Singapore Sling Shot

by Andrew Grant

  The door behind us opened and a loud group of Europeans erupted into the room. I took Simone by the arm and we moved on.

  The second of the surrender rooms was a long room and we were the only living bodies in it. There was just the two of us amongst a couple of dozen wax mannequins. We stood at the entrance and I used my camera to grab a quick panoramic sequence. There was no telling if the people behind us were about to come charging in. They gave the appearance of being the sort of tourists who do five continents in three hours or less.

  There were long tables on each side of the room and a pedestrian corridor down the middle. A low wooden railing on either side defined the boundary. I noted that there was an empty chair at the head of the table to my immediate right. A battered leather briefcase lay on the table in front of the empty seat. A long row of seated, uniformed Japanese and Allied military types stretched into near infinity. A naval officer in white was standing between the table and the pedestrian way on my right. There was a support pillar beside him and there was a transparent screen protecting his back from any groping hands, I presumed.

  The other side of the room was almost a mirror image, except in this case the standing figure in front of the table was dressed in khaki. He also had a screen protecting his back. There didn’t appear to be any cameras in this room either but I wasn’t betting they weren’t there. I’d check the images later. I was, however, prepared to bet there was some sort of proximity alarm system to prevent anyone looting anything from the display. It was probably just an infrared beam, like the others I’d seen placed around the various displays we’d just looked at.

  So in case there was a keyhole camera or two at work, I again posed Simone strategically and took a whole bunch of shots. When the boisterous crowd from next door came in, it was time for us to bail out.

  “Aquarium,” Simone said as we walked down the fort access road. I would have gladly settled for a drink, but yes, we were still in tourist mode and the aquarium was next on the agenda.

  Before the entrance into the aquarium itself was a pool divided by a bridge. One side contained fishes of the finned variety. The other side of the pool had turtles and goldfish in it. Huge turtles, enormous things. We stopped for a moment to watch them. Very occasionally they stuck their heads up out of the water to breathe.

  “Such old faces,” Simone commented, and I guess she was right. These things live to a great old age. Suddenly she squealed, grabbed my arm and pointed into the shadows at the far side of the pool.

  There, at the bottom of the pool, was a body. It was black and almost lost in the shadows cast by the bridge leading into the aquarium. But it wasn’t a dead body. It was very much alive. A plume of bubbles exploded to the surface. It was a diver in a wetsuit using what seemed like a giant pool vacuum cleaner.

  “Housework,” I said to Simone, who breathed a huge sigh of relief. The mechanism of the pool cleaner was across the pool. It sat humming and spluttering as the diver worked. Some of the turtles were interested in the diver and his activities. He frequently had to push them away as he worked. None of them seemed to be trying to bite him; rather they were just bumping him with their shells. Given their size, some of these big bruisers would have had quite an impact. Even so, the guy just kept on cleaning.

  We took the aquarium tour. I didn’t particularly enjoy it. After my time spent crawling through a wrecked submarine on the bottom of the Andaman Sea, I wasn’t as nearly as impressed as Simone was by the display, as good as it was. The sharks especially left me cold. I still had the vision of a giant Tiger shark steaming out of the blackness into the light from an underwater scooter’s headlamp, and racing away with a diver clenched in its huge jaws. Believe me when I say that is the stuff of nightmares.

  “Let’s go get a drink,” I said as we emerged from the aquarium back into the sunlight. I felt a big cold shiver run down my spine and I momentarily forgot my companion of the moment was teetotal. Sharks can do that to one.

  “Let’s,” came the reply.

  By mutual agreement, we ended up back at the Sky Tower bar on the Imbiah plateau. It was 16:20. A huge chunk of the day had been spent touring the fort and aquarium. Simone had orange juice and ice while I damaged a pint of the sponsor’s brew.

  “Did you get whatever it was you were after up at the fort?”

