Escape (6)
I still hadn’t made up my mind, so I said to him, “If you’re planning to retire for good, then you can spend your old age there in comfort. If not, then you can start preparing for the second act of your life.”
“The second act of my life?”
“Jordan and Saudi Arabia are neighbors. As you know, Saudi Arabia has recently been trying to reshape its economy so it doesn’t depend only on resources. One of those efforts is Neom City, a massive construction project.”
Saudi Arabia had money, but it didn’t have many capable executives. That was because it had spent so long doing nothing but selling oil.
Samara, though, had the kind of talent that could turn Kionos, a company that had been bleeding red ink for years, into a profitable one. On top of that, he was from Jordan, so he spoke Arabic too.
It was a waste to let ability like that rot away.
“If you take some time to rest there, people who need you will come looking for you.”
“Hmm. In Saudi Arabia, you mean?”
Given Continue Capital’s ties with PIF and the way Saudi Arabia was moving right now, it was obvious I wasn’t talking nonsense.
He had come from an immigrant family and climbed all the way up to the top by sheer force of will. A man like that wasn’t going to be satisfied with money alone, or content to fade away as some forgotten old man in the back room.
If he fled Japan and reemerged as a manager somewhere else, wouldn’t that be revenge of its own kind?
Most people only think as far as escape. To go one step further and even design the life that came after it? That was what I called customer service.
His expression didn’t quite reach gratitude, but it did look as though the idea appealed to him.
“Why are you helping me?”
“Ah! I just can’t walk past someone in trouble and ignore them. It’s the way I’m built.”
Samara gave me a look of open disbelief.
“You expect me to believe that? Maybe you’re helping me escape just so you can stab me in the back later.”
“What? Are you seriously doubting me?”
“I’m afraid I learned the hard way that once you’ve been taken in, you can’t trust people so easily.”
“Fair enough. You were probably betrayed by the person you trusted most.”
As if remembering Masaki Saito, Samara let out a bitter smile.
Saito, who had originally been assigned to the home-appliance division, had been supposed to get the axe during the sale.
Instead, Samara had promoted him to his heir apparent and closest aide.
The reason he’d gone out of his way to pull someone away from the appliance division was simple: Japanese companies tended to harbor a deep resentment toward foreign CEOs. So he had needed someone he could truly call his own.
Saito had lived up to those expectations and supported him with everything he had.
Samara sighed. “He was a good one.”
He probably never imagined he’d be stabbed in the back by the very successor he trusted.
...That was the easy way to think about it, anyway. The truth was that Samara hadn’t trusted Saito blindly.
He had put his own safeguards in place. He’d just been taken down before he could use them.
I told him why I was helping him.
“As you know, we’re working with Yuseong Electronics, and we’re also buying shares through the Rush Fund.”
Samara understood immediately.
“So you want to shake Kionos and push Yuseong Electronics’ stock higher?”
“That alone isn’t enough. We’re planning to bet on Kionos falling, too.”
After Yuseong Electronics’ announcement, Yuseong Electronics’ stock had fallen, while Kionos had risen by more than 30 percent.
The market had priced in expectations that Kionos would win future contracts from big tech companies. If those expectations turned to dust, the stock would fall harder than it had risen.
He snorted. “Continue Capital really does love short selling.”
“Well... yes, I suppose it does.”
The first time we’d made our name was with the short against Thomas Motors. Somehow, we had ended up branded as nothing but shorts and put traders.
And, to be fair, we had shorted a lot of companies.
After all, it’s easier to drive a stock down than to push it up.
I asked him, “Then let me ask you the opposite question. Why should I trust you?”
Samara looked incredulous.
“What do you mean?”
“If you escape and then change your mind, we could be in a bind, couldn’t we?”
The reason I was helping him escape was so that he would expose everything.
If he closed his mouth for any reason, this plan would fail.
I knew he had gone public in the first timeline, but now that the timing had been moved up because of me, there might be other variables at play.
It wouldn’t hurt to build in a failsafe.
“And what exactly are you expecting me to do?”
“As I said at the beginning, I came to introduce you to a good investment product. You should bet on Kionos falling, too.”
“What?”
“If you did it directly, it could be considered stock manipulation, so I’ll set up a paper company fund. How about investing through that?”
Samara’s mouth fell open in disbelief.
“What?”
“I’ll make sure the profits are guaranteed. You didn’t even get your severance or your stock options, did you? Since SPME and Kionos aren’t going to take care of you now, shouldn’t you at least make sure you get your own share?”
At that, Samara burst out laughing.
“Hahaha!”
What in the world was more reliable than money?
A little later, Samara spoke again.
“How does the plan work?”
“It’s not that difficult.”
I laid out the escape route I’d prepared.
When I finished, he looked at me as if he couldn’t quite believe what he’d heard.
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“It seems a little flimsy.”
Excuse me, but this flimsy method was exactly how you escaped in the first timeline.
Everyone who heard the plan seemed to react the same way.
“Were you expecting something like Mission Impossible or 007? If you want a shootout or to hang from a helicopter by a single rope, I’ll go find you that kind of method.”
“...That’s fine.”
Apparently, he didn’t want to do that at his age.
I told him, while he still looked doubtful, “We’ve already run two dry runs, and we’ve confirmed that there aren’t any problems.”
Once he heard we’d practiced it, he seemed to trust it a little more.
“But to carry out this plan, we’d need to hold a party at the house. What kind of party are you talking about?”
In the original timeline, his escape had taken place right after Christmas next year.
“Is there any holiday coming up soon?”
“No. My birthday’s in August, and my wedding anniversary... when was that again? I think it was sometime in the fall.”
