"Yes, of course. Friendship, International. I should have guessed."
"My words exactly. He was inside this computer in the Zurich bank basement. The bank officials tell me it was supplied by their security agency, called InterFriend. Friend probably has systems all over the world where he can hide in a pinch. But we got him. We pulled out all the works that looked like they might be something. We're bringing them back with us."
"Good. No ... wait," Smith suddenly said.
He looked at his screen. Spurts of data zipped before his widening eyes.
"Remo. Forget about coming back. Friend was only a conduit. I've just received new intelligence on the recipients of the locomotives."
"Who?"
"It's a joint Swedish Navy-British Intelligence plot."
"What?"
"The data intercepts are right before me. Write this down."
Smith rattled off two names and addresses. "Got that?"
"Yeah, but what do we do with them?"
"Find them and interrogate them. We need to uncover the launch site."
"What about these computer parts?"
"Ship them to me. I'll analyze them on this end. They may tell us nothing, but at worst we've neutralized an important worldwide mischief-maker."
"Right, Smitty. Will do."
The connection went dead and Smith replaced the receiver.
Friend. Imagine that. The little sentient computer chip that had been designed to do one thing: make a profit. Intelligent, amoral, inexhaustible, it had been a terrific problem once before. Now they had him. Or it.
Smith returned to his terminal. New data was coming in. Hard, raw data on the latest Soviet advances in satellite technology. It was incredible. It would take hours to absorb, but with Remo and Chiun on the job, Smith knew it would be time he could well afford.
He paged through the on-screen text, scribbling notes to himself.
In Zurich, Remo asked, "Anyone have a box I can put this junk in?"
The employees of the Longines Credit Bank looked at him with fear-stricken eyes. No one spoke. A few of them hid behind desks.
"I told you to go easy on the gendarmes-or whatever the Swiss call their police," Remo scolded.
"I did nothing," Chiun retorted.
"To you, it's nothing. To me, it's nothing. To them, it looks like a massacre."
"I killed none of them. They will live."
"You threw them all through a plate-glass window at high speed. They looked dead."
"If I wanted them dead, I would have extinguished them like candles, not made a show of their folly."
"They probably wouldn't have fired on us. We're unarmed. Hey, you! Manager," Remo called. The manager had opened his office a crack. He had retreated there after Chiun, coming up in the elevator, had walked into the armed ambush and made short work of four of Zurich's best police agents.
"I need a box."
The door slammed shut.
"If you don't come out, I'm sending my friend with the long, sharp fingernails in after you," Remo warned.
The manager minced out. His face dripped greasy sweat. "I ... I am at your service," he groveled.
"You could have said that before. And you could have told me that Friendship, International handled your security work. It would have saved everyone a lot of trouble." The manager said nothing.
"Tell you what. I'll let it go on one condition."
The manager wrung his hands. "Yes. Anything. Anything."
"Find a box for this junk and mail it to Smith, Folcroft Sanitarium, Rye, New York, USA. Write it down."
"I will remember it," the manager assured him. "Forever."
"Good. We gotta go."
Stepping over the moaning bodies of the Swiss police agents, Chiun asked, "Where do we go now?"
"We'll have to split up. Take your pick, Stockholm or London."
"The Swedes are worse than the Swiss."
"You can have London, then."
"I want Stockholm."
"Why, pray tell?"
"Because it is a shorter journey."
"Not because you like busting my chops? Okay, suit yourself. Let's find a cab."
Chapter 25
Major General Gunnar Rolfe was a hero to his country.
This was no small thing for a military man in a nation at peace. But when one was a high-ranking officer in the Swedish armed forces, a military machine that had avoided combat since the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1814, it was a special thing to be a hero. And Major General Gunnar Rolfe was exactly that.
He was a hero to the average Swede. The man they affectionately dubbed "the Steel-Haired Peacemaker." He was a hero to his fellow officers and men. They loved him, and some-even the most peace-loving of them-secretly envied him. Major General Rolfe had accomplished the unthinkable for a Swedish military man.
He had actually fought a battle. And won it.
But that was not all. No, the remarkable thing, the unbelievable thing, was that Major General Rolfe had fought this terrible battle against the dreaded Bear of the North, the Russians.
True, some said openly, it was not much of a battle. A skirmish. An incident, perhaps. But no one could deny the fact that the major general had successfully defended Sweden's rocky coastline against the Soviet bear, and the bear had not retaliated. Rolfe had been the first Swedish officer to lead an attack against an enemy in over 170 years, so no one was indelicate enough to make much of the fact that the Battle of Stockholm Harbor-as it was called-was the result of Major General Gunnar Rolfe's mistakenly ordering evasive action against a lurking Soviet spy submarine he believed to be off the port bow of the patrol boat under his command.
It was not off the port bow.
It was lurking under the stern.
When the patrol craft backed away from the shadow in the water that turned out to be a sunken oil drum, it rammed the spy submarine. The sub broke open like an eggshell and sank, killing all aboard and embarrassing the Soviet Union before the entire world.
Major General Gunnar Rolfe's patrol boat also sank during the Battle of Stockholm Harbor, with the loss of half its crew, but this was dismissed as "an acceptable level of casualties in an engagement of this magnitude," in the report the Steel-Haired Peacemaker submitted to the office of the Prime Minister.
Or, as he later expressed it to his fellow officers: "Leading men to their deaths is good for morale. More officers should have the opportunity. Who knows, we may be forced to fight a war in another hundred years."
"Or two," a lieutenant said grimly.
"Or two," agreed Major General Rolfe, taking a deep draft of imported dark lager to stiffen himself against the prospect that his great-grandson, or great-great-grandson, might have to go through the hell he had suffered on that dark day. He shuddered.
Life had been good to the major general since that day. The government had increased his pension by many thousands of krona. A summer cottage in the pastoral valleys of Norrland had been built especially for him. Nubile blonde teenage girls asked for his autograph in public, and entertained him in private as only Swedish girls can.
As much as Major General Rolfe was admired in his native land, he was despised by the Soviet leadership. It had been an open secret that Russian submarines regularly prowled Swedish coastal waters, mapping her military installations. Everyone knew it. And everyone knew why. Sweden was an officially neutral nation, and the only Scandinavian country not allied with NATO. Sweden had no military allies, an inexperienced army, and virtually no defense against Soviet aggression. The Soviets had targeted Sweden as the first nation for annexing in the event of a ground war in Europe. When the Soviet subs first began venturing into Swedish waters, the official policy was to ignore the intrusions. When the Kremlin realized how much they could get away with, they began slipping tractor-treaded midget subs into Swedish waterways. This was too much even for the peace-loving Swedes, so they sent out their patrol boats to drop depth charges a harmless three miles away from the lurking subs and made a public show of pointing an accusing finger at the terrible Soviet aggression.