by Mattias Berg
The next time I permitted myself to look, when I could no longer stop myself, my wrist-watch showed 03.56 and 108.9 degrees. My brain was calculating slowly in this heat. We were ten people in this low, long and narrow room, about ten by twenty-five feet with barely seven feet of headroom, which meant little more than a twenty-one-square-foot area totaling 141 cubic feet of air per person—and that was gradually but surely being consumed by us all. And humans breathe in 21 per cent oxygen and 0.03 per cent carbon dioxide—but exhale 16 per cent oxygen and 4 per cent carbon dioxide. It’s an equation which cannot hold for long. Not here in “Fort Knox”.
I could feel it in my head, in my sluggish thinking, how the oxygen was beginning to run out. And slowly, so slowly, it dawned on me why Edelweiss had called the guards, the pawns, into the game. Probably none of them had the slightest idea who we were. How much we were wanted, how seriously and covertly pursued. And they were not meant to guard us in any real sense, because that was still not necessary, given all of our multiple and partly contradictory agendas.
Their only role was to consume the oxygen, drive up both the heat and the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere. All of the pressure in the room.
Once again I pressed my heel back against the hybrid, needed to feel that the briefcase was still there: the most important object in the world, the ace up my sleeve. Everything else had slipped through my fingers. My mission, my family, my life. My only remaining role was to save the universe. In some way deliver Ingrid to Edelweiss, put an end to her crazy idea once and for all, both Plan A and Plan B. Then be given safe conduct to my next and final destination—hoping against all odds that he would keep his end of the bargain. Would tell my family, once all the cards had been played, the true story of my flight. How I had been duped all along by Ingrid.
But how this was all meant to happen, the endless complexity of the exchange, was something I could not calculate. That had to be Edelweiss’ problem.
And still the other two kept their silence. The expressionless Ingrid to my right, and Jesús María on my left, still staring at John. Intent on translating Ingrid’s agreement to take him down into an end as macabre as Kurt’s.
I tried to remain vigilant, once again running the alternatives through my mind, focused, dazed, absent, when the alarm went off. At 04.54, just as the temperature was passing the 111 degree mark, my watch, and Ingrid’s, emitted a faint synchronized buzzing. The warning signal that the heat had now risen to a level where movement and mental functions were being affected. In fifteen minutes the watch would signal again, to remind us that human operational capacity reduces by 1 per cent every quarter of an hour at such high temperatures.
This was the sort of refinement technicians loved, intended for the army at the time of the desert invasion in 1993: our first war in really unbearable heat. All those involved had disabled the function, regarded as not just superfluous but at times deadly dangerous. One single buzz from the watch could after all be the difference between being able to move forward unobserved or giving away one’s position.
That was why Edelweiss had picked it up off the scrapheap of history and insisted that we should never switch off the signal function. Not because he thought it could be useful to know where the other members of the Team might be—but rather as yet one more challenge, another handicap, for us to cope with.
In order not to attract the attention of the guards and make them suspect that I was planning something, I turned off the watch’s signal mode. Collected the saliva my glands were still producing, swallowed when there was a decent volume of it. Behaved just as we had been taught for desert environments. Limit all functions, keep movements to a bare minimum, think of cold. The blessings of the eternal ice.
The thirst was the worst part, now as ever. Sometimes humans too stretch out their tongues, like dogs, in an ancient reflex from the age of cavemen. Our psycho-physiologists said that this was the ultimate warning sign. If you see one of your unit doing that, they said, you have to give as much as possible of your own liquid to them.
Now I had no liquid, neither for myself or anyone else, nothing at all after John had emptied out all of our bottles. So I could only observe in the mirror how Jesús María opened her mouth and stretched out her cloven tongue, cautiously yet still visibly. The diamonds or bling glittered in her mouth. So it was she—who from earliest childhood must have been well accustomed to extreme heat, the baking temperatures of Mexico’s interior—who was the first of us three to weaken.
