by Jake Needham
Naturally, Tay had jumped to the conclusion that August was CIA. When he encountered Americas wandering around Asia who were vague about their affiliations, he always jumped to the conclusion they were CIA.
After a while, however, Tay realized it was more complicated than that. August wasn’t just another freebooting intelligence operative bouncing around Asia on contract to the CIA. He wasn’t a spy.
John August solved problems the old fashioned way. He killed them.
August had ties to the American security establishment all right, Tay had no doubt of that, but Tay understood now that August was connected with something far scarier than the CIA. And he wasn’t sure he even wanted to know what that was.
Whoever August really was, Tay genuinely liked the man, but in spite of that he had kept his relationship with August to himself. For a CID detective in Singapore to have connections with American intelligence, whatever brand of American intelligence August might be, raised all sorts of questions he didn’t want anyone to ask. He hadn’t found it particularly difficult to keep his relationship with August quiet since the truth was they didn’t really have all that much of a relationship. They certainly weren’t pals, and they didn’t hit the bars together. Which was just fine with Tay.
Tay had asked August for a couple of favors, and August had never appeared to mind. Violence wasn’t Tay’s first choice for solving problems, but it beat the hell out of doing nothing. Justice might be blind, but it didn’t have to be stupid.
August hadn’t asked Tay for any favors in return, at least not yet, but Tay figured if his bill ever came due the payment was likely to be a doozy.
Okay, so the girl in the window was someone connected with John August. He got that, but it still didn’t tell him anything about what she was doing there.
Tay could always try to call August, of course, but that wasn’t easy. He had a telephone number with a Los Angeles city code, but neither August nor anyone else ever answered the telephone. Tay just called the number and hung up. Then an hour or a day or a week later August either called back or he didn’t. Tay assumed the number functioned as a caller ID system that couldn’t be blocked, but that was only a guess on his part. He considered a couple of times borrowing someone else’s telephone and calling the number to see what would happen, but he never did it. John August wasn’t a guy you played games with.
So what was going on here? Putting a flyer for Baby Dolls in the mailbox of an abandoned apartment just so Tay would know August had been there was pretty exotic, even by John August’s standards. And it offered him no hint at all as to why August had someone sitting on a hotel where ISD had brought one of the world’s most wanted terrorists, presumably for a meeting with his sister. Regardless, at least now Tay knew something he hadn’t known before. He just couldn’t figure out exactly what it was he knew.
American intelligence, at least whatever part of it John August was connected with, had been using that apartment to watch the Fortuna Hotel. But why? Did they know in advance that Suparman was going to be there? They must have or they wouldn’t have been there either. Unless the surveillance was for somebody else altogether, and that was way too big a coincidence to swallow. So what did that tell him? Were the Americans trying to grab Suparman, too?
The more Tay thought about it, the less sense that made. The old man told him somebody rented the apartment two months back. To do that, somebody in American intelligence would have to know Suparman was going to be at the Fortuna Hotel more than two months before he turned up there. How could that possibly be?
Tay also thought back to the man who spoke to Suparman’s sister in the alleyway behind the Inn at Temple Street before she went to the Fortuna Hotel. Tay had followed the man from Temple Street to the Australian High Commission and watched him pass through security like someone who worked there. That hadn’t made any sense at the time, actually it still didn’t, but did the Australians have something to do with John August and his people watching the Fortuna Hotel from a rundown apartment across the street?
Both things pointed to involvement in all this by western intelligence agencies, that was clear enough, but Tay still couldn’t see exactly what that involvement was or what it meant.
While he pondered the mysterious layers of the hidden world of national security operations, Tay watched the city sliding by outside the cab’s windows. All at once it occurred to him he didn’t recognize where they were and he leaned forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder.
“Where are you going?”
The driver shot a glance over his shoulder. “You say Gilstead Road.”
“What? I did not. I said Emerald Hill Road.”
The driver shook his head. “No, you say Gilstead Road.”
He sounded so certain that for a second Tay wondered if he really had said Gilstead Road, but since he didn’t think he had ever heard of Gilstead Road, he thought that was unlikely.
Tay turned his head from side to side trying to figure out where they were, but nothing looked familiar. Then he peered through the windshield over the driver’s shoulder and finally saw something he thought he recognized.
“Is that Newton Circus in front of us?”
The driver grunted, which Tay took as a yes.
“Then go around it past the hawker center and take Clemenceau Avenue. I’ll show you where to stop.”
Emerald Hill Road dead-ended just south of Clemenceau Avenue, and a short pathway with a flight of stairs allowed pedestrians to walk down to it from Clemenceau. If Tay got out of the taxi on Clemenceau and walked to his house, he would spare himself having to guide this nitwit through the maze of one-way streets they had to navigate to drive into Emerald Hill Road. It was only a few hundred meters. The walk would do him good anyway. He wondered for a moment how much weight he would lose by walking three or four hundred meters, but he knew it probably wasn’t very much.
A few minutes later Tay leaned forward behind the driver and pointed to the curb.
