The Carrier

7.01

It was not an interrogation in the conventional sense. But in Edelweiss’ sense. Began only after endless waiting.

“Well, here we all are. Together again!”

Edelweiss seemed to be overlooking the fact that while there were indeed as many of us in the lecture hall as had been in NUCLEUS, six including Alpha, two were new. Kurt and John’s replacements were dramatically different from each other—one tall and dark, the other short and ruddy—but functionally they were the same. Animals with no great evolutionary finesse. Muscles and reflexes, the most rudimentary wiring, trained to react to the slightest stimuli.

They were two out of the ten special security agents who had taken us under guard from the depths of the M.U.O.S. base and off-site to a secure location. The bodyguards were standing behind me and Ingrid on our stainless-steel revolving stools fixed to the podium floor. To avoid any repetition of the incidents at Dulles airport, no guard was secured to us. We were chained instead to the stools, with our hands cuffed behind our backs: an arrangement as good as escape proof.

While waiting for the interrogation to begin, the guards at regular intervals spun us around on our stools. Not for any reason I could make out—just because they could. In this particular moment in time, they had the power and the possibility.

These people probably had names too, some sort of designation, real or invented. But since none of them had as yet been used, I had no means of knowing what they were. I just said “Kurt-or-John,” if for example I needed to go to the bathroom to throw up after some particularly rapid revolutions on my stool. A meaningless bit of fuss, which probably did not even register with them. But it was the only thing I could do in this situation. Thrash around a little under the gallows.

Edelweiss had moved himself here from our headquarters in anticipation of events, pulling his strings. Was sitting in his special chair, in the center of the first row of the audience seating. In the armchair to his left was the briefcase in its original guise: black and anonymous. The security strap was attached to his left wrist, in accordance with regulations. Ingrid’s black backpack containing the portable command terminal was propped up against the briefcase.

So everything remained under cover, hidden. Machines and men, brooding over their secrets.

Zafirah, the other surviving member of our original Team, was one seat beyond the briefcase and the backpack. To the left and right of her and Edelweiss were framed photographs. On the low podium in front of them, a candle was burning. The portrait to the left, as I looked at it, showed a dark young man with a pronounced dimple in his chin. The one to the right was similar but with sharper features and blond hair that was crew-cut in those days. Both Kurt and John—whichever was which—looked so expectant in those old portraits. Ravenously curious about the future.

And then there was one other person here. Not in the audience seating, but on the podium, between me and Ingrid. He was even more shrunken than we were: seemed to have given up all hope. But he had no chains holding him down onto his stool, nor any guard standing behind him.

He finally drew the first question from Edelweiss.

“Would you like to tell us about the events out in the courtyard, Sixten? Describe what really happened here? Even though I know it will be hellishly difficult for you.”

Sixten said nothing for several moments, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed his quick glance at both Ingrid and me. Although he cleared his throat several times, his voice over the microphone remained thick.

“Yes, hellish is the right word, Joseph. Pretty much impossible, I’d say.”

So we all sat buried deep in his silence, almost drowning: ten seconds, twenty seconds, thirty seconds… The pressure mounted down here in the stuffy air of the lecture hall. What emerged at last was Sixten’s description of the events at Niscemi, detailed but accurate as ever, his grief over Aina’s death a powerful minor tone coloring it all. People can sometimes do that. Handle mixed feelings, play the contrast like one single instrument, sometimes in one and the same sentence.

When at last the interrogation proper started, Sixten’s role became clearer with each question. For example, the fact that he had waited so long for Ingrid to return to him. Ever since 4.03 p.m., October 23, 1988, as he said without a moment’s hesitation.

That was the moment when Edelweiss had contacted Sixten, since Ingrid was on her way to visit Stockholm for the first time in connection with our joint work on the dissertation. And since Sixten still remained on Edelweiss’ payroll.

It became clear that he had been Edelweiss’ eyes and ears in Sweden for more than fifty years. Not only during the almost twenty years after Sixten saw Ingrid for what he too thought would be the last time: when she was stopped at customs at Arlanda with Meitner’s californium—which, according to him, was also when Sweden’s nuclear weapons program ended. But also long before that. During the whole period of time from when Sixten, just eighteen years old, came to F.O.A. in Ursvik and became America’s clandestine tentacles in the worrying developments in Sweden, with Meitner as its priceless resource: the world’s leading nuclear physicist outside of the Manhattan Project.

Edelweiss wondered—just out of curiosity, he said, or maybe it was to emphasize Sixten’s loyalty for the rest of us listeners, who might not be as familiar with this distant spy’s travails—how much of his time had been devoted to watching over Oskarsson during these last decades. From the time he had been contacted about her in 1988.

It was during the time when Sixten was closing down his infiltration of the disarmament commissions as a member of the Swedish delegations, because Alva Myrdal and Inga Thorsson were no longer seen as opponents. When global détente was growing, leading in due course to the fall of the Wall and the spectacular collapse of the Soviet Union.

Sixten closed his eyes and counted. Then opened them again and formulated his answer.

