Cheap Israeli steel.

The eight-hundred-year-old katana of Yoritomo

Minamoto's swordsmith parted the Uzi's perforated black barrel like
Hotel Bar butter, bifurcated it into identical slices. Guard number two
just grunted as it clattered to the floor.
By my reckoning we'd been in the inner chamber for about three
quarters of a second, but Noda's two human mountains were now
standing there holding nothing but time in their hands. Nobody had to
draw them a picture. The game was over. Bushido.
I motioned Tam toward the first guard's weapon.
"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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

"It's the worst of times, buddy, and the best of times. Whatever
dude once said that didn't know the half of it. He oughta be around now
to check out the Street."
That was Henderson's Georgia Mafia co-conspirator, an irritatingly
smug young man with red hair and acne who dressed entirely in white,
right down to his skinny Italian tie. We were told he went by the handle
of Jim Bob. As he meditated upon Wall Street's macroeconomic
incongruities, he punched a Willie Nelson tape into his boom box and
popped a Coors, pregame warm-up for programming a full-scale assault
on the U.S. securities markets.
Jim Bob allowed as how he'd arrived in the Big Apple four years
earlier with a cardboard suitcase, a finance degree from Georgia Tech,
and a larger than regulation endowment of natural cunning. After a
couple of years' toil in Henderson's quasi-legal vineyards, he'd gone out
on his own, whereupon he'd parlayed his winnings with Bill and the
remnants of a baseball scholarship into what was now a high six-figure
"haircut," the name options players use for their grubstake. The way he
figured it, he was just hitting his stride.
How, I inquired at one point during that long weekend, had he
managed it?
"Chum, it's idiot simple. You buy into fear, sell into greed, and fuck
fundamentals. Main thing is, if something makes sense, don't do it.
America's in the all-time shit, and Wall Street's oblivious. It's like
everybody's bidding up standing room on the Tttanic. But who cares?
You play options like I do and all you have to worry about is not getting
stupider than the herd. Which ain't necessarily much of a trick."
Stock options, he went on to assert, were like having a credit card
in a whorehouse—a ton of action for what amounted to tip money up
front. No wonder Las Vegas was in trouble, when Wall Street was
beckoning our high rollers to take odds on the direction of the market.
Only widows and orphans, he observed, bought actual securities
anymore. That action was reserved for the halt and lame.
While country singers twanged beer hall soliloquies on the general
increase in faithless women, Jim Bob coded in the brokerage houses and
offshore banks we'd be using, the catalog of stocks in the DNI portfolio,
and our sequence of transactions.
As noted earlier, the financial setup had been handled by
Henderson and friends. Using his connections, he'd opened accounts for
hundreds of dummy corporations in about two dozen offshore banks.
He stuck to the usual no-questions-asked operations like Banca della
Svizzera Italiana and Bank Leu in the Bahamas—the latter a Swiss-
owned Nassau laundry that had, in years past, reportedly destroyed
records and lied to the Securities and Exchange Commission as a favor
to certain of America's more inventive inside traders.
Since the volume of money to be moved was staggering, it would all
be handled by sophisticated telecommunications networks. We would
pass it through the anonymous accounts we'd established, accessed both
ways by computer, and it would never be touched by human hands.
DNI's cash would flash in and out with total cover. Added to that,
anybody who tried to trace us would first have to break through a
traditional Swiss stone wall.
To dump the stock we were planning to exploit fully the new
"globalization" of the financial scene. Now that the National Association
of Securities Dealers had struck a deal with the London and Tokyo stock
exchanges to swap price quotes, worldwide market makers were buying
and selling American securities around the clock. Plenty of active
market-making was happening off the exchange floors as well, at places
like Jeffries out on the coast, which had recently handled a massive
Canadian takeover of an American company overnight, entirely off-
exchange. With all the avenues available it was almost impossible to
track the movement in a given issue. DNI's computers would be routing
sell orders to brokerage firms around the globe, a block here, a block
there, none of them in quantities that would raise eyebrows.
 Maybe I also should add that none of the "corporations" Henderson
had set up would be allowed to show a profit, which would simplify
Treasury Department reporting requirements. As a matter of fact, before
we were through, DNI was going to lose billions. But it would all be
done legally, in accordance with SEC regs. It would also lead to a world
financial flap of notable proportions. Nobody would ever take Noda's
money for granted again.
