “THESE ARE THE CODES—THAT WILL MAKE THE CODES SUPERFLUOUS”. We let it wash over us both, in strange long sessions, as we had during our work on my dissertation. Systematically burned the codes into our synapses.

Ingrid hardly ever left her command terminal, never went out, barely ever got up from the mattress on the floor except to prepare food or go into the bathroom. When the leftovers from our Christmas dinner ran out—both the turkey and the panettone—there was the whole of the larder to get through. She made soup from lentils and beans, pasta dishes with no real taste: food for food’s sake.

And then we stared through the window. I gazed far away into the distance, down toward the sea, the escape I could never really bring myself to make, however many opportunities my evening runs miles away from the apartment afforded me. Looked at the world as if each sight was going to be my last. She seemed to gaze in a more concrete way, examining, reconnoitering. Always fully on the look-out for our pursuers.

But eventually there was not much else to resort to except the T.V. As time passed we left C.N.N. on throughout the day, bellowing out the world’s course, that theatrical chatter which was both comforting and threatening. Especially since it was increasingly about our issue in particular, our field. What Ingrid called her arrangements.

The evening programs began more and more often with the headline “THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS SCANDAL”, white block letters against a black background. There were now two additional bullet points in the short summary:

One evening toward the end of January 2014 there was also a feature which the news anchor delivered with a slight smile. She announced that the channel’s special reporter had at last been given access to one of our large missile bases, after months of negotiation, although the reporter had promised not to reveal which base it was. But according to our sources, the news anchor continued, conditions are approximately the same everywhere. “And this is what our reporter saw. Look carefully: you will not believe your eyes!”

What followed was an almost satirical piece about the analog technology at the nuclear weapons bases. For the female reporter who had managed to get into the top security base, everything seemed as laughable as it was terrifying: the enormous missiles, the pointless round-the-clock state of readiness, the huge cracks in the facade.

She latched in particular onto the fact that the guidance system still used floppy discs to store the literally life-or-death information. That both the codes and the procedures existed only on what remained of this age-old technology, with no reasonable possibility of backup or synchronization with other systems. Her facial expressions heavy with meaning, the reporter also revealed that there was only one functioning adjustable spanner to tighten the nuts on the warheads of our 450 Minuteman III missiles. And that this spanner was couriered back and forth between our underground nuclear missile bases in North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana.

She could not say, nor even understand, that this was how we wanted it. That Edelweiss had in the end managed to persuade us in the Team of the increasing superiority of the low-technology approach. That the absence of an industrial standard and any recognizable structures made it much more difficult for anybody to penetrate our systems using high-tech methods. That our most senior commanders had started to take their critics seriously some years ago. Those who were sounding warnings that a system which was always “on-line” and in “stand-by mode”, with several thousand nuclear missiles ready to destroy our civilization in just a few minutes, had to be the most attractive of targets for the world’s most advanced hackers. Regardless of what their motives might be.

At the same time, an amorphous system like this made Ingrid’s work in linking it all together even more complex. But, as she herself used to say in reply to the students’ repeated complaints that everything was so endlessly complicated, all these links between different disciplines and centuries constituted the very historical framework of moral philosophy: “And who ever said that it was going to be simple?”

But there was still nothing on the news about our flight, hers or mine. About the briefcase itself having been removed from the system, together with one of the two portable command terminals. Not a word about the most fateful thing of all.

And that same evening I found the courage to ask Ingrid why. She turned her eyes away from the televisions. Explained it once more, as if to a child.

“Ed and we are still chained to each other, my treasure. He knows very well that I’ll reveal everything as soon as he makes any serious attempt to capture us. And what’s more that I’ve planted a Plan B. with some other person on this earth—without him having any idea who it is. Who might be the Needle in the Haystack, among the world’s seven billion inhabitants. Who won’t be able to cause as much damage as you and I, it’s true, but with the help of some of my chosen supporters still enough to eliminate nuclear weapons as a military strategic tool for decades to come, if not longer.”

“Was that why Edelweiss let us go at Dulles?” I said.

“Perhaps. Or else he wants to see where it all leads, follow the threads the whole way. Or maybe just give himself time to understand our irrational style of play. The fact that we were prepared to offer up Jesús María in exchange for John: a black knight for a pawn. Or maybe he’s just turned.”

Then she said nothing more—and I did not ask.

When C.N.N. at last changed topics, we switched to the local news. Ingrid no longer needed to translate the items about the M.U.O.S. base, very close to us here, 3.24 miles according to her computer. The pictures told their own story. The protests and incursions, the whole resistance, seemed to grow by the day. As did the violence of the reaction. The T.V. images showed another encounter between encroaching activists and the local authorities: that is to say a loose mixture of Sicilian policemen, N.A.T.O. forces and American security guards. Young women being beaten nearly unconscious with batons. A soldier stamping three times on an activist who already lay on the ground, trying to shield his head with his hands.

The next feature showed another eruption on Etna. We sat spellbound, watching that thick, glowing mass consuming everything in its path. A natural weapon that still nobody could protect themselves against. I could not help thinking of the parallel with our assignments, now and always. The merciless snail’s pace, that slowly gnawing panic, terror, petrification or obliteration.

But when the signal finally came, toward the end of February, it was unmistakable. I knew it in the same instant that I saw the headlines on C.N.N. This would be Ingrid’s starting point—as well as that of the military authorities at the M.U.O.S. base. The moment when everyone would be looking in another direction.

The fuzzy images in the darkness showed soldiers without uniforms. Quick, almost invisible movements in low resolution. Their clothes tight-fitting and jet-black, darker than the surrounding night, what was called “general combat wear”. In theory they could have been any mercenaries. Yet all those in the know were very clear about where they came from. That the persistent rumors to the contrary were disinformation, cyberattacks, red herrings. Just the sort of hybrid warfare that we ourselves had been trained for—and against—throughout our adult lives.

There had been many warnings that Russia would occupy Ukraine, probably going in via Crimea, even from our own observers. Those who had long been obsessing about the traditional enemy. That it was Russia which would continue to be our main sparring partner, regardless of the fact that the headlines were talking about al-Qaeda or Iran or I.S. Whatever that alarming group now happened to call itself.

The C.N.N. commentators seemed almost relieved that the natural order of things had been re-established. That it was us versus them once more, west against east. One of the presenters already used the expression “Cold War 2.0”.

