At Hell's Gate

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. I kind of liked the Red Garden because there were so many different food stalls in there. But Lennie clearly didn’t. ‘You name it.’

  ‘Chin’s, on the Island,’ he said, and I agreed.

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘No, I’m working days. Make it dinner, seven?’

  ‘I’ll see you then,’ I said, and we signed off.

  I ordered a burger and fries from room service and found an action movie on the TV. It almost felt routine.

  7

  I found Joel at 8.46 am, outside the Pan Pacific main entry. He was as Chris McCann had described: late thirties Anglo male, thin black hair in a crew cut, and athletically built. He was walking with the foot traffic and wearing a pale sports jacket over a polo shirt and jeans. I focused on the folded Financial Times that Chris and I had agreed he’d be carrying and then watched as he made a quick look at the street, turned left and skipped through the massive glass doors and into the hotel lobby.

  From my perch across the road, where I stood in shadow, I waited for thirty seconds. I was looking for watchers and tails and anything that looked like surveillance. No one gets it right 100 per cent of the time but I’d been doing this for so many years that my surveillance-detection was pretty good. I checked the street for cars with two gentlemen sitting in the front seat and could see nothing. I crossed the road and walked into the massive atrium area of the Pan Pac, and cut across the marble expanses to the restaurant.

  I held back, behind a credenza, and watched Joel talk with the maître d’ as he scanned the room. She pointed at a table and he walked into the dining area, past the enormous buffet service. I moved forward then, and gave the maître d’ a wink. ‘Hi, love, Mike Daly, room 1412. Dining alone – anyone else a single?’

  She smiled, swiped my room card, and led me across the room. As Joel placed the pinkish Financial Times on his table and looked around, we arrived. Before the maître d’ could speak, I held out my hand to Joel. ‘I’m travelling alone – do you mind if I join you? The name’s Mike.’

  He shook my hand and the maître d’ put cutlery on the table while we made small talk. He had an English accent – educated but not plummy – and I noticed very dark, intense eyes, a wide face and flat cheekbones. He was built like a middle-weight boxer and he knew enough about intel tradecraft to go along with my act for the maître d’. I led him towards the buffet service, and I picked up fresh fruit and ordered black coffee. Joel went for something cooked.

  When we were seated, he said, ‘So, what’s the plan?’

  ‘The plan is don’t talk about plans,’ I said, smiling. ‘Not in public, anyway.’

  He smiled too. ‘Is there anything you need me to do?’

  ‘Stay off the phone and the internet,’ I said. ‘Don’t be seen with me except at chance meetings like this one.’

  ‘Really?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, really,’ I said, trying to keep it light. ‘And let’s work on your cover.’

  ‘Businessman?’

  ‘Doing what?’ I asked, and he shrugged. So I said, ‘You’re a tourist, much easier. Get a camera, lose the sports jacket and buy a cheap backpack.’

  Now Joel leaned back and I could see he’d thought this was going to play differently. ‘I’m not here to sit on the sidelines.’

  ‘What are you here for?’ I asked, and the barista approached with a tall white mug of steaming coffee.

  ‘Triple shot, double mug,’ he said, very proud of himself, and he left.

  ‘Look,’ Joel said. ‘I have a group in-country and all we have are some crappy borrowed weapons from a local militia . . .’

  I raised my hand and to his credit he stopped, realising what he was doing.

  ‘Just so we understand one another,’ I said, quietly, ‘I’m going to make a business introduction.’

  ‘Well, sure,’ he started, and I raised my hand again.

  ‘And the introduction part of the job is maybe one-twentieth of my concerns, understand?’

  ‘It’s the main –’

  ‘Not for me it’s not,’ I said, anticipating where he was going. I sensed someone a bit fired-up, and needing to prove himself in his company. And people like that can draw attention to me. I had to shut him down.

  ‘We’re going to eat and leave and I’ll meet you beside the Flower Dome, at the Gardens, at ten. Got it?’

  Joel started with a disagreement, but he stopped himself and nodded.

