The Carrier

by Mattias Berg

  “Ever since my visit to Oxford I had thought that the baby should be called Lise if she was a girl. Then I began to think that it would be too obvious, too likely to arouse suspicions, I probably became a bit paranoid down there in the solitude of the tunnels. So I wrote ‘LISA’ on a label and tied it round her little throat and left her with Sireen.

  “Hours later they managed to find my hiding place, far inside the most remote connecting tunnel, to which I had crawled with my remaining strength in order to die, and they took me by ambulance plane across the Atlantic and straight to the base. Jesús María had to sew me together then and there, that fallen angel, my blood sister. Restored me like a work of art. Her first ever assignment in the military.”

  I took a last look at my wrist-watch. 00.37 on December 26, 2013, 65.8 degrees in our room. The co-ordinates I needed to hold on to.

  “So that was the only condition I imposed, when Sixten asked me if we wanted to use Ursvik as our safe haven, after our flight. That I did not under any circumstances want to meet Lisa. That I should never see her as a grown woman.”

  She got to her feet and tidied away our plates. Moved to the sink, half turned away from me, and began to unpack the dessert. The panettone with diced oranges and raisins.

  “So one could understand Sixten’s actions, my treasure. Why he did as he did once they had taken Lisa.”

  The last sentence also came as she had her back to me, facing straight into the kitchen cupboards, after a pause of about twelve seconds.

  “And she’s my kryptonite too, you see.”

  6.08

  The next day I felt I was wrung dry, had no strength left. As if I had emptied the bottle of wine on my own. Anxiety coursed and tore through my body. Doubt. Hesitation.

  When Ingrid went to take a shower, toward evening, pallid from the previous day, the alcohol and the emotional storm, I called Edelweiss. Not wasting a second.

  “Did Ingrid have a child with someone called Bo Sixten Lundberg, in the spring of 1969?”

  “A child? Ingrid Oskarsson?” he said.

  I hung up right away, more uncertain than ever. The apartment was swaying. When Ingrid had finally finished—she must have been practicing her yoga in the bathroom, on the tile floor, for certain the “Destroyer of the Universe” once again—I had to ask. She sat there showered, fragrant, in her long underwear and holding an impossible yoga asana, tapping away on her portable command terminal.

  “Don’t you ever have doubts?” I said.

  “About what, my treasure?”

  I so wanted to be able to give a sincere answer: that I had been full of doubts and still remained so, caught between trust and dread. But I could not say anything.

  “Do you?” she asked me back, as I stood there silently.

  “Always,” I managed to say. “From the moment I wake up until I eventually fall asleep. Which is when the nightmares start.”

  She took my hand, pulled me gently down into a sitting position. I would hardly have been able to resist, even had I wanted to.

  “I feel so sorry for you, my treasure.”

  As soon as I was beside her, right next to her on the mattress, she changed the image on her portable command terminal. I tried to look at it rather than at her.

  “And for me it’s the same,” she said. “Every single second.”

  The map of the world came up on the screen, with its yellow triangles joined by solid red lines. Our seven home nuclear bases. Those initials which I knew by heart ran like a reflex through my reptile brain, three-letter sequences from east to west: SJN CWM BLM NDW WMM KW. Seymour-Johnson in North Carolina, Whiteman in Missouri, Barksdale in Louisiana, Minot in North Dakota, Warren in Wyoming, Malmstrom in Montana and Kitsap in Washington.

  Then over to our eight European nuclear weapons bases, the sequence ITG TIA IRG BGK BBV NLE, from east to west. Incirlik in Turkey, Ghedi Torre in Italy, Aviano in Italy, Ramstein in Germany, Büchel in Germany, Kleine Brogel in Belgium, Volkel in the Netherlands and Lakenheath in England. The first thing I noticed was that the red lines to and from Kleine Brogel were no longer dotted but solid. That what we did there must have been successful, despite or maybe because of Ingrid almost having been burned up.

