The Carrier

by Mattias Berg

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Spy Thrillers; Suspense; High-tech & Sci-fi Thrillers; Terrorism & Assassination Thrillers

Synopsis

The man with the nuclear briefcase has gone rogue - Mission Impossible meets the Hunt for Red October "What should a thriller do to rise above the ranks of the clichéd? It does no harm to demonstrate some intelligence and (if possible) an engagement with serious issues - but no polemics. Thankfully, Mattias Berg's The Carrier hits those targets squarely" Barry Forshaw, Financial Times "Enjoyable, ingenious . . . packed with fascinatingly arcane nuclear facts" Myles McWeeney, Irish Independent Erasmus Levine has a job like no other He travels with the President of the United States at all times, and holds in his hands the power to obliterate life as we know it. He is the man with the nuclear briefcase, part of a crack team of top-secret operatives established after 9/11, led by a man codenamed Edelweiss. But not even Edelweiss is party to the identity of their ultimate authority, known only as Alpha. Erasmus Levine has a secret For years he has been receiving cryptic messages from Alpha, an elaborate communication that began with the words we two against the world. Levine begins thinking of escape: his chance comes during an official visit to Sweden, when the alarm sounds in Stockholm's Grand Hotel. But Alpha has other plans From their first meeting in a network of tunnels and bunkers beneath the city, Levine is drawn into a plan to eliminate the world's nuclear arsenals. But is controlled demolition really the endgame? Could he be working towards a controlled apocalypse, a doomsday plot to wipe humanity from the face of the earth? Translated from the Swedish by George Goulding

Release date: May 23, 2019

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 480

Sample

1.01

I had been so very close to the President. Never more than a few feet away during official duties, always with my briefcase prepared. Even when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. When he gave that damned speech about a world without nuclear weapons.

You must understand. But you won’t.

How we had been consumed, taken in, seduced yet again by the fire. Not so much through our guilt as our innocence. My own diabolical innocence.

We called it “The Nuclear Football”, as if it was some kind of game. And talked about “Pressing the Button”, but there was neither a button nor anyone who did any actual pressing. To me it was more like an occult ceremony, a magical-technological transformation trick. Carrying out a series of procedures in the correct sequence, with the help of the codes, to render insecure the one thing in our entire civilization that should be the most secure of all.

The contents of the briefcase had been so highly classified that few apart from us knew about them. From the start there were only four primitive objects there. The Black Book with every possible operational option for retaliation or attack; a folder listing the underground bases to which the President could be taken at times of maximum alert; a note summarizing the structure of our nuclear weapons system. And then the square plastic counter with the codes the President was to use when identifying himself to Centcom. We called it “the biscuit”.

During the Cold War, it was more or less understandable. As soon as the briefcase was opened a signal was transmitted to Centcom. After the President had used “the biscuit” to confirm his identity, he and the Carrier of the briefcase faced a number of choices according to the war plan then in place. The last step was for Centcom to follow the President’s order and carry out the launch itself.

But things had become complicated with the developing wizardry of digital technology, as well as our own much-altered war plan. We were assured that the guiding principle was still “Always-Never”. The nuclear weapons should always be ready for launch within half an hour, but never capable of being dispatched in error.

Yet over the last decade the boundaries had been extended with each new technological advance. Once both circuits and microprocessors had become small enough, it was possible to integrate parts of the detonation mechanism into the briefcase itself. Centcom now seemed more or less superfluous. Everything merged into a single whole. The difference between “always” and “never” began to dissolve. In the end it became impossible, even for me, to distinguish between safety measures and launch procedures.

That is when the thought of escape came to me.

1.02

Our gigantic sortie took off into a clear blue morning sky, like a lumbering bumblebee defying gravity. As usual, our first leg was to Andrews Air Force Base—and from there we went on over the Atlantic. We were more than seven hundred people, an entourage worthy of the Sun King himself three centuries ago. Air Force One, five other more or less identical Boeings, twenty-nine cargo planes, forty cars, 250 security staff, three hundred advisors and members of the White House press corps, two more Cadillacs.

