The decisive difference between this official visit and earlier ones was that something would now be happening. An incident at least as grave as those we had faced during the most serious of our maneuvers—and this time, what is more, for real. The run-through carried much more significance than all of our earlier rehearsals.
And no-one other than me knew anything about it.
As usual, the three-dimensional animation began with our intended escape route in the most critical situation. Alert level LILAC, when the President was to be taken under protection and our team would assume command of the whole military apparatus. It showed POTUS and FLOTUS surrounded by our fast-paced escort, in which our Team had been mixed up with the President’s own handpicked security detail. With me never more than fifteen feet away from him, the briefcase in my grasp, ready to use.
Now I saw all the strictly classified information I had never been able to get at during my research: details of the path we were to follow. If the need arose, our escape route would run from our quarters at the Grand Hotel to the assembly point at the helipad in Stockholm’s Gamla Stan. The secret emergency exit on this occasion turned out to be a narrow little hatch to the left of the last set of stairs, down toward the goods entrance of the hotel on Stallgatan 4.
But from then on the escape route became less narrow, in the form of a gigantic tunnel system deep in the bed-rock, stretching under the whole of central Stockholm and its outer edges.
This system was unknown to the public, according to Edelweiss. I tried to find the best place to split off from the Team—but the number of possibilities seemed almost endless. On the sketches, the system looked like an enormous terra incognita, in which our escape route was marked in red and most of the rest was a morass of dotted lines and shaded areas: like a map of the world before it was known to be round. According to the observers in our advance party, we would also have to depend on headlamps down there, because none of the tunnels had light sources.
The escape route started off heading northward, through passages running under the Blasieholmen peninsula. Once we were level with the platforms of Kungsträdgården Tunnelbana station, we would turn sharp west and then immediately south, passing through underwater tunnels. Then we would continue further south, deep under the Parliament, the Royal Palace and the oldest parts of the city, rising to the surface again at the helipad at the edge of the water on Riddarfjärden. From there, the airborne forces would take over, leading POTUS and FLOTUS to safety escorted by an alternate non-NUCLEUS Carrier of the briefcase while the Team would muster for a counter-attack.
Edelweiss froze the animation at an immense verdigrised copper gate. It originated, he said, from the ruins of the seventeenth-century Makalös palace, according to him one of the most beautiful and talked-about buildings of the time, and had been installed in the walls of the underground system as a part of its artistic decoration. He made a point of saying that the gate had not been opened since it was put there in 1983, and that it could likely not be budged so much as a fraction of an inch without the greatest difficulty.
Yet the observers in our advance party had felt uncomfortable with even that minimal risk: of somebody making their way in from the passages of the blue Tunnelbana line directly beneath the President’s quarters. The whole Kungsträdgården station had therefore been sealed off in preparation for our visit.
Every time Edelweiss played the animation through again, so we could learn the escape route by heart, my first impression became clearer. Next to the copper gate you could see something set in the rock wall, more regular than the rough pattern of the stone: a paler, small square. The similarity to the control panel outside our own secure facilities—reminiscent of an ordinary, innocent electrical box—could not have been a coincidence.
So having no idea how I might be able to realize my crazy dream, I determined that the copper gate from the Makalös castle would be the invisible crack in the wall.
The starting point of my and Alpha’s impossible escape out of the Team. “We two against the world.”
1.03
A natural cloud can weigh five hundred tons. A mushroom cloud so much more.
Before I was given my assignment, I used to wonder how all that weight would affect a person. How it would feel to exercise control and power over the nuclear weapons system, to be the finger on the Doomsday button. The man with the briefcase. The Carrier.
When I came to the Team in November 2001, I had for some time harbored doubts. My doctoral thesis had in essence been one long questioning of the justification for nuclear weapons. I tested the limits, challenged, pushed and tugged at the issues. At first I had even thought of calling it “The Atom: A Moral Dilemma”, but I was persuaded by my supervisor to change the title to “Lise Meitner’s Secret”.
My home life revolved around a family who knew nothing about my other existence. I played the roles of researcher and family man—with a well-educated wife, two girls and a boy aged eleven, nine and seven, a house in the suburbs and drinks on a Friday with our middle-class neighbors—in the same faithful way as that of “The Man with the Briefcase”. Everything had been false and true in equal measure.
And there’s nothing to say that one’s feelings become weaker while leading a double life. Rather the opposite: this intense heat, the intricate interplay within a life which all the time had to be manipulated, just made everything more intense. Even though I was play-acting on all fronts, for many years I was able to be both passionate and professional across the board. Until the briefcase’s inherent weight, the absurd load of my assignment, began to be too much for me to handle.
But I still went along with it for a few years more, while doubt and hesitation grew. I was like a Hamlet within the nuclear weapons system. Then, out of the blue, I was contacted by Alpha. I came to realize that I had an unusual ally.
And the time had now come. Tense, I waited for the signal, even though I still had no idea what it might look like. Peered through the tinted windows as we sped through empty streets into Stockholm.
Over the years we had got used to never seeing city centers other than just like this. The same the world over, wherever we came. The most vibrant and sprawling cities, empty and sealed off, devoid of natural life. The buildings intact, the people gone. As in the aftermath of the big bang, the detonation of a “neutron bomb”.
The briefcase was on the floor between my legs, in accordance with the regulations which governed movement by transport, the security strap fastened over my left wrist. The President and the First Lady exchanged small talk on the rear seats of our car, speaking softly so that none of the rest of us could make out what they were saying.
I unclenched my right fist, squinted at the print-out and recited under my breath the allocated sleep times for myself. Zafirah 00.00—02.13, Edelweiss 02.13—04.55, Erasmus 04.55—06.00. Kurt and John never slept at night during our shorter state visits, but still seemed to get enough rest while we crossed the Atlantic, when they shared guard duty equally.
Yet again, Zafirah had drawn the winning lot. Edelweiss assured us that the sleep times were allocated at random—but once again I had ended up with the last and shortest slot. They must have had suspicions about me for such a long time.