by Tom Clancy
That fear had pushed him into taking positions with America that he knew to be dangerous. And now even that was not enough, was it?
“Many would say that,” Goto allowed with the most perfect manners. “And I salute you for your courage. Alas, objective conditions have hurt our country. For example, the relative change of dollar and yen has had devastating effects on our investments abroad, and these could only have been the result of deliberate policy on the part of our esteemed trading partners.”
There was something about his delivery, the Prime Minister thought. His words sounded scripted. Scripted by whom? Well, that was obvious enough. The PM wondered if Goto knew that he was in even a poorer position than the man he sought to replace. Probably not, but that was scant consolation. If Goto achieved his post, he would be even more in the pawn of his masters, pushed into implementing policies that might or might not be well considered. And unlike himself, Goto might be fool enough to believe that he was actually pursuing policies that were both wise and his own. How long would that illusion last?
It was dangerous to do this so often, Christopher Cook knew. Often? Well, every month or so. Was that often? Cook was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, not an intelligence officer, and hadn’t read that manual, assuming there was one.
The hospitality was as impressive as ever, the good food and wine and the exquisite setting, the slow procession through topics of conversation, beginning with the polite and entirely pro forma inquiries as to the state of his family, and his golf game, and his opinion on this or that current social topic. Yes, the weather was unusually pleasant for this time of year—a perennial remark on Seiji’s part; fairly enough, since fall and spring in Washington were tolerably pleasant, but the summers were hot and muggy and the winters wet and dank. It was tedious, even to the professional diplomat well versed in meaningless chitchat. Nagumo had been in Washington long enough to run out of original observations to make, and over the past few months had grown repetitive. Well, why should he be different from any other diplomat in the world? Cook asked himself, about to be surprised.
“I understand that you have reached an important agreement with the Russians,” Seiji Nagumo observed as the dinner dishes were cleared away.
“What do you mean?” Cook asked, thinking it a continuation of the chitchat.
“We’ve heard that you are accelerating the elimination of ICBMs,” the man went on, sipping his wine.
“You are well informed,” Cook observed, impressed, so much so that he missed a signal he’d never received before. “That’s a rather sensitive subject.”
“Undoubtedly so, but also a wonderful development, is it not?” He raised his glass in a friendly toast. Cook, pleased, did the same.
“It most certainly is,” the State Department official agreed. “As you know, it has been a goal of American foreign policy since the late 1940s—back to Bernard Baruch, if memory serves—to eliminate weapons of mass destruction and their attendant danger to the human race. As you well know—”
Nagumo, surprisingly, cut him off. “I know better than you might imagine, Christopher. My grandfather lived in Nagasaki. He was a machinist for the naval base that was once there. He survived the bomb—his wife did not, I regret to tell you—but he was badly burned in the ensuing fire, and I can well remember his scars. The experience hastened his death, I am sorry to say.” It was a card skillfully played, all the more so that it was a lie.
“I didn’t know, Seiji. I’m sorry,” Cook added, meaning it. The purpose of diplomacy, after all, was to prevent war whenever possible, or, failing that, to conclude them as bloodlessly as possible.
“So, as you might imagine, I am quite interested in the final elimination of those horrible things.” Nagumo topped off Cook’s glass. It was an excellent chardonnay that had gone well with the main course.
“Well, your information is pretty accurate. I’m not briefed in on that stuff, you understand, but I’ve caught a few things at the lunch room,” Cook added, to let his friend know that he dined on the seventh floor of the State Department building, not in the more plebeian cafeteria.
“My interest, I admit, is personal. On the day the last one is destroyed, I plan to have a personal celebration, and to offer prayers to grandfather’s spirit, to assure him that he didn’t die in vain. Do you have any idea when that day will be, Christopher?”
“Not exactly, no. It’s being kept quiet.”
“Why is that?” Nagumo asked. “I don’t understand.”
“Well, I suppose the President wants to make a big deal about it. Every so often Roger likes to spring one on the media, especially with the election year on the horizon.”
Seiji nodded. “Ah, yes, I can see that. So it is not really a matter of national security, is it?” he inquired offhandedly.
Cook thought about it for a second before replying. “Well, no, I don’t suppose it is, really. True, it makes us more secure, but the manner in which that takes place is ... well, pretty benign, I guess.”
“In that case, could I ask a favor?”
“What’s that?” Cook asked, lubricated by the wine and the company and the fact that he’d been feeding trade information to Nagumo for months.
“Just as a personal favor, could you find out for me the exact date on which the last missile will be destroyed? You see,” he explained, “the ceremony I will undertake will be quite special, and it requires preparation.”
