She walked me over, put the napkin on my lap and poured me a glass of water. I noticed there was already a beer for me, sweating slightly. I clinked glasses with the florid-faced Aussie and I relaxed. Chin’s was a place that was quite unlike any other. The colour schemes looked like something out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, there was poster art on the ceiling, and a view over the sea. It was the kind of place that made you want to order lots of beers and eat a tonne of excellent food.
We caught up on old times. Lennie had moved sideways from government agencies about eight years ago, similar to me. He’d gone through the divorce and the stress of the work and walked away. But rather than going into private contracting, he’d taken tangential work: first for the Winter Olympics in Turin and now for a port security in Malaysia. His face wore a few extra wrinkles that I didn’t recall, and his moustache had gone from black to silver. But those piercing blue eyes that saw everything were still there, and as we talked I knew he was scanning the room – an old habit that was hard to break.
‘And you, mate?’ he asked with a smile.
‘Went back to building.’
‘Yeah?’ He laughed. ‘And?’
‘And I still take work, but I’m not exactly advertising for it.’
‘That’s the way to do it,’ he said, gesturing for two more beers from the waitress. ‘Fuck, Mike – some of the shit we did. Can you believe it?’
I shook my head slowly and looked out Chin’s big seafront windows. I still occasionally woke up with night sweats and terrors, when some of the old operations came back to me in my sleep.
‘Did you move on?’ he asked.
‘Yep, Melbourne,’ I said.
‘Funny about those days,’ said Lennie. ‘You reach a certain point and you can’t see the good in a place again.’
He was talking about Sydney, where we had mainly operated, often in the same teams. Sydney was a beautiful city but its underbelly included Hamas and Fatah, al-Qaeda and Hezbollah; Israeli and Iranian intelligence running in one direction while the bankers and money transfer agents worked in another. I’d opted for Melbourne – he’d gone to Italy.
He was maybe two years older than me, and while my marriage had fallen over first, he was the first to walk away from his government employment and leave the country. I knew he’d flown the coop because I’d been pulled into an intensive weekend of friendly chats with a number of debriefers. It goes like that in some arms of the government. You don’t get to simply fuck off and disappear. Everyone – as they say – has to be comfortable.
I’d learned from that episode, and when it was my time to move on I eased out of the government circuits, but remained contactable and agreed to do work as a private contractor. And, most important, I always made myself available to share memories and intel that perhaps didn’t make it into the reports.
When the main dishes started to be placed on the table, we tucked in and Lennie asked, ‘So, what do you need?’ and I explained that I had a client who needed a new source of armaments for their security operations in the Middle East, and could he hook me up? I basically knew that he could – I’d targeted Lennie because he was well connected with weapons. The question was: would he?
‘An introduction?’ he said. ‘That’s it?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’m not doing any buying or managing myself. Merely connecting two parties. Can you help?’
‘Sure,’ said Lennie, raising his glass.
10
I woke with a slight hangover, and was in a cab for the airport before 8 am. I’d booked my return flight the day before and now it was time to get out of town. Lennie was building a new life in a new part of the world and I wasn’t going to hang around, shit in his nest. I’d given him the phone number of my burner service and he was going to pass it on. No other incoming calls would come to that number other than the people connected with the armoury.
I was in the back of a cab, halfway to the Pan Pac, when the Nokia rang. I looked: it said No Caller ID, and I answered.
‘A friend says you want to talk?’ said the English male voice, over a slightly scratchy line with a high-pitched tone in the background. ‘Get to Medan and we’ll call you at midday.’
The call ended and I looked at the phone. Only very serious, very professional people operated like that, and while I felt the stakes rising, I also recognised I was in good hands.
I cleaned out my room, and as I did my burner phone buzzed. I looked at it: a note from Joel that said, All okay?
I smiled. He couldn’t help himself. Wonderful sunset – great pics, I responded, and left it at that. You want to be a tourist? Think like one.
I checked out and walked along Raffles Boulevard and around the back of a huge shopping centre building, where I found a small café that had two internet screens at the back. I bought coffee and sat at one of the screens. I booked a flight to Medan for the evening and two nights at a non-chain hotel in old Medan. I shut down the browser and powered off the operating system, and as I stood to look for a proper table I had a line of sight through the front windows of the café and over Stamford Road, to where two people were sitting in a white Camry. I noticed that the car was stationary in a part of Singapore where you can’t park. At least, not legally. I found a table and fished out my Canon. There was something about the driver. I made a show of being a tourist messing with the camera settings, and then put my eye up to the viewfinder and used the 70–300 millimetre lens to scope the car and its driver. Even through the window I could see that the driver of the Camry was Mr Yellow Shirt. He’d changed his shirt, however – he was now in red. Which made him inexperienced: yellow and red are the two colours I wouldn’t wear if was following someone.
I fired off a few pics, but I couldn’t get a good enough angle to see who was in the passenger seat. It wasn’t a good scenario: I tell the client to stay put and wait for my call, so he puts his people on me? And his man’s idea of low-key is changing from a bright yellow polo to a bright red one. I drained my coffee and left the café, turning east on Stamford and walking to the big intersection with North Bridge Road. I wanted Yellow Shirt out of the car and on my tail.
