gut himself open in front of his boss. Who the fuck knows?”
“So who the hell’s in charge, Mark?”
“Nobody,” Gant answered. “Just like everything else here.”
“Goddamn it, Mark, somebody has to be giving the orders!”
‘ ‘We don’t have any instructions,” the executive replied. “I’ve called the
guy. He’s not at the office-hey, I left messages, tried his house, Yamata’s
house, everybody’s friggin’ house, everybody’s friggin’ office. Zip-o,
George. Everybody’s running for cover. Hell, for all I know the dumb fuck
took a header off the biggest building in town.”
“Okay, I need an office and all the data you have,” Winston said.
“What data?” Gant demanded. “We don’t have shit. The whole system
went down, remember?”
“You have the records of our trades, don’t you?”
‘ ‘Well, yeah, I have our tapes-a copy, anyway,” Gant corrected himself.
“The FBI took the originals.”
A brilliant technician, Gant’s first love had always been mathematics.
Give Mark Gant the right instructions and he could work the market like a
skilled cardsharp with a new deck of Bicycles. But like most of the people on
the Street, he needed someone else to tell him what the job was. Well, every
man had some limitations, and on the plus side of the ledger, Gant was
smart, honest, and he knew what his limitations were. He knew when to ask
for help. That last quality put him in the top 3 or 4 percent.
So he must have gone to Yamata and his man for guidance . . .
“When all this was going down, what instructions did you have?”
“Instructions?” Gant rubbed his unshaven face and shook his head.
“Hell, we busted our ass to stay ahead of it. If DTC gets its shit together,
we’ll come out with most of our ass intact. I laid a mega-put on GM and
made a real killing on gold stocks, and-”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“He said to run with it. He got us out of the bank stocks in one big hurry,
thank God. Damn if he didn’t see that one coming first. We were pretty well
placed before it all went down. If it hadn’t been for all the panic calls-I
mean, Jesus, George, it finally happened, y’know? One-eight-hundred-
R-U-N. Jesus, if people had just kept their heads.” A sigh. “But they didn’t,
and now, with the DTC fuckup . .. George, I don’t know what’s going to be
opening up tomorrow, man. If this is true, if they can rebuild the house by
tomorrow morning, hey, man, I don’t know. I just don’t,” Gant said as they
entered the Lincoln Tunnel.
The whole story of Wall Street in one exhausted paragraph, Winston told
himself, looking at the glossy tile that made up the interior of the tunnel. Just
like the tunnel, in fact. You could see forward and you could see behind, but
you couldn’t see crap to the sides. You couldn’t see outside the limited per-
spective.
And you had to.
“Mark, I’m still a director of the firm.”
“Yes, so?”
“And so are you,” Winston pointed out.
‘ ‘I know that, but-”
“The two of us can call a board meeting. Start making calls,” George
Winston ordered. “As soon as we’re out of this damned hole in the ground.”
“For when?” Gant asked.
“For now, goddamn it!” Winston swore. “Those who’re out of town, I’ll
send my jet for.”
‘ ‘Most of the guys are in the office.” Which was the only good news he’d
heard since Friday afternoon, George thought, nodding for his former em-
ployee to go on. “I suppose most everyone else is closed.”
They cleared the tunnel about then. Winston pulled the cellular phone
from its holder and handed it over.
“Start calling.” Winston wondered if Gant knew what he was going to
request at the meeting. Probably not. A good man in a tunnel, he had never
outgrown his limitations.
Why the hell did I ever leave? Winston demanded of himself. It just
wasn’t safe to leave the American economy in the hands of people who
didn’t know how it worked.
“Well, that worked,” Admiral Dubro said. Fleet speed slowed ID twenty
knots. They were now two hundred miles due east of Domini Ik-ad. They
needed more sea room, but getting this far was success enough. The two
carriers angled apart, their respective formations dividing and loiminn pro
lective rings around the centerpieces, Abraham Lincoln and Dwii^ht I) /•./-
senhower. In another hour the formations would be outside of visual contact.
and that was good, but the speed run had depleted bunkers, and that was very
bad. The nuclear-powered carriers perversely were also tankers of a sort.
