Project Daedalus

  Chapter Ten

  Monday 6:32 p.m.

  Tanzan Mino was dressed in a black three-quarter sleeved kimono, staring straight ahead as he knelt before the sword resting in front of him. His hands were settled lightly on his thighs, his face expressionless. Then he reached out and touched the scabbard, bowing low to it. Inside was a twelfth-century katana, a five-foot-long razor created by swordsmiths of the Mino School, from the town of Seki, near Gifu in the heart of old Honshu. It was, he believed, a perfect metaphor for Japanese excellence and discipline.

  The sword had now been reverenced; next he would use it to test his own centering. At this moment his mind was empty, knowing nothing, feeling nothing.

  As his torso drew erect, he grasped the upper portion of the scabbard with his right hand, its tip with his left, and pulled it around to insert it into the black sash at his waist. He sat rigid for a moment, poised, then thrust his right foot forward as he simultaneously grasped the hilt of the sword with his right hand, the upper portion of the scabbard with his left. In a lightning move he twisted the hilt a half-turn and drew the blade out and across, his right foot moving into the attack stance. The whip of steel fairly sang through the empty air as the sword and his body moved together. It was the chudan no kamae stroke, the tip of the blade thrust directly at an opponent's face, an exercise in precision, balance.

  Rising to a half kneel, he next lifted the sword above his head, his left hand moving up to seize the hilt in a powerful two-handed grip. An instant later he slashed downward with fierce yet controlled intensity, still holding the hilt at arm's length. It was the powerful jodan no kamae stroke, known to sever iron.

  Finally, holding the hilt straight in front of him, he rotated the blade ninety degrees, then pulled his left hand back and grasped the mouth of the scabbard. As he rose to both feet, he raised the sword with his right hand and touched its tsuba handguard to his forehead in silent reverence, even as he shifted the scabbard forward. Then in a single motion he brought the blade around and caught it with his left hand just in front of the guard, still holding the scabbard. With ritual precision he guided the blade up its full length, until the tip met the opening of the sheath, and then he slowly slipped it in.

  This weapon, he reflected with pride, was crafted of the finest steel the world had ever seen, created by folding and hammering heated layers again and again until it consisted of hundreds of thousands of paper-thin sheets. The metallurgy of Japan had been unsurpassed for eight hundred years, and now the Daedalus spaceplane had once again reaffirmed that superiority. Building on centuries of expertise, he had succeeded in fashioning the heretofore-un known materials necessary to withstand the intense heat of scramjet operation.

  The remaining problems now lay in another direction entirely. The difficulty was not technology; it was human blundering. Lack of discipline.

  Discipline. The news he had just received had only served to assure him once again that discipline was essential in all of life.

  As he turned and stationed the sword across his desk, he surveyed his penthouse domain and understood why heads of state must feel such isolation, such impotence. You could have the best planning, the best organization, the tightest coordination, and yet your fate still rode on luck and chance. And on others.

  Overall, however, the scenario possessed an inescapable inevitability. A lifetime of experience told him he was right. He glanced at the sword one last time, again inspired by it, and settled himself at the desk.

  Tanzan Mino was known throughout Japan as a kuromaku, a man who made things happen. Named after the unseen stagehand who pulled the wires in Japanese theater, manipulating the stage and those on it from behind a black curtain, the kuromaku had been a fixture in Japanese politics since the late nineteenth century. He fit the classic profile perfectly: He was an ultranationalist who coordinated the interests of the right-wing underworld with the on-stage players in industry and politics. In this role, he had risen from the ruins of World War II to become the most powerful man in Asia.

  It had been a long and difficult road. He'd begun as an Osaka street operator in the late thirties, a fervent nationalist and open admirer of Mussolini who made his followers wear black shirts in imitation of the Italian fascists. When the Pacific War began, he had followed the Japanese army into Shanghai where, under the guise of procuring "strategic materials" for the imperial Navy, he trafficked in booty looted from Chinese warehouses and operated an intelligence network for the Kempei Tai, the Japanese secret police. After Japan lost China, and the war, the occupying supreme commander for the allied powers (SCAP) labeled him a Class A war criminal and handed him a three-year term in Sugamo prison.

  The stone floors and hunger and rats gave him the incentive to plan for better things. The ruins of Japan, he concluded, offered enormous opportunity for men of determination. The country would be rebuilt, and those builders would rule.

