For the first time Ingrid turned directly to me.
“Hardly anyone knows that we even exist. Isn’t that right, my treasure?”
I felt the strength of her glare, so I turned back to the screen. Still without being able to get out a single word.
“Hardly anyone has an idea who we are, or where, you see. Or of the Team’s existence. And the few who do will keep on doing whatever they can to stop anybody from finding out—now more than ever. Finding out that we’ve had this type of experimental crack unit, contrary to all procedures, even at certain times with full operational responsibility for the most dangerous weapon in the history of mankind. So their goal will be to envelop us in the same silence from which we first emerged. Melt us back into hellfire, like a pack of tin soldiers.”
“And how many would you say know the whole story, Ingrid?”
“If you mean that we ever existed, then the innermost circle which Edelweiss called NUCLEUS, and I would say about twenty or so in addition to us. If you mean that I and Erasmus have broken away with both his briefcase and my portable command terminal still in hair-trigger alert, you’d have to reckon half that number. The President, inevitably, as well as the rest of the Team and a very small number of our most senior commanders. All the others who were here with us in Stockholm will probably have been told that we were taken down some days ago. Rendered harmless, in terms both of existence and function.”
A last little pause for effect.
“But as we always used to say, Sixten: ‘What is essential is invisible to the eye.’”
2.06
I could only blame what happened next on my exhaustion.
The fact that it was closer to 5.00 a.m. by the time we came back to the Test Rooms. My having been knocked off course by Ingrid’s plan. My lack of physical training for nearly four days—while at the same time having been on the receiving end of a number of anesthetic injections. My body’s reaction following the surgery.
But it was purely a beginner’s mistake. The sort of error I had not made in decades, hardly at all after beginning my special forces training at West Point as a new cadet, little more than twenty years old.
We could not find Jesús María, not in the large rock chamber where Ingrid and I had our bunks or in the smaller one, where she had carried out the surgery and then gone to lie down for a rest. We searched frenetically, splitting up so that we could cover a larger area, searching with the help of our headlamps far beyond the circle of light thrown by the night lights. Maybe Ingrid really was anxious that something might have happened to her “blood sister”. As for me, I was worried about where she might pop up next: like the time in my youth when a gigantic hairy spider had simply disappeared among the sleeping bags during a scout trip.
The darkness, the bed-rock, the plan, everything being so unreal—all of it probably increased the tension. And also the feeling from the two largest display cases furthest in toward the western long wall, which I had not studied closely before. I shone my headlamp into them, one at a time—with rising fascination and alarm.
In the right-hand case were a number of stuffed animals, packed tightly together, in lamentable condition. A zebra on which most of the beautiful coat along one side seemed to have moldered away. A tiger in an attacking pose with its head laid bare: only a thin white membrane protected the cranium. A mighty rhinoceros, with parts around the eyes and the horn which were white. A troop of monkeys of different sizes and in varying states of decay.
The left-hand display case was even more nightmarish—with a number of skeletons neatly lined up. First humans, everything from tall adults to very small children, after that animals by turn, based on what seemed to be their genetic proximity to mankind. More monkeys and apes, and in addition pigs, dogs and many smaller skeletons which I could not identify.
Here too everything was in a terrible condition. The skulls on several of the humans had crumbled, as if eaten away, all the monkeys and apes were missing body parts and each of the skeletons had some marked damage.
My own condition still being fragile, I had difficulty in bringing down my pulse. So I became amateurishly keen when I suddenly sensed something inside the man-high glass display case with the stuffed animals. A tiny suggestion of movement between the chimpanzees and the gorillas, right in front of the tiger. So lightning quick that you could hardly register it: just a fraction of a second.
When I took a couple of steps into the unlocked case, shone around with my headlamp among the crumbling animals, I felt the chill of some sort of silk around my throat. Twisted many times to make it as thin as possible. To cut properly into my larynx.
“Where the hell have you been?”
With her free hand, Jesús María pulled the door of the display case shut again—and switched off my lamp. As I gasped for air a sickly sweet smell streamed in through my nostrils. I tried to work out if it was moth-proofing for the stuffed animals, or some sort of knock-out drug. In the end I decided it must be something for Jesús María’s private needs. Something she was heavily dependent on.
Jesús María relaxed the pressure around my throat for a brief moment before tightening again. That was the usual strategy. Let the victim think he might escape—only then to make him lose hope again. Psychological destabilization as well as physiological. I began to cough. Partly because I had to, partly to play for time.
“Checking things out. Where our pursuers might be,” I finally said.
She kept up the pressure with the noose around my throat. Possibly pulled it a fraction tighter.
“I don’t take prisoners, Erasmo, I promise you that. You’ve got exactly three seconds. What the hell are we doing here?”
Torture training is just theory, however realistic the exercises are said to be. It is always harder to hold out in actual practice. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
“We were up with someone who calls himself Sixten. He seems to have worked with Ingrid in the Swedish program, in the old days.”
“That much I know… that guy. More.”
Yet again Jesús María relaxed the noose, maybe half an inch—before she pulled it tight again. Soon I would be able to hold out no longer. I could see small dots in the air: the first sign of serious oxygen starvation.
“His wife is called Aina.”
Jesús María loosened the noose, half an inch, three quarters, an inch. Probably realized that I would not be giving her any more information, would follow regulations by giving her details which were correct but without significance. I heaved for breath, tried to get in as much air as possible—and just then she tightened up again. Harder than before.
“Now you’ve got one second, Erasmo. For real.”
I did not have enough oxygen for more than a few words at a time. The syllables crept like fat caterpillars over my swollen lips.
“They had blackout… curtains in the… living… room.”
“Half a second!”
The blood was draining away from above my throat, as if my whole head was being cut off. I tried shaking my body, to communicate that I knew nothing more of value, but could not move. My legs started to fold. My grip on the briefcase loosened. It fell to the floor of the display case, the security strap starting to cut deeply into the flesh of my wrist.
Yet I made one last attempt. Nearly everybody wants to be admired, most of the time.
“She said… you had been… textile… designer… Mexico. You make… beautiful… thig… things.”
Jesús María hesitated for a second, let go a little, tightened again—before finally releasing. But probably not thanks to my flattery. More likely because she had realized what so many torturers had before her: a dead informant loses all meaning. His value falls from one hundred to zero.