The Carrier

by Mattias Berg

“Necessarily such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide. It is clear that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity even if he happens to be a resident of an enemy country.”

  And further:

  “The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.”

  And it is these evil things—thermonuclear weapons, hydrogen bombs—which even to this day stand proudly in position across the surface of the earth. Each and every one of the upward of twenty thousand individual warheads has an explosive force which is at least ten, and in some cases a thousand, times greater than the only nuclear weapons which have ever been used. The atom bombs dropped over first Hiroshima, and then Nagasaki.

  3.07

  For the weeks that followed, I remained convinced that the incident at Minot must have been simulated. Digital conjuring with the help of the footage Ingrid had managed to take away with her from Esrange, manipulated images streamed from the satellites. Another test of my determination and loyalty.

  I never asked her directly—since things never became any clearer when I did. And there was no sign from our pursuers, not even now. No reaction, no counter-move.

  Until Edelweiss called.

  I knew it had to be him as soon as I heard the ring tone—at 4.00 a.m.

  In Edelweiss’ universe, nothing happened by chance. The time of his call fell precisely in the middle of the hour of the wolf on my side of the Atlantic. When we had learned that all people with a normal daily rhythm were at their most vulnerable, the body’s activity level, temperature, blood pressure at its lowest—and the melatonin at its highest. That is why attacks just before dawn had become so popular, since our military researchers discovered the effects of melatonin. Especially because our night-combat technology was so superior to that of the impoverished states which we invaded: Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again.

  But I had been awake for a while. Had not been able to fall asleep again this time either, after the night’s blasting in the heart of the mine, once I had completed my check of the status of the briefcase. I lay there listening to the ghost furniture squeaking against the floor on the conference level above me. Stared at the spiders finding ways in everywhere, in spite of the cold that should have frozen them all solid before they came in.

  Yet I let the ring tone cut through the room: the “Dallas” theme tune. Four, five, six times . . . Then I just did it. Pressed the green button, waited out Edelweiss’ heavy breathing.

  “Ah, Erasmus . . . did I wake you? Sorry, one really should hang up after the phone has rung more than four times. But my mind must have wandered for a moment. No doubt feeling a bit lost in spacetime.”

  I did not manage to get a word out. It was such a long time since I had last heard Edelweiss speaking live. The voice of that person who awakened in me such strong and confused feelings: intense hatred and something bordering on admiration. Not warmth certainly, but heat.

  “Perhaps you’ve felt the same way lately, my dear friend. Ever since the incident at Minot? That reality has shifted a tiny bit, sunk out of sight, like a sand dune. Have you seen a six-eyed sand spider try to climb out of a deep pit in the desert? How it struggles, fights for its life, even though it’s made for just this biotope.”

  I did not want to follow him to any of the strange places where our dialogue often wandered.

  “You know that the missile attack wasn’t real.” I said.

  “Not real?”

  I gave nothing away, wasn’t going to fall into the trap. Just let him continue in his gentle voice.

  “I would guess that the relatives of those who died at Minot do see it as perfectly real, not to mention the fourteen seriously injured, and their relatives, to the extent that we humans can determine that. On average twenty-one dead makes about eighty-four nearest and dearest. On top of that the same number again of not so close relatives, like rings spreading in the water: brothers and sisters, cousins, grandparents, stepchildren maybe. I’d say you’re talking about three hundred people more or less directly affected. We do of course try to stress the importance of their not disclosing anything about what happened, because that would prejudice the longer-term possibilities, both for us and for you. And that doesn’t come cheaply. But if we were also to pretend that it was all just one big fiction, even their dead relatives . . . I don’t think that even our whole military budget would be enough to pay all of them off. People are extremely sensitive about the genuineness of their sensory impressions, as you know, my dear friend. Can take it pretty badly if that’s questioned.”

  He fell silent, let me dangle in the uncertainty. Which of these two less than wholly credible people was the more believable. Ingrid or Edelweiss. The devil or the deep blue sea.

  “But I understand exactly how you feel, Erasmus. How one can evolve after a long time in the vicinity of that woman. I know what you’ve been through earlier, many years ago—but not in a situation like this, as quarry on the run, with all the psychological pressure. And there’s a lot I could tell you about Oskarsson.”

  Then, in that very moment, I began to speak.

  First he listened, but eventually a conversation of sorts unfurled. Some kind of dialogue. A transaction took shape. Time vanished, as it so often did with Edelweiss. When he hung up at last, it was 6.00 a.m., November 20. And nothing had become easier. Rather, very much harder.

  I pulled the curtains aside, removed one of the boards, observed the mine in the yellowish artificial light. There were still three hours and nineteen minutes to go until sunrise. Three weeks until the Polar Night, beginning December 10. The day when the sun sank beneath the horizon here in Kiruna—not to reappear until the New Year.

  I knew that that ought to be the signal. The one symbolic point in time, the starting pistol for our move away from here: to the next stop after our apparently successful intervention out at Esrange.

