Smith moved quickly to the ashtray. He bent to relace one of his gray oxford shoes. When he straightened up, the blue notebook was under one arm.
He exited the terminal and hurried to his dilapidated station wagon, which was parked nearby.
The Master of Sinanju endured the flight to the city called Boston despite the hectoring of the galley servant who insisted that he ride in the front of the plane, where everyone knew death sat should the plane fly into the side of a mountain, as frequently happened.
"I will ride over the wing," he told her.
"But, sir, your ticket says first class," the stewardess pointed out. "You are entitled to our best service."
"And the best service you can render me is to allow me to sit over the wing so that if it should fall off, I will know this."
"I've never head of a wing actually dropping off in flight."
"Then it is bound to happen," Chiun snapped, "for every other calamity imaginable has already befallen these pitiful metal birds you whites command."
At that example of invincible logic, the stewardess relented, and a coach passenger was delighted to discover upon boarding that the flight was overbooked, but instead of being bumped, he would be permitted to sit in first class.
The wing did not fall off, although the Master of Sinanju did notice that it wobbled alarmingly upon takeoff:
He spent the flight confiding to an elderly woman that he was the victim of a foul slander.
"What slander?" the woman gasped.
"That I am Japanese," Chiun admitted in a pained voice.
"You poor dear Chinaman. How awful."
After that the Master of Sinanju pointedly refused to listen to the details of the ignorant woman's hysterectomy, going so far as to insert his fingers into his ears by way of hint.
At the Boston airport there was a Roman servant awaiting him.
"You the Jap computer guy?" he asked.
"I am Chiun. I am not called the Jap."
"Name's Bruno. The boss is waitin', and boy is he steamed. "
" I am very interested in meeting this steamed boss of yours," said Chiun, walking beside the servant. "Is he also a Roman?"
"The boss is Italian, like me. Proud of it, too."
"Pride is very Roman. It is good to be proud of your heritage," Chiun sniffed. "Even if you have sunk into mediocrity."
"Is that an insult?"
"And ignorance," added Chiun, whose ancestors had worked for the Roman emperors when the sons of Rome had not been debased by the pagan cult called Christianity. If only the lions had been more plentiful . . .
The corner of Boston called the North End made the Master of Sinanju think of parts of the outer world he had visited when he was very young, in the beginning part of this century. It did not make him feel nostalgic, however. Nothing in the modern world was to be admired. Although the Ottoman Empire had its good points.
He was taken to the side door of an ugly brick structure, where the cracked glass face of a computer stared back like the shattered eye of a Cyclops. Three swarthy Romans stood around it like glowering votaries.
"This is the troublesome machine?" asked Chiun.
"What does it look like?" said Bruno. He laughed. "This here's the Jap," he told the security guards.
His voice dripping disdain, the Master of Sinanju said, " I will proceed to fix this. But first I must know what has befallen it."
Bruno shrugged. "It's simple. It broke."
"Explain. "
"First the boss was having trouble with it. It wasn't doin' what he told it to. So he gave it a good whack."
"And?"
"It went blooie."
Chiun nodded safely. "Ah, blooie. Yes, I have seen blooie before. A common scourge of machines. It is possible to fix this. "
"Then the last guy IDC sent, when he couldn't fix the disk, broke the whole machine. His name was Remo, too. Can you imagine a guy named Remo doin' that?"
" I cannot imagine one named Remo not doing that," said Chiun, advancing upon the machine.
His hazel eyes narrowed at the strange oracle the whites called a computer. Emperor Smith had explained certain things about these machines to him. His eyes went to the black panel which concealed the all-important hard discus.
He inserted two long fingernails into a vent and pulled sharply.
The black panel popped off, exposing naked machinery.
"Ah-hah!" cried Chiun. "Behold! No wonder this machine stubbornly refused to do its master's bidding."
Bruno crouched to see better. "Yeah? What is it?"