And if Ukraine had not, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, handed over its nuclear weapons to Russia, in return for what was then called protection, the tension could rapidly have become apocalyptic. When the images shifted to Moscow—where soldiers were seen leaning out of train windows, their loved ones cheering and crying all at once, and men in bars were following the crisis on wide-screen T.V.s as if it were a sporting event—I came to think of the crowds on docks and station platforms waving soldiers off to the First World War. To what was meant to be a triumphal march, a walk in the park.

According to the experts in the studio, Russia had brought its new S.S.27 long-range missiles into service just a week or so earlier. And days after the Russians’ gigantic training maneuvers on the theme “Simulated large-scale nuclear weapons attack”, which they otherwise used to hold in the fall, our forces had replied with yet another comprehensive “Global Lightning” exercise. So the game was already in full swing.

In addition, what our security services had been warning us about for many years had now been made public in the usually reliable magazine Foreign Policy. The C.N.N. anchor asked the experts for their views on what the Russians themselves simply called “Status-6”. Their plans for a new underwater drone armed with a powerful thermonuclear weapon, causing especially high levels of radiation, designed, for example, to attack New York’s harbor area. Making the city essentially uninhabitable for decades to come, through both its primary and secondary effects. Rather like Edelweiss’ simulations: the hydrogen bomb over Manhattan slowly blossoming out on the screen.

Some of the experts in the studio pointed out another remote but natural association: between the continuing “Nuclear Weapons Scandal”, with burned-out missile operators cheating on safety tests as a matter of routine, and the growing crisis in Crimea. That a cure for the missing sense of purpose they had felt was perhaps near at hand. And that “our boys”, as he expressed it, might now have an objective in their minds following the Crimean crisis. Not just the underground missile forces, but also the men handling our nuclear missiles on submarines, or bombs from aircraft. That this would at least get them to pull themselves together.

I tried to read his facial expression. Whether he was being serious, or just trying to be amusing. In this situation.

The wind had been building up over the last few days; the first scirocco of the year was rattling the window panes. Even the indoor temperature rose by the hour in line with the strength of the wind. I put aside thoughts of going for a last run around the area, some sort of meaningless reconnaissance. Instead I went to bed at the same time as Ingrid turned off the T.V.s and returned to her terminal.

“It’s confirmed,” she said, “the inauguration of the M.U.O.S. base will be tomorrow.”

6.10

I dreamed I was General Curtis LeMay, some time during 1954, the year which he had foretold as Ragnarök. When we were for the first time to confront the full military potential of the Soviet Union, following the introduction of nuclear weapons into the world.

We sat gathered together before an early form of computer, the whole potent little command group of S.A.C., Strategic Air Command. I had finally managed to plant at least the idea in their minds. Let our spy planes fly so close to the frontier that they could ratchet up Russian preparedness to the point where an attack against them might feel justified.

There is an historic moment, I said, breaking the silence, when we could win a nuclear conflict with Russia. That moment is now. Not earlier, not later. The Russians will need a month to deploy their 150 hydrogen and atomic bombs in total. Our 750 will need no more than a few hours.

The bulky computer helped me to illustrate the unthinkable, unfolding events step by step. With the help of an astonishing level of technology for the time, successive maps showed the evolution hour by hour, how the Soviet Union was being covered by ever thicker lines. Each line represented a separate flank in the attack. Everything pointed straight at the heart of Russia, Moscow, and on the way there the rest of the country was being wiped out as collateral.

The final image was not a map but a manipulated photograph. It represented the whole of enemy territory as one single smoking, radioactive, stony desert. Across the picture was a single line, in vivid yellow capital letters: “THE SOVIET UNION, 1917–54. R.I.P.”

Then I pressed the button, transforming simulation into reality. A calm warmth spread through my body.

6.11

I was woken up by my cell phone. A Swedish number, one that I did not recognize. After a while I decided to answer—just as the caller rang off.

Waiting for a message to be left, I looked at my wrist-watch. Time 02.31, indoor temperature 82.2. The mattress was soaked with sweat in the stifling scirocco heat. I thought about opening a window, but there was no catch to hold it. The wind would immediately have smashed the cracked pane against the wall.

I listened, looked, and listened again, but no message came into my voicemail. Ingrid was sitting at the kitchen table, turned away from me, with the costume make-up spread out over the wax tablecloth. The light of the moon was so strong that she needed no lamp. Its bluish sheen tinged the whole apartment in a new tone, with the whining of the wind as an eerie backdrop of sound.

“Who was that?” she said, without turning around.

“I’ve no idea.”

I got up from the mattress, showed her the cell phone, the numbers still on the display.

“That’s Aina,” she said.

“What would she want with me? And no message either…”

“Women of our generation don’t like leaving them, you know. Or what was on her mind was something she didn’t feel like recording. Why don’t you call her, my treasure?”

When I pressed the green button, the recall function, I tried to picture Aina lying there alone on a February night in Ursvik. How Sixten might have just left her and started to make his way down here. Having heard the news from Crimea last night and understood the significance. How Aina might not have been able to get any sleep in his rare absence. Staring out of her window at the snowdrifts—before picking up the phone at last, and choosing me to call.

I called back, but pressed the red button before she answered. Did not pick up her next call, or the one after that. Could not really find room for Aina’s anxiety too. For Sixten, for the world—and maybe for us.

Then I laid the cell phone aside, sat down on the other side of the kitchen table and looked at Ingrid’s changing face. How it seemed older with each dab of costume make-up. How she was overtaking her real age, somewhere around seventy if I was to believe her stories. How she placed the Lucia crown on her head, tried it out, grimaced into her pocket mirror.

There is something about the scirocco. In Sicily it is said to be a mitigation for women who kill their husbands under its influence.

“A penny for your thoughts, Erasmus.”

She turned to me in the pale blue-light of the moon, this suddenly aged woman. Or perhaps it was my own imagination which made her look different. It was as if I too were feeling the effects of the scirocco, its faintly occult power, the bewitching wind which ripped and tore at the shutters.

“None at all, Ingrid. Not a single one,” I said.

She let her gaze dwell on me, waiting. Then filled my silence.

“I spotted you immediately, my treasure, already during that first lecture. Saw your full potential. And now it’s time for your exam. We two against the world.”

Ingrid got up, put on her pack. Passed the hybrid to me: I accepted it without a word. Looked at my wrist-watch. At 04.00, the witching hour, we left our safe house for the last time. Swapping some sort of security for a fundamental uncertainty. Not only for us, but for the whole of mankind.

