947–48

Allan had most certainly experienced more comfortable nights than those he spent lying on his stomach in the back of a truck on the road to Tehran. It was cold, and there was no specially treated goats’ milk to warm him up. And that would have been difficult anyway because his hands were tied behind his back.

No wonder Allan felt pleased when the journey was over. It was late afternoon when the truck stopped outside the main entrance of a large brown building in the middle of the capital.

Two soldiers helped the stranger to his feet and brushed off the worst of the dirt. Then they loosened the ropes that had tied Allan’s hands and picked up their rifles to guard him.

If Allan had mastered Farsi, he would have been able to read where he had ended up on a little yellow sign by the entrance. But he couldn’t. And he couldn’t care less. More important to him was whether anyone was going to serve breakfast. Or lunch. Or preferably both.

But, of course, the soldiers knew exactly where they had brought the suspected communist. And when they pushed Allan through the doors, one of the soldiers said goodbye to Allan with a grin and a ‘good luck’ in English.

Allan thanked him for the good wishes even though he realised they were meant ironically, and then he thought that he probably needed to pay attention to his surroundings now.

The officer in the group that had arrested Allan formally handed his prisoner over to somebody of equivalent rank. When Allan was properly registered, he was moved to a holding cell down a nearby corridor.

The holding cell was pure Shangri-La compared with what Allan had been used to recently. Four beds in a row, double blankets on each bed, an electric light in the ceiling, a washbasin with running water in one corner and in the other an adult-size bucket with a lid. Allan also received a decent-sized bowl of porridge and a whole litre of water to satisfy his hunger and quench his thirst.

Three of the beds were unoccupied, but in the fourth lay a man on his back, with his hands clasped and his eyes closed. When Allan arrived, the man woke from his slumber and got up. He was tall and thin and had a white clerical collar, a contrast to his otherwise black clothing. Allan held out his hand to introduce himself and said that unfortunately he didn’t know the local language. Did the clergyman perhaps speak a word or two of English?

The man in black explained that he did, since he was born and bred in Oxford, and educated there too. He introduced himself as Kevin Ferguson, an Anglican priest who had been in Iran for twelve years searching for lost souls to recruit to the true faith. And where did Mr Karlsson stand?

Allan answered that in a purely physical sense he was lost, since he had no control of where he stood, but that didn’t mean he was spiritually lost. Allan had always reasoned about religion that if you couldn’t know for sure then there was no point in going around guessing.

Allan saw that the Reverend Ferguson was about to embark on a longer sermon, so he quickly added that the priest should be so kind as to respect Allan’s sincere wish to avoid becoming an Anglican, or for that matter anything else.

The Reverend Ferguson wasn’t a man who took no for an answer. Nevertheless, he hesitated just this once. Perhaps he shouldn’t be too eager to convert against his will the only person – besides God – who might be able to save him from his dire situation.

The Reverend Ferguson settled for a compromise. He made a half-hearted attempt to suggest that it wouldn’t hurt Mr Karlsson if the priest could at least shed some light upon the Trinity. That happened to be the first of the thirty-nine articles in the Anglican creed.

Allan answered that the priest couldn’t begin to appreciate just how uninterested Allan was in that trinity.

‘Of all the groupings here on Earth, I would think that the Trinity is the one I am least interested in,’ said Allan.

The Reverend Ferguson thought that was so stupid that he promised he would leave Karlsson in peace as far as religion was concerned, ‘even though God must have had some purpose in placing us in the same cell’.

Instead, he turned to the matter of his and Allan’s plight.

‘It doesn’t look good,’ said the Reverend Ferguson. ‘We might both of us be on our way to meeting the Creator, and if I hadn’t just promised to leave you in peace, I would add that it might be high time for you to embrace the true faith.’

Allan looked sternly at the cleric, but said nothing. The priest explained that they were now both in the holding cell of the department for domestic intelligence and security, in other words the secret police. Perhaps Mr Karlsson thought that sounded safe and good, but the truth was that the secret police cared only about the shah’s security, and their purpose was actually to keep the Iranian populace suitably terrified and respectful, and whenever possible to hunt down and destroy socialists, communists, Islamists and other disturbing elements.

‘Such as Anglican priests?’

Mr Ferguson answered that Anglican priests didn’t have anything to fear, because they had freedom of religion in Iran. But that this particular Anglican priest had probably gone too far.

‘The prognosis is not good for somebody who ends up in the clutches of the secret police, and for my part I am afraid that this is the last stop,’ said the Reverend Ferguson and suddenly looked very sad.

Allan immediately found himself feeling sorry for his cellmate, even though he was a cleric. He said consolingly that they would probably find a way to get out, but that there was a time for everything. First of all he wanted to know what the priest had done to find himself in this pickle.

The Reverend Kevin Ferguson sniffed and pulled himself together. It wasn’t that he was afraid to die, he explained, he just thought that he had so much more to do here on our Earth. The priest as always put his life in the hands of God, but if Mr Karlsson, while they were waiting for God to decide, could find a way out of this, then the priest was certain that God would not be offended.

Then the priest told his story. The Lord had spoken to him in a dream when the priest had just finished his studies. ‘Go out into the world to do missionary work,’ the Lord had said, but then he hadn’t said any more so the priest himself had to decide where to go.

An English friend and bishop had tipped him off about Iran – a country where the existing freedom of religion was grossly abused. For example, you could count the Anglicans in Iran on the fingers of only a few hands, but the place was seething with Shi’ites, Sunnis, Jews and people who adhered to pure mumbo-jumbo religions. To the extent that there were any Christians at all, they were Armenians or Assyrians.

Allan said that he hadn’t known that, but now he did, and he thanked the priest for the information.

The priest went on. Iran and Great Britain were on good terms and with the help of the Church’s highly placed contacts the priest had managed to get a lift to Tehran on an official British aeroplane.

