Blindfold Game

NOVEMBER,

NOORTMAN CHOSE HONG KONG as his base of operations for the new commission, partly for its location and partly because anything could be had there for a price. Also, he was a little lazy and he liked the idea of working from home.

Maritime freight was his specialty: his vocation and his avocation. He’d spent much of his childhood on the docks and the marinas of Singapore, watching as the cargoes of the world’s nations were off-loaded from the gigantic maw of one ship’s hold to be freighted to another dock and deposited in the hold of a different ship bound for another port. Fruit from New Zealand. Vegetables from Chile. Beef from Argentina and lamb from Australia. Computer chips from Japan, waybills beautifully inscribed with Japanese characters that looked more like art than a cargo manifest. From Thailand, beds and dressers and tables and chairs made of teak, from the United States entire ships full of Ford Escorts, from Canada wood products from raw timber to wood pulp to newsprint. From China textiles and toys, from Jamaica sugar, from Sierra Leone cocoa.

He would scribble down the cargoes he saw each day on a notepad and at home look up the countries of origin and destination in his father’s atlas, a tome so large that as a boy he was barely able to lift it down from its shelf. Its pages were filled with colorful illustrations of the world’s great mountains and canyons and rivers and deserts, and maps topographical, agricultural, and political. He mooned over the oceans and the coastlines of continents and fell headlong in love with the perfect natural harbors created by islets and inlets and peninsulas, places like Sydney and San Francisco and Seattle.

Not so surprising, certainly not from a boy born to a nation made up of fifty-nine islands, with only two percent of its land arable and a less than amicable neighbor across its only border. It followed that the lifeblood of that nation would be carried by ships, and that much of that nation’s industry would be concerned with ships and the sea.

Apart from inclination and familiarity, there were personal reasons as well. He was following in his father’s footsteps, a respected man on the Singaporean waterfront. The elder Noortman was a Netherlander who had gone to sea when he was sixteen and fetched up on the shore of the South China Sea, there to meet and marry a less than beautiful but very well connected Singaporean woman whose father had retired from twenty years at sea to a post with the Board of Customs in Singapore, and who brought his new son-in-law into what he regarded as the family firm almost immediately, which would have been impossible otherwise for a white man with no connections.

Noortman’s father rose slowly but steadily in rank, achieving a local reputation for ability and an international reputation for probity, by which was meant that he stole no more than what was generally recognized as a reasonable percentage of the worth of the goods that passed beneath his mark. Neither did he flaunt his extracurricular earnings in a vulgar display of wealth, which he well knew would provoke envy and suspicion, because he was already laboring under the handicap of his white skin. He maintained a modest if well-appointed home in the Or-:hard suburb for his wife, son, and two daughters, who were sent to pubic school, and the son on to the National University of Singapore.

Young Noortman graduated in the middle of his class, although he could have achieved high honors were it not for the admonishments of his father, whose own credo was never to draw any more attention to oneself than absolutely necessary. The younger Noortman’s degree was in business administration, but his real education took place on the docks, working nights and weekends for the Board of Customs, learning the arcane language of international shipping, no little facilitated by his flair for languages. This polyglot state had been inculcated almost from birth, as his father decreed that the family would speak Chinese on Mondays and Tuesdays, Dutch on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and English on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Noortman expanded his international vocabulary in school, studying French first, which introduced him to the Romance languages, and then Russian and Japanese, to the point that one day an instructor wondered out loud why he was majoring in business instead of in languages. He invited the young man out for dinner at a first-class restaurant run by an expatriate Filipino chef. There followed further discussion of Noortman’s tendency toward the multilingual, what he might do professionally with such an agile tongue, and seduction. Noortman thoroughly enjoyed both the chicken adobo and the sex.

From his instructor, an Israeli who had found the continual state of war on his nation’s borders to be aesthetically distasteful and had emigrated the day after he was of age, Noortman gained, among other things, a working knowledge of two more languages, Hebrew and Arabic. The instructor was moved to say, “There is a real future in government for a young man with your talents.”

Noortman, to whom double-entry bookkeeping did not come naturally, reported this to his father that evening-his father had decreed that he would pursue his studies from home, not from a room in a dormitory on campus-with the admittedly faint hope that he might be allowed to take his future into his own hands. The elder Noortman had replied calmly, “There is a real future in the customs service as well.”

Resentfully, Noortman went back to school and continued to wrestle with interest rates and amortization and debentures. When he graduated he made a second bid for freedom, requesting permission to pursue a master’s degree in languages. This, too, was denied, and his resentment, festering beneath a dutiful facade, grew into a bitter anger. Still dependent on his father’s largesse, he accepted an offer of employment in the customs service. If he was not quite under the direct supervision of the elder Noortman, then he was close enough for his father to critique his job performance every evening after dinner. Which he did, with a devastating eye for every tiny error and a dispassionate manner of speaking that was withering in the extreme. The younger Noortman endured these critiques with outward calm, but he was already looking for a way out.

