"We're about to undertake some corporate restructuring."
Tam proceeded to herd Tanaka and the guards into Noda's office, pausing just long enough to kill the phone wires. As he began to recover, he commenced sputtering about legal action and jail and general hellfire. Who cared? As of this moment, the offices and computer of Dai Nippon, International belonged to us.
Henderson was informed of our progress when his phone rang at exactly 4:48 P.M. He arrived, along with his Georgia Mafia computer expert, at 5:17, and Tam met them at the security doors.
I wasn't actually there to welcome them aboard, since I was guarding Tanaka just then and engaged in a small one-on-one with the man, explaining to him that Matsuo Noda's ass was ours. The president of Dai Nippon, I advised, was a few short days away from becoming everybody's lead story, featured as the Japanese executive who'd (apparently) rebelled against his homeland. Noda was no stranger to headlines, of course, but he preferred to engineer them himself, so this definitely wasn't going to be his style. Matsuo Noda was, albeit unwillingly, about to make history. As I broke this news to Dai Nippon's chief of New York operations, I sensed he was definitely less than enthusiastic about the prospect. Well, he'd have a few days to get used to the idea, since nobody was going to enter or leave the eleventh floor for a while.
It was still a bit difficult to believe what had happened. Or even more, what was next. But sometimes reality can have a way of outstripping your wildest powers of imagination—a Space Shuttle explodes, a nuclear meltdown in the Ukraine, ten-dollar oil, all of it too farfetched to make credible fiction. It could only exist in the realm of the real.
We were about to start moving billions and billions of dollars, fast. And since we didn't know how long we could continue before Matsuo Noda figured out a way to stop us, we were going to adhere to a schedule that covered the most vital sectors first—those outfits whose R&D Tam considered strategic to America's future technological leadership. Our goal for the first day was five billion, worldwide.
Thus the countdown began. Henderson's financial artist loaded Tam's new program tape onto DNI's big NEC supercomputer and cranked up. We had roughly sixty hours till the opening bell on Monday.
[CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN]
"It's the worst of times, buddy, and the best of times. Whatever dude once said that didn't know the half of it. He oughta be around now to check out the Street."