Юнас Юнассон - The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man

Julius had touched upon an idea earlier, without being very serious about it. At the time. But now? ‘What about honouring the memory of your mother and starting again in the clairvoyance industry?’

Allan was on the verge of becoming excited. He thought it sounded thrilling to talk to the dead: what came out of the living was seldom of much interest. There were exceptions, of course. At the old folks’ home back in Malmköping, the man in the neighbouring room had dug trenches in Finland’s Winter War. An intriguing job. Or not, really, but the man told a good story. They’d had one ten-minute break per hour, which they devoted to more digging so they didn’t freeze to death.

Sabine turned off her ears to Allan while she thought.

‘Would that be a feasible path?’ Julius asked.

‘Trenches?’

Sabine glared at the hundred-and-one-year-old and replied to Julius. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Or maybe. It depends.’

If their assumption was that her mother had truly been clairvoyant, there was no way for them to move forwards. After all, Sabine hadn’t inherited an ounce of her mother’s talent.

But if in fact she had been a charlatan or, alternatively, believed in her own fantasies, thanks to her regular intake of happy pills, well, that put things in a different light.

Julius belonged to the small group of people who think that charlatans are a lovely thing. So he said encouragingly that Sabine shouldn’t worry that her mother had been anything but.

Sabine thanked Julius for his kind words but said that the fantasy explanation was the most likely. ‘And it’s possible to copy those. Or even develop them further.’

For all those years, her mother had talked about how she wanted to take her operation and herself to new heights; Sabine knew her stories by heart. There were reasons nothing ever happened on that front. Towards the end, she could hardly get out of bed.

Her favourite story was the one about Olekorinko.

What if he was still alive? And she could find him and his operation via the internet?

‘You’re not touching my tablet,’ said Allan.

‘Oh yes I am.’

The Americans returned to Los Angeles without touching base with Johnny and without letting him touch base with them. There is nothing you can say to a person who has buried one of the brotherhood in a pale blue coffin with bunnies on it. Perhaps you could beat the bastard to death, but that was the problem. Kenneth’s little brother was spared because he was Kenneth’s little brother. With that, the Stockholm branch closed; it died with its founder. All planned future payments to the Aryan Alliance would be immediately cancelled.

Yet Johnny still wanted to be optimistic about the future. Once those guilty of the coffin mix-up were properly executed, he would try to contact Los Angeles again.

Via the thoroughly distressed woman at the morgue he came to learn that Kenneth had at least ended up in the right coffin, but the coffin had ended up in the wrong place. Now that it had been returned, it was time for a new funeral. Unfortunately the pastor in charge was indisposed after sustaining injuries from a bad fall. Johnny dropped the idea of finding a new pastor. There was no time. He bought a bouquet of tulips at the closest corner shop and paid an evening visit to the battered man at the hospital. The pastor thanked him for his concern, told him of his fractured nose and the crack in his right cheekbone, and said he could probably be back in service within six to eight weeks.

‘You’ve got two and a half,’ said Johnny.

Meanwhile, Kenneth would stay at the morgue. Johnny, seeking to comfort himself, reasoned that it was no colder there than in the ground.

His priorities were clear. Before anything else, the coffin marauders must float in a puddle of their own entrails. Thanks to the coffin shop’s website, he knew he was looking for one Sabine Jonsson. But he’d spoken to a man on the phone when ordering the coffin – probably the man next to her in the car when they’d fled. If Johnny could just find Sabine and the hearse, he would get the strange man too.

It didn’t take long to learn more about the woman, via the internet.

She was the CEO and only permanent board member of Die with Pride AB. The other member was one Allan Emmanuel Karlsson, who had to have been the man next to her in the car; he could no longer hide his identity. Sabine had also been a board member of Other Side AB, which had since been liquidated. Other Side AB? What the hell was that?

Oh, right, the internet. Other Side had specialized in clairvoyance! They talked to people who had departed life on earth. Johnny brushed aside the sudden urge to spend one more moment with Kenneth. One last conversation. No, dammit! There was no point in believing all that nonsense.

Sabine Rebecka Jonsson and Allan Emmanuel Karlsson. In a black hearse registered to the company. With a residential address they seemed utterly unlikely to return to. He would find them, he knew it. He just didn’t know how.

‘Good morning, Volodya. How are things? You look concerned.’

Yes, that was true. President Putin had some thinking to do. His colleague Trump was about to go entirely off the rails.

‘That idiot in Washington has seriously riled that fool in Pyongyang,’ he said. ‘What will we do, Gena?’

Gennady Aksakov took a seat at his friend’s desk. They were an unbeatable pair. Not just good, they were the best. Just as they had once been on the sambo and judo mats.

But, as they say, it’s possible to be too successful. That was more or less what the Russian president was brooding over now.

Under Gena’s discreet leadership, Russia had started a war with the United States without telling anyone. A whole army of young men and women had marched onto the internet, literally donned American baseball caps, opened a Dr Pepper and gone on the attack.

From within.

The battles took place on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, blogs and websites. From those positions, the fake American web soldiers aimed shots in every direction: they undermined left-wing movements one day and right-wing movements the next, supporting NFL players’ right to kneel before the flag on Facebook and calling those same players unpatriotic on Twitter. They expressed support for stricter gun laws and protested against the very same thing. They demanded walls against Mexico and the opposite. They praised and cut down every new attempt at health-care reform. Opined every possible opinion on LGBTQ issues. They fired up the masses, no matter who the masses were and what they stood for.

The point was to set American against American. A divided country was a weakened country, after all.

When the dust of war settled, the president and his friend found that their troops had won every single battle. But what about the war itself?

Putin wondered if it had all gone too well. Gena had even managed the impossible: placing the extreme divider Trump in the White House. Was it a Pyrrhic victory? Had they created a monster that could no longer be reined in?

The United States was definitely going to pieces; that part was good. But nations are like the Siberian tiger: a wounded one can be lethal. The USA was still the greatest military power in the world. The man who was running his own country into the ground, with Russia’s help, might now, in his monumental unsuitability for the job, be on his way to a nuclear war with North Korea. Which was in the immediate vicinity of eastern Russia.

That hadn’t been part of their calculations. And it was impossible to predict what it might lead to. In hindsight, they never should have sent over that goddamn plutonium centrifuge.