Mattias Berg - The Carrier

After I had done my light training session—increasing each day the number of reps, even though my body might not be ready for the intensity to be raised—I went into the shower room. The space must have had a different function in the good old days. I did not ask Ingrid about it because her answers rarely made me any the wiser. I turned the tap counter-clockwise as far as it would go. At first I had been amazed that the water started to run after all these years, and then at how icily cold it could become in the Scandinavian bed-rock. In due course I wobbled back to the metal worktop where I had left my training gear, half-paralyzed with cold.

I decided every morning that I would ask Ingrid about the next phase, and every evening I fell asleep without having done so.

On Friday the 13th a week had gone by since our flight. The day which more or less all of the western world had chosen as a symbol of ill luck. Ingrid had spoken about what she considered to be the most likely origin of this during one of her mesmerising lectures: how a number of Knights Templar had been imprisoned by Philip IV on Friday, October 13, 1307 and then tortured and executed.

It was also the day on which the curse of inactivity and uncertainty—the creeping in my body, the slow increase in my pulse: phase two or perhaps even phase three already—was finally broken.

First I heard the eight beeps from the control panel by the door. Then in came Sixten, fired off his warm smile.

“Do you fancy doing a round, Erasmus? Giving your spirits a boost?”

His running gear seemed at least as high-tech as mine, as was the clever backpack with two water bottles in pouches on the front of each of the shoulder straps. They not only demonstrated that Sixten was a committed runner, but also that he was at least as much of a perfectionist about it as about everything else.

“Ingrid has told me that you like running. So I thought it would be nice to have some company—and at the same time show you something of the surroundings. It might interest you, Erasmus.”

My watch showed 21.43. Late enough for us not to have to worry too much about bumping into anyone, early enough not to seem suspicious if we did so.

I looked at Ingrid. She met my eye, nodded.

“Have faith in your pretty new face, my treasure. You can hardly recognize yourself. So how would anyone else?”

Nevertheless, I pulled the thin, stretchy bobble hat down over my forehead further than was needed, just to deal with the temperature. The training clothes were a mandatory part of our combat pack. Edelweiss—who never himself walked more than a few feet—used to stress that keeping as mobile as possible counteracted the almost physical pain of inactivity.

The watch showed 16.1 degrees in the Test Rooms and now 7.3 up here on the earth’s surface. The air was crisp and brittle as glass. Just to be outside was dizzying. Everything was familiar and yet so unfamiliar. The same sky and the same moon as when I was feverishly waiting for the signal, looking out from the suite at the Grand Hotel, waiting for first sunset and then sunrise, before I found out who Alpha actually was and anything at all about her insane plan. Before the world was turned upside down.

Sixten noticed that I was catching my breath. Stopped and gave me a worried look.

“How’s it going, Erasmus? Is the backpack too heavy for you after your surgery? I’ll take it if you want.”

“Thank you, sir, but I can hardly feel it.”

“Good. It’s a bit out of the ordinary from the point of view of running gear. But even if we bump into someone unexpectedly tonight, or some time in the future, it’ll be fine. I prepared the neighbors for the fact that relatives from America are coming to visit. I thought that you would have a lot of equipment, stuff to carry that might look odd—so I laid it on a bit thick. Said that you were semi-professional bird watchers, that you were going to study some unique Swedish biotopes.”

Sixten took off his own voluminous backpack, large enough to conceal not just one but two telescopes. Without a word he handed over one of them, which I left protruding enough so that it could be seen clearly. The sign of a twitcher.

Then he took the lead again, running at a comfortable long-distance pace, in the range of ten minutes per mile. At that speed I could follow him relatively easily. It felt so strange to have both hands free and yet not be in civilian mode. The apparatus swayed softly inside Jesús María’s hybrid, the world’s most important object, contained within her thin and yet tough fabric, the magic she had wrought.

We left the houses and the glow of the streetlights. Steadily I lengthened my stride, felt the intoxication of freedom. As we passed the last windows before the wooded area I could not help having a quick look in. Small red lamps in the children’s bedrooms, blue moons with gold stars, cuddly toys. I let the memories come, wash over me, like blood, before I erased the images from my mind.

Then the darkness took hold. Tall trees, roots and rocks on the ground. Sixten was obviously used to moving in unlit terrain. When we had got far enough in, he stopped and waited. Here we were surrounded by fir trees, as in a chamber in the forest, I could hardly see the sky through the dense branches.

I glanced at the weakly illuminated numbers on my wrist-watch: 22.49, September 13, 2013. I was now in Sixten’s hands. This was a man it was easy to rely on. Yet I tried very hard to keep my focus—tensed all over when I heard through the darkness how he started to move in some way, the rustling of his windcheater, the situation changing. I readied myself to draw my weapon from the hybrid before he had time to get much further.

But Sixten was quicker than me. In the next moment I felt the cold of his bottle against the back of my left hand, just above the security strap. I raised it to my mouth and took a little of the sports drink, even though neither of us really needed it after running for such a short time at a light long distance speed. But he was not attacking, he was reaching out to me. Making a gesture.

“All the same it’s odd, you know,” he said.

I waited, watched, listened to the heavy silence. Until the pulse had subsided in my still delicate frame. Until Sixten at last said:

“How the lies just came. Almost by themselves, when I was going to talk to the neighbors about your arrival—and suddenly made up all that stuff about bird watching. That the machinery could start up again like that, with turbines and drive belts going full tilt, the whole business. After forty-five long years.”

I had to fight to keep down the sticky sweet aftertaste of the drink. Could hardly have said anything, even if I’d wanted to.

“Can you imagine it was Aina who wanted to move out here? That she, who hated everything to do with nuclear weapons from the first day, had seen a brochure about this nice new area in Ursvik and suggested we come and have a look. As soon as we stepped off the bus she began to sob like a little girl over her memories. Couldn’t stop telling me how fantastic the sense of solidarity had been during the so-called Ursvik March in 1961: the first large-scale protest against the Swedish nuclear weapons program. That it was this which got her into studying jurisprudence at Lund University, to choose a life in the law, this which was the starting pistol for the whole of her pretty formidable engagement.”

Still no sound. Save for Sixten’s gentle past tense and the soft hum of night-time motorway traffic.

“And you understand that I felt incredibly uncomfortable. Nya Ursvik was going to be built bang on top of our most secret installations from before. The Plutonium Laboratory, the Metallurgy Section, the Test Rooms. Even if they were impressively deep down I was worried that someone would stumble upon the network of the old system during the construction of the houses.”