by Jake Needham
“Look, pal,” the deskman said, “We only work here. We just do what we’re told. I suggest you do the same thing.”
Tay and Kang stood silently while the security man ran the wand over them with what Tay thought was grossly exaggerated care under the circumstances. Each time it beeped, they were forced to pull out whatever they had in their pockets for examination.
“Okay,” the deskman said when the procedure finally finished. “Go straight in. You’re the last. They’re waiting for you.”
“And you’ve made them wait longer,” Tay said.
When he walked through the door, Tay didn’t find himself in a conference room as he had been expecting, but rather in what seemed to be a small lecture hall. He was looking down on it from behind the top row and saw about two dozen people scattered over four rows of theater seats arranged in tiers that rose up from a small platform. On the platform was a long wooden table with four chairs behind it, three of which were occupied.
Tay was surprised to see he knew one of the men on the platform although he tried not to show it. He had encountered Philip Goh several times in cases he was working. Goh did something or another at ISD, but Tay wasn’t sure what it was and he had never gotten Goh to give him a straight answer to the questions he had asked him about that subject.
If Tay were feeling generous, he could probably say he and Goh had worked together, but saying they had worked together would be stretching it a bit. It would be more accurate to say they hadn’t worked against each other. At least, not that anyone would notice.
Goh was a man of average height and weight and mostly forgettable appearance. He could have been the manager of a grocery store or a guy who worked at an insurance company. Perhaps it was that very anonymity which qualified him for ISD. He had a square Chinese face and black, badly cut hair. His most prominent feature was a scar that started somewhere inside his hairline above his left ear, meandered more or less diagonally across his cheek, and then disappeared below his jaw. It looked like a dueling scar on the face of some nineteenth-century German aristocrat and seemed completely out of place on a man like Goh who was otherwise so ordinary.
“Inspector Tay,” Goh called up from the front of the room. “So glad you could join us. We’ve been waiting for you.”
Tay said nothing. He merely nodded and sat in the first empty seat he saw. Kang glanced around, spotted Sergeant Lee one row further down, and slid in next to her.
“Not back there, Inspector,” Goh called out. “You’re down here.” He pointed to the empty chair on the platform right next to him.
Kang glanced over his shoulder at Tay, who gave a half shrug. Tay stood up and walked down to the platform and sat in the chair Goh had indicated.
“What am I doing up here, Goh?” Tay asked in a low voice.
“You’re in charge of the CID people. I figured you should be down front with me.”
“And why are you down front?”
“I’m running ISD’s operation.”
“You mean you and I are jointly in charge of this?”
“I guess we’d better get this straight right now, Tay. ISD and CID aren’t partners and CID isn’t here to help me. If I had my way, you wouldn’t be here at all. But to get the snatch approved, we had to agree to have you here. If it becomes necessary to make arrests under Singapore law, that’s your department. Everything else is my department.”
“Snatch?”
Goh looked annoyed. “What?”
“You used the world snatch. I just thought that was an odd way to characterize an operation to arrest a man.”
“I should have guessed having you here was going to be a joy, Tay. I ought to have my head examined for not refusing to let them stick me with you.”
“And yet here I am.”
“Look, ISD is taking down Suparman and holding him under the Internal Security Act. That has nothing at all to do with CID. But if anyone interferes with us, you might actually be useful. Something like that wouldn’t fall under the Internal Security Act. That would be a breach of civil law and CID will be responsible for making an arrest, if one is necessary.”
“In other words, you’re saying—”
“Can I conduct my briefing now, Tay? Would that be okay with you? If you have any questions, I’ll try to answer them when I’m done.”
Goh flashed a grin he probably thought looked nasty. Tay just thought it made Goh appear constipated.
“Who are they?” Tay asked, jerking his head at the other two men sitting on the platform.
“Everything in this operation is on a need to know basis. And you don’t need to know that.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Goh, give it a rest. Where do you guys get all this spy crap?”
“How much do you know about this operation, Tay?”
“Nothing at all.”
“Then, for once in your life, keep your mouth shut and listen. You’ll find out everything you need to know, and nothing you don’t.” And then Goh winked at him, actually winked. “That’s what need to know means.”
Tay gave a little wave with one hand that could have meant almost anything. Then he leaned back, folded his arms, and waited.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“AS ALL OF you already know,” Goh told the room, “we have intelligence Abu Suparman has either already slipped into Singapore or soon will. We’re going to take him down the moment he shows his face, and you’re the people who are going to do it.”
No one said anything or offered any obvious reaction to Goh’s announcement. There was no applause, certainly no pumping fists. These people were all far too professional for that. But there was electricity in the air, and Tay could feel it.
“We’re setting a trap for him,” Goh continued. “His sister has been diagnosed with third-stage breast cancer. Her doctor in Indonesia recommended a radical mastectomy and the surgery is scheduled here in Singapore on Saturday. Even with the procedure, she has only been given a fifty-fifty chance of survival. We are therefore certain that Suparman will try to see her sometime before the surgery.”
