THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 4)

by Jake Needham

“They think Suparman is as much a threat to them as he is to you. When they grabbed his sister, they saw an opportunity to lure him out into the open and take him. But that was when they discovered there are people here in Singapore heavily invested in the belief Suparman is really your guy. ISD didn’t want ASIO or anybody else to take him down.”

  “So ASIO abandoned the whole idea?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Sam. That was when they decided to kill him instead.”

  Tay thought back to the man in the alleyway behind the Temple Street Inn who appeared to slip something to the woman they thought was Suparman’s sister.

  “The woman worked for the Australians?”

  August nodded.

  “And the Australians provided the weapon?”

  August nodded again.

  “But this woman screwed it up and didn’t kill Suparman,” Tay finished.

  “It was a stupid fucking idea from the beginning,” August shrugged. “Australian Intelligence dreamed it up. That’s an oxymoron if I ever hear one. What else do you need to know?”

  “I still don’t understand what you were doing at the Fortuna Hotel.”

  “The Australians convinced ISD the sister was for real, but ISD wanted to use a little misdirection in setting up the meet to give them an extra layer of deniability. ASIO was happy enough with the plan when they heard it. It gave them a nice quiet location to stage their stunt.”

  “You haven’t answered my question yet.”

  “We wanted Suparman taken down,” August said. “We’ve been trying to get ISD on board to do that for nearly a year and we had come to the conclusion it wasn’t going to happen. When we found out about this Aussie shit show, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. We decided we’d solve the problem ourselves if they didn’t.”

  “You mean you were going to try to take Suparman away from ISD?”

  “Don’t be silly, Sam. We wanted to kill him, too. ISD thinks he’s their bitch, that he’ll tip them off to all kinds of nefarious shit. Personally, I’m convinced they know they’ve been had, but you’ve got people at high levels here who don’t want to admit they made a mistake.”

  “How high?”

  August wiggled his hand in a gesture that could have meant almost anything.

  “So you were…what, John? Planning to sit in that apartment until you saw Suparman and then run down and shoot him?”

  “I don’t do manual labor anymore myself, Sam. Haven’t you heard? I’m an executive now. Besides, we decided on a sniper shot and there are better people for that than me.”

  “So why didn’t whoever you had up there take the shot?”

  “Why, funny you should ask, Sam. At the last minute these three Singapore cops showed up. We were already coping with Suparman being surrounded by his ISD security detail and the crazy female assassin the Aussies had running around. The cops made it all just a little too complicated for us so we decided to fold our tent and wait for a better day.”

  “But you haven’t given up?”

  “Not a chance, my friend. Especially not now that it’s gotten personal.”

  “Personal?”

  “That body you pulled out of the Singapore River was our man in Indonesian intelligence. Suparman found out and killed him. You lost one of yours, and we’ve lost one of ours. That makes it personal in my book.”

  “Do you know about the hotel manager?”

  “Of course I know about him. Suparman did him, too. The bastard’s got a good gig here. He’s willing to do whatever he needs to protect it.”

  “Then Suparman was responsible for all the murders? It wasn’t ISD cleaning up, eliminating anybody who knew they were protecting Suparman?”

  “ISD might be a bunch of clowns, Sam, but they don’t murder their own. At least not as far as I know.”

  “So why was ISD waiting for me when I went home, John? They were in a van parked up the street. I would never have seen them if I hadn’t walked home from an unusual direction. Otherwise, I would have walked straight into their trap.”

  “It wasn’t a trap, Sam. They were just keeping an eye on you. They were afraid Suparman might come after you, and two CID detectives going down in the same day would have been downright embarrassing.”

  Tay reached for the beer he had abandoned. He didn’t want it, but he needed a second to let what August had just told him sink in. He sipped at it absentmindedly, but it was warm and he almost spit it out.

  “You haven’t told me yet why I’m here, John. You didn’t go to all this trouble just to explain everything to me.”

  “You’re right, Sam. You’re here because I need your help.”

  “With what?”

  “I don’t see how we can get this bastard without you.”

  “I’m flattered, John, but what do you need me for? I’m sure you have all sorts of capabilities I can’t even imagine. I’m just a local cop.”

  “There’s somebody I want you to meet and then we’ll talk about that.” August stood up. “I’ll be right back.”

  Tay was halfway through another Marlboro when August returned with the woman who had been in the front passenger seat of the van when they picked him up.

  She was relatively tall and her long blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She was lean and fit looking with a tanned face, and the khaki shirt, jeans, and aviator sunglasses she wore gave her a slightly masculine look. Tay assumed she was an American, but nothing about her appearance confirmed it. That was only one of many things that disconcerted Tay about Americans. There was no template for an American. They could look like anything.

  “This is Claire,” August said. “She’s my best sniper.”

  “Inspector,” Claire nodded and sat down on the couch opposite him.

  Tay wasn’t sure whether he should stand up and offer his hand or not. What was the etiquette on shaking hands with a sniper? Then he noticed that August was sitting down so he decided that was the end of the greeting portion of the program and let it go.

