by Mattias Berg
“So she doesn’t have clearance, you mean?”
“Are you kidding me? Jesús María is like a wounded animal, lives on old injustices, which is the only reason I managed to get her along here. But she’s never let us down in action. And if it hadn’t been for her, I wouldn’t be sitting here today. She and I are blood sisters. Literally so.”
I turned to face Sixten, since I could not bear to keep looking at the world map, all the lines, triangles and crosses: Ingrid’s whole crazy plan. He was practically upright now. Seemed to be taking on more and more of his old military persona, I thought, despite the alcohol. He had to be a seasoned drinker, may have spent decades as a fringe alcoholic.
“And do you know the current locations of the others? Have you got any co-ordinates for them?”
Ingrid tapped away at the keyboard. A blue ring appeared on the Eastern Seaboard, level with D.C., the White House, our own headquarters. Remained there motionless.
“That is?”
“Kurt, no less. One of the Team’s two, nowadays totally identical, bodyguards. Jesús María put a chip in his neck during surgery—as you do to a cat—many years ago, when the technique was brand new. So she would always know where he was. Only Jesús María and I knew about it. Now it’s very useful, pure gold.”
“Looks like he’s back at the starting point.”
Sixten knew more than he had let on. Ingrid must have given sufficient information for him to accept his role in what was going on, be willing to take the risk of hiding us away from the world’s most advanced surveillance apparatus.
“Is your thinking that the rest of the Team must be close to . . . Kurt? That they’re working in that kind of tight formation?” he asked.
“Edelweiss gives the impression of being predictable: he’s usually parked at the other of our two portable command terminals, except when we’re on official duty. He prefers not to move more than a few feet from headquarters. Rarely does. But it’s impossible to foresee where the power of his imagination will take him, even for me. Zafirah’s probably at the sharp end of things now, she’s always the one to throw herself into the thick of things, together with Kurt or John. But right now they won’t have the least idea where we’ve got to.”
“And the other outfits? The administration, Secret Service, C.I.A., special forces? The global search that must be under way for such high priority targets as you two?”
For the first time Ingrid turned directly to me.
“Hardly anyone knows that we even exist. Isn’t that right, my treasure?”
I felt the strength of her glare, so I turned back to the screen. Still without being able to get out a single word.
“Hardly anyone has an idea who we are, or where, you see. Or of the Team’s existence. And the few who do will keep on doing whatever they can to stop anybody from finding out—now more than ever. Finding out that we’ve had this type of experimental crack unit, contrary to all procedures, even at certain times with full operational responsibility for the most dangerous weapon in the history of mankind. So their goal will be to envelop us in the same silence from which we first emerged. Melt us back into hellfire, like a pack of tin soldiers.”
“And how many would you say know the whole story, Ingrid?”
“If you mean that we ever existed, then the innermost circle which Edelweiss called NUCLEUS, and I would say about twenty or so in addition to us. If you mean that I and Erasmus have broken away with both his briefcase and my portable command terminal still in hair-trigger alert, you’d have to reckon half that number. The President, inevitably, as well as the rest of the Team and a very small number of our most senior commanders. All the others who were here with us in Stockholm will probably have been told that we were taken down some days ago. Rendered harmless, in terms both of existence and function.”
A last little pause for effect.
“But as we always used to say, Sixten: ‘What is essential is invisible to the eye.’”
2.06
I could only blame what happened next on my exhaustion.
The fact that it was closer to 5.00 a.m. by the time we came back to the Test Rooms. My having been knocked off course by Ingrid’s plan. My lack of physical training for nearly four days—while at the same time having been on the receiving end of a number of anesthetic injections. My body’s reaction following the surgery.
But it was purely a beginner’s mistake. The sort of error I had not made in decades, hardly at all after beginning my special forces training at West Point as a new cadet, little more than twenty years old.
We could not find Jesús María, not in the large rock chamber where Ingrid and I had our bunks or in the smaller one, where she had carried out the surgery and then gone to lie down for a rest. We searched frenetically, splitting up so that we could cover a larger area, searching with the help of our headlamps far beyond the circle of light thrown by the night lights. Maybe Ingrid really was anxious that something might have happened to her “blood sister”. As for me, I was worried about where she might pop up next: like the time in my youth when a gigantic hairy spider had simply disappeared among the sleeping bags during a scout trip.
The darkness, the bed-rock, the plan, everything being so unreal—all of it probably increased the tension. And also the feeling from the two largest display cases furthest in toward the western long wall, which I had not studied closely before. I shone my headlamp into them, one at a time—with rising fascination and alarm.
In the right-hand case were a number of stuffed animals, packed tightly together, in lamentable condition. A zebra on which most of the beautiful coat along one side seemed to have moldered away. A tiger in an attacking pose with its head laid bare: only a thin white membrane protected the cranium. A mighty rhinoceros, with parts around the eyes and the horn which were white. A troop of monkeys of different sizes and in varying states of decay.
