“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.”
I think that everything became still. But inside my head there was a hissing, a roar, as Ingrid went on.
“Erasmus, I’m sorry… but I thought we needed something in common that neither of us would forget. Not even when confronted with the worst challenge any human being has ever faced: with Doomsday in the palm of our hand. So I burned my own code system into your subconscious as well. Tested you first with the arachnophobia. And when that was securely lodged I—and you—were ready for that abhorrent memory from childhood. The moment when a mother disappears within herself.”
She hesitated for an instant—and then went on to clarify.
“So you have to understand. It wasn’t you who made up the code. Not you who had a pathological fear of spiders. Not you who sat there at the kitchen table with your distraught mother, only thirteen years old and showing her the book cipher as some kind of distraction. Who had a dark enough imagination to come up with that peculiar key sentence.
“No, it was me, Erasmus. And my own poor little mother.”
7.02
When you no longer understand anything, everything can be a clue.
Which is why, inside the solemn solitude of the isolation cell, I took out my dissertation and started to turn the pages again. From cover to cover, over and over. Trying to remember the exact circumstances in which each separate part had been written. What I had been thinking, what she had said. Who I might indeed have been at various stages.
They had also let me keep my notebook. Not out of kindness, but because they genuinely wanted to know, Edelweiss said. See the end of my chronicle. How I would describe even this unlikely ending. So I did as they—as Edelweiss—wanted, did not know what else to do. Was scrupulous not to change anything to fit the knowledge I now had. Or to judge what might have been real and what was not. In that way I kept the account pathetically innocent, or ignorant, up to and including our interrogation.