But then I realized that showing the tip of her tongue had merely been a signal to John. And at that point Jesús María finally took action.
“Excuse me, sir . . . Mr Smith . . .” she said.
“Yes ma’am?” he said.
“I need to use the bathroom.”
John got up heavily and theatrically, like a statue rousing itself from centuries-long immobility. Came a few steps closer to us and laid his enormous hand on the shoulder of one of the female guards.
“This here is Mrs Jones. And she would love to accompany you to the bathroom.”
Jesús María looked first at her, then back at John.
“Honestly . . . and no offense, Mrs Jones, I would feel more comfortable if someone like you were to come with me, Mr Smith. In this situation.”
It took a few seconds before John answered. I counted, one technique for surviving unbearable situations: six, seven, eight . . . Then John went in an instant from being a psychological riddle—that eerily silent creature—to an open book. In two short sentences.
“Well, now. Of course I’ll come with you, if that’s what you want, ma’am.”
And then his predictable minor addition:
“What wouldn’t one do for a lady in need?”
5.08
The asymmetry in asymmetrical warfare rarely represents anything specific. Mostly it is the fact that things do not follow patterns, regularity, norms. That is to say: the expression can cover more or less anything that one does not understand. The trick is to operate strategically even when everybody’s motives—both on your own side and the enemy’s—seem obscure or simply unreasonable.
So here we were, me and Ingrid, without both John and Jésus María. And a new female guard came into the room with food for us all.
I tried to re-interpret the situation according to its new unfathomable premises. The next step had to be the exchange: an attempt to deliver Ingrid to Edelweiss in some way. Despite the fact that the guards in the room, now numbering seven, would hardly be sympathetic to that, likely would not even understand what I was trying to achieve. So first I would have to overcome them and then “Fort Knox” itself. And then whatever else was waiting outside the four-inch-thick walls.
But I had no choice. Somewhere deep inside I still felt a basic moral sense, some sort of world conscience. Maybe it was for the sake of my former family, which only an hour ago had been sitting here opposite me; maybe for everybody else’s sake too. Under layer upon layer of toughening and steeling myself, my conviction had grown that Ingrid’s ideas would jeopardize mankind’s future more than anything else throughout history. With the help of the one weapon which had been built, deliberately, for our own annihilation.
I watched her in the mirror opposite, peered between the guards to see her sphynx-like expression, totally blank. Perhaps she was not following our training. Or she was still affected by the drug, had not recovered as miraculously as I had first thought. Small drops of sweat had begun to trickle down her face too, as she began to eat the yellow-brown sludge which had come in on the female guard’s trolley.
It was hard to make out if this was meant to be breakfast, lunch or dinner: or what it was at all. Whether the revolting smell of rancid fat was meant to add to the situation. To the heat and the tension.
Yet we needed the food, as well as the liquid contained in it. Ingrid had emptied her plate—as had all the guards apart from the woman who came with the trolley and knew what this mess really consisted of—bef
ore I had my first mouthful. This was why our physiologists had chosen the concentrated crunch cookies for our combat packs. Because everything else could, under certain conditions, be impossible to eat.
I managed in the end to down half of my portion, despite the smell from our plates, the heat, the unbearable atmosphere. My wrist-watch showed 06.01 and 115.4 degrees. Ten minutes since John had left with Jesús María. I awaited Ingrid’s move, had to let her go first, assumed that she was not incapacitated by the drug.
The clock crawled forward while the temperature approached 122. The hypothesis that this was really all about me and not Ingrid seemed more credible by the minute. That I was in one way or another the Core of the Poodle and the entire situation had been set up so that I and not she would be handed over to Edelweiss.
That the arrangements from and including Jukkasjärvi, in all their complexity, had in fact been designed precisely to lure me back into his lair. That they did not see Ingrid as the main threat to the world’s survival, mankind’s fragile future, our whole civilization—but rather me, Erasmus. The Carrier and not Alpha. That it was Ingrid who had first sealed an alliance with the Master of Darkness, Edelweiss, long before my own pathetic little efforts.
