Debt of Honor

  That was the good news. The bad news was that each individual frame of imagery had to be examined by a team of experts, one at a time; that every irregularity or curiosity had to be reexamined and graded; that the time involved despite—indeed, because of—the urgency of the task was immense. Analysts from the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Intelligence and Threat Analysis Center (I-TAC) were grouped together for the task, looking for twenty holes in the ground, knowing nothing other than the fact that the individual holes could be no less than five meters across. There could be one large group of twenty, or twenty individual and widely separated holes. The first task, all agreed, was to get new imagery of the whole length of standard-gauge rails. Weather and camera angles impeded some of that task, and now on the third day of the hunt, 20 percent of the needed mapping still remained undone. Already thirty potential sites had been identified for further scrutiny from new passes at slightly different light levels and camera angles which would allow stereo-optic viewing and additional computer enhancement. People on the analysis team were talking again about the 1991 Scud-hunts. It was not a pleasant memory for them. Though many lessons had been learned, the main one was this: it wasn’t really all that hard to hide one or ten or twenty or even a hundred relatively small objects within the borders of a nation-state, even a very open, very flat one. And Japan was neither. Under the circumstances, finding all of them was a nearly impossible task. But they had to try anyway.

  It was eleven at night, and his duties to his ancestors were done for the moment. They would never be fully carried out, but the promises to their spirits he’d made so many years before were now accomplished. What had been Japanese soil at the time of his birth was now again Japanese soil. What had been his family’s land was now again his family’s land. The nation that had humbled his nation and murdered his family had finally been humbled, and would remain so for a long, long time. Long enough to assure his country’s position, finally, among the great nations of the world.

  In fact, even greater than he’d planned, he noted. All he had to do was look at the financial reports coming into his hotel suite via facsimile printer. The financial panic he’d planned and executed was now moving across the Atlantic. Amazing, he thought, that he hadn’t anticipated it. The complex financial maneuvers had left Japanese banks and businesses suddenly cash-rich, and his fellow zaibatsu were seizing the opportunity to buy up European equities for themselves and their companies. They’d increase the national wealth, improve their position in the various European national economies, and publicly appear to be springing to the assistance of others. Yamata judged that Japan would bend some efforts to help Europe out of her predicament. His country needed markets after all, and with the sudden increase in Japanese ownership of their private companies, perhaps now European politicians would listen more attentively to their suggestions. Not certain, he thought, but possible. What they would definitely listen to was power. Japan was facing down America. America would never be able to confront his country, not with her economy in turmoil, her military defanged, and her President politically crippled. And it was an election year as well. The finest strategy, Yamata thought, was to sow discord in the house of your enemy. That he had done, taking the one action that had simply not occurred to the bonehead military people who’d led his country down the path of ruin in 1941.

  “So,” he said to his host. “How may I be of service?”

  “Yamata-san, as you know, we will be holding elections for a local governor.” The bureaucrat poured a stiff shot of a fine Scotch whiskey. “You are a landowner, and have been so for some months. You have business interests here. I suggest that you might be a perfect man for the job.”

  For the first time in years, Raizo Yamata was startled.

  In another room in the same hotel an admiral, a major, and a captain of Japan Air Lines held a family reunion.

  “So, Yusuo, what will happen next?” Torajiro asked.

  “What I think will happen next is that you will return to your normal flight schedule back and forth to America,” the Admiral said, finishing his third drink. “If they are as intelligent as I believe them to be, then they will see that the war is already over.”

  “How long have you been in on this, Uncle?” Shiro inquired with deep respect. Having now learned of what his uncle had done, he was awed by the man’s audacity.

  “From when I was a nisa, supervising construction of my first command in Yamata-san’s yards. What is it? Ten years now. He came down to see me, and we had dinner and he asked some theoretical questions. Yamata learns quickly for a civilian,” the Admiral opined. “I tell you, I think there is much more to this than meets the eye.”

  “How so?” Torajiro asked.

  Yusuo poured himself another shot. His fleet was safe, and he was entitled to unwind, he thought, especially with his brother and nephew, now that all the stress was behind him. “We’ve spoken more and more in the past few years, but most of all right before he bought that American financial house. And so, now? My little operation happens the same day that their stock market crashes ... ? An interesting coincidence, is it not?” His eyes twinkled. “One of my first lessons to him, all those years ago. In 1941 we attacked America’s periphery. We attacked the arms but not the head or the heart. A nation can grow new arms, but a heart, or a head, that’s far harder. I suppose he listened.”

  “I’ve flown over the head part many times,” Captain Torajiro Sato noted. One of his two normal runs was to Dulles International Airport. “A squalid city.”

  “And you shall do so again. If Yamata did what I think, they will need us again, and soon enough,” Admiral Sato said confidently.

  “Go ahead, let him through,” Ryan said over the phone.

  “But—”

  “But if it makes you feel better, pop it open and look, but if he says not to X-ray it, don’t, okay?”

  “But we were told just to expect one, and there’s two.”

