“Yes, sir, but we still don’t know it all.”
“What do you mean?” Winston asked. “They cripple us, start a world-
wide panic, and you say there’s more?”
“George, how often have you been over there?” Ryan asked, mainly to
get information to the others.
‘ ‘In the last five years? I guess it comes out to an average of about once a
month. My grandchildren will be using up the last of my frequent-flyer
miles.”
“How often have you met with government people over there?”
Winston shrugged. “They’re around a lot. But they don’t matter very
much.”
“Why?” the President asked.
“Sir, it’s like this: there’re maybe twenty or thirty people over there who
really run things, okay? Yamata is the biggest fish in that lake. The Ministry
of International Trade and Industry is the interface between the big boys in
Ihe corporate arena and the government, plus the way they grease the skids
themselves with elected officials, and they do a lot of that stuff. It’s one of
Ihe things Yamata liked to show off when we negotiated his takeover of my
Group. At one party there were two ministers and a bunch of parliamentary
guys, and their noses got real brown, y’know?” Winston reflected that at the
time he’d thought it a good demeanor for elected officials. Now he wasn’t
quite so sure.
“How freely can I speak?” Ryan asked. “We may need their insights.”
Durling handled that: “Mr. Winston, how good are you at keeping se-
crets?”
The investor had himself a good chuckle.’ ‘Just so long as you don’t call it
insider stuff, okay? I’ve never been hassled by the SEC, and I don’t want to
start.”
“This one’ll come under the Espionage Act. We’re at war with Japan.
They’ve sunk two of our submarines and crippled two aircraft carriers,”
Ryan said, and the room changed a lot.
“Are you serious?” Winston asked.
“Two-hundred-and-fifty-dead-sailors serious, the crews of USS Asheville
and USS Charlotte. They’ve also seized the Mariana Islands. We don’t
know yet if we can take those islands back. We have upwards of ten thou-
sand American citizens in Japan as potential hostages, plus the population of
the islands, plus military personnel in Japanese custody.”
“But the media-”
“Haven’t caught on yet, remarkably enough,” Ryan explained. “Maybe
it’s just too crazy.”
“Oh.” Winston got it after another second. “They wreck our economy,
and we don’t have the political will to … has anybody ever tried anything
like this before?”
The National Security Advisor shook his head. “Not that I know of.”
“But the real danger to us-is this problem here. That son of a bitch,”
George Winston observed.
“How do we fix it, Mr. Winston?” President Durling asked.
“I don’t know. The DTC move was brilliant. The takedown was pretty
cute, but Secretary Fiedler here might have smarted his way out of that with
our help,” Winston added. “But with no records, everything’s paralyzed. I
have a brother who’s a doctor, and once he told me …”
Ryan’s eyeballs clicked at that remark, clicked hard enough that he didn’t
listen to the rest. Why was that important?
“The time estimate came in last night,” the Fed Chairman was saying
now. “They need a week. But we don’t really have a week. This after-
noon we’re meeting with all the heads of the big houses. We’re going to try
and…”
The problem is that there are no records, Jack thought. Everything s fro-
zen in place because there are no records to tell people what they own, how
much money they . . .
“Europe is paralyzed, too …” Fiedler was talking now, while Ryan
stared down at the carpet. Then he looked up:
“If you don’t write it down, it never happened.” Conversation in the
room stopped, and Jack saw that he might as well have said, The crayon is
purple.
“What?” the Fed Chairman asked.
“My wife-that’s what she says. ‘If you don’t write it down, then it never
happened.’ ” He looked around. They still didn’t understand. Which wasn’t
overly surprising, as he was still developing the thought himself. “She’s a
doc, too, George, at Hopkins, and she always has this damned little notebook
with her, and she’s always stopping dead in her tracks to take it out and make
a note because she doesn’t trust her memory.”
“My brother’s the same way. He uses one of those electronic things,”
Winston said. Then his eyeballs went out of focus. “Keep going.”
