We got going, wasted no time on questions. Managed with some contortions to fish in the dead guards’ pockets for the keys to our handcuffs, and unlocked them, before retrieving our weapons and the envelopes from the desk and the bags from the floor where they had been left, again tantalizingly close. Edelweiss continued to sit there, Buddha-like, watching.
I felt his eyes burning in the back of my neck as we ran out through the security doors, down the corridor with the packs. In the stairwell we stopped and I tore open the envelopes from Edelweiss. The same passports—still the Core of the Poodle—our money and cards returned.
The courtesies of his web extended throughout the departure process, reeling us out through the checks at Dulles with the same ease with which he had reeled us in through Zaventem. The illusion of freedom spinning down the departures board. Blind eyes and broad smiles through to the gate. Even as we seated ourselves on the Paris flight.
“Skål to Ed! For never keeping to the rules of the game!” Ingrid said.
“So why on earth did he set us free?” I asked.
“God only knows. Maybe he just wanted to play a little longer. Or has flipped, to our side.”
She closed her eyes. I noticed more sweat running down her face—until I realized that it wasn’t sweat at all.
“Why are you crying?” I said.
Ingrid turned to me, opened her eyes, gave me a tearful look. Did not seem at all surprised that I’d addressed her in Swedish, using one of the many basic expressions she’d taught me during our long discussion sessions.
“I’m grieving for Jesús María,” she said, now also in Swedish.
“How do you know she’s dead?”
“She isn’t, my treasure, not yet. But there can’t be too much time.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I was the one who fitted the apparatus inside her. In the women’s restroom on arrival at Dulles.”
“Apparatus?”
“A machine from hell. I did exactly as Jesús María said: followed her macabre instructions. Because I made her a promise, before our flight to Stockholm, that she could take them both down. But not herself, never herself…”
She fell silent, dried her tears with the back of her hand. I looked around the cabin.
Then she gave a half-smile, before a last sentence in Swedish:
“And John is the one who will set it off.”
I felt ice throughout my veins, in the midst of all the heat, even though I could not fully comprehend what Ingrid meant. How the duel between Jesús María and John in the restroom would actually play out. Except that it would be a dance of death in which they would both perish.
I looked at her, tried to recall the sequence of events.
“And most of all skål to Jesús María! My blood sister, all the way to the bitter end…”
The cloud cover was still above us, like thick gray-white cotton wool, as opaque as everything else at the moment. Soon, though, the plane would break through it all and emerge into the heavenly sunshine. Penetrate the clouds and allow light to flood the cabin.
There was a sudden flash, like sunlight. But it seemed to be hitting us before we had ascended above the clouds.
And I realized that it could not be the sun—the silver-white light was coming from land, not from the ocean to the east. What had happened next I recognized from my worst nightmares. After the sharp white radiance there was the unmistakable mushroom shape, soon swallowed up by the cloud cover. Just before we lost sight of the ground, it seemed as if the entire airport was in flames far below.
Finally the pressure wave, making the aircraft rock violently, knocking the cabin crew onto the floor, and eliciting hysterical screams from the passengers.
“What the hell was all that?” I shouted at Ingrid through the chaos.
She did not look back at me. Just stared out the window, even though one could only make out a thick whitish haze. Muttered the same sentence over and over again:
“Yes… what in heaven’s name was that, my treasure… What in heaven’s name…?”
6
Third Down
December 2013–February 2014
Sicily
6.01
The flight to Palermo was delayed, like all the others here at Charles de Gaulle, security checks having been stepped up ferociously at all airports after the incident at Dulles International Airport in Washington. Probably Code Orange, maybe even Red.
But in practice it had probably been LILAC, the highest level of alert, ever since Ingrid and I had fled from the Team at the start of September. “Large-scale nuclear attack with critical consequences for global security.”
It was December 23—but there was little sense of Christmas in the air. Most passengers in transit were tensely following C.N.N.’s live transmission on the T.V. screens, trying to make sense of it all, as were we. Just standing here in the bar, staring.
About nine hours had passed since the gigantic explosion. Speculation in the studios swung between a massive fuel leak from storage tanks to a planned terrorist attack. Shots of the mushroom cloud, taken by several passengers on different departing or arriving flights, were played over and again in slow motion. Yet the commentators, the “terrorism experts”, were dismissive and said that too much was being read into them: that they were just a trick of the eye. They compared them with the photographs posted across on conspiracy theory websites after 9/11, which seemed to represent the Evil One in a cloud of smoke and dust.
All the while the death toll on the news crawl at the foot of the screen—the body count—rose with merciless arithmetic. At 1.12 p.m. it was seventy-two dead and 412 injured. Fourteen minutes later seventy-five dead and 409 injured.
Then my cell phone rang. It buzzed deep inside the hybrid, and even though the ring tone must have sounded as many as ten times before I pulled it out, the caller had not rung off.
I stared at the display. Edelweiss.
Eventually I pressed the green button as if in a trance and, by way of greeting, said:
“You’re still alive…?”
“So it would seem, my friend. I thought you might want to know that.”
“But no-one survives something like that, within such a small radius… It was a nuclear explosion,” I said.
“Let’s just put it like this, Erasmus: you saw that we’d taken certain precautions here in the sealed wing since you started at West Point. After the eleventh of September, the invasion of Afghanistan, the war in Iraq… the logic of the suicide bomber has to be countered in some way. Elementary game theory basically, nothing remarkable, risks, opportunities, pluses and minuses. So both the Interview Room and the Office can now, after the latest renovations, withstand a shock wave of 220 psi and a direct hit of up to 44 psi. And this explosion wasn’t actually that powerful, in absolute terms—although it was certainly impressive for a microcharge. Unparalleled, I’d say. We certainly felt it!”
I listened, waited.
“On the other hand, it did knock out most of the rest of the airport. The whole international departure hall, just after you’d passed through it, I assume, parts of arrivals, duty free, the food court. In that sense the force of the blast was a scientific mystery. Which was explained—and at the same time increased exponentially—after we had the results of our first quick analyses. But I thought that you could perhaps shed some light on all of this for us.”
I didn’t give an inch, managing to hide my own curiosity. Let him keep going in his own good time.