Mattias Berg - The Carrier

But in the end there is a limit to what is achievable. Ingrid’s strategy showed itself to be a classic—and yet it would prove impossible. To take the back way into the underground level, through the emergency exit, in the opposite direction to the builtin logic of all security systems. The protective doors at our facilities could only ever be opened in one direction: nobody was allowed to move against the flow. And that is therefore the very thing that we were now going to attempt.

The air-intakes were the sign. We had always pointed out that the small ventilators were still not small enough, and therefore not invisible enough, to deter the enemy. Our technicians had just shaken their heads and said that they could not be made any smaller. If we were wanting to house more people underground, often for even longer periods according to our increasingly opaque scenarios, the air-intakes had to be larger.

So we knew what our target should be. As did, to judge from their actions, the two female figures who blocked our path, one about thirty feet in front of the other.

Alva Myrdal, the leading figure of the Swedish U.N. disarmament committee from the ’60s, came straight at me. In other words Zafirah in the guise of the venerable stateswoman. Her body compact and small, the center of gravity low. It seemed to me that she had become more solid since I had last seen her, even more terrifying. The Team’s most committed ultra-violence specialist.

It all went extremely fast. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ingrid moving toward the air-intakes—but also another masquerade figure moving even faster in the same direction. Yet one more Eleanor Roosevelt, tall and sinewy with her muscles clearly visible through the long sleeves of her dress. It could hardly be anyone other than our Close Combat instructor. A nameless, melancholy woman from Rwanda, with unconventional techniques honed during their civil war. The only one who could defeat Zafirah in training.

But I was forced to shift focus. As Zafirah came in for the attack she began screaming. I looked at the open mouth behind the Alva Myrdal outfit and make-up, saw it move in slow motion, but heard no more sound whatsoever. Just focused on sliding into the fight zone. Minimizing the chances of her getting me onto my back, as she usually did, putting pressure on my larynx until the air ran out.

Much more easily than I would have expected, like in a dream, I got in close. As I grabbed hold of Alva Myrdal’s wavy hair and managed to twist her head, with the same crunching sound as when you break the neck of a pike, she seemed to be trying to say something to me. Her mouth was still wide open. I knocked her over backward with a powerful shove to her chest, and kept banging her head against the cement, and then there was no longer any question of her speaking.

All this took place in silence, as if the volume had been turned off. I registered a very specific smell. Familiar, yet impossible to place, under the thick stench of blood and brain tissue in the heat.

I left the lifeless woman behind me. Rushed up to the two surviving women by the air-intake, the protective doors. Saw Eleanor Roosevelt throwing herself headlong over St Lucia. Heard the Close Combat instructor’s surprisingly deep bellow cut through the hum of the crowd when she got Ingrid down onto the ground.

But St Lucia had a weapon to fight back with. From flat on her back she raised her upper body, in a slight bow, as the instructor sat down on top of her—setting fire to Eleanor Roosevelt’s wig with her chemical crown of candles.

Although our tough instructor fought with immense courage as the flames spread inexorably through the wig, she had no chance in the end. However much she tightened her grip on Ingrid, trying to drag her down to hell with her, set her alight too. Because this Lucia was wearing a nightshirt made from a special impregnated fabric of Jesús María’s.

Then I was paralyzed, frozen in movement as if I had been shot.

Because just as I reached Ingrid, and the combat instructor ran screaming like a banshee away across the base, with the flames reaching her scalp, spreading fire to other victims around the facility, I was suddenly able to place the smell which had risen from Alva Myrdal’s dead form.

It was a ladies’ perfume, perhaps the best known of them all. But I had met only two women who actually used Chanel No. 5 as their signature fragrance. The first was my mother, who was now in secure accommodation in an idyllically located home for dementia sufferers in northern Connecticut.

And the other was Aina.

So it turned out to be a classical drama after all. A tragedy of mistaken identity.

I suppressed the thoughts of Aina as we moved on silently through the low, dark system of culverts, in the opposite direction to what was intended, from the emergency exit inward rather than the other way around. I did not even raise my eyebrows when Ingrid simply led us in by pressing eight symbols on the buttons on the concealed control box and the doors opened.

Both the alarm and the surveillance cameras appeared to have been knocked out already, as well as the emergency lighting. Ingrid’s Lucia crown lit the way for us. The glow projected my shadow onto the wall, flickering jerkily, the smell of raw rubber and fuel nauseating in the stifling tunnels. Whatever was burning in the crown must have been napalm or some more modern pyrochemical substance.

We had only occasionally had the opportunity to rehearse a scenario like this. It was based on the assumption that a mole had prepared the way in the facility in question, one of our missile bases under the prairies of the Mid West. Ingrid must have done something similar here in Niscemi—as part of all her planning over so many years, decades according to her, that secret global folk movement. All aiming for just this moment.

I felt the weight of our mission growing heavier step by step. The hybrid seemed suddenly to be filled with lead. Every step required an effort, as if I were moving under water. After a few minutes we reached the door: marked with a simple “C.C.” in neutral gray letters. Thoughts were racing through my mind. On the other side was the place where not just our fate would be decided—but also yours, the fate of all future generations.

Reflexively I readied myself for close combat with the guards inside the command center, no doubt reinforced for the inauguration. Tensed myself. Drew my weapon, in case there was going to be space enough.

But Ingrid stopped fifteen feet short of the door. Began to fumble at the ceiling, until she found the control box for the entrance. The light from her Lucia crown now fell in a way which let me see what she was keying in on the tiny set of buttons under the lid—not the symbols themselves, but the movement of her fingers. The code had been the same up in Ursvik: everything is easy once you know. When she keyed in her “LISA 1969”, a sliding door opened soundlessly to the right in the metal wall.

I had to work hard to follow Ingrid as she ran at top speed down the spiral stairs on the other side of the door, turn after turn. So as not to lose the light from her crown but at the same time keep my dizziness under control, and the nausea from the pyrochemical smell. I clung onto the handrail. The piercing alarm must have been a figment of my imagination, all the mental warning lights flashing red in my mind. Yet they no longer helped: I paid no heed to her, just flung myself after.

Once down on level ground I just had time to see Ingrid open one more invisible door, following the same ritual, with the same code. Here too the sliding door opened in silence. When it closed again, sealing us off from the world, Ingrid turned to me and made a sweeping gesture across the control console.