by Mattias Berg
“You hate me,” I said.
I was not sure if the Nurse was able to answer, and in that case if her ability to speak had suffered temporary or permanent damage. I took what was necessary out of my backpack: scalpel, suture thread, needles, anesthetic, syringes. Ingrid Bergman was now wide awake and moved away from the Nurse when she saw my equipment. Put herself by the inner door, to give me plenty of elbow-room for the stitching.
Then it all happened with lightning speed. The Nurse let out a shrill screech, like a war cry, before throwing herself over me. I thought that the normal holds would be enough, but the Nurse matched me, move for move. Our nurses have obviously had military training: yet I parried her initial attacks without any great difficulty.
But it is all too easy, isn’t it, to let your guard drop. Even when things are moving at lightning speed, to be so sure of victory that you lean back and take it all for granted.
The Nurse suddenly dived in under my guard. Grabbed my balls, tore and twisted at them, squeezed until they felt crushed: that indescribable pain shot all the way down to my knees. I was as shocked as the Nurse had been when used as a sledgehammer on Kurt-or-John. Without letting go of my testicles, she managed to get hold of the syringe with her other hand—and plunged it deep into my chest.
It was not the strongest of drugs but very fast-acting, spreading throughout the arteries to my whole body. My legs softened at once. Slowly, I dropped to my knees, like an old elephant.
From that position I saw the Nurse pull the scalpel from my left hand. How she held it, ready to strike. Ingrid Bergman did not move from where she had retreated over by the inner door, she just sat there, observing the action.
The scalpel was raised—and then disappeared. Some of the glass shards fell onto the welded steel floor with clinking, crystal sounds. Blood flowed from the Nurse’s forehead. With quick and practiced movements she sewed the incisions herself, without an anesthetic, before tearing off some toilet paper and wiping away the blood. Finally she took some bandaging from her own pack and nonchalantly wound it around her head.
Then I heard her dark voice for the first time.
“Stay between me and him, Ingrid, every fucking inch of the way. If he tries anything again, he’s dead.”
2
Timeout
September–October 2013
Ursvik, Sweden
2.01
We moved through the labyrinth of the tunnel system as fast as we could, Ingrid and the Nurse in the lead while I fell further and further behind, like a dead weight. The anesthesia flowed through my body, heavy as mercury, contributing to my nausea, at best dulling the pain. The Nurse had all but ruptured my scrotum, though she had left me able to walk. Feverish, I vomited in the darkness.
At regular intervals Ingrid Bergman paused to check that I was still in touch. Just a glance back so she would not lose contact with either me or the Nurse ahead of her, searching for a way through the passages like a tracker dog. All that energy, even though she had so recently been unconscious. Maybe she had just put on an act. She had certainly managed to absorb the impact with Zafirah and Kurt-or-John better than should have been possible.
In the glow from the light-emitting diodes in the floor—which Ingrid Bergman had lit from the control panel inside the fallout shelter, as effortlessly as she had then opened the doors—everything turned blood-red and dream-like. We were in a dark womb. The diodes showed us the way through the vast tunnel system: the one, the only right choice among all the false paths.
It must have taken years to carve out the bed-rock, maybe even decades. Large numbers of personnel and materials could have been moved around within the system without problems, entire units, medium-weight armaments.
I could feel in my stomach that we kept going deeper, and the altimeter reading on my wrist-watch registered 260 feet below. The tunnels were narrow and claustrophobic: my head was inches from the roof, but we had been trained to master the elements. Through air and fire, deep in the earth and under water, we had prepared ourselves for everything that was unnatural. Ultimately, for the end of the world.
The system was similar to our own—top secret links between strategic points tens of miles apart, correspondences far below ground. Whole cities growing downward, like stalactites, civilizations beneath the earth’s surface, unknown to all but a tiny number of people with the highest security clearance. But this complex went deeper and wider than anything I had experienced before.
I breathed more heavily with each step. The anesthetic hung like a lump of fat around my heart, my entire musculature aching and cramping. Soon small dots seemed to appear along the tunnel walls. When exhaustion reaches the threshold of oxygen starvation, one simply begins to hallucinate, tries to escape reality in any way possible.
So I knew that the little dwarf spider—which was soon growing to the size of the walls, finally beginning to engulf the whole tunnel system, like a deluge from an invisible source—only existed in my imagination. Though that was not a great comfort.
I had no choice but to stop and get some liquid inside me and take one of our crunch crackers. From the start, Edelweiss had rejected the normal self-heating field rations and instead got our physiologists to develop a new type of nourishment, to a degree inspired by the space program. Highly concentrated, tasteless nutrition. Thin discs, grayish sacramental wafers, which took up no room and could be eaten whatever your condition. Except if unconscious or dead, as Edelweiss had said when he first presented them to the Team.
“When it’s crunch time, all you need is a crunch cracker. And for you, my little lambs, it’s always crunch time.”