Cook almost said, Sorry, Seiji, but that is technically speaking a national-security matter, and I never agreed to give anyone that sort of information. The hesitation on his face, and the surprise that caused it, overpowered his normal diplomat’s poker face. His mind raced, or tried to in the presence of his friend. Okay, sure, for three and a half years he’d talked over trade issues with Nagumo, occasionally getting information that was useful, stuff he’d used, earning him a promotion to DASS rank, and occasionally, he’d given over information, because ... because why? Because part of him was bored with the State Department grind and federal salary caps, and once upon a time a former colleague had remarked to him that with all the skills he’d acquired in fifteen years of government service, he really could escape into private industry, become a consultant or lobbyist, and hell, it wasn’t as though he were spying on his country or anything, was it? Hell, no, it was just business, man.
Was this spying? Cook asked himself. Was it really? The missiles weren’t aimed at Japan and never had been. In fact, if the papers were right, they weren’t aimed at anything except the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and the net effect of their destruction was exactly zero on everyone. Nobody hurt. Nobody really helped, except in budgetary terms, and that was pretty marginal for all concerned. So, no, there wasn’t a national-security element to this, was there? No. So, he could pass that information along, couldn’t he?
“Okay, Seiji. I guess this once, yeah, I can see what I can find out.”
“Thank you, Christopher.” Nagumo smiled. “My ancestors will thank you. It will be a great day for the entire world, my friend, and it deserves proper celebration.” In many sports it was called follow-through. There was no term for it in espionage.
“You know, I think it does, too,” Cook said after a further moment’s contemplation. It never occurred to him to be amazed that the first step over the invisible line that he had himself constructed was as easy as this.
“I am honored,” Yamata said with a great show of humility. “It is a fortunate man who has such wise and thoughtful friends.”
“It is you who honor us,” one of the bankers insisted politely.
“Are we not colleagues? Do we not all serve our country, our people, our culture, with equal devotion? You, Ichiki-san, the temples you’ve restored. Ah!” He waved his hand around the low polished table. “We’ve all done it, asking nothing in return but the chance to help our country, making it great again, and then actually doing it,” Yamata added. “So how may I be of service to my friends this evening?” His face to
ok on a quiet, passive mien, waiting to be told that which he already knew. His closest allies around the table, whose identity was not really known to the other nineteen, were studies of curious anticipation, skilled, as he was, in concealment. But for all that there was tension in the room, an atmosphere so real that you could smell it, like the odor of a foreigner.
Eyes turned almost imperceptibly to Matsuda-san, and many actually thought that his difficulties would come as a surprise to Yamata, even though the request for the meeting must have ignited his curiosity enough to turn loose his formidable investigative assets. The head of one of the world’s largest conglomerates spoke with quiet, if sad, dignity, taking his time, as he had to, explaining that the conditions that had brought about his cash-flow problem had not, of course, been the fault of his management. It was a business that had begun with shipbuilding, branched out into construction, then delved into consumer electronics. Matsuda had ridden to its chairmanship in the mid-1980s and delivered for his stockholders such return as many only dreamed of. Matsuda-san gave the history himself, and Yamata did not show the least impatience. After all, it worked in his favor that all should hear in his words their own corporate success stories, because in seeing the similarity of success, they would also fear a similarity of personal catastrophe. That the cretin had decided to become a major player in Hollywood, pissing away an immense quantity of cash for eighty acres on Melrose Boulevard and a piece of paper that said he could make movies, well, that was his misfortune, was it not?
“The corruption and dishonor of those people is truly astounding,” Matsuda went on in a voice that a Catholic priest might hear in a confessional, causing him to wonder if the sinner was recanting his sins or merely bemoaning his bad luck. In the case at hand, two billion dollars were as thoroughly gone as if burned to cook sausages.
Yamata could have said, “I warned you,” except that he hadn’t, even after his own investment counselors, Americans in this particular instance, had examined the very same deal and warned him off in the strongest terms. Instead he nodded thoughtfully.
“Clearly you could not have anticipated that, especially after all the assurances you were given, and the wonderfully fair terms you gave in return. It would appear, my friends, that proper business ethics are lost on them.” He looked around the table to collect the nods his observation had earned. “Matsuda-san, what reasonable man could say that you were in any way at fault?”
“Many would,” he answered, rather courageously, all thought.
“Not I, my friend. Who among us is more honorable, more sagacious? Who among us has served his corporation more diligently?” Raizo Yamata shook his head sorrowfully.
