Mattias Berg - The Carrier

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, only 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.”

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.