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

Agent B considered putting the car into reverse and disappearing. But the situation was too complicated. The hundred-and-one-year-old enemy might just as easily be a friend. And, anyway, now that B had been discovered, she would never know which it was unless she changed tack.

And what did she have to lose? When she got home, she would give her notice. Become a beat cop in Rödelheim? That might be nice. But what would happen if she got toothache and had to visit the local clinic?

The agent rolled up to the old man and his car. She stepped out and walked over to Allan without a word.

‘Good day, good day,’ said Allan. ‘Find any exciting properties to broker since we last spoke?’

They were in the one place on earth a professional real-estate broker was least likely to visit on the job.

Agent B had spent the last seven years of her life being beyond secret. She was suffering from exhaustion. She was hungry. And thirsty. And tired of herself and her life. And she was standing across from a man who might be the enemy but might be a friend.

Enough was enough. Agent B made up her mind.

‘No, I haven’t. My name is Fredrika Langer and I am employed by the Federal Republic of Germany to try to prevent the spread of enriched uranium from Africa to – as one example – North Korea.’

‘I was starting to suspect something along those lines,’ said Allan. ‘You were behind us in the queue at the airport in Dar es Salaam. Then we ended up next to each other on the plane and it turned out you had no idea where you were going. When I surmised there wasn’t any real estate to broker in Musoma you agreed. We were so ridiculously mistaken. A little while ago I recognized you – you haven’t changed your blazer since yesterday. And out here on the savannah, you couldn’t be after anything other than me and my friends, could you?’

‘That’s correct,’ said the agent. She had never felt so unprofessional in all her life.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Meitkini.

‘Quite a bit,’ said Allan. ‘May I introduce you to one another?’

Up to this point, Meitkini had had club and knife at the ready, but he understood from Allan’s tone that he wouldn’t need them. The miserable agent had already acknowledged that she had approached four potential enemies on the savannah with no weapon whatsoever. Look, another failure to stack up with the rest.

When the formalities had been dealt with, Allan suggested that the new addition to their group could also be invited to Meitkini’s camp. They had a lot to talk about. ‘Don’t you agree, Mrs Langer?’

Yes, she did.

‘And we certainly can’t stand around here. Don’t you agree with that as well, Mrs Langer?’

Yes, she did.

‘Then let’s go,’ said Meitkini. ‘Follow me, Mrs Langer.’

Allan chose to ride in the German agent’s car, so they could begin chatting at once. This put Agent Langer in a better mood. If Karlsson was playing with her, he would soon talk himself into a corner. In which case it would still be true that she was in the wrong place – unarmed and having said too much – but at least she would know it.

During the rest of their journey, as it grew dark around them, Allan gave her the short version of events from the hot-air balloon onwards, with some choice flashbacks to earlier points in his life. Agent Langer believed every word. There were too many verifiable items to Karlsson’s advantage. If he were a major uranium smuggler, running errands for North Korea, why would they have fled the country instead of staying put? And how could any uranium smuggler in his right mind come up with the bright idea to bring four kilos to the United States, only to have it dumped at the German embassy in Washington with a love letter to Angela Merkel?

‘The director of the laboratory in Pyongyang mentioned a shipment many times larger than the first one,’ said Allan. ‘Does the uranium in question come from around here, given your presence and interest?’

Yes, that was what the agents suspected. There wasn’t much reason to deny it. From Congo, to be more precise. And the same ship that had picked up Karlsson and Jonsson a few months earlier was out at sea again. ‘We’re reasonably sure that the handover will take place just south of Madagascar.’

‘Then what are you doing here?’

Agent Langer became annoyed. ‘If it weren’t for you, Mr Karlsson, I would have been somewhere else.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Allan.

With each passing moment, the road seemed to get worse. At some points it had been rerouted, thanks to African downpours that created torrents of water that ate up parts or the entirety of the road that once had been.

Here and there, stretches went straight through a stream. Sometimes the road was divided in the middle by a boulder or log that wasn’t where it should have been. This made it too narrow to pass oncoming traffic on one of the sides so there were certain brief single-lane stretches. Traffic signs of any sort are a rare sight on the Kenyan savannah. In instances where the road splits, common sense must rule when it comes to choosing right or left. Meitkini chose left, born and raised as he was in a country with left-hand traffic.

But Agent Langer was only on an involuntary visit. What was more, she had spent the first thirty-three years of her life a stone’s throw from Autobahn 5 outside Frankfurt am Main. The crucial difference between the A5 and Kenya’s county highway C12 was not that the former functioned at 200 kilometres per hour and the latter at ten, max, but that in Kenya you don’t drive on the same side of the road as they do in Germany.

The long and the short of it was that the agent, unlike Meitkini, rounded a large boulder on the wrong side. The waiting stream had two separate fords, with ten metres between them. The western one functioned as it should, while the latest cloudburst had washed away great masses of earth from the eastern. An observant and conscientious Maasai had put up a warning sign to say that the upcoming ford was no longer three decimetres deep but more like a metre and a half. But since the Maasai, like Meitkini, always kept left, he hadn’t expended any effort on warning the other side, too – the side Agent Langer was coming from.

The agent drove cautiously down the slope as the depth went from three centimetres to five times that in just one second. The vehicle tipped violently forwards and got stuck with both its front tyres in the deep hole lurking beneath the surface. Parts of the engine ended up under water and, in a matter of seconds, it had stopped.

‘Oops,’ said Allan, who had to hold on to keep from falling in. ‘If I were to guess, I would guess that Madame Agent has got us into a mess.’

Agent Langer thought things just kept getting worse, and at an insane rate. It had become clear a few hours ago that she was in the wrong part of Africa. Now it appeared that, in addition, there was no way she would get out of there until someone managed to fish out and repair the car for her.

It turned out to be an adventure, getting Allan and the agent across to the other side. Meitkini used a branch to determine how far out in the water he could dare to drive his own car, and got close enough for the German and the Swede to climb from bonnet to bonnet, then on to safety, in the company of Julius and Sabine.

‘Your car will have to stay put,’ said Meitkini. ‘It will have to be pulled out from the other side, with a towrope, and that’s not the sort of thing you should do in the middle of the night, around all the animals. Also, I can’t imagine that the engine is in good enough shape to start, now that you’ve chosen to put it under water.’

‘I did not choose to put it under water,’ said Agent Langer.