"I agree." Tam nodded concurrence. "We can leave it there and you could have somebody pick it up tomorrow."
"That's dangerous, for both of you."
"Maybe so," she said, "but he's going to come after this case, guns blazing, as his first priority. Ken, you're the one who's going to have to stay out of his way now, not us. The quicker you move, the better."
"You've got a point. All right, if you want me to, then I could take the copter back to Tokyo myself and you can use the Toyota." He was fishing for his keys. "In fact, maybe you should just leave now."
"Let me check the schedule." I'd asked his secretary for a listing of the afternoon and evening flights in case we got delayed. It was now one-thirty. The next flight that looked like a sure thing was a United at seven forty-two, or maybe the JAL at nine. Then there was a Northwest at ten-fifteen. Loads of time.
"Look, we can wait for the chopper and at least see you off. Why don't we head back over to the hotel and have a drink. Solemnize the occasion—the final nailing of Matsuo Noda."
"Fine." He started the car. "But both of you get only one, at least whoever's driving does. I want you back in one piece."
The hotel bar was beginning to feel like a second home, though now it was deserted, the lunch trade long departed. Our ceremonial libation also provided my first real opportunity to study Ken Asano at leisure. I sat sipping my Suntory while he repeated once again the details of his upcoming political move at MITI. Given any kind of luck, the flap would render Noda's takeover a worldwide scandal.
Good. Tam and I had been Noda's point men, had done everything we knew to assist him, and now it was clear he'd been using us all along for his own ends. He was bent on bringing American industry back to life for the sole purpose of skimming the cream.
What other reason could there be? Noda's noble intention supposedly was to help rejuvenate those American corporations doing basic research—but the price was then to let Japan lift that R&D and translate it into consumer technology, thereby keeping for his team all the elements of real economic value in the chain from laboratory to cash register. They would be the ones refining their strategic capacity to transform new ideas into world-class products and economic leadership. Japan would retain the advanced engineering segment of product development, while tossing a few low-skill assembly plants to the U.S. to make us think we were still part of the action. It would, of course, be a fatal delusion. The high-tech hardware of tomorrow's world increasingly would be Japanese, while America became an economy of paper-shuffling MBAs and low-paid grease monkeys assembling products we no longer were able to design or engineer.