  ‘And Joel,’ I said, sipping on a great mug of coffee. ‘Tourist, okay? Big hat, big smile, lots of pictures – it’s all good.’

  8

  I’ve had worse meetings than my breakfast with Joel, and I’ve had better. Intel is a people business and people have different agendas and goals . . . and personalities. I had no doubt that Joel had his corporate pressures and all sorts of people breathing down his neck. I got that, but those people can often be more dangerous to my health than outright rivals and terrorists. The pressured corporate person can find it very hard – perhaps impossible – to disconnect their subjective self and see the bigger picture. They see deadlines and performance reviews and pay rises and promotions. They find it hard to stand back and see broader issues such as both of us staying out of prison, not getting on Malaysian intelligence’s radar, not bringing my friend – Lennie – into an investigation that would ruin his security career. That sort of thing.

  I could tell you this in theory, and perhaps you’d only half get it. Or I can tell you about the time I was investigating a piracy cell in the Sulu Sea, on behalf of a government agency. The person I was subordinated to agreed to allow a shipping company’s security manager to be an observer on our ongoing investigations. The security company person should not have been with us – and I certainly complained about it – but he was ex-military and knew the rules. Or he should have. Our very sensitive inquiries saw me and a couple of other operatives sailing around Sulu and Mindanao in a chartered tourist yacht, picking up intel. A highly hazardous action, by the way: the Moro pirate clans of that part of the world are a law unto themselves and react with great and sudden violence against outside threats to their way of life. So when I relayed our intel back to the person running our gig, I asked him to keep it from the shipping security guy. But he didn’t, and a few days later I learned that five of the people we’d spoken to in the islands had been executed.

  The leak had come directly from the security manager, who was big-noting himself with his superiors, trying to look important. He couldn’t help himself, and five people paid a very high price because some dude wanted a faster journey up the corporate ladder.

  Which was why I was tucked away in the shadows of trees that morning, on the verges of the entry to the Flower Dome. I had to take control of the op-sec before we got too far into it. I needed Joel to blend in and keep his distance from me. And I needed to have this outdoors, where I could raise my voice slightly and deal with any arguments. The shit he’d pulled at the Pan Pac? Any sort of arguing ruins the carefully constructed idea that we are unknown to one another and are simply strangers sharing a meal. When words like ‘weapons’ and ‘militias’ rise above the squabble, you’re inviting trouble.

  I watched a man approach the entrance to the enormous steel-and-glass structure that held the flower exhibits and I ticked the first box. Joel was now wearing comfy cargo shorts and a pair of Nikes, and while he’d kept his blue polo shirt, he was wearing a dark green Callaway cap and had a compact digital camera slung over his shoulder. The difference one change of clothing makes. I’ve followed and watched hundreds of people in my career and I can tell you that I’d show almost no interest in the person I was now observing. I waited for three or four minutes, looking for people like me. Not necessarily someone following Joel, but maybe someone riding shotgun. I was convinced by his overly confident performance at breakfast that he was travelling with perhaps one other person,
and he’d come to meet me intent on having someone else – me – in his chain of command.

  I looked through the 70–300 millimetre zoom lens on my Canon DSLR, giving me great magnification and good image quality. I noted another twenty or twenty-five people in the immediate grounds of the Gardens by the bay park. It was a fine day, not too hot, and the tourists were wandering around, in several distinct parts of the grounds. I decided I couldn’t separate all the tourists from one watcher, so instead I’d walk around with Joel and see what I could see. I walked to the entrance wearing my own tourist gear: cap, polo shirt, boardies and runners. I stood near to Joel and stared up at the glass structure.

  ‘Nice work on the clothing,’ I said, not looking at him. ‘That’s how I want it from here on in.’

  Before he could answer I pointed to the Flower Dome. ‘Largest greenhouse in the world,’ I said. ‘The scent of a million flowers is so strong that some people faint, you know that?’

  I saw Joel shaking his head.

