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Kitabı oxu: «The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man»

Name: The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man
ISBN: 9780008275587

Jonas Jonasson, Rachel Willson-Broyles

Şrift:

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

Cover based on a series design by Jonathan Pelham

Jonas Jonasson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN 9780008275570

Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008275587

Version: 2018-10-03

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

Indonesia

The Indian Ocean

Congo

North Korea

USA, North Korea

The Indian Ocean

Tanzania

North Korea

South Korea

North Korea

USA

Switzerland, USA

North Korea

USA

USA, Sweden

Sweden

Indonesia

Sweden

USA

Sweden

Russia

Sweden, Germany

Germany

Denmark, Sweden

Russia

Sweden

Russia

Sweden

Sweden, Denmark

Russia

Denmark

Sweden

Denmark, Sweden, Germany

Germany

Russia

Tanzania

Congo

Tanzania

Tanzania, Kenya

Kenya

Congo

Kenya

Indonesia

Kenya, Germany

Kenya

Kenya, Madagascar

Kenya, Germany

Germany

Kenya

Sweden

Madagascar, North Korea, Australia, USA, Russia

Sweden, USA, Russia

Kenya

Extra thanks to:

Also by Jonas Jonasson

About the Publisher

Foreword

I AM JONAS JONASSON and I want to explain myself.

There was never meant to be a sequel to the story of the hundred-year-old man who climbed out of a window and disappeared. Many people wanted one, not least the protagonist, Allan Karlsson, who kept strolling around inside my head and calling attention to himself whenever he wished.

‘Mr Jonasson,’ he might say, out of nowhere, as I was busy with my own thoughts. ‘Have you changed your mind yet, Mr Jonasson? Don’t you want to have another round before I’m really old?’

No, I didn’t. I’d already said everything I wanted to say about what was perhaps the most miserable century ever. The idea had been that if we reminded one another of all the shortcomings of the twentieth century, maybe it would make us better at remembering and less inclined to make at least those mistakes again. I packaged this message of mine with warmth and humour. Soon the book spread all over the world.

It sure as hell didn’t make the world a better place.

Time passed. My inner Allan stopped getting in touch. All the while, humanity kept moving forwards, or whatever direction it was moving in. Event after event filled me with the sense that the world was more incomplete than ever. All the while, I was just an onlooker.

More and more I started to feel the need to speak up again, in my own way. Or Allan’s. One day I heard myself asking Allan straight out whether he was still with me.

‘Yes, I’m here,’ he said. ‘What might you have on your mind, Mr Jonasson, after such a long time?’

‘I need you,’ I said.

‘For what?’

‘For telling it like it is and, indirectly, how it ought to be.’

‘About everything?’

‘About more or less everything.’

‘Mr Jonasson, you understand that won’t help, right?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Good. Count me in.’

* * *

RIGHT, THERE’S ONE MORE THING. This is a novel about recent and present events. I make use of a number of public political figures in the plot, and of people in their immediate vicinity. Most of the characters in the book go by their real names. Others, I have spared.

Since these leaders sometimes look down upon, rather than up at, ordinary folks, it’s reasonable to poke a little fun at them. But that doesn’t make them less than human, every one, and as such they deserve a moderate amount of respect. To all these potentates, I would like to say: I’m sorry. And: Deal with it. It could have been worse. As well as: What if it is?

Jonas Jonasson

Indonesia

A life of luxury on an island in Paradise ought to be satisfactory to just about anyone. But Allan Karlsson had never been just anyone, and his hundred-and-first year of life wasn’t the time to start.

It was, for a certain amount of time, gratifying to sit in a lounger under an umbrella and be served drinks of various colours at whim. Especially when one’s best and only friend, the inveterate petty thief Julius Jonsson, was right next to one.

But soon old Julius and the much older Allan grew tired of doing nothing but frittering away the millions from the suitcase they’d happened to bring with them from Sweden.

Not that there was anything wrong with frittering. It just got so monotonous. Julius tried renting a fully staffed hundred-and-fifty-foot yacht so he and Allan could sit on the foredeck with fishing rods in hand. It would have been a pleasant break if only they enjoyed fishing. Or, for that matter, eating fish. Instead, their yacht excursions involved doing the same thing on deck as they’d already learned to do on the shore. Namely, nothing at all.

Allan, for his part, made sure to fly Harry Belafonte in from the United States to sing three songs on Julius’s birthday – speaking of too much money and not enough to do. Harry stayed for dinner even though he wasn’t paid extra for it. Altogether, this constituted an entire evening of pattern-breaking.

By way of explanation for his selection of Belafonte over anyone else, Allan pointed out that Julius had a soft spot for this newer, youthful sort of music. Julius appreciated the gesture and didn’t mention that the artist in question hadn’t been young since the end of the Second World War. Compared to Allan, he was, of course, a child.

Although the superstar’s visit to Bali provided no more than a speck of colour in their otherwise dull grey existence, it would prove to affect Allan and Julius for a long time to come. Not because of what Belafonte sang, or anything like that, but because of what he brought along and devoted his attention to during breakfast prior to his journey home. It was a tool of some sort. A flat black object with a half-eaten apple on one side, and on the other a screen that lit up when you touched it. Harry touched and touched. And grunted now and again. Then tittered. Only to grunt once more. Allan had never been the nosy sort, but there were limits.

‘Perhaps it’s none of my business to pry into the young Mr Belafonte’s private matters, but if I may be so bold as to enquire what you’re doing there … Is something happening in that … well, in that?’

Harry Belafonte realized that Allan had never seen a tablet before and was delighted to demonstrate. The tablet could show what was going on in the world, and what had already gone on, and it verged on showing what was about to happen. Depending on where you touched, up came pictures and videos of all imaginable sorts. And some unimaginable ones. If you touched other buttons, out came music. Still others, and the tablet began to speak. Apparently it was a ‘she’, Siri.

After breakfast and the demonstration, Belafonte took his little suitcase, his black tablet and himself, and headed to the airport for his trip home. Allan, Julius and the hotel manager waved adieu. The artist’s taxi had no more made it out of sight before Allan turned to the manager and asked him to procure a tablet of the same sort Harry Belafonte had been using. Its diverse contents had amused the hundred-year-old and that was more than could be said about most things.

The manager had just returned from a hospitality conference in Jakarta, where he had learned that the main duty of hotel staff was not to deliver but to over-deliver. Add to this that Messrs Karlsson and Jonsson were two of the best guests in the history of Balinese tourism, and it was no wonder that, by the very next day, the manager had a tablet ready for Karlsson. And a cellular phone to boot. As a bonus.

Allan didn’t want to seem ungrateful, so he didn’t mention that he had no use for the phone since everyone he could imagine dialling had been dead for at least fifty years. Except Julius, of course. Who had nothing to answer with. Although that particular point could be remedied.

‘Here you are,’ Allan said to his friend. ‘It’s really a gift from the manager to me, but I have no one to call but you, and until this moment you didn’t have any way to answer.’

Julius thanked him for his kindness. And chose not to point out that Allan still couldn’t call him, but for the opposite reason.

‘Just don’t lose it,’ Allan said. ‘It looks expensive. It was better before, when phones were stuck to the wall with a cord so you knew what they were up to.’

* * *

The black tablet became Allan’s most treasured possession. What was more, it was free to use since the hotel manager had instructed the staff at the computer store in Denpasar to set up the tablet and phone with all the bells and whistles. This included, among other things, linking the SIM cards to the hotel, which found its total telephone costs doubled, although no one understood why.

Once the hundred-year-old man learned how the remarkable contraption worked, he no sooner woke for the day than he turned it on to see what had happened overnight. It was the minor delightful news items from all the corners of the world that amused him most. Like the one about how a hundred doctors and nurses in Naples took turns signing each other in and out so no one had to work but everyone still got paid. Or the one about Romania, how so many government officials had had to be locked up for corruption that the country’s prisons were full. And how those officials who had yet to be arrested had a solution to the problem: legalize corruption so they would avoid the need to build more prisons.

Allan and Julius developed a new morning routine. The old one had involved Allan launching into every breakfast with complaints about his friend’s loud snoring, which he could hear through the wall. The new one involved the same, but with the addition of Allan’s reports about what he’d found out on his tablet since last time. At first Julius enjoyed the brief news updates, not least because they took the focus off his snoring. He was immediately delighted by the Romanian notion of making the illegal legal. Just think how much easier it would be as a petty thief in such a society.

But Allan quickly disabused him of that thought, because if petty thievery were to become legal then the concept would cease to exist. Julius, who had been on the verge of suggesting that he and Allan leave Bali and move to Bucharest, immediately deflated. The joy in being a small-time thief was, of course, mainly derived from tricking someone out of something, preferably someone who deserved it or at least wouldn’t suffer too much from it. If swindling could no longer be considered a swindle, what was the point?

Allan consoled him with the information that the Romanians had turned out to a man to protest against the politicians’ and officials’ plans. The average Romanian was not as philosophically inclined as those in power. He or she reasoned that those who stole should be locked up, no matter their title or position, and whether or not there was anywhere to lock them up.

Breakfast times at the hotel in Bali ended up revolving ever more often around where in the world Julius and Allan should go now that life had become so humdrum in their current location. When the leading news story on the morning in question told him that it was twenty degrees warmer than usual at the North Pole, Allan wondered if that might be an option.

Julius stuffed fried noodles into his mouth, finished chewing, then said he didn’t think the North Pole was the right place for him and Allan. Especially not if the ice was about to melt. Julius caught a cold whenever his feet got wet. And there were polar bears, and all Julius knew about polar bears was that they seemed to get out of the wrong side of bed every morning from birth onwards. At least the snakes on Bali were shy.

Allan said that perhaps it was no wonder a polar bear might lose its temper given that the ground was melting beneath its feet. If things were about to go down the tubes, that bear probably ought to stroll to solid ground while it still had time. Canada, in that case, because the United States had a new president again – had Allan already mentioned this to Julius? And, by golly, this new guy wouldn’t allow just anyone over the border.

Yes, Julius had heard of Trump. That was his name. The polar bear may have been white, but it was a foreigner first and foremost. So it shouldn’t get its hopes up.

The news on Allan’s black tablet had the curious habit of being both big and small. Mostly big, unpleasantly enough. Allan sought out the small and charming but got the rest of it into the bargain. It was impossible to see the molehills for the mountains.

During his first hundred years of life, Allan had never reflected upon the bigger picture. Now his new toy was telling him that the world was in a dreadful state. And reminding him of why he had, once upon a time, rightly chosen to turn his back on it and think only of himself.

He recalled his early years as an errand boy at the gunpowder factory in Flen. There, half the workers had devoted their free time to longing for a red revolution, while the other half was horrified at the threat from China and Japan. Their understanding of the Yellow Peril was nurtured by novels and booklets that depicted a scenario in which the white world was devoured by the yellow one.

Allan did not care about such nuances, and he continued along the same path after the Second World War when brown shirts made brown the ugliest colour of them all. He noticed this as little then as he did the next time people converged around an ideological expression. This time it was more a longing for something than away from it. Peace on earth was in, and so were floral VW buses and, frequently, hash. Everyone loved everyone else, except Allan, who didn’t love anyone or anything. Except his cat. Not that he was bitter: he just was.

The flowery era of life lasted until Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took over in their respective realms. They thought it was more practical to love oneself and one’s own successes. But if you insisted on disliking someone it should be the Russians. Essentially there were no other threats, and when Reagan killed Soviet Communism simply by talking about sending missiles from space, it was peace and joy for all, except the half of humanity who had no daily food and the several thousand British miners who no longer had a mine to go to. The new view was that there was no reason to care about your neighbour; it was enough to tolerate him or her. And people did, until the winds of change blew once more.

A bit unexpectedly, perhaps, the brown-shirt ideology made a comeback. Not by way of Germany this time, at least not first and foremost. Or even second and middlemost. But in a number of other countries it was in. The United States wasn’t first among them, but it soon became the most noticeable, thanks to its recently elected president. It was impossible to say how much he really believed in it: that seemed to change from day to day. But the old adage about doing something yourself if you want it done right wouldn’t suffice: it was time to point out external threats to the white Western lives we all deserved to live.

Allan, of course, wanted to consider his black tablet a tool of pure entertainment, but he had a hard time shielding himself against the broader contexts he was beginning to perceive. He thought about putting the tablet down. Leaving it be for a whole day. And another. Only to admit reluctantly that it was too late. The man who had, more than anyone else, not bothered to care about the state of things had started to care about the state of things.

‘I’ll be damned,’ he mumbled to himself.

‘What’s that?’ Julius wondered.

‘It was nothing. Except what I just said.’

‘Damned?’

‘Yes.’

Indonesia

Once Allan had come to terms with his new-found relative interest in the rest of humanity, his black tablet helped him regain lost ground. It greeted him with the news of a Norwegian who had his own lake, where he fed the roach and bream pellets full of carotene. When the pike in the lake ate the recently fed fish their flesh turned pink, whereupon the Norwegian caught them, filleted them and sold them as salmon. He minimized his risks by exporting the frauds solely to Namibia where, naturally, there lived a retired health inspector from Oslo. The inspector sounded the alarm, the Norwegian was locked up, and the price of salmon in south-western Africa went back to normal.

And so on. The black tablet helped Allan enjoy life again, even as Julius continued to live in frustration. It had been months since he’d managed a single dishonourable undertaking. In his last few years as a criminal at home in Sweden, he had devoted himself to a mild form of that Norwegian pike-salmon business. He’d imported vegetables from distant lands, had them repackaged and sold them as Swedish. There was a lot of money to be made there. The cool northern climate in combination with a sun that never set meant that tomatoes and cucumbers matured slowly and developed world-class flavour. Or, as the nineteenth-century poet Carl Jonas Love Almqvist put it, ‘Only Sweden has Swedish gooseberries.’

Gooseberries in particular were not of interest to Julius; besides, there was little market for them. But the same was not true of green asparagus. When spring became early summer, people would pay four or five times as much for a bunch of asparagus, as long as it was Swedish.

Julius Jonsson’s Swedish asparagus, at that point, was shipped all the way from Peru. For a long time business was good. But then one of Jonsson’s middlemen grew too eager and began to sell Gotland asparagus on Hötorget in Stockholm at least five weeks before it was even to be found on Gotland. This led to rumours of fraud, and the Swedish foodstuffs authorities began to stir. Suddenly there were spot checks when and where there shouldn’t have been. In short order Julius lost three whole Peruvian lots, all seized and destroyed in the name of the law. Moreover, his middlemen – unlike Julius – were locked up. Such is a middleman’s lot.

But even if the long arm of the law couldn’t reach all the way to the brains behind it, Julius had lost interest. He was tired of Sweden being orderly beyond all reason. Who’d ever died of eating Peruvian asparagus?

No, honourable petty thieves might as well not bother any more. So Julius had chosen to retire. He made some moonshine, poached a moose here and there, borrowed the neighbour’s electricity without permission – and that was about it. Until a hundred-year-old man unexpectedly knocked on his door. The old man said his name was Allan, and with him he had a stolen suitcase they opened after a pleasant dinner and accompanying vodka. It had turned out to be full of millions.

So one thing had led to another, and another to the third. Julius and Allan had shaken off all the stubborn individuals who wanted their money back and ended up in Bali, where they were doing away with it at a steady pace.

Allan saw that Julius was hanging his head. He tried to inspire his bored friend by reading aloud from his black tablet about various types of immorality from all the corners of the world. Romania, Italy and Norway were already settled. President Zuma of South Africa managed to take up a whole breakfast when it turned out he’d built a private swimming pool and a theatre with taxpayers’ money. A Swedish dance-band queen received well-deserved attention after calling seven dresses and eighteen pairs of shoes a ‘business trip’ on her tax return.

But the head-hanging didn’t stop. Julius needed something to do before he became depressed for real.

Allan, who hadn’t let himself be concerned about anything at all for a hundred years, could not feel at peace, given his friend’s lost spark. Surely there must be something Julius could engage himself in.