And the Nurse was sitting so close. Monitoring my every movement.

I was saddled with her from the start of our journey, after I had collapsed in the culverts under the air base as our aircraft was being refueled. Which was the only way I could interpret the last message from Alpha: “CREATE MORE TIME. PLAY SICK!” It was naïve to imagine that my own little moment of weakness would have any effect whatsoever on our vast convoy. That it would be able to hold up the immense machinery involved in a state visit.

Yet in my overheated imagination, right there and then, I believed it. So I let myself fall headlong into the cement tunnel leading out to the helipad. Screwed my eyes shut, while some of the medical orderlies carried me into the examination room.

It is easy to believe that one is irreplaceable. If anyone, then me, the Carrier of the briefcase, the man with the world’s most critical assignment. Before my little collapse, I had no idea about our backup plan either. But as the doctor was talking to our logistics people, I found out that even I would be swapped for a substitute.

From the outside, nobody is meant to be able to tell whether the helicopter is, in fact, Marine One, with the President and myself on board, or just another of all our look-alike helicopters. If the airplane is Air Force One out of the many in our armada. From whichever airport we touch down at, we are always transported behind smoked glass in Cadillac One, also known as “The Beast”, with a five-inch-thick floor of reinforced armor. With another limousine, identical from the outside, traveling just in front or just behind.

But in these times of sweeping cosmetic change, of doubles and false identities, no-one is irreplaceable.

And because I suddenly became aware that somebody else in the Team would take my place, I had to blame it on a passing fever. When my preliminary readings turned out to be in perfect order, I was given clearance to travel with the Team. I had no earlier mark on my record, no contrary indication, not from all those years. But I was forced to accept the Nurse as a personal escort. For safety’s sake, as they put it.

As she sat down next to me in the helicopter, in the row behind the President and the First Lady, I could not help feeling that this was meant to be. That the Nurse, in one way or another, was part of the plan.

The state visit to Stockholm was mysterious, written into the President’s calendar at the last moment. In strict terms, it could only be referred to as an “official visit”, since there had been no invitation from Sweden’s head of state. The only plausible reason for traveling to this particular corner of the world was that our government wanted to make a diplomatic point to Russia, the country we were scheduled to visit. If Edward Snowden had not just been granted asylum there.

Our security people had not been happy about these late changes. Priority in Stockholm would be given to external security and would tick all the right boxes despite the short notice. The advance party had been sent out as soon as the date was fixed. But what was called “internal security” was an altogether more complex matter.

In the weeks before our departure, we were warned to increase our vigilance. There were rumors about moles within the organization. In the Team we kept a close eye on each other, watched every move. And on this occasion we were not given our final instructions until on board Air Force One—and only after we had taken off and could no longer communicate with anybody who did not have clearance.

Our team consisted of four special security agents, not counting Edelweiss. He was our operational boss and the one giving our daily briefings. He was the one the rest of us followed, admired, respected—but above all feared. His body was monumental. Like an entire foreign planet with folds and pockets, craters, deep secrets. He would stroke his chins as he pondered one of our questions. Then deliver the answer with his surprisingly soft, clear voice: often saying things that no-one else would even think of. Still less say out loud.

We were told that it was Edelweiss who had hand-picked each of us on the basis of our specialist skills, in the desperate days following 9/11, when all other available structures had failed.

We also gathered that he had been given a free hand. That often requires a filter, a layer which both empowers and conceals, relieves the decision-makers of responsibility for their decisions. Sometimes numerous, almost invisible sheets: like a vast millefeuille in which the bottom level always protects the upper one, complex sequences of knowledge and not knowing, none of which can do without the other.

In our own cases, camouflage was the beginning and the end. It was referred to as a “military approach to precautionary security measures”. After our training in the sealed wing at West Point—which continued in parallel with our university education, allowing us to practice our abilities to lead double lives and to deceive—we started putting our new-found skills to use. For the most part, I was sent out on short solo missions of increasing ardor. At first small, and then bigger sabotage operations, designed to ensure that our country should not be exposed to the same thing, resolving or setting off almost invisible conflicts in countries which many people had never heard of, unleashing domestic political turmoil elsewhere in the world.

