Now my allocated sleep time would only let me have sixty-five minutes, with a marginally reduced level of internal surveillance, before Kurt or John came to wake me. And the Nurse would no doubt follow me all the way into the bedroom, ready to sound the alarm at the slightest unnatural movement, even though she did not figure anywhere on the roster.
She was slumbering beside me in the car, to all intents disengaged, even though we had almost reached the hotel. I ran my eyes over the Nurse’s face, her heavy make-up, the dyed-blond hair, the short, compact figure. Tried to get a feeling for who she was. To understand why just this person had been allowed to accompany me here, been given this assignment.
A dull day then passed, as if in slow motion. The spare itinerary showed the extent to which this official visit had been thrown together in haste. Our reception at the Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan was a disappointment. There was no sense of history at all, no experimental reactor R.1, no glimpse of the rooms in which Lise Meitner might have worked. Only the dull exhibition halls and a number of sterile display cases with a variety of “environmental innovations”.
The First Couple had played their roles, as usual, nodded and said this and that, asked all the right questions. They had even had a short time to rest before the dinner while we installed ourselves in the temporary surveillance center, a grandiose two-storey high corner room on the upper floors, with bracket lamps fixed to the walls and a thick blue carpet covered with small yellow crowns.
From this vantage point we could keep watch over all of the entrances to the hotel, as well as large parts of the surrounding terrain facing three points of the compass. On the other side of our wall, with connecting doors, was the Presidential couple’s lavish seven-room suite, laid out over four floors, including the luxurious little bedroom on the top level of a cupola which had been added to the building. But since the observers in our advance party had failed in their efforts to have the hotel install bullet-proof glass in the room’s panoramic windows, it could be used now only as a relaxation room for the bodyguards.
As usual it would not take me many seconds to reach the President’s side if the alarm was sounded. Or, in this case, leave his side.
The Winter Garden banqueting hall also lay but a few doors from our space. It was there that the dinner was going to be held, starting in about an hour and continuing until just before midnight, when official events always ended. Protocol dictated that the President’s own detail was in charge of physical personal security, but Kurt and John began to set up our own portable monitors along the longest wall of our corner room. In the meantime, I made myself comfortable in the heavy marble window frame, from where I had the best vantage point.
The view was like a fake. A piece of theatrical scenery, a picture postcard, as artlessly idyllic as the whole of this neutral little country. I stared out at the sun, the light, the sky, a whole illuminated world which I would soon have to leave. When Alpha gave the signal, it would at the same time be the starting gun for a new existence for us both. Forever on the run, like some quarry, prey, rats underground. Yet I had no idea what I was waiting for. What kind of sign.
I let my gaze sweep on, across the throng of people outside the hotel not just hoping for a glimpse of the President—they were after the scent of some accident, maybe even a terrorist attack: people, just like sharks, are attracted to blood. As the time passed, the light from the setting sun started to filter through the houses along Skeppsbron, on the opposite side of the water. The scene darkened with the light, the baroque facades lost their earthen colors, ocher and umber, and the sun sailed behind the stately but lifeless buildings like an enormous red balloon.
My watch showed 19.31. Ten minutes till sundown. So often it had been the secret signal to launch an attack, with our superior night-combat technology. Operation Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom, or full-scale nuclear weapons training. The aim was often to start at the very moment when the sun dropped like a mysterious piece of space rock straight down into the sand and the desert night fell in an instant.
During the last minute of daylight I stared as much at my watch as at the view outside the window, counting down to myself. At 19.41, exactly on time according to the calendar, the fiery globe’s last contour dipped below the horizon: as if swallowed up by the enormous tunnel system under the platforms of Kungsträdgården station.
But still no sign of Alpha. No signal from the one person who could help me.
Time passed. Just before midnight, Zafirah also disappeared, the first one on our roster heading up the stairs to the bedroom floor. Every half hour throughout the night the Nurse laid two warm—almost sweaty—fingers against my wrist, checking my pulse. She had taken up position next to me in the window frame. Stroked my forehead, making sure that my body temperature had not started to race away again.
I myself peered ever more often at my watch, soon at intervals of only a few minutes. The briefcase seemed to burn at my feet.
At 04.50, a few minutes before it was my turn to sleep, Zafirah pushed herself between me and the Nurse. With a serious look she told us that she had received new orders, now that the results of my medical tests taken just before departure were available. That she should also take her rest with me and the Nurse, for safety’s sake.
So when Edelweiss came down from the bedroom level, still drowsy and with the many folds in his face creased from sleep, Zafirah got to her feet and led me up the stairs while the Nurse fell in at the rear of our little column.
I was allowed first into the bathroom. Through the walls I could hear Zafirah moving her sofa-bed until it blocked the bedroom door from the inside. With her almost inhuman ability to master her small, muscular form, to focus her whole force onto one tiny point.
For the benefit of the Nurse, Zafirah said that she very much wanted to be able to look out through the window on the opposite side of the room, “to lose myself in the pale northern darkness”. I never heard any answer. Maybe the Nurse had fallen asleep.
I put the briefcase—never once out of reach—down next to the toilet and relieved myself while standing up, with the black security strap still around my left wrist. I splashed outside the bowl as much as I could, marking the gold mosaic which must have cost hundreds of dollars per square foot. When I emerged, the Nurse was lying snoring on the outer side of our double bed, a dark sound with some lighter overtones. I eased myself over her and pressed myself hard against the wall.
The trick of course is never to let yourself sink below the surface, either mentally or physically. Beneath me, the sheet creased, like wrinkles blown by the wind on the ocean surface or the desert sand. But time raced on, as it does when it is running out. First 5.11 a.m., then 5.23 a.m., barely before I had time to blink. Light started to leak up over the facades of the city, from below the horizon, ocher and umber returning from the earth’s core. The screeching of gulls sounded like vultures through the triple-glazed windows.
And then there was no more than half an hour left for me to get some sort of indication of how I was going to get myself out, to solve the classic riddle of the locked room, find the invisible crack in the wall.
I slid myself backward in the bed, tried to find a position from which I could observe as much as possible, both inside and outside the bedroom, find a lead. My wrist-watch showed 05.57. Three minutes left until Kurt or John would come to wake us up.
At that moment, the alarm went off. The howling sirens drowned out the cries of the seagulls, cut right into my brain.
At last: the signal from Alpha.