Debt of Honor

stopped, he walked over to stand at the foot of the stairs.

'How bad?' was the first thing George Winston said. There was warmth between the two men, but business came first.

'We don't know yet,' Gant replied, leading him to the car.

'Don't know?' The explanation had to wait until they got inside. Gant handed over the first section of the Times without comment.

'Is this for real?' A speed-reader, Winston scanned across the opening two columns, turning back to page 21 to finish a story framed by lingerie ads.

Gant's next revelation was that the manager Raizo Yamata had left behind was gone. 'He flew back to Japan Friday night. He said to urge Yamata-san to come to New York to help stabilize the situation. Or maybe he wanted to gut himself open in front of his boss. Who the fuck knows?'

'So who the hell's in charge, Mark?'

'Nobody,' Gant answered. 'Just like everything else here.'

'Goddamn it, Mark, somebody has to be giving the orders!'

'We don't have any instructions,' the executive replied. 'I've called the guy. He's not at the office-hey, I left messages, tried his house, Yamata's house, everybody's friggin' house, everybody's friggin' office. Zip-0, George. Everybody's running for cover. Hell, for all I know the dumb fuck took a header off the biggest building in town.'

'Okay, I need an office and all the data you have,' Winston said.

'What data?' Gant demanded. 'We don't have shit. The whole system went down, remember?'

'You have the records of our trades, don't you?'

'Well, yeah, I have our tapes—a copy, anyway,' Gant corrected himself. 'The FBI took the originals.'

A brilliant technician, Gant's first love had always been mathematics. Give Mark Gant the right instructions and he could work the market like a skilled cardsharp with a new deck of Bicycles. But like most of the people on the Street, he needed someone else to tell him what the job was. Well, every man had some limitations, and on the plus side of the ledger, Gant was smart, honest, and he knew what his limitations were. He knew when to ask for help. That last quality put him in the top 3 or 4 percent. So he must have gone to Yamata and his man for guidance…

'When all this was going down, what instructions did you have?'

'Instructions?' Gant rubbed his unshaven face and shook his head. 'Hell, we busted our ass to stay ahead of it. If DTC gets its shit together, we'll come out with most of our ass intact. I laid a mega-put on GM and made a real killing on gold stocks, and—'

'That's not what I mean.'

'He said to run with it. He got us out of the bank stocks in one big hurry, thank God. Damn if he didn't see that one coming first. We were pretty well placed before it all went down. If it hadn't been for all the panic calls—I mean, Jesus, George, it finally happened, y'know? One-eight-hundred-R-U-N. Jesus, if people had just kept their heads.' A sigh. 'But they didn't, and now, with the DTC fuckup…George, I don't know what's going to be opening up tomorrow, man. If this is true, if they can rebuild the house by tomorrow morning, hey, man, I don't know. I just don't,' Gant said as they entered the Lincoln Tunnel.

The whole story of Wall Street in one exhausted paragraph, Winston told himself, looking at the glossy tile that made up the interior of the tunnel. Just like the tunnel, in fact. You could see forward and you could see behind, but you couldn't see crap to the sides. You couldn't see outside the limited perspective.

And you had to.

'Mark, I'm still a director of the firm.'

'Yes, so?'

'And so are you,' Winston pointed out.

'I know that, but—'

'The two of us can call a board meeting. Start making calls,' George Winston ordered. 'As soon as we're out of this damned hole in the ground.'

'For when?' Gant asked.

'For now, goddamn it!' Winston swore. 'Those who're out of town, I'll send my jet for.'

'Most of the guys are in the office.' Which was the only good news he'd heard since Friday afternoon, George thought, nodding for his former employee to go on. 'I suppose most everyone else is closed.'

They cleared the tunnel about then. Winston pulled the cellular phone from its holder and handed it over.

'Start calling.' Winston wondered if Gant knew what he was going to request at the meeting. Probably not. A good man in a tunnel, he had never outgrown his limitations. Why the hell did I ever leave? Winston demanded of himself. It just wasn't safe to leave the American economy in the hands of people who didn't know how it worked.

'Well, that worked,' Admiral Dubro said. Fleet speed slowed to twenty knots. They were now two hundred miles due east of Dondra Head. They needed more sea room, but getting this far was success enough. The two carriers angled apart, their respective formations dividing and forming protective rings around the centerpieces, Abraham Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower. In another hour the formations would be outside of visual contact, and that was good, but the speed run had depleted bunkers, and that was very bad. The nuclear-powered carriers perversely were also tankers of a sort. They carried tons of bunker fuel for their conventionally powered escorts, and were able to refuel them when the need arose. It soon would. The fleet oilers Yukon and Rappahannock were en route from Diego Garcia with eighty thousand tons of distillate fuel between them, but this game was getting old in a hurry. The possibility of a confrontation compelled Dubro to keep all his ships' bunkers topped off. Confrontation meant potential battle, and battle always necessitated speed, to go into harm's way, and to get the hell out of it, too.

'Anything from Washington yet?' he asked next.

Commander Harrison shook his head. 'No, sir.'

'Okay,' the battle-force commander said with a dangerous calm. Then he headed off to communications. He'd solved a major operational problem, for the moment, and now it was time to scream at someone.

27—Piling On

Everything was running behind, at maximum speed, largely in circles, getting nowhere at amazing speed. A city both accustomed to and dedicated to the prevention of leaks, Washington and its collection of officials were too busy with four simultaneous crises to respond effectively to any of them. None of that was unusual, a fact that would have been depressing to those who ought to be dealing with it, a digression for which, of course, they didn't have time. The only good news, Ryan thought, is that the biggest story hadn't quite leaked. Yet.

'Scott, who're your best people for Japan?'

Adler was still a smoker or had bought a pack on his way over from Foggy Bottom. It required all of Ryan's diminishing self-control not to ask for one, but neither could he tell his guest not to light up. They all had to deal with stress in their own ways. The fact that Adler's had once been Ryan's was just one more inconvenience in a weekend that had gone to hell faster than he'd thought possible.

'I can put a working group together. Who runs it?'

'You do,' Jack answered.

'What will Brett say?'

'He'll say, 'Yes, sir,' when the President tells him,' Ryan replied, too tired to be polite.

'They have us by the balls, Jack.'

'How many potential hostages?' Ryan asked. It wasn't just the residual military people. There had to be thousands of tourists, businessmen, reporters, students…

'We have no way of finding out, Jack. None,' Adler admitted. 'The good news is that we have no indications of adverse treatment. It's not 1941, at least I don't think so.'

'If that starts…' Most Americans had forgotten the manner of treatment accorded foreign prisoners. Ryan