We grow old. We die. He had played his part. All that remained was the disintegration.
He felt strangely satisfied with life.
He was playing for his friend Evert Gullberg.
It was Saturday, July 9. Only four days until the trial, and the Section could set about putting this whole wretched story behind them. He had had the message that morning. Gullberg had been tougher than almost anyone he had known. When you fire a 9 mm full-metal-jacketed bullet into your own temple you expect to die. Yet it was three months before Gullberg's body gave up at last. That was probably due as much to chance as to the stubbornness with which the doctors had waged the battle for Gullberg's life. And it was the cancer, not the bullet, that had finally determined his end.
Gullberg's death had been painful, and that saddened Clinton. Although incapable of communicating with the outside world, he had at times been in a semi-conscious state, smiling when the hospital staff stroked his cheek or grunting when he seemed to be in pain. Sometimes he had tried to form words and even sentences, but nobody was able to understand anything he said.
He had no family, and none of his friends came to his sickbed. His last contact with life was an Eritrean night nurse by the name of Sara Kitama, who kept watch at his bedside and held his hand as he died.
Clinton realized that he would soon be following his former comrade-in-arms. No doubt about that. The likelihood of his surviving a transplant operation decreased each day. His liver and intestinal functions appeared to have declined at each examination.
He hoped to live past Christmas.
Yet he was contented. He felt an almost spiritual, giddy satisfaction that his final days had involved such a sudden and surprising return to service.
It was a boon he could not have anticipated.
The last notes of Verdi faded away just somebody opened the door to the small room in which he was resting at the Section's headquarters on Artillerigatan.
Clinton opened his eyes. It was Wadensjoo.
He had come to the conclusion that Wadensjoo was a dead weight. He was entirely unsuitable as director of the most important vanguard of Swedish national defence. He could not conceive how he and von Rottinger could ever have made such a fundamental miscalculation as to imagine that Wadensjoo was the appropriate successor.
Wadensjoo was a warrior who needed a fair wind. In a crisis he was feeble and incapable of making a decision. A timid encumbrance lacking steel in his backbone who would most likely have remained in paralysis, incapable of action, and let the Section go under.
It was this simple. Some had it. Others would always falter when it came to the crunch.
"You wanted a word?"
"Sit down," Clinton said.
Wadensjoo sat.
"I'm at a stage in my life when I can no longer waste time. I'll get straight to the point. When all this is over, I want you to resign from the management of the Section."
"You do?"
Clinton tempered his tone.
"You're a good man, Wadensjoo. But unfortunately you're completely unsuited to shouldering the responsibility after Gullberg. You should not have been given that responsibility. Von Rottinger and I were at fault when we failed to deal properly with the succession after I got sick."
"You've never liked me."
"You're wrong about that. You were an excellent administrator when von Rottinger and I were in charge of the Section. We would have been helpless without you, and I have great admiration for your patriotism. It's your inability to make decisions that lets you down."
Wadensjoo smiled bitterly. "After this, I don't know if I even want to stay in the Section."
"Now that Gullberg and von Rottinger are gone, I've had to make the crucial decisions myself," Clinton said. "And you've obstructed every decision I've made during the past few months."
"And I maintain that the decisions you've made are absurd. It's going to end in disaster."
"That's possible. But your indecision would have guaranteed our collapse. Now at least we have a chance, and it seems to be working. Millennium don't know which way to turn. They may suspect that we're somewhere out here, but they lack documentation and they have no way of finding it - or us. And we know at least as much as they do."
Wadensjoo looked out of the window and across the rooftops.
"The only thing we still have to do is to get rid of Zalachenko's daughter," Clinton said. "If anyone starts burrowing about in her past and listening to