"Besides, my fees can be substantial." They weren't all that substantial, but I was looking to slow him down.

"Your fees do not present a problem." He continued, "This afternoon a retainer of one hundred thousand dollars was deposited in your personal account at Chase."

"What in h.e.l.l . . .!"

"Money is of no consequence in this matter, Mr. Walton. Time is."

"You seem awfully sure I'll agree."

"We expect your involvement to begin immediately. I cannot stress too strongly the urgency of what you will undertake." He smiled thinly. "I also feel confident a man who enjoys a challenge as much as you do will find our undertaking . . . intellectually rewarding."

Seems I was hired and I hadn't even said yes.

This guy had another think coming. Besides, he could get anybody to do what he wanted. He didn't need me. As I stood

there, I started trying to guess the dimensions of Matsuo Noda's financial hedge. Taken all together, j.a.pan probably had roughly a hundred billion and change tied up in U.S. government paper. No way could he be thinking of covering more than a fraction of that. I knew plenty of law clerks who could do it, for G.o.dsake. A few phone calls to a couple of floor traders in Chicago . . .

"Look, the most I can do for you is recommend some very competent brokers I know to help you out. There shouldn't be too much to it.

You'll just have to go easy. You can't hit the market makers in Chicago with too much action all at once. Prices get out of kilter. Then, too, there are exchange limits. . . ."

"That is why we will be trading worldwide." Noda withdrew a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket. "Perhaps you'd like to glance over our program. These are c.u.mulative totals, which include our activity to date, but we will begin moving much more rapidly as soon as I've completed all the financial arrangements with our inst.i.tutional managers at home. Perhaps you will see why we need a monetary professional."

I was still chewing on the "financial arrangements" part as I took the paper, opened it, and scanned the schedule of contracts. While I stood there, the room around us sort of blurred out. I had to sit down again.

All his talk about samurai and nerves of steel was for real.

Matsuo Noda had a program underway to sell futures on a pile of U.S.

Treasury bills, notes, and bonds he didn't own, "naked," in an amount I had trouble grasping. I knew one thing, though: if interest rates headed down, raising the value of those presold obligations, he'd be forced to cover awesome losses. He'd be in a financial pickle that would make Brazil look flush. On the other hand, if some disaster occurred and U.S. interest rates suddenly shot sky high . . .

Numbers? The CBOT's long-interest contracts, notes and bonds, are in denominations of a hundred thousand each; the Merc's short paper, bills and CDs, are in units of a million per. Finally I did some quick arithmetic and toted up the zeros. Something had to be wrong here.

n.o.body had b.a.l.l.s that big. I decided to run through the figures again, just to be sure.

It was along about then that I realized all Noda's pious talk about sheltering j.a.panese widows and orphans had been purest bulls.h.i.t.

Resting there in my hand was the biggest wager slip in world history.

a.s.suming enough players could be found worldwide to take his action, he was planning to advance-sell U.S. Treasury IOUs in the amount of five hundred billion dollars. A full quarter of our national debt.

His bet: something or somebody was about to push America over the brink.

CHAPTER TWO

"Yo, counselor. Get thy b.u.t.t over here and buy me a drink."

I was standing in the smoky entry of Martell's, on the way back downtown from Sotheby's, when I heard the voice, a Georgia drawl known from Wall Street to Washington. And sure enough, leaning against the long mahogany bar, the usual Glenfiddich on the rocks in hand, was none other than Bill Henderson.

Long time, no see. I'd actually stopped by for a little ninety proof nerve medicine myself, not to pa.s.s the time with America's foremost cowboy market-player. But the idea of bringing in a Wall Street pro was most welcome. If anybody could dissect Noda's game, Bill was the man.

What was I going to do? I'd stalled on giving Matsuo Noda a final answer, telling him I needed time to think. Then just to make sure the whole thing hadn't been some sort of macabre hoax, I'd checked at a Chase bank machine on Lex. He hadn't been kidding. A retainer had been deposited all right, presumably by certified check, since it had already cleared. I was on the payroll, ready or not.

Noda was right about one thing. What he planned to do had grave international consequences. The problem was, his game had just one payoff. The way I figured it, he won if, and only if, the U.S. suddenly went broke. As international consequences go, that seemed reasonably grave.

Henderson was the perfect guru to take apart the scenario. a.s.suming he was sober. Tell the truth, at first glance I wasn't entirely sure. The guy looked a mess. I a.s.sumed he was holding some sort of private celebration, or maybe it was a wake. What was the occasion?

"William H., welcome back to town. Thought you'd decamped permanently down to D.C."

"Packed it in. Back to start making a living again. Could be I've just set some kind of new world record for the briefest tenure ever seen on the Council." He eased over to make room, while the jukebox began some Bobby Short standard about incomparable NY. "So where's your TV star tonight? Sure love that gal." He toasted Donna's memory. "If t.i.ts were brains, she'd be a genius."

s.e.xist? Tasteless? That was merely Henderson warming up.

