He looked at his cell phone and saw, mercifully, that he had a signal. But who was he going to call? If he called the motor pool at the Cantonment Complex and asked them to come tow the car, how was he going to explain what he was doing in Malaysia?
Before he could decide, he heard the crunch of tires on pavement and looked up to see a black Mercedes with Singapore plates rolling to a stop behind him. The driver was a man who appeared to be alone in the car. He was wearing dark glasses and a white shirt without a tie, and he had an official sort of look to him which shifted Tay’s imagination straight into high gear.
Tay had only the vaguest idea how to detect surveillance and the dim-witted effort he had made to find out if he was being followed after he passed through the Woodlands checkpoint was now an embarrassing memory.
Had he led ISD straight to John August? Well, he supposed he hadn’t, since John August was nowhere to be found at the Polo Store and the room where he and Tay had met before was now filled with cartons of socks. He was certain ISD would get a big laugh out of that.
The man opened the driver’s door and got out.
Tay took a deep breath. Was he about to sink even deeper into whatever this quagmire was that he had stumbled into?
He had no idea, and no better plan than to wait and find out.
THIRTY
“NEED SOME HELP?” The man called out as he walked toward Tay.
“No,” Tay answered automatically. “I’m fine.”
“It looks to me like you’re having car trouble.”
Tay supposed there was no point in denying it. The Volvo was parked awkwardly, neither in the parking lot nor out of it. It didn’t look like a place anyone would stop who didn’t have to.
Maybe this was just some guy who was trying to be a Good Samaritan, Tay told himself. He had been a policeman for so long that his inevitable response to every situation, no matter how innocent, was suspicion.
There was nothing about the Volvo to identify it as a police vehicle and nothing about Tay to identify him as a policeman so Tay didn’t have to explain anything. He could just play the whole thing straight.
“Well,” Tay said after an awkward moment of silence. “The engine did quit on me, but I restarted it without any trouble the last time it did that, so I’m sure it will start again.”
“Why don’t you check it out while I’m here?” the man suggested gesturing at the Volvo. “If it doesn’t start, I can give you a lift.”
Tay couldn’t think of any reason to say no, so he nodded and slipped back behind the wheel. He turned the key and hit the ignition. The starter motor produced the familiar grinding sound, but the engine didn’t fire. Tay let off the ignition, waited a few seconds, and tried again, this time pumping the accelerator a little as well. Nothing.
Tay got out of the car again and shrugged. “I guess this isn’t my lucky day.”
“Were you headed to Singapore?” the man asked.
Tay’s suspicions came flooding back. “Why would you think that?”
The man pointed at the Volvo’s license plate.
“Of course,” Tay nodded, feeling foolish. “Yes, I’m going…home.”
The man stepped forward and offered his hand.
“I’m David Low,” he said.
“Sam Tay.”
As they shook hands, Tay sized the man up. His surname was Chinese, but Tay guessed he was Singaporean since he looked a little Chinese, a little Malaysia, and a little Caucasian. He could have been anything, really. Which is why Tay thought he was probably a Singaporean.
The man was about six feet tall and seemed fit. He was probably in his forties, but it was difficult to tell for sure since Tay couldn’t see his eyes through the heavy gold aviator-style sunglasses he wore. Tay had the sense that the man might be military or law enforcement. He sure didn’t look like a traveling salesman.
“I can give you a lift to a gas station,” Low said, “but my guess is a gas station isn’t going to be of much help. You’re going to need a garage. One that knows something about Volvo’s.”
Tay nodded. He was pretty sure the man was right.
“Why don’t you let me take you back to Singapore? You’ll probably have more luck arranging to get the car picked up from there than you will from here. Malaysia isn’t a place where…uh, maybe we should just say it’s not very efficient and leave it at that.”
The man smiled in a Singaporean’s automatic affirmation that, no matter what he thought of the way things worked in Malaysia, he didn’t actually have anything against Malaysians. Not as a race. Not as such. Not really.
The suggestion sounded attractive to Tay since the Volvo wasn’t his problem. He could just abandon the damned thing, tell the motor pool personnel at the Cantonment Complex where he had left it, and then it was their problem. He would eventually have to come up with some kind of explanation as to what he was doing in Malaysia, of course, but he was sure he could handle that. He was a senior police inspector. He was used to lying.
“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Low.”
“David.”
“David, then.”
“Where in Singapore are you headed?”
Where was he headed indeed?
Tay hadn’t thought much beyond finding John August, and now that August had done his disappearing act he didn’t have the slightest idea what he would do next. He could hardly go to his office and get back to work on the Woodlands case. There wasn’t a Woodlands case anymore, not officially, and if he continued to act like there was one then he had no doubt the full wrath of ISD would come down on his head pretty quickly. And he was sure the full wrath of ISD would be one hell of a lot of wrath.
So Tay thought he might as well go home. He liked being home. He felt secure there. And right now a little security would go a long way.
“Emerald Hill,” he said.
