by Jake Needham
Tay was at his desk contemplating the piles of paper that had accumulated since the last time he had been in the office when Sergeant Lee’s head appeared around his door.
“Good day, sir. Am I interrupting anything?”
Tay waved her in and was pleased to see her carrying two mugs of coffee. She placed one in front of him and settled into a chair facing his desk. While Lee drank her coffee, Tay told her about going home, walking up his street from a different direction than usual, and discovering the men waiting for him in the van.
“Are you sure they were ISD, sir?”
“It was the same van we saw outside the Fortuna Hotel, and the man who got out to smoke was one of the men we saw there. If those guys were ISD, so were these.”
“So that’s why you were so weird on the telephone. You think they’re watching me, too?”
Tay said nothing, but saying nothing answered Lee’s question.
“That really does sound a little crazy, sir.”
“We’re the only two people left who can tie ISD to Suparman. And there are people who don’t want us to be able to do that. It’s just that simple, Linda.”
“So you’re saying ISD might kill two cops in the Criminal Investigation Department to keep us quiet? You can’t be serious.”
Tay didn’t say anything. He just looked at Lee.
“Oh shit,” Lee said. “You are serious.”
“Somebody is killing the people who can expose all this. If it’s not ISD, it’s Suparman. I suppose he wouldn’t want his cozy arrangement with ISD to be public information either.”
“But you think it could be ISD?”
“We’re targets either way,” Tay shrugged. “Is there someplace you can lie low for a few days?”
“You mean, not go home? Not go to work?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
Lee took a deep breath and looked away.
“I’m working on something, Linda. I need to know you’re safe for the next couple of days. I can't be worrying about you along with everything else.”
“Are you going to tell me what you're doing, sir?”
Tay hesitated. He didn’t want to tell Lee about the girl in the window, partly because he wasn’t sure why that mattered yet and partly because he had absolutely no intention of telling her anything about John August. So Tay just shook his head.
Lee looked a little annoyed, but she didn’t say anything.
“Is there some place, Linda?” Tay pressed. “Some place you can go?”
“I have a friend I can stay with. She and her husband recently moved to JB, and she’s always after me to come out and visit them.”
JB was Johor Bahru, the Malaysian city right across the Straits of Johor. Getting Lee completely out of the country was even better than Tay had hoped for.
“When do you want me to go, sir?”
“Right now. This afternoon. Turn your phone off and keep it off. Do not turn it on under any circumstances. Is it one of those you can take the battery out of?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do that, too.”
“But shouldn’t you be able to reach me?”
“When you get to JB buy yourself a prepaid cell phone. Text the number to me. Just the number and nothing else, but type it backwards. Last number first and so on.”
“You’re scaring me, sir.”
“Good. Stay scared. You’ll be safer that way.”
“Where are you going to be, sir?”
Tay said nothing.
Lee held up both hands, palms out. “Okay, never mind. Forget I asked. How about that call? Are you ready for me to make it yet?”
For a moment Tay had no idea what Lee was talking about, but then he remembered he told her he wanted her to make an anonymous call about the body of the hotel manager. So much had happened since they found it that he had completely forgotten.
“Make it this afternoon on your way home to pack.” Then all at once something occurred to Tay. “Do pay telephones still exist? They do, don’t they?”
“I was thinking of going to the airport, sir. They have them there and the location won’t help to identify who made the call.”
Tay nodded. It was a good idea. He should have thought of it himself.
“Fine,” he said. “Go home, get your passport and pack a bag. Take a cab to the airport and kill about an hour. Then make your telephone call and right away take another cab from there straight to JB. If anybody’s watching, they’ll assume you’re on an airplane. By the time they figure out you aren’t, you’ll be in Malaysia.”
“I really don’t understand any of this, sir. What’s really going on here?”
“I don’t know, Linda. Not yet. But when I do, I’ll tell you. Besides, it’s probably better that you don’t know too much right now anyway.”
“Then everything must be peachy keen, sir, because right now what I know is fuck all.”
A minute or two after Lee left Tay’s office his telephone buzzed. He took it out of his pocket and looked at the screen.
Sure enough, there was another stranger number and another message.
Walk south on Cantonment Road, west on Neil Road, south on Everton.
Why the hell couldn’t August say left and right like everybody else? Tay was still sitting there picturing a city map in his mind and trying to turn August’s text into directions he could follow when his phone buzzed again.
Stop overthinking this. Just do it. Right now.
Tay had to admit August knew him pretty well.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
TAY LIKED WALKING in Singapore, although most people avoided it unless it was absolutely necessary. The city was generally so hot and muggy that any exposure to air that hadn’t been comprehensively cooled and thoroughly dehydrated by industrial strength machinery was pure misery.
