The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

to be between the leaders of the two countries.
    But what joyous thing lasts for ever?
    One day, just before the SALT II treaty was signed, Brezhnev thought that Afghanistan needed his help. So he sent his elite troops into the country, and they happened to kill the sitting president, so that Brezhnev had no choice but to appoint his own.
    This of course irritated President Carter (to put it mildly). The ink on the SALT treaty had barely dried. So Carter arranged a boycott of the Olympic Games in Moscow as well as increasing the secret CIA support to the mujahidin, the fundamentalist guerrilla forces in Afghanistan.
    Carter didn’t have time to do much more than that, because very soon Ronald Reagan took over and he had a much shorter temper when it came to communists in general and the old relic Brezhnev in particular.
    ‘He does seem to be dreadfully angry, that Reagan,’ Allan said to Yury at the first agent spy meeting they had after the new president had been sworn in.
    ‘Yes,’ Yury answered. ‘And now we can’t dismantle any more of the Soviet arsenal of nuclear weapons because then there would be nothing left.’
    ‘In that case, I suggest we do the opposite,’ said Allan. ‘That is bound to soften up Reagan a bit, just wait and see.’
    So the next spy report to the USA, via Secret Agent Hutton, bore witness to a sensational Soviet initiative in their missile defences. Allan’s imagination had gone right out into space. From up there, Allan thought up the idea that Soviet rockets would be able to pick off everything that the USA intended to attack with down on Earth.
    With that, the politically blind American agent Allan, and his politically blind Russian nuclear weapons boss Yury, had laid the foundations for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Because Ronald Reagan blew his top when he read the intelligence report that Allan sent, and he immediately embarked upon his Strategic Defence Initiative, also known as Star Wars. The description of the project, with its satellites with laser guns, was almost a copy of what Allan and Yury had cooked up some months earlier, in a hotel room in Moscow, under the influence of what they thought was a suitable anount of vodka. The American budget for defence against nuclear weapons reached astronomical sums. The Soviet Union tried to match this, but couldn’t afford it. Instead the country started to crack at the seams.
    Whether it was from the shock over the new secret American military plans (Reagan wouldn’t even tell the American people about it until 23rd March 1983), or for some other reason, one can’t say, but on 10th November 1982, Brezhnev died of a heart attack. The following evening, Allan, Yury and Larissa happened to have one of their intelligence meetings.
    ‘Isn’t it time to stop all this nonsense?’ Larissa asked.
    ‘Yes, let’s stop this nonsense,’ said Yury.
    Allan nodded, and agreed that everything must come to an end, especially nonsense perhaps.
    And he added that the following morning he was going to phone Secret Agent Hutton. Thirteen and a half years of service to the CIA was enough; that most of it had been make-believe was neither here nor there. All three agreed that it was best to keep that part secret from Secret Agent Hutton and his so irascible president.
    Now the CIA would have to see to it that Yury and Larissa were airlifted to New York, they had already promised that, while Allan himself was wondering what things were like in good old Sweden.
     
    The CIA and Secret Agent Hutton kept their promise. Yury and Larissa were transported to the USA, via Czechoslovakia and Austria. They were given an apartment on West 64th Street in Manhattan, and an annual stipend that wildly exceeded their needs. And it wasn’t particularly expensive for the CIA either, because in January 1984 Yury died in his sleep and three months later his Larissa followed him, dying of sorrow. They were both seventy-nine years old and they had their happiest year together in 1983, which was when the Metropolitan Opera celebrated its hundredth anniversary with an endless array of unforgettable experiences for the couple.
     
    Allan, for his part, packed his bags and informed the administrative section of the American Embassy in Moscow that he was about to leave for good. That was when the section discovered that Allen Carson for unclear reasons had only been paid his additional foreign allowance during the thirteen years and five months he had been in