That was as far as he got in his musings before chance stepped in. It happened one evening after Allan had crawled into bed, while Julius felt he still had sorrows in his soul to deaden. He sat down in the hotel bar and ordered a glass of local arak. It was made of rice and sugarcane, tasted like rum, and was so strong it made the eyes water. Julius had learned that one glass would blur one’s troubles and a second would chase them away. Just to be safe, he tended to have a third glass, too, before bedtime.

The evening’s first was empty and the other well on its way when Julius’s senses expanded enough for him to notice that he wasn’t alone in the bar. Three chairs away sat a middle-aged Asian man, also with arak in hand.

‘Cheers,’ Julius said, raising his glass.

The man smiled in response, whereupon both turned bottoms up and grimaced.

‘Now things are starting to look up,’ said the man, whose eyes were as full of tears as Julius’s.

‘First or second?’ Julius asked.

‘Second,’ said the man.

‘Same here.’

Julius and the man moved closer and each decided to have a third glass of the same.

They chatted for a while before the man chose to introduce himself. ‘Simran Aryabhat Chakrabarty Gopaldas,’ he said. ‘It’s a pleasure!’

Julius looked at the man who had just said his name. And had enough arak in his body to say what he was thinking. ‘Surely no one could have a name like that.’

Yes, one could. Especially if one was of Indian origin. Simran Etc. Etc. had ended up in Indonesia after an unfortunate incident with the daughter of a far-too-unsympathetic man.

Julius nodded. Dads of daughters could be more unsympathetic than most. But was that any reason to possess a name that took an entire morning to say?

The man, who was named what he was named, turned out to have a pragmatic attitude toward the significance of his own identity. Or perhaps he just had a sense of humour. ‘What do you think I should be called instead?’

Julius liked the exiled Indian. But if they were going to become friends, all those names in a row just wouldn’t do. He had to seize this opportunity. ‘Gustav Svensson,’ he said. ‘That’s a proper name, rolls off the tongue, easy to remember.’

The man said he’d never had trouble remembering Simran Aryabhat Chakrabarty Gopaldas either, but he agreed that Gustav Svensson sounded pleasant. ‘Swedish, isn’t it?’ he asked.

Yes. Julius nodded again. Couldn’t get much more Swedish than that.

And there and then, his new business idea began to take root.

* * *

Julius Jonsson and Simran Something truly hit it off as the third glass of arak took hold. Before the night was over they had decided to meet again. Same place, same time, the next night. In addition, Julius had decided that the man with the impossible name would henceforth be called Gustav Svensson. Simran Aryabhat Chakrabarty Gopaldas thought that was just as well. The name he’d had so far hadn’t brought him an overabundance of luck.

The old men went on in the same vein for several nights in a row. The Indian grew used to his new alias. He liked it.

He’d checked into the hotel under his previous name on the day the two had met, and he continued to stay there while he and Julius laid plans for their future partnership. When the hotel manager informed him, at increasing volume, that he wanted payment for the Indian guest’s stay, Gustav told Julius that he intended to depart from the place permanently. Without paying. And without announcing his intentions. The management would never understand, after all, that Gustav couldn’t be held responsible for Simran’s bill.

But Julius understood. When was Gustav planning to depart?

‘Preferably in the next fifteen minutes.’

Julius understood this too. But he didn’t want to lose his new friend, so he sent the man off with the phone Allan had given him. ‘Here’s something so you can be reached. I’ll call you from my room. Now go. Take the way through the kitchen. That’s what I would do.’

Gustav followed Julius’s advice and was gone. Later that evening, the hotel manager appeared after wandering around for at least an hour in pursuit of the now-vanished Indian guest.

Julius and Allan observed the sunset from the shore, each in a comfortable chair and with an accompanying drink. The manager apologized for the intrusion. But he had a question. ‘Mr Jonsson, is there any chance you have seen our guest Simran Aryabhat Chakrabarty Gopaldas? I’ve noticed the two of you spending some time together here at our establishment in recent days.’

‘Simran who?’ said Julius.

* * *

Thenceforth, Gustav Svensson and Julius Jonsson had to meet somewhere other than the hotel when the time came to talk business. The manager couldn’t exactly lay the blame for his vanished guest at Jonsson’s feet, but that didn’t stop him aiming a slightly raised level of suspicion at the Swedish gentlemen. In their case, there was considerably more money at stake. Thus far they had always paid up, but currently the bill was larger than usual and it seemed advisable to proceed with caution.

Jonsson and Svensson’s meetings were instead held in a filthy bar in central Denpasar. Gustav turned out to be almost as much a petty thief as Julius. Back home in India, he had spent many years living large by renting cars, switching their engines and returning them. It often took the rental agency several months to discover that the vehicle in question had become seven years older, and by then it was impossible to say which of several hundred renters was the guilty party. Unless it was someone on the staff.

In those days, fancy cars had become part of Gustav’s daily life. As a result he noticed that the nicer the car, the greater the potential to attract a beautiful girl. This equation got him into trouble more than once. To such an extent, most recently, that he had found it best to leave the automotive industry, the girl and all of India behind, since the girl had become pregnant. Her father had turned out to be both a Member of Parliament and a military man, and when Gustav, for strategic reasons, had asked for the girl’s hand in marriage, the father responded by threatening to send the seventh infantry after him.

‘What a grumpy bastard,’ Julius said. ‘Couldn’t he think of what was best for his daughter?’

Gustav agreed. A complicating factor was that the father had just noticed that his six-cylinder BMW had become a four-cylinder while he was on a business trip to Singapore.

‘And he blamed you?’

‘Yes. With no evidence.’

‘Were you innocent?’

‘That’s beside the point.’

In conclusion, Gustav said it felt right that Simran Aryabhat Chakrabarty Gopaldas was no more.

‘But it’s too bad he didn’t have time to settle up with the hotel. Cheers to you, my friend.’

* * *

Some time after their initial, cheerful meeting at the bar, Julius Jonsson and his new partner Gustav Svensson, with the help of a substantial amount of the money that remained in the suitcase, took over an asparagus farm in the mountains. Julius held the reins, Gustav was the site manager, and a great number of impoverished Balinese people bent their backs in the fields.

With the help of previous contacts in Sweden, Julius and his new partner now exported ‘Gustav Svensson’s locally grown asparagus’ in lovely bunches tied with blue-and-yellow ribbon. Nowhere did Julius or the man who had, until recently, been named something else claim that the asparagus was Swedish. The only thing Swedish about it was the price, and the name of the Indian grower. Unlike the Peru project, this wasn’t as illegal as Julius would have preferred, but you couldn’t have it all. Furthermore, he and Gustav succeeded in establishing a supplementary, and shadier, line of business. Swedish asparagus had such a good international reputation that Gustav’s Balinese variety could be shipped to Sweden, transferred into different boxes, and exported to a series of luxury hotels around the world. In Bali, for example. High-profile hotels there had their international reputations to consider, and it was worth every single extra rupiah it cost to avoid serving guests the bland, locally grown variety.

Allan was glad his friend Julius was back to his old self. And with that, life surely would have been a gas once more for both Julius and his hundred-year-old friend with the black tablet, except the money in the suitcase that never ran dry was starting to run dry. The income from the crop fields in the mountains was respectable, but life at the luxury hotel where the friends resided was anything but free. Even the imported Swedish asparagus in the restaurant cost half a fortune.

Julius had wanted to broach the topic of their finances with Allan for some time. He just hadn’t got round to it. At breakfast that morning, however, the time had come. Allan had brought his black tablet along as usual, and the day’s news was a story about the love between siblings. The North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had just had his brother poisoned to death at an airport in Malaysia. Allan said he wasn’t overly surprised: he’d had his own dealings with Kim Jong-un’s father. And grandfather.

‘Both father and grandfather did in fact intend to take my life,’ he recalled. ‘Now both of them are dead, but here I sit. Such is life.’

Julius had grown used to Allan popping up with such reflections on the past and was no longer surprised by them. He had probably heard that particular story before, but he didn’t quite recall. ‘You met the North Korean leader’s father? And grandfather? How old are you?’

‘A hundred, almost a hundred and one,’ said Allan. ‘In case that somehow escaped you. Their names were Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung. The one was only a child, but he was very angry.’

Julius resisted the urge to enquire further. Instead he guided the conversation towards the topic he’d been planning to discuss from the start.

The problem was, as Julius had hinted earlier, that the suitcase of money was increasingly transforming into a suitcase without money. And it had been two and a half months since they’d last settled their debts with the hotel. Julius didn’t want to think about what the bill would say.

‘Then don’t,’ Allan suggested, taking a bite of his mildly seasoned nasi goreng.

More urgent was the issue with the boat-renter, who had been in touch to say that he had throttled their line of credit and intended to do the same to Messrs Karlsson and Jonsson unless their debt was settled within the week.

‘The boat-renter?’ Allan said. ‘Did we rent a boat?’

‘The luxury yacht.’

‘Oh, right. So that counts as a boat, does it?’

Then Julius confessed that he’d been planning to surprise Allan on his hundred-and-first birthday, but their financial situation was such that the celebration couldn’t be up to Harry Belafonte standards.

‘Well, we met him once before,’ Allan said. ‘And my birthday parties and I have never quite seen eye to eye, so don’t worry about that.’

But Julius did. He wanted Allan to know he had appreciated the Belafonte gesture. It had been above and beyond. Julius was no spring chicken himself, and at no time in history had anyone done anything as nice for him as Allan had.

‘Though I wasn’t the one singing,’ Allan said.

Julius went on to say that there would absolutely be a party: he’d already ordered a cake from the one bakery he’d been able to find that would make it on credit. Thereafter awaited a hot-air balloon ride over the beautiful green island, along with the balloon pilot and two bottles of champagne.

Allan thought a hot-air balloon ride sounded pleasant. But perhaps they could skip the cake, given that their finances were strained. Even the hundred and one candles might cost a fortune.

The state of the friends’ joint capital didn’t hinge on a hundred and one birthday candles, according to Julius. He had dug through the suitcase the night before and made a rough estimate of how much was left. Then he made another based on what he expected the hotel thought they owed. When it came to the yacht, he didn’t need to make an estimate, since the lessor had been kind enough to tell him the exact amount.

‘I’m afraid we’re at least a hundred thousand dollars in the red,’ said Julius.

‘Is that with or without the candles?’ Allan asked.

Indonesia

The hundred-year-old man had always had a calming effect on those around him, except during isolated moments in history in which he had riled people beyond all rhyme and reason. Like the time he’d met Stalin in 1948. That had led to five years in a gulag. And a few years after that, it had turned out the North Koreans weren’t great fans of his either.

Oh, well, that was all in the past. Now, he had got Julius to agree that they would first celebrate his hundred-and-first birthday according to the plan (since Julius so desperately wanted to) and then they would sit down and deal with their finances. Everything would work out. With a little luck, perhaps a new suitcase full of money would turn up.

Julius didn’t believe it would, although one never knew what might happen in Allan’s company. Despite their sub-optimal financial situation, he had gone along with Allan’s suggestion that there be four bottles of champagne in the hot-air balloon rather than two. There might be a lull in the air up there, and in that case they would need some way to amuse themselves.

‘Perhaps a few sandwiches as well,’ Julius mused.

‘But why?’ said Allan.

The hotel manager was keeping a close eye on the old man and his even older friend, these days. Their unpaid bills had surpassed a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That was only a small part of what the manager had made from the spendthrift Scandinavians in the past year, but at the same time it was far too much to let it go unpaid. He had taken certain steps and measures. A few days ago, or nights ago, he had put a man on discreet watch outside the gentlemen’s luxury bungalow, just in case they should get it into their heads to climb through one of the paneless windows and vanish.

But there was a certain amount of gratitude involved in the manager’s relationship with Messrs Jonsson and Karlsson. The former had, in a fairly believable manner, suggested that more money would be on its way before the week’s end. And, after all, this wasn’t the first time Jonsson had clung to his money just a little too long. Maybe the whole issue was simply down to him loving his cash. And who didn’t?

All in all, the manager thought it prudent and strategically smart to lie low, and to join in celebrating the older man’s birthday on the beach, with cake and a few carefully selected words.

* * *

In addition to the birthday boy, Julius and the hotel manager, the hired balloon pilot was present for the party. Gustav Svensson would have liked to attend, but he had the good sense not to.

The balloon was inflated and ready. Only a classic anchor around a palm tree kept it from taking off on its own. The heat in the balloon was regulated by the pilot’s nine-year-old son, who was deeply distressed as he would much rather have been next to the cake a few metres away.

Allan stared at the hundred and one unnecessary candles. Imagine the waste of money. And time! It took Julius several minutes to get them all lit, with the help of the hotel manager’s gold lighter (which ended up in Julius’s pocket).

At least the cake tasted good. And champagne was champagne, even if it wasn’t grog. It seemed to Allan that things could have been worse.

And, all of a sudden, they were. For the hotel manager was tapping his glass with the aim of giving a speech. ‘My dear Mr Karlsson,’ he said.

Allan interrupted him. ‘That was well said, Mr Manager. Truly charming. But surely we can’t all stand around here until my next birthday. Isn’t it high time we took off in the balloon?’

The hotel manager became flustered and Julius gave the nod to the balloon pilot, who immediately put down his piece of cake. After all, his primary purpose for being there was to work.

‘Roger that! I’ll go and make the call to the weather service at the airport. Just want to be sure that the winds haven’t changed. Back in a minute.’

The danger of a speech had been averted. Now it was time for boarding. It was easy to step into the basket, even for a hundred-and-one-year-old. There was a set of six portable stairs outside and a slightly smaller variant with three steps inside.

‘Hello there, little man,’ Allan said, ruffling the hair of the nine-year-old assistant.

The nine-year-old responded with a shy ‘Good day.’ He knew his place and was good at his job. The anchor was no longer necessary, not with the added weight of the foreigners.

Julius asked the boy for a demonstration and learned that the heat and, as a result, the balloon’s altitude, was adjusted by way of the red lever at the top of the gas line. When it was time to take off, all you had to do was turn it to the right. And back to the left when you wanted to come in for a landing.

‘First right, then left,’ said Julius.

‘Exactly, sir,’ said the boy.

And now three things happened simultaneously, within the span of a few seconds.

One: Allan noticed the nine-year-old’s longing glances at the cake and suggested that the lad run over quick and help himself. Plates and cutlery were both on the table. The boy needed no coaxing. He hopped out of the basket almost before Allan had finished speaking.

Two: Julius tested the red lever, turning it both left and right, and twisted it so hard it came off in his hand.

Three: the balloon pilot exited the hotel looking unhappy, and said that the ride would have to wait for the wind was about to become northerly. The balloon was in a poor position for such a wind.

At this, three more things happened, also rather simultaneously.

One: the balloon pilot caught sight of his nine-year-old son with his nose in the cake and scolded the poor boy for leaving his post.

Two: Julius swore at the red lever that had come off just like that. Now hot air was streaming into the balloon, which …

Three: … began to lift off the ground.

‘Stop! What are you doing?’ cried the balloon pilot.

‘It’s not me, it’s this damned lever,’ called Julius.

The balloon was at an altitude of three metres. Then four. Then five.

‘There we go!’ said Allan. ‘Now this is a party.’

The Indian Ocean

It took quite some time for Karlsson, Jonsson and the balloon to float far enough across the open sea that they could no longer hear the screaming balloon pilot. After all, the wind was at his back.

They could still see him for a while, after he ceased to be audible – he was flapping his arms. They could also see the hotel manager at his side. Not quite as flappy. But likely just as unhappy. Or even more so. He was watching a hundred and fifty thousand dollars float away before his very eyes. Meanwhile, the nine-year-old boy returned to the cake while everyone else was otherwise occupied.

A few more minutes passed, and then they could no longer see land in any direction. Julius finished cursing the red lever and threw it overboard, having given up trying to reattach it.

