Bubble: A Thriller

by Anders de la Motte

  He couldn’t help trying it out over and over again.

  The smell of electricity spread through the flat.

  Best plug it in to recharge . . .

  He pulled out a large sports bag and carefully began to pack all his equipment away inside it.

  There was only one thing missing, albeit a very important one. After that, his backup plan would be complete. All he could do was hope that the Fenster’s suppliers would come up with the goods.

  He stretched. His body still felt sore, and his little excursions hadn’t helped.

  Time to take one of the pills and have a little nap.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The security check surprised her.

  No handbags or briefcases, and all your other belongings packed into a transparent plastic bag before you were let in.

  As she waited in the line she took the opportunity to look for cameras. She managed to locate three of them before it was her turn. Dark little spheres up in the ceiling or stuck to the thick stone walls. Exactly the same sort as the ones she had seen in Police Headquarters and down in the bank vault.

  “ID,” the woman on the door said.

  “What?”

  “I need to scan your ID,” the woman said. “It’s the Royal Library’s new security policy. You probably heard about the thefts . . .”

  Rebecca muttered something and fished out her driver’s license. The woman placed it on a flat glass screen set into the counter. There was a flash of light, then a bleep.

  “There you go!”

  Rebecca put the license away.

  “By the way,” she said as the woman was about to turn to the next visitor, “what do you do with the information?”

  “Sorry?”

  “The data, the information from my driver’s license. What happens to it?”

  “You’ll find a copy of our data policy over there.”

  The woman pointed to a notice board and turned away.

  All data relating to visitors is stored for security purposes for thirty days before it is purged of all personal details. The anonymous data is used to help plan our visitor strategy. The Royal Library does not share information with any third parties.

  She couldn’t help glancing up at one of the little round cameras in the ceiling. For a moment she thought she could see movement behind the dark glass. She shivered.

  Pull yourself together, Normén!

  She shook off the sense of unease and carried on into the reading room.

  It took her about ten minutes to find the books she wanted. A couple of dry-as-dust official parliamentary reports and a thick history book. On her way back to her desk she stopped at the coffee machine.

  “The nuclear weapons program, there’s a lot of people interested in that right now! Probably because of that business with the plutonium . . .”

  The voice made her jump.

  An elderly man in a white shirt, tie, and knitted sweater vest was standing behind her. Evidently he had been looking at the books under her arm.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you . . .”

  “Don’t worry,” she mumbled as she got herself a cup.

  “Thore Sjögren,” the man said. “But I’ll refrain from shaking hands.” He held up his hands, both of them clad in white cotton gloves.

  “It looks like you’ve already found what you were looking for, but just say if you need any help.”

  The man seemed rather too old to work there, but maybe he was a regular. A lonely old guy keen for a bit of social contact. Well, she didn’t have time for that sort of distraction.

  “Of course, thanks very much, Thore.” She allowed herself a polite smile, then set off toward her desk.

  “It was an exciting time,” he said as she walked away, as he put a coin in the machine. “Until we got shut down, I mean . . .”

  She put her cup of coffee down and turned around. He took his time at the machine, tentatively adjusting his cup in an attempt to keep his white gloves clean.

  “Did you work on the nuclear weapons program?”

  He nodded, then blew gently on his coffee.

  “Would you mind telling me about it?”

  “Of course not.” He looked around. “I even have a few photographs, if you’re interested.”

  He held up his pass card to a reader, then held the door open for her. So he did work there after all.

  “We want that lift over there.”

  He used his pass card in the lift and pressed one of the buttons.

  “We’re heading for minus three,” he said. “There are five floors in total. Five library buildings stacked on top of one another, plus the one aboveground. Everything printed in Sweden since 1661 is kept here. As soon as anything comes off the printing press—newspapers, journals, books, even audiobooks these days—a copy must be sent here, according to law. It’s fantastic, don’t you think? I usually think of them as little time bubbles, millions of them, all with their own stories from the past. And of course Swedes love time bubbles, have you ever thought about that?”

  Rebecca shook her head. The word bubble had caught her attention, but she realized that Thore Sjögren’s bubbles were quite different from the ones Uncle Tage often mentioned.

  “In the midst of all this change, all this modern technology that we’re so keen to adopt, we still want certain things to remain the way they have always been: Donald Duck on Christmas Eve, national heats for the Eurovision Song Contest, communal singing at Skansen. Not to mention the royal family. Just look at the fuss everyone is making about the princess’s wedding . . . Of course it all requires a huge amount of storage space, the fifth floor is all of forty meters down into the bedrock . . .” Thore Sjögren went on.

  Rebecca was only half listening. All this was doubtless very interesting, but right now she had other things on her mind. Why couldn’t he just get to the point?

  The little man didn’t seem to have noticed her lack of interest and carried on about how much shelf space there was, how many pages. Without even pausing long enough to drink his coffee.

  Finally the lift stopped and they emerged into a long, well-lit corridor. The dark globe of the camera in the ceiling was unmissable . . .

