Mattias Berg - The Carrier

Ingrid paused, looked first at Sixten without getting any reaction. Then she turned to me, the same calm, open features.

“Imagine my surprise to find the key in your hybrid at the Ice Hotel, having returned there after retrieving the briefcase. We left you to your dreams, Jesús María and I. But I kept wondering, of course. What had my treasure been thinking?”

I could not meet her gaze. She continued before I could form the words to respond, or question—I was not sure which—and her attention returned to Edelweiss.

“Jesús María, my little dark angel, got hold of that small black case of californium during Aina’s birthday party last fall. While we were tattooing the codes onto Aina in the bathroom she revealed that after taking the case at Arlanda, she had simply put it away at the back of her freezer, wrapped in some nondescript grease-proof paper, knowing that it needed to be stored at that temperature, and that Sixten would never think of looking there. Hiding it away in plain sight. Aina said she thought it was some kind of explosive charge, but was not much more specific than that. It had later made the move to Ursvik with them, and lain in the kitchen undisturbed until Jesús María grabbed it in the midst of the chaos during the attack on the house, thinking it might come in useful at some point. Then she eventually crafted some kind of device, maybe during our stay in Belgium. Combining the case with a simple detonator she must have stolen from my combat gear, then wrapping it all in Kevlar, with her textile talents.”

Once again a pause, while we held our breath.

“So I had no idea what exactly the device was that I helped her insert inside herself in the bathroom at Dulles. Even my fertile imagination did not go that far. But I did think that it would be sufficiently powerful to kill John when he set it off, doing what he always did with Jesús María. I tried hard to dissuade her, but having given her—my blood sister—a promise before our escape from NUCLEUS, I felt I had no argument. So neither I nor, I think, Jesús María, understood the terrifying force with which she was ‘impregnated’. The third operational nuclear explosion in history. And one I am going to regret for the rest of my life.”

There was then a break in which Ingrid and I were allowed to go to the bathroom in silence, closely guarded by Kurt-or-John, and to drink two plastic cups of water each. On the way back into the lecture hall, we encountered Sixten coming in the opposite direction. He and I looked away from each other, while out of the corner of my eye I saw Ingrid staring straight at him. The trace of a smile passed across her face.

When everybody had returned, the scene was all set again and it was my turn.

“Erasmus, my friend… could you give us your own perspective on all this?”

I observed Edelweiss’ almost childish curiosity, the breathing which had his whole organism heaving and swaying. I inhaled as deeply as I was able with the chains across my chest—before taking it all from the beginning: in one flow, from the moment I was sucked into Ingrid’s maelstrom.

I said that I had begun my university studies with the unusual combination of a major in medieval history and a minor in moral philosophy. When it appeared that I would have the same teacher for both of these very different subjects, it seemed strange at first, as if the college was not approaching this in a very serious way or was suffering from a staff shortage. But then that teacher had linked the topics together in such a spell-bindingly obvious way.

After that came the recruitment to West Point, which took place following my first lectures. I could not at first take the recruiters’ quiet questions entirely seriously—I of all people, a drifting pacifist, a young seeker for something, as obsessed with cultural history as with encryption—but then I had fallen hook, line and sinker. The spiral staircase up to the helipad at the university was the frontier between this fundamentally humanistic world and the fundamentally unhumanistic one in West Point’s sealed wing. Then the wordless flight over the Hudson, the initiation rite.

I told them I was asked by “Ingrid Bergman” if I wanted to become her first doctoral candidate. That she had just vanished as soon as my dissertation was finished and accepted, against all the odds, her and my vague search for “Lise Meitner’s secret” while I myself was stowed away at the Catholic University in Washington.

It was such an incongruous relief to spew it all up, right there, as a witness before my Team, the survivors of what Edelweiss had once called NUCLEUS: our top secret elite force against barbarity, terrorism, the darkness within. Because nothing mattered now. Because the system had in the end swallowed us all, was so much bigger than any one individual. Even an Ingrid Oskarsson, it would seem.

At first Edelweiss did not appear interested. He had after all heard my formal history so many times before, ever since he interviewed me at West Point, the episode that sealed my fate.

It was my private history he was after: what had driven me, attracted me. What it was that could get a person to diverge, head off in a diametrically different direction. So it was at about that point that he started to listen to my account in a different way, to wake up. Edelweiss moved his hand to his face. Passed it over his chins, the rolls of fat, that remarkable landscape of skin and folds, like a foreign planet.

“And at around that time you come into NUCLEUS, my dear lost sheep—only to bale out again later, regardless of the cost. Leaving everything of importance behind. Abandoning house and home. Your beloved wife, the little children with their strange names, who hadn’t even reached their teens before you cast them adrift. As you did your country, your assignment, gambling with the fate of the world: placing such huge pressure on our civilisation. What is it that can drive a man to do that? Can you give us any clue, Erasmus?”

I stole a look at Ingrid, searched for words. And then they just came.

“Because I found my way back to the real me, slowly but surely, that lost pacifist who had once upon a time enrolled at university because he had a desperate need for some sort of moral compass. Because I was being hollowed out from inside, until all that was left was a thin shell. Because man doesn’t get that many chances to rescue his own world.”

The silence was deafening. Edelweiss regarded me with curiosity, more amused than worried, seemed to be waiting for more. I took a deep breath—but Ingrid got in ahead of me.

“I’m sorry, my treasure.”

Silence once more, watching and waiting. I thought I caught a glimpse of Sixten giving her a quick glance.

“But those were never your words. They were mine,” she said.

I turned, leaned forward to look past Sixten: looked right into Ingrid’s blue-gray eyes. Met her gaze.

“I shifted you, Erasmus, hour by hour, month by month, year after year. It was I who sent the cuttings in the brown envelopes to your office. Worked on you with all the methods I had available, finally got you to take the step. To flee with the briefcase, leaving everything behind, your finger still on the trigger.”

I stole a look at Edelweiss. Felt some sort of warmth inside. Ingrid was trying to defend me, to save at least one of us. So I just stared at the floor and did not interrupt. Listened to her melodious voice, as I so often had before.

“You had naturally been barred from getting into the missile forces, during your first officer training course, after that incident during the security regulations exam. Do you remember anything of that, my treasure?”

I shook my head, let her go on with her piece of theater. From the rest of the audience there came only the same silence.