by Jake Needham
Tay handed the glasses to Lee.
“Does she look sick to you?” he asked.
Lee studied the woman again and Tay waited, curious as to what she thought.
“I don’t know, sir. She looks okay to me, but what do I know?”
Kang glanced back over his shoulder at Tay. “Why would they lie to us about that, sir?”
“Because it’s what they do.”
Kang looked puzzled. He didn’t understand exactly what Tay meant by that. Tay didn’t blame him. He wasn’t absolutely sure what he meant either.
“What do you want to do, sir?” Kang asked.
“We are supposed to be watching for Suparman, not for her, so I suppose we do nothing.”
“Maybe she came outside to wait for Suparman.”
Tay nodded. That was exactly what he was thinking.
For a long while after that nothing at all happened. Tay, Kang, and Lee passed the glasses back and forth and watched the woman, but she only leaned against the wall next to the door, glancing up and down the alleyway.
The sun had reappeared and the alley was again filled with swirling hordes of people, which meant they occasionally lost sight of the woman. Singapore was usually a quiet, uncrowded city, except in tourist areas like Chinatown. Tay had observed that western tourists in particular had a way of walking that commandeered a lot of space in a crowd. He didn’t know why that was, but it was clearly true.
“She’s talking to someone, sir.”
Tay took the glasses from Kang. The woman was still leaning against the wall next to the door, but now a man was standing directly in front of her. They looked as if they were carrying on a conversation.
“Where did he come from?”
“I’m not sure, sir. Just out of the crowd.”
“Not from the hotel?”
“No, sir. I’m certain of that.”
The man’s back was to them and Tay couldn’t see his face. He looked to be of average height with short black hair, and he was wearing dark slacks and a white, short-sleeved shirt with the tail out. He could have been anybody. Every man in Singapore was of average height with short black hair, and an untucked, short-sleeved white shirt over dark slacks was the standard male uniform.
“Do you think it’s Suparman, sir?”
Tay said nothing. He simply had no idea.
“I don’t think so,” Lee offered. “He’s not tall enough, is he?”
Tay said nothing. He just stared at the man’s back through the glasses, willing him to turn around.
“Shouldn’t we put it on the radio, sir?”
“And how is it we see what we’re seeing, Sergeant Kang? Had you forgotten we’re actually back at the Santa Grande Hotel watching television and waiting for our pals in ISD to give us a call?”
“Yes, sir, but—"
“Forget it. We say nothing unless we’re absolutely sure we’re looking at Suparman.”
The problem was that Tay had no idea how they were going to do that unless the man cooperated by turning around and giving them a look at his face. If the conversation finished and the man walked away without them seeing his face, Tay knew he would feel like a real idiot.
“Go downstairs, Robbie. See if you can walk past them at an angle that will give you a good look at him without being obvious about it.”
Kang picked up the radio. “If it’s Suparman, sir, should I–”
“Just telephone me. But be absolutely sure before you telephone me. I don’t want to be responsible for another false alarm.”
Kang nodded, put the radio back on the desk, and headed downstairs.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE WOMAN ABRUPTLY pushed herself away from the wall. It looked to Tay like the conversation was over. He also thought the man might have handed the woman something, but his view was blocked and he had no idea what it was, if it was anything at all. The woman and the man started walking slowly away together and for one tantalizing moment the man turned his head slightly. Tay was sure he was about to get a look at his face, but he didn’t turn it quite far enough and all Tay saw was a flash of his profile. It wasn’t nearly enough.
When Kang stepped out into the alleyway, he saw what was happening and called Tay.
“They’re moving so slowly I think I can walk past them and come back. I ought to be able to see his face that way.”
But before Tay could say anything, everything changed.
All at once the woman turned around and came directly toward Kang. The man speeded up and walked away in the opposite direction.
“Sergeant Lee and I are coming down, Robbie. You and Lee stay with her. I’ll take him.”
