The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man
Page 31
Meitkini acted, quick as lightning.
‘Nice throw,’ Allan said encouragingly.
‘Thanks,’ said Meitkini.
Julius and Sabine said nothing: it had all happened too fast for them. The same went for Fredrika Langer. She was the one to break the silence.
‘Exactly what just happened?’ she asked.
Allan responded.
‘What exactly happened was – I’m guessing – that Madame Agent, Fredrika, just found her five hundred kilos of uranium. Just think – it really is a small world.’
Congo
A few months earlier, it had been quite an adventure to get the test cargo to Madagascar, where the North Koreans picked it up. But the rest of the trip to Pyongyang had gone well. A few days before Goodluck Wilson’s ill-fated encounter with Allan and his friends, he had initiated ‘Operation Jackpot’. The Supreme Leader far, far away wanted to buy the five hundred kilos that had accidentally become four hundred. And it would happen now. After all, they couldn’t just keep the uranium in the hut in the middle of the village, halving itself every four-billionth year.
But four kilos was one thing. Four hundred was another. It was easy to get the load into Tanzania via Burundi, by way of well-targeted bribes, but the next border, between Tanzania and Mozambique, was heavily guarded. The border patrol officers there took their jobs seriously. People like that were Goodluck Wilson’s pet peeve.
What was more, he had likely left a number of traces behind, having managed that route once. Goodluck Wilson didn’t believe in luck, despite his name. He believed in cleverness.
The leader of the watchdog force had needed to think up a new plan.
So he had.
Everyone who was on the lookout for enriched uranium, or other exciting items that were worth a lot of money on the international market, assumed that the cargo was on its way to the nearest coast, the Tanzanian one, or the next nearest, the one in Mozambique. So Goodluck Wilson settled on a different route. The load would go straight north, to the Serengeti, where the Maasai kingdom was. The Maasai herded cattle and raised goats and generally didn’t get involved in the modern world. Above all, like the wild animals that migrated north each summer on the hunt for more fertile areas, they didn’t pay attention to national borders. The border of Tanzania and Kenya ran straight through the Maasai land, with no patrols. Telling a Maasai that he couldn’t herd his two hundred cattle across a certain line on the ground just couldn’t be done.
The plan was to transport the load of uranium in a Hilux from Congo, via Burundi, south of Lake Victoria, into the Serengeti, across the border into Kenya, and all the way to the insignificant Keekorok Airport. It consisted of one runway made of mineral-rich red earth, and a terminal building the size of a newspaper stand. Air Kenya came from Nairobi to drop off safari-hungry tourists and pick up others who had finished touristing. When the sun went down, the newspaper stand closed and the airport stopped functioning. Not a single person would be in the vicinity until the next morning.
A person who didn’t have pure intentions but did have bright enough landing lights on his aeroplane, and a decent navigational system, could easily and freely land and take off again in the dark with no witnesses but the occasional giraffe or zebra. Goodluck Wilson needed only to ask the Russians to put him in touch with the right pilot and that would be that. The Russians because the North Koreans were unreachable: they were like ghosts in the night.
Once the load was delivered, the plane would fly to the coast, and from there it would travel at an altitude of forty metres across the sea, all the way to a well-trampled field near the southern tip of Madagascar. There, the secretive North Koreans would take over. As long as they had eighty million dollars with them in exchange.
The last bit was slightly worrisome to Goodluck Wilson. But only slightly. The payment of a hundred thousand for the initial test delivery had gone as it should. That time it had been in advance. Suddenly, one day, a strange man who looked Asian was standing outside Goodluck Wilson’s office. He had a briefcase in either hand, and said nothing but ‘Name?’
‘Goodluck Wilson,’ said the head of the watchdog force, and refrained from asking the same question in return.
The Asian nodded, then said that one briefcase contained the agreed-upon amount of money, while the other indicated exactly how his employer wished to have the delivery packed. The lead lining was already in place.
And that was that. The Asian left as quickly as he had appeared and hadn’t been seen since. Goodluck Wilson had no way of knowing, but he suspected the man had come from the North Korean embassy in Kampala. It was easy to get from Uganda to Congo. And back again. Goodluck would have chosen a fishing boat across Lake Albert, but there were other ways.
Be that as it may. The important thing was that the North Koreans had proven they could deliver. Just as he had immediately afterwards. Everything had gone fine that time; everything would go fine again.
Thought Goodluck Wilson.
Kenya
A frequently used Land Cruiser, designed for the tough terrain of the African savannah, will get a puncture about once a week. A Hilux, under the same circumstances, will be affected somewhat more often. A person who is only on a short visit, and is sufficiently cautious, has a good chance of avoiding the bother of changing wheels.
