The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden (38 page)

‘In the middle of the city!’ Nombeko said, hoping for a second that her distraction had worked.

But when that second passed, the prime minister broke in and said that the group should stop discussing the weather and ornithology.

‘Instead, tell me what kind of damage the bomb can do. How bad is it?’

Nombeko answered hesitantly. They were just talking about a few or perhaps several megatons.

‘How many?’

‘Two or three. No more.’

‘And what does that mean?’

He was a stubborn rascal, that prime minister.

‘Three megatons is about 12,552 petajoules. Is the king sure that it was a white-tailed eagle?’

Fredrik Reinfeldt gave his head of state such a look that the latter refrained from answering. Then the former pondered whether he knew how much a petajoule was, and how bad twelve thousand of them might be, before he decided that the woman in front of him was being evasive.

‘Tell me exactly what that means!’ he said. ‘In a comprehensible manner.’

So Nombeko did. She told him what it meant: that the bomb would take everything within a thirty-eight-mile radius with it, and that in the worst-case scenario, bad weather with a lot of wind could double the damage.

‘Then it’s lucky that the sun is shining,’ the king mused.

Nombeko nodded in appreciation of his positive attitude, but the prime minister called attention to the fact that Sweden was facing what might be its greatest crisis since the nation’s birth. The heads of state and government found themselves roving through Sweden with a ruthless weapon of mass destruction, and they didn’t know the motives of the man behind the wheel.

‘Given these circumstances, mightn’t the king find it more fitting to think of the survival of our nation rather than white-tailed eagles and the fact that at least we’ve been lucky with the weather?’ said the prime minister.

But the king had been around for a while; he had seen prime ministers come and go, while he himself had endured. There wasn’t really anything the matter with this new one, if he would just calm down a bit.

‘There, there,’ he said. ‘Just have a seat on one of the potato boxes like the rest of us, and we’ll ask Mr and Mrs Kidnapper for an explanation.’

* * *

In truth, he would have liked to have become a farmer. Or a steam-shovel operator. Or anything at all, as long as it had something to do with cars or nature. Preferably both.

And then he had become king.

This didn’t really come as a surprise to him. In an early interview he described his life as a straight line from birth onwards. Predetermined as soon as the forty-two cannon shots rang out over Skeppsholmen on 30 April 1946.

He was named Carl Gustaf: Carl after his maternal grandfather Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (who was an exciting combination of Nazi and Brit at the same time), and Gustaf after his father, paternal grandfather and great-grandfather.

Things started off terribly for the little prince. When he was only nine months old he lost his father in a plane crash. A dramatic hitch in the order of succession ensued. His grandfather, the future Gustaf VI Adolf, would have to stay alive until he was ninety-nine years old, otherwise there would be a vacancy that risked putting wind in the sails of the republicans in Parliament.

There was general agreement among the advisers that the hereditary prince should be kept within the yard-thick walls of the palace until the order of succession was secure, but his loving mother, Sibylla, refused. Without friends, her son would at worst become crazy, at best impossible to deal with.

So the prince was allowed to attend an ordinary school, and in his free time he was able to develop his interest in engines and be involved in the Scouts, where he learned to tie square knots, sheet bends and half hitches faster and better than anyone else.

However, at the Sigtuna Allmänna Läroverk boarding school he failed maths and barely passed everything else. The reason was that letters and numbers were one big mess; the crown prince had dyslexia. The fact that he was the best in the class at the mouth-organ didn’t win him any extra marks, except with the girls.

Thanks to his mother Sibylla’s care, he still had a number of friends out there in the real world, even if none of them happened to belong to the radical Left that almost everyone else professed to be an adherent of in 1960s Sweden. Letting one’s hair grow, living in collectives and enjoying free love was not for the future king, even if he himself didn’t think the last of those sounded so bad.