The gas and the flame were irreversibly on. And, in certain respects, that was a positive thing. Otherwise they would certainly fall into the ocean, basket and all.

Julius looked around. On the other side of the gas tank he found a GPS navigator. This was good news! Not that there was any way to steer the craft, but now at least they would know when land could be expected.

As Julius delved into geography, Allan opened the first of the four bottles of champagne they had brought along. ‘Whoopsie!’ he said, as the cork flew over the edge of the basket.

Julius felt that Allan wasn’t taking the situation seriously. They had no idea where they were heading.

Of course they did, Allan thought. ‘I’ve been around the world so many times that I’ve started to understand how it looks. If the wind keeps up like this, we’ll end up in Australia in a few weeks. But if it turns a little that way we’ll have to wait a few more.’

‘And where will we end up in that case?’

‘Well, not at the North Pole, but you didn’t want to go there anyway. Likely the South Pole, though.’

‘What the hell—’ Julius said, but he was interrupted.

‘There, there. Here’s your glass. Now, cheers to us on my birthday. And don’t you worry. The gas in the tank will run out long before the South Pole. Have a seat.’

Julius did as Allan said, sitting down next to his friend and staring straight ahead with a vacant gaze. Allan could tell that Julius was concerned. He was in need of comfort. ‘Yes, things look dark right now, my friend. But they’ve been dark before in my life, yet here I am. You’ll see, the wind will change. Or something.’

Julius found Allan’s inexplicable calmness a little bit helpful. Perhaps the champagne could take care of the rest. ‘Pass me the bottle, please,’ he said quietly.

And he took four liberal gulps without bothering to use a glass.

Allan was correct: the gas did run out before land was in sight. The tank began to sputter and the flame danced irregularly for some time before it went out completely, just as the friends managed to drain the contents of bottle number one.

It was a gentle journey down to the surface of the Indian Ocean, which, that day, was practically a Pacific one.

‘Do you think the basket will float?’ Julius asked, as the surface of the water grew nearer.

‘We’ll soon find out,’ said Allan. ‘Look at this!’

The hundred-and-one-year-old had been digging through the balloon’s wooden box of supplies for unforeseen incidents. He held up a brand-new fitting for the red lever.

‘Pity we didn’t find this while there was still time. And look!’

Two rocket flares.

The crash landing in the sea went better than Julius had dared to hope. The balloon basket hit the water, plunging half a metre below the surface, thanks to its speed and weight, then tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, straightened again, and bobbed like a fishing float with ever-waning movements.

Both old men were knocked over by the strike and the angle, and they ended up in a communal pile along one of the basket’s walls. Julius was quick to get up, a knife in his hand to separate the basket from the deflated balloon, which would no longer be of any use. It was temporarily spreading out on the water but would soon sink and take both basket and old men with it if it could.

‘Well done.’ Allan praised him from where he lay.

‘Thanks,’ said Julius, helping his friend back onto the bench.

Then Julius dismantled the heavy gas assembly and dumped it into the sea along with the four bracings that had held it up. With that, the vessel suddenly weighed at least fifty kilos less. Julius wiped the sweat from his brow and sank down next to his friend. ‘Now what?’ he said.

‘I think we should have another bottle of champagne so we don’t sit around here sobering up. Can’t you fire off one of those flares while I uncork it?’

Water was already seeping in through the sides of the basket, but it wasn’t so dire that they would sink before a few hours had passed, Allan thought. Or even more, if only they had something decent to bail with. ‘A lot can happen in two hours,’ he said.

‘Like what?’ Julius wondered.

‘Oh, well, a little can happen as well. Or nothing.’

Julius unwrapped the first flare and tried to make sense of the Indonesian instructions. He was tipsy and didn’t have the energy to be as desperate as he should have been. On the one hand, he knew he was soon to die. On the other, he was in the company of a man who was possibly immortal. A man who had not been executed by General Franco, had not been locked up for life by the American immigration authority, had not been strangled by Comrade Stalin (although it had been a close shave), had not been put to death by Kim Il-sung or Mao Zedong, had not been shot by the Iranian border patrol, had not had a hair touched on his ever-balder head in his twenty-five years as a double agent in the inner circles of the Cold War, had not been killed by Brezhnev’s bad breath, and had not been dragged along into President Nixon’s downfall.

The only thing to suggest that Allan might actually die, after having failed to do so for so many years, was the fact that he was sitting in a woven basket that was taking in water, in the sea somewhere between Indonesia, Australia and Antarctica. But if the recently-turned-hundred-and-one-year-old survived this too, one might reasonably expect that Julius could ride shotgun.

‘I reckon you just have to pull on this,’ he said, tugging on the right string in the wrong position, at which the emergency flare shot into the water and kept going until it presumably extinguished at a depth of a few hundred metres.

Julius considered giving up. But Allan popped the cork on the next bottle, handed it to his friend, and asked him to take a few sips – with or without a glass – because he appeared to need it.

‘Then I think you should try again with the other flare. But feel free to aim it upwards – I imagine it will be easier to see that way.’

The Indian Ocean

The official task of the North Korean bulk carrier Honour and Strength was to transport thirty thousand tons of grain from Havana to Pyongyang. A much less official task was to slow down the vessel south-east of Madagascar and, under cover of darkness, allow four kilos of enriched uranium to be brought aboard. This cargo had changed hands from courier to courier, from Congo to Burundi to Tanzania to Mozambique and on to the island east of the African continent, which Honour and Strength had a legitimate reason to pass.

The North Koreans understood that they had eyes on them. Just a few years earlier their sister ship had been caught in a rebel-controlled harbour in Libya; the captain had managed to bribe his way out, that time with a ship full of oil. To make a stop in Somalia, Iran or anywhere else with a similar reputation on the way home from Cuba would likely result in nothing but boarding by UN troops on the open sea. It had happened before, most recently outside Panama. That time there happened to be aircraft engines and advanced electronics under the grain, in violation of the current UN sanctions against the proud Democratic People’s Republic. Upset, the Koreans had informed the world that it was the world, not the Koreans, who had placed the engines and electronics there.

This time, the journey home from Cuba was going in the other direction; the earth was, after all, round. The official line was that the Democratic People’s Republic refused to allow itself to be wronged again in Panama. What was not mentioned was that they had an errand along the way.

Thus far everything had gone right instead of wrong. Captain Pak Chong-un had a hold full of high-quality grain that the Supreme Leader didn’t care about; he ate his fill anyway. But in addition there were now four kilos of lead-shielded enriched uranium, secured in a North Korean briefcase. The uranium was a necessity for the continued crucial battle against the American dogs and their allies south of the 38th parallel. The amount, four kilos, might not have been much upon which to build the nation’s future, but that was not the point. This was a test of the distribution channels as such. If all went well, the Russians promised, their efforts would be doubled many times over.

Captain Pak could feel the imperialist satellites following the ship’s path back to Pyongyang, prepared, as always, to find reasons to board, humiliate and disgrace.

Pak kept the briefcase in the safe in the captain’s quarters; the hooligans would find what they were looking for anyway, if it came to a boarding. But no sign of that yet. Still no mistakes made. Soon nothing could keep the captain from returning in triumph.

Pak Chong-un’s thoughts were interrupted when the first mate entered the room without knocking. ‘Captain!’ he said. ‘We’ve spotted an emergency flare four nautical miles to the north. What should we do? Ignore it?’

Blast! Just when everything was looking so good. Many thoughts flew through Captain Pak’s head all at once. Could it be a trap? Someone who intended to seize the uranium? Best to pretend they hadn’t seen it, of course, just as the first mate had suggested.

But some people were guaranteed to see it – the Americans. From space. And they were surely taking photographs. A North Korean ship ignoring someone in distress at sea – that would be a crime against maritime law, and an enormous PR disaster for the Supreme Leader (while Captain Pak himself would face a firing squad).

No, the least troublesome option would probably be to find out the reason for the flare.

‘Shame on you, sailor!’ said Captain Pak Chong-un. ‘Representatives of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea don’t leave those in distress in the lurch. Set a new course and prepare for a rescue action. That’s an order!’

The first mate gave a frightened salute and hurried off. He cursed himself for not doing a better job of watching his tongue. If the captain reported this, his career would be over. At best.

* * *

By now the water was up to the ankles of the friends in the basket on the sea. Allan sat with his black tablet, marvelling that it worked in the middle of nowhere. ‘Listen to this!’ he said.

And he told his friend that it wasn’t only presidents who made fools of themselves out in the world, like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, for example, the man who had defined homosexuality as ‘un-African’ and decided that it ought to be worth ten years in prison so the homosexual would learn. Recently Mugabe’s wife had allegedly used an extension cord to attack a girl who had spent time with the couple’s son at a hotel room. Apparently in that family they had issues with heterosexuality as well.

Julius was too distressed to have any opinion on his friend’s latest news and was just about to ask him to be quiet, so he could sit there and die in peace, when he was interrupted by a horn. In the distance he and Allan could make out a ship. Heading straight for the basket.

‘Isn’t that the damnedest thing?’ said Julius. ‘You’re going to survive this too, Allan.’

‘And so are you, it seems,’ said Allan.

* * *

The only items that accompanied the two old men onto the ship were Allan’s black tablet and the last bottle of champagne. Allan was holding the tablet in one hand and the champagne in the other as he and Julius met Captain Pak on the foredeck.

‘Good day, Captain,’ he said, once each in English, Russian, Mandarin and Spanish.

‘Good day,’ the astonished captain responded in English.

He had command of both Russian and Mandarin and, thanks to his many excursions to and from Cuba, he knew a certain amount of Spanish, but he was the only one of the crew who spoke English, and he felt instinctively that the fewer ears that listened and understood the better. At least until this mysterious situation cleared up.

Captain Pak informed the two castaways that their lives had just been saved in the name of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and for the glory of the Supreme Leader.

‘Say hello and thanks to the Supreme One, if you run into each other from now on,’ said Allan. ‘Where might we be let off along the way? Indonesia would be great, if it’s not too much trouble. We didn’t bring any identification papers, and it’s always a little tricky to change countries, isn’t it?’

Yes, Captain Pak knew how tricky it could be to change countries. It wasn’t the sort of thing you did with ease where he came from. But that wasn’t enough reason to fraternize with foreign gentlemen plucked from a bucket on the open sea. And certainly not in front of the crew, no matter the language.

‘As commanding officer, I am bound by law to guard the cargo of this ship carefully during our journey, as well as watch out for the cargo owners’ interests more generally. According to the same law, I am duty-bound to conduct the ship with due promptness.’

‘What does that mean?’ Julius asked nervously.

‘It means what I just said,’ said Captain Pak.

‘It means he’s not going to let us off before Pyongyang,’ said Allan.

Julius had no desire to see North Korea. ‘But please, dear Captain,’ he said. ‘We happen to have a bottle of champagne here. We thought it might come in handy if we were picked up as we now have been. It’s not quite as well chilled as it ought to be, but if the captain doesn’t mind that, we’d be happy to share it. We can get to know each other and see what sorts of solutions might be hiding just around the corner.’

That was well put, Allan thought, holding up the bottle in support.

The captain took it from his hand and informed them that it was being confiscated as no alcohol was allowed on board.

‘No alcohol?’ said Julius.

No alcohol? Allan thought, on the verge of asking to return to the basket.

‘You gentlemen will be interrogated for information in two hours. For the time being you are not under suspicion of any crime, but that can always change. I intend to conduct the interrogation myself. The first two questions will be, who are you and why did you elect to float around in a woven basket on the open sea? With a bottle of champagne. But we’ll deal with that then.’

Captain Pak turned to his first mate, who was told he must take his belongings and move down with the crew, since he had just been relieved of his officer’s cabin. He should instead have the two foreign men installed there. Furthermore, the first mate should make sure a sailor stood watch outside the cabin, unless he chose to guard it himself, to make sure the two gentlemen didn’t come to any harm or, for that matter, get up to causing any harm.

The first mate gave a salute. He wasn’t happy about this development. Forced to associate with the crew for the sake of two aged whites … No, the captain should have left them at sea. This could only end as poorly as it had begun.

Captain Pak Chong-un sensed trouble brewing. Once again he checked the contents within the otherwise securely locked door to the safe in the captain’s quarters. He kept the key on a chain around his neck.

The safe contained all the mandatory ship’s logs, a copy of maritime law, and a briefcase full of four kilos of lead-shielded, enriched uranium.

The task he had personally been delegated by the Supreme Leader was now only three days from completion. There were no clouds on the horizon of this task. In a literal sense, that was. Which meant, as always, that the American satellites were keeping a watchful eye on him. That was a cloud in and of itself, albeit a metaphorical one. Another was the two foreign men in the first mate’s cabin just on the other side of the wall.

Captain Pak allowed himself to sum up the situation before walking the few steps to the neighbouring cabin. ‘Ugh.’ He stared at the watchman until said watchman realized he should open the door for his captain. And then he stared again until the watchman closed the same door.

‘Gentlemen, it is time to be interrogated,’ said Captain Pak Chong-un.

‘Lovely,’ said Allan.

Congo

Congo is the second-largest country in Africa and has always been rich in two particular things: natural resources and misery.

The most miserable period of all was when King Leopold II of Belgium used the country as his private rubber farm. He enslaved everyone he encountered and had upwards of ten million people killed. That’s an entire Sweden. Or an entire Belgium, if you prefer.

When Congo gained independence many difficult years later, a certain Joseph Mobutu ended up in the president’s chair. He became most famous for selling his country’s resources to the highest under-the-table bidder, keeping the money for himself, and changing his name to ‘the All-powerful Warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake’.

This guy, thought the United States, was the future of Congo and Africa. And, with the kind aid of the CIA, the All-powerful Warrior remained in power for several decades. Uranium succeeded rubber as the most interesting natural resource. Indeed, the USA received the uranium for the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki from Congo and, as thanks for the help, assisted in the installation of a Congolese nuclear research facility under the leadership of the all-powerful one who left fire in his wake. It’s possible that this was not the United States’ brightest political decision in history.

In the country where everything was corrupt, no exceptions, large quantities of enriched uranium vanished. Some of it turned up here and there and could be secured, while an unknown amount remained missing.

Time passed. The most important security services in the Western world no longer had the energy to search for what couldn’t be found. What remained was to try to keep any more from reaching the black market. Some of those with operational units found comfort in the fact that at least the missing uranium lost strength with each year that went by.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, however, was in possession of knowledge that made her view of the whole thing rather less rosy. Frau Merkel had already been around longer than most of the world’s leaders and she was counting on being re-elected next autumn. Her background as a chemist told her that she would not be in her current position on the day the missing isotope no longer posed a potential threat to her country. To be sure, she still had a lot to give, even at the age of sixty-three, after twenty-eight years in politics. But even so, her own half-life was considerably shorter than that of enriched uranium: four point five billion years.

North Korea

Kim Jong-un had never asked to be the person he became. In fact, two older brothers were ahead of him in line, but one sealed his fate when he took his family under his wing and sneaked out of the country under a fake name to go to Tokyo for a lark. To Disneyland, to boot – he was 0 for 2. And their father, Kim Jong-il, considered his other son far too weak. That basically meant he was suspected of being gay. Here and there, it was considered questionable to love whomever you wished.

Their father Kim was quite advanced in age when he took over from Eternal President Kim Il-sung, and likely had plans for a similar run-in period for his youngest son. But the problem with life is that people both high and low die when they die. Suddenly there he was, the twenty-five-year-old son, expected to move forward the legacy of his just-deceased father. Or preferably further than that since his father had gone down in history as the man who had turned a hungry people into a starving people.

In the span of a few months, young Kim went from capable Game Boy player to three-star general. He wasn’t given terrific chances by international analysts. A puppy, commander of a series of battle-scarred officers, including the puppy’s own uncle? Surely that would never work out.