In my other life, I completed my doctoral thesis in moral philosophy. Interminable sessions with my mesmerizing supervisor went on throughout the remainder of the 1980s and all through the 1990s, in parallel with my special duties in the security world. I took my doctorate in September 2001, five days before the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Some weeks after that, on November 4, we were brought together in a windowless lecture hall two stories below ground. Like silhouettes, shadows, ghosts from earlier times: some of us maybe even on the same special forces training course at West Point. But we had all been through cosmetic surgery at least once since then. I did not recognize anyone in this select group.

And not one of us understood the implications of our having been brought together. We had answered the encrypted summons, from which could be gleaned that the formation of the Team would be the beginning of our new life and the end of the old. An invitation which we had felt unable to resist.

There were more of us than I would have expected for what had to be a very special assignment. That meant that the core would be smaller—and everything around it much bigger. The Team itself might not consist of more than eight to ten people, and the rest would make up the support functions.

It became apparent that the Team—Edelweiss called us “NUCLEUS”, as in the center of a cell or atom—would consist of six chosen ones, including himself and someone unknown, who went by the name Alpha.

And after more than a day’s wait without food or drink, no doubt intended to make us more malleable from the start, Edelweiss appeared. That enigmatic figure with his enormous silhouette. Floating and formless, like an apparition in the ill-lit room. He who had been my main teacher at West Point, maybe for the others too, and who would be in charge of our lives.

Edelweiss began with the official version. The vague formulation that defined the Team’s place in our new war plan, transformed by the shock-waves from 9/11: “A small, mobile unit acting as a separate protection squad in times of peace, side by side with the President’s own command, and which in case of crisis and war can operate with full autonomy.”

Then the unofficial version. Edelweiss had been given a free hand to create something new. A phoenix from the ashes of the World Trade Center, from the ruins of our old security system, from what in every way was a “Ground Zero”. Now that all our existing structures—the security services, the surveillance system, our counter-terrorism efforts—had proved to be inadequate.

His idea was that our team should be the spider in the web. Or rather, both web and spider. An amorphous structure binding together all the existing functions: the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the N.S.A., the Secret Service . . . But which could also operate in the gaps between them.

Edelweiss told us that he had no idea who had given him the task. He only knew that someone using the pseudonym Alpha had written him credible e-mails, with sufficient encryption in place to have convinced him that the orders came from the very top. There was no doubt one more layer or filter between Alpha and the President, but perhaps no more than one. And that layer, in turn, must have been given a free hand by the President.

Our goal seemed simple. Edelweiss’ orders were expressed in broad terms, and the person who had given them did not want to know the details of their execution. Everything had one focus: stop something like this from happening again, anything like a hostile airplane flying into the World Trade Center in broad daylight. The idea was for us to take all necessary preventive measures outside the scope of conventional intelligence work. The end would justify the means.

What he described in the ensuing three or four hours—with Edelweiss, time in some way acquired another consistency—was at first sight a defensive assignment. Our team should stay close to the President and his own security detail during state visits and other official public duties. Should become a sort of floating security layer, flexible and adaptable, ready for any conceivable situation.

In short, it was meant to be what one now calls “hybrid warfare”. To combat hidden sabotage, digital attacks, advanced psychological warfare, political destabilization, ever more ingenious assaults on our infrastructure. And be able to strike back—using the same weapons.

In the case of serious crisis, the strategy was turned on its head. The Team could then be transformed into a raw strike force, focused on the enemy’s weakest points, with methods at least as unthinkable as their own. Its nature could be altered, as Edelweiss expressed it in one of his elaborate yet precise metaphors, in the same way that an amphibious vehicle operates both on land and water.

When the global security threat stood at its highest level—LILAC—reserved for the one thing that could destroy the world at a few minutes notice: a nuclear threat from another state or from terrorists—the President himself should be placed under protection. Until the threat was neutralized, the Team would take over covert command of the whole military apparatus. Including the nuclear weapons system.

“You have to be ready for every conceivable attack on the country’s security. And more than that—for every inconceivable one too,” Edelweiss said.