‘ ‘There are no records, no really official records of any of the transactions,
are there?” Jack went on. Fiedler handled the answer.
“No. Depository Trust Company crashed for fair. And as I just said, it’ll
take-”
“Forget that. We don’t have the time, do we?”
That depressed SecTreas again. “No, we can’t stop it.”
“Sure we can.” Ryan looked at Winston. “Can’t we?”
President Durling had been covering the snippets of conversation like a
spectator at a tennis match, and the stress of the situation had placed a short
fuse on his temper. “What the hell are you people talking about?”
Ryan almost had it now. He turned to his President. “Sir, it’s simple. We
say it never happened. We say that after noon on Friday, the exchanges sim-
ply stopped functioning. Now, can we get away with that?” Jack asked. He
didn’t give anyone a chance to answer, however. “Why not? Why can’t we
get away with it? There are no records to prove that we’re wrong. Nobody
can prove a single transaction from twelve noon on, can they?”
‘ ‘With all the money that everyone lost,” Winston said, his mind catching
up rapidly, “it won’t look all that unattractive. You’re saying we restart
. . . Friday, maybe, Friday at noon . . . just wipe out the intervening week,
right?”
“But nobody will buy it,” the Fed Chairman observed.
‘ ‘Wrong.” Winston shook his head. ‘ ‘Ryan’s got something here. First of
all, they have to buy it. You can’t do a transaction-you can’t execute one, I
mean, without written records. So nobody can prove that they did anything
without waiting for reconstruction of the DTC records. Second, most people
went to the cleaners, institutions, banks, everybody, and ihc\ II .ill W.IMI u
second chance. Oh, yeah, they’ll buy into it, pal. Mark.1″
“Step in a time machine and do Friday all over again?” (Jam’s lau^-h was
grim at first. Then it changed. “Where do we sign up?”
“We can’t do that to everything, not all the trades,” tin- I cil ( haitni.ui
objected.
“No, we can’t,” Winston agreed. “The international T-Hill trunsai lions
were outside our control. But what we can do, sir, is conference wiih the
European banks, show them what’s happened, and then together wiih
them-”
Now it was Fiedler: “Yes! They dump yen and buy dollars. Our currency
regains its position and theirs falls. The other Asian banks will then think
about reversing their positions. The European central banks will play ball, I
think.”
“You’ll have to keep the Discount Rate up,” Winston said. “That’ll sting
us some, but it’s one hell of a lot better than the alternative. You keep the
rate up so that people stop dumping T-Bills. We want to generate a move
away from the yen, just like they did to us. The Europeans will like that
because it will limit the Japs’ ability to scoop up their equities like they
started doing yesterday.” Winston got off his chair and started pacing a little
as he was wont to do. He didn’t know that he was violating a White House
protocol, and even the President didn’t want to interrupt him, though the two
Secret Service agents in the room kept a close eye on the trader. Clearly his
mind was racing through the scenario, looking for holes, looking for flaws. It
look perhaps two minutes, and everyone waited for his evaluation. Then his
head came up. “Dr. Ryan, if you ever decide to become a private citizen
again, we need to talk. Gentlemen: this will work. It’s just so damned outra-
geous, but maybe that works in our favor.”
“What happens Friday, then?” Jack asked.
Gant spoke up: ‘ ‘The market will drop like a rock.”
“What’s so damned great about that?” the President demanded.
“Because then, sir,” Gant went on, “it’ll bounce after about two hundred
points, and close . . . ? It’ll close down, oh, maybe a hundred, maybe not
even that much. The following Monday everybody catches his breath. Some
people look for bargains. Most, probably, are still nervous. It drops again,
probably ends up pretty stagnant, down another fifty at most. The rest of the
week, things settle out. Figure by the following Friday, the market has re-
stabilized down one, maybe one-fifty, from the Friday-noon position. The
drop will have to happen because of what the Fed has to do wiih the Dis-
count Rate, but we’re used to that on the Street.” Only Winsion fully ap-
Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225