His grandfather, Gustav Adolf, had ‘duty above all’ as his motto. Perhaps that was why he kept himself alive until he was ninety. He didn’t pass away until September 1973, when the royal house was saved; his grandson was old enough to take over.

Since square knots and all-synchromesh gearboxes are not the first topics that come to mind when conversing with the Queen of England, the young Carl Gustaf didn’t always feel at home in the smartest drawing rooms. But things got better as the years went by, mostly because he dared more and more to be himself. After more than three decades on the throne, a gala banquet at the palace in honour of Hu Jintao was a bore he could both handle and tolerate. But he would have preferred to dispense with it.

The current alternative, being kidnapped in a potato truck, wasn’t exactly worth his time either, but the king thought it would probably work out somehow.

If only the prime minister would chill out a little.

And listen to what the kidnappers had to say.

* * *

Prime Minister Reinfeldt had no intention of sitting down on any of the dirty potato boxes. Furthermore, there was dust everywhere. And dirt on the floor. But he could listen, all the same.

‘By all means,’ he said, turning to Holger Two. ‘Would you be so kind as to tell us what’s going on?’

His words were polite, his tone commanding, his irritation with the king intact.

Two had rehearsed his conversation with the prime minister for nearly twenty years. He had prepared an almost infinite number of scenarios. None of them included the possibility that he and the prime minister might find themselves locked in a potato truck. Along with the bomb. And the king. With Two’s king-hating brother behind the wheel. On their way to destinations unknown.

While Holger Two was at a loss for words and thoughts, his brother was in the cab, thinking aloud about what would happen next. His father had clearly said, ‘Drive, my son, drive,’ but that was it. But wasn’t the simplest thing to let the king decide – either climb down from his throne and make sure that no one climbed up in his place, or climb up on the bomb so One and Celestine could blow king, parts of the kingdom and themselves sky-high?

‘My brave, brave darling,’ Celestine said in response to Holger’s ponderings.

This was the mother of all protests. Plus, it was a nice day to die, should it prove necessary.

In the back of the truck, Holger Two finally found his tongue again.

‘I think we should start at the beginning of the story,’ he said.

So he told them about his father, Ingmar, about himself and his brother, about how one of them had decided to continue fighting their father’s battle, while the other was now, unfortunately, sitting where he was sitting and saying what he was saying.

When he had finished and Nombeko had added her own life story, including the explanation of how the bomb that didn’t really exist had ended up on the loose, the prime minister thought that this could not possibly be happening, but that to be on the safe side it was best to act according to the frightening prospect that it was happening despite that. Meanwhile the king, for his part, was thinking that he was starting to get hungry.

* * *

Fredrik Reinfeldt tried to take in the scene. To assess it. He thought about the alarm that would be sounded at any minute, if it hadn’t been already, and about how there would be a nationwide panic with the National Task Force and helicopters in the air, surrounding both potato truck and bomb. Nervous youths with automatic weapons would be hanging out of the helicopters, and they might accidentally fire shots that went through the sides of the truck and on through the layers of protective metal around all the megatons and petajoules. Alternatively they might just provoke the nut behind the wheel into doing something rash. Like driving off the road, for example.

This was all on one side of the balance.

On the other were the stories the man and the woman before him had just told. And President Hu, who had vouched for the latter.

Given the circumstances, shouldn’t he and the king now do everything they could to make sure that things didn’t run completely amok, so that the catastrophe they were threatened with would not be self-fulfilling?

Fredrik Reinfeldt had finished pondering, and he said to his king, ‘I have been thinking.’

‘Great,’ said the king. ‘That’s the sort of thing we have prime ministers for, if you ask me.’

Reinfeldt rhetorically asked His Majesty if they really wanted the National Task Force fluttering around above them. Didn’t a three-megaton nuclear weapon demand more respect than that?