  “I have absolutely no idea. I was flying blind,” I replied. “Sami wanted me to get an overview and see if I could spot any watchers. I got the former but didn’t see the latter.”

  “Are you a spy?”

  The question came so totally out of the blue that I must have registered more than a little surprise. I shook my head and tried to laugh it away.

  “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  Simone looked at me thoughtfully, her head cocked a little to one side. It was a good look.

  “I accidentally heard Mr Somsak talking to Stanley about his friend Daniel. He said that his friend—you—had consigned his boss to hell and no longer worked for the British Government. He said he hoped that you would come work with him.”

  “It is most unlike Sami to let someone overhear him,” I replied, taking a gulp of beer while I searched for a response.

  “I was in my office next to Stanley’s. The intercom suddenly came on. I couldn’t help hearing what he said. Stanley had put his briefcase on his desk and it had jammed the talk button on the console down. I immediately went through and told him, of course.”

  “Of course,” I replied, matching her grin for grin. I do believe she would have done just that. “So how come you call Stanley by his first name and Sami, Mr Somsak?” I was trying to move the conversation away from where it had been heading.

  “I worked for Stanley for five years. He told me the first morning to call him that. I’ve only ever seen Mr Somsak a dozen times. He never asked me to call him by his Christian name.”

  “Call him Sami,” I replied. “Everyone does.”

  “Maybe,” Simone countered. Then she fixed her big blue eyes on mine. She hadn’t forgotten her original question, despite my rather feeble attempt to distract her. “I think you are a spy or a secret agent, or you were one.”

  “Imagination and the wrong end of the stick, my good lady. I’m a security consultant, nothing more, nothing less.” I learned a long time ago that if you’re going to lie, stay within earshot of the truth. It’s easier that way. I finished my Carlsberg and waved the waitress over. I could have decided that the day was done and found a cab or grabbed the cable car across to the mainland, but that would have indicated she had been right and anyway, I was enjoying her company so why rush things?

  “Is seduction on your agenda?”

  For probably the first time in my life, I was absolutely speechless. Simone lowered her glass. Her big blue eyes stayed locked on mine. They were like blue laser beams.

  “I’m just asking because, if it is, I’ll need to organise my sitter for my children.”

  “Would you like it to be on the agenda?” I asked. My throat was dry despite having just bathed it in Mr Carlsberg’s best lager.

  “Very much indeed. I don’t have a boyfriend and casual sex is not my thing, even if the opportunity arises. We have people in common, so that makes us definitely not casual, and anyway, it appears we are man and wife.” Simone held up her left hand. On her ring finger was a gold band. I hadn’t noticed it before. When she played a role, she certainly played it for real.

  “So we are,” I replied. All of my earlier thoughts about being Mr Virtuous went right out the window. Hell, I was helping a lady in distress, or something.

  The waitress arrived as Simone flipped open her cellphone to call her sitter. I forewent another beer and called for the bill. I paid for our drinks and we went in search of a taxi.

  7

  Being the imperfect gentleman I am, all I will say about the night I spent with the beautiful Simone DeLue is that it was spectacular. She admitted at some stage that she hadn’t had sex for more than a year. It showed
. Her enthusiasm bordered on the psychotic. Eventually things calmed down and moved on from her lonely, animal lust to another place. Later still, mutually exhausted, we ended up in the huge spa bathtub.

  Room service delivered a bottle of Moet and glasses. Yes, Simone drank some of it. Not much to be sure, but lying there amongst the bubbles she let the yeasty golden velvet of the champagne tickle her senses.

  Simone DeLue left my room very, very, late. Or was that very early? The phraseology always confuses me. Whatever, it was 03:30 when we said goodnight.

  “Will I see you again?”

  “I hope so, but no promises.”

  “I hope so too. Take care, Mr Spy!”

