The Digested Twenty-first Century (31 page)

Wallander arrived home to find Baiba outside. She had been the love of his life and he hadn’t seen her for over 10 years since she had rejected him. ‘Why are you here?’ he asked. ‘Because I’m dying of cancer and I wanted to say goodbye.’ Wallander said nothing, as she drove away into the fog. There was a loud crash. She had hit a wall and killed herself.

Now Wallander knew he had to go to Berlin to meet Talboth. The drive was pleasingly bleak and he had disappointing, anonymous sex with a stranger in a hotel. His penis stung when he urinated. Great, he thought, I’ve got chlamydia.

‘There were a lot of spies in the 70s and 80s,’ Talboth said, enigmatically. Suddenly everything made sense. He called Sten and together they rowed through a blizzard to see Håkan.

‘It’s true,’ said Håkan. ‘I am a CIA spy. But I never killed Olof
Palme. You’ll never take me alive.’ ‘How could you?’ said Sten, shooting his best friend through the head before turning the gun on himself.

Wallander went home. Others could find the bodies and sort out the loose ends. Who cared how Louise had died, who had killed her or what secrets Håkan had given away or how? Luckily his memory now had as many holes in it as the plot. At least the rain was still falling horizontally.

Digested read, digested:
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The train piled high with radioactive cargo raced through the Serbian night. Bond checked his iPhone. No updates. All he knew was that an Irishman called Niall Dunne was planning to send the plutonium to the bottom of the Danube. A sixth sense told Dunne he was being watched and he slid out of sight. A seventh sense told Bond the Irishman had moved out of position. Bond reacted in an instant. A large explosion tore the track in two and Bond looked on as the train came to a halt short of the river. The world was saved. But the Irishman had escaped.

‘Good work, Bond,’ said the Admiral on his return to London. ‘But you’ve still only got four days to save the world from another disaster the Irishman is planning. The only lead we’ve got is his business partner: Severan Hydt, the garbage and recycling magnate.’

On his way out of M’s office, Bond noticed an attractive young agent chatting to Moneypenny. Ding-dong! Stockings or tights? ‘The name is Bond, James Bond,’ he said. ‘Ophelia Maidenstone,’ she replied. ‘I’ve split up with my fiancée. Would you like to take
me out to dinner?’ Bond smiled to himself. He might have been 30 for the past 50 years but he hadn’t lost his edge. Yet an eighth sense told him that however much she might enjoy spending the night with him, he ought to save her from himself. ‘I’ve got to go home to my Chelsea flat to put out the recycling.’ he said. ‘But have a bottle of Chablis on me.’

Severan Hydt had been enjoying looking at photographs of decomposing bodies when he was interrupted by the Irishman. ‘A ninth sense tells me we are being watched,’ Dunne said. ‘If Project Gehenna is to work and we are to destroy the world on Friday we must leave via the back door.’ Bond smiled to himself as he followed at a safe distance in his Bentley. A 10th sense had told him that the Irishman was expecting to be watched and he had organised a decoy surveillance. He tailed them to an underground dump; an 11th sense told him someone was going to die there and he would have to go to Dubai.

The heat was stifling in the Emirate as Bond met up with his old CIA contact, Felix Leiter. ‘You’re being followed, Bond,’ Leiter said. ‘I know,’ Bond had replied evenly, checking the time on his Rolex. ‘It’s better to keep your enemies where you can see them.’ Hydt and Dunne were relieved a 12th sense had told them they were being followed and had doubled back on themselves. Bond was ahead of them. A 13th sense had told him Hydt and the Irishman would double back on themselves. Now he knew he had to go to South Africa.

‘Welcome to South Africa, Mr Bond,’ said Bheka Jordaan, the head of Cape Town counterintelligence. ‘With a name like that you are obviously not going to try to have sex with me, much as you are obviously gagging for it.’ ‘Correct, Mr Bond,’ Bheka replied longingly. ‘Now, how can I help?’ ‘You can create me an identity as Mr Theron.’

‘We can do business, Mr Theron,’ said Hydt. ‘But first we must go to a charity auction.’ Hydt left early to look at some
decaying flesh, leaving Bond with the head of the food programme. ‘I’m Felicity Shagwell,’ she said. ‘Something tells me we are going to end up in bed,’ Bond smirked.