“Well, my work relating to Oskarsson must have taken up roughly 40 per cent of my time, in total, over the last twenty-five years. Possibly as much as 45 per cent. Maybe even close to 50.”

I could not help smiling at all this pointless accuracy. Edelweiss began to describe a circle with his right foot. But it took a while for Sixten to spot it, that unfailing sign of impatience, as he spelled out his assignment in detail for those of us who did not know.

“During the later part of that period, when your concerns regarding not only Meitner’s activities but also Oskarsson’s grew, I started to lay out bait on some activist and similar sites which Aina also frequented, so that I could be confident that it would be just us who Oskarsson would get in touch with—when at last she made her long-planned move. But most of my work involved keeping all of you on the other side of the Atlantic updated about Levine’s and Oskarsson’s work on the dissertation, trying to get a reasonable overview of the Swedish aspect: which archives she visited, the people and institutions she contacted and so on. At that time I think I was working more than full time on Oskarsson. I’d say about a 110–115 per cent, from the moment when she finally made contact with me on October 25, 2008, forty years to the day after we were separated. When she took the bait.”

I looked at Sixten, tried hard to understand how far one might be prepared to go just to find relevance. Whether it had ever been out of some sort of conviction.

Zafirah took over the interrogation, cut straight to the point.

“And why did you sacrifice Aina?”

Sixten stared at her. Frozen. As if he had not understood.

“Sacrifice?” he repeated.

Then rolled the word around on his tongue a few more times, as if it were foreign to him. As if his English was less than perfect—as if he had never heard the expression before.

“I assumed it would be enough for me to slip a sleeping pill into her tea, lock her in the kitchen.”

We sat in silence, interviewers and interviewees, on the podium as well as in the audience. Sixten leaned forward and drank from the plastic cup on the lectern in front of him. Again I was counting the seconds. Twenty, twenty-one… The pressure built, a whistling grew in my ears, before he continued.

“There were provisions there, stockpiles of both food and drink. And she could sleep on the kitchen sofa. I did not expect to be away for more than a few days, so Aina would still be in good shape when I got back. She would have had to find a way of dealing with her bathroom needs. But we don’t in any case shower more than a few times a week, these days, either of us.”

After a long, renewed silence—upward of a minute at least—it was Zafirah who spoke, glancing in the direction of Edelweiss, with a blunt follow-up question.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand, Sixten. Enlighten us.”

“Well… This isn’t easy for me, you know.”

“Try.”

“So… the night before I was due to leave, there was this desire between us, for the first time in many years: as if Aina had sensed that this might be the last night… for me. It was then that I saw the tattoo on the inside of her left thigh. And bearing in mind what Ingrid had revealed to me, it wasn’t that hard to put two and two together. To work out that my adored wife was the key to the whole of Plan B., what Ingrid had termed the ‘Needle in the Haystack’.”

Ingrid cleared her throat. Just that—cleared her throat—and let Sixten continue.

“But I had to leave so early in the morning and couldn’t think of any reasonable alternative. So I locked the door on her just after she had kept me company with a quick cup of tea. And I am pretty sure that there’s only one key to the kitchen. And the window panes would not have been easy to break, with the type of protective glass I’ve had put in, not without special tools. Yet still she managed to get out of there. My stubborn little Aina.”

The last part of what Sixten said was barely audible. One of the two new Kurt-or-Johns went to the very back of the enormous lecture hall and turned up the volume of the loudspeakers.

“And you know how it ended, of course… the dreadful thing that Levine did, which I was forced to witness just before you and I had to make our way down into the tunnel system, Zafirah. I recognized my beloved at first sight, even in that costume. My own Alva Myrdal…”

I stared straight ahead, felt Sixten’s wordless fury and grief from the side. Knew so well that one can live both sides of a double life with equal passion.

Then it was Ingrid’s turn to be questioned—and Edelweiss took over.

“First of all I would like to thank you, dearest Ingrid, for helping us start the reboot here in Niscemi. We can reverse your little plan, have the digital footprint of your code sequences, can find the patterns. I don’t think it will take us too long to decipher them, put the weapons system back in place again. We may even disable the briefcase without your assistance. Although we would much rather have it—together with the names of your helpers around the world. So we can now once more defend ourselves with the ultimate means, if the same thing is used to attack us. God help us…”

If Ingrid had been at all derailed, perhaps to some extent devastated, by Sixten’s account of how he had misled her for the whole of their lives together, it did not show. She just sat there ramrod straight, in the shadow of the gallows—still managing to seem untroubled.

“You will not get names—people—from me. You have your counterparts under stones unturned across the world, Ed. Let them do the work. And God help us.”

The candle flickered in the warm draft that blew under the door into the lecture hall and she appeared transfixed in the flame for several moments. Then she began again. Said that what both Edelweiss and I had for so long been seeking, “Lise Meitner’s secret”, did not exist. Not in that sense. That it had been a mere illusion, an integral part of Ingrid’s plans for decades.

Edelweiss took the bait right away.

