THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 4) (13 page)

She told the cheap bastards to give her a full team, but they said it wasn’t necessary. Not necessary, huh?

She took a long drink from a bottle of water and thought about it. She would give it an hour, she decided, and see what developed. If nothing developed, she would call in for instructions.

Either the target was inside the hotel now or he was coming soon. Even if he had gotten past her going in, there was no way on earth the bastard was going to get past her going out. She’d get him. One way or the other, she’d get him.

This was what she did. And there was nobody better at it than she was.

After the sister disappeared into the hotel lobby, the woman’s eyes instinctively quartered the area around the hotel looking for surveillance patterns. She had no reason to believe anyone else was tracking the sister, but she checked regardless. She always checked.

And it was that checking that drew her attention to the woman walking on the opposite side of Serangoon Road. She had stopped exactly at the moment the sister went into the Fortuna Hotel, turned around, and crossed the road where she and a man who had been walking behind the sister on the same side of the road met on the sidewalk. They talked for a moment and the man made a telephone call.

The man was tall and very thin and wore heavy black glasses. The woman was young, fit looking, and attractive. Her guess was they were both locals, but of course she couldn’t be sure.

Were they working surveillance on the rabbit, or were they just two people who knew each other well enough to say hello on the street? She watched as the conversation ended and the man crossed Serangoon Road and took a table in an open-fronted vegetarian restaurant which had a clear view of the entrance to the Fortuna Hotel. The woman made a circuit around the hotel, checking for other exits it looked like, and then she crossed the road and joined the man in the restaurant.

That seemed to settle it. She couldn’t think of any other reasonable interpretation.

The sister was under surveillance by somebody, but who? Was it possible the couple she was watching even worked for the same people she did? Not likely, she decided, but not completely impossible.

She picked up one of the burners and hit the speed dial for the only number in its memory. When the call connected, she spoke without waiting for the man on the other end to say something because she knew he wouldn’t.

“Do you have eyes on the rabbit?” she asked.

“Affirmative, hunter. She is still at the Temple Street Inn.”

Really?
Then those couldn’t be their people sitting in that vegetarian restaurant, could they?

“Then hold onto your hat because I’ve got a real surprise for you. Your rabbit just walked up Serangoon Road big as life and straight into the lobby of the Fortuna Hotel.”

There was a pause. She waited.

“Are you certain, hunter?”

“Absolutely certain. She’s inside the hotel now.”

“That’s not my information.” The man thought about it for a moment. “Can you get eyes on whoever you saw and reconfirm her identity?”

“No chance of that. On the other hand, I do have eyes on the man and the woman who have her under surveillance.”

“Say again?”

“A man and a woman tailed her here. Now they’re both sitting in a restaurant with a view of the lobby doors.”

That brought another silence, as she thought it might.

“Can you identify them?”

“My first thought was they might be yours.”

“Negative.”

“Yeah, I’ve already worked that out for myself.”

The man cleared his throat. “What about the fox?”

“No sign of him. Either he’s not in the hotel yet or he got past me.”

“It was your job to make sure he didn’t get past you.”

“Well, fuck you very much. I sleep a little and I even pee occasionally just like a real human being. If you had given me a full team, we would have had eyes on twenty-four hours, but you didn’t give me a team and I’m doing the best I can working alone here. So shove that sanctimonious crap about me doing my job right up your ass, pal. Are we clear?”

The man chuckled. “You’re a real piece of work, aren’t you, little girl?”

“Call me little girl one more time, you piece of shit, and I’ll shove something a lot bigger than your sanctimonious crap up your ass.”

She stabbed at the off button and slammed the phone down on the table.

Prick
.

She got herself another bottle of water and a PowerBar and sat back down in front of the window. While she ate and drank, she thought about what to do.

Well, what
could
she do? The target was either in the hotel or he wasn’t. If he weren’t inside already, he would be coming soon. If he was inside now, he had to come out again, and she wasn’t going to miss him this time. Looking at it that way, she felt a lot better.