Suparman was a dangerous terrorist and taking him out of circulation was absolutely necessary, Tay knew, but going about it this way gave him a moment of pause. Using a man’s sister who was dying of cancer to lure him into a trap? Somehow that didn’t seem decent.
The lights in the room abruptly lowered and a large screen on the wall behind Goh came alive. A photograph of a pleasant but unremarkable looking middle-aged woman appeared on the screen. Tay thought she looked Malaysian or Indonesian.
“This is Atin Hasan,” Goh said. “She is Abu Suparman’s sister.”
The woman was of medium height and slightly plump with the chubby red cheeks of a healthy baby. She had on a dark red hijab with strands of black hair peeking from beneath it and was wearing jeans and what looked like a man’s shirt with the tails hanging down over her waist. The woman had a white plastic carrier bag in her left hand and on it Tay could just make out the Cold Storage Market logo. The photograph had the oddly flattened look of one taken through a long telephoto lens.
“Atin Hasan will be arriving at Changi Airport from Jakarta around eleven-thirty this morning. We will have eyes on her from the moment she leaves the airplane. The intelligence we have now is that she will be staying at the Temple Street Inn in Chinatown until Friday, when she will check into Mount Elizabeth Hospital for her surgery on Saturday morning. Because of her condition, we assume she will go straight to the hotel on arrival, but if she goes anywhere else we are prepared for that, too.”
“Do we know who she is traveling with?” The question came from a Caucasian man on the left side of the room and Tay thought he detected traces of an Australian accent.
“Our information is that she will be alone,” Goh said.
Tay raised an eyebrow. That didn’t feel right. Who traveled by himself to another country for medical treatment when you had only a fifty-fifty chance of survival? Surely the woman must have family who could give he
r help and support at such a time. Why would she be in Singapore alone unless…well, unless what? Tay couldn’t come up with anything at all.
“How solid is this intelligence?”
The question came from a tall man with a Chinese face sitting in the second row. Tay assumed he was probably ISD. The man looked to Tay to be no more than twenty-five or thirty years old. People around him seemed to get younger and younger every year.
“This intelligence is as solid as intelligence gets,” Goh answered.
Tay snorted, but he did it quietly. If that was the best Goh could do, he figured they were in trouble.
Tay worked on the basis of facts; things he either knew to be true or had good reason to believe were likely to be true. When people told him they worked on the basis of intelligence, it usually meant they didn’t have very many facts. They had collected what some people told them or what other people told them other people had told them and were trying hard to make it all sound like facts. In Tay’s view, relying on so-called intelligence to make decisions was nearly always a sure way to get your ass handed to you.
“What can you tell us about the source of your intelligence?” Tay asked.
He noticed everyone else in the room turned to look at him, and he didn’t detect a lot of warmth in their looks.
“Nothing,” Goh said.
“So you want us to take all this on faith.”
“ISD has vetted the intelligence and views it as actionable. That’s all you need to know.”
“It seems to me—”
“Look, Tay, I don’t really care how anything seems to you. ISD is taking down Suparman on the basis of this intelligence and holding him under the Internal Security Act. If anyone interferes with us, or if we discover citizens of Singapore involved in sheltering or protecting Suparman, CID might be needed since that wouldn’t fall under the Internal Security Act. Otherwise, the details of this operation are of no concern to you.”
“Then you’re saying—”
“Can I go on with my briefing now, Tay? If you have any questions, I’ll try to answer them when I’m done.”
The screen behind Goh began to flash as it displayed a succession of images of the woman Goh had identified as Abu Suparman’s sister. In most of them she was wearing the same jeans, shirt, and dark red hijab she had been wearing in the first picture, which suggested most of them were made at the same time.
The screen stopped flashing and held on a picture of a row of shophouses that looked vaguely familiar to Tay.
“This is the Temple Street Inn. As most of you probably know already, it’s on Temple Street just east of New Bridge Road in Chinatown. The hotel consists of four shophouses, each three stories high, joined together into a single structure.”
Tay always thought it was a little strange that Singapore, which was as a practical matter a Chinese city, had a neighborhood called Chinatown. The narrow streets lined with small shophouses and filled with restaurants and souvenir shops were a big draw for tourists, particularly western ones, but the area bore more resemblance to an amusement park than it did to any real Chinese city Tay had ever seen.
“If Suparman does try to see his sister as we expect, we are certain it will be at this hotel, not at a public place like the hospital. That’s why we’re going to put a net over the Temple Street Inn from the moment Atin Hasan arrives until she leaves for the hospital. We have every confidence we will snare Suparman in that net.”
“Let me lay out the operational plan for you,” Goh went on. “Three teams of six men will work eight-hour shifts to keep the Temple Street Inn under constant surveillance. We have taken over two apartments on Temple Street, one about fifty yards to the east of the hotel and one about thirty yards to the west, and we have access to the back of a restaurant on Pagoda Street which overlooks the loading dock at the rear of the hotel. One team will man each of those positions twenty-four hours a day. Nobody will be able to get in or out of the hotel without us knowing it.”
