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.
Each time, the Russian subs were allowed to leave peacefully-even though Swedish law called for their capture on espionage charges. It was official policy not to antagonize the Soviet leadership. In fact, there had been considerable embarrassment in the upper levels of the government when it came out that Major General Rolfe had actually sunk a Soviet spy sub in Swedish waters. The Prime Minister had been formulating a formal apology for hand-delivery to the Russian ambassador and there was talk of cashiering Major General Rolfe for violating Sweden's official neutrality policy, which had kept them safely out of World War II-although it hadn't prevented the government from allowing German troops to cross supposedly neutral Swedish territory so the Nazis could finish crushing Norway.
But when the Russians didn't retaliate, the Swedish government decided they were safe and declared victory. Overnight, Major General Rolfe had gone from blunderer to national savior-although he, too, suffered from sleepless nights wondering if Soviet KGB agents weren't planning to liquidate him personally as a warning to his government. But nothing of the sort had happened.
This lack of retaliation bothered Major General Gunnar Rolfe, but he was enjoying his newfound acclaim too much to dwell on it. Even six months after the Battle of Stockholm Harbor, he was still receiving decorations; presents, and the favors of high-school girls. His apartment overlooking the Kungstadgarden, whose marigolds had been in bloom a century before Columbus, overflowed with them.
Had he known that at that very moment a Scandinavian Airlines jet was carrying the representative of a tradition far older than Sweden's neutrality, with several grisly methods of dealing with him in mind, Major General Gunnar Rolfe would have immediately fled his beloved Sweden for asylum in a safer country.
Even if that country was Soviet Russia.
* * *
Lord Guy Phillston pulled his elegant black Citroen into the spot reserved for him in front of Ten Downing Street and noticed that his pipe had gone out during the drive from his office at Britain's supersecret counterintelligence agency, the Source.
"Oh, drat!" he exclaimed. He pulled the pipe, which was a meerschaum with a bowl carved in the semblence of Anne Boleyn's head, and applied a freshly struck wooden match. The rich Dunheap tobacco caught slowly and Lord Guy inhaled a good stiff draft to steel himself for the interview.
Puffing furiously, he walked up to the simple door with the gold number ten on it and rapped the brass knocker politely.
A male secretary answered.
"She is expecting you," the secretary said. "Do come in."
The secretary waved him to a velvet-cushioned seat in the foyer and Lord Guy took it gratefully. Ordinarily he detested waiting, but a few additional minutes meant a few more bracing puffs of the pipe.
When the secretary finally emerged from the study to inform him the Prime Minister would see him, Lord Guy hastily snuffed out the pipe and slipped it into his jacket pocket. It wouldn't do to appear before the Prime Minister with poor Anne Boleyn's face sticking out of his mouth. Might offend the sensibilities and all that. Privately, Lord Guy doubted that this woman who controlled the destiny of the Commonwealth, who was known by friend and foe alike as the Iron Lady, had sensibilities of any sort. But he knew that she was not above pretending to take offense if she thought it gave her psychological leverage.
The Prime Minister greeted him cordially, with that smile that was more a polite baring of teeth than a smile. It was completely empty of warmth, like a barracuda's smile.
"Good of you to come," she said, waving him to a seat. "I have your report on my desk." She looked at the report, removed her reading glasses, and still smiling emptily, added, "Rather fanciful, isn't it?"
"Ah, Madam Prime Minister, I realize the ... er ...unorthodox nature of the matter. But I stand behind every...ah ...word."
"I see." She adjusted her glasses again and flipped through the report-or pretended to. The head of the Source was suddenly struck by the thought of how much like a schoolmistress she seemed with her too-matronly brown hair and condescending manner. She wasn't reading a jot, he knew. She just wanted to make him as uncomfortable as possible.
When he refused to fill the dead air with an apology or qualification, the Prime Minister spoke again.
"You are absolutely sure of your facts, then, Lord Guy?"
"Quite."
The Prime Minister dropped the Source report and leaned back in her high-backed chair. The room was dim and somehow homey, like the parlor of some grandmotherly sort from Dorset, Lord Guy thought.