by Mattias Berg
I let my eyes scan around me. Everything in here followed the regulations to the letter. The floor, the walls and the ceiling were covered with the same metal. The edges of the outer doors sealed with copper plate, so as to minimize the electro-magnetic pulses. The whole room was also mounted on springs, so that it would sway rather than be crushed when the big bang came.
It looked just like any one of our top secret shelters under the bases in the endless plains of the Mid West. Yet I had never seen anything like it. Here, of all places: a doll’s house-like hideaway built to withstand a direct hit of the strength of the Hiroshima bomb. In this insignificant country, midway between Moscow and Brussels.
Even the color-coding of the different small sections followed the international standard. The section of the wall behind the control panel with the light-emitting diodes had been painted purple for “Command/communication”. The border of the wall around the inset cupboard was pale yellow, indicating “Stores”. Continuing clockwise, facing the doors, the wall was first orange for “Passageway” and then blue for “Restroom/hygiene”.
This last consisted of two parts. First there was the decontamination area, not much bigger than ten square feet: you were meant to screen yourself off with a lead-lined plastic curtain and rinse away what you could of the radioactive fallout using a hand-held shower. Behind the same curtain there was also a sort of electric waste grinder sunk into the floor, surrounded by the same welded steel plate and copper plate. But this state-of-the-art toilet seemed to have stopped working.
The fallout shelter had already become an unbearable place. The drain in the floor near the hand-held shower was blocked by the last of the vomit which I had spewed out after the extreme violence of our escape. There were more bodily fluids some hours later. The usual reaction to an extreme adrenaline rush, however much you train, try to prepare. The stench made me catch my breath, inhale as little as possible through my nose, inside this strange little space.
The rest of the shelter was brilliant red, the color for “Emergency Exit”, which was ironic given that I was locked in with little chance of escape. Only the lower part of the wall, directly opposite the entrance, had been painted green for “Sleeping Quarters”.
On the floor the Nurse drew my attention again, the sound of her occasional whimpers. She must have been one of the “support functions” behind the scenes. I had seen her for the first time only a few days ago, I could not recall having so much as heard her voice. Yet I had inflicted severe injuries on her. The scent of her perfume—cloying, penetrating—was overwhelmed by the stench of blood and urine. Her uniform was also now more red than green, her garish, dyed-blond hair a mess of blood and dirt and glass splinters from the headlamps, the shards looking like a crown of thorns. Her whimpering grew a little louder, she almost seemed to be coming to, before falling back into her darkness. Once I had my own strength back, I would be her nurse, carrying out the emergency surgery which we had been taught in the sealed wing at West Point.
For now, exhaustion began to wash over me. It was two days since I had had even a brief sleep, in addition to lying mostly awake during the period just before our departure. Another dwarf spider came creeping along my left arm, in the direction of my wrist, climbing over the security strap of the briefcase. It moved with science-fiction-like speed given how small it was. As it reached the skin over my artery, I killed it with my pencil. Felt my skin freeze, shivered, as if I had a fever.
But I had to get a grip on myself, not let panic carry me away. The complete lack of activity in here became harder to bear with each passing hour. I had no information. I checked the depth meter on my service watch once more: it was a normal altimeter, but our technicians had adapted it to provide underground readings. And it did say 253.3 feet, just as in the encrypted message Alpha had sent to the cell phone at the playground. Twelve hours had now passed since I broke away from the Team and took the Nurse with me—and I still had no idea where everyone else was. All of our pursuers. Or rather: the chosen few.
According to instructions, no search bulletin would have been sent out, no digital message about my escape, not even in the most encrypted form. A very small circle would have been kept informed, and that would be it. Apart from the Team, I guessed only the President himself—unless Edelweiss had decided just to inform him that the alarm had turned out to be false, a minor technical hitch, as with so many other supposed nuclear weapons attacks in the course of the decades, and that the situation was now back to normal. Plus, a couple of our most senior military commanders. Probably not even the First Lady—and certainly not my own family.
So if Alpha did not come for me, fetch me from this escape-proof underground prison, nobody would ever know what had happened.
Tiredness continued to creep through me, like a drug. I shook my head and stood up to take a look at the Nurse. She felt chill, as if already dead, even though her pulse was ticking weakly in her wrist. I huddled up close to her, my pistol in my right hand and the briefcase in my left, the security strap on my wrist. I had to get a few minutes of rest.
Over the years, it had become increasingly difficult to distinguish dream from reality, step by step they had slid into and out of each other. So I did not really know if I slept at all, or if I was still doing so when the diodes in the control panel by the door started to whirr. I noticed no difference when I pinched myself in the arm. The message on the panel really did say “OPEN”.
I got to my knees, using the Nurse’s more or less lifeless form as a shield, and tried to steady my weapon. I pointed it at the height of the heart. The mean height of men in the U.S. is five feet ten, here in Scandinavia presumably a bit more. The door handle began to be pressed down. There was a mechanical click. I undid the safety on the gun.
