Kusanagi

by Clem Chambers

  Yet for Jim what happened next was obvious. He was supremely rich because he could see what would happen while others had simply no idea.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Akira.

  Jim grinned. ‘I’m going to crash the Kimcorp stock price.’

  ‘I know Evans-san, but how?’

  ‘Do you buy shares, Akira?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Is that no or yes?’

  ‘Occasionally.’

  ‘OK.’ Jim was watching pressure increase as Fuch-Smith and the London bank started to sell. ‘When a stock is falling do you want to buy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When a share is rising do you want to buy?’

  ‘Most likely.’

  ‘So you have some shares and the share price suddenly starts falling heavily. What do you want to do?’

  ‘I want to cry,’ Akira said, as if he had actually experienced such a moment.

  ‘Well, apart from that, do you feel more like selling?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to make people want to sell. First, though, I’m going to own the market.’

  ‘Own the market?’

  ‘I’m going to buy from all the sellers and I’m going to sell to all the buyers, and when they’re all satisfied and gone, I’m going to fill up all the places for buyers and sellers with my orders and I’m going to control the price. Then I’m going to walk the price down.’

  ‘Walk the price down?’

  ‘I’m going to sell when the buying is weak and make the price fall even further. Then I’ll let it settle, maybe buy some back. Then I’m going to do it again and sell it down. The price will fall and fall and at some point panic selling will set in.

  Then, when the market collapses and pukes, I’ll buy back again and I might even make a profit. I’m going to do it again and again and again. By the time I’ve finished Kimcorp’s share price will be a smoking crater.’

  ‘Is that legal?’

  Jim smiled at him. ‘You are the one with the carte blanche, so you tell me.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Akira, ‘you are correct and I think this is a good use of our permission to do what is required to be done.’

  Kimcorp’s share price was already falling gently.

  ‘Right,’ said Jim. ‘Let’s get going.’ He filled the input screen with a series of orders. ‘Bombs away.’

  In the hour and a quarter to close, Kimcorp dropped 32 per cent. The news wires buzzed with speculation. Had Kim-san died? Was Kimcorp mired in scandal? Was Kimcorp in breach of its banking covenants and therefore on the brink of bankruptcy?

  James Dean Yamamoto walked behind Jim and bent down to the screen. He exclaimed in Japanese. Jim grinned up at him.

  Akira said, ‘Yamamoto-san says you are a very frightening person.’

  ‘I wish my nan was alive to hear you say that,’ he said. ‘She might have been impressed.’

  Jane smashed the camera casing on the floor. It cracked open like a walnut. She examined the pieces. There was a lens, a circuit board and a small aluminium frame bent for the assembly to nestle in. She broke out the components and spread them in front of her. She picked up the metal housing and bent out one side. It would make a blade of sorts. Blades were good. It might be what she was searching for.

  Much later Jane looked out into the night. A set of lights far in the distance hovered in the sky. She waved.

  ‘She’s seen us,’ said Jim.

  Akira translated.

  ‘Oooh!’ said Yamamoto. ‘Time to leave then. If she has seen us, others might.’ He piloted the helicopter away.

  Whoever you are, thought Jane, I hope you’re friendly. And if you are, get on over here fast.’

  Kim lay in bed, dozing, the morning light illuminating the room with a bluish tint. His apartment took up the floor below the zoo. It was modern and minimal. The whole floor was more of a facility than a home. He didn’t like decoration unless it was a priceless antique. Then it was just another asset and, like all his assets, hocked to the banks.

  Sometimes, like now, lethargy overcame him and he would lie there for two or three days, exhausted. Great pleasure was usually succeeded by something like despair; after victory came disappointment.

  This time the exhaustion was unbounded. Although he was physically recovered the malaise had overtaken him. The tranquilliser had triggered it.

  His assistant came into his room. ‘The finance director must see you now. He assures you it is of vital importance.’

  Kim sat up.

  Toyoda entered respectfully and bowed. ‘Our share price has collapsed.’ He opened a folder and handed Kim a sheet of paper with Kimcorp’s stock chart on it.