“What about putting somebody inside, sir?” a man two rows up asked. Tay assumed he had to be ISD since he addressed Goh as sir. Tay couldn’t imagine anyone else would be willing to do that.
“We can’t put surveillance inside the hotel since it’s small and there’s no way we can do it covertly. We considered approaching management and getting their cooperation, but we decided not to. We are simply not certain we can trust either the management or the staff and we don’t want to take a chance of tipping off Suparman if has sympathizers there. If we scare him off, we might not get another chance at him.”
“How about cameras?” the same man asked.
“Again, we can’t access the hotel’s own CCTV system with somebody there knowing about it. We looked at putting our own cameras inside the hotel, but we don’t think we could do that either without at least some of the staff finding out. We simply don’t want to take a chance on this operation being blown by gossip or even by an informer.”
“Anything else?” Goh asked, looking around the room. When nobody said anything, he went on.
“Now, as most of you are already aware, the biggest problem we’re going to have is that Suparman has never been photographed. There are no authenticated pictures of him we can use for identification.”
Well, yes, I see how that might be a problem, Tay thought. When you’re peering down out of a window into the street looking for somebody, it’s reasonably important to know what he looks like.
Tay settled back to see how the geniuses at ISD were going to deal with that one.
A black and white pencil drawing flashed onto the screen behind Goh. It was of a man who appeared to be about fifty years old with a generically Asian face. He could have been Indonesian or Malaysian or, for that matter, Singaporean. The man had a prominent nose, widely set eyes, bushy eyebrows, and long, dark, slightly stringy hair that hung straight down almost to his shoulders.
“This is a composite sketch based on the description of Suparman given to us by two of the men involved in the Bali bombings,” Goh said. “They had contact with him on several occasions while the bombings were being planned, so their descriptions should be reasonably accurate.”
“Wait,” Tay interrupted. “That was…what? Ten or twelve years ago?”
Goh turned his head slowly and looked at Tay. “We’re not completely stupid, regardless of what you might believe. This drawing has been aged to compensate for the timeframe. Now, do you have any other helpful observations?”
Tay wiggled one hand in what he thought was a suitably ambitious gesture and folded his arms.
“We also know,” Goh said, shifting his eyes back to the room, “that Suparman is tall for an Indonesian, perhaps six feet. But he walks with a stoop and may appear shorter.”
That’s just wonderful, Tay thought. They’re going to try to pick out a guy in the street who’s tall but appears shorter, has a face that looks like any one of about ten million other men, and had long hair ten years ago. Piece of bloody cake.
Goh started talking again before Tay could say any of that out loud, which even Tay understood was probably for the best.
“Each surveillance post will have a copy of this sketch plus copies of the photographs of Suparman’s sister I showed you earlier. You will also have field glasses equipped for night vision and an encrypted radio tuned to the operations channel.”
A few heads around the room bobbed, but nobody said anything.
“When we pick up Suparman entering the hotel, an army Special Operations Force will be standing by to seal off Temple Street from both ends. After that, ISD will move in on Suparman. We don’t expect him to be armed and we think the possibility of him resisting is remote, but you should all be armed and fully prepared if he tries to leave the hotel before the army seals off the street or if he does resist. Now…any questions about all that?”
Sergeant Kang raised his hand in the back of the room. “What is CID supposed to be doing while these three ISD teams watch the hotel?”
> “We’ve organized a room for CID at the Santa Grande Hotel across the street from the Temple Street Inn.”
The screen behind Goh flashed through several more pictures of the Temple Street Inn and stopped on one Tay saw had been taken looking toward South Bridge Road. Along one side of the hotel there was a tiny alleyway too narrow for cars that ran all the way from Temple Street through to Pagoda Street and which was lined end to end with vendors’ carts selling tourist junk. Opposite the alleyway on the other side of Temple Street, Tay saw the entrance to the small hotel called the Santa Grande.
“Whichever CID officer is on duty,” Goh continued, “will remain at the Santa Grande until we need you. If something arises which requires the exercise of civil police authority, I’ll call for you on the operations channel and give you instructions. If I don’t call for you, you’ll wait in the room and stay out of the way.”
“Wait a minute,” Tay cut in. “You want CID to sit in a hotel room twenty-four hours a day waiting for you to call us?”
Goh tossed out another of his obnoxious grins. “I thought I’d find something for CID to do that you could handle, Tay.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Tay snapped.
“I’m sorry you think so, but I’m running this operation and that’s what you’ll be doing.” Goh turned back to the room. “There will be no one on the operations channel except for the three surveillance posts, the CID post at the Santa Grande, and my supervisory post. I want you to stay off the radio until you have located and identified Suparman. Is that clear?”
A few people nodded.
“Okay,” Goh concluded, “any final questions?”
For his part, Tay had lots of questions, but he knew it would be prudent to save them for a private conversation with Goh. Starting an argument in front of everyone else would do nothing but piss Goh off and create even more ill will between CID and ISD, if such a thing were even possible.
Nobody else spoke up either.
Welcome to Singapore, Tay thought. Where we obey orders and don’t ask any questions.