The left-hand display case was even more nightmarish—with a number of skeletons neatly lined up. First humans, everything from tall adults to very small children, after that animals by turn, based on what seemed to be their genetic proximity to mankind. More monkeys and apes, and in addition pigs, dogs and many smaller skeletons which I could not identify.
Here too everything was in a terrible condition. The skulls on several of the humans had crumbled, as if eaten away, all the monkeys and apes were missing body parts and each of the skeletons had some marked damage.
My own condition still being fragile, I had difficulty in bringing down my pulse. So I became amateurishly keen when I suddenly sensed something inside the man-high glass display case with the stuffed animals. A tiny suggestion of movement between the chimpanzees and the gorillas, right in front of the tiger. So lightning quick that you could hardly register it: just a fraction of a second.
When I took a couple of steps into the unlocked case, shone around with my headlamp among the crumbling animals, I felt the chill of some sort of silk around my throat. Twisted many times to make it as thin as possible. To cut properly into my larynx.
“Where the hell have you been?”
With her free hand, Jesús María pulled the door of the display case shut again—and switched off my lamp. As I gasped for air a sickly sweet smell streamed in through my nostrils. I tried to work out if it was moth-proofing for the stuffed animals, or some sort of knock-out drug. In the end I decided it must be something for Jesús María’s private needs. Something she was heavily dependent on.
Jesús María relaxed the pressure around my throat for a brief moment before tightening again. That was the usual strategy. Let the victim think he might escape—only then to make him lose hope again. Psychological destabilization as well as physiological. I began to cough. Partly because I had to, partly to play for time.
“Checking things out. Where our pursuers might be,” I finally said.
She kept up the pressure with the noose around my throat. Possibly pulled it a fraction tighter.
“I don’t take prisoners
, Erasmo, I promise you that. You’ve got exactly three seconds. What the hell are we doing here?”
Torture training is just theory, however realistic the exercises are said to be. It is always harder to hold out in actual practice. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
“We were up with someone who calls himself Sixten. He seems to have worked with Ingrid in the Swedish program, in the old days.”
“That much I know . . . that guy. More.”
Yet again Jesús María relaxed the noose, maybe half an inch—before she pulled it tight again. Soon I would be able to hold out no longer. I could see small dots in the air: the first sign of serious oxygen starvation.
“His wife is called Aina.”
Jesús María loosened the noose, half an inch, three quarters, an inch. Probably realized that I would not be giving her any more information, would follow regulations by giving her details which were correct but without significance. I heaved for breath, tried to get in as much air as possible—and just then she tightened up again. Harder than before.
“Now you’ve got one second, Erasmo. For real.”
I did not have enough oxygen for more than a few words at a time. The syllables crept like fat caterpillars over my swollen lips.
“They had blackout . . . curtains in the . . . living . . . room.”
“Half a second!”
The blood was draining away from above my throat, as if my whole head was being cut off. I tried shaking my body, to communicate that I knew nothing more of value, but could not move. My legs started to fold. My grip on the briefcase loosened. It fell to the floor of the display case, the security strap starting to cut deeply into the flesh of my wrist.
Yet I made one last attempt. Nearly everybody wants to be admired, most of the time.
“She said . . . you had been . . . textile . . . designer . . . Mexico. You make . . . beautiful . . . thig . . . things.”
Jesús María hesitated for a second, let go a little, tightened again—before finally releasing. But probably not thanks to my flattery. More likely because she had realized what so many torturers had before her: a dead informant loses all meaning. His value falls from one hundred to zero.
“True. You can check for yourself, Erasmo. Follow the pattern and even someone like you should be able to understand.”
Some kind of fabric suddenly enveloped me, until I was covered closely in it from head to toe, like a body stocking. I could probably have freed myself, especially someone skilled like me. If Jesús María had not also tied me to both the gorilla and the chimpanzee.
So eventually Ingrid had to free me—once she had found me in the dark, among all the decaying stuffed animals. First she tried to undo the impossible knots. Then she cut them open, before putting the briefcase back in my hand and helping me out of the display case.
Long before that, Jesús María had given me a piece of advice. I only just heard it through the thick glass, her voice whispering as she closed the door of the display case on me, on her way back into the smaller of the rock chambers.
“But don’t believe a single goddamn word that witch says, Erasmo. Take my word for it. She can pull the wool over anyone’s eyes.”
2.07
I had spent days and nights reading the reports. Tested myself again and again, against those who did suffer breakdowns. Edelweiss also insisted that we must have the essential parts of the report in our combat packs. That we should never forget those hidden risks. That we, or someone else in our immediate surroundings—even within NUCLEUS itself—could be the very one the report anticipated. The Chosen One. The Destroyer. The carrier of the disease.
The initials of the classic 1958 report, “On the Risk of an Accidental or Unauthorized Nuclear Detonation”, seemed to be a play on the name of the research institute, the R.A.N.D. Corporation, and described at least one case of great importance. A heavily intoxicated officer managed to overpower the guards at a nuclear weapons base and started to make his way in among the rockets at the launch pad. The intruder was stopped in time, and no details of what had happened had leaked out.
