The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden. Jonas Jonasson

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СКАЧАТЬ to detonate one atomic bomb of approximately three megatons within the next three months. This will take place in early 1978 in the Kalahari Desert, more specifically, at these exact coordinates: 26°44'26"S, 22°11'32"E. Afterwards, the plan is for South Africa to equip itself with five more of the same type, to use as it sees fit.

      Sincerely,

      A Friend

      Wearing rubber gloves, Nombeko closed the envelope, addressed it and added ‘Death to America!’ in one corner. Then she put it all in another envelope that was expedited the very next day to a professor in Johannesburg who had security clearance and a Chinese-sounding name.

      * * *

      The White House in Washington was constructed by black slaves imported from Nombeko’s Africa. It was a majestic building from the start, and it was even more impressive 177 years later. The building contained 132 rooms, 35 bathrooms, 6 levels, a bowling alley and a cinema. And an awful lot of staff, who between them received more than thirty-three thousand pieces of post per month.

      Each one was X-rayed, subjected to the sensitive noses of specially trained dogs, and visually inspected before they went to each individual recipient.

      Nombeko’s letter made it through both X-ray and dogs, but when a sleepy yet observant inspector saw ‘Death to America’ on an envelope addressed to the president himself, the alarm was sounded. Twelve hours later, the letter had been flown to Langley, Virginia, where it was shown to CIA director Stansfield M. Turner. The debriefing agent described the envelope and informed him that the fingerprints on it were limited in extent and placed in such a way that they were unlikely to lead to anything more than various postal workers; that the letter had not caused the radiation sensors to react; that the postmark appeared to be authentic; that it had been sent from postal zone nine in Johannesburg, South Africa, eight days earlier; and that a computer analysis indicated that the text had been formed from words cut out of the book Peace on Earth, which had been written by a British professor who first argued that the combination of the League of Nations and jazz would bring good fortune to the world and then, in 1939, took his own life.

      ‘Jazz is supposed to bring peace on earth?’ was the CIA director’s first comment.

      ‘Like I said, sir, he took his own life,’ the agent answered.

      The CIA director thanked the agent and was left alone with the letter. Three phone calls and twenty minutes later, it was clear that the contents of the letter were in complete agreement with the information he had, embarrassingly enough, received from the Soviets three weeks earlier but had not believed at the time. The only difference was the exact coordinates in the anonymous letter. All in all, the information appeared to be extremely credible. Now there were two main thoughts in the CIA director’s head:

      1 Who the hell had sent the letter?

      2 Time to contact the president. The letter had been addressed to him, after all.

      Stansfield M. Turner was not popular at the agency because he was trying to exchange as many of his colleagues as possible for computers. And it was one of them – not a person – that had been able to trace the cut-out words to the book Peace on Earth.

      ‘Jazz is supposed to bring peace on earth?’ said President Carter to his old schoolmate Turner when they met the next day in the Oval Office.

      ‘He took his own life a few years later, Mr President,’ said the director of the CIA.

      President Carter – who loved jazz – still couldn’t let the thought go. What if the poor professor had been right? And then the Beatles and the Rolling Stones showed up and ruined everything?

      The director of the CIA said that the Beatles could be blamed for a lot of things, but not for starting the Vietnam War. And then he said that he was sceptical of the theory, because if the Beatles and Rolling Stones hadn’t already destroyed peace on earth, there was always the Sex Pistols.

      ‘The Sex Pistols?’ the president wondered.

      ‘“God Save the Queen”, you remember?’ the CIA director quoted.

      ‘Oh, I see,’ said the president.

      Now to the question at hand. Were the idiots in South Africa about to detonate an atomic bomb? And was this work being led by an ass?

      ‘I don’t know about the ass part, sir. We have indications that the work is being supervised by an Engineer Westhuizen, who graduated with top grades from one of South Africa’s best universities. He must have been handpicked.’

      But there were many indications that the rest of the information was correct. The KGB had, of course, already been so kind as to tip them off about what was going on. And now this letter, formulated in such a way that the CIA director was prepared to bet his life that the KGB wasn’t behind it this time. Plus, the CIA’s own satellite images showed activity in the desert exactly where the mystery sender said it would be.

      ‘But why this “Death to America” on the envelope?’ said President Carter.

      ‘It meant that the letter landed on my desk immediately, and I think that was the point. The letter writer seems to have great insight into how security around the president works. That makes us even more curious about who he is. Cleverly executed, in any case.’

      The president hemmed and hawed. He had trouble seeing what was so clever about ‘Death to America’. Or, for that matter, the assertion that Elizabeth II was of any race other than the human one.

      But he thanked his old friend and asked his secretary to call up Prime Minister Vorster in Pretoria. President Carter was directly responsible for 32,000 nuclear missiles that pointed in a number of directions. Brezhnev in Moscow was in a similar situation. The world did not need another six weapons of the same magnitude. Someone was going to get a talking-to!

      * * *

      Vorster was furious. The president of the United States, that peanut farmer and Baptist, had had the nerve to call and claim that preparations were under way for a weapons test in the Kalahari Desert. Furthermore, he had recited the coordinates of the exact location of the test site. The accusation was completely baseless and incredibly, terribly insulting! In a rage, Vorster slammed down the phone in Jimmy Carter’s ear, but he had enough sense not to go any further. Instead he called Pelindaba right away to order Engineer Westhuizen to test his weapons somewhere else.

      ‘But where?’ said Engineer Westhuizen while his cleaning woman swabbed the floor around his feet.

      ‘Anywhere but the Kalahari,’ said Prime Minister Vorster.

      ‘That will delay us by several months, maybe a year or more,’ said the engineer.

      ‘Just do as I say, dammit.’

      * * *

      The engineer’s servant let him spend two whole years thinking about where the weapons test could be done, now that the Kalahari Desert was no longer available. The best idea Westhuizen had was to shoot the thing off in one of the many homelands, but not even he thought this sounded good enough.

      Nombeko sensed that the engineer’s share value was on its way to a new low, and that it would soon be time to drive his price up again. But then something lucky happened – an external factor that gave the engineer, and by extension his cleaning woman, another six months СКАЧАТЬ