Once we were outside, my watch showed 75 degrees, in the middle of the night, February 22. My cheeks began to glow as I followed Ingrid along a new path in the shelter of the mountains, below the ridge, hidden from the moon—much quicker than the calm miles during my evening runs. The weight of the hybrid was distributed equally between my back and stomach, thanks to Jesús María’s genius. There was not a cloud in the sky and the light was magical. I looked up, into space, experienced the weight and lightness of the moment. Felt like a reed in the warm strong wind, a mere insect, a dwarf spider. Shivered again despite the temperature.

Once we had come some way into the ravine, Ingrid forked off due south, through a small cleft leading to the durum fields which ran gently down to the sea. It was of course only a diversion. The sort of thing that people like us did without even thinking, as synchronized now as in Kiruna. Then she found her way back to our original course, a classic zigzag, adapted to the natural obstacles of the mountain.

Soon our pace was down below 8.3 minutes per mile, even with the hot south-east wind directly in our faces. Ingrid was always in the lead, the “Destroyer of the Universe” coursing through the illuminated landscape. Since the full moon was like a spotlight, keeping close to the lee of the mountains, we sought out shadows.

In the hollow down near the M.U.O.S. base itself—where we could, for the first time, make out the enormous antennae, the topography having concealed them until then—we paused. Drank, ate one crunch cookie each, checked our surroundings from the shelter of the last small olive grove above the facility. Gazed at the anarchic mass of people and tents, which left very little open space on the vast, steppe-like slope below us.

This area alone must have been nearly four square miles in size, 2470 acres, the equivalent of almost two thousand football fields. It had of course been strategically correct to put the base here. So as not to risk being hemmed in by any form of attack, as could have been the case in a bowl between the mountains. It had allowed us to hold frequent joint maneuvers of air and ground forces on a larger scale. Have the space to really roll out the foot soldiers. Sometimes entire divisions with tens of thousands of infantrymen, rehearsing chaotic combat operations with drones hovering overhead.

But the enormous open space in front of the base also offered a perfect gathering place for activists. And even if half a million of them were to turn up here for the inauguration today, at this remote corner of the island, they would still have twenty-one square feet of ground apiece.

Not as many as that had come, at least not yet. But the distinctive noise of the mass—a roar of whistles, songs and chanted slogans, both in unison and dissonant—could be heard clearly all the way up in our olive grove, about a half a mile away, even though it was not yet 5.00 a.m. In all likelihood none of them would have slept that night. Just stayed awake and watchful, let the jungle drums sound out, after having picked up the same news that Ingrid received on her portable command terminal. That the inauguration would take place some time during the coming day. That the authorities believed the peace movement too would be focusing on Crimea, on “Cold War 2.0”, and not this place. Which seemed a gross misjudgment given the number of activists who had gathered around the base.

The first activists must have been in place for days and nights, maybe even weeks. In the sharp light of the full moon we could see that the tent villages had a permanent look about them, seemed fully established, homely in a chaotic way, with swim-wear and towels hung out to dry, their dots slowly climbing up the surrounding slopes. At regular intervals, delighted little cries even penetrated the mass when the scirocco gusted across the slope before the base, making the camps in their entirety shiver, the costumes flutter.

When Edelweiss held his special presentations we had often expressed surprise at the tactical thinking—or rather the lack of it—of the peace activists. But he made it clear that it was not a matter of short-term tactics but rather of a long-term strategy. That for them it was at least as important just to be seen, to shape opinion and stimulate debate, as it was to make their way into the base unseen.

With the help of their different costumes, they could also bring together the conflicting objectives of the protesters in a lighthearted way: they attracted attention as well as offering camouflage. The way in which the activists dressed up had also developed in international demonstrations in recent years. Become a sort of pacifist haute couture, some kind of arms race of love. And here in Sicily the costumes really seemed to have become one with the age-old carnival traditions of the island.

After the sun had come up at 06.41, and dawn began to draw out the colors of the activists, Ingrid and I could just tick off the standing figures. All these complex anti-heroes borrowed from the dramas of antiquity. Ten or so Lysistratas and as many again Medeas. And in addition the authentic heroes: Mahatma Gandhi, Alva Myrdal, Eleanor Roosevelt, any number of each of them. Edelweiss had assured us that this too was a part of the activists’ cold-blooded strategy. That a large number of entirely disparate individuals, ranging from real idealists to genuine terrorists, could wear exactly the same outfits. So that the powers-that-be should never know who lay behind which disguise.

Here too as at Kleine Brogel there were a number of examples of what he had, during his presentations on the threats posed by peace demonstrations, called the Love Dress. Pink wigs and glitter on cheeks, piercings everywhere, grotesquely large lips and breasts, false penises, much naked flesh on both women and men.

On top of that, figures out of the Bhagavad Gita. Often extreme allusions to what Robert Oppenheimer, with his interest in religions, is said to have thought during the first test of an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945—code-named Trinity, like my youngest daughter. Only weeks before the invention was tested for real over Hiroshima.

The quote had spread around the world following a T.V. interview many years later, long after Oppenheimer himself had started to argue against the proliferation and use of nuclear weapons. When he revealed that he had come to think of those precise words as it became clear that the atomic bomb would actually work: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Vishnu’s words in the Gita, as he assumes his four-armed shape to persuade the Prince to do his violent duty.

And then there were images of the enemy, skeletons, demons, zombies. Many of them clearly inspired by Death on Blu’s huge mural in Niscemi, that macabre figure playing the whole nuclear weapons system like one single finely tuned instrument.

But despite all these spectacular costumes, most striking still was the sheer number of people around the M.U.O.S. base. If the number of activists gathered at Kleine Brogel had been more than one hundred thousand, here there already seemed to be twice as many. Despite the base’s remote location—and the fact that there were still some hours to go before the formal inauguration.

But the peace activists had recently got fresh wind in their sails, all around the world. Alongside their reporting on the Nuclear Weapons Scandal, C.N.N. had been covering recent developments at the U.N. General Assembly. A joint proposal by a number of smaller states to launch negotiations on a treaty outlawing nuclear weapons had, against all expectations, been adopted.

The small states’ logic was as simple as it was compelling. According to the resolution there were only two alternatives. Either nuclear weapons were not a means of combat sanctioned by the laws of war, in which case they should be forbidden under international conventions, or they should be regarded as a legitimate weapon. Which in turn meant that all states should be permitted to acquire their own nuclear weapons, on the basis that it was not for the U.N. to prescribe a fundamentally unequal world order.

