by Tom Clancy
"How much time do we have for this?" Winston asked.
"Let me worry about that," Jack replied.
31—The How and the What
Treasury Secretary Bosley Fiedler had not allowed himself three consecutive hours of sleep since the return from Moscow, and his stride through the tunnel connecting the Treasury Building with the White House meandered sufficiently to make his bodyguards wonder if he might need a wheelchair soon. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve was hardly in better shape. The two had been conferring, again, in the Secretary's office when the call arrived—Drop everything and come here—peremptory even for somebody like Ryan, who frequently short-circuited the workings of the government. Fiedler started talking even before he walked through the open door. "Jack, in twenty minutes we have a conference call with the central banks of five Euro—who's this?" SecTreas asked, stopping three paces into the room.
"Mr. Secretary, I'm George Winston. I'm president and managing director of—"
"Not anymore. You sold out," Fiedler objected.
"I'm back as of the last rump-board meeting. This is Mark Gant, another of my directors."
"I think we need to listen to what they have to say," Ryan told his two new arrivals. "Mr. Gant, please restart your rain dance."
"Damn it, Jack, I have twenty minutes. Less now," the Secretary of the Treasury said, looking at his watch.
Winston almost snarled, but instead spoke as he would have to another senior trader: "Fiedler, the short version is this: the markets were deliberately taken down by a systematic and highly skillful attack, and I think I can prove that to your satisfaction. Interested?"
The SecTreas blinked very hard. "Why. yes."
"But how…?" the Fed Chairman asked.
"Sit down and we'll show you," Gant said. Ryan made way and the two senior officials took their places on either side of him and his computer, "It started in Hong Kong…"
Ryan walked to his desk, dialed the Secretary's office, and told his secretary to route the conference call to his room in the West Wing. A typical executive secretary, she handled the irregularity better than her boss could ever have done. Gant, Jack saw, was a superb technician, and his second stint at explaining matters was even more efficient than his first. The Secretary and the Chairman were also good listeners who knew the jargon. Questions were not necessary.
"I didn't think something like this was possible," the Chairman said eight minutes into the exposition. Winston handled the response.
"All the safeguards built into the system are designed to prevent accidents and catch crooks. It never occurred to anybody that somebody would pull something like this. Who would deliberately lose so much money?"
"Somebody with bigger fish to fry," Ryan told him.
"What's bigger than—"
Jack cut him off. "Lots of things, Mr. Winston. We'll get to that later."
Ryan turned his head. "Buzz?"
"I'll want to confirm this with my own data, but it looks pretty solid."
SecTreas looked over at the Chairman.
"You know, I'm not even sure it's a criminal violation."
"Forget that," Winston announced. "The real problem is still here. Crunch time is today. If Europe keeps going down, then we have a global panic. The dollar's in free-fall, the American markets can't operate, most of the world's liquidity is paralyzed, and all the little guys out there are going to catch on as soon as the media figure out what the hell is going down. The only thing that's prevented that to this point is that financial reporters don't know crap about what they cover."
"Otherwise they'd be working for us," Gant said, rejoining the conversation. "Thank God their sources are keeping it zipped for the time being, but I'm surprised it hasn't broken out all the way yet." Just maybe, he thought, the media didn't want to start a panic either.
Ryan's phone rang and he went to answer it. "Buzz, it's your conference call." The Secretary's physical state was apparent when he rose. The man wavered and grabbed the back of a chair to steady himself. The Chairman was only a touch more agile, and if anything both men were yet more shaken by what they had just learned. Fixing something that had broken was a sufficiently difficult task. Fixing something deliberately and maliciously destroyed could hardly be easier. And it had to be fixed, and soon, lest every nation in Europe and North America join the plunge into a deep, dark canyon. The climb out of it would require both years and pain, and that was under the best of political circumstances—the long-term political ramifications of such a vast economic dislocation could not possibly be grasped at this stage, though Ryan was already recoiling from that particular horror.
Winston looked at the National Security Advisor's face, and it wasn't hard to read his thoughts. His own elation at the discovery was gone now that he'd given the information over to others. There ought to have been something else for him to say: how to fix matters. But all of his intellectual energy had been expended in building his case for the prosecution, as it were. He hadn't had the chance yet to take his analysis any further.
Ryan saw that and nodded with a grim smile of respect. "Good job."
"It's my fault," Winston said, quietly so as not to disturb the conference call proceeding a few feet away. "I should have stayed in."
"I've bailed out once myself, remember?" Ryan got back into a chair.
"Hey, we all need a change from time to time. You didn't see this coming. It happens all the time. Especially here."
Winston gestured angrily. "I suppose. Now we can identify the rapist, but how the hell do you get unraped? Once it's happened, it's happened. But those were my investors he fucked. Those people came to me. Those people trusted me." Ryan admired the summation. That was how people in the business were supposed to think.
"In other words, now what?"
Gant and Winston traded a look. "We haven't figured that one out."
"Well, so far you've outperformed the FBI and SEC. You know, I haven't even bothered checking how my portfolio did."