“But Ingrid, this is so interesting… do you mean to tell us that the very strange happening at Dulles airport, a nuclear explosion with californium as active substance, did not in fact have anything to do with Meitner?”

“Let me put it like this: causal connections are rarely just causal. So yes, Lise had a lot of californium—relatively speaking—in her possession, a small black case, about two inches long, filled with the world’s most valuable substance. She had received it from Glenn Seaborg when he visited her at her home in Oxford in 1966 to deliver the prize. And when I met Lise some years later, shortly before she died, she still did not know why Seaborg had given it to her. Whether he was hoping to hide his discovery from the world, or to give her some token of his affection, or even to pass over to her—the only person he considered his intellectual equal—the responsibility for taking this idea to the next level, before the Russians did. According to Lise, Seaborg had found a new way of producing californium and then keeping it stable with liquid ammonia and another highly secret compound, in a practical container of this sort. A small, copper-lined and battery-powered climate chamber which could maintain a very low temperature for several months. A real Wunderkammer, as she called it.

“But I’m guessing that this was a prototype for small nuclear ammunition. We may in other words have been well ahead of the Russians even then—it was only toward the end of the ’70s that they managed to construct something similar for the bullets for their much talked about californium pistols. But the cooling device that they needed weighed more than 200 pounds, according to our reports. Which was one reason why the weapons never went into full service.”

There was no outward sign that Ingrid was accused of any crime: her demeanor was of someone delivering a report. Except that she was chained to a stool made of stainless steel with a six-foot-five guard standing right behind her.

“But Lise could not test what Seaborg had given her, whether it was something which could have been taken further—assuming she wanted to do that. She would not even have been able to open the container without a substantial risk of exposure to lethal doses of radiation. So before I left her, I had to promise Lise that the case of californium would vanish from the face of the earth. She was adamant that transuranic elements could be used to create even more dangerous Doomsday weapons than we had ever been able to imagine—her own research suggested as much. Her anxiety was that people would never be able to resist the temptation to use them.”

Once again she cleared her throat.

“This was the moment that sowed the seeds of pacifism in my mind. Lise demonstrated to me with a simple sketch how one could harness the world’s nuclear weapons—and then re-route the network. It may have been no more than a passing fantasy, an impossible dream. But from that moment on I began to work on it. The whole project I called ‘Lise Meitner’s secret’.”

Silence, a dramatic pause. I could not help but smile at Ingrid’s talents, even in a situation like this. Her absolute freedom when anything but free.

“I meant to take the case up to Pluto, leave it underground at the Kiruna mine, inside Mount Doom. Hide it there for eternity—together with the waste from all of our futile attempts to create new nuclear weapons based on transuranic elements. But you stopped me at customs. Took both the case and the key to Lise’s underground laboratory in Ursvik.”

“Yes, we did have wonderful Sixten to thank for being able to have our people right there at Arlanda, just when you landed after your visit to Oxford,” Edelweiss said with a smile.

Ingrid turned to Sixten, her features calm, open, as Edelweiss continued.

“I don’t know if you realize this, Ingrid, but you Swedes have always been so flexible. As devoted to betraying secrets as to preserving them. To all this double-dealing. For example, first trying to create your own nuclear weapons and then working hard to prevent anyone else from having them—when things did not go as you had hoped. For you, an arms build-up and disarmament seem to be nothing more than two sides of the same coin, heads or tails, chance rather than destiny. For myself, I’d be very happy to have none but Swedes on my payroll!”

Sixten did not say a word. He just leaned forward and drank another mouthful of water. Maybe it was starting to warm up in here. I was no longer capable of judging, was freezing cold inside. But Ingrid still seemed unconcerned by Edelweiss’ little outpouring: his attempt to twist the knife in the wound. She twisted it back.

“After that it was quite a long time before you suddenly asked me to take another look at californium, Joseph. And I realize that it might have appeared like a reasonable question at that time, in the mid ’80s, when everything seemed possible. That this idea even came up—at the same moment in history, when in all seriousness we were pouring billions into Star Wars: imagining that we would wage nuclear war far out in space. So the thought of californium as an active substance in our new generation of nuclear weapons was indeed no crazier than many other things then. Or what do you say, Joseph?”

Edelweiss’ heavy breathing, amplified by his microphone, was the only thing that could be heard in the silence. A hissing sound, as if from a respirator. When he did not answer, she kept going.

“But I soon discovered that the scientific basis wasn’t solid, that it would hardly be possible to achieve anything like that on an operational scale within the foreseeable future. I started to fan the flames, however, because I noticed how that old vision still fascinated you all so much: the endless promise and threat of transuranic elements. The possibility of producing small nuclear weapons, pocket-sized but at the same time with unimaginable explosive power, the ultimate Cold War fantasy in modern form. Working on Erasmus’ dissertation was also inspiring me with new ideas for disinformation. So I had you all looking the wrong way for decades. At the same time as I slowly but surely undermined the whole system, right under your own feet, you were just standing there staring up at the sky. Into the dust which I was throwing in your eyes.”

