by Jake Needham
“Holy Christ,” August murmured. “How could we not have put that together?”
“There you go with the we stuff again.”
August didn’t take the bait. He just raised his hand and called out, “Hey, Freddy! Bring us two more beers!”
“Could I have coffee instead?” Tay asked.
“Coffee?”
“Yeah, you know, that brown stuff that usually comes in a cup.”
August snorted and raised his hand again. “Freddy,” he called, “can you bring a cup of coffee instead for my friend here?”
“Coffee?” the bartender called back in a bemused voice. “He wants coffee?”
“Yeah,” August said. “You know, that brown stuff that usually comes in a cup.”
“You can both go fuck yourselves,” Tay said. Then he leaned back in his chair and folded his arms.
The bartender served the beer and the coffee and retreated back across the room.
“What’s your interest in Goodnight-Jones?” Tay asked.
“You first,” August said.
“I have no interest in Goodnight-Jones.”
“Yet you went to his office.”
“Emma asked me to help her research her story about the death of Tyler Bartlett. Tyler Bartlett worked for Zachery Goodnight-Jones. She thinks Tyler’s suicide was faked.”
“Do you think the kid was murdered?”
Tay nodded.
“I still don’t see what that’s got to do with Goodnight-Jones.”
“Emma thinks Tyler was killed because of something he knew.”
“About Goodnight-Jones?”
“Not necessarily. But it might have had something to do with his work at The Future.”
“How do you get to that?”
“Tyler quit his job suddenly and told people he was going back to the US. Three days later, he was killed and somebody tried to make it look like he committed suicide. That doesn’t feel like a coincidence to me. Something made him quit. Something got him killed. It might be the same something.”
“Have you found out why he quit?”
Tay shook his head.
August leaned back in his chair and sipped at his beer. Tay played with his pack of Marlboros and waited.
“How much do you know about what they do at The Future?” August asked.
“They claim they’re designing software for driverless cars.”
“They claim? You don’t think that’s what they’re really doing?”
“They probably are, but nobody gets killed over software for driverless cars. Either they’re doing something else, too, or Tyler wasn’t killed because of his work.”
“Can you prove—”
“I can’t prove anything yet, John, but Tyler was killed because of something connected with the work he was doing for The Future. There’s no doubt in my mind. I simply don’t believe it was a coincidence that Tyler quit his job and was murdered three days later.”
“And you’re sure he was murdered?”
“I’m sure.”
The door to Secrets opened and both Tay and August shifted their eyes to the man standing in the doorway. He was short with a Chinese face and a haircut that made you think he knew where Mao’s old barber was hanging out these days.
“I’ll be awhile, Spike,” August called out. “I’ll find you when I’m done.”
The man didn’t say anything, but he raised a hand in acknowledgment and closed the door behind him.
“His name is Spike?” Tay asked.
August offered a half shrug and sipped at his beer. Clearly the subject was closed.
“Now it’s your turn,” Tay said. “What’s your interest in Goodnight-Jones?”
August pursed his lips, and his eyes drifted away.
“You don’t have any intention of telling me, do you, John? You wanted to know what I knew, but you’re not going to tell me shit in return.”
“I’ve done a lot more for you than give you information, Sam.”
That was true enough. Without August’s help, he would have been in a lot of trouble a couple of times. August had been a friend. Still was, Tay knew full well, and he wasn’t going to throw a tantrum because August wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell him something. But he was still disappointed. If August was interested in Goodnight-Jones, something was going on there that might well help him figure out why Tyler Bartlett was killed. Now he wasn’t going to find out what it was.
“You didn’t get me to come all the way to Pattaya just for this, John. What’s really on your mind?”
August’s eyes came back to Tay’s. “Do you know who owns The Future, Sam?”
“Emma asked, but Goodnight-Jones wouldn’t tell her.”
“Well, I’m going to tell you. But if you share it with her, you can’t say where you got this.”
“Don’t worry, John. I wouldn’t consider telling anybody we know each other. Just think what that would do to my reputation for integrity.”
August mimed a laugh and cleared his throat.
“It’s the Chinese,” he said.
“Come on, John,” Tay laughed. “Chinese own nearly every company in Singapore.”
“Not Chinese. I said the Chinese.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Chinese army controls The Future through a series of anonymous tax haven holding companies.”
“The Chinese army?”
“The People’s Liberation Army has a long history of involvement in commercial activities. They’re particularly interested in developing technology companies when that technology has military or intelligence implications.”
Tay couldn’t stop himself from laughing again.
“You think that’s funny, Sam?”
“I think it’s hilarious. Are you seriously telling me that the Chinese army is trying to develop software for driverless cars? I can see them now. Invading Southeast Asia in a fleet of Toyota Prius hybrids connected to laptops.”
“I don’t think that’s exactly what they have in mind.”
“Then what do they have in mind?”
“I don’t have a fucking clue, Sam. That’s why we’re keeping an eye on Goodnight-Jones.”
