Kusanagi (22 page)

The lift door opened to reveal four men with stun guns. They'd have to be dweebs not to get the better of her. There was no time to let them surround her. They were fanning out. The guy to the left jabbed at her and she kicked him in the chest. He fell. She grabbed the guy to the right as he lunged – but the charge from the guard in front shot through her. She flipped backwards, then cried out as another shot pulsed through her.

When she woke up, she hurt like hell. They'd done a good job of tenderising her. The gorilla was looking through the bars. She lay there for a few moments, then hoisted herself up. At least they hadn't stripped her. ‘You should have come and given me a hand,' she said, sitting down by the beast. It put a hand on her head and stroked her hair.

Jane was wondering whether she was going to get another chance. She looked around the cage. The plate was gone. She checked her pocket. Not unsurprisingly the cufflinks were gone too.

The necklace felt hot around Jim's neck, the ends of the jade teeth pressing into his flesh – like fingers. He adjusted it. Then he jumped to his feet. ‘Fuck me,' he said. ‘Kimcorp! Is that like a listed company?'

Akira looked up from the photos. ‘Yes, Evans-san, on the TSE main market.'

‘Main market listed?'

‘Yes.'

Jim sat down again with a bump. ‘Well, well, well.' He clutched the necklace under his shirt. ‘You know what? I think I might have a bit of an idea brewing.'

Jane stood in front of the gorilla. She put her right hand on a bar and the gorilla did the same. She gripped a bar about a foot away with her left hand and the gorilla copied her. She stood on the two middle bars, then pulled with her hands and pushed with her feet, trying to wrench the bars from their moorings. They didn't move – but the gorilla might have the strength to bend them and shatter the welding.

The gorilla watched her curiously, seeming amused by her antics.

Jane dropped down from her braced position. ‘You don't get it, do you?' she said, laughing a little. She scratched the back of her head.

The gorilla scratched its head too, then offered a hand to Jane. She took it. ‘Got to get out of here,' she said, ‘before it's too late.'

She let go of the gorilla and walked to the middle of the cage. She sat down, legs crossed, and put her hands into her lap. She closed her eyes. She was going to clear her mind. Then she was going to send herself out of her body, float around the cage and imagine it afresh. There was always an answer to any puzzle; it was just a matter of working it out. Once you had the answer, it seemed obvious, but before you had it, it could stare you in the face and you wouldn't see it. Calm was the platform of survival. It didn't matter how desperate you were or how close to death, calm was a prerequisite for rescue.

As she stilled herself she imagined she was like the gorilla: sentient but not quite smart enough to work out a way to escape. If she could double her IQ, she could waltz out of there, but instead she had to strain for the insight that would set her free.

In trying to fly beyond the boundaries of her mind, she hoped to release herself from her preconceptions and assumptions. Her mental bonds trapped her as effectively as the bars. That was why the mad were especially dangerous. Their thoughts were untrammelled, their solutions often unimaginable to the normal mind. Without the limitations of the sane, they could find the doorway to another level. This was the doorway she sought.

‘Do the obvious,' she told herself.

She stood up and walked to the ledge where the tiger had lain. She had hidden the chopsticks there. She had put them on the other side of the bars where the cage frame met the floor and was shielded by the ledge. She squatted down, pushed her hand along the cold edge of the metal cage, and fished out a chopstick.

She smiled. They'd missed it.

She climbed onto the ledge and put the chopstick between her teeth. The bars of the cage were about six foot above, but the tiled shelf had a ridge to grip about three feet above her reach. She scrambled up the wall to it and hoisted herself onto the bars. She balanced, adjusted her grip, then swung from bar to bar. She turned, rotating ninety degrees to hang between the horizontal bars. She had become so strong over the years that the stress of holding her own weight by her hands was of no account. Finally, all those years of swinging on frames were actually proving useful.

Jane swung her legs up between the bars and wrapped them around one so that her weight was braced by her feet. She slid along it until she was comfortably below the CCTV camera. She took the chopstick out of her mouth and stretched out to the CCTV with the point. The extra six inches of wood gave her the necessary reach to stab it.

The camera wasn't designed to take abuse and, after a couple of minutes, the plastic eyeball fell out of its housing and hung on its wires. Jane put the chopstick back between her teeth, reached up as far as she could and took the camera in her fingers. She tore it out and dropped it onto the floor.

That's better, she thought. A little privacy.

She unlocked her legs and hung from the bar, six feet off the ground. She looked out of the window into the blue sky of the Tokyo afternoon. Hanging felt good: it was like stretching. About half a mile away a chopper was hovering parallel to the window. She focused on it. It was at the same level as her window and in line with it. She dropped to the floor, ran to the window and waved frantically. The aircraft's nose dropped and it headed away.

Had it come for her? Was it her people, the DIA? Was it just another pervy moment from the creeps holding her in the cage? Was a tourist having a look at the zoo on the sixty seventh floor?

She sat down and went back to clearing her mind.