“Yes, congratulations, Ingrid. I would guess there’s only one person in the world who can really understand how you think, see into the remotest corners of your mind. And by a strange coincidence he’s sitting there next to you,” Edelweiss said.

Still Sixten showed no reaction. Neither did Ingrid. She kept on giving Edelweiss all the answers, since it was all too late in any case. Too late to remedy a lifetime of deceit.

“And of course Aina had that case of californium with her in Ursvik the whole time. In your own home, Sixten, for each of those forty-five years. Somewhere in your freezer, very simply, the first hiding place she could find—since she did not want to touch it ever again. Aina had managed to pocket it in a wonderfully intuitive moment, when she was supervising my hastily assembled preliminary hearing at Arlanda. Sixten, on the other hand, ended up with the key to Lise’s laboratory, but he didn’t find anything there that he could understand—which is why he was hoping to go down there again with you, Erasmus: the supposed expert on Meitner’s secret. If Zafirah and Kurt hadn’t fire-bombed the house in Ursvik, flushing us out before he got the opportunity. I imagine that’s the only reason he helped you there, my treasure, showed us all the way to escape through the window. He needed you for later.”

Ingrid paused, looked first at Sixten without getting any reaction. Then she turned to me, the same calm, open features.

“Imagine my surprise to find the key in your hybrid at the Ice Hotel, having returned there after retrieving the briefcase. We left you to your dreams, Jesús María and I. But I kept wondering, of course. What had my treasure been thinking?”

I could not meet her gaze. She continued before I could form the words to respond, or question—I was not sure which—and her attention returned to Edelweiss.

“Jesús María, my little dark angel, got hold of that small black case of californium during Aina’s birthday party last fall. While we were tattooing the codes onto Aina in the bathroom she revealed that after taking the case at Arlanda, she had simply put it away at the back of her freezer, wrapped in some nondescript grease-proof paper, knowing that it needed to be stored at that temperature, and that Sixten would never think of looking there. Hiding it away in plain sight. Aina said she thought it was some kind of explosive charge, but was not much more specific than that. It had later made the move to Ursvik with them, and lain in the kitchen undisturbed until Jesús María grabbed it in the midst of the chaos during the attack on the house, thinking it might come in useful at some point. Then she eventually crafted some kind of device, maybe during our stay in Belgium. Combining the case with a simple detonator she must have stolen from my combat gear, then wrapping it all in Kevlar, with her textile talents.”

Once again a pause, while we held our breath.

“So I had no idea what exactly the device was that I helped her insert inside herself in the bathroom at Dulles. Even my fertile imagination did not go that far. But I did think that it would be sufficiently powerful to kill John when he set it off, doing what he always did with Jesús María. I tried hard to dissuade her, but having given her—my blood sister—a promise before our escape from NUCLEUS, I felt I had no argument. So neither I nor, I think, Jesús María, understood the terrifying force with which she was ‘impregnated’. The third operational nuclear explosion in history. And one I am going to regret for the rest of my life.”

There was then a break in which Ingrid and I were allowed to go to the bathroom in silence, closely guarded by Kurt-or-John, and to drink two plastic cups of water each. On the way back into the lecture hall, we encountered Sixten coming in the opposite direction. He and I looked away from each other, while out of the corner of my eye I saw Ingrid staring straight at him. The trace of a smile passed across her face.

When everybody had returned, the scene was all set again and it was my turn.

“Erasmus, my friend… could you give us your own perspective on all this?”

I observed Edelweiss’ almost childish curiosity, the breathing which had his whole organism heaving and swaying. I inhaled as deeply as I was able with the chains across my chest—before taking it all from the beginning: in one flow, from the moment I was sucked into Ingrid’s maelstrom.

I said that I had begun my university studies with the unusual combination of a major in medieval history and a minor in moral philosophy. When it appeared that I would have the same teacher for both of these very different subjects, it seemed strange at first, as if the college was not approaching this in a very serious way or was suffering from a staff shortage. But then that teacher had linked the topics together in such a spell-bindingly obvious way.

After that came the recruitment to West Point, which took place following my first lectures. I could not at first take the recruiters’ quiet questions entirely seriously—I of all people, a drifting pacifist, a young seeker for something, as obsessed with cultural history as with encryption—but then I had fallen hook, line and sinker. The spiral staircase up to the helipad at the university was the frontier between this fundamentally humanistic world and the fundamentally unhumanistic one in West Point’s sealed wing. Then the wordless flight over the Hudson, the initiation rite.

I told them I was asked by “Ingrid Bergman” if I wanted to become her first doctoral candidate. That she had just vanished as soon as my dissertation was finished and accepted, against all the odds, her and my vague search for “Lise Meitner’s secret” while I myself was stowed away at the Catholic University in Washington.

It was such an incongruous relief to spew it all up, right there, as a witness before my Team, the survivors of what Edelweiss had once called NUCLEUS: our top secret elite force against barbarity, terrorism, the darkness within. Because nothing mattered now. Because the system had in the end swallowed us all, was so much bigger than any one individual. Even an Ingrid Oskarsson, it would seem.