None of the experts in the studio had thought that the resolution had any chance of success, despite all of that. But that a proposal for negotiations was at least adopted was in itself a victory. The first public sign of life in years from the peace movement.

Not long after that there were huge demonstrations against Britain’s proposed renewal of Trident, the new generation of nuclear weapons, its own revitalization. The seventy-five thousand who gathered in and around Trafalgar Square represented the largest nuclear weapons protest since three hundred thousand had gathered in Hyde Park more than thirty years before, in 1983, against the deployment of cruise missiles at Greenham Common.

The renewal of interest around the nuclear weapons question had persuaded even the largest American media companies to make the pilgrimage all the way to little Niscemi—and, after the ever-complicated choice between definitely appearing in a bad light sooner, or eventually doing so later, our administration seemed to have given way to pressure and approved the applications for accreditation. The sanctioned white press buses stood neatly lined up at a safe distance from the base, in fact at rather more than a safe distance.

Partly because the activists’ camp now covered an area with a radius of about half a mile, maybe more. Partly because nobody really knew how far the effects of the possible confrontation would spread.

So the scene was set. The inauguration of the fourth and final global M.U.O.S. base, the completion of our new communications system with its enormous but partly hidden potential, would most likely be the lead story in the American T.V. stations’ morning news programs, thanks to the time difference. Or rather: the violent clashes which would soon be taking place around the inauguration.

This was what Ingrid was expecting. The maximum possible focus, but in the wrong direction, that age-old magician’s trick. So that the real drama could unfold elsewhere, probably in some place deep beneath the surface of the facility.

It was now 07.49, the temperature 77.5 degrees here in the shade of the olive grove. The sun was shining mercilessly on the activists in their costumes and the defenders in their tight uniforms. The force of guards still did not seem nearly strong enough to be able to stop the activists from storming the base, did not appear to have been reinforced in any significant way. Nor could I detect any of our pursuers. Not Zafirah, who preferred to operate alone in the heat of things, but was presumably now supported by some of the President’s own most capable security staff. Not Edelweiss either—he would likely still be in Washington, directing the drama.

The pursuit had to be concluded in the same silence which had governed it for more than five months. Even those on our trail had to synchronize their actions with the movements of the crowd, as did we: both hunters and hunted, trying hard not to risk drawing the slightest attention from the media apparatus in curious attendance here, not to disclose the black hole at the heart of our organization. And thereby lend the headline “NUCLEAR WEAPONS SCANDAL” a new dimension.

Revealing that a very small group of people had so much operational power. The top secret war plan, for the most part still unapproved. The existence of an Alpha whose mandate in certain cases exceeded that of the President himself. The man with the briefcase, the nuclear football, like a pulsating red light at the very center of our group. And finally: that the two of us had been on the run together since September of the previous year.

Ingrid and I stared into the gigantic crowd, the absurd carnival. There was no sign of Sixten either. He had told her that he would not be joining us until the moment of the attack, when the tumult would start to build up. And she said that she did not want to risk arousing suspicion among those using drone images to analyze the internal structure of the mass, in case they began to follow our movements more closely, placing their digital markers on us.

She looked at her wrist-watch—and turned to me for the first time since we had arrived at the olive grove.

“You wouldn’t like to call Aina again, my treasure?”

I took out the cell phone, saw that I had five missed calls from her number. Called my own number, let the engaged tone ring for a certain length of time.

“No answer and no voicemail,” I said.

“Then it probably wasn’t anything important, my treasure.”

When eventually the sun fell on the olive grove she took the last of Jesús María’s preparations out of her own combat pack. The final remnant of that woman’s jet-black humor. Without a word I put on the full beard, the curly black wig and the torn brown shift made of homespun cloth. Realized what she was trying to get at—even though I knew that from the outside I would look no different from all the other martyrs around the perimeter of the base.

It was my mother who told me the whole story, long before I was old enough to understand the detail. She always emphasized that she had been thinking of Erasmus of Rotterdam when deciding on my name, the great European humanist, the symbol for an entirely new world: he who disputed the issue of free will with Martin Luther. But she also told me the colorful story of St Erasmus, who had been born in 240 and died in 303, one of the many victims of the Emperor Diocletian’s persecution of Christians. And it was my mother who first told me that the saint’s symbol was a windlass and that he was martyred by having his intestines slowly wound up on one. As time went on I became almost obsessed with the grim fate of the saint. And Jesús María had put his symbol onto my outfit, elegantly but discreetly. On the lower part of my top, level with my intestines, there was a small windlass embroidered in blood-red thread against the brown of the fabric.

Ingrid scrutinized me, my look yet again entirely new, as if she were trying to get to the bottom of something. I had to look away. At that she put on her own simple outfit, on top of her general combat gear. It looked exactly the same as in Belgium: a white nightshirt cut off above the knees so as not to inhibit movement, blond wig, crown of light in her hair which she would cast off before we went in. Allowed ourselves to be washed along in the big wave of activists, before moving off on our mission once inside the gates.

I could see almost thirty more Lucias along the base’s perimeter fence, without even having to pick up my field glasses. In all probability the most common of all the ensembles being worn by the activists. So there was little risk that anybody would connect Ingrid to the incident inside Kleine Brogel, that inexplicable electrical fault, the sudden smoke at the base.

According to legend, St Lucia came from Syracuse—a hundred miles to the south-east from here, and died just one year after Saint Erasmus. After her torture, Lucia ended up as a prostitute in a brothel. In due course she too, according to the typically convoluted myth, had both boiling oil poured over her and a sword pierce her throat, surviving both. Only when somebody nevertheless gave her the last rites, was she able to be at peace and leave this mortal coil.

Ingrid picked up what looked like a normal lighter and lit the candles before placing the crown on her head, although it was hard to see the flames in the bright sunlight. There was a slight smell of crude rubber or oil. The candles did not blow out even when the wind gusted in the olive grove. They were probably made with some special agent, some chemical witch’s brew.

Then she led us out from the treeline, traversing the slope down toward the installations. None of the security guards who had mingled with the activists made any move to obstruct our way as we took our place by the sign which said “MARTYRS FOR PEACE”.

The crowd grew by the minute. Normal people, those who were curious, family members, full-blown idealists who had taken the day off from their jobs in the village or perhaps didn’t have one in this depopulated area. Global peace activists from far away, with well-worn routines from scores of similar demonstrations. Thanks to the costumes it was as hard as ever to distinguish the professionals from the amateurs. Streamers with the “No M.U.O.S.” message were hanging on the fence surrounding the establishment, like strings of white glue binding it all together, while none of the guards made any move, vastly outnumbered as they were. Gradually the activists inched forward. The mass’ slow landslide.

