by Mattias Berg
I felt his eyes burning in the back of my neck as we ran out through the security doors, down the corridor with the packs. In the stairwell we stopped and I tore open the envelopes from Edelweiss. The same passports—still the Core of the Poodle—our money and cards returned.
The courtesies of his web extended throughout the departure process, reeling us out through the checks at Dulles with the same ease with which he had reeled us in through Zaventem. The illusion of freedom spinning down the departures board. Blind eyes and broad smiles through to the gate. Even as we seated ourselves on the Paris flight.
“Skål to Ed! For never keeping to the rules of the game!” Ingrid said.
“So why on earth did he set us free?” I asked.
“God only knows. Maybe he just wanted to play a little longer. Or has flipped, to our side.”
She closed her eyes. I noticed more sweat running down her face—until I realized that it wasn’t sweat at all.
“Why are you crying?” I said.
Ingrid turned to me, opened her eyes, gave me a tearful look. Did not seem at all surprised that I’d addressed her in Swedish, using one of the many basic expressions she’d taught me during our long discussion sessions.
“I’m grieving for Jesús María,” she said, now also in Swedish.
“How do you know she’s dead?”
“She isn’t, my treasure, not yet. But there can’t be too much time.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I was the one who fitted the apparatus inside her. In the women’s restroom on arrival at Dulles.”
“Apparatus?”
“A machine from hell. I did exactly as Jesús María said: followed her macabre instructions. Because I made her a promise, before our flight to Stockholm, that she could take them both down. But not herself, never herself . . .”
She fell silent, dried her tears with the back of her hand. I looked around the cabin.
Then she gave a half-smile, before a last sentence in Swedish:
“And John is the one who will set it off.”
I felt ice throughout my veins, in the midst of all the heat, even though I could not fully comprehend what Ingrid meant. How the duel between Jesús María and John in the restroom would actually play out. Except that it would be a dance of death in which they would both perish.
I looked at her, tried to recall the sequence of events.
“And most of all skål to Jesús María! My blood sister, all the way to the bitter end . . .”
The cloud cover was still above us, like thick gray-white cotton wool, as opaque as everything else at the moment. Soon, though, the plane would break through it all and emerge into the heavenly sunshine. Penetrate the clouds and allow light to flood the cabin.
There was a sudden flash, like sunlight. But it seemed to be hitting us before we had ascended above the clouds.
And I realized that it could not be the sun—the silver-white light was coming from land, not from the ocean to the east. What had happened next I recognized from my worst nightmares. After the sharp white radiance there was the unmistakable mushroom shape, soon swallowed up by the cloud cover. Just before we lost sight of the ground, it seemed as if the entire airport was in flames far below.
Finally the pressure wave, making the aircraft rock violently, knocking the cabin crew onto the floor, and eliciting hysterical screams from the passengers.
“What the hell was all that?” I shouted at Ingrid through the chaos.
She did not look back at me. Just stared out the window, even though one could only make out a thick whitish haze. Muttered the same sentence over and over again:
“Yes. . . what in heaven’s name was that, my treasure . . . What in heaven’s name . . .?”
6
Third Down
December 2013–February 2014
Sicily
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.
*
People had been searching for them for such a long time, predicted their possible existence, the world of science buzzed with rumors. In 1935 Meitner and Hahn had been given joint responsibility for the so-called “Transuranium Project” in Berlin.
From a theoretical point of view, “transuranic elements” is only a generic term for elements which are heavier than uranium, that is to say with more protons in their nucleus, and an atomic number higher than 92. But in practice they both were and are so much more than that. Trans-uranic elements are by nature unstable, seldom exist for more than fractions of a second and are also called “synthetic” elements because the only transuranium which exists naturally on earth—and what is more, in extremely small volumes—is pluto-nium. Other than in a laboratory environment, the others have only been encountered in nuclear reactors or after atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons.
What came to be called neptunium and plutonium carried also for a long time the mysterious designations Element 93 and Element 94 because of their estimated atomic numbers. In other words, it was known that they ought to exist—all theoretical calculations indicated as much—but under conditions prevailing at the time it was in practice still not possible to produce any of the transuranic elements.
With the war and in due course the Manhattan Project came both the possibility and the driving force. Only then was it possible to generate sufficient impetus, energy and motivation to produce the new elements, perform the whole “transmutation” from one element to another. Neptunium was created in 1940, followed soon after by plutonium. The substance which together with uranium made the atomic bomb possible.