  ‘What has caused this?’

  ‘I do not know. This morning our share price is falling again. The banks are bound to start calling soon. Soon we will be in breach of our debt conditions.’

  Kim’s stasis was replaced by anger and fear. ‘When?’

  ‘In theory we are in breach if the market falls another twenty-five per cent.’

  ‘I will be in my office in twenty minutes. Leave me.’

  Jim was hammering Kimcorp. He owned the market in the stock. Kimcorp and other stocks traded via a system called an order book. It collected all buying and selling into one place and, via the coming and goings of buyers and sellers, settled the price. It was like a rolling auction that matched up the people trading the share. Jim had muscled in and overwhelmed the other players. Kimcorp would normally trade fifty million dollars of stock a day and move a percentage point or so. Now Jim had waded in, he had taken control of the price and was driving it down. He was cornering the market.

  Market corners, as they were called, were as old as markets themselves. Cornering the market in a commodity or stock was an old game and always ended badly. The market was always right in the end and you couldn’t fix the price of anything for long. At some point the market would bite back and hurt the manipulator. Whether it was the silver corner, by Bunker Hunt the Texan billionaire, Enron cornering electricity, or the oil corner of 2008, sooner or later it had imploded and prices went back to normal. Corners were usually about making a price go abnormally high, but in this case Jim was forcing a price down. He was crashing the stock by bullying the market.

  And, of course, he had an advantage: he could see what was going to happen next an hour or two at a time and could accentuate the moves he wanted. By making money from them, he ploughed the profit into forcing the price the way he wanted it to go.

  Fundamentally Kimcorp was bust and he could see it in the company’s stock chart. He was just accelerating the inescapable gravitation forces of financial reality. With the picture of Jane hanging from the bars beside his keyboard, he was trading Kimcorp into the ground.

  57

  Kim looked at the chart of his stock. It was being destroyed. The stock price line tried to rise but it was as if a hammer was smashing down on it every time it raised its head. There had been a call from a big US investment bank. This must be something to do with them. He looked up the name of the individual attached to the number. It was one of the bank’s top board members. Something was going on, something outside his knowledge and skills. Japanese bankers had been easy meat when he had lured them into lending him billions. They would give him all the money he wanted if it was backed by property. When they were in deep, they had no other option but to lend him more.

  Americans were different: they lent you money, then destroyed you and took what you had created. They were predators like him. Predators needed to concentrate on feeding off the meek rather than turning on each other, he thought, but Americans didn’t understand this.

  He called.

  Wolfsberg would do Jim any favour he asked. Jim was a phenomenon, the very thing that PhDs and Nobel Prize winners said couldn’t exist. He was the guy who conclusively proved the markets weren’t random. He was the kind of person you wanted to be indebted to yo
u. The kid had worked for him once. Jim had made his name at his bank, then gone off and done some crazy shit even Wolfsberg couldn’t quite believe.

  Wolfsberg hoped he could entice Jim to buy the bank one day. Then the sky would surely be the limit for him and the organisation. With Jim, the bank really could become the all-powerful global engine the conspiracy theorists thought it was, rather than a crazy gambler, bullying and cheating its way along. With Jim, they really would be able to call the shots. Using his foresight, they could go from ‘doomed to fail’ to the world’s power pivot.

  ‘Mr Kim, I’m so glad you called.’

  ‘Mr Wolfsberg, I have read a lot about you,’ he lied.

  ‘I’m flattered. Thanks for calling me back.’

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Well, we’ve been watching your recent difficulties, so I thought I’d give you a call and see if we could be of any help.’

  ‘Thank you, but what do you have in mind?’

  ‘Our analysts reckon you could use a debt restructuring and maybe some new equity.’

  ‘I do not think that is necessary.’

  ‘You’re probably right, but you know how it is. Perhaps you should have a back stop. We don’t know what your debt covenants look like but we’re thinking you might be in breach soon enough. You know how that can set off a meltdown, however unfair that might be.’