‘Evans-san,' called Akira, ‘we have confirmation. Please come and see.'

Jim walked to Yamamoto's desk and looked over Akira's shoulder. There was a picture of Jane hanging behind the bars of a cage. ‘Oh, bloody hell,' moaned Jim.

Akira flicked onto the next image. Jane was on the ground, waving at them. ‘Thank goodness for that,' sighed Jim, ‘I thought she was strung up.'

‘No, Evans-san,' said Akira. ‘She looks to be all right.' He flicked through the images uploaded from the chopper.

‘I hope they haven't spotted the helicopter,' said Jim.

Akira didn't reply directly. ‘There is no building that overlooks this side of Kim's head office. It was the only way to be sure.'

Jim nodded. ‘I know,' he said. ‘Now we've got to get in there and bust her out.' He picked up his satellite phone. ‘Here goes. If this doesn't work, I'm just going to go in there on my own.'

‘I will be with you,' said Akira, clenching the fist on his short arm.

For the DIA man it was two a.m., but when his phone rang he answered. ‘Hi,' he said, his voice gravelly and slow.

‘Will, it's Jim.'

Will sat up in bed. ‘What's up?'

‘I've found Jane.'

‘Go ahead.'

‘I need your help to get her to safety.'

‘Where is she?'

‘Tokyo.'

‘Leave it to us.'

‘No,' said Jim. ‘She'll be dead as soon as you make a call to the authorities.'

‘What's going on?'

‘North Koreans connected at the highest level in Japan. I can rescue her if you'll help me, but it has to be fast and it has to be now.'

‘I'm listening.'

‘OK, this is what I need.'

Kim was sneering at the doctor.

‘I'm afraid, Kim-san, that your heart is weak. You need more rest before you can resume work.'

He didn't reply, just held the oxygen mask to his face. The tranquilliser had laid him so low that he had nearly died. He knew he was unfit, and he had not made his health a priority, but he had been shocked to discover just how weak he had become. Now he lay disconsolate in his bed, confused, his whole body aching to sleep again.

He hated the doctor for the news and despised the nurses who tended him. He was nauseated by the thought that they should see him in such a pathetic and vulnerable state. When he regained his strength he would go up to the zoo and shoot the woman. She was a demonic banshee and had to be liquidated at all costs. He didn't have the strength to imagine what else he would do with her, but it would come to him. Then he would know he was strong enough to get up.

Jim was downloading his trading software onto James Dean Yamamoto's computer. He was praying it would work. Software was almost guaranteed not to work first time. Whatever could go wrong would go wrong.

The installation ended with a prompt for his login and password. ‘Ah,' he said, mildly surprised that it was working. He typed in his ID and his password: jelliedeel. He offered a prayer to the gods of binary.

‘Yes!' he exclaimed, as the desktop booted up. There was an hour and twenty minutes before the close of trading in Tokyo. He pulled up Kimcorp's stock chart. It looked OK – but he smiled when it dawned on him that the chart looked as if it was going to crash. ‘You betcha it is! And I'm going to crash it.'

He called his friend at the bank, Sebastian Fuch-Smith.

‘Jim?' came the startled reply at the other end. ‘You've caught me heading to work.'

‘You want to make some money?'

‘Me, mate?' said Sebastian, every syllable honed at Eton. ‘I'm never unhappy to make a little extra cash, old chap.'

‘Kimcorp on the Tokyo exchange. It's about to go down like a duchess.'

‘When?'

‘Any time now – count to a hundred if you like. Tell the floor.' Jim hung up.

Akira pulled up a chair next to him. ‘May I watch?' he said.

‘Sure,' said Jim, as he laid out the chart of the stock in the right-hand corner of the screen. He placed the order window – the interface where he entered buy and sell instructions to pick up or let go of shares he was trading – to the left. He had all kinds of orders he could place and robots to slice and dice them before they were sent to the market. For Jim it was like a textual version of a computer game where armies were massed and sent against the troops of other players. In this game there were only buy and sell orders and whether, when you called a move in the market, you were right or wrong.

Traders would stare at charts, hoping to guess the next few seconds and thereby glean an advantage over the other players, but with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people buying and selling, the outcome of every following moment was strictly random, or so it seemed and so they said.

Yet for Jim what happened next was obvious. He was supremely rich because he could see what would happen while others had simply no idea.

‘What are you going to do?' asked Akira.

Jim grinned. ‘I'm going to crash the Kimcorp stock price.'

‘I know Evans-san, but how?'

‘Do you buy shares, Akira?'

‘Not really.'

‘Is that no or yes?'

‘Occasionally.'

‘OK.' Jim was watching pressure increase as Fuch-Smith and the London bank started to sell. ‘When a stock is falling do you want to buy?'

‘No.'

‘When a share is rising do you want to buy?'

‘Most likely.'

‘So you have some shares and the share price suddenly starts falling heavily. What do you want to do?'

‘I want to cry,' Akira said, as if he had actually experienced such a moment.

