by RJ Bailey
But I also knew that I was pretty exhausted after the past twenty-four hours and my nerves were shot. I needed some proper, dead-to-the-world rest. But sleep no longer seemed to refresh me. If anything, I awoke feeling more tired and tetchy than before.
I also had another thing to worry about: who was watching me? Like the blind violinist, I had no idea who was out there. If I did find a lead in Singapore’s underbelly, wouldn’t Bojan or his guys be right behind me?
A party of schoolchildren arrived for a visit, respectful, but still noisy. I wiped my eyes, walked back down among the gravestones and looked out over the flat sea, raising my face to the breeze.
What had I hoped to achieve by coming to the cemetery? To put my problems into perspective? Well, that hadn’t worked. I wasn’t going to abandon my daughter just because it was only one life among thousands. I would throw myself into whatever cesspits the city could offer.
And if I was being followed, well, I’d find a way to deal with that.
Not much of a plan, Wylde, eh?
You got anything better? No, I thought not.
So where to begin? Go the lowest levels of society I could find in Singapore and hope for the best.
Orchard Towers was a good place to start, so the lawyer had advised, maybe Clarke Quay, and somewhere called Geylang.
In Geylang, there were alleys called lorongs, she explained. The odd-numbered ones were crammed with basic restaurants selling excellent frog porridge or clay-pot rice. The even-numbered ones were where it would be worth showing a photo of Matt around. She also warned me that talking to the girls outside the area’s ‘nail bars’ – many of which did more than simply apply varnish in the evenings – was a waste of time. Most of them were from mainland China and spoke little English.
Get some local knowledge, she had advised.
I might just do that.
But there was another possibility I had to consider: Matt and Jess had never been in Singapore, or at least, not for any length of time. Aja might have been primed by Bojan to tell me – after a little hesitation to sell the story – that they had gone to Singapore. It might have all been a plan to get me caught with drugs at Changi and trigger the media interest. I guess they hadn’t figured on me going full psycho on her to get the information.
I had wandered into a hot zone for my phone and it pinged. I looked at the screen and felt a shock as physical as if I’d been plugged into the mains.
It was just two words, but they made my battered heart soar. It was from Freddie.
Woking. Bingo.
TWENTY-NINE
When we were in Iraq, the big fear, of course, was that the opposition would go chemical. Whether the top brass really thought this or it was just to reinforce the propaganda around Weapons of Mass Destruction, I still don’t know.
Our medical regiment was issued with NAPS tablets. It stood for Nerve Agent Pre-treatment Set and we were told by the captain who issued them that it would ‘precoat’ our nerves, delaying the effect of any chemical weapon, allowing us extra time to jab ourselves with a combo pen from our Biological Agent Treatment Set (BATS), which contained the antidote to several nerve agents.
The NAPS, we were told, had to be taken three times a day for a whole week. At the end of that time, our nerves would have more insulation than an HT lead. We were then ordered into the Collective Protection tent, which came complete with airlocks.
As the blister packs of twenty-one tablets were handed out for self-administration, Freddie whispered in my ear: ‘Don’t take it. Keep it under your tongue if you have to.’
‘What?’ I hissed back. ‘And if one of those Scud missiles is full of Tabun?’
‘You just make sure you remember your NBC drill. Don’t rely on this. Here’s the headline, Buster: the people who took this last time around reckon it poisoned them. If nothing else, the tablets give you terrible shits. And yours are pretty bad as it is.’
Nuclear, Biological and Chemical warfare drills were performed daily. The idea was, you were able to get a breathing mask on within nine seconds and then suit up, complete with overboots and thick, black rubber gloves. Next, you would check your buddy to make sure that their gas-tight seals had seated properly. This gear had yet another bloody acronym: IPE (Individual Protection Equipment). Most squaddies preferred to call it the Noddy Suit.