  “Is Claire your real name?” Tay asked

  “Don’t be fucking stupid, Sam,” August chimed in. “Of course it isn’t.”

  Claire said nothing. She just smiled. A little.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” August said. “Suparman could be anywhere. We’re not going to find him by blundering around the city. We need to make him come to us, and I have a way to do that.”

  “Don’t you think ISD will throw a blanket over him after all this?”

  “They’ll try, but they aren’t going to want to piss him off. Remember, they’re treating him like a valued informant, not a prisoner. And he’s had enough freedom of movement to kill at least two people and not get caught at it. He knows how to get around the city, he knows how to avoid his handlers, and he’s willing to do whatever he thinks needs to be done.”

  “So what you need is a motivation powerful enough to convince him to surface and go after somebody else.”

  August nodded.

  Tay took a long drag on his cigarette, flipped away the butt, and thought about what August had just told him. He shifted his eyes back to August.

  August nodded again.

  “Oh shit,” Tay said.

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much the deal, Sam. He knows you’re coming after him, but he also knows either you or that woman sergeant who was with you can blow him up even if you don’t find him just by going public with what you know. He has to stop you before you do that or his cushy gig is over. Where’s your sergeant now?”

  “She’s…” Tay hesitated. “Out of the country. I told her to lie low for a while.”

  “So that leaves you,” August said.

  “That leaves me. I gather you want me to be the bait.”

  “Doesn’t matter what I want, Sam. You are the bait. Suparman is coming after you anyway. I’m just proposing we use that to set a little trap for him.”

  Tay looked out across the lawn, thought about it, and then he looked back at August. “You better expla
in that to me.”

  “We just want you to go about your life as you always do. Don’t do anything that might scare him off.”

  “You’re going to have a group of armed guards following me everywhere just in case Suparman shows up?”

  “He’s not going to come after you on the street, Sam, and he’s sure as hell not going to come to the Cantonment Complex and take an elevator up to your office. He wants to walk away after he gets rid of you.”

  “Then what do you think he has in mind?”

  “Suparman will come for you when you’re at home. He’ll have you alone then. There’s really no other way he can do it.”

  “So you think—”

  “Your house will be completely covered. And Claire will be there to take him when he shows up. She’s the best. She’s not going to waste another chance.”

  Tay shifted his glance to the woman. She had said nothing at all. He couldn’t see her eyes behind the sunglasses, but he thought there was a hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

  “You were the girl in the window,” Tay said to her.

  “I would have waved, but I never wave at strange men.”

  “I’m not strange.”

  “That’s not what John says.”

  Tay looked at August.

  August shrugged.

  August’s van carried Tay up to Orchard Road and he found a taxi to take him home. The taxi dropped Tay in front of Preranakan Place where he usually asked taxis to drop him, and he walked up Emerald Hill toward his house exactly the way he always did. As he walked, he examined the vehicles parked further up Emerald Hill Road with as much subtlety as he could muster. The ISD van that had been there before was gone, but did any of the other vehicles contain a new set of watchers? Tay had no idea.

  He assumed August would have his people in place soon. For all he knew, they were already there. If they weren’t and Suparman made an early appearance, Tay figured he was pretty much screwed. He doubted he would be any match for Suparman one on one, so he was largely in August’s hands. He trusted August, that wasn’t the problem, but he also recognized that people made mistakes. He only hoped he wouldn’t be one of August’s.

  Tay went straight to the kitchen, poured himself a couple of inches of Irish whiskey, and took it and his cigarettes out into the garden. August had told him to behave normally, hadn’t he? And this was as normal as life got for him.

  As he smoked and sipped his whiskey, he thought about how it felt to be the cheese in John August’s mousetrap.

  He couldn’t blame August, no matter how much he wished he could. He alone was responsible for the position he was in now. It was his decision to freelance and not tell anyone else what he was doing that had started all this. It was his decision that left Robbie Kang dead and him hoping very much now not to become dead.

  On the other hand, it was also true that his decision to freelance had accomplished something of real value, too. That was how he found Suparman, and how he found out ISD was protecting Suparman to save face for the men who ran ISD and the politicians to whom they reported.

  The idea of face was very much an Asian concept. When Westerners heard people talk about saving face, they generally thought it meant avoiding embarrassment, but losing face was far more serious to an Asian than suffering an embarrassment. Lost face was something never regained. When you lost face you were permanently diminished. You mattered less than you did before. You were less than you were before. To most Asians, their face was their very existence, and protecting it was everything.

  Had Robbie Kang and other people died because some bureaucrats feared losing face? Was it possible that people above them, politicians at the top levels of government, knew and approved the plan because they would lose face too if it became known how badly they had screwed up?

  If that was what had happened here, Tay thought, maybe August was killing the wrong man. If bureaucrats or government ministers had known who Suparman really was and what he had done and they had said nothing to save face, they deserved shooting as much as Suparman did. Maybe more. Perhaps he ought to see what he could do about that.

