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

Russia

Gennady Aksakov grew up in 1950s Leningrad. His father taught philosophy; his mother worked at a bank. His loving parents doted on their only child. On his tenth birthday, Gena received a hockey stick and a new pair of ice skates, but ice hockey wasn’t for him. It felt too collective. The same went for football.

Instead he became enamoured of the combat sport of sambo, self-defence without weapons. It was man to man, with no one but yourself to depend on. It was a much better match for Gena’s temperament. What’s more, he met Volodya at the gym. They were the same age, an even match on the mats, they laughed at the same things and had a similar outlook on life. In short, they became best friends and still were, fifty-five years later.

Gena came and went as he pleased at Volodya’s workplace. He was the only one who was spared the extensive security routine at every entrance. The fact was, he didn’t even knock before stepping into his friend’s private office. Such as on this day.

‘Hi, Volodya,’ he said. ‘I just spoke with our friend from Chabarovsk. An ambitious young man, I must say. Who has, unfortunately, begun to sound a lot like the little big man in Pyongyang.’

‘How so?’ asked President Putin.

‘He wants that centrifuge. He says he needs it to make the Americans and Chinese start gasping in chorus.’

Putin smiled at the picture his friend had painted. A gasping Chinese and an equally gasping American, side by side. Lovely.

The ‘friend from Chabarovsk’ was the new director of the plutonium factory north of the North Korean capital. It so happened, of course, that the man formerly responsible for the operation had been put to death after failing at his task, and had been replaced by the man who, to those around him, had never been called anything but ‘Mr Engineer’. After the engineer in question had hanged himself from an extension cord in the cold storage room of the laboratory, the position had stood vacant for a few weeks before Kim Jong-un managed to get Putin in Moscow to have mercy on the Koreans and their situation. At least, that was how the Supreme Leader wanted to see it, that the Russian apostates of the True Way still had a little bit of Communist spirit left.

The truth was that Putin and his secret right-hand man, Gennady Aksakov, had no other agenda than to destabilize certain parts of the world, with a view to indirectly strengthening Russia. Then, as now, Volodya and Gena had not been about to send any plutonium centrifuge to the nut in Pyongyang. Instead they offered a highly qualified Siberian engineer. From Chabarovsk, not too far from the border between North Korea and Russia.

The man from Chabarovsk had a rough start, but soon turned out to be the asset the Russian president knew he was. Just a few weeks after stepping in, he had found success in his first underground detonation. This, of course, provoked an unholy fuss from the hypocrites in the rest of the world, all according to plan. Part of Putin’s agreement with the Supreme Leader was that Putin himself, and Russia, would sound as upset as everyone else.

The new guy’s loyalties lay with Moscow above all, and the uranium used was Russian. The man from Chabarovsk regularly reported to Gennady Aksakov. Thus Volodya and Gena knew everything worth knowing about the hundred-and-one-year-old Swede who’d had a cameo in the laboratory and made a mess of things. Kim Jong-un had nagged President Putin nearly to death on the topic of how the Russians, with their global network of agents, ought to track down Karlsson and slit his throat, but Putin was secretly amused by the old man. Imagine being more than a hundred years old, coming to Pyongyang and getting the little big man all worked up like that. Even if the old man hadn’t vanished, the president would have let him be. The problem seemed likely to solve itself within the not-too-distant future.

In any case, the news of the day was that the man from Chabarovsk had joined Kim Jong-un in whining for a plutonium centrifuge. Volodya could see Gena’s opinion written on his face.

‘Hmm,’ said the president. ‘Send the damn thing over, then. But we won’t go too far, will we, Gena?’