I heard the voice before I saw the face, that melodic intonation which had made me sweat through sleepless nights. It was also the voice that caused me to release my index finger from the trigger.
The surprise made me recoil against the green wall. That it should have been her, of all people. Through all those years.
1.07
She had wanted us to call her “Ingrid”, but among her students she was only ever referred to as “Ingrid Bergman”. Even though she did her best to hide her beauty—with her long straggling hair, even then graying, falling to her shoulders—the Swedish movie star’s classic looks were etched into her face. At night we used to watch the movies over and over. Always in the same order, from light to dark: “The Bells of St Mary’s”. “Notorious”. “Spellbound”. “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”.
You must understand. But you won’t.
That even I had once been an ordinary young person with no clear direction, pretty much the same as anyone else, with deep but not yet incurable wounds from my childhood. That I became obsessed with mathematics and physics at an early age, ciphers, numbers theory. But that I then, for one reason or another, felt that I needed an overview of the history of ideas, of mankind’s thinking throughout the ages, and some optional courses in moral philosophy. Constructive thought as some sort of compass, a map out into the world, maybe even as therapy.
Instead, I met Ingrid Bergman.
After her first lecture I had a blinding headache. And then it got worse. She challenged everything we had thought or believed in, the uncertainty spread far beyond the lecture hall, the slightest detail sometimes meant life or death for me. How long I brushed my teeth. The interval between red light for cars and green man for pedestrians. The choice between taking the steps up to the university library one or two at a time.
I counted seconds, interpreted signs. Everything stood on edge. Absolutely nothing was settled or fixed any longer.
Just then, I also received my first “approach”, as we called it. By that stage, they could have got me to do just about anything. We knew that other students had already fallen for the recruiters’ spiraling promises: they were said to come back at least once with guarantees of even bigger scholarships and incre
asingly adapted courses. Assurances that in future even the world of business would be crying out for our specialization.
At first I supposed that they had confused me with someone else, or that somebody in my corridor had given them my name as a joke. That I would be recruited by them did not seem likely. A fundamentally useless young man, pacifist since his teen years, unable even to decide which way to walk over the campus lawn, at this stage with unruly brown curls and apparently good-looking in a melancholy sort of a way. A lost, contrary student who could as easily have prepared a massacre at the university as study its moral consequences.
But the recruiters would not give up. Ran down the list of names with their index finger and found my name. Checked the spelling and date of birth. After they paid me a second visit I decided to try out after all, went along as if sleep-walking, counted the steps up the spiral staircase in the unused part of the university building leading to the helipad. Interpreted random parts of graffiti as signals addressed to me.
West Point was an hour away. I stared down at the shadow of our helicopter as it raced above the surface of the Hudson, but the military academy could as well have lain in another galaxy. On arrival there I vomited my entire former life out into a waste paper basket and then started, to my own great surprise and probably theirs too, to score top in the tests, one after the next. After only the third session I was selected for special training.
The requirements were clear from the start. Those of us in the special training group should at all costs continue our studies, in parallel with our course at West Point, and finish them in style, as if nothing had happened. We were to start working up our first alternate identity. The double life was demanding but manageable. I was furiously driven, a fire in my belly, wanting, it seemed, to take some sort of revenge: on existence in general, the meaninglessness of life, my father.
Since we did not have supervised studies more than three days a week, and the training at West Point mostly took place outside office hours—often late, sometimes in the form of repellent interrogation training sessions long into the night—the logistics were possible. No-one was waiting for me in my dorm. The corridor lay desolate and dark when I returned, and in the mornings I would spin the latest yarn about my fictitious girlfriend Sarah, with whom I said I was more or less living. The smoke-screens soon became an integral part of my existence.
Everything ran through my mind more or less in the same way, slid into and out of my being. Military life and moral philosophy, lectures, the Middle Ages, the violence, the ideas.
On the flight to West Point I would sit there, minutes after we had streamed out of the auditorium and I had taken one of my alternate routes to the helipad, trying to absorb what Ingrid Bergman had been telling us.
I turned my notebook this way and that without understanding in which direction I should be reading the letters. The insights which very recently had seemed so fantastic, were now little more than foreign symbols. Something which had cooled and solidified. In vain I tried to recall the heat of an hour before, the memory not only of Ingrid Bergman’s thoughts but her entire being. All that was left were random bullet points. Capitalized phrases, a rash of exclamation marks, the occasional question.
Slowly I read them out loud to myself, the pilot next to me enclosed in his headphones. “CLIQUES!”, “MIRRORS!?”, “VISCOSITY!”, “DUALISM!”, “THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH!”. Usually she wrote from left to right, but sometimes also from top to bottom. Before the end of the lecture she would join up the bullet points on the blackboard, like an intricate crossword or a Scrabble board.
Everything taken together seemed to form a gigantic cipher, full of hidden meanings, secret connections she called them, correspondences. Buried links between the history of art and weapons technology, eternal truths and the geopolitics of the day.