I then heard a dull roar, first thinking that it must be thunder from some distance away, the normal climax of a scirocco. I looked up at the clear-blue sky—and saw that it was filled with drones from Sigonella.

After that the all-terrain buses arrived, together with the airborne convoy. The Marine One helicopter was escorted by about ten others from the H.M.X.1 squadron in Quantico, Virginia. The special forces troops streamed out of the buses, made straight for the gates, where they lined up in full readiness. The dark bellowing of thousands of soldiers with their adrenaline pumping, even before anything had started to happen. The lighter yelling from the protesters, by now surely closer to three hundred thousand.

Through the field glasses I saw the doors of Marine One opening and our new Secretary of Defense step out. If it really was him—and not just a double. Dropped into the ceremony to mark how important the installations were, the entire M.U.O.S. system, while the real Secretary stayed in Washington to plan our strategy for responding to the developing crisis in Crimea.

He had a Carrier at his side. A dummy, for the sake of appearances, as was the briefcase in the Carrier’s hand. The apparatus which, according to Ingrid, would now have lost all meaning as it was decoupled from the system.

Then came another dull sound from all around us, of people rather than machines. The enormous mass divided, like the Red Sea, while a small figure in a devil’s mask made his way slowly but determinedly toward the gates.

“Blu,” Ingrid said.

I watched his progress: a Messiah being urged on by people thumping him enthusiastically on the back, lifting him up through the crowds. Even twelve-year-old Unity knew about him, had talked about his work. How he made his breakthrough in the suburbs of Bologna and had then wandered all over the world like a ghost. Never more than one mural, or exhibition, at a time in any one place. Identity unknown, computer not connected to the internet, all the necessary measures taken to avoid being traced. His face always in different masks.

Yet he had painted two murals specifically here in Niscemi, in the same place, for the first time in his career. Once Blu had arrived at—or rather been led all the way to—the main gate, he turned around and shouted something which I could not hear. At that, a long line of women wearing black dresses and shawls started moving. They too were allowed to make their way through the crowds to the front line of activists. There they spread out along the wide expanse of the circle. Silence fell over the scene, a sort of collective gathering of breath.

Ingrid checked her watch and I did the same: time 12.51, temperature 96.4 degrees in the burning sun. The sweat was already itching under my clothes. She turned her eyes to me, still in her magical burning crown of light, with that look.

“Now it starts, St Erasmus,” she said, with expectation in her voice.

As if we were at the movies. Or watching a classical tragedy.

6.12

It began with Blu climbing to the very top of the fence. Securing himself with his feet and starting to wave his arms. He was a master at parkour, a seasoned urban explorer, accustomed to finding his way in everywhere to access the perfect painting surface. Through my field glasses I observed the soldiers studying him, their bodies tensed and ready, trying to decide whether he was holding any form of weapon. But in the end they just let him sit there and wave in his devil mask: a bad strategic decision.

Because it looked as if what Blu was doing was conducting events—which turned out to be the case. With his long arms and eloquent hands he set the whole course of events in motion.

The dark humming rose from the women in black, who, maybe inspired by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, were perhaps campaigning for the health of their children and grandchildren after the warnings about the risks posed by the parabolic antennae. The sound spread through the gathering, in a widening circle by the perimeter fence, dull and rhythmic like the chorus in a Greek drama. Only when it had reached all the way back to me and Ingrid, somewhere in the middle of the crowd, could I distinguish the two words. Even my Italian was good enough for that: I remembered the phrases from my mother’s obsession with opera. The message could hardly be plainer.

“Maledetto, Malefatto,” the crowd chanted, over and again.

“A cursed and evil construction,” Ingrid muttered to herself, or perhaps to me.

Yet the show had to go on: the Defense Secretary’s speech, the inauguration, the authorities’ own manifestation. At precisely 1300 hours the fireworks started, just to demonstrate that we had the ability to put on light shows which could be seen even when the sun was at its zenith here in Sicily. Then it was the turn of the Secretary, just as the last ear-shattering explosions were fading away, at exactly ten after.

He played his role perfectly, pretended not to notice the women’s dull refrain now coursing rapidly throughout the immense crowd. The security troops stood still as the drones hovered above our heads.

The Secretary, or his double, said just what was expected of him. Played to his strengths. Empty phrases for the media about global security and addressing the terrorist threat. M.U.O.S. not only making it possible to co-ordinate global military forces, but also radically increasing each individual soldier’s possibility of survival during complex operations.

This was not what the activists wanted to hear. The ability to wage war more easily, anywhere on the earth’s surface. The new communications technology as the spearhead of something that nobody could yet oversee—and with the worrying side-effects of the powerful antennae.

Yet the answer from the crowd cannot have been what was expected. No furious booing, shrieks or howls, as at Kleine Brogel. Just that continuing dull, dark chant, the two words, four syllables each, rhythmic and foreboding. Ma-le-de-tto… Ma-le-fa-tto… Ma-le-de-tto…

Until the chorus suddenly stopped, at exactly the same time as the Secretary reached the end of his speech. That was the signal. And Blu jumping back down onto the ground outside the fence.

As he stood in front of the specially trained troops, our hardest-drilled forces, I did not need the field glasses to make out their fear, despite the machine guns at their chests and the high-tech armor covering them. You could tell from their postures, the theater of the body. How they recoiled before that little man with his only weapon a devil’s mask. How the soldiers themselves put on their masks, folded down the riot helmet visors, assumed their roles.

And then everything let go. The collective energy of the hundreds of thousands of activists was like a small nuclear charge. An ear-shattering roar of abuse and exaltation. A triumphant primal scream rising from the plain straight up toward the drones in the sky.

And if it had not been clear to me which strategy the military would be adopting when the time came, it became very obvious as soon as the special forces commanders stepped to one side—so that Blu could be the first of us all to get into the base.

Because a crowd of that size heading in one direction is a force of nature which cannot be resisted, unless one is prepared to use a level of violence which would be enough to turn public opinion very hostile. We had learned to measure the power of the crowd in terms of an equivalence with herds of buffalo, goods trains or steamrollers: calculating what Edelweiss called the Onslaught Effect.

