Chapter 9
Lane Six
At twenty past two the water main hadn't burst, and Kees was early.
"He's at the gate," said Ravi, his voice going up. "He took the Botlek tunnel. It's the one route I didn't plan for, because nobody takes it, it has a toll. He's in the queue right now with forty minutes to spare."
David stood in the rain at the foot of the stack and did the arithmetic. In six minutes the real driver would reach lane six. The crane operator would see a truck with the right plate and the right card, and lift the box onto it. There would be nothing to stop him but a man in a yellow jacket who had told a guard that morning he was there to confirm the seal.
All week he had been so careful about traps. And it was a tunnel with a toll.
"Nell, I need five minutes of a man's time and a good reason."
"Section nine, paragraph three of the port-security order," said Nell. "Art transfers over ten million need a physical seal check by an Inspection Services officer, at the chassis, before the lift. I've been waiting a week to say that."
"Is it real?"
"Real enough that nobody will check."
Kees Vermeulen was a big, red-faced man of fifty-two who had driven for Maes twenty-six years without being asked to do anything he didn't understand.
"Seal check?" he said, climbing down. "I've done this run forty times. Nobody checks."
"I'm afraid there's a new order, Mr. Vermeulen." David was apologetic and weary, a civil servant who dislikes his own job. "It came from the ministry. I'm fifty-one, I have a sore back, and if I don't do it, there'll be a report, and two of us in the rain. My wife will be very cross."
Kees, who had a wife too, said something in Dutch that wasn't personal, and rolled his lorry round into the waiting bay.
"Beautiful," said Nell.
"I'm not proud of it."
David looked up. Sixty feet above him, a great crane stood against the grey. In its little glass cabin sat a man, and the man was not looking at the container. He was looking down at David.
At 2:37 an old grey lorry rolled in at the gate with Kees's number plate. At the wheel, in a flat cap and a jacket two sizes too small, sat Anselm Boateng, with the dull patience of a Rotterdam driver. David held up a hand.
"Vermeulen?"
"Ja," said Anselm in a guttural, ill-tempered Dutch, and handed over Camille's four-colour paper. David read it carefully in the rain and signed. As he handed it back, he saw Anselm's eyes flick to the screen on the gantry pillar.
It was flashing amber. Two white words: DUPLICATE PLATE.
"Oh no," Ravi said quietly. "I didn't think of that. The real truck is registered in the waiting bay. The system flagged it to the crane operator. He has a camera and a button. If he presses it the wrong way, the stack goes into hold, and security comes."
"I'm sitting in a lorry," said Anselm softly, "with no door that opens from the inside. I would like to say a thing. I am glad that I came."
David looked up. The man in the cabin was staring at the screen. Then, slowly, he turned and looked down the length of the beam at the lean figure in the lane with a clipboard.
For five seconds, the two of them looked at each other.
Then a large, scarred hand came down on the console and pressed.
The screen flickered. The amber went out. Overhead, with a rising whine, the spreader came down like a hand lowering a cup and locked onto the box.
The lift took three minutes. The crane took the forty-foot container out of the stack like a tooth, swung it over the lane, and set it on Anselm's flatbed. The locks went home with four dull knocks.
"Going," said Anselm. "I am the most careful lorry in Holland."
The truck rolled away toward Gate Three. In the other direction, a second identical truck with a hidden transmitter turned north toward Antwerp, carrying nine tonnes of Gouda cheese.
"Ravi. The main," said Nell.
"It's going now," said Ravi.
Across the terminal, on the Waalhavenweg, a plume of water rose thirty feet into the rain.
At a quarter past three the day shift came out of the gate in twos and threes, grey and wet, their boots like a tide going out. David stood at the tram stop with his clipboard.
A long-jawed man with a once-broken nose stopped beside him. He did not look at David.
"I've got a brother," said Wim Jansen, in Dutch. "Not in the family. In the work. A Filipino, Roberto. He lived in my spare room a year when I was nineteen. Four years ago he signed on a Maes boat, the Pelagia. Nine months. They put him ashore in Piraeus with a bag. His wife was told the company had no assets. He has two daughters. I send them a little. It isn't enough."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. I've done a bad thing. I over-rode a flag. I signed that I saw it with my own eyes." He finally looked up. "I'll be asked tomorrow. I'll say I was sure. It isn't what I'd say. I'd say I saw a man in a yellow jacket who was very frightened of something, and he wasn't frightened of me. And I thought of Roberto. I don't know what's in the box. I don't think it's art."
"It's wages," said David. "About thirty-eight million euros, part of what's owed to four thousand men. Every one will be paid within the week, less a small itemised deduction. Give me the Pelagia's crew list. Send me a name and an account, and Roberto will be first."
The tram stopped and its doors hissed open. Wim Jansen climbed on. At the top of the steps, with one hand on the rail, he said in a flat voice, "Pelagia. Fourteen men. I know all their children's names."
The tram hummed away in a sheet of spray.
"David?" said Ravi in his ear. "The box is on the barge. It's all real, thirty-eight million, a bag of bearer bonds that smells like a loft. Are you okay?"
"I think," said David Morgan, "I've been outplayed by a crane driver."
In Antwerp, at ten past eight that night, a man in a dark car sat outside a cold-store and watched a lorry unload nine tonnes of Gouda. They had followed it seven hours. At last, they cut the lock. Inside: a mountain of yellow wheels and a tray of tulip bulbs. And propped against the third wheel from the top, one white card.
The man rang London. "Mr. Strake? It's cheese."
In a pale room off Berkeley Square, Gideon Strake stood in his shirtsleeves with a glass of water, looking at the rain.
"Bring me the card in a bag. Don't hold it. Don't warm it. And tell the men I'm not cross. It's a very good trick. It's the oldest one in the world, and I think he has just done it to me on purpose."
"I don't understand."
"No," said Strake gently. "But he knows that I will."