by Andrew Grant
However, if things went totally out of control and we failed to kill Lu, the magnificent condo block in which Thomas Lu lived would be reduced to rubble in seconds. The Mendez brothers always kept their promises, according to their legend anyway. Now was not the time to check the veracity of that legend.
Their cartel had blown up the main prison in Bogota in 2003 in a controlled blast. While it had freed dozens of their own men, who obviously knew it was coming, it had also killed two hundred other inmates, many of whom were members of rival drug gangs. Fifty police and prison guards also died in the blast.
The cartel was also blamed for an explosion that completely destroyed the mansion of a legislator from La Palma, chairman of the anti-drug wing of the government in neighbouring Panama. Thirty people died in the blast, all because the official had aligned himself firmly with the Americans and introduced an anti-smuggling regime that seriously hindered the Mendez cartel’s movement of drugs across that border and into vessels bound for the US and Europe.
There had been other bombings attributed to the cartel, many of them, so both Sami and I knew full well that Marco’s threats were far from idle.
“It will work, Daniel, and it will appear as a suicide. I can see the headlines: ‘Financial woes lead Singapore businessman to suicide!’ It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?” Those had been Sami’s last words on the coming night’s activities. He vanished, or should I say the little old man vanished, and I was left waiting. It was thirty-five degrees outside with a humidity rating in the high nineties, so naturally I went for a run.
Thomas Lu had someone watching the entrance to Sami Somsak’s building. The watcher wasn’t the policewoman. He had phoned her and asked her to do it, but she’d told him she was on shift, so he used another watcher, a former cop with a serious alcohol problem. He worked in return for whisky.
The watcher reported that Crewe had run out of the complex dressed in a tracksuit at a few minutes to noon. Lu wondered briefly at that. Supposedly David Crewe was flying out to Australia this day, in just a few hours. What was he doing out running? Then Lu shrugged. No matter what he did in the meantime. As long as this man, Somsak’s hired killer, was gone by day’s end, he could forget him.
Lu opened a drawer on his desk and flicked a switch on the panel inside. The flat screen television mounted on the wall opposite his desk flared into life. A basketball game was on. Lu liked watching athletes at play. The sound was off. He pressed another button and the image changed. Now he was in the bedroom of Kaylin’s suite. The woman was there. She was trying on clothes, of which there were many, both in bags on the floor and lying across her bed.
Undressing, she pulled a dress over her head. But for a pair of high-heeled shoes, she was naked. Despite his preference for men, Lu could still appreciate the female form, albeit from a purely aesthetic perspective. He could see why men such as Chairman Meng would be attracted to the likes of her.
He watched as Kaylin lifted a bag from the floor and spread its contents onto the bed. There was black leather, silver studs and chains. This was the type of costume that he had seen Kaylin wearing in the photographs he had seen of her at play. She selected a pair of leather shorts and wriggled into them, parading in front of the full-mirrored wall beside the walk-in wardrobe. The shorts had a full-length zip that ran from the waistband at the front to the band at the back. The woman undid the zip and the crotch on the shorts parted. Kaylin’s hands went between her legs. Watching her reflection, she stood there with her legs wide apart. She began to pleasure herself.
Fascinated by the pure wanton display on the screen in front of him, Thomas Lu found he was experiencing the beginnings of an erection. This was a first. Never before had a woman had that effect on him. He reached for the zip on his trousers and opened it, groping to free his penis. Perhaps, just perhaps, he would ask this woman to try and work her magic on him? Perhaps even this very evening!
49
It was time to move. Sami had planned everything to happen at midnight. At 11.30pm Sami, myself and K got into the plain white four-door utility that had appeared in the underground car park late in the afternoon. K was driving.
Sami sat up front with him, while I was in the back. All three of us were dressed in dark overalls. We were workers going on a late shift or coming off shift, even though our overalls were perhaps too clean for that scenario.
The guns and our other equipment were in a bag on the seat beside me. We weren’t going prepared for a big firefight. There was a Browning each, silenced and with a shoulder holster and spare magazines, and each of us had a handheld stun gun. These were the torch-like devices, not the taser version that fired hooked darts with wires attached. These weapons had two metal prongs protruding from the front. The prongs were held against the unfortunate subject and the button on the body of the device pressed, sending 50,000 volts into the victim.
I’d been hit with tasers and stun guns several times over the years. It had been highly unpleasant, totally immobilising, and definitely something I did not want to experience again.
In addition to the automatics and stun guns were the inevitable gloves, along with restraints in the form of nylon cable ties. There was also a glasscutter, a small jemmy bar and other assorted bits and pieces. We also had balaclavas, not so much to hide our faces from Lu but to hide from any casual observers.
K obviously knew Singapore better than I did. Apart from my short hundred-yard dash on Sentosa, I’d never driven here at all. When on a mission in a strange country, I never wanted to drive. Local talent was the best option. A skilled local driver, paid a great deal of cash and given a vehicle other than his own, usually led to him doing a great deal of inventive and often spectacular driving, especially when the proverbial shit hit the fan and a fast getaway was called for.
K wove a confusing trail around a network of streets. I was totally lost and said so.
