"What are you saying?" Now Comrade Karanova had moved closer. "Is it really true you have the embezzled funds?" She examined Vance with a startled look, then glanced at Novosty, as though to confirm. His eyes were defeated as he nodded.

"You should check the desk here more often." Vance pointed toward the mahogany reception. "Photocopies of the open cashiers checks were dropped off for you at nine o'clock tonight. So maybe it's time everybody talked to me." He thumbed back at her two bodyguards. "For starters how about losing those two apes. Send them down to the park for a stroll. Then maybe we can talk. Over a drink. The vanguard of the proletariat sits down with the decadent capitalists. Could be there's a deal here yet. East meets West."

"Tell me what you want," Vera Karanova said, without noticeable enthusiasm.

"For starters, how about some protection. If these incompetents of yours can manage it."

"From whom?"

"Look, there's a deal cooking, and I think there's more to it than meets the eye. I do know there's a very smart individual, on the other side of the globe, who's got some very definite plans for Eva and me.

As well as for Mother Russia. I would suggest it might be in your interest to help us stop him while we still can. He's never played straight, and I don't think he's about to start now."

"I have my responsibilities too. Just return the money and we will handle the situation after that."

"The best thing you can do right now is stay out of the way. I've seen too many screw-ups out of Dzerzhinsky Square to turn this thing over to Moscow."

"Dr. Vance, you are playing a dangerous game."

"If you want to see the money again, it's the only game going. Now do we play or what?"

CHAPTER TWELVE

Monday 11:32 P.M.

"When did you receive this?" Tanzan Mino glanced over the cable message once again, then looked up. Although the time was near midnight, the aide had found him still behind his black slate desk. The lights in his penthouse office were turned low, muting the already dull earth tones of the walls. Neko paced across the expanse fronting the wide picture window, flicking her tail and anticipating her evening dinner of water buffalo _tartare_.

"Fifteen minutes ago, Mino-sama." He eyed the leopard nervously. "It was logged in on the eleventh floor, over the secure telex. I was reluctant to bother you at this late hour."

"When you live to my age, you no longer have the patience for sleep.

There is so much to do and so little time. Two or three hours are all I allow myself now." He tossed the paper onto his desk, then rose, strolled to the darkened window and, gently pushing Neko aside, gazed down. Below, the neon-lighted streets of Tokyo's Ueno district blazed.

"In a way this news is welcome. Perhaps the money is no longer in the hands of an incompetent. I have always preferred doing business with a professional."

"You would consider dealing with him?" The subordinate, in dark suit and crisp white shirt, tried to mask the surprise in his voice. The _oyabun_ had never let himself be blackmailed.

"You seem startled." He smiled, then walked over and extracted a raw steak from the cooler in the corner. Neko dropped to her haunches as he tossed it to her. "Don't be. I've spent a lifetime in negotiation."

That much, his subordinate knew, was true. Tanzan Mino had seen more deals than most men would in a hundred lifetimes. The most important ones had been the back-room kind. For thirty-five years, he'd funneled vast chunks of laundered cash to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's leading politicians, and as a result, he enjoyed final say over all its major decisions, dictating the choice of cabinet ministers, even prime ministers. He was the undisputed godfather of Japan's _kuroi kiri_, "black mist," the unseen world of political deal making.

The subordinate also admired Tanzan Mino's discretion. After his ascension to kingpin of the LDP, U.S. interests had funneled over $12 million in cash bribes through him to Japan's most powerful political figures, much of it handled by the Lockheed Corporation. In return, that corporation received over $1 billion in sales to Japan's government and civilian airlines, while the CIA got to sleep easy, knowing America's interests were receiving the close attention of Japan's decision makers. But then, when newspapers finally broke the story that Lockheed's American money had reached the highest levels of the LDP, Tanzan Mino arranged for a rival _kuromaku_, Yoshio Kodama, to take the fall. As befitted a true professional, he escaped without a hint of scandal.

It was a deft move that brought him much prestige among those in the circles of power. Besides, with a Yakuza income in the billions, he certainly needed none of the Lockheed money himself. His perennial concern, as everyone also knew, was what to do with all his cash. By the late fifties, Mino Industries Group already owned real estate, shipping lines, construction companies, trucking concerns, newspapers, baseball teams, film companies, even banks. Eventually, when Japan couldn't absorb any more investment, he'd expanded abroad, opening luxurious offices in other Southeast Asian cities, including new digs in Manila's Makati, the Wall Street of Asia, in Hong Kong, in Singapore (a favorite Yakuza town for recruiting prostitutes), in

Taipei, and on and on. But still, there was the money. And more money .

Kenji Nogami's predecessor had finally suggested the perfect solution to Tanzan Mino's cash dilemma. The safest, most welcome haven for Mino Industries' excess money was just across the Pacific, on the island of Hawaii, where his investments could be protected by the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. In the early sixties he opened a branch of his shadow investment company, Shoshu Kagai, in Honolulu, and today he was, through dummy corporations, the largest landowner in the state.

Having long since solidified his ties with former militarists and prominent rightists in the Japanese business community, Tanzan Mino turned abroad in the early seventies, offering deals and support to Pacific Rim strongmen such as Chiang Kai-shek, Syngman Rhee, Ferdinand Marcos.

All of it, however, had merely been preparation for this, his final objective. He was about to reclaim Japanese territory lost in the war, open Soviet Asia for Japan, and pillage the world's leading space program--all in one synergistic strike. Best of all, he was going to do it using foreign, _gaijin _money.