While Tam went over her new program with Jim Bob, pointing out
her special features, Henderson and I found ourselves at reasonably
loose ends. We sat around drinking green tea (God, how I came to hate
that stuff) and puzzling how we'd all managed to get into such a mess.
The major plus, however, was that we finally had Matsuo Noda by the
short and curlies.
Or so we hoped. The problem was, he'd been a player longer than
any of us, and he'd already demonstrated plenty of stamina. How would
he counterattack? The question wasn't if, it was when. For the moment,
though, we seemed to be on our way with clear sailing; in fact, the
communications link with Kyoto was entirely empty. Tanaka also had
clammed up, refusing to talk—beyond a rather firm prediction that our
wholesale divestiture of DNI's assets was an insane act doomed to
failure. I might also add he didn't appear nearly as concerned as the
circumstances would seem to merit. In fact, he was so complacent I
started getting a little uneasy. Finally Bill and I ran his prediction past
young Jim Bob. Could somebody get through to Tam's program and
devise a way to shut us down?
Henderson's increasingly glassy-eyed protege took out enough time
from popping "uppers" and swilling Coors to assure us to the contrary.
"Hell, no way you could stop what we're settin' up here. We got
ourselves what you call a closed system. Everything's
going to be handled by that green-eyed monster over there in the
corner. We got these numbered brokerage accounts all over the place.
Zip, in go the sell orders; zap, out go confirmations. And since none of
the cash sits around, our bank accounts are all just gonna churn. We'll
have billions of buckaroos rollin' at the speed of light. Ain't nobody
gonna be able to get a bead on the action, take my word for it."
Our computer-generated buying and selling, he went on to declare,
was conveniently similar in appearance to the "program" trading of the
big institutional investors, the arbitrage players who routinely sold
millions of dollars of securities in minutes using computers. Thanks to
them, the market these days had been conditioned to accept huge,
unaccountable trades as part of the territory. If somebody dumped
massive blocks of stock unexpectedly, it could mean anything—such as,
the spread between those stocks' prices and some "index future" had
gotten momentarily out of sync. Shuffling securities like poker chips was
the name of the game on the Street these days, so nobody would really
notice or care. The turnover we'd be generating would merely suggest to
the market that various investment-house arbitrage desks were
unwinding positions.
What the heck, I said to Tam, maybe we could unload the better
part of DNI's holdings before Noda struck back. The real key to our
attack on Dai Nippon, however, depended on what happened to that
cash after we turned it around. When I mentioned that, she just crossed
her fingers.
By late Sunday night the DNI offices were a clutter of empty
Chinese take-out containers, Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes, and
computer printouts. However, Jim Bob claimed the system looked like a
go. He'd completed a long sequence of test runs, and he was predicting
he could probably swing at least four billion the first day, something in
the nature of a warm-up for grander things to come.
Jim Bob, I should say, was fully as efficient as advertised by
Henderson. Even if he was now flying higher than a moon shot, thanks
to all the pills. He worked methodically, carefully analyzing the program
at every step, double-checking the codes, poring over his verification
printouts for obscure glitches. Mainly, though, he kept one unfocused
eye on the clock, saying he always delivered on time. Point of honor.
Thus it was that, when Monday morning rolled around, we
were primed to move on Wall Street. Tam's program was poised inside
the mainframe like some lurking id, ready to be unleashed. We decided
to start modestly, sticking to the exchanges in New York, and only later
in the day expanding outward as we gained firmer footing.
At the stroke of nine-thirty A.M. Jim Bob inaugurated our maiden
run with yet another beer. Henderson and I poured ourselves a
bourbon. Tam even joined us, accepting a respectable shot.
"Fasten your seat belts, boys and girls." Jim Bob shakily peeled back
the tab on his Coors. The screen in front of him focused our attention
down to one small flashing green dot.
"Ignition."
He hit a key on the terminal, and Merrill Lynch got a computerized
"sell" order for ten thousand shares of Texas Instruments. The time was
exactly 9:31.
 It was a textbook lift-off. Rows of green numbers began to scroll up
the screen, only to blink and disappear. By God, the thing seemed to be
working. We had just pulled the plug on DNI. All that was left now was
to sit back and watch it sink.