The lights turned my way and I headed across to the Raffles City Shopping Centre, backpack over one shoulder and my cabin wheelie bag behind me. The Raffles City had four or five entries, and if this bloke was serious about tailing me I wanted him to recognise how easily I could slip him in Raffles City, and make the decision to get out of the car and chase me.
I walked in the Stamford Road entrance and did some window-shopping. About two minutes later, Yellow Shirt walked in and made straight for a storefront. I got a decent look at him: he was built like an AFL footy player. Tall, muscular and athletic. Somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty years old. Crew-cut hair, with a decent amount on top – for a man-bun, maybe? He was about fifteen years younger than me and in much better shape. And I gave him no chance.
Ignoring him, I walked outside, onto Stamford Road, lucked into a green crossing light at the intersection and walked west for two blocks, pausing to look in the odd window, checking that Yellow Shirt was still with me and that the white Camry had fallen away – which it had.
Generally speaking, when I’m being followed or surveilled – particularly when I know there’s more than one of them – I stay out of closed environments such as malls, elevators and corridors.
After about six minutes of walking across town, dodging the office workers and shoppers, I walked past the Central Fire Station and into my destination: Fort Canning Park. This is a public park on the site of the old military fort and barracks, and it has lots of paths and trees that can give the followed person some advantages.
I used my camera, firing off shots and then checking my pictures on the play-back screen, which allowed me to scan for Yellow Shirt. He had followed me into the park, and while he was persistent, he stuck out like balls on a
you-know-what.
I arrived at the big lawn in front of the old barracks building – now called the Arts Centre – and paused in the middle of the green expanse, to take some pictures. Checking that my tail was still with me, I moved towards the colonial building and then veered off to the left, where white arch structures marked the end of the lawn and the beginning of more trees. Moving into shadow, I stalked around in a large semicircle, keeping my eye on Yellow Shirt as he scurried across the lawn, his eyes scanning, worried that he’d lost me. As he entered into the shaded area, he paused at one of the white arches, before moving across the copse to thicker woodlands. Which is when I stepped out, at about 90 degrees to his left.
‘Looking for me?’
He turned, too quickly, his eyes wide and mouth agape. At this point I was quite prepared to let the meeting turn into a full and frank exchange of ideas, if that’s what the bloke wanted. But he didn’t stop and have a chat among professionals – he came at me with a big stamp-kick at my bladder. I crouched into it slightly, taking the kick but also grabbing his ankle. I was slightly winded but I tightened my grip on his foot, backed him up, making him lose his balance. As I lifted his foot higher – to distract him – I kicked him in the left kneecap. As his leg gave way, I let go of the ankle and, grabbing him by the collar and hair, aided his descent by throwing him head-first into the hard earth. He hit with a thud, that sounded too hard, and the lights went out for my assailant – knocked out, or perhaps stunned.
Oops, I thought as I looked around. I didn’t want to kill him. But, geez, if you come at a decent-sized bloke – and he’s been trained by the best and still works out on the heavy bag three times a week – you’d better know what you’re doing.
There were tourists up by the old barracks, but there was no one in the trees. So I dragged Yellow Shirt into a knot of tree roots that gave us some cover, and arranged him in the recovery position and felt for a pulse. It was there – thank Christ for that. I quickly searched him and came up with a small 9mm pistol – it was a seven-shot Taurus, so it was flat and tucked in a holster in the small of his back. I emptied the rounds onto the ground, and having dropped the emptied magazine on the ground I actioned the weapon and dismantled it into pieces around Yellow Shirt. I found a smartphone in Yellow Shirt’s trousers and pocketed it. The only other thing on his person was a room card to the Conrad Centennial, a flash hotel right beside the Pan Pac. I took that as well and, making one last check of his pulse, I grabbed my bags from my hide and made for the main pathway out of the park.
I couldn’t see any tails in the park and I stopped at the south entrance and paused there for a few moments, looking for that white Camry. But I couldn’t see it, and as soon as I spotted a cab approaching, I walked onto the footpath and hailed it.
‘Airport,’ I said as I pulled the back door shut, and the driver accelerated.
11
You have many options when gigs start turning to custard. I guess – broadly – they fall into two categories: fix the problem and keep going; or, pull the plug and get out of town.
To fix things, one of my options was to talk my way into the Conrad, use the room card to access the suite which I’d bet Yellow Shirt was sharing with Joel, and turn over the place. If we were in the movies, you’d probably do that and go after the people who were going after you. But that wouldn’t ‘fix’ the situation, because Yellow Shirt was connected with my client. So, instead, I was going to fulfil my undertakings, and ask for the US$50,000 completion payment. I had other concerns that stopped me running for the exits: I was engaged by a large company to make a very specific, and legally dodgy, introduction to an armoury service, and I’d already set that job in motion using my own contacts. I’m a privateer: I can’t activate my networks, and then just not show. Word gets around. People talk, and if my reputation becomes flaky, no one serious will deal with me. Next thing you know, I’m driving cash around Australia as a bonded delivery man. That’s all I can get.
