"In the last five years? I guess it comes out to an average of about once a month. My grandchildren will be using up the last of my frequent-flyer miles."

"How often have you met with government people over there?"

Winston shrugged. "They're around a lot. But they don't matter very much."

"Why?" the President asked.

"Sir, it's like this: there're maybe twenty or thirty people over there who really run things, okay? Yamata is the biggest fish in that lake. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry is the interface between the big boys in the corporate arena and the government, plus the way they grease the skids themselves with elected officials, and they do a lot of that stuff. It's one of the things Yamata liked to show off when we negotiated his takeover of my Group. At one party there were two ministers and a bunch of parliamentary guys, and their noses got real brown, y'know?" Winston reflected that at the time he'd thought it a good demeanor for elected officials. Now he wasn't quite so sure.

"How freely can I speak?" Ryan asked. "We may need their insights."

Durling handled that: "Mr. Winston, how good are you at keeping secrets?"

The investor had himself a good chuckle. "Just so long as you don't call it insider stuff, okay? I've never been hassled by the SEC, and I don't want to start."

"This one'll come under the Espionage Act. We're at war with Japan. They've sunk two of our submarines and crippled two aircraft carriers," Ryan said, and the room changed a lot.

"Are you serious?" Winston asked.

"Two-hundred-and-fifty-dead-sailors serious, the crews of USS Asheville and USS Charlotte. They've also seized the Mariana Islands. We don't know yet if we can take those islands back. We have upwards of ten thousand American citizens in Japan as potential hostages, plus the population of the islands, plus military personnel in Japanese custody."

"But the media—"

"Haven't caught on yet, remarkably enough," Ryan explained. "Maybe it's just too crazy."

"Oh." Winston got it after another second. "They wreck our economy, and we don't have the political will to…has anybody ever tried anything like this before?"

The National Security Advisor shook his head. "Not that I know of."

"But the real danger to us—is this problem here. That son of a bitch," George Winston observed.

"How do we fix it, Mr. Winston?" President Durling asked.

"I don't know. The DTC move was brilliant. The takedown was pretty cute, but Secretary Fiedler here might have smarted his way out of that with our help," Winston added. "But with no records, everything's paralyzed. I have a brother who's a doctor, and once he told me…"

Ryan's eyeballs clicked at that remark, clicked hard enough that he didn't listen to the rest. Why was that important?