Invisible Things (19 page)

“The other picture,” she continued, “was a photograph of my parents in the company of Elsa Blix.”

“Elsa Blix!” Arne exclaimed. “But how can this be? Elsa Blix is the one who’s taken Mikael—what does that have to do with this bit of ancient history, if you will forgive my calling it that? However much it may matter to Sophie to find out what happened to her parents, Mikael’s safety is far more important.”

“Elsa Blix used to work with my father,” Sophie said.

“In one sense,” said the remote voice belonging to the man in the bed, “the fact of Sophie and Mikael’s happening to encounter Elsa Blix falls under the heading of the onein-a-million coincidence. In another, their convergence at the Nobel building in Stockholm results from a rationally comprehensible set of pressures that make it not nearly so surprising. I do not know precisely why Sophie and Mikael found themselves there, though the onset of war had, of course, brought them inexorably to neutral Sweden, and it was a very natural thing for them to find themselves at the doorstep of a building to which they might be expected to feel some connection. And I have, after all, taken considerable trouble to render the museum attractive to members of the general public. Elsa Blix was there because she had been trying to sell me something: namely, the plans of the device built by Sophie’s father.”

“But—”

“What—”

Sophie and Arne had spoken at the same time; Arne fell quiet, and motioned to Sophie to continue.

“Your brother’s disappearance,” said Nobel, “may be no more than a random act of malice. But when Niels Bohr alerted me several weeks ago to Sophie’s wish to explore the old connection between Blix and her parents, I knew nothing good would come of it!”

“Who is Elsa Blix, then?” Sophie asked. “I mean, who is she really? I know she studied with Bohr—he told me she was a research scientist turned weapons dealer. I suppose she must have kept a copy of the plans after she left my father’s factory. But why did she take Mikael, and how will we get him back? Does she really live in an ice palace in Spitsbergen, and will we have to go there to find him?”

“A woman of many questions, I gather,” said Nobel.

Sophie was starting to be able . . . well, not to reconcile the voice with the uncanny shape in the tank, but at least to credit it with a full personality and consciousness. She found it made more sense to look in the direction of the speakers than to keep her eyes on that strange, cold face.

“I will tell you everything I can,” Nobel continued. “It happens that I knew Elsa Blix’s mother—a beautiful socialite, a butterfly flitting around Europe as whimsy took her. As a young girl, Elsa had a fierce intelligence that led her to feel something like contempt for her mother—and yet she herself had little more self-discipline than the mother she despised. I had known Elsa slightly when she was a child. Her mother and my wife were acquainted. I met her again at the institute at the end of her fellowship period—she interviewed for a job with one of my companies, and I interviewed her myself, once she had been thoroughly vetted by the personnel department, to see whether she would be a suitable member of Alan Hunter’s staff in Russia. Her technical expertise complemented his nicely, and he had a high opinion of her brains from the time they’d spent together at the institute; I thought a productive dynamic might arise between the two of them.”

“And did it?” Sophie asked. It was mad to linger on the distant past when Mikael even now might be in pressing danger—time now mattered in hours or even seconds rather than years and decades—but the past also seemed to hold the secrets of Elsa Blix’s present motivation, and Sophie supposed it might be worth taking the extra time to find out what she could.

“Yes and no,” said Nobel, and Sophie thought it might have been another sigh that issued from the machines. “Alan and Elsa did work well together; she contributed a fair amount to the technical specifications, though not, perhaps, as much as your mother did, Sophie. Rose was a quieter woman than Elsa, which led to her being often underestimated.”

“You speak as if you knew them all quite well!” said Sophie, slightly bewildered.

“I take an interest in all those who work for me,” said Nobel, “but Alan Hunter’s project was particularly dear to me. I was already quite an elderly man, of course, but I was not the pitiful wrecked carcass you see before you now. I traveled twice to see the factory, and was intimately involved with your father’s plans. He was, after all—Arne, you will pretend you did not hear this part—my only son. And the device he hoped to build was the weapon I had always dreamed of: an explosive device powered by a nuclear reaction so powerful and so profoundly destructive that the mere threat of its use, or so I then believed, promised to end conventional warfare forever.