“Keeping away from the obvious as always, Daniel,” Sami said by way of response. K made another turn and there we were on Nassim Hill Road. We drove past Lu’s tower and I noted a late model Rolls Royce parked in the forecourt. A chauffeur was rubbing a cloth over it. Poor arsehole! Midnight and you’re waiting for some rich prick to stop shagging his mistress and let you take him home. Something like that anyway. Years ago, before I joined The Firm, I’d been a chauffeur for the diplomatic corps. Apart from the offensive and defensive driving courses, it had been a crap job.
My silent history lesson was interrupted as K turned us into our destination. It was the construction site Sami had been so interested in when he had been playing his little old man role. The gate rolled shut behind us. We were expected, it seemed.
Lights burned everywhere, both at ground level and in the lattice of beams rising above us. There was no one around but for the man who had opened the gate. Sami told me that because of noise restrictions, no construction was carried out at night.
We drove to the rear of the lot and parked behind the portable site office. It was time to cover up. I handed out the masks and the heavy rubber gloves we would wear instead of flash gloves. This was partially in deference to the stun guns. We pulled on the balaclavas and gloves before getting out of the utility. I hefted the sports bag as I slid out. Our next mode of transportation was waiting. The only other man on the building site was many, many metres above us, invisible against the black sky.
I couldn’t verify it in the dark but I knew, from what Sami had told me, that the giant crane that stood on the site had grown considerably higher since I had seen it several days ago. Sami had hatched his plot well. There had been time enough to add another four sections to the crane’s stem to raise it high enough to accomplish what he had in mind.
We were going to visit Thomas Lu, but we weren’t going to have to fight our way up to him past his army of thugs. We were going to drop in from above. One of the disadvantages of living in a penthouse was about to be illustrated to the man; hopefully, that demonstration would take place in the most fi
nal and complete way possible.
The basket, a three-metre square, open-topped box constructed of heavy piping and steel mesh, was sitting on the ground waiting for us. The side gate was open. I went in first and laid our bag of goodies down on the wooden deck. The others followed. There was a handheld radio in a bracket on the top rail of the basket. K, the last one to climb in, pulled the gate shut and slid the retaining bolt across. Sami picked up the radio handset.
“We are ready. Take it away!”
No sooner had he uttered the instruction than we were airborne, silently gliding upwards, passing the lights on the floors of the skeleton building in rapid succession. Looking up, I still couldn’t even see the boom of the crane against the black sky.
Now we were high above the site, still climbing and swinging through an arc as the crane driver somewhere above us manoeuvred us to our target. The lights of Singapore were laid out below us. Even at midnight, cars streamed on the streets. The city was wide awake.
We continue climbing. We were now above the crane operator. I could see his head and shoulders in the dim lights as he sat inside his tiny cab as we wound our way upward. Up where we were beyond the light haze from the buildings, the black night was crowded with stars. It would have been almost romantic in another setting. I could imagine lying on a hilltop on a rug with Simone and simply counting stars on a night like this.
“Fuck it!” I snapped. I could feel Sami and K both looking at me, although they were just shadowy outlines against the lights of the city. “Sorry,” I muttered. “Just a bad memory.”
“We all have those,” Sami replied.
We were now sweeping over the apartment complex that separated the construction site from Lu’s building. This was obviously the reason Sami had ordered the extensions fitted to the crane, to get it high enough to get over the intervening structure. I hadn’t asked him how he’d organised that. Did he own the construction site? Had he simply bribed the right person or people? The fact was that somehow he had got it done.
Sami was now working the radio as we started to drop down towards our target. The crane operator was now flying blind. It was up to a combination of Sami’s precise instructions and the driver’s skills. K and I pulled on our shoulder holsters and quickly checked our weapons in the half-light. They had been checked before, several times, but old habits die hard. I put a stun gun into one pocket and a bundle of cable ties in another. I hitched the jemmy bar through the belt on my overall. I was ready for whatever came next.
Below, Lu’s lair was rapidly coming up at us. The penthouse roof covered much of the actual area below us. There were, however, two large patios. One, the largest, was on the street side, while the second, adjoining one was on the side from which we were approaching. Looking down, I could see deck furniture on both patios. There was a covered pergola on the smaller one and a closed octagonal structure on the larger one.
“Spa,” Sami said as he came to my side, pulling on his shoulder harness. “My bet is that Lu will be in there right about now. Michael said he is a real night owl and always has a late night spa before going to bed. Let’s hope he’s right or we’ll have to go into the penthouse after him.”
Sami started talking to the crane guy again. He slowed us down and moved our cage slightly to the right. Our landing zone was the smaller patio and we had to avoid the pergola.
The apartment building we were sliding by as we came down didn’t have balconies facing us but there were windows. Would anyone be looking out of them? Would they actually see the basket? Would they see what was about to happened on the terraces below? Too much speculation is bad for one. I stopped asking, “What if?” and concentrated on what I could control.
“We won’t touch down, too much chance of noise. We’ll hover and jump.”