At first Edelweiss did not appear interested. He had after all heard my formal history so many times before, ever since he interviewed me at West Point, the episode that sealed my fate.

It was my private history he was after: what had driven me, attracted me. What it was that could get a person to diverge, head off in a diametrically different direction. So it was at about that point that he started to listen to my account in a different way, to wake up. Edelweiss moved his hand to his face. Passed it over his chins, the rolls of fat, that remarkable landscape of skin and folds, like a foreign planet.

“And at around that time you come into NUCLEUS, my dear lost sheep—only to bale out again later, regardless of the cost. Leaving everything of importance behind. Abandoning house and home. Your beloved wife, the little children with their strange names, who hadn’t even reached their teens before you cast them adrift. As you did your country, your assignment, gambling with the fate of the world: placing such huge pressure on our civilisation. What is it that can drive a man to do that? Can you give us any clue, Erasmus?”

I stole a look at Ingrid, searched for words. And then they just came.

“Because I found my way back to the real me, slowly but surely, that lost pacifist who had once upon a time enrolled at university because he had a desperate need for some sort of moral compass. Because I was being hollowed out from inside, until all that was left was a thin shell. Because man doesn’t get that many chances to rescue his own world.”

The silence was deafening. Edelweiss regarded me with curiosity, more amused than worried, seemed to be waiting for more. I took a deep breath—but Ingrid got in ahead of me.

“I’m sorry, my treasure.”

Silence once more, watching and waiting. I thought I caught a glimpse of Sixten giving her a quick glance.

“But those were never your words. They were mine,” she said.

I turned, leaned forward to look past Sixten: looked right into Ingrid’s blue-gray eyes. Met her gaze.

“I shifted you, Erasmus, hour by hour, month by month, year after year. It was I who sent the cuttings in the brown envelopes to your office. Worked on you with all the methods I had available, finally got you to take the step. To flee with the briefcase, leaving everything behind, your finger still on the trigger.”

I stole a look at Edelweiss. Felt some sort of warmth inside. Ingrid was trying to defend me, to save at least one of us. So I just stared at the floor and did not interrupt. Listened to her melodious voice, as I so often had before.

“You had naturally been barred from getting into the missile forces, during your first officer training course, after that incident during the security regulations exam. Do you remember anything of that, my treasure?”

I shook my head, let her go on with her piece of theater. From the rest of the audience there came only the same silence.

“One of those in charge of your training, with whom I worked at the C.I.A.’s Project M.K.Ultra—their mind control project—called me afterward, deeply troubled. He saw your capabilities, of course. The strength, the aggression, the madness, but he had no idea how it could be tamed. So he asked me to try. Promised to cover up what had happened if I came to the conclusion that you could be of any use to us.

“And I had seen the potential already during the first lecture of the introductory course. All this brutality within you, scarcely concealed by an obsessive interest in doing something about it: in moral philosophy, medieval culture, magnificent paintings through the ages, humanity’s most brilliant achievements. The very opposite of all this war and destruction. Your questions about ‘The Triumph of Death’, for example: how animatedly you looked at the painting, with fascination and fear in equal doses, like me. I thought we complemented each other wonderfully. So I decided that you would be the perfect hit man in disguise.”

Ingrid waited, gathered her breath. I tried to do the same.

“I took you under my wing. Thought that you could turn out to be the chosen one, my comrade-in-arms to implement the plan which had begun to grow inside me when I met Lise in the ’60s, right before Sixten vanished and with him our fantasies about a new Swedish golden age built around nuclear power. Become ‘my treasure’.

“During all of our work—somewhat fictitious on my part—on the dissertation, only the two of us, I was free to practice my skills undisturbed. Inculcate you with some sort of pacifist conviction, without making you operationally unusable, take away all that dark energy. I had learned a lot at M.K. about how thoughts take root: what memory researchers came to call ‘implants’. Gave you such a strong resistance to ultra-violence that you literally vomited—but only after you had carried out your assignment. All those appalling dreams you told me about during our sessions. And I succeeded in the end with the trigger command itself.”

I stared at her, felt myself falling headlong, through layer after layer.

“M.K.’s program for mind control was probably like the bulk of our cutting-edge research from the Cold War. Most of it hocus pocus, pseudo-scientific crap—and some aspects astonishing even by today’s standards. We had such endless resources, you see. Yet most of it was buried for fear of what later generations would think. As early as 1973, when I hadn’t been in the project for more than three years, I was charged by the head of the C.I.A. with destroying every suspension file at M.K. Tens of thousands of documents, more or less speculative research reports about remote mind control and truth drugs, straight into the shredder, night after night.

“But I’ve always been a bit rogue, have taken my own decisions. So I kept some things which I thought might one day come in handy. After a few years working as supervisor of Erasmus’ dissertation, while at the same time being the Woman with the Briefcase, I then got that question from on high: simply could not turn down the role of Alpha in this new team. All the opportunities which that would give Erasmus and me.