I kept staring at the tallest of the female guards: tried to remember where I had seen her before, the set of her shoulders, that icy look. Then my recollections came to a sudden stop. When my wrist-watch showed 6.10, she spoke. After a slight reaction, as the message sounded in her earpiece:
“Director Edelweiss will receive you now. Follow me!”
There was not really anything else we could do. Before we left the room, one of the guards cuffed his right wrist to my left and my right to Ingrid’s left—while one of the other guards was secured to Ingrid’s right. It was the classic formation. Two prisoners in the middle, one guard on either side. To break free would require a very advanced maneuver, a veritable Houdini exploit, huge raw strength and sublime timing. And with the bulky packs once more on our backs.
There were of course solutions even to this problem. The easiest one we referred to during our training as “Croquet”, where the two prisoners swung their respective guards in toward the middle. The most spectacular results came if their two heads crashed into each other.
But it was all made much more difficult by the fact that there were five other guards, the crew-cut female one in front of us and four behind, even if we managed to pull off the trick perfectly. And last but not least: each prisoner was no longer on the same side—certainly I was no longer on Ingrid’s.
The corridor was empty and cool, it felt as if we were taking a dip in the ocean after the extreme heat in the packed Interview Room. I stole a look at Ingrid next to me, her face still expressionless and impenetrable, like a mask. The female guard in front of us walked with determined steps without ever turning around. Seemed to be relying blindly on the fact that the six guards behind her would be able to keep matters under control.
I listened in the direction of the bathrooms, straining for some sort of sound—literally any sign of life—from Jesús María. But nothing could be heard and with each foot we drew further away. The wall-to-wall carpeting swallowed our footsteps. Everything was deathly quiet and ominous. Focused on something indeterminable. Entirely logical in all its lunacy. The pieces of the puzzle no longer fitted, the figures on the chessboard weren’t the right ones, even the rules of the game made no sense.
When we had reached the office—a white door with no name on it, no outward sign at all—the female guard brought our formation to a halt.
“We’re here now, Director!” she said into the minimal microphone, invisible to anyone not in the know.
There was a click from the lock and the heavy door swung open. I noted that it too had been strengthened since I was last here: seemed to have gone from a tolerance of 14.7 psi of overpressure, the only standard for the unthinkable that we had been able to imagine, to at least double that. Roughly speaking, a direct hit from a smaller nuclear weapon.
The four of us went in, Ingrid and myself chained to our escorts, while the rest of the guards—including the woman seemingly in charge—remained in the corridor. Edelweiss was sitting at his desk facing away from us, reinforcing the impact of his presence. Heavy and mysterious as a Buddha statue. And when he spun around on his chair, I could not help but catch my breath: it had been so long since I last saw him in the flesh.
His dark persona was accentuated by the surrounding whiteness. The entire office, even the floor, had been painted in the same almost floatingly light color as everything else in the sealed wing. The vast desk was made of graphite gray metal and cast in one piece. On its surface lay a single piece of paper, some sort of document, and a black fountain pen. Edelweiss spared no look for Ingrid. Just stared straight at me and the hybrid on my back, the apparatus inside. The world’s most important object.
“Welcome, my dearest Erasmus,” he said.
I did not answer. You could almost hear him licking his lips, his words slurred with saliva. The breathing as labored as ever.
Four metal chairs in the same graphite gray were lined up in front of the desk. To sit down, the four of us had to do so at exactly the same time. Yet we managed it relatively easily: we were trained to be adaptable, both as interviewers and interviewees. We were even able to put down our packs in front of the chairs, my launch mechanism and Ingrid’s portable command terminal, the full Doomsday potential. The guards, who had taken the weapons out of our packs, now laid them on the desk, beyond our reach. That too was intended to be psychologically destabilizing. So near, and yet so far.
