The Carrier

by Mattias Berg

  Our goal seemed simple. Edelweiss’ orders were expressed in broad terms, and the person who had given them did not want to know the details of their execution. Everything had one focus: stop something like this from happening again, anything like a hostile airplane flying into the World Trade Center in broad daylight. The idea was for us to take all necessary preventive measures outside the scope of conventional intelligence work. The end would justify the means.

  What he described in the ensuing three or four hours—with Edelweiss, time in some way acquired another consistency—was at first sight a defensive assignment. Our team should stay close to the President and his own security detail during state visits and other official public duties. Should become a sort of floating security layer, flexible and adaptable, ready for any conceivable situation.

  In short, it was meant to be what one now calls “hybrid warfare”. To combat hidden sabotage, digital attacks, advanced psychological warfare, political destabilization, ever more ingenious assaults on our infrastructure. And be able to strike back—using the same weapons.

  In the case of serious crisis, the strategy was turned on its head. The Team could then be transformed into a raw strike force, focused on the enemy’s weakest points, with methods at least as unthinkable as their own. Its nature could be altered, as Edelweiss expressed it in one of his elaborate yet precise metaphors, in the same way that an amphibious vehicle operates both on land and water.

  When the global security threat stood at its highest level—LILAC—reserved for the one thing that could destroy the world at a few minutes notice: a nuclear threat from another state or from terrorists—the President himself should be placed under protection. Until the threat was neutralized, the Team would take over covert command of the whole military apparatus. Including the nuclear weapons system.

  “You have to be ready for every conceivable attack on the country’s security. And more than that—for every inconceivable one too,” Edelweiss said.

  “First and foremost, this requires our imaginations to be greater than the enemy’s. Which is what we will have to work on, our creative ability, our impulsive intelligence. Each one of you is an exceptional agent already. But once we’ve been through this together, you should see yourselves more as artists.”

  He ran his hand over his chins.

  “But what distinguishes our assignment is that it’s to do with nuclear weapons. Things which you can’t compare with anything else throughout military or even human history, because by their nature they were so far outside our experience. The only meaningful difference between them and other fantasies, say the lightsabers in ‘Star Wars’ or Superman’s X-ray vision, is that nuclear weapons became reality.”

  Another pause for effect, as Edelweiss peered around him in the half darkness.

  “There has never yet been a full-scale war using battlefield nuclear weapons. Nobody knows how that might affect us, how we would all turn out in a situation like that. That’s also what we are going to explore together, my little lambs, under more or less controlled conditions.”

  The extent of our authority under those conditions seemed astonishing, even to me. The briefcase would of course be the jewel in the piece. Our innermost and outermost secret, our last resort, the chained beast. First, the thing we were most of all tasked to protect, then our ultimate offensive weapon.

  “The most important object in the world,” Edelweiss called it—before handing it to me at the end of that first meeting. With this small gesture turning me into both savior and destroyer. The center not just of the Team, his NUCLEUS, but of the universe.

  From that point on he called me the Carrier. As if it were some sort of virus.

  Around me were the few others: at a respectful yet inquisitive distance. Zafirah, who tried to persuade me of the blessings of ultra-violence. Her interest in everything that had sufficient striking power, as she put it, was pathological. According to her own account, it had started with heavyweight boxing, the never-ending shows night after night with her father in Bahrain, and had then just escalated. Martial arts, M.M.A., military close combat. She was the one whom Edelweiss always sent into the thick of things during training. Often alone and unarmed against a number of opponents.

  To see her at a distance, that compact little woman with her shimmering headscarves, one could never guess what Zafirah was capable of. What she and I had done together to the Taliban in Afghanistan and Iraq, deep inside hostile territory. That is how it is with genuine specialist skills. There is no need to advertise them—until there is no alternative.

  Apart from us two, the Team’s operational core consisted only of two identical security guards, whom we alternately called Kurt and John. They looked after everything to do with personal protection, both in theory and in practice, as well as most of our technical equipment. Always surrounding me, of course, bedding in the Carrier with their mighty bodies, exuding latent violence. Committed to laying down their lives for me at any moment. Or rather for the briefcase.

  Behind the scenes, however, the apparatus was larger. All of those we never or seldom got to see: strategists, observers, technicians, psychologists, medical staff and other support functions. And in addition doubles, decoys and substitutes. These strange functionaries who together make up the security world’s extras.

  We were not permitted to mix with any others in NUCLEUS outside work. We were instead encouraged to refine our civilian identities, to lead a full double life, the preference was for a family. Edelweiss spoke about having been inspired by none other than Kim Philby. He said we would increase our operative capability, keep on our toes, be ever ready, by forever manipulating our surroundings in that way. Besides, not being stationed together would reduce our exposure to elimination at a single stroke.

  So after almost twelve years I still knew nothing about the others in their civilian lives: had no knowledge of their “real” or “alternate” existences, no idea who they were, these camouflaged people handpicked for our camouflaged assignments. Not Edelweiss, nor Zafirah, John or Kurt.

  And least of all Alpha.