By this time his clothes occupied half the closet and drawer space in the Israeli instructor’s home. He told his father the instructor was continuing to tutor him in languages, which was technically the truth. The elder Noortman, in the magisterial way that his son had come to detest, decided this was acceptable. Freighters, containerships, bulk carriers, tankers, military vessels of every size and shape, cruise ships, they all docked at Singapore, and they carried multinational crews. Many languages could greatly enhance one’s future in the customs service.

One day, a year into full-time employment in the family business, he was told by his father that he had located a suitable bride for his son, a well-connected young woman whose father was a relation of the Goh family, a scion of which currently occupied the prime minister’s office. The Goh family’s reservations over allying themselves with a half-breed had been overcome by the general respect with which the elder Noortman was regarded by people who mattered. The matter was fully explained to the younger Noortman, who walked out of his father’s study that evening with the sound of a cell door slamming in his ears.

The following week, a wiry Chinese man in his late thirties had appeared in the customs office. He asked for Noortman in Mandarin.

“I am Noortman,” the young man replied, in that same language.

The Chinese looked at him with an indifferent gaze. “Not you.”

At that moment his father appeared and shepherded the Chinese into his office and closed the door behind them. They were in there for quite some time, and when the Chinese left the elder Noortman escorted him to the door and all the way out to his car, an honor usually accorded only to high government officials on fact-finding missions.

“Who is the Chinese man you spoke to today?” Noortman asked his father over dinner that evening.

His father returned an impassive stare. “He is nothing and no one to you. Do not speak of him again.”

The next day the younger Noortman noticed a great deal of activity on and around a freighter moored three docks down from the office. When he went to take a closer look, he was waved off by a man with an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder and no uniform.

He sat on a crate just outside the perimeter created by perhaps a dozen such men, the majority of them Indonesian and Filipino, he thought, all with the same flat, steady regard. This regard was trained outward, away from the ship they ringed, ignoring the cranes and trucks moving around them as container after unmarked container was unloaded, settled onto the back of a flatbed, and moved off the dock. The men were rough-edged and muscular. They continued to ignore him so long as he did not breach their perimeter, but when he appeared the next day the Chinese man he had seen in his father’s office came down the gangway of the freighter and walked up to him. “What do you want?”

Noortman rose to his feet without undue haste, a nice blend of deference to elders and a display of self-confidence. “I am the son of Noortman, the customs agent.”

“I know,” the Chinese said. “What do you want?”

“I have been watching you. Over the last thirty-six hours, you have off-loaded almost one hundred containers of freight and reloaded them on a freighter bound for the port of Tokyo.”

The Chinese did not change expression.

“I notice that my father passed all of the containers from your ship through customs, even when he had to work overtime to do so.”

“And?”

“My father is a creature of habit. He goes home to sit down to dinner with his family at six P.M. every day of his life.”

The Chinese watched him with a menacing gaze meant to intimidate, very similar to those of the guards posted round his ship.

The younger Noortman continued to speak. His father would have been proud of his careful, detached manner. He hoped he didn’t look as frightened as he felt, but he could either wait for his doom to be pronounced or he could try to build a future of his own. Desperation was a highly motivating force. “I notice that the identification numbers on the containers have been very recently renewed. I notice also that they have been reinforced to carry heavier loads.”

“You’re a very noticing fellow,” the Chinese said.

It was not a compliment. “Very,” Noortman agreed, not without an increase in heart rate. There was something very initimidating-and not a little exciting-about the Chinese’s cold eyes. “And then I remembered reading in the newspaper one month ago of the taking of a ship loaded with aluminum ingots in the Makassar Strait. Pirates boarded her at four in the morning, shot the captain and crew, and tossed their bodies overboard, and vanished into the night.” Noortman paused. “One of the crew survived. He was pulled out of the water by a fisherman the next day, and he lived long enough to tell the authorities that the head pirate was a Chinese man in his thirties or forties, wiry, with a very dark tan and black hair cut very short, like American soldiers in the movies.”

He paused, and let his eyes wander over the Chinese’s brush cut. “The ship has not been found. Neither has its ten-million-dollar cargo.”

The Chinese said nothing, calloused hands remaining loose at his side, but there was an alert set to his head and a thoughtful expression in his eyes that had not been there before.

“It was an interesting story, and I looked for more, but there was nothing. The ship and its cargo simply disappeared.” He stopped to consider, and added, not without admiration, “It must have been very carefully planned, to be able to make a ship of that size disappear. Not to mention, Mr. Fang, seventy metric tons of aluminum ingots.”

