The Carrier

by Mattias Berg

  And so it went on for a decade, while my doubts about everything that I was doing in my military guise increased. When the articles arrived—even though I had often already read them—these feelings grew. The absurdity of the nuclear weapons system became ever clearer to me. The rhetoric was being peeled away, the arguments crushed.

  From 2010 on, the articles also began to confirm what the Team, the inner circle, had known for years. For example, a Russian military analyst expressed the view that the risk of nuclear conflict had not been so great since the height of the Cold War thirty years earlier. But, he argued, the global disarmament mechanism had no time to deal with the issue.

  An American peace researcher pointed out that the top-level meetings about nuclear safety which were still taking place were chiefly dealing with political instability in the smaller nuclear nations, and the risk of the spread to other states like Iran and North Korea. But nothing at all about the arsenals of the two nations who dominated the scene—Russia and us, the United States.

  As one famous peace researcher put it in an article which arrived in my office in March 2011: “The world’s most powerful leaders have now met three times in the last eight years to discuss 17 per cent of the global stock of nuclear weapons. The remaining 83 per cent have not been discussed at all.”

  In the same way that the articles were a theme with variations, the cipher system also changed each time, while adhering to the same core principles. Each time the key to decryption required the arrangement of a number of words which had been circled in accordance with a certain system. Each time the message in clear was “We two against the world”.

  And then it was February 2013.

  I was going to celebrate my birthday, in peace and quiet as usual, with a simple dinner at home with my family. On the morning of that day yet another brown envelope was in my mailbox. But this time the outer appearance was different because the envelope creased around the contours of a hard, flat object within and it had been carefully taped.

  At the top I read “HAPPY 50TH BIRTHDAY!” in the same neat hand as ever. Under it was the usual address. I sat there for a long time before I pushed the D.V.D. into my computer, fingering it, inspecting the plastic, trying to weigh the risk, judging whether our little game was going to end like this—with a banal explosion in an office in D.C.’s Catholic University. But I ran it through my own private anti-virus program, obviously not the university’s inadequate one, and started to play the movie.

  I had seen “Mata Hari” once before, at the university’s film club during my student years. But it had not left much of a mark. Seeing it now, I was surprised by how powerful the movie was. From the first scene—the firing squads executing the spies, its sudden brutality—all the way to the dark ending. When Greta Garbo as Mata Hari is led away to her end, head held high, her back to the camera: the spy who was said to have bewitched the whole of France.

  After the end of the movie I felt extremely unwell. I went out, drank a few mouthfuls of water from the fountain, took some deep breaths in the dead end of the corridor where I had my room. Nothing helped.

  So I lowered my head between my knees and small symbols seemed to start spinning inside my closed eyelids. I opened my eyes, shut them again and sat down at my desk with a pen in my hand. Tried to wait out my twitching muscles, the interplay between my brain and my reflexes, but without success.

  I pushed the disc in again, did my best to relax, make myself as receptive as possible. A little more than half-way through I again felt my sub-conscious being stirred in that peculiar way. Now I was convinced.

  In the Team we had tried out steganography. The old art of concealing the fact that a secret message exists at all, as distinct from cryptography which only hides the message itself. The classic example was Histaios, the tyrant of Miletus in the late sixth century B.C., who had his slave’s head shaved and inscribed on the bald scalp an important dispatch about an impending war. He waited for the slave to grow his hair back before sending him off.

  Even that technique had its shortcomings. To begin with, the one thing that is rarely described in the story: how to convey to the recipient what needs to be done to get at the message, for example shave the messenger’s head. If you make that too clear—in the old days by writing, more recently with a telephone call or yet another dispatch using a different technique—the information becomes too vulnerable and easy to crack. And if not clear enough, how would one know that there was even something being transmitted?

  I ran the movie from the start a second time, and waited for that strange feeling to grow again. This message would presumably be double-encrypted. Partly with steganography—some kind of message hidden within the file, being the movie—and partly with some subliminal technique. The hidden message can only have been shown for a tenth of a second or so, at the most a few frames, something which our normal perception would not pick up.

  That is why I had felt so ill. When my conscious was trying to catch at something which by its nature was out of reach.

  After watching the movie again, its symbols remaining insufficiently clear, I downloaded the steganography programs which we had tested in the Team. SteganPEG, Secret Layer and QuickStego, which could both hide intelligence and crack the codes.

  Digital steganography, the art of hiding secret messages within apparently innocent data files such as family photographs or YouTube clips, had become fashionable some years earlier. But in the endless race between the code setters and the code breakers, even this technique started to be hauled in. One of its drawbacks was the change in file size, noticeable however small the message.

  But none of the programs helped me to uncover the information I was looking for. I sat through the entire afternoon, watching the movie over and over, without getting any further than identifying the frame in which the message must have been planted. In the scene in which Mata Hari starts to tug at General Shubin’s arm—to stop him from revealing her adored Rosanoff as a spy—that feeling in my brain started assert itself. And then it reached its climax at the precise moment when Mata Hari shoots Shubin.