And it didn’t. For the uncle and the generals. It’s possible that they were scheming, but before they could finish they were purged, every last one. Young Kim proved to be a person not to be trifled with or herded about. The uncle was sentenced to death for, among other things, being unfaithful to his wife. Nowhere in the twelve-page verdict was there a word about the fact that young Kim’s father had had five children with three different women.

Several years earlier young Kim had attended school in Switzerland under a secret name while his mother travelled around Europe to shop for the sorts of things the average North Korean had never even seen a picture of. Kim was more interested in basketball and videogames than girls, but his grades were nothing to sneeze at. And when he hastily, and with a decent amount of enthusiasm, took over the entire nation his grandfather had created and his father had partially ruined, it was his grandfather he took after. He was an extrovert, liked to mix with his people, might thump the occasional citizen on the back when he was in the mood – he even spoke to them. Above all, he adjusted the dials of the homemade Communist system, after which the food didn’t run out on as many tables as quickly as it had before.

So, as the world continued to titter in horror over the puppy, he made sure that the citizens were no longer starving even as he realized that the country he’d inherited must either curl up and die or pick a fight with the whole rest of the world, which was striving to make sure that the former occurred.

He chose the fight-picking.

But there was a slight issue with North Korea’s inadequate finances. It would cost much more than they had squirrelled away to upgrade the aged Soviet tanks and ordnance. Better, then, to speed up the pace of the project Dad had helmed with a certain level of success.

Not many bombs. Just a few. But with a decent amount of oomph in them.

Nuclear weapons, in short.

By way of the development of the nuclear weapons programme and an eternal number of test-fired missiles, he informed the scornfully smiling world that North Korea was still in the game. Young Kim was rather satisfied when the world reacted with fear, sanctions and repeated condemnations. Incidentally, he was no longer ‘young Kim’ but Supreme Leader.

As a godsend, the United States replaced a Nobel Peace Prize-winning president with one who constantly fell into Kim Jong-un’s traps. Each time Donald Trump ran his mouth about how North Korea would be struck by ‘fire and fury’, he bolstered the Supreme Leader’s position.

During his first years in power, Kim Jong-un had achieved more than his father had done in his whole life. There was really only one thing that concerned him: the fact that the domestic plutonium factory had such trouble making it. The downside to plutonium is that it does not occur naturally in the earth. Anyone who wishes to play around with it, to build nuclear weapons for example, must first make sure he can create it.

And that’s no small task.

Even the production of five tiny grams is a tough job. But say you succeed in that. Then it must be stabilized, preferably to 99 per cent or greater, with the help of the element gallium, which in turn has the troublesome tendency to melt about as easily as a chocolate bar in the sun.

To stop the entire plutonium process slipping through your fingers, you must have a fancy centrifuge, and that is almost as complicated as the very process it is meant to aid.

All this for five grams of weapons-grade plutonium 239. For a nuclear charge worth mentioning, you need more like five kilos.

Things would probably have worked out if only the Russians had stopped giving the North Koreans the run-around. They had quietly promised to deliver a centrifuge, but now they were making excuses this way and that. It was not an option to wait out their dilly-dallying for eternity upon eternity. Kim Jong-un hated being anyone’s lapdog.

Incidentally, the Russians were masters of double dealing. They might vote for sanctions against North Korea on Monday, half promise a centrifuge on Tuesday – and offer up valuable uranium contacts before the week was out.

For the alternative to homemade plutonium was enriched uranium. It could be had on the black market in the darkest parts of Africa. But the proud Democratic People’s Republic had many enemies out there. Half a ton of material for nuclear weapons was not the sort of thing you could ship intercontinentally by DHL.

And now the schizophrenic characters in Moscow had tipped them off about enriched uranium in Congo.

But could the supplier be trusted?

And would the delivery method work?

Both questions were currently under investigation.

USA, North Korea

The new president of the United States had been forced to fire his security advisor after it turned out the advisor was a security risk. Beyond this, his focus during the initial period of his presidency was to try to get the media to shape up. It was going so-so.

As a result it was basically a welcome interruption for President Trump when the Supreme Leader in Pyongyang allowed four mid-range Pukguksong-2 missiles to be fired five hundred kilometres straight out into the Sea of Japan.

On the initiative of the United States, Japan and South Korea, the UN Security Council was convened, and it soon unanimously condemned the North Korean test. The American ambassador to the UN commented that ‘It is time to hold North Korea accountable – not with our words, but with our actions.’ What those actions might be, she was happy to hand over to the president, who in turn tweeted a number of suggestions.

It so happened that little Sweden was a member of the aforementioned Security Council that year. Margot Wallström, Sweden’s minister for foreign affairs, was known for her outspokenness and enterprising nature. It was said, but not confirmed, that Benjamin Netanyahu had a picture of her on his office wall in Jerusalem and liked to throw darts at it each time he needed to work out his frustrations. This was because Sweden, on the urging of Margot Wallström, had upped and recognized the state of Palestine. A state without borders, without a functioning government and, as Netanyahu and others saw it, a state full of terrorists.

But Wallström persisted. And now, on the Security Council, she aimed high. Among her colleagues she promoted the idea that she should personally visit Pyongyang to establish a direct line of contact with the leader about the serious nature of things, as a representative of both Sweden and the UN Security Council. The visit must first be sanctioned by North Korea, and it must be completely unofficial. A high-level diplomatic game, but also a serious attempt to tone down the war rhetoric coming from both sides.

No Western country had as genuine a diplomatic relationship with North Korea as Sweden did. The Security Council gave Wallström the green light. All that remained was to convince the Supreme Leader to do the same.

* * *

If Torsten Lövenstierna had been an athlete, he would have been world-renowned and a multi-millionaire. But instead he was a diplomat, so no one had ever heard of him.

During his nearly thirty years in the Swedish foreign service, he had quietly performed his highly qualified services in Egypt, Iraq, Turkey and Afghanistan. Among his merits were a posting to the UN in New York, being a special advisor during the Iraq inspection, taking on a leadership role in Mazar-e Sharif, and serving as the Swedish consul general in Istanbul.

What Torsten Lövenstierna didn’t know about advanced diplomacy wasn’t worth knowing. Now he was Sweden’s ambassador in Pyongyang, perhaps the most complicated embassy posting of all.

According to some, he was a genius. Whatever, it was this man who had received the delicate task of bringing the North Koreans onto the track of discreet arbitration.

World peace was on the line. Torsten Lövenstierna prepared himself meticulously, as always. Following his preparations he requested, and was granted, an audience with the Supreme Leader. The ambassador wasn’t nervous – he’d been around far too long for that – but he was incredibly focused.

With great precision, deploying the right word at exactly the right moment, he conveyed the UN’s argument for why quiet arbitration in Pyongyang would be in the best interest of the aforementioned world peace. He was so skilled at his job that he managed to finish his speech without being interrupted even once. What Torsten Lövenstierna accomplished in front of the Supreme Leader was nothing other than a feat of diplomacy.

When he had finished, he expressed thanks for being allowed to take up the leader’s precious time, then awaited a response.

The leader looked the star diplomat in the eye and said, ‘A secret peace summit? Here? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.’

And with that, the audience was over.

‘Then I ask permission to withdraw,’ said Ambassador Lövenstierna, backing out of the Supreme Leader’s gigantic office.

And that would probably have been the end of that. If it weren’t for Allan Karlsson.

The Indian Ocean

Captain Pak Chong-un took the only empty chair left at the table in the first mate’s quarters. Allan and Julius were already sitting in the other two chairs.

The captain took out a pen and paper and began by enquiring what the gentlemen’s names were, where they were from, and why they had chosen to float around in a woven basket fifty nautical miles from land.

This was the sort of thing Allan was best at, Julius thought, and said nothing. Allan didn’t think much. Instead he said a lot.

‘My name is Allan. And this is my best friend Julius. He’s an asparagus farmer. I’m not anything, except old. I’m a hundred and one today, can you imagine?’

Captain Pak could imagine. He thought that this interrogation had got off to a difficult start. There was something carefree about the man who claimed to be older than should be reasonably possible. It made the interrogator both anxious and watchful.

‘Well, Mr Allan can be as old as he likes,’ said Captain Pak. ‘Where are you from and what are you doing here?’

‘What are we doing here?’ said Allan. ‘Please, dear captain, you’re the one who doesn’t want to let us off.’

‘No quibbling,’ said Captain Pak. ‘It’s possible that I will let you off before you even know it. It probably wouldn’t take more than ten, twelve days to swim from here to East Timor, if that’s what you’d prefer.’

No, neither Allan nor Julius would prefer that. Instead Allan explained that a birthday celebration on Bali had gone awry. They were supposed to take a hot-air balloon trip over the island, but instead the wind had changed and the balloon come loose. By the time the captain and his boat had done them the kindness of passing by, only the basket was left. Allan supposed it had looked very odd indeed, but there’s an explanation behind everything.

‘Isn’t that so?’ he said.

‘What’s that?’ said the captain.

‘That everything has an explanation. Everything really does – don’t you sometimes think that too, Captain?’

Julius looked at Allan in concern. He tried to communicate that it might not be advisable to run his mouth so much: the captain still had the chance to throw them overboard.

‘So you’re saying you’re Indonesians?’ Captain Pak asked sceptically.

‘No, we’re from Sweden,’ said Allan. ‘A lovely country. Have you been there, Captain? No? Well, a visit would absolutely be worth considering. Snow in the winter and long days in the summer. Nice people too. Generally speaking, that is. There are certainly some we could have done without, even in our country. I had a frightfully bad-tempered director at the old folks’ home where I lived before we ended up here. In Bali, I mean. I shudder to think of her. Perhaps you understand what I’m talking about, Captain?’

The captain was displeased that the old man was sending questions back across the table. If he didn’t watch out, he would lose control of the situation.

‘Let’s start from the beginning.’

And he wrote down Allan and Julius’s full names, nationalities and business. Their business was, in fact, nothing. It hadn’t been their intention to float around on the sea. As Captain Pak decided to believe their story, he also began slowly to believe he would survive this chapter of his life.

The interrogation paused at a knock on the door. The terrified sailor outside had been tasked with asking if there was a chance they would be serving the guests dinner. The captain thought that would be fitting. If fifteen or twenty minutes suited.

‘Is there still a ban on alcohol?’ Allan wondered, after the sailor had left.

The captain confirmed that there was. With their food they would be served water and tea.

‘Tea,’ said Allan. ‘Captain, are you really sure you wouldn’t like to drop us off somewhere along the way?’

‘That would put both our cargo and my life in jeopardy. If you behave yourselves, you may accompany us to the Democratic People’s Republic.’

‘If we behave ourselves?’

‘Exactly. There, the Supreme Leader will take care of you in the best way possible.’

‘The way he took care of his brother not long ago?’ Allan asked.

Julius swore internally. Couldn’t the old man control himself? Did he want to become shark food?

Captain Pak might not have had a black tablet like Allan’s, but he did have access to news from all corners of the world as long as he was at sea. He was aware of the accusations in the international media and said angrily that Mr Karlsson had clearly allowed himself to be taken in by imperialist propaganda. ‘No Korean leader would kill either relatives or visitors from other countries.’

For one second, Julius entertained the vain hope that the hundred-and-one-year-old would back down. When that second had passed, Allan said: ‘Oh yes they would. The only reason I’m sitting here today is that Mao Zedong saved my life a few years back, when Kim Il-sung intended to have me shot. As it happens, Mao himself had a change of heart at the last moment.’

What was Captain Pak Chong-un hearing? So much was wrong, all at the same time. A Caucasian blaspheming the name of the Eternal President of the Republic. The president who had stepped into said eternity twenty-three years previously.

‘A few years back?’ said Captain Pak, waiting for his thoughts to fall into order.

‘Oh, time flies. It was 1954, I think. When Stalin was putting on airs. Or was it ’fifty-three?’

‘Mr Karlsson, you … met the Eternal President of the Republic?’

‘Yes, him and his angry boy both. But, of course, they’ve both sailed on since then – not everyone can simply grow healthier with age, like me. Aside from my memory, that is. And my hearing. And my knees. And something else. I’ve forgotten – the memory part, you know.’

Captain Pak realized that the risk to his own life was not at all in the past. The man before him might constitute a direct threat to his health. For him to bring someone who might possibly have denigrated the Eternal President to Pyongyang could not reasonably lead to anything other than … other than what the imperialists claimed had afflicted the Supreme Leader’s brother.

Then again: to take the life of someone who had sat down with the Eternal President without first double-checking with that leader’s grandson …

Rock or hard place? Captain Pak weighed his options.

Julius was, to his own surprise, still conscious. Did Allan understand how high the stakes were, or was he just old? Whichever it was, the hundred-and-one-year-old had talked himself into a state in which the captain’s threat to throw them overboard was more topical than ever.

Julius considered how he might salvage the situation and heard himself saying, ‘Allan here is a great champion of freedom for the Democratic People’s Republic. And an expert in nuclear weapons, too. Isn’t that right, Allan?’

Captain Pak stopped breathing for a few seconds. He automatically brought his right hand to the safe key around his neck to make sure it was still there. A nuclear weapons expert? he thought.

Allan was thinking the same thing. He was afraid he had played a little too offensively against the suspected teetotaller across the table. And, as things were, it was best to play along with the make-believe his friend had started. ‘That was kindly put, Julius. Yes, I suppose we’re experts just about to a man, but in different areas. My speciality happens to be slapping together what we called atom bombs in the good old days. I’m almost as good at that as I am at making vodka out of goat’s milk. But, as I’ve understood it, vodka won’t win me any points on this ship. And, anyway, I don’t suppose there are any goats aboard.’

Allan noticed the captain’s hand seeking something around his neck whenever nuclear weapons were mentioned. That might, of course, have been mere chance. Or perhaps it explained somehow why he looked so tormented. The hundred-and-one-year-old had done some reading on the North Korean atomic weapons programme. Why, just a few days earlier, Kim Jong-un had sent a missile over the Sea of Japan, provoking fury from the rest of the world. This had prompted the old dynamiter to update himself via the black tablet, where you could read absolutely anything if you only knew where to look.

It turned out a lot had happened on the atom bomb front in the seventy-plus years since Allan had last had reason to delve into the topic. But the North Koreans seemed to be far from leaders in the field. ‘Beginners’ would be a better word. International pundits guessed that the country’s plutonium facilities hadn’t yet succeeded in delivering what they were meant to.

Should Allan mention this to the captain and see what sort of reaction he got? With a tiny promise embedded to be on the safe side? His and Julius’s options were no longer to be let off in Indonesia or North Korea, if they ever had been. Instead they would be let off in North Korea or tossed over the railing. North Korea sounded more pleasant. ‘Like I said, nuclear weapons and I are the best of friends. And you seem to have plenty of problems.’

Captain Pak’s hand immediately went back to the key.

Allan went on: ‘Judging by the puny strength of your country’s first nuclear weapons tests, either you haven’t quite figured out plutonium production or you have a severe lack of uranium. Or maybe both. One issue, when it comes to uranium, might be that you don’t understand how to maximize it. That’s what usually happens to nuclear weapons bunglers in general. No wonder people are laughing at you.’

‘Who’s laughing at us?’ Captain Pak said defensively.

‘Who isn’t?’ Allan said, and Julius prayed silently to himself that Allan would stop there.

But Allan had caught a scent. The captain wasn’t protesting at Allan’s account of things: instead he was lamely arguing about the laughter. Had Allan hit the mark more accurately than he could have guessed? ‘Uranium,’ he said, feeling his way forward.

That was it. Nothing more. And once again.

‘Uranium.’

Now the captain’s hand, clutching the key, almost turned white.

‘Why do you keep saying uranium all the time?’ he asked angrily and uncertainly all at once.

‘Because anyone who has two plutonium facilities at their disposal and still shoots off toy bombs likely has a problem. Anyone who can’t produce their own plutonium must seek solace in – you guessed it – uranium.’

