by Jake Needham
“Here’s what I know, Sam. Suparman has a sister who has been diagnosed with cancer. She is coming to Singapore for an operation this week and there is intelligence that Suparman will try to meet her somewhere here in Singapore before her operation since there is a risk she will not come through it. ISD is putting her under surveillance while she is in the country in the hope she will lead them to Suparman. I spoke to the Minister of Home Affairs this morning. I told him I know about what ISD is planning and I demanded CID be included in it. He agreed.”
The SAC looked at Tay. Tay wasn’t certain how he was supposed to react to that so he just nodded again. That must have satisfied the SAC because he started talking again.
“The Minister made it clear ISD is in charge of this operation. I think that’s a mistake. If ISD gets their hands on Suparman, they’ll tuck him away somewhere under the Internal Security Act and we’ll never see him again. This bastard is a criminal, Sam. I want him hanged.”
All at once Tay understood exactly why the SAC was sitting in his garden drinking his whiskey instead of talking to him on the telephone. There were some things you didn’t talk about on the telephone in Singapore. There were a great many such things if you knew what was good for you, but without a doubt the first topic on nearly anyone’s list of things not to talk about on the telephone in Singapore would be exactly the same.
The Internal Security Department.
CHAPTER NINE
THE SECURITY ESTABLISHMENT in Singapore is ferociously efficient. The police are the visible part of that establishment, but the Internal Security Department is the part of it that really scares the crap out of most Singaporeans.
Officially, ISD is an intelligence agency that collects whatever intelligence is required to protect Singapore against threats to its internal security such as espionage, terrorism, and subversion. Unofficially, ISD is a sort of Singaporean secret police.
ISD is officially acknowledged to exist, but that’s all most of the public really knows about it. It doesn’t appear in the Singapore Government Directory and it cultivates an air of mystery Tay always thought downright laughable. Even the name of the Director of ISD is an official secret. Tay was willing to bet he could find out who the current director was easily enough, but he didn’t care enough to try.
Under Singapore’s Internal Security Act, ISD has extraordinary powers to detain people more or less indefinitely without charges, and it is not reluctant to use those powers. In real democracies, people are justifiably horrified when they hear about security agencies that can arrest anyone they like and hold them without charges for however long they want. Singaporeans seemed to accept ISD secret detentions as an everyday part of government. Maybe that meant Singapore wasn’t much of a democracy. Funny, Tay thought, how few people seemed to notice that.
Tay didn’t much like either the Internal Security Department or the people he knew there. He had been forced to work with them a few times in the past and it wasn’t an experience he wanted to repeat. The little pricks just rubbed him the wrong way. They were smug, they were arrogant, and they treated the police like cops were good for nothing but manual labor.
Tay picked up the pack of Marlboros he had left on the table and put it down again.
It was his garden, of course, and even in Singapore he didn’t need to ask anyone’s permission to smoke in his own home—not yet, at least—but the whole idea of lighting a cigarette in front of a senior officer seemed so peculiar he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it.
“If the Minister told you ISD is in charge of this operation,” Tay asked, clasping his hands together in front of him to prevent them from making another grab for the Marlboros, “what part is CID supposed to play?”
“The Minister said he was concerned the operation could touch on domestic issues like people who might be sheltering Suparman, and he thought CID ought to be available in case issues not related to the Internal Security Act come up. He also said the first order of business was locating Suparman, and he thought a better chance of doing that existed if ISD and CID worked together.”
“And what happens if we do find him, sir?”
“That’s a good question. I just don’t know what the answer to it is. I suppose we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Tay didn’t much like the sound of that. A public tug of war between ISD and CID over taking control of Abu Suparman, assuming they could even cooperate enough to find him, would be unseemly at best, humiliating at worst. Especially if it ended badly for CID.
“I’ll keep pushing the Minister, Sam, but he’s not a man who likes to make difficult decisions. You’ll probably be on your own if you do find Suparman. You’ll just have to figure it out then.”
Tay didn’t mind being on his own. The truth was he rather preferred it. Better to ask for forgiveness, as the saying went, than to ask for permission.
On the other hand, he couldn’t exactly see how the SAC imagined this would play out. Say they spotted Suparman in this joint surveillance operation. What then? Did ISD and CID race each other to see who got to him first? Did ISD and CID shoot it out over who would control the prisoner? Tay didn’t see any way this would end well unless the Minister made a firm decision before they found Suparman.
“I could always just shoot the bastard, sir.”
The SAC pursed his lips and looked thoughtful.
“I was only kidding, sir.”
“Were you? Too bad.”
Before Tay could decide what to say to that, the SAC pointed to his empty glass. “Another one would be very welcome, Sam. We have more to talk about.”
Did they? Tay wondered what that could be. The SAC had already deputized him to fight a war against ISD for control of a notorious international terrorist. What came after that? Taking on the Prime Minister, too? But he didn’t say any of that, of course.
What he said was, “Yes, sir. Coming right up.”