This was more than ten years earlier, around 1935. Since then, he had worked his way through religion after religion, in a growing ring around the capital. At first he concentrated on the various religious ceremonies. He sneaked into mosques, synagogues and temples of every kind and waited for a suitable moment before he quite simply interrupted the ceremony and with the help of an interpreter preached the true faith.

Allan praised the priest for his courage but said he had some doubts about his mental abilities. Surely these visits had rarely ended well?

The Reverend Ferguson conceded that in fact they had not ended successfully on a single occasion. He had never been able to have his full say. He and the interpreter had been thrown out and usually both of them had been knocked about too. But none of this had prevented the priest from continuing his struggle. He knew that he was planting tiny Anglican seeds in the souls of all the people he met.

In the end, however, the reputation of the priest had spread so far and wide that it became difficult to find interpreters who would work with him.

So the priest took a break and put more effort into studying Farsi. While doing so, he worked out how to refine his tactics and one day he felt so comfortable in the language that he launched his new plan.

Instead of going to temples and services, he visited markets where he knew that the teachings he considered false had a lot of followers among the shoppers, and he would stand on a wooden box and preach.

This method had not resulted in as many beatings as during his first years, but the number of souls saved was still not at all what the Reverend Ferguson had hoped.

Allan asked by how many converts the Reverend Ferguson had fallen short of his target, and was told that it depended on how you looked at it. On the one hand, the priest had exactly one convert from every religion he had worked on, which amounted to eight in all. On the other hand, he had realised a few months ago that all eight could actually be spies from the secret police, sent out to keep track of the proselytising priest.

‘Between zero and eight genuine converts, then,’ said Allan.

‘Probably closer to zero than eight,’ answered the Reverend Ferguson.

‘In twelve years,’ said Allan.

The priest admitted that he had become discouraged when he realised that his already meagre results were actually even more meagre. And he also realised that he would never succeed in this country, because however much the Iranians might want to convert, they wouldn’t dare. The secret police were everywhere and if someone changed his religion a dossier would definitely be created with his name in their archives. And from a dossier in the archives to disappearing without trace was rarely a long step.

Allan said that, in addition, it might be the case that an Iranian or two – whatever the Reverend Ferguson might think – went around generally satisfied with their current religion, couldn’t he see that?

The priest answered that he had rarely heard such ignorant talk, but that he was prevented from providing a proper answer because he had promised Mr Karlsson he would eschew all Anglican preaching. Could Mr Karlsson listen to the rest of the priest’s story without interrupting more than necessary?

The Reverend Ferguson went on to describe how, with his newly acquired insights as to the manner in which the secret police had infiltrated his missionary work, he had started to think in new ways. He had started to think big.

So the priest shook off his eight possible spying disciples, and contacted the underground communist movement. He told them he was a British representative for the True Faith and he wanted to meet them to discuss the future.

It took time to get a meeting arranged, but he eventually found himself sitting with five gentlemen from leading communist circles in the province of Razavi Khorasan. He would have preferred to meet the Tehran communists because the Reverend Ferguson thought that they probably made the important decisions, but this meeting would do for starters.

Or not.

The Reverend Ferguson presented his big idea to the communists. In brief, Anglicanism would become the state religion in Iran the day the communists took over. If the communists went along with this, the Reverend Ferguson promised to accept the job of government minister of religion and ensure that right from the beginning there would be enough bibles for everyone. The churches could be built afterwards, but to start with, the synagogues and mosques – which would have been closed by decree – could be used. There was just one thing the Reverend Ferguson wanted to know: how long did the gentlemen think it would be before the communist revolution?

The communists had not reacted with the enthusiasm, or even curiosity, that the Reverend Ferguson had expected. Instead, he was told in no uncertain terms that there wouldn’t be any Anglicanism or for that matter any other sort of ism besides communism when the day came. In addition, he got a loud telling-off for having requested this meeting under false pretences. The communists had never experienced such a dreadful waste of time.

With a vote of 3–2 in favour, it was then decided that the Reverend Ferguson would be given a good beating before being put on the train back to Tehran, and with a unanimous vote it was decided that it would be best for the priest’s health if he didn’t come back.

Allan smiled and said that – with permission – he could in no way eliminate the possibility that the priest was completely mad. To bring about a religious agreement with the communists was, of course, quite hopeless. Didn’t the priest understand that?

The priest answered that heathens like Mr Karlsson would do well not to judge what was wise or unwise. But of course he had understood that there was little chance of success.

‘But just think, Mr Karlsson, if it had actually worked. Just think of being able to send a telegram to the Archbishop of Canterbury and report fifty million new Anglicans all at once.’

Allan admitted that the difference between madness and genius was subtle, and that he couldn’t with certainty say which it was in this case, but that he had his suspicions.

Be that as it may, it turned out that the shah’s cursed secret police were bugging the Razavikhorasan communists, and the Reverend Ferguson was picked up as soon as he got off the train in the capital, and taken in for questioning.

‘And I admitted everything and a bit more besides,’ said the Reverend Ferguson, ‘because my thin body is not created to withstand torture. A good beating is one thing, but torture is something else.’

With that immediate and exaggerated confession, the Reverend Ferguson had been transported to this holding cell, and he had been left in peace for two weeks because the head of the secret police, the vice prime minister, was on a business trip to London.

‘The vice prime minister?’ Allan wondered.

‘Yes, or the boss of the murderers,’ said the Reverend Ferguson.

It was said of the secret police that no organisation was more controlled from the top. Putting fear in the hearts of the population on a more routine basis, or killing communists, socialists or Islamists, that of course didn’t require the blessing of the boss. But as soon as something happened that was the slightest bit out of the ordinary, then it was he who decided. The shah had given him the title vice prime minister, but in effect he was a murderer, in the Reverend Ferguson’s opinion.