Fang’s expression did not change. “Supposing I was this Chinese pirate,” he said. “According to the story you read, I made a ship disappear, and I made its crew disappear, and I made seventy metric tons of aluminum ingots disappear. How hard would it be to make you disappear as well?”

“True,” the younger Noortman said, nodding. It required an effort to keep his expression as bland as his voice, but he thought he succeeded quite well. “Very true. But I was able to figure out who you were and what you were doing here the first time I saw you and your ship. If I could do so, so, too, could others.” He let Fang think this over.

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.

The automatic identification system was a praiseworthy attempt by the International Maritime Organization to have every ship on the seven seas broadcast an identification number to be picked up and monitored by satellite. This was a good idea for shippers, who could track their cargos around the world, and a great idea for pirates, because anyone with a fifty-dollar receiver from Radio Shack could also monitor them and identify the most lucrative targets.

He followed their current voyages via their AIS numbers through a satellite tracking firm that had proved reliable in the past. Most of this information would be discarded as he whittled down the list, but Noort-man was nothing if not thorough.

In the end, he had ten prospects, of which he eliminated seven on the grounds that their owners were too easily identifiable, if only to him. Of the three remaining, one ship looked very promising, registered out of Niue, an island nation in the South Pacific, one of whose very few viable industries was registering offshore firms wishing to avoid filing financial statements and paying taxes, owned through a Panamanian company with headquarters in Liberia and a parent company incorporated in the Bahamas controlled from Amsterdam and bankrolled out of Switzerland, where the trail ended abruptly in a Byzantine layer of partnerships and limited-liability corporations. He was so delighted with the artistry inherent in this industrial-strength obfuscation of lawful accountability that he promised himself he would trace the ship’s owner to the top of the food chain after the job was done.

It was at present leased to a Russian corporation. One of the attractions of this particular ship was that it was scheduled for maintenance next month in its home port. Since the Wall came down in 1989, pretty much everything in Russia could be had for the asking in exchange for currency of any solvent Western nation. Noortman chose a dock, contacted a local expediter, and bought a local customs agent. In all it took about an hour, and the total cost would be the lowest expense on this operation’s balance sheet.

The deck-top cargo took a little longer and cost a great deal more, but it would be loaded out of the same port. Pitiful, really, and no challenge at all for a man of his skill and experience.

The cargo from China required a little more finesse, although with the precipitous drop in the price of Chinese steel over the past two years he was able to negotiate a price that would not only give them enough ballast for a reasonably smooth ride but also ensure a more than reasonable profit on the other end.

Always assuming Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones had any interest in selling. Which he was fairly confident they did not. He arranged for lading and customs in Shanghai and then went to the market to buy fresh fish for the sashimi he would make that evening for the handsome young lawyer he hoped would become his next lover.

Seven weeks after they had met with the Koreans in Thailand, he called Fang and reported in.

There was a long silence. “What?” he said.

“I’m worried about this one,” Fang said.

“Why?”

“Perhaps it is our customer.”

Noortman was no fool, and he gave Fang’s concern due consideration. “They don’t leave witnesses, do you mean?”

“No, not that-less refuse for me to dispose of. No, what bothers me is that they are fanatics.”

Noortman shrugged. “They are customers. They pay us, we provide a service.”

“I don’t trust people with causes. They are not rational, and therefore they are dangerously unpredictable.”

“They have given us a very large sum of money. Without haggling over the price. This argues a very strong commitment.”

“That may be what worries me most,” Fang said.

Noortman laughed. Fang didn’t. “What?” Noortman said.

“How do we get off?”

“Mr. Smith said he has made arrangements.”

“You are very confident for someone who won’t be along for the ride. I’d like a few more details.”

“Mr. Smith seems to be very security conscious.”

“He certainly does,” Fang said.

When Noortman’s phone rang next it was Smith. Noortman, mindful of the respect due an employer with a bankroll the size of Smith’s, sat up straight and gave a sober precis of his progress to date.

“That is acceptable,” Smith said. He stayed on the line.

“There was something else?” Noortman said cautiously.

“Yes. I have another task for you. You alone.”

Translated, this meant Fang was not to be told. After a moment, Noortman said, “What is this task?”

When Smith finished speaking, Noortman was silent.

“Well?” Smith said. “Are we agreed?”

Fang would show no mercy if he knew that Noortman was cutting deals behind his back. Still, Noortman wasn’t a fool, he knew that Fang was thinking of retiring. Even if Fang survived this trip, doubtful now that he knew of this second of Smith’s requirements, Noortman would very probably be looking for employment elsewhere.

But perhaps it was time for Noortman to step out on his own, to prove his own abilities to future associates. He made up his mind and, conscious of the acceleration of his heartbeat, said, “It will be very expensive.”

“It always is,” Smith said.

When they completed their business, Noortman hung up the phone and looked at his palm. It was damp.

One thing Fang was right about. Fanatics were dangerously unpredictable.