  So the days went by in the same nerve-racking stillness. Jesús María usually behind the scenes with Bettan and the Girls. Ingrid less and less with her computer in her room and increasingly often in front of the T.V. or in the Ice Queen—which in itself was a sign that she would soon have finished her business here. Often practicing advanced yoga while watching the game shows she seemed passionate about: the more mindless, the better. Extended her body out of the Chesterfield armchair, in whichever direction, at times straight up into the air with no apparent support.

  I tried to keep some sort of control. Training, showering, suppressing doubts, anxieties, dreams. Going through that technical-occult ceremony of the briefcase day and night. Counting the number of hairy spiders as they made their way into my room, every night trying to convince myself that their sheer number indicated they could not be real.

  And the person we were waiting for was Sixten. For whatever it was that he could add to Ingrid’s lunatic project: this ex-engineer from Sweden’s former nuclear weapons program. But once you had met him—experienced his reserved warmth, how calmly he gave and received confidence—you were no longer sure you could manage without him.

  By lunchtime on December 10, the first day of the Polar Night, he had still not come. I was passing the time with Ingrid in front of the T.V. After yet another game show, she switched channels to a midday re-run of a documentary about a presumed Swedish mass-murderer who, after years in a psychiatric hospital, had turned out to be entirely innocent.

  I could not stop myself, was sucked right into the story. This man had seemingly been influenced by his therapist into confessing to actions he had never carried out, by recovering his own “repressed memories”. Guided into a world of mirrors in which he
himself could determine the rules and show the investigators evidence which had already been written about in the media. In this way the man was able to dupe the Swedish judicial system, the police force and a number of the country’s best lawyers.

  From my dissertation work, with all the Swedish source material, I had learned enough of the language to be able to follow what was going on in this documentary. Large parts consisted of a subtitled interview with an American psychologist. Her theories about “false memory” had become the film-makers’ key to understanding what had happened. The historic breakthrough for the theories had come when the psychologist managed to get several subjects in an experiment in the ’90s to recall, in exactly the same way, having been lost in a shopping mall as children, something which had never happened to any of them. During the interview the psychologist called this process “implantation”. Fictitious memories which are deliberately implanted deep within an individual’s mind.

  We did not say a word to each other while the documentary was playing. Only when the credits started to roll did Ingrid turn to me.

  “She looked much younger with her new hairstyle.”

  “Who do you mean?”

  “The psychologist, of course. She became my best friend during those first fragile years of study, at Columbia, when I was starting to build up my own double life: in the same way as you yourself some decades later, my treasure. She and I were studying two quite different subjects, but in the academic world there’s a lot of important stuff that crosses over between them, bridges over dark waters.”

  At that moment—when I was presented with an unsought opportunity to ask follow-up questions, to try to make some sense of Ingrid’s life story, logistically as well as chronologically—she suddenly got up from the sofa.

  “It’s time, Erasmus. A little over two hours before he’s due to collect us. Less than an hour till sundown.”

  3.08

  Then Ingrid led the three of us, with full packs, in among the low line of trees and up toward Luossa Hill. She had managed to track down Jesús María in the hotel. Now she was in front of me and I could hear her breathing. Not because there was anything wrong with her fitness—far from it—but she sounded like a predator out for the hunt.

  Once we reached the slope we saw that there was an impressive Saturday crush, low-level chaos. But Ingrid did not hesitate and made her way through the line. Seemed to trust entirely in her new face, confident that no-one would recognize her even here.

  “These are my last rentals, ma’am . . . but everything looks about right for you.” The young blond man in the rental store tested the length of the skis against Ingrid’s height, assessed the bindings. She inverted the poles, placed her hands in the baskets and measured their height in line with her forearm and elbow. “Just to warn you, the lifts close as soon as the sun has gone down, that’s our tradition for the day, for the Polar Night après-ski. The party goes on until midnight . . .” Ingrid paid him no attention, looked through the window at the mountain. “You’ll have half an hour at the most on the slope, barely ten minutes without sun and twenty with. At 11.45 a.m. it’ll be gone for the year.”

  “That will be more than enough,” she said.

  “And these two won’t be skiing?” he said, gesturing to me and Jesús María.

  “Oh, they’re just my fans.”

  “O.K. Got it.” The young man smiled in our direction. “Have you been here before?”

  “On top of the hill centuries ago, my friend. But I’ve never skied the slope.”

  “So, in that case you won’t have experienced our sun ritual either. It was meant to be a bit of fun when we opened a couple of years ago, on Polar Night, to try to get people in. It turned out to be such a success that we’ve kept it going. It’s our third year now. And the same clear sky as before.”

  “What’s this ritual about, then?”

  “I think you should wait and see, ma’am. It’s pretty cool, even if I say so myself.”

  The young man went out and closed the door while Ingrid put on the boots. I leaned forward and whispered to her:

  “Seriously? Ski here, now, among all these people?”

  “Have you ever known me not serious, my treasure? I simply can’t leave without trying the piste, can I? And Bettan said that this would be the best day of all. We’ve got enough time before we’re due to be picked up, just after lunch. Only a few runs, before the lifts close.”