It was a couple of years after the war had ended that I read about the possible side effects of NAPS, which went beyond temporary loose bowels and nausea into long-term confusion and memory loss. The Ministry of Defence insisted that the NAPS pills administered ‘would not have had adverse health effects’. But they would say that, wouldn’t they?
Anyway, despite frequent false alarms of ‘GAS! GAS! GAS!’ the nerve agents never actually rained down on us – who would have thought it would eventually rear its toxic head in Salisbury rather than Basra?
I never took the pills; neither did Freddie. Some other things we saw – and did – in that war might have fucked us up, but we were in the clear for NAPS. I had always been grateful to Freddie for that small mercy.
And when she said ‘bingo’, I had to believe I had a full house.
I caught a cab to downtown Singapore, but really, even in that suffocating humidity, I could have sprinted it, given the amount of adrenaline I had coursing through me.
Then, just as we were passing signs for the zoo, I realised I was being dicked.
In my brief tour in Afghanistan – being wounded and pregnant cut that one short – if you were ever out on patrol, or picking up a casualty from another base, or scooping up wounded civilians, then young men on motorbikes would be buzzing around, reporting your every move to the Taliban. It was like being harassed by mosquitoes – you wanted to roll up a newspaper and swat them away.
This meant you always had to come back to base via a different route, if possible. Otherwise, a little IED present might be waiting for you on your return trip.
When these guys picked you up, the expression for it was being ‘dicked’. And right now, I was being double-dicked.
I didn’t think an IED in the middle of Singapore was a likely outcome, but I was definitely on someone’s radar.
One of the pair was in a Mazda, the other on a far-too-distinctive Harley-Davidson Street Rod with lurid yellow rear springs. I had seen that bike before on the outward journey – it was the colour that had stuck in my mind.
Now, the Mazda made a point of overtaking and then dropping back, while the Harley had switched with it. BIP, my old instructor used to call it.
Behavioural Indicators of Pursuit.
Even in civilian life I was haunted by acronyms.
I wondered why they bothered putting a tail on me. After all, it was Singapore, not Texas. There were no wide-open spaces to get lost here in the city-state. And sooner or later I’d be back at the hotel. It could only mean they were convinced I was going to jump ship.
Unless . . . maybe it was the CNB – Singapore’s drug cops – who were following me, still convinced I was Howard Marks.
The traffic thickened and slowed as we approached the towers of downtown and I watched the Harley accelerate away. Perhaps I had been wrong about that one. Just the Mazda behind. Maybe they didn’t need two tails – after all, it was a good bet I was heading back to my hotel.
Then the Mazda saw a break in the traffic a couple of lanes over and dived for it. I shook my head as if I could clear it of the obsessive thoughts piling up in there. Just paranoia, I thought.
I was wrong, of course.
I got the cabbie to drop me a block from the hotel rather than pull into the drop-off point. Then, I began to wade through the lunchtime crowds on Orchard Road. I realised that Singapore gave you an edge when trying to spot someone following you. It would be the one person not glued to a screen.
Almost everyone in this well-dressed, neatly coiffured and heavily moisturised crowd had their heads down. Yet, they rarely bumped into each other. It was like they had a human anti-collisi
on mechanism, able to break and swerve to avoid any objects ahead.
Those who weren’t looking down, who were maybe watching where they were going, stood out. I, of course, was one of them: it worked both ways.
I spotted one guy who seemed off – a tall, broad-shouldered Westerner with a neat military-style haircut – but he ducked into a fast-food restaurant and joined the queue. I glanced over my shoulder a few times but he stayed put.
I turned into the driveway that led up to the reception of the hotel, then stopped halfway.
Nobody appeared from the street behind me, apart from a Japanese couple, laughing and giggling and oblivious to everything outside their bubble-for-two. I waited a minute and then entered the vast marbled lobby, so air-conditioned it felt chilly after the street, already looking forward to a shower and a change of clothes.
There was no message for me at the desk. I grabbed a Straits Times and went and sat by the central fountain with a view of the entrance. Water tinkled along with a nearby piano, its player hunched over the keyboard, tensed, as if he were about to explode into fortississimo.