Time 09.41, depth negative 289.4 feet. Had we not been heading downward, I would hardly have made it much further. Ingrid Bergman turned and said, “not much further to go now”. My hearing had also started to fade, with each step it became harder to take in the physical world around me. I had often to step sideways, as if my feet were skis and I were trying to clamber across the rough slope of the tunnel floor, just to stop myself from falling headlong. The reflexes from my years of training were all that enabled me, in my current state, to keep a hold on the briefcase.
Without warning, the two women came back up to me. Put themselves, as I was now, with their feet on either side of the steep tunnel. If anything, it was even harder to stand still like that: Ingrid Bergman had also planted herself next to me, lest my legs gave way. Muttered something overblown about needing to make arrangements for security, to put us beyond the reach of angels.
And in those circumstances it was not difficult to let them take the briefcase from me.
When Ingrid Bergman reached toward my left hand, I tried at first to put up some resistance. Then I gave in, put my blind trust in her: my lecturer, supervisor and mentor.
She took the briefcase in her left hand, slid down gently like a skier, until she found a position where she could put it on her knees. Used the combat pack on her back as a cushion against one rough wall, boots braced against the other. Then she reached over her right shoulder and took out a wrinkled piece of paper from one of her pack’s outer pockets.
The light-emitting diodes on the tunnel wall cast a weak red sheen over the sketch. Yet even from this distance, about fifteen feet now that she had slithered down, I could see on the paper an outline of the inside of the briefcase—but covered in thin, penciled lines, arrows and strokes in different directions.
I wondered why she did not light her headlamp, but got my answer a moment later.
“It’s easier to do this if the light’s better. But I don’t think we want to illuminate ourselves more than necessary,” she said.
The Nurse and I positioned ourselves as Ingrid Bergman had, backs against one wall and legs against the other: my upper body throbbed with the effort. Then we both pushed forward from the walls to be able to see as much as possible. As close to her as we could—without coming too close to each other.
“I’m not sure that we need to be doing this al
ready. Whether the Test Rooms remain connected to the outside world. But let’s assume so in any case, as a hypothesis, which will force us once and for all to cut off contact with our old friends.”
Ingrid Bergman held up the paper in the light from the diodes. Tilted it in my direction, away from the Nurse.
“Have you seen, Erasmus? Quite the piece of handicraft from hell!”
I began to make out what the lines and arrows on the sketch represented. The wiring itself inside the briefcase, the thing that would always allow them to know the briefcase’s position. It had been kept secret even from me. I could never find it, however much I had, over long hours, fiddled about with the innermost parts of the briefcase.
I had supposed it to be a single point—most likely the usual G.P.S. transmitter, which our technicians forever managed to make smaller—rather than this elegantly constructed pattern. According to the sketch in Ingrid Bergman’s hand, the wires ran into and out of the heart of the apparatus, resembling a medieval tapestry: there seemed to be no possibility of removing them without setting off both an alarm and a local explosion. Which would expose and obliterate whichever enemy had somehow managed to come by the briefcase and attempted to remove the tracking system. At the same time, it would destroy the briefcase, rendering it unusable. Just as they had assured us.
Now Ingrid Bergman put the sketch between her teeth and, leaning forward over the precipitous pathway of the tunnel, flipped open the briefcase. She seemed to have mastered the hand movements at least as reflexively as I had, the waltz of the little fingers, the ritual for revealing the keyboard. Then she held the drawing up in the dark red glow of the diodes.
“What do you reckon?” she said.
I could not find an answer, did not know what she wanted me to say. Then I heard the Nurse’s dark voice.
“Like, impossible. Two optic fibers, twisted hard around themselves, so thin that you’re meant to think they’re a single fiber. I know there has to be a way. But do you really want me to try, Ingrid?”
“What happens if you don’t succeed? Hell-fire?”
“Apart from the fact that alarms will instantly go off at Centcom and we’ll be sending smoke signals for everybody who wants to know where we are? No fucking idea. I just followed the drawing the technicians gave me, like a sewing pattern. But those lunatics can think up pretty much anything.”
Ingrid Bergman seemed to hesitate for a moment before nodding at the Nurse. There was so much we did not know. A cloud of secrets among us. Nobody wanted—or was allowed to have—the whole picture. Not even Alpha.
With great care, the Nurse lifted the open briefcase off Ingrid Bergman’s lap and set it on her knees and then took three sizes of scalpel from her medical pack. I looked at my wrist-watch as she started: 10.24, September 6, 2013. Perhaps, I thought, this was as far as our escape and our lives would go.
The Nurse opened and closed the briefcase a few times, all the right hand movements, her little fingers each on the correct points. Kept feeling around the leather cover of the metal case. Leaned forward, listened, as we were trained to do: trying to catch the mechanism’s own breathing.
I glanced at Ingrid Bergman. She was following developments with as much apprehension as I was, her nervousness seemed genuine. The Nurse picked up one of the scalpels and tested it on the outside of the briefcase—before she chose a second one with a thinner blade. Then, with infinite care, she slit open the leather from the outside never more than a hair’s breadth at a time, her tongue in the corner of her mouth. The light from her headlamp revealed pearls of sweat strung across her upper lip.
In the end she slit the rest of the briefcase’s lid in one long straight cut. Two ultra-thin optic fiber threads were now visible under the leather. She pulled the full length of them out, let them fall onto the ground with a casual flick of her left hand, like surgical thread.
