I scribbled a few notes for Emma, taped them to her word processor, and headed out the door. Minutes later I was in their Third Avenue lobby, greeting the new security staff, several of whom, as a favor to Tanaka, I'd interviewed for their jobs.

Then I took the elevator up to DNI's offices on the eleventh floor and proceeded to have my argyle socks blown away.

First off, top security. The entryway just off the elevator bank had been completely transformed. TV intercom, steel doors—it could have been the vault at Chase. I told the camera's eye who I was and then waited while a computer somewhere gave me a voice-ID check. How they managed to have me in the system already I wasn't exactly sure . . . maybe they'd taken it off the phone?

After I'd cleared that, the doors slid open and I entered the first chamber of a two-room security check. An electronic voice ordered me to put my briefcase into the X-ray machine while I proceeded through the metal detector.

That cleared, the set of steel panels leading into the next room slid open and I went in . . . to be confronted by two crew-cut guards who could have been retired sumo wrestlers. As the doors clicked behind me, I took one look at DNI's welcoming committee and realized they were packing Uzis, those Israeli automatics that could probably cut down a tree in about two seconds. No candy-ass .38's for Dai Nippon. Without ceremony they commenced a body search. It was all very polite, but it sure as hell wasn't perfunctory. I just stood there in astonishment while this gorilla roughly twice my size felt me up.

That indignity completed, I was now in line for the real surprise. Yet another set of steel doors opened, and there awaited the man I'd been dealing with over the phone, Yasuhiro Tanaka. Medium build, late forties, cropped hair, automatic smile—he was Noda's chief of operations for New York. He didn't say much, just led me onto the floor, heading for his office. But he was clearly the on-site daimyd: lots of heavy bowing from the young, white-shirted Japanese staff as we headed for the corner suite.

Which brings us to the real shocker. Dai Nippon's floor operation looked like the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise. Let me attempt a brief description. In the far back was a massive NEC augmented supercomputer—a half dozen off-white octagonal units about head high, one the mainframe and the others storage modules arranged alongside in a neat row. Pure power. The whole thing was encased in a glassed room with (I assumed) critical temperature and humidity control. Then out on the floor were lines and lines of workstations. Computer screens everywhere, printers running, stacks of color hard copy—pie charts, bar graphs, spreads—plus terminals carrying every financial service offered by cable or satellite.

This was just the first, five-second glance. Incredible, I thought. There must be a heck of a lot more Japanese investment in the U.S. than anybody realizes.

But something had to be wrong here. Why should . . . ? Finally I slowed down—Tanaka was hurrying me along, clearly

annoyed that I'd appeared uninvited. That's when I noticed the rest. Across one wall was a line of projection TVs, on which computer data was being scrolled. As we walked past, I noticed that each screen seemed to be under the scrutiny of a team of analysts, who were intently studying the numbers, comparing notes, running calculations on their individual terminals.