Mattias Berg - The Carrier

The answer was like so many others with Ingrid. Little more than something leading to new questions, new inadequate replies. I tried another tack.

“And what happens now?”

“You’ve no doubt seen the headlines, my treasure: THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS SCANDAL?”

She turned from the window, looked into my eyes. I nodded.

“So Ed’s therefore been made harmless for the time being. I’ve instructed my informants to release what we know to the media bit by bit, only as much as is necessary at each stage so that heads will roll—as in a medieval painting. Today, for example, the Secretary for Defense is going to have to go. And Ed knows that we still hold the trump card. That the next step is to disclose the existence of NUCLEUS, his own role, the unbelievable secret of our hidden mandate.”

Ingrid paused. Continued in English.

“And even after that we still have an ace up our sleeves. Because the day you and I go public, my treasure, not even the President will survive for long. That two individuals, the Carrier himself and somebody who calls herself Alpha, had the entire nuclear weapons system in the palms of their hands for so many years—and have now taken off with their finger still on the button. That the future of the world is literally in the balance.”

Jesús María woke up again, yawned, while Ingrid kept whispering in my ear. Her warm voice right into my mind. Her deepest secrets. Whispering, but still in a melodic voice that someone close by could detect.

“Besides that, Ed now knows that I’ve planted everything necessary—codes, structure, instructions down to the tiniest detail on how to complete the arrangements with a normal computer—with one unknown person. In case something should unexpectedly happen to us. Chosen one single person out of the seven billion who still populate the earth. And Ed will never be able to find that one small person, my ‘Needle in the Haystack’. I call it Plan B: our common insurance policy.”

Jesús María gave me an odd smile.

“No need to worry, Erasmo. I’m not the Needle. Me you can kill whenever you want.”

I stared at Ingrid.

“Yes, Jesús María is the only one who knows. She helped me with the practicalities, in Ursvik. Tattooed all of the information in coded form onto Aina’s body, a place where nobody looks: not even somebody who loves you more than anyone. That was why it took us such a long time in the main bathroom, if you remember. And that was why Aina had to pour so much champagne into herself so quickly. To cope with the pain—and on her birthday too: she who never otherwise drinks a single drop! But she didn’t hesitate for one second to sacrifice herself for the cause.”

I was overrun by a cascade of bad memories. The messages from Edelweiss that I picked up while inside the smaller bathroom, that image of Zafirah with the jerry can, the fire, our escape.

“So we’ve got Jesús María to thank for that. And for what happened out at the base this evening. She had to play your part, in the heat of the moment.”

“Yeah. Hot as hell it was,” Jesús María said.

“Yes, I simply don’t understand what went wrong. The assignment, nothing more complicated than a distraction, had been perfectly set up by my helpers—did you notice the nuclear symbol on the dummy bomb?—and Jesús María helped me to get everyone looking in completely the wrong direction for a moment. But with the pyrotechnics—”

“Oh, give me a break. We’ll all be dead and buried soon anyway.”

Jesús María cut off the discussion and the mood turned tense, stifling. So I broke the silence with another of my questions.

“And why did you sacrifice Falconetti first?”

Ingrid turned away, stared out of the window into space. As if looking back in time. Then leaned even closer to me and revealed everything in one long-whispered fairy-tale.

“For a long time he was my only playmate. Eventually the one who gave me the job of creating an entirely new security unit after 9/11, free hands . That was when I contacted your old teacher from West Point, Ed—who else?—and asked him to put together a tight little team which would be unlike anything under the sun. But the whole time it was Falconetti, our four-star general, the most senior operational commander of the nuclear weapons system, who was the missing link between the President and me.

“He was so inspired by General LeMay in the 1950s, you see, that whole Cold War mentality. For Falconetti too we were always on a war footing. He insisted that we had to be ready at all times both to strike and to strike back, in full scale, have the tools to hand.

“And to be honest it was Falconetti, not me, who first formulated the vision of being able to direct the whole nuclear weapons system even when Centcom and the Commander-in-chief had been knocked out. On the run, fully mobile. But also in a situation like that we had to follow the basic outlines of our rigorous security arrangements: “No Lone Zone”. Insure ourselves against a single madman—so that no-one would ever be alone with the decision, the ceremony for launching our weapons.”

Ingrid paused, perhaps for effect, and Jesús María got up and went to the bathroom, just a couple of feet from the front row. I could hear her violent vomiting, the result of the drug she had injected herself with, or the tequila or both. Then Ingrid said: “But for two madmen we left the field open.”

I swallowed, felt the nausea welling up. Possibly from having heard the sounds from Jesús María in the bathroom. Or because of the situation we all found ourselves in.

“So when the time came I needed you, my treasure. And had to throw Falconetti to the wolves—as well as Goldsmith, who always defended him. A few well-placed calls and some leaked e-mails was all it took. I let it all trickle out after their attack in Ursvik, as a small revenge.”

When at last I managed to fall asleep in my seat, after another straight tequila, both women sleeping in the seats on either side of me, I dreamed that I was the last survivor of the crew of the Enola Gay and had suffered a serious heart attack while on a holiday in Tokyo. Beside me in the little hospital room sat my very old doctor—a woman long past retirement age—and she wanted to tell me before it was too late how it had actually been. Because she did not give me many more days to live.

She began by saying that there was nothing special about her story. That she had seen that light like all the others, the silver flash, the ghostly glare. That she was in other words not one of the seventy thousand people who died on the spot, which she had regretted for the rest of her life, every minute, she said. Nor one of the same number who died from the secondary effects, which meant that half of the city’s inhabitants were killed by the bomb.

Instead she became one of the many hibakusha , the tens of thousands of survivors who after the war had become invisible. “Most people can neither see nor hear us,” she said. “Can you?” she asked with a serious look, curious and determined. As if she really did wonder.

I countered with my experience of the event. That as the plane’s navigator I had been responsible for getting us to the exact place that was selected just prior to take-off, more or less by chance, one of several possible targets. The random choice prevented information from leaking out. The choice happened to fall on her city and her life.

I also told her that I could still remember how the plane lurched, and that special metallic click when the Bomb was released, and how the sky was then covered by the mushroom cloud. When the pillar of smoke eventually sank away we could see that the place where the city had turned into a black, formless mass, like a cauldron filled with boiling tar. A sight nobody had prepared us for.