‘And according to the prison guards, you’d better forget the “vice” bit of his title when you address him, if things go so badly that you need to meet him, which they seem to be doing in both your case and mine.’

Perhaps the priest had spent more time with underground communists than he cared to admit, thought Allan, because he went on:

‘Ever since the end of the Second World War, the American CIA has been here and has built up the shah’s secret police.’

‘CIA?’ said Allan.

‘Yes, that’s what they are called now. They were the OSS before, but it’s the same dirty business. They’re the ones who have taught the Iranian police all the tricks and tortures. What can he be like, the man who allows the CIA to destroy the world in this way?’

‘You mean the American president?’

‘Harry S. Truman will burn in hell, believe you me,’ said the Reverend Ferguson.

‘You think so?’ said Allan.

The days passed. Allan had told his own life story to the Reverend Ferguson, without leaving anything out at all. And after this, the priest stopped talking to Allan because he realised what sort of relationship his cellmate had to the American president and – even worse – to the bombs over Japan.

Instead, the priest turned to God and prayed for advice. Was it the Lord who had sent Mr Karlsson to help him, or was it the Devil who lay behind it?

But God answered with silence. He did that sometimes, and the Reverend Ferguson always interpreted it to mean that he should think for himself. Admittedly, it didn’t always work out well when the priest thought for himself, but you couldn’t just give up.

After two days and two nights of deliberation, Mr Ferguson came to the conclusion that for the time being he should make his peace with the heathen in the next bed. And he informed Allan that he now intended to speak to him again.

Allan said that although it had been nice and quiet while the priest kept silent, it was probably preferable in the long run that when one man spoke, the other answered.

‘Besides, we’re going to try to get out of here, and it would perhaps be best if we can do so before the murder boss gets back from London. So we can’t just sit, grumpily, in our corners, can we?’

The Reverend Ferguson agreed. When the murder boss came back, they would probably face a short interrogation and then simply disappear. That was what the Reverend Ferguson had heard happened.

The holding cell was not in a real prison, with all the security and locks that went with that. On the contrary, the guards sometimes didn’t even bother to lock the door properly. But there were never fewer than four guards at the building’s entrance and exit, and they were unlikely to just stand and stare if Allan and the priest tried to slip out.

Would it be possible to create some sort of tumult or distraction? Allan wondered. And then sneak out in the midst of the general disarray?

Allan wanted peace to work, and he therefore assigned the priest the task of finding out from the guards how long they had. That is, exactly when would the murder boss be back?

The priest promised to ask as soon as he got an opportunity. Perhaps even right away, because there was a rattling sound at the door. The youngest and kindest of the guards stuck his head in and with a sympathetic look said:

‘The prime minister is back from England and it’s time for questioning. Which of you wants to go first?’

The head of the department of domestic intelligence and security was in a dreadful mood.

He had just been to London where he had been told off by the British. He, the prime minister (well as good as), head of a government department, one of the most important elements of Iranian society, had been told off by the British!

The shah did nothing but make sure that the arrogant Englishmen were kept happy. The oil was in the hands of the British, and he himself made sure they weeded out everybody and anybody who tried to bring about change in the country. And that was no easy matter, because who was really satisfied with the shah? Not the Islamists, not the communists and definitely not the local oil workers who literally worked themselves to death for the equivalent of one British pound a week.

And for this he had now been told off, instead of being praised!

The secret police chief knew he had made a mistake when a while ago he had been a little heavy-handed with a provocateur of unknown origin. The provocateur had demanded to be set free because the only thing he was guilty of was insisting that the line in the butcher’s shop should be for everyone, not just employees in the state’s secret police.

When the provocateur had put forward his case, he folded his arms and refused to answer any more questions. The police chief didn’t like the look of the provocateur (it was indeed provocative), so he made use of a couple of the CIA torture methods (the police chief admired the inventiveness of the Americans). It was only at that point that it transpired that the provocateur was an assistant secretary in the British Embassy and that, of course, was most unfortunate.

The solution was first to tidy up the assistant as best they could, then let him go, but only so that he could immediately be run over by a truck which then disappeared from the scene. That is how you avoid diplomatic crises, the police chief reasoned, pleased with himself.

But the British Embassy picked up what was left of the assistant secretary, and sent all the pieces to London where they went through them with a magnifying glass. After which the police chief was summoned and asked to explain how the assistant secretary suddenly turned up on a street outside the head office of the secret police and was immediately so drastically run over that marks of the torture he had previously been subjected to were barely visible.

The police chief had of course firmly denied all knowledge of the affair, that was how the diplomatic game worked, but this assistant secretary happened to be the son of some lord or other who in turn was a good friend of the recent prime minister, Winston Churchill, and now the British were going to take a firm stand.

As a result of all this, the department for domestic intelligence and security had now been relieved of responsibility for the visit that same Winston Churchill was to make to Tehran in just a couple of weeks. Instead, the amateurs in the shah’s own bodyguard would take care of the visit, which was of course far beyond their competence. This was a major loss of prestige for the police chief. And it estranged him from the shah in a way that did not feel good.

To dispel his bitter thoughts, the police chief had summoned the first of the two enemies of the state that were said to be waiting in the holding cell. He anticipated a short interrogation, a quick and discreet execution, and a traditional cremation of the corpse. Then lunch and in the afternoon he would probably have time for the other enemy of the state, too.

Allan Karlsson had volunteered to be first. The police chief met him at the door of his office, shook hands, asked Mr Karlsson to have a seat and offered him a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

Though he had never met a murder boss before, Allan had assumed that they would be more unpleasant of manner than this murder boss seemed to be. And then he thanked him for the coffee and asked if it would be OK with Mr Prime Minister if he declined the cigarette.

