Mattias Berg - The Carrier

When the congenial formal dinner was over, I met the military advisors in my room for a final polishing of our plans for a full-scale and irreversible nuclear weapons attack on the other superpower.

I took one last close look at the calculations for the devastation. Felt a warmth through my body, like endorphins after a run.

And that was my frame of mind as finally I woke up, with a smile on my lips.

It did not take too many seconds before my mouth stiffened into a grimace and the warmth in my body was replaced by freezing cold. The lit-up ice figure of Jesus on the cross was staring me in the face, paralyzed with agony, just like me.

I tried to lift my naked back. But just the first inch of movement gave an indication of how bad the pain would be when my body tried to free itself from the bluish block of ice. Although I would be largely anesthetized by the cold.

The smell of Zafirah’s heavily spiced scent—enough to provoke headaches even under normal conditions—was still hanging in the air, or maybe just in my memory. The steel-gray short wig, as well as Sixten’s turquoise shell jacket, lay discarded beside the ice bed. As dysfunctional as my brain was, this made me realize that he had probably never been here.

I managed to get up after a number of unsuccessful attempts. It was like tearing off a Band-Aid. Except that it covered my entire back—and that it was my own efforts which were ripping open the wound.

I staggered around among the objects which had been spread across the suite. The hybrid was still there, but without the briefcase. My weapon, field knife, and the medical pack containing the treasured anesthetics and things far worse which could bring an end to everything at once, were also gone. As well as my notebook, the crunch cookies, the cell phone from the playground, my watch: everything that could keep me oriented. And the key which Sixten had given me.

But they had left most of the contents of the pack, including my field glasses, latest passport, currency, the matching credit cards in one of the hybrid’s secret pockets. Probably hoping to keep me under electronic surveillance, waiting to see where the tracks would lead. Or they had simply been in a hurry.

My sweater and down vest lay just inside the hybrid’s upper lid. I put my clothes on incredibly slowly, a few inches at a time, adding layer after layer with infinite care as if I were made of cracked glass. With some effort I also managed to get my winter boots on as well as the black snowmobile suit with the words “THE INNER STATION. Niklas’ Adventures” on the breast pocket. I strapped on the noticeably lighter hybrid as loosely as I could, opened the unlocked door to Suite 325, “The Martyrdom of Christ”, and went down into the sparse night lighting of the Ice Lobby. Scanning the area, I looked for some sign of either Ingrid or Jesús María. When the receptionist informed me they had checked out, I thanked her, turned, and—without a backward glance—made for the cover of the Polar night.

Our psychologists had told us that nobody could really explain how our will to live functions. Why it could suddenly stop. Or why it did not.

So I walked away from the hotel, reflexively, instinctively, although I could have headed down into the river instead. The clock outside the souvenir store showed 05.01, December 12, 2013. Everything was crystal clear and unreal. The area surrounding the hotel in power-save mode, the transfer buses like giant bugs sleeping along the main road.

But the vast restaurant on the other side, scaled to accommodate mass tourist assault, was still open at this time of night: for the most part as a gesture to a few individual truckers who had slept in their vehicles. One of them was sitting at a table inside, finishing his breakfast.

“Are you headed near Kiruna station?” I said.

“Certainly am, but I’m leaving right now.”

“Do you have any alcohol in the truck? I can pay you for it.” I showed him money. He nodded, got slowly to his feet and I followed him out to the biggest eighteen-wheeler on the road.

When I jumped down at the station he handed me a small, transparent, plastic bottle without a label. It could just as easily have been home-distilled spirit or face cleanser—an impression which downing the bottle in the bathroom on the train did nothing to dispel. But it did to some extent deaden the pain, and the effect of feeling frozen solid began to wear off.

I removed the jumpsuit and pulled on the neutral, black gear which I had taken out of the combat pack in the hybrid. I stared at the face in the mirror, still strange to me. The new lips, the fleshy nose: Jesús María’s attempt to make me look like General Shubin. The face in the mirror looked back at me, searching for some trace of the man before the martyr. I saw the wreckage of a person—not only after the trials of the night, my temporary death. But also the psychological warfare.

By the time we arrived at Luleå, after not many hours’ journey, the locomotive succumbed to the cold. While we were waiting, I went to the station store and bought a ballpoint pen and a notebook. Then eventually I sat down in the restaurant car of the new train, put the hybrid under the table and ordered an inedible Pyttipanna with cream sauce, sliced beetroot and two fried eggs. Carefully noted down in the new notebook everything that had happened since we left the Snowflake, barely two days ago.

When I was finished, my left temple started to burn with pain, as well as much of my back—I needed something else to concentrate on. I began a comprehensive analysis of the situation in my new notebook.

I made the basic assumption that the core team was now up and running. If not immediately after the launch at Minot, then in any case since the Ice Hotel. Apart from Zafirah and Kurt-or-John—together or separately—Edelweiss was presumably as ever at headquarters in Washington. On top of that, elements of the President’s own forces had presumably been assigned to take us down. But in accordance with the directives, few, if any others at all, would be informed: not even the Vice President.

The remaining authorities, all of our jumble of more or less rival agencies, would probably have no idea either. Likely not the C.I.A. Presumably neither the F.B.I. nor the N.S.A. Almost certainly not the Secret Service either—or the S.S., as Edelweiss sometimes used to label them, the meaning hidden yet clear. They would only be thinking that NUCLEUS were away on yet another top secret training maneuver somewhere around the globe.

Even I was no longer aware of much more than pieces of the puzzle. I had no idea who had my briefcase or Ingrid’s portable command terminal. Who were the hunters, who the hunted.

So I wrote down the names of the people in chronological order, without specifying their respective roles. In order of appearance during our flight: first Jesús María, then Ingrid, Sixten, Aina, Lisa, Bettan, Niklas. After that I added my ageing senile mother, as well as Amba and the children.

Then I put a cross underneath those who might be dead. That made at least half, maybe all of them. Eliminated in silence, as always during our classified assignments overseas. Later there would be talk of accidents and illnesses, chance fateful encounters: only we would know the whole picture, had sufficient numbers of paid informants.

Finally I added our nuclear weapons bases, both at home and in Europe, as well as other strategic targets—and began to sketch in the connections. Solid arrows between the squares represented movements which had already taken place, ones with dashed lines meant upcoming ones, double lines between people indicated that they trusted each other while single lines suggested fundamental uncertainty. And soon it all became one solid cloud of ink.