The same evening, when his wife came home and they’d gone to bed, he dreamed. The only nightmare he could remember having as an adult. No ether-induced stupor this time; he hadn’t had very much to drink, and he was definitely not eleven years old anymore. Even so he had fallen freely.
Fallen freely, as if in a dream. Simply whirled down and down, fell headfirst into a black hole that never ended. He sat upright in bed without knowing whether he was alive or dead. He must have done something more, because Pia was holding his arm so hard that it hurt. Even though his muscles were tensed like rope.
“What’s going on, Lars? God, I was frightened.”
“I’m alive,” he said. Am I? he thought.
“Of course you’re alive,” said Pia, stroking his cheek. “It was only a dream. A nightmare. I guess you’re not used to them. Don’t forget you’ve promised me to live to be a hundred.”
“I haven’t forgotten. I promise,” said Johansson, shaking his head. I’m alive, he thought.
“Nothing else has happened? Is there anything you want to say? Nothing you’ve forgotten to tell me?”
“I’m going to quit my job,” said Johansson. “I’ve already talked with them. I’m through with this now. I really thought I never would be, but now I am.”
“And nothing else has happened? Something I ought to know?”
“Nothing,” said Johansson. “Nothing has happened.” Finally, he thought. Finally it’s over.
Truth, myth, or just a simple tall tale? Regardless of which, early on Friday morning the first of December a single shot echoed in the park behind Mary Magdalene’s College in Oxford. The previous night had been cold. The ground was white with frost, shrouded in fog that rolled in from the river Cherwell, when the largest of the park’s deer had to sacrifice his life. Still the largest of them all but declining the past few years. Now he mostly created disorder in the herd, bothered the hinds and held back the younger, more energetic stags. For that reason someone decided he should be removed.
The man who held the shotgun was a thirty-year-old professional hunter from one of the nearby estates. Among many other things his employer was also a senior fellow of Magdalen, and his own hunter took care of the wildlife at the College as a part-time job. But no proctor in a Spanish cloak and tall black hat, because that belonged to a time long past. Instead a young, very professional game warden in a green cap and oilskin jacket who made certain there was a proper backstop behind the prey before he shot, who had loaded the bullet the evening before so as not to unnecessarily disturb the peace in the halls of learning, who made the suffering brief and put the bullet in the deer’s neck.
The deer that collapses on the spot, on head and horns, with curled-up front legs and a few final kicks with the back hooves. The red blood that colors the white frost, the final snorting exhalation. Red blood that shows up especially well against white frost, time that stops for a moment. But no more than that, and for the others in the herd life will immediately go on.
Truth, myth, or just a simple tall tale? Regardless of which, on the first Sunday in Advent, Sunday the third of December, there was a dinner at Magdalen College in memory of a recently deceased honorary fellow. Not a remarkable dinner, simply a typical English gentlemen’s dinner, with venison steak, brown gravy, and overcooked vegetables, but the wine they served was excellent. A Romanée-Conti from the great year of 1985, a large quantity of which the special adviser had purchased long before at three-hundred-year-old Berry Bros. & Rudd on St. James Street in London, and also took the opportunity to send a couple of cases to the wine cellar at Magdalen.
The English upper classes have the good custom of almost never giving speeches during dinner. Dinner is eaten every day, dinner speeches are given only on special occasions, and this particular day one of the dinner guests did give a speech. A memorial speech to the deceased.
The speaker was himself both an honorary fellow and a member of the governing body of another college. It had been founded more than five hundred years later and in a completely different era than when the buildings were erected to honor the memory of the foremost of Jesus’s female disciples. It was called St. Antony’s College, which was an honorable enough name compared with all the other colleges at Oxford, but insiders simply called it “The Spy College.” Founded after the most recent world conflagration by donors who almost always wanted to be anonymous and all of whom seemed to have unlimited amounts of money. As an academic institution the logical answer to the Western powers’ demand for better, more educated, and more reliable brains in the Western security agencies. Perhaps the historical inheritance of the five traitors from Cambridge, if you preferred to think along such lines.
The dinner speaker was named Michael Liska, born in Hungary during the Second World War, fled as a teenager to the U.S. after the revolt against the Russians in 1956. He had no notable academic credentials, especially not in the company in which he found himself. He had worked his entire adult life for the CIA, a successful career, and when he had retired a few years ago he had been deputy director of the organization. Even substituted as its director on a few occasions when circumstances compelled the president of the United States to make rapid, radical changes.
A big, burly fellow who was always called “The Bear,” even though “Liska” means “fox” in Hungarian. Michael “The Bear” Liska, who was now a healthy retiree of sixty-seven. Even though as a teenager he climbed up on a Russian T54 in the streets of Budapest, threw a Molotov cocktail through the open turret door, and sent a volley of bullets through the body of the driver when he tried to crawl out of his burning tank.
About this and other things of the same sort he had of course not said a word. Instead, for his learned listeners he talked about his Swedish friend and comrade-in-arms of almost forty years.
He began his memorial oration by recounting his friend’s scientific achievements. The decisive contributions he had made to harmonic analysis in mathematics, about their significance for coding and encryption in an intelligence operation.
Liska also placed him in a historical perspective. The last, and youngest, of the three great Swedish mathematicians who used the gift that only the Lord God Almighty could have given them, to protect freedom and law.
Arne Beurling, who had been the first of them. Professor of mathematics at the University of Uppsala, who in 1940 reluctantly reported for service as a sergeant with the Defense staff’s intelligence division. Then in fourteen days he broke the Germans’ secret telecommunications codes with the help of paper, pen, harmonic analysis, and a highly unusual mind.
His contemporary colleague Johan Forselius, professor of mathematics at the Royal Technical Academy, who with the computers of the new era and his own contributions to prime number theory made sure that the messages the democracies of the Western world chose to conceal would also remain concealed in practice. In the spirit of the time that was then required.
Then the youngest of the three, for whom they were now gathered to grant a final farewell. Forselius’s disciple, professor of mathematics at the University of Stockholm at the age of twenty-nine. His dissertation on stochastic variables and harmonic divisions for many years considerably facilitated the uncovering of every dictator’s evil projects and secret traps.
Liska concluded his talk by quoting the final words in a letter he had received from his old friend only a month or so before he died.