Tay and Lee left the radio, the backpack, Tay’s books, and everything else, and ran for the stairs. When they stepped into the alleyway, Tay saw Kang’s back disappearing into the crowd. He gathered Kang had eyes on the woman and she was somewhere in front of him. Back to his left, the news was not so good. The crowd had already swallowed up the man.
“Go,” he snapped at Lee. “Don’t lose her.”
Turning in the opposite direction, Tay weaved through the throngs of tourists trying to catch sight of the man. He dodged a pushcart from which an elderly woman was selling ice cream and stepped out of the end of the alleyway into Pagoda Street.
The crowds were a bit thinner there and he swept his eyes back and forth. Then he had a stroke of luck. A flash of red caught his eye and he glanced toward a little girl who was jerking a balloon up and down by its string. About twenty feet beyond her, walking west toward New Bridge Road, he spotted the man. Something about the posture and the body language left Tay with no doubt he was looking at the same person he had seen in the alleyway.
That part of Pagoda Street had been blocked off to vehicles and turned into a walking street for tourists. Strings of hokey red and white paper lanterns fluttered overhead and carts displaying every imaginable kind of tourist junk stood shoulder to shoulder along both sides. Tay plowed into the crowd and hustled forward to keep the man in sight.
Following someone undetected when you are working alone is an almost impossible task, even for an expert. Tay understood that, and he also understood all too well that he was no expert. About all he knew about street surveillance was what he had picked up from reading John le Carré novels. Which suddenly gave him an idea.
Scanning the vendors’ stalls, Tay spotted a middle-aged man looking at baseball caps that said Singapore! across the front. The man appeared to be having a hard time deciding between a blue one with white lettering and a red one with blue lettering, and he had taken off his own cap to try on first one and then the other and examine each in a little mirror hanging on the side of the stall. The man was concentrating on his image in the mirror and the stall’s owner was concentrating on his customer to be sure he didn’t steal anything, which gave Tay an opportunity to scoop up the man’s old cap from the place he had momentarily set it aside.
Sliding back into the crowd, Tay glanced at the front of the light green hat he had just stolen. Dolphins, it said across the front beneath a cartoon of a large fish.
Why would anyone put the name of a fish on the front of a baseball cap?
Tay had absolutely no idea. He shook his head, jammed the cap down to his ears, and kept walking.
If the man he was after checked behind him for surveillance, he would see a man in a green cap that said Dolphins. After that Tay could ditch the cap and his appearance would be different if the man checked behind him again. It wasn’t much, Tay knew, it might not be anything really, but the trick usually worked in spy novels and it was the only idea he had.
All of a sudden Tay lost sight of the man altogether. Three large Caucasian women in bulging shorts and t-shirts were walking very slowly right down the middle of the street with their arms linked and Tay couldn’t see past them. As long as he could remember, the rotund nature of the city’s Caucasian tourists had been a source of wonder and amusement for the locals. Did all the thin tourists go some pla
ce else, Singaporeans asked each other, or were the Caucasian tourists everywhere that fat?
Tay cut left between two t-shirt stalls, trotted through a scattering of small metal tables surrounded by white plastic chairs, and rejoined Pagoda Street on the other side of the three bovine woman. He was certain he had lost the man, but he moved back and forth through the crowd a few times and then a space opened in front of him and he found the man again. He was about fifty feet ahead and making straight for New Bridge Road.
But was it Suparman? Tay still had couldn’t tell.
“Turn around, you son of a bitch,” Tay muttered. “Give me a look at your face.”
The man apparently wasn’t feeling cooperative. Heedless of Tay’s plea, he kept walking.
When he reached New Bridge Road, he jogged up the steps of a pedestrian bridge, crossed over the busy double roadway to the northbound lanes, and took the steps back down to a taxi stand in front of the People’s Park Complex. A blue Comfort taxi pulled up when Tay was still forty feet from the stand and the man got in. Tay looked around frantically and was amazed at his luck when he saw another Comfort taxi just turning in. The cab hadn’t even stopped rolling when Tay jerked open the door, ripped off his stolen baseball cap, and dived into the backseat.