Don’t get me wrong. I wanted to go into the Conrad, but I also wanted to complete the gig, do my job and provide no reason for these people to dud me. As I seethed in that cab, I also weighed the threats and opportunities, and realised that whoever was following me was armed. And I wasn’t. There were also more of them. And as I have learned from doing this many times, you don’t want to make assumptions about who’s on your tail. Paranoia, false conclusions, confirmation-bias – all of these things are tricks that people play on themselves. I needed to go back to facts, and I could only point to one fact: Mr Yellow Shirt had followed me, and he had attacked me. Joel wasn’t there, and I had no confirmation it was Joel in the car with my attacker. In fact, when I’d given Joel the chance to tell me about Yellow Shirt – looking for typical banter like, ‘He’s a good operator’ or ‘I’ve worked with him, we can trust him’ – Joel had just said it was company policy to be accompanied. Like he barely knew the guy.
I couldn’t get paranoid. Stay calm, get the brain working, make good decisions. I looked at what I had: the Conrad room card was tempting, but I was not going to use it; that left the smartphone. I had a close look at it. It was a Sony Xperia, with a big screen and no password lock on it. I pressed the ‘on/off’ button on the side and the screen came to life. It was an Android phone, so I tapped on the square at the base of the screen and it showed me – fanned out – the applications that the user had been using prior to his unscheduled nap. I saw Phone and Google and Messages, and right there among them was an app called AccuTracking.
I tapped on it and looked. ‘You bastards,’ I muttered, as I saw the number of my burner phone. I tapped on the number and it took twenty seconds or so, but up came a map of Singapore, and a blinking red marker that showed the phone on the East Coast Parkway.
‘Where are we?’ I asked the driver.
‘The ECP, sah,’ said the Tamil. ‘It is good for the time of day.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, and looked at the thing. I was more furious with this bit of bugging than I was with having to slap Yellow Shirt. I use burner phones in-country to break any trails that might lead to me, but there are downsides. You’re putting yourself in a position where perhaps you don’t spend enough time setting up the phone, and you don’t go through the settings as you should. I thought back and identified that the only time they could have hacked my burner phone and installed the AccuTracking was that first morning when I had breakfast with Joel in the Pan Pac. I’d noticed that Yellow Shirt was messing around with his phone and I’d thought he was just a muppet who was easily bored. But he’d probably been installing the AccuTracking remotely – who knows what he had on his lap or in his pocket? But a ‘sniffer’ box, that picks up radio frequency signal from phones and hacks into them through that channel, was not out of the question.
I was disgusted and about to put the phone down when I realised there was another number being tracked. I looked at it and it looked familiar. It couldn’t be, I thought to myself, and I opened my burner phone and looked at the only outbound text.
‘Fuck me,’ I said, loud enough that the driver heard me.
They were also tracking Joel.
12
I asked the driver to get off the ECP and onto one of the side roads. ‘I need to get some rubbish out of my bag,’ I told him. It was a lame request but he shrugged and a few minutes later we were off the ECP, and he pulled up in an apron that buses use to drop off and pick up passengers, and stopped beside a rubbish bin. I grabbed my burner phone and the Conrad card, put down the window and just reached over and dropped them in the bin. The good thing about Singapore? Very clean place, where the garbage is constantly being collected.
I considered holding on to the Xperia, but whoever Yellow Shirt was working with might have been tracking him too. So I took one last look at the phone – saw that Joel was at Sentosa Island, probably sight-seeing and taking my advice about living his cover of tourist – and then I dumped that phone too.
>
We made straight for the airport and by the time I touched down in Medan in north Sumatra, I was using my old Nokia 6110, and had Joel’s number committed to memory. I’d gone analogue. At Changi I’d wandered the big concourses, ducking into the newsagent and browsing so I could have a look at who was around; ordering coffees and reading my newspaper. That sort of thing. Now I sped to the Alpha Inn in downtown Medan, and as I walked in I saw there was a pizza café on the ground level.
As the sunlight faded, leaving a rim of red on the horizon, I walked down to the pizza café. I had a Hawaiian pizza and went back to my room; tried watching some local TV news. I was tired and the gig only really started in earnest the following day. But I had food in my belly, so I decided to do one more thing before I had to sleep. Across the road was a one-stop shop that sold everything from laundry detergent to car wiper blades. I ducked in and bought a basic prepaid phone package and walked down the road to where a bus stop and shelter were sitting just off the main road. I fired up the burner phone, activated it, and tried a number from my memory. The call was answered by voice mail very quickly and I left a simple message: It’s Mike. And then I hung up.
I waited for a few minutes, and some locals turned up, and a bus came, and I waved it on. And as I did so, the phone rang.
‘Yep,’ I said. ‘MG?’
‘You called?’ came that slow Texan drawl that inexperienced folks took for laziness.
‘I might have a job for you. You around?’
At Hell's Gate Page 18
