The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden (40 page)

Nombeko would very much have liked to talk strategy with the king, the topic of which would be that he should continue digging around in the Mannerheim regions, but she couldn’t reach him: he was absorbed in their hostess, and vice versa.

His Majesty had an ability that the prime minister lacked: he could take pleasure in the present moment, quite regardless of external threats. The king enjoyed Gertrud’s company, and he was sincerely curious about the old woman.

‘Gertrud, what is your relationship with the marshal and Finland, if you’ll excuse my curiosity?’ he said.

This was the exact question that Nombeko had wanted to hear answered but had been unable to ask.

Good, King! Are you that clever? Or did we just get lucky?

‘My relationship to the marshal and Finland? Oh, the king doesn’t want to know that,’ said Gertrud.

Of course you do, King!

‘Of course I do,’ said the king.

‘It’s a long story,’ said Gertrud.

We have plenty of time!

‘We have plenty of time,’ said the king.

‘Do we?’ said the prime minister, and received an angry look from Nombeko.

This doesn’t involve you!

‘It begins in 1867,’ said Gertrud.

‘The year the marshal was born.’ The king nodded.

You’re a genius, King!

‘Oh, the king is so clever!’ said Gertrud. ‘The year the marshal was born, that’s exactly right.’

Nombeko thought that the description of Gertrud’s family tree was as great a botanical contradiction as the first time she’d heard it. But her story had not lessened the king’s good humour in the least. He had, after all, once failed maths at Sigtuna Allmänna Läroverk. Perhaps that was because he hadn’t managed to calculate that barons, false or not, do not generate countesses.

‘So she’s a countess!’ he said appreciatively.

‘She is?’ said the prime minister, who was better at calculating, and who received yet another angry look from Nombeko.

There was certainly something about the king that was weighing on Holger One and Celestine. It was just a bit hard to put a finger on it. Was it his bloody shirt? The rolled-up sleeves? The gold cuff links the king had placed in an empty shot glass on the kitchen table for the time being? His disgustingly medal-covered uniform jacket hanging on a hook on the henhouse wall?

Or merely that the king had just chopped the heads off three chickens?

Kings don’t chop the heads off chickens!

For that matter, prime ministers don’t pick potatoes (at least not in a tailcoat) but, above all, kings don’t chop the heads off chickens.

While One and Celestine worked through this appalling contradiction, the king managed to make things even worse. He and Gertrud walked into the potato field, and then to the old tractor, which of course the group no longer needed, and that was good, because it didn’t work anyway. Gertrud described the problem to her king, who replied that the MF35 was a little peach, and one had to pamper it to get it to work. And then he suggested cleaning the diesel filter and the spraying nozzle. If there was just some juice left in the battery, it would probably rumble to life after that.

Diesel filter and spraying nozzle? Kings don’t fix tractors.

Dinner was over. After coffee and a private walk to take a look at the MF35, the king and Gertrud returned for one last Mannerheim together.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Reinfeldt cleared the table and cleaned up the kitchen. In order to avoid dirtying his tailcoat more than was necessary, he put on the countess’s apron.

Holger One and Celestine sat whispering in a corner, while his brother and Nombeko did the same in another corner. They talked about how the situation looked and what their next strategic move ought to be.

That was when the door flew open. In came an older man with a pistol. He bellowed in English that everyone should stay where they were, and not make any sudden moves.

‘What’s happening?’ said Fredrik Reinfeldt, dish-scrubbing brush in hand.

Nombeko answered the prime minister in English. She told the truth: the Israeli Mossad had just barged into the house with the aim of commandeering the atomic bomb in the potato truck.

CHAPTER 21

On a lost composure and a twin who shoots his brother

Thirteen years is a long time to spend behind a desk without anything sensible to do. But at any rate, Agent B had finished the last day of his career. He was sixty-five years and nine days old. Nine days earlier, he had been sent off with almond cake and speeches. Since the speech from his boss was lovely but insincere, the almond cake tasted bitter.

After one week of retirement, he had made up his mind. He packed his bags to go to Europe. To Sweden.

