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

USA

Chancellor Merkel had just finished her first meeting with President Trump in Washington. In it she had been informed that NATO was useless. And that NATO was fantastic. That Trump loved Germany. And also that Germany had to get its act together on a number of issues. That the bonds between the countries were strong. And that the only thing that united them was that they had both been wiretapped by Obama.

Now she was back at the German embassy, where she was immediately shown to a situation room that was protected from bugs. Waiting for her there were the German ambassador, the German UN ambassador, and the director of German intelligence in the United States.

The chancellor, who had thought her day couldn’t get any worse, realized that it absolutely could. The intelligence officer was leading the meeting.

The issue was, as the chancellor had already been informed, that North Korea had succeeded in smuggling four kilos of enriched uranium to Pyongyang via a ship called Honour and Strength. The Swiss nuclear weapons expert, whom Kim Jong-un had put on display at a press conference, had turned out to be Swedish. His name was Allan Karlsson and he was not on Kim Jong-un’s side, as they had feared earlier. Instead he had managed to leave Pyongyang and make it to New York. And he’d brought the enriched uranium with him.

‘To America? The uranium is here?’ said the chancellor.

‘Yes,’ the intelligence officer confirmed. ‘It’s very much here.’

A few days earlier, Allan Karlsson had met President Trump, with Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs Margot Wallström, who was also Sweden’s representative on the UN Security Council.

‘Yes, I know who she is,’ said Angela Merkel. ‘A competent woman. Do we know what was said during the meeting?’

‘Not exactly. It seems President Trump stated that Wallström and Karlsson had not done anything wrong, and warned them not to do it again.’

‘Sounds like President Trump,’ said Angela Merkel. The chancellor had been around the block. She could sense in the air that there was more to come. ‘And?’ she said.

‘Well, after that meeting, Ambassador Breitner ran into Allan Karlsson outside UN headquarters. Admirably enough, the ambassador recognized a possibility for gaining intelligence and invited him and his friend Jonsson to dinner.’

The intelligence officer looked unhappy. But not as unhappy as the UN ambassador at his side.

‘And?’ said Angela Merkel again.

‘The ambassador promised to help Karlsson and his friend with a briefcase they wished to turn over to the Federal Republic. They said it contained important nuclear weapons-related information that Karlsson had originally intended to give President Trump, but he changed his mind after meeting the president in person.’

The chancellor felt a certain sense of solidarity with Karlsson. They seemed to have had similar experiences with the American president. ‘And now you’re going to hand the information to me so that I may consider sending it on to our analysts in Berlin.’

‘Well,’ said the intelligence officer, ‘the briefcase turned out to contain… the four kilos of enriched uranium. And a letter to you, Frau Chancellor. Written on three napkins.’

‘Three napkins?’ said the chancellor.

But what she was thinking was, Four kilos of enriched uranium? Here? At the German embassy in Washington?

By the time the intelligence meeting concluded, the chancellor had also learned that the previously intercepted code word ‘asparagus’ referred to actual asparagus, nothing more. And that Karlsson, by his own word, had heard Pyongyang was expecting a larger shipment of enriched uranium, five hundred kilos’ worth this time. The intelligence officer in Dar es Salaam had already been duly informed. Since the test shipment had made it all the way to Pyongyang from Africa, there was reason to believe the North Koreans would try the same route again.

Chancellor Merkel knew most things but she didn’t know whether UN Ambassador Breitner should be considered a national hero or one of the greatest idiots in the Federal Republic. She decided, for the time being, to view him as something in between.