Thomas Hoover - The samurai strategy

What was that he'd said about coming back home? Her books being circulated here even in manuscript? What was he hinting at?

Finally around two A.M. he called for the check and neither said a word as they headed for the elevator.

She thought one last time about Allan's warning as she watched the floors flash above the door and searched for her key. But this was no time to brood about conspiracies. Ken made her feel good. Which was a hell of a lot more than Dave Mason had done. Besides, Ken had some style; all Dave did was mope around in a pair of baggy chinos and whine about his department. Ken was upbeat, alive, aware.

What's more, she enjoyed being with him, feeling the heat of his cheek against hers. As the elevator doors opened, he slipped an arm about her waist and nuzzled her hair. Then their lips met.

He was just as she remembered. His touch, his taste, his body. Still, something about him was definitely changed.

Then he reached for her key and opened the door. The minute they entered the sitting room of her suite, he took her in his arms.

"Tam, let's not talk anymore about business, no more Swords. I'm already bored hearing about it. Just us. What do you say?"

"Agreed." She looked at him and suddenly realized something. Ken Asano was beautiful, kirei. Not handsome, beautiful. Anata wa kirei desu, Kenji Asano. "Want a nightcap? There's some airport Remy in my-"

"Who could even think about another cognac. I just want to think about us." He stood back. "All right, maybe if you insist. For old times' sake."

"'Old times' is right, Ken. It's been a very long time since Kyoto." She located the dark Remy bottle, still packed in her leather flight bag. A nice inauguration, she told herself. "What was that all about? Was it real? Or did I just imagine it all?"

"The heart never lies." He settled on the couch. "Do you really remember?"

"Vividly." She laughed as she poured an inch into each of two thin hotel tumblers. "Including that dreadful bar you took us all to."

"A glimpse of the real Japan, Tam, for our tourist friends. Show them it's not all ikebana and haiku. Believe me, it's not." He clicked her glass. "Do try to forgive me. And here's to us."

"To us."

"And to the slightly scary world we're stumbling into. Japan needs you here." He pulled her next to him and brushed her cheek lightly with his fingertips. Then he kissed her deeply on the mouth, and again. "/ need you here, Tam. Somebody like you. There's… well, there's a lot we could do together."

She reached up and loosened his tie, then began unbuttoning his shirt. His chest was firm, smooth, scented. She wanted him. "Let's just remember Kyoto for a while."

"I've never forgotten it."

Sometime around four A.M., more content than she had been in a long, long time, Tam Richardson lay awake on the cool sheets, Ken's trim body beside her, and wondered how it would end this time around.

Or possibly, just possibly, it wouldn't.

Back in New York, optimism was in increasingly short supply. What do you do if you think you're being set up? One thing, you may have occasion to muse long and hard about the consequences, personal and otherwise. You also may choose to ponder the larger motives of the individual behind it all.

So far, what had happened? Matsuo Noda had hired Matt Walton, corporate attorney-at-law, to begin shorting the American Treasury market, then proceeded to make himself a bona fide hero back home, in the process of which he acquired access to the biggest chunk of savings in the world, presumably the "financial arrangements" he once alluded to. Using that money as margin, Noda was ready to shift his play into high gear. My latest telexed instructions indicated he was poised to accelerate dramatically, "borrowing" bonds and selling them for whatever the market would pay. Of course if the price went down anytime soon, he could then replace those borrowed instruments at some fraction of what he'd sold them for. The man was gambling, for godsake. With the "Emperor's" fund.

Or was he? Therein, as somebody once said, lies the rub. Short selling has always been a reasonably good definition of gambling, except… except you are gambling only if you are wagering money on an event whose outcome is not precisely known. If you do know it, you are not gambling. You are taking prudent steps that will allow you to benefit from prior knowledge of said, etc.

Enough airy semantics. The big question: Why me? Now, I've been set up a few times before in my life. Everybody has. I even wonder in darker moments if the reason Joanna demanded a champagne lifestyle wasn't to make sure I spent all my time supporting it, thereby rendering me exactly what she eventually accused me of being-an absentee husband and father. That is a no-win situation.

The undertaking at hand, however, could have a very obvious beneficiary. Matsuo Noda. The only problem was that in order for Noda to win, America had to lose. Massively. The old zero-sum game: for every winner there has to be an equal and opposite sucker.

After that Friday evening with Henderson, I spent the next week mulling over the complexities of the situation. The whole thing boiled down to two very strong presumptions: one, I was indeed being set up, being told one scenario while the truth lay in quite another direction; and two, my employer had something very lethal to America's financial health up his sleeve. Still, these were merely presumptions, nothing more. The only thing I was sure about was that I had a very unpredictable tiger by its posterior handle. Time to find out a little more about my pussycat.

I hadn't actually seen Dai Nippon's midtown office, but I talked to the manager almost every day on the phone, and he occasionally shipped materials down to my place in the Village. I knew they'd taken over the building, installed a new security staff, moved into the vacant floor, and were doing something. However, I hadn't been invited up to see what the something was. I concluded the time was at hand.

As I understood it, Dai Nippon's purpose in life was to oversee the use of investment capital. Fair and good. As it happens, Japanese business tends to be funded a little differently from our own. Instead of selling off stock to the public, Japanese industry relies much more heavily on bank financing. In fact, less than twenty percent of Japan's industrial assets are publicly traded. Consequently the rules of the game are changed. If your company is beholden to a financial institution instead of a lot of nervous stockholders and fund managers, you're in partners with somebody less interested in next quarter's profits than in the larger matter of your still being around ten years hence to pay off its paper. That lender naturally rides herd very closely on your long-term planning.

As best I could tell, DNI was one of the herd-riders, a sort of hired gun that monitored various companies' operations to make sure they were managing their loans prudently. Again, since the prospectus emphasized they were specialists in overseas investment, I assumed that maybe part of the reason they were coming to the U.S. was to oversee the Japanese companies doing business here with money borrowed from back home.

Nobody had actually told me this. In fact nobody had told me anything. That was merely what I considered to be an educated guess. It was the only thing I could think of that made the slightest sense.

The following Monday morning I told myself the guesswork was over. It was high time I went up and saw for myself what they were doing. All I needed was an excuse.

Then the phone rang. I was in the garden out back, skimming the Times and working on a pot of fresh coffee while waiting for the Chicago exchanges to open. Ben was cruising the fence line, sniffing for cats.