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“First of all I would like to thank you, dearest Ingrid, for helping us start the reboot here in Niscemi. We can reverse your little plan, have the digital footprint of your code sequences, can find the patterns. I don’t think it will take us too long to decipher them, put the weapons system back in place again. We may even disable the briefcase without your assistance. Although we would much rather have it—together with the names of your helpers around the world. So we can now once more defend ourselves with the ultimate means, if the same thing is used to attack us. God help us…”

If Ingrid had been at all derailed, perhaps to some extent devastated, by Sixten’s account of how he had misled her for the whole of their lives together, it did not show. She just sat there ramrod straight, in the shadow of the gallows—still managing to seem untroubled.

“You will not get names—people—from me. You have your counterparts under stones unturned across the world, Ed. Let them do the work. And God help us.”

The candle flickered in the warm draft that blew under the door into the lecture hall and she appeared transfixed in the flame for several moments. Then she began again. Said that what both Edelweiss and I had for so long been seeking, “Lise Meitner’s secret”, did not exist. Not in that sense. That it had been a mere illusion, an integral part of Ingrid’s plans for decades.

Edelweiss took the bait right away.

“But Ingrid, this is so interesting… do you mean to tell us that the very strange happening at Dulles airport, a nuclear explosion with californium as active substance, did not in fact have anything to do with Meitner?”

“Let me put it like this: causal connections are rarely just causal. So yes, Lise had a lot of californium—relatively speaking—in her possession, a small black case, about two inches long, filled with the world’s most valuable substance. She had received it from Glenn Seaborg when he visited her at her home in Oxford in 1966 to deliver the prize. And when I met Lise some years later, shortly before she died, she still did not know why Seaborg had given it to her. Whether he was hoping to hide his discovery from the world, or to give her some token of his affection, or even to pass over to her—the only person he considered his intellectual equal—the responsibility for taking this idea to the next level, before the Russians did. According to Lise, Seaborg had found a new way of producing californium and then keeping it stable with liquid ammonia and another highly secret compound, in a practical container of this sort. A small, copper-lined and battery-powered climate chamber which could maintain a very low temperature for several months. A real Wunderkammer, as she called it.

“But I’m guessing that this was a prototype for small nuclear ammunition. We may in other words have been well ahead of the Russians even then—it was only toward the end of the ’70s that they managed to construct something similar for the bullets for their much talked about californium pistols. But the cooling device that they needed weighed more than 200 pounds, according to our reports. Which was one reason why the weapons never went into full service.”

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.