I gave the room a 360. Again, everyone around me was focused on their electronic devices. After five minutes of glancing at the same story, I dumped the paper and went to catch the lift, the secondary bank down a corridor, rather than the obvious ones opposite the concierge.
I pressed for my floor and was about to breathe a sigh of relief when a hand grabbed the closing doors and they reluctantly sprang back.
A guy stepped in. Tall, broad, good-looking, with a military-style haircut, and I knew I was in trouble.
Condition: Red.
THIRTY
‘Queue too long, was it?’
He turned to look at me. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘At the restaurant. The one I saw you go in while you were following me. Did you change your mind?’
His hand reached for his jacket but I stepped in, grabbed his wrist and yanked it away, going for the ulnar nerve on the pinkie side. Somehow, he managed to slide his arm from my grasp. With his other hand, he got a sharp palm-blow to my elbow that sent me reeling backwards, shock vibrating down through my ribcage.
A strong one, then.
The self-defence experts offer you all sorts of techniques and tips designed to take down a stronger opponent, but believe me, given the choice, you want the guy to be Woody Allen-sized.
This one wasn’t.
I went in with a flurry: a kick that connected, an aim for the head that didn’t.
A similar blur of limbs came back at me and I lost ground as I raised my elbows to parry him. The only thing that saved me was his rhythm: he came in with a highly practised sequence of moves that was forceful, but predictable. I managed one quick thrust to his head with my fingers, going for his eyes, but he leaned back and I ended up barely brushing him. Then, he used his knees against my thighs, one-two, and my legs decided it was time to lie down.
I got a punch to his neck and used it less to hurt him than to propel myself back, out of his immediate reach.
‘Eleventh floor,’ cooed the lift and gave its little ding.
The ride from the lobby had seemed to take a Methuselah’s age to reach my floor.
As it glided to a halt with barely a shudder, we were on opposite walls of the lift, leaning against the panels that advertised the hotel bar’s happy hour on my side and the spa on his.
We were both panting, me more than him.
Not good.
I knew that if the fight continued, unless I got really lucky, I would lose. He had blood on his cheek where one of my nails had caught him under the eye – unlucky for him because I keep my nails short – but I had a throbbing shoulder, sore forearms from blocking his blows and a burning spot of pain on each thigh.
The doors slid open. Standing there was a young, moon-faced woman behind a trolley of dirty room-service trays, most of them reduced to unappetising debris. She pushed in between us and we both stepped out.
The woman giggled. Of course. Two people, sweaty and panting, who have obviously just unclenched from each other as the doors parted. Lovers. What else could be going on?
The corridor was quiet. The lamps lining it were a modern take on Chinese lanterns and gave my assailant’s skin a reddish glow.
There was amusement in his eyes. He was enjoying this.
My room was just a few dozen metres behind me, but I couldn’t turn and run. He’d be on me in a second, like a cheetah bringing down a gazelle.
I did the only thing I could: I went into a defensive crouch.
‘Rusty,’ he said.
‘Been a while,’ I admitted, keeping my eyes on his limbs, waiting for a tell-tale tightening of muscle or a shift in balance before the move came.
‘Even so. He said you were good.’
‘Who did?’
‘The Colonel.’
He took his time to relax, just in case I did anything dumb. It was a sort of uncoiling from ready-to-strike to stood down. Now it was my turn to enjoy something: watching a professional who had control of his major muscle groups. And from what I could make out, there were plenty of muscles under that suit. Some of them had hurt me, I reminded myself.
I, on the other hand, stayed in my defensive crouch. ‘Which Colonel?’ I asked.
‘Colonel d’Arcy,’ he said. I couldn’t place the accent. ‘Your lawyer contacted him. She was worried about you. Said you were . . .’
‘Said I was what?’ I asked, tetchier than intended.
‘Running solo. No back-up. Which, as you know, is not always the smart way. Not out here. So he asked us to keep an eye on you.’
