THE DEAD AMERICAN (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 3)

by Jake Needham

“So you think The Future is working on software to control airplanes,” Goh said after a while. “Maybe drones for the military. Something like that?”

  “Don’t forget what Tyler’s specialty was. He was an expert in security protocols. He designed software to prevent people from interfering with the software that runs driverless cars.”

  “Then what are you saying, Tay? That Goodnight-Jones set up a company that was pretending to write software for driverless cars, but it was really developing software to prevent people from interfering with drone aircraft?”

  “To prevent people from hacking into software, you have to figure out how to hack into it yourself.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Tay, stop pissing around. If you know something, just tell me.”

  “I’m trying to get you to see that—”

  “Oh fuck!” Goh twisted around on the bench until he was facing Tay. “Are you saying these guys are really designing software to interfere with the operation of remote controlled aircraft like military drones?”

  “Not just interfere. I think they’re designing software to take over their operation.”

  “You mean hijack military drones? By remote control?”

  “Maybe not just military drones. What if the software worked on any aircraft? What if they could take control of any aircraft they wanted?”

  Tay had of course heard the old expression about someone turning white. He had never taken it literally and always thought of it as a poetic exaggeration, but right at that moment that was exactly what happened. Goh’s face turned as white as a sheet of paper.

  “It gets worse,” Tay went on quickly before he lost his nerve. “Do you know who really owns The Future?”

  “We’ve been trying to find out, but we’ve gotten nowhere.”

  “I know who really owns The Future.”

  “I don’t believe you. The ownership is hidden behind shell companies in half a dozen countries. I’ve had my best people trying to untangle it. You’re one guy, and you don’t know crap about that kind of thing.”

  “Maybe not, but I know people who do. And one of them told me.”

  “Who?”

  Tay shook his head.

  “I didn’t know you were into spook culture, Tay.”

  Tay just shook his head again.

  “Do you trust your source?” Goh asked.

  “I do.”

  “Okay, so…” Goh spread his hands.

  “The Future is funded and controlled by the Chinese army.”

  Goh looked like someone had just slapped him.

  “You’re shitting me,” he said. “The Chinese army?”

  Tay nodded.

  “Holy shit,” Goh breathed out, and then he lapsed into silence.

  Tay lit another cigarette and waited for Goh to say something.

  Sometimes he wondered how people who didn’t smoke managed to face the world these days. No matter what horrible thing Tay heard or saw, he was only one sweet hit of nicotine away from equanimity. Maybe when other people discovered what calamity was upon them they bit the inside of their lip until they drew blood or went out and got stinking drunk. All Tay had to do was take out his pack of Marlboros and light one, and then the universe was back in order again.

  Goh shifted his weight on the bench and cleared his throat.

  “Let me be absolutely certain I understand what you’re telling me here, Tay. You’re saying that a front company here in Singapore controlled by the Chinese army is secretly developing software capable of taking over airplanes and either redirecting them or even stealing them.”

  “Yes. And that Goodnight-Jones has killed at least two people to cover it up.”

  “Personally?”

  Tay hesitated. “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  Goh nodded several times very slowly.

  “Okay, Tay. But even if you’re right about all that, why are you telling me?”

  Now it was Tay’s turn to look astonished.

  “Because someone has to put a stop to it.”

  “Maybe,” Goh said, “but it ain’t going to be me.”

  Tay just stared.

  “Look, Tay, Singapore is a place that welcomes all kinds of commercial pursuits. There’s nothing illegal about the Chinese army owning a company here. And there’s nothing illegal about that company developing software to do just about anything it wants to do.”

  “I can’t believe you can just sit there and—”

  Goh held up his right hand, palm out, like a traffic cop.

  “I already told you The Future has friends right at the top. I’m not fucking with those guys unless what The Future is doing is clearly a crime under the laws of Singapore. And, from what you’re telling me, it’s not.”

  Tay shook his head and looked away.

  “I thought you might be different, Goh, but you’re just like all the other frightened government hacks here. You’ll go along with anything as long as you get to keep your job.”

  “Oh go fuck yourself, Tay, and take your self-righteous horseshit with you. I don’t see you out on the front lines leading the revolution either, pal, so just stick that crap where the sun don’t shine.”

  “Two murders aren’t enough for you?”

  “Can you prove Goodnight-Jones was responsible for either killing?”

  “He was responsible for both of them.”

  “But can you prove it?”

  Tay shook his head.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  They went back to sitting in silence again after that. Tay wanted to tell Goh the rest, but it sounded so crazy he hesitated.

  Then he thought, well, what the hell?

  And he just told him.

  “It was more than two murders, Goh.”

  Goh looked puzzled. “Who else do you claim they killed?”

  “I don’t have their names, but I can get them.”

  “Names? Plural?”

  “Yes. There were two hundred and thirty-nine others.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You’re just jerking my chain.”

  “Do you know the date when Tyler Bartlett was killed?”

  “I thought he committed suicide.”

  “You know he didn’t. What was the date?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “His body was found on March 16. So he was killed on either March 14 or March 15.”

  “Okay. So what?”

