Debt of Honor

The bodyguard started to move after him. In Japan he would have been able to hammer the bakayaro to the ground. A policeman would be summoned, and this fool would be detained, but the bodyguard knew he was on unfamiliar ground, and held back, then turned to see if perhaps this had been a setup to distract him from a more serious attack. He saw his employer standing erect, his face first frozen in shock, then outrage, as his expensive English-made coat dripped with half a liter of cheap, tasteless American beer. Without a word, Murakami got into the waiting car, which headed off to Washington National Airport. The bodyguard, similarly humiliated, took his seat in the front of the car.

A man who had won everything in his life on merit, who remembered life on a postage-stamp of a vegetable farm, who had studied harder than anyone else to get ahead, to win a place at Tokyo University, who had started at the bottom and worked his way to the top, Murakami had often had his doubts and criticisms of America, but he had deemed himself a fair and rational actor on trade issues. As so often happens in life, however, it was an irrelevancy that would change his mind.

They are barbarians, he told himself, boarding his chartered jet for the flight to New York.

'The Prime Minister is going to fall,' Ryan told the President about the same time, a few blocks away.

'How sure are we of that?'

'Sure as we can be,' Jack replied, taking his seat. 'We have a couple of field officers working on something over there, and that's what they're hearing from people.'

'State hasn't said that yet,' Durling objected somewhat innocently.

'Mr. President, come on now,' Ryan said, holding a folder in his lap.

'You know this is going to have some serious ramifications. You know Koga is sitting on a coalition made up of six different factions, and it won't take much to blow that apart on him.' And us, Jack didn't add.

'Okay. So what?' Durling observed, having had his polling data updated again this very day.

'So the guy most likely to replace him is Hiroshi Goto. He doesn't like us very much. Never has.'

'He talks big and tough,' the President said, 'but the one time I met him he looked like a typical blusterer. Weak, vain, not much substance to him.'

'And something else.' Ryan filled the President in on one of the spinoffs of Operation SANDAL WOOD.

Under other circumstances Roger Durling might have smiled, but he had

Ed Kealty sitting less than a hundred feet from him.

'Jack, how hard is it for a guy not to fuck around behind his wife's back?'

'Pretty easy in my case,' Jack answered. 'I'm married to a surgeon, remember?'

The President laughed, then turned serious.

'It's something we can use on the son of a bitch, isn't it?'

'Yes, sir.' Ryan didn't have to add, but only with the greatest possible care, that on top of the Oak Ridge incident, it could well ignite a firestorm of public indignation. Niccolo Machiavelli himself had warned against this sort of thing.

'What are we planning to do about this Norton girl?' Durling asked.

'Clark and Chavez—'

'The guys who bagged Corp, right?'

'Yes, sir. They're over there right now. I want them to meet the girl and offer her a free ride home.'

'Debrief once she gets back?'

Ryan nodded. 'Yes, sir.'

Durling smiled. 'I like it. Good work.'

'Mr. President, we're getting what we want, probably even a little more than what we really wanted,' Jack cautioned. 'The Chinese general Sun Tzu once wrote that you always leave your enemy a way out—you don't press a beaten enemy too hard.'

'In the One-Oh-One, they told us to kill them all and count the bodies.'

The President grinned. It actually pleased him that Ryan was now secure enough in his position to feel free to offer gratuitous advice. 'This is out of your field, Jack. This isn't a national-security matter.'

'Yes, sir. I know that. Look, I was in the money business a few months ago. I do have a little knowledge about international business.'

Durling conceded the point with a nod. 'Okay, go on. It's not like I've been getting any contrarian advice, and I suppose I ought to hear a little of it.'

'We don't want Koga to go down, sir. He's a hell of a lot easier to deal with than Goto will be. Maybe a quiet statement from the Ambassador, something about how TRA gives you authority to act, but—'

The President cut him off. 'But I'm not really going to do it?' He shook his head. 'You know I can't do that. It would have the effect of cutting Al Trent off at the ankles, and I can't do that. It would look like I was double- dealing the unions, and I can't do that either.'

'Do you really plan to implement TRA fully?'

'Yes, I do. Only for a few months. I have to shock the bastards, Jack. We will have a fair-trade deal, after twenty years of screwing around, but they have to understand that we're serious for once. It's going to be hard on them, but in a few months they're going to be believers, and then they can change their laws a little, and we'll do the same, and things will settle down to a trading system that's completely fair for all parties.'

'You really want my opinion?'

Durling nodded again. 'That's what I pay you for. You think we're pushing too hard.'

'Yes, sir. We don't want Koga to go down, and we have to offer him something juicy if we want to save him. If you want to think long-term on this, you have to consider who you want to do business with.'

Durling lifted a memo from his desk. 'Brett Hanson told me the same thing, but he's not quite as worried about Koga as you are.'

'By this time tomorrow,' Ryan promised, 'he will be.'

'You can't even walk the streets here,' Murakami snarled.

Yamata had a whole floor of the Plaza Athenee reserved for himself and his senior staff. The industrialists were alone in a sitting room, coats and ties off, a bottle of whiskey on the table.

'One never could, Binichi,' Yamata replied. 'Here we are the gaijin. You never seem to remember that.'

'Do you know how much business I do here, how much I buy here?' the younger man demanded. He could still smell the beer. It had gotten on his shirt, but he was too angry to change clothes. He wanted the reminder of the lesson he'd learned only a few hours earlier.

'And what of myself?' Yamata asked. 'Over the last few years I've put six billion yen into a trading company here. I finished that only a short time ago, as you will recall. Now I wonder if I'll ever get it back.'

'They wouldn't do that.'

'Your confidence in these people is touching, and does you credit,' his host observed. 'When the economy of our country falls into ruin, do you suppose they will let me move here to manage my American interests? In 1941 they froze our assets here.'

'This is not 1941.'

'No, it is not, Murakami-san. It is far worse today. We had not so far to fall then.'

'Please,' Chavez said, draining the last of his beer. 'In 1941 my grandfather was fighting Fascists outside St. Petersburg—'

'Leningrad, you young pup!' Clark snarled, sitting next to him. 'These young ones, they lose all their respect for the past,' he explained to their two hosts.

One was a senior public-relations official from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the other a director of their aircraft division.

'Yes,' Seigo Ishii agreed. 'You know, members of my family helped design the fighters our Navy used. I once met Saburo Sakai and Minoru Genda.'

Ding opened another round of bottles and poured like the good underling he was, dutifully serving his master, Ivan Sergeyevich Klerk. The beer was really pretty good here, especially since their hosts were picking up the tab, Chavez thought, keeping his peace and watching a master at work. 'I know these names,' Clark said. 'Great warriors, but'—he held up a finger—'they fought against my countrymen. I remember that, too.'