‘Us?’
‘Obsidian.’
Now I let some of the air leak out of me, just a little. Obsidian Solutions, to give them their full title. I had the accent now.
‘Mossad?’
A non-committal shrug. Mossad was like Fight Club. Ex-agents didn’t talk about their time in Mossad; they didn’t even confirm they knew what it was. What was Hebrew for omertà?
‘How many of you on the job?’
‘Just me and some local talent. I was reaching for my card when you went chopsocky on me.’
‘Krav Maga,’ I said. He should know. The self-defence and fighting system was an Israeli invention.
His eyes twinkled as he laughed. When he smiled, only one side of his mouth went up, turning it into a sneer. It wasn’t a comforting look. ‘As I said, rusty. Look, can we do this over a coffee?’
I held out my hand. ‘Give me the card.’
He extracted it slowly and passed it over. It was black, of course, with gold embossed writing. I kept my fingers away from that. It said his name was Nate Segal. Maybe it was.
I took out my phone and called the Swiss number I knew by heart. I kept my eyes on the guy. ‘Colonel? Sam. You sent a Mossad gorilla after me?’
‘I sent you Obsidian. I was worried—’
‘Let’s not get into that. Can you give me a heads-up? There’s someone here called Nate Segal.’
‘That’s the guy.’
‘Can you give me confirmation?’
‘Ask him to do his party piece. You’ll never forget it.’
I took the phone away from my ear. ‘Do your party piece.’
‘Is he sure? Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure,’ I said.
He reached up and did something I couldn’t quite believe.
‘Sam?’ I heard the colonel say.
‘Yeah, OK, thanks. I’ll speak later.’ I clicked the phone off. I probably would remember it for the rest of my life.
‘Maybe something stronger than coffee?’
‘Coffee will be fine.’
I was so distracted I almost forgot to check my room. I gave my luggage a once-over. Nothing disturbed. It all seemed pretty clean, apart from one thing: the chair in front of the desk where I had left the laptop was warm. Barely warm, but still some faint residual radiation brushed my hand. I looked at the position of the win
dow. No sun could have caused it. There was an indentation in the leather, too.
Someone had been sitting there, and quite recently.
‘This you?’ I asked Segal.
‘What?’
‘Been sitting here?’
‘Not me. First time in your room.’ He walked over to the window and looked down over the gardens. ‘Nice.’
So who? I thought back to the woman who had entered the lift between us. Maybe it was just a cleaner taking the weight off for a minute.
Maybe.
‘I’ll do the coffee,’ I said.
‘Black is fine.’
‘You sure this wasn’t you?’
Now he came over and examined the work station himself. He pointed at the computer and then ran a finger over his throat. The laptop could have been tampered with by whoever sat in the seat. Something might have been inserted to relay keystrokes to another terminal; the microphone could have been activated and linked to voice-recognition software that would transcribe everything we said. Or, there could be a bug elsewhere in the room.
Without specialist equipment we would probably never find it.
I scooped the computer up off the table, placed it at the bottom of the bathtub and ran the water until it was covered. It might just be paranoia, but once it takes hold, it’s hard to stop the spread of suspicion.
What if the laptop was a feint? What if we were meant to find it?
‘We have to move,’ I said. ‘I’ll call down and get us a day room.’
We decamped to a room along the corridor on the opposite side. I took my RTG bag, just in case. While I made the coffee, Nate made sure the room was clean – even though nobody had any time to plant anything, it could always have been pre-bugged.
It was one of those pod machines. It took a while for me to figure it out and get two cups. We talked while I did so. After Nate had given the room the once-over, he sat on the edge of the bed and explained how he had become involved.
‘So, Jacinta the lawyer called the Colonel who called you to watch my back?’ I summarised.
‘That’s about the size of it. Jacinta said she was worried you might . . . well, “go off like a nuke” is how she put it. So, calls were made. Oh, then you attacked me in the lift.’