  Thus it was that while still in Sugamo he set about devising the realization of his foremost ambition: to make himself oyabun of the Tokyo Yakuza. His first step, he had decided, would be to become Japan's gambling czar, and upon his release-he was thirty years old at the time-he had made a deal with various local governments to organize speedboat races and split the take on the accompanying wagering. It was an offer none chose to refuse, and over the next forty years he and his Mino-gumi Yakuza amassed a fortune from the receipts.

  While still in Sugamo prison he had yet another insight: That to succeed in the New Japan it would be necessary to align himself temporarily with the globe's powerful new player, America. Accordingly he began cultivating connections with American intelligence, and upon his release, he landed a job as an undercover agent for the occupation's G-2 section, Intelligence. He'd specialized in black- bag operations for the Kempei Tai in Shanghai during the war, so he had the requisite skills.

  When SCAP's era of reconstruction wound down, he thoughtfully offered his services to the CIA, volunteering to help them crush any new Japanese political movements that smacked of leftism. It was love at first sight, and soon Tanzan Mino was fronting for the Company, putting to good use his Mino-gumi Yakuza as strikebreakers. With Tanzan Mino as kuromaku, the Yakuza and the American CIA had run postwar Japan during the early years, keeping it safe for capitalism.

  Then as prosperity returned, new areas of expansion beckoned. When goods could again be bought openly, the black market, long a Yakuza mainstay, began to wither away. But he had converted this into an opportunity, stepping in to fill the new Japanese consumer's need for cash by opening storefront loan services known as sarakin. Although his Yakuza charged interest rates as high as 70 percent, the average Japanese could walk into a side-street office and minutes later walk out with several thousand dollars, no questions asked.

  Unlike banks, he didn't bother with credit checks-he had well-proven collection techniques-and before long his sarakin were handling more consumer loans than all Japan's banks combined. His success was such that foreign bankers wanting to gain a foothold in Japan soon started coming to him. Bank of America, Bankers Trust, Chase Manhattan, American Express Bank-all began placing capital wholesale through the Yakuza's sarakin.

  When the CIA bankrolled the Corsican mob as strikebreakers in Marseilles in the fifties, they were merely financing heroin labs for the French Connection, but when they and America's leading banks hired on with Tanzan Mino's Yakuza, they were furthering the career of the man destined to become the world's richest right-winger. The CIA arrangement had lasted until a midlevel field consultant blew the whistle.

  The score for that had yet to be settled.

  He shrugged away the thought with a glimmer of anger and turned to study the column of green figures on the computer screen atop his desk, mentally running a total. The numbers, at least, pleased him. Capitalization for the first year was ready to be issued; the dummy corporations were in place, their paperwork impeccable. None of the financing packages was likely to raise eyebrows. The plan was as flawless as huma
n ability could make it.

  As the pale light of dusk crept through the blinds, laying faint shadows across his silver hair, he reached over with a smile and touched the white stingray-skin binding on the sword's hilt. Yes, the plan was brilliant. A third world war, one of economics, had begun, but none of the other combatants fully realized it.

  The European trading nations of 1992 were banding together, also bringing in the new capitalists of Eastern Europe, to create a trade monolith. At the same time Japan had, through strategic planning, achieved its own Pacific trade bloc, finally realizing its aim during the war, a Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere. Now only one final target remained: the new consumers of the Soviet Union, who represented the world's largest untapped market for goods, technology, investment. The Europeans, the Americans, all the capitalists, were fighting for that prize, but Tanzan Mino was within a whisker of seizing it for Japan and Mino Industries. The Soviets would have no choice.

  He reached down to stroke Neko, the snow leopard who slept beside his desk, and reflected on the scenario. The Soviets had bought into it with eyes open. The plan was turning out to be absurdly easy.

  At the moment all he needed was the cleanly laundered payoff money. The political risks, the financial risks, everything had to be covered. The powers in the Liberal Democratic Party feared going out on a limb for such a risky strategic objective. They required encouragement. And certain prominent Japanese bankers, who would have to assist in the scenario, also needed inducement. But the money had to be cash and totally untraceable. No more Recruit-style fiascos.

  Where was it?

  He pushed that worry aside momentarily as he studied the gleaming model of the Daedalus, poised like a Greek statue in the center of his office. To think that the Soviets would agree not only to the hard financial and territorial terms he had demanded, but actually were willing to help Mino Industries develop the most advanced airplane the world had ever seen. Their plight was fully as desperate as he'd assumed. It was a game where he won everything.

  Yes, the Daedalus was as important as all the rest combined. It would leapfrog Japan to the undisputed ranks of the major powers, erasing forever the distinction between civilian and military technology.

