Debt of Honor

'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 —'

Now it was Fiedler: 'Yes! They dump yen and buy dollars. Our currency regains its position and theirs falls. The other Asian banks will then think about reversing their positions. The European central banks will play ball, I think.'

'You'll have to keep the Discount Rate up,' Winston said. 'That'll sting us some, but it's one hell of a lot better than the alternative. You keep the rate up so that people stop dumping T-Bills. We want to generate a move away from the yen, just like they did to us. The Europeans will like that because it will limit the Japs' ability to scoop up their equities like they started doing yesterday.' Winston got off his chair and started pacing a little as he was wont to do. He didn't know that he was violating a White House protocol, and even the President didn't want to interrupt him, though the two Secret Service agents in the room kept a close eye on the trader. Clearly his mind was racing through the scenario, looking for holes, looking for flaws. It look perhaps two minutes, and everyone waited for his evaluation. Then his head came up. 'Dr. Ryan, if you ever decide to become a private citizen again, we need to talk. Gentlemen: this will work. It's just so damned outrageous, but maybe that works in our favor.'

'What happens Friday, then?' Jack asked.

Gant spoke up: 'The market will drop like a rock.'

'What's so damned great about that?' the President demanded.

'Because then, sir,' Gant went on, 'it'll bounce after about two hundred points, and close…? It'll close down, oh, maybe a hundred, maybe not even that much. The following Monday everybody catches his breath. Some people look for bargains. Most, probably, are still nervous. It drops again, probably ends up pretty stagnant, down another fifty at most. The rest of the week, things settle out. Figure by the following Friday, the market has re-stabilized down one, maybe one-fifty, from the Friday-noon position. The drop will have to happen because of what the Fed has to do with the Discount Rate, but we're used to that on the Street.' Only Winston fully appreciated the irony in the fact that Gant had it almost exactly right. He himself could hardly have done it better. 'Bottom line, it's a major hiccup, but no more than that.'

'Europe?' Ryan asked.

'It'll be rougher over there because they're not as well organized, but their central banks have somewhat