As the morning wore on, Tam fielded phone calls from staffers,
always claiming that Tanaka was not available just then. Of course, we
weren't sure how long we could get away with that excuse, but for now
none of us wanted to set the man free to start jabbering in Japanese on
the phone. On the other hand, we were loosening up a bit on security.
Partly, I guess, because we were all increasingly wrecked, but also
because it seemed to fit the situation. By Monday, Tanaka and his two
retired sumo bone-crushers appeared to have grown resigned, one might
even say philosophical, and I don't mind admitting it bothered me a lot.
Tanaka was watching us destroy Noda's grand design right before his
very eyes, yet he just sat there as though none of it mattered. How could
this be? All he did was busy around brewing tea for everybody. (Except,
of course, for Jim Bob, who stuck to Coors.) However, I was too tired by
then to think much about it.
Around two-thirty Henderson began complaining of a splitting
headache and declared he had to go home and get some rest. I started to
protest, but the man looked half dead. Tam and I weren't much better
off, so we flipped a coin to see who would take the first watch. She won,
which was great by me, since the long hours without sleep were really
starting to unravel my concentration.
To understand what happened next, you have to try and envision
the scene. It was three P.M. and things were going letter perfectly. The
dollars were sailing through the accounts we'd set up and along about
noon we'd even kicked in our buy program.
Yes, buy. That's not a typo. You see, we had to lose billions, not
necessarily a trivial task. Think about it. If you merely want to drop a
few million, all you have to do is just invest in some high-flying start-up
and then sit there till the venture craters. But billions?
That's the part where Tam really showed her mettle (no pun
intended). Look, she said, the Brothers Hunt managed to blow millions
by trying to corner silver, bidding up the price and then seeing it
collapse. But we've got to get rid of some serious money, so why don't
we do the same thing, only with a commodity worth something?
Platinum.
All life's great ideas have an inevitable simplicity. That's right, we
were programmed to sell DNI's stock and buy platinum. From anybody,
anywhere, at any price. We were planning to just swallow the
worldwide commodity markets in the stuff, starting at the NY Merc and
ending at Capetown. Of course, what we were also doing was boosting
its price into the stratosphere—we were even bidding against ourselves
through different brokerage houses. Anything to drive it up. I mean we
had a lot of money to get rid of. We figured that by the time we were
finished, DNI would be the proud owner of a couple of hundred billion
in platinum metal, platinum futures, platinum mining stocks, platinum
storage companies, platinum dealerships, platinum reserves, platinum
investment coins. All of it at a price as high as we could push. I was
betting on two thousand dollars an ounce by Friday.
The nice part was, what central bank was going to step in? Platinum
was strategic, sure, but it wasn't a monetary metal. And if we had to bid
against governments, so much the better. We were playing a drunken
speculator's dream, going all out for the most volatile of all the world's
commodities. After we'd squeezed that scam for every ounce it was
worth, we would deliberately puncture the bubble and let the price
nosedive. We were going to destroy the cancer of Dai Nippon by
gorging Noda's takeover machine with financial poison. The eventual
collapse should wipe out Matsuo Noda totally.
Platinum. I asked Jim Bob to check the waning moments of
Monday's spot market, the latest prices down at the NY Merc, and he
reported it had scooted up about twenty dollars an ounce. A little slow
maybe, but then we were just starting out. I figured it would probably
double in a couple of days.
Such was my fond hope as I drifted off for a nap on my desk. Tam
was in Tanaka's office, half-nodding in her chair, while Jim Bob was
sitting before his monitor, still nourishing himself with beer and colored
pills. I gave him the Uzi and told him to help Tam out by keeping an eye
on Tanaka and the two guards, all now sleeping like a baby. My last
vision was of Jim Bob sitting there, the Uzi draped over his wrinkled
white lap, clicking away at the keyboard.
I slept right through Emma's four-o'clock phone call from my office
downtown. When I awoke around nine P.M. Jim Bob mentioned she'd
rung. No message, he said. Then don't worry about it, I mumbled to
myself; get back to her in the morning.
Tam didn't seem to remember the call, which momentarily troubled
me. Had we both been dozing at the helm? Well, who could blame her?
In spite of my own nap I still felt like hell, so I dragged myself up,