  I smiled. ‘You look like a tourist, mate, you have to talk like a tourist.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, and cracked a smile. ‘That’s fascinating, about the flowers.’

  He lifted his compact camera – a white Nikon – and clicked away.

  ‘I’m Mike, by the way,’ I said, holding out my hand.

  ‘Joel,’ he said. ‘On holidays.’

  A bunch of Koreans had walked past us towards the Flower Dome entrance and I wanted the theatre to be for them. If they were questioned, they could say they saw us meeting and introducing ourselves.

  I led Joel away and we got onto the main paths of the Gardens that fronted Singapore’s Marina Bay.

  ‘We’ll do this my way,’ I said as we strolled. ‘It’s the only way I can do it. You might have heard about an American ship being seized in India this week?’

  ‘Seaman Guard Ohio,’ he said, sounding annoyed. ‘Yeah, we know all about that.’

  ‘So in parts of the world where terror and political instability are facts of life, private armouries are not taken lightly.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Joel.

  ‘I only want to say this once, but here we go.’

  ‘I have to keep my mouth shut?’

  ‘You’re learning,’ I said. ‘I’ll introduce you to this person, and if he accepts you and your company, then away you go.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Joel, like he was impatient.

  ‘But there’s something you should know – the people I introduce you to will want a lot of details about you, and you know why?’

  ‘Because if it goes to shit, they’ll come after me?’

  ‘As long as we’re clear on that, then we’re in business,’ I said. ‘But that’s your end – there’s also my end.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the part where you agree to do everything my way, and if I think you’re on the phone every afternoon giving names, ages and details, then we’re done and I walk, okay?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said, smiling as we walked past an Indian man arguing with his wife while the kids watched on. ‘But I have to give updates – I have people to answer to and if I can’t get this done soon, the company has to know that.’

  ‘That’s fair,’ I said. ‘But if that’s the case, you don’t release information you are privy to. You speak in generalities and you check with me before you disclose them. We’re the ones on the ground and we’ll be the ones strapped to a chair in the basement if this goes pear-shaped.’

  He understood, and I felt I’d broken through. ‘So answer me this,’ I said. ‘How many people are you travelling with?’

  I stopped at a railing and raised my camera, to take a shot of the parklands and the incredible ‘solar trees’. I let the question dangle. When I brought down the camera, Joel was staring at me. ‘Okay, you’ve had your fun,’ he said.

  ‘Was he that young bloke in the yellow polo shirt, sitting three tables away from us at breakfast, wouldn’t stop fucking with his iPhone?’

  I was thinking about an early-thirties Anglo man in the restaurant, who didn’t look tourist and didn’t look business and didn’t look like he had the resources to stay at the Pan Pac. He had too many muscles in the wrong places. It was just a guess.

  ‘Company policy,’ Joel said, raising his own camera as tourists walked the pathway behind us. ‘No one travels alone.’

  ‘Where is he, right now?’

  ‘Sitting on a park bench, on the other side of the Flower Dome.’

  I moved us down the path that would take us towards the backup. ‘Joel, from a crowded restaurant I picked out one person in a yellow shirt because he looked wrong, and believe me, if I can do that, the people following us are going to do that much faster.’

  He nodded.

  ‘So I’m not going to meet this person, and he’ll no longer be anywhere near us when we operate, okay?’

  Joel sighed, and as we walked down the foreshore pedestrian areas of the Gardens, we kept walking, past the seated muscular youngster in the yellow polo, towards a convenience store.

  ‘You want an ice-cream?’ I asked, and he said no.

  I bought two ice-creams and a prepaid phone, which I removed from the box and fired up while still in the store. When I walked outside I handed an ice-cream to Joel and could see him about to complain. ‘There you go, tourist,’ I said with a smile, and he dropped his complaint. We walked along the esplanade that fronted Marina Bay and leaned on the railing, looking over the water.

  ‘You have family, Joel?’ I asked.

  He tensed. ‘Don’t threaten me.’

  I laughed, licking the ice-cream to stop it melting down my hand. ‘If you can’t answer that for me then you don’t want to meet the people I have in mind.’