“...”
If he didn’t want to end up divorced in his twilight years, he ought to start memorizing that date now.
Either way, this was the problem: we needed a party, but there wasn’t a single anniversary coming up within the next few months. If we threw one for no reason, it would look suspicious.
Unlike next year, when surveillance would be a little looser, things were pretty tight right now.
Fortunately, I had already thought of a solution.
“Then how about we do it this way?”
After our talk ended, I left Samara’s house and returned to the JR Blackwood Hotel.
The plan was already in place, so all that was left was to execute it. If everything went smoothly, Samara would be able to escape Japan before the month was over.
What mattered now was our investment position.
As expected, I planned to throw every last bit of our capital into shorting Kionos. If I wanted to stay under the radar, it would be better not to touch options at all.
I was sitting in the café in the lobby, drinking coffee and sketching out the investment plan, when someone approached me.
He addressed me in English.
“Hello.”
When I looked up, I saw a Japanese man who looked to be in his late forties.
He wore a suit and a Burberry coat, along with gold-rimmed glasses. His build was ordinary, his face unremarkable, but there was something faintly authoritarian about him all the same.
I asked him, “Who are you?”
“Ah! I’m someone like this.”
He handed me a business card. There was no English on it, only a field of kanji. I couldn’t read his name, but I could read the company.
“Oh? You’re with the Tokyo District Prosecutors Office.”
He introduced himself.
“I’m prosecutor Yoshine Kentaro.”
I knew the name.
He was the man who had put Samara away.
Like anywhere else, investigating a conglomerate chairman in Japan was no small matter. In Samara’s case, they also had to take the French government into account.
The Tokyo District Prosecutors Office had spent nearly a year conducting an internal investigation into Samara, and they had thrown elite prosecutors at the case.
The man in charge was Yoshine Kentaro.
By handling this matter, he had risen to fame as a star prosecutor. Later, he would ride that popularity into the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, enter politics, and eventually become Chief Cabinet Secretary.
Just before I regressed, I think people were even talking about him as a possible future prime minister.
“Would you mind if we talked for a moment?”
There was no reason to refuse.
“Of course.”
He sat down across from me and ordered coffee.
I had figured the prosecutors might try to make contact, but I hadn’t expected him to come in person.
He was one of the rare Japanese graduates of the University of Paris law school. That was probably part of the reason he’d been assigned to the case.
Maybe because he’d been on the elite track since childhood, his English pronunciation was better than mine.
“Are you Han Miru of Continue Capital?”
“I am. What brings the Tokyo District Prosecutors Office here?”
“Ah! Nothing serious. I just had a few things I wanted to ask.”
“Such as?”
“Why were you meeting a suspect?”
“As the application for visitation would have explained. I was handling Samara’s assets.”
I subtly turned my wrist so he could get a good look at my watch.
Even after I showed him my Rolex, the kind of watch every financial planner was supposed to have, he didn’t seem entirely convinced.
It was a pity I didn’t have a Porsche key in my pocket, too.
“As far as I know, Continue Capital doesn’t take private clients.”
“That depends on the amount.”
Maybe because he was a prosecutor, the way he asked questions felt more like an interrogation.
If this had been the old me, I might have been nervous. But now I didn’t feel much of anything.
Money had a way of giving a person room to breathe.
“Is there any purpose here besides asset management?”
For a second, I was caught off guard, but I kept my expression smooth.
“What other purpose would there be?”
“Continue Capital has a partnership with Yuseong Electronics through Snow Crash. And recently, through the Rush Fund you co-invested with PIF, you’ve been buying Yuseong Electronics shares.”
“So?”
“Perhaps you were trying to obtain inside information about Kionos.”
It wasn’t completely absurd to think it suspicious that a private equity fund tied to Kionos’s competitor had contacted a suspect in custody. Still, something about it did feel off.
Was he worried Samara might expose things by some other route?
I shook my head.
“That never happened.”
He said in a warning tone, “Anyone who leaks corporate inside information will be punished according to the law.”
Was that his way of saying he’d deal with anyone who passed the story to the press?
I gave a faint smile.
“You really do like doing things by the book, don’t you?”
“There are no exceptions under the law.”
“That’s funny, coming from someone who seemed willing to bend over backward to put Samara away.”
His expression shifted slightly.
“If a foreigner or a domestic executive commits a crime, it’s only natural that they be punished.”
“I’m not exactly trying to defend him, but when you run a major company, embezzlement, breach of trust, and disclosure violations are hardly rare. There are plenty of managers out there with similar suspicions hanging over them, so why was Samara the only one you arrested?”
“If evidence is found, anyone will be investigated.”
What a load of nonsense.
They wouldn’t so much as touch the hair on the heads of the zaibatsu types tangled up with politics.
“For someone so confident in proving the charges, there hasn’t even been a trial.”
“The investigation isn’t over yet.”
Then finish the investigation and arrest him after that. What kind of logic is arresting him first and investigating later?
Was this some kind of racism toward foreigners?
“Wouldn’t you normally call that a frame-up?”
In kanji, it would have been written as original sin, but what it really meant was using the legal system to harass someone who hadn’t done anything wrong.
Every legal system in the world had its share of people being dragged in by mistake, but in bureaucratic Japan, it was especially bad.
Japanese prosecutors in particular were notorious for refusing to admit mistakes—apparently, if they ever did, they’d have to commit seppuku. They’d rather die than acknowledge their own faults.
If this had been a poorer country, they might at least have been bribed to look the other way. But this was a developed nation, so even that wasn’t an option.
Which was exactly why I had come here myself to pull him out.