Tay thought for a while about what August had just told him. Could that be what Tyler Bartlett had found out? That The Future was really controlled by the PLA? But even if he had, why would he have been killed for that? Murdering a man brought with it its own set of risks. All the PLA would have done by killing Tyler Bartlett was bring attention to The Future, and attention was absolutely the last thing they should have wanted. Of course, whoever killed Tyler did try to make it look like a suicide. Maybe they thought that would be enough to protect them. And it was enough, at least for the Singapore police.
Wait… could it have been the PLA that leaned on Singapore CID to overlook the evidence of murder and declare Tyler’s death a suicide? That sounded ridiculous, but Tay couldn’t swear it was impossible, and the more he thought about that the unhappier he got. Tay’s head was starting to hurt.
Tay could see easily enough where August was leading him with all this. He just couldn’t yet see why.
“You think the driverless car thing is just a front, too, don’t you, John? You think The Future is really working on something else.”
“If I did think that, Sam, you know I couldn’t tell you. But I can certainly see how you might come to that conclusion.”
Tay kept waiting for August to wink. He didn’t, but he might as well have.
“Do you know what Tyler Bartlett was doing at The Future?” August asked.
“Emma says Tyler was a security expert. His job was to look for ways to breach the security of the software The Future was designing, then plug the holes he found.”
“Are you telling me, Sam, that Tyler was a hacker, and The Future hired him to try to hack the software they were designing?”
“I don’t know if you could call him a hacker, but his girlfriend says he was running attacks on the automotive c
ontrol packages the company was developing. If his attacks succeeded, the idea was to find a way to prevent it from happening again.”
August nodded. He looked to Tay like a man who was thinking hard. Tay just couldn’t see what he was thinking about. All at once August jumped to his feet.
“I’ve got to go, Sam. I’m sorry to make you come all the way here, but you see now why I didn’t want to talk on the telephone.”
“Actually, I don’t.”
“I had no idea what you’re into or who you’re working for. And I certainly didn’t want to share with whoever’s listening to your phone calls the information that we are looking closely at Goodnight-Jones.”
“What makes you think someone is listening to my phone calls?”
“I work on the assumption that somebody is listening to everybody’s telephone calls.”
“You’re just too paranoid for your own good, John.”
“No such thing, man. No such thing.”
August stuck out his hand, and they shook.
“You going to keep working with this woman, Sam?”
“I imagine so. I want to see how the story ends.”
August nodded again. “Maybe we can help each other. I’ll be in touch.”
Then, without another word, he turned and left.
Tay pocketed his cigarettes and got to his feet. Before he walked out the door, he gave the bartender a friendly wave. The bartender didn’t wave back. Good thing, Tay thought, he hadn’t tipped the bastard.
Tay walked back to the Marriott along Beach Road. The ocean was on his left, the go-go bars were on his right, and the streetwalkers were directly in front of him.
It had never bothered Tay that some women chose to earn their way in life by selling sex to men. He always figured a decision like that, whatever he personally thought of it, was pretty much up to the woman who made it, and that society ought to mind its own business and stop treating women who had made that choice as objects of scorn.
What did bother him was the vulnerability of the women who made themselves available to any drunken psychopath who happened along with money. He had seen too many dead bodies mutely testifying as to how vulnerable these women really were, and he recalled every one of those bodies with a clarity that verged on the pornographic. He sometimes wondered how any of them survived.
When Tay got back to his room he went out onto his narrow balcony, sat down in one of the two white plastic chairs, and lit a Marlboro. Cigarettes had become part of the furniture of his solitary life. Did he even enjoy them anymore, or did he just smoke them automatically when he had nothing better to do, which was all too often? He was less and less sure which it was.
Tay sat and smoked and thought about Zachery Goodnight-Jones, and about Emma Lazar, and about Tyler Bartlett. Most of all he thought about the horror of Tyler hanging from that bathroom door and slowly strangling to death. Tay wondered what Tyler’s sin had been, what had he uncovered that had required him to die?
He also thought about the sudden and unexpected appearance of John August in the mix, and he tried to decide how that fit together with everything else. August had told him who was really behind The Future, so he had another piece of the puzzle. The problem was that piece didn’t fit any better than the other pieces he had. He still didn’t have the vaguest idea what the whole puzzle was going to look like when he put it together, or if that was going to explain who had killed Tyler Bartlett, or why.
He finished his cigarette, went back inside, and undressed. Then he got into bed and turned on the television. After flicking back and forth through the channels for a while, he realized that Pattaya, God help it, had even dumber television programs than Singapore. But he hadn’t brought a book to read so he sat with his back against the headboard and for a while he watched a movie about American cops in spite of the plot making absolutely no sense to him.
Tay knew he should shut off the television and get some sleep. He was not an early riser and he had never trusted anyone who was, but he was still going to have to haul his butt out of bed at six o’clock tomorrow morning to make the two-hour taxi trip to the Bangkok airport and catch his ten o’clock flight back to Singapore.