  “It’s okay,” Jack told the head uniformed guard at the west entrance. The problem with increased security alerts was that they mainly kept you from getting the work done that was necessary to resolve the crisis. “Send them both up.” It took another four minutes by Jack’s watch. They probably did pop the back off the guy’s portable computer to make sure there wasn’t a bomb there. Jack rose from his desk and met them at the anteroom door.

  “Sorry about that. Remember the old Broadway song, ‘The Secret Service Makes Me Nervous’?” Ryan waved them into his office. He assumed the older one was George Winston. He vaguely remembered the speech at the Harvard Club, but not the face that had delivered it.

  “This is Mark Gant. He’s my best technical guy, and he wanted to bring his laptop.”

  “It’s easier this way,” Gant explained.

  “I understand. I use them, too. Please sit down.” Jack waved them to chairs. His secretary brought in a coffee tray. When cups were poured, he went on. “I had one of my people track the European markets. Not good.”

  “That’s putting it mildly, Dr. Ryan. We may be watching the beginning of a global panic,” Winston began. “I’m not sure where the bottom is.”

  “So far Buzz is doing okay,” Jack replied cautiously. Winston looked up from his cup.

  “Ryan, if you’re a bulshitter, I’ve come to the wrong place. I thought you knew the Street. The IPO you did with Silicon Alchemy was nicely crafted—now, was that you or did you take the credit for somebody else’s work?”

  “There’s only two people who talk to me like that. One I’m married to. The other has an office about a hundred feet that way.” Jack pointed. Then he grinned. “Your reputation precedes you, Mr. Winston. Silicon Alchemy was all my work. I have ten percent of the stock in my personal portfolio. That’s how much I thought of the outfit. If you ask around about my rep, you’ll find I’m not a bullshitter.”

  “Then you know it’s today,” Winston said, still taking the measure of his host.

  Jack bit his lip
for a moment and nodded. “Yeah. I told Buzz the same thing Sunday. I don’t know how close the investigators are to reconstructing the records. I’ve been working on something else.”

  “Okay.” Winston wondered what else Ryan might be working on but dismissed the irrelevancy. “I can’t tell you how to fix it, but I think I can show you how it got broke.”

  Ryan turned for a second to look at his TV. CNN Headline News had just started its thirty-minute cycle with a live shot from the floor of the NYSE. The sound was all the way down, but the commentator was speaking rapidly and her face was not smiling. When he turned back, Gant had his laptop flipped open and was calling up some files.

  “How much time do we have for this?” Winston asked.

  “Let me worry about that,” Jack replied.

  31

  The How and the What

  Treasury Secretary Bosley Fiedler had not allowed himself three consecutive hours of sleep since the return from Moscow, and his stride through the tunnel connecting the Treasury Building with the White House meandered sufficiently to make his bodyguards wonder if he might need a wheelchair soon. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve was hardly in better shape. The two had been conferring, again, in the Secretary’s office when the call arrived—Drop everything and come here—peremptory even for somebody like Ryan, who frequently short-circuited the workings of the government. Fiedler started talking even before he walked through the open door.

  “Jack, in twenty minutes we have a conference call with the central banks of five Euro—who’s this?” SecTreas asked, stopping three paces into the room.

  “Mr. Secretary, I’m George Winston. I’m president and managing director of—”

  “Not anymore. You sold out,” Fiedler objected.

  “I’m back as of the last rump-board meeting. This is Mark Gant, another of my directors.”

  “I think we need to listen to what they have to say,” Ryan told his two new arrivals. “Mr. Gant, please restart your rain dance.”

  “Damn it, Jack, I have twenty minutes. Less now,” the Secretary of the Treasury said, looking at his watch.

  Winston almost snarled, but instead spoke as he would have to another senior trader: “Fiedler, the short version is this: the markets were deliberately taken down by a systematic and highly skillful attack, and I think I can prove that to your satisfaction. Interested?”

  The SecTreas blinked very hard. “Why, yes.”

  “But how ... ?” the Fed Chairman asked.

  “Sit down and we’ll show you,” Gant said. Ryan made way and the two senior officials took their places on either side of him and his computer. “It started in Hong Kong ...”

  Ryan walked to his desk, dialed the Secretary’s office, and told his secretary to route the conference call to his room in the West Wing. A typical executive secretary, she handled the irregularity better than her boss could ever have done. Gant, Jack saw, was a superb technician, and his second stint at explaining matters was even more efficient than his first. The Secretary and the Chairman were also good listeners who knew the jargon. Questions were not necessary.

  “I didn’t think something like this was possible,” the Chairman said eight minutes into the exposition. Winston handled the response.

  “All the safeguards built into the system are designed to prevent accidents and catch crooks. It never occurred to anybody that somebody would pull something like this. Who would deliberately lose so much money?”

  “Somebody with bigger fish to fry,” Ryan told him.

  “What’s bigger than—”

  Jack cut him off. “Lots of things, Mr. Winston. We’ll get to that later.” Ryan turned his head. “Buzz?”

  “I’ll want to confirm this with my own data, but it looks pretty solid.” SecTreas looked over at the Chairman.

  “You know, I’m not even sure it’s a criminal violation.”

