The Samurai Strategy Part 60

"Then let's collect her and get it done fast."

He opened the door of the Toyota, then turned to me. "You know, Matthew, I think you and Tam ought to be gone from here, too, as soon as possible. There's a copter pad by the hotel. I'm going to phone for a MITI chopper to pick you up and take you straight to Narita." He patted his briefcase. "After we've transmitted the contents of this, I want you back in New York. I'll call my secretary and have her book the next flight out; we'll just have somebody b.u.mped if it's full."

"Why don't you come with us? No need for you to face Noda alone."

"Not yet." He hit the ignition. "But I'll be there in spirit."

How prophetic.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Our major concern at that point was time. We had a lot to do, and we weren't sure how long we had to do it. Furthermore, it would be foolhardy to a.s.sume everything was going to proceed smoothly. That apprehension was, in fact, soon to be thoroughly vindicated.

First, it wasn't all that simple to track down Tam. We finally discovered she'd already left the Robotics Lab and was back at the Tsukuba Hotel lunching with Matsugami and some of his senior staff.

Returning there, however, did provide a perfect opportunity to grab our bags. Ken dragged her from the lunch with a phony excuse, and minutes later we were checked out, solving at least one logistics problem.

Unfortunately, it also tipped off Matsugami and anybody else who might be interested that we were departing.

Next were the details of arranging for the chopper. While we were driving around trying to locate Tamara, Ken was busy on his car phone pulling strings to commandeer one of the two MITI helicopters. After three calls he managed to locate one at their auxiliary pad, currently being refueled and serviced. I listened to him lean on the service people, doing his diplomatic but firm deputy minister routine. End of long story: it would be on its way shortly, arriving in about an hour and a half.

Good, we thought. Plenty of time to handle the transmission of the still-unseen doc.u.ments in Noda's silver case. In the car we brought Tam fully up to date on the extraordinary circ.u.mstances by which it had fallen into our possession, including its potential for use as leverage against Noda. Then we headed for the Teleconferencing Center, where we planned to open the thing, scan the contents with a reader, and bounce the pages to New York via satellite. Ken revealed the ministry had a high-security channel it used to communicate with the New York offices of JETRO, the j.a.pan External Trade Organization over on Sixth Avenue, MITI's public relations arm. He declared we would just link up with that office and have them patch us through to the DNI computer. Nothing to it.

Which was correct, theoretically. When we marched in, Ken again flaunting his deputy minister walk-on priority, the white-shirted staff bowed to the floor, led us to the hard-copy scanner, turned it on, and diplomatically excused themselves, closing the security door. The place was ours.

Don't know why, but until that moment none of us had really wanted to know what was in Noda's case. Maybe a part of me still didn't, even then. Whatever the reason, however, none of us had bothered to take it out of Ken's briefcase for examination. Turned out that was a mistake.

He settled his satchel onto the desk, clicked it open, and out came the box for our first real look. As he wiped off the smoke, my initial reaction was to be dazzled. It was magnificent, a silversmith's masterpiece, engraved with all manner of mythological beast and fowl. A work of art in every sense. Never seen anything remotely like it.

The problem was, it wasn't merely locked. It was soldered shut. The silver lid had literally been welded on, leaving it essentially a solid piece. Noda, it turned out, left nothing to chance. Only a silversmith could crack the seal and divulge the contents. So we still had no idea what was inside, and worse, we'd managed to fritter away a valuable half hour coming to that fruitless discovery. Now what?

"s.h.i.t," said Tam. "When will we ever get a break?"

"Looks like we've got two choices," Ken announced ruefully, gazing down at the intractable chunk of metal in his hands. "We can do what we probably should have done in the first place: simply stash this for the moment and let Noda think we know what's in it. Or we can drive into Tokyo and locate somebody there who can open it, then transmit from MITI headquarters downtown."

Neither of these plans seemed particularly inspired. The first gave us nothing but presumptions for leverage, and the second could take hours.

Noda, we all realized, was not a man who dallied.

"Actually"--Tam spoke up--"there's a third option. Surely Noda's going to find out sooner or later we came here to the

Center. Believe me, he always learns everything eventually. So why not transmit something else now, anything, and then after you get the case open you can send the real data?"

"You mean, give him circ.u.mstantial cause to a.s.sume we've got the goods on him?" Sounded good to me. "Buying ourselves more time?"

"Right. It'll take him awhile to find out exactly what was transmitted.

All he'll know for certain is that we sent something. In the meantime Ken can go on to Tokyo and proceed with plan B: open the case there and transmit the real contents."

