The Frequency of the Dead – Chapter 23
Forty-Seven Hours
The extended toxicology screening on Casimir Lund — ordered by the inquiry committee after Ost’s testimony — took forty-seven hours and returned a result that, in the dry language of forensic chemistry, confirmed the presence of a potassium compound in the cardiac tissue at concentrations inconsistent with natural processes. It was not proof beyond reasonable doubt in itself; the defense would argue degradation, contamination, the imprecision of post-mortem chemistry on a body that had been dead for months. But it was enough. Combined with Ost’s testimony about the program’s decision to silence Casimir, combined with the documented involvement of Dr. Fors, it was enough for charges to be filed.
Fors was found in Lisbon. He did not resist extradition. He was, by all accounts, a man who had been carrying something very heavy for a long time and found, when it was taken from him, that his posture changed. His statement to the prosecutor ran to sixty pages. He named people, documented meetings, described decisions. He was not a sympathetic figure. He was a deeply necessary one.
Erik Lund — Rook — was not charged with anything. He had, over seven years, operated in legal gray areas, but he had also been the catalyst for exposing an illegal government surveillance program that had operated for thirty years, and the political appetite for prosecuting a dead engineer’s nephew for irregular investigative methods was approximately zero. He returned to his regular life, which turned out to be the management of an outdoor equipment shop, which Mira found simultaneously surprising and entirely appropriate.
She visited him once, at the shop. They sat in the back office with instant coffee and talked for two hours about his uncle — about who Casimir Lund had been before the Quiet Office, during it, and in the years between retirement and death, when he had begun slowly, carefully, building his last broadcast. Erik knew these stories in the way you know a person you have loved without ever quite knowing. He told them with the roughness of someone who hadn’t told them aloud before.
“He never lost his sense of humor,” Erik said. “Even at the end, when he knew he was being watched, when he knew he was ill. He called the encoded signal his ‘final transmission.’ He thought it was very funny that all those years building infrastructure for other people’s messages, and the only one he got to design himself was the most complicated one.”
Mira thought about the amber glow of the Grundig 700 in the dark apartment. About the pattern she had transcribed in her notebook on the first morning — six short, two long, four seconds of silence. She had never quite finished parsing the outermost layer of the encoding. She did so now, in the shop, with Erik looking over her shoulder.
Six short bursts, two long ones. In Morse, which she recognized belatedly with a laugh that surprised her: the letters V and W. An old signal. A known one. A pun for the technically literate: the signal from a Grundig machine beginning with the same letters as the operator who built it. Casimir Lund, laughing, even at the end.