“Stop right here,” he said.
The driver grunted. “Double yellow line,” he said. “Cannot stop.”
Tay pulled out his warrant card and held it in front of the man’s face.
“Police,” he snapped. “Stop the goddamned taxi right here.”
The driver stopped.
Tay looked at the meter and counted out the exact fare. He usually tipped cab drivers at least a little although most people in Singapore didn’t bother. He didn’t want to be petty, but he had no intention of tipping this driver because he had been such a surly jerk. The man accepted the money Tay handed him without comment and Tay got out and walked away.
A short flight of concrete stairs with a green metal railing led from the sidewalk on Clemenceau Road down to the end of Emerald Hill Road. Because of all the one-way streets there was very little automobile traffic there. People owned the streets in Tay’s neighborhood, not vehicles. Actual human beings walked along them and talked to the neighbors they saw as they passed. Even if you didn’t know your neighbors personally, and almost no one did, you recognized their faces when you saw them and that was part of what made the area feel like a real neighborhood.
Tay took the stairs two at a time and walked briskly toward home. He had always liked the upper end of Emerald Hill Road. It was lined on both sides by brightly painted row houses with wooden shutters and iron balconies. Clumps of banana trees peeped over garden walls, their big flat leaves draped on whitewashed concrete like drying laundry, and lush vegetation sprouted from every patch of earth. The area was almost a museum of colonial Singapore. All over the city, government bureaucrats had ruthlessly bulldozed neighborhoods like Emerald Hill and replaced human-scale structures with nondescript high-rise apartments and ugly office buildings. Somehow this tiny pocket of old Singapore still survived, but Tay knew it would not survive forever. Nothing in Singapore did.
There was a smell of ozone on the breeze. It would rain soon. Tay quickened his pace toward home.
CHA
PTER THIRTY-SEVEN
TAY SPOTTED THE van as soon as he crossed Saunders Road. It was parked at the curb on the left side of Emerald Hill facing toward his house. He stopped behind a beige Mercedes parked on the opposite side of the street and took a long look.
It was a silver blue Hi-Lux, unmarked and without windows. It looked exactly like the van ISD had at the Fortuna Hotel.
That might just be a coincidence, of course. The Toyota Hi-Lux was a common commercial vehicle in Singapore, and Tay imagined a fair number of them were silver blue, but he didn’t remember ever seeing a commercial vehicle that didn’t display the name and the telephone number of whatever business operated the vehicle. Nobody wanted to waste a perfectly good billboard like the side of a van that plied the city’s streets all day.
Poised halfway between caution and paranoia, Tay stood behind the Mercedes and contemplated the van. Something about it sitting there didn’t feel at all right.
Was ISD waiting to snatch him when he came home? Even if they were, surely they wouldn’t do it on a public street in broad daylight. Maybe that meant they were already in his house and that they would grab him the moment he set foot inside. Or maybe they had something in mind more permanent than grabbing him.
Tay and Lee were the only people left alive who could connect ISD with Suparman and the Fortuna Hotel. If ISD wanted to hide that connection badly enough to have been involved already in the deaths of at least three people, wouldn’t they be willing to kill Tay, too? ISD was in pretty deep already if that’s what they had been doing. Was getting in a little deeper really much of an additional risk for them?
His best protection, Tay knew, was to nail ISD in public for protecting Suparman. Once that was all out there, ISD would no longer have any reason to move against either him or Lee. Once that was all out there, there would be nothing to protect any longer.
Could John August be the key to doing that? Maybe that was why he left the Baby Dolls card. To tell Tay he could help him out.
ISD didn’t know about the girl in the window, at least he didn’t think they did, and now that Tay knew the observation post across from the Fortuna Hotel had something to do with John August and that John August wanted him to know that it had something to do with him, Tay was willing to bet that August had something good to tell him. Maybe it was something he could even use to nail ISD on all this.
Tay took a deep breath and thought about it. Was he getting carried away here? It was probably just a neighbor’s silver blue Toyota Hi-Lux van parked there on Emerald Hill Road. If not, it was probably one belonging to somebody who was visiting one of his neighbors.
Looking at everything that way made him feel better.
But not for long.
The sliding door in the side of the van started to move and Tay reacted quickly. Two large trees were right next to the Mercedes and he stepped behind them to block the line of sight from the van. He duck-walked forward until he was next to the front right tire of the Mercedes and, keeping his head well below the hood, he very slowly pressed himself up enough to see the van again.
A man was standing next to the open door smoking a cigarette. As Tay watched, the man turned and spoke to someone inside the van. Tay was too far away to hear what he said, but he was plenty close enough to recognize the man. He had been at the Fortuna Hotel. Tay didn’t have the slightest doubt.
Tay eased his head down until he was concealed behind the Mercedes again. Then he dropped to his hands and knees and scuttled back behind the trees. Sitting down, he leaned against the trunk of one of the trees and thought about what to do.
