Our major concern at that point was time. We had a lot to do, and we
weren't sure how long we had to do it. Furthermore, it would be
foolhardy to assume everything was going to proceed smoothly. That
apprehension was, in fact, soon to be thoroughly vindicated.
First, it wasn't all that simple to track down Tam. We finally
discovered she'd already left the Robotics Lab and was back at the
Tsukuba Hotel lunching with Matsugami and some of his senior staff.
Returning there, however, did provide a perfect opportunity to grab our
bags. Ken dragged her from the lunch with a phony excuse, and minutes
later we were checked out, solving at least one logistics problem.
Unfortunately, it also tipped off Matsugami and anybody else who might
be interested that we were departing.
Next were the details of arranging for the chopper. While we were
driving around trying to locate Tamara, Ken was busy on his car phone
pulling strings to commandeer one of the two MITI helicopters. After
three calls he managed to locate one at their auxiliary pad, currently
being refueled and serviced. I listened to him lean on the service
people, doing his diplomatic but firm deputy minister routine. End of
long story: it would be on its way shortly, arriving in about an hour
and a half.
Good, we thought. Plenty of time to handle the transmission of the
still-unseen documents in Noda's silver case. In the car we brought Tam
fully up to date on the extraordinary circumstances by which it had
fallen into our possession, including its potential for use as leverage
against Noda. Then we headed for the Teleconferencing Center, where we
planned to open the thing, scan the contents with a reader, and bounce
the pages to New York via satellite. Ken revealed the ministry had a
high-security channel it used to communicate with the New York offices
of JETRO, the Japan External Trade Organization over on Sixth Avenue,
MITI's public relations arm. He declared we would just link up with
that office and have them patch us through to the DNI computer. Nothing
to it.
Which was correct, theoretically. When we marched in, Ken again
flaunting his deputy minister walk-on priority, the white-shirted staff
bowed to the floor, led us to the hard-copy scanner, turned it on, and
diplomatically excused themselves, closing the security door. The place
was ours.
Don't know why, but until that moment none of us had really wanted to
know what was in Noda's case. Maybe a part of me still didn't, even
then. Whatever the reason, however, none of us had bothered to take it
out of Ken's briefcase for examination. Turned out that was a mistake.
He settled his satchel onto the desk, clicked it open, and out came the
box for our first real look. As he wiped off the smoke, my initial
reaction was to be dazzled. It was magnificent, a silversmith's
masterpiece, engraved with all manner of mythological beast and fowl. A
work of art in every sense. Never seen anything remotely like it.
The problem was, it wasn't merely locked. It was soldered shut. The
silver lid had literally been welded on, leaving it essentially a solid
piece. Noda, it turned out, left nothing to chance. Only a silversmith
could crack the seal and divulge the contents. So we still had no idea
what was inside, and worse, we'd managed to fritter away a valuable
half hour coming to that fruitless discovery. Now what?
"Shit," said Tam. "When will we ever get a break?"
"Looks like we've got two choices," Ken announced ruefully, gazing down
at the intractable chunk of metal in his hands. "We can do what we
probably should have done in the first place: simply stash this for the
moment and let Noda think we know what's in it. Or we can drive into
Tokyo and locate somebody there who can open it, then transmit from
MITI headquarters downtown."
Neither of these plans seemed particularly inspired. The first gave us
nothing but presumptions for leverage, and the second could take hours.
Noda, we all realized, was not a man who dallied.
"Actually"--Tam spoke up--"there's a third option. Surely Noda's going to
find out sooner or later we came here to the
Center. Believe me, he always learns everything eventually. So why not
transmit something else now, anything, and then after you get the case
open you can send the real data?"
"You mean, give him circumstantial cause to assume we've got the goods
on him?" Sounded good to me. "Buying ourselves more time?"
"Right. It'll take him awhile to find out exactly what was transmitted.
All he'll know for certain is that we sent something. In the meantime
Ken can go on to Tokyo and proceed with plan B: open the case there and
transmit the real contents."
He looked skeptical. "That might deceive everybody for a while, but not
for long. There're too many links in the chain between here and DNI's
New York office."
"But sending something now will gain time. It has to. Then you can go
on to Tokyo and do what you need to from there. Tomorrow."
"Maybe." He still wasn't totally convinced. "But all right--rather than
waste time arguing, let's just go ahead and do it. No harm in any
instance."
She peeked into his briefcase, a jumble of documents. "What have you
got in here that we could send?"
"Today's _Asahi Shimbun _. . ." He laughed.