“Shit, I hate working backward,” she muttered, “trying to work out what the hell you were thinking.”
Then she lifted open the top, felt with similar care inside the lid, in the foam rubber filling between the pockets and the different parts of the mechanism, parts which I had never myself thought of as being significant. I noticed all our futile bits of information proudly in their places. The Black Book, the list of our underground bases, the information folder, “the biscuit”. Knew that the essential parts were still concealed: the keyboard that covered half of the lower part of the case. The screen inside the lid.
The Nurse made two straight vertical incisions into the underside of the lid, at the point where the screen ended. I felt my body cramp, the static electricity over my scalp, just waiting for the explosion. Shut my eyes, the evolutionary, albeit pointless, reflex that we all learn.
When I opened my eyes, I saw the Nurse picking out with extreme delicacy the thin optic fiber threads which had been wound around each other, separating them one by one, fraction of an inch by fraction of an inch, with the finest of her scalpels. Each moment lasted an eternity. I glanced at my watch: barely two minutes had passed since the Nurse started to take out the tracing mechanism.
The fiber threads in the underside of the case seemed if possible even more complicated. According to what I could make out from the sketch, they appeared to have been bound together with the threads in the lid to form one single intricate pattern, in which it was impossible to identify which was beginning and which was end. Yet the Nurse was still switching rapidly between outer covering and the insides. The next time I opened my eyes, more threads were discarded beside her—and the briefcase was back in my left hand.
I swallowed, blinked. Breathed. Let the air rush out of my lungs.
“Thanks,” was all I could say.
But it was not the Nurse answering.
“Thanks to you too, my treasure. The secret is to find the right assistants,” Ingrid Bergman said.
2.02
The dreams, through the chemical haze, came back more viciously than ever.
I had endured terrible nights for so many years. Ever since I started my research work in the ’90s.
I thought it must be because of the stress. The endless threat of being unmasked. Not just academically, with a supervisor who demanded so much, but in my whole double—or maybe even triple—life. The apparently incompatible identities which in some way came to meld like an alloy: family man, moral philosopher and Carrier. All of that has to seep out in one way or another, even with a person like me.
From the start, the dreams were of violence. Flashes of hyper-realistic visions of me doing the most appalling things to friends or family, those I held most dear. First to my mother. Soon to Amba, even to the children.
As I began to study the history of atomic weapons, my academic work became woven into these brutal scenes. Images of burning buildings, cities crumbling, bubbling with cooking asphalt and human remains, as if out of a documentary: sleeping hallucinations rather than ordinary dreams.
I was always the one playing the main character—even though my identities in the dreams changed. The only thing they had in common was the savage acts which ended them, often carried out in similar fashion. I could not tell a single other person about this. Not my supervisor, Ingrid Bergman, not Amba. And never, ever, our team’s psychologists.
The series of macabre images this particular night—the last dream, the one which woke me up: the only one you can ever remember with any sort of precision—ended with me once again being Robert Oppenheimer. In the most classic scene of them all.
The nuclear test went by the code name “Trinity”. A small group of researchers gathered outside the little town of Alamogordo on July 16, 1945: for the first time able to see the effects of my creation, little more than three weeks before testing it for real over Hiroshima. The result of our combined efforts. In a little more than three years, more or less around the clock.
The setting was as high-tension as the experiment itself. Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, the Destiny Symphony, boomed through the concr
ete bunker from an old-style portable gramophone, while the thunder outside rumbled along with the music. I waited, impatient, sulking, keeping myself apart from the other researchers and senior military until the storm had passed overhead. Kept scribbling until the last moments, noting down my speculations as to how strong the explosion was going to be—pure guess-work—on the little notepad with squared paper. When the time came, I walked slowly out of the bunker to observe the miracle in the desert with my own eyes.
And for an instant it seemed as if all my calculations inside the secret laboratory had been underestimates: as if the atmosphere itself had caught fire.
The landscape was bathed in a glowing light many times stronger than the midday summer sun. The color was at once and in some incomprehensible way both golden and purple. The reflection lit up every mountain top, each ridge, the smallest crack in the surrounding peaks, with a clarity and beauty which nobody could later capture in words. I reflected that this is the awe the poets have sought to describe throughout the millennia.
Thirty seconds later came the pressure wave and straight after it the indescribable roar, a resounding premonition of Doomsday. An event of extreme violence which only the Almighty could have created before. When the whole sequence of events began to ebb—even at my distance it felt as if some low-pressure area were sucking everything from us, like waves washing out from a beach—we started to pump each other’s hands. Slapped each other on the back, laughed like children, giggled in relief, almost in a state of hysteria.
The mathematician with whom I had made a bet as to whether or not the experiment would ignite the universe asked for his ten dollars, a boyish smile on his lips. I smiled back, a little ashamed. In part because I never thought that anything of that sort would indeed occur—that I was the one chosen to cause the world to end: Ragnarök itself—but rather had assumed that his more or less playful bet had been some sort of incantation to protect us. And in part because I had no money on me.