Then I turned my field glasses toward the landing strips, the aircraft, the fuel depots. The area from where the blast came. That old-fashioned, low-tech explosion, the very opposite of a nuclear charge. Thick, roiling black smoke rose toward the sky in the north-east corner of the base. As far away as one could get from the circle where R.R. Maine was now getting to his feet, after the successful demonstration of the world’s most advanced radar-based guidance system for bombs.
Maybe he had not even noticed the attack, been so absorbed in his own bubble of adrenaline and euphoria. Before he realized that the applause would not come, the sirens had started to howl across the base, the lights to flash. The voice of the commentator was replaced by a recorded loop: “All visitors are requested to vacate the area immediately and to follow the instructions of the guards. This is not a drill! We repeat: this is not a drill!”
I tried to control my breathing, assess the situation. Kept away from the guards who were beginning to direct all the guests of honor down through the evacuation exits which had been opened under the luminous red circles and that led into the network of culverts, then up onto the abandoned fields on the other side of the main road.
Instead I waited until the activists were let in. Because those in charge of the outer gate had been forced to avoid even worse consequences—maybe some people suffocated, a few civilian deaths—when, after the explosion, the demonstrators tried to climb the fences to see what had happened inside the base. Simultaneously, the security forces stormed in to stop the protesters from getting any closer: to our sealed-off but possibly still revealing storage site for the live nuclear warheads, from which the smoke was now billowing. Soon everybody else found themselves trapped. Children, old enthusiasts, families.
And when the chaos was at its height, I made my way out of the base. Above ground, amid the throngs of people: first through the inner gate, then the outer gate. I had been training for this kind of thing for most of my adult life. Navigating even in the most difficult terrain.
So I was able to follow the tall woman and her short companion through the chaos when I caught sight of their familiar movements about a hundred feet ahead of me. I stuck to them, my eyes on their backpacks—new black ones, I noticed—as they made their way along the side of the autoroute. Until we reached the taxi which was waiting in a clearing.
“What the hell happened?” the driver said.
“Can you skip Hasselt and take us straight to Zaventem, to the airport?” Jesús María said.
“How dangerous is it going to be for me, Madame?”
“Who knows, but you’ll probably be O.K., you’ll see. Either way, you’ll get a shit load of money, you know that.”
The driver scanned our motley crew in his rearview mirror: Ingrid, propped up between us, more or less lifeless, sinking fast, and still giving off a distinct smell of burning even though her protective clothing had been fully extinguished. I remained, despite my disguise, vaguely familiar. The ever-baffling Jesús María. When he heard the sirens from the emergency vehicles approaching from the opposite direction, he drove off along the winding forest roads.
When we got to the airport we found a remote corner. Half-dragging Ingrid inside, Jesús María gave her an injection—painkiller, sedative, God knows what else—and looked at me. She seemed almost to be smiling, maybe at my rudimentary disguise with wig, beard and mustache.
“O.K. Erasmo, where to now?”
I stared at her.
“Hasn’t Ingrid said anything?”
“Zip, nada. You know her.”
Jesús María saw my hesitation, or maybe it was horror, glanced at Ingrid and shrugged.
“So. Make a decision, Erasmo. Rise to the occasion.”
I walked thirty or so feet away from her, from the café and the people, from the television screens showing the breaking news from the airbase—mostly material damage, no lives lost but some injuries among the fire fighters. This would make the Nuclear Weapons Scandal stories even harder for our military authorities to contain. I went into the telephone booth. Glanced at the huge clock on the wall outside: 21.12. Closed my eyes, went through the options, made up my mind—or perhaps followed my instincts.
“Erasmus, good Lord, you’re alive!” Sixten said.
“Yes…” I said, and immediately pressed the red button, without really knowing why.
For a few moments more I pondered—it felt like minutes but could well have been seconds—looking over toward the two women there in the dark corner of the airport. If anybody else saw them they would not understand what was going on. Two women with bulky packs: even bigger than before, with yet one more large black bag which Ingrid must have been carrying over her shoulder. One of them awake, the other in a deep sleep, just beyond one of the airport cafés outside the security zone, next to the cleaners’ storage area. A brief rest stop before the next stage on a long journey. Nobody who noticed us would begin to comprehend anything of the context.
A large hairy spider dashed across the floor. I knew it could not really be here, at a modern European airport, not that kind of species—yet my arachnophobia now seemed like the only real thing in my life. Not until the spider crept up my wrist, the artery, did I shudder: had to fight to control myself to not try to brush it off or even shout out loud inside the booth. In a cold sweat I looked around. None of the other travelers seemed to be in the least bit interested in us. Ingrid was still unconscious, her head against the wall, and even Jesús María had closed her eyes.
I took the phone, put in a few coins and dialed the number I had memorized, along with everything else.
“We’re coming in. She’s completely under, probably won’t wake up before we reach you,” I said.
Edelweiss breathed deeply at the other end of the line. I must have woken him in the middle of his obligatory 3.00 p.m. power nap.
“So you no longer believe Oskarsson’s stories? That she’s going to short-circuit the whole system,” Edelweiss said.
I heard him pant through the trans-Atlantic static. Calculating, analyzing, weighing his alternatives without exactly knowing what his opponent’s were. The art of war.
“And how can we know, my friend, that you’re telling the truth now? Will keep your own little side of our bargain?” he said.
“How can I know that you will?” I said.
He held back, waited for my next move—which followed:
“Shall I try to get Jesús María to come in too?”
“Yes, do that. That would be good. Seats will be arranged for you on the night flight.”
Silence once more, before his final remark.
“Posterity will be forever grateful to you, Erasmus. And you won’t forget to bring the briefcase, will you?”
“Don’t you have it?” I said, hanging up without waiting for an answer.
When I sat down again, with the anesthetized Ingrid as a barrier between me and Jesús María, she could not contain herself for long.
“So what’s going on, Erasmo?”
I waited, deep in thought, before her next question provided me with an opening: “What did Sixten say?”
“That Washington is the next step,” I said.
Now it was Jesús María’s turn to sit quietly. Her move.
“Why’s that?” she said.
Games of bluff are like chess, or any game of strategy actually: they depend as much on the opponent’s imagination as one’s own.
“He didn’t want to say. But we’ll get the information when we’re there, from Sixten—unless Ingrid wakes up before then.”
“O.K….” Jesús María drew out her answer. “And who’s going to be there, Erasmo?”
“Edelweiss, for sure. Probably Zafirah. Presumably Kurt-or-John.”