The Carrier

by Mattias Berg

  The view was like a fake. A piece of theatrical scenery, a picture postcard, as artlessly idyllic as the whole of this neutral little country. I stared out at the sun, the light, the sky, a whole illuminated world which I would soon have to leave. When Alpha gave the signal, it would at the same time be the starting gun for a new existence for us both. Forever on the run, like some quarry, prey, rats underground. Yet I had no idea what I was waiting for. What kind of sign.

  I let my gaze sweep on, across the throng of people outside the hotel not just hoping for a glimpse of the President—they were after the scent of some accident, maybe even a terrorist attack: people, just like sharks, are attracted to blood. As the time passed, the light from the setting sun started to filter through the houses along Skeppsbron, on the opposite side of the water. The scene darkened with the light, the baroque facades lost their earthen colors, ocher and umber, and the sun sailed behind the stately but lifeless buildings like an enormous red balloon.

  My watch showed 19.31. Ten minutes till sundown. So often it had been the secret signal to launch an attack, with our superior night-combat technology. Operation Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom, or full-scale nuclear weapons training. The aim was often to start at the very moment when the sun dropped like a mysterious piece of space rock straight down into the sand and the desert night fell in an instant.

  During the last minute of daylight I stared as much at my watch as at the view outside the window, counting down to myself. At 19.41, exactly on time according to the calendar, the fiery globe’s last contour dipped below the horizon: as if swallowed up by the enormous tunnel system under the platforms of Kungsträdgården station.

  But still no sign of Alpha. No signal from the one person who could help me.

  Time passed. Just before midnight, Zafirah also disappeared, the first one on our roster heading up the stairs to the bedroom floor. Every half hour throughout the night the Nurse laid two warm—almost sweaty—fingers against my wrist, checking my pulse. She had taken up position next to me in the window frame. Stroked my forehead, making sure that my body temperature had not started to race away again.

  I myself peered ever more often at my watch, soon at intervals of only a few minutes. The briefcase seemed to burn at my feet.

  At 04.50, a few minutes before it was my turn to sleep, Zafirah pushed herself between me and the Nurse. With a serious look she told us that she had received new orders, now that the results of my medical tests taken just before departure were available. That she should also take her rest with me and the Nurse, for safety’s sake.

  So when Edelweiss came down from the bedroom level, still drowsy and with the many folds in his face creased from sleep, Zafirah got to her feet and led me up the stairs while the Nurse fell in at the rear of our little column.

  I was allowed first into the bathroom. Through the walls I could hear Zafirah moving her sofa-bed until it blocked the bedroom door from the inside. With her almost inhuman ability to master her small, muscular form, to focus her whole force onto one tiny point.

  For the benefit of the Nurse, Zafirah said that she very much wanted to be able to look out through the window on the opposite side of the room, “to lose myself in the pale northern darkness”. I never heard any answer. Maybe the Nurse had fallen asleep.

  I put the briefcase—never once out of reach—down next to the toilet and relieved myself while standing up, with the black security strap still around my left wrist. I splashed outside the bowl as much as I could, marking the gold mosaic which must have cost hundreds of dollars per square foot. When I emerged, the Nurse was lying snoring on the outer side of our double bed, a dark sound with some lighter overtones. I eased myself over her and pressed myself hard against the wall.

  The trick of course is never to let yourself sink below the surface, either mentally or physically. Beneath me, the sheet creased, like wrinkles blown by the wind on the ocean surface or the desert sand. But time raced on, as it does when it is running out. First 5.11 a.m., then 5.23 a.m., barely before I had time to blink. Light started to leak up over the facades of the city, from below the horizon, ocher and umber returning from the earth’s core. The screeching of gulls sounded like vultures through the triple-glazed windows.

  And then there was no more than half an hour left for me to get some sort of indication of how I was going to get myself out, to solve the classic riddle of the locked room, find the invisible crack in the wall.

  I slid myself backward in the bed, tried to find a position from which I could observe as much as possible, both inside and outside the bedroom, find a lead. My wrist-watch showed 05.57. Three minutes left until Kurt or John would come to wake us up.

  At that moment, the alarm went off. The howling sirens drowned out the cries of the seagulls, cut right into my brain.

  At last: the signal from Alpha.

  1.04

  The field cell phone showed the highest possible alert level, LILAC. Large-scale nuclear attack with critical consequences for global security.

  Without thinking, I tried to turn on the bedside light, but nothing happened: the power must have been cut. Yet the light of dawn shining through the windows was strong enough—it hardly made any difference when we turned on our headlamps, leaving our hands free. Our movements were lightning quick and yet dreamlike, despite the deafening shrieks of the alarm, making it impossible for me to communicate with either Zafirah or the Nurse.

  We went at top speed down the stairs from the bedroom level to join the rest of the Team. Touching base with the President’s own security detail, checking our combat packs and the briefcase, taking up our positions, out through the doors of the surveillance suite. In my case, at most five feet from the President. Apart from the alarm, everything was calmer than usual. Quietly counting our steps, as if choreographed, while we made our way toward the emergency stairs at the far end of the corridor.