He looked skeptical. "That might deceive everybody for a while, but not for long. There're too many links in the chain between here and DNI's New York office."

"But sending something now will gain time. It has to. Then you can go on to Tokyo and do what you need to from there. Tomorrow."

"Maybe." He still wasn't totally convinced. "But all right--rather than waste time arguing, let's just go ahead and do it. No harm in any instance."

She peeked into his briefcase, a jumble of doc.u.ments. "What have you got in here that we could send?"

"Today's _Asahi Shimbun _. . ." He laughed.

"Ken."

"Okay, okay." He laid the newspaper aside and was riffling through his paperwork. "How about a few MITI memos?"

"Nothing to do with Marketshare - 90, I hope," said Tam.

"Promise."

The apparatus was already humming, so he put through the connection to JETRO's New York office, whereupon Tam took over and gave them instructions for the phone link over to the DNI mainframe. It probably required all of a couple of minutes. Welcome to the Brave New World of global information technology.

Since we were just shooting in the dark, they transmitted some twenty or twenty-five pages. Actually it would have been almost better to send too few rather than too many. At four pages a minute, though, we were finished in no time. As something of a joke, Tam suggested using the file name Nipponica, homage to Noda's takeover pipe dream. Somehow it seemed poetic justice.

Whether the transparency of our ruse would be immediately evident to Matsuo Noda remained a big unknown. But . . . maybe Noda would have no real way of discovering we'd sent garbage, at least not for a while.

The transmission done, we signed off, zipped up Ken's briefcase, and marched out as if we knew what we were doing. Still, it was only a bluff, and a shaky one at that. Which set me to thinking.

"Ken, it seems to me yours is the critical path in this play now." We were walking back to the executive parking lot where we'd left his car.

"It's more important to have a real copy of the data stashed somewhere than it is for us to blow the country in the next two hours. Which means maybe you ought to take the chopper back yourself, send the stuff today, and let us just drive down to Narita in your car?"

"I agree." Tam nodded concurrence. "We can leave it there and you could have somebody pick it up tomorrow."

"That's dangerous, for both of you."

"Maybe so," she said, "but he's going to come after this case, guns blazing, as his first priority. Ken, you're the one who's going to have to stay out of his way now, not us. The quicker you move, the better."

"You've got a point. All right, if you want me to, then I could take the copter back to Tokyo myself and you can use the Toyota." He was fishing for his keys. "In fact, maybe you should just leave now."

"Let me check the schedule." I'd asked his secretary for a listing of the afternoon and evening flights in case we got delayed. It was now one-thirty. The next flight that looked like a sure thing was a United at seven forty-two, or maybe the JAL at nine. Then there was a Northwest at ten-fifteen. Loads of time.

"Look, we can wait for the chopper and at least see you off. Why don't we head back over to the hotel and have a drink. Solemnize the occasion--the final nailing of Matsuo Noda."

"Fine." He started the car. "But both of you get only one, at least whoever's driving does. I want you back in one piece."

The hotel bar was beginning to feel like a second home, though now it was deserted, the lunch trade long departed. Our ceremonial libation also provided my first real opportunity to study Ken Asano at leisure.

I sat sipping my Suntory while he repeated once again the details of his upcoming political move at MITI. Given any kind of luck, the flap would render Noda's takeover a worldwide scandal.

Good. Tam and I had been Noda's point men, had done everything we knew to a.s.sist him, and now it was clear he'd been using us all along for his own ends. He was bent on bringing American industry back to life for the sole purpose of skimming the cream.

What other reason could there be? Noda's n.o.ble intention supposedly was to help rejuvenate those American corporations doing basic research--but the price was then to let j.a.pan lift that R&D and translate it into consumer technology, thereby keeping for his team all the elements of real economic value in the chain from laboratory to cash register. They would be the ones refining their strategic capacity to transform new ideas into world-cla.s.s products and economic leadership. j.a.pan would retain the advanced engineering segment of product development, while tossing a few low-skill a.s.sembly plants to the U.S. to make us think we were still part of the action. It would, of course, be a fatal delusion. The high-tech hardware of tomorrow's world increasingly would be j.a.panese, while America became an economy of paper-shuffling MBAs and low-paid grease monkeys a.s.sembling products we no longer were able to design or engineer.

That depressing conclusion required the s.p.a.ce of one Scotch. By then I was ready to order a second, hoping it would bring forth a solution to the problem the first had evoked with such alarming clarity.