“Follow that taxi, the blue one right in front of you,” he snapped.
The driver turned his head and stared at his passenger, his eyes wide. He was an elderly Chinese man with a heavy black glasses and a bad haircut.
“I drive taxi more than thirty year,” he said. “I always dream somebody say that to me.”
Tay fumbled in his pocket, pulled out his warrant card, and held it up.
“This is police business. Get moving.”
“Yes, sir!”
The rear tires spun as the driver gunned the engine and shot out of the taxi stand into New Bridge Road.
“Don’t get too close,” Tay snapped. “Just keep that taxi in sight and don’t lose it.”
“I no lose,” the driver said. “I see Fast and Furious.”
Wonderful, Tay thought. I learned about surveillance from spy novels and this guy learned about driving from car chase movies. What could possibly go wrong?
The traffic heading north on New Bridge Road was light and they had no difficulty keeping the other taxi in sight. They crossed the Singapore River on the Coleman Bridge and passed the Old Hill Street Police Station without slowing down.
Before they reached Raffles, the little convoy turned west on Stamford Road, passed Fort Canning Park, and headed toward the hotels and malls of Orchard Road. It seemed unlikely to Tay that Suparman had been seized by an impulse to do some shopping, and even more unlikely he was staying in one of the very public five-star hotels in the area. Tay began to feel some serious doubts creeping in. Maybe this wasn’t Suparman he was following. Notorious international terrorists didn’t stay at the Four Seasons, did they?
Tay’s telephone began to buzz. He fished it out of his shirt pocket and looked at the screen. Kang.
“What have you got?” Tay asked.
“We’re in the Raffles Place MRT station, sir. She’s getting on a train.”
“Can you and Lee stay with her?”
“I don’t know, sir. We’ll try, but she may spot us. Neither one of us has much experience at this.”
“Have faith, Sergeant. Surely she doesn’t have any more experience at detecting surveillance then you have at doing it. Just don’t lose her.”
Tay disconnected the call and shoved the phone back in his pocket. He looked up in time to see they were coming up on the glass curtain walls of the ION Orchard Complex, still not completely rebuilt from the bombings. When he glanced back at the road ahead, he saw three blue Comfort taxis at different distances in front of them.
“Which one are we following?” Tay asked the driver.
“Right lane. Maybe one hundred feet in front.”
The traffic light at Paterson Hill Road changed from green to yellow and the taxi they were following accelerated through it. Then the light changed to red.
“Don’t slow down,” Tay snapped. “Run the light!”
The driver’s head began to rotate slowly toward Tay like a radar dish trying to fix on something unfamiliar and mystifying. Willfully disobeying the law was a foreign concept to every Singaporean, and Tay could see the man struggling to comprehend an instruction to do it.
“Run the fucking light! I’m the police!”
Disobeying the police was an even more foreign concept to every Singaporean.
The man floored the accelerator, slalomed between two buses, and shot through the intersection against the light. It was probably the most thrilling moment of his life.
The taxi they were following rolled along Orchard Boulevard. At the Camden Medical Centre, it turned right and headed north on Grange Road. Now they were moving away from the commercial district and nothing was in front of them but expensive apartments, even more expensive homes, and foreign embassy compounds. Did Suparman have wealthy supporters who had loaned him a house or an apartment to lie low in? That seemed unlikely, but Tay had seen stranger things.
Still heading north, the two taxis passed Tanglin Road, merged into Napier Road, and passed the American Embassy. The low-slung building was built out of giant blocks of stone that made the whole structure seem massively oversized. It sat well back from Napier Road atop a small, doubtless artificial rise and the grassy expanses surrounding it were a jangling contrast to its harshness of uncompromising gray stone structure. The American Embassy always reminded Tay of a cross between a Japanese warlord’s castle and the elephant house at a very prosperous zoo.