“First and foremost, this requires our imaginations to be greater than the enemy’s. Which is what we will have to work on, our creative ability, our impulsive intelligence. Each one of you is an exceptional agent already. But once we’ve been through this together, you should see yourselves more as artists.”

He ran his hand over his chins.

“But what distinguishes our assignment is that it’s to do with nuclear weapons. Things which you can’t compare with anything else throughout military or even human history, because by their nature they were so far outside our experience. The only meaningful difference between them and other fantasies, say the lightsabers in ‘Star Wars’ or Superman’s X-ray vision, is that nuclear weapons became reality.”

Another pause for effect, as Edelweiss peered around him in the half darkness.

“There has never yet been a full-scale war using battlefield nuclear weapons. Nobody knows how that might affect us, how we would all turn out in a situation like that. That’s also what we are going to explore together, my little lambs, under more or less controlled conditions.”

The extent of our authority under those conditions seemed astonishing, even to me. The briefcase would of course be the jewel in the piece. Our innermost and outermost secret, our last resort, the chained beast. First, the thing we were most of all tasked to protect, then our ultimate offensive weapon.

“The most important object in the world,” Edelweiss called it—before handing it to me at the end of that first meeting. With this small gesture turning me into both savior and destroyer. The center not just of the Team, his NUCLEUS, but of the universe.

From that point on he called me the Carrier. As if it were some sort of virus.

Around me were the few others: at a respectful yet inquisitive distance. Zafirah, who tried to persuade me of the blessings of ultra-violence. Her interest in everything that had sufficient striking power, as she put it, was pathological. According to her own account, it had started with heavyweight boxing, the never-ending shows night after night with her father in Bahrain, and had then just escalated. Martial arts, M.M.A., military close combat. She was the one whom Edelweiss always sent into the thick of things during training. Often alone and unarmed against a number of opponents.

To see her at a distance, that compact little woman with her shimmering headscarves, one could never guess what Zafirah was capable of. What she and I had done together to the Taliban in Afghanistan and Iraq, deep inside hostile territory. That is how it is with genuine specialist skills. There is no need to advertise them—until there is no alternative.

Apart from us two, the Team’s operational core consisted only of two identical security guards, whom we alternately called Kurt and John. They looked after everything to do with personal protection, both in theory and in practice, as well as most of our technical equipment. Always surrounding me, of course, bedding in the Carrier with their mighty bodies, exuding latent violence. Committed to laying down their lives for me at any moment. Or rather for the briefcase.

Behind the scenes, however, the apparatus was larger. All of those we never or seldom got to see: strategists, observers, technicians, psychologists, medical staff and other support functions. And in addition doubles, decoys and substitutes. These strange functionaries who together make up the security world’s extras.

We were not permitted to mix with any others in NUCLEUS outside work. We were instead encouraged to refine our civilian identities, to lead a full double life, the preference was for a family. Edelweiss spoke about having been inspired by none other than Kim Philby. He said we would increase our operative capability, keep on our toes, be ever ready, by forever manipulating our surroundings in that way. Besides, not being stationed together would reduce our exposure to elimination at a single stroke.

So after almost twelve years I still knew nothing about the others in their civilian lives: had no knowledge of their “real” or “alternate” existences, no idea who they were, these camouflaged people handpicked for our camouflaged assignments. Not Edelweiss, nor Zafirah, John or Kurt.

And least of all Alpha.

None of us knew who or what that was, even whether man or machine, some sort of digital function. Edelweiss himself after all these years claimed that he had no idea. That he got his orders from this mysterious signature in the form of double-encrypted messages on his screen: protection assignments, transfers, the scope for our next training scenario. Nothing had persuaded him that Alpha was a living individual. Many of our training maneuvers also seemed so haphazard, in terms of both objective and significance, that they might as well have been generated at random.

Yet it was the training which tested and hardened our team, fused us together like glass in the heat of the moment, transformed us into artists. Early on in our history we took part in two regular military invasions. Afghanistan was first—November 13, 2001, nine days after we had met in that windowless headquarters below ground—and then came Iraq, on March 20, 2003.