“Done,” I agreed. There was no wind, so the cage could just hang there while we did what we had to. I held my Browning at the ready. I couldn’t see any of Lu’s people on either of the terraces, but it was possible there was a man on watch inside the building. Unless Lu was an exhibitionist, it was doubtful he would have anyone close enough to watch or overhear him and his playmates at bathtime. I didn’t know the guy, but I was hoping I was right in my assumption.
We crept down to a metre off the patio deck when Sami gave the word to stop. The basket jerked to a halt. K eased the bolt on the gate out of its cleat and carefully swung it open. He used a cable tie to fasten it so it couldn’t swing and make any noise. There was little noise up here, other than the whisper of the wind and the hum of the traffic far below. These sounds were punctuated by the occasional aircraft passing overhead. The night outside the subdued patio lighting was as black as velvet. It was studded with stars. A perfect night in Singapore and a perfect night to kill Thomas Lu.
K was the first down, Sami next. I brought up the rear. The windows and the one sliding door on the wall facing us were all closed, as well as the drapes. That was a bonus. K led the way to the corner of the penthouse. The bathhouse was fifteen metres away, half way along the second side of the penthouse. There were uncovered windows and light spilled out from inside the penthouse itself. Dim lights glowed through the darkened glass of the spa.
If Lu were inside the spa, would he see us coming across the face of the penthouse and sound the alarm? We eased back from the corner. The only logical approach was to pull back and move around the edge of the patio and come in from the street side where there was little light. The door to the spa house was nearest to the wide, uncovered double doors leading into the penthouse. Anyone inside the penthouse would probably be able to see us as we came around the front. Was there anyone inside?
There was a sound from the spa. A woman laughed and there was the unintelligible response from someone else, a male. Using hand signs, it was decided that K and I would take the circuitous route while Sami would stay at the corner of the building and give us what cover he could.
I pressed close to the glass. How many people were in the spa? I could hear the voices clearly now. Lu, no doubt, but the woman, who was she? He was gay, so what was happening? Was there another silent partner in there as well? I listened for a moment longer. Lu was obviously enjoying whatever was going on.
“You are surprised?” the woman was saying. She was laughing, her voice teasing.
“Very. You are very good,” the man I had to assume was Lu replied.
“I know,” the woman chuckled. “Now lie back and imagine I am your favourite boy.”
That was the end of the conversation for the moment. Who was the woman? Her presence meant that we now had to deal with two people. We had factored in the likelihood that Lu might have a boy with him, but what if there were three in the spa? A double-suicide yes, but a triple? That could get messy.
So my attempt at deciphering what was going on inside the spa and the number of bodies involved was inconclusive. We had a minimum of two and a maximum of I had no idea how many. Whatever, we were going in. K and I split and one of us came around each side of the spa house. We were on our bellies, keeping below the tall black glass windows. Sami, meanwhile, was crouched at the corner of the main building with his Browning held in both hands, the long silencer pointing across the face of the building. I could see directly through the double patio doors. There was no one in the lounge beyond the doors and no sign of anyone in the lighted rooms on my side of the spa. Hopefully it was the same for K on his side.
There were more human sounds from inside the spa above that of the pumping equipment. I moved to the front of the spa house. K was waiting. I signalled for him to get the outward-opening door while I did the bust-in. I had the Browning in my right hand. I transferred it to my left. Yes, I am ambidextrous when it comes to guns. I put the stun gun in my right. I had a plan for that. Electricity and water are great playmates.
I nodded to K. He pulled the door open and I went through.
50
The interior of the spa was surprisingly large. The pool itself was maybe built for eight
or ten people. There were only two in it. Thomas Lu, who was lying back against the spa surround, had one arm on the edge. The other, the one attached to his injured shoulder, was crossed over his chest and held by a strap. Lu’s long legs were stretched out in front of him, resting on the bath’s central seating core. On Lu’s left side, a woman was kneeling in water up to her shoulders. Her mouth and right hand were working diligently on Lu’s erect penis. The woman was Kaylin.
Thomas Lu’s eyes snapped open as I arrived at the edge of the bath.
“Greetings, Mr Lu, and you too, Kaylin. So pleased to find you both here and enjoying yourself.”
“Thomas, I never knew you had it in you.” Sami was at my shoulder, the muzzle of his Browning aimed directly at Lu’s open mouth.
Kaylin had stopped pleasuring Lu and was staring at us, her face going the colour of chalk under the glow from the spa. She looked as if she were building to scream. I pushed the head of my stun gun into the water and pressed the go button.
The stun gun crackled and buzzed. The static tableaux in the water suddenly became very mobile. One could even say the motion was frenzied. Kaylin’s body jerked and fell backwards into the rolling water, while Lu’s long frame contracted into a fetal position and rolled off the seat into the water.
“That works,” I said to Sami.
“Very effective,” he agreed. “K has the watch!”
“Leave her in the water. She accidentally drowns and remorseful Thomas Lu commits suicide. Another take to be considered,” I suggested. Lu’s face came above the surface of the water. He gasped in air. Kaylin was also gaining some control of her limbs. She heaved herself upwards like a breaching whale to stand swaying, waist deep in the water. She coughed out water and then pulled in a deep breath. I put the head of my stun gun back into the water and pressed the button. Both of them vanished back under the water, limbs thrashing.