He was always tired when he traveled. He really didn’t understand those people who claimed to take pleasure in travel. At least this trip had been worth the effort. He now had two new players in the murder of Tyler Bartlett: John August, and the Chinese army. And he wasn’t at all sure which one of them worried him more.
Finally Tay shut off the television and the light. He pulled the duvet up under his chin and lay still, staring at the darkness. His last conscious thought was that he hoped his mother wouldn’t decide to show up in his dreams and start another one of those interminable conversations they had been having lately, the point of which usually turned out to be to remind him what a lousy son he was.
Sometimes just before he went to sleep he could hear her coming, but he couldn’t hear her tonight. Perhaps tonight his mother would just stay wherever she was and let him get a few hours’ sleep.
He hated to think such a thing about his mother. He really did. He wondered if that might mean he really was a lousy son.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
IT WAS RAINING when Tay emerged from Terminal Three at Changi Airport, and the taxi line was long and moved slowly. When at last it came his turn, his driver was an elderly Chinese man who was short and bad-tempered. At least he didn’t try to engage Tay in conversation, which Tay regarded as a major blessing.
The wipers thunked back and forth across the windshield, and the tires hissed against the wet pavement. Tay watched through the rain-streaked back window as the landscape rolled by.
The road into the city from Changi was two lanes of pristine concrete lined on both sides by trees of identical heights with perfectly matched banks of bougainvillea piled up between them. The trees were so perfect they looked like life-sized plastic replicas of trees rather than the real thing. It was freakish that something so artificial looking could exist in nature.
Tay had mixed feelings every time he returned to Singapore from somewhere. His city was a tight, squeaky-clean little ship. No criticism, no dissent, no opposition. It was like an entire country run by the Walt Disney Corporation. Disneyland with the death penalty, somebody once called the place, and Tay thought that about summed it up.
Tay had lived all of his life in Singapore. Singapore was his home however much it annoyed and irritated him; but when he stopped to think about it, he was amazed how little attachment he felt to it. Wasn’t it unnatural not to be attached to one’s home? Just about as unnatural as those phony-looking trees streaming by outside the window of the taxi?
Maybe his suspension was the jolt he needed. His father had been an American, and that entitled him to American citizenship although he had never pursued it. Perhaps he would do that now. Perhaps he would get himself an American passport. Then he could go live in Miami in a condominium overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, or buy a ranch in Montana, or find himself an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan from which he could walk to the Metropolitan Opera anytime he wanted.
Who was he kidding? He was never going to do any such thing. He was going to spend the rest of his life in his little row house on Emerald Hill Road sitting in the garden and smoking Marlboros. How could he hold out the slightest hope of becoming somebody else now that he was over fifty? He was who he was, and that was that.
Tay leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. The drudgery of twenty-first century air travel took a terrible toll on both body and spirit. Every time he went to the airport, the toll seemed to get higher. He stopped thinking about Miami and Montana and Manhattan, and he allowed himself just to drift in the twilight between waking and sleeping while he waited for his bad-tempered Chinese cabdriver to return him to Emerald Hill Road.
Tay stopped outside his gate and collected the mail that had accumulated in his box while he was away. Inside, he tossed it on the table
and went into the kitchen to make coffee.
When he came back with a mug in his hand, he shuffled dutifully through the mail although he knew it would be nothing but junk. It wasn’t until he pushed aside a circular from his neighborhood supermarket that he noticed the off-white envelope with the Ritz-Carlton logo. It was addressed in blue ink and, although he didn’t recognize the handwriting, he could think of no one he knew at the Ritz-Carlton other than Emma Lazar.
Putting down his mug of coffee, he used both hands to tear open the envelope. He removed a single sheet of paper folded in thirds.
I have been trying to call your cell phone, but you don’t pick up and each time I’m sent straight to voicemail.
Tay patted his pockets looking for his cell phone and then remembered he had stuck it in his carry-on bag. He found the bag, unzipped it, and pulled out the phone. It was turned off, which would explain why Emma hadn’t been able to get through to him.
Thinking back, he remembered turning it off when he got on the plane for Bangkok. Was it possible he had forgotten to turn it back on? Was it even possible he had left it turned off the entire time he had been away? Yes, it was possible. In fact, he was pretty sure that was exactly what had happened. He pushed the power button on his phone and it beeped and lit up. The moment it connected with SingTel, it began emitting a furious series of tones that meant he had both voicemail and text messages waiting for him.
Tay shut the telephone off again and went back to reading Emma’s note.
Did you go away somewhere? You didn’t tell me you were leaving, but I can’t reach you and your house looks like it’s closed up. Is everything all right?
It was true that he hadn’t told Emma he was going to Thailand to see August. That was partly because he didn’t know what to tell her since he didn’t like talking about his connection with August, and partly out of reflex. He told almost nobody what he was doing. That was just who he was.
Tay could see how him leaving town without telling Emma might annoy her, but he thought her note sounded more disappointed than irritated. Maybe she would understand. The trip had certainly yielded some interesting pieces to help them put together the puzzle that was the death of Tyler Bartlett. He figured that certainly ought to be enough to get him off the hook.
