Part 67 (1/2)

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 h.e.l.lfire.

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 a.s.s was ours. The president of Dai Nippon, I advised, was a few short days away from becoming everybody's lead story, featured as the j.a.panese 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 n.o.body 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 s.p.a.ce 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 leaders.h.i.+p. 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 a.s.sault 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 scholars.h.i.+p 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 f.u.c.k fundamentals. Main thing is, if something makes sense, don't do it.

America's in the all-time s.h.i.+t, 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 a.s.sert, were like having a credit card in a wh.o.r.ehouse--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 tw.a.n.ged beer hall soliloquies on the general increase in faithless women, Jim Bob coded in the brokerage houses and offsh.o.r.e 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 offsh.o.r.e 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 Na.s.sau 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sociation 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 ma.s.sive 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 quant.i.ties 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. n.o.body 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 (G.o.d, 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 divest.i.ture of DNI's a.s.sets was an insane act doomed to failure. I might also add he didn't appear nearly as concerned as the circ.u.mstances 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 gla.s.sy-eyed protege took out enough time from popping ”uppers” and swilling Coors to a.s.sure us to the contrary.

”h.e.l.l, no way you could stop what we're settin' up here. We got ourselves what you call a closed system. Everything's