A 14th sense told Bond he was being followed. ‘Who are you?’ he asked, trapping him in a corner. ‘I’m not sure. I think I’ve got into the story by mistake.’ Bond tied him up and mused on whether his parents had been Russian spies. It was good to have some pathos in the backstory. He checked his Rolex. Time to break into Hydt’s plant and foil Gehennna. He called M on his iPhone: ‘They are planning to blow up York University.’ A shot rang out. Hydt fell dead.

‘Congratulations, Bond,’ said Bheka, ‘case over.’ ‘Not quite,’ said Felicity Shagwell triumphantly, as she put a gun to Bond’s head. ‘Dunne is working for me and Hydt was a decoy. The world is about to be destroyed.’ ‘That’s what you think,’ Bond laughed, evading her aim. ‘A 15th sense told me you were a baddy and I had to pretend to let you capture me to find out.’ ‘It could have been so different, James,’ Felicity cried, as Bheka handcuffed her.

‘Indeed it could,’ said Bheka. ‘If you had stayed a bit longer you could have slept with me too.’ ‘Another time, maybe,’ Bond replied. ‘M needs me in London. Someone else is trying to destroy the world.’

Digested read, digested:
Carte him off.

Captain Tord Schultz sighed as he landed the plane. As the opening character in a thriller, he knew his only purpose was to die a slow, agonising death. Within 70 pages a brick studded with nails had ripped off half his face.

I’m a thief and a junkie. God help me, I’ve also prostituted my
foster-sister, Irene. It was all going so well. Oleg and I were selling for Ibsen and Dubai, and then we got greedy and started doing the violin ourselves. Now they are coming for me
.

Harry Hole ran his titanium finger along the scar that ran from his mouth to his ear. It had been three years since he’d been in Oslo, three years since he’d been kicked out of the police, three years since he’d been on the booze. Three years since he’d watched Spurs on TV. Every inch of his body ached with the excruciating pain of the maverick. He’d cornered The Leopard. Survived The Snowman. But this was worse. Much worse. This was personal. It was a Gooner. Flooding Oslo with a new opiate, violin, that was six times more powerful than heroin and being sold by dealers wearing Arsenal Fly Emirates shirts.

Then there was Rakel. The love of his life. The woman who would be better off without him. But he couldn’t not come back for this. Oleg, her son, the boy he’d almost come to think of as his son, was in prison charged with murdering his dope-dealing associate, Gusto. ‘He didn’t do it,’ Rakel had said. ‘You’re the only one who can help him.’

As the new head of Kripos, Mikael Bellman didn’t mind if the readers were unsure he was a bent cop. It added to the tension and as the most handsome man in Norway, he was used to people mistrusting him. Besides, he had a date with Isabelle Skøyen, the femme fatale of the council, who had helped clean up the city’s drug problem. Truls Bernsten was really ugly, so there were no doubts he was a burner, the cop who tidied away Dubai’s inconvenient evidence. Still, accidentally putting a drill through a dealer’s skull had been a little much, even for him.

I should have kept my mouth shut. But writing in a different font and from the past is a great way of filling in the back story. I was doing OK just selling smack for Dubai. Then Ibsen came along with the violin. He grassed all the other dealers to his contact in the council. Oslo was ours
.

Sergei had never been convinced he had what it took to be Dubai’s hitman. And as Harry withdrew the corkscrew from his oesophagus and he took his last three breaths he was certain of it. Harry gasped. He recognised it was some achievement to be the undisputed top dog of Scanda-crime noir, but it was taking it out of him. Sure, he had stopped a prisoner killing Oleg, had got the boy released, had closed down Oslo’s power supply, had dug up Gusto’s grave, killed a small army of Dubai’s goons, unmasked the true identities of Ibsen and Dubai, rescued Irene, almost drowned in a Nazi escape tunnel, fallen off a horse into a ravine and turned down a shag with Isabelle even after she had flashed her shaven pussy (nice detail), but it had taken half a bottle of Jim Beam to do it all.

‘I love you, Harry,’ said Rakel. ‘And I will marry you even though you are clearly deranged.’

Harry switched off his stolen phone. He had waited years to hear those words. But he had to do what was right. And what was right would mean she would have to marry her dull solicitor. He drove to the final showdown. ‘It was you all along,’ he said. Two bullets ripped into him and Harry could feel the rats gnawing at the open wounds. ‘Is this it?’ he wondered. He checked Nesbø’s contract and smiled. Almost certainly not.

Digested read, digested:
Harry’s Black Hole.