  ‘Our covenants are not linked to our stock price.’

  ‘That’s great,’ said Wolfsberg. ‘When can you take a meeting with a team of ours? I think we can help you with your stock price.’

  Kim knew they were probably driving his price down to get their claws into him. It was a kind of extortion racket. He understood that well enough. His stock price had just gone vertically down. ‘You can come tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Wolfsberg, hitting ‘return’ on his keyboard. ‘Ten?’

  Jim’s Skype said, ‘Show them some love?’ It was Wolfsberg.

  Jim started buying. Kimcorp stock spiked three per cent.

  Kim saw his stock shoot up. He grimaced and gripped the phone. ‘Very well.’

  ‘We look forward to doing business.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  Jim sat back, smiling. ‘We’re in.’

  Kim stood up from his desk and pulled open the second drawer on the right of his desk. He took out the pistol and headed to the lift. He would kill the woman and go into the cage. He touched the cufflinks on his shirt. Then his bad luck would end.

  Yamamoto led them to the board room and they followed him. ‘Wow,’ said Danny, on seeing Jim.

  The four Americans stood up and began shaking hands.

  ‘Reece.’

  ‘Jim.’

  ‘Brandon.’

  ‘Jim.’

  ‘Casey.’

  ‘Jim.’

  ‘Major, right?’ said Casey.

  Jim laughed. ‘For about three hours once.’

  Akira looked at Jim strangely. ‘Army major?’

  ‘It’s a long story, Professor,’ said Jim.

  ‘And I’m Danny. This is turning into an epic,’ said Danny.

  ‘Sit down, guys,’ said Jim. ‘First off, thanks for coming.’

  Reece smiled up one side of his face, ‘No problem.’ They hadn’t had a choice. ‘Nice to be out of the dog house. What’s the plan?’

  Jim took the blueprint from James Dean Yamamoto and rolled it out on the table. Yamamoto pinned it down with four paperweights. ‘Colonel Jane Brown is held on the sixtieth floor of Kimcorp Tower.’

  Akira put some photos down the side of the blueprint.

  ‘Is that like Major General Brown?’ said Danny.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jim.

  ‘Wow,’ said Danny. ‘Like the Major General Brown, now Colonel?’

  ‘Probably,’ said Jim.

  ‘Danny’s her biggest fan,’ said Brandon, shrugging.

  ‘Hell, yes,’ said Danny. He smirked at Jim.

  ‘I take it we’re busting her out,’ said Casey.

  ‘Hell, yes,’ said Danny again.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jim.

  ‘How quiet has this got to be?’ said Reece.

  ‘Don’t let that worry you,’ said Jim.

  ‘Chopper onto the roof, in through the windows,’ suggested Casey.

  ‘Roof’s covered in aerials. There’s no good landing spot,’ said Reece, studying the blueprints. ‘We could rappel down, then off the sides and go in through the windows.’

  ‘She’s in a cage,” said Jim. “We have to be able to get into that. We’ve got a different plan. We’re going in through the front door.’

  ‘We have an appointment with Kim,’ said Akira. ‘We will take him, then he will release her and we will leave the way we came.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ said Reece. ‘What do you need us for?’

  ‘In case it gets nasty,’ said Jim.

  ‘I guess you think that’s likely,’ said Reece.

  Jim nodded.

  Reece grinned. ‘That’s cool. It’s been a while since we’ve had some real action.’

  ‘We’ve got to get you boys suited up,’ said Jim. ‘Can’t play investment bankers in jeans.’

  ‘Hey, hey,’ said Danny.

  ‘Better be loose,’ said Casey. ‘We’re going to be packing a lot of iron.’ He lifted his holdall onto the table and pulled out a machine pistol.

  ‘We’ll buy you briefcases,’ said Jim.

  ‘Big briefcases,’ said Danny. ‘Giant ones.’