  Still, though, there were problems. Always problems. First, the news he had just received: The laundered funds still had not been delivered. Then there was the matter of the NSA cryptographer who had been given an intercepted copy of the protocol. Three men had been lost attempting to retrieve it, but she remained at large. That was unacceptable. It had to be reclaimed, no matter the cost, lest there be a premature exposure of the plan. Timing was everything.

  Added to that was the puzzling matter of the Soviet test pilot, on whom the fate of the entire project hinged. He'd begun making outrageous demands, insisting on moving up the first hypersonic flight to Friday. Why? He'd once spent time in the United States as an exchange pilot. Could he be fully trusted?

  Tanzan Mino had finally, reluctantly, approved the schedule change, though his instincts told him to beware. His instincts rarely failed, but it was better not to appear too inflexible too soon. At this stage the test pilot had become the crucial component of the project. Sometimes you had to bend to get what you wanted, and instincts be damned.

  As if all that were not enough, he'd just heard an unsettling rumble out of London concerning Kenji Nogami, a Mino-gumi kobun for thirty years, a man he'd made rich.

  He turned his attention back to the computer screen and studied the numbers once more. However, he could not concentrate.

  The problems. He felt his anger rise, unbidden. He was too old for problems. Surmounting human incompetence was a young man's game. He had, he told himself, struggled enough for a dozen men. And now, having dedicated himself to fashioning Japan's twenty-first century ascendancy, he no longer really cared about money. No, what mattered now was the triumph of the Japanese people, the emperor, the Yamato spirit.

  His countrymen, he had always believed, shared a noble heritage with another race, one distant in time and place but brothers still. Both the modern Japanese and the ancient Greeks had pursued a mission to refine the civilizations around them, offering a powerful vision of human possibilities. They both were unique peoples chosen by the gods. He wanted, more than anything, for the entire world to at last understand that.

  With a sigh he turned and gave Neko a loving pat on her spotted muzzle, then touched the buzzer on his desk. Time to start solving the problems.

  Monday 1:03 p.m.

  "Michael, I'm terribly glad you could make it." Kenji Nogami smiled and reached for his pint of amber-colored lager. His tailoring was Savile Row via Bond Street, his accent Cambridge, his background well concealed. In a business where appearances counted for much, he had all the careful touches that separated the players from the pretenders-cheeks sleek from a daily workout at his club, eyes penetrating and always alert, hair graying at the temples. Today he stood out like a beacon in the mob of chatting brokers and jobbers in the paneled gloom of the pub, his aloof bearing and dark pinstripe suit proclaiming INSIDER as clearly as neon. A Japanese to the core, he still looked as though he had belonged there for a hundred years.

  "By the way, congratulations on the takeover." Vance caught the pint of ale sliding across the beer-soaked mahogany, then lifted it. "I hear you scared hell out of the big players here in the City. Here's to going straight. Hope it doesn't take all the fun out of life."

  "It had to happen eventually, Michael." He nodded with innocent guile and raised his glass tankard in return. "Cheers."

  "To your health and wealth." Vance joined him in a sip. It was warm and bitter, the way he liked it. "No more intrigue."

  "Well . . . He winked and drank again, blowing back the foam. "We bankers still thrive on intrigue, old man. And secrecy. Otherwise somebody else would start making the money."

  The young brokers laughing, smoking, and drinking in the pub all looked as though they made buckets of money. Outside, the ocher-trimmed Doric columns of the refurbished Leadenhall Market looked down on the lunchtime crowds of the financial district, almost all men in white shirts and dark suits, the modern uniform of the money changer.

  "Trouble with secrets, though"-Vance settled his mug onto the wet bar and looked up-"is that eventually the word gets out."

  Nogami studied him. "Are you hinting at something? Something I should know?"

  "Maybe I'm just thinking out loud. But what if a guy like me came across some proprietary information, sort of by accident, and consequently an old friend of ours back home in Tokyo was very unhappy?"

  "If that 'friend' is who I think you mean, he's not someone either of us wants to see unhappy, do we?" He sipped solemnly at his beer.

  "Speak for yourself," Vance replied, and drank again. "But to continue, what if this hypothetical guy had decided to try and simplify the situation, get news back to Tokyo about a way to solve everybody's problem? Then he'd need an information conduit. One that's tried and true."

  Nogami reached for a tray of peanuts, took a small handful and shook them in his fist before popping one into his mouth. He chewed for a second, then smiled. "One way might be to have a drink with an old, shall we say, acquaintance, in hopes he might be able to help with some communication."