‘Well, apart from that, do you feel more like selling?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to make people want to sell. First, though, I'm going to own the market.'

‘Own the market?'

‘I'm going to buy from all the sellers and I'm going to sell to all the buyers, and when they're all satisfied and gone, I'm going to fill up all the places for buyers and sellers with my orders and I'm going to control the price. Then I'm going to walk the price down.'

‘Walk the price down?'

‘I'm going to sell when the buying is weak and make the price fall even further. Then I'll let it settle, maybe buy some back. Then I'm going to do it again and sell it down. The price will fall and fall and at some point panic selling will set in.

Then, when the market collapses and pukes, I'll buy back again and I might even make a profit. I'm going to do it again and again and again. By the time I've finished Kimcorp's share price will be a smoking crater.'

‘Is that legal?'

Jim smiled at him. ‘You are the one with the
carte blanche
, so you tell me.'

‘Yes,' agreed Akira, ‘you are correct and I think this is a good use of our permission to do what is required to be done.'

Kimcorp's share price was already falling gently.

‘Right,' said Jim. ‘Let's get going.' He filled the input screen with a series of orders. ‘Bombs away.'

In the hour and a quarter to close, Kimcorp dropped 32 per cent. The news wires buzzed with speculation. Had Kim-san died? Was Kimcorp mired in scandal? Was Kimcorp in breach of its banking covenants and therefore on the brink of bankruptcy?

James Dean Yamamoto walked behind Jim and bent down to the screen. He exclaimed in Japanese. Jim grinned up at him.

Akira said, ‘Yamamoto-san says you are a very frightening person.'

‘I wish my nan was alive to hear you say that,' he said. ‘She might have been impressed.'

Jane smashed the camera casing on the floor. It cracked open like a walnut. She examined the pieces. There was a lens, a circuit board and a small aluminium frame bent for the assembly to nestle in. She broke out the components and spread them in front of her. She picked up the metal housing and bent out one side. It would make a blade of sorts. Blades were good. It might be what she was searching for.

Much later Jane looked out into the night. A set of lights far in the distance hovered in the sky. She waved.

‘She's seen us,' said Jim.

Akira translated.

‘Oooh!' said Yamamoto. ‘Time to leave then. If she has seen us, others might.' He piloted the helicopter away.

Whoever you are, thought Jane, I hope you're friendly. And if you are, get on over here fast.'

Kim lay in bed, dozing, the morning light illuminating the room with a bluish tint. His apartment took up the floor below the zoo. It was modern and minimal. The whole floor was more of a facility than a home. He didn't like decoration unless it was a priceless antique. Then it was just another asset and, like all his assets, hocked to the banks.

Sometimes, like now, lethargy overcame him and he would lie there for two or three days, exhausted. Great pleasure was usually succeeded by something like despair; after victory came disappointment.

This time the exhaustion was unbounded. Although he was physically recovered the malaise had overtaken him. The tranquilliser had triggered it.

His assistant came into his room. ‘The finance director must see you now. He assures you it is of vital importance.'

Kim sat up.

Toyoda entered respectfully and bowed. ‘Our share price has collapsed.' He opened a folder and handed Kim a sheet of paper with Kimcorp's stock chart on it.

‘What has caused this?'

‘I do not know. This morning our share price is falling again. The banks are bound to start calling soon. Soon we will be in breach of our debt conditions.'

Kim's stasis was replaced by anger and fear. ‘When?'

‘In theory we are in breach if the market falls another twenty-five per cent.'

‘I will be in my office in twenty minutes. Leave me.'

Jim was hammering Kimcorp. He owned the market in the stock. Kimcorp and other stocks traded via a system called an order book. It collected all buying and selling into one place and, via the coming and goings of buyers and sellers, settled the price. It was like a rolling auction that matched up the people trading the share. Jim had muscled in and overwhelmed the other players. Kimcorp would normally trade fifty million dollars of stock a day and move a percentage point or so. Now Jim had waded in, he had taken control of the price and was driving it down. He was cornering the market.

Market corners, as they were called, were as old as markets themselves. Cornering the market in a commodity or stock was an old game and always ended badly. The market was always right in the end and you couldn't fix the price of anything for long. At some point the market would bite back and hurt the manipulator. Whether it was the silver corner, by Bunker Hunt the Texan billionaire, Enron cornering electricity, or the oil corner of 2008, sooner or later it had imploded and prices went back to normal. Corners were usually about making a price go abnormally high, but in this case Jim was forcing a price down. He was crashing the stock by bullying the market.

And, of course, he had an advantage: he could see what was going to happen next an hour or two at a time and could accentuate the moves he wanted. By making money from them, he ploughed the profit into forcing the price the way he wanted it to go.

Fundamentally Kimcorp was bust and he could see it in the company's stock chart. He was just accelerating the inescapable gravitation forces of financial reality. With the picture of Jane hanging from the bars beside his keyboard, he was trading Kimcorp into the ground.