Okay, he wasn’t being paranoid. It was the same van and it was the same ISD guys, and they were parked on Emerald Hill Road just down from his house.
What were they doing there? That much, at least, was easy enough to guess. They were waiting for him to come home. Were they going to kill him? Were they going to kidnap him? Were they going to kick the unholy shit out of him? Tay had no idea, but he was pretty sure they weren’t there to present him with a public service award.
So what the hell did he do now?
It was easier to decide what he didn’t do.
He didn’t go home. He had no idea what ISD’s plan was, but he was absolutely certain he didn’t want to walk right into it, whatever it was.
He could always phone for a couple of fast response cars, say there were suspicious people outside his house and bang these guys up, but that would end up accomplishing nothing. The ISD men would just tell the cops they had no interest in Tay and were there on some other surveillance mission, the details of which they were not allowed to talk about. Who was going to challenge that? The men would go away, of course, but that would be a temporary fix because they would be back. It would be some other time or perhaps even some other place, but they would be back.
No, he had it right the first time. The fix here was to get everything out in the open. He and Lee were a threat to ISD because they knew ISD was protecting Suparman, even if they had no idea why. Once it was public knowledge ISD was protecting Suparman, he and Lee would no longer be a threat. But to make it public knowledge Tay knew he needed some kind of evidence, something to corroborate his claim. Without that, no one would believe him.
He needed to talk to August. He had to find out whether August had something that might help him. He could call him, of course, but the only way he had to reach August by telephone was so awkward it wasn’t particularly useful when you were in a hurry.
His passport was in a desk drawer at his office, so maybe he should get it, go straight out to the airport, and grab the next flight to Thailand. He could be in Pattaya in four or five hours, and he didn’t remember August ever returning a call in less time than that.
The problem there was Tay had never been a keen traveler. He thought all that business about how you broaden your mind when you visited other countries was nonsense. When you went to other countries mostly what you discovered was how good you had it at home. He would just telephone August and hope for the best. At least that way he didn’t have to leave Singapore and go blundering around some third world shithole.
A few moments later Tay heard the sound of the van’s sliding door again and he peeked cautiously out from behind the tree. The smoker must have gone inside and shut the door because now the van once again sat closed up and silent. If he was going to make a move, this was the time to do it.
So he did.
Tay retraced his steps back to the end of Emerald Hill Road and climbed the concrete stairs up to Clemenceau. Traffic was still running heavy and it took only a moment to find a cab driver hungry enough for a fare to be willing to stop on a double-yellow line.
He told the driver to take him to the Cantonment Complex and pulled out his telephone. His first call was to the switchboard at New Phoenix Park where he identified himself with his warrant card number and got Sergeant Lee’s number. Then he dialed Sergeant Lee.
“Where are you, Linda?”
“At the Cantonment Complex, sir.” Lee hesitated. “Is everything okay?”
“Listen to me very carefully. Do not leave the building for any reason until I get there. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir. But why—”
Tay broke the connection without another word and scrolled through his contacts list until he found the number he had for August. When he called it, of course nothing happened. The number just rang until Tay hung up. Maybe John August would call him back, maybe he wouldn’t, but Tay wasn’t sure what to do if August didn’t call. The advertising card for Baby Dolls sure hadn’t gotten into that apartment’s mailbox by accident. August was trying to tell him something. Tay didn’t have any idea what it was, but he knew it was important. August didn’t do anything that wasn’t important.
The rain Tay smelled coming a while ago began falling and he sat watching the big drops roll down the taxi’s windows. There was something comforting about rain. It dampened the noise of the world and hid the misery of it.
&
nbsp; Maybe it would rain forever.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
TAY PAID OFF the cab driver and was showing his warrant card at the security post in the lobby of the Cantonment Complex when his telephone buzzed.
He stopped in front of the elevators and looked at the screen. He saw an unfamiliar number and a text message.
Where are you?
Almost no one ever sent him a text message. He couldn’t even remember the last one he had gotten so he figured it had to be from John August. Who else? All this cloak and dagger crap really drove him mad.
Fortunately, the phone’s software displayed a box right below the message and invited him to type a reply into it. Otherwise he wouldn’t have had any idea how to do it.
Tay laborious picked out his response on the keyboard using one finger.
My office. The Cantonment Complex.
An elevator opened and the passengers flooded out. Tay stepped to the side, stared at the screen of his telephone, and waited for another message. None came.
Tay had never really understood the whole concept of text messages. If you had something to say to someone, why didn’t you simply telephone and say what you had to say and then hang up? What was the point of sending words and phrases back and forth in staccato bursts until everyone figured out what the hell the conversation was really about? More and more things about modern life utterly eluded him.
When he got tired of waiting for what would probably be another cryptic question from August to appear on his screen, Tay jammed the telephone in his pocket and got on the next elevator that opened. Unfortunately, he discovered it was going down, not up. All the way to the garage and back up to the lobby, Tay berated himself for not noticing before he got on. That was one more thing for which he could blame the whole ridiculous concept of text messages.