"Ken."
"Okay, okay." He laid the newspaper aside and was riffling through his
paperwork. "How about a few MITI memos?"
"Nothing to do with Marketshare - 90, I hope," said Tam.
"Promise."
The apparatus was already humming, so he put through the connection to
JETRO's New York office, whereupon Tam took over and gave them
instructions for the phone link over to the DNI mainframe. It probably
required all of a couple of minutes. Welcome to the Brave New World of
global information technology.
Since we were just shooting in the dark, they transmitted some twenty
or twenty-five pages. Actually it would have been almost better to send
too few rather than too many. At four pages a minute, though, we were
finished in no time. As something of a joke, Tam suggested using the
file name Nipponica, homage to Noda's takeover pipe dream. Somehow it
seemed poetic justice.
Whether the transparency of our ruse would be immediately evident to
Matsuo Noda remained a big unknown. But . . . maybe Noda would have no
real way of discovering we'd sent garbage, at least not for a while.
The transmission done, we signed off, zipped up Ken's briefcase, and
marched out as if we knew what we were doing. Still, it was only a
bluff, and a shaky one at that. Which set me to thinking.
"Ken, it seems to me yours is the critical path in this play now." We
were walking back to the executive parking lot where we'd left his car.
"It's more important to have a real copy of the data stashed somewhere
than it is for us to blow the country in the next two hours. Which
means maybe you ought to take the chopper back yourself, send the stuff
today, and let us just drive down to Narita in your car?"
"I agree." Tam nodded concurrence. "We can leave it there and you could
have somebody pick it up tomorrow."
"That's dangerous, for both of you."
"Maybe so," she said, "but he's going to come after this case, guns
blazing, as his first priority. Ken, you're the one who's going to have
to stay out of his way now, not us. The quicker you move, the better."
"You've got a point. All right, if you want me to, then I could take
the copter back to Tokyo myself and you can use the Toyota." He was
fishing for his keys. "In fact, maybe you should just leave now."
"Let me check the schedule." I'd asked his secretary for a listing of
the afternoon and evening flights in case we got delayed. It was now
one-thirty. The next flight that looked like a sure thing was a United
at seven forty-two, or maybe the JAL at nine. Then there was a
Northwest at ten-fifteen. Loads of time.
"Look, we can wait for the chopper and at least see you off. Why don't
we head back over to the hotel and have a drink. Solemnize the
occasion--the final nailing of Matsuo Noda."
"Fine." He started the car. "But both of you get only one, at least
whoever's driving does. I want you back in one piece."
The hotel bar was beginning to feel like a second home, though now it
was deserted, the lunch trade long departed. Our ceremonial libation
also provided my first real opportunity to study Ken Asano at leisure.
I sat sipping my Suntory while he repeated once again the details of
his upcoming political move at MITI. Given any kind of luck, the flap
would render Noda's takeover a worldwide scandal.
Good. Tam and I had been Noda's point men, had done everything we knew
to assist him, and now it was clear he'd been using us all along for
his own ends. He was bent on bringing American industry back to life
for the sole purpose of skimming the cream.
What other reason could there be? Noda's noble intention supposedly was
to help rejuvenate those American corporations doing basic research--but
the price was then to let Japan lift that R&D and translate it into
consumer technology, thereby keeping for his team all the elements of
real economic value in the chain from laboratory to cash register. They
would be the ones refining their strategic capacity to transform new
ideas into world-class products and economic leadership. Japan would
retain the advanced engineering segment of product development, while
tossing a few low-skill assembly plants to the U.S. to make us think we
were still part of the action. It would, of course, be a fatal
delusion. The high-tech hardware of tomorrow's world increasingly would
be Japanese, while America became an economy of paper-shuffling MBAs
and low-paid grease monkeys assembling products we no longer were able
to design or engineer.
That depressing conclusion required the space of one Scotch. By then I
was ready to order a second, hoping it would bring forth a solution to
the problem the first had evoked with such alarming clarity.
But there wasn't time. At that moment we heard the MITI copter settling
onto the pad next to the hotel parking lot.
"Ken, here's to success." I saluted him with the last melting ice
cubes.
He toasted back, then signaled for the bill. Time to get moving.
The chopper was a new Aerospatiale AS 365N Twin Dauphin, big and white,
a VIP four-seater. Single pilot, capable of 180. (The Japanese love
those high-rotor French copters.) Guess Ken had called in a lot of
chips to arrange this customized three-wheeler for a couple of_
gaijin_. The seat-mile costs alone must have been staggering. But there
it was, fully serviced and set to go.