“And our chance came just when I thought we were both going to crack. When I managed to persuade our Administration to fill the gap after the canceled state visit to Russia with an official visit to Stockholm. I could at last contact you, Sixten, and take up your offer of safe harbor during our flight. Even though I knew it would reopen old wounds. Or maybe, to be honest, for precisely that reason.”

Ingrid avoided all eye contact with those looking at her, that crossfire: from Edelweiss and Sixten, Zafirah. Everybody—except me, staring, as much amazed as terrified.

Then Edelweiss cut in with the obvious question:

“You brain-washed your poor doctoral candidate?”

“I wouldn’t put it quite like that, Joseph…”

She turned to me and I tried very hard not to look in her direction.

“My dear, poor Erasmus, I can understand if you see it that way. But if you do, please interpret it literally: as washing the brain. Getting you to see and think clearly. A terrible invasion of your psyche, that much is true, throughout all those years—but also critical to the cause, as cursed as it’s blessed. And this is the only crime I’ll confess to. Apart from that, I’ll leave judgment and sentence for posterity.”

The interrogation could have finished more or less there. But I was scrambling so desperately for a foothold: needed to know before we both vanished without trace. So I put the question, there and then, in front of the congregation, all the witnesses. The one that had been gnawing away at my mind ever since Alpha made contact via the D.V.D. with “Mata Hari”, where it all started. Some sort of final “unreality check”.

“So was that how you got hold of the key sentence, Ingrid, the whole code system? My main secret from childhood?”

She met my gaze. Took a deep breath, began to mumble, maybe only I could distinguish the words in the phrase.

“I love you just as senselessly as my pretty weird and hellish father, for the time being and onward into eternity, Amen.”

I think that everything became still. But inside my head there was a hissing, a roar, as Ingrid went on.

“Erasmus, I’m sorry… but I thought we needed something in common that neither of us would forget. Not even when confronted with the worst challenge any human being has ever faced: with Doomsday in the palm of our hand. So I burned my own code system into your subconscious as well. Tested you first with the arachnophobia. And when that was securely lodged I—and you—were ready for that abhorrent memory from childhood. The moment when a mother disappears within herself.”

She hesitated for an instant—and then went on to clarify.

“So you have to understand. It wasn’t you who made up the code. Not you who had a pathological fear of spiders. Not you who sat there at the kitchen table with your distraught mother, only thirteen years old and showing her the book cipher as some kind of distraction. Who had a dark enough imagination to come up with that peculiar key sentence.

“No, it was me, Erasmus. And my own poor little mother.”

7.02

When you no longer understand anything, everything can be a clue.

Which is why, inside the solemn solitude of the isolation cell, I took out my dissertation and started to turn the pages again. From cover to cover, over and over. Trying to remember the exact circumstances in which each separate part had been written. What I had been thinking, what she had said. Who I might indeed have been at various stages.

They had also let me keep my notebook. Not out of kindness, but because they genuinely wanted to know, Edelweiss said. See the end of my chronicle. How I would describe even this unlikely ending. So I did as they—as Edelweiss—wanted, did not know what else to do. Was scrupulous not to change anything to fit the knowledge I now had. Or to judge what might have been real and what was not. In that way I kept the account pathetically innocent, or ignorant, up to and including our interrogation.

The question is, of course, what is credible in all of this: the whole tangle of mind control, multiple agendas and cosmetic transformations. Where the very existence of nuclear weapons, man’s ingenious invention for exterminating himself, may in the end be the most unbelievable thing of all. The Doomsday conviction I tried to explore in my dissertation.

You must understand. But you won’t.

How there was very nearly no further development, how it could all have been interrupted.

7.03

The last night, I lived that nightmare again. Dreamed that I was back in the subterranean eternity of the facility, carrying out the Test. The missile itself was as ever only a few hundred feet away. Eerily silent in its specially constructed silo, like a gigantic chained beast, a chrysalis brooding day and night under temperature control and exact monitoring of levels and flows.

No detail could ever go wrong. Once a month each of us had to do the Test, to ensure that we still remembered the correct procedures—in case anything should happen, unlikely as it might seem.

Otherwise, here we were to sit all day long, throughout the year, decade after decade, deep underground, so the status quo could continue. Up on the surface the concluding phases of the Cold War would soon be over, the world would spin forward to the fall of the Wall, détente, eventually 9/11, our invasions, global terrorism as a kind of counter-attack, the President’s fine words about a world free of nuclear weapons. But down here, time had stopped.

I often thought of it as the strangest assignment in the world. The enormous tension which never found its release: 100 per cent concentration on total inactivity. On nothing other than nothing ever happening. The fact that we had created a system all around the world which could never be used, on a scale that was larger than human life.

Equally often I wondered why we operators never received a fraction of the attention the missiles themselves did. Nobody ever checked our levels, flows, the temperature of our brains. So long as we passed the Test, all our lights showed green.

The first question this month was what we would do if the seismic alarm went off in gate L.04 after the obligatory L.F.F. test, the control routines for seeking out Launch Facility Faults. I read swiftly through the multiple choice answers.

(A) Sound the Security Alert.

(B) Contact F.S.C. (Flight Security).