  With that she was gone without a backward look. I closed the door and locked it. How different this night had been from my escapades of the past few months. Sex for sex’s sake, especially when you’re an addict like I am, is a totally empty experience, beyond the physical at least. This had been good sex. It had meaning of sorts. We had connected throughout the day. Dare I say it? We’d had genuine fun as we’d play-acted our roles as Mr and Mrs Ed from Perth. Big kids, I guess, but it had been fun none the less, and fun is something I haven’t experienced much over the years. It was another day when I didn’t have to kill anyone, and that can’t be bad.

  But as for the sex Simone and I had just shared, that had been quite wonderful. The thing is that, since quitting Thailand, sex for me had been bar, pick-up, home and bed. Several girls had been on a repeat loop but after a couple of weeks I moved on. Variety is supposedly the spice of life. How about we replace that cliché with another claim. How about “Variety is the flat grey sludge of boring repetition”?

  On her way home by cab, Simone DeLue was smiling to herself. She was exhausted, sore and happy. She’d had no intention of inviting Daniel to seduce her. That had never been in her plans. She’d imagined a day out play-acting. She’d anticipated some nice food and a few laughs and that would have been that. A pleasant day away from her normal routine.

  In fact, she admitted to herself at one point during the day that she hadn’t really been sure she even liked the man she was with. However, somewhere along the way her perception of him had changed.

  In her book, physically Daniel Swann was every woman’s dream, or at least he was very close. He was good looking in a rugged sort of way. He had a great body and he knew how to use it. However it was the little things that made her really connect with him.

  Throughout the day she’d had glimpses beyond that hard, almost callous exterior he presented and she knew there was a lot more to Daniel Swann than he was prepared to show the world.

  She had seen immediately that he was smart and humorous, but she had felt that there was a very real sense of vulnerability about him. She had gone in search of it and in doing so she had experienced both the toughness and the gentleness of this man who she so much wanted to see more of.

  “My spy,” she murmured as she stepped into the elevator at her Toa Payoh apartment block. She was still smiling when she eventually found sleep.

  After a long lie-in I had a shower that probably drained the hotel’s hot water system dry. A room service breakfast followed and then it was time for me to get serious. I had my Toshiba with me. I connected the camera to the laptop and started sifting through the hundred or so images I’d taken at Siloso. I saved a couple of good shots of Simone into a separate folder. I don’t think there was one bad of her in the bunch, but these particular ones were very good and the romantic in me decided they were keepers.

  Once I’d done that I started to analyse the remaining images and see if I could spot the surveillance types Sami thought would be somewhere around the fort. Now, I’ve got a jungle fighter’s senses when it comes to watchers and the watched. I hadn’t felt the burn of eyes on me throughout the hours we had spent either in the fort complex or on Sentosa itself.

  I pulled up the images I’d taken on the spur above the watchtower and started to examine the bush edge, winding the magnification to maximum. Leaf by leaf, I quartered the jungle. It was taking me forever, but breaking down camouflage patterns and seeing the reality behind them is an art form. I switched the colour images to monotone and looked for human outlines, a head, an arm, a hand. If I had been colour blind it would have been easier. Conventional camouflage can often be completely useless against an observer with that condition. I didn’t have that luxury or handicap, I just had to do it the hard way.

  I was starting to think this was all a waste of time when I finally saw something. I had a fresh image onscreen and was still in colour mode when something caught my eye. It was tiny, black and shining against the green haze of the jungle background!

  Looking along the right hand, or ocean side of the spur, there was an indentation in the jungle edge and situated in the small clearing was a tower, radio, cellphone or something. Its function didn’t matter. What did matter was the fact that on a cross spar of the tower’s skeleton frame, about ten feet above the ground, someone had mounted a small camera.

  Now, without a bunch of megapixels and a trained eye, the camera, which was held in position with a strip of wide grey tape of about the same colour as the metal of the tower itself, probably wouldn’t have been seen. Certainly not at a glance! What gave it away was the small, dark circle of the lens. The lens wasn’t large. It was no bigger than a Singapore one-dollar coin, but it was black and there was a spark of reflected light on it. It was probably that spark that had caught my eye in the first place.

  The camera, which I presumed had a wide-angle lens, was positioned so it was looking along the spur towards where I had been standing to take my photo. I was prepared to bet there was another pointing the other way looking down towards The QuarterMaster Store and the surrender rooms.

  I looked for a telltale bulge on the corresponding crossbeam on the opposite side of the tower framework. Obviously I wasn’t about to see a lens from this angle, purely because it would be pointing in the other direction. And yes, there was a grey bump on the straight edge of the beam on the far side. Camera number two.

  “Clever!” I muttered, lighting a Marlboro. I was perhaps rewarding myself for being an eagle-eyed genius, or lucky bugger. But yes, the camera option was clever. By using the technology they—whoever they were—could mount a continuous watch while staying out of sight.

  The cameras, of course, didn’t mean there was no one in the jungle itself. Perhaps there was even a Japanese death squad left over from the war bivouacked in the seemingly dense bush waiting to come out and take Singapore for a second time. Whatever, Sami had been right with his call so far.

  Cameras of the type that were set up on the tower were not standard CCTV. These were small mil-spec devices. Expensive and cutting-edge technology. They were the sort of thing I’d seen the US Special Forces guys using what now seemed like years ago in the jungle in the Thai highlands. With long-life batteries and remote sender devices, they could remain in situ for long periods of time and still function. They also operated in extreme low-light conditions. I had to figure that if the unknown watchers had two cameras set up, they probably had a whole bunch more.

  I checked all the other images I’d taken to try and spot any other cameras. I looked at all the hard sites like railings, posts and buildings. Even the artillery pieces and the big stand-alone trees that dotted the hillside above The QuarterMaster Store. I had one possible hit.

  Behind the store on the steep hillside there was an outdoor display showing how heavy cannon barrels were hoisted up the slope to the top of the fort. Beyond that there was an object sitting in the crook of a tree branch. This was little more than just another bulge where possibly one should not be. It was green and brown and matched the colour of the tree. However, the green lump had a circular black centre. Under maximum magnification, the pixels onscreen were almost the size of bricks and they all but destroyed the image, but I was prepared to bet that, yes, it was a camera. If I was right, positioned where it was it would cover the b
ack of The QuarterMaster Store building and any approaches up the roadway from the main gate below.

  With a transmitting range of several kilometres, our adversary’s screen-watchers could be in the jungle, in a vehicle parked somewhere on the island or even sitting in the harbour basin in a launch. They could even be across the harbour in an apartment for that matter. However, I figured that wherever they were, they would have people within easy reach of the surrender rooms and whatever Stanley Loh had secreted there.

  The watchers had one big advantage. Because the fort is situated at the narrow end of the island, anyone attempting to leave and reach the train, bus, car, cab or whatever had to pass through the concourse outside the aquarium. I was sure that the guys using the cameras had people stationed right there to intercept their target if anyone made the pick-up and tried to get away.

  I switched to the images of the two surrender rooms. I’d photographed the panels to the right of the door over a smiling Simone’s shoulder. There were five boxes in all. One was a black-fronted keyed unit, below that a standard digital alarm box. To the right a small keyed box, a faceless panel, possibly hiding fuses. There was a red box below that, a fire alarm control box, I had to assume.

  I was figuring there was a general sensor movement system for the entire floor as a whole. That theory matched the sensors I’d spotted. The second alarm system was probably the infrared trip alarm around the displays. Fire alarm and fuse box aside, the remaining two boxes probably related to the air conditioning and the lights. Short of actually getting right up close and personal with them that was my best guess.

  I skipped through the images in the Allied surrender room and started in-depth in the Japanese room, looking at everything in high resolution. As with my study of the exterior shots, it took time. I ordered a pot of coffee and a sandwich and smoked my way through half a pack of cigarettes before I finished.