  "Sounds like we're making headway here." He paused. "Say this hypothetical guy wants to talk a deal."

  "What sort of deal?" Nogami chewed on more peanuts, his eyes noncommittal.

  "For instance, if Tokyo'll lay off, he'll see what he can do about some laundered funds our friend's been waiting for. He's in a position to make it happen. But if they keep on with the muscle, the deal's off. In other words, no play, no pay."

  "Supposing I know the individual in Tokyo you mean, as things stand now you've quite possibly come to the wrong man." He sighed. "This isn't the old days, my friend. I'm not wired in like I used to be. Times have changed, thank God. I'm out. I run an honest merchant bank, at least as honest as you can in this new day an
d age. And I like it that way."

  "Ken, don't start the runaround." Vance tried to keep his tone easy. "You're not talking to some bank examiner now. In Japan connections last forever. We both know that."

  "You were never more correct." Nogami examined his lager. "Obligations remain, even though influence wanes. Which is, in fact, one of the reasons I wanted to see you today. Michael, if I do you this favor, could you perhaps do one for me in return?"

  "Is it legit?"

  "I suppose that depends," he laughed. "Look, of course I'd be more than happy to send a secure telex, if that's all you want. Heaven knows I owe you that much." He paused to sip from his mug. "But I'll sound rather a fool if I don't know the first thing about the situation. Can't you at least give me some idea?"

  "Tokyo'll understand. And the less you know, the better for everybody."

  "All right. But my position right now is . . . well, I may not be able to help as much as I'd like."

  "I don't like the sound of that."

  "It's the problem I mentioned to you. That 'individual' is calling in favors with me now, not the other way around. So this could be a trifle awkward, if you see what I mean."

  "Ken, have you forgot I took care of you once? Remember the Toshiba milling-machine sale to the Soviets? All the posturing back in the U.S.? It could have been a lot worse for your team politically. Afterwards you said you owed me one."

  "Yes, and I still appreciate what you did, tipping me off about the French, the fact they'd already sold such machines to the Soviets years ago. It helped us dampen the fires of moral indignation on Capitol Hill." He took another sip. "I got a lot of points with the right people in the LDP."

  "I just got fed up with all the bullshit. No harm done." He leaned back. "But now it's your turn."

  "Fair enough." He gazed around the crowded, smoke- filled pub. "Michael, I don't know if we really should be talking here. Care to take a walk, down to the Thames? Get a bit of air. Maybe hope for some sunshine?"

  "All right." Vance tossed down a five-pound note and reached for his overcoat, draped across the stool next to them. "Weather's nice. At least for London."

  Nogami nodded as they pushed through the crowded doorway and into the street. "Don't say what you're thinking. Don't say you can't imagine why I moved here."

  "Never crossed my mind." Vance took a breath of the fresh air, expelling the residual smoke from his lungs. The lunchtime mob elbowed them from every side.

  "You know the reason as well as I do. It's all part of our overall strategy. Japan is a world player now, Michael. I'm part of the vanguard that's going to do to financial services worldwide what we did to semiconductors and electronics. You just watch and see."

  "I already believe it." He did. Japan's dominance of the world money scene was just a matter of time.

  They navigated their way through the midday throng. On every side lunchtime shoppers were munching sandwiches, lining up for knick-knacks to take back to the office. They strolled past the rear of the tubular-steel Lloyds building, then headed down a cobblestone side street toward the river.

  "But we had to come here and buy our base in order to be part of the financial game in Europe," Nogami continued, not missing a beat. "We expect to be major players before long."

  "I'd say you're already one. When the Plaza Accord sliced the greenback in half, it doubled the value of Japan's bankroll. Every yen you had was suddenly worth twice as many dollars, as if by magic."

  "We can't complain." He paused to inhale the gray, heavy air. "Of course the locals here in London are constantly enlisting their 'old boy' regulators to make up new rules to hamper us, but Tokyo invented that little ploy. It almost makes this place feel like home."

  "Word is you play all the games. I hear Westminster Union now handles more Eurodollar deals than anybody."

  "We pull our weight." He smiled and dodged a red double-decker bus as they crossed Lower Thames Street. "You name a major currency, we'll underwrite the debt offering."

  "Lots of action."

  "There is indeed. Sometimes perhaps too much. Which is why I wanted to talk down here, by the river. Shall we stroll out onto London Bridge?"

  "Sounds good."