He had always been bothered by the case of the cleaning woman who had disappeared with the bomb that had been honestly stolen by Israel, and the feeling seemed to have followed him into old age.

Who
was
she? Beyond her thievery, she had probably killed his friend A. Former Agent B didn’t know what was spurring him on. But if something is bothersome, that’s it.

He ought to have had more patience at that PO box in Stockholm. And he ought to have checked Celestine Hedlund’s grandmother. If only he had been allowed to.

That was a long time ago now. And the clue hadn’t been much of a clue to start with. But still. Former Agent B’s first plan was to travel to the forest north of Norrtälje. If that didn’t result in anything, he would stake out that post office for at least three weeks.

After that, perhaps he could retire for real. He would still wonder, and never find out. But at least he would feel that he had done all he could. Losing to a superior opponent was bearable. But giving up before the final whistle had been blown wasn’t. Michael Ballack never would have done that. Incidentally, the two-footed star of FC Karl-Marx-Stadt had made it all the way to the national team, and become captain.

B landed at Arlanda Airport. There he hired a car and drove straight to Celestine Hedlund’s grandmother’s house. He had thought the house would probably be empty, boarded up – or maybe that was what he was hoping to find. After all, the main goal of this trip was to bring the agent peace of mind, not to find a bomb that wouldn’t let itself be found anyway.

At any rate, there was a potato truck in the road just outside the grandmother’s house – and all the lights were on! Why was it there? What could it contain?

The agent climbed out, sneaked up to the truck, looked into the back of it, and – it was as if time stood still. The crate with the bomb was in there! Just as scorched at the corners as last time.

Since the world appeared to have gone crazy, he checked to see if the keys were in the ignition. But he wasn’t that lucky. He would have to confront them inside the house after all, whoever they might be. An eighty-year-old woman, certainly. Her grandchild. The grandchild’s boyfriend. And the goddamn fucking cleaning woman. Anyone else? Well, maybe the unknown man who had been spotted in the Blomgrens’ car that time outside the burned-down buildings on Fredsgatan in Gnesta.

Agent B picked up the service weapon he just happened to have packed with his things on the day he retired, and cautiously tested the doorknob. It was unlocked. He just had to step in.

* * *

Fredrik Reinfeldt (with dish-scrubbing brush in hand) had blurted out his question about what was happening. Nombeko answered him in English and told the truth: that the Israeli Mossad had just barged into the house with the aim of commandeering the atomic bomb in the potato truck. And maybe, while he was at it, killing one or two of the people in the room. In that regard, she believed that she herself was of immediate interest.

‘The Israeli Mossad?’ said the prime minister (also in English). ‘What right does the Israeli Mossad have to wave weapons around in my Sweden?’

‘
My
Sweden,’ the king corrected him.

‘Your Sweden?’ Agent B heard himself say, looking back and forth between the man with the apron and the dish-scrubbing brush and the man on the sofa with the bloody shirt and empty schnapps glass in hand.

‘I am Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt,’ said the prime minister.

‘And I am King Carl XVI Gustaf,’ said the king. ‘The prime minister’s boss, one might say. And this is Countess Virtanen, the hostess of this gathering.’

‘Why, I’m much obliged,’ the countess said with pride.

Fredrik Reinfeldt was almost as upset as he had been a few hours earlier in the potato truck when he realized that he had been kidnapped.

‘Put down your weapon at once. Otherwise I will call Prime Minister Olmert and ask what is going on. I presume you are acting on his orders?’

Agent B stood where he was, struck by something that could be compared to a brain fart. He didn’t know which was worst: that the man with the apron and the dish-scrubbing brush claimed to be the prime minister, that the man with the bloody shirt and the schnapps glass claimed to be the king, or the fact that Agent B thought they both looked familiar. They
were
the prime minister and the king. In a house in the middle of the forest, beyond the end of the road in Swedish Roslagen.

An agent of the Israeli Mossad never loses his composure. But Agent B was in the process of doing just that. He lost his composure. He lowered his weapon. He put it back in the holster inside his jacket. And he said:

‘May I have something to drink?’

‘Such luck that we haven’t put the bottle away yet,’ said Gertrud.

