"Tell her. Look, I've gotta run."
"All right. Just advise your mother something unexpected came up. Maybe you and I can make it next weekend. We'll do the snow leopards, that's an absolute guarantee."
"Great. So long, Dad. Have fun."
I almost said "good-bye." Bad luck, I thought. So instead I said, "Take care."
Shortly thereafter Matsuo Noda, Tam Richardson, and yours truly were headed over to New York Helicopter's midtown pad, one of Noda's bodyguards in the limo with us. The battle was drawn.
Now as I looked down at the boroughs of New York gliding below, all those little strings of metallic beads lined up on the ribbons of asphalt, the backyards of New York's solid middle class glimmering with remnants of snow, I found myself wondering what Noda had planned for them.
Another imponderable still nagged at me as well: what about Akira Mori? Tam reported that by the time she'd arrived at the DNI offices this morning our friend had vanished. Ditto her information-packed attache case. As quickly as the lady had come, she'd disappeared back to Tokyo. But not with Noda. She'd gone on her own terms. Was he now using his new Concorde to try and head her off. What had she been doing here? Just hand-delivering MITI's latest "guidance"?
Maybe we were finally about to uncover everybody's real agenda.
Again my mind went back to ken and kan, Miyamoto Musashi's famous discourse on mental attitude in The Way of the Warrior, which he called heiho kokoro mochi no koto. What was merely appearances, ken, and what was kan, the global picture, the essence?
Noda had temporarily gained the upper hand, but now I realized that was almost to be expected. After all, he was a swordsman with decades of experience. So much for ken, my superficial observation. The real truth, kan, lay much deeper. And like all such truths it had to be elementary, elegantly simple.