As the front rows poured through the gates, thoughts of other historical processes from our times flashed through my mind. The fall of the Berlin Wall, perhaps the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Arab Spring. Events where the odds faced had been at least as high. Where one party had had such a hold on power, the arms were as unequally divided, the security forces both organized and strong. But where the undercurrents had been almost as impossible to foresee.

This nearly pacifist strategy was of course made all the easier for the military by the media’s presence. The fact that all the journalists and photographers had dared to mingle with the activists, were rushing around with their cameras and notebooks, penetrating ever further into the burlesque chaos of fancy dress and heavily armed special forces. As at Kleine Brogel—but on an even larger scale here, with even more people in uncontrolled motion—there was quite simply no alternative but to admit us all. Despite the huge strategic importance of the installations.

Ingrid and I let ourselves be washed along in the wave. Ran quickly but carefully over a collapsed fence, giving the razor wire a wide berth: it had already injured a number of people on the way in, cutting open clothes and flesh on any who were not aware of its multiple function, how it grabs onto things as well as slicing into them.

Blood from the activists’ lacerated calves and thighs could be seen against the pale gray of the cement flooring inside the gates. But still the tide of people kept rolling forward. Surging, spreading out in all directions at once, like water or gas.

One might think that a mass like this is a single flood wave, streaming in a certain direction. And in this case there must have been tens of thousands moving from the gate all the way over to the gigantic parabolic antennae—soon to be made famous by the direct transmissions of the T.V. companies’ morning reports.

But Edelweiss used to stop the reels during his lectures on mass psychology, winding forward and backward to demonstrate that only rarely was there any collective movement. Many of those who were now here, dragged along without any clear idea of what they were doing, would certainly have liked to turn back had they been able, were not after all willing to risk so much for their ideological convictions. Some others had already been panicked by the crush. Yet more had specific objectives, such as picking up some trophy from within the base.

The secret lay not so much in understanding that a mass heading in a certain direction always contains people moving against the flow—but rather how they do so. And then to match one’s own movements scrupulously to this pixelated pattern.

Ingrid showed herself to be a master of just this. We were therefore able to move both with and against the swarm toward the eastern periphery of the facility, while the main wave surged toward the western part, where the M.U.O.S. antennae stood brooding on their secrets. One Lucia among certainly hundreds, perhaps more. One bearded martyr lost in a crowd of them. Without anybody apparently taking any notice of us.

The sweat was now itching inside my beard and costume. Not even Jesús María’s perforated fabric wicked enough of the condensation in what must have been approaching 104 degrees in the boiling sun. I did not take the time even to glance at my wristwatch, only kept looking straight ahead, following Ingrid’s sure course through the sea of people. The hot wind lifted us forward, until I caught sight of our objective a few hundred feet ahead, through the chaos of costumed people. Everything grew quiet around me. I felt the hybrid against my body. Saw the whole train of events like a simulation on a computer screen. The activists, the soldiers, the choices of route open to us.

But in the end there is a limit to what is achievable. Ingrid’s strategy showed itself to be a classic—and yet it would prove impossible. To take the back way into the underground level, through the emergency exit, in the opposite direction to the builtin logic of all security systems. The protective doors at our facilities could only ever be opened in one direction: nobody was allowed to move against the flow. And that is therefore the very thing that we were now going to attempt.

The air-intakes were the sign. We had always pointed out that the small ventilators were still not small enough, and therefore not invisible enough, to deter the enemy. Our technicians had just shaken their heads and said that they could not be made any smaller. If we were wanting to house more people underground, often for even longer periods according to our increasingly opaque scenarios, the air-intakes had to be larger.

So we knew what our target should be. As did, to judge from their actions, the two female figures who blocked our path, one about thirty feet in front of the other.

Alva Myrdal, the leading figure of the Swedish U.N. disarmament committee from the ’60s, came straight at me. In other words Zafirah in the guise of the venerable stateswoman. Her body compact and small, the center of gravity low. It seemed to me that she had become more solid since I had last seen her, even more terrifying. The Team’s most committed ultra-violence specialist.

It all went extremely fast. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ingrid moving toward the air-intakes—but also another masquerade figure moving even faster in the same direction. Yet one more Eleanor Roosevelt, tall and sinewy with her muscles clearly visible through the long sleeves of her dress. It could hardly be anyone other than our Close Combat instructor. A nameless, melancholy woman from Rwanda, with unconventional techniques honed during their civil war. The only one who could defeat Zafirah in training.

But I was forced to shift focus. As Zafirah came in for the attack she began screaming. I looked at the open mouth behind the Alva Myrdal outfit and make-up, saw it move in slow motion, but heard no more sound whatsoever. Just focused on sliding into the fight zone. Minimizing the chances of her getting me onto my back, as she usually did, putting pressure on my larynx until the air ran out.

Much more easily than I would have expected, like in a dream, I got in close. As I grabbed hold of Alva Myrdal’s wavy hair and managed to twist her head, with the same crunching sound as when you break the neck of a pike, she seemed to be trying to say something to me. Her mouth was still wide open. I knocked her over backward with a powerful shove to her chest, and kept banging her head against the cement, and then there was no longer any question of her speaking.

All this took place in silence, as if the volume had been turned off. I registered a very specific smell. Familiar, yet impossible to place, under the thick stench of blood and brain tissue in the heat.

I left the lifeless woman behind me. Rushed up to the two surviving women by the air-intake, the protective doors. Saw Eleanor Roosevelt throwing herself headlong over St Lucia. Heard the Close Combat instructor’s surprisingly deep bellow cut through the hum of the crowd when she got Ingrid down onto the ground.

But St Lucia had a weapon to fight back with. From flat on her back she raised her upper body, in a slight bow, as the instructor sat down on top of her—setting fire to Eleanor Roosevelt’s wig with her chemical crown of candles.

Although our tough instructor fought with immense courage as the flames spread inexorably through the wig, she had no chance in the end. However much she tightened her grip on Ingrid, trying to drag her down to hell with her, set her alight too. Because this Lucia was wearing a nightshirt made from a special impregnated fabric of Jesús María’s.

Then I was paralyzed, frozen in movement as if I had been shot.

Because just as I reached Ingrid, and the combat instructor ran screaming like a banshee away across the base, with the flames reaching her scalp, spreading fire to other victims around the facility, I was suddenly able to place the smell which had risen from Alva Myrdal’s dead form.

It was a ladies’ perfume, perhaps the best known of them all. But I had met only two women who actually used Chanel No. 5 as their signature fragrance. The first was my mother, who was now in secure accommodation in an idyllically located home for dementia sufferers in northern Connecticut.

