by Mattias Berg
One evening, just before he had finished filling up our supplies and while Ingrid was in the shower room after yet another yoga session, I confronted him. Started gently, so the mussel would not close.
“We couldn’t go for another run, could we, Sixten? It was great to be able to stretch my legs, breathe fresh air.”
He gave me a sympathetic look. Almost pitying.
“I wish we could. It must be hard work for you here in the bed-rock, I do see that.”
Sixten stopped, seeming to concentrate on getting the last of the meatball sandwiches with beetroot salad and a slice of orange into the fridge next to the tubes of cod’s roe paste, which Ingrid appeared to be emptying with regularity.
“But I’ve promised Aina not to head out like that again. She was beside herself with worry when I got back to our bedroom after our little tour. Poor thing had lain awake all night—and that hadn’t happened since Ingrid made contact a few years ago. She had even started to imagine that I’d gone off with you lot.”
He managed to fit the broad sandwich in beside the tubes, as precisely as he did everything else.
“So at least until Aina’s jubilee, which will be trying enough for her as it is—not to be able to invite any guests apart from you, because we don’t dare tempt fate at the moment—I don’t want to disturb her more than I can help. But I can let you out to go running on your own, Erasmus. As long as Ingrid is happy with that.”
As Sixten packed the empty containers into his backpack, I wondered whether I could ask about the key. In the end I held back. I suppose I did not want to trouble either Aina or him any further.
“That would be great, Sixten. I’ll check with Ingrid.”
It took time. Each initiative started to feel ever heavier, as if we were under water. Edelweiss would say we must now be in the fourth stage of the curse of tranquility. So I did what I could. Methodically built up the level in my strength training on the floor beside the bunk. Checked the briefcase, its contents, the mechanism, the functions, over and over again. Repeated the rituals. Mumbled the different steps for launch, as if they were prayers for myself. Kept writing in my notebook. Trained, showered, trained, in an unending wait for Ingrid to give us our orders.
Just after my return from the long tour with Sixten, she had said that we would be ready to regroup soon. Proceed to our first stop, one of the few places which had still to be connected up to the whole, before her plan could be set in motion. By the time she said “soon” to me again, a month had passed: we were deep into October.
There was now also a sweetish smell around the Nurse, whenever she momentarily abandoned whatever it was she was doing in her smaller rock chamber and passed by Ingrid’s and my bunks on her way to or from the refrigerator. It was as if she did not have much to do with us.
Nor was there the slightest peep from across the Atlantic. Not from the Team, nor from Edelweiss, nobody was put forward to negotiate with us, not even the President himself. Nothing.
That too was entirely in accordance with the directives: our escape had to be concealed by them as by us. In some of our training exercises, public opinion had swung in favour of the terrorists. Even if they were threatening to blow up the world, having commandeered the means to do so, sooner or later the tide could turn against us. The fact that the U.S.’s proud system for mastering The Weapon—all these dual controls and double checking, piles of proclamations and international documents to stop it spreading to other nations—also involved something like our strange little team.
The silence, unlike in our training, was ghostly in the extreme. Finally I asked Ingrid if I could go for that run around the area on my own. Perhaps not so much for the sake of the exercise, the oxygen, the sky. But to see if the world above ground really was still there.
“Absolutely, my treasure. So long as Sixten is happy with it.”
Once more her confidence—in both him and me. When Sixten next came down to fill up the refrigerator, he was aware of his other task: to follow me to the surface and let me out of the house at about the same late hour as the first time.
Aina had already gone to bed.
“I’ll set the egg timer to one hour. After that I’ll call the police,” he said with a straight face.
With some ceremony, Sixten turned off the house alarm—they seemed to use it even when they were at home.
“And keep to the forest, Erasmus. The security company looks to have increased their patrols after the mysterious demolition of a wall up in the new school development.”
Only then did he give his warm little smile. Looked at me with his deep-blue eyes and opened the door.
“Bye, my friend. Please take care.”
Out on the sidewalk everything swam before my eyes for a moment. I took a few unsteady steps before I got into my stride. My whole compromised state. Solitude, freedom, captivity, all at once. The air felt fragile and ice-cold. It crackled in my nostrils as I lengthened my stride toward the wooded area, the thermometer on my watch showing below zero. Ingrid had said during our rare conversations that it was unusually cold for the time of year.
Naturally this was another test set by her. To let me run free, literally speaking, with the primitive cell phone my only lifeline. To see if I came back. The Nurse had certainly put some sort of tracer in the hybrid I took with me, no doubt as hard to find as the one that was in the briefcase.
And where was I supposed to go to? Back to my family, which I had been betraying for so long? The rest of the Team? To a court martial, a death sentence?
When I got to the place to which Sixten had taken me, the hollow of dense trees, I did not turn back again as I had said I would, but went further on the path which I had memorized since our tour together. Once I caught sight of the yellow surveillance light, I followed the fence around the area. The sense of being able to choose my own route, simply pull a little at my chains, was intoxicating.
