fingertips of these strangers prodding away at
It gnaws at him all through the afternoon session, which is all about the communications links joining Kinakuta to the wide world. Randy ought to be paying attention to this, since it impinges massively on the Philippines project. But he doesn't. He broods over his keyboard, contaminated by a foreign touch, and then he broods about the fact that he's brooding about it, which demonstrates his unfitness for Biz. It's technically Epiphyte's keyboard-not even his-and if it enhances shareholder value for sinister Eastern nerds to poke around his files, he should be happy to let them do it.
They adjourn. Epiphyte and the Nipponese dine together, but Randy's bored and distracted. Finally, about nine P.M., he excuses himself and goes to his room. He's mentally composing a response to [email protected], along the lines of
'Do you realize who those people were?' he says. His voice, if subjected to biometric analysis, would reflect disbelief, bewilderment, maybe a trace of amusement.
Or maybe he's just faking it, trying to get Randy to let down his guard. Maybe
'Yeah,' Randy lies.
When Randy revealed the existence of Mugshot, after the meeting, Avi gave him a commendation for deviousness, printed up the mugshots in his hotel room, and Federal Expressed them to a private dick in Hong Kong.
Kepler turns around and gives Randy a searching look. 'Either I had bad information about you guys,' he says, 'or else you are in way over your heads.'
If this were the First Business Foray, Randy would piss his pants at this point. If it were the Second, he would resign and fly back to California tomorrow. But it's the third, and so he manages to maintain composure. The light is behind him, so perhaps Kepler's momentarily dazzled and can't read his face very well. Randy takes a swallow of water and breathes deeply, asking, 'In light of today's events,' he says, 'what's in store for our relationship?'
'It is no longer about providing cheap long-distance service to the Philippines-if, indeed, it ever was in the first place!' Kepler says darkly. 'The data flowing through the Philippines network now takes on entirely new significance. It's a superb opportunity. At the same time, we're competing against heavy hitters: those Aussies and the Singapore group.
It is a simple and direct question, the most dangerous kind. 'We wouldn't be risking our shareholders' money if we didn't think so.'
'That's a predictable answer,' Kepler snorts. 'Are we going to have a real conversation here, Randy, or should we invite our PR people into the room and exchange press releases?'
During an earlier business foray, Randy would have buckled at this point. Instead he says, 'I'm not prepared to have a real conversation with you, here and now.'
'Sooner and later we have to have one,' says the Dentist.
'Naturally.'
'In the meantime, here is what you should be thinking about,' Kepler says, getting ready to leave. 'What the hell can we offer, in the way of telecommunications services, that stacks up competitively against the Aussies and those Singapore boys? Because we can't beat 'em on price.'
This being Randy's Third Business Foray, he doesn't blurt out the answer: redundancy. 'That question will certainly be on all of our minds,' Randy says instead.
'Spoken like a flack,' says Kepler, his shoulders sagging. He goes out into the hallway and turns around, saying, 'See you tomorrow at the Crypt.' Then he winks. 'Or the Vault, or Cornucopia of Infinite Prosperity, or whatever the Chinese word for it is.' Having knocked Randy off balance with this startling display of humanity, he walks away.
Chapter 39 YAMAMOTO
Tojo and his claque of imperial army boneheads said to him, in effect: Why don't you go out and secure the Pacific Ocean for us, because we'll need a convenient shipping lane, say, oh, about ten thousand miles wide, in order to carry out our little plan to conquer South America, Alaska, and all of North America west of the Rockies. In the meantime we'll finish mopping up China. Please attend to this ASAP.
By then they were running the country. They had assassinated anyone in their way, they had the emperor's ear, and it was hard to tell them that their plan was full of shit and that the Americans were just going to get really pissed off and annihilate them. So, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, a dutiful servant of the emperor, put a bit of thought into the problem, sketched out a little plan, sent out one or two boats on a small jaunt halfway across the fucking planet, and blew Pearl Harbor off the map. He timed it perfectly, right after the formal declaration of war. It was not half bad. He did his job.
One of his aides later crawled into his office-in the nauseatingly craven posture that minions adopt when they are about to make you really, really unhappy-and told him that there had been a mix-up in the embassy in Washington and that the diplomats there had not gotten around to delivering the declaration of war until well after the American Pacific Fleet had gone to the bottom.
To those Army fuckheads, this is nothing-just a typo, happens all the time. Isoroku Yamamoto has given up on trying to make them understand that the Americans are grudge-holders on a level that is inconceivable to the Nipponese, who learn to swallow their pride before they learn to swallow solid food. Even if he could get Tojo and his mob of shabby, ignorant thugs to comprehend how pissed off the Americans are, they'd laugh it off. What're they going to do about it? Throw a pie in your face, like the Three Stooges? Ha, ha, ha! Pass the sake and bring me another comfort girl!
Isoroku Yamamoto spent a lot of time playing poker with Yanks during his years in the States, smoking like a chimney to deaden the scent of their appalling aftershave. The Yanks are laughably rude and uncultured, of course; this hardly constitutes a sharp observation. Yamamoto, by contrast, attained some genuine insight as a side-effect of being robbed blind by Yanks at the poker table, realizing that the big freckled louts could be dreadfully cunning. Crude and stupid would be okay-perfectly understandable, in fact.
But crude and clever is intolerable; this is what makes those red headed ape-men extra double super loathsome. Yamamoto is still trying to drill the notion into the heads of his partners in the big Nipponese scheme to conquer everything between Karachi and Denver. He wishes that they would get the message. A lot of the Navy men have been around the world a few times and seen it for themselves, but those Army guys have spent their careers mowing down Chinamen and raping their women and they honestly believe that the Americans are just the same except taller and smellier.
This is what Yamamoto thinks about, shortly before sunrise, as he clambers onto his Mitsubishi G4M bomber in Rabaul, the scabbard of his sword whacking against the frame of the narrow door. The Yanks call this type of plane 'Betty,' an effeminatizing gesture that really irks him. Then again, the Yanks name even their
Because the plane's a bomber, the pilot and copilot are crammed into a cockpit above the main tube of the fuselage. The nose of the plane, then, is a blunt dome of curving struts, like the meridians and parallels of a globe,
