Thomas Hoover - The samurai strategy

"How stupid of me," I apologized. "Had it all along. Noda- san's 'top priority' pass. He gave it to me only yesterday."

Yamada took the business card and studied it with a puzzled look. What did this have to do with anything?

That's when I impatiently turned it over and pointed to the English scribbling on the back. Noda's initials, I groused, right there at the bottom.

"Hai, wakarimasu." He understood that Noda-sama surely had written this, but so what? It wasn't the official form that the rules specified. More muzukashii.

Noda-san was in a rush, I apologized again. Didn't have time to locate the regular form. Tam passed that along in better Japanese.

"Soo desu…" Yamada thoughtfully agreed that such oversights sometimes happened. Everybody knew the big daimyo had a tendency to override official channels. He shifted his Uzi uncertainly.

"Noda-sama insisted I finish this report by Monday," Tam stressed. "We should only be a minute."

Yamada scrutinized the back of the card a moment longer, holding it up to the light. What was he going to do?

Finally he handed it back, bowed reluctantly, and looked the other way. It was a go.

"God, that was close." Tam closed the door behind us and clicked on the lights. "You don't know how lucky we were. If Morikawa had been on duty tonight, forget it. He'd never have bought that cock-and-bull routine."

About a dozen computer workstations had been installed on twelve to link up with the mainframe and data center on eleven. As we moved quickly past the sleeping screens, blind eyes staring vacantly into space, there was an eerie, ghostlike abandonment to the place, all the more so because of its hectic motion during regular hours. The phantoms of regimented analysts seemed to haunt the rows of empty desks. Tam remarked she'd never seen it like this: the nerve center off duty. Only the storm of the decade, together with two A.M. Sunday morning, could create such solitude. It took God to shut down Dai Nippon.

"Okay, time to move fast. Let's hit Mori's lair." I was whispering as we neared the corner office. Ahead was the closed door, solid oak. I took a deep breath and reached for the knob.

It was locked.

"No dice." I looked around at Tam, who was still wearing her lamb coat, gray against her dark hair, sleet melting on the shoulders.

"Let me try." She gave it a twist. Nothing. "I don't suppose we'd be very smart just to kick it in. Though that's what I feel like right now, after all our trouble." She turned to me. "Maybe there's a key somewhere in Noda's office? Think there's a chance?"

"Could be." I was rummaging my pockets. "First, though, let me check something."

I pulled out a ring and began to flip through it. "I ended up with a master, courtesy of the RM amp;S floor manager that day they turned in their keys. Now, if this internal door lock hasn't been changed yet, maybe…"I selected one and kissed it for luck. "Here goes."

The key, a large silver model, was resistant, the way masters always are. Undeterred, I wiggled it forcefully, and slowly it slipped into the knob. A couple of jiggles more and the thing began to revolve under my hand.

We emitted matching sighs of relief as Tam shoved the door wide and reached for the light switch. "Now I've got to regress into the past. A lot of their reports are in Japanese." She went on to explain that although she could read the kana syllabaries easily enough, she'd forgotten a lot of the kanji ideograms. She could piece together enough to work through a simple newspaper story, but heavy technical prose was always tough.

She quickly sorted through the papers piled in neat stacks atop Mori's desk, but who knew what most of them said? Nothing looked like my stolen list. Next she checked the drawers of the desk. One contained a heavily marked printout; the others, nothing.

Time was ticking. If Yamada decided to make the rounds, no quantity of creative fiction would save us.

She quickly grabbed the printout. At least we had one item that might give us something. What, though, we still weren't sure. Nothing resembled the page I'd lifted, but locating that document now appeared increasingly like a long shot anyhow. Guess everything seems easy till you actually try doing it.

Where else to look?

I glanced around the room, wondering about the file cabinet. Probably locked, and besides…

That's when I saw it. On a side table next to some technical books was an item we'd both failed entirely to notice. A large leather attache case.

"Tam, I think we've hit pay dirt. Check that out. Do you suppose she could have forgotten it last night when they shut the place down?"

"Maybe she didn't need it. Anything's possible. I remember seeing her carrying it around yesterday afternoon."

"Well, could be this is our find." I lifted it… and realized it was empty.

"Shit." I slammed it down, and just then detected a faint rattle inside. Hold on a minute.

I carefully shook it again and listened. "Tam, there's something in here."

"I vote we take a peek."

Which is what we did. No harm, right? I mean, the darned thing was just lying there. No "break and entry."

Guess what was inside. Not paper. Not a MITI report. Not lunch. Nothing in fact except for a shiny little compact disk, a CD.

"What the hell is this doing in here? Did she bring along some Beach Boys?"

"Matt, that's an optical disk, a CD-ROM." She suddenly seemed very pleased.

"Huh?"

"Compact disk, read-only memory. Except this one looks to be erasable and writable. This is the latest thing in computer storage technology." She held it up to the light, which reflected a rainbow of colors off its iridescent surface. "Maybe we've found what we came for. Let's take it and go."

"Is this like the CDs in record stores? The ones you play back using some kind of laser gizmo?"

"Same technology, only this is for text and data, not music. These can hold five-hundred megabytes, about one hundred and fifty thousand pages."

"Then I have some disquieting information to impart. I saw somebody come in here one day after shopping at Tower Records, and a CD he'd bought tripped the metal detector out there in Yamada's anteroom like he was wearing sleigh bells. Down inside this shiny plastic must be aluminum or something. We can't take it out." I turned it in my hand. "And besides, what would we do with it anyway? Stick it in a Walkman and listen to all the little digits spin by? In hi-fi?"

"I've got a reader at home… but wait, there's a better way." She lifted it from my grasp and headed out onto the floor. "Ever hear of computer crime?"

"In passing."

"Good. Then what you're about to witness won't shock you."

I watched as she kicked on one of the NEC desk stations and loaded in a program. Next she walked over, flipped a switch on a little box, and a drawer glided out. In went Mori's shiny disk. Another button was pushed, the drawer receded, and the disk was spinning silently.

Well, I thought. You want peaches, you shake the tree, right? Maybe she's about to kick hell out of the orchard.

"I'm going to dump this into the memory of the mother ship downstairs." She did some fiddling, then typed in her password to sign on the mainframe on eleven. "Beam us down, Scottie." In moments she and all those silicon cells below us were beeping away at each other. She didn't look up, just kept typing away, the hollow click-clack that's become the signature sound of our computer age. Finally she leaned back and breathed. "Okay, it's reading the disk. After it's in memory down there, we can pull up the contents here on the screen and see what we've got."

I don't know how long it took to read the thing. Probably no more than a minute or so, though it seemed forever. Finally something flashed on the screen and told us the disk had been dumped. Tam took it out of its little player and passed it to me.