Up by a massive white wooden building I stopped to drink, to breathe. My heart was pounding. The timer on my watch showed that I still had twenty minutes until Sixten’s deadline: I must have run faster than I had calculated. Thoughts raced through my mind as I looked at the facade of the building. The sign seemed to be newly made from an old original: “Gunpowder Railway. Ursvik stop.” The laminated images on the building showed train enthusiasts gathered around an electric engine which looked to be from before rather than after the Second World War.
Then I started to run again, as if by remote control, following the rusty rails. I found myself on a narrow path between the structures and the forested rock wall to my right. Five substantial metal doors appeared further along. Probably one of the upper entrances to the Inner Circle that I had seen on the plan in the laundry room.
That was when I saw them: outside the fifth and last metal door, counting from where I was standing. Instinctively, I tried to find somewhere to hide, before realizing that would only seem even more suspicious. Instead, I increased my speed to get past them as quickly as possible.
It would have been striking enough with any two adults standing in an embrace just there and then. But since the couple consisted of Sixten and an unknown woman, it was even more remarkable.
It was instead the couple who took cover when they saw me, stepping up toward the dark, wooded area with long strides, but I was able to catch a clear sight of the woman in the construction company’s surveillance lights. Short blond hair, almost as tall as Sixten, certainly more than five feet nine. And at least twenty years younger.
After that I ran a long loop back to the house, so that he would have enough time to return before I knocked on the door. My timer—and his egg timer—buzzed at the exact moment Sixten opened the door. He gave nothing away. Just asked the usual questions runners ask: about speed, how it had felt, clothing versus temperature. I answered briefly but comprehensively as he led me down through the tunnel system, back to the Test Rooms. Our safe haven.
Ingrid was sitting in front of her screen as usual, on
ly looking up quickly to note my return. I sat down next to her on the bunk and stared into the map of the world. All these triangles, crosses and lines.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said.
Ingrid turned to me: that long, absorbing look.
“Yes, my treasure?”
“Sixten . . . what do you actually know about him nowadays?”
“More than I need to. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, I was only wondering about him when I was out just now. A fascinating person, imperturbable and yet sensitive. There must be a lot beneath the surface.”
“There’s no surface, only depth. Sixten is all solid.”
“But can he handle the pressure?”
“It just makes him even harder, tough as a diamond.”
“And temptations?”
“If you mean women, my treasure, they’ve of course always flocked around him. But trust me: Sixten can withstand anything and anybody. There’s no-one I would sooner trust with our lives.”
2.13
One week later, on October 23, it was time for what Sixten called Aina’s “jubilee”. In other words, her seventieth birthday.
As we were helped up through the hatch, Ingrid first and Jesús María last, I heard a strange sound, some sort of distorted music. I looked around the laundry room. The next time I caught it, on the half-flight of stairs on the way up to the hallway, I recognized it very well: like an echo from another time. The cheerful theme tune from “Dallas” the T.V. series in the late ’70s—and it seemed to be pouring out of the hybrid.
Nobody had ever called my cell phone. Its only function had been as a transmitter and receiver of encrypted messages between Alpha and me, while it had lain hidden in the ruins of the hut for half a year. Yet the tune could not be coming from anywhere else.
The others were a step or two ahead of me in the hallway, on their way into the living room. Yet they did not seem to hear the ring tone at all. It was the first time Sixten and Aina would be meeting the third person in our company, and we had now been kicking our heels 328 feet under their house for more than six weeks so everybody’s attention was probably focused on this awkward encounter. The mood was charged. Festive, however. All of them—but neither Jesús María nor myself—were laughing too loudly.
We had also arrived extremely late, since the preparations had taken much longer than expected. We had been given a selection of Aina’s old clothes, from the time when she had been a lot thinner, and Jesús María was given permission to unstitch and redo them as she wished. Out of these she had managed to make a tight mauve dress which fitted her paradoxical shape—everything that was artificial: a wasp waist, enormous breasts, and something that looked like a hump on her back—as well as a bottle green party dress for Ingrid. I had been lent a dinner jacket by Sixten.
Jesús María had also equipped us with disguises. We had decided to play it safe, even though Sixten insisted that we would be the only guests and that the blackout curtains would make the house look empty and unlit from the outside. As if Sixten had taken Aina out for a surprise birthday dinner, which was apparently what the neighbors had been told.
So I was blond and curly, with hair to my shoulders. Besides that, I was wearing ice-blue lenses in roughly the same shade as Ingrid’s—or rather, as she had been wearing earlier, before becoming a brunette with a neat bob and chocolate-colored eyes. Jesús María had a thick red wig and intense green lenses.
Best-looking was Aina herself. She must have devoted hours to her make-up. The sort of discreet elegance that first has to be chiseled out with great care and then filed down again just as scrupulously. The diamond ring had been taken out in honor of the day and sparkled alongside her slightly too-broad smile. She was wearing a black pleated skirt, a pigeon-blue angora sweater and matching high heels.
Aina really deserved more guests, I thought: a much larger gathering. But she had had to accommodate herself to the cause, as she and Sixten called it, because our paths happened to cross around the month of her seventieth birthday.
