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.
“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.