Captain Pak tried to bring his hand to the key again, only to discover it was already there. Allan told the captain not to look so terrified. Surely it was no surprise that the world’s leading nuclear weapons expert, all humility aside, would understand the situation.

One person who didn’t was Julius. Had Allan become a mind-reader?

‘What situation?’ said Captain Pak, fearing the answer.

Allan was on the verge of betting that the captain’s boat was full of smuggled uranium. But if he was wrong, matters would deteriorate. ‘Let’s not spend too much time on the obvious,’ he said. ‘This sort of thing is best dealt with discreetly. But the captain will have to make his decision soon. Either Julius and I will come to Pyongyang and whip your puny attempts at nuclear weapons into shape. Or you will have to throw us overboard and justify it to the Supreme Leader after the fact.’

Captain Pak wanted to bury the two gentlemen a few thousand metres below the sea. At the same time, the older one knew so much. Perhaps more than the republic’s own experts. How patriotic would it be to feed the fish with all that knowledge?

Allan could tell that the captain hadn’t yet made up his mind. He gave it an extra go. ‘I believe this is your lucky day, Mr Lackey of a Captain. Let’s do this, for the good of everyone.’

And he promised to tell the Supreme Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic everything he knew about the technology behind the new hetisostat pressure.

‘Hetistosat …?’ Captain Pak attempted.

‘Almost,’ said Allan. ‘Twice the power for a quarter the uranium, in short. Or, alternatively, the same amount but eight times the power. With my help, you could blow half of Japan sky-high without losing more than a few kilos. Although I don’t recommend it. The Japanese who were still around would be furious, I can tell you that much right now. And the Americans too, I’m sure, although they were once out to do the same thing. With a certain amount of success.’

‘Hetistosat …’ Captain Pak tried again, but Allan hushed him.

‘That’s not something that should be said aloud, Captain, even if you could get the pronunciation right.’

Captain Pak sat quietly in his chair, apparently awaiting Allan’s instructions about what to do next.

Well, first of all the captain must immediately revoke that fussy rule against alcohol. If he wanted to join in and share the champagne with Allan and Julius he could; otherwise he didn’t have to. If by chance there happened to be anything else good to drink hidden in the captain’s quarters, he was more than welcome to bring it out so the champagne wouldn’t feel lonely.

‘Revoke the ban on alcohol?’ the captain said.

‘Be quiet and let me finish.’

Julius closed his eyes as Allan snapped at the man who held their lives in his hands.

Allan went on to say that he would prefer to sleep in a separate room from Julius, as his friend tended to be a noisy sleeper, but in the interest of healthy cooperation he was able to overlook this. The captain should, however – once the bit about alcohol had been dealt with – get in touch with the Supreme Leader; Allan suggested doing so in an encrypted manner.

‘Say that you’ve snagged the solution to all his problems, and that the Democratic People’s Republic shall blossom like never before, thanks to hetisostat pressure and your resourcefulness. The Korean nuclear weapons programme will reach heights you never thought possible. Given the part about the champagne, that is. And the rest.’

Captain Pak made notes on his paper.

‘Het-iso-stat pressure,’ said Allan. ‘Hetisostat pressure one thousand two hundred is between sixty and eighty GDM more than the USA itself can produce. And that is double the pressure of Russia’s capacity.’

‘GDM,’ said Captain Pak, still writing.

‘Double, Mr Captain. Can you even comprehend such a thing?’

No, the captain couldn’t. Neither could Julius. Nor even could Allan, as it turned out, once the friends were alone once more.

‘I suppose I invented more than I actually needed to,’ he said.

‘Oh? How much was that?’ asked Julius.

‘All of it.’

* * *

Captain Pak made no promises as he left the friends’ cabin. No more than that he would ‘process things’.

To some extent he had already made his decision. The situation remained potentially fatal for him, but the potential upsides for the Democratic People’s Republic, and by extension himself, were great. To touch a hair on the head of, or even displease, the man who possessed the solution of the hetisostat-something technique would presumably be very stupid.

The captain felt that he had reached his conclusion. As far as he could, anyway. Soon he would sit down and formulate the to-be-encrypted message to his Supreme Leader. There was only one thing he needed to take care of first.

Ten minutes after the captain had left Allan and Julius to do his processing, there was a cautious knock at the gentlemen’s door. It was an on-duty watch sailor, who, with a greeting from Captain Pak Chong-un, handed over, first, the bottle of champagne, and, second, one of dark Cuban rum. Then he asked in Russian what else the gentlemen would like to drink with their meal.

‘I think we have enough to get by for now, thank you,’ said Allan. ‘If you like you could have our tea.’

The sailor bowed and made his exit. He left the tea. A few minutes later he was back with a meal of stewed meat and rice.

The friends gorged themselves. But the question was, with what would they wash down their food?

‘I think we should start with the rum,’ said Allan. ‘And have the champagne for dessert. Perhaps we could have used the tea to brush our teeth, if only we had brought toothbrushes. We can save thinking up something clever about hetisostat pressures and GDM for tomorrow.’

‘We?’ said Julius.

The Indian Ocean

The encrypted report from the captain of Honour and Strength was absolutely sensational. Kim Jong-un read it himself and drew his own conclusions. He had certain similarities to Trump in Washington in that he was reluctant to delegate tasks in his administration. With the possible difference that Trump drew conclusions without doing the actual reading.

The captain had managed to spell the non-existent phrase ‘hetisostat pressure’ correctly. And he had got the meaningless acronym GDM in the right order. But in the captain’s formulation, the international expert Allan Karlsson happened to become Swiss instead of Swedish.

Perhaps this was lucky, given what was to come. A Swedish foreign minister who wanted to talk nuclear weapons, and an equally Swedish nuclear weapons expert a few days later, might have been too much for a conspiracy theorist’s brain.

Instead the entire situation landed within the realm of likelihood, and Kim Jong-un could see potential.

Honour and Strength would reach the harbour outside Pyongyang in a few days. What if one were to … said Kim Jong-un to himself. And agreed. A PR war was still war. With the help of the UN and the Swiss man, the republic could, within a few days, begin to matter extraordinarily in this area.

The Supreme Leader summoned his secretary from outside the door, with a curt order: ‘Get the Swedish ambassador here.’

‘Yes, Supreme Leader. When, Supreme Leader?’

‘Now.’

* * *

‘The Supreme Leader wished to speak with me,’ said Ambassador Lövenstierna when, under an hour later, he found himself in Kim Jong-un’s palace.

‘Not so much with you as to you,’ said Kim Jong-un. ‘I have decided to invite the UN Security Council to informal talks. What was her name again, the one who wanted to come here?’

‘Minister for Foreign Affairs Margot Wallström,’ said Ambassador Lövenstierna.

‘That’s right. Bring her here, as I said. Immediately.’

Ambassador Lövenstierna nodded in acknowledgement. ‘Then I ask permission to withdraw,’ he said, for the second time in twenty-four hours.

And once again he backed out of the Supreme Leader’s office. Whatever he was thinking, he kept it to himself.

Tanzania

Unlike their American colleagues, the Germans were not particularly good at outer space. But they were good on the ground – not least when it was African. The German equivalent to the CIA, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, had placed one of its many worldwide non-existent offices inside a hairdresser’s in central Dar es Salaam. Work there was led by a self-involved, unpleasant but capable male agent. For assistance he had a meek, depressed and slightly more capable woman.

Through months of working on a dubious laboratory assistant in Congo, as well as patient network-building in environments where people were particular about portraying themselves as something other than they were, the BND had cobbled together some clear indications that a limited amount of enriched uranium would soon make its way out of Congo, through Tanzania, and on to the south.

But unfortunately, a couple of holidays got in the way. Among the few things that might be more important to the arrogant Agent A than saving the world was to travel home to Germany over Christmas and New Year in order to salvage whatever he could of his family.

The meek Agent B reconciled herself to a break in their work and spent the holiday on her own inside the salon in Dar es Salaam. She had no family to go home to, since her spouse in Rödelheim had exchanged her for a younger woman with nicer teeth.

After the holidays were over they resumed their patient puzzle-piecing, day by day, week by week. The package seemed to have left Congo. And was transported on through Mozambique. This created plenty of concern, for the ruler there was a former freedom fighter, a Marxist-Leninist, and a buddy of Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang.

The arrogant man and the meek woman were getting closer to it. Apparently the uranium had been carried by fishing boat to Madagascar, off the east coast of Africa. This was a country that had formerly tight bonds with the blessedly late Soviet Union.

The trail went cold in Madagascar. And there were no further informants to turn to.

Agent A decided, in his capacity as the boss, that B should find out what was going on. The meek B did as she was told. After a brief period of analysis, she informed her boss that there were three potential scenarios for the uranium parcel in question. The least likely was that the isotope was still on Madagascar. Unless it had been sent on, either by plane or boat. Flying to or from Madagascar necessarily meant flying internationally. And to do this with more than a few kilos of uranium in your luggage would be tantamount to being discovered. Which left a boat – that was to say, the same method of transport by which the uranium had been brought to Madagascar. Repacking it and coming back the same way on a different fishing vessel didn’t strike her as rational.

The meek woman’s conclusion was that the uranium had left Madagascar by boat, but the size of the boat must be such that it could manage an ocean crossing. Either the Indian Ocean in one direction or the Atlantic in the other.

The arrogant man nodded, agreed, and made this line of reasoning his own in the subsequent report to Berlin, without protest from the meek woman.

The next step was to list all the cargo vessels that had recently called at and sailed from the harbour in Toamasina. When that didn’t turn up any obvious hits, A and B expanded their search to encompass potentially suspicious ships that had been anywhere near Madagascar during the period in question.

As a result, they were currently looking at a list of ships’ names. It consisted of one: the North Korean bulk carrier Honour and Strength.

On its way from Havana to Pyongyang.

It had passed immediately south of Madagascar fifteen days earlier.

The relationship between the Germans and the Americans wasn’t the best, ever since it had turned out that the Americans had bugged Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone, at which the chancellor picked up said phone and called President Obama to say she hoped the CIA was also listening to what she had to say now.

On the basis of his personality, as well as Germany’s strained relationship with the United States, the BND’s top central African representative had no problem lying through his teeth when explaining to his American colleague why he wanted help in determining the exact route and speed of the North Korean vessel Honour and Strength. As well as, of course, where the ship might currently be located.

The CIA, which was informed that it had to do with suspected industrial espionage on the car manufacturer Volkswagen in Brazil, told him what they knew. Without grumbling or delay, to boot. The blunder with the chancellor’s phone meant that they would be indebted to the Germans for quite some time.

The North Korean ship had followed a route a little closer to the southern coast of Madagascar than was optimal. The various time stamps, as calculated from the CIA’s satellite reports, also indicated that the ship had slowed down around there.

The German agents drew the conclusion that there was an immediate risk the uranium would soon wind up in North Korea, to be used for the nuclear weapons programme that Germany, and the world in general, had condemned.

They had to hurry!

Or, as it turned out, they didn’t.

Honour and Strength had, two hours earlier, reached North Korean waters and would arrive in the harbour at Nampo later that day.

North Korea

Uranium or plutonium? Plutonium or uranium? Kim Jong-un wanted the answer to be plutonium, and it would have been, too, if the Russians had kept their centrifugal promise, or if the only person in the northern hemisphere who was a bigger screw-up than the director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy in Pyongyang wasn’t his colleague at the plutonium plant in Yongbyon. What they had accomplished, at great cost to the Democratic People’s Republic, was certainly enough to be a slight annoyance to the Americans and their puppets scattered throughout the area, but it was far from anything that could demonstrate real might.

Therefore the Supreme Leader had first removed the plutonium director north of the capital, citing his incompetence – that is, treason. It was, of course, a correct decision, as were all decisions made by the Supreme Leader, but in practice it had not led to anything but the removed director being replaced by a man who essentially deserved the same. And the one in Pyongyang mostly kept slinking around with his back to the wall, terrified, for some reason.

All these things a person had to do himself. The Supreme Leader gave the order to purchase enriched uranium on the free market. Just three or four kilos to start. The purveyor the Russians had mentioned had to prove himself, and the method of smuggling had to be run in before any meaningful deliveries could be fulfilled. It would never do to obtain uranium for maybe a hundred million dollars, only to see the load seized by the devil himself.

A few kilos (or even half a ton) were far from sufficient to win a large-scale war, but that was never the intent. Naturally, Kim Jong-un realized that an attack on South Korea or Japan could not end in anything but destruction for all. More so if he reached the United States, or even just Guam.

At the same time, four kilos (unlike half a ton) was too little for the true purpose, which was to prove themselves and make the dogs in Washington drop their ideas about doing what they’d already done in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. History showed that countries that couldn’t bite back were devoured. A happy side effect of the armament was that it allowed for an ever-brasher rhetoric, which in turn brought local fighting spirit to entirely new levels. In this way, the Supreme Leader became even more supreme.

Deep down, Kim Jong-un didn’t believe in anything but himself, his dad and his grandpa. Religion in the wider sense was forbidden in North Korea. Yet he was close to thinking that a higher power was involved, in that the one person on earth he needed more than any other, for his purposes, had been found floating in a basket at sea just days before. Only to be scooped up by the very ship that was on its way home with the trial cargo of uranium. If this person was who he claimed to be, of course. That was a detail that remained to be investigated.

Anyway, scooped up he had been. And by a captain who proved able to think for himself. For that, the captain would be awarded a medal. And scrutinized a bit more closely by the director of Domestic Security. To think for himself. From there, it was a slippery slope towards planning a coup.

There was plenty of uranium out there, if you only had the contacts. And nowadays they did. Furthermore, Kim Jong-un also loved the fact that the main distributor of the necessary uranium was the director of a plant in Congo that had been created by the Americans.

The dream, of course, would be a hydrogen bomb, but for that they would need, first, a functional production line of plutonium (which, again, the screw-ups hadn’t yet managed to create) and then something totally, uniquely complicated where deuterium and tritium melted together into helium atoms at the same time as … something. Kim Jong-un’s brain was too valuable to the nation for him to weigh it down with the sort of thing his researchers ought to be able to manage in an afternoon.

The advantage of a hydrogen bomb was that it would erase Japan and South Korea from the map in a single bang. The disadvantage was that the Democratic People’s Republic would cease to exist thirty seconds later. But as long as malevolent Americans, Japanese and South Koreans didn’t completely understand that Kim Jong-un realized this, it would fulfil its function. If only it were possible to build.

The hydrogen bomb would have to wait. The plutonium facilities could continue not to deliver. Kim Jong-un had uranium on the way now – and, possibly, the man who knew the best way to make use of it.

All that was left to do was to let the world know.

North Korea

Since Kim Jong-un was never wrong, naturally he had not rushed off in youthful zeal after that encrypted message from the captain of Honour and Strength, the one about how the solution to his ongoing nuclear weapons problems was a hundred and one years old and would soon arrive at the harbour in Nampo, sixty kilometres south of Pyongyang.

Instead he settled down for a bit of reflection with his evening tea. Because, really, what was to say that the Swiss man Karlsson was who and what he said he was, other than that he’d said so himself?

According to the Honour and Strength captain’s second, more detailed, report to the Supreme Leader, Karlsson seemed to have demonstrated a surprising amount of insight into the Democratic People’s Republic’s ongoing woes when it came to the production of plutonium. This was, of course, one piece of circumstantial evidence. Another was the fact that he was Swiss. The Supreme One had lived and studied in Switzerland when he was younger. A lot could be said about the Swiss. They were, to be sure, detestable capitalists, like just about everyone else, and a bit more so than almost everyone else. And they worshipped their bloody Schweizerfranc. As if it had anything the North Korean won didn’t.

But in addition they were always on time, as if they all had Swiss clocks surgically installed in their heads. And they succeeded in every undertaking. Quite simply, a Swiss nuclear weapons expert could not be a fraud. Right?

There would have to be a double-check before the Swiss man was allowed in.