  “My little cubbyhole is at the far end,” Thore said, gesturing with his free hand toward the other end of the corridor.

  He set off, and she followed a meter or so behind him.

  A strange little character, slightly shorter than she. Thin gray hair arranged in a neat side part. Reading glasses on a cord around his neck. Vest, white shirt, and tie, even though it must be thirty degrees outside, and then those white cotton gloves.

  His clothes accentuated the impression that he was a cozy little old uncle. But it took her only a few seconds to notice that his neatly ironed shirt collar was worn and frayed, and that his well-polished shoes could have done with new heels a while back. The sense of creeping but inevitable decay suddenly made her feel rather depressed. She’d seen this before, at close quarters.

  Dad. Everything seemed to begin and end with Dad.

  Thore Sjögren pointed to a double door just ahead of them on the right.

  “And in there is the apartment . . .” he whispered.

  “What?”

  He stopped and turned around.

  “The apartment. Nelly Sachs’s apartment, exactly as it was when she died. Down to the very last detail. The ultimate time capsule or bubble. Fascinating, don’t you think?”

  She smiled and tried to look like she knew what he was talking about, but evidently didn’t succeed particularly well.

  “Of course you know who Nelly Sachs was?”

  “Erm . . . actually I don’t.”

  He sighed, then took a deep breath.

  “Nelly Sachs, a German author with Jewish roots, born December tenth, 1891, in Schönenberg. She mostly wrote poetry, and her early works were burned by the Nazis in 1933.

  “Selma Lagerlöf, no less, helped her to escape to Sweden in 1940, and in 1952
she became a Swedish citizen. She remained here until her death in 1970 . . .”

  He paused to catch his breath.

  “Nelly Sachs was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, which was actually handed out on her birthday. She left all her belongings to the Royal Library: papers, books, even the furnishings in her apartment. It was all reconstructed in there . . .”

  He pointed toward the double doors again.

  “Just the way it was when she died.”

  Rebecca nodded, not entirely sure what she should say. But this time he seemed to pick up on her cool response.

  “A little digression, perhaps, you’ll have to forgive me. I don’t often have visitors down here, and sometimes it does get a little lonely . . .”

  For a moment it looked almost as if the little man was blushing.

  “But the story of Nelly Sachs actually has some connection to the subject that interests you.”

  He stopped at a small door, pulled out a key, and unlocked it.

  “Please, do go in, Nelly . . . No, no, of course I mean Rebecca . . .” he quickly corrected himself.

  She stepped inside. The room was little more than ten square meters in size, and the slightly claustrophobic atmosphere made her think almost immediately of the interview rooms in Police Headquarters. Most of the space was taken up by a desk covered with papers, some bulging bookshelves along one side, and two office chairs.

  The little man closed the door behind her. The thick concrete walls seemed to absorb the sound, making it muffled.

  “Well, as I was saying,” Thore went on. “Nelly Sachs became a Swedish citizen in 1952, the same year that we started to build the first nuclear reactor in the bedrock below the Royal Institute of Technology. Please, sit down . . .”

  He gestured to one of the chairs.

  “In 1966, the year she got the Nobel Prize, Sweden signed the nonproliferation treaty where we promised to stop trying to develop an atomic bomb of our own, and by the time she died in 1970, work on shutting down the program was well under way. Two years later almost everything had been closed down . . .”

  “But not quite everything . . .” Rebecca added quickly.

  He gave her a long look and took a first sip of his coffee.

  “No, you’re right. Part of the project continued. It was called defense research . . .”

  “But it was actually something completely different?” she said.

  He shook his head slowly.

  “You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet, my dear . . .”

  He patted the lid of a folded laptop, a fairly old model, that was sitting in the middle of the desk.

  “The nuclear weapons program as a whole was shut down in the seventies. The Ågesta reactor was closed down in 1973. Of course little fragments of the research carried on, but their activities were severely restricted, and limited to defense research.”

  “I see. So what was your role, Thore?”

  She glanced at her watch.

  “I was a research assistant in what was known as the L-Project. We worked mainly out in Ågesta in what we called Reactor Three. We were trying to produce our own plutonium, but without much success. When Erlander and Palme shut us down, I had to leave. Now, in hindsight, obviously that looks like a good thing. Helping to develop an atomic bomb isn’t the sort of thing you want on your conscience when you reach the autumn of your life.”

  He suddenly stood up.

  “But forgive me, my dear, how very impolite of me. Here I am, running on, and you didn’t bring your coffee with you. Can I offer you something else? A little mineral water, perhaps?”

  He leaned down and opened a small cupboard in one of the bookcases, from which he conjured up a bottle of Ramlösa and a glass.

  She opened the bottle with the opener he gave her, poured a glass, and drank it in silence. The bubbles stung her tongue and she was starting to get a very strong feeling that she was wasting valuable time.

  “Now, let’s see . . . since we moved out of the villa I’ve kept most of my papers here. Maj-Britt didn’t want it all at home. I was thinking of writing a book . . .”

