I hung up the phone very slowly.
"We've 'moved the shadow.'" I spoke the words to myself hesitantly, maybe even a little apprehensively. That was the name for a famous strategy of the seventeenth-century swordsman Miyamoto Mushashi, using a feint to lure your opponent into prematurely disclosing his battle plan.
The way I saw it, Matsuo Noda now stood revealed. It had all been a setup. The financial scam, the help-American-industry cover, the MITI "guidance." This was a takeover, all the way. A global takeover. What else could it be?
And the only people on this side of the Pacific who knew were Matt Walton and Tam Richardson.
For some reason that thought brought to mind the professor at Stanford, the AI guy who'd disappeared. What was it Tam had said? He'd had dinner at her apartment? Asked her to do something for him in Japan? And her MITI friend, whose name was all over that stack of memos on the table downstairs? Asano. Where did he fit in?
One thing, he'd helped Noda recruit her. They'd worked together, and their play had been flawless.
But now our friend Matsuo Noda had a small headache. Tam Richardson and Matt Walton had exposed the underside of his game. The shadow had moved. Which meant it would only be a matter of time before he struck.
Where was our weakness, hers and mine? What would cause us to lose our rhythm, to blunder? He'd already outmaneuvered Jack O'Donnell with ease. He had a master swordsman's unerring instinct for his opponent's weakness. So where was mine? I had to know it before he found it.
He'd realized Jack could be blackmailed, if the stakes were
his constituents' jobs and lives. But I didn't need a job. And the only life . . .