“During my first visit, I truly believed the dream was at long last about to come to fruition. The project was going well, with the unmistakable aura of a prosperous and productive workplace. Your father was a very talented manager, above and beyond his intellectual gifts, and both the engineering staff and the manual laborers in the factory seemed devoted to him personally as well as to the project. Of course, there were significant financial incentives for them to stay on or ahead of schedule. Your father would have received a substantial bonus—a mix of company stock and hard cash in a currency of his choice—for early completion.”

“Was he still on track for that when the factory blew up?” Sophie asked, trying to listen for what Nobel was omitting and ask the right questions to bring it out.

“He was not,” Nobel said. “On my second and final visit, which took place about two months before the explosion, I found a singularly different environment. A series of small but troublesome acts of industrial sabotage had time and again halted the production line. This in itself would not have been catastrophic, but it had a sort of cascade effect. The factory workers—untutored peasants!—had become convinced the project was cursed. Their superstition and ignorance were such that this was no metaphor. A number of men had left already, and the village priest was agitating against the project in a way that it made it difficult for your father to recruit new workers. The worries heaped on his shoulders had pushed him dangerously close to the brink of absolute exhaustion.”

“What about Elsa Blix?” Sophie asked. “Was she still there? Tabitha said in her letter that she left a month or so before it all came to an end, but she could not tell me how or why the rift came about.”

“She was still there when I visited,” Nobel said, “although the professional relationship was in the final stages of its decay. It had become clear, over the life of the project, that the superficial alignment of goals between your father and Elsa Blix was just that—a matter of surfaces only. Alan shared the dream that has united me and Niels Bohr and Tabitha Hunter over these many years—a dream of universal peace. Elsa had quite another idea, and I think your father had almost come to see her as a demonic force: she hoped to persuade him to break his contract with me, in defiance of the requirements both of honor and of his deepest ideals.”

“Why would she want him to break the contract?” Sophie asked.

“So that they could sell the weapon—the atom bomb, as they called it amongst themselves—to the highest bidder. Elsa had a vision of her own, and it was not a vision of perpetual peace. . . .”

“My father wouldn’t have broken his word to you, would he?” Sophie asked anxiously, aware of the unlikelihood of getting an unbiased answer and yet quite unable to stop herself from asking.

“He refused to break the contract,” Nobel answered, “and he recoiled in horror at the notion of the weapon’s being put on the open market. The force of the weapon was literally inconceivable—the devastation it was projected to wreak was beyond the capabilities of the human imagination to grasp.”

“What did Elsa Blix do, then, once she realized my father really meant it when he said no?”

“On the face of it,” said Nobel, “the answer is simple. She resigned her position and took a new job working for a massive German munitions company, though her tenure there was brief. Certain instabilities in her personality made it difficult, I think, for her to work well with others, especially with administrative superiors of whose intelligence she had a low opinion. The original psychometric testing we did before we hired her had shown as much, but I chose to overlook those results—subsequent events proved the error of my decision.”

“On the face of it, yes, I see,” Sophie said slowly. “But what do you think really happened?”

“At the time, I thought nothing more than that I had made a poor hire,” Nobel said.

Arne had remained silent, but was following the conversation’s revelations with a bewildered intentness that made Sophie suddenly feel, with her heart rather than her head, that Arne might be even more worried about Mikael than Sophie was.

“Elsa Blix was a failed experiment, a former employee who’d left on rancorous terms,” Nobel continued, “but little more than that. For many years, I believed that the mystery of your parents’ death would never be solved. The initial investigation went nowhere. The disaffected worker whom the other employees suspected of having committed the earlier acts of sabotage, and who may well have detonated the charge that blew the factory up, was found dead a week later at the bottom of a nearby quarry, having gone over the edge after a bout of solitary drinking, but it is also possible the accident’s real instigator decided to tie up the last remaining loose end by getting rid of him.”

