"You believe he was an American?" Tanzan Mino, president and CEO of the Daedalus Corporation, a paper creation of the Mino Industries Group, adjusted his pale silk tie and examined the subordinate now standing before him. He had just turned seventy-three, but the energy in his youthful frame made him seem at least a decade younger, perhaps two.
"Hai, Mino-sama." The other man, in a dark suit, bowed. "We have reason to believe the Russian has . . . they were seen exchanging an envelope."
"And your people failed to intercept either of them?"
The man bowed again, more deeply. "An attempt was made, but unfortunately the Soviet escaped, and the American . . . my people were unsure what action to take. We do know the funds have not been deposited as scheduled."
Tanzan Mino sighed and brushed at his silver temples. His dark eyes seemed to penetrate whatever they settled upon, and the uncomfortable vice-president now standing in front of him was receiving their full ire.
Back in the old days, when he directed the Mino-gumi clan's operations at street level, finger joints were severed for this kind of incompetence. But now, now the organization had modernized; he operated in a world beholden to computers and financial printouts. It was a new age, one he secretly loathed.
He'd been worried from the start that difficulties might arise. The idiocy of Japan's modern financial regulations had driven him to launder the payoffs thoroughly. In the old days, when he was Washington's man, controlling the Liberal Democratic Party, no meddling tax agency would have dared audit any of his shadow companies. But after a bastard maverick named Vance—with the CIA, no less!— had blown the whistle on his and the Company's clandestine understanding . . .
He had arranged the initial financing for the project, as well as the political accommodations, with letters of credit, promissory notes, and his word. And, eventually, if need be, the full financing could be raised by partial liquidation of his massive real estate holdings in Hawaii.
But the near-term expenses—and the necessary payoffs in the LDP—that was different. In Japanese kosaihi, the "money politics" of gifts and outright bribes, secrecy was everything. He remembered how he'd had to arrange for the mighty Yoshio Kodama, a powerbroker who had once shared his virtual ownership of the Japanese Diet and the Japanese press, to accept responsibility for the CIA-Lockheed bribe affair. It was a close call. That had involved a mere twelve million of American cash to Japanese politicians, but it had changed the rules forever. These days— particularly after the Recruit debacle had disgraced the LDP yet again—money had to be laundered and totally untraceable.
Promises had been made, schedules signed off, the veil of total secrecy kept intact. Everything was arranged. The Soviets, incompetents that they were, had no inkling of the larger plan.