The Samurai Strategy Part 43

_Hai, so desu_. Yes, and he was deeply apologetic. Lots of _sumimasen_, very sorry.

At first I thought he just hadn't bought the story. But then it turned out that there were these rules, you see. No one was allowed on the floor weekends without a pa.s.s signed personally by Tanaka-san. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly two A.M. More heavy intakes of air and _muzukas.h.i.+'s_. Of course the honorable Dr. Richardson-san, being an honorable director herself, should be able to come and go as she pleased, but the rules . . .

He seemed to be pleading with Tarn to help him find a resolution for this towering dilemma.

"What's the problem, Tam?" I enquired, sotto voce.

"No f.u.c.king pa.s.s."

After an extremely awkward pause a light bulb clicked on in my simple mind. With great theatrics I suddenly slapped my own forehead, gave Tam a tip-off in English, and began rummaging my pockets. When we left the house I'd grabbed an old topcoat, not worn since that rainy night I met Noda, and in it somewhere was . . .

She started explaining that Walton-san may have brought the pa.s.s with him and merely let that fact slip his mind.

Then I felt what I was looking for, in the bottom of the inside pocket.

Noda's _meis.h.i.+_, his business card, complete with the English note scribbled across the back.

"How stupid of me," I apologized. "Had it all along. Noda- san's 'top priority' pa.s.s. He gave it to me only yesterday."

Yamada took the business card and studied it with a puzzled look. What did this have to do with anything?

That's when I impatiently turned it over and pointed to the English scribbling on the back. Noda's initials, I groused, right there at the bottom.

"_Hai, wakarimasu_." He understood that Noda-sama surely had written this, but so what? It wasn't the official form that the rules specified. More _muzukas.h.i.+_.

Noda-san was in a rush, I apologized again. Didn't have time to locate the regular form. Tam pa.s.sed that along in better j.a.panese.

"_Soo desu . . ._" Yamada thoughtfully agreed that such oversights sometimes happened. Everybody knew the big _daimyo _had a tendency to override official channels. He s.h.i.+fted his Uzi uncertainly.

"Noda-sama insisted I finish this report by Monday," Tam stressed. "We should only be a minute."

Yamada scrutinized the back of the card a moment longer, holding it up to the light. What was he going to do?

Finally he handed it back, bowed reluctantly, and looked the other way.

It was a go.

"G.o.d, that was close." Tam closed the door behind us and clicked on the lights. "You don't know how lucky we were. If Morikawa had been on duty tonight, forget it. He'd never have bought that c.o.c.k-and-bull routine."

About a dozen computer workstations had been installed

on twelve to link up with the mainframe and data center on eleven. As we moved quickly past the sleeping screens, blind eyes staring vacantly into s.p.a.ce, there was an eerie, ghostlike abandonment to the place, all the more so because of its hectic motion during regular hours. The phantoms of regimented a.n.a.lysts seemed to haunt the rows of empty desks. Tam remarked she'd never seen it like this: the nerve center off duty. Only the storm of the decade, together with two A.M. Sunday morning, could create such solitude. It took G.o.d to shut down Dai Nippon.

"Okay, time to move fast. Let's. .h.i.t Mori's lair." I was whispering as we neared the corner office. Ahead was the closed door, solid oak. I took a deep breath and reached for the k.n.o.b.

It was locked.

"No dice." I looked around at Tam, who was still wearing her lamb coat, gray against her dark hair, sleet melting on the shoulders.

"Let me try." She gave it a twist. Nothing. "I don't suppose we'd be very smart just to kick it in. Though that's what I feel like right now, after all our trouble." She turned to me. "Maybe there's a key somewhere in Noda's office? Think there's a chance?"

"Could be." I was rummaging my pockets. "First, though, let me check something."

I pulled out a ring and began to flip through it. "I ended up with a master, courtesy of the RM&S floor manager that day they turned in their keys. Now, if this internal door lock hasn't been changed yet, maybe . . ."I selected one and kissed it for luck. "Here goes."

The key, a large silver model, was resistant, the way masters always are. Undeterred, I wiggled it forcefully, and slowly it slipped into the k.n.o.b. A couple of jiggles more and the thing began to revolve under my hand.

We emitted matching sighs of relief as Tam shoved the door wide and reached for the light switch. "Now I've got to regress into the past. A lot of their reports are in j.a.panese." She went on to explain that although she could read the _kana _syllabaries easily enough, she'd forgotten a lot of the _kanji_ ideograms. She could piece together enough to work through a simple newspaper story, but heavy technical prose was always tough.

She quickly sorted through the papers piled in neat stacks

atop Mori's desk, but who knew what most of them said? Nothing looked like my stolen list. Next she checked the drawers of the desk. One contained a heavily marked printout; the others, nothing.

Time was ticking. If Yamada decided to make the rounds, no quant.i.ty of creative fiction would save us.

She quickly grabbed the printout. At least we had one item that might give us something. What, though, we still weren't sure. Nothing resembled the page I'd lifted, but locating that doc.u.ment now appeared increasingly like a long shot anyhow. Guess everything seems easy till you actually try doing it.

Where else to look?

I glanced around the room, wondering about the file cabinet. Probably locked, and besides . . .

That's when I saw it. On a side table next to some technical books was an item we'd both failed entirely to notice. A large leather attache case.

"Tam, I think we've hit pay dirt. Check that out. Do you suppose she could have forgotten it last night when they shut the place down?"

"Maybe she didn't need it. Anything's possible. I remember seeing her carrying it around yesterday afternoon."

"Well, could be this is our find." I lifted it . . . and realized it was empty.

"s.h.i.+t." I slammed it down, and just then detected a faint rattle inside. Hold on a minute.

I carefully shook it again and listened. "Tam, there's something in here."

"I vote we take a peek."

Which is what we did. No harm, right? I mean, the darned thing was just lying there. No "break and entry."

Guess what was inside. Not paper. Not a MITI report. Not lunch. Nothing in fact except for a s.h.i.+ny little compact disk, a CD.

"What the h.e.l.l is this doing in here? Did she bring along some Beach Boys?"

"Matt, that's an optical disk, a CD-ROM." She suddenly seemed very pleased.

"Huh?"

"Compact disk, read-only memory. Except this one looks to be erasable and writable. This is the latest thing in computer storage technology."

She held it up to the light, which reflected a rainbow of colors off its iridescent surface. "Maybe we've found what we came for. Let's take it and go."

"Is this like the CDs in record stores? The ones you play back using some kind of laser gizmo?"

"Same technology, only this is for text and data, not music. These can hold five-hundred megabytes, about one hundred and fifty thousand pages."