Thus it came to pass that Kim Jong-un contacted the director of the laboratory at the plutonium factory in Yongbyon, the one who had just replaced the boss who had disappeared some time earlier. The new man could not yet be held accountable for all the shortcomings of the factory, but that was only a matter of time. Now he was tasked with meeting the Swiss man as soon as he set foot on North Korean ground, and not allowing him access to the Supreme Leader until it was clear that he was what and who he ought to be.

* * *

Allan and Julius were escorted ashore in the harbour at Nampo and met by a middle-aged man in civilian clothing, who was flanked by six young, nervous soldiers.

‘Messrs Karlsson and Jonsson, I presume?’ the man said in English.

‘Well presumed,’ said Allan. ‘I’m Karlsson. And you? We were supposed to meet the Supreme Leader to offer our services. It seems to me that you are not he. In which case he is not you, I imagine.’

The man in civilian garb was concentrating too hard on his task to allow himself to be distracted by Allan’s exposition.

‘You are correct that I am not the Supreme Leader. I am the director of the laboratory at one of the development plants of the Democratic People’s Republic. We’ll leave my name out of it. I have arranged a place for us to sit down and speak undisturbed. If the conversation goes as it should, the Supreme Leader awaits you afterwards. Circumstances dictate that time is at a premium, so would you please be so kind as to follow me?’

The laboratory director didn’t wait for an answer before he began to walk to the harbour offices, while the six young soldiers surrounded Allan and Julius and made sure they followed.

Soon the trio had settled into a conference room that the harbour had kindly made available after a proposal from the Supreme Leader’s staff. The six young soldiers were left outside the door.

‘Let’s begin. I turn to you, Mr Karlsson, since you are the one who claims to be a nuclear weapons expert, willing to put your services at the disposal of the Democratic People’s Republic. For that reason I have a few questions concerning your commitment to our cause, as well as what you believe you can contribute more specifically. In short, my task is to find out if you’re a charlatan or not.’

A charlatan? Allan thought. Surely it doesn’t make you a charlatan just because you invent as much about yourself as necessity demands. ‘No, I’m no charlatan,’ he lied. ‘Just old. And well-travelled. A little hungry and thirsty. And something more too, I’m sure. By the way, Julius here is an asparagus farmer. Green asparagus, primarily.’

Up to this point, Julius hadn’t said a word. What could he say? He nodded cautiously, longing to be somewhere else. ‘Asparagus,’ he said. ‘Green, as you heard.’

The laboratory director was not interested in Julius. Instead he leaned across the desk and looked Allan in the eye. ‘Lovely to hear that you’re a truth-teller. I’d just like to remind you, Mr Nuclear Weapons Expert, that I’m an expert myself. Nonsense and empty phrases about asparagus or anything else will not suffice. Are you ready for my questions? The first is about your motive in helping the Democratic People’s Republic.’

Julius prayed to the god he appropriately didn’t believe in, considering the country he was in. Please don’t let Allan go too far.

‘Well, if we’re being honest here, Mr Laboratory Director must not be much of a nuclear weapons expert. My services would not be required otherwise. By “development plant”, I assume you mean a plutonium factory. Is it the one to the north of the city you work at? Perhaps it doesn’t matter, because you can’t have sorted out any measurable amounts of weapons-grade plutonium.’

Within just a few seconds, the laboratory director had lost control of the conversation. Allan went on: ‘Although there’s no reason to be too upset about it – this business with plutonium is terribly difficult. I think you should switch to uranium. And I imagine you’ve probably already come to this realization on your own.’

Any charlatan worth his salt radiates a level of confidence that’s hard to defend oneself against. The laboratory director now had very little left of his original certainty. ‘Would you please answer the question?’ he said curtly.

‘I would be very happy to,’ said Allan. ‘But I’m a bit advanced in age and I have to confess I’ve forgotten what the question was.’

The laboratory director had very nearly done the same, but he racked his brains and repeated it.

The answer to the question about why Allan wanted to help was basically that he didn’t want to help at all. However, he had nothing against surviving his repeat visit to North Korea. With that in mind, perhaps it was best to adjust his tone. ‘All you have to do is look around, Mr Laboratory Director,’ he said, pointing through the windows of the harbour offices.

The view was of a run-down industrial area. To the left of the rustiest warehouse stood a dead maple, representing the only greenery the scene had to offer.

‘It’s hard to beat the beauty of your democratic republic. The abundant nature. The devoted people. The struggle against an ever-crueller world. Someone must dare to take the side of peace and love. A few days ago, your country saved the lives of me and my friend Julius. The least we can do is pay back the favour as best we can. Our services are fully at your disposal. If you would like advice on how to optimize your asparagus operations, there’s no better man for the job than Julius. If you happen to want to prioritize your optimization of whatever enriched uranium you may have lying around, then I’m your man.’

On occasion, people function such that they hear what they want to hear and believe what they want to believe. The laboratory director nodded, decently satisfied with this truthful description of his country, while he said that the Democratic People’s Republic intended mainly to avail itself of Karlsson’s services, not Jonsson’s. But to be more concrete? The reports said that Karlsson was an expert in hetisostat pressure? No matter how hard the laboratory director looked, he could not find any confirmation that such a thing existed. Much less any information about how it might work.

Julius prayed to God again.

Allan responded. ‘I remember it from my relative youth at Los Alamos in the United States. The Americans toiled day and night to build that atom bomb, until at last I had to step in and tell them what to do. But there isn’t a single word about that on the internet, is there?’

No. The laboratory director had to acknowledge that there wasn’t. And he understood that this wasn’t only because the internet hadn’t been invented until over forty years later.

‘Hetisostat pressure was created by me, in a secret laboratory outside Geneva. Though it’s not as secret now as it was until just a moment ago, before I talked about it. As you will know, Mr Laboratory Director, the critical mass of enriched uranium of the grade in question is twenty-five kilos – twenty-five point two, to be exact. With my pressure, the neutrons are held in place many times longer, and the chain reaction gets another burst of strength over and over until you have destroyed what needs to be destroyed with a considerably smaller amount of the key isotope. Particularly suitable for someone who prefers to stick the nuclear weapon into a missile rather than carry around a bomb that weighs a few tons.’

Allan had read something about twenty-five point two and sounded sufficiently sure of himself to make the laboratory director equally sure.

‘But in greater detail?’ he tried again.

‘Greater detail? How many weeks do we have? Perhaps the Supreme Leader has no problem being made to wait. Although I think I speak for both myself and the asparagus farmer here beside me when I say that, if we’re going to do this, we’ll have to start with some food and a bed on top of that, or rather, two beds. We may be good friends, Julius and me, but we prefer to sleep separately. Once we’re full and rested I’ll be more than willing, even genuinely eager, to tell you what you want to know, Mr Laboratory Director.’

The hundred-and-one-year-old was a gifted talker. The laboratory director knew what Allan suspected: that Kim Jong-un absolutely did not want to wait a week or two. Or even much more than an hour. A decision had to be made, and soon. The director had been given sanction to supply the two Swiss men with a shot to the back of the head each instead of food and a place to sleep, should the situation so demand. But he also had orders to allow them through if it was likely to be in the best interest of the nation.

So what should he do? It was true that the old man was a chatterbox. It was also true that he’d hit the mark when it came to the critical mass of uranium, and to the decimal besides. And he appeared to be completely assured about this situation.

The laboratory director picked up a cigarette and looked around for his lighter. Julius fished the hotel manager’s from his pocket and offered it to him. The laboratory director thanked him, lit up and took a deep drag.

After another of the same, the laboratory director made his hasty decision. Hasty being the operative word. The Supreme Leader had extended an invitation to the UN envoy and he wanted to bring her and the Swiss man together; the envoy would be landing any minute. There was no time to do anything but decide.

‘We will absolutely run through every part of your pressure system,’ he said. ‘Make no mistake about that. But first I will ask to send you over to the Supreme Leader.’

The laboratory director was displeased at having misplaced his lighter, but pleased that his voice had sounded so confident. Much more confident than he actually was. Or ever would be again, as long as he lived.

He summoned the six nervous soldiers and had them lead the foreigners to a waiting car.

Allan and Julius had made it through their encounter with mortal danger number one on Korean ground, their good health still intact. All that remained was everything else. Now they were sitting on either side of a North Korean soldier in the back seat of a 2004 Russian GAZ-3111, one of the nine specimens the Russians had produced that year before giving up, sending the crap to North Korea, and signing a contract with Chrysler instead.

‘Good day, my name is Allan,’ Allan said to the soldier in Russian. He received no response. He went on to offer the same greeting to the two soldiers in the row of seats ahead of him and was met with the same silence. Then he looked at Julius and said he hoped the Supreme Leader would be more talkative, or it might be a boring afternoon.

Julius didn’t reply, but he thought anyone who could use the word ‘boring’ in their current situation must be missing a considerable part of his common sense. What Julius was doing now, placing his life in the hands of a completely carefree hundred-and-one-year-old, was trying. He breathed heavily as he mentally counted backwards from 999; he had learned that this sometimes helped.

A change in the air told Allan that something was weighing on Julius; what it might be was unclear. As his friend passed two hundred in his countdown self-help, Allan asked if it might cheer him up if Allan read something exciting from the black tablet.

187, 186 … No, that question was too much. Julius interrupted himself and opened his eyes. ‘Goddammit!’ he said. ‘We’re going to be world news ourselves soon, if we don’t look out. How about you focus on your fucking hetisostat pressure? In ten minutes you need to have something to say to the man who is in charge of our lives. Can’t you put that bloody tablet down for one second and think about something useful?’

Allan had been looking at Julius, but now he aimed his gaze slightly to the left and out of the window.

‘The “ten minutes” part was wrong. I think we’re here.’

* * *

Allan and Julius were led into the holiest of holies, the Supreme Leader’s office, three hundred square metres in area, with sixteen-metre-high ceilings. An oak desk across the room, a briefcase, an intercom, a quill, and a few documents on the desk, four paintings of the Eternal President on the wall, and that was it. The Supreme One himself was not present; the old men were left alone in the room for a brief time after their escorts hurried off and closed the double doors.

‘You could fly a kite in here, if you could just get a cross-breeze from the windows,’ said Allan. ‘Almost a hot-air balloon, too.’

‘Think hetisostat pressure,’ said Julius. ‘Do you hear me? Hetisostat pressure.’

It was difficult to think about something that didn’t exist, but this was a reflection with which Allan didn’t want to trouble Julius. His friend seemed unbalanced enough as it was.

At that moment, a smaller door just past the desk opened. A soldier with a holstered pistol stepped in and stood guard. Behind him came the Supreme Leader. Noticeably short of stature, thought Allan.

‘Please have a seat,’ said Kim Jong-un, pointing at two chairs on the other side of the desk even as he himself sat down.

‘Thank you, Supreme Leader,’ Julius said, his words as nervous as they were fawning.

‘Agreed,’ said Allan. ‘Is there anything tasty to drink to break the ice? We can hold off on the food for a bit, if that would be too much trouble.’

Kim Jong-un had no need to break any ice. But, still, he ordered a pot of tea by way of his Soviet intercom from the seventies. The order arrived under a minute later, delivered by a North Korean soldier who, with a certain amount of difficulty, tried to combine a straight back with a level tray and an apology in Korean that might have expressed regret for the delay.

The Supreme Leader sent the soldier away and raised his cup to the guests.

‘A toast to a long and fruitful cooperation. Or the opposite.’

Allan pretended to drink. Julius drank, and felt concerned about the Supreme Leader’s part in what they had just toasted. But when the terrible tea had sunk into his soul, he decided to allow Allan to continue saving their lives on his own. The hundred-and-one-year-old certainly had his issues, but if there was anything he was good at, it was surviving. Then again, better safe than sorry. Julius did his best to put the ball in Allan’s court in the hopes of benching himself.

‘Supreme Leader,’ he said. ‘My name is Julius Jonsson and I am the executive assistant to the world’s leading nuclear weapons expert, that is, my dear friend Allan Karlsson here. I will hereby gladly hand things over to him.’

‘Oh no you won’t,’ said Kim Jong-un, with a smile. ‘This is my meeting, and I decide who speaks. You’re the executive assistant, you say? Where are the other assistants?’

Julius immediately lost the speaking ability he had so briefly managed to muster. Allan noticed, and rushed to his assistance.

‘Supreme Leader,’ he said, ‘I hereby request the right to say something important while my friend the executive assistant gathers his thoughts. Very important, even. Depending on how concerned you are about your country’s future, of course.’

Kim Jong-un was extremely concerned about his country’s future. Not least because it was inextricably linked with his own. ‘Granted,’ he said, and with that, his grip on poor Julius loosened.

‘Good,’ said Allan. ‘Then I’d like to begin by praising you for your out-and-out battle against the evil that surrounds you. You are furthering the legacy of your father and grandfather in an exemplary manner.’

Julius still didn’t dare to speak, but he was regaining a faint hope of survival. Allan was obviously in his rubbing-up-the-right-way mood!

‘What do you know about that?’ Kim Jong-un asked, in a defensive tone.

The truth was, Allan knew very little about Kim Jong-un’s doings – no more than he’d read on his black tablet. And it wasn’t always pretty. ‘I know all about it,’ he said. ‘But to sit here and praise your many accomplishments would take up far too much of your precious time.’

It was true that time was precious. Or, at least, short. At any moment, the Swedish minister for foreign affairs, UN envoy Margot Wallström, would land at Sunan International Airport and, in that moment, the Supreme Leader’s PR plan would enter a critical stage.

‘Well, then,’ said Kim Jong-un. ‘Tell me this important thing you had to say. I assume it has to do with hetisostat pressure?’

‘That’s exactly right,’ said Allan. ‘My humble suggestion is that my assistant and I teach North Korea everything worth knowing about hetisostat pressure and, in return, you help us reach Europe after our task is completed. As fantastic as your country is … well, there’s no place like home, as they say.’

Kim Jong-un nodded and gave the impression that he felt the same. An arrangement of that sort didn’t seem like too much trouble to sign off on, especially given that he had no intention of keeping his side of the bargain. If this man was as competent as he was old, he couldn’t be allowed to loaf around Europe or anywhere else with his knowledge. It belonged permanently in the Democratic People’s Republic. End of.

‘Agreed!’ said the Supreme Leader.

And then he openly stated that Karlsson and his assistant had four kilos of enriched uranium to play with, with another five hundred on their way. Incidentally, the first four kilos had arrived on the same boat as the gentlemen.

‘Properly lead-encased,’ said Kim Jong-un, and with that he placed his hand on the brown briefcase on the desk. Annoyingly enough, there was no time at the present to hear what hetisostat pressure might achieve with the contents of the briefcase. An assistant had snuck into the room to whisper something into the Supreme Leader’s ear.

‘Thank you,’ said Kim Jong-un. ‘I would have liked to hear more about your pressure, but we must get moving. We’re going to KCNA. All three of us. No, scratch that, we have no use for the executive assistant there, so we’ll send him directly to the hotel.’

Kim Jong-un stood up and signalled the gentlemen to follow him.

Julius didn’t know which was worse – being forced to visit a mysterious jumble of letters with Kim Jong-un, or not being allowed to come.

‘KCNA?’ he whispered anxiously to Allan. ‘What’s that?’

‘I’m sure it is whatever it is,’ said Allan. ‘I hope that, unlike the tea, it can be drunk. Or at least eaten.’

North Korea

Korea had held together as a united empire for 1274 years. Then it had gone downhill fast. After the Second World War, the Americans and Russians couldn’t agree on what the Koreans wanted, and neither thought it was an option to ask the Koreans. The Russians placed a Communist in power in the north; the Americans, an anti-Communist in the south. The guy in the north thought he had the right to all of Korea. The one in the south thought the same thing, but the other way around.

This led to the violence that history books call the Korean War. Of course there had been wars on the peninsula before, but people have such short memories.

After two million Koreans (plus the occasional foreigner) had died in battle, enough was enough. They pointed at a line in the ground (the same line that had been there since before the war) and decided that, until further notice, they would keep to their own sides.