"Your ten percent of Silicon Alchemy won't hurt you. Long term," Winston said, "new communications gadgets always make out, and they have a couple of honeys."
"Okay, that's settled for now." Fiedler rejoined the group. "All the European markets are shut down, just like we are, until we can get things sorted out."
Winston looked up. "All that means is, there's a hell of a flood, and you're building the levee higher and higher. And if you. run out of sandbags before the river runs out of water, then the damage will only be worse when you lose control."
"We're all open to suggestions, Mr. Winston," Fiedler said gently.
George's reply matched it in kind. "Sir, for what it's worth, I think you've done everything right to this point. I just don't see a way out."
"Neither do we," the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board observed.
Ryan stood. "For the moment, gentlemen, I think we need to brief the President."
"What an interesting idea," Yamata said. He knew he'd had too much to drink. He knew that he was basking in the sheer satisfaction of carrying out what had to be the most ambitious financial gambit in history. He know that his ego was expanding to its fullest size since—when? Even reaching the chairmanship of his conglomerate hadn't been this satisfactory. He'd crushed a whole nation and had altered the course of his own, and yet he had never even considered public office of any kind. And why not? he asked himself. Because that had always been a place for lesser men.
"For the moment, Yamata-san, Saipan will have a local governor. We will hold internationally supervised elections. We need a candidate," the Foreign Ministry official went on. "It must be someone of stature. It would be helpful if it were a man known and friendly to Goto-san, and a man with local interests. I merely ask that you consider it."
"I will do that." Yamata stood and headed for the door.
Well. He wondered what his father would have thought of that. It would mean stepping down from chairmanship of his corporation…but—but what? What corpor
ate worlds had he failed to conquer? Was it not time to move on? To retire honorably, to enter the formal service of his nation. After the local government situation was cleared up…then? Then to enter the Diet with great prestige, because the insiders would know, wouldn't they? Hai, they would know who had truly served the interests of the nation, who more than the Emperor Meiji himself had brought Japan to the first rank of nations. When had Japan ever had a political leader worthy of her place and her people? Why should he not take the honor due him? It would all require a few years, but he had those years. More than that, he had vision and the courage to make it real. Only his peers in business knew of his greatness now, but that could change, and his family name would be remembered for more than building ships and televisions and all the other things. Not a trademark. A name. A heritage. Would that not make his father proud?
"Yamata?" Roger Durling asked. "Tycoon, right, runs a huge company? I may have bumped into him at some reception or other when I was Vice President."
"Well, that's the guy," Winston said.
"So what are you saying he did?" the President asked.
Mark Gant set up his computer on the President's desk, this time with a Secret Service agent immediately behind him and watching every move, and this time he took it slow because Roger Durling, unlike Ryan, Fiedler, and the Fed Chairman, didn't really understand all the ins and outs. He did prove to be an attentive audience, however, stopping the presentation to ask questions, making a few notes, and three times asking for a repeat of a segment of the presentation. Finally he looked over to the Secretary of the Treasury.
"Buzz?"
"I want our people to verify the information independently—"
"That won't be hard," Winston told them. "Any one of the big houses will have records almost identical to this. My people can help organize it for you."
"If it's true, Buzz?"
"Then, Mr. President, this situation comes more under Dr. Ryan's purview than mine," SecTreas replied evenly. His relief was tempered with anger at the magnitude of what had been done. The two outsiders in the Oval Office didn't yet understand that.
Ryan's mind was racing. He'd ignored Gant's repeated explanation of the "how" of the event. Though the presentation to the President was clearer and more detailed than the first two times—the man would have made a fine instructor at a business school—the important parts were already fixed in the National Security Advisor's mind. Now he had the how, and the how told him a lot. This plan had been exquisitely planned and executed. The timing of the Wall Street takedown and the carrier/submarine attack had not been an accident. It was therefore a fully integrated plan. Yet it was also a plan which the Russian spy network had not uncovered, and that was the fact that kept repeating itself to him.
Their existing net is inside the Japanese government. It is probably concentrated on their security apparatus. But that net failed to give them strategic warning for the military side of the operation, and Sergey Nikolay'ch hasn't connected Wall Street with the naval action yet.
Break the model, Jack, he told himself. Break the paradigm. That's when it became clearer.
"That's why they didn't get it," Ryan said almost to himself. It was like driving through patches of fog; you got into a clear spot followed by another clouded one. "It wasn't really their government at all. It really was Yamata and the others. That's why they want THISTLE back." Nobody else in the room knew what he was talking about.
"What's that?" the President asked. Jack turned his eyes to Winston and Gant, then shook his head. Durling nodded and went on. "So the whole event was one big plan?"
"Yes, sir, but we still don't know it all."
"What do you mean?" Winston asked. "They cripple us, start a world-wide panic, and you say there's more?"
"George, how often have you been over there?" Ryan asked, mainly to get information to the others.
"In the last five years? I guess it comes out to an average of about once a month. My grandchildren will be using up the last of my frequent-flyer miles."
"How often have you met with government people over there?"
