The Spoilers / Juggernaut. Desmond Bagley

checked the figures again, Ben – and they still don’t make sense.’

      Bryan slowed as he approached a difficult comer. ‘They are startling,’ he admitted.

      ‘Startling!’ echoed Warren. ‘They’re damned nearly impossible. Look, Ben; it calls for twenty tons of raw opium – twenty tons, for God’s sake! That amount of opium would cost nearly a million pounds on the illegal market. Do you think the Delorme woman has that much capital to play with?’

      Bryan laughed. ‘If I had that much money I’d retire.’ He twisted the wheel. ‘I’ve just had a thought, though. Perhaps Raqi fudged the figures in his excitement. He was translating from an oriental script into western notation, remember. Perhaps he made the identical mistake throughout, and uprated by a constant factor.’

      Warren chewed his lip. ‘But what factor? Let’s say he made an error of a factor of ten – that brings us to about four hundred pounds of morphine. That’s stall a hell of a lot, but it’s much more reasonable.’

      ‘How much would that be worth to Delorme?’ asked Bryan.

      ‘About twenty million dollars, landed in the States.’