They carried tons of bunker fuel for their conventionally powered escorts,
and were able to refuel them when the need arose. It soon would. The fleet
oilers Yukon and Rappahannock were en route from Diego Garcia with
eighty thousand tons of distillate fuel between them, but this game was get-
ting old in a hurry. The possibility of a confrontation compelled Dubro to
keep all his ships’ bunkers topped off. Confrontation meant potential battle,
and battle always necessitated speed, to go into harm’s way, and to get the
hell out of it, too.
“Anything from Washington yet?” he asked next.
Commander Harrison shook his head. “No, sir.”
“Okay,” the battle-force commander said with a dangerous calm. Then
he headed off to communications. He’d solved a major operational problem,
for the moment, and now it was time to scream at someone.
Piling On
Everything was running behind, at maximum speed, largely in circles, get-
ting nowhere at amazing speed. A city both accustomed to and dedicated to
the prevention of leaks, Washington and its collection of officials were too
busy with four simultaneous crises to respond effectively to any of them.
None of that was unusual, a fact that would have been depressing to those
who ought to be dealing with it, a digression for which, of course, they didn’t
have time. The only good news, Ryan thought, is that the biggest story
hadn’t quite leaked. Yet.
“Scott, who’re your best people for Japan?”
Adler was still a smoker or had bought a pack on his way over from Foggy
Bottom. It required all of Ryan’s diminishing self-control not to ask for one,
but neither could he tell his guest not to light up. They all had to deal with
stress in their own ways. The fact that Adler’s had once been Ryan’s was just
one more inconvenience in a weekend that had gone to hell faster than he’d
thought possible.
“I can put a working group together. Who runs it?”
“You do,” Jack answered.
“What will Brett say?”
“He’ll say, ‘Yes, sir,’ when the President tells him,” Ryan replied, too
tired to be polite.
“They have us by the balls, Jack.”
“How many potential hostages?” Ryan asked. It wasn’t just the residual
military people. There had to be thousands of tourists, businessmen, report-
ers, students . . .
“We have no way of finding out, Jack. None,” Adler admitted. “The
good news is that we have no indications of adverse treatment It’s nol i<>41,
ul least I don’t think so.”
“If that starts . . .” Most Americans had forgotten the maimei ol treat
mcnt accorded foreign prisoners. Ryan was not one ol them. “Then we Mart
going crazy. They have to know that.”
“They know us a lot better than they did back then. So much interaction.
Besides, we have tons of their people over here, too.”
“Don’t forget, Scott, that their culture is fundamentally different from
ours. Their religion is different. Their view of man’s place in nature is differ-
ent. The value they place on human life is different,” the National Security
Advisor said darkly.
“This isn’t a place for racism, Jack,” Adler observed narrowly.
‘ ‘Those are all facts. I didn’t say they’re inferior to us. I said that we’re not
going to make the mistake of thinking they’re motivated in the same way we
are-okay?”
“That’s fair, I suppose,” the Deputy Secretary of State conceded.
“So I want people who really understand their culture in here to advise
me. I want people who think like they do.” The trick would be finding space
for them, but there were offices downstairs whose occupants could move
out, albeit kicking and screaming about how important protocol and political
polling were.
“I can find a few,” Adler promised.
“What are we hearing from the embassies?”
“Nobody knows much of anything. One interesting development in
Korea, though.”
“What’s that?”
“The defense attache in Seoul went to see some friends about getting
some bases moved up in alert level. They said no. That’s the first time the
ROKs ever said no to us. I guess their government is still trying to figure all
this out.”
“It’s too early to start that, anyway.”
“Are we going to do anything?”
Ryan shook his head. “I don’t know yet.” Then his phone buzzed.