  Spread before them now was the muddy, gray expanse of London's timeless waterway. Shakespeare had gazed on it. Handel had written music to accompany fireworks shot over it. Today a few tugs were moving slowly up the center channel, and a sightseeing boat was headed down to Greenwich. Cranes of the new Docklands development loomed over the horizon downriver.

  "So what's the problem?" Vance turned to study his face. There was worry there, and pain.

  "Michael, that 'individual' you spoke of. He has, in the famous phrase, 'made me an offer I can't refuse.' He wants me to handle a debt issue, corporate debentures, bigger than anything this town has ever seen. Anything Europe has ever seen."

  "You should be ordering champagne."

  "Not this time." He turned back to study the river. "The whole thing stinks."

  "Who're the players?"

  "It's supposedly to raise capital for the Mino Industries Group. I've been 'asked' to underwrite the bonds, then unload them with minimal fanfare and keep a low profile." He looked back. "But it's almost fraud, Michael. I don't think there's anything behind them at all. Nothing. The beneficiaries are just phony Mino Industries shadow corporations. Only nobody will know it. You see, the bonds are zero-coupons, paying no interest till they mature ten years from now. So it will be a full decade before the buyers find out they've acquired paper with no backing."

  "Won't be the first time the sheep got sheared by a hustler."

  "Michael, I'm not a hustler," he snapped. "And there's more. They're so-called bearer bonds. Which means there's no record of who holds them. Just one more trick to keep this thing below the radar."

  "Typical. 'Bearer bonds' always sell like hotcakes in high-tax locales like the Benelux countries. That mythical Belgian dentist can buy them anonymously and screw the tax man."

  "Yes, that's part of what makes Eurocurrency ideal for this, all that homeless money floating around over here. No government is really responsible for keeping track of it. In fact, every effort has been made to ensure that these debentures appeal to greed. Their yield will float, pegged at two full points above the thirty-year British government bond, the gilt. As lead underwriter I'll have the main responsibility, but I'm also supposed to form a syndicate of Japanese brokerage houses here-Nomura, Daiwa, Sumitomo, the others-to make sure the offering goes off without a hitch. But that precaution will hardly be necessary. At those interest rates, they should practically fly out the door." He sighed. "Which is a good thing, because . . . because, Michael, the amount I'm being asked to underwrite is a hundred billion dollars."

  "And that's just for the first year, right?"

  Nogami looked up, startled. "How did you know?"

  "Call it a lucky guess." He took a deep breath. So that's where the funding stipulated in the protocol was going to come from. European suckers. My God, he thought, the play is superb.

  "Michael, nobody could float an offering like that and have it covered with real assets. Nobody. Taken all together that's enough money to capitalize a dozen world-class corporations." He paused. "Of course, I won't be offering it all at once. The debentures will dribble out over the period of a year, and then the next year, it starts all over again. For five years."

  "So you're supposed to raise five hundred billion dollars in the Eurobond market over five years. Not impossible, but it's a tall order."

  "Especially since the ratings will be smoke and mirrors. It is, in effect, an unsecured loan." He looked away, down at the swirling brown surface of the Thames. "You know what it really means? He wants me to sell junk bonds. And I can't refuse." His voice came close to a quaver. "Just when I was well into earning the esteem of the European banking community, I'm suddenly about to become the Drexel Burnham of Eurobonds. I'll be operating the investment equivalent of a shell game."

>   "Ken, why are you telling me all this?" Vance had never seen him this upset.

  "Because I have to find out what this is all about. What the money's going to be used for."

  "I take it the Tokyo oyabun's not talking."

  "Michael, no one dares question him. You know that." His voice grew formal. "It's the Yakuza way."

  "Well, you're in London now. A free man."

  "It's not that simple. You may not know-it's a very well-kept secret-that he capitalized my takeover of the Westminster Union Bank here. He put together a consortium of private financiers for me. A lot of the money was actually his. The whole thing had to be low profile, since none of our banks dared have its name associated with a hostile takeover in London. Our institutions are still squeamish about such things. They all cheered me on in private, but in public they didn't know anything about it."

  "Maybe he had this little return favor in mind all along."

  "To tell you the truth, I've since wondered that myself. Anyway, now he's calling in my obligation. We Japanese call it giri. I have to play. But either way I'm ruined. If I do it, I'll become a pariah in the European banking community. If I don't . . . well, the consequences are almost unthinkable."

  "Ken, I don't know how to say this, but there's a chance this whole scenario is bigger than anything you can imagine."