The Communist in the north invented ‘self-reliance’ as a political ideology, while his counterpart in the south, sensibly enough, did not label the dictatorship he created with any honest name.

Years passed. Leaders on both sides came and went, as leaders tend to do. The dictatorship in the south gradually lost its hold, while the self-reliance in the north prospered so extensively that people began to starve.

It’s easy for someone who trusts only themselves to become suspicious of others. When the south allowed American tactical nuclear weapons to be placed on their side of the border, those in the north took it all wrong. At least from an arms reduction perspective.

The Swedish manufacturer Volvo, outside Gothenburg, was full of celebration after the delivery of a thousand shiny new cars to Pyongyang. This celebration later turned out to be premature. For the North Koreans had rearranged their priorities. They chose to build test sites for nuclear weapons instead of paying what they owed. To this day, Volvo hasn’t received a single North Korean won in return.

Despite one thing and the next, there were some cross-border talks. Surely a solution could be reached. Yes, perhaps. For a while, in the early childhood of the current century, things were looking very bright indeed.

But back to the part about how leaders come and go. In 2017, tensions were higher than ever between the north on the one hand, and most of the rest of the world on the other. The latest in the series of leaders who had come, but not yet gone, were named Kim Jong-un and Donald J. Trump. And caught in the middle was the Swedish UN envoy Margot Wallström.

She had no illusions that her task would be an easy one.

* * *

The envoy and her plane landed at Sunan International Airport ten minutes ahead of the scheduled time. The Supreme Leader was informed and, as planned, he immediately adjourned the ongoing meeting with Messrs Karlsson and Jonsson.

Wallström was shown to a limousine and informed that the Supreme Leader awaited. Her baggage would be transported to the pre-booked hotel or the Swedish embassy, depending on which the envoy preferred.

The journey took her south towards central Pyongyang. After forty minutes the limousine passed the Supreme Leader’s palace and continued towards downtown.

‘Excuse me, but weren’t we going to see the Supreme Leader?’ said Minister for Foreign Affairs Wallström.

‘That is correct,’ the driver responded, without expounding further.

Ten minutes later, in any case, the journey was over. The minister for foreign affairs was invited out of the limousine and led into an eight-storey building.

‘Where are we?’ she asked her smiling female escort in bewilderment.

‘This is the main office of the news bureau KCNA. The Supreme Leader awaits.’

A news bureau? Margot Wallström felt ill at ease. After all, this trip was supposed to take place under the greatest discretion so that it didn’t spur even greater polarization between the parties. On the other hand, this was probably a country where no news bureau would dare to report on her presence without first obtaining the blessing of the Supreme Leader. Perhaps her worry was unfounded.

Their journey continued three storeys up, down a long hallway, to the left, right and left again.

‘Here we are,’ said the escort. ‘Please step in.’

If Margot Wallström had been expecting crystal chandeliers and velvet chairs, she was disappointed. This was more like … Well, what was this? The anteroom of a theatre stage? A TV studio? There were cables running along the sides, two discarded spotlights in one corner, and …

There he was.

‘Welcome, Madame Minister for Foreign Affairs,’ the Supreme Leader said kindly. ‘Was the trip okay?’

‘Yes, thank you. Very nice to meet you, but I have to ask … Where are we, and what are we doing here?’

‘Why, we’re going to save the world together,’ said Kim Jong-un. ‘But right now, you must meet the man to whom I myself have hardly even had time to say hello.’

Allan Karlsson was shoved out from behind a curtain and walked over to greet Minister for Foreign Affairs Wallström.

‘This is the world’s perhaps pre-eminent expert in nuclear weapons, Mr Karlsson from Switzerland. He has come to the Democratic People’s Republic out of love for our common cause.’

Minister for Foreign Affairs Margot Wallström found herself in a situation out of her control. But she took the old Swiss man’s hand on Kim Jong-un’s urging.

‘Good day,’ said the minister, hesitantly and in English.

‘Good day yourself,’ said Allan, one hundred per cent in Swedish and with a faint Sörmland accent.

There was no reaction from Kim Jong-un when he didn’t understand the nuclear weapons expert’s greeting, but Margot Wallström realized to her horror that a Swedish man, not a Swiss, was apparently about to upgrade North Korea’s nuclear weapons arsenal. What was going on?

Karlsson, was that his name? Minister for Foreign Affairs Wallström refrained from beginning to speak Swedish with him. He had, after all, been introduced as Swiss and the very best thing she could do right now was to feel her way through the situation.

The Supreme Leader lightly clapped both Allan and the UN envoy on the back and said he was looking forward to a dinner together in the palace that same evening. Karlsson’s executive assistant Jonsson was invited as well.

Jonsson? That didn’t sound particularly Swiss either.

‘But we’ll start with the press conference,’ said Kim Jong-un, signalling to a man with a headset who, in turn, spoke into his microphone.

Suddenly a round of applause began very close by. So they were backstage. A press conference?

‘But, Supreme Leader, we can’t talk to the media and keep our conversation discreet at the same time. I don’t feel this is something we agreed upon,’ said Margot Wallström.

Kim Jong-un laughed. ‘Naturally we won’t say a word about the contents of any conversations. How could we? We haven’t had any yet.’

No, this was well within the scope of the parties’ common ambitions. As the leader of the Democratic People’s Republic, Kim Jong-un had a responsibility to his people, the dignity of which perhaps Minister for Foreign Affairs Wallström did not fully comprehend. ‘It’s called “transparency”, Madame Wallström.’

‘Well, howdy-do,’ Allan said in Swedish.

Who was he? He was as old as the hills, clearly Swedish, alleged to be Swiss, and devoted to North Korea’s nuclear weapons-related future. And his respect for his employer seemed to be moderate at best.

Out on stage, a woman had begun to speak Korean before the audience, which had temporarily stopped applauding. Then she switched to English.

‘And with that I would like to welcome the UN envoy and minister for foreign affairs for the kingdom of Sweden, Madame Wallström – as well as the world’s leading nuclear weapons expert, devoted friend of the Democratic People’s Republic, straight from Switzerland: Mr Allan Karlsson.’

Kim Jong-un led Wallström and Karlsson to the edge of the stage, where he stopped while the guests had to continue. Neither of them was given any choice but to step into the spotlights that shone down from four directions. They were guided to their respective marks on one side of a table and received polite applause from the audience. Margot Wallström was not at all a fan of the situation she found herself in.

Allan looked around and discovered at least three TV cameras aimed at them. ‘Why, this is my first time on TV,’ he said to the minister in Swedish, before they had made it all the way to the table and the microphones.

The host began by turning to the UN envoy.

‘You’re here, Madame Wallström, because the UN and the Democratic People’s Republic share a common concern about the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the world, and about the tough rhetoric that so often flies from one side to the other.’

Yes. Thus far Margot Wallström was more or less on the same page.

‘Or from the other side to this one,’ she clarified. ‘It’s a mutual problem.’

‘Tell me, Madame Wallström, what do you think of our country, from what you’ve seen so far?’

What Margot Wallström had seen so far was no more than the airport and a few glances at the North Korean countryside and cityscape on her way into downtown Pyongyang. The countryside appeared poor but not shabby. In the city, the streets were wide, devoid of cars, edged by various monuments. The cult of personality was plain to see.

Like the diplomat she was, she responded by saying that she hoped to get the chance to enjoy the country before it was time to go home again; it struck her as both green and beautiful. The weather was also quite welcoming.

By the latter, the typical Swede means it’s above freezing, which it was.

The host nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Our motto is “a powerful and prosperous nation”. I see that you understand why, Madame Minister for Foreign Affairs.’

She did not wait for any response from Margot Wallström but turned to Allan. ‘And Mr Allan Karlsson. The world’s leading expert in hetisostat pressure one thousand two hundred. In possession of knowledge he would now like to share with the Democratic People’s Republic in the name of peace. What do you think of our beautiful country?’

‘Well, this isn’t my first time here,’ said Allan. ‘I had business here way back in the days of the Eternal President. It seems to me the roadblocks aren’t as numerous today as they were back then.’

Kim Jong-un signalled that he wished to be called onstage. As it happened, the host had prepared another question for the Swiss man, but the Supreme Leader didn’t trust that the old man would answer as he should. Roadblocks? What kind of talk was that?

The presentation of the Supreme Leader appeared to be magnificent. Exactly what was said was impossible to know for anyone who didn’t speak Korean. But now the formerly lukewarm audience stood up and gave an intense round of applause.

Kim Jong-un nodded first at the minister for foreign affairs, then the Swiss man, and joined them at the table.

The audience continued to applaud.

And more applause. It didn’t stop until the Supreme Leader ordered it to with his own hand. The host was able to make herself heard once more.

‘Supreme Leader,’ she said. ‘You are the world’s foremost champion of peace. How do you view the possibility that the aforementioned world would be a better place to live in under your leadership?’

Kim Jong-un nodded thoughtfully. A very good question. Almost as if he had come up with it himself. Which he had. ‘Peace between two parties presupposes cooperation by all. I cannot bring about peace on my own. I need help. Peace will come only when everyone wants it. It is with great sorrow I must say that the United States of America and its allies are instead trying to drive us all to destruction. But I do what I can, I do what I can. Hope is the last thing to abandon each individual in the Democratic People’s Republic. And I am glad we have the United Nations on our side in this struggle, represented here by Madame Wallström, who is also the minister for foreign affairs in the neutral country of Sweden. With the help of the equally neutral nation of Switzerland – represented by Mr Karlsson, as previously mentioned – the ultimate in nuclear strength can in the long term be relocated from the warmongers in Washington, Tokyo and Seoul to here, the centre of peace and love.’

Minister Wallström was about to flip out. Was that bastard standing there and placing the neutral countries of Sweden and Switzerland on the side of North Korea in a nuclear arms race? And where was this being broadcast? Wherever it was, it would become an international story at any moment.

‘May I say something?’

‘Yes, that is certainly the intent here,’ said Kim Jong-un. ‘We will begin our demanding work this very evening. The Democratic People’s Republic, the UN and the countries of Sweden and Switzerland, which have so proudly refused to fall in line with the North American hawks.’

The host realized that the show was over. She thanked her leader with a reverent bow and said she did not want to spend any more time standing in the way of the important work of the Supreme Leader and the others.

‘Go, Supreme Leader, in the name of peace. And feel the love of your people. Take your friends with you. Our love extends to them as well.’

Once again backstage, a very pleased Kim Jong-un said that everything had gone very well, didn’t Minister for Foreign Affairs Wallström agree?

No, she did not.

‘With all respect, Supreme Leader, what we just experienced was not part of our agreement, and it complicates rather than facilitates our upcoming talks.’

Kim Jong-un smiled. ‘Oh, yes, our talks. I think one will be enough. As I said, you are welcome to the palace this evening for an early dinner. Now you will be escorted to your hotel and picked up again at around seventeen hundred hours. Do be sure to make the most of the fantastic service at Ryugyong until then. According to many reviewers, it is the best hotel in the world.’

The minister, as annoyed as she was bewildered, was herded back through the hallways alongside the Swiss-Swedish Karlsson. At last they found themselves alone in the back seat of Wallström’s limousine. There was no way the driver could hear what they said or in which language they said it. Once the car had gone a few hundred metres, the minister for foreign affairs thought the time was right.

‘I must say I find myself curious about a few things,’ she said quietly to Allan, in Swedish.

‘I can imagine,’ said Allan. ‘What might be the most curious part? We can start there and work our way down. Or up, whichever it is.’

Margot Wallström had actually been planning to stay at the embassy, but she needed more time with the remarkable man beside her. ‘Then let’s start with how it happens that a Swede pretending to be Swiss finds himself in Pyongyang on business, with a purpose diametrically opposed to the one I am here to represent.’

‘Good question,’ said Allan. ‘And well formulated. I don’t think I’ll start from the beginning, because we would never finish. That’s how old I am. Let me instead begin with my hundred-and-first birthday on a beautiful white-sand beach on Bali in Indonesia.’

And then came the story of the hot-air balloon. The crash into the sea. The rescue. The white lie about hetisostat pressure to survive at least in the short term, and the arrival in Pyongyang as recently as a few hours before her own. How he had become Swiss, he didn’t know. As far as he could remember, he had never been to Switzerland. ‘But I hear it’s lovely. And the Swiss are said to be orderly to a fault.’

‘Yes,’ said the minister. ‘But the question is, how happy will they be now that they’ve got a presumed traitor on their hands?’

‘They have?’

‘You, Mr Karlsson.’

‘Oh, that’s what you meant.’

* * *

Ryugyong Hotel was an impressive creation, 330 metres and 105 storeys tall. The North Koreans had been building it since 1987 without ever finishing it. It was slow going, since the state coffers were substantially used up by the production of nuclear weapons and military parades. After three decades, they hadn’t yet built more than the lobby and the first floor. At this rate, it would take another fifteen hundred years for the whole building to be finished.

Yet the ground floor was stylish. It consisted of a golden reception desk to the right, offering space for up to twelve simultaneous check-ins or check-outs, and a tastefully decorated piano bar to the left, with three pianists engaged to cover the better part of each day. Thus far the budget had not allowed for the acquisition of a piano, but it was a priority.

Julius was sitting on the edge of the bed in room 104, waiting for Allan to return from the alphabet soup KCNA. Since it was impossible to imagine what that place might be, he was succeeding, for the moment, in repressing the situation they had found themselves in. Instead he was thinking about his asparagus partner down in Bali. To be sure, that wasn’t much fun either. Now Gustav had to handle the operation all on his own. What would come of it?

There was a telephone on the nightstand. Could it possibly be functional, in contrast to the hotel’s eight lifts? It was worth a try.

He called his business partner, the Indian Gustav Svensson. The call went through, but instead of a ringtone followed by Gustav, voicemail took over.

Julius recorded a few irritated sentences. In his haste, he forgot to mention that he was still alive, but perhaps his partner would work that out for himself.

Then he took off his shoes and lay down on the bed. He yawned and closed his eyes, trying to aim his thoughts in a direction other than that of asparagus and alphabet soup.

It didn’t work.

South Korea

How’s the asparagus?

Three deliveries this month too?

Any return shipments?

Will we make it to five hundred million before the year is half out?

On the top floor of a fourteen-storey building in the city of Goyang, north-west of the South Korean capital, a man and a woman wearing headphones sat in front of quadruple computer screens and various instruments. Both were civil servants. Nothing remarkable so far, except possibly the location: a simple two-bedroom apartment. And the fact that the state served by the civil servants was not the Republic of Korea but Germany.

The woman was a low-ranking diplomat; the man was the same, only a little lower. Officially they were involved in a number of German-Korean housing projects, but they were seldom seen in such contexts. Instead they sat where they sat on order of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the BND. They were distant colleagues to an arrogant site director and his meek colleague in Dar es Salaam.

The two fake diplomats’ primary task, in the apartment in Goyang, was to make recordings of the Americans’ wiretaps in North Korea. By doing so they avoided having to do the job themselves, and also got a dash of pleasure out of it. Winding up American intelligence services was one of life’s little joys.

One of their easier targets was the permanently unfinished showpiece Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang. Seldom, bordering on never, did anything of interest come from there.

Today was an exception.

From room 104, a guest unknown to the BND had left a message on a powered-down cell phone in Indonesia that belonged to an equally unknown recipient. The message was in English, in code, and consisted of four questions.

How’s the asparagus?

Three deliveries this month too?

Any return shipments?

Will we make it to five hundred million before the year is half out?

What asparagus was code for, the fake diplomats couldn’t say. But the sum – five hundred million! – suggested narcotics or worse. The Germans knew that a small load of enriched uranium had just reached Pyongyang. It could hardly have cost half a billion. But what if this was a case of several ongoing deliveries? Such as three? Per month?

What was Kim Jong-un up to? Was he planning to start a war with the whole world? And where was he getting the money? Five hundred fucking million dollars! And 104 unfinished floors in the country’s only luxury hotel.