I hadn't actually set eyes on Bill since an ill-fated birthday dinner Donna had thrown for him in midsummer, a favor to a producer friend of hers at the station who'd wanted to try vamping a real live millionaire. That evening he'd arrived with a serious head start on the whiskey, his meditation on the concept of birthdays, and then proceeded to regale those a.s.sembled with his encyclopedic repertoire of farmer's- daughter and traveling-salesman vignettes. In the aftermath, Donna swore she'd kill him if he ever set foot in her place again. When I made the mistake of speaking in his defense, she critiqued a few of my character defects as well, then added me to the list.

"Friend, no small thanks to you and that sordid evening, I haven't seen Donna since."

"That was a dark moment in my history. After listening half the night to that air-head producer she put next to me, I was in mourning for the hearts and minds of America." He revolved back to the bar. "What're you drinking?"

"Something serious." I pointed toward the single malt. Laphroaig neat.

Just then Bill paused to watch as two women in bulky raincoats brushed past. They receded toward the other end of the bar, settled their coats across an empty stool, and ordered drinks. One was a youngish blonde, a bit nervous, having some tall, colored potion that looked as if it could use a cut of pineapple and a plastic monkey on the gla.s.s. But the other one, brunette, was a different story. Pained eyes, with a psychic armor that could only be called battle-weary New York. Joanna, all over again. Tanqueray martini. Straight up.

"Hot d.a.m.n, sure is good to be back in this town." He was trying, without conspicuous success, to catch the younger woman's eye.

"Henderson, you're standing next to a man with some news that could well alarm you considerably."

"Like maybe this dump might run low on booze?"

"Not likely." I reached for my new drink. "I've got to make a decision, fast. So try to keep a clear head and see if you can help me out."

In my estimation Henderson was a phenomenon--sober or loaded. He'd emerged from the red clay hills somewhere in north Georgia, former football All-State ("I only did it for the p.u.s.s.y"), and ended up at Yale Law--where we shared an apartment for three whole years. By the time we'd finished our degrees, I figured I was ready to tackle real life, but Bill had hung in and gone for a Ph.D. in economics. Although his athlete's physique hadn't survived Yale--an early casualty of the single malt and the Dunhills--Henderson still had the delusion he was twenty-five. Easter before last he'd arrived at my place down in the islands with some leggy print model half his age and a case of Jack Daniel's Black. Did the redneck routine bamboozle the cautious hearts of his admiring ladies? Probably. Right under the radar.

All that notwithstanding, it was a commonly accepted fact that Bill was the sharpest private currency-trader on the East Coast. If tomorrow the dollar was about to dive, the guy who'd already sold it short tonight from Hong Kong to Zurich was invariably Henderson. That part of his life had been all over the papers the previous spring, after he got tapped for the President's Council of Economic Advisers. I guess some genius on the White House staff--urged on by that wily senator from New York, our mutual friend Jack O'Donnell--concluded the Council needed a pet "contrarian" on board for appearances, and Henderson looked to be a sufficiently pro-business prospect. Wrong. After a couple of interviews he was forbidden to make any more public statements. He'd failed to grasp that the national interest required fantasy forecasts just before elections. Bill may have been a master of subtlety when he was trading, but otherwise he tended to call a spade a spade, or worse.

"What's up?" He was about to punt with the blonde after one last try.

"Maybe you'd better go first." I took a sip, savoring the peaty aroma.

Let Henderson decompress in his own good time, then sound him out on Noda's chilling proposition. "What are you doing here?"

"Call it modesty and discretion." He turned back.

These were not, as you might infer, the first descriptors that leapt to mind whenever I thought of Bill.

"Care to expand?"

He slid his hand across the bar, extracted another Dunhill from its red pack, and launched a disjointed monologue starting with the G.o.ddam traffic in D.C., then proceeding to ditto coming in from LaGuardia.

All this time his cigarette had been poised in readiness. Finally he flicked a sterling silver lighter, the old-fashioned kind, and watched the orange flame glisten off the mirror at our right. "So, old buddy, that's it. All the news that's fit to print. History will record this as the moment yours truly bailed out. I figure it like this. If I can't read the signals myself these days, what in h.e.l.l am I doing giving advice? Time to hit the silk. Get back to making a living. Don't know how long this circus is going to last, but I figure we'd all better be saddled up and ready to ride, just in case."

As it happens, self-proclaimed ignorance was a crucial ingredient in Henderson's deliberate "country boy" camouflage, designed to disarm the city slickers. I estimated the professional dirt farmer next to me, Armani double-breasted and gold Piaget timepiece, was now worth about forty million, including a chunk of an offsh.o.r.e bank. Yet for it all, he still liked to come across as though he'd just moseyed in and wished somebody would help him through all this fine print.