“So?” Sophie said impatiently. Arne put out his hand as if to restrain her, then drew it back without actually touching her. “What happened to make you question that version of events?”

“Arne may speak to this more directly than I,” said Nobel.

Sophie looked at Arne, who shrugged.

“Part of it you know already,” he said. “You remember the day I practically dropped dead of shock at the sight of that page that appeared in the pantelegraph machine at your old school. . . .”

“Of course,” said Sophie.

“When I saw you last in København, I told you that those images represented work we thought had perished with your father,” Arne continued. “I sent them immediately to Nobel—they represented only a small fraction of the full plans, of course, but their very existence gave us reason to believe that the rest of the plans might have survived as well.”

“Who sent them, though?” Sophie asked urgently. “Where did they come from?”

“It is truly an unsolved mystery how that page turned up in my classroom,” Arne said. “Why, the machines were connected only to each other—there was no line to the outside world! I suspected an illusion or a piece of trickery of some sort, but could not work out how such a thing would have been pulled off; for a while, I even came to suspect that occult forces might have been at work.”

This did not seem entirely far-fetched to Sophie. It had been a summer of paranormal manifestations in all aspects of her life—it seemed as likely to her that the plans had been transmitted by someone dead as by someone alive, though she was not sure who that person could have been.

“I set out to inquire, on my employer’s behalf, of course, as to where the rest of the plans might be,” Arne continued. “The path led straight to Elsa Blix.”

“What do you mean?” Sophie asked.

Arne looked at his watch.

“In about ten minutes,” he said, “we will have a conversation with the woman herself. We can hope that some of these matters will be clarified then. In the meantime, I will just say that as we put the message out that we’d be interested in purchasing more pages, should any such thing exist, the word
Spitsbergen
first came to be mentioned. Not long afterward, Mr. Nobel received a direct communication from Blix herself. She had the plans, she said; they were missing certain crucial elements to do with the actual fuel the device would require, elements she had tried in vain to reconstruct, and partly as a result of this she would consider selling the plans to Nobel Enterprises, if the price was right.”

“Would you buy them from her?” Sophie asked anxiously.

“I meant to,” Nobel said. “She has been in Stockholm this past week meeting with my people and trying to hammer out a deal. But Bohr’s latest work has changed the terms of the conversation. With the recent discovery made by Frisch and Meitner, this problem of the fuel has to a great extent been solved, which means that the weapon teeters on the edge of becoming a reality—the plans are infinitely more valuable than they would have been mere months ago. Infinitely more valuable—and infinitely more dangerous!”

“But why would she have waited so many years to try to sell the plans to you?” Sophie asked, quite confused.

“That, Sophie, is the question,” Nobel said, the voice sounding heavier, wearier than before. “I have often felt, over the years, as though some shadowy adversary were thwarting me.”

“An adversary?”

“One wonders, of course, whether it might not be a paranoid fantasy,” Nobel continued. “A factory closure in Libya, a lost convoy of merchandise in the Great Lakes, a valued employee poached, or a contract lost to a competitor—why should any one of these things be connected to another? Might it not be a flaw of the human meaning-generating system to find patterns in events that may really and truly be unrelated?”

“You think it wasn’t just a fantasy, though,” Sophie said.

“I became increasingly convinced that a single person’s diabolical scheming could be seen operating against me,” Nobel answered, “and that it could only be an individual whose ambition saw no limits—someone who imagined that the era of Nobel was passing, and that a vacancy would be created thereby for a new master of life and death.”

The voice fell silent. It had become weaker and threadier, and the nurse seemed to know that something was needed, for she opened the dome again—Sophie had a sudden comic-grotesque revelation that it worked exactly like the sliding cover on a hot dish at a catered dinner—pulled back Nobel’s lips with her fingers, and sponged off the inside of his mouth with a carbohydrate solution, then adjusted several settings on the machine regulating the flow of nutrients into his body.