The type of incident that went on all the time, and hardly anyone was aware of it. Our world of secrets, that strange little snow globe.
At that point, more than half a century ago, the American air-force alone had twenty thousand personnel who worked more or less directly with nuclear weapons. Not even a medical diagnosis of “occasional psychosis” was a bar to recruitment. Each year a few hundred were transferred to other duties on the grounds that they had exactly those symptoms—and according to the report an estimated ten to twenty people involved in managing nuclear weapons suffered psychological breakdowns every year.
The case notes were graphic, like literature, a horror movie. I still knew them by heart. One 23-year-old pilot, for example, was delusional. Some hours after speaking to a senior officer he was “overwhelmed with fantasies of tearing that person apart. He enjoyed the violence of the judo class. He felt like exploding when in crowded restaurants, though the feeling lessened when hostile fantasies of ‘tearing the place apart’ came to him.”
Flying warplanes became the ultimate liberation for him. Having the potential to hold the necessary power in his hand.
I read these case studies again, in a new light, horror-struck after Ingrid had presented her delusional plan at Sixten and Aina’s. Saw not only myself, but certainly her, in these psychological profiles.
Nor were the R.A.N.D. Corporation reports on “Deliberate Actions as a Cause of Unauthorized Detonation” comforting: “We are here concerned with unauthorized acts that are done more or less deliberately with an intent to bring about the detonation of a nuclear weapon. By and large, intentional acts will not be prevented by the safety measures that are effective against human error, such as the requirement for several independent steps in the arming process, safeguards which prevent inadvertent manipulation, and training personnel to maintain safe procedures.
“The borderline between an inadvertent mistake and a deliberate unauthorized action is vague. On the one hand, subconscious motivations may contribute to certain apparent errors; on the other hand, they may lead to actions that seem to be deliberate. An intent to cause destruction may be perfectly clear to the person who performs a certain act, or it may be concealed from him in his subconscious; it may be persistent and lead to a long-range plot, or it may arise as a fleeting impulse. For some seemingly deliberate acts, no motive at all can be discovered.”
I read on, put the neutral leaflet that Edelweiss had made of the central pages of the report down on the blanket and then my notebook over it, hiding any sign of what I was reading. Trying not to glance at Ingrid in the bunk beside me.
“The most dangerous disorders are those of the paranoid group. Advance detection is often difficult because persons afflicted with such disorders can act conventionally enough to avoid arousing suspicion. There are two delusional complexes frequently observed in people with paranoia or paranoid disorders which could bring forth the intent to cause an unauthorized nuclear detonation. One is the desire to seek fame—even by a purely negative act—and to immortalize one’s name. The other complex is the idea of having a special mission in history.
“The interval between the hatching of the destructive idea and the actual attempt may last anywhere from a few weeks to several years, during which these madmen can sometimes plan shrewdly, watching for an opportunity to carry out their intentions. It is this kind of methodical plotting which is particularly serious for nuclear weapons safety.”
I had a feeling that Ingrid gave me a look, as if wanting to ask me something. I sensed her warmth and intensity. But I went on reading:
“More frequent than these paranoid acts are senseless destructive acts committed as a result of impulse disorders or psychopathy. Usually they do not have the scope and magnitude of the paranoid group, but if they involve highly destructive tools they can also lead to catastrophe. But familiarity with nuclear weapons may also b
reed carelessness. Moreover, people with certain impulse disorders may even be tempted by the power of the weapon and its potential destructiveness, giving them the feeling of excitement, adventure, and drama. Pyromaniacs, for example, frequently desire to see tangible evidence of their personal power on a large scale and may plan for months to obtain jobs in hospitals or even in the fire department itself.”
And then the conclusion in the psychiatric appendix, the last part Edelweiss had put in his extract of the report. The chilling fact that what was called “Unauthorized Nuclear Detonation” was the perfect fantasy for people with paranoid tendencies—and that they were often drawn to precisely this sector.
Just because nuclear weapons provided the possibility of catastrophe “of a magnitude unknown to persons who might have been similarly tempted in the past. Nuclear weapons will not only make acts technically possible that could scarcely have been dreamed of before, but they may even constitute a specific attraction for those with paranoid potentialities. In fact, in certain paranoid delusions, a nuclear detonation may seem the ideal tool for translating the fantasies into reality.”
So here I was: in the company of what seemed like at least two such lunatics, on the run, hidden from the rest of the world.
My watch showed 09.56, September 11, 2013. Twelve years since we got our blank check to do whatever we wanted, with the entire so-called international community on our side. And more than a day since Ingrid slipped into a rehabilitation-induced lethargy, after extricating me from the glass display case.
Eventually I gave up reading, had no choice but to linger in this uncertainty, and put the leaflet back in my combat pack. Instead—to distract myself—I took a closer look at Jesús María’s strange piece of fabric. Tried to understand what it was that had enveloped me in the glass case. To follow the detailed instructions which Jesús María must have written on the black fabric while she was waiting for us the other night, with arrows and dashed lines in what looked like chalk.