The police chief always chose to start his interrogations in a civilized manner. Just because you were soon going to kill someone, you didn’t have to behave like a yokel. Besides, it amused the police chief to see how a flutter of hope rose in the eyes of his victim. People in general were so naive.

This particular victim didn’t look so terrified, not yet. And he had addressed the police chief in the manner in which he liked to be addressed—an interesting and positive beginning.

During the interrogation, Allan – lacking a well thought-out survival strategy – provided selected episodes from the later part of his life story: namely that he was an expert on explosives who had been sent by President Harry S. Truman on an impossible mission to China to combat the communists, and he had subsequently started his long walk home to Sweden and that he now regretted that Iran had lain in the way of that walk, and that he had been obliged to enter the country without the requisite visa, but that he now promised to leave the country immediately if Mr Prime Minister would just let him do so.

The police chief asked him a lot of supplementary questions, not least why Allan Karlsson was in the company of Iranian communists when he was arrested. Allan answered truthfully that he and the communists had met by chance and agreed to help each other across the Himalayas. Allan added that if Mr Prime Minister planned a similar walk, then he shouldn’t be too fussy about whose help he accepted because those mountains were dreadfully high when they were in the mood for it.

The police chief didn’t have any plans to cross the Himalayas on foot, nor did he intend to set Allan free. But perhaps he could make some use of this explosives expert with his international experience before letting him disappear for good? With a voice that perhaps sounded a little too keen, the police chief asked Mr Karlsson what experience he had with secretly killing people who were famous and well-guarded.

Allan had never done that sort of thing, consciously sitting and planning to kill a person as if you were blowing up a bridge. And he had no wish to do so either. But now he had to think ahead. Could this chain-smoking murder boss have something special in mind?

Allan searched his memory and in his haste found nothing better than:

‘Glenn Miller.’

‘Glenn Miller?’ the police chief repeated.

Allan could remember from his time at Los Alamos a couple of years earlier how shocked everyone had been on hearing the news that the young jazz musician Glenn Miller was missing after his US Army Air Forces plane had disappeared off the coast of England.

‘Exactly,’ Allan confirmed in a hush-hush tone. ‘It was supposed to look like an accident and I succeeded in that. I made sure both engines burned up, and he crashed somewhere in the middle of the English Channel. Nobody has seen him since. A fitting fate for a defector to the Nazis, if you ask me, Mr Minister.’

‘Was Glenn Miller a Nazi?’ asked the astonished police chief.

Allan nodded in confirmation (and silently apologized to all of Glenn Miller’s surviving family). The police chief, for his part, tried to accustom himself to the news that his great jazz hero had been running errands for Hitler.

Now Allan thought it was perhaps best to take charge of the conversation before the murder boss asked a lot of other questions about what happened to Glenn Miller.

‘If Mr Prime Minister so wishes, I am prepared to get rid of anybody, with maximum discretion of course, in exchange for us then parting as friends.’

The chief of police was still shaken after the sad unmasking of the man behind ‘Moonlight Serenade’ but that didn’t mean that he was anyone’s fool. He certainly wasn’t planning to negotiate over Allan Karlsson’s future.

‘If I want you to get rid of somebody, you will do as you are told. And it is just possible that I will consider letting you live,’ said the police chief as he leaned across the table to stub out his cigarette in Allan’s half-full coffee cup.

‘Yes, that is what I meant, of course,’ said Allan, ‘although I expressed myself a little vaguely.’

This particular morning’s interrogation had turned out differently from what the police chief was used to. Instead of getting rid of the enemy of the state, he had adjourned the meeting to accustom himself to the new situation in peace and quiet. After lunch, the police chief and Allan Karlsson met again and plans were laid.

The intention was to kill Winston Churchill while he was being protected by the shah’s own bodyguard. But it must happen in such a way that nobody could find any possible link to the department for domestic intelligence and security, let alone to its boss. Since it could safely be assumed that the British would investigate the event with extreme attention to detail, there must be no slip-ups. If the project succeeded, the consequences in every possible way would be to the police chief’s advantage.

First and foremost it would shut those arrogant British up, the British who had taken away the police chief’s responsibility for the security arrangements during the visit. And furthermore, the police chief would most certainly be entrusted with sorting out the bodyguard, after its failure. And when the smoke had cleared, the police chief’s standing would be greatly strengthened, instead of what it was now – weakened.

The police chief and Allan worked out a plan as if they were best friends, although the police chief did stub out his cigarette in Allan’s coffee every time he felt the atmosphere became too intimate.

The police chief told Allan that Iran’s only bulletproof motor car was in the department’s garage in the cellar below them. It was a specially built DeSoto Suburban. It was wine-red and very stylish, the police chief said. There was the greatest likelihood that the shah’s bodyguard would soon ask for the car, to transport Churchill from the airport to the shah’s palace.

Allan said that a well-proportioned explosive charge on the car’s chassis might be the solution to the problem. But bearing in mind Mr Prime Minister’s need not to leave any clues that could lead back to him, Allan proposed two special measures.

One was that the explosive charge should consist of exactly the same ingredients that Mao Tse-tung’s communists used in China. This was something Allan knew a lot about, and he was certain that he could make it all look like a communist attack.

The other measure was that the charge in question should be hidden in the front part of the DeSoto’s chassis, but that it should not detonate immediately but be designed to drop from the car and explode a few tenths of a second later when it hit the ground.

During that time the car would have travelled a short distance so that the position where Winston Churchill would be sitting and smoking his cigar would now be directly above the explosion, which would rip a hole in the floor of the car and send Churchill to eternity. It would also leave a large crater in the ground.

‘In that way we’ll get people to think that the explosive charge was buried in the street instead of somebody having hidden it in the car. That little deception would surely suit Mr Prime Minister perfectly?’

