by Mattias Berg
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.”
7
Final Quarter
February–March 2014
Niscemi, Italy
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 i
n 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 ha
d 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.”
