Fang did, and gave a slight nod. Possibly he was reluctant to kill his pet customs agent’s son. Possibly he was intrigued by the younger Noortman’s self-assurance. At any rate, he stayed his hand, for the moment.
“Had I been in charge of-disbursing, shall we say?-the cargo in question,” Noortman said, almost dreamily, “I would, first, have done a better job of replacing the identification numbers on the containers. I know, I know”-he raised a hand, palm outward, although the Chinese had yet to say anything-“given the amount of freight traveling the oceans these days, it is very hard to track down any one container. But, as I said, if I could figure out what is going on, so could someone else, so why take the risk when a decently faked registry, a good stencil, and a steady hand is all that is required to ensure disinterest on the part of the world’s customs services?”
He didn’t wait for an answer this time. “Secondly, I would have made sure that no one customs agent in any port had total authority over the cargo. Thirdly, I would have made arrangements to off-load the cargo in more than one port, and possibly even to transfer the cargo to another ship between ports.” He paused to consider this. “Possibly. It is unwise to put one’s trust in any one agent in any one port, and it is unnecessary, especially if a good forger provides a believable provenance for the cargo.”
The Chinese regarded him meditatively. The moments ticked by. Noortman didn’t squirm. Eventually, the Chinese man said, “How did you know my name?”
Noortman smiled. It was a charming smile, attractive, infectious, disarming (the gold tooth would come later), and he knew it and employed it selectively. “I heard one of your men call you by name yesterday.”
Fang’s lips tightened. “Which one?”
Noortman’s smile faltered. “I don’t know. One of the guards you have stationed round your ship. I think the guard in charge.”
Without turning his head, Fang said sharply, “Win!”
A guard trotted over. “Go to the bridge and wait there until I come.”
The guard, a young man, impassive as his boss, gave a nod and trotted to the gangway.
Noortman never saw him again. Fang was not a forgiving employer. It was the first lesson Noortman learned in association with the sometime master mariner and full-time pirate, and it wouldn’t be the last, but it was by far the most important.
Noortman resigned his position that evening after dinner, in his father’s study. The elder Noortman was at first disbelieving and then angry. He came out from behind his desk like the wrath of God and hit Noortman hard enough to loosen three teeth. Noortman got back on his feet and picked up a thick book his fall had knocked from the shelves. The next thing he knew his mother and sisters were pulling him from his father’s body, supine on the floor with his face unrecognizable beneath a wash of blood. He couldn’t see that shade of red today without remembering a flood of pure joy.
That had been nine years before. Noortman was now thirty-four, with a growing reputation in the international maritime freight business, a slightly less admirable but no less respectful one with Interpol, and healthy bank accounts in Hong Kong, Zurich, and Nassau. Over the years, Noortman had become a master of the shell game of international maritime freight, moving containers and ships as if conducting a game on a chessboard. It was challenging, exciting work, not least because he knew very well that if caught practicing this commodities sleight of hand the ocean-view apartment in the Hong Kong high-rise would be replaced by a cot in a twelve-by-twelve cell. And that was only if he were arrested by Western authorities. He shuddered to think of the consequences of being arrested in his native Singapore.
He avoided targeting U.S. and Russian-owned ships as they were known to carry small arms, and added British ships to the no list when they began hiring ex-Gurkha soldiers for on-board security. He took pride in the fact that he had done his work so well that in nine years Fang had faced serious opposition from only three crews. None of them survived the experience, of course. Fang was insistent on leaving no witnesses behind, and he especially hated cameras of any kind. The new cell phones, with their photograph-taking capabilities, were a target of particular abhorrence, and Fang insisted on being the only member of any of his crews who carried a phone. If anyone protested on shore, their services were declined. If anyone protested at sea, they joined the crew of the captured vessel as shark food.
From the small bits that Fang let fall during their association, Noortman knew that Fang had been raised in a hard school. Son of a Shanghai prostitute, father unknown, he took to the sea as a boy and grew up smuggling goods between Taiwan and China. He said he had a master’s license, but Noortman had never seen it. He knew how to handle a ship, and more important for their business, he was extremely efficient at hijacking them. Noortman regarded himself as the brain of their operation and Fang as the brawn, but he never made the mistake of saying that to Fang.
Fang knew it anyway, but his bottom line had trebled and quadrupled since he’d brought the young Singaporean on board, so he let it slide. He’d never given a lot of consideration to retiring before this, but Noort-man’s genius was such that Fang was beginning to entertain thoughts of a positively middle-class nature, involving a luxury apartment in Shanghai, a plump, placid wife, and perhaps even sons to carry on his name. No, he had no intention-no immediate intention-of teaching the younger Noortman a sense of humility.
Having identified a likely target, Noortman would plot its course, consider and discard and eventually find the ideal point of interception (he enjoyed inventing business euphemisms for what was essentially high seas piracy), after which he turned this information over to Fang. After that it was simply a matter of placing the stolen cargo with the appropriate customer for the maximum profit, snapping his fingers at the law enforcement agencies of literally dozens of countries as he did so.
All this had seemed the height of adventure when he was twenty-five. Not to mention profoundly satisfying when he, dutiful son that he was, went home once a month to spend a weekend with his parents and indulged in a good, long inner chuckle when he sat down across the dinner table from his father, blind in one eye and deaf in one ear from the beating his son had given him. The elder Noortman might have been blind in both eyes for all the notice he gave his son on his irregular visits.
The younger Noortman also very much enjoyed bringing back black pearls from Tahiti, diamonds from South Africa, and emeralds from Colombia and laying them, metaphorically speaking, at his mother’s feet. That good, silent woman was appreciative if somewhat bewildered. She never did work up the courage to ask him where it all came from, and she never ceased to produce an endless line of eligible young women for his inspection and approval.
Even these trophy visits home were beginning to pall, though. So when Smith and Jones presented Noortman with this new, much more difficult, and altogether more dangerous challenge, he had embraced it with enthusiasm. First he looked at the area in question, working the phones and the Internet, monitoring ships and cargo moving in and out of the various ports. Many of the ports were so obliging as to have multiple remote cameras mounted over their docks, and it cost only a small portion of the sum set aside for operating expenses to hire a computer technician from a small, anonymous firm in Calcutta that specialized in such things to hack into the various operators’ computer systems to access them and feed the displays to Noortman’s computer.
He watched the traffic in and out of these ports for a month, looking up each ship’s AIS and searching their most recent ports of call, working up a history of each going back five years.