The police chief giggled with joy and anticipation, and flicked a lighted cigarette into Allan’s newly poured coffee. Allan said that Mr Prime Minister could do as he wished with his cigarettes and with Allan’s coffee, but that if he really wasn’t satisfied with the ashtray he had in front of him, and if Mr Prime Minister would consider giving Allan a short period of leave, then he would go out and buy a nice new ashtray for the Prime Minister.

The police chief ignored Allan’s talk about ashtrays, but immediately approved Allan’s explosive plan and asked for a complete list of what he needed to prepare the car in the shortest possible time.

Allan listed the names of the nine ingredients that he needed to make up the formula. In addition, he included a tenth – nitro-glycerine – which he thought might be useful, and an eleventh – a bottle of ink.

Furthermore, Allan asked to borrow one of Mr Prime Minister’s most trusted colleagues as an assistant and purchasing manager, and to have his cellmate, the Reverend Ferguson, as his interpreter.

The police chief muttered that what he would like most of all was to do away with the priest straight away, because he didn’t like clerics, but now there wouldn’t be time. Yet again he stubbed out his cigarette in Allan’s coffee, to indicate that the meeting was at an end and to remind Allan who was boss.

The days passed, and everything went according to plan. The boss of the bodyguard did indeed get in touch and announce that he would pick up the DeSoto the following Wednesday. The police chief boiled with anger. It had been an announcement rather than a request. But in fact, it fitted perfectly with Allan’s plan. What if the bodyguard hadn’t contacted the department about the car? And in any case, the boss of the bodyguard would soon get his comeuppance.

Allan now knew how much time he had to prepare the charge. Unfortunately, the Reverend Ferguson had also eventually fathomed what was going on. Not only was he going to be an accomplice in the murder of former Prime Minister Churchill, but he also had good reason to believe that his own life would end shortly afterwards. To stand before the Lord as a murderer was not something the Reverend Ferguson looked forward to.

But Allan calmed the vicar, promising that he had a plan to solve both those problems. First, there was a good chance that Allan and the priest would be able to abscond, and second, it need not necessarily happen at the cost of Mr Churchill’s life.

But the whole scheme required the priest to do what Allan said when the right moment arrived, and the priest promised to do so. Allan was his only hope of survival, since God still wasn’t answering his prayers. And it had been like that for almost a month now. Could God possibly be angry with the priest for his attempt to ally himself with the communists?

Wednesday arrived. The DeSoto was rigged and ready. The explosive charge on the car’s chassis happened to be rather larger than the task demanded, and yet it was still completely hidden, if anyone were to look to see if there was anything strange there.

Allan showed the police chief how the car had been rigged and how the remote control worked, and explained in detail what the final result would be when it went off. The police chief smiled and looked happy. And stubbed out that day’s eighteenth cigarette in Allan’s coffee.

Allan then pulled out a new cup, one that he had kept hidden behind the toolbox, and placed that strategically on a table next to the stairs leading to the corridor, the holding cell and the entrance. Without making a fuss of it, Allan then took the priest by the arm and left the garage, while the police chief walked round and round the DeSoto, puffing on the day’s nineteenth cigarette, delighting in the thought of what would soon happen.

The priest understood from Allan’s firm grasp that this was for real. Time to obey Mr Karlsson to the letter.

They walked past the holding cell and continued towards reception. Once there, Allan didn’t bother to stop by the armed guards, but continued right past them, still keeping a firm hold on the Reverend Ferguson.

The guards had become accustomed to Karlsson and the priest and they had not thought there was any risk of an escape attempt, so it was with some surprise that the officer in charge called out:

‘Halt! Where do you think you are going?’

Allan stopped with the priest on the very threshold to freedom and looked very surprised.

‘We are free to go. Hasn’t Mr Prime Minister informed you?’

Mr Ferguson was terrified, but forced a little oxygen into his nostrils so as not to faint.

‘Stay exactly where you are,’ said the officer in charge, in an authoritative tone. ‘You are not going anywhere until I have Mr Prime Minister’s confirmation.’

The three guards were ordered to keep a careful eye on the priest and Mr Karlsson, while the officer in charge went down the corridor to the garage to ask for confirmation. Allan smiled encouragingly at the priest and said that soon everything would be sorted out – unless the opposite happened and it all blew up.

Since firstly the police chief had not given Allan and the priest permission to leave, and, secondly, did not have any plans to do so, he reacted forcefully to the officer’s query.

‘What? They’re standing by the entrance and brazenly lying? They are bloody well going to pay for that…’

The police chief rarely swore. He had always been careful to keep a certain dignity about him. But now he was furious. And as was his custom, he stubbed his cigarette into that damned Swede’s coffee cup, before heading for the stairs.

Or rather, that was his intention, but he didn’t get any further than the coffee cup. Because this time it didn’t contain coffee, but pure nitroglycerine mixed with black ink. There was a huge explosion and the vice prime minister and the officer in charge of the guards were ripped to bits. A white cloud billowed out of the garage and made its way along the corridor at the other end of which Allan, the priest and the three guards stood.

‘Time to go,’ Allan said to the priest. And off they went.

All three guards were sufficiently alert to think that they really ought to stop Karlsson and the priest from leaving, but only a few tenths of a second later – and as a logical consequence of the garage now being a sea of fire – the charge under the DeSoto, the one intended for Winston Churchill, also detonated. And in so doing, it proved to Allan that it would have amply served its intended purpose. The entire building immediately leaned over, and the ground floor was in flames when Allan changed his order to the priest:

‘Let’s run out of here, instead.’

Two of the three guards had been blown into a wall by the pressure wave and had caught fire. The third found it impossible to gather his thoughts sufficiently to attend to his prisoners. For a few seconds, he wondered what had happened, but then he ran away to avoid ending up like his comrades. Allan and the priest had gone off in one direction. The only remaining guard now ran off in the other.