At about the same time as my ring tone started up again—whoever was calling must have been keen to get hold of me—Ingrid leaned forward.
“Forgive me, dearest Aina. But your pearls seem to have got tangled up in your chignon, just there at the back of your neck. You can’t see it yourself. Let’s step in here for a second. Can you help out, Jesús María?”
And the next moment all three of them were gone, vanished into the bathroom. Then came a short vibration from inside the hybrid: definitely audible in the silence around me.
“Is there another bathroom?” I asked Sixten.
“Of course. There on the other side of the passage,” he said. “And take it easy. I can wait a bit with the champagne. A few seconds at least.”
I managed to get the cell phone out. The display showed five missed calls from No caller I.D.—one this morning, which must have been when I was in the shower, and four in the past hour—as well as two voice messages and a text. I sat on the toilet lid and listened to the first message. Did not dare to stand in case it was going to knock me off my feet.
It was not Amba and the children, which I had hoped as much as dreaded. Rather the opposite.
“Erasmus, my little lost lamb . . .”
I switched off the message, cutting into Edelweiss’ gentle voice, stared straight ahead. Then I played it again, my eyes closed: pressed the cell phone tighter to my ear so that no sound could escape.
“. . . as you well know, I’ve always had a particularly soft spot for you. Even worried about you, in many ways looked on you as a son, ever since you came to us.
“And now I really do have reason to be concerned. Because news has reached us that you’ve taken yourself off the formation, and what’s more with the briefcase in active mode. Which shouldn’t even be possible.”
He smacked his lips, gave a heavy, audible sigh. It was hard for Edelweiss to speak for so long at a time.
“All of this is serious enough, although it could still be put right. But we’ve also found out, through the same reliable sources, that you’re now in a group together with Ingrid Oskarsson: our former Alpha.
“And I’m aware that you know her from before, Erasmus. Better than most of us, apart from myself perhaps. That you think you’re pretty well acquainted with her.
“But what really troubles me is that however much you know about her, or you may think you know, she will always know more about you. Which means that she’s going to exert a strong influence over you. Very strong.
“Since we also know about Oskarsson’s plans, which presuppose your own participation because of our rigorous security measures—the impossibility from a pure technical point of view of doing anything like that on one’s own—I’d advise you to call me as soon as you hear this. Help us to render this woman harmless.”
The first message ended. I played the second.
“I’ve already tried to call you a number of times, Erasmus, now that we’ve received definite confirmation of what we previously only suspected. Maybe you’re still asleep. But as soon as you wake up, I would ask you from the bottom of my heart, with all of your and my care for the world—everything we’ve fought so hard for together—to get back in touch with me. We do not have a minute to lose.”
He must have exerted himself to get out the last bit, before he would have had to drink, rest, breathe.
“Because I can guarantee you that a nuclear explosion of the sort Oskarsson is planning would not only extinguish all life in those parts of the globe where the bases lie. The consequences would also be that the ozone layer disappears for ever, for all time, in the same way as over Mars once upon a time; permanent drops in temperature of twenty to thirty degrees worldwide, before the U.V. rays burn up the entire surface of the earth once and for all. Only a fully fledged apocalypticist would do something like that.
“But you know all of this—at least in theory. So call me, Erasmus, my dear friend, that’s all I’m asking. A br
ief moment of cool, calm reflection: I’m giving you ten hours with effect from now.”
When the message ended, I just sat there with the cell phone in my hand and my head between my knees in an effort to get some blood back to my brain. Then I filled the basin with cold water and dunked my head, as if I were being waterboarded, five times up and down. Then I dried my face and hair with their pink towel and sat down on the toilet lid again, steeled myself. Opened the little envelope on the cell-phone display.
It was not an S.M.S., as I had thought, but a media message. I did not even know it was possible to receive something like an image on such an old cell phone. The picture was also hard to make out, due to the low resolution. The only thing I could see was a large white surface in the foreground, some sort of long stick with a darker top and a blurry figure in the background.
The image was incomprehensible—until I suddenly realized what it must have represented.
Although my head was still cold from the water, I felt the heat rise up over my hair as if I were already in flames. The content of the picture was simple, almost stylized, like the message. A plastic jerry can in the foreground, a matchbox beside it. And Zafirah in the background. She who was always sent into the thick of things.
I clicked on the timing information. The picture, the almost over-explicit message saying, “WE ALL BURN SO FAST AND FOR SUCH A SHORT TIME”, was received at 17.33—when Edelweiss’ ultimatum of ten hours from the day before, when he recorded the messages, ran out. And immediately after, he had tried to call me four times: as I was making my way through the secret hatch under the floor drain up to the hallway.
Without even having to check, I also knew that his first call and the picture message must have been sent at precisely the times of sunrise and sunset in Sweden at this time of year. That Edelweiss, like Ingrid, favored symbolic time, as he called it.
I checked the actual time: my watch showed 18.16. Only then did I hear sounds from the hallway. The three women coming out of the bathroom opposite, Ingrid chatting away as she moved toward the living room—“Now just knock back the whole glass, Aina, you really need it!”—and Jesús María saying nothing. They had been taking their time in there too.