  None of us knew who or what that was, even whether man or machine, some sort of digital function. Edelweiss himself after all these years claimed that he had no idea. That he got his orders from this mysterious signature in the form of double-encrypted messages on his screen: protection assignments, transfers, the scope for our next training scenario. Nothing had persuaded him that Alpha was a living individual. Many of our training maneuvers also seemed so haphazard, in terms of both objective and significance, that they might as well have been generated at random.

  Yet it was the training which tested and hardened our team, fused us together like glass in the heat of the moment, transformed us into artists. Early on in our history we took part in two regular military invasions. Afghanistan was first—November 13, 2001, nine days after we had met in that windowless headquarters below ground—and then came Iraq, on March 20, 2003.

  But it was in situations during training that we could be confronted with the most extreme challenges. The sorts of thing that we had been created for.

  Not least a simulated full-scale nuclear attack based on our strategy document “Global Strike and Deterrence”. The gravest threat to the survival not only of the nation but of the whole world, the extinction of mankind, Ragnarök. The sort of moment in history which a paleontologist alone can grasp.

  And so now we were sitting there at the walnut table in the conference room inside Air Force One, going through the routines for the official visit to Stockholm from September 4–5, 2013. After all our years in the Team, the challenges posed by our assignments were still a paradox. Building the same state of high alert, being prepared for anything to happen, at any time, required us to act with extreme precision, to follow our training without deviation. Every little routine had to stand out like some sort of prelude to Doomsday.

  Edelweiss had his way of going about it, always getting us to pay full attention, to sit bol
t upright in our chairs. Just his way of opening with “Good morning, my little lambs” chilled us to the core. After his first few lectures in West Point’s sealed wing, I had nightmares for weeks. So when he now opened his eyes and fixed his look at the projection screen in the conference room, we all did the same, as if spellbound.

  The decisive difference between this official visit and earlier ones was that something would now be happening. An incident at least as grave as those we had faced during the most serious of our maneuvers—and this time, what is more, for real. The run-through carried much more significance than all of our earlier rehearsals.

  And no-one other than me knew anything about it.

  As usual, the three-dimensional animation began with our intended escape route in the most critical situation. Alert level LILAC, when the President was to be taken under protection and our team would assume command of the whole military apparatus. It showed POTUS and FLOTUS surrounded by our fast-paced escort, in which our Team had been mixed up with the President’s own handpicked security detail. With me never more than fifteen feet away from him, the briefcase in my grasp, ready to use.

  Now I saw all the strictly classified information I had never been able to get at during my research: details of the path we were to follow. If the need arose, our escape route would run from our quarters at the Grand Hotel to the assembly point at the helipad in Stockholm’s Gamla Stan. The secret emergency exit on this occasion turned out to be a narrow little hatch to the left of the last set of stairs, down toward the goods entrance of the hotel on Stallgatan 4.

  But from then on the escape route became less narrow, in the form of a gigantic tunnel system deep in the bed-rock, stretching under the whole of central Stockholm and its outer edges.

  This system was unknown to the public, according to Edelweiss. I tried to find the best place to split off from the Team—but the number of possibilities seemed almost endless. On the sketches, the system looked like an enormous terra incognita, in which our escape route was marked in red and most of the rest was a morass of dotted lines and shaded areas: like a map of the world before it was known to be round. According to the observers in our advance party, we would also have to depend on headlamps down there, because none of the tunnels had light sources.

  The escape route started off heading northward, through passages running under the Blasieholmen peninsula. Once we were level with the platforms of Kungsträdgården Tunnelbana station, we would turn sharp west and then immediately south, passing through underwater tunnels. Then we would continue further south, deep under the Parliament, the Royal Palace and the oldest parts of the city, rising to the surface again at the helipad at the edge of the water on Riddarfjärden. From there, the airborne forces would take over, leading POTUS and FLOTUS to safety escorted by an alternate non-NUCLEUS Carrier of the briefcase while the Team would muster for a counter-attack.

  Edelweiss froze the animation at an immense verdigrised copper gate. It originated, he said, from the ruins of the seventeenth-century Makalös palace, according to him one of the most beautiful and talked-about buildings of the time, and had been installed in the walls of the underground system as a part of its artistic decoration. He made a point of saying that the gate had not been opened since it was put there in 1983, and that it could likely not be budged so much as a fraction of an inch without the greatest difficulty.

  Yet the observers in our advance party had felt uncomfortable with even that minimal risk: of somebody making their way in from the passages of the blue Tunnelbana line directly beneath the President’s quarters. The whole Kungsträdgården station had therefore been sealed off in preparation for our visit.

  Every time Edelweiss played the animation through again, so we could learn the escape route by heart, my first impression became clearer. Next to the copper gate you could see something set in the rock wall, more regular than the rough pattern of the stone: a paler, small square. The similarity to the control panel outside our own secure facilities—reminiscent of an ordinary, innocent electrical box—could not have been a coincidence.

  So having no idea how I might be able to realize my crazy dream, I determined that the copper gate from the Makalös castle would be the invisible crack in the wall.

