by Jake Needham
For a long while, Rebecca Sternwood said nothing at all. She simply sat, arms still folded on the table in front of her, and looked at Tay with that half smile, half frown on her face like she was trying to decide how much potential he might have. She made up her mind far more quickly than he would really have liked. She appeared to conclude that he had little or none.
“What do you want?” she asked in that smoky voice Tay had already decided he quite liked.
“You are aware of the explosion that occurred about two weeks ago at the Cordis Hotel in Hong Kong, are you not?”
And just like that Rebecca Sternwood blinked. Her facial expression never changed, but Tay saw it for just a moment in her eyes. She blinked.
“I may have heard or seen something about it,” she said, looking away. “I really don’t remember.”
“Does your job include any responsibility for the Agency’s activities in Hong Kong?”
She tilted back her head and laughed, apparently quite genuinely. “Come now, Inspector. Surely you know I’m not going to answer that.”
“The explosion was caused by a bomb.”
“Was it? I don’t recall hearing that before, I really don’t, but if you say so.”
“The bomb was placed in room 1121.”
Rebecca Sternwood’s face remained still, but Tay saw the blink again in her eyes.
“Was that bomb a CIA operation?” he asked her.
“Oh my, Inspector, why would you even think of asking me something like that?”
“Because I figured you should have a chance to get out in front of this. Three people are dead. We want to know who is responsible for that and we’re starting with you.”
Just at that moment the waitress appeared with her breakfast order. A plate of sliced fruit and a buttered English muffin.
“More coffee, honey?” the waitress asked. When Rebecca nodded, she refilled her cup from an aluminum carafe and then put the carafe on the table.
“Would you like something, sir?” the waitress asked Tay.
“No, nothing.”
“Just some coffee maybe?”
“No.”
“Bring him a cup,” Rebecca Sternwood cut in.
They sat in silence until the waitress had returned with the cup for Tay, filled it from the aluminum carafe, and left them again.
The coffee smelled good. Tay had only had one cup that morning and frankly he needed more. Tay took a sip, then another.
“I have to tell you I’m very impressed, Inspector. I still have no idea how you found me here. If I did work for the Agency, I’m sure I would be equally curious how you found that out, too. Nevertheless, I’m sure you must already realize I’m not going to answer any of the questions you’re asking me, so may I ask you one instead?”
Tay nodded slightly, but said nothing.
“What is it you really want?”
“I’ve already told you. I want to give you a chance to get in front of this before it pulls you down.”
“But why would you possibly think that I would know anything at all about this explosion in Hong Kong, regardless of who you think I am and who I might or might not work for?”
“Because we have you on surveillance video.”
Rebecca Sternwood laughed again. Then she ate a slice of plum, drank some coffee, and took a bite out of the English muffin.
“This is all becoming clear now, Inspector. You have obviously mistaken me for somebody else. Didn’t you say this explosion occurred in Hong Kong a few weeks ago?”
Tay nodded.
“I haven’t been in Hong Kong for at least a year, probably longer. It couldn’t possibly be me on your video.”
Her face reflected nothing, but Tay could see the relief in her eyes as she ate some more of the muffin and followed it with a slice of orange.
That was when he leaned back, folded his hands in his lap, and delivered the kill shot.
“The surveillance video we have is from the Pattaya Hilton. It was taken when you were in Thailand setting up the victims.”
This time even Rebecca Sternwood couldn’t cover her reaction. She looked as if she had been poleaxed. Her mouth opened slightly and her eyes flicked from side to side like she was contemplating fleeing.
“We have most of it now,” Tay said, “and I’ll get the rest. Then it will be too late for you to help yourself.”
She lifted her coffee cup and Tay watched her hand to see if it was shaking. It wasn’t. The coolness of her natural demeanor had reestablished itself with remarkable speed. Tay found himself admiring that a little.
“You have no legal jurisdiction here, Inspector.”
“That’s true. Just think of me as like Batman. I drop in, grab you, and hold you for the local cops. In this case, the FBI.”
“Batman, huh?” Rebecca Sternwood chuckled in a throaty way that Tay couldn’t help noticing was extremely sexy. “I’d always pictured Batman as taller. And younger.”
That last part hurt. Boy, did it hurt, but he tried hard not to show it.
Tay reached into his shirt pocket, took out a white card about the size of a business card, and placed it on the table. She glanced down and saw that it was blank except for a single telephone number written on it in black ink.
“That’s the number of the phone I’m using here in the US. Call me if you change your mind and decide you want to talk to me.”
“Maybe I could just turn on the Bat Signal.”
Tay didn’t even smile.
“I won’t change my mind, you know.”
Tay shrugged and stood up.
“It’s your funeral, Miss Sternwood. We’re going to hang some people for this. I’m sorry you have to be one of them. Thanks for the coffee.”
Then he walked away from the booth, turned the corner out of the dining room, and was gone.
Tay crossed the parking lot and slid into the passenger seat of the Mustang.
“Well, what do you think?” Claire asked.
“I don’t know. She was surprised, of course, but…” Tay trailed off. “I’m not sure I sold it,” he finished quickly.
