Second Skin (4 page)

‘Linnear-san.’ Nangi’s face appeared on the flat liquid-crystal-display screen, incredibly clear via the digital video pathway. This vid-byte bandwidth communication was the technological breakthrough that made the CyberNet so valuable – and vulnerable to corporate espionage.

The opening of the TransRim CyberNet in Southeast Asia and Russia had generated an almost feverish scrutiny from Sato International’s rivals. In an age when the speed of information was everything, whoever controlled so-called cyberspace on the Pacific Rim would reap billions of dollars of benefits for the foreseeable future.

‘Nangi-san, where are you? The TransRim launch dinner is about to begin.’

‘I am aware of the time.’ Nangi interrupted in uncharacteristic fashion. He passed a hand across his face. Where was he? There was not enough background showing on the screen for Nicholas to tell. He only knew he wasn’t home. ‘But I have had something of a dizzy spell –’

‘Are you all right?’ A stab of fear went through Nicholas. ‘Have you called the doctor?’

‘There’s no need, I assure you.’ Nangi said hastily as his eyes flicked briefly to one side. Was someone in the room with him? ‘I am being well taken care of.’

‘But, Nangi-san, where are you? The guests are waiting.’

‘Yes, yes, I understand your concern,’ Nangi said as a small cup of tea was placed in front of him by someone unseen. ‘But I am not indispensable. The party can go on without me.’

Why was he keeping his whereabouts secret? Nicholas wondered. ‘Perhaps we should postpone the opening of the Net.’

‘Nonsense. It must be opened tonight.’ For a moment, some of Nangi’s old spark and fire returned. ‘We have far too much riding on its success. Postponement will only send rumors through the industry that would surely undermine confidence. No, no. I trust you and Tōrin to do the honors. Whatever help you need, he’ll provide. As my new right-hand man, he can be of extraordinary use to you.’

Nangi was about to disconnect from the CyberNet when Nicholas said, ‘Nangi-san, at least hear me out.’ He’d gotten an idea, but would Nangi go for it? ‘Perhaps there is a way to use your absence to work for us.’

Ill or not, this got Nangi’s attention. He lifted a hand. ‘Go on, please.’

‘Let’s make the first use of CyberNet in Japan a link from the dinner to you.’

‘No.’

Nicholas was puzzled. ‘But it’s perfect, Nangi-san. You can stay where you are, and everyone can see you blown up on the special screen that’s been erected downstairs.’

‘I said no and that’s final,’ Nangi snapped, and without another word, he disconnected from the Net.

Nicholas, whose loyalty to Sato was now joined with his loyalty to Mikio Okami, did not know whether he felt more puzzled or concerned. He could not imagine Nangi acting in such a cold and irrational manner. What was happening to his friend? These abruptly ended communications were fast becoming the rule rather than the exception. He knew Nangi was under extreme pressure in putting the CyberNet on-line, and at seventy-six he was no longer young. But Nicholas suspected these conversations could not merely be explained away by Nangi’s age. Had the heart attack somehow changed his personality? Nicholas resolved to see him in person when tonight’s dog and pony show was over.

As he checked his tuxedo, he took one last moment to evaluate his recent decision to join Mikio Okami, the Kaisho.

The Yakuza’s role in Japan was significant. Unlike in America, where the underworld was outcast from society, the Yakuza were, in a very real sense, a part of it. Even though they might still see themselves as outcasts, they were an unspoken part of what was known as the Iron Triangle that, since 1947, had ruled Japan: bureaucracy, business, and politicians. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry, MITI, had emerged as the most powerful of the postwar bureaucratic entities. It was MITI that dictated economic policy and allowed the
keiretsu,
the interlocked trading groups run by the top industrial families, tax breaks and incentives to move into fields that MITI determined would be best for Japan as a whole. It was MITI, for instance, that decided in the 1960s to encourage the trading companies to switch from the manufacture of heavy goods such as steel to computers and semiconductors. In this way MITI orchestrated Japan’s economic miracle and, simultaneously, made billionaires of the industrialists. MITI perpetuated its absolute control over business by sending its ex-ministers out to work at the very
keiretsu
for which it created policy.