After Allan in his own special way had arranged for himself and the priest to be somewhere other than the headquarters of the secret police, it was now the vicar’s turn to be useful. He knew where most of the diplomatic missions were located and he guided Allan all the way to the Swedish Embassy. Once there, Allan gave him a warm hug to thank him for everything.

Allan asked what the priest himself was going to do. Where was the British Embassy?

It wasn’t far away, said the vicar, but why would he need to go there? They were all Anglicans already and didn’t need converting. No, the priest had thought up a new strategy. If there was something the last hour or so had taught him, it was that everything seemed to start and finish at the department for domestic intelligence and security. So it was a matter of changing that organisation from the inside. Once all the people working for the secret police, and all those who helped them, were Anglicans – well, the rest would be easy as pie!

Allan said that he knew of a good asylum in Sweden if in the future the priest should happen to come to some sort of self-understanding. The priest answered that he didn’t want to appear ungrateful, not in any way. But he had once and for all found his calling, and now it was time for him to say goodbye. The priest was going to start with the surviving guard, the one who ran off in the other direction. He was basically a nice, easy-going boy, and he could probably be led down the path of the true faith.

‘Farewell!’ said the priest solemnly and walked off.

‘Bye for now,’ said Allan.

He watched the priest vanish into the distance, and thought that the world was crazy enough that the priest might survive the course he was now taking.

But Allan was wrong. The priest found the guard wandering around in a daze in the Park-e Shahr in the middle of Teheran, with burns on his arms and an automatic with the safety catch off in his hands.

‘Well, there you are, my son,’ said the priest and walked up to embrace him.

‘You!’ shouted the guard, ‘It’s you!’

And then he shot the priest twenty-two times in the chest. It would have been more but he ran out of bullets.

Allan was allowed into the Swedish Embassy because of his regional Swedish accent. But then things got complicated, because he didn’t have any documentation that proved who he was. So the embassy could not give him a passport, nor could they help him back to Sweden. Besides, said Third Secretary Bergqvist, Sweden had just introduced special personal identity numbers and if it was the case that Karlsson had been out of the country for many years, then there would be no Mr Allan Karlsson in the Swedish system back home.

To that, Allan answered that regardless of whether all Swedes’ names had now become numbers instead, he was and would remain Allan Karlsson from the village of Yxhult outside Flen and now he wanted Mr Third Secretary to be so kind as to arrange papers for him.

Third Secretary Bergqvist was for the time being the most senior official at the embassy. He was the only one who hadn’t been able to attend the diplomatic conference in Stockholm. It was just his luck that everything suddenly happened at once. It wasn’t enough that some parts of the centre of Tehran had been on fire for the last hour: now on top of that an unknown person turns up claiming to be Swedish. There were of course hints that the man was telling the truth, but this was a situation where it was important to follow the rules so as not to jeopardize his future career. So Third Secretary Bergqvist repeated his statement that no passport would be forthcoming unless Mr Karlsson could be properly identified.

Allan said that he found Third Secretary Bergqvist to be exceptionally stubborn, but that they could perhaps solve everything if only the third secretary had a telephone available.

The third secretary did. But it was expensive to make long-distance phone calls. Whom did Mr Karlsson intend to phone?

Allan was beginning to tire of the difficult third secretary so he didn’t answer, but instead asked:

‘Is Per Albin still the Swedish prime minister?’

‘No,’ said the astounded third secretary. ‘Tage Erlander is prime minister. Prime Minister Hansson died last autumn. But why…’

‘Could you please be quiet for a moment so we can clear this up?’

Allan phoned the White House in Washington, and was put through to the president’s senior secretary. She remembered Mr Karlsson very well and she had also heard so many good things about him from the president and if Mr Karlsson really considered it important then she would see if they could wake the president. It was only eight in the morning in Washington, and President Truman was not an early riser.

A short while later the newly awoken President Truman came to the phone and he and Allan had a hearty chat for several minutes, catching up with each other’s news before Allan finally mentioned his errand. Could Harry possibly do him a favour and phone the new Swedish Prime Minister Erlander and vouch for who Allan was, so that Erlander in turn could phone Third Secretary Bergqvist at the Swedish Embassy in Tehran and inform him that Allan should immediately be issued a passport.

Harry Truman would of course do this for him, but first please spell the third secretary’s name so that he got it right.

‘President Truman wants to know how you spell your name,’ Allan said to Third Secretary Bergqvist. ‘It would be easier if you told him directly.’

After Third Secretary Bergqvist, almost in a trance, spelled out his name letter by letter for the president of the United States, he replaced the receiver and didn’t say anything for eight minutes. Which was exactly how long it took before Prime Minister Erlander phoned the embassy and ordered Third Secretary Bergqvist to 1) immediately issue a passport with diplomatic status to Allan Karlsson, and 2) without delay arrange to get Mr Karlsson back to Sweden.

‘But he hasn’t got a personal identity number,’ Third Secretary Bergqvist attempted.

‘I suggest that you, Third Secretary, solve that problem,’ said Prime Minister Erlander. ‘Unless you wish to become the fourth or fifth secretary instead…’

‘There is no such thing as a fourth or fifth secretary,’ the third secretary attempted.

‘And what conclusions do you draw from that?’

War hero Winston Churchill had somewhat unexpectedly lost the British elections in 1945, the British people’s gratitude having run out.

But Churchill planned his revenge and marked time by travelling the world. The former prime minister suspected that the Labour incompetent who now governed Great Britain would introduce a planned economy at the same time as handing over the Empire to people who couldn’t administer it.

Take British India for example, which was now on its way to falling to bits. Hindus and Muslims could not get along, and in the middle sat that damned Mahatma Gandhi with his legs crossed, having stopped eating because he was dissatisfied with something. What sort of war strategy was that? How far would they have got with such a strategy against the Nazi bombing raids over England?