(C) Contact the next gate, L.05, and obtain two confirmations from the E.M.T. team.

(D) Contact M.M.O.C. (Missile Maintenance Operations Control).

And then my mind went blank.

I tried to control my breathing. Knew after all that help was within reach: the crib that had been circulating among us without any fuss, with our commanders’ approval, for many decades. That all I needed to do was to make that little sign behind my back to be told the secret, the one that in fact no longer needed to be kept secret from anybody, except during inspections. As was the case now.

The crib was our insurance. As well as that of our superiors, the whole system’s.

Because the rigid and non-negotiable requirement from the nuclear weapons command, in other words our political establishment, was that we had to score 100 per cent on the long and demanding Test, each and every time. We were all playing to the gallery. No operator could achieve that. Not in this subterranean solitude, with the inhuman psychological pressure that we faced all day long, with only the mighty missile and its gently sighing premonition of Doomsday for company.

But all I ever needed to do was shape my fingers to make that sign behind my back. Discreetly enough so that only the necessary people would see it: the commander and the person with the crib within reach. My breathing was already back to normal, just the realization that the commander would soon be pushing that paper gently into my hand helped with that.

Which must have been why it took so long—a minute, maybe closer to two—before my pulse really started to race. When I realized that no-one was coming to my rescue this time.

I cast my eyes around the examination hall at Gate L11, hardly bothering to hide my desperation, even from the inspector, the sullen gentleman furthest back along the wall. At last I caught sight of his smirk. It was the most recently arrived operator, a ginger kid from somewhere in the Mid West, and he was pointing discreetly at his knee under the desk. That is where he had put the crib.

There was a roaring in my temples, I felt the blood coursing in time with my pulse, rising with each second. My uniform jacket was becoming soaked with sweat, everything seeping through.

Desperately I tried to concentrate on the next question. What measures should be taken if “M.O.S.R. X.” appeared on the screen in the control room.

The only thing I could recall was that the acronym stood for “Missile Operational Status Response X.”. Again I looked over at the new recruit. His eyes were focused downward. Moving between the Test on the desk, and the crib on his knee. No glance in my direction.

I read through the choice of answers as slowly as I could. The acronyms flickered before my eyes. Panic at the thought that I would not be allowed to remain down here, in my blessed sealed-off refuge, poured through my body. That they would dismiss me right away. I heard myself breaking the soft rustling quiet of the examination hall, mumbling the different options:

(A) Begin with an L.F.F. to check whether the information on the computer screen really is correct.

(B) Contact Flight Security immediately.

(C) Call Team immediately using the separate S.I.N. telephone network.

(D) Order an immediate and total evacuation of the facility with the exceptional command Emergency Launch L.F.F. Evacuation.

When I caught up with the new arrival after the Test—just outside the hall, on the way into tunnel T24 heading toward the canteen, in full sight of all the inspectors—I just took him down. Before I smashed his head into the metal floor, not once but repeatedly, the answer suddenly occurred to me.

“Of course, answer ‘D’,” I said, looking straight into his terrified eyes—and went on: anything can happen when it’s “Status Response ‘X’!”

7.04

Before they came and fetched me, after a number of days or weeks in my isolation cell, and when I had told them that my chronicle for Edelweiss was complete, I was granted one last telephone call. Custom dictated that one should ring home. A pointless and heart-rending conversation, a repugnant punishment, certainly, for the soon-to-be-deceased, but maybe even more so for the dependents.

Yet I could not stop myself from putting Amba through it. She was now my only hope of hearing some form of truth before it was all too late. Who would recall what I had told her about my mother, maybe even that scene at the kitchen table when I was thirteen, or my spider phobia. Whether I had revealed things I should not have during our first night together, immediately after the welcome for new teachers at The Catholic University. When she and I had poured out our memories to each other: lifetimes in fast-forward. Perhaps said something about once having been a violent young man, which Ingrid had referred to during our interrogation, and not at all the pacifist, before she had started working on me. Or muttered something in my sleep.

If nothing else, I wanted to tell her everything, give her my own version. Try to get her and the children, if not to understand—how could anybody do that?—then in some way to forgive me. At least just say that, for form’s sake. As my last rites.

But she did not answer: she never did with unknown numbers. There was only that voice, still teasing, still with the same message I could remember since so long ago. “Hi, it’s Amba, I’m probably busy with something incredibly exciting. But leave your name and number and I’ll call back as soon as I have nothing better to do.”

For a moment I thought of leaving a message. But again… what good would that have done? I pressed the red button, and they took the telephone away.

Then I brought out the reproduction. Bruegel’s masterpiece from 1562, more than four centuries before the year of my birth. Almost time enough for his vision to become reality. I laid the picture on the bunk, using a couple of the door-stopper-sized nuclear weapons thrillers from the bookshelves in here to flatten it out. Studied all of its details for the last time. The arc from Bruegel’s visions of Doomsday to our own. His yellowed, scorched landscape, the piles of dead, the entire, almost nuclear, apocalypse.