But MITI had help. The Liberal Democratic Party, which had dominated Japan’s political scene from the forties through to its ouster in 1993, worked hand in hand with the ministry to keep Japan, Inc. on an even keel. This was relatively easy, since the Japanese people have been used to leaders taking care of them. Before the war, they had looked to the emperor for this. Afterward, it was a series of prime ministers from the LDP.

As for the Yakuza, they were the intermediaries who greased the wheels. For the proper remuneration, they ensured that the LDP remained in power by brokering each prime minister’s constituency. For the proper remuneration, they saw to it that the ‘political contributions’ the
keiretsu
made influenced the politicians to enact legislation favorable to business. And so it went for decades, an endless wheel of staggeringly swift progress and deeply entrenched corruption.

Until the great recession of 1991 brought everything Japan, Inc. had worked toward to a screeching halt.

Nicholas was about to go down to R&D when his Kami buzzed him. This time, he saw Mikio Okami’s face in the screen. Even with the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, accentuated now by the exhaustion evident on his face, he looked at least ten years younger than his ninety years.

‘Nicholas,’ he said without the usual ritual of formality, ‘I have momentous news.’ Without anybody else knowing about it, Nicholas had given him a prototype Kami so the two could keep in touch at all hours. CyberNet Communications were far more secure than most cellular phone conversations. ‘Tomorrow morning the prime minister will announce his resignation.’

Nicholas, feeling suddenly deflated, sat down on the edge of his burlwood desk. ‘That makes six in just over three years.’

Okami nodded. ‘Yes. As I predicted, without a strong LDP, the coalition of lesser parties cannot hold the center. There are too many different and mutually exclusive agendas for a true consensus to form. The Socialists, especially, have proven difficult, and this has weakened every new prime minister because he has been, in one form or another, something of a compromise.’

‘What are we to do now?’

‘That’s why I’ve called. This latest resignation will come as a complete shock to all parties. There is no one waiting in the wings, no strong foreign minister or trade representative ready to step up as has been the case before. There will be a power vacuum. This means political chaos and we cannot allow that.’

‘I think we should meet.’

Okami was nodding. ‘My thoughts precisely. The Karasumori Jinja the day after tomorrow at seven
P.M.
I will be tied up in urgent meetings until then.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Good.’ Okami looked visibly relieved. ‘How is the reception going?’

‘I’m about to find out.’

‘Good luck.’

Nicholas thanked him, then disconnected from the Net. He left his office, heading through the reception area, toward the private chairman’s elevator that would whisk him at high speed down to mezzanine level. He glanced at his watch. No time now to stop at R&D on the way down. Maybe he could break away during dinner so he could check on the CyberNet data transfer. As he fitted his key into the slot in the scrolled-bronze elevator door, he again heard Okami’s voice as the Kaisho had told him the real reason he had called in Nicholas’s debt of honor:

When you came to me last year and I saw how full of hate you were for the Yakuza, I could find no way to tell you the truth about your father. That he and I – the Kaisho, the head of all the Yakuza clans – were partners from 1946 until his death in 1963 in the creation of the new Japan. Then I was obliged to carry on his vision virtually alone.

Your father was the most remarkable visionary, and because you are his son, I finally summoned you to my side. Not to protect me as I told you – you have now seen that I am well capable of doing that with my own resources. It was merely the trigger to begin your healing, first, your rage at Koei’s mistake, and because of it, your unreasoning hatred of the Yakuza. So you could begin to understand the truth that lies behind your father’s carefully composed mask. And for you to accept that truth. It is time for you to continue the work Colonel Linnear and I planned together.

Two years before, Nicholas and Nangi had decided to buy the long-term lease of the stuffy French restaurant that had occupied the mezzanine level of the Shinjuku Suiryu Building when it had gone bust. For eighteen months, architects, technicians, and designers had been at work transforming a rather austere space into an opulent nightclub-restaurant suitable for entertaining on the grandest scale.

Indigo had opened three months ago to great fanfare and, so far, extraordinary success. But, tonight, it was closed to the public so that Sato International could have its TransRim CyberNet launch party.

The impressive three-story space was composed of an ascending series of flying-carpet-like platforms each occupied by three or four boomerang-shaped tables with semicircular banquettes facing onto a dance floor that had been laser-etched to resemble a vast Persian rug. Soft lights shone from high above the tables and, embedded in the dance floor, from below, giving the sensation of floating in a pool of blue-green light. Panels of cherrywood, stained indigo, rose in tiers at the restaurant’s curvilinear sides, and along one of them a long bar snaked, the lights glinting off its blued stainless-steel top. Bottles of spirits, liqueurs, and imported beers from Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and microbreweries in the States were arrayed on glass shelves hung against a long mirror.