If Singaporeans were absolutely forced into the streets for some reason, they ducked and dodged from one tiny patch of shade to the next like soldiers picking their way through a minefield. When there was no shade, he had even seen women holding their purses in front of their faces to keep the sun off. Did that do any good? It seemed a bit silly to Tay, but what did he know about such things?
For Tay, one of the things he liked most about walking in Singapore was that it usually constituted an almost solitary pursuit. He frequently had the sidewalks more or less to himself and he could soak in the unique feel of every neighborhood and tune in to its sounds and smells without battling other people. Even so, Tay very much preferred walking when he had at least a rough idea where he was going and why he was going there. And right then he had no fucking clue about either of those things.
Tay turned right outside the Cantonment Complex and walked along Cantonment Road. The blue and silver glass of the high-rise towers shimmered in the bright sun and Tay felt like most of the heat was being focused directly onto him. By the time he got to Neil Road, he was already sweating. He turned right and walked along in front of one of those massive, soulless apartment complexes that had taken over most of Singapore.
It wasn’t an especially interesting neighborhood for walking. If Tay had chosen his own route, he would have gone north up New Bridge Road toward Chinatown where the streets were still lined with the little shophouses of another era. But he had not chosen his route, of course. John August had. Tay assumed August had some specific reason for sending him this way, and he hoped to hell August would reveal it before he died from either heatstroke or boredom.
When Tay got to Everton Road, he turned left, exactly as he had been instructed. He still didn’t see why he was there. On one side of the road more bland and nondescript apartment buildings were grouped behind an arched gateway that said Everton Park at the top, and on the other side a line of two-story shophouses had been converted into modest private residences. Tay warily examined the shophouses as he passed. He peered into the shadows cast by the overhangs of the upper levels and looked for anything that seemed off. He saw nothing.
All at once i
n his peripheral vision he caught sight of a silver-blue van. It came out of a side street, turned into Everton Road about a hundred yards in front of him, and drove straight toward him. ISD had found him and here he was stranded out in the open.
Crap.
Tay glanced around, but he couldn’t see any obvious refuge. Unless he forced his way into one of the shophouses there was no safety on this side of the street. But even if he could, what would he do after he got inside? He was pretty sure there were no back entrances to any of the little houses so he would be trapped.
More by default than because of any clear idea why he was doing it, Tay jogged across the road toward the entrance arch to Everton Park. Maybe he could somehow lose himself among the apartment buildings inside. It felt like a forlorn hope, but he had no other ideas.
The silver-blue van suddenly accelerated. It bounced over the sidewalk, roared up a driveway, and slammed to a stop right in front of him. The sliding door on the side flew open.
“What the fuck are you doing, Sam?”
John August was comfortably slumped in a black leather captain’s chair in the back of the van. His legs were stretched out and crossed at the ankle, and his arms were folded. He was swiveling the chair briskly left and right and looked downright annoyed.
“We’re as conspicuous in this concrete wasteland as tits on a bull,” he snapped. “Now would you please get the fuck in here before somebody calls the cops?”
When Tay had climbed into the van and settled into a similar chair, August reached into an ice chest and handed him a bottle of water. Tay cracked the cap and took a long pull. The bottle was wet and cold and crystals of ice clung to the plastic. Tay leaned back and rolled the bottle against his forehead.
“I don’t know how you people live in this place,” August said as the van accelerated away. “It’s so goddamned hot here a scorpion would go shopping for an air conditioner.”
Tay drank some more water and looked around the van. He was sitting in another captain’s chair facing August across a small table. They were alone in the back, but he could see a driver in the front and a woman in the passenger seat. Both of them were facing forward and he could make out nothing about either.
“Nice van, John. It looks exactly like the ones ISD uses.”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” August grinned. “I guess we spooked you, and when you started running away—”
“I wasn’t exactly running.”
“No, you weren’t, but I suppose you were moving as fast as you could. I was trying to be kind.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
August grinned again. Tay just drank some more water.
“What are you doing here, John?”
“I know why you called me, of course. We need to talk.”
Tay drank some more water and waited.
“I’m sorry about your sergeant, Sam. I really am. That was rotten luck. He never should have been there in the first place. You never should have been there.”
“Robbie was there because that’s where I told him to be.”
“Don’t be so tough on yourself, Sam. Shit happens to good people. That’s not our fault. We’re both in hard businesses.”
Tay looked over August’s shoulder and out through the windshield of the van. They were on New Bridge Road heading north toward the Singapore River.
“Where are we going, John?”
“We have a safe house off Nassim Road. I thought we could talk there.”
“That must be handy for you. You can just about walk to the American Embassy from there.”
“I wouldn’t know,” August said. “I don’t hang around embassies.”
Tay took out his Marlboros and a pack of matches. He shook a cigarette from the package and automatically offered it to August, but August shook his head as Tay knew he would. Tay lit it for himself and returned the pack and the matches to his pocket.
“This is a United States government vehicle,” August said. “Absolutely no smoking is permitted.”