A minute or two later Tay saw the blue Comfort taxi slow and signal a left turn into Middlesex Road.
That’s strange, Tay thought. There’s nothing up there but…
Before Tay had even completed his thought, the taxi turned off Middlesex Road into the main entrance of the Australian High Commission and stopped at the security gate.
“Keep going, keep going!” Tay shouted at his driver. “Don’t slow down!”
The driver understood exactly what Tay meant and they rolled right on by Middlesex Road at a steady rate of speed. Just one more nondescript taxi plying the streets of Singapore.
As they passed the Australian High Commission, Tay watched the man he had been following get out of the taxi. He could see his face clearly now. The man was a Caucasian. He certainly wasn’t Suparman.
Tay swiveled his head as they passed and watched the man as he was quickly cleared to pass through the security gate. Obviously somebody who was well known at the Australian High Commission.
So who the hell was he? And, more to the point, why had he met Suparman’s sister outside the Temple Street Inn?
Oh, shit, Tay thought. What have I gotten myself into?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“TURN AROUND AND go back to Chinatown,” Tay told the taxi driver.
He pulled out his telephone and pushed the speed dial number for Kang. “Do you still have Suparman’s sister in sight?”
“Yes, sir. She got off the MTR at Farrer Park and took the steps up to Serangoon Road. She’s walking south now.”
“Has she spotted you?”
“I don’t think so. Linda…uh, Sergeant Lee got ahead of her on the other side of the street so I’ve dropped back now.”
“That sounds pretty slick.”
“It was Linda’s idea, sir. She’s really good at this.”
Tay lowered the telephone and leaned forward toward the cab driver. “Forget Chinatown. Take me to Serangoon Road.”
“What place on Serangoon Road?”
“I’ll tell you when we get there.”
“Sir? Sir? Are you still there?”
The tinny scratching of Kang’s voice from the telephone caused Tay to lift it back to his ear.
“Yes, I’m here, Robbie.”
“She turned off to the right on some side street and I lost sight of her, but
Linda is coming back toward me now. Maybe Linda saw where she went.”
Tay listened to the murmur of conversation between Kang and Lee, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying.
“Sir?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Linda says Suparman’s sister went into the Fortuna Hotel. It’s over—”
“I know where it is.”
Tay was as familiar as he wanted to be with the neighborhood where the Fortuna Hotel was. He thought it didn’t have much to recommend it. It was…well, it wasn’t anything really. Block after block of old shophouses had been razed a decade or so back in a harebrained rush to modernize the city, and all that had been put in their place were new buildings of no particular design. These days that part of Serangoon Road wasn’t a real neighborhood at all, just a jumbled looking collection of unrelated buildings separated by empty lots and connected by mostly empty sidewalks. Serangoon Road carried a lot of traffic, but most of it was heading somewhere else as fast as it could.
“Just a minute, sir,” Kang said.
The sound of murmuring started up again and Tay waited.
“Linda says there’s a vegetarian restaurant on the other side of the street where we can watch the entrance to the hotel. What do you think?”
“Do it. Does the hotel have a back door?”
“I don’t know, sir. It must. Doesn’t everything in the world have a back door?”
Kang’s question raised a metaphysical issue Tay had no interest in pondering, at least not right then. So he kept his response simple and practical.
“One of you check the hotel for other exits.”
“Right, sir. Did you ID the man you followed? Was he Suparman?”
Tay hesitated. The story about following his man to the gate of the Australian High Commission was too strange to get into over the telephone, so he decided to keep it simple for now.
“No. Turned out to be just some guy.”
“Then we don’t—”
“I’m coming to you,” Tay interrupted. “We’re only a few minutes away.” He broke the connection before Kang could say anything else.