  We looked over the water, eating in silence. ‘Three kids. They live with my wife in France,’ said Joel. ‘I don’t want them in this.’

  ‘And I don’t want me in this,’ I said, not looking at him. ‘I’m just the introducer – you think I want to be locked up or murdered because I put two parties together?’

  ‘Nope,’ he said, and now I sensed he’d surrendered.

  ‘So, you do this my way and it’ll never be about Mike and Joel – it’s just a deal, it’s money, it’s containers landed where you stipulate. How does that sound?’

  ‘That works.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Phone.’

  ‘What?!’ he said, like I’d asked him if he could chop off his left hand.

  ‘Your phone – now.’

  I ate down to the waffle cone and I waited. And after twenty seconds, he reluctantly reached into his pocket and brought out a large iPhone.

  ‘There,’ I said, nodding at the railing in front of me. He put it down and I finished the ice-cream cone, wiped my fingers on my shorts, and then flung the iPhone into the bay.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, before stopping himself.

  ‘My way,’ I said, pulling out the prepaid phone and placing it on the railing. ‘There’s one text on there, from my prepaid phone. You don’t use that phone for anything or anyone, except texting or phoning me. And only me. If we text, you wipe the message as soon as you’ve read it or sent it, okay?’

  He was still smarting from the iPhone reassignment.

  ‘I’d prefer you text, but if circumstances call for it, you can ring me. You are not to phone home from the hotel or any other phone and as soon as you reconnect with Yellow Shirt, you’ll ask for his phone and do what I’ve just done with it.’

  He didn’t argue.

  ‘If you have an attack of manners, and decide that a youngster can’t be without his phone, just think about your smiling kids and how they’ll react seeing Dad in hospital with his reconstructed face and mangled feet.’

  He threw his unfinished ice-cream into the sea. ‘Thanks for that, Mike.’
>
  ‘No worries,’ I said, and left him to think.

  9

  I booked a flight to Penang at the Pan Pac’s business centre and caught the train to Changi airport just before midday. The AirAsia flight landed late in the afternoon and when I got out into the airport I bought two prepaid SIM cards and cabbed to the Museum Hotel in George Town. They gave me one of the suites overlooking the street and I cracked a cold beer and stood on my balcony, stretching and loafing around like a tourist but looking for unwanted attention. In a stroke of luck, I got my room swipe card at 4.23 pm, meaning there was a good chance my name wouldn’t be on the daily sheets sent to the intel every afternoon in South-East Asia.

  I couldn’t see anything amiss on the street, so I pulled up a chair at the courtesy table on the balcony and enjoyed the beer. I was tired. I’d struggled to push Joel back in his hole, and as much as I understood his need to keep his superiors apprised of the goings-on, I didn’t want the Chinese whispers putting me in danger. I was happy to have Joel and his buddy waiting patiently in Singapore while I did what I had to do. I couldn’t see any reason for Joel to be on this trip, or for the Pan Pac to know I was out of town.

  I went back into the room and fished a crucial item from the bottom of my backpack. A Nokia 6110. Battered, bruised and very unfashionable, but still working and with no connectivity on it except for voice and texting. With a phone like this, a dedicated, professional team could find my location to an accuracy of maybe 100 metres square, but they’d have to be fast and good. These old phones didn’t give anywhere near the insights that the smartphones did, and the further I went into this gig, the more ‘dark’ options I needed. I put one of the new SIMs in the phone and plugged in the old charger, and then did the basic activation. Then I tore the printed phone number for the SIM off the cardboard packaging and put the strip of paper in my pocket.

  I lay on the bed. And when I woke up it was with a start. I looked at my phone beside me on the bed – 6.37 pm. I snapped out of sleep mode and got down to Chin’s, a restaurant on the strait separating George Town from the mainland. I took a cab to save time and walked into the Church Street pier restaurant with a group of other tourists. I saw Lennie as I got to the maître d’ and pointed out my friend.