“I’m going to Marina Bay,” Tay’s benefactor said. “I could drop you off on Orchard Road right in front of Centrepoint. Would that work for you?”
“That would be great. You’re sure I’m not taking you out of your way?”
“Not at all, Sam. It’s my pleasure.”
Tay decided his suspicions had been entirely misplaced. He had simply had the good fortune to encounter a pleasant and generous man who held a genuine concern for his fellow human beings and tried to help them out when he could. There were still a few people like that around, Tay was pretty sure. He just didn’t personally meet that many in his line of work.
Tay and his benefactor made small talk until they cleared the Woodlands checkpoint into Singapore and were rolling south on the Bukit Timah Expressway. The thought that there was yet decency and generosity in the world continued to amaze and warm Tay.
They were just passing the Upper Peirce Reservoir when everything changed.
***
“We need to talk, Inspector.”
Tay’s head swiveled away from the make-believe wilderness that separated the expressway from the reservoir. He looked carefully at David Low. He couldn’t see the man’s eyes behind the dark glasses he wore and for a moment he wondered if he had even heard him correctly.
“I apologize for ambushing you like this,” Low continued, “but I’ve been asked to tell you some things you need to know and it was important to do it privately.”
Tay had heard him correctly. But he still struggled for a moment to get his mind around what the man was saying.
“So this isn’t just a coincidence?”
“No.”
“You were you following me when my car broke down?”
“Your car didn’t break down. We arranged that.”
“But you were following me.”
“Yes.”
“You’re ISD?”
The man chuckled at that.
“Hardly,” he said. “I work for John August.”
If Tay’s head had been capable of doing a couple of 360-degree rotations, he would have done them right then and it would have looked ju
st like a scene out of The Exorcist.
The man said nothing more. It was plain he wasn’t going to go on until Tay acknowledged in some way what he had just been told.
“I don’t understand,” was all Tay could think of to say.
It sounded lame and foolish, of course, and the moment Tay said it he was sorry he had, but it was still pretty much the truth.
***
The man drove on in silence for a few moments. Now that Tay noticed, he seemed to be checking his mirrors rather more than the level of traffic around them seemed to warrant. What was he looking for?
“Here’s what I need to tell you,” the man finally said after yet another check of his mirrors. “Jemaah Islamiyah had nothing to do with the bombings.”
He glanced over at Tay as if he wanted to reassure himself Tay was listening.
Tay was.
“ISD is trying to make JI the scapegoat. They’re desperate to keep the truth from coming out, and that’s why they’re shutting down your Woodlands case.”
“And I suppose you know what that truth is.”
“Sure we do.” The man flashed a quick smile in which Tay didn’t see all that much humor. “We know all sorts of stuff. We’re not just some guys.”
“Then who are you?”
“Ah, well….”
The man trailed off and checked his mirrors again.
“What has August told you about that?” he asked.
“Not much. Nothing, actually. But from what I know of what he does, I assume he must be CIA.”
“CIA?” The man chuckled again. “August would love that.”
Tay waited. He wasn’t going to say something dumb just to fill space.
This man, whoever he was, would eventually tell Tay whatever he wanted to. So Tay just sat and waited. Besides, they were doing seventy down an expressway in a Mercedes with darkened windows. It wasn’t like he had a whole host of alternatives.
“Please believe me, Inspector, when I tell you this information August has asked me to share with you comes from the highest levels of the government of the United States. Levels that are far above the CIA.”
“Okay, I believe you.”
Now it was the driver’s turn to examine Tay carefully. Tay offered up the blandest smile he could manage.
The man shook his head. “August told me you could be a squirrelly little son of a bitch.”
“Coming from August, I take that as a compliment.”
They blew by a truck towing a long trailer piled high with pallets of red bricks wrapped in plastic sheeting.
“The bombings were domestic,” the man suddenly said. “Foreign terrorists weren’t responsible. It was strictly a case of domestic terrorism.”
“I don’t—”
Tay stopped before he could say again that he didn’t understand. He didn’t understand, of course, but it would have sounded really stupid to say so.
“Singapore has always presented itself to the world as something like the Switzerland of Asia,” the man continued. “An island of stability in a sea of upheaval. Of course, you’ve managed to pull that off by imposing relentless one-party rule and effectively hounding the opposition out of politics or sometimes even out of the country. The world’s only unanimous democracy, huh?”
Tay said nothing. He didn’t know what to say. The man was pretty close to right about that.
“Well, there’s an opposition now,” the man said with a glance at Tay, “and they’ve decided to take a more direct course of action than writing letters to the Straits Times that no one will publish.”
“You’re telling me some Singaporeans blew up their own city?”
“You can’t bottle up frustrations forever, Inspector. Eventually, they boil over. Exclude people from participating in their government and, when there are enough of them, they’ll hurt you.”
“They hurt a lot of people who don’t care about the government of Singapore one way or another.”
“You’ve got to break some eggs to make an omelet.”
