Night Call from a Distant Time Zone

Hiroji Sujimoto is no ordinary Japanese industrialist. Early in his phenomenal career, he discarded his wife, the mother of his only son, and for the past thirty years his companion has been a former French journalist by whom he has a beautiful, highly spirited daughter, Mariko. Their European home is a chateaufort in Liechtenstein, that magical principality with liberal banking laws and few, if any, extradition treaties.

Sujumoto's vast maze of diversified corporations has made his name a synonym for the mysterious high art of Japanese management, but recent large increases in his personal fortune have come from an unorthodox system. With the zest and daring of one of his samurai ancestors and with the reluctant help of Charles Daughtry, the brilliant, young foreign exchange expert of New York's Confederated Trust - a multinational bank in which Sujimoto holds controlling interest - this one-time Japanese navy captain has been pocketing enormous sums through illegal currency transactions.