The Samurai Strategy Part 17

"Agreed." She looked at him and suddenly realized something. Ken Asano was beautiful, _kirei_. Not handsome, beautiful. _Anata wa kirei desu_, Kenji Asano. "Want a nightcap? There's some airport Remy in my--"

"Who could even think about another cognac. I just want to think about us." He stood back. "All right, maybe if you insist. For old times'

sake."

"'Old times' is right, Ken. It's been a very long time since Kyoto."

She located the dark Remy bottle, still packed in her leather flight bag. A nice inauguration, she told herself. "What was that all about?

Was it real? Or did I just imagine it all?"

"The heart never lies." He settled on the couch. "Do you really remember?"

"Vividly." She laughed as she poured an inch into each of two thin hotel tumblers. "Including that dreadful bar you took us all to."

"A glimpse of the real j.a.pan, Tam, for our tourist friends. Show them it's not all _ikebana_ and _haiku_. Believe me, it's not." He clicked her gla.s.s. "Do try to forgive me. And here's to us."

"To us."

"And to the slightly scary world we're stumbling into. j.a.pan needs you here." He pulled her next to him and brushed her cheek lightly with his fingertips. Then he kissed her deeply on the mouth, and again. "/ need you here, Tam. Somebody like you. There's . . . well, there's a lot we could do together."

She reached up and loosened his tie, then began unb.u.t.toning his s.h.i.+rt.

His chest was firm, smooth, scented. She wanted him. "Let's just remember Kyoto for a while."

"I've never forgotten it."

Sometime around four A.M., more content than she had been in a long, long time, Tam Richardson lay awake on the cool sheets, Ken's trim body beside her, and wondered how it would end this time around.

Or possibly, just possibly, it wouldn't.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Back in New York, optimism was in increasingly short supply. What do you do if you think you're being set up? One thing, you may have occasion to muse long and hard about the consequences, personal and otherwise. You also may choose to ponder the larger motives of the individual behind it all.

So far, what had happened? Matsuo Noda had hired Matt Walton, corporate attorney-at-law, to begin shorting the American Treasury market, then proceeded to make himself a bona fide hero back home, in the process of which he acquired access to the biggest chunk of savings in the world, presumably the "financial arrangements" he once alluded to. Using that money as margin, Noda was ready to s.h.i.+ft his play into high gear. My latest telexed instructions indicated he was poised to accelerate dramatically, "borrowing" bonds and selling them for whatever the market would pay. Of course if the price went down anytime soon, he could then replace those borrowed instruments at some fraction of what he'd sold them for. The man was gambling, for G.o.dsake. With the "Emperor's" fund.

Or was he? Therein, as somebody once said, lies the rub. Short selling has always been a reasonably good definition of gambling, except . . .

except you are gambling only if you are wagering money on an event whose outcome is not precisely known. If you do know it, you are not gambling. You are taking prudent steps that will allow you to benefit from prior knowledge of said, etc.

Enough airy semantics. The big question: Why me? Now, I've been set up a few times before in my life. Everybody has. I even wonder in darker moments if the reason Joanna demanded a champagne lifestyle wasn't to make sure I spent all my time supporting it, thereby rendering me exactly what she eventually accused me of being--an absentee husband and father. That is a no-win situation.

The undertaking at hand, however, could have a very obvious beneficiary. Matsuo Noda. The only problem was that in order for Noda to win, America had to lose. Ma.s.sively. The old zero-sum game: for every winner there has to be an equal and opposite sucker.

After that Friday evening with Henderson, I spent the next week mulling over the complexities of the situation. The whole thing boiled down to two very strong presumptions: one, I was indeed being set up, being told one scenario while the truth lay in quite another direction; and two, my employer had something very lethal to America's financial health up his sleeve. Still, these were merely presumptions, nothing more. The only thing I was sure about was that I had a very unpredictable tiger by its posterior handle. Time to find out a little more about my p.u.s.s.ycat.

I hadn't actually seen Dai Nippon's midtown office, but I talked to the manager almost every day on the phone, and he occasionally s.h.i.+pped materials down to my place in the Village. I knew they'd taken over the building, installed a new security staff, moved into the vacant floor, and were doing something. However, I hadn't been invited up to see what the something was. I concluded the time was at hand.

As I understood it, Dai Nippon's purpose in life was to oversee the use of investment capital. Fair and good. As it happens, j.a.panese business tends to be funded a little differently from our own. Instead of selling off stock to the public, j.a.panese industry relies much more heavily on bank financing. In fact, less than twenty percent of j.a.pan's industrial a.s.sets are publicly traded. Consequently the rules of the game are changed. If your company is beholden to a financial inst.i.tution instead of a lot of nervous stockholders and fund managers, you're in partners with somebody less interested in next quarter's profits than in the larger matter of your still being around ten years hence to pay off its paper. That lender naturally rides herd very closely on your long-term planning.

As best I could tell, DNI was one of the herd-riders, a sort of hired gun that monitored various companies' operations to make sure they were managing their loans prudently. Again, since the prospectus emphasized they were specialists in overseas investment, I a.s.sumed that maybe part of the reason they were coming to the U.S. was to oversee the j.a.panese companies doing business here with money borrowed from back home.

n.o.body had actually told me this. In fact n.o.body had told me anything.

That was merely what I considered to be an educated guess. It was the only thing I could think of that made the slightest sense.