But it was in situations during training that we could be confronted with the most extreme challenges. The sorts of thing that we had been created for.

Not least a simulated full-scale nuclear attack based on our strategy document “Global Strike and Deterrence”. The gravest threat to the survival not only of the nation but of the whole world, the extinction of mankind, Ragnarök. The sort of moment in history which a paleontologist alone can grasp.

And so now we were sitting there at the walnut table in the conference room inside Air Force One, going through the routines for the official visit to Stockholm from September 4–5, 2013. After all our years in the Team, the challenges posed by our assignments were still a paradox. Building the same state of high alert, being prepared for anything to happen, at any time, required us to act with extreme precision, to follow our training without deviation. Every little routine had to stand out like some sort of prelude to Doomsday.

Edelweiss had his way of going about it, always getting us to pay full attention, to sit bolt upright in our chairs. Just his way of opening with “Good morning, my little lambs” chilled us to the core. After his first few lectures in West Point’s sealed wing, I had nightmares for weeks. So when he now opened his eyes and fixed his look at the projection screen in the conference room, we all did the same, as if spellbound.

The decisive difference between this official visit and earlier ones was that something would now be happening. An incident at least as grave as those we had faced during the most serious of our maneuvers—and this time, what is more, for real. The run-through carried much more significance than all of our earlier rehearsals.

And no-one other than me knew anything about it.

As usual, the three-dimensional animation began with our intended escape route in the most critical situation. Alert level LILAC, when the President was to be taken under protection and our team would assume command of the whole military apparatus. It showed POTUS and FLOTUS surrounded by our fast-paced escort, in which our Team had been mixed up with the President’s own handpicked security detail. With me never more than fifteen feet away from him, the briefcase in my grasp, ready to use.

Now I saw all the strictly classified information I had never been able to get at during my research: details of the path we were to follow. If the need arose, our escape route would run from our quarters at the Grand Hotel to the assembly point at the helipad in Stockholm’s Gamla Stan. The secret emergency exit on this occasion turned out to be a narrow little hatch to the left of the last set of stairs, down toward the goods entrance of the hotel on Stallgatan 4.

But from then on the escape route became less narrow, in the form of a gigantic tunnel system deep in the bed-rock, stretching under the whole of central Stockholm and its outer edges.

This system was unknown to the public, according to Edelweiss. I tried to find the best place to split off from the Team—but the number of possibilities seemed almost endless. On the sketches, the system looked like an enormous terra incognita, in which our escape route was marked in red and most of the rest was a morass of dotted lines and shaded areas: like a map of the world before it was known to be round. According to the observers in our advance party, we would also have to depend on headlamps down there, because none of the tunnels had light sources.

The escape route started off heading northward, through passages running under the Blasieholmen peninsula. Once we were level with the platforms of Kungsträdgården Tunnelbana station, we would turn sharp west and then immediately south, passing through underwater tunnels. Then we would continue further south, deep under the Parliament, the Royal Palace and the oldest parts of the city, rising to the surface again at the helipad at the edge of the water on Riddarfjärden. From there, the airborne forces would take over, leading POTUS and FLOTUS to safety escorted by an alternate non-NUCLEUS Carrier of the briefcase while the Team would muster for a counter-attack.

Edelweiss froze the animation at an immense verdigrised copper gate. It originated, he said, from the ruins of the seventeenth-century Makalös palace, according to him one of the most beautiful and talked-about buildings of the time, and had been installed in the walls of the underground system as a part of its artistic decoration. He made a point of saying that the gate had not been opened since it was put there in 1983, and that it could likely not be budged so much as a fraction of an inch without the greatest difficulty.

Yet the observers in our advance party had felt uncomfortable with even that minimal risk: of somebody making their way in from the passages of the blue Tunnelbana line directly beneath the President’s quarters. The whole Kungsträdgården station had therefore been sealed off in preparation for our visit.