He walked over, ducking the rotor, and advised the pilot that there had
been a slight change of plans. They'd be returning directly back to
Tokyo. The man, wearing a blue uniform, bowed and gave him a little
salute. They seemed to be old friends. Well, I thought, if deputy
ministers don't use this gold-plated extravagance, then who's it for?
Then he returned to pick up his briefcase (Noda's silver box safely
therein), have a brief farewell, and give us his keys.
"Tamara, telex me the minute you get back. We'll proceed immediately.
Full speed."
"Let's go for it." She smiled and drew his face down for a long,
languorous kiss. I then shook his hand, and we headed for the car.
Since our bags were just little carry-ons, we looked solid to catch the
United flight with a couple of hours to spare, assuming traffic
cooperated.
"Tam, how about taking the wheel? This left-hand-side-of- the-road
driving takes practice. I almost hit somebody once in England."
"Sure." She reached for the keys, then turned back to wave to Ken. But
he was already climbing aboard and didn't notice.
"Isn't it odd?" I mused, "We still haven't heard zip out of Noda. He
must have realized by now we have his silver case. What's he planning
to do? Where'll he try to head us off?"
"Good question." She turned the key in the ignition. "I'm not going to
feel safe till we've got the actual goods on his phony sword. Not just
some dummy data."
"My guess is he'll try and nail us at the airport. It'd be his best
shot."
"At least Ken was smart enough to make the reservations under fake
names, so he won't know which flight to watch."
"There're not that many. He could be covering them all. On the other
hand, he'll assume we're arriving via the MITI chopper, so maybe we can
dodge his hit squad."
"I feel like I've been run through a wringer." She was pulling out of
the slot, backing around to begin making her way through the rows of
staff vehicles, all with special Tsukuba parking stickers.
"You can say that again. Who could have guessed all the . . ."
I'd reached around to check the back window, hoping to get the heat
going, when my field of vision turned an incandescent orange, bright
and glaring, as though the sun had just come in for a close encounter.
Before I could turn to see what . . . the dashboard rose up and slugged
me in the teeth, as a shock wave flung us both against the seat belts.
We're dead, I thought. We've been bombed. Noda's just dropped . . .
Then I looked up.
The MITI Aerospatiale, about two hundred feet off the ground, had
become a blazing sphere, a grotesque nova. Now its rotor blades were
clawing the air, askew, while it circled downward like a wounded bird.
An instant later it nosed into the parking lot behind us, hurtling
fragments of tail assembly through several empty staff cars.
I sat mesmerized as a second ball of fire erupted where it had crashed.
One of the fuel tanks had ignited, just like in the movies.
"Ken!" Tam let out a choked cry after the first few seconds of
disbelief. Then she slammed the transmission into 'Park' and began
ripping off her seat belt.
Where's she going? Doesn't she realize--?
Her door was open and she was stumbling out. That's when I finally came
to my senses, which included the sobering thought that there might be
more fuel tanks, such as the auxiliary, that hadn't yet blown.
"Wait!" I'd ripped off my own seat harness by that time and had rolled
out to begin running after her as she stumbled across the snowy stretch
of asphalt separating us from the flames.
She was moving like a gazelle, but I managed to catch up about thirty
yards from the wreckage. Using a modified shoulder block, I pulled her
around and tried to get a grip.
"Tam, nobody could survive that. We've got to stay back . . ."
At which point we both slipped and collapsed in a patch of snow . . .
just as the last fuel tank detonated with the impact of a sonic boom.
Memory can be a little unreliable under such circumstances, but I still
remember more wreckage sailing past us, including a strut off the
landing gear that gouged a furrow in the asphalt no more than ten feet
from our heads.
"Tam, he never knew what hit him. It had to be instantaneous." I was
trying to brush the wet snow off her face as I slipped my arm around
her shoulders. She was still holding back the tears, but only just.
"We didn't even have a real good-bye." Her words were jagged. "There
were so many things . . . I was hoping we . . ."
Her voice trailed off into tears.
"Look, I only knew him for a day, but that was enough to learn some
things. Kenji Asano was a wise and noble soul. Everything about him was
good."
She took my hand and held it against her cheek. "Matt, he was so kind.
That was what . . . He was . . . all that I . . ." Her eyes were
reflecting back the flames, now billowing into the pale afternoon sky.
Around us the labs were emptying as technicians raced toward the lot,
white coats fluttering.
"You know, he said something to me today. About you . . ."
"What?" She glanced up, her face streaked. "What did he
say?"