  “Forget that,” Winston announced. “The real problem is still here. Crunch time is today. If Europe keeps going down, then we have a global panic. The dollar’s in free-fall, the American markets can’t operate, most of the world’s liquidity is paralyzed, and all the little guys out there are going to catch on as soon as the media figure out what the hell is going down. The only thing that’s prevented that to this point is that financial reporters don’t know crap about what they cover.”

  “Otherwise they’d be working for us,” Gant said, rejoining the conversation. “Thank God their sources are keeping it zipped for the time being, but I’m surprised it hasn’t broken out all the way yet.” Just maybe, he thought, the media didn’t want to start a panic either.

  Ryan’s phone rang and he went to answer it. “Buzz, it’s your conference call.” The Secretary’s physical state was apparent when he rose. The man wavered and grabbed the back of a chair to steady himself. The Chairman was only a touch more agile, and if anything both men were yet more shaken by what they had just learned. Fixing something that had broken was a sufficiently difficult task. Fixing something deliberately and maliciously destroyed could hardly be easier. And it had to be fixed, and soon, lest every nation in Europe and North America join the plunge into a deep, dark canyon. The climb out of it would require both years and pain, and that was under the best of political circumstances—the long-term political ramifications of such a vast economic dislocation could not possibly be grasped at this stage, though Ryan was already recoiling from that particular horror.

  Winston looked at the National Security Advisor’s face, and it wasn’t hard to read his thoughts. His own elation at the discovery was gone now that he’d given the information over to others. There ought to have been something else for him to say: how to fix matters. But all of his intellectual energy had been expended in building his case for the prosecution, as it were. He hadn’t had the chance yet to take his analysis any further.

  Ryan saw that and nodded with a grim smile of respect. “Good job.”

  “It’s my fault,” Winston said, quietly so as not to disturb the conference call proceeding a few feet away. “I should have stayed in.”

  “I’ve bailed out once myself, remember?” Ryan got back into a chair. “Hey, we all need a change from time to time. You didn’t see this coming. It happens all the time. Especially here.”

  Winston gestured angrily. “I suppose. Now we can identify the rapist, but how the hell do you get unraped? Once it’s happened, it’s happened. But those were my investors he fucked. Those people came to me. Those people trusted me.” Ryan admired the summation. That was how people in the business were supposed to think.

  “In other words, now what?”

  Gant and Winston traded a look. “We haven’t figured that one out.”

  “Well, so far you’ve outperformed the FBI and SEC. You know, I haven’t even bothered checking how my portfolio did.”

  “Your ten percent of Silicon Alchemy won’t hurt you. Long term,” Winston said, “new communications gadgets always make out, and they have a couple of honeys.”

  “Okay, that’s settled for now.” Fiedler rejoined the group. “All the European markets are shut down, just like we are, until we can get things sorted out.”

  Winston looked up. “All that means is, there’s a hell of a flood, and you’re building the levee higher and higher. And if you run out of sandbags before the river runs out of water, then the damage will only be worse when you lose control.”

  “We’re all open to suggestions, Mr. Winston,” Fiedler said gently. George’s reply matched it in kind.

  “Sir, for what it’s worth, I think you’ve done everything right to this point. I just don’t see a way out.”

  “Neither do we,” the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board observed.

  Ryan stood. “For the moment, gentlemen, I think we need to brief the President.”

  “What an interesting idea,” Yamata said. He knew he’d had too much to drink. He knew that he was basking in the sheer satisfaction of carrying out what had to be the most ambitious financi
al gambit in history. He knew that his ego was expanding to its fullest size since—when? Even reaching the chairmanship of his conglomerate hadn’t been this satisfactory. He’d crushed a whole nation and had altered the course of his own, and yet he had never even considered public office of any kind. And why not? he asked himself. Because that had always been a place for lesser men.

  “For the moment, Yamata-san, Saipan will have a local governor. We will hold internationally supervised elections. We need a candidate,” the Foreign Ministry official went on. “It must be someone of stature. It would be helpful if it were a man known and friendly to Goto-san, and a man with local interests. I merely ask that you consider it.”

  “I will do that.” Yamata stood and headed for the door.

  Well. He wondered what his father would have thought of that. It would mean stepping down from chairmanship of his corporation ... but—but what? What corporate worlds had he failed to conquer? Was it not time to move on? To retire honorably, to enter the formal service of his nation. After the local government situation was cleared up ... then? Then to enter the Diet with great prestige, because the insiders would know, wouldn’t they? Hai, they would know who had truly served the interests of the nation, who more than the Emperor Meiji himself had brought Japan to the first rank of nations. When had Japan ever had a political leader worthy of her place and her people? Why should he not take the honor due him? It would all require a few years, but he had those years. More than that, he had vision and the courage to make it real. Only his peers in business knew of his greatness now, but that could change, and his family name would be remembered for more than building ships and televisions and all the other things. Not a trademark. A name. A heritage. Would that not make his father proud?

  “Yamata?” Roger Durling asked. “Tycoon, right, runs a huge company? I may have bumped into him at some reception or other when I was Vice President.”