"Matthew . . ." She hesitated a moment, then snapped into action. "You
weren't kidding about that sword. I never realized--"
"Let's go."
"Right." She now had the one remaining automatic. The other was no
longer usable. Didn't matter. One was all we needed.
We now had to kill the automatic ID on the outer door and put it on
manual. Otherwise the two guards upstairs might come calling. While Tam
stood there with the Uzi, I went back out and yanked the wires that
hooked the voice reader to the computer. There was probably a
scientific way to turn it off, but who had time for science? Besides,
just then my veins were still pumping pure adrenaline. Facing the
business end of an Uzi, even for a fleeting instant, is no way to begin
an evening.
Tam ordered the guards to open the last door and in we marched. Tanaka
was standing outside his office, his dark eyes glazed, his bristle-
covered skull rosy with shock. He turned even redder when he saw the
_katana_. Nobody had to tell him what it could do.
"Mr. Walton, why are you here?"
"We're about to undertake some corporate restructuring."
Tam proceeded to herd Tanaka and the guards into Noda's office, pausing
just long enough to kill the phone wires. As he began to recover, he
commenced sputtering about legal action and jail and general hellfire.
Who cared? As of this moment, the offices and computer of Dai Nippon,
International belonged to us.
Henderson was informed of our progress when his phone rang at exactly
4:48 P.M. He arrived, along with his Georgia Mafia computer expert, at
5:17, and Tam met them at the security doors.
I wasn't actually there to welcome them aboard, since I was guarding
Tanaka just then and engaged in a small one-on-one with the man,
explaining to him that Matsuo Noda's ass was ours. The president of Dai
Nippon, I advised, was a few short days away from becoming everybody's
lead story, featured as the Japanese executive who'd (apparently)
rebelled against his homeland. Noda was no stranger to headlines, of
course, but he preferred to engineer them himself, so this definitely
wasn't going to be his style. Matsuo Noda was, albeit unwillingly,
about to make history. As I broke this news to Dai Nippon's chief of
New York operations, I sensed he was definitely less than enthusiastic
about the prospect. Well, he'd have a few days to get used to the idea,
since nobody was going to enter or leave the eleventh floor for a
while.
It was still a bit difficult to believe what had happened. Or even
more, what was next. But sometimes reality can have a way of
outstripping your wildest powers of imagination--a Space Shuttle
explodes, a nuclear meltdown in the Ukraine, ten-dollar oil, all of it
too farfetched to make credible fiction. It could only exist in the
realm of the real.
We were about to start moving billions and billions of dollars, fast.
And since we didn't know how long we could continue before Matsuo Noda
figured out a way to stop us, we were going to adhere to a schedule
that covered the most vital sectors first--those outfits whose R&D Tam
considered strategic to America's future technological leadership. Our
goal for the first day was five billion, worldwide.
Thus the countdown began. Henderson's financial artist loaded Tam's new
program tape onto DNI's big NEC supercomputer and cranked up. We had
roughly sixty hours till the opening bell on Monday.