Yet in the end it was not Meitner and Hahn who discovered plutonium, despite the fact that they had worked with transuranic elements for longer than most. Instead that honor fell to the Swedish American Glenn Seaborg. And not only for plutonium, a substance which Seaborg was later responsible for enriching to weapons grade at Los Alamos, but also a number of other new elements, in close and fateful succession.
Curium and americium were created in 1944 and 1945, although without practical implications for the outcome of the war. With the arrival of peace, the short window between hot and cold war, Seaborg became professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. At the start of the 1950s his team there produced no fewer than five different transuranic elements in as many years. First berkelium and californium—named after their place of creation—and after that einsteinium, fermium and mendelevium.
The photograph on the facing page (Ill. 13) is a facsimile copy of an historic special issue of “Chemical & Engineering News”. There we see Seaborg and his collaborator Stanley Thompson beaming at a test tube filled with a glittering pale substance against a dark background. The caption underscores the significance of the discovery: “MAGICIANS. Scientists Thompson and Seaborg pose like ancient alchemists in 1948, just before the discovery of californium.”
In the pages of illustrations in the center of my dissertation there is another photograph of californium (Ill. 36). It shows a petri dish full to the brim with a silver substance. The original caption states that the container has a diameter of barely one millimeter. Not surprising, considering that californium is often seen as the world’s most expensive material. At the time of writing, its price is approximately $60 million per gramme.
In the following section (Chapter Six) I will consider more closely californium and its different uses. Not only as a “neutron cannon” for starting up nuclear reactors or creating further new elements, but also, for instance, in the treatment of cancer or to search for gold or oil.
In the same section I will also look in greater detail at certain of the more speculative theories about californium as an active component in a number of very small nuclear weapons. From backpack-sized atomic bombs to the much talked about, but never fully confirmed, nuclear pistol with bullets filled with californium.
But let me dwell a little longer here on researcher and Nobel Prize winner, Seaborg. In the pages which follow, there are more photographs of him. The first one (Ill. 14) shows Seaborg as if in motion, slightly out of focus, surrounded by students on his way into a lecture hall, on one of his many visits to Sweden. He came often to his beloved second homeland, as guest of honor at gatherings for Swedish Americans or to lecture on his area of expertise. It was certainly no disadvantage that this also allowed him to keep up his contacts with the Nobel committee. In 1951 he was awarded the prize, jointly with his colleague Edwin McMillan, for “their discoveries within the chemistry of the transuranic elements”.
On the facing page (Ill. 15) you will also see Seaborg and Meitner together during the Nobel dinner in Stockholm. He is smiling proudly at the camera, she characteristically shy next to him. One side of her face is looking happier, as ever. The other paler, almost sickly. It looks like two different people, if one covers up one side at a time.
This is the source of the working title for this dissertation, “The Two Faces of Lise Meitner”. Before my supervisor and I decided instead to use the title, “Lise Meitner’s Secret”.
Her strangely ambiguous face can be seen in other photographs in these pages. For example in (Ill. 41), the only known picture of Lise Meitner with Edward Teller, the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb. Enrico Fermi, who was central to the development of the atom bomb in Los Alamos, also appears in the photograph. On the reverse is written: “Meeting, Chicago, June 1946”. That is to say, toward the very end of Meitner’s guest professorship at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
But there is no reference to what the meeting might have been about. In her diary, Meitner says only that it was surrounded by “stifling security arrangements”. And then adds: “It felt more
like being a member of a secret society than participating in a scientific discussion.”
Opposite this mysterious photograph is another much later one (Ill. 42). It shows Seaborg at Meitner’s home in Oxford in 1966. He had gone there to present to her in person the prestigious Enrico Fermi Prize, for her “extensive experimental studies leading to the discovery of fission”. A belated consolation for having been denied the Nobel Prize and all the other distinctions which Meitner was never awarded. When the honor was announced, Meitner stated that she did not want to travel across the Atlantic to receive the prize, which was interpreted to mean that she still did not wish to be associated with the bomb. But when Seaborg then offered to travel to her home in Oxford instead, she accepted immediately—and is said to have received him with joy and pride.
The photograph shows Meitner, now close to ninety, looking with apparent delight at a small, black case which Seaborg is handing to her. It cannot have been the medal itself in the case, because that is already lying in a velvet box on her lap together with the plastic-covered diploma.
What the case really contained I have been unable to discover, despite extensive researches in the context of this dissertation. In my concluding section (Chapter 10) I nevertheless describe some of my hypotheses—and what their significance might be for how we should view the woman, and the mystery, that is Lise Meitner.
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.
