Debt of Honor

traditional kimono, now that he was a man of leisure for the first time in thirty years. But he'd taken the call and extended the invitation quickly enough, and listened with intense silence for ten minutes.

Kimura looked down. 'I have many contacts, Koga-san. In my post I must.'

'As do I. Why have I not been told?'

'Even within the government, the knowledge has been closely held.'

'You are not telling me everything.' Kimura wondered how Koga could know that, without realizing that a look in the mirror would suffice. All afternoon at his desk, pretending to work, he'd just looked down at the papers in front of him, and now he could not remember a single document. Just the questions. What to do? Whom to tell? Where to go for guidance?

'I have sources of information that I may not reveal, Koga-san.' For the moment his host accepted that with a nod. 'So you tell me that we have attacked America, and that we have constructed nuclear weapons?'

A nod. 'Hai.'

'I knew Goto was a fool, but I didn't think him a madman.' Koga considered his own words for a moment. 'No, he lacks the imagination to be a madman. He's always been Yamata's dog, hasn't he?'

'Raizo Yamata has always been his…his—'

'Patron?' Koga asked caustically. 'That's the polite term for it.' Then he snorted and looked away, and his anger now had a new target. Exactly what you tried to stop. But you failed to do it, didn't you?

'Koga often seeks his counsel, yes.'

'So. Now what?' he asked a man clearly out of his depth. The answer was entirely predictable.

'I do not know. This matter is beyond me. I am a bureaucrat. I do not make policy. I am afraid for us now, and I don't know what to do.'

Koga managed an ironic smile and poured some more tea for his guest.

'You could well say the same of me, Kimura-san. But you still have not answered a question for me. I, too, have contacts remaining. I knew of the actions taken against the American Navy last week, after they happened. But I have not heard about the nuclear weapons.' Just speaking those two words gave the room a chill for both men, and Kimura marveled that the politician could continue to speak evenly.

'Our ambassador in Washington told the Americans, and a friend at the Foreign Ministry—'

'I too have friends at the Foreign Ministry,' Koga said, sipping his tea.

'I cannot say more.'

The question was surprisingly gentle. 'Have you been speaking with Americans?'

Kimura shook his head. 'No.'

The day usually started at six, but that didn't make it easy, Jack thought. Paul Robberton had gotten the papers and started the coffee, Andrea Price turned to also, helping Cathy with the kids. Ryan wondered about that until he saw an additional car parked in the driveway. So the Secret Service thought it was a war. His next step was to call the office, and a minute later his STU-6 started printing the morning faxes. The first item was unclassified but important. The Europeans were trying to dump U.S. T-Bills, and nobody was buying them, still. One such day could be seen as an aberration. Not a second one. Buzz Fiedler and the Fed Chairman would be busy again, and the trader in Ryan worried. It was like the Dutch kid with his thumb in the dike. What happened when he spotted another leak? And even if he could reach it, what about the third?

News from the Pacific was unchanged, but getting more texture. John Stennis would make Pearl Harbor early, but Enterprise was going to take longer than expected. No evidence of Japanese pursuit. Good. The nuke hunt was under way, but without results, which wasn't surprising. Ryan had never been to Japan, a failing he regretted. His only current knowledge was from overhead photographs. In winter months when the skies over the country were unusually clear, the National Reconnaissance Office had actually used the country (and others) to calibrate its orbiting cameras, and he remembered the elegance of the formal gardens. His other knowledge of the country was from the historical record. But how valid was that knowledge now? History and economics made strange bedfellows, didn't they?

The usual kisses sent Cathy and the kids on their way, and soon enough Jack was in his official car for Washington. The sole consolation was that it was shorter than the former trip to Langley.

'You should be rested, at least,' Robberton observed. He would never have talked so much to a political appointee, but somehow he felt far more at case with this guy. There was no pomposity in Ryan.

'I suppose. The problems are still there.'

'Wall Street still number one?'

'Yeah.' Ryan looked at the passing countryside after locking the classified documents away. 'I'm just starting to realize, this could take the whole world down. The Europeans are trying to sell off their treasuries. Nobody's buying. The market panic might be starting there today. Our liquidity is locked up, and a lot of theirs is in our T- Bills.'

'Liquidity means cash, right?' Robberton changed lanes and speeded up. His license plate told the state cops to leave him alone.

'Correct. Nice thing, cash. Good thing to have when you get nervous and not being able to get it, that makes people nervous.'

'You like talking 1929, Dr. Ryan? I mean, that bad?'

Jack looked over at his bodyguard. 'Possibly. Unless they can untangle the records in New York—it's like having your hands tied in a fight, like being at a card table with no money, if you can't play, you just stand there. Damn.' Ryan shook his head. 'It's just never happened before, and traders don't much like that either.'

'How can people so smart get so panicked?'

'What do you mean?'

'What did anybody take away? Nobody blew up the mint'—he snorted—'it would have been our case!'

Ryan managed a smile. 'You want the whole lecture?'

Paul's hands gestured on the wheel. 'My degree's in psychology, not economics.' The response surprised him.

'Perfect. That makes it easy.'

The same worry occupied Europe. Just short of noon, a conference call for the central bankers of Germany, Britain, and France resulted in little more than multilingual confusion over what to do. The past years of rebuilding the countries of Eastern Europe had placed an enormous strain on the economies of the countries of Western Europe, who were in essence paying the bill for two generations of economic chaos. To hedge against the resulting weakness of their own currencies, they'd bought dollars and American T-Bills. The stunning events in America had occasioned a day of minor activity, all of it down but nothing terribly drastic. That had all changed, however, after the last buyer had purchased the last discounted lot of American Treasuries—for some the numbers were just too good—with money taken from the liquidation of equities. That buyer already thought it had been a mistake and cursed himself for again riding the back of a trend instead of the front. At 10:30 A.M. local time, the Paris market started a precipitous slide, and inside of an hour, European economic commentators were talking about a domino effect, as the same thing happened in every market in every financial center. It was also noted that the central banks were trying the same thing that the American Fed had attempted the previous day. It wasn't that it had been a bad idea. It was just that such ideas only worked once, and European investors weren't buying. They were bailing out. It came as a relief when people started buying up stocks at absurdly low prices, and they were even grateful that the purchases were being made in yen, whose strength had reasserted itself, the only bright light on the international financial scene.

'You mean,' Robberton said, opening the basement door to the West Wing. 'You mean to tell me that it's that screwed up?'

'Paul, you think you're smart?' Jack asked. The question took the Secret Service man aback a little.

'Yeah, I do. So?'

'So why do you suppose that anybody else is smarter than you are? They're not, Paul,' Ryan went on. 'They have a different job, but it isn't about brains. It's about education and experience. Those people don't know crap about running a criminal investigation. Neither do I. Every tough job requires brains, Paul. But you can't know them all. Anyway, bottom line, okay? No, they're not any smarter than you, and maybe not as smart as you. It's just that it's their job to run the financial markets, and your job to do something else.'

'Jesus,' Robberton breathed, dropping Ryan off at his office door. His secretary handed off a fistful of phone