When Tay returned with the SAC’s drink, he brought another one for himself as well. They sat in silence for a few moments, each man sipping his drink and sorting through his own thoughts. Tay gave up worrying about what the SAC might think and shook out a Marlboro from the pack on the table. He lit up without apologizing, but the SAC didn’t seem to care. He didn’t even appear to notice.
“I want you at New Phoenix Park at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, Sam. There is a briefing at ISD then about the surveillance operation. The Minister has agreed to include you and your officers in that briefing and ISD will be expecting you.”
New Phoenix Park was the heavily secured compound of the Ministry of Home Affairs located on the north side of the city. The compound housed the general headquarters of the Singapore Police as well as the headquarters of ISD and some other law enforcement agencies supervised by the Minister of Home Affairs such as the Immigration and Checkpoint Authority and the Civil Defense Authority. The Cantonment Complex where Tay had his office housed only CID and the Central Narcotics Bureau.
A group of buildings off to itself in the back of the compound was ISD’s operating base. All glass and concrete, the buildings were structures so humorless and overblown Tay always believed they would have embarrassed Albert Speer. It was inside those imperious looking buildings that ISD did whatever it was it did, and Tay wasn’t at all sure he even wanted to know what that really was.
“ISD is expecting me specifically, sir?”
“Yes, you specifically. That’s what I told the Minister.”
“And the Minister was fine with that?”
The SAC hesitated. “He accepted my decision to assign you to the operation.”
Which apparently meant, no, he was not fine with that, but I shoved you down his throat anyway.
This just kept getting better and better.
“You’re in charge of this operation, Sam, or at least in charge of whatever CID’s part in it turns out to be, and you will report only to me. I’m assigning two other CID detectives to work with you. The three of you and mysel
f will be the only people at CID I want involved in this.”
“Two other detectives, sir?”
“Sergeant Kang, of course. And since Inspector Aw is on annual leave, Sergeant Lee has very little to do so she’ll be your third detective.”
Tay hesitated. “Sergeant Linda Lee?”
“Yes. You know her, don’t you, Sam?”
Tay did indeed know her.
A couple of years back he and Linda Lee had gone out a couple of times and the result had been so disastrous neither of them ever mentioned it to anyone. Even now, Tay didn’t really understand exactly what had happened.
Linda was attractive. Tay would be the first to say that. And he would even concede she was intelligent and articulate, too. Tay thought the problem might have been that he and Linda were too much alike. He had never believed opposites attracted and he was certain that cliché had been responsible for more divorces than infidelity, but he didn’t think being too much alike was exactly the road to heaven either. You had to find a balance of some kind; although God only knew he didn’t have the first idea how to do that. And that explained as well as anything why he had never married.
Tay drew on his cigarette and exhaled slowly. Could this get any worse? He really didn’t see how.
“What about the floater, sir? If Kang and I are looking for Suparman, I don’t see how we can work that case the way it needs to be worked. We don’t even have an ID on the corpse yet.”
“I’ll put somebody else on it.”
“It was a gunshot death, sir.”
The SAC’s mouth dropped open. “What?”
“That’s what Dr. Hoi says.”
“Who?”
“The pathologist who examined the body at the scene, sir. She said there was a gunshot wound in the back of the head. Probably nine millimeter.”
For a moment the SAC appeared to Tay to be too astonished to speak, then he sighed and shook his head so slowly he seemed concerned it might fall off.
“That’s all we need,” he said. “I’ll put somebody on getting an ID tomorrow and then we’ll see where we are.”
In other words, Tay thought, if it turns out to be somebody important, or God forbid a foreigner, I’ll keep the case regardless of having to battle ISD over Suparman at the same time. If it’s nobody, they’ll give the case to the first guy who walks by.
That was what he thought, but what he said was nothing at all.
“One other thing, Sam. The Minister didn’t argue nearly as hard as I expected him to when I demanded he force ISD to include us.” The SAC hesitated. “You see what I’m getting at, don’t you?”
“Not really, sir.”
“They made it too easy. So it’s occurred to me that they might be setting us up.”
“Setting us up? For what?”
“To take the fall if everything turns to shit. ISD would like nothing better than to dump all the blame for anything that goes wrong right on CID.”
“You mean like—”
“Like a very public fuck up. The kind that leaves bodies behind.”
Tay didn’t like the sound of that so he said nothing.
“Watch your butt out there, Sam. Watch our butt. Those sons of bitches are going to try to blame CID if this goes bad. I can feel it.”
Tay nodded, but he stayed silent.
The SAC tossed back the rest of his Irish whiskey and put the glass down on the table.
“That’s it, Sam. I’m going home. I’ll arrange for Sergeant Lee to meet you at New Phoenix Park tomorrow morning, but I’ll leave it to you to talk with Sergeant Kang. After the briefing call me and tell me what you think.”
Tay already knew what he would think. He would think this whole mess had the makings of a major cluster fuck and he was standing right on the bull’s eye.