"He must have known there was danger. He sort of asked me to look out
for you."
"Danger?" She looked back at the wreckage, and a new tear trailed down
her left cheek. "I guess we don't really know for sure, do we? Maybe it
was just a fuel tank rupture, or . . ."
"You don't believe that."
"No." The tears, abruptly, were gone. "Matsuo Noda just took away the
one . . . Matt, I'm going to kill him."
It was a sentiment I shared in buckets. The question was merely how.
Medieval torture seemed too kind. I started to say something inane, and
then, finally, the shocking truth landed with the force of that last
explosion.
"Tam, that was supposed to be us." I was gazing at the flames, watching
talons of metal contort in the heat. "Noda thought we were going to be
on that copter."
"My God, of course."
"We've got to get out of here. Now. There's nothing anybody can do for
Ken."
"I'm not leaving till I've settled the score."
"Be reasonable. There's no way we can do it here. This is Noda's turf."
I was urging her to her feet. "We'll find a way. All I ask is that he
know we were the ones who did him in."
"But how can we just leave?"
"What else are we supposed to do? There's nothing left." I tried to
take her hand. "Come on."
She finally relented and, with one last tearful stare, turned to follow
me back to the car. By then a crowd of technicians was surging in
around us.
Ken's blue Toyota was still running. Without a word she buckled in,
shoved the stick into gear, and turned for the exit, whereupon she
barely avoided colliding with the first racing fire engine.
"Look, are you okay? I can drive if you . . ."
"Matt, don't say anything more, please." The tears had vanished. "Can I
just think for a while? Just give me some quiet to think." She was
gripping the wheel with raw anger. "Please."
"You've got it."
By the time we reached the highway, she was driving mechanically but
with absolute precision, almost as though tragedy had somehow sharpened
her reflexes, her logical processes.
It's a curious thing, but different people respond differently to
disaster, and Tam was one of those rare few who become harder, not
softer. I could see it in her eyes. As the minutes ticked by, and we
reached the packed thoroughfare that would take us south, it even got
to be a little unsettling. What in hell was going through her head?
Finally, after about an hour of bumper-to-bumper freeways, I couldn't
take the silence any more. Without asking anybody's permission, I
reached over and clicked on the radio. It was set for a classical
station, the music Chopin. Was this Ken's regular fare? I wondered. Was
he a romantic at heart or a classicist? Guess I'd never know . . .
that, or much of anything else about him. Which thought brought with it
a renewed sadness. Kenji Asano was a man of the East who was as much of
the West as anybody I'd ever met in Japan. I'd wanted him for a friend.
When you get to be my age, you don't make too many new friends, not
real ones. After forty, it's acquaintances. The roots of true
friendship extend so deep that there's never really time to plant them
if you start too late. Maybe it's because there's always a part
missing, that shared experience of being young and crazy and broke.
Those times back when you both still believed anything was possible.
New friends can't begin sentences with "Remember that weekend before
you were married when we got drunk and . . ." Getting old is tough, and
that's one of the toughest parts. But somehow I felt, with Ken, that
I'd known him forever. Could be that's absurd, but I really did. So
quite apart from the tragedy of his death, I felt cruelly robbed. It
sounds selfish, maybe, but it's the truth. A sad but true truth.
I was still thinking those thoughts when the four-o'clock newscast came
on. For a moment neither of us noticed, but then Tam snapped alert and
turned up the volume. The report was opening with a live remote from
Tsukuba Science City. I couldn't really follow very well, but she
realized that and began to translate as it went along.
". . . was the first tragedy of its kind for the ministry, and there
are widespread calls for an official inquiry. Dr. Kenji Asano,
nationally known director of The Institute for New Generation Computer
Technology, died today here at Tsukuba Science City when a MITI
helicopter, an Aerospatiale Twin Dauphin, crashed due to a malfunction.
No cause has yet been ascertained for the accident, which also took the
life of the pilot, Yuri Hachiro, a MITI veteran with fifteen years of
service. The condition of the wreckage has made it impossible to
determine how many other passengers may have been on board, although
MITI sources report that two visiting American scientists are also
thought to have been traveling with Dr. Asano. Their names are being
withheld by the ministry at this time, pending the completion of a full
investigation. . . .
Next came an interview with a MITI official, after which the reporter
offered a wrap-up.
". . . believe Dr. Asano's death represents a significant blow to
several vital sectors of MITI's computer race with America. However,
the vice minister has assured NHK that MITI's research effort will
redouble its commitment to . . ."