terests here. I suggest that you might be a perfect man for the job.”
For the first time in years, Raizo Yamata was startled.
In another room in the same hotel an admiral, a major, and a captain of Japan
Air Lines held a family reunion.
“So, Yusuo, what will happen next?” Torajiro asked.
“What I think will happen next is that you will return to your normal
flight schedule back and forth to America,” the Admiral said, finishing his
third drink. “If they are as intelligent as I believe them to be, then they will
see that the war is already over.”
“How long have you been in on this, Uncle?” Shiro inquired with deep
respect. Having now learned of what his uncle had done, he was awed by the
man’s audacity.
“From when I was a nisa, supervising construction of my first command
in Yamata-san’s yards. What is it? Ten years now. He came down to see me,
and we had dinner and he asked some theoretical questions. Yamata learns
quickly for a civilian,” the Admiral opined.’ ‘I tell you, I think there is much
more to this than meets the eye.”
“How so?” Torajiro asked.
Yusuo poured himself another shot. His fleet was safe, and he was entitled
to unwind, he thought, especially with his brother and nephew, now that all
the stress was behind him. “We’ve spoken more and more in the past few
years, but most of all right before he bought that American financial house.
And so, now? My little operation happens the same day that their stock mar-
ket crashes . . . ? An interesting coincidence, is it not?” His eyes twinkled.
“One of my first lessons to him, all those years ago. In 1941 we attacked
America’s periphery. We attacked the arms but not the head or the heart. A
TOM CI.ANCY
nation can grow new arms, but a heart, or a head, that’s far harder. I suppose
he listened.”
‘ ‘I’ve flown over the head part many times,” Captain Torajiro Sato noted.
One of his two normal runs was to Dulles International Airport. “A squalid
city.”
‘ ‘And you shall do so again. If Yamata did what I think, they will need us
again, and soon enough,” Admiral Sato said confidently.
“Go ahead, let him through,” Ryan said over the phone.
“But-”
“But if it makes you feel better, pop it open and look, but if he says not to
X-ray it, don’t, okay?”
‘ ‘But we were told just to expect one, and there’s two.”
“It’s okay,” Jack told the head uniformed guard at the west entrance. The
problem with increased security alerts was that they mainly kept you from
getting the work done that was necessary to resolve the crisis. “Send them
both up.” It took another four minutes by Jack’s watch. They probably did
pop the back off the guy’s portable computer to make sure there wasn’t a
bomb there. Jack rose from his desk and met them at the anteroom door.
“Sorry about that. Remember the old Broadway song, ‘The Secret Ser-
vice Makes Me Nervous’?” Ryan waved them into his office. He assumed
the older one was George Winston. He vaguely remembered the speech at
the Harvard Club, but not the face that had delivered it.
“This is Mark Gant. He’s my best technical guy, and he wanted to bring
his laptop.”
“It’s easier this way,” Gant explained.
“I understand. I use them, too. Please sit down.” Jack waved them to
chairs. His secretary brought in a coffee tray. When cups were poured, he
went on. “I had one of my people track the European markets. Not good.”
“That’s putting it mildly, Dr. Ryan. We may be watching the beginning
of a global panic,” Winston began. “I’m not sure where the bottom is.”
“So far Buzz is doing okay,” Jack replied cautiously. Winston looked up
from his cup.
‘ ‘Ryan, if you’re a bullshitter, I’ve come to the wrong place. I thought you
knew the Street. The IPO you did with Silicon Alchemy was nicely
crafted-now, was that you or did you take the credit for somebody else’s
work?”
“There’s only two people who talk to me like that. One I’m married to.
The other has an office about a hundred feet that way.” Jack pointed. Then
he grinned. “Your reputation precedes you, Mr. Winston. Silicon Alchemy
was all my work. I have ten percent of the stock in my personal portfolio.
That’s how much I thought of the outfit. If you ask around about my rep,
you’ll find I’m not a bullshitter.”