In a characterless hotel in Gibraltar, a pleasant if not remarkable man in his late 50s is in his room. What was his assumed name,
he asked himself. Anderson. Paul Anderson. That was it! He is as jumpy as the tenses. However had he got himself into the situation.

‘We’ve got a situation,’ said Fergus Quinn. Junior foreign minister. Dynamic and bulky. Cell phone pressed to an ear. Close-cropped ginger hair, greedy eyes and a pout of privileged discontent. Paul knows from the outset that any man who gets three damning sentences of description is a baddy, but as a civil servant he has a duty. ‘I want you to supervise a mission. You’ll be working with private contractors, Ethical Outcomes.’

Paul senses the irony is being rather trowelled on, but it’s now too late. Elliott, a South African – you can never trust a South African – calls him to say the operation is on. ‘We’ll be picking up Punter when he meets Aladdin. You wait at the top of the Rock with the Brit special forces. The Americans will go in when you give the all-clear.’

Jeb, the leader of the British squad, is as unhappy as Paul. ‘We’re basically just mercenaries,’ he says. Paul said there was no sighting of Punter but Elliott sent the Americans in anyway. ‘All clear,’ says Elliott. ‘Another jihadi in the bag.’

In Whitehall, Toby Bell, newly appointed private secretary to Fergus Quinn, is feeling jumpy. He too has read the three-sentence description of his new boss and can tell he is a baddy. He called his old mentor, Giles Oakley, for assistance and was alarmed to find he also was given a contemptuous three-sentence description.

Toby is disappointed. He has been told by George Smiley that one of the most enjoyable qualities of starring in a le Carré novel is that nothing is ever black and white, but now it seems his anger at New Labour and the privatisation of the intelligence services has got the better of him. ‘Ah well!’ he thinks. At least he knows where he stands. It does still seem curious to Toby that Quinn should have got away with similar practices while at
Defence – not even Peter Mandelson could have hoped for a reprieve after getting caught out like that – and it also feels unbelievable that Quinn should now be having private meetings without the knowledge of his staff. He breaks the habit of a lifetime and secretly records the meetings between Quinn, ‘Paul’ and another man with three dripping-with-hatred sentences from Ethical Outcomes.

‘Oooh ahh, oooh ahh.’ Three years have passed and to show we are in Cornwall, the locals are talking in dialect. Sir Christopher Probyn is enjoying his retirement from the civil service, though he did sometimes wonder if his last unmerited posting to the Caribbean, and the knighthood that came with it, might have had something to do with Gibraltar and his secondment as ‘Paul’. A decrepit man appears at the Bumpkins Annual Fayre. Christopher looked at Jeb in amazement.

‘The Gibraltar operation,’ Jeb spits. ‘It was a cover-up. The intelligence was wrong. There was no jihadi. The Americans killed a Muslim woman and her child.’

‘Good God!’ Christopher replies, his conscience and his knighthood gnawing away at him. ‘We must do something. But what?’

Toby always knew he’d be dragged in again. His suspicions had been proved right when Quinn had been moved sideways again and Giles had underlined his corruption by taking a job in a merchant bank. It was just that he rather missed the old cold war days where nothing was ever quite as it seemed, where every sentence had a double, if not treble, negative, and espionage was coated in layers of repressed homoeroticism. Now he was just in a straightforward thriller. Anyone could now see that Jeb’s life was in danger and that Christopher was too dim to sort things out. It was down to him. He retrieves the memory stick from its hiding place. If he plays his hand right,
there is still time to see this one out to a suitably downbeat and inconclusive ending.

Digested read, digested:
Tinker, tailor, soldier, sledgehammer.

The buzz in the street was like the humming of flies. Snow fell steadily as a large group of paparazzi stamped their feet on the pavement that was as icy as frozen water, hoping to snap the body of the young supermodel Lula Landry, who had just jumped to her death from the balcony of her Mayfair apartment.

Cormoran Strike’s eyes were as chilly as the world outside. His prosthetic leg ached in the chilly chill; he had just split up with his wealthy girlfriend and he was down to his last three shillings. He sucked deeply on a cigarette, pondering a future that looked as empty as a room with no furniture. Just then, the office doorbell rang.

‘Hello,’ said a young woman who, to Cormoran’s trained eye, looked as if she might be engaged to an accountant named Matthew. ‘I’m your new PA.’

‘I can’t really afford to pay you, but what the hell?’ he said as rashly as someone with a bad case of shingles. He extended his hand like one of those ladders that came apart to make a longer one. ‘Cormoran Strike.’