  The starting point of my and Alpha’s impossible escape out of the Team. “We two against the world.”

  1.03

  A natural cloud can weigh five hundred tons. A mushroom cloud so much more.

  Before I was given my assignment, I used to wonder how all that weight would affect a person. How it would feel to exercise control and power over the nuclear weapons system, to be the finger on the Doomsday button. The man with the briefcase. The Carrier.

  When I came to the Team in November 2001, I had for some time harbored doubts. My doctoral thesis had in essence been one long questioning of the justification for nuclear weapons. I tested the limits, challenged, pushed and tugged at the issues. At first I had even thought of calling it “The Atom: A Moral Dilemma”, but I was persuaded by my supervisor to change the title to “Lise Meitner’s Secret”.

  My home life revolved around a family who knew nothing about my other existence. I played the roles of researcher and family man—with a well-educated wife, two girls and a boy aged eleven, nine and seven, a house in the suburbs and drinks on a Friday with our middle-class neighbors—in the same faithful way as that of “The Man with the Briefcase”. Everything had been false and true in equal measure.

  And there’s nothing to say that one’s feelings become weaker while leading a double life. Rather the opposite: this intense heat, the intricate interplay within a life which all the time had to be manipulated, just made everything more intense. Even though I was play-acting on all fronts, for many years I was able to be both passionate and professional across the board. Until the briefcase’s inherent weight, the absurd load of my assignment, began to be too much for me to handle.

  But I still went along with it for a few years more, while doubt and hesitation grew. I was like a Hamlet within the nuclear weapons system. Then, out of the blue, I was contacted by Alpha. I came to realize that I had an unusual ally.

  And the time had now come. Tense, I waited for the signal, even though I still had no idea what it might look like. Peered through the tinted windows as we sped through empty streets into Stockholm.

  Over the years we had got used to never seeing city centers other than just like this. The same the world over, wherever we came. The most vibrant and sprawling cities, empty and sealed off, devoid of natural life. The buildings intact, the people gone. As in the aftermath of the big bang, the detonation of a “neutron bomb”.

  The briefcase was on the floor between my legs, in accordance with the regulations which governed movement by transport, the security strap fastened over my left wrist. The President and the First Lady exchanged small talk on the rear seats of our car, speaking softly so that none of the rest of us could make out what they were saying.

  I unclenched my right fist, squinted at the print-out and recited under my breath the allocated sleep times for myself. Zafirah 00.00—02.13, Edelweiss 02.13—04.55, Erasmus 04.55—06.00. Kurt and John never slept at night during our shorter state visits, but still seemed to get enough rest while we crossed the Atlantic, when they shared guard duty equally.

  Yet again, Zafirah had drawn the winning lot. Edelweiss assured us that the sleep times were allocated at random—but once again I had ended up with the last and shortest slot. They must have had suspicions about me for such a long time.

  Now my allocated sleep time would only let me have sixty-five minutes, with a marginally reduced level of internal surveillance, before Kurt or John came to wake me. And the Nurse would no doubt follow me all the way into the bedroom, ready to sound the alarm at the slightest unnatural movement, even though she did not figure anywhere on the roster.

  She was slumbering beside me in the car, to all intents disengaged, even though we had almost reached the hotel. I ran my eyes o
ver the Nurse’s face, her heavy make-up, the dyed-blond hair, the short, compact figure. Tried to get a feeling for who she was. To understand why just this person had been allowed to accompany me here, been given this assignment.

  A dull day then passed, as if in slow motion. The spare itinerary showed the extent to which this official visit had been thrown together in haste. Our reception at the Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan was a disappointment. There was no sense of history at all, no experimental reactor R.1, no glimpse of the rooms in which Lise Meitner might have worked. Only the dull exhibition halls and a number of sterile display cases with a variety of “environmental innovations”.

  The First Couple had played their roles, as usual, nodded and said this and that, asked all the right questions. They had even had a short time to rest before the dinner while we installed ourselves in the temporary surveillance center, a grandiose two-storey high corner room on the upper floors, with bracket lamps fixed to the walls and a thick blue carpet covered with small yellow crowns.

  From this vantage point we could keep watch over all of the entrances to the hotel, as well as large parts of the surrounding terrain facing three points of the compass. On the other side of our wall, with connecting doors, was the Presidential couple’s lavish seven-room suite, laid out over four floors, including the luxurious little bedroom on the top level of a cupola which had been added to the building. But since the observers in our advance party had failed in their efforts to have the hotel install bullet-proof glass in the room’s panoramic windows, it could be used now only as a relaxation room for the bodyguards.

  As usual it would not take me many seconds to reach the President’s side if the alarm was sounded. Or, in this case, leave his side.

  The Winter Garden banqueting hall also lay but a few doors from our space. It was there that the dinner was going to be held, starting in about an hour and continuing until just before midnight, when official events always ended. Protocol dictated that the President’s own detail was in charge of physical personal security, but Kurt and John began to set up our own portable monitors along the longest wall of our corner room. In the meantime, I made myself comfortable in the heavy marble window frame, from where I had the best vantage point.