  Even one part of the previously dotted blue connection from Esrange in Kiruna all the way down to what I now knew to be Niscemi in Sicily, a wide arc over a large part of the world, had become solid. But the other arc in the circle, from Niscemi back up to Kiruna, was still dotted and incomplete. This was no doubt what we had come to fill in. The end of the story.

  Ingrid zoomed in on the black cross on Sicily—and a square popped up on the screen, emerging from the place itself. Exactly the same scene I had watched many times during the past year, ever since my fiftieth birthday in February, when I received the D.V.D. anonymously at my office at the university. The one in which Greta Garbo as Mata Hari tries to take the telephone receiver from Lionel Barrymore as General Shubin. The two enemies who Jesús María had later tried to change us into with her surgeries, either for fun or in deadly earnest.

  Ingrid started to play the scene. A new code surfaced in my subconscious: itching, nagging, a feeling one cannot fully describe. Twenty-four digits and three letters swirled through my brain. Nine sequences of three each, like the nuclear weapons codes. 151 221 621 11R 211 612 21C 19D 216.

  I deciphered the message. Once again used the strange key sentence from the darkest days of my childhood. I love you just as senselessly as my pretty weird and hellish father, for the time being and onward into eternity, Amen.

  And the clear text turned out to be simple, much more straightforward than I had been expecting, without any of Ingrid’s usual cryptographical refinement. “THESE ARE THE CODES” was all it said. No more, no less.

  Yet I listened to Ingrid’s proud tones, like those of a child, without once looking at her. Just gazed straight ahead at the screen.

  “Elegant, don’t you think, my treasure? Antiquity’s most secret art wrapped up in our most modern systems, a technological span of about 2,500 years. It took time to perfect it all. But you can’t get any more secure than this, with the R.S.A. cryptosystem likely to be cracked soon, when all our digital security will have crumbled.”

  She clicked on the keyboard and the image dissolved into pixels. The code had been contained in one single frame. The sequences which had been implanted in me using subliminal techniques, in a split second, and furthermore hidden inside a classic old movie.

  I was impressed, as always, but not convinced.

  “You know that sooner or later even this type of advanced steganographic file will be opened up.”

  “But of course, my treasure. I’ve therefore made some other arrangements. Belt and suspenders, as they say.”

  Ingrid fast-forwarded, basically through the whole movie, all the way to the ending. In the very last scene, that strange feeling came back to me—as if something was itching in the furthest recesses of my mind: just as Mata Hari is being taken out to face the firing squad. Ingrid rewound, and then played the movie forward again, extremely slowly, frame by frame.

  I noted yet again the strange fact that in the movie Greta Garbo never delivered the line “I am ready” to her guards. The perfect last words which the real life Mata Hari is said to have spoken when she was fetched for her execution in France on October 15, 1917, at the height of the First World War. Sentenced to death as a German spy even though she was in fact working for the French.

  Then Ingrid froze the movie at the precise moment when Garbo steps out of her prison cell. I checked the figures on the single frame onto which they had been written against that same key sentence from my childhood—but got nowhere. However I tried to read the sequences, I could make no sense of them. Ingrid laid paper and pen before me on the floor and I wrote down the numbers and letters, exactly as they occurred to me in my unconscious. 111 319 172 015 151 65K 101 117 10C O31 018 412 P10 R24 151 2O1 24.

  I felt the heat of her stare from besi
de me. My cheek began to glow, as if it were about to catch fire.

  “Use your imagination, Erasmus. Your wonderful memory. Our common history. Because what was it that you wrote to me when you signed the dissertation? You must recall, surely? That sentence on the front cover which I tore out and immediately burned, just to be on the safe side, but will still remember for the rest of my long life.”

  Reflexes are a funny thing, the way memory works. Suddenly I started simply to speak the sentence out loud, even though I had devoted hardly any conscious thought to it for more than a decade. To my dear supervisor and friend, who helped me enjoy the unrelenting hunt for Lise Meitner’s half-century-old secret—although I never managed to find it.

