by Mattias Berg
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.”