It was not quite as bad in British East Africa, not yet, but it was only a matter of time before the Africans also wanted to become their own masters.

Churchill understood that not everything could remain as it was, but nevertheless the Empire needed a leader who could announce what was needed, and do so with authority. They did not need a sneaky socialist like Clement Attlee.

As regards India, the battle was lost, Churchill knew that. It had been developing that way for many years, and during the war it had been necessary to send signals about future independence to the Indians so that in the midst of the struggle for survival the British would not also have to deal with a civil war.

But in many other places there was still plenty of time to stop the process. Churchill’s plan for the autumn was to travel to Kenya and evaluate the situation. But first he would drop in on Tehran and drink tea with the shah.

He had the misfortune to land amidst chaos. The day before, something had exploded at the department for domestic intelligence and security. The entire building had collapsed and burned up. The idiot of a police chief had evidently died in the explosion too, the same man who had previously been clumsy enough to use his harsh methods on innocent British Embassy staff.

The police chief was no great loss, but apparently the shah’s only bulletproof car had been consumed by the flames too, and this led to a much shorter meeting between the shah and Churchill than had first been envisaged, and for reasons of security it took place at the airport.

Nevertheless, it was a good thing that the visit came off. According to the shah the situation was under control. The explosion at the headquarters of the secret police was something of a bother, and so far they couldn’t say anything about the cause. But the shah could live with the fact that the police chief had died in the explosion. The man was beginning to lose his touch.

So they had a stable political situation. They were about to appoint a new chief for the secret police. And they were seeing record results for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Oil provided fantastic wealth to both England and Iran. Mainly England, if the truth be told, but that was only fair because Iran’s sole contribution to the project was cheap labour – and of course the oil itself.

‘Mainly peace and prosperity in Iran then,’ Winston Churchill said to the Swedish military attaché who had been assigned a place in the plane on the way back to London.

‘Glad to hear that you are satisfied, Mr Churchill,’ Allan answered, adding that he thought Churchill was looking well.

Allan finally landed at Stockholm’s Bromma airport, after a stopover in London, and stood on Swedish soil for the first time in eleven years. It was late in December 1947, and the weather was the usual for that time of year.

In the arrivals hall, a young man was waiting for Allan. He said he was Prime Minister Erlander’s assistant and that the PM wished to meet Allan as soon as possible, if that could be arranged.

Allan thought it could, and he willingly followed the assistant, who proudly invited Allan to sit in the brand new government car, a black, shiny Volvo PV 444.

‘Have you ever seen anything so swanky, Mr Karlsson?’ asked the assistant, who was interested in cars. ‘Forty-four horsepower!’

‘I saw a really nice wine-red DeSoto last week,’ Allan answered. ‘But your car is in better condition.’

The drive took Allan to the centre of Stockholm and he looked around him with interest. To his shame, he had never been in the capital before. It was a beautiful city indeed, with water and bridges everywhere, and none of them had been blown up.

The prime minister welcomed Allan with a ‘Mr Karlsson! I have heard so much about you!’ Upon which he pushed the assistant out of the room and closed the door.

Allan didn’t say so, but he realised that he himself had heard nothing whatsoever about Tage Erlander. Allan didn’t even know if the prime minister was Left or Right. He must certainly be one of them, because if there was one thing life had taught Allan, it was that people insisted on being one or the other.

Anyway, the prime minister could be whichever he liked. Now it was a question of hearing what he had to say.

The prime minister had, it transpired, called President Truman back and had a longer conversation about Allan. So now he knew all about…

But then the prime minister stopped talking. He had been in the job less than a year and there was a lot left to learn. He did, however, already know one thing; in certain situations it was best not to know or at least best not to leave any way of proving that you knew what you knew.

So the prime minister never finished his sentence. What President Truman had told him about Allan Karlsson would be forever a secret between them. Instead the prime minister came straight to the point:

‘I understand that you don’t have anything to come back to here in Sweden, so I have arranged a cash payment for services rendered to the nation… in a manner of speaking… Here are ten thousand crowns for you.’

And the prime minister handed over a thick envelope full of banknotes and asked Allan to sign a receipt. Everything had to be by the book.

‘Thank you very much, Mr Prime Minister. It occurs to me that with this fine and generous contribution I will be able to afford new clothes and clean sheets at a hotel tonight. Perhaps I’ll even be able to brush my teeth for the first time since August 1945…’

The prime minister interrupted Allan just as he was about to describe the condition of his underpants, and informed him that the money was of course without any conditions, but that since some activities connected to nuclear fission were being carried out in Sweden at this time, the prime minister would like Mr Karlsson to have a look.

The truth was that Prime Minister Erlander had inherited a number of important issues when his predecessor’s heart had stopped the previous autumn, and he had no idea what to do about them. For example: what stance should Sweden take with regard to something called an atom bomb. The commander-in-chief had been telling him about how the country must defend itself against communism, since they only had little Finland between Sweden and Stalin.

There were two sides to the question. On the one hand, the commander-in-chief happened to have married into a rich upper class family and it was generally known that he sometimes drank a bit of the hard stuff with the old Swedish King. But Social Democrat Erlander couldn’t bear the idea that Gustav V might imagine that he could influence Swedish defence policy.

On the other hand, Erlander could not exclude the possibility that the C-in-C might be right. You couldn’t trust Stalin and the communists, and if they should get it into their heads to widen their sphere of interest westwards then Sweden was unpleasantly close.

Sweden’s military research department had just moved its few nuclear energy specialists to the newly created Atomic Energy PLC. Now these experts were trying to figure out exactly what had happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In addition, their mission in more general terms was to ‘analyse the nuclear future from a Swedish perspective’. It was never spelled out, but Prime Minister Erlander had understood that the vaguely formulated task – had it been put in plain language – would have read:

How the hell do we build our own atom bomb, if necessary?