  I kept a firm grip on the briefcase in my left hand. With the alert level at RED or above, the security strap could no longer be attached to my wrist, so as not to delay any possible use of the Doomsday weapon. We could hear the chaos of the mêlée of people behind the safety doors in the stairwell, the panic of the hotel guests, desperate cries, a baby’s piercing yells. Fear ran like a bass tone underpinning the alarm.

  Some of the President’s own security detail were in the lead, just as in the animations, with the First Couple immediately behind. I fell in between them on the way down the stairs. Zafirah pushed her way in just ahead of me, with Kurt or John behind. The Nurse was right beside me and all of a sudden stuck her small but surprisingly strong left hand in my right one. So I would have to shake it off to be able to draw my weapon.

  Once I had squeezed through the little hatch in the wall by the last set of stairs and was standing close to the hotel goods entrance on Stallgatan 4, one foot on the first step of a long and rusty spiral staircase, I glanced back at the Nurse. Even with her bulky medical backpack she followed me nimbly through the small opening. She too must have been hand-picked and specially trained.

  After forty-three rotations in the narrow spiral stairway—never losing control, always keeping a close eye on the situation, the First Couple and our lines of retreat—we reached ground, as in the animations, the even floor of the mystifying tunnel system.

  But not one lamp could be seen along the rough rock walls, no cabling, not a trace of anything which would make it easier for those needing to move around inside the immense tunnel system at normal times. For those who had built it. For whatever reason anyone might even have thought of devoting so much effort to something like this, here—in this neutral country, at peace for more than two hundred years.

  The Nurse squeezed my hand so tightly that it was impossible to tell if she was wanting to protect me or to be protected. In fact I had not much more information than she did. From level RED and up, all technical details were classified at least one layer above me. All I knew was that I, or rather the briefcase, was regarded even in
those situations as both the ultimate counter-strike weapon and the most important thing to be protected—after the President.

  And that Alpha had to be somewhere in the vicinity. Had to be the one pulling the strings, letting the whole plan unfold, step by step. Our escape together from the Team.

  In contrast to the appalling din up in the hotel—the alarm, the rippling panic of the guests—the sudden silence here within the bed-rock was unreal. We were breathing in short bursts through our noses, to reduce the noise coming from the group. Although our speed was equivalent to high-intensity short interval training, I had a dream-like feeling that we were standing still while the enormous tunnel system was rushing back past us, like a tsunami of stone. It seemed as if there were constant new passages on either side of our path, appearing in the circular gleam cast by our headlamps: a myriad of alternate tracks leading out into the darkness.

  The President now passed me to the left to be next to the First Lady, so that only Zafirah was between the First Couple and me. The President had never devoted much attention to any of us in the Team. To the country’s Commander-in-chief, we were for the most part faceless figures, functions rather than human beings, pretty much seamlessly mixed up with his own security people. Even I was probably no more than “The Man with the Briefcase”. The unknown person who would always be close.

  Our formation hurried forward. The Nurse was right behind me, holding my hand in a grip which tightened for every turn in the labyrinth, with an astonishing strength for somebody so small. My pulse increased, I could now feel it clearly in my chest, not because of the exertion—I had never been fitter—but with the insight that I would have to take the next step all on my own. Alpha had given the signal, fired the starting pistol. The rest was up to me.

  Yet I had no idea how it was going to happen. I knew nothing beyond the short encrypted messages sent to the cell phone at the playground, and beyond the fact that I would only have a few seconds to act. Not enough for me both to get out of the Nurse’s grip and to draw my weapon, however fast I did it.

  I saw Edelweiss’s animations before me. The verdigrised copper gate would soon come into view on our right-hand side. I heard something beating. There was an intensive ticking, like a timepiece, a clock-work mechanism. My eyes passed over the rock walls, looking for some form of detonation device—before I realized that it was my own racing pulse.

  So I improvised.

  Just before the last bend I gripped the Nurse’s left hand even harder. I could have bent it right back and broken it, snapped her wrist like a biscuit. She cannot have weighed more than 110 pounds, but that ought to be enough.

  When I caught sight of the small symmetrical installation in the rock wall—it was a control box, no question about it—the Nurse suddenly gave my hand a squeeze back. It must have been a signal. But I still followed my instincts and improvised: I braced myself against my left leg and swung her around my left shoulder with my right hand.

  Kurt-or-John fell headlong, not only because of the force behind the human sledgehammer but also from sheer surprise. Blood and glass splinters from the headlamp spattered across the rock.

  The Nurse let out a shrill sound as I swung her around again—this time aiming in front of me. Zafirah hardly had a second in which to turn before the Nurse’s head, sticky with blood and covered in razor-sharp shards, hit her straight in the face.

  Still there was an unreal silence, as if everything was muffled. Only a weak whimpering from the Nurse, not a sound from Zafirah or Kurt-or-John. With blood running over their faces, they were all fumbling for their weapons, which the impact of the Nurse had knocked away from them, trying hard to understand what had happened. What had got into me. The First Couple had already been bundled away among their own security detail and continued at full speed, while a few others separated themselves from them.