The following Monday morning I told myself the guesswork was over. It was high time I went up and saw for myself what they were doing. All I needed was an excuse.

Then the phone rang. I was in the garden out back, skimming the Times and working on a pot of fresh coffee while waiting for the Chicago exchanges to open. Ben was cruising the fence line, sniffing for cats.

When I picked up the receiver, waiting at the other end was Mr.

Yasuhiro Tanaka, office manager for the New York operation. He chatted a bit about the weather, how nice it was to be working in the U.S., the usual. Finally he mentioned that he needed to meet with me to discuss, among other matters, certain legal questions concerning one of the other leases in their building. Would it be convenient if he came down to my place and we went over the paperwork?

Not necessary, I replied. I just happened to be headed for midtown in the next few minutes. I'd throw a copy of the leases into my briefcase and drop by to see him. Then before he could protest, I mumbled something about the doorbell and hung up. The phone rang again immediately, but I didn't answer it. I was already putting on my jacket.

I scribbled a few notes for Emma, taped them to her word processor, and headed out the door. Minutes later I was in their Third Avenue lobby, greeting the new security staff, several of whom, as a favor to Tanaka, I'd interviewed for their jobs.

Then I took the elevator up to DNI's offices on the eleventh floor and proceeded to have my argyle socks blown away.

First off, top security. The entryway just off the elevator bank had been completely transformed. TV intercom, steel doors--it could have been the vault at Chase. I told the camera's eye who I was and then waited while a computer somewhere gave me a voice-ID check. How they managed to have me in the system already I wasn't exactly sure . . .

maybe they'd taken it off the phone?

After I'd cleared that, the doors slid open and I entered the first chamber of a two-room security check. An electronic voice ordered me to put my briefcase into the X-ray machine while I proceeded through the metal detector.

That cleared, the set of steel panels leading into the next room slid open and I went in . . . to be confronted by two crew-cut guards who could have been retired sumo wrestlers. As the doors clicked behind me, I took one look at DNI's welcoming committee and realized they were packing Uzis, those Israeli automatics that could probably cut down a tree in about two seconds. No candy-a.s.s .38's for Dai Nippon. Without ceremony they commenced a body search. It was all very polite, but it sure as h.e.l.l wasn't perfunctory. I just stood there in astonishment while this gorilla roughly twice my size felt me up.

That indignity completed, I was now in line for the real surprise. Yet another set of steel doors opened, and there awaited the man I'd been dealing with over the phone, Yasuhiro Tanaka. Medium build, late forties, cropped hair, automatic smile--he was Noda's chief of operations for New York. He didn't say much, just led me onto the floor, heading for his office. But he was clearly the on-site daimyd: lots of heavy bowing from the young, white-s.h.i.+rted j.a.panese staff as we headed for the corner suite.

Which brings us to the real shocker. Dai Nippon's floor operation looked like the flight deck of the Stars.h.i.+p Enterprise. Let me attempt a brief description. In the far back was a ma.s.sive NEC augmented supercomputer--a half dozen off-white octagonal units about head high, one the mainframe and the others storage modules arranged alongside in a neat row. Pure power. The whole thing was encased in a gla.s.sed room with (I a.s.sumed) critical temperature and humidity control. Then out on the floor were lines and lines of workstations. Computer screens everywhere, printers running, stacks of color hard copy--pie charts, bar graphs, spreads--plus terminals carrying every financial service offered by cable or satellite.

This was just the first, five-second glance. Incredible, I thought.

There must be a heck of a lot more j.a.panese investment in the U.S. than anybody realizes.

But something had to be wrong here. Why should . . . ? Finally I slowed down--Tanaka was hurrying me along, clearly

annoyed that I'd appeared uninvited. That's when I noticed the rest.

Across one wall was a line of projection TVs, on which computer data was being scrolled. As we walked past, I noticed that each screen seemed to be under the scrutiny of a team of a.n.a.lysts, who were intently studying the numbers, comparing notes, running calculations on their individual terminals.

What's this all about?

I stopped before one screen and studied it a second. Beneath it a small sign said simply "Electronics." The one next to it read "Biotechnology." Then I glanced at a couple of others. Each one covered a different industrial sector. Gee, I thought, you're really out of touch, Walton. Who would have guessed j.a.pan has so much investment in manufacturing here. I didn't remember much going on besides a few joint ventures. Sure, they've got a few auto a.s.sembly plants, that steel plant they'd bought out on the coast, some TV-tube production, chips, VCRs. But mostly it represented entries into sectors where they're trying to get the jump on protectionism, start a token manufacturing operation here before they get shut out.

"If you have any questions, I'm sure we can discuss them later." Tanaka had taken my arm and was urging me politely toward his office. The whines and hums of laser printers and the beep of computers made conversation all but impossible.

"Well, I was merely interested . . ." Then I stopped.

Know that test psychologists have, the one where you look at a couple of silhouettes and describe what you see? If you think you're supposed to look at the white part in the middle, then you see one thing--I think it's a vase. But if you concentrate on the black instead, you see something else entirely, maybe the profiles of two human faces opposite each other. Thus what you see is largely a product of your prior a.s.sumptions concerning what you're supposed to be looking for. Or maybe it measures whether you view the world as a positive or a negative image, something like that. I don't recall exactly. I do remember receiving a B- in Psych 101, which was generous.

The point is, what I first thought I saw was actually the inverse of what was really there. I'd told myself what it was, rather than believing my eyes.