When Nicholas entered, the dance floor was alive with extravagantly dressed people and the hubbub of a hundred conversations in at least a dozen languages. People were three deep at the bar, the three bartenders kept humming with a constant barrage of orders. The cool jazz of Miles Davis was drifting from the sixty-six speakers sunk flush into the walls, ceiling, and floor.

Heads turned at his approach, and it was no wonder. The guests saw a powerfully built man, graceful as a dancer with wide shoulders and narrow hips. What was most impressive – and intimidating – about him, however, was his fluidity of motion. He did not walk or turn as other people did but appeared to be skating on thin air, operating in very low gravity. When he moved, it was with all his weight in his lower belly, the place of power the Japanese called
hara.
He had dark, thickly curling hair that was at odds with the distinct oriental cast to his face – the high flat cheekbones, the almond-shaped eyes. Despite that, the face was long and bony, as if some English influence deep in his genes would not be denied its due.

Nicholas picked out Kanda Tōrin, headed toward him through the crowd. Still in his early thirties, Kanda Tōrin was a tall, slender man with a long, handsome face and the cool, calculating demeanor of a man with a decade’s more experience. Nicholas’s opinion of him was still not completely formed. He had apparently proved to be an invaluable aide to Nangi during Nicholas’s absence. So much so that Nangi had recently promoted him to senior vice president, an unprecedented level for a man his age.

To be truthful, Nicholas resented the younger man’s presence. It compromised his special relationship with Tanzan Nangi. That Tōrin was astute, perhaps even, as Nangi believed, brilliant, was beyond question, but Nicholas suspected he was also gifted with an overweening ambition. His power grab at the CyberNet was a prime example. Or was Nicholas being too harsh with his judgments? Tōrin could simply have had Sato International’s best interests at heart, filling the vacuum Nicholas had left. Still, Nicholas could not entirely shake the impression, admittedly hastily gleaned, that Tōrin was a team player only so long as it suited his own needs. That was a potentially dangerous trait.

As Nicholas approached, he saw that Tōrin was being harangued by a florid-faced American with curly red hair and the belligerent demeanor of a man too long frustrated by Japan’s arcane and maddening protective barriers. Unfortunately, this was the attitude of too many Americans these days. Nicholas recognized this one as Cord McKnight, the trade representative of a consortium of Silicon Valley-based semiconductor manufacturers.

Nicholas circled around until he was standing behind Tōrin’s right shoulder.

‘You poor bastard,’ McKnight was saying. With his strong face and stronger ideals he would not have looked out of place on the athletic field of an Ivy League campus. His pale eyes, set wide apart, gave nothing away. ‘Was it only three years ago you guys bought into Hollywood, Manhattan, Pebble Beach, and two-thirds of Hawaii at prices no sane businessman would touch? Yeah, it’s gotta be ’cause now that your bubble economy’s burst, you can’t afford to hold on to anything you bought.’

Tōrin said nothing, either out of good sense or an acute sense of humiliation. The recession had had an incalculable emotional effect on the younger men of Japan, Inc. These men had become used to their supreme power – their
ichiban,
their number-one-ism. The concept of Japan as number two, inconceivable only four years ago, had caused a severe shock to their egos.

‘I mean, look what’s happening now,’ McKnight went on as a small crowd began to form. In among the curious onlookers Nicholas saw Koei and Nguyen Van Truc, the Vietnamese head of marketing for Minh Telekom, a company that had been trying to interest Nicholas and Nangi in accepting a capital infusion in exchange for a piece of Sato. ‘Japan’s already a second-rate power. Remember, when you were bashing our education system? You don’t hear any of that crap now.’ His lips cracked a superior smile. ‘Wanna know why? You guys are turning out computer-illiterate graduates. While we use computers in our schools from the ground up, you find them too impersonal. Your elaborate and cumbersome rituals of doing business are impossible to carry out via computer, so you think of it as a symbol rather than a tool.’ He laughed raucously. ‘You’d rather use a fucking abacus, for Christ’s sake.’