  That was how they were going to try to solve the impossible puzzle: to be able to protect the President and at the same time neutralize the Mole. And also take care of my briefcase.

  But my thoughts were already several steps ahead. Before any of the President’s men had got back to Kurt-or-John, still less passed by his enormous figure blocking the narrow tunnel, I had flipped open the lid to the control box and uncovered the buttons on the panel under it.

  I did not need to think, my fingers moved automatically as I keyed in the only thinkable code. The first message which Alpha had sent to me, artfully encrypted, the start of our whole elaborate communication over the course of twelve long years. The long sequence was 102 115 101 922 G52 0N6 161 512 211 019 R2D. It became, once deciphered: WE TWO AGAINST THE WORLD.

  There was an audible click from the lock. The mighty copper gate swung open with a piercing screech.

  I tightened my grip on the Nurse’s wrist—she was now almost unconscious—and stepped through, dragging her in just before the gate closed again. The salvo of gunshots from the Team and the President’s men smattered like muffled keystrokes on a computer console as they hit the surface of the thick metal. We were alone, in the sealed-off underground station.

  I wish I could say this was a sign that I was still capable of empathy. To show how it had survived all these years, my entire transformation; that something of the real me remained deep inside. But even the decision to take the Nurse with me was purely a tactical one.

  I would be forced to go significantly more slowly, since I would be carrying a full combat pack and also the Nurse like a broken doll by one hand, the briefcase by the other. Besides which she would leave a trail of blood along the floor, which our pursuers could not possibly miss. Before I tested the elevator which led down to the platforms I therefore considered leaving the Nurse there. Like wounded prey, for the others to pick up or not, perhaps delaying them for critical moments.

  But I did not do it. The Nurse’s hand had given a squeeze in the tunnel just before we reached the control box, clearly some sort of signal. And since I still knew nothing at all about Alpha’s wider plans, I did not dare to rule out the possibilities: that maybe the Nurse would turn out to be useful. Or the Nurse might even be Alpha. So I laid her across my shoulder and started to run down the first escalator.

  The elevators from the station’s next level had been shut down. There were also man-high barriers at the ticket gates, like a wall of toughened glass, but I managed to get over them with all of my load by shifting the briefcase, the Nurse, my combat pack and myself one at a time. Then I ran on as fast as the weight would allow, down the dizzyingly steep second escalator leading to the platforms. It was heavy, but no worse than on one of our desert training maneuvers with two simulated wounded men to carry in at least forty degrees of heat.

  In my intense research before our departure—when I still had no idea what use this was all going to be, if any—I had read that the escalator was one of the longest in all of Stockholm. The sound of rubber soles against metal, my rhythmic and controlled breathing even at top speed, were the only sounds penetrating the silence of the bed-rock. I counted my footsteps . . . 148, 149, 150, 151.

  Then I was down there: in the cabinet of horrors on the way to the platforms, the artistic and historical installation in the station which I had studied during my days and nights of research. But I was still not prepared for it. The lighting was spare and theatrical, as in a museum, the emergency illumination seemed not to be working all the way down here. The sealed-off station was only lit up in places by the old-fashioned street lamps, with their flickering ice-blue neon spirals and the weak sheen from the gargoyles built into the rock walls. With the help of my headlamp I was still able to hurry on through this weird underworld. It seemed to me as if I were already dead.

  I also saw that there were black and white radiation symbols in the naïve paintings on the ceiling. I had not noticed them during my research, maybe none of the photographs had been taken at the right angle. For a moment I felt myself sway. The briefcase seemed to be sending out its spell, but I kept going, crossing the checkered f
loor in hard, short bursts on my way to the platforms.

  I looked at my watch. Almost five minutes since we passed through the copper gate, and no sound of our pursuers.

  The load over my left shoulder must have weighed at least 165 pounds, including the Nurse’s bulky medical backpack. With my own combat pack, the total must have come to more than two hundred pounds. Sweat ran from every pore, mixing with the Nurse’s blood to form sticky trickles down my back. Just as I was making my way to the platforms, I was at last forced to stand and catch my breath, gasp for oxygen. My mind needed it, as much as anything. And I had an idea, a hypothesis. Not much more.

  The gold-colored cross on the rock wall looked exactly as it had in the photographs. To the left of it stood the God of War with the dead wolf over his arm, everything was as it should be. As I put down the briefcase and carefully laid the Nurse next to it on the checkered terrazzo floor, I could clearly hear the dull thump all the way down here. Our pursuers—parts of the Team, maybe some of the President’s own men, those who were not needed to lead the First Couple through the tunnel system away to the helipad—must have forced the copper gate with a powerful and probably excessive explosive charge. They would not have had time to make an exact calculation.

  The alarm immediately went off. The underground platform was bathed in a yellow, rhythmically flashing light. My pulse fell rather than increased. What had felt impossible during the early part of my training, to achieve anything at all with such a powerful adrenaline rush, quickly became addictive.