  Nogami turned to stare. "What do you know?"

  "Let's just say I hear things. But first we need to strike our deal."

  "Of course. As I said, I'll send a telex, from my secure trading room, for what good it may do. But you've got to help me too. Please." He turned back to the river. "You know, Michael, I like my life here. More and more. Even given all that's going on here these days, the pace is still much more civilized than Tokyo. For all our prosperity back home, I think we've traded something very valuable. Call it our soul perhaps. Here I feel almost free from the old days, part of a real, legitimate world. I hated all the money laundering, the shady deals. These days I can look myself in the face."

  "I was temporarily changing professions myself, until about a week ago. Then this problem came up." He waved to a pleasure boat slowly motoring up the river. It was only a thirty footer, but the lines reminded him of the Ulysses. It made him suddenly homesick for real sunshine and real air.

  "Michael, what's going on? We need to work together."

  "I'll just say this. I think the godfather's got a big surprise cooking. Maybe we're both caught in the middle."

  He smiled. "If that's true, we can help each other out. Though I can't push too hard." He took a deep breath and gazed at the murky London sky. "But still . . . I'll tell you the truth. I'm very seriously thinking I may just refuse to touch the whole thing. Tanzan Mino-yes, why not name names? He's even made vague threats against my family. The man has pushed me too far this time. Somewhere it has to end."

  "You're a brave man. He still runs some very persuasive muscle. Better have your life insurance paid up."

  "I'm well aware. But I don't want to jeopardize everything I've built here. My whole new life. So that's why I need you. If you could find out what's behind all this, I could decide whether I should risk everything and go ahead with the offering. Or just stand up to him at last. Otherwise . . ."

  "What's the timing?"

  "I have to list the first offering with the Issuing House Association day after tomorrow. We've already put together the paperwork, just in case."

  "Pretty tight."

  "Michael, I'll see what I can do about your problem. And if there's anything else, you know I'll try my best."

  "Depending on whether my message gets through, I could be needing somebody to handle some cash. A reasonably substantial sum. Maybe as part of our little quid pro quo you could arrange it."

  "Is this money . . .?" He paused awkwardly. "Well, you understand my question."

  "It's laundered. Clean as a hound's tooth."

  "Where is it now?"

  "Don't worry," Vance smiled. "It's liquid."

  "And the sum?"

  "Hang on to your bowler hat. It's around a hundred million U.S."

  "Is that all?" he laughed. "That figure is barely a blip on the screen these days. For a minute there I thought you were talking real money."

  "Seems a reasonably substantial sum."

  "It's scarcely more than walking-around money in our business, as you well know. Over two hundred billion passes through the foreign exchange markets every day, a large amount of it right here in London."

  "Well, there could be a small complication, if the KGB gets into the action."

  "KGB?" He pulled up sharply. "What in bloody hell do they-?"

  "It's a long story."

  "But why would Soviet intelligence be involved? They're supposed to be keeping a lower profile these days."

  "Rumor has it they let this one get past them. The money left home without a passport and now they look like fools for letting it happen."

  "I see." He grew silent, then glanced at his watch and pulled his overcoat tighter. "Well, perhaps I should send that cable now. Before Tokyo tucks in for the night."

  "The sooner the better."

  "And the matter of concern to me?"

  "Let me think it over." Vance spoke slowly. "But in the meantime, I'd strongly advise you to hold off with the offering."

  "You're not telling me what you know. Is that fair?"

  "No. But who said the world's got to be fair? There's a play about to go down. I know about part of it, not all. But before I'm through, well, let's just say that when somebody starts using muscle on me, I sort of lose my sense of proportion."

  "Is it that bad?" His stare carried alarm. "What am I supposed to do?"

  "Sit tight on the offering. Don't say yes or no, just find a way to postpone it. And send that telex. I'll dictate it for you. After that, you can reach me at my hotel. Strand Palace."

  "The Strand Palace? Michael, you?" He smiled. "Hardly up to your usual standards."

  "I don't do as much freelance these days as I used to. So I have to learn to live closer to my means."

  "I'll believe that when I see it," he said with a laugh. "You're not telling me the truth. About anything."

  "You're right. And it's for your own good. You just stall on the offering and let me play this my way. If things aren't straightened out in a day, two tops, we're both in a lot of trouble."

  "Two days?"

  "It has to happen by then. Too much is going on."

  "Now you're really starting to make me alarmed."

  "You should be."

  Because if this isn't settled in two days, he thought, somebody's probably going to be dead.