A taxi caught her eye as it pulled to the curb on Serangoon Road. She watched a man get out and walk slowly south. It wasn’t the fox. Not even close.

Still, this wasn’t the kind of neighborhood in which a lot of people took strolls so she followed the man with her eyes. She wasn’t particularly surprised when he joined the man and woman she had made for surveillance and sat down at the table they had taken in the vegetarian restaurant. She lifted the binoculars and studied him.

He was middle-aged, of average height, and could honestly stand to lose a few pounds. He was also older than the other two, and from their body language she could see he was in charge. Okay, she thought, they’ve called in some kind of supervisor, although she still didn’t see what he might be a supervisor
of
.

Who the hell was she dealing with here? Cops? Not likely. Why would the local cops have the target’s sister under surveillance? She certainly hadn’t done anything to attract the attention of law enforcement, at least not as far as she knew.

If it wasn’t law enforcement, it had to be an intelligence operation. Most likely it was the locals, which meant Singapore’s Internal Security Department, but she supposed it could be almost anybody. The Brits, the Aussies, the French, the Germans, even the Israelis were active in Singapore. Could it be one of them?

Whatever it was, she wasn’t real happy. Taking down the target in front of people working for an intelligence organization that was obviously looking for him just meant she was going to piss off somebody big time, and they were almost certainly going to come looking for her. She had an exit route from Singapore mapped out, of course, a damned good one, and a couple of alternatives just in case something went wrong with the primary one, but that wasn’t what bothered her. She just didn’t like performing in front of an audience. That was something you never did in her business unless you absolutely had to. At least not if you intended to stay in her business.

She was still thinking about that when a dirty white Toyota pulled up across Serangoon Road from the vegetarian restaurant and stopped near the hotel’s emergency exit. When no one got out, she shifted her field glasses to the Toyota and examined the two men in the front seat. They were younger and thicker than any of the three at the table in the restaurant. She didn’t know who they were either, but they sure weren’t students of architecture admiring the local cityscape.

She swung the glasses back to the restaurant. The three at the table appeared to have noticed the Toyota, too, but it looked like they had no idea who it was either. Did that meant she had two entirely separate sources of company now, not one? It certainly looked that way.

Who the hell
are
all these people?

She was already considering packing up and scrubbing the whole operation when the older man sitting in the restaurant got up and walked out to the sidewalk. He lit a cigarette and stood quietly smoking in the shadows. There was something about the man she liked. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was, but there it was anyway. Just something in his body language, she supposed.

The man turned and spoke over his shoulder, and the man and woman at the table got up and joined him. The three of them stood there, the older man continuing to smoke, and all of them looking at something on the other side of Serangoon Road.

She swung the binoculars to follow their eyes and saw that a silver blue Hi-Lux van, unmarked and without windows, had stopped right behind the white Toyota. While she watched, the door in the side of the van opened and three men got out. They all wore sunglasses in spite of the fading light, and they all had their shirts hanging over their belts. Guns were concealed under those flapping shirttails. She had not the slightest doubt of that.

So who were
they
?

It didn’t really matter, she supposed. She knew a cluster fuck when she saw one, and this was shaping up as a doozy.

She was out of there.

It would take her no more than five minutes to pack everything, maybe another ten minutes or so to wipe down the place with a little bleach. Then she was out the door and no one would ever know she was there. Not unless she wanted them to know.

“MAYBE WE’RE NOT on our own after all, sir.”

Kang pointed and Tay shifted his eyes to where Kang was pointing.

“Doesn’t that look like CID surveillance to you?” Kang asked.

A dirty white Toyota was parked on the other side of Serangoon Road not far from the hotel’s emergency exit. Two men sat in the front seat. They had short hair and wore nondescript short-sleeved white shirts. They appeared to be watching the Fortuna Hotel.

Tay studied the men for a moment. “I don’t recognize either of them. Do you?”