Chiun reached in and extracted a thick-edged black disk.
"This," he said. "It is the wrong record for this brand of machine."
"It is?" Bruno asked, dumbfounded.
"This is designed for a seventy-eight-rpm computer. You have the thirty-three-and-one-third kind."
Chiun held the shiny black hard disk up to the light triumphantly.
"Do they work that way?" asked Bruno doubtfully.
"It is a professional secret," said Chiun conspiratorially. " I am only revealing this to you because you have been abused by Remo the Terrible."
"What do we do?" asked Bruno, straightening up.
"I must secure the proper record."
"You don't have one with you?"
"Alas, no. I was misinformed by my employer as to the true nature of the problem. I must return to Idiocy right away. "
"You mean IDC."
"I mean what I mean. For I am Chiun, world's greatest repairer of computers such as this."
"I'd better check with the boss."
The Master of Sinanju nodded. "I must treat with your master. So this is good."
Bruno went to a door and knocked once.
"What?" a raspy voice growled.
"The Jap figured out what's wrong with the box."
"Is it fuggin' fixed?"
"No. He's gotta take a part back. Says we got a seventy-eight when we shoulda had a thirty-three and a third. Like on a record player." "That don't mean nothin' to me.'
"It's like records. You know."
The door opened.
"Is that right?" asked Carmine Imbruglia, for the first time hearing something about computers that made sense.
"You the Jap?" he demanded, staring at the Master of Sinanju.
"I am Chiun," said Chiun frostily. He raised the hard discus. "And this is the source of all your vexing problems." Chiun looked more closely at the one known as the boss. "You are a moneylender?" he asked.
"What's it to you?"
"You remind me of a moneylender. Such as lived in Roman days. "
"You need a loan? I can front you a few bucks. Six for five. "
"No, I need only a conveyance from whence I came."
"What's that in American?" asked Carmine suspiciously.
"I must return to my employer, who will replace this faulty record."
"That ain't the hard disk, is it?"
"No. "
"That's good, because I ain't lettin' the hard disk outta my sight," said Carmine firmly. "I told them that before. It stays here. "
"You are very wise," said Chiun blandly.
"Just to be safe, I want you to show me the hard disk, okay?"
"Why?"
"I'm from Brookyn, right? I don't know nothing from computers. You show me and I'll let you go get the right record."
"Very well," said the Master of Sinanju. He peered into the open aperture, saying, "It is that silver object there."
Don Carmine Imbruglia blinked into the aperture like a gorilla into a hole in a tree.
"That little silver dingus?" he asked, surprise in his raspy voice.
"The very same."
Don Carmine squinted his piggish eyes. His brutish face scrunched up like a fist.
"So that's what it looks like. All this trouble over that little thing. It looks like a little washer. Who knew?"
"It is the way with these machines," said Chiun firmly.
Carmine
straightened.
"Okay, you done good. About time, too. Bruno, you take this little Jap genius back to the airport. Give him anything he wants. Then you stay there until he gets back. You understand?"
"Got it, boss."
"When this is over," said Don Carmine to the Master of Sinanju, " I wanna talk to you about maybe doin' a little work for me on the side. Savvy?"
"On what side?" asked Chiun curiously.
"On my side."
The Master of Sinanju bowed.
"When I return," he said, "we will have much to discuss, you and I."
Chapter 15
The supersecret organization, CURE, ran by computer.
In the basement of Folcroft Sanitarium, behind a sealed wall, a bank of mainframes hummed like a grandmother doing her knitting.
For the three decades Dr. Harold W. Smith had overseen the organization, those data banks had grown and grown, absorbing and retaining vast files on every American, every business entity, and every conceivable fact that might be of use to Dr. Smith in his tireless effort to hold in check the forces that threatened to rend America apart.
Smith loved his computers. Although he had seen action during World War II as an OSS operative and later in the CIA, in his declining years Smith preferred the quiet order of his office and its simple terminal that could access virtually any computer on the continent.
