Chapter 8
The Shell Game
In Rotterdam it rained in a straight line for nineteen days.
The team lived on a black houseboat in Delfshaven, with a stove in the wheelhouse and vegetables growing in tubs on the roof. It rocked. Ravi, who was already afraid of heights, discovered he was afraid of things that rocked too, and sat in the galley eating rusks with his knees together.
On the table lay the new dossier.
"Corneel Maes," said David. "Sixty-three. Maes Maritime, thirty-one ships, a family firm for a hundred and four years. He gives generously to the Rijksmuseum. He has also failed, over eleven years, to pay four thousand one hundred sailors."
"Failed," said Anselm.
"That's the word in the file. Filipinos, Indonesians, Ukrainians. They sign on through an agency, sail nine months, and when the ship docks the agency has vanished and the contract was with a company dissolved the day they sailed. The total owed is a hundred and thirty-one million euros. He keeps the cash in steel containers. He doesn't trust banks."
"Rather admirable," said Camille.
"Once a quarter, a container leaves his warehouse marked fine art in transit to Basel. Nobody opens a crate that says Picasso. This one holds thirty-eight million in notes and bonds. On Tuesday it will sit in a stack at the Delta Quay terminal for nine hours."
"And we take it from a crane?"
"We have the terminal take it for us. That's the elegance."
It was an old game, and the best David had ever learned, on a pier in Wales.
He was seventeen. The fair was closed, and rain came in off the sea. Emrys Morgan set up a folding table with three walnut shells and a dried pea.
"Watch the pea."
"I am."
"No, you're watching the hand you think is cheating." The old man shuffled the shells and lifted one. The pea was there. "The first rule: the mark must be allowed to be right. Let him win four or five times. Let him feel clever. Then he puts his week's wages on it." The gnarled hands blurred. He lifted the shells, one after another. Nothing. Then, smiling, he held the pea up between finger and thumb. "The pea's never under the shells. It's been in my hand since the start. They only ever watched the shells."
David had thought about that sentence for twenty-two years.
He laid three toy lorries on the saloon table, on a printed map of the terminal.
"One is Kees's, Maes's real driver. One is ours. One is nobody's. At Delta Quay, a crane operator sixty feet up is given a job: lift container MSKU 774201 onto the truck in lane six. He doesn't open the doors. He looks at the lane. He lowers the box onto whatever truck is physically there."
"And Kees won't be in lane six," said Ravi in a small voice. "He'll be stuck on the Waalhavenweg behind a burst water main. I'll make sure the city knows about it twelve minutes before he does."
"And ours will have Kees's number plate, his driver's card, and a paper release in Camille's four-colour forgery."
"When the real Kees arrives, the crane has already put his box away," said Nell, dealing patience. "And a Dutch terminal will shout at him for a very long time, because the paperwork says he's been and gone."
"It's not glamorous," said Ravi.
"It's meant to be dull. Dullness is what's wrong with every security system." David pushed the third lorry forward. "And the third truck?"
"Maes hid a private tracker in the container's door frame. We can't switch it off. They'd know. So the third truck leaves at the same moment with the same paint, and I move the signal to it. It'll drive very slowly to Antwerp, followed by a lot of people."
"It's a shell game," said Anselm softly.
"Then where's the pea?" said David.
"In your hand," said Anselm. "It's always in your hand."
Rain drummed on the roof. Nell laid a red knave on a black queen. "Mr. Morgan, who taught you that?"
"A man on a pier."
"I think I'd have liked him," said Nell.
After midnight, Ravi found David on the roof among the leek tubs, hat low, looking at the port lights. A tanker slid by with every window lit.
"I've been thinking about Istanbul," said Ravi. He sat on a bucket in a blanket. "It was close. A footnote in the Archivist's file said 'the chief of staff checks the device on arrival.' We read it as the morning. If Selin had been a minute faster, we'd be in a Turkish prison. The Archivist is never wrong, and suddenly it's wrong where it matters, and you said nothing. Did you notice?"
"I noticed." David took off his hat and looked into it. "It isn't the first time. Marseille had a night guard who turned out to be a day guard. In Zurich, a door was said to open outward and opened in. Small things. Things a man might get wrong. I've known for two years that she makes mistakes, and every one was in a place where one of us could have been caught. I told myself that's what mistakes are."
"You knew?"
"I suspected."
"Why didn't you tell us?"
He couldn't answer for a moment. Rain ran off the brim onto his knee.
"Because I didn't want it to be true. It's the only thing I've ever had that told me I was right."
Ravi sat with him a long minute. "I'm going to put that in the file," he said gently. "And I'm going to remember you said it on a boat. Tuesday. Don't fall off the crane."
"I shan't be on the crane."
In the hatchway, Ravi paused. "David? I'm not going anywhere. I'm just very frightened of everything."
"So am I," said David. For the first time that night he laughed, and put his hat back on.
On Tuesday at ten past six, in the dark and the same straight rain, a lean man in a yellow jacket and a white hard hat stood at the Delta Quay gate with a clipboard and a pass that said CUSTOMS LIAISON — TEMPORARY.
"Name?" said the guard, not looking up.
"Pieter de Wit. Inspection Services. They moved my shift. I've been up since four." His Dutch carried the flat accent of the northern marshes. "Lane six this afternoon. The Maes art container. I'm to confirm the seal."
The guard looked at the pass, then the clipboard, then the man. It was raining, it was six in the morning, and the lorries behind him stretched back to the motorway. He sighed and lifted the barrier.
"Don't walk under anything."
"I never do," said David.
He walked in among forty thousand containers stacked eight high, red and blue and ochre. Over them the long cranes hummed on their tracks, their glass cabins sixty feet up like insects' eyes.
"Morning, Mr. de Wit," said Nell in his ear. "Your tea's in a flask in the left pocket."
He drank. Standing in the roar and the rain, in the middle of the biggest machine he had ever seen, among ten thousand men who didn't look at him, he felt something he hadn't felt in a long time. He didn't at first know what it was.
It was happiness.
"I've got the Waalhaven road," said Ravi. "The main bursts at two-forty. I'll say a prayer."
"You don't pray."
"I'll start."