Still, though, there were problems. Always problems. First, the news he had just received: The laundered funds still had not been delivered. Then there was the matter of the NSA cryptographer who had been given an intercepted copy of the protocol. Three men had been lost attempting to retrieve it, but she remained at large. That was unacceptable. It had to be reclaimed, no matter the cost, lest there be a premature exposure of the plan. Timing was everything.
Added to that was the puzzling matter of the Soviet test pilot, on whom the fate of the entire project hinged. He'd begun making outrageous demands, insisting on moving up the first hypersonic flight to Friday. Why? He'd once spent time in the United States as an exchange pilot. Could he be fully trusted?
Tanzan Mino had finally, reluctantly, approved the schedule change, though his instincts told him to beware. His instincts rarely failed, but it was better not to appear too inflexible too soon. At this stage the test pilot had become the crucial component of the project. Sometimes you had to bend to get what you wanted, and instincts be damned.
As if all that were not enough, he'd just heard an unsettling rumble out of London concerning Kenji Nogami, a _Mino-gumi kobun _for thirty years, a man he'd made rich.
He turned his attention back to the computer screen and studied the numbers once more. However, he could not concentrate.
The problems. He felt his anger rise, unbidden. He was too old for problems. Surmounting human incompetence was a young man's game. He had, he told himself, struggled enough for a dozen men. And now, having dedicated himself to fashioning Japan's twenty-first century ascen- dancy, he no longer really cared about money. No, what mattered now was the triumph of the Japanese people, the emperor, the Yamato spirit.
His countrymen, he had always believed, shared a noble heritage with another race, one distant in time and place but brothers still. Both the modern Japanese and the ancient Greeks had pursued a mission to refine the civilizations around them, offering a powerful vision of human possibilities. They both were unique peoples chosen by the gods. He wanted, more than anything, for the entire world to at last understand that.