Today he had his system up and running, its tentacles reaching out through the phone lines to the mainframe at IDC world headquarters, only a few miles away from Rye, New York.
The blue LANSCII notebook lay propped up beside it.
Smith was conducting a surreptitious search through the IDC data banks for the LANSCII program. The IDC system had succumbed to a brute-force password testing program like a sand castle swept aside by a surf.
He had been doing this for over an hour. Although it should have taken no more than ten minutes to isolate LANSCII if it were there, he kept at it.
"It must be on file. LANSCII is an IDC program," he muttered to himself.
But it seemed not to be.
When at last he was forced to admit defeat, Smith logged off IDC, and picked up the blue notebook. He looked at the cover again.
He knew that LAN was a computer term meaning "local area network." A fancy name for a PC. Assuming it was identical to the end letters of Ascii, the double I would mean "information interchange." Ascii actually stood for Association Standards Committee for Information Interchange.
But this strange configuration had him stumped. Except that it sounded hauntingly familiar. But Smith as yet could not place it in his memory.
"What could the SC stand for?" he muttered.
Cool fall sunlight streamed through the replacement window behind Smith's hunched form. He frowned.
A buzzer buzzed.
"Yes, Mrs. Mikulka?" Smith said absently.
"Dr. Gerling asked me to tell you the new patient remains in stable condition."
Smith looked at his watch. "Thank you. Inform Dr. Gerling I will expect the next update at precisely three-oh-five."
"Yes, Dr. Smith."
Smith went back to the blue notebook. His knowledge of computer systems, in the days when CURE was new, had been as good as anyone's. Superior to most. Over the intervening decades, Smith had kept up with the fabulous developments in the field. But in recent years he had been forced to concede that technology had outpaced his ability to keep abreast of it.
Still, he was able to understand most of the LANSCII program. It was a combination spreadsheet and inventory accounting program. A variation on existing software.
True, some of the rubrics and subsets were odd. But computer terminology had a tendency to be either overly technical or playful to a degree Smith found asinine.
What on earth, he wondered, was meant by VIG? Or LAYOFF? The former appeared to be an employee tracking component, but it was not connected with the configuration surrounding the LAYOFF rubric, which appeared to be some sort of insurance program along the lines of futures trading.
A moment later his secretary buzzed him again.
"Yes?" Smith said, this time a trifle testily.
"Mr. Great is here to see you."
"Who?"
"He says his first name is Chiun. You know, that man."
"I see," said Smith. The Master of Sinanju had been a frequent visitor to Folcroft, and Smith had allowed his secretary to believe that Chiun was a former patient subject to delusions. It covered virtually every outburst the old Korean might make. "Send him in," Smith said crisply.
The door flew open. Chiun came billowing in like a blue-and-silver cloud-the colors of his kimono. He waved a hard disk in the air triumphantly.
"Behold, Emperor! The very prize you seek!"
"You extracted the disk," Smith said, his face falling into long drawn lines of regret.
"Of course," Chiun said proudly. "Was there any doubt?"
"But," sputtered Smith, rising from behind his shabby desk, "hard disks are not supposed to be removed like a common CD. They require delicate handling. A clean-room environment. The data have no doubt been destroyed."
"Why do you say that?" asked Chiun, taken aback by the sheer ingratitude of his employer.
"It's too complicated to explain," said Smith with a sigh. "But suffice it to say that dust and debris on the surface of the disk, no matter how minute and seemingly inconsequential, would obliterate the very magnetic particles that store the data."
Chiun wrinkled his tiny nose at the incomprehensible babbling of his emperor. He raised the disk into the air on the tip of one long-fingered nail. With the other hand he set it to spinning. Faster and faster, he spun the disk.
Then with a touch of the same finger, he brought it to an abrupt halt.
"It is now clean," he said tightly.