  “You know that he was killed only a few days after he quit his job, don’t you?”

  “I think I remember hearing that.”

  “When did he quit his job at The Future?”

  “Somehow I get the feeling you’re about to tell me.”

  “March 12.”

  “Okay.”

  “And if you’ve looked into the case at all, and I know you have, you also know Tyler told his girlfriend and his parents that he quit because he discovered something that frightened him.”

  “Yes, I remember them saying that.”

  “So here’s the jackpot question, Goh. What was it that happened a few days before March 12? What was Tyler talking about?”

  “I have no fucking idea, Tay.”

  “Yes, you do. You just haven’t put it together yet.”

  “What in God’s name are you—”

  “What happened on March 8?” Tay prodded.

  Goh opened his mouth to say something. Then abruptly he closed it again.

  “What happened on March 8, Goh?”

  Goh looked away and then looked back. When he did, he seemed unhappy Tay was still there.

  “On March 8,” Goh said, “Malaysian Airlines flight 370 disappeared over the South China Sea shortly after leaving Kuala Lumpur for Beijing.”

  Tay nodded, but he didn’t say anything.

  “It was a B777-200ER wide body jet with two hundred and thirty-nine souls on board,” Goh continued in a low voice. “It has never been found. No crash site. No debris. Just… gone. What happened to it is the biggest mystery in the histor
y of commercial aviation.”

  Tay nodded again and took his pack of Marlboros and a box of matches out of his shirt pocket.

  Goh held out his hand. “Give me one of those.”

  “I didn’t know you smoked.”

  “I do now.”

  Tay lit Goh’s cigarette, then his own. He dropped the match on the ground again. This time Goh didn’t make a joke about it.

  “You really think Goodnight-Jones had something to do with the disappearance of MH 370?” Goh asked.

  “It all fits. Every bit of evidence about the disappearance of MH 370 suggests that the plane behaved exactly as it would have behaved if it had been hijacked. The problem is that no one onboard the aircraft has ever been identified as a possible hijacker. So if the hijacker wasn’t on onboard the aircraft—”

  “They must have been on the ground,” Goh finished.

  “My guess is Goodnight-Jones and his people were testing their software on the Malaysian airplane and something went wrong. Either they lost control of the plane or they couldn’t terminate the test and turn the plane back over to the pilots. Either way, the pilots were locked out of all the controls and the radios. All they could do was sit there while the aircraft flew on its own until it ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere in the ocean.”

  “And you think Tyler Bartlett found out about that, and that’s why he was killed.”

  “Goodnight-Jones couldn’t allow what they had done to be discovered. A company controlled by the Chinese army experimenting with software that could be used to hijack a commercial airliner? The experiment going wrong and killing two hundred and thirty-nine people, more than half of them Chinese citizens? The country would have been thrown into turmoil. What was killing one young American against the damage that would have been caused to China if the story got out?”

  “Then that journalist—”

  “Her name was Emma Lazar.”

  Goh nodded. “You think Emma Lazar found out what Tyler had discovered.”

  “Yes. So they had to kill her, too.”

  Goh nodded again and sat smoking quietly.

  “But now you know,” he added after a while. “And you’ve told me.”

  “Goodnight-Jones doesn’t know that.”

  Tay was far less sure of that than he sounded. He thought back to the night when he and John August had faced down Goodnight-Jones and his thugs after they had broken into his house. He didn’t think he would tell Goh about that, at least not yet.

  “What Goodnight-Jones does know is that it’s all spinning out of control,” Tay said.

  “That probably explains what’s going on.”

  Tay turned his head and looked at Goh. “What do you mean?”

  “I told you we’ve been keeping an eye on The Future, didn’t I?” Goh continued.

  Tay nodded.

  “Goodnight-Jones hasn’t been seen there since Tuesday.”

  “He’s left Singapore?”

  Goh shook his head. “Not yet, but we think he’s getting ready to.”

  “You know where he is, don’t you?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Because I don’t want him to get away with this.”

  “Be careful, Tay. I already told you this guy has a lot of support at the top.”

  “Why would anybody in our government protect him?”

  “Come on, Tay, don’t be naïve. Singapore is a Chinese city. Oh, they stick an ethnic Indian or a Malay in a government post every now and then just to make things look good, but the fact of it is that ethnic Chinese run Singapore. And some of them have more allegiance to their race than they do to their nationality.”

  Tay dropped his cigarette on the ground and pushed on it with the toe of his shoe until it went out.

  “So you’re just going back to your office and forget we had this conversation.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m going to do. And I advise you to forget it, too.”

  “You know I’m not going to do that.”

  “Maybe you’re a better man than I am, Tay, possibly a braver one, too, but there is no way you are going to pull me into this snake pit. The only way to stop Goodnight-Jones now is to kill him.”

  Tay looked away.

  “Not only am I not going to get involved in any shit like that,” Goh continued, “I wouldn’t even consider telling you that we’ve traced Goodnight-Jones to a house in The Cove on Sentosa Island.”

  Tay looked back.

  “And there is absolutely no fucking way,” Goh continued, “I would ever tell you that the address of that house is 237 Ocean Drive. If you knew where Goodnight-Jones was, and that he appeared to be alone there, it might encourage you to do something I could never support. Something that would be downright crazy.”

