suda’s real-estate holdings both in Japan and America, and that the failure of
lh.il conglomerate would reduce his reserves to dangerous levels. The prob-
lem was that even though he could survive the corporate failure in both real
uiul theoretical terms, it required only the perception that his reserves were
weaker than they actually were to bring his institution down, and that idea
could appear in a newspaper merely through the misunderstanding of a sin-
gle reporter. The consequences of such a misguided report, or rumor, could
begin a run on the bank, and make real what was not. Certainly the money
withdrawn would then be deposited elsewhere-there was too much to go
under mattresses, after all-in which case it would be lent back by a fellow
corporate banker to safeguard his colleague’s position, but a second-order
crisis, which was quite possible, could bring everything crashing down.
What went unsaid, and for that matter largely unthought, was that the men
in this room had brought the crisis upon themselves through ill-considered
dealings. It was a crucial blindspot that all shared-or nearly all, Yamata
told himself.
“The basic problem is that our country’s economic foundation rests not
on rock, but on sand,” Yamata began, speaking rather like a philosopher.
” As weak and foolish as the Americans are, fortune has given them things
which we lack. As a result, however clever our people are, we are always at
u disadvantage.” He had said all of this before, but now, for the first time,
they were listening, and it required all of his self-control not to gloat. Rather
he dialed back his level of rhetoric even more than he had in previous dis-
courses. He looked over to one of them, who had always disagreed with him
before.
“Remember what you said, that our real strengths are the diligence of our
workers and the skill of our designers? That was true, my friend. These are
strengths, and more than that, they are strengths that the Americans do not
have in the abundance which we enjoy, but because fortune has for reasons
of her own smiled on the gaijin, they can checkmate our advantages because
they have converted their good fortune into real power, and power is some-
thing we lack.” Yamata paused, reading his audience once more, watching
their eyes and gauging the impassivity there. Even for one born of this cul-
ture and reared in its rules, he had to take his gamble now. This was the
moment. He was sure of it. “But, really, that is not entirely the case either.
They chose to take that path, while we have chosen not to. And so, now, we
must pay the price for that misjudgment. Except for one thing.”
“And what is that?” one asked for all the others.
“Now, my friends, fortune smiles on us, and the path to real national
greatness is open to us. In our adversity we may, if we choose, find oppor-
tunities.”
Yamata told himself that he had waited fifteen years for this moment.
Then he considered the thought, watching and waiting for a response, and
realized that he’d really waited a lifetime for it, since the age of ten, when in
February 1944, he alone of his family had boarded the ship that would take
him from Saipan to the Home Islands. He could still remember standing at
the rail, seeing his mother and father and younger siblings standing there on
the dock, Raizo being very brave and managing to hold back his tears, know-
ing as a child knows that he would see them again, but also knowing that he
would not.
They’d killed them all, the Americans, erased his family from the face of
the earth, encouraged them to cast their lives away, off the cliffs and into the
greedy sea, because Japanese citizens, in uniform or out, were just animals
to the Americans. Yamata could remember listening to the radio accounts of
the battle, how the “Wild Eagles” of the KidoButai had smashed the Amer-
ican fleet, how the Emperor’s invincible soldiers had cast the hated Ameri-
can Marines back into the sea, how they had later slaughtered them in vast
numbers in the mountains of the island claimed from the Germans after the
r’irst World War, and even then he’d known the futility of having to pretend
to believe lies, for lies they had to be, despite the comforting words of his
uncle. And soon the radio reports had gone on to other things, the victorious
bailies over the Americans that crept ever closer to home, the uncom-
prehending rage he’d known when his vast and powerful country had found
herself unable to stop the barbarians, the terror of the bombing, first by day
and then by night, burning his country to the ground one city at a time. The
orange glow in the night sky, sometimes near, sometimes far, and the lies of
his uncle, trying to explain it, and last of all the relief he’d seen on the man’s
face when all was over. Except that it had never been relief for Raizo
Yamata, not with his family gone, vanished from the face of the earth, and
even when he’d seen his first American, a hugely tall figure with red hair and
freckles on his milky skin who’d clipped him on the head in the friendly way
one might do for a dog, even then he’d known what the enemy looked like.
It wasn’t Matsuda who spoke in reply. It couldn’t be. It had to be another,
one whose corporation was still immensely strong, or apparently so. It also
had to be one who had never agreed with him. The rule was as important as it
was unspoken, and though eyes didn’t turn, thoughts did. The man looked
down at his half-empty cup of tea-this was not a night for alcohol-and
pondered his own fate. He spoke without looking up, because he was afraid
to see the identical look in the eyes arrayed around the black lacquer table.
“How, Yamata-san, would we achieve that which you propose?”
“No shit?” Chavez asked. He spoke in Russian, for you were not supposed
to speak English here at Monterey, and he hadn’t learned that colloquialism
in Japanese yet.
‘ ‘Fourteen agents,” Major Oleg Yurievich Lyalin, KGB (retired), replied,
as matter-of-factly as his ego allowed.
“And they never reactivated your net?” Clark asked, wanting to roll his
eyes.
“They couldn’t.” Lyalin smiled and tapped the side of his head. “Tms-
li i was my creation. It turned out to be my life insurance.”
Ni> shit, Clark almost said. That Ryan had gotten him out alive was some-
where lo the right of a miracle. Lyalin had been tried for treason with the
normal KGB attention to a speedy trial, had been in a death cell, and known
the routine as exactly as any man could. Told that his execution date was a
week hence, he’d been marched to the prison commandant’s office, in-
formed of his right as a Soviet citizen to appeal directly to the President for
executive clemency, and invited to draft a handwritten letter to that end. The
less sophisticated might have thought the gesture to be genuine. Lyalin had
known otherwise. Designed to make the execution easier, after the letter was
sealed, he would be led back to his cell, and the executioner would leap from
un open door to his right, place a pistol right next to his head and fire. As a
result it was not overly surprising that his hand had shaken while holding the
ballpoint pen, and that his legs were rubbery as he was led out. The entire
ritual had been carried out, and Oleg Yurievich remembered his amazement
on actually reaching his basement cell again, there to be told to gather up
what belongings he had and to follow a guard, even more amazingly back to
Ihe commandant’s office, there to meet someone who could only have been
an American citizen, with his smile and his tailored clothes, unaware of
KGB’s wry valedictory to its traitorous officer.
“I would’ve pissed my pants,” Ding observed, shuddering at the end of
the story.
“I was lucky there,” Lyalin admitted with a smile. “I’d urinated right
before they took me up. My family was waiting for me at Sheremetyevo. It
was one of the last PanAm flights.”
“Hit the booze pretty hard on the way over?” Clark asked with a smile.
‘ ‘Oh, yes,” Oleg assured him, not adding how he’d shaken and then vom-
ited on the lengthy flight to New York’s JFK International Airport, and had
insisted on a taxi ride through New York to be sure that the impossible vi-
sion of freedom was real.
Chavez refilled his mentor’s glass. Lyalin was trying to work his way off
hard liquor, and contented himself with Coors Light. “I’ve been in a few
tight places, tovarich, but that one must have been really uncomfortable.”
“I have retired, as you see. Domingo Estebanovich, where did you learn