  I did not even have to wait for Ingrid’s reaction, since I already knew the answer was right. I started to decrypt the code with the aid of the new key sentence. The first letter of the first or maybe eleventh of its words, in both cases a “T”. Then the first letter in the first or thirteenth word in the key sentence, again a “T” or an “H”. I scribbled down the letters and the words, rapidly found my way through to possible and less likely alternatives. What the clear text soon revealed was not actually a message on its own—it was just meant to be hooked onto the earlier one.

  I read it out aloud for Ingrid, as if in class.

  “THESE ARE THE CODES—THAT WILL MAKE THE CODES SUPERFLUOUS”.

  Ingrid nodded calmly. Then, in a gentle, matter-of-fact tone, almost hypnotically:

  “An entirely new program, my treasure. The file size doesn’t alter when new information is added, which was of course otherwise the weak point in digital steganography, as you know.”

  “Yes, but what does it mean?” I said.

  “Oh, I think that will become obvious when the time comes.”

  She closed the window showing the map of the world, as well as Greta Garbo surrounded by guards in the frozen “Mata Hari” scene. All the sequences of numbers hidden inside one single frame of the movie.

  “So this is our insurance, yours and mine, in case neither of us can remember the code at the crucial moment. As we stand there with the weight of the world on our shoulders. Now you too have a chance to learn it. In one day, two, a week, maybe a month—until it’s time for the final combat. The battle for our souls. For the future of mankind. Before then you have to know it by heart, my treasure.”

  Ingrid closed the lid of the portable command terminal, folded her body together softly. I still felt her gaze burning in from the side but I kept on staring straight ahead. Tried to control my nausea, the classic side-effect of subliminal tampering on my cerebral cortex, the very depths.

  “Because man thinks that it’s he who controls the nuclear weapons system. But there’s probably no need for me to remind you about computers, Erasmus, the ‘war games’ phenomenon, the entire space program, nuclear power which did not come into the picture until more than twenty years after nuclear weapons. Everything which we originally created for the sake of that system and not for ourselves. So it’s not we who control the nuclear weapons. It’s still they who control us.”

  Only then did I look at her, right into her eyes, perhaps because she took my arm and turned me carefully to face her.

  “And yes, my treasure, I do doubt—that we will actually rise to the challenge, you and I. Every waking moment, all through the nights. That we really will be able to stand up to our own darkest sides. The entire Doomsday syndrome.”

  6.09

  After that, we bided our time.

  I recorded Ingrid’s story in my notebook, detailed everything she had told me. I also continued my rock-hard training sessions on the mattress and took freezing showers, while Ingrid spread herself out more and more across the room with her yoga asanas, like a spider.

  At other times I clicked away with my magical Bruegel cube from Peer. Changed “The Tower of Babel”, with the cloud of smoke extending from the apertures in the building, through the other works all the way to “The Fall of the Rebel Angels” and back again. Checked the functionality of the hybrid twice each day. The keyboard’s launch mechanisms, the safety procedures, the whole process. The age-old information with the President’s options in case of a nuclear attack. “The biscuit”. And in the late evenings I went for dogged runs outside when the whole building closed down at night, tasted freedom. Listened to the sounds from the apartments below us. The clinking and the music, the soft murmuring.

  At night—before the dreams took over, those terrible images—I was convinced that they had to be the sound of prayers. A sort of plea for the future of mankind.

  I also began to re-read my dissertation, from cover to cover. Looked at my reproduction of “The Triumph of Death”, rolled up in my pack. Forever trying to find some sort of answer to it all: the enigma which I was facing.

  And then there was the homework which Ingrid had given me. Together we watched the ending of “Mata Hari”, over and over again. Recognized the subliminal effects of the steganographic message. “THESE ARE THE CODES—THAT WILL MAKE THE CODES SUPERFLUOUS”. We let it wash over us both, in strange long sessions, as we had during our work on my dissertation. Systematically burned the codes into our synapses.

  Ingrid hardly ever left her command terminal, never went out, barely ever got up from the mattress on the floor except to prepare food or go into the bathroom. When the leftovers from our Christmas dinner ran out—both the turkey and the panettone—there was the whole of the larder to get through. She made soup from lentils and beans, pasta dishes with no real taste: food for food’s sake.