Tay had a deep personal aversion to clichés, and normally would have greeted that one with a scornful rejoinder of some kind. But he was so dumbstruck by what this man was telling him that he hardly even noticed.
“So who did it?” Tay asked.
The man hesitated in his narrative for the first time, and Tay thought he could guess what was coming next.
“We’re not sure,” he said after a moment. “They recruited Johnny the Mover to bring in the explosives for them. So he knew. That’s probably why he’s dead.”
***
They rode in silence for a while after that. Tay was waiting for the rest, but nothing was forthcoming.
The man slowed, shifted into the outside lane, and exited on Stevens Road. They were just passing behind the Shangri-La Hotel when Tay got tired of waiting and asked the obvious question.
“Why would somebody working for American intelligence deliver explosives to domestic terrorists in Singapore?”
“Johnny wasn’t working for us. He hadn’t worked for us for years.”
“So you say.”
“Yes, so I say. But it’s true.”
The man looked uncomfortable and Tay knew something more was coming.
“Look, Inspector, this is going to sound like I’m making excuses for Johnny, but it’s just a fact and you should know it. He has a daughter. She has leukemia. Johnny was dying of cancer. He wasn’t going to be able to look after her much longer so he needed money to make sure she had something when he was gone. Simple as that.”
“He needed money. So he sold explosives to a bunch of nutcases who wanted to blow up Singapore in order to seize political power?”
“No, Johnny was a smuggler. He didn’t sell weapons and explosives. He just moved them. He was good at that kind of thing. He couldn’t have known what they were going to do with what he was moving.”
“He smuggled in God only knows how many pounds of explosives to Singapore and you expect me to believe he didn’t know what they were doing to do with it?”
“He thought it was all being trans-shipped to Iraq. No matter how badly he needed the money, he would never have done it if he’d known they were going to use it in Singapore.”
“It sounds like he was a friend of yours.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” The man hesitated again. “He was a friend of mine.”
***
The next ten minutes passed in silence as they threaded their way down Orange Grove Road into the top of Orchard Road and right through the heart of the destruction. What had always been a bustling city center thronged with tourists and visitors was nearly deserted. Huge construction barriers had been erected on both sides of the streets and painted in cheerful colors, but above the barriers the bombed-out buildings loomed like broken teeth that had to be pulled.
The man pulled to the curb just before the Centrepoint Shopping Center and Tay got out. The car had hardly stopped rolling before a uniformed policeman was trotting toward it. Everyone was nervous now. People looked at stopped vehicles in Singapore in the same way New Yorkers had probably looked at aircraft flying over their city after September 11. Could this be the next one? people wondered.
Tay held up his warrant card as the young patrolman approached the car. That brought a salute from the patrolman and he continued on by without speaking.
Tay’s benefactor lowered the passenger window to say good-bye and Tay took the opportunity to ask him one more question.
“Why didn’t August just tell me these things himself in JB? Why go through all this?”
“ISD is all over you. You can’t be connected with us. And we certainly don’t want to be connected with you.”
“All over me? What does that mean?”
“Look, Inspector, think this through. If you find out who killed Johnny, you’ll find out who he was working for. And that probably means you’ll find out who was responsible for the bombings. ISD isn’t going to let you do that. They’re watching you.
They’re listening to you. They’re going to step in if you get too close.”
“And exactly how are they going to step in? Shoot me?”
“I imagine they have something more subtle in mind, Inspector. Maybe a nice hit and run?”
“Oh, come on. You don’t expect me to believe the Internal Security Department would kill an inspector in the Singapore police just because he might learn something they don’t want him to know, do you?”
“I hope you find out who killed Johnny, Inspector. But, if you do, August and I very much hope you’ll still be alive to tell us who it was. Please be careful.”
Then the man hit the button to raise the window and put the car back in gear. Tay stood there on the sidewalk in front of Centrepoint and watched him drive away.
As soon as the car was out of sight, Tay glanced quickly over both shoulders. As far as he could tell, no one was paying any particular attention to him.
He felt like a fool looking around and checking, but he did it anyway.
THIRTY-ONE
TAY THREADED HIS way from Orchard Road through the clogged pedestrian passageway to Emerald Hill. Was it really only a couple of weeks ago he had made the same walk in the opposite direction to search out what had caused the explosions he heard? Now that felt more like something that had happened in a prior life.
When Tay was almost to his front gate, he saw Cindy Shaw emerging from her house a few doors up. His immediate instinct was to turn and flee, of course, but he was too slow and she spotted him before he could do anything to prevent it.
“Sam!” she shouted. “I’ve been looking for you!”
“Hello, Cindy!” Tay shouted back. “Can’t stop. A lot happening!”
To his relief, his key slid smoothly into the lock on his front gate and he was through and into his house before Cindy Shaw could get to him. Some neighborhoods had angry, barking dogs. His had Cindy Shaw. He would have preferred angry, barking dogs.
Umbrella Man (9786167611204) Page 17