  ‘Yamamoto-san will organise the pick-up outside Kimcorp and we end up back here,’ said Jim. ‘All the floor plans for the top five floors are there. It’s either a simple in-and-out performance or we’re going to get completely fucked.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ said Casey, looking up from the plans. ‘That’s how it always goes.’

  Kim walked out of the lift, gun in hand. The woman was some kind of witch. As soon as she died the curse of bad luck would be lifted from him. His heels clicked on the tile flooring. He took the pistol off safety and squeezed the butt. A pistol had only one purpose: killing people. It was good at it. A life was ended with little more than a gesture.

  A pointing movement, followed by a slight twitch of the index finger was all it took to destroy someone. A complex, amazing creature could be shattered beyond repair in a fraction of a second on his slight whim, a moment of beautiful poignancy. Without power someone was worthless and with power they were like a god. A pistol made anyone a god and right now, like a god, he was going to extinguish a life with a clap of thunder. But first he would torture and humiliate.

  The gorilla looked up at him as he passed. A fine animal, he thought. When he found a bigger, better one, he would kill this one and put the new one in its place.

  He scanned the tiger cage for the woman. Where was she? He walked quicker to be able to see the entire cage. It was empty. There were wires hanging over the lock mechanism, with what looked like a camera attached to them.

  He swivelled around, holding out the gun, expecting the woman to jump at him. There was nowhere for her to hide. He spun back to the cage. It was still empty.

  He shrieked in anger. How was it possible? He went to the wires. They were jammed between the door frame and the lock mechanism. How had she opened the lock with that? The cage door was on a spring so it would have closed once she had escaped, but what contraption had opened it?

  He wrenched it out and stuffed it into his pocket. She must be hiding on the floor somewhere. There was no way out, apart from the lift. Maybe someone had rescued her while he slept – perhaps one of his men had stolen her for someone else.

  He paced around the zoo, the animals shrieking. She must be there somewhere. She would not have been able to operate the lift without help.

  His phone rang. It was his finance director. ‘Tokyo bank request an urgent meeting.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘Tell them no.’

  ‘They are in the lobby waitin
g to see you and so are Kyoto Maritime Bank.’

  ‘Soooooo.’ He put the pistol onto safety and shoved it into his pocket. ‘I will see them on the hour.’

  Who had betrayed him and released the woman? It must have been someone very close, someone very close indeed. He would work out who and he would cut them to pieces from their toes upwards and from their fingers in.

  58

  Apart from the occasional click of the mouse, the room was silent. James Dean Yamamoto had taken the SEALs out to buy investment-bank outfits. Getting to a store that fitted outsized Americans needed the sort of local knowledge they didn’t have. Yamamoto was in love with the American GIs – it was like reliving a dream from childhood. He was actually living an old Hollywood movie. He was sure this was a moment of fate, the final chapter of his life where destiny would enjoy the joke of a puppet dancing to its own ironic song. He was being honoured. He would jump into the abyss with abandon.

  ‘Got a minute, Professor?’ Jim was getting up from Yamamoto’s desk.

  ‘Yes, Evans-san,’ said Akira, looking up from a magazine.

  Jim lifted the Yasakani no Magatama from under his shirt. It always felt a little colder when he took it off. He handed it to Akira. ‘Time to get this back where it belongs. We don’t want Kim to get his hands on it.’

  Akira took it. ‘You cannot go without me,’ he said, his eyes narrowing. ‘I will take this and be back in one hour, but you must promise to not leave without me.’

  ‘You’ll probably just get in the way.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Yeah, me too, but I’ve got more reason than you to get in the line of fire.’

  ‘How so?’ said Akira, slipping the necklace into his pocket.

  Jim shrugged. ‘You know, love and all that.’

  ‘Honour is as powerful as love,’ said Akira.

  There was a knock at the door. It opened and a tall, beautiful girl walked into the room with a plastic tray. ‘Mashi,’ she said, bowed and left.

  Akira picked up a box. ‘So,’ he said, ‘I have the correct calling card and therefore I must come.’ He smiled. ‘You have not promised me yet.’