Every time Edelweiss played the animation through again, so we could learn the escape route by heart, my first impression became clearer. Next to the copper gate you could see something set in the rock wall, more regular than the rough pattern of the stone: a paler, small square. The similarity to the control panel outside our own secure facilities—reminiscent of an ordinary, innocent electrical box—could not have been a coincidence.

So having no idea how I might be able to realize my crazy dream, I determined that the copper gate from the Makalös castle would be the invisible crack in the wall.

The starting point of my and Alpha’s impossible escape out of the Team. “We two against the world.”

1.03

A natural cloud can weigh five hundred tons. A mushroom cloud so much more.

Before I was given my assignment, I used to wonder how all that weight would affect a person. How it would feel to exercise control and power over the nuclear weapons system, to be the finger on the Doomsday button. The man with the briefcase. The Carrier.

When I came to the Team in November 2001, I had for some time harbored doubts. My doctoral thesis had in essence been one long questioning of the justification for nuclear weapons. I tested the limits, challenged, pushed and tugged at the issues. At first I had even thought of calling it “The Atom: A Moral Dilemma”, but I was persuaded by my supervisor to change the title to “Lise Meitner’s Secret”.

My home life revolved around a family who knew nothing about my other existence. I played the roles of researcher and family man—with a well-educated wife, two girls and a boy aged eleven, nine and seven, a house in the suburbs and drinks on a Friday with our middle-class neighbors—in the same faithful way as that of “The Man with the Briefcase”. Everything had been false and true in equal measure.

And there’s nothing to say that one’s feelings become weaker while leading a double life. Rather the opposite: this intense heat, the intricate interplay within a life which all the time had to be manipulated, just made everything more intense. Even though I was play-acting on all fronts, for many years I was able to be both passionate and professional across the board. Until the briefcase’s inherent weight, the absurd load of my assignment, began to be too much for me to handle.

But I still went along with it for a few years more, while doubt and hesitation grew. I was like a Hamlet within the nuclear weapons system. Then, out of the blue, I was contacted by Alpha. I came to realize that I had an unusual ally.

And the time had now come. Tense, I waited for the signal, even though I still had no idea what it might look like. Peered through the tinted windows as we sped through empty streets into Stockholm.

Over the years we had got used to never seeing city centers other than just like this. The same the world over, wherever we came. The most vibrant and sprawling cities, empty and sealed off, devoid of natural life. The buildings intact, the people gone. As in the aftermath of the big bang, the detonation of a “neutron bomb”.

The briefcase was on the floor between my legs, in accordance with the regulations which governed movement by transport, the security strap fastened over my left wrist. The President and the First Lady exchanged small talk on the rear seats of our car, speaking softly so that none of the rest of us could make out what they were saying.

I unclenched my right fist, squinted at the print-out and recited under my breath the allocated sleep times for myself. Zafirah 00.00—02.13, Edelweiss 02.13—04.55, Erasmus 04.55—06.00. Kurt and John never slept at night during our shorter state visits, but still seemed to get enough rest while we crossed the Atlantic, when they shared guard duty equally.

Yet again, Zafirah had drawn the winning lot. Edelweiss assured us that the sleep times were allocated at random—but once again I had ended up with the last and shortest slot. They must have had suspicions about me for such a long time.

Now my allocated sleep time would only let me have sixty-five minutes, with a marginally reduced level of internal surveillance, before Kurt or John came to wake me. And the Nurse would no doubt follow me all the way into the bedroom, ready to sound the alarm at the slightest unnatural movement, even though she did not figure anywhere on the roster.

She was slumbering beside me in the car, to all intents disengaged, even though we had almost reached the hotel. I ran my eyes over the Nurse’s face, her heavy make-up, the dyed-blond hair, the short, compact figure. Tried to get a feeling for who she was. To understand why just this person had been allowed to accompany me here, been given this assignment.

A dull day then passed, as if in slow motion. The spare itinerary showed the extent to which this official visit had been thrown together in haste. Our reception at the Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan was a disappointment. There was no sense of history at all, no experimental reactor R.1, no glimpse of the rooms in which Lise Meitner might have worked. Only the dull exhibition halls and a number of sterile display cases with a variety of “environmental innovations”.

The First Couple had played their roles