And the other was Aina.

6.13

So it turned out to be a classical drama after all. A tragedy of mistaken identity.

I suppressed the thoughts of Aina as we moved on silently through the low, dark system of culverts, in the opposite direction to what was intended, from the emergency exit inward rather than the other way around. I did not even raise my eyebrows when Ingrid simply led us in by pressing eight symbols on the buttons on the concealed control box and the doors opened.

Both the alarm and the surveillance cameras appeared to have been knocked out already, as well as the emergency lighting. Ingrid’s Lucia crown lit the way for us. The glow projected my shadow onto the wall, flickering jerkily, the smell of raw rubber and fuel nauseating in the stifling tunnels. Whatever was burning in the crown must have been napalm or some more modern pyrochemical substance.

We had only occasionally had the opportunity to rehearse a scenario like this. It was based on the assumption that a mole had prepared the way in the facility in question, one of our missile bases under the prairies of the Mid West. Ingrid must have done something similar here in Niscemi—as part of all her planning over so many years, decades according to her, that secret global folk movement. All aiming for just this moment.

I felt the weight of our mission growing heavier step by step. The hybrid seemed suddenly to be filled with lead. Every step required an effort, as if I were moving under water. After a few minutes we reached the door: marked with a simple “C.C.” in neutral gray letters. Thoughts were racing through my mind. On the other side was the place where not just our fate would be decided—but also yours, the fate of all future generations.

Reflexively I readied myself for close combat with the guards inside the command center, no doubt reinforced for the inauguration. Tensed myself. Drew my weapon, in case there was going to be space enough.

But Ingrid stopped fifteen feet short of the door. Began to fumble at the ceiling, until she found the control box for the entrance. The light from her Lucia crown now fell in a way which let me see what she was keying in on the tiny set of buttons under the lid—not the symbols themselves, but the movement of her fingers. The code had been the same up in Ursvik: everything is easy once you know. When she keyed in her “LISA 1969”, a sliding door opened soundlessly to the right in the metal wall.

I had to work hard to follow Ingrid as she ran at top speed down the spiral stairs on the other side of the door, turn after turn. So as not to lose the light from her crown but at the same time keep my dizziness under control, and the nausea from the pyrochemical smell. I clung onto the handrail. The piercing alarm must have been a figment of my imagination, all the mental warning lights flashing red in my mind. Yet they no longer helped: I paid no heed to her, just flung myself after.

Once down on level ground I just had time to see Ingrid open one more invisible door, following the same ritual, with the same code. Here too the sliding door opened in silence. When it closed again, sealing us off from the world, Ingrid turned to me and made a sweeping gesture across the control console.

“Ecco. What I amused myself with while the M.U.O.S. began to be built over our heads—since I had to be in the vicinity but invisible, as Alpha. I had help from more or less the same construction team who were working up there on the surface, but at odd times. And also a number of others who were ideologically committed. Activists, moles, daredevils. People who signed up for the military only to deconstruct it. The sort whose silence one never has to buy.”

In here too the lights were out, but Ingrid’s napalm candles were more than enough. She pulled out one of the two chairs in front of the control console for me and sat down in the other. I sank into my seat. Scrutinized every one of the controls, all the possible functions, repeated the exact sequences of this technological-occult ritual for myself while Ingrid continued.

“The only thing we really needed to communicate to the local commanders was the huge importance of the installations. That even if the sky were to fall, the project had to go on. No details beyond that—only that nothing was to be obstructed, that the M.U.O.S. protests had to be suppressed at all costs. So I never had to make myself known. Could just hover around down here like an underworld spirit, an Alpha who gave her oracular orders digitally, everywhere and nowhere.”

I laid the hybrid on the floor, unlocked the keyboard, made the whole apparatus operational. Shut my eyes and just listened to that melodic voice.

“Yet not one of our secret helpers understood what I was doing during all those years; they were just working on a single piece of the puzzle and sometimes hardly even that. So no-one other than I, not even Ed, knew that this installation represented something so much bigger than the completion of the M.U.O.S. system. That the key to the whole of our nuclear weapons system was to be found here, 138.13 feet below the upper command center.”

She took out her computer, the portable command terminal, opened up the lid, started to key in the access sequences. I did the same, following the rhythm exactly. The cold-blue light of the screen blended with the warm glow from her crown of candles. My own shadow quivered on the steel wall to my left, like a ghost, an unholy spirit.

“The thought was that nobody other than Sixten and I would need the codes down here. My thought during all the years—the thing that honestly kept me sane, just enough, kept the pot simmering—was that it would be him and me sitting here now. Reunited in just this moment.”

I said nothing, nor could I utter a sound, just kept clicking my way into the system. Completed the first complicated series. Just what was necessary for the screen to be revealed in the lid, the simulated fabric screen slowly sliding away to the right, Alpha’s increasingly mannered security rituals. The puzzle pieces in the map of the world softly slid together, step by step: the sign that every one of the sequences was correct.

Only once the whole map became visible did the yellow triangles appear, one after the other, each needing another correct sequence of at least twenty-one and up to twenty-nine symbols. First our nuclear bases in Europe, now joined together with solid red lines. Then the image zoomed out over the Atlantic, to the U.S., the home nuclear bases. The numbers flickered before my eyes. I heard Ingrid’s words as a part of this whole ritual, everything seeming to flow together.

“Because it was important for me to keep to our regular security routines, just in case one of us might not be able to resist the temptation, the Doomsday syndrome. So there has to be two of us, we two, even in here: No Lone Zone. But it had to be you instead of him, my treasure, my best stand-in. Sixten should instead be standing guard at the bottom of the spiral staircase outside this door. That is what he and I agreed when we spoke on Christmas Day.”

I hacked ever deeper into the system, heard the muted sound of her keyboard at the same pace as mine. Her portable command terminal and my nuclear football. The man with the briefcase, the Carrier, with his Alpha. It ended with the blue lines meeting all across the world—all the way from Esrange in Kiruna to the one here in Niscemi. The Nuclear Family was now complete, all these correspondences under and above ground. Man had at last gained control over his own Fall.

I watched in awe as Ingrid stood up and placed a U.S.B. stick into one of the ports on the desk. The control console came alive, all the different screens lit up in blue and green, the monitor started with the same image as was on her computer and the inside of the lid of my briefcase. The world map, the bases, the yellow triangles.