More questions without answers. A return shipment? What, in that case, was supposed to be transported out of North Korea? And how? And where was it going? Indonesia? Well, shit.

North Korea

Julius was involuntarily imprisoned in the capital of North Korea, and he longed for the peace and petty thievery he had known back on Bali. His goal of five hundred million rupiah – almost forty thousand dollars – had been realistic once, but perhaps not now that he wasn’t there to keep an eye on things.

On the other hand, his and Allan’s debts to the hotel and the boat-renter were much greater than that. In this sense it was economically advantageous to keep their distance, although visiting North Korea was certainly overdoing it.

When this mess was all over, perhaps they could move the asparagus operation to an area where they didn’t owe anyone any money.

‘Thailand?’ Julius said aloud, just as the door opened.

Allan held it open and allowed Minister for Foreign Affairs Margot Wallström to enter first. ‘Allow me to introduce my friend Julius Jonsson,’ said Allan. ‘He’s single, if the minister feels so inclined.’

Margot Wallström shot an angry look at Allan. ‘Thanks, but no thanks. I have been happily married for over thirty years.’

Julius greeted the minister with the comment that she would have to forgive Allan. It must have to do with his age. The strangest things came out of his mouth sometimes. Most of the time, really.

Minister Wallström nodded and said she had noticed as much.

In the limousine after the horrid press conference, she had formed an approximate idea about Karlsson and Jonsson. The hundred-and-one-year-old really did seem to be a nuclear weapons expert, or at least he had been once upon a time. The only good news of the day was that he aspired not to help Kim Jong-un.

The truly bad part was that he had no plans about how to avoid doing so.

The general impression in the UN building was that North Korea had the capacity for nuclear weapons but so far that capacity was limited; the Supreme Leader was trying to make such a rumpus that no one would notice. In any case, the threat was real. Nuclear weapons are so powerful, of course, that even a small, half-failed load could destroy an entire city. Like Seoul, for example. Or Tokyo. Or a whole island, like Guam.

Margot Wallström shuddered at the thought. And at the apparent truth that the man who could sort out the North Korean nuclear weapons programme was in this very hotel room, digging through the empty minibar. And, furthermore, he was Swedish. Was Sweden going to be the primary reason behind a shift in the balance of worldwide power?

No, she had to stop it happening if she could. Preferably without ending up imprisoned in this country for thirty years or more, accused of espionage or whatever the Supreme Leader happened to dream up.

‘Do you think you could come with me on my plane out of here?’ she asked. ‘Twenty-nine of the thirty seats in the cabin are available.’

Julius lit up.

Allan stopped looking for liquor. ‘As empty as the minibar in this hotel room,’ he said. ‘The whole hotel, in fact.’

The minister for foreign affairs went on. ‘I can try to help you get diplomatic passports. I’m afraid you’ll have to sort out the rest on your own.’

‘The rest?’ said Julius.

‘Getting to the plane when it’s time to take off.’

Allan hadn’t listened beyond the first part of what had just been said. ‘Diplomatic passports?’ he said. ‘I haven’t had one of those since 1948, when Churchill and I flew home from Tehran together. Or ’forty-seven. No, ’forty-eight.’

‘Winston Churchill?’ said the minister.

‘Yes, that’s his name. Or it was. I suppose he’s been dead a long time, like most people.’

The minister for foreign affairs suddenly felt as if she was in a movie. And it made her stomach hurt to think of what she was about to do. Espionage wouldn’t be an entirely inaccurate charge. But she took portraits of Allan and Julius with her phone camera and promised them passports within a few days.

‘Sign the back of my business card so they’ll have something to go on at home.’

She’s one results-oriented woman, thought Julius. And delightful. Shame she’s taken.

* * *

The Swedish UN representative had been assigned room 105, next door to Allan and Julius. Once she was in the room, ostensibly to prepare herself for the evening’s dinner, she spent more time pondering how she could rescue the two Swedes and trick Kim Jong-un out of knowledge he shouldn’t have. It seemed as if the Supreme Leader didn’t want her around any longer than necessary, but she had to give Karlsson and Jonsson time to come up with a plan. Plus the diplomatic passports had to make it over. She wouldn’t be able to order them until she got to the embassy several hours later. Time seemed to be her greatest enemy right now. Although it was in serious competition with everything else.

She showered, changed clothes, spiffed herself up, and at last stood ready in front of the hall mirror. She looked at herself and said, ‘What am I doing here?’

Her mirror image gazed back but didn’t respond.

* * *

Kim Jong-un asked his guests to have a seat at the dining table as he remained standing at one end, his hands on the back of his chair. He appeared to have something to say.

Two of the waiting staff came through the doors, their arms full of plates, and a third walked in with two bottles of wine. But all three immediately turned back after a glance from the Supreme Leader.

Allan watched the food and drink come and go in the span of one second and was disappointed.

‘Friends,’ Kim Jong-un began.

‘Could we perhaps talk while we eat?’ Allan suggested.

The Supreme Leader pretended not to hear this comment. He launched into a speech about peace and freedom.

‘Peace’ seemed to involve supplying his country with ever more deadly weapons. What constituted ‘freedom’ was not quite as clear. Except possibly that every single citizen had the right to love their leader, combined with the duty to avoid not doing so.

With that, the Supreme Leader expressed his contentment that Providence had supplied him with Mr Karlsson, who had come all the way from Switzerland to contribute to the fight against American imperialism. And that UN Envoy Wallström had joined in for similar reasons.

‘Well,’ said Margot Wallström, ‘as Mr Kim is aware, my task is rather to try to open up lines of dialogue between different people, to begin talking to each other, like we’re doing now, instead of putting on performances here and there, like the one that took place in front of the TV cameras earlier today. I have already expressed my displeasure with that, have I not?’

She’s not only delightful, she’s brave too, Julius thought. Now, if only Allan remains calm …

Kim Jong-un looked at the UN envoy without listening to what she said. And went on with his speech.

He started on how happy everyone was in the Democratic People’s Republic, how well the crops were growing, and how much nicer the weather was in the northern half of the peninsula than in the south. Altogether, it was no wonder tens of thousands of Koreans fled from south to north each year.

Food and drink were turned away at the door once again, causing Allan to lose patience. On occasion it could be a wise strategy to hold one’s tongue or express agreement, but right now it was time to say something before they all starved to death.

Julius sensed what Allan was about to do and desperately tried to make eye contact so he could say, using his hands and face, ‘No, Allan, don’t do it!’

But do it he did.

‘Forgive me, Mr Supreme Leader. My name was mentioned not far into your speech about a bit of everything. And here I am. Old and frail, but ever at your service. However, I suspect I will be of far too little use if I’m dead, and I’m about to starve to death. Is there any way what you have to say can be wrapped up a bit more speedily than you had perhaps intended?’

Kim Jong-un’s proud smile went chilly. ‘You will soon be allowed to eat, Mr Karlsson. But your presumed cleverness about nuclear technology doesn’t give you the right to express yourself as you wish, here in the People’s Palace.’

Oh, so he was in that sort of mood.

‘I certainly didn’t mean any offence, O Supreme One, but it’s possible that in addition to all the rest I haven’t been sleeping very well lately. You see, my friend the asparagus farmer here has trouble being as quiet as he ought to be at night.’

Kim Jong-un didn’t follow. ‘What do you mean?’

‘He doesn’t mean anything—’ Julius attempted.

‘I mean he snores,’ said Allan. ‘Oh, how he snores. If the Supreme One had any idea at all how much he snores! The boat that picked us up was the size of an entire warehouse, but not big enough that we didn’t have to share a cabin, and, well, there hasn’t been as much sleeping as there ought to have been. But what were we talking about, again? Oh, that’s right, food. And perhaps a drink alongside. Might it be on its way, perchance?’

With that, Kim Jong-un’s train of thought was sufficiently derailed. When the staff dared to stick their noses out of the kitchen again, he gave the green light.

They were served entrecôte with mushroom sauce. Not particularly Asian, but it appealed to the guests and was washed down with an Australian cabernet sauvignon.

Spirits rose around the table. Allan decided to tolerate the Supreme Leader’s talk of this and that for a little longer. But when the Supreme One claimed the nation had detonated a hydrogen bomb the year before, Allan had to protest. He’d read about that on his tablet, and the truth was that the so-called hydrogen bomb had hardly made a bang.

‘The fact that you’re transporting four measly kilos of uranium in a boat that could bring thirty thousand tons all the way from God-knows-where to Pyongyang is enough proof for me that, one, you aren’t anywhere near having a hydrogen bomb, two, you hardly even know the first thing about plutonium, and three, your total stores of uranium fit into a briefcase. In short, you have nothing to use, except those four kilos. And, as luck would have it, me. And I have nothing left in my glass.’

Kim Jong-un waved over a waiter. The impudence of the Swiss man was really too much. Well, there were two options: either he would turn out to be useful, in which case there was no reason to send him home to Europe. Or he wouldn’t, and then he would be sent nowhere but to his eternal rest. In either case he would come to regret his lack of respect.

The Supreme Leader decided to continue being amiable and generous. ‘You are outspoken, Mr Karlsson, I must say. And I suppose you have every right to be, given your age. Although your primary reason for being here is to work, I’d be happy to make sure you do some sightseeing in our beautiful capital city. What do you say we arrange a visit to the city’s most exclusive shopping centre after work tomorrow? Unfortunately I won’t be able to join you, but I’m sure you’ll manage with the guide I’ll put at your disposal.’

By ‘most exclusive shopping centre’, the Supreme Leader meant the city’s only shopping centre.

Visiting department stores? That was more than Allan needed. But it seemed like a good idea to play along, so Julius could stop looking so tormented. ‘That’s a kind thought,’ he said. ‘Sounds relaxing in every way, after a long day in the laboratory. I don’t suppose we could borrow a coin or two? In all our haste we didn’t bring anything with us but a few bottles of champagne, and unfortunately those are gone.’

Kim Jong-un said that Karlsson and his friend shouldn’t worry about the cost. If they found a souvenir or two to take home, they should consider it a gift.

When it came to the peace project, Karlsson could have six days in the lab. Time limits tended to promote creativity. Upon proven results, the Supreme One promised both a medal of valour and a first-class ticket home to Switzerland.

Julius still didn’t dare to say anything, not after the failed attempt in the Supreme Leader’s office.

Allan, however, was beyond daring. ‘A lot can be accomplished in six days. If only I manage to stay alive … I’ve been frail for a pretty long time. The last thirty or forty years, really. I suppose I’m singing my last refrain, as they say. Of course, Noah lived to be nine hundred and fifty. The difference is that I’m real.’

‘Who?’ said Kim Jong-un.

‘Noah. From the Bible. Exciting literature. Oh, but wait, what am I saying? I suppose you haven’t read it, because you would have had to execute yourself, if I’ve understood your laws correctly.’

Was this bloody Swiss man bringing up the Bible – a forbidden book – during dinner in the Palace of the People’s Republic? Now he had crossed a line.

But Margot Wallström came to his rescue. She broke in and thanked the Supreme Leader for the opportunity to meet in private.

Kim Jong-un nodded, even though he hadn’t promised any such thing. ‘Tomorrow I’m busy with important matters, but lunch the day after might work. And then you may leave, Madame Wallström. Go home and tell them that the world’s leading expert in nuclear weapons is in my hands. That ought to prompt some humility in America. If that characteristic even exists there.’

Margot Wallström took an extra large sip of her replenished wine to calm her nerves as she wondered what would happen if someone were to let Kim Jong-un and Benjamin Netanyahu into the same room. Monumental lack of humour and self-awareness against monumental lack of humour and self-awareness. All that would be missing was Donald Trump as a mediator.

* * *

Julius chewed Allan’s ear off all the way from the palace to the hotel. Why on earth had he quarrelled with the Supreme Leader like that?

‘Quarrelled? When has anyone died from a little honesty?’

‘Here people have dropped like flies from honesty over the years! Where’s the sense in it if we do the same?’

Allan allowed that he didn’t see any sense in that particular result. ‘But, please, can you stop worrying about every tiny thing? This will all work out for the best, you’ll see.’

‘How the hell do you expect it to work out? After tonight he’ll never let us go!’

‘He wouldn’t have anyway. I have no intention of helping that chatterbox more than necessary. When that dawns on him, it’ll be best if we’ve left the country. Preferably in the company of that briefcase he’s so proud of.’

‘And how do you intend for us to disappear?’

‘With the help of that charming Swedish minister for foreign affairs, of course. Have you already forgotten?’

‘In greater detail, Allan.’

‘Detail, schmetail.’

* * *

Margot Wallström took her limousine straight from the half-surreal dinner at the Supreme Leader’s palace to the Swedish embassy to start the process of producing passports. It wasn’t as simple as cobbling together a passport or two at the embassy. Sweden was Sweden and rules were rules.

The chief of the Swedish passport police wasn’t happy about the call from Pyongyang. He wavered and balked and wavered some more, with a series of formal objections to the minister’s request that he produce two diplomatic passports in extremely dubious accordance with the rules. He said he didn’t understand how the minister could put him on this sort of spot.

It would never do, of course, for Margot Wallström to explain that she had two Swedes to smuggle out of North Korea in the interest of averting a third world war, so she decided to change tack. Thus she informed the chief of the passport police that there was no need for him to understand what he was doing: the important thing was that he did as she said. When the chief of the passport police responded by wondering once more if the minister was seriously suggesting he falsify signatures and produce passports for two people no one at the passport office in Stockholm had even met, she responded with a simple ‘Yes.’ And ‘Diplomatic passports, as I said.’

‘Diplomatic passports perhaps, but as for the rest …’

‘As for the rest, either you do as I say or you do as I say. If necessary I can ask the prime minister to call you and repeat the request. If that’s not enough, I have contacts in the royal court. The king could give you a ring, if you like. And the speaker. Whom else would you like to hear from? Secretary General Guterres?’

The chief of the passport police fell silent. What did the king have to do with this?

‘Please, Mr Passport Police Chief. There’s not much time. The lives of Swedish citizens are at stake. And more lives than that.’

At last he went along with her request, given that it would also be sent in writing along with the electronic transmission of photographs and signatures.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Minister for Foreign Affairs Wallström. ‘But the passports must be produced at once and sent by diplomatic courier to Pyongyang within the hour.’

‘Within the hour? But it’s almost lunchtime.’

‘No, it isn’t.’

USA

‘What the hell?’ said President Trump, to National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster, who had just replaced National Security Advisor Michael T. Flynn, who had, of course, turned out to be a security risk.

The issue was that Fox had just put up a clip from a so-called press conference in North Korea, and Breitbart News had followed up with an article on the same topic. And with that, the president knew all that was worth knowing about the issue, except for the whole situation as such.

That bitch Wallström from Sweden had nagged her way to a secret meeting with Kim Jong-something in … whatever the capital of North Korea was called. And then she’d stood up next to him on North Korean TV! How stealthy did she think that made her, that goddamn nutcase? And as if that wasn’t enough, she had hugged, on live TV, a Swiss Communist who was there to upgrade the North Korean nuclear weapons programme.

‘Well,’ said Lieutenant General McMaster. ‘She didn’t hug the Swiss Communist. Breitbart might have been mistaken on that point.’

The president waved away the security advisor’s comment. He would have to twist that Wallström’s nose when she got back, but who was the Communist she’d hugged?

‘Didn’t hug, as I said.’

President Trump spent some moments swearing about the self-righteous Swiss before he realized he should give them a call. He picked up the phone and ordered his secretary to get him a line to the president of Switzerland on the double.

‘And find out his name while you’re at it,’ he said to the secretary, who said his name was Doris Leuthard and, given the first name, was likely a she. ‘Another bitch? You can bet your ass on it. Well, come on, make the call!’

‘It’s two in the morning in Europe, sir,’ said the secretary.

‘Good,’ said President Trump.

Pulsuz fraqment bitdi.