Kang shook his head and looked at Lee, who shook her head as well.

“Might be Central Narcotics Bureau, sir,” she said. “It’s that sort of neighborhood.”

Tay grunted. “Or it could be ISD.”

“I don’t think so, sir,” Kang said. “If ISD had followed her from Temple Street, we would have seen them, and we didn’t.”

“Unless they knew where she was going and didn’t have to follow her.”

Kang scrunched up his face. “That doesn’t make any sense, sir.”

“Maybe not,” Tay said, inclining his head in the direction of the Toyota, “but then who the hell
are
they and what are they doing here?”

“Maybe it’s got nothing to do with Suparman’s sister,” Kang suggested. “Maybe it’s just a coincidence.”

Tay gave Kang a look, but Kang wouldn’t meet his eyes.

Tay reached for his cigarettes and the Indian-looking woman scurried over to the table before the pack was even out of his shirt pocket.

“No, no!” She waved both her arms above her head like a sports referee signaling a foul, which in a manner of speaking Tay supposed she was. “No smoking! No smoking! I call police!”

Everyone in Singapore loved enforcing the law. Sometimes Tay wondered why it was necessary for Singapore to have a police force at all. He considered telling the woman that they
were
the police, but he almost immediately abandoned the idea. This business with Suparman and his sister was getting stranger and stranger by the minute, and Tay had an unhappy feeling the end of the strangeness was still a long way off. Making a fuss about the presence of three policemen on the scene that might cause them to be remembered later seemed like a really bad idea.

Tay sighed, stood up, and walked out to the sidewalk. He shook a cigarette out of the pack and glanced back at the woman. She glared at him, still itching to order him not to smoke, but he was outside the restaurant and now there was nothing she could do about it.

He had always believed there was something deranged about the fanatics who treated smokers as if they were having public sex with goats. Didn’t these people have anything better to do than scream at other people who enjoyed a cigarette now and then? No, probably not, which was no doubt the reason they put so much energy into their screaming.

Tay stood in the shadows smoking quietly. It had begun to rain again and he listened to the staccato splashing of the drops on Serangoon Road and the
plop, plop, plop
of a drip from a gutter somewhere nearby. The street was the color of steel and the rain scratched the twilight and gave it the silvery, monochrome tint of an old silent movie. The city hung in the air like a spectral projection.

The two men in the Toyota hadn’t moved and Tay still couldn’t work out who they were or what they were doing there. He doubted they were CID or even Central Narcotics. His gut told him they were ISD, but then how did they get there? If they had followed Suparman’s sister there, surely they would have spotted Kang and Lee and they would know somebody else was around, too. But if they knew somebody else was around, would they just be sitting out there in the open? No, of course they wouldn’t. That meant they didn’t know, even if Tay couldn’t quite see how that could be.

If they hadn’t followed the sister, how did they get there? Had ISD known all along she would slip out of Chinatown and go to the Fortuna Hotel? Tay shook his head. He didn’t see how that made the slightest amount of sense. All this cloak and dagger bullshit gave him indigestion so he decided to stop thinking about it, smoke his cigarette, and see what developed.

Nothing at all developed the whole time he was smoking. But then he took a final puff, dropped the butt on the sidewalk, and stood on it with the heel of his shoe, and that was exactly when something
did
develop.

A silver blue Hi-Lux van, unmarked and without windows, stopped right behind the white Toyota. The door in the side of the van slid open and three men got out. Big men, all wearing dark sunglasses and all with their shirts hanging over their belts. Tay knew the look. They had guns under those shirttails.

“You better come see this,” Tay called out softly to Kang and Lee.

When they both got to the front of the restaurant, the three men were standing on the sidewalk next to the van. They weren’t exactly hiding, but Tay noticed the men stayed far enough up Serangoon Road so as not to be visible from the hotel’s lobby. One of them walked over to the passenger side of the Toyota and bent down to talk to the men inside. It was a short conversation. After less than a minute he straightened up and walked back to the group by the van.