Then she moved her chair closer to mine. I looked across at her—and she glanced back, gave me that look, before she fixed her gaze on her keyboard. Waited for me like an old jazz pianist. Counted the rhythm for herself.

The scene from the movie, when Mata Hari begins to tug at General Shubin’s arm to stop him from revealing her beloved Rosanoff as a spy, flickered past in my subconscious. Then I saw the clear text in my mind’s eye, “THESE ARE THE CODES…” I keyed in the sequences following exactly the same rhythm as Ingrid: 151 221 621 11R 211 612 21C 19D 216.

On all the screens—both hers and mine, as well as on the large round monitor on the control console—the red circle above the globe, between all of our nuclear weapons bases, started to blink rhythmically. The text “RED ALERT” soon covered the world map.

My whole field of vision grew small, seemed to be sucked in toward my brain with a strange fizzing sound, soon vanished almost completely. My hands became heavy and stiff. However hard I tried, I could not move them an inch in any direction.

Through my tiny hole to the world I could see how Ingrid was now looking right into the innermost part of me, as if I had neither skin nor skeleton. Once again she waited out my own rhythm, the next step in our mission, the message which en clair read “THAT WILL MAKE THE CODES SUPERFLUOUS”. The life-critical sequences, so that she could synchronize her own movements and do the same.

But since I sat there immobile, doing absolutely nothing, the alert status soon switched over to “FIRING MODE”. All of our warheads around the world were now linked and ready to be fired off.

The text which appeared next on the screen I had never seen before. Not during any of Edelweiss’ most unthinkable scenarios, our very worst simulations, had I been able to imagine that any conceptual possibility like this was indeed built into the system. “WARNING: EXTINCTION MODE,” it said.

Yet my hands still lay there, like pieces of dead meat. The circles above the world started to blink in a fuzzy lilac, almost fluorescent color. This was the beauty of the apocalypse. A gentle electronic chirping sounded around the room. It could have been a shrieking alarm, maybe at full volume—but if so then tempered by my enclosed being, receptive only through that little hole to and from the world.

The yellow triangles on the monitor penetrated in my eyes, luminous with all their inconceivable significance. Villages, remote areas, hardly even places as such, which for some reason had been chosen to host our nuclear weapons according to the strategy we called “sharing”. Who were allocated their predetermined roles in this classical tragedy.

I heard a ghostly voice in the room. It took a moment to realize that it was I myself who was rattling off the names, like a medieval incantation: “Incirlik, Araxos, Aviano, Ghedi Torre, Ramstein, Büchel, Volkel, Kleine Brogel, Lakenheath, Kings Bay, Whiteman, Barksdale, Minot, Warren, Malmstrom, Kitsap. And then Niscemi… Niscemi… Niscemi.” The key to the entire system. The secret of secrets.

Only when Ingrid grabbed my right hand in her left, with surprising roughness—like a strict piano teacher trying to help an obtuse pupil with fingering, once more teacher and pupil, mentor and novice—did my body recall the rest of the code.

Every time Ingrid pressed my right index finger against the keyboard, at exactly the same time as she typed out the same sequences with her own right index finger, an ever larger part of the code appeared in my mind. We sped through the sequences together: 111 319 172 015 151 65K 101 117 10C O31 018 412 P10 R24 151 2O1 24, Ingrid driven in pursuit of her goal, focused on not just me but also on her own keyboard and the control console monitor.

“EXTINCTION MODE ACTIVATED”. The briefcase flashing, the command terminal flashing. The consoles around flashing in bright red.

She gripped my hand tight, pulled it away from the keyboard. The light from the screens flooding dark shadows across her face then blanketing her features in white—her eyes wild, glistening—close to my own. I tasted the sourness of her breath, the fumes of napalm from her crown.

“Erasmus, my treasure. We have control. Our lonely little moment,” she said. And moved closer. “Yet maybe not so lonely.”

Ingrid pulled my hand to her own terminal using my index finger to sequence an unfamiliar code. A new map flooded all the screens: Russia, China, Iran, a field of yellow triangles tangled by red lines in a web across the giant land mass of Eurasia.

“I have had a little help over the years, Erasmus. In small corners. Do you understand me, Erasmus? Are you ready?”

Then I could not take any more. I remember violent retching—my body writhing from within to escape from itself—eyes bursting from my skull. I fell into the black beneath the table. Ingrid bent with me, soothing, stroking my hair with her free hand, the thin bones of her left still entwined around my own.

And that explained why not even she noticed the two other costumed figures in the command center. Maybe the figures had already been standing in here when we arrived, biding their time behind us while our concentration was so focused to the front, getting hold of our code sequences. Maybe they had followed the threads all the way in. I myself, however, only became aware of them when the grip on my wrist tightened to such an extent that it could no longer be Ingrid who was holding it. Then I recognized Zafirah’s spiced scent, for the first time since the Ice Hotel. Her concentrated power applied to the arteries in both of my wrists.

I had hardly enough strength even to turn. Just caught a glimpse of Zafirah’s furious, made-up presence behind me, modeled on Death: the image from Blu’s mighty mural in Niscemi.

When in the next instant she cut the hidden main fuse, the whole control console went dead. Then Sixten cut the power to both my briefcase and Ingrid’s computer, including the reserve batteries, not hesitating, knowing exactly how to do it. Needing nothing more than a free hand and the light from Ingrid’s Lucia crown.

Not pausing, he opened the protective doors—smoothly keying the code: LISA 1969—and led Ingrid toward the spiral staircase. They seemed to me like an abstract sculpture. The tall woman and the even taller man. The two lovers with the projects they had once had together: Doomsday and the child.

He had his weapon against her throat, in a stranglehold she was unable to break, he as trained as she. Both in their masquerade costumes. Mahatma Gandhi and St Lucia, entwined, joined for one last time. She so decisively betrayed in her cut-off Lucia nightgown and theatrical crown of lights.

Not one of us said anything. We simply went up the stairs together, all four figures, in two pairs. When we came out through the sliding door by the upper command center, the special forces stepped in: six fully armed soldiers around each one of us. Sixten—Mahatma Gandhi, the pacifist—halted and waved his pistol at Ingrid.

“This woman will face a military tribunal for grave breaches of security.”

Then Sixten turned to me with his steel-blue eyes, for the first time since our meeting again here. I saw clearly that he was crying, his voice cracking.

“But this man is an altogether different case. He killed my life companion up there, a few minutes ago. She had been my heart and soul for forty-five enchanted years. And he did it in the most savage way imaginable.”