The king commended the prime minister for having chosen the description ‘three megatons’ over ‘twelve thousand petajoules’. But as the king understood it, the damage would still be considerable. Furthermore, he was old enough to remember the reports from the last time – it was in Gnesta, if the king remembered correctly – the National Task Force’s first and thus far only task. Why, they had burned down a number of buildings while the suspected terrorists walked away.

Nombeko said that she had read something about that, too.

That settled it. The prime minister took out his phone and called the on-duty head of security to say that a matter of national interest had come up, that both he and the king were doing well, that the banquet dinner should be held as planned, and that this matter was to be blamed for the heads of both state and government having become indisposed. Beyond that, the head of security was to do nothing except await further orders.

The head of security on duty was sweating with anxiety. Fortunately his boss, the director of Säpo, the security service, was also invited to the banquet and was currently standing beside his subordinate, ready to take over. He was just as nervous, as it happened.

Maybe that was why the director of Säpo led off with a check question he himself didn’t know the answer to. His muddled reasoning was that there was a risk that the prime minister had said what he said under threat.

‘What is the name of the prime minister’s dog?’ he began.

The prime minister replied that he didn’t have a dog, but that he promised to get a big one with sharp teeth and set it on the director of Säpo if he didn’t have the good sense to listen carefully.

The situation was exactly as the prime minister had just said. The director of Säpo could check with President Hu if he had any doubts; they were with the president’s friend, after all. Alternatively, he could try ignoring the prime minister’s instructions, ask for the name of his pet fish (for he did have one of those), declare them missing, turn the country upside down – and look for a new job starting tomorrow.

The director of Säpo liked his job. The title was nice, and so was the salary. And he was getting close to retirement. In short, he really didn’t want to search for a new job. Instead he decided that the prime minister’s pet fish could be called whatever it liked.

Furthermore, Her Majesty the Queen was now standing next to him, and she wanted to say something.

Fredrik Reinfeldt handed the phone to his king.

‘Hi, darling. No, darling, I’m not out partying . . .’

The threat of a task force attack from above had been averted. As the journey continued, Holger Two explained their problems in greater detail. The fact was, his twin brother behind the wheel had – just like their long-dead father – got it into his head that Sweden ought to be a republic, not a monarchy. The woman on his right was his angry and equally confused girlfriend. Unfortunately she shared his brother’s views when it came to forms of government.

‘For the sake of order, I would like to state that I am of a differing opinion,’ said the king.

The potato truck drove on. The group in the back of the truck had jointly decided to wait and see. Mostly they were waiting, of course: they couldn’t see anything at all from where they sat, since Celestine had drawn the curtains of the window between them and the cab.

Suddenly their journey seemed to be over. The potato truck stopped; the engine was turned off.

Nombeko asked Two which of them should kill his brother first, but Two’s thoughts lay more along the lines of where they might be. For his part, the king said that he hoped there would be food. Meanwhile, the prime minister started examining the doors. They should be able to be opened from the inside, too, right? It wouldn’t have been a good idea to try this while the truck was still moving, but now Fredrik Reinfeldt couldn’t see any reason to stay in this dirty place. He was the only one who had chosen to remain standing the whole time.

While this was going on, Holger One had run into the barn at Sjölida and up to the hayloft, where he lifted up a bucket, under which Agent A’s pistol had lain hidden for nearly thirteen years. One was back before the prime minister succeeded in figuring out how the door mechanism worked from the inside.

‘Now don’t do anything stupid,’ he said. ‘Just climb down, nice and slowly.’

The king’s many medals jangled as he took a leap from the truck to the ground. The sound and the image of the baubles gave One renewed strength. He raised his weapon to show who was in control.

‘You have a
pistol
?’ said Nombeko, deciding to put off both killing him and twisting his nose.

‘What is going on over there?’

It was Gertrud, who had seen through the window that the group had grown larger, and she was coming out to greet them with – as always when she wasn’t sure of the situation – her father Tapio’s moose-hunting rifle in hand.

‘This just keeps getting better and better,’ said Nombeko.