Winston shrugged. "They're around a lot. But they don't matter very much."
"Why?" the President asked.
"Sir, it's like this: there're maybe twenty or thirty people over there who really run things, okay? Yamata is the biggest fish in that lake. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry is the interface between the big boys in the corporate arena and the government, plus the way they grease the skids themselves with elected officials, and they do a lot of that stuff. It's one of the things Yamata liked to show off when we negotiated his takeover of my Group. At one party there were two ministers and a bunch of parliamentary guys, and their noses got real brown, y'know?" Winston reflected that at the time he'd thought it a good demeanor for elected officials. Now he wasn't quite so sure.
"How freely can I speak?" Ryan asked. "We may need their insights."
Durling handled that: "Mr. Winston, how good are you at keeping secrets?"
The investor had himself a good chuckle. "Just so long as you don't call it insider stuff, okay? I've never been hassled by the SEC, and I don't want to start."
"This one'll come under the Espionage Act. We're at war with Japan. They've sunk two of our submarines and crippled two aircraft carriers," Ryan said, and the room changed a lot.
"Are you serious?" Winston asked.
"Two-hundred-and-fifty-dead-sailors serious, the crews of USS Asheville and USS Charlotte. They've also seized the Mariana Islands. We don't know yet if we can take those islands back. We have upwards of ten thousand American citizens in Japan as potential hostages, plus the population of the islands, plus military personnel in Japanese custody."
"But the media—"
"Haven't caught on yet, remarkably enough," Ryan explained. "Maybe it's just too crazy."
"Oh." Winston got it after another second. "They wreck our economy, and we don't have the political will to…has anybody ever tried anything like this before?"
The National Security Advisor shook his head. "Not that I know of."
"But the real danger to us—is this problem here. That son of a bitch," George Winston observed.
"How do we fix it, Mr. Winston?" President Durling asked.
"I don't know. The DTC move was brilliant. The takedown was pretty cute, but Secretary Fiedler here might have smarted his way out of that with our help," Winston added. "But with no records, everything's paralyzed. I have a brother who's a doctor, and once he told me…"
Ryan's eyeballs clicked at that remark, clicked hard enough that he didn't listen to the rest. Why was that important?
"The time estimate came in last night," the Fed Chairman was saying now. "They need a week. But we don't really have a week. This afternoon we're meeting with all the heads of the big houses. We're going to try and…"
The problem is that there are no records, Jack thought. Everything's frozen in place because there are no records to tell people what they own, how much money they…
"Europe is paralyzed, too…" Fiedler was talking now, while Ryan stared down at the carpet. Then he looked up:
"If you don't write it down, it never happened."
Conversation in the room stopped, and Jack saw that he might as well have said, The crayon is purple.
"What?" the Fed Chairman asked.
"My wife—that's what she says. 'If you don't write it down, then it never happened.' " He looked around. They still didn't understand. Which wasn't overly surprising, as he was still developing the thought himself. "She's a doc, too, George, at Hopkins, and she always has this damned little notebook with her, and she's always stopping dead in her tracks to take it out and make a note because she doesn't trust her memory."
"My brother's the same way. He uses one of those electronic things," Winston said. Then his eyeballs went out of focus. "Keep going."
"There are no records, no really official records of any of the transactions, are there?" Jack
went on. Fiedler handled the answer.
"No. Depository Trust Company crashed for fair. And as I just said, it'll take—"
"Forget that. We don't have the time, do we?"
That depressed SecTreas again. "No, we can't stop it."
"Sure we can." Ryan looked at Winston. "Can't we?"
President Durling had been covering the snippets of conversation like a spectator at a tennis match, and the stress of the situation had placed a short fuse on his temper. "What the hell are you people talking about?"
Ryan almost had it now. He turned to his President. "Sir, it's simple. We say it never happened. We say that after noon on Friday, the exchanges simply stopped functioning. Now, can we get away with that?" Jack asked. He didn't give anyone a chance to answer, however. "Why not? Why can't we get away with it? There are no records to prove that we're wrong. Nobody can prove a single transaction from twelve noon on, can they?"
"With all the money that everyone lost," Winston said, his mind catching up rapidly, "it won't look all that unattractive. You're saying we restart …Friday, maybe, Friday at noon…just wipe out the intervening week, right?"
"But nobody will buy it," the Fed Chairman observed.
"Wrong." Winston shook his head. "Ryan's got something here. First of all, they have to buy it. You can't do a transaction—you can't execute one, I mean, without written records. So nobody can prove that they did anything without waiting for reconstruction of the DTC records. Second, most people went to the cleaners, institutions, banks, everybody, and they all will want a second chance. Oh, yeah, they'll buy into it, pal. Mark?"
"Step in a time machine and do Friday all over again?" Gant's laugh was grim at first. Then it changed. "Where do we sign up?"
"We can't do that to everything, not all the trades," the Fed Chairman objected.
"No, we can't," Winston agreed. "The international T-bill transactions were outside our control. But what we can do, sir, is conference with the European banks, show them what's happened, and then together with them—"
