Thomas Hoover - The samurai strategy

My intuition, as we rode the elevator up toward Dai Nippon's center of operations, was troubled. The offices had been cleared in advance of our arrival by somebody from DNI's Kyoto operation. We had struck at the proper void in space, all right, but our opponent had deliberately created that opening. Things weren't supposed to happen that way.

Then the elevator light showed eleven and the door glided open. We were there. Before us lay the steel doors of The Kingdom. While Tam gave the computer a voice ID, I stood to the side readying the surprise I planned for Noda's security twosome. Off came the brown paper, then the scabbard, and in my hand gleamed a twelfth-century katana from the sword-smith who once served the Shogun Yoritomo Minamoto. The prize of my collection. It was, arguably, the most beautiful, sharpest, hardest piece of steel I had ever seen. With the spirit of the shoguns.

"Ready?" She glanced over as the doors slid open.

"Now."

Awaiting us just inside the first doors were the X-ray and metal detector, the latter a walk-through arch like you see in airports. Then past that were the second doors, beyond which were stationed the two Uzi-packing guards. The detector was set to automatically lock the second doors if metal was detected on the persons of those passing through, and the wires leading out of it were encased in an aluminum tube, attached there on the left. This would have to be fast.

The sword was already up, poised, and as we entered, it flashed. Out went the electronic box with one clean stroke, the encased wires severed at the exact point where they exited from the gray metal. There was no alarm, not a sound. We'd iced it.

Beautiful.

I figured there would be time for exactly two more strokes, but they had to be right, intuitively perfect. So at that moment I shut down my rational mind, took a deep breath, and gave my life to Zen. Mental autopilot.

The connecting doors slid open, and there stood the guards. We'd caught them both flat-footed. So far, so good. Now the sword…

Yukio Mishima, whom I mentioned earlier, once asserted that opposites brought to their logical extremes eventually come to resemble one another, that life is in fact a great circle. Therefore, whenever things appear to diverge, they are actually on a path that brings them back together-an idea of unity captured visually in the image of the snake swallowing its own tail. According to him there is a realm wherein the spirit and the flesh, the sensual and the rational, the yin and yang, all join. But to achieve this ultimate convergence you must probe the edge, take your body and mind to the farthest limits.

I'd been reflecting considerably on what this meant to us. Noda's two heavies personified brute physicality, the body triumphant; Tam and I were meeting them with the power of the mind and, I hoped, finely honed intuition. Whereas these may seem the farthest of opposites, as with the symbol of the snake, they merged at their extremities. They became one. I knew it and the two startled guys now staring at us understood it as well. Mind and body were about to intersect. The circle had joined.

Their Uzis-about two feet long, black, heavy clip, metal stock-were hanging loosely from shoulder straps several inches away from their hands. I saw them both reach for the grip, but that sight didn't really register. My cognitive processes were already shut down.

While the first man's left-hemisphere neurons were telling his right hand to reach downward, the sword was already moving, milliseconds ahead. It caught the gun's heavy leather strap, parting it like paper, and the Uzi dropped, just eluding his fingers. He stood naked.

That was all for him and he immediately knew it. If you're looking at a razor-sharp katana, you don't get a fallback try. However, the second guard, dark eyebrows and bald head, now had time on his side. Up came the automatic, one-handed.

Right here let me say you've got to admire his pluck. If I'd been staring at a four-foot katana that could have bisected me like a noodle, I might have elected to pass. But he'd weighed the odds and concluded he had a chance. Again, though, his rationality bought us time. The neurons firing in his brain were setting in motion a sequence of logic. He was thinking.

The sword wasn't. My blank mind was centered on the void, the place where the Uzi would be when it was leveled at my chest. The overhead stroke caught it just where intuition said it would be, point-blank, his finger a millimeter from the trigger.

Cheap Israeli steel. The eight-hundred-year-old katana of Yoritomo Minamoto's swordsmith parted the Uzi's perforated black barrel like Hotel Bar butter, bifurcated it into identical slices. Guard number two just grunted as it clattered to the floor.

By my reckoning we'd been in the inner chamber for about three quarters of a second, but Noda's two human mountains were now standing there holding nothing but time in their hands. Nobody had to draw them a picture. The game was over. Bushido.

I motioned Tam toward the first guard's weapon.

"Matthew…" She hesitated a moment, then snapped into action. "You weren't kidding about that sword. I never realized-"

"Let's go."

"Right." She now had the one remaining automatic. The other was no longer usable. Didn't matter. One was all we needed.

We now had to kill the automatic ID on the outer door and put it on manual. Otherwise the two guards upstairs might come calling. While Tam stood there with the Uzi, I went back out and yanked the wires that hooked the voice reader to the computer. There was probably a scientific way to turn it off, but who had time for science? Besides, just then my veins were still pumping pure adrenaline. Facing the business end of an Uzi, even for a fleeting instant, is no way to begin an evening.

Tam ordered the guards to open the last door and in we marched. Tanaka was standing outside his office, his dark eyes glazed, his bristle-covered skull rosy with shock. He turned even redder when he saw the katana. Nobody had to tell him what it could do.

"Mr. Walton, why are you here?"

"We're about to undertake some corporate restructuring."

Tam proceeded to herd Tanaka and the guards into Noda's office, pausing just long enough to kill the phone wires. As he began to recover, he commenced sputtering about legal action and jail and general hellfire. Who cared? As of this moment, the offices and computer of Dai Nippon, International belonged to us.

Henderson was informed of our progress when his phone rang at exactly 4:48 P.M. He arrived, along with his Georgia Mafia computer expert, at 5:17, and Tam met them at the security doors.

I wasn't actually there to welcome them aboard, since I was guarding Tanaka just then and engaged in a small one-on-one with the man, explaining to him that Matsuo Noda's ass was ours. The president of Dai Nippon, I advised, was a few short days away from becoming everybody's lead story, featured as the Japanese executive who'd (apparently) rebelled against his homeland. Noda was no stranger to headlines, of course, but he preferred to engineer them himself, so this definitely wasn't going to be his style. Matsuo Noda was, albeit unwillingly, about to make history. As I broke this news to Dai Nippon's chief of New York operations, I sensed he was definitely less than enthusiastic about the prospect. Well, he'd have a few days to get used to the idea, since nobody was going to enter or leave the eleventh floor for a while.

It was still a bit difficult to believe what had happened. Or even more, what was next. But sometimes reality can have a way of outstripping your wildest powers of imagination-a Space Shuttle explodes, a nuclear meltdown in the Ukraine, ten-dollar oil, all of it too farfetched to make credible fiction. It could only exist in the realm of the real.