1)1 HI 01 HONOR .{Ki
“Then you know il’s today,” Winston said, still lakuij.- the mc.iMiir nl lu\
host.
Jack bit his lip for a moment and nodded. “Yeah. I told H»// ilu- same
Ihing Sunday. I don’t know how close the investigators an- to u-miisinu iiti>-
the records. I’ve been working on something else.”
“Okay.” Winston wondered what else Ryan might he working on hut
dismissed the irrelevancy. “I can’t tell you how to fix it, hut I think I can
show you how it got broke.”
Ryan turned for a second to look at his TV. CNN Headline News had just
started its thirty-minute cycle with a live shot from the floor of the NYSI-.
The sound was all the way down, but the commentator was speaking rapidly
and her face was not smiling. When he turned back, Gant had his laptop
flipped open and was calling up some files.
“How much time do we have for this?” Winston asked.
“Let me worry about that,” Jack replied.
The How and the What
Treasury Secretary Bosley Fiedler had not allowed himself three consecu-
tive hours of sleep since the return from Moscow, and his stride through the
tunnel connecting the Treasury Building with the White House meandered
sufficiently to make his bodyguards wonder if he might need a wheelchair
soon. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve was hardly in better shape. The
two had been conferring, again, in the Secretary’s office when the call ar-
rived-Drop everything and come here-peremptory even for somebody
like Ryan, who frequently short-circuited the workings of the government.
Fiedler started talking even before he walked through the open door.
‘ ‘Jack, in twenty minutes we have a conference call with the central banks
of five Euro-who’s this?” SecTreas asked, stopping three paces into the
room.
“Mr. Secretary, I’m George Winston. I’m president and managing direc-
tor of-”
“Not anymore. You sold out,” Fiedler objected.
“I’m back as of the last rump-board meeting. This is Mark Gant, another
of my directors.”
“I think we need to listen to what they have to say,” Ryan told his two
new arrivals. “Mr. Gant, please restart your rain dance.”
“Damn it, Jack, I have twenty minutes. Less now,” the Secretary of the
Treasury said, looking at his watch.
Winston almost snarled, but instead spoke as he would have to another
senior trader: “Fiedler, the short version is this: the markets were deliber-
ately taken down by a systematic and highly skillful attack, and I think I can
prove that to your satisfaction. Interested?”
1)1 HI 01 HONOR
The SecTreas blinked very hard. “Why. yes.”
“But how . . . ?” the Fed Chairman asked.
“Sit down and we’ll show you,” Gant said. Ryan mack1 way am! tin- iwo
senior officials took their places on either side of him and his computer, “ll
started in Hong Kong …”
Ryan walked to his desk, dialed the Secretary’s office, and told his secre-
tary to route the conference call to his room in the West Wing. A typical
executive secretary, she handled the irregularity better than her boss could
ever have done. Gant, Jack saw, was a superb technician, and his second
stint at explaining matters was even more efficient than his first. The Secre-
tary and the Chairman were also good listeners who knew the jargon. Ques-
tions were not necessary.
“I didn’t think something like this was possible,” the Chairman said
eight minutes into the exposition. Winston handled the response.
“All the safeguards built into the system are designed to prevent ac-
cidents and catch crooks. It never occurred to anybody that somebody
would pull something like this. Who would deliberately lose so much
money?”
“Somebody with bigger fish to fry,” Ryan told him.
”What’s bigger than-”
Jack cut him off. “Lots of things, Mr. Winston. We’ll get to that later.”
Ryan turned his head. “Buzz?”
“I’ll want to confirm this with my own data, but it looks pretty solid.”
SecTreas looked over at the Chairman.
“You know, I’m not even sure it’s a criminal violation.”
“Forget that,” Winston announced. “The real problem is still here.
Crunch time is today. If Europe keeps going down, then we have a global
panic. The dollar’s in free-fall, the American markets can’t operate, most of
the world’s liquidity is paralyzed, and all the little guys out there are going to
catch on as soon as the media figure out what the hell is going down. The