  As she got into the lift line—she had given me her large backpack but kept her small one—Ingrid fired off her most irresistible smile.

  “Besides, I just wanted to show off a bit of my former magic for you, from the good old days. If you just spread out a bit and keep an eye open, I’ll feel completely safe here. This is my natural element, I’m almost on my home turf. And the bigger the crowds, the lower the risk.”

  Without further discussion—about who should stand where out of the two of us, any strategic considerations—Jesús María started to half-run up the steep lower part of the slope, stopping just below the tree line. I remained where I was, by the side of the lift line, with not only the large hybrid but also Ingrid’s pack at my feet, which limited my ability to move and intervene. Yet my reflexes kicked in as I began to survey the crowd. Any suspicious-looking individuals or groups, conceivable threats, potential escape routes.

  But for the most part it all seemed peaceful. Among the other skiers some, especially the teenagers, appeared to have stolen a march on the ski hut’s planned après-ski party. Their shouts to their friends waiting in line were loud and shrill, but at least the group was preoccupied. Nobody seemed to be taking any notice of Jesús María, who now stood a few hundred feet above me, looking out over the masses. Nor of Ingrid.

  Except for me. I could not take my eyes off her. How she let her seventy-year-old body dance and play, dominating the whole piste, at once relaxed and theatrical.

  As she took the lift up again, having slid to an elegant stop at the tail of the lift line, my eyes resumed their scan across the people who filled most of the piste. Using the usual profiling. One possible risk group was four men in their fifties. Most of the skiers were in pairs, except for one bunch of six young people. Eight pairs were single-sex—five only men and three only women, who all seemed much younger—and six were mixed.

  It was not easy to identify any particular characteristics among them: not when they were all wearing helmets and goggles, with their faces protected against the extreme cold by balaclavas, and the same sort of clothes. They were more or less indistinguishable from each other, except for their height. Even Jesús María and myself.

  Only three sets of skiers stood out. The first was a couple who seemed to be absorbed in each other further up the slope and not far from Jesús María. Even at a distance one could see the intensity of their embrace. The woman almost disappeared within the man’s frame.

  The next was of course Ingrid, who cut through the swarm of people with the ease of a razor blade. She made a number of turns on her way down, with an expertise which showed us that she could have done as many more or less as she would have liked. She appeared spellbound by the snow and the sun and the skiing, unaware of what was going on around her, buried deep within herself.

  When the third conspicuous skier, an enormous man on his own, swung in to the lift line again, I thought I should watch him closely—which was becoming more difficult because an increasing number of people poured in by the minute, some coming up from below. Non-skiers, they stepped off the T-bar, about half-way up. The skiers coming from higher on the slope also stopped at the same point. Within moments it had become nearly impossible to make one’s way through the mass of people just below the point where Jesús María was standing. Two snowcats, each towing a refrigerator, braked suddenly in the crowd—whereupon the drivers jumped off and started to hand out bottles of beer.

  At that precise moment the sun rose above the hill opposite us, at an angle which allowed the lowest of its rays to fall just wh
ere the people were all gathered. From where I was, suddenly alone at the bottom of the lift—which was still running but was now not being used by anybody—I saw the faces in the crowd all turned toward the light, gazing at the pale disc of the sun. I could not help thinking about our early nuclear weapons tests. How the spectators had been sitting in rows, some with sunglasses, some without, admiring the ball of fire as it hovered half up in the sky, before the throng here raised their bottles and shouted “Skål!” to each other and to the now so distant star.

  Then the music began to boom through enormous speakers at the base area, while people who seemed to be total strangers hugged and kissed, as if on New Year’s Eve. I looked at my watch: 11.21.

  So this was the sun ritual—which instantly made the security situation much more fluid, so much harder to calculate. Ingrid was now almost the only person still skiing, and she had a clear view to both sides of the slope. But to navigate the crowd of people in the middle of the piste she needed to carve a sharp turn far out to the right, about where Jesús María seemed to have hidden herself away in the trees. Then she descended, carving giant turns around the lift pylons.

  Only one other person could be seen on the piste. The solitary giant of a man, who became, in an instant, so recognizable. That terrifying pattern of movement, conspicuous even on skis.

  When he took the lift up again just three seats ahead of Ingrid, who was gesticulating at me with her index finger to indicate that she wanted only one more descent, I started running up the hill as fast as I could with the hybrid on my back and her pack on my front. I noticed the amorous couple to the right of the festive crowd, just near to the point where Ingrid would be passing in a minute or two, but I was still too far away to be able to shout a warning—even if she were able to hear anything at all through the music and the buzz of the throng.

  So Ingrid would soon be caught in their ingenious trap, with me as nothing more than spectator.

  When the young man from the rental store looked at the clock and began the countdown—from sixty, second by second, as “The Final Countdown” blasted from the loudspeakers—I managed to get a reasonably clear line of sight through all the people as they stood there with eyes screwed tight shut against the disappearing sun, shouting out the numbers in unison. Was able, as I struggled to make my way through them, to follow what was happening behind their backs.