“Of greater concern, my friends, is that a similar fate could await us all,” a banker announced quietly, meaning that his bank held the paper on Matsuda’s real-estate holdings both in Japan and America, and that the failure of that conglomerate would reduce his reserves to dangerous levels. The problem was that even though he could survive the corporate failure in both real and theoretical terms, it required only the perception that his reserves were weaker than they actually were to bring his institution down, and that idea could appear in a newspaper merely through the misunderstanding of a single reporter. The consequences of such a misguided report, or rumor, could begin a run on the bank, and make real what was not. Certainly the money withdrawn would then be deposited elsewhere—there was too much to go under mattresses, after all—in which case it would be lent back by a fellow corporate banker to safeguard his colleague’s position, but a second-order crisis, which was quite possible, could bring everything crashing down.
What went unsaid, and for that matter largely un-thought, was that the men in this room had brought the crisis upon themselves through ill-considered dealings. It was a crucial blindspot that all shared—or nearly all, Yamata told himself.
“The basic problem is that our country’s economic foundation rests not on rock, but on sand,” Yamata began, speaking rather like a philosopher. “As weak and foolish as the Americans are, fortune has given them things which we lack. As a result, however clever our people are, we are always at a disadvantage.” He had said all of this before, but now, for the first time, they were listening, and it required all of his self-control not to gloat. Rather he dialed back his level of rhetoric even more than he had in previous discourses. He looked over to one of them, who had always disagreed with him before.
“Remember what you said, that our real strengths are the diligence of our workers and the skill of our designers? That was true, my friend. These are strengths, and more than that, they are strengths that the Americans do not have in the abundance which we enjoy, but because fortune has for reasons of her own smiled on the gaijin, they can checkmate our advantages because they have converted their good fortune into real power, and power is something we lack.” Yamata paused, reading his audience once more, watching their eyes and gauging the impassivity there. Even for one born of this culture and reared in its rules, he had to take his gamble now. This was the moment. He was sure of it. “But, really, that is not entirely the case either. They chose to take that path, while we have chosen not to. And so, now, we must pay the price for that misjudgment. Except for one thing.”
“And what is that?” one asked for all the others.
“Now, my friends, fortune smiles on us, and the path to real national greatness is open to us. In our adversity we may, if we choose, find opportunities.”
Yamata told himself that he had waited fifteen years for this moment. Then he considered the thought, watching and waiting for a response, and realized that he’d really waited a lifetime for it, since the age of ten, when in February 1944, he alone of his family had boarded the ship that would take him from Saipan to the Home Islands. He could still remember standing at the rail, seeing his mother and father and younger siblings standing there on the dock, Raizo being very brave and managing to hold back his tears, knowing as a child knows that he would see them again, but also knowing that he would not.
They’d killed them all, the Americans, erased his family from the face of the earth, encouraged them to cast their lives away, off the cliffs and into the greedy sea, because Japanese citizens, in uniform or out, were just animals to the Americans. Yamata could remember listening to the radio accounts of the battle, how the “Wild Eagles” of the Kido Butai had smashed the American fleet, how the Emperor’s invincible soldiers had cast the hated American Marines back into the sea, how they had later slaughtered them in vast numbers in the mountains of the island claimed from the Germans after the First World War, and even then he’d known the futility of having to pretend to believe lies, for lies they had to be, despite the comforting words of his uncle. And soon the radio reports had gone on to other things, the victorious battles over the Americans that crept ever closer to home, the uncomprehending rage he’d known when his vast and powerful country had found herself unable to stop the barbarians, the terror of the bombing, first by day and then by night, burning his country to the ground one city at a time. The orange glow in the night sky, sometimes near, sometimes far, and the lies of his uncle, trying to explain it, and last of all the relief he’d seen on the man’s face when all was over. Except that it had never been relief for Raizo Yamata, not with his family gone, vanished from the face of the earth, and even when he’d seen his first American, a hugely tall figure with red hair and freckles on his milky skin who’d clipped him on the head in the friendly way one might do for a dog, even then he’d known what the enemy looked like.
It wasn’t Matsuda who spoke in reply. It couldn’t be. It had to be another, one whose corporation was still immensely strong, or apparently so. It also had to be one who had never agreed with him. The rule was as important as it was unspoken, and though eyes didn’t turn, thoughts did. The man looked down at his half-empty cup of tea—this was not a night for alcohol—and pondered his own fate. He spoke without looking up, because he was afraid to see the identical look in the eyes arrayed
around the black lacquer table.
“How, Yamata-san, would we achieve that which you propose?”
“No shit?” Chavez asked. He spoke in Russian, for you were not supposed to speak English here at Monterey, and he hadn’t learned that colloquialism in Japanese yet.
“Fourteen agents,” Major Oleg Yurievich Lyalin, KGB (retired), replied, as matter-of-factly as his ego allowed.
“And they never reactivated your net?” Clark asked, wanting to roll his eyes.
“They couldn’t.” Lyalin smiled and tapped the side of his head. “THISTLE was my creation. It turned out to be my life insurance.”
