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

go. Hasn’t Mr Prime Minister informed you?’
    Mr Ferguson was terrified, but forced a little oxygen into his nostrils so as not to faint.
    ‘Stay exactly where you are,’ said the officer in charge, in an authoritative tone. ‘You are not going anywhere until I have Mr Prime Minister’s confirmation.’
    The three guards were ordered to keep a careful eye on the priest and Mr Karlsson, while the officer in charge went down the corridor to the garage to ask for confirmation. Allan smiled encouragingly at the priest and said that soon everything would be sorted out – unless the opposite happened and it all blew up.
    Since firstly the police chief had not given Allan and the priest permission to leave, and, secondly, did not have any plans to do so, he reacted forcefully to the officer’s query.
    ‘What? They’re standing by the entrance and brazenly lying? They are bloody well going to pay for that…’
    The police chief rarely swore. He had always been careful to keep a certain dignity about him. But now he was furious. And as was his custom, he stubbed his cigarette into that damned Swede’s coffee cup, before heading for the stairs.
    Or rather, that was his intention, but he didn’t get any further than the coffee cup. Because this time it didn’t contain coffee, but pure nitroglycerine mixed with black ink. There was a huge explosion and the vice prime minister and the officer in charge of the guards were ripped to bits. A white cloud billowed out of the garage and made its way along the corridor at the other end of which Allan, the priest and the three guards stood.
    ‘Time to go,’ Allan said to the priest. And off they went.
    All three guards were sufficiently alert to think that they really ought to stop Karlsson and the priest from leaving, but only a few tenths of a second later – and as a logical consequence of the garage now being a sea of fire – the charge under the DeSoto, the one intended for Winston Churchill, also detonated. And in so doing, it proved to Allan that it would have amply served its intended purpose. The entire building immediately leaned over, and the ground floor was in flames when Allan changed his order to the priest:
    ‘Let’s run out of here, instead.’
    Two of the three guards had been blown into a wall by the pressure wave and had caught fire. The third found it impossible to gather his thoughts sufficiently to attend to his prisoners. For a few seconds, he wondered what had happened, but then he ran away to avoid ending up like his comrades. Allan and the priest had gone off in one direction. The only remaining guard now ran off in the other.
     
    After Allan in his own special way had arranged for himself and the priest to be somewhere other than the headquarters of the secret police, it was now the vicar’s turn to be useful. He knew where most of the diplomatic missions were located and he guided Allan all the way to the Swedish Embassy. Once there, Allan gave him a warm hug to thank him for everything.
    Allan asked what the priest himself was going to do. Where was the British Embassy?
    It wasn’t far away, said the vicar, but why would he need to go there? They were all Anglicans already and didn’t need converting. No, the priest had thought up a new strategy. If there was something the last hour or so had taught him, it was that everything seemed to start and finish at the department for domestic intelligence and security. So it was a matter of changing that organisation from the inside. Once all the people working for the secret police, and all those who helped them, were Anglicans – well, the rest would be easy as pie!
    Allan said that he knew of a good asylum in Sweden if in the future the priest should happen to come to some sort of self-understanding. The priest answered that he didn’t want to appear ungrateful, not in any way. But he had once and for all found his calling, and now it was time for him to say goodbye. The priest was going to start with the surviving guard, the one who ran off in the other direction. He was basically a nice, easy-going boy, and he could probably be led down the path of the true faith.
    ‘Farewell!’ said the priest solemnly and walked off.
    ‘Bye for now,’ said Allan.
    He watched the priest vanish into the distance, and thought that the world was crazy enough that the priest might survive the course he was now taking.
    But Allan was wrong. The priest found the guard wandering around in a daze in the