  Tay stubbed out his cigarette, finished his whiskey, and went upstairs to bed.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  TAY WAS FULLY awake in an instant. He had felt the foot of his bed move slightly, but he didn’t open his eyes. If he did open his eyes, he was certain he would see one of two things. Either a murderous terrorist waiting to kill him, or the ghost of his mother preparing to give him advice. On the whole, he thought he might prefer the murderous terrorist.

  “Samuel, I can see you’re awake. Don’t try to pretend you’re sleeping. That’s childish.”

  Tay sighed and buried his face in the pillow.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Samuel, cut it out,” his mother snapped. “You’re a grown man. Act like it!”

  Tay yawned. He realized there was no point in trying to ignore her. She had always been able to wait him out. Better to let her have her say and get it over, then he could go back to sleep.

  He pushed himself up on his elbows, jammed a pillow behind him, and leaned back against the headboard. A very realistic manifestation of his mother was sitting at the foot of his bed. Usually his mother’s little visits didn’t amount to much more than a few swirling lights, but this was the second full-body materialization within a few days. This was getting serious.

  “Good evening, Mother. To what do I owe the pleasure tonight?”

  “You owe the pleasure, as you put it in that snarky tone of yours, to the same thing you always do. I’m your mother. It is my responsibility to try to help you in any way I can no matter what obstacles I must overcome to do it.”

  “And is one of those obstacles the fact that you’re dead?”

  His mother unfolded her arms and gave an airy little wave with one hand. “That’s the least of my problems. It’s your obstinacy and pigheadedness that make helping you so difficult.”

  “Can we skip the part where you criticize my character just this once, Mother? I’m really very tired. It’s been a hell of a few days and I’d like to go back to sleep. Please tell me what you’ve come to say and then bugger off.”

  “Such language, Samuel, such language. I swear I don’t know why I go to all this trouble for you. It’s not as if doing these materializations is a day at the beach, you know. Do you have any idea how much energy I have to put into this?”

  “Perhaps next time, you could just send me an email.”

  “You don’t read emails.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  Tay’s mother shook her head, and then she stood up and walked across the room to the low dresser between two windows that overlooked his garden.

  “Every single time I’m here I hope to see a framed picture of a woman on your dresser, Samuel, but I never do.”

  “You’d only start asking me a lot of questions about her.”

  “Of course I would. Shouldn’t a mother be interested in the woman with whom her unmarried and I should also say increasingly elderly son is keeping company?”

  “I’m hardly elderly.”

  “Getting close, Samuel. Getting very close.”

  “And I’m not keeping company, as you put it, with anyone.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” she said, waving vaguely at the top of the dresser. “More’s the pity.”

  Tay’s mother strolled around the room casually peering here and there, and then after a bit she returned to the foot of Tay’s bed and resumed her seat.

  “Why are you here, Mother?” Tay asked.

  “I heard what you and your friend were talking about yesterday. And I wanted to tell you—”

  “What friend?”

  “That August person.”

  “I wouldn’t really call John August a friend.”

  “Whatever you call him, when he asked you to—”

  “Wait a minute. You’re saying you heard what August and I were talking about yesterday?”

  “Y
es, that’s what I just said. Don’t you ever listen to me, Samuel?”

  “How could you have heard us, Mother? You weren’t there.”

  Tay wasn’t certain what to make of the rather humorless smile on his mother’s face. He had never seen an expression quite like it before.

  “Were you there, Mother? Somewhere?”

  Tay’s mother shook her head and looked away.

  “Why must we always have the same tiresome conversation, Samuel?”

  “Are you saying you know about my conversation with John August yesterday because of your universal knowledge?”

  Tay’s mother just looked at him. “I’ve told you over and over. It’s one of the few advantages of being dead.”

  “You know everything I say? All the time? Regardless of where I am or who I’m talking to?”

  “More or less. Sometimes I don’t really pay any attention to you, but you haven’t paid any attention to me in forty years so I think that’s only fair, don’t you?”

  “You’re telling me you hear—”

  “For God’s sake, Samuel, would you stop talking long enough for me to say what I came here to say?”

  “Sorry, Mother. Yes, please, by all means. Say whatever you would like to say so I can go back to sleep.”

  “I wanted to tell you I’m proud of you for doing this.”

  Tay couldn’t ever remember his mother telling him she was proud of him about anything before. For a moment, he had no idea what to say.

  “Did you hear me, Samuel?” his mother prodded.

  “Yes, I heard you. I’m just too surprised to speak.”

  “You really can be an ass sometimes, Samuel. Can’t I even tell you that I’m proud of you without getting a dose of sarcasm?”

  “I’m sorry, Mother. You’re absolutely right. I am glad you’re proud of me, but…well, I’m not exactly sure what it is you’re proud of.”

  “You went after Robbie Kang’s killer in spite of my advice, and I realize perhaps I was wrong to tell you not to. Now you’ve found him—”

  “Not exactly, Mother. August thinks he’s going to find me.”

  “Same thing. Anyway, I’m sure you’re going to get this man before he hurts anybody else. Superman? Isn’t that what they call him?”