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

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    The only solution was to bring in knowledge from the outside to complement what they already knew at the research centre in the secret city of Sarov, a few hours by car south-east of Moscow. Since only the best was good enough for Marshal Beria, he told the head of the department of international secret agents:
    ‘Pick up Albert Einstein.’
    ‘But… Albert Einstein…’ said the shocked boss of the international agents.
    ‘Albert Einstein is the sharpest brain in the world. Do you intend to do as I say, or are you nurturing a death wish?’ asked Marshal Beria.
    The boss of the international agents had just met a new woman and nothing on Earth smelled as good as she did, so he certainly wasn’t nurturing a death wish. But before he had time to tell this to Marshal Beria, the marshal said:
    ‘Solve the problem. Or to express myself more clearly: SOLVE THE PROBLEM!’
     
    It was no easy matter to pick up Albert Einstein, and send him in a package to Moscow. First of all, they had to find him. He was born in Germany, but moved to Italy and then on to Switzerland and America, and since then he had travelled back and forth between all sorts of places and for all sorts of reasons.
    For the time being he had a house in New Jersey, but according to the agents on the spot, the house seemed to be empty. Besides, if possible Marshal Beria wanted the kidnapping to take place in Europe. Smuggling celebrities out of the USA and across the Atlantic was not without complications.
    But where was the man? He rarely or never told people where he was going before a journey and he was notorious for arriving several days late for important meetings.
    The boss of the international agents wrote a list of places with some sort of close connection with Einstein, and then he sent an agent to keep an eye on each place. There was his home in New Jersey, and his best friend’s house in Geneva. Then there was his publisher in Washington and two other friends, one in Basel, the other in Cleveland, Ohio.
    It took some days of patient waiting, but then came the reward – in the form of a man in a grey raincoat, a turned-up collar and hat. The man came on foot and went up to the house where Albert Einstein’s best friend Michele Besso lived in Switzerland. He rang the doorbell and was heartily and sincerely welcomed by Besso himself, but also by an elderly couple who would need further investigation. The watching agent summoned his colleague who was doing the same job in Basel 250 kilometres away, and after hours of advanced window-watching and comparison with the sets of photos they had with them, the two agents came to the conclusion that it was indeed Albert Einstein who had just come to visit his best friend. The elderly couple were presumably Michele Besso’s brother-in-law and his wife, Maja, who was also Albert Einstein’s sister. Quite a family party!
    Albert stayed there with his friend and his sister and her husband for two well-watched days, before again putting on his overcoat, gloves and hat and setting off, just as discreetly as he had come.
    But he barely made it around the corner before being grabbed and pushed into the back seat of a car and anaesthetized with chloroform. Then he was taken via Austria to Hungary, which had a sufficiently friendly attitude towards the USSR that few questions were asked when the Soviets expressed the wish to land at the military airport in Pécs to refuel, pick up two Soviet citizens and a very sleepy man, and then immediately take off again for an unknown destination.
    The next day they started to interrogate Albert Einstein on the premises of the secret police in Moscow, with Marshal Beria in charge. The question was whether Einstein would choose to cooperate, for the sake of his health, or to be obstructive which, wouldn’t help anybody.
    Regrettably, it turned out to be the latter. Albert Einstein would not admit that he had given a moment’s thought to thetechnique of nuclear fission (even though it was common knowledge that as early as 1939 he had communicated with President Roosevelt about the matter, which in turn had led to the Manhattan Project). In fact Albert Einstein would not even admit that he was Albert Einstein. He maintained with idiotic stubbornness that he was instead Albert Einstein’s younger brother, Herbert Einstein. But Albert Einstein didn’t have a brother; he only had a sister. So that trick naturally didn’t work with Beria and his