To begin with, we students had sat together and tried to interpret all this, help each other to understand what she was hoping to get across. We speculated over where her intriguing accent might have come from. Was she German or Dutch? I thought she was Swedish, like the real-life Ingrid Bergman. But as time passed, our relationship to her world became something much more personal and private for each of us. We all thought that our understanding was the correct one—and did not want to disclose this to anyone other than to Ingrid Bergman herself.
Nobody dared to contact her directly. The more that Ingrid Bergman drew us into the world of her thoughts, the more she seemed also to need to keep us at a distance. The most that she would do was to nod at those students she ran into on campus: she seemed to put all of herself into the lectures, emptying herself entirely.
I had been the exception. Although she must have been at least ten to fifteen years older than us—a time in her life when she should have had a firm base, a nuclear family according to the norm—she cast long looks back at me when we happened to run into each other in the library or on the lawns. It might have been my imagination, my heated dreams. But the other students confirmed it. Made comments.
In due course it was she who became my academic supervisor. After I had completed the basic course, with top grades in each subject, the idea was that I would write a dissertation and that they would arrange everything for the benefit of my double life.
I still sometimes wonder how they could have let me go so far, choosing the particular subject that I did. I can only speculate that even then Edelweiss saw me as a possible candidate for the world’s most important assignment. And that somebody who so intensively called the whole nuclear weapons system into question, could never be suspected of serving the ends of that system: that my research, in the standard way of such paradoxes, would be for him the optimal camouflage.
The working title of my dissertation was “The Atom: a Moral Dilemma”. At first, Ingrid Bergman suggested that it should center on Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century philosopher who was accused of heresy and burned at the stake. From him, threads also ran back to antiquity and the so-called “atomists” in southern Italy.
Bruno was a typical Ingrid Bergman figure—somebody who could get her animated, play a sufficient role in her own dramatization of world history: always lit up and theatrical.
But I wanted to go further. Right up to the fire. My first thought had been that the dissertation should center on Robert Oppenheimer, the “Father of the Atomic Bomb”, who after Hiroshima and Nagasaki pleaded for nuclear weapons never to be used again. But Ingrid Bergman dismissed that as conventional, even banal.
I next tried Andrei Sakharov. The Russian nuclear physicist who was one of the leaders of the Soviet hydrogen bomb project, the step after the atom bomb, and then became the world’s best-known dissident and pacifist. But think about the language, was Ingrid Bergman’s only response. By the time you’ve learned enough Russian, your scholarship funds will have run out.
I could not tell her that I had long since mastered that language too, after both Russian and Arabic courses at West Point. Or that I had inherited my linguistic skills—as well as my German—from my mother.
So then I suggested Lise Meitner. During my advanced course in the theory of science, Ingrid Bergman had described her as the greatest female scientist ever. Einstein had apparently called her “our Madame Curie”. An Austrian Jewish physicist, she had fled to Sweden immediately before the war, and there she was the first to comprehend the principle of nuclear fission—before being hidden away behind an obscure research post at Stockholm’s Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan.
Meitner turned down all the increasingly persuasive requests to move to Los Alamos and to join in the Manhattan Project’s work, refusing to get involved in any sort of military research. Despite that, the over-excited reports in the newspapers after Hiroshima and Nagasaki referred to her as none other than the “Mother of the Atomic Bomb”. The world’s press lined up outside the boarding house in Dalarna province where she was on holiday at this historic moment. Hollywood wanted to produce a movie about her with the title “The Beginning of the
End”. She was incredibly well known at the time—and now was almost forgotten.
It was even said that Meitner had before the war worked out how one could build an atom bomb. While she was still in Germany, she had smuggled out the secret and passed it to the Americans. In the movie script, she was supposed to have fled with the bomb itself in her handbag. That was what decided her to turn down the proposal.
When I mentioned the name, Ingrid Bergman was more or less lost for words. “That’s a fantastic idea,” she said at last, “absolutely brilliant.”
Quite soon the idea appeared to be better on paper than in reality. The problem was not the German, which both Ingrid Bergman and I were able to understand more than adequately. Nor the fact that I, because of my other life as a special agent, could never get clearance for private travel overseas—and most of what was interesting about Meitner’s story seemed to be in the Swedish archives. All I had to do was to tell Ingrid Bergman that I had a pathological fear of flying, which did not appear to surprise her at all: sensitive and talented young man that I was.
That problem resolved itself easily enough because Ingrid Bergman traveled to Sweden regularly to research in the Swedish archives—sometimes she was away for the whole summer—and she copied for me Meitner’s letters to friends and scientific colleagues the world over. It was then that she told me she came from a small town in the far north of Sweden, but that she had when young mostly worked as a boss’ secretary in Stockholm. Before she happened to fall head over heels in love and follow the object of her affections to the U.S., where eventually she began her studies.
The real problem was that there was so little information about Meitner that one could get one’s hands on. Almost nothing about what she had been doing in Sweden during the war, at a time when the academic world was buzzing with rumors about extensive research within nuclear physics, and both sides thought that the other already had a finished bomb. Or what she had been involved in for all those years after the war. Who she really was. Meitner seemed to have wrapped herself in secrecy.
