British spy-turned-detective Harry Palmer stumbles upon an oil tycoon's plot to overthrow Communism using a supercomputer.

Harry Palmer has left the British Secret Service and become a private detective. One of his first assignments is to deliver an apparently innocent Thermos flask to an old friend in Helsinki, Palmer is suspicious of the flask' contents and starts to doubt his friend's motives, and those of his boss, a Texan billionaire.—Dave Jenkins <[email protected]>

Harry Palmer, a London-based private investigator with a somewhat checkered past, is in Helsinki in the dead of winter to deliver a package, contents unknown, on his latest partially prepaid job for an anonymous client and unknown recipient, he offered the job through a computer-generated voice on a telephone call and necessary materials sent to him via special delivery post. While Harry, following instructions including using the necessary code words, does ultimately recognize the recipient of the package as a friendly American face from his past, Leo Newbegin, Harry doesn't fully trust the situation. The case leads to Harry's former employer bringing him back into the fold, namely Colonel Ross of MI5. Ross couldn't accomplish rehiring him previously in asking him directly, most-likely to work on this case. The issue is that the package contains a deadly virus stolen from a British scientific facility, MI5 who had a double agent inside the organization that stole it, the Crusade for Freedom funded by Texas oil millionaire, Midwinter. That double agent was killed probably by Leo and/or his beautiful associate, Anya, and was the intended recipient of the package. Knowing nothing else, Ross wants Harry to replace the double agent to infiltrate the organization to stop the deployment of the virus for whatever purpose and ultimately to retrieve the virus itself, all to which Leo should be none the wiser in already having asked Harry to join the organization. Included in what Harry will learn is that Midwinter's money has gone into a billion dollar computer that is programmed to give the orders to the organization's operatives in the goal of the fall of Communism, hence the person or people closest to the computer able to dictate the goals through what is input into the computer.—Huggo

Harry Palmer no longer spies for the British and is instead a starving private detective. He receives a package of money which is followed by a mechanical voice that gives him his instructions over the phone. He accepts the assignment and finds that he has entered the world of a Texas billionaire who thinks he can bring about a popular uprising in the Soviet Union with help from a highly-sophisticated computer.—John Vogel <[email protected]>