I glanced at Ingrid on my right. She seemed indifferent to the way Edelweiss, her long-standing brother-in-arms, was treating us. He in turn still took an interest only in me. Observed me intently, seemed to be awaiting something specific. I looked past him, at the clock over the desk. It would soon be half an hour since John had taken Jesús María to the bathroom.
Then I shut my eyes and went on rehearsing scenarios. The first assumed that Edelweiss was indeed relying on me to keep my side of the bargain, meaning that he too would do as he had promised. That my family would be released or at least no longer harassed, and that I would be given safe passage, once Ingrid had been delivered to him.
The other was similar, but the other way round. It ended with Ingrid getting safe passage—having delivered me in her place. It was based on their seeing me and not her as the main protagonist in this whole piece, the Core of the Poodle. On her having somehow laid the lion’s share of the blame on my shoulders.
And the third scenario, which appeared to be the most likely, was that neither I nor Ingrid would emerge from here alive. That they would seize the opportunity to take down both of the special agents, who had so spectacularly fled from the Team and placed the future of mankind in jeopardy, at one go. Regardless of the short-term consequences. Even the President’s resignation, if it came to that, once details of our top secret formation were revealed by the media. Or the rolling out of Ingrid’s Plan B.—which could, after all, hardly be worse than her first alternative.
But all three scenarios suffered from the same weakness. None of them took sufficient account of Ingrid herself. The scope of her fantasy, her power of imagination and ability to improvise: at least equal to Edelweiss’ own.
So I was keeping a close eye on her too—trying to be vigilant in all directions at once—when Edelweiss pushed the document over the desk toward me. To make it possible for me to sign, all four of us had to stand up, like a controlled chain reaction. And not before Edelweiss handed me the pen, and I leaned forward over the paper, could I distinguish the name “INGRID OSKARSSON” in capital letters. The document was a delivery order for Alpha.
Then I felt a movement from her, a soft pull at our shared cuffs. My whole field of vision narrowed as I heard her melodic voice.
“I’m ready.”
Intense focus on the guards, the desk, our assignment, like sunlight concentrated t
hrough a magnifying glass. Moving without thinking, reflexively. I did not even need to look at Ingrid as she continued:
“Are you, Erasmus? Then let us pray.”
She had chosen the second alternative, the one we called “Prayer”. Quickly bent her guard’s right arm behind his own head and pressed him to the corner of the desk. His face slammed against the sharp-edged metal, cracking like an egg. At the same time, perfectly synchronized, I did the same to my guard on the other corner of the desk.
In an instant the rest of the guard force burst in, five of them with heavy weapons drawn, having obviously seen everything on the surveillance footage. The piercing alarm cut through my brain. I vomited onto the floor, my lifelong reaction to ultra-violence, straight onto the immaculately polished shoes of one of the dead security guards. Instantly, Ingrid raised her right hand over her head, signaling that the game was over. And my left hand, bound by the cuffs, followed it. Edelweiss was sitting stock-still, watching us with a strangely amused look on his face.
He tossed three envelopes across the desk in my direction. Then, without a word, he took the pen back from me, leaned across and drove its needle-like tip straight up the nose of the guard nearest to the desk. The silver nib disappeared completely—and the Secret Service agent crumpled like a rag doll and fell to the floor.
Inside me, all was calm, even though the alarm must have continued to pulse. The scene was like a movie frozen on one frame. Edelweiss again immobile. And none of the remaining guards with the least idea, any more than us, of that man’s ever-complex agenda: that he was letting us both run free.
We got going, wasted no time on questions. Managed with some contortions to fish in the dead guards’ pockets for the keys to our handcuffs, and unlocked them, before retrieving our weapons and the envelopes from the desk and the bags from the floor where they had been left, again tantalizingly close. Edelweiss continued to sit there, Buddha-like, watching.