could, anyway. Soon he would sit down and formulate the to-be-encrypted message to his Supreme Leader. There was only one thing he needed to take care of first.
Ten minutes after the captain had left Allan and Julius to do his processing, there was a cautious knock at the gentlemen’s door. It was an on-duty watch sailor, who, with a greeting from Captain Pak Chong-un, handed over, first, the bottle of champagne, and, second, one of dark Cuban rum. Then he asked in Russian what else the gentlemen would like to drink with their meal.
‘I think we have enough to get by for now, thank you,’ said Allan. ‘If you like you could have our tea.’
The sailor bowed and made his exit. He left the tea. A few minutes later he was back with a meal of stewed meat and rice.
The friends gorged themselves. But the question was, with what would they wash down their food?
‘I think we should start with the rum,’ said Allan. ‘And have the champagne for dessert. Perhaps we could have used the tea to brush our teeth, if only we had brought toothbrushes. We can save thinking up something clever about hetisostat pressures and GDM for tomorrow.’
‘We?’ said Julius.
The encrypted report from the captain of Honour and Strength was absolutely sensational. Kim Jong-un read it himself and drew his own conclusions. He had certain similarities to Trump in Washington in that he was reluctant to delegate tasks in his administration. With the possible difference that Trump drew conclusions without doing the actual reading.
The captain had managed to spell the non-existent phrase ‘hetisostat pressure’ correctly. And he had got the meaningless acronym GDM in the right order. But in the captain’s formulation, the international expert Allan Karlsson happened to become Swiss instead of Swedish.
Perhaps this was lucky, given what was to come. A Swedish foreign minister who wanted to talk nuclear weapons, and an equally Swedish nuclear weapons expert a few days later, might have been too much for a conspiracy theorist’s brain.
Instead the entire situation landed within the realm of likelihood, and Kim Jong-un could see potential.
Honour and Strength would reach the harbour outside Pyongyang in a few days. What if one were to … said Kim Jong-un to himself. And agreed. A PR war was still war. With the help of the UN and the Swiss man, the republic could, within a few days, begin to matter extraordinarily in this area.
The Supreme Leader summoned his secretary from outside the door, with a curt order: ‘Get the Swedish ambassador here.’
‘Yes, Supreme Leader. When, Supreme Leader?’
‘Now.’
* * *
‘The Supreme Leader wished to speak with me,’ said Ambassador Lövenstierna when, under an hour later, he found himself in Kim Jong-un’s palace.
‘Not so much with you as to you,’ said Kim Jong-un. ‘I have decided to invite the UN Security Council to informal talks. What was her name again, the one who wanted to come here?’
‘Minister for Foreign Affairs Margot Wallström,’ said Ambassador Lövenstierna.
‘That’s right. Bring her here, as I said. Immediately.’
Ambassador Lövenstierna nodded in acknowledgement. ‘Then I ask permission to withdraw,’ he said, for the second time in twenty-four hours.
And once again he backed out of the Supreme Leader’s office. Whatever he was thinking, he kept it to himself.
Unlike their American colleagues, the Germans were not particularly good at outer space. But they were good on the ground – not least when it was African. The German equivalent to the CIA, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, had placed one of its many worldwide non-existent offices inside a hairdresser’s in central Dar es Salaam. Work there was led by a self-involved, unpleasant but capable male agent. For assistance he had a meek, depressed and slightly more capable woman.
Through months of working on a dubious laboratory assistant in Congo, as well as patient network-building in environments where people were particular about portraying themselves as something other than they were, the BND had cobbled together some clear indications that a limited amount of enriched uranium would soon make its way out of Congo, through Tanzania, and on to the south.
But unfortunately, a couple of holidays got in the way. Among the few things that might be more important to the arrogant Agent A than saving the world was to travel home to Germany over Christmas and New Year in order to salvage whatever he could of his family.
The meek Agent B reconciled herself to a break in their work and spent the holiday on her own inside the salon in Dar es Salaam. She had no family to go home to, since her spouse in Rödelheim had exchanged her for a younger woman with nicer teeth.
After the holidays were over they resumed their patient puzzle-piecing, day by day, week by week. The package seemed to have left Congo. And was transported on through Mozambique. This created plenty of concern, for the ruler there was a former freedom fighter, a Marxist-Leninist, and a buddy of Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang.
The arrogant man and the meek woman were getting closer to it. Apparently the uranium had been carried by fishing boat to Madagascar, off the east coast of Africa. This was a country that had formerly tight bonds with the blessedly late Soviet Union.
The trail went cold in Madagascar. And there were no further informants to turn to.
Agent A decided, in his capacity as the boss, that B should find out what was going on. The meek B did as she was told. After a brief period of analysis, she informed her boss that there were three potential scenarios for the uranium parcel in question. The least likely was that the isotope was still on Madagascar. Unless it had been sent on, either by plane or boat. Flying to or from Madagascar necessarily meant flying internationally. And to do this with more than a few kilos of uranium in your luggage would be tantamount to being discovered. Which left a boat – that was to say, the same method of transport by which the uranium had been brought to Madagascar. Repacking it and coming back the same way on a different fishing vessel didn’t strike her as rational.
The meek woman’s conclusion was that the uranium had left Madagascar by boat, but the size of the boat must be such that it could manage an ocean crossing. Either the Indian Ocean in one direction or the Atlantic in the other.
The arrogant man nodded, agreed, and made this line of reasoning his own in the subsequent report to Berlin, without protest from the meek woman.
The next step was to list all the cargo vessels that had recently called at and sailed from the harbour in Toamasina. When that didn’t turn up any obvious hits, A and B expanded their search to encompass potentially suspicious ships that had been anywhere near Madagascar during the period in question.
As a result, they were currently looking at a list of ships’ names. It consisted of one: the North Korean bulk carrier Honour and Strength.
On its way from Havana to Pyongyang.
It had passed immediately south of Madagascar fifteen days earlier.
The relationship between the Germans and the Americans wasn’t the best, ever since it had turned out that the Americans had bugged Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone, at which the chancellor picked up said phone and called President Obama to say she hoped the CIA was also listening to what she had to say now.
On the basis of his personality, as well as Germany’s strained relationship with the United States, the BND’s top central African representative had no problem