Agent B took a seat next to the king and was immediately served the marshal’s shot. He drained his glass, gave a shudder and gratefully accepted another round.

Before Prime Minister Reinfeldt had time to commence the shower of questions he had for the intruder, Nombeko turned to Agent B and suggested that the two of them should tell boss Reinfeldt and his boss the king exactly what had happened. From Pelindaba on. Agent B nodded numbly.

‘You start,’ he said, showing Countess Virtanen that the glass in his hand was empty again.

So Nombeko started. The king and the prime minister had already heard the short version while they were locked up in the back of the truck with the bomb. This time she went into greater detail. The prime minister listened intently as he wiped the kitchen table and the counter. The king listened, too, from his spot on the kitchen sofa next to the very delightful countess, with the less-delightful agent on his other side.

Nombeko started in Soweto, then moved on to Thabo’s diamonds and how she got run over in Johannesburg. The trial. The verdict. The engineer and his passion for Klipdrift. Pelindaba and all its electric fences. The South African nuclear weapons programme. The Israeli involvement.

‘I cannot confirm that,’ said Agent B.

‘Watch it,’ said Nombeko.

Agent B considered. It was all over for him anyway. Either by way of life in a Swedish prison or by way of the prime minister making a call to Ehud Olmert. The agent preferred life in prison.

‘I have changed my mind,’ he said. ‘I can confirm that.’

As the story went on, he had to confirm more than that. The interest in the seventh bomb, the one that didn’t exist. The agreement with Nombeko. The idea of using the diplomatic post. Agent A’s initial hunt when the mix-up was discovered.

‘What happened to him, by the way?’ said Agent B.

‘He landed in the Baltic Sea in a helicopter,’ said Holger One. ‘Rather hard, I’m afraid.’

Nombeko went on. About Holger & Holger. Fredsgatan. The Chinese girls. The potter. The tunnel. The National Task Force’s intervention. How the force waged several hours’ worth of war with itself.

‘Everyone who’s surprised, raise your hand,’ the prime minister mumbled.

Nombeko went on. About Mr and Mrs Blomgren. About the diamond money that had gone up in flames. About the meeting with B outside the condemned building. About all the fruitless phone calls to the prime minister’s assistant throughout the years.

‘She was just doing her job,’ said Fredrik Reinfeldt. ‘Gertrud, do you happen to have a broom? All that’s left is the floor.’

‘“Countess”, please,’ said the king.

Nombeko went on. About the potato farm. Two’s studies. The idiot’s interference in the dissertation defence.

‘The idiot?’ said B.

‘That’s probably me,’ said Holger One, feeling like there might possibly be something to that name.

Nombeko went on. About the magazine
Swedish Politics
.

‘That was a good magazine,’ said the prime minister. ‘For one issue. Which of you wrote the editorial in the second issue? No, wait, don’t tell me. Let me guess.’

By now, Nombeko had nearly finished. By way of conclusion, she explained her connection with Hu Jintao. Her plan to attract his attention outside the palace. And how Holger One – the original idiot – then kidnapped them all.

Agent B drained his third schnapps and felt that he was sufficiently anaesthetized for the time being. Then he added his own story, from his birth onwards. After his retirement, this matter had continued to bother him. So he had travelled here. Not at all on Prime Minister Olmert’s orders. Completely on his own initiative. And boy, did he regret it now.

‘What a mess!’ said the king with a laugh.

The prime minister had to admit that His Majesty had summed things up quite well.

* * *

Around midnight, the director of Säpo was on the verge of not being able to take it much longer.

The king and the prime minister were still missing. According to the president of the People’s Republic of China, they were in good hands, but wasn’t that what he thought about the people of Tibet?

Of more significance, of course, was that the prime minister had called and said that everything was fine, and that everyone should lie low. But that had been several hours ago. Now he wasn’t answering his phone, and it was impossible to search for the phone’s signal. Furthermore, the king didn’t have a phone.

The gala banquet was long since over, and rumours were spreading. Journalists were calling to ask why the hosts hadn’t been there. The court’s and the government’s press staffs had replied that the king and the prime minister had unfortunately and independently become indisposed, but that there was no danger to either of them.