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

most importantly he revealed that he was an explosives expert, with all sorts of experience ranging from running his own explosives business, to the manufacture of cannons, and most recently to participating in the war between Spaniards and Spaniards.
    After which Allan pulled out his letter from General Franco. Terrified, the Spanish interpreter translated it for the immigration officer who immediately summoned his superior who immediately summoned his superior.
    At first the inferior and the two superiors agreed that thefascist Swede should immediately be sent back where he had come from.
    ‘As long as you can find a ship for me, I’ll be happy to go,’ said Allan.
    This was not a practicable suggestion, and so the interrogations continued. And the more the immigration officer got out of Allan, the less fascistic the Swede seemed to be. He wasn’t a communist either. Or a national socialist. He was nothing at all, it would seem, other than an expert on explosives. As for the story of how he came to be on first-name terms with General Franco, it was so ridiculous that it had to be true – he could hardly have made it up.
    The most senior immigration officer had a brother in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and as far as he knew, his brother was working on some kind of explosive device for the military. Since he had no better ideas, the senior immigration officer arranged for Allan to be locked up for a couple of months. Unfortunately, the months turned into years, and the immigration boss mostly forgot about Allan, until one day he found himself discussing the case with his brother when they met at the family farm in Connecticut for Thanksgiving. His brother was working on some kind of explosive device for the military. The brother was not thrilled at the idea of having a potential Franco supporter on his hands, but they were desperately in need of all the expertise they could muster down at Los Alamos and they could probably find some suitably unqualified and not too secret work for this odd Swede, if it would help out his brother.
    The immigration director answered that it most definitely would be a favour, and then the brothers tucked into the turkey.
    Some time later in the winter of 1943 Allan flew, for the first time ever, to the US National Laboratory in Los Alamos, where it was soon discovered that he didn’t speak a word of English. A Spanish-speaking lieutenant was given the task offinding out the extent of the Swede’s professional skills, and Allan was required to write down his most explosive chemical formulae for the lieutenant. The latter looked through these, finding evidence of a considerable innovative ability, but pointing out that the force of Allan’s explosive charges would barely blow up a car.
    ‘Oh, but it would,’ answered Allan. ‘A car with a man in it. I’ve tried it.’
    Allan was allowed to stay on, at first in the most remote corner of the compound, but as the months and years went by and he started to speak English, he was allowed to move about more and more freely. As an extremely meticulous observer, during the days Allan learned how to make explosive charges of a substantially different nature from those he’d been in the habit of setting off on Sundays back home in the gravel pit. And in the evening, when most of the young men at the Los Alamos lab went out to town to chase women, Allan sat in the restricted-access library and learned about new realms in the world of explosives.
    The war in Europe was escalating, but these events largely passed Allan by, as he acquired knowledge which as a lowly assistant he couldn’t really use. It was no longer about familiar chemicals like nitroglycerine and sodium nitrate – that was for amateurs – but about exotic relationships between atoms like hydrogen and uranium which turned out to be far more complicated elements than he could ever have imagined.
    From 1942 on, extremely strict security restrictions came into force at Los Alamos. The scientists had been given a secret mission by President Roosevelt to create a big bomb, a bomb that, Allan guessed, could destroy ten or even twenty Spanish bridges with a single explosion. Lowly assistants are needed on even the most secret projects, and the hugely popular Allan was given the highest security clearance.
    He had to admit that they knew their stuff these Americans. Instead of working with the conventional materials Allan had been brought up on, these scientists had found ways of