She reached up and loosened his tie, then began unbuttoning his shirt. His chest was firm, smooth, scented. She wanted him. "Let's just remember Kyoto for a while."
"I've never forgotten it."
Sometime around four A.M., more content than she had been in a long, long time, Tam Richardson lay awake on the cool sheets, Ken's trim body beside her, and wondered how it would end this time around.
Or possibly, just possibly, it wouldn't.
[CHAPTER E]IGHT
Back in New York, optimism was in increasingly short supply. What do you do if you think you're being set up? One thing, you may have occasion to muse long and hard about the consequences, personal and otherwise. You also may choose to ponder the larger motives of the individual behind it all.
So far, what had happened? Matsuo Noda had hired Matt Walton, corporate attorney-at-law, to begin shorting the American Treasury market, then proceeded to make himself a bona fide hero back home, in the process of which he acquired access to the biggest chunk of savings in the world, presumably the "financial arrangements" he once alluded to. Using that money as margin, Noda was ready to shift his play into high gear. My latest telexed instructions indicated he was poised to accelerate dramatically, "borrowing" bonds and selling them for whatever the market would pay. Of course if the price went down anytime soon, he could then replace those borrowed instruments at some fraction of what he'd sold them for. The man was gambling, for godsake. With the "Emperor's" fund.
Or was he? Therein, as somebody once said, lies the rub. Short selling has always been a reasonably good definition of gambling, except . . . except you are gambling only if you are wagering money on an event whose outcome is not precisely known. If you do know it, you are not gambling. You are taking prudent steps that will allow you to benefit from prior knowledge of said, etc.
Enough airy semantics. The big question: Why me? Now, I've been set up a few times before in my life. Everybody has. I even wonder in darker moments if the reason Joanna demanded a champagne lifestyle wasn't to make sure I spent all my time supporting it, thereby rendering me exactly what she eventually accused me of being—an absentee husband and father. That is a no-win situation.