Smith blinked. He knew it was hopeless, but he also knew the power of the Master of Sinanju. He came out from behind his desk with his long face quivering with suppressed hope.
"It is worth a try," he said, taking the disk between two fingers.
As Chiun watched, Smith opened a port in his terminal. It was one of two capable of accepting auxiliary hard disks. He inserted the new disk into the drive, closed the port, and engaged the disk.
The drive whined warningly.
"Not a good sign," Smith murmured.
"I endured great personal hardship to recover that object," Chiun pointed out. "Canards and abuses were heaped upon my poor head like cold raindrops." The tone of his voice told Smith that the Master of Sinanju was miffed.
Greenish symbols appeared on the screen. They looked like a combination of English and Chinese. Garbage.
"I am sure you did," Smith said, moderating the drive's speed. The whine lessened, the symbols on the screen shifting in and out of readability.
"I allowed myself to be known as a Japanese," Chiun said, drawing near.
"As I explained to you earlier, you were undercover. In disguise. No one will know it was you."
"I was forced to identify myself to ignorant persons as Chiun, former chief of Nostrum, Ink, the mighty corporation of which everyone has heard."
"That was quick thinking. I am very pleased."
"And so I am branded in some eyes," Chiun continued, "a lowly and avaricious Japanese instead of a graceful Korean. My ancestors would weep tears of bile if they knew of this."
Smith said nothing. He was absorbed in his manipulation of the mysterious disk. Letters were resolving themselves.
"How does Remo fare?" asked Chiun, changing the subject. As always, the white was unreachable when communing with his machine.
"He is fine. Just fine," said Smith, his pinched face almost the color of the glowing screen. A sickly phosphor green.
When he had the whine muted, Smith tapped several keys.
He got a sign-on screen. It read:
LANSCII
Smith would have grinned, had smiling been in his nature.
The screen winked out, was
replaced by another image.
This one read:
***LOCAL AREA NETWORK***
***SICILIAN CRIME***
***INFORMATION INTERCHANGE***
Dr. Harold W. Smith stared at this with a stupefied expression as the screen was replaced by a user-friendly menu.
Frantically he exited the system and rebooted. Again he got the sign-on. Then the second screen. He stabbed a pause button.
The glowing green letters stared back at him mockingly.
***LOCAL AREA NETWORK***
***SICILIAN CRIME***
***INFORMATION INTERCHANGE***
"Good God," said Harold Smith hoarsely. He disengaged the pause.
"What is it, Emperor?" asked Chiun, coming around to Smith's side of the desk to see what had so amazed his emperor. If it were important enough, it might be something to throw in Smith's face at the next contract negotiation.
Smith did not reply. He was going through the system. His eyes widened. At one point he input the name VIG.
A screen came up, showing a simple ledger accounting format. It was headed VIGORISH.
"Vig? Vigorish!" said Smith, his lemony voice tinged with disbelief.
" I do not know these words," remarked Chiun with interest.
"'Vigorish' is a slang term for the interest paid in usurious loans," Smith explained, not taking his eyes from the screen. "Sometimes shortened to 'vig.' "
"Of course. The Roman they call the boss is a moneylender. He offered me five for six."
Smith nodded. "A shylock."
Chiun shrugged. "It is not so bad. Brutus was infamous for demanding sixty-percent interest."
Smith looked up quizzically.
"Brutus?"
"The thug who betrayed Caesar."
" I see." Smith returned to his screen. He paged through the data, squinting harder as he concentrated. He discovered that the LAYOFF program was simply a method of tracking the laying off of high-risk sports bets. An insurance scheme, as he had deduced.
Half-forgotten underworld slang came back to him. He found programs covering running numbers, a method of randomly selecting floating-dice-game locations and what appeared to be an accounting of the daily take on supermarket cash registers. It was an old trick, Smith knew. A manager would be strong-armed and coerced into installing a checkout line unsuspected by the parent chain. All proceeds from the phantom register would go into criminal hands.
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