“You mean she didn’t believe the whole Interpol thing?”
“Oh, she believed that all right, but she didn’t panic when I told her I was investigating the Hong Kong bombing. She’s a cool one.”
“She wasn’t shocked?”
“She only flinched a couple of times and it was hardly noticeable. Mostly she just sat there with a little half smile on her face and looked at me. You know, I never realized from the surveillance video what an arresting-looking woman she is.”
Tay glanced over at Claire and then did a double take. She was staring at him like he had suddenly grown an extra pair of ears.
“What?” he asked.
“I’ve never heard you say before that you thought a woman was attractive.”
“You don’t think she is?”
“It’s not that. I thought you were gay.”
For a moment, Tay wasn’t sure he had heard Claire correctly.
“I mean,” she continued, “you’ve never married and you never seem to take any interest in women, so I just assumed—”
“That I’m gay?” Tay sputtered. “You can’t be serious.”
Claire pulled a face and looked away.
“Now I’ve put my foot in it,” she said. “I really didn’t mean to insult you.”
“You didn’t insult me. I mean, I’m not gay, but it’s not an insult for you to think I might be. There’s nothing wrong with being gay. Absolutely nothing. I know a lot of… actually, no, I don’t know a lot of people who are gay, at least I don’t think I do, but if I did know a lot of people who were gay then I’m sure I would think that every one of them was an absolutely fine—”
Claire giggled. “You’re babbling, Sam.”
Tay abruptly stopped talking and looked at his hands.
“Yes, I guess I am, but you bowled me over there and I’m still reeling a little from that. No one has ever
said they thought I was gay before.”
“Maybe they didn’t say it to your face, but a fiftyish guy who’s never been married? A lot of people always think he’s gay whether they say so or not.”
Tay’s mouth slowly began to open. Could that really be true? Was it possible that behind his back people had been speculating for years, decades even, over whether he might be gay and no one had ever said anything to him about it? Surely that couldn’t be, could it?
“You’re not gay then? Not even a little bit?”
Tay was baffled as to how to respond to that. A little bit gay? What in the world did that mean? How could anyone be a little bit gay? He decided this conversation was complicated enough already, so he wasn’t about to ask. He just went with the simplest possible answer.
“No, I’m not gay. Not even a little bit.”
“Okay, then I was wrong. I apologize.”
“No need to apologize. I told you that, if I were gay, I—”
“Let’s not go through all that again. I’ll take your word that you’re not prejudiced against gay men, okay? Just tell me what this really attractive woman said when you told her you were investigating the Hong Kong bombing for Interpol and that the investigation had led you to her.”
“She didn’t say much. She just smiled.”
“Which I’m sure you loved.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Claire made a little snorting noise.
“Jesus, you men are such goddamned simpletons! Put you in front of a good-looking woman and you all become little boys again, squirming around and hoping for her approval. Maybe we would have gotten a better result if you were gay.”
“I suppose I ought to resent that.”
“Resent it or not. I don’t really care. You were supposed to beat her up, Sam. Slap her around. Scare the crap out of her.”
“What I told her will either scare her or it won’t,” Tay shrugged. “The tone of voice I used or whether I smiled has nothing to do with it. She thinks now that Interpol has somehow connected her to the bombing. Me screaming and frowning wouldn’t add anything to it.”
Claire made that snorting sound again, but she said nothing else.
“August has her phones covered, a tracker on her car, and a team of watchers ready to go.” Tay shrugged again. “Now she does what she does.”
“You seem awfully fatalistic about this. What if it doesn’t work?”
“It doesn’t matter whether I think it will work. It’s still what we’ve got.”
Claire sat looking out the window across the parking lot.
“Look, Claire, you and I come at the world from entirely different places. You’re an operator. You try to shape the world, to make it behave the way you want it to. I’m an investigator. I just observe the world. I watch and collect and put information together. An investigation goes where it goes and I follow.”
“And what if this one goes nowhere?”
“Then I’ll have a smoke and think up another way to do whatever I’m trying to do.”
Tay fished in his jacket pocket until he found his Marlboros and a box of matches.
“Relax, Claire. Stop trying to pound the world into submission. You’ll never do it.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Rebecca knew she had to do something to kill this investigation before it went anywhere, but she wasn’t quite sure what that should be. She sat still and thought about it while she drank some more coffee she didn’t really want.
How had Interpol connected the Agency and, perhaps more pressing right at the moment, how had it connected her personally to the Hong Kong bombing? She hadn’t set foot in Hong Kong at any time when the operation was being carried out. Other than meeting John August in Pattaya to give him the phony assignment that sent him to Hong Kong, she had never gone anywhere near the operation.
Now, barely two weeks after the bombing, this Interpol investigator suddenly shows up when she’s having breakfast near her apartment in Washington D.C. At the IHOP for God’s sake. Not only had he somehow connected her to the bombing, he knew she worked for the Agency, he knew where she lived, and he knew where she had breakfast.
What was his name? Tan? No, that wasn’t right. Tay. That was it: Tay.
