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

Back at camp, things had changed. Fredrika Langer didn’t go into the details with Meitkini: she just said it was no longer urgently necessary for them to rush off to Musoma together.

‘Lovely,’ said Meitkini. ‘In that case, are you ladies and gentlemen content for me to ask John to pour us something pleasant in the lounge before we sit down for a late supper?’

‘Something pleasant in the lounge sounds pleasant to me,’ said Allan.

The others nodded in agreement.

Fredrika Langer appeared to have a more pleasant time in the lounge than any of the others, including Allan. She needed it. Partly because of Allan Karlsson she was now sitting on four hundred kilos of enriched uranium, all weighed out and ready – that is, a hundred times more than Karlsson had already managed to present to Chancellor Merkel.

Agent Langer’s boss had long stood watch along the six-hundred-kilometre border between Tanzania and Mozambique, looking for the uranium that was currently in Kenya. Now he was probably doing the same thing in Madagascar. Fredrika felt she needed more time to think before she called her boss with the news.

What should she do? Not even taking into account how tired she was of everything.

‘You look worn out, Madame Agent,’ said Allan. ‘Fredrika, I mean. Have things perhaps been a little much lately?’

And then there was Karlsson. Who saw right through you.

As everyone gathered around the table to enjoy a late three-course meal on the veranda, with a view of the pitch-black valley, two headlights popped up in the distance. At first they were just a faint flicker in the darkness: obviously someone, or several someones, was slowly approaching the camp.

Julius began to worry.

Sabine began to worry.

Fredrika Langer began to worry.

Meitkini checked to make sure he had his club.

‘A visitor?’ said Allan. ‘Exciting!’

The starter arrived, but it remained untouched. The car was getting close. Oh, dear God, it was an ordinary old car! A taxi! That had made it the entire way?

‘Could it be someone who’s missing Stan Smith?’ wondered Fredrika, who had gone to fetch the crowbar to be on the safe side.

‘Hmm,’ Meitkini mused. ‘But how would missing him lead to us?’

The taxi stopped just below the veranda. A man thanked the driver, handed over some money, and stepped out. His eyes searched the people standing in a row and landed on Julius, second from the left.

‘Hello, my friend,’ said Gustav Svensson. ‘Nice to see you!’

It had been difficult there on Bali, in his solitude, to be Gustav Svensson. And it wouldn’t have made anything easier if he’d gone back to being Simran Aryabhat Chakrabarty Gopaldas.

Gustav’s mentor in the export of vegetables of uncertain origins had vanished. Gustav himself had, by way of faulty decision-making, caused the wholesaler in Sweden to be locked up for an indeterminate length of time. The asparagus was flourishing, but Gustav had nowhere to send it. He had both asparagus and expenses. What he needed was Julius and money.

Still, there was some of the latter left. Gustav racked his brains for every last rackable idea. And he could come up with no better plan than to invest the remainder of his assets in finding his partner.

But where was he? The last sign of life had come from America. And Pyongyang before that. Julius could be in Argentina by now. Or New Zealand. Or anywhere in between.

Gustav fervently wished he could just call his partner. But that wouldn’t work, because the last thing Julius had done before he disappeared was give away his phone. To Gustav.

Send a message, then? An email? No, Julius wasn’t wired that way. Nor was Gustav, to be fair. The only option left was his friend Allan’s tablet. It had been on constantly every day on Bali, and it probably still was, but what help was that?

Unless…

A wild idea took shape.

He’d received the phone from Julius, who in turn had got it from Allan, who in turn had got it from the hotel manager at the same time as he received his tablet. Everything had been set up before the manager had handed the package to the hundred-year-old who had since had time to turn a hundred and one.

Gustav had hated himself for not having the phone switched on when Julius had tried to call. As punishment he forced himself to learn how to use the new technology properly. The first thing he discovered was that batteries discharge unless they get recharged.

The second thing was something called ‘Bluetooth’. And then there were oddities like ‘roaming’ and ‘tethering’ and… exactly! ‘Find my iPhone.’ Gustav had thought this was the strangest function of all, considering he was holding it. But if you dug deeper it turned out that the service also covered Allan’s black tablet.

What if…

But surely it couldn’t be that easy, could it?

Then again, why not? Just about everything had gone to hell so far, but his luck had to change sometime, right?

Gustav Svensson had ‘found “his” iPad’ and was given a proper welcome into the group. Now they had to get rid of the uranium. Allan was beside the office phone. It rang four times at the other end, then someone picked up.

‘Hello?’

That was how Chancellor Merkel always initiated calls on her private phone. She didn’t announce who she was.

‘Hello yourself,’ said Allan. ‘Might I be speaking to the very chancellor herself? In which case, will my English be understood, or is Russian to be preferred? We could also get by with Mandarin.’

‘Who is calling?’ Angela Merkel asked in Russian.

‘Didn’t I say? This is Allan Karlsson. I’ve found an awful lot of enriched uranium for you, in addition to what I’ve already delivered, so to speak.’

Angela Merkel had not yet begun to eat her breakfast. She was sitting at the small desk outside her bedroom in her dressing-gown and had been browsing through documents regarding the day ahead when the phone rang. That phone. The one ten people, tops, knew about.

‘I don’t feel comfortable about this conversation,’ she said guardedly. ‘How did you get my number?’

‘I understand you may wonder about that, Madame Chancellor. I could be anyone. An admirable level of suspicion! And important, frankly, in your position.’

‘Thank you, but you didn’t answer my question.’

‘Didn’t I? That’s probably because I’ve become so forgetful in the last forty years. But I imagine you’ll venture to believe that I am who I am when I say that I wrote you a letter, in a great hurry, on a couple of napkins, not long ago. Although that note was in English, now that I think about it.’

Chancellor Merkel lowered her guard a few millimetres. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, that was a tremendously pleasant dinner with your UN ambassador. What was his name again? Konrad! That’s it. A good man. Picked up the tab and everything. Including drinks. He wasn’t stingy in the least. Although can you believe the Germans put an apple flavour in their vodka? Why?’

Angela Merkel lowered her guard another millimetre. ‘Well, it’s not as if the apple in vodka is a constitutional law,’ she said. ‘But what I meant, Mr Karlsson, was that perhaps you could instead tell me more about… the napkins you mentioned.’

In the event that the man at the other end of the line could reproduce their message, it would be possible at least to consider believing that he was who he claimed to be. He had already told her which language the note had been written in.

‘Oh, yes, right. Well, the thing was, Konrad visited the lavatory. I suppose he was… that is… it took some time for him to return.’