  Darkness had fallen outside the tall windows of my office when my right hand started to move the pen over the notebook, as if of its own accord. There were thirteen numbers and two letters there now: 161 221 192 D12 U15.

  As if straight from my sub-conscious, written out automatically.

  Then there was only one thing left to do, whether I wanted it to or not. The words rolled out from the back of my head. I love you just as senselessly as my pretty weird and hellish father, for the time being and onward into eternity, Amen. There was no doubt. Reading the sequence of numbers as 16, 12, 21, 19, 2, D, 12, U and 15 and using my key sentence resulted in something that simply could not be a coincidence.

  The clear text was “THE OLD HUT”. And the unfathomable implication was not only that somebody other than my mother and I knew the key sentence—but also that the same person was aware of the boys’ and my favorite hiding place in the abandoned playground.

  Now that I knew what I knew, I literally had no idea where to turn. I went out into the deserted corridor, but the automatic neon lights had little time to come on before I went back into my room again. Threw up into the sink. Sat on the floor with my head again between my knees, while the nausea rose and fell.

  Eventually I got to my feet and walked all the way to the abandoned playground. My watch showed 19.04. If I was quick I could still get home in time for the birthday dinner.

  There was nobody to be seen. I pushed my way into the dark bushes where the hut had once been. Pulled on my gloves, felt under the last of the rotting bits of plank—and immediately found the cell phone.

  There was a grayish envelope symbol in the primitive display. The message was encrypted using the same key sentence. I ran my eyes over the thirty-five characters, as a musician would read a score: 615 19C K12 192 814 20V 216 219 162 181 721 R/1.

  In clear, “STOCKHOLM FIVE SEPTEMBER”.

  Sud
denly I had a direction, a place, a goal—as well as a dispatcher. The last number was a signature as clear as anything could be in the world of cryptology. Because it was the position for the letter “alpha” in the Greek alphabet.

  I no longer had the slightest shadow of a doubt. The message could only have been signed by one person—or machine.

  1.09

  Unblessed are the believers, Edelweiss used to say. Blessed are those who know.

  So I did not speculate how Alpha could have known my greatest secret, the key sentence, the scene with Mom at the kitchen table thirty-seven years ago. Could have cracked the code to my whole life. Not then—when all I did was to delete the simple message and reply 19K, “O.K.”, before I put the cell phone back in the same place. Nor after that time, either.

  Partly because I could never be sure if I was communicating with man or machine. And partly because it was all overshadowed by the realization that I had somehow managed to acquire an ally, a confidant.

  I had been wondering about escape for so long, been looking for the opportunity, indeed ever since my basic training at West Point. And when I became part of the Team, that temptation had only grown. After I got involved in the nuclear weapons administration and was given my assignment, became one of the carriers. Saw how far-reaching the issue was.

  The simple thought had been to just vanish, never again to reappear. Some quick changes of identity during my escape, the way we normally would, and then lower myself into the eternal ice with the briefcase.

  Yet I knew that it would make no difference. Other than to me personally: that I alone would be spared my moral dilemma. But the rest of it would stay intact. They said the briefcase became unusable as soon as the system was broken. After they had altered the codes, and the whole security structure down to the minutest detail, somebody else would take my place and the whole caboodle would go back to what they called normal.

  But now—with each new message to the cell phone at the abandoned playground, always synchronized with another brown envelope in the mailbox—everything became as much possible as impossible. To leave my family and my whole double life. In some way break out of the Team together with Alpha. Escape with the briefcase still fully functional, my finger on the launch button. We two against the world.

  I had no idea what the plan could be, beyond the rudimentary instructions which came to the cell phone during the seven months between February and September 2013, until two days before the official visit to Stockholm. But I took it for granted that Alpha knew exactly.

  And I had for so long been straining at the leash, testing the limits of my civilian identity, been stirred by the mysterious envelopes with the articles. My presence in the School of Philosophy coffee room had long since become a trial for most people. I would kick off with a simple assertion, already at the time when we withdrew from the A.B.M. Treaty in 2002: that the nuclear weapons issue was troubling me. How strange it was that so few people talked about the biggest issue of all. That here we were, as close to extinction as we had been during the Cold War.

  Most of my idealistic, left-leaning colleagues gave the same answer: that there was surely no longer any nuclear threat worth talking about. Weapons of that kind had after all been taken off the apocalyptic daily agenda after the Wall fell. I had begun to argue back, with quiet determination, confining myself of course to public sources yet still getting ever closer to the line.

  For more than a decade I had held forth in the coffee room, pointing out that there were still upward of twenty thousand nuclear warheads distributed across the world’s surface. That the Doomsday Clock, which a group of committed natural scientists set periodically based on their judgment of how close the world is to man-made catastrophe, had been moved to just two minutes to midnight to reflect the nuclear threat. That, according to the U.N., mankind could end world starvation by giving only one third of the global expenditure on nuclear weapons to the poorest countries. That the cost of the world’s stock of nuclear weapons had been calculated at close to a trillion dollars per decade. Yes, I clarified for these godforsaken humanists, that’s a one followed by twelve zeros.

