Mattias Berg - The Carrier

But how this was all meant to happen, the endless complexity of the exchange, was something I could not calculate. That had to be Edelweiss’ problem.

And still the other two kept their silence. The expressionless Ingrid to my right, and Jesús María on my left, still staring at John. Intent on translating Ingrid’s agreement to take him down into an end as macabre as Kurt’s.

I tried to remain vigilant, once again running the alternatives through my mind, focused, dazed, absent, when the alarm went off. At 04.54, just as the temperature was passing the 111 degree mark, my watch, and Ingrid’s, emitted a faint synchronized buzzing. The warning signal that the heat had now risen to a level where movement and mental functions were being affected. In fifteen minutes the watch would signal again, to remind us that human operational capacity reduces by 1 per cent every quarter of an hour at such high temperatures.

This was the sort of refinement technicians loved, intended for the army at the time of the desert invasion in 1993: our first war in really unbearable heat. All those involved had disabled the function, regarded as not just superfluous but at times deadly dangerous. One single buzz from the watch could after all be the difference between being able to move forward unobserved or giving away one’s position.

That was why Edelweiss had picked it up off the scrapheap of history and insisted that we should never switch off the signal function. Not because he thought it could be useful to know where the other members of the Team might be—but rather as yet one more challenge, another handicap, for us to cope with.

In order not to attract the attention of the guards and make them suspect that I was planning something, I turned off the watch’s signal mode. Collected the saliva my glands were still producing, swallowed when there was a decent volume of it. Behaved just as we had been taught for desert environments. Limit all functions, keep movements to a bare minimum, think of cold. The blessings of the eternal ice.

The thirst was the worst part, now as ever. Sometimes humans too stretch out their tongues, like dogs, in an ancient reflex from the age of cavemen. Our psycho-physiologists said that this was the ultimate warning sign. If you see one of your unit doing that, they said, you have to give as much as possible of your own liquid to them.

Now I had no liquid, neither for myself or anyone else, nothing at all after John had emptied out all of our bottles. So I could only observe in the mirror how Jesús María opened her mouth and stretched out her cloven tongue, cautiously yet still visibly. The diamonds or bling glittered in her mouth. So it was she—who from earliest childhood must have been well accustomed to extreme heat, the baking temperatures of Mexico’s interior—who was the first of us three to weaken.

But then I realized that showing the tip of her tongue had merely been a signal to John. And at that point Jesús María finally took action.

“Excuse me, sir… Mr Smith…” she said.

“Yes ma’am?” he said.

“I need to use the bathroom.”

John got up heavily and theatrically, like a statue rousing itself from centuries-long immobility. Came a few steps closer to us and laid his enormous hand on the shoulder of one of the female guards.

“This here is Mrs Jones. And she would love to accompany you to the bathroom.”

Jesús María looked first at her, then back at John.

“Honestly… and no offense, Mrs Jones, I would feel more comfortable if someone like you were to come with me, Mr Smith. In this situation.”

It took a few seconds before John answered. I counted, one technique for surviving unbearable situations: six , seven , eight … Then John went in an instant from being a psychological riddle—that eerily silent creature—to an open book. In two short sentences.

“Well, now. Of course I’ll come with you, if that’s what you want, ma’am.”

And then his predictable minor addition:

“What wouldn’t one do for a lady in need?”

The asymmetry in asymmetrical warfare rarely represents anything specific. Mostly it is the fact that things do not follow patterns, regularity, norms. That is to say: the expression can cover more or less anything that one does not understand. The trick is to operate strategically even when everybody’s motives—both on your own side and the enemy’s—seem obscure or simply unreasonable.

So here we were, me and Ingrid, without both John and Jésus María. And a new female guard came into the room with food for us all.

I tried to re-interpret the situation according to its new unfathomable premises. The next step had to be the exchange: an attempt to deliver Ingrid to Edelweiss in some way. Despite the fact that the guards in the room, now numbering seven, would hardly be sympathetic to that, likely would not even understand what I was trying to achieve. So first I would have to overcome them and then “Fort Knox” itself. And then whatever else was waiting outside the four-inch-thick walls.

But I had no choice. Somewhere deep inside I still felt a basic moral sense, some sort of world conscience. Maybe it was for the sake of my former family, which only an hour ago had been sitting here opposite me; maybe for everybody else’s sake too. Under layer upon layer of toughening and steeling myself, my conviction had grown that Ingrid’s ideas would jeopardize mankind’s future more than anything else throughout history. With the help of the one weapon which had been built, deliberately, for our own annihilation.

I watched her in the mirror opposite, peered between the guards to see her sphynx-like expression, totally blank. Perhaps she was not following our training. Or she was still affected by the drug, had not recovered as miraculously as I had first thought. Small drops of sweat had begun to trickle down her face too, as she began to eat the yellow-brown sludge which had come in on the female guard’s trolley.

It was hard to make out if this was meant to be breakfast, lunch or dinner: or what it was at all. Whether the revolting smell of rancid fat was meant to add to the situation. To the heat and the tension.

Yet we needed the food, as well as the liquid contained in it. Ingrid had emptied her plate—as had all the guards apart from the woman who came with the trolley and knew what this mess really consisted of—before I had my first mouthful. This was why our physiologists had chosen the concentrated crunch cookies for our combat packs. Because everything else could, under certain conditions, be impossible to eat.

I managed in the end to down half of my portion, despite the smell from our plates, the heat, the unbearable atmosphere. My wrist-watch showed 06.01 and 115.4 degrees. Ten minutes since John had left with Jesús María. I awaited Ingrid’s move, had to let her go first, assumed that she was not incapacitated by the drug.

The clock crawled forward while the temperature approached 122. The hypothesis that this was really all about me and not Ingrid seemed more credible by the minute. That I was in one way or another the Core of the Poodle and the entire situation had been set up so that I and not she would be handed over to Edelweiss.

That the arrangements from and including Jukkasjärvi, in all their complexity, had in fact been designed precisely to lure me back into his lair. That they did not see Ingrid as the main threat to the world’s survival, mankind’s fragile future, our whole civilization—but rather me, Erasmus. The Carrier and not Alpha. That it was Ingrid who had first sealed an alliance with the Master of Darkness, Edelweiss, long before my own pathetic little efforts.

I kept staring at the tallest of the female guards: tried to remember where I had seen her before, the set of her shoulders, that icy look. Then my recollections came to a sudden stop. When my wrist-watch showed 6.10, she spoke. After a slight reaction, as the message sounded in her earpiece: