Singapore Sling Shot

by Andrew Grant

  “I’ll just play the amnesia game,” I replied. “I think after the past three days, they’ll buy that.”

  Sami chuckled at that and nodded. “Yes, I think you’re right. Your background checks out. I had to provide a photograph, it was a close likeness, but it was not you.”

  “Okay. I’m David Crewe. I thought I recognised the name they were calling out to me, but I didn’t know it was me,” I admitted. So, all I had to remember was my fake name. I could do that now, but yesterday, I wouldn’t have had a chance.

  Thanks to my years with The Firm, Mr Crewe, along with all of my purloined passports and identities, had a history and everything that went with it. I’d become an expert at this over the years. David Crewe had an apartment and a business address in Hong Kong and the import-export company he worked for, Kavac International Ltd, actually existed. On computer records at least. An answer service meant someone always responded when the company telephone number was activated. A quick electronic shunt and David Crewe could answer from anywhere in the world. Incidentally, that guy also lived in my apartment, which was actually quite cramped, considering about twelve other identities lived there as well.

  “Remember they’re not stupid, Daniel. They’re just lost in the mist,” Sami said softly. The warning was clear. “The enormity of the bomb on top of everything else that’s happened over the past few weeks has them very agitated. Play it safe, my friend. Amnesia is good. You did business with Stanley. You developed a relationship with his assistant Simone. You came back for the funeral. Got it?”

  “Absolutely,” I replied. “So what about Lu?”

  “They put out the full media list of the dead and injured two days ago. I’m not on it. So he finally knows I’m alive. He’s holed up in his palace.”

  “Damn,” I muttered. It would have been perfect if Sami had managed to swing things so he appeared to be dead.

  “I spread the word that I’ve gone back to Thailand to recuperate and bury Jo,” he added. “I had his body shipped back to his family.” It obviously hurt Sami that he wasn’t there for his friend’s funeral. I could see the effort it required to move on. “I have a plan and I’ll tell you about it in time.”

  “One question: Simone … was she in that coffin?” I asked. That had been uppermost in my mind since I’d got it back in working order. I couldn’t stand the thought of her having being blown to pulp in the blast. Sami was shaking his head.

  “The police found her in her original coffin in the warehouse the undertakers use as a transit depot to store their coffins and equipment. The coffin containing the bomb was an exact duplicate. The undertaker’s assistant and the driver didn’t notice the difference when they reloaded it back into the hearse.”

  “Transit depot?” I was struggling to keep up with Sami’s words. My brain was understandably still sluggish and the painkillers didn’t help.

  “When they have several funerals scheduled throughout the day and are busy, they don’t go back to their parlour which, as you know, is quite small,” Sami patiently explained. “Like a lot of funeral parlours, they have a warehouse they use as a way station. Because of the prior bookings at the cathedral, we had to have the service early while the burial had to be scheduled later, for the same reason. They needed the hearse in between times, so after the service, they stopped off and unloaded Simone and the flowers and went back to the parlour for another pickup. After that funeral, they returned to warehouse, reloaded the coffin with the bomb in it, and drove to wait for us outside the parlour in Clementi. Apparently, this sort of thing happens all the time.”

  “Someone must have been on the inside to switch the coffins.”

  “Obviously,” Sami replied grimly, “and we have a traitor on our team.”

  To me, even lying there trying to get my brain back into full working order, I realised what he was getting at. “You were in Thailand when you heard the news of Simone’s death. Did you specify which funeral home to use?”

  “No. I left that to my people back here.”

  “Lu can’t have people in all the funeral homes in Singapore, but he either had someone on his payroll in one already, or he managed to get someone into that home at short notice. Right?”

  “Right! Remember that it wasn’t the home itself, but their transit warehouse. So it was probably a labourer who made the switch and not one of the morticians.”

  “So it appears that someone on Lu’s payroll and on your team selected the funeral parlour.” I wasn’t surprised really. To me, the huge money on permanent offer in Sami’s world meant there would always be a traitor.

  “I haven’t been to the apartment since the bombing. My own people think I’m back in Thailand. I’ve been routing my calls through Bangkok. I’ve told them you are coming, so you go there when you’re released in the morning. K will be there. Go in through the front entrance, but later when you want to get in and out unseen, there’s a basement service tunnel that links three of the buildings in the complex. Access is through the parking garages via this key.” Sami handed it to me. “I suggest you use the tunnels when you want to be invisible. Just in case Lu has anyone watching, which he probably does. Be very careful and trust no one, not even K.” There was a deep sadness in Sami’s voice.

  “You suspect he’s the rat?”

  “I honestly don’t know, Daniel. There were six people in the apartment when I called from Bangkok: K and five others. One was Stanley’s former in-house accountant, Paul Wang. Paul was out at a meeting when the office was attacked. That in itself raises suspicion. There were two house staff there and two others from Jo’s crew when I called. I haven’t had the time to play detective. I’d hate to think it was K.”

  “So would I.” We all went way back. To have to kill a man you once called friend was the pits.

  “I’ll be in touch, Daniel! By the way,” he paused, “on the subject of spies. Michael, my man in Lu’s camp, has been severely tortured and is in intensive care in KL. Obviously, his cover was well and truly blown.” Sami’s expression was grim. “Another score to be settled, Daniel. We’ll bury Simone and the others when Lu is gone. It will be more fitting then. Take care, my old friend.” Sami patted me on the arm and walked out of the room without a backward look.

  Shortly after Sami’s departure, the detectives arrived.

  To the police officers, David Crewe was an injured man with blank eyes and very little memory. I could see they were frustrated by my act, but I was convincing. Given I’d spent the past three days hiding in the jungle on Pulau Ubin helped give credence to the amnesiac angle. That and the nurse who was hovering in the background like an anxious mother.

  Eventually, after asking questions that drew only the vaguest of confused responses, the interview or interrogation or whatever it was came to an end.

  “I don’t think he has anything for us,” one of the detectives said to the other.

  “No. He checks out with Hong Kong, no problem.”

  The two of them were still standing at the foot of my bed. They were speaking Mandarin. I didn’t let on I knew what they were saying, I just stared blankly up at them.

  “Thank you, Mr Crewe. We will be in touch if there is anything else we may need. Here is my card.” The conversation was now in English again. The more senior of the pair put his card on my side table and they turned for the door.

  “If I remember anything at all, I will contact you,” I called after them as the door swung shut. I could have added a big fat “Not!” to the end of the sentence, but didn’t.

  Soon I would be out of this place.

  42

  They took the staples out of my head and washed off the iodine. The scars are vivid, but they will fade or vanish under my hair when it grows back. However, I made a decision about my appearance. The photo of the man Sami told the police was David Crewe had been all over the newspapers and on television. I needed to make myself as dissimilar to that photo as I could.

  A nurse brought a razor. She carefully shave
d my head, and then I shaved off my moustache. It was the first time in two decades I actually saw my upper lip. It came as a shock, but suddenly I looked nothing like the man in the media.

  My good doctor Dr Chang was on his way to give me a final assessment. I was hoping to be released before lunch. I needed to get out. There were things I had to do. People I had to kill—just joking!

  Dr Chang did give me the all clear with the instructions I was to contact him directly at the first sign of any problems. There was a stark white bandage turban on my head. I had some painkillers and sleeping pills. He wanted to see me in a week’s time. That, of course, was supposing I was still alive.

  I thanked the doctor and was escorted down to a waiting taxi by a pretty young attendant. I gave the driver the Cairnhill Circle address Sami had given me and sat and undid my bandages as we travelled. I looked stupid in a turban. I would get a tanning agent to hide the vivid paleness of my scalp. It would glow in the dark the way it was.

  We pulled up at the entrance to the condominium complex. It was imposing. There was a uniformed doorman. He made a call and K appeared in less than a minute and greeted me with a big grin as he took my bag and led me to one of the elevators. I noted that he pressed the button for “Penthouse Only”. It was key controlled. I wondered if Sami owned the apartment building. I suspected he probably did.

  Sami’s domain was magnificent in every way. The rooms were large and airy, the furnishings expensive. There was much wood, but that was to be expected; Sami Somsak loved wood and used it extensively in all of his homes that I had seen. There were several of them I knew about but doubtless he had many more.

  K showed me into a bedroom; or rather, into a suite, a large suite. The bedroom itself was the size of a normal lounge, plus there was a sitting room with a bar and a small kitchen off to one side. The bathroom had an enormous spa bath and double shower. It was magnificent.

  The first thing I needed to do was meet the other residents. K gathered them in the main lounge. Apart from K, there was the accountant, Paul Wang. Following the firebombing, he had been relocated to the apartment. He had known Simone, so why hadn’t he been at the funeral? I couldn’t remember seeing him there, and what about his absence from the office when it had been attacked? These were things about Mr Paul Wang I would need to find out about.

  That’s the thing about not trusting people. Everyone is a suspect. Everyone can be a traitor. That’s a great way to judge people.

  Then there was Kaylin, the apartment’s housekeeper. She was a short, attractive Chinese woman in her mid-thirties. She was all smiles and helpfulness. There were two Thai minders, Quong and Dep. I’d met Quong before, of course. Dep, however, was new to me. He was a young guy, maybe thirty, handsome, with a physique that suggested a lot of hard gym work. He was potentially a real lady-killer. Regardless, he was too young to be one of Jo’s original core group of Special Ops people, so he had to be a new recruit. Maybe he was the traitor?

  The last of the group was a young Singapore Chinese named George Hu. He was the live-in chef. A considerable waistline showed he loved his food. He was another who smiled easily. That’s the problem with smiles, of course; they are an easy shield and can hide a multitude of sins.

  These, then, were the six people who had been in the apartment when Sami had phoned following the news of Simone’s death. He told me Kaylin had answered the phone and taken down his instructions, but had she personally made the funeral arrangements? I would be asking her that question when the opportunity arose.

  I couldn’t help but think that because the arrangements that our Judas had made with Lu had been aimed specifically at killing Sami Somsak, he or she would assume there would be no follow-up. If the plot had succeeded in killing Sami, as intended, there would certainly have been no follow-up. In fact, there would have been no one left to investigate the “how” of it all.

  On that basis, I figured that the insider wouldn’t necessarily have bothered with an elaborate scheme to cover up the plot. Time would surely tell on that one. My arrival here would probably shock the traitor, more so if he or she knew the real reason for my presence.

  The fact that I looked like something from a horror movie hopefully would lull the Judas into thinking I was simply here to recuperate.

  Introductions over, I settled into my room. I had only been in my luxurious suite for a few minutes when there was a knock at the door. It was K. He handed me a Browning Hi-Power, a shoulder holster, two extra loaded magazines and a silencer.

  “A welcome gift,” he said with a grin as he went out, closing the door behind him. I balanced the automatic in my hand and checked it. The weapon was clean and any excess oil had been wiped off. The magazine was fully charged and there was a round in the breech. The safety was on. No doubt K had prepared it. Only a pro left a round under the hammer and he only did that when he presented a weapon to another pro.

  I genuinely liked K, and until events of the last few days, I had trusted him completely. I certainly hoped it wouldn’t be him that I had to kill, perhaps with the very weapon he had just given me. I unloaded the piece and stripped it down. The firing pin hadn’t been removed or filed down. That’s the oldest trick in the book of dirty tricks. Everything looks absolutely fine until one goes to use the weapon and finds it has no teeth.

  I used the shower. There was a full cabinet of every type of toiletry known to mankind, including a tanning agent, or rather a type of staining lotion. I used thin strips of plaster to cover my wounds and applied the solution as directed.

  Ten minutes later, my glow-in-the-dark head was an almost match for my real tan. I wiped some of the solution across my upper lip. The result wasn’t perfect, but it would do. I now didn’t look like a freshly bald man who had just shaved off his moustache. I certainly didn’t look like David Crewe, and that was fine.

  I was just finishing my makeup session when I noticed that the bathroom had two telephones. There was one beside the twin vanity and another between the toilet and the bidet. Overkill perhaps, but it started a train of thought. It was something I should have worked out sooner, but I was still a little slow in the brain department.

  Obviously, most modern digital telephone systems retain call records as a matter of course, and that was the initial key to finding out who the traitor was. I quickly dressed and went hunting for Sami’s office. I had complete access to the joint. Sami had made that perfectly clear to everyone. K was stationed in the foyer watching a CCTV monitor. The images flicked between garage, elevator and fire escape. There was an MP5 sitting on the table beside the monitor. I asked where Sami’s study was. K pointed to a set of double doors set off to one side. I went and opened them and stepped into Sami-land.

  Sami’s obsession with wood is one thing. His other passion is artwork, and stepping into his magnificent study was like walking into an art gallery. There were paintings on the wall I had seen in books and magazines; paintings that, in any other situation, I would have said were copies. There were pieces of sculpture in marble, bronze, maybe silver and gold even, and in various woods. They stood on pedestals and several of the larger ones were free-standing on the highly polished wooden floor. I wasn’t up on sculpture, but these looked impressive.

  More impressive was the Samurai warrior that stood to the right of the massive mahogany desk. I’d seen its twin in Sami’s Bangkok mansion. It was a very scary, lifelike figure. The lacquered wood and leather armour was black and gold, as was the full-face helmet. The gauntlets of both hands were around the long handle of a magnificent katana. The shimmering blade of the sword formed an arc above and behind the warrior. The Samurai was poised for the killer stroke, the blow that would form a cleft in his unfortunate target from shoulder to hip, angled through the body. Sami was an expert with the beautiful, deadly sword. He was Samurai by heritage, through his father. He adhered to the best of that ancient culture and wove it through his Chinese and Thai backgrounds. That perhaps explained, in part at least, some of my friend’s co
mplexities.

  I suppressed a shudder as I stepped past the warrior and sat at the desk. The figure was so powerful and so very lifelike that I had to force myself to rationalise that it was just a mannequin, like those in Fort Siloso—but this one was much more realistic.

  Half an hour later, I left Sami’s office none the wiser. His phone records showed normal traffic. Business calls to and from our accountant friend. There were calls from the housekeeper and chef ordering in goods and a variety of incoming calls from several different sources. The call from Sami was also logged, but there was no record of anyone—through the time leading up to or following that call—phoning any number not already logged in the system.

  The one thing I did note, however, was that following the call from Sami, there had been a long delay of almost two hours before the call had been made to the Sacred Dream Funeral Home. Why had Kaylin waited so long before making it?

  Of course, cellphones threw the whole equation sideways. Everyone in Singapore has a mobile. Short of gathering everyone’s personal cell and searching their individual records, how was I going to identify who had been talking to Thomas Lu or one of his crew?

  I wasn’t prepared to point the finger at anyone just yet, but the two Ks (K and Kaylin), along with Paul Wong, were high on my list. What had Kaylin done during the two hours between Sami’s call and her phoning the funeral parlour? Had she used her cell to call Lu? Had he called her prior to Sami’s call. Had he ordered her to use the Sacred Dream Funeral Home where he had a man or men in waiting? Did he, in fact, own a share of the business itself? That was something that would be difficult to confirm either way.

  I found a baseball cap to cover my scalp wound. It had a Levi’s 501 logo on it. I would have preferred something a little less distinctive, but my BMW one hadn’t made this trip with me and the 501 cap was the only other available. It would have to do. K gave me an elevator key. I put it on the ring already containing the key for the service tunnel doors as I travelled the twenty or so floors down to the basement car park. I unlocked the heavy steel door into the service tunnel and went through the garage of the neighbouring building and on to the next. The garages were all identical and so, I guessed, were the buildings above.