  He shuffled the piles of paper on his desk, evidently looking for something. High time to get to the point, before he started up again:

  “Thore, did you ever work with anyone called Erland Pettersson?”

  No reaction, he didn’t even look up, which actually felt like something of a relief. But at the same time it didn’t.

  “Or Tage Sammer?”

  Still no response.

  “No, I’m afraid neither of those names sounds familiar . . .” he muttered as he stood up and went over to the files in the bookcase at the other end of the room.

  She was close to swearing out loud with relief and disappointment. Then another name occurred to her.

  “What about André Pellas?”

  He stopped.

  “You know him, don’t you?” She could hear how eager she sounded.

  “Well, I’m not sure I’d say that I know him . . . Lieutenant Colonel Pellas was in charge of one of the sections within the program.”

  “Which one, which section?” She was fighting a spontaneous urge to leap up from her chair.

  “They were called the I-Group. They kept themselves to themselves, you could say. Information and Intelligence, I think that was their real title, but I’m not entirely sure. I’m afraid my memory isn’t quite what it used to be . . .” He shook his head.

  “And what was their role in the program?”

  “I don’t really know. But there was a monthly report, where we would register problems that had arisen. Instances where we had ground to a halt entirely used to be marked with a large I. A week or so would pass, and then we would be given a detailed description of what to do in order to solve the problem. The report would be in Swedish, but every now and then you could tell that it had been translated from English. It was mostly just a feeling, certain words and expressions . . .”

  “And those reports would come from the I-Group? In that case, surely that must have meant they were talking to people outside the program?”

  He shrugged.

  “We were fairly convinced of that, but we never had any direct proof . . .”

  “The Americans?”

  “That’s the logical answer. Even if the politicians might have liked to suggest the opposite, there had been strong military ties between Sweden and the USA ever since the war. The American OSS, the forerunners of the CIA, for instance, financed secret military activities along the northern part of the Norwegian border. The main purpose wasn’t to fight the Nazis, but to have troops ready once the Germans had withdrawn. To prevent any potential Soviet annexation of Norway,” he clarified. “The operation would never have been possible without the help of the Swedish military and intelligence services . . .”

  He broke off midsentence and smiled apologetically.

  “I’m sorry, my dear, I’ve wandered off the point once again, but I was trying to show that the Swedish and American militaries had been cooperating, albeit unofficially, long before our project began . . .”

  She nodded.

  “Do you know what happened to the I-Group later, after 1972?”

  He paused for a few seconds as he drank his coffee.

  “Like I said, the project was shut down, and the military personnel were transferred to other duties. Those of us who were civilians had to try to find work elsewhere. Very sad, of course, so many dedicated colleagues, so much work just abandoned. All in vain . . .”

  He sighed.

  “I myself moved to Västerås and got a job at ABB as an automation engineer. I was there until I retired. They were a fantastic company to work for, so you could say that it turned out for the best in the end. You see, we developed processes that . . .”

  He carried on, but she was no longer listening to what he was saying.

  She had been right. Uncle Tage had worked on the nuclear weapons program, handling the exchange o
f information with the Americans.

  “Now, let’s see . . .”

  Thore Sjögren took out an envelope and spread its contents across the desk. Photographs, most of them black-and-white, but a few in color. Faded pictures of long-forgotten summer holidays, outings, and other significant events. Judging by the clothes and hairstyles, most of them were taken in the sixties and seventies.

  “My wife, Maj-Britt,” he muttered, putting down a photograph of a smiling, sunburned woman in a sundress sitting at a table in a restaurant.

  “She passed away three years ago . . .”

  “I’m sorry . . .”

  He went on looking through the pictures.

  “Here!”

  He laid out several black-and-white pictures. Typical group shots that could have been from any business. Lots of somber men in suits, some in white coats. Sixty or seventy of them in total, lined up in three rows on a broad flight of steps.

  “That picture was taken in 1966 or 1967, I seem to recall . . . That’s me.”

  He pointed to a young man in the middle row with a side par. The resemblance was striking.

  “Young and fashionable.” He laughed. “These days I’ve only got the and left . . .”

  He ran his finger across the rows of faces.

  “There,” he said, but she had already spotted him.

  Back row, third from the left. Suddenly she felt sick.

  “Colonel Pellas,” he said, pointing, but she was staring at a different face altogether.

  Her dad’s.

  22

  AND THOSE WE’VE LEFT BEHIND

  THEY WERE STANDING in a clearing among the trees. Even though it was dark and he was a long way off at first, he had no trouble recognizing them. The old man with the stick, straight-backed.

  Beside him Mange’s slouched silhouette. Steam was rising from their coffee cups.

  As he approached them through the snow he gradually noticed more people in there among the trees. Dozens, possibly even hundreds of silent silhouettes that seemed to be watching him. He could feel the snow crunch beneath his feet, but oddly enough there was hardly any sound. The two men now had company in the clearing. Four more figures, all in white Guy Fawkes masks, with painted, curling mustaches and goatee beards.