Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

More bugs.

You’re committed, Cook told himself, and so he took a deep breath, and,

on reflection, another sip of his drink.

“Seiji, we’re going to have to take the long view on this one. TRA”-he

couldn’t call it the Trade Reform Act, not here-“is going to pass in less

ihun two weeks, and the President’s going to sign it. The working groups at

Commerce and Justice are already forming up. State will participate also, of

course. Cables have gone out to several embassies to get copies of various

trade laws around the world-”

“Not just ours?” Nagumo was surprised.

“They’re going to compare yours with others from countries with whom

our trade relationships are … less controversial right now.” Cook had to

watch his language, after all. He needed this man. “The idea is to give them

something to, well, to contrast your country’s laws with. Anyway, getting

this thing fixed, it’s going to take some time, Seiji.” Which wasn’t an alto-

gether bad thing, Cook reasoned. After all, it made for job security-if and

when he crossed over from one employer to another.

‘ ‘Will you be part of the working group?”

“Probably, yes.”

“Your help will be invaluable, Chris,” Nagumo said quietly, thinking

more rapidly now. “I can help you with interpreting our laws-quietly, of

course,” he added, seizing at that particular straw.

“I wasn’t really planning to stay at Foggy Bottom much longer, Seiji,”

Cook observed. “We’ve got our hearts set on a new house, and-”

“Chris, we need you where you are. We need-/ need your help to miti-

gate this unfortunate set of circumstances. We have a genuine emergency on

our hands, one with serious consequences for both our countries.”

‘ ‘I understand that, but-”

Money, Nagumo thought, with these people it’s always money/

“I can make the proper arrangements,” he said, more on annoyed im-

pulse than as a considered thought. Only after he’d spoken did he grasp what

he’d done-but then he was interested to see how Cook would react to it.

The Deputy Assistant Secretary of State just sat there for a moment. He

too was so caught up in the events that the real implications of the offer

nearly slipped past him. Cook simply nodded without even looking up into

Nagumo’s eyes.

In retrospect, the first step-the turning over of national-security informa-

tion-had been a harder one, and the second was so easy that Cook didn’t

even reflect on the fact that now he was in clear violation of a federal statute.

He had just agreed to provide information to a foreign government for

money. It seemed such a logical thing to do under the circumstances. They

really wanted that house in Potomac, and it wouldn’t be long before they’d

have to start shopping for colleges.

That morning on the Nikkei Dow would long be remembered. It had taken

that long for people to grasp what Seiji Nagumo now knew-that they

weren’t kidding this time. It wasn’t rice all over again, it wasn’t computer

chips all over again, it wasn’t automobiles or their parts, not telecommunica-

tions gear or construction contracts or cellular phones. It was, in lad, all of

the above, twenty years of pent-up resentment and anger, some justified,

some not, but all real and exploding to the surface at a single lime. Al first

the editors in Tokyo just hadn’t believed what they’d been told by their peo-

ple in Washington and New York, and had redrafted the stories to fit their

own conclusions until they themselves had thought the information through

and come to the stunning realization on their own. The Trade Reform Act,

the papers had pontificated only two days earlier, was just one more blip, a

joke, an expression of a few misguided people with a long history of antipa-

thy to our country that will soon run its course. It was now something else.

Today it was a most unfortunate development whose possibility of enactment

into Federal Law cannot now be totally discounted.

The Japanese language conveys information every bit as well as any

other, once you break the code. In America the headlines are far more ex-

plicit, but that is merely an indelicate directness of expression typical of the

gaijin. In Japan one talked more elliptically, but the meaning was there even

so, just as clear, just as plain. The millions of Japanese citizens who owned

stock read the same papers, saw the same morning news, and reached the

same conclusions. On reaching their workplaces, they lifted phones and

made their calls.

The Nikkei Dow had once ridden beyond thirty thousand yen of bench-

mark value. By the early 19905, it had fallen to half of that, and the aggregate

cash cost of the ‘ ‘write-down” was a number larger than the entire U.S. gov-

ernment debt at the time, a fact which had gone virtually unnoticed in the

United States-but not by those who had taken their money from banks and

placed it in stocks in an attempt to get something more than a 2 percent com-

pounded annualized return. Those people had lost sizable fractions of their

life savings and not known whom to blame for it.

Not this time, they all thought. It was time to cash in and put the money

back into banks-big, safe, financial institutions that knew how to protect

their depositors’ funds. Even if they were niggardly in paying interest, you

didn’t lose anything, did you?

Western reporters would use terms like “avalanche” and ‘ ‘meltdown” to

describe what began when the trading computers went on-line. The process

appeared to be orderly. The large commercial banks, married as they were to

the large corporations, sent the same depositors’ money that came in the

front door right out the back door to protect the value of corporate stocks.

There was no choice, really. They had to buy up huge portfolios in what

turned out to be a vain stand against a racing tide. The Nikkei Dow lost fully

a sixth of its net value in one trading day, and though analysts proclaimed

confidently that the market was now grossly undervalued and a huge techni-

cal adjustment upward was inevitable, people thought in their own homes

that if the American legislation really became law, the market for the goods

their country made would vanish like the morning fog. The process would

not stop, and though none said it, everyone knew it. This was especially

clear to the bankers.

On Wall Street, things were different. Various sages bemoaned the interfer-

ence of government in the marketplace; then they thought about it a little bit.

It was plain to see, after all, that if Japanese automobiles had trouble clearing

customs, that if the popular Cresta was now cursed with a visual event that

few would soon put behind them, then American cars would sell more, and

that was good. It was good for Detroit, where the cars were assembled, and

for Pittsburgh, where much of the steel was still forged; it was good for all

the cities in America (and Canada, and Mexico), where the thousands of

components were made. It was good, further, for all the workers who made

the parts and assembled the cars, who would have more money to spend in

their communities for other things. How good? Well, the majority of the

trade imbalance with Japan was accounted for in automobiles. The sunny

side of thirty billion dollars could well be dumped into the American econ-

omy in the next twelve months, and that, quite a few market technicians

thought after perhaps as much as five seconds’ reflection, was just good as

hell, wasn’t it? Conservatively, thirty billion dollars going into the coffers of

various companies, and all of it, one way or another, would show up as prof-

its for American corporations. Even the additional taxes paid would help in

lowering the federal deficit, thus lowering demands on the money pool, and

lowering the cost of government bonds. The American economy would be

twice blessed. Toss in a little schadenfreude for their Japanese colleagues,

and even before the Street opened for business, people were primed for a big

trading day.

They would not be disappointed. The Columbus Group turned out to be

especially well set, having a few days earlier purchased options for a huge

quantity of auto-related issues, and thus able to take advantage of a hundred-

twelve-point upward jolt in the Dow.

In Washington, at the Federal Reserve, there was concern. They were closer

to the seat of government power, and had insider information from the Trea-

sury Department on how the mechanics of the Trade Reform Act would run,

and it was clear that there would be a temporary shortage of automobiles

until Detroit geared up its lines somewhat. Until the American companies

could take up the slack, there would be the classic situation of too much

money chasing too few cars. That meant an inflationary blip, and so later in