And now the answer was sitting right across from the prime minister. Tage Erlander knew that, but above all he knew that he didn’t want anybody else to know he knew. Politics was about watching where you put your feet.

So the previous day, Prime Minister Erlander had contacted the head of research at Atomic Energy PLC, Dr Sigvard Eklund, and asked him to invite Allan Karlsson for a job interview at which he could thoroughly question him as to whether he could be of use in Atomic Energy PLC’s activities – assuming that Mr Karlsson was interested.

Dr Eklund was not at all pleased with the prime minister involving himself in the atom project. He even suspected that Allan Karlsson might be a Social Democratic spy. But he promised to interview Karlsson, even though, oddly, the prime minister would not say anything about the man’s qualifications. Erlander had just emphasized the word ‘thoroughly’ when he said that Dr Eklund ought to thoroughly question Mr Karlsson about his background.

Allan, for his part, said that he had nothing against meeting Dr Eklund or any other doctor, if that would please the prime minister.

Ten thousand crowns was an almost excessive amount of money, Allan thought, and checked in at the most expensive hotel he could find.

The receptionist at the Grand Hotel had his doubts about the dirty and badly dressed man, until Allan showed proof of his identity with a Swedish diplomatic passport.

‘Of course we have a room for you, Mr Military Attaché, sir,’ the receptionist announced. ‘Would you like to pay cash or should we send the bill to the Foreign Ministry?’

‘Cash would be fine,’ said Allan. Did he want payment in advance?

‘Oh, no, Mr Attaché, sir. Of course not!’ The receptionist bowed.

If the receptionist had been able to see into the future, he would most certainly have answered differently.

The next day, Dr Eklund welcomed a newly showered and more-or-less well dressed Allan Karlsson to his Stockholm office. The doctor offered him coffee and a cigarette, just as the murder boss in Tehran used to do. (Eklund, however, stubbed his cigarettes out in his own ashtray.)

Dr Eklund was unhappy with the way the prime minister had interfered with his recruiting process. And Allan, for his part, felt the negative vibe in the room and for a moment was reminded of the first time he met Soong May-ling. People could behave how they liked, but Allan considered that in general it was quite unnecessary to be grumpy if you had the chance not to.

The meeting between the two men was short:

‘The prime minister has asked me to question you thoroughly, Mr Karlsson, to ascertain whether you would be suited to work in our organisation. And that is what I shall do, with your permission, of course.’

Yes, that’s fine, Allan thought. It was quite in order for the Mr Doctor to want to know more about Allan and thoroughness was a virtue, so Mr Doctor should simply ask away.

‘Well, then,’ said Dr Eklund. ‘If we can begin with your studies…?’

‘Not much to boast of,’ said Allan. ‘Only three years.’

‘Three years!?’ exclaimed Dr Eklund. ‘With only three years of academic studies, Mr Karlsson, you can hardly be a physicist, mathematician or a chemist?’

‘No, three years altogether. I left school before my tenth birthday.’

Dr Eklund made an effort to retain his composure. So the man didn’t have any education! Could he even read and write?

‘Do you, Mr Karlsson, have any professional experience that might be seen as relevant for the work that you might assume we carry out here at Atomic Energy PLC?’

Well, yes, in a manner of speaking, Allan did. He had worked for a while in the USA, at Los Alamos in New Mexico.

Now Dr Eklund’s face lit up. Erlander might have had his reasons after all. What had been achieved at Los Alamos was general knowledge. What had Mr Karlsson worked on there?

‘I served coffee,’ Allan answered.

‘Coffee?’ Dr Eklund’s face darkened again.

‘Yes, and on occasion tea too. I was a general assistant and waiter.’

‘Were you ever involved in any decisions at all that were connected to nuclear fission?’

‘No,’ Allan answered, ‘the closest I came was probably that time I happened to say something at a meeting when I was really meant to be serving coffee.’

‘So Mr Karlsson happened to say something at a meeting where he was in fact a waiter… and then what happened?’

‘Well, we were interrupted… and then I was asked to leave the room.’

Dr Eklund was utterly dumbfounded. Did the prime minister think that a waiter who had dropped out of school before he was ten years old could be put to use to build atom bombs for Sweden?

Dr Eklund thought to himself that it would be a sensation if this beginner of a prime minister would even last the year out, then he said to Allan that if Mr Karlsson had nothing to add then their meeting could end now. Dr Eklund did not think that at present there was any opening for Mr Karlsson. It was true that the assistant who made the coffee for the academics at Atomic Energy PLC had never been to Los Alamos, but Dr Eklund thought that she nevertheless managed to do a good job. Besides, Greta even found time to clean the offices and that must be seen as a plus.

Allan sat there in silence for a moment, and wondered whether he ought to point out to the Doctor that, unlike all of Dr Eklund’s academics, and probably Greta too, he actually knew how to build an atom bomb.

But then Allan decided that Dr Eklund didn’t deserve his assistance if he hadn’t the sense to ask the question. Besides, Greta’s coffee tasted like dishwater.

Allan didn’t get a job at Atomic Energy PLC, his qualifications being seen as woefully inadequate. But he felt a quiet satisfaction as he sat on a park bench outside the Grand Hotel, with a nice view of the Royal Palace across the water. And how could he feel otherwise? He still had most of the money that the prime minister had been so kind as to give him. He had been staying in a fancy hotel for a while now. He ate in a restaurant every evening, and on this particular early January day he sat with the sun in his face and felt how it warmed his body and soul.

Of course, it was a bit cold for his bottom, and so it was a little surprising when a man sat down right next to Allan.

Allan greeted him with a polite ‘Good afternoon’ in Swedish.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Karlsson,’ the man answered in English.