  And then we stared through the window. I gazed far away into the distance, down toward the sea, the escape I could never really bring myself to make, however many opportunities my evening runs miles away from the apartment afforded me. Looked at the world as if each sight was going to be my last. She seemed to gaze in a more concrete way, examining, reconnoitering. Always fully on the look-out for our pursuers.

  But eventually there was not much else to resort to except the T.V. As time passed we left C.N.N. on throughout the day, bellowing out the world’s course, that theatrical chatter which was both comforting and threatening. Especially since it was increasingly about our issue in particular, our field. What Ingrid called her arrangements.

  The evening programs began more and more often with the headline “THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS SCANDAL”, white block letters against a black background. There were now two additional bullet points in the short summary:

  April 2013:

  In an unprecedented move, an Air Force commander stripped 17 of his officers of their authority to control and launch nuclear missiles.

  The officers, based in Minot, North Dakota, did poorly in an inspection. They were ordered to undergo 60 to 90 days of intensive refresher training on how to do their jobs.

  August 2013:

  A missile unit at Malmstrom Air Force Base failed a safety and security inspection “after making tactical-level errors – not related to command and control of nuclear weapons,” the Air Force Global Strike Command said.

  The 341st Missile Wing operates about 150 of the 450 Minuteman III nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles in the U.S. forces, according to an Air Force statement.

  October 2013:

  A military officer with high-level responsibility for the country’s nuclear arsenal lost his job.

  He was formally relieved of his duties as deputy chief of U.S. Strategic Command. A military official said his demotion was connected to allegations that he used counterfeit gambling chips at a casino.

  October 2013:

  Just days later, a U.S. general who oversaw nuclear weapons was relieved of his duties after he boozed, fraternized with “hot women” and disrespected his hosts during an official visit to Russia, Air Force officials said.

  The General led the 20th Air Force, responsible for three nuclear wings.

  According to an Air Force Inspector General report, he bragged loudly about his position as command
er of a nuclear force during a layover in Switzerland, saying he “saves the world from war every day”.

  December 2013:

  The Secretary of Defense is forced to resign—in the wake of what is now generally known as the Nuclear Weapons Scandal.

  January 2014:

  At the Montana base, 34 Air Force officers entrusted with maintaining nuclear missiles are accused of cheating or turning a blind eye to cheating on a competency test.

  One evening toward the end of January 2014 there was also a feature which the news anchor delivered with a slight smile. She announced that the channel’s special reporter had at last been given access to one of our large missile bases, after months of negotiation, although the reporter had promised not to reveal which base it was. But according to our sources, the news anchor continued, conditions are approximately the same everywhere. “And this is what our reporter saw. Look carefully: you will not believe your eyes!”

  What followed was an almost satirical piece about the analog technology at the nuclear weapons bases. For the female reporter who had managed to get into the top security base, everything seemed as laughable as it was terrifying: the enormous missiles, the pointless round-the-clock state of readiness, the huge cracks in the facade.

  She latched in particular onto the fact that the guidance system still used floppy discs to store the literally life-or-death information. That both the codes and the procedures existed only on what remained of this age-old technology, with no reasonable possibility of backup or synchronization with other systems. Her facial expressions heavy with meaning, the reporter also revealed that there was only one functioning adjustable spanner to tighten the nuts on the warheads of our 450 Minuteman III missiles. And that this spanner was couriered back and forth between our underground nuclear missile bases in North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana.

  She could not say, nor even understand, that this was how we wanted it. That Edelweiss had in the end managed to persuade us in the Team of the increasing superiority of the low-technology approach. That the absence of an industrial standard and any recognizable structures made it much more difficult for anybody to penetrate our systems using high-tech methods. That our most senior commanders had started to take their critics seriously some years ago. Those who were sounding warnings that a system which was always “on-line” and in “stand-by mode”, with several thousand nuclear missiles ready to destroy our civilization in just a few minutes, had to be the most attractive of targets for the world’s most advanced hackers. Regardless of what their motives might be.