  Tay pulled the pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket and held it out to Goh.

  “You want another cigarette?” he asked.

  “Fuck yeah,” Goh said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  SENTOSA ISLAND IS a lush resort of beautiful beaches, expensive hotels, and luxurious golf courses that is only a few hundred yards off Singapore’s southern coast. It’s connected to the rest of Singapore by a single, narrow toll bridge to discourage private cars and promote the use of public transportation. On weekends, Singaporeans jam the trains and the cable cars to Sentosa, walk its pathways, swim at its beaches, and take their children to the Universal Studios theme park that sprawls improbably along the island’s north shore.

  During the week, Sentosa is a different place. From Monday through Friday the island is left mostly to those rich enough to stay in its hotels or play on its golf courses. They do not arrive by public transportation. During the week, Sentosa looks like a storage depot for Mercedes-Benz.

  Sentosa Cove is a small group of private homes on the far eastern tip of the island. They are the only private homes on Sentosa and, as you might expect, they are behind gates manned twenty-four hours a day by security guards. Enthusiastic real estate developers hyped Sentosa Cove as the Monte Carlo of Asia, and for a while it looked like it might actually become something not far from that. It was the only place in Singapore where the government permitted foreigners to buy land and that naturally attracted the rootless rich from all over Asia. They built fabulous houses along Ocean Drive that backed right up to the sea, and less grand but still spectacular homes around the yacht anchorages at Treasure Island and Coral Island.

  Tay had been to Sentosa Cove only once. A woman he had gone out with off and on for several years, more off than on, had taken him to a party there one Sunday afternoon. He remembered the houses all looking like beaches houses in Malibu, or rather like what he assumed the beaches houses in Malibu would look like if he had ever seen them, which he hadn’t. They were all wood and stucco and glass and granite, many with private boat docks and the rest with spectacular ocean views. It was like a set for a television series about rich Americans living in Florida or California or someplace else that Tay didn’t care about.

  There was nothing even remotely Asian about Sentosa Cove. It was internationalism in its most perfect incarnation.

  Tay hated it.

  It was almost dark, and Tay was sitting in his garden, thinking. He hadn’t had a cigarette in over four hours. This time a cigarette wasn’t going to help. He knew what his choices were.

  It was Monday night. He was reporting back to CID for duty tomorrow morning. He had given his word he would drop his inquiries into the murders of Tyler Bartlett and Emma Lazar when he came back to work.

  That would be an easy promise to keep now.

  He knew what had happened. He knew what Goodnight-Jones had done. He even knew where Goodnight-Jones was.

  There was nothing left to learn. He had only to decide what he was going to do now that he knew.

  That was not so easy.

  Tay got up and went inside and walked around the ground floor of his house, turning on lights. Bright light was exactly what he wanted now. No shadows to hide in
. No darkness to cover up the truth.

  He went into the kitchen and made coffee.

  Tay knew why Goodnight-Jones was at the Cove on Sentosa. It was all falling apart for him. He was running. Getting out of Singapore by air was impossible. There was only one airport and the security there was impenetrable. He couldn’t leave by land either. There were only two crossing points to Malaysia and monitoring both of those was as easy as monitoring the airport. He might be protected, but using the airport or the land crossings to get out of Singapore was thumbing his nose at fate.

  Goodnight-Jones had only one practical avenue of escape. The sea.

  Many of the homes at the Cove on Sentosa had private docks. A small boat could ferry Goodnight-Jones from his back door out to one of the hundreds of vessels lying at anchor in the Singapore Straits. The Chinese had dozens of ships out there. Any one of them could take Goodnight-Jones to a port on the mainland and he would be gone.

  So now it all came down to a single question.

  Was Tay going to let that happen? Was Tay going to let Zachery Goodnight-Jones get away with it?

  Tay didn’t have enough to arrest Goodnight-Jones. Even if he had, he wasn’t going to be a policeman again until tomorrow. And the price for being a policeman again was to foreswear any interest in Zachery Goodnight-Jones. That was a circle that took Tay nowhere.

  Besides, Goodnight-Jones had too many friends. Even ISD was afraid to move against him. Even if Tay had the legal authority to arrest Goodnight-Jones, he knew it would be futile. In the end, it would accomplish nothing but to end Tay’s career as a policeman.

  So if Tay couldn’t arrest Goodnight-Jones, how could he stop him from getting away with what he had done? Even Goh knew the answer to that question.

  He would have to kill him.

  Tay knew better than most that justice is a tricky thing. Most of the time justice is more about appearances than anything else. People are arrested, pictures of them in handcuffs appear in the newspapers, and eventually they stand before a court and go to jail.

  But it doesn’t always work that way. The simple truth is that sometimes people are punished in public, and sometimes they are not. Sometimes people are arrested and tried, and sometimes they are not. Sometimes people who screw over the justice system end up having tragic accidents. They might be shot to death by a mugger one dark night, or maybe they’re driving and run off a bridge into a concrete abutment. Sometimes they even commit suicide.