Mattias Berg - The Carrier

“Listen up, ladies and gentlemen, or rather: lady, girls and boy . You now have the chance to put your questions. To the only ones who, based on our research, know anything about Erasmus Levine’s disappearance. So I think you should take this opportunity, kids. You too of course, Mrs Levine.”

They looked so terribly confused, all of them, Amba included. Probably just like all of us on the bench opposite. Me above all.

When Amba then looked straight at me in a different way, deep into my eyes: as she used to once upon a time, I fell over backward even though from the outside I remained sitting upright. Because her eyes beamed like X-rays at the disguise and my new face. Through successive layers, hidden strata, as sharp as few others in her increasingly frequent hunts for forgeries. That strangely penetrating gaze I had fallen for that very first evening.

She must have recognized me—but if she did, she gave nothing away. Seemed to be allowing me the chance to run free for a while longer, as much as she was in a position to do so. Then she turned to John with tired resolution.

“No, I don’t think we have any questions, Mr…?”

“Smith. Peter Smith,” John said.

I breathed out for a second or two. Even though this probably wouldn’t advance my cause by more than a fraction. Then another thunderbolt, as Amba continued. They say lightning doesn’t strike twice—which is mere superstition, of course.

“And to be honest, Peter, I don’t care. The explanation which that police inspector with the funny name—Edelweiss, I think—gave me seemed good enough… that Erasmus had just run off with his old academic supervisor. That she’d bewitched him. And you could tell it was going to happen from the way Erasmus used to go on about that woman: I always regarded her as our ghost from the past.”

I sat very still, shut my eyes. Paralyzed by the power in the room. The charge from the thunderbolt. But what Amba said next may have come as a surprise even to Edelweiss, who would surely be following all this minutely via the monitor in his office.

“And anyhow we’d stopped relying on him a long time ago. All of us.”

When I was able to open my eyes again I saw the children nod. Well-mannered but perhaps with a little melancholy.

Then I saw something glint by Trinity’s pocket as she turned and the spotlights in the room fell on it. I realized immediately what she had been clutching throughout this whole unbearable session. The last part of the trinitite, the glassy residue left by the first nuclear weapons test—when the desert sand in New Mexico encountered the blast, destruction and creation—which became a kind of rarity among collectors. I had given her a small piece on each of her birthdays, fragments from what Edelweiss had once given me. When I fled, in that last goodbye, I left all that remained of it in a gift box under her bed.

I tried not to look into Trinity’s eyes as my family got to their feet from the bench opposite, Amba and then the children, from youngest to oldest. Closed my eyes as I listened to the last I would ever hear of Amba’s voice.

“So if you’ll excuse us, Peter, we want to go now. Get on with our lives. We have a twelfth birthday party to finish. A cake to polish off, bowls of candies just for us, piles of potato chips left—isn’t that right, kids?”

As they were led out of the room by two escorts, one in front and one behind, there was a change of scene. A number of other guards came in and stood just in front of us, by our bench. Six of them in that small room, “Fort Knox”: two for each of us. A man and a woman in each pair. Staring us right in the eye, trained even to blink as little as was physically possible, not one movement in their faces.

I tried so hard not to wonder where they were taking Amba and the children. Whether back into some sort of custody, maybe worse—or really back out to the suburbs, home, free, in a normal civilian car, where they might resume Unity’s party with as much enthusiasm as they could muster the next day.

Had Amba played her role perfectly? Or rather broken every imaginable rule, and improvised, thought for herself, usually a prisoner’s worst offense. Or had she articulated their genuine feelings about me? Real, deep hatred following my sudden escape.

One by one, I managed to shut down my thoughts of Amba and the children. Put into practice all the things I had so long trained for, never dreaming that this ultimate challenge would be where I would make use of them most. Not in my worst nightmares.

I looked past the guards toward John, who had assumed the same position as before on the bench opposite us: eyes on the floor and fingertips together, as if meditating. I had never before seen him like this. While Kurt was alive they had been indistinguishable, rarely speaking with anybody except each other, as only they were sufficiently receptive to each other’s brutal humor. As far from being meditative as it was possible to be.

But perhaps this was John’s way of mourning his life-long partner. Or brooding, stock-still, over the next phase in his revenge.

As I leaned further to my right to be able to see the whole of him, my two guards—cheap Secret Service types, pawns on Edelweiss’ board—followed the movement and reached for their weapons. Then they swayed back into position, since this was not turning into any incident. I stayed in the same crooked and uncomfortable position, watching for John’s next move.

His T-shirt was now so wet and rank from the heat in here that every ripple of his mighty chest and stomach muscles had become visible. After a few more minutes he started to carry out a certain movement with mechanical precision. Seemed preoccupied with the small pool of sweat which was forming in the crook of his elbow, just below his sculpted biceps, and he dried it at regular intervals with a tiny ball of cotton wool. On the other hand he appeared not to care at all about the floods of sweat which simply ran down his bald scalp, continuing like tears over his face, and then onto the floor with a soft plop.

The next time I permitted myself to look, when I could no longer stop myself, my wrist-watch showed 03.56 and 108.9 degrees. My brain was calculating slowly in this heat. We were ten people in this low, long and narrow room, about ten by twenty-five feet with barely seven feet of headroom, which meant little more than a twenty-one-square-foot area totaling 141 cubic feet of air per person—and that was gradually but surely being consumed by us all. And humans breathe in 21 per cent oxygen and 0.03 per cent carbon dioxide—but exhale 16 per cent oxygen and 4 per cent carbon dioxide. It’s an equation which cannot hold for long. Not here in “Fort Knox”.

I could feel it in my head, in my sluggish thinking, how the oxygen was beginning to run out. And slowly, so slowly, it dawned on me why Edelweiss had called the guards, the pawns, into the game. Probably none of them had the slightest idea who we were. How much we were wanted, how seriously and covertly pursued. And they were not meant to guard us in any real sense, because that was still not necessary, given all of our multiple and partly contradictory agendas.

Their only role was to consume the oxygen, drive up both the heat and the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere. All of the pressure in the room.

Once again I pressed my heel back against the hybrid, needed to feel that the briefcase was still there: the most important object in the world, the ace up my sleeve. Everything else had slipped through my fingers. My mission, my family, my life. My only remaining role was to save the universe. In some way deliver Ingrid to Edelweiss, put an end to her crazy idea once and for all, both Plan A and Plan B. Then be given safe conduct to my next and final destination—hoping against all odds that he would keep his end of the bargain. Would tell my family, once all the cards had been played, the true story of my flight. How I had been duped all along by Ingrid.