Tay was a Singaporean name, wasn’t it? Did it have any significance that Interpol had assigned a Singaporean to the case? Was it a message that the Chinese government was determined to nail the Agency for this? Tay didn’t really look that Chinese, not really, but Singapore was almost a Chinese city, wasn’t it? Or pretty much the next thing to it.
She wasn’t sure what to make of Tay. He was such a bland and nondescript human being that he could disappear in a telephone booth, or he could if telephone booths still existed. That made him an easy man to dismiss as insignificant, but her instincts were screaming at her not to do that. There was something about him that reminded her of… well, what?
Then she realized what it was.
That old television show from twenty or thirty years ago that she used to see on late night television when she was in school and trying to avoid studying. Columbo, it was called. Who was that actor, the guy with the glass eye… Peter Falk. Yeah, that was it. Peter Falk played a rumpled, bumbling detective most people thought was an insignificant jerk, but he wasn’t really bumbling at all and he always ended up bringing people down because they didn’t take him seriously.
Tay reminded her of the Peter Falk character in that show. He even looked a little like Peter Falk, now that she thought about it. All he needed was the wrinkled trench coat.
Tay said he had surveillance video of her at the Pattaya Hilton. That meant he had not only connected her to the bombing, but he knew exactly how and when and where she had set it up. Only three people knew she had gone to Pattaya to send John August and his team to Hong Kong. Only three people. And she was absolutely certain neither of the other two had told anyone since it would make them just as culpable in this thing as she was.
It was plainly impossible that Interpol could have found out she had been in Pattaya and connected her to the bombing.
But, just as plainly, somehow Tay had.
She put a twenty on the table to cover the check. Way too much, but she really didn’t feel like talking to a waitress right then, not even to ask for the check and pay it, so she left more than enough to cover whatever her breakfast had cost and wrote off the excess as a contribution to her general wellbeing.
As she walked across the parking lot to her car, her eyes swept the area, but she saw no sign of Tay. If he knew so much about her that he could walk in on her while she was having breakfast at the IHOP, then he probably didn’t need to watch her. She shuddered slightly as she slid into the driver’s seat of her car. She felt naked and exposed, which she knew was exactly how Tay wanted her to feel.
Looking out over the beautiful IHOP parking lot, she took several deep breaths, got a grip on herself, and started thinking again.
She had used Agency personnel in Hong Kong for the mechanics of the operation. Local operators had obtained and placed the bomb at the Cordis Hotel, but her contact had been limited to one man and he had directed everyone else. Frank Ward was the only person in Hong Kong who could connect her with the operation.
The story she gave to Frank was similar to the one she gave to August, that a defector was going to expose dozens of American agents and his defection had to be stopped before he disappeared into the vastness of China. Ward hadn’t questioned the operation. She had known him long enough that he had simply assumed that, coming from her, it had to have been authorized at the highest level. Besides, there was nothing in the operation so unusual that it raised eyebrows.
The bomb was a little showy maybe, that part did stand out a bit, but there were a lot of explanations for the way she had chosen to deal with the problem. Maybe she was just trying to create a superficial level of deniability. An explosion at the hotel could be explained away as a gas leak if no one looked too closely, or
perhaps it could even be blamed on the defector himself who could have been trying to cover his tracks and screwed it up. A bullet in the back of his head, however, would have been what it was. No possible ambiguity there, superficial or otherwise.
Could Frank Ward have dropped the dime on her with Interpol? That didn’t even bear thinking about. Frank was an old pro. If anyone had started sniffing around Agency personnel and asking questions about the explosion, Frank would have faded right away. There wasn’t a chance in hell he would have admitted knowing anything about it, much less offered up her name. Still, she was going to have to cover that base, at least find out what kind of inquiries Interpol had made of the Agency in Hong Kong.
She looked at her watch. It was only a little after eight. Was Hong Kong twelve or thirteen hours ahead of Washington at this time of year? Thirteen, she was pretty sure, which meant it would be after nine o’clock at night there. She would have to wait twelve hours to reach Frank through the secure communications at the station and she didn’t want to wait twelve hours. And maybe leaving a record of her talking to Hong Kong Station immediately after she had been rousted by Tay wasn’t such a good idea anyway, but the only alternative was to call Frank at home tonight using a non-secure phone. She mulled that over for a moment and came to an easy conclusion.
Fuck security.
She wanted to know what Interpol knew about the station’s involvement, and she wanted to know it right fucking now.
She might be willing to run a tiny risk with security by talking to Frank on an open line, but she wasn’t an idiot. There were still some basic precautions she could easily take.
The IHOP was located in the parking lot of a Target Store and five minutes later she was inside Target buying a cheap, pre-paid mobile phone. She didn’t even know flip phones were still being made, but there they were, half a dozen different brands of them. She grabbed one at random, made certain it was a standard unlocked GSM phone, then picked up something T-Mobile called a Tourist SIM Kit. It contained a prepaid SIM card good for three weeks and loaded with more talk time than she had any use for. She paid cash for the phone and the SIM and as soon as she was back in her car she punched out the SIM and inserted it into the phone. Good to go.