“That’s very interesting,” Forte broke in finally, as the monologue threatened to go on forever, “but I-”
“Ah here we are at last at the Hotel Bengal which as you must know was established in the year when Colonel Powers and the Second Bengal Lancers put down the insurrection in Mymensingh and thus became when convalescing from his wounds the first guest at this august establishment.”
Forte gave up. He allowed himself to be steered into the somewhat seedy hotel, where ceiling fans sluggishly churned the fetid air. Satto with a self-important flourish signed the register in Forte’s name, objected to the room assigned, and picked out one more to.his liking, sweetening the rejection by sliding a 100-taka note across the desk to the clerk.
In room 443 Forte slung his bag on the bed and reached for the carafe of water on the bedside table.
“It’s not so hot as rooms go, but at least it isn’t bugged,” said Satto. “I had my men check it out.”
Forte stared at him. “What happened to our fine little subcontinental conversational style?”
“Oh, that. Well, Mr. Forte, our cabbie is a well-known KGB man. I picked him for that very reason. You must have stopped listening before I casually dropped the purpose of your visit to Bangladesh: to see the Minister of Human Resources to contract for 6,200 Bangladeshis as seasonal labor for Mr. Mansour’s Nullarbor wheatlands. Our driver’s English is fairly rudimentary, so I spoke in the local patois to make sure he didn’t miss anything.”
“Fine. Now you’ve got to make sure I don’t miss anything. I sure as hell didn’t learn anything in Dhaka, and frankly, Chittagong doesn’t seem any more promising.”
“Exactly what is it you want to find out, Mr. Forte?”
Forte leaned back in the patched upholstered chair, shucked his shoes, put his feet on the varnished pine coffee table. “Don’t ask me. All I know for certain is two things-one: Bangladeshis eat rice, and two: two hundred thousand tons of Australian wheat have been bought by an organization called Ali Khan Trading Company, which exists only as a nameplate on 115 Khadoorie Street in Dhaka, with two clerks who know absolutely nothing.”
“Yes. At Mr. Mansour’s request, I have been keeping those shipments under observation. Of seven vessels scheduled to bring the wheat into Chittagong, two have already unloaded. Another-the S.S. Princess Potter- is heading into port. At the moment, it is seven or eight miles off Cox’s Bazar in the Bay of Bengal. It will be tying up sometime early tomorrow morning.”
“What about the wheat already landed?”
“It’s distributed among five warehouses on the waterfront.”
“Can we have a look tonight?”
“Why not?”
That evening Forte and Satto made the rounds of bars frequented by foreigners, staggered back to Forte’s room-where Satto made a quick and professional search for bugs-and left in place the two he discovered. He smiled and handed Forte the battery-operated tape recorder he had picked up from a bartender who did odd jobs for him. For nine hours the tape would play night sounds-the flushing of a toilet, the click of the bedside light, intermittent snoring, the creak of bedsprings. He held up two fingers and said blearily: “It has been quite an evening Mr. Forte and I do hope you have enjoyed yourself and will be able to receive me when I pass by your presence at the only slightly ungodly hour of ten o’clock ante meridian on the morning and I wish you pleasant dreams and a very good night.”
It was ten minutes past twelve, and Forte had topped off the evening with two bottles of warm beer, confident that they would awaken him before two hours passed. He stripped off his sweat-soaked clothes and was asleep within minutes.
He awakened at one forty-five, went to the bathroom, and dressed in dark trousers, a navy-blue silk turtleneck, and running shoes. He turned on the tape recorder on the dresser and silently left the room. As briefed by Satto earlier, he ascended the stairs to the top floor, where he found Satto. Satto nodded and led him out the door onto the roof. They threaded their way among the mats on which the service staff of the hotel slept beneath the stars, across low walls to the roofs of adjoining buildings, and finally descended the musty stairs of an apartment house on the far side of the block. On the ground floor, an old man in a dhoti waited with two bicycles, and Satto and Forte rode off through the darkened streets toward the waterfront.
Despite the darkness, Satto several times turned corners and stopped, or doubled back, to make sure they weren’t being followed. Then, assured that they were unobserved, he pedaled directly toward the long, low warehouse where the first shipment of wheat had been stored two weeks earlier.
Two guards were sitting on one side of the building, chatting over a small fire they’d made to brew tea. Satto led the way to the other side, improvised a platform from abandoned packing crates, and on the third try found a window unlocked.
The two men eased through the window. Bags labeled DURUM WHEAT-PRODUCED IN AUSTRALIA BY AUSSIES were stacked to the rafters of the low building as far as the beam of Satto’s light would penetrate. The ledge on which they stood led to a narrow catwalk running the length of the building. They walked carefully down the catwalk, guided by the masked beam of the flashlight, stopping from time to time to inspect the bags that filled the long chamber.
“Well?” Satto whispered, when they had made a tour of the premises and were back at the open window.
Forte shook his head. The wheat was there, all right, but why? This was the first shipment. It had been there two weeks. Whoever the Ali Khan Trading Company represented had invested a huge sum in the contents of those burlap bags. Sound business practice dictated moving the wheat to market-wherever the market was -as soon as possible, to make a profit for further investment. It just didn’t make sense to let the wheat accumulate warehousing charges while being eaten by rats.
Rats! He hadn’t seen or heard the squeak of a single rat. If it was impossible to prevent rats running free in the best-protected warehouses in America, certainly he’d have seen some sign of them here. It stood to reason: where there was wheat, there were rats.
But what if there wasn’t any wheat in the warehouse?
Forte crouched on the beam on which he stood and swung himself to the bags just below. The moment his feet touched he knew he had been right. He motioned to Satto to toss him the flashlight. In its beam he flicked open the switchblade he carried and slit one of the bags. It deflated like a punctured balloon.
In fact, it was a punctured balloon….
The activity in the fifth warehouse, where bags of wheat were being carried in from the S.S. Princess Potter, docked only an hour before, did nothing to enlighten them. From a window in the side of the warehouse, they observed a procession of coolies, each bent almost double with the weight of a sack of wheat, stacking their burdens in orderly rows.
More than a hundred meters back along the dock was the fourth warehouse with wheat from Australia, and here they found the answer. From the darkened depths of the warehouse, forklift trucks bearing pallets of bulging jute bags labeled polished rice-product of bangladesh were rumbling to the front of the warehouse, where the bags were shouldered by coolies and loaded onto the S.S. Malcolm Miller tied up to the opposite quay. Forte was tempted to steal back into the interior of the warehouse, but decided it wasn’t worth the risk. Besides, he already had the answer he came for.
“How do you figure it?” Ziaur Satto asked out of politeness as they were bicycling back to the hotel through the ill-lit streets, although he thought the answer was pretty obvious.
“Why they’re doing it-why they’re going to the immense trouble of transshipping the wheat, I can’t guess, but how they’re working it is easy: they’re unloading the wheat from the ships, filling one warehouse at a time. As they begin filling up the second warehouse, they begin emptying the first, after having transferred the wheat to bags labeled rice. Into the bags that held the wheat are then inserted prefabricated balloons-and this means that we’re onto something big, for special heavy-duty rubber balloons to be manufactured for this specific purpose-and the balloons inflated. Then the empty but now inflated durum wheat bags are stacked in the warehouse. The last step: the wheat is shipped out.”
“Shipped out-where?” asked Ziaur Satto.
“How the hell do I know?”
“Okay, then-why?”
“When I know where,” Forte temporized, “maybe I’ll know why.”
15. SEVASTOPOL
4 JULY 2009
“That’s right, Mr. President,” said Ripley Forte, “I need to borrow a missile frigate.”