But the rocks are many, and sharp. The risk is always present. After nightfall it is important to be even more watchful, for if the accident happens you are not as alone on the edge of the road as you might wish. The lion slinks through the dark on the hunt for food. So does the leopard, which the Maasai call the ‘murder machine’. Even the hyena can be pretty unpleasant. The angriest animal of them all, the Cape buffalo, has probably called it a night, given that your puncture hasn’t occurred in just the wrong spot. And which spot that is is impossible to know.
In short, in the event of a flat tyre at night, you should:
Stay. In. The. Car. Until. It. Gets. Light.
But what if you don’t have time? What if you have four hundred kilos of enriched uranium in your truck bed and an aeroplane has just landed under cover of darkness at a poor excuse for an airport forty minutes away, impatiently waiting for its delivery? And with eighty million dollars at stake?
Perhaps not everyone would do the same, but Goodluck Wilson did believe in luck after all. Not for himself but for his favourite cousin Samuel. His cousin was sent out with a flashlight to change the wrecked tyre. He defied almost all statistics by getting so far as to have mounted the spare and was about to replace the nuts when two lionesses came out of nowhere from two different directions.
Lions think logically, and always in the same way. They don’t have the ability to tell a living being from its engine-driven vehicle so long as the being has the good sense to remain inside said vehicle. If, for example, an open-cab car full of safari-loving humans arrives, the lion sees the totality, not each individual potential meal. And it thinks three things: (1) Can I eat this? (No, it’s too big.); (2) Can it eat me? (No, a long life has taught me that utility vehicles and trucks never attack.) (3) Can I mate with it? (No, I don’t think I’ll ever be that kinky.)
But when someone leaves the safety of their elephant-sized vehicle, the lion gets very different answers to its questions. (1) Can I eat this? (Yes, and it will be delicious!) (2) Can it eat me? (No, how would that work?) And (3) Can I mate with it? (No, I don’t think I’ll ever be that kinky.)
A lion’s speciality is to aim its initial blow at the victim’s nose and mouth so at first Goodluck Wilson heard nothing of the attack but a muffled rustling sound, and the wrench striking the hard slope as it fell from his cousin’s hand. Then he saw two pairs of glowing eyes in the darkness and the sound of crunching bone reached him.
And then he understood.
He understood that he was left alone. His first thought was not for his cousin or his cousin’s family: instead he wondered how the four million dollars that had just been freed up should be di
vided. He arrived at the conclusion that he would do best to keep it for himself, so as to avoid strife within the group.
Just after the lionesses dragged the remains of his dead cousin into the bush, so that first the males and then the cubs had something to feast on, a vehicle appeared on the road. Here? In the middle of nothing and nowhere? And almost in the middle of the night? Dammit!
Kenya
Meitkini had learned how to handle a spear, knife and club when he was three years old. At the age of four, he had the misfortune, as a cowherd, to come face to face with a buffalo. The greatest misfortune belonged to the buffalo, however, for the four-year-old’s spear landed almost where it was meant to and he managed to stay hidden under a bush as the life slowly drained from the beast. Eleven years later, the fifteen-year-old boy was sent out on the savannah, with only the clothes on his back and his spear, knife and club. Nothing more. That was how it worked. The boys who came back to the village a year later were accepted into the adult world: they were Maasai warriors for real. If they didn’t come back, the question was no longer of interest.
Yes, Meitkini came back, as did all his friends. Those who have been taught to survive from the age of three tend to do just that.
Now, at thirty-two, he asked his fellow travellers to take off all the clothing they didn’t absolutely need and gather up all the blankets that were in the car. Meanwhile, Meitkini himself climbed into the back and grabbed the extra can of petrol.
He tossed strategically placed piles of petrol-drenched clothing and blankets around both cars, then handed out flashlights to all his companions and instructed them in which direction to aim the beams. He then dropped a match on top of each pile of fabric, which immediately began blazing wildly.
‘There we go,’ he said. ‘Now I’ll climb down and lift the boxes out while those of you who can manage it receive them. That should work.’
As a final safety measure, he handed a crowbar to Fredrika: he had found it next to the petrol can.
‘Throw this if you see anything approaching.’
She nodded seriously. For the moment, she felt like a field agent again.
Ten minutes later, Meitkini was done. The piles were still burning. Fredrika Langer was still standing at the ready with the crowbar. The last thing Meitkini did was lift the dead Stan Smith out of the car and lay him in the ditch.
‘Are you leaving him there for the lions?’ Sabine asked.
‘No,’ said Meitkini, who had recognized four pairs of glowing eyes not far off in the bush. ‘For the hyenas.’
* * *
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!’
Indonesia
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?
Kenya, Germany
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.
‘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.’