When the clock radio showed 17.00, I switched on the T.V. It was the guards who reminded me because I had lost all sense of time. As the camera swept over the auditorium of the World Forum of Nuclear Weapons Security at The Hague, I could still identify almost all of the ministers, doubles and agents. As well as the “Carriers” of all of the nuclear weapons nations—with their briefcases and professionally neutral expressions: the seven official states’ holders of their secrets, codes and rituals.

The red wine was excellent, as was the beef filet, even if I had left the plate standing for an hour or so on the desk under the T.V. I ate slowly, chewed the meat thoroughly. Really tried to savor my last hour. Observed the new Carrier’s motionless face a foot or so behind the President: the culmination of what had been the Team’s “Revitalization”.

Proof of the fact that they had achieved the improbable feat of persuading the decision makers, the very few who were sufficiently in the know, that it really was worth continuing with an asymmetrical little unit like this to carry out asymmetrical warfare. That it was precisely this that had saved mankind on this occasion—skillfully pursuing two defectors, following them all the way into the heart of the conspiracy that had being going on for decades, and which all the others had failed to uncover, all these cherished institutions like the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the N.S.A. and the Secret Service.

That unthinkable strategies could only be revealed by unthinkable structures. That the nuclear weapons system had to be defended with the same conceptual madness that created it.

After the President’s formal speech—his constant assurances that a nuclear weapons-free world was the only conceivable solution—I rose to turn off the T.V. Knew that this was what they had wanted to demonstrate. How the show kept rolling on at the nuclear weapons summit, as if nothing at all had happened, while the rest of the world remained in ignorance of the flight and pursuit—as well as the capture. How not even Ingrid and I had been able to make any difference.

But up close to the T.V., I froze. Suddenly I recognized our new Carrier. The same woman I had seen with Sixten in Ursvik, briefly, but long enough for her image to linger. The same guard who took us to Edelweiss’ office at Dulles airport. Her appraising ice-blue gaze in the Interview Room, her supple way of moving with the briefcase a couple of meters behind the President on their way out from the Nuclear Weapons Security Forum. It must be Lisa, Sixten’s daughter. Ingrid’s daughter.

I knocked back the rest of the wine. Thoughts whirled around in my mind. About who I was, about Ingrid, my mother, Lisa… This entire tapestry of deception. Who I might once have been. How I had then become somebody entirely different, if Ingrid was ever to be believed. With that lover and that daughter…

I tried once more to gather my memories, get them in some semblance of order. The scene at the breakfast table with my mother and the thirteen-year-old who might have been me, her despair, my way of trying to get her to think of something else, the book cipher as distraction, that strange key sentence which had welled up from the darkness inside me. Had this really happened? Could something so real simply never have existed? I tried as best I could to recall what had been said during my and Ingrid’s endless sessions on the dissertation, images which were both seared into my mind and faded. My early days at university—how I had been picked up by the recruiters, chosen for special services or the missile forces, at the same time as I threw myself headlong into Ingrid Bergman’s moral philosophy lectures.

I grimaced, frowned, scribbled fragments of recollections on the back of the last pages in my account for Edelweiss. My witness statement. Myself as example, held up as a warning to posterity.

Once Edelweiss had it, my report of what can happen when two sufficiently dedicated people make common cause, he would destroy it or bury it in some obscure military archive. And as soon as he was pensioned off, if not before, the next person in charge would look at this little notebook as some kind of refuse from the past. When a new special team would have been in existence for a long time, called NUCLEUS II or something of that sort, and the “Revitalization” would have left our nuclear weapons system bigger and more powerful than ever. Long after Ingrid and I had been erased.

When they opened the door, the line-up was as I had expected. Two groups of guards, four thugs in each. One outside my cell, one outside Ingrid’s about fifteen feet away. Her group of guards led by Zafirah, mine by our close combat instructor from Rwanda: with the burns still as a macabre memento from the battle with Ingrid at the M.U.O.S. base. I got to my feet, pushed the notebook into the left-hand thigh pocket of my combat pants, to be delivered to Edelweiss as my last act. Walked through my cell door.

For a moment we stood there like that, both groups. I glanced back at Ingrid. The dark star that had guided me through so much of my life. As impossible to resist as to do her bidding. She who had deceived and transformed me, for good or ill, bewitched me until I no longer had any grasp on who was her and who me. Stately, broad-shouldered, proud and majestic, like Greta Garbo. Like Mata Hari in the movie, on her way to face the firing squad—with no regrets for what she had done.

I had wondered why the director had not used that quotation as a dramatic ending. If, that is, the Dutch dancer and double agent had in fact spoken those words when she was taken from her cell.

But Ingrid used it now.

“I am ready.”

The guards did not react to what appeared to be a gesture of submission, a final acceptance. Their expressions remained blank, they stood immobile, waiting. Even our Close Combat instructor in front of me. Zafirah alone tensed her body, but did not make any move, waiting for orders through her earpiece from Edelweiss.

“Farewell, Ingrid. It always was we two against the world,” I said.

She did not answer directly, but continued with the last part of the trigger command, apparently so harmless:

“Are you ready, Erasmus?”