“What an enlightened and forward-looking policy that is, John. I’m sure all Americans are better human beings simply for knowing such a policy exists and that it is rigorously and impartially enforced at all times by the government of the United States.”
Tay took a long pull on his cigarette, exhaled slowly, and stared at August expressionlessly.
When the van stopped and the door was opened from the outside, Tay climbed out and looked around.
“Nice digs.”
“Come on, Sam. You didn’t expect me to hang around in some shithole, did you?”
Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Singapore’s British rulers built lavish villas all over the island to house high-ranking officials and civil servants. Called black and white bungalows because of their dark timber beams and whitewashed walls, the structures were stately two- and three-story houses of vaguely Tudor design, but with tropical touches such as wide, shady verandas. Only a few hundred were left now. Tucked away in genteel enclaves, they were throwbacks to the country’s colonial past.
“It’s owned by a shell company in the British Virgin Islands,” August offered. “The company even leased it out for a while to the Iranian ambassador. We had a lot of fun with that.”
August’s safe house was one of the most lavish black and whites Tay had ever seen. Surround by a rolling, emerald-green lawn mowed to the smoothness of a golf green, the two-story structure was capped with a sloped roof of red tile that overhung the house and cast it into deep, cooling shadows. A wide veranda on the ground floor had groupings of thick-cushioned rattan furniture scattered here and there, and the louvered windows around the upper floor rattled and clicked in the light breeze.
“Some people say these old houses are haunted, John.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that, too. The Japanese used this one as a prison camp during World War II.”
August pointed down to where the rolling lawn ended at a thick stand of long-leafed gum trees.
“One day the Japs are supposed to have dragged something like a hundred sick and wounded prisoners down there, lined them up, and shot them in retaliation for an attack on a Japanese officer. To this day, people claim to hear gunshots and screams coming from down there late at night. Never heard them myself. You don’t believe in ghosts, do you, Sam?”
Tay wondered if he had ever in a moment of weakness told August about his occasional visits with his mother. Surely he hadn’t, but he wasn’t absolutely certain.
To his relief, August dropped the subject without saying anything else and started walking across the lawn to the veranda. Tay followed.
They sat on two facing rattan couches that had big, fluffy cushions covered with white sailcloth. An elderly woman who looked to Tay to be Filipina sat a tray on the coffee table between them and immediately disappeared. The tray held a large pitcher of water with chunks of ice floating in it, three tall glasses, and three bottles of Tiger beer.
“Help yourself,” August said.
“I gather someone is joining us.”
“She’ll be along in a minute.”
“She?”
August half shrugged, but he didn’t say anything else.
Tay wasn’t a beer drinker, but the sweating bottles on the tray looked refreshing so he took one, tilted it back, and took a long drink. All at once it came back to him why he wasn’t a beer drinker. Was it just Tiger beer that tasted this bad, or did all beer taste terrible?
He set the beer down on the table and took his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket.
Tay looked at August. “Another United States government facility that is absolutely non-smoking?”
August nodded slowly and reached for a beer.
Tay shook out a cigarette, lit it, and sat smoking quietly. It certainly tasted a lot better than the beer.
“When are you going to tell me what’s going on here, John?”
August seem to consider the question for a moment, and then he grinned. “How about now
?”
“Now would be good,” Tay said.
So August told him.
CHAPTER FORTY
“YOUR INTERNAL SECURITY Department—"
“It’s not my Internal Security Department,” Tay said.
August even didn’t bother to smile.
“Regardless of whose responsibility ISD is,” he said, “they started running Suparman years ago. They believed he gave them access to the inner circles of—”
“Running?” Tay interrupted again. “You guys just love the spy movie bullshit, don’t you?”
“Would you feel less annoyed if I said Suparman was an informant for ISD?”
“How could Suparman be an informant for anyone? He’s one of the most hunted terrorists in Asia. He’s been responsible for bombings all over Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore.”
“Opinions on that vary. Some say he’s mostly a creation of the press, a bogeyman to frighten children, and he wasn’t really involved in most of the things people say he was.”
“He wasn’t involved in the hotel bombings here?”
“Some people think not.”
“What do you think?”
“I think the people who say he wasn’t are full of shit.”
Tay considered that for a moment. He took a final puff and flipped the butt of his cigarette into the grass.
“I don’t see the connection between ISD thinking Suparman was their informant and John August watching the Fortuna Hotel.”
“It started when we heard that ridiculous story from the Indonesians about his sister supposedly having cancer.”
“So it’s not true?”
“Of course it’s not true. The woman at the hotel wasn’t even Suparman’s sister. The real sister was grabbed a couple months ago trying to sneak into Australia. That’s when ASIO dreamed up this stunt. The idea was—”
“Wait…what? ASIO? The Australian Security Intelligence Organization?”
“Sure. Counterterrorism in Australia is their patch.”
“What’s Australia got to do with all this?”