At the front door, the SAC stopped and put a hand on Tay’s shoulder.
“Be damn careful, Sam. And look out for Kang and Lee, but don’t tell them any of this came from me. Just treat this as a routine assignment through normal channels.”
“I’ll do that, sir.”
Tay watched as the SAC walked to the front gate and let himself out. Tay raised his hand prepared to wave when the SAC looked back at him, but he never did. He just closed the gate and walked toward Orchard Road without turning around.
CHAPTER TEN
AT A LITTLE before nine the next morning Kang pulled up to the main gate of the Ministry of Home Affairs compound. He and Tay held up their warrant cards and the guard at the security post leaned down and flicked his eyes back and forth between their faces and the pictures on the cards until he was satisfied.
“Yes, sir.” The guard straightened up and saluted crisply. “You are to go to room 3271 in Block B. Do you know where that is?”
“No idea,” Kang said, since he was doing the driving.
“Follow the road until you come to a fork.” The guard stepped out of his hut and pointed toward the center of the compound. “Go to the right and continue straight ahead all the way to the end. You’ll be in a parking lot and you can park anywhere there you can find a space. Block B is the building right in front of you and room 3271 is—”
“On the third floor,” Kang cut in. “Got it.”
“Yes, sir,” the guard said.
He stepped back, tossed out another snappy salute, and pushed a large red button on the side of the guardhouse. The yellow and black striped anti-terrorism barrier sticking out of the road slowly lowered.
“Christ,” Kang muttered as they drove through the gate. “Is everyone around here like that?”
“Every single one of them,” Tay said.
When they got to the third floor of Block B, they saw that room 3271 was all the way down at the end of the corridor. It was as far from the elevators as you could walk and still be inside the building. Tay briefly wondered if ISD was holding the meeting there so they would have more time to examine people over CCTV as they walked the length of the corridor. That was probably silly, but anything to do with ISD just naturally kicked his paranoid instincts into high gear.
Tay opened the door to room 3271 without knocking and was surprised to discover it wasn’t an office or even a conference room, but what looked like a reception area of some kind. Two beefy Malaysian-looking men with military-style haircuts stood in an approximation of parade rest on opposite sides of a door directly opposite them and to their left a third man sat behind a mahogany desk. He looked so much like the other two they might all have been brothers.
“ID’s,” the man at the desk said, holding out his hand. “Please.”
He did say please at least, but Tay was pretty sure he didn’t mean it.
Tay and Kang handed over their warrant cards and stood quietly while the man scrutinized first one and then the other as if he suspected they might be forgeries. When he was apparently satisfied their warrant cards were genuine, the deskman turned and tossed them into separate compartments in a wooden rack mounted on the wall behind him. About six inches deep and divided into five rows of small compartments, it made Tay think of the key racks that were always behind hotel reception desks in old black and white crime movies from the forties.
“No phones, cameras, recording devices, or firearms permitted inside,” the deskman announced, holding out his hand again. “You can pick up your stuff when you come out.”
Tay and Kang surrendered their telephones, and the man put them into the compartments with their warrant cards.
“Any other electronic devices of any kind? Cameras, recorders? Anything like that?”
They both shook their heads.
“Are you armed?”
“No,” Tay said.
Kang nodded his head.
“Seriously?” Tay asked him.
Kang looked at Tay and shrugged. He reached under his shirt and unclipped an inside-the-waistband holster from which peeped the butt of what looked like a big semi-automatic and handed it over. The deskman reached back and plopped Kang’s holster and pis
tol into the same compartment as his mobile phone.
Tay didn’t much like carrying a gun and he seldom did. It wasn’t that he harbored high-minded scruples that prevented him from shooting people. He had a long list of people in mind he thought could use shooting. It was more a matter of not wanting to be tempted.
Most of the time, Tay left his service revolver at home in the top drawer of his bedside table. It was an old-fashioned wheel gun, a Smith & Wesson .38, five shots with a two-inch barrel, and it marked him as even more of an old fart than most people already thought he was, which was really saying something. The Smith & Wesson .38 hadn’t been issued to CID detectives in nearly fifteen years. It was practically an antique. Carrying it now was like making telephone calls with a rotary dial phone.
These days most CID cops carried Heckler & Koch forty calibre semi-automatics, but Tay had never bothered to qualify with one and just stuck to his old-fashioned .38. He knew his colleagues snickered about it. It’s a great weapon if you ever get into a gunfight in an elevator, they had joked so often Tay had decided to smack the next guy who said it, but he almost never carried a gun anyway so it didn’t matter much to him what it was. To tell the truth, he was such a lousy shot he figured one gun was pretty much as useless to him as another.
The deskman pointed to one of the heavies flanking the door and the man stepped forward and held out a black plastic paddle Tay recognized as a handheld metal detector. He didn’t speak, but he gestured to Tay and Kang to hold their arms out from their sides.
“You don’t trust us?” Tay asked.
“Standard procedure,” the man muttered.
“Standard procedure for everybody or just for CID people?”