  Later, I could only recall all this as if through a haze. How I had ground on that in the U.S. alone we had produced more than seventy thousand nuclear warheads between 1945 and 1996, more than all other countries put together. In recent years, compared to those before 9/11, we had at the same time increased our defense budget by more than 50 per cent—while our national debt was greater than our G.N.P. Now we were spending five times more than China, ten times more than Russia, on our military apparatus.

  Then I would go on to lecture them about the renewal. The “Revitalization”, as it was called: the coming generation of nuclear weapons. I stressed that this was what really caught the eye—and was yet rarely commented on. That the whole of our nuclear arsenal was in other words going to be renewed, at a cost of at least a trillion dollars during the coming thirty years. Once again: a one and twelve zeros.

  Many commentators, I would go on, claimed those figures were way too low. That to replace the twelve Ohio-class atomic submarines would cost at least 110 billion dollars. And that renewing the B.61 atomic bomb, our faithful servant from the Cold War days which was still loaded onto F.16 aircraft at our bases all over Europe and elsewhere in the world, would cost five billion dollars per year for the next decade.

  Somewhere around there, the majority of my colleagues would have taken themselves back to their offices with many a sigh. Only the most radical stayed and chimed in.

  Sooner or later one of them would also take up the internal aspect. For example, say that they had seen a documentary about the fabled “nuclear code” and learned that for a long time it had consisted of just eight zeros, 00000000—because it should be as easy as possible to send off the missiles in a crisis.

  I used to say that I had seen the very same documentary.

  And that the lead times, according to what I had read, were still at least as short as during the Cold War. The Russians’ intercontinental missiles could reach us in half an hour—and in the continental U.S. we needed two minutes before the corresponding rockets, and twelve before the nuclear weapons on our U-boats, were airborne and counter-attacking. That would give the President between eighteen and twenty-eight minutes to reach a critical decision. Under the greatest possible pressure, dealing with all of the controls needed to ensure that the alarm was not a technical glitch, which was by no means a rare occurrence.

  I could have told them that the internal scenario was more rapid. By the time it would come to light that a handful of people with the necessary level of authority had gone to pieces, or had consciously and resolutely decided to take matters into their own hands, not much time at all would be left to arrest the process.

  But I never did tell them. That is where I drew the line.

  I had, however, begun to refer to the books written by Bruce Blair, a former missile operator, which were published in the 1990s. According to him, during the Cold War it would have required at the most four moles to set off a full-scale nuclear attack, including two personnel at the operational level to confirm each other’s breaches of orders, thereby rendering the whole so-called “No Lone Zone” rule meaningless. Our fail-safe regulations prescribed that no one person could be alone with the critical controls and were still cited by our authorities as a guarantee that nothing unforeseen could happen within the system. Furthermore, a maximum of two personnel would be needed at a sufficiently high strategic level.

  It was also Blair who had disclosed that, a long way into the ’70s, the security codes had been no more advanced than those eight zeros, so as not to slow down launch procedures. After he had lectured at one of our highly classified internal security conferences, Zafirah asked him how many moles it would take these days. How many do you yourself think, he had answered, bearing in mind digital vulnerability, mobility, the deliberate nature of our decentralized war plan? Twenty? Ten? Two?

  If
some of my very few Republican colleagues stayed on in the coffee room, they would be capable of defending our security routines with a strange fervor. Insist, for example, that the briefcase was always within reach of the President—according to what they had read in magazines without any “alarmist agenda”.

  I could have answered that there was indeed in theory a close proximity between the President and the briefcase; also a complicated structure of bodyguards, competing security teams, the chance of lightning-fast and unpredictable things happening. The human factor. That the physical distance between the President and the briefcase could in practice change—but that it never was short enough to stop one worrying about it.

  And that it had been me, and none other, who was the main Carrier of the briefcase.

  1.10

  Now the briefcase was lying beside me in the fallout shelter: torn from its complex context, just like me. It was now more than twenty-four hours since I had broken out, taking the Nurse with me. Half a day since Alpha had joined us in here. After I had been communicating with her for more than half a year before my escape, using nothing more than one-way messages to a cell phone at the abandoned playground, without having the least idea who she was.

  I had done my uttermost to interpret the encrypted messages, whose clear text rarely became any clearer: “SIGNAL”, “AROUND MARS”, “NEGATIVE TWO FIFTY-THREE POINT THREE”, “THE SHELTER”, “CREATE MORE TIME. PLAY SICK!”

  When Ingrid Bergman—Alpha—finally woke up, it was 8.13 a.m., Friday, September 6, 2013. I went straight to her, as soon as I saw her body start to move, and I asked her that question:

  “How did you come across my key sentence?”

  Ingrid Bergman did not answer. She just kept on stretching, seeming not to hear. I repeated the question, louder—and that woke up the Nurse. She opened her dark-brown eyes and stared right into mine. As much terrified as aggressive, like a wounded animal.