"You still haven't told me anything I didn't already suspect." He tossed the pages onto a side table. "So how about answering a few less-obvious questions?" "Shoot."
"First off, what's this Operation Marketshare - 90 all about?" He took off his glasses and pocketed them.
"Jack, remember the famous Hitachi directive that got loose a while back, the one on how to market their 256K memory chips, ordering their salesmen just to keep underpricing American manufacturers till they had the sale, loss no object. According to Henderson, by the time the International Trade Commission got around to convicting them of dumping, they'd demolished America's domestic industry and nailed down ninety percent of the market."
"Ninety, you say. Well, that's getting to be a familiar number." He slumped back against the sofa. "Out of curiosity, what's included in this MITI Marketshare - 90 operation?"
"Computers, of course. But also pretty much everything in high tech where the U.S. still has a leading position—from biotech to aerospace. These guys don't think small."
I gave Ben a pat, then pulled Mori's printout around, going on to explain that we'd come across it in the drawer of her desk. It was, I added, obviously some kind of special computer sorting of the firms DNI was targeting. The categories in the sort were a breakdown of high-tech areas, with individual firms listed underneath, together with a summary of their research expenditures.
"Take a look. First, notice that this printout has been sorted and converted into this list here." I placed it alongside the page I'd found in the Xerox machine. "Voila, they're identical."
"So?"
"Okay, now compare that list with the R&D areas targeted in Ikeda's memo." I laid Tarn's translation down next to Mori's pages. "See? Everything on Ikeda's MITI wish list for research in semiconductors is now being done by the American outfits named here in Mori's sorting, which is the latest revision in DNI's acquisition program."
"What are you getting at?" He looked it over.