Thomas Hoover - Project Daedalus

Finally, after the fifth burst, he decided to reach for it. Probably just the desk, calling about the breakfast things.

The voice was the last one he expected.

"Hello, darling."

"Eva!" He almost shouted. "Where the hell are you?"

"You really must stop shooting people, you know," she lectured. "You're getting to be a horrible menace to society."

"What-?"

"Michael." The voice hardened. "Christ, what a mess."

"Are you okay?"

"Yes, I think so." She paused to inhale. "But I'm literally afraid to move. I think KGB got Alex, there in Terminal Four at Heathrow. He was trying to bluff them, though, so maybe he pulled it off. Anyway, they were so tied up I just slipped past."

"The hell with him. Where are-?"

"I don't dare take a step outside this room now. Let's meet tonight. Besides, I want to work on translating… you know. I rang a scholarly bookshop I used to order from and they're delivering one of Ventris's books. Maybe I can make some headway."

"I already did a bit of it."

"I saw that in the files. A whole page." She laughed. "Congratulations."

"Give me a break. It's been ten years."

"Well, it looks like you're still able to fake the scholar bit. But just barely."

"Thanks. What do you think of it so far?"

"Scary. Very scary. But we have to do more. Enough so we can go public."

"Exactly. Look, I've got to do a couple of things today. Can you-?"

"That's fine, because I want to work on this." She sounded businesslike again, her old self. "Something to while away the empty hours. The saga inside my little Zenith has got to be the ticket out of this madness."

"Maybe, but we need to put some more spin on the scenario. Just to be safe."

"What?"

"Not on the phone. Can you just sit tight? Play your game and let me take a shot at mine?"

"It better be good."

"That remains to be seen." Who knew how it would go? But if it proceeded as planned, the whole thing could be turned around. "Now where the hell are you?"

"The place we always stayed, of course. Figuring you'd come here. But you stood me up, naturally. Same old Michael. So this morning I started calling around."

"You mean you're-?"

"At the Savoy, sweetie, our love nest of happy times past. Right across the street."

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.