THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 4) (27 page)

“We’re as conspicuous in this concrete wasteland as tits on a bull,” he snapped. “Now would you please get the fuck in here before somebody calls the cops?”

When Tay had climbed into the van and settled into a similar chair, August reached into an ice chest and handed him a bottle of water. Tay cracked the cap and took a long pull. The bottle was wet and cold and crystals of ice clung to the plastic. Tay leaned back and rolled the bottle against his forehead.

“I don’t know how you people live in this place,” August said as the van accelerated away. “It’s so goddamned hot here a scorpion would go shopping for an air conditioner.”

Tay drank some more water and looked around the van. He was sitting in another captain’s chair facing August across a small table. They were alone in the back, but he could see a driver in the front and a woman in the passenger seat. Both of them were facing forward and he could make out nothing about either.

“Nice van, John. It looks exactly like the ones ISD uses.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” August grinned. “I guess we spooked you, and when you started running away—”

“I wasn’t exactly running.”

“No, you weren’t, but I suppose you were moving as fast as you could. I was trying to be kind.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

August grinned again. Tay just drank some more water.

“What are you doing here, John?”

“I know why you called me, of course. We need to talk.”

Tay drank some more water and waited.

“I’m sorry about your sergeant, Sam. I really am. That was rotten luck. He never should have been there in the first place.
You
never should have been there.”

“Robbie was there because that’s where I told him to be.”

“Don’t be so tough on yourself, Sam. Shit happens to good people. That’s not our fault. We’re both in hard businesses.”

Tay looked over August’s shoulder and out through the windshield of the van. They were on New Bridge Road heading north toward the Singapore River.

“Where are we going, John?”

“We have a safe house off Nassim Road. I thought we could talk there.”

“That must be handy for you. You can just about walk to the American Embassy from there.”

“I wouldn’t know,” August said. “I don’t hang around embassies.”

Tay took out his Marlboros and a pack of matches. He shook a cigarette from the package and automatically offered it to August, but August shook his head as Tay knew he would. Tay lit it for himself and returned the pack and the matches to his pocket.

“This is a United States government vehicle,” August said. “Absolutely no smoking is permitted.”

“What an enlightened and forward-looking policy that is, John. I’m sure all Americans are better human beings simply for knowing such a policy exists and that it is rigorously and impartially enforced at all times by the government of the United States.”

Tay took a long pull on his cigarette, exhaled slowly, and stared at August expressionlessly.

When the van stopped and the door was opened from the outside, Tay climbed out and looked around.

“Nice digs.”

“Come on, Sam. You didn’t expect me to hang around in some shithole, did you?”

Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Singapore’s British rulers built lavish villas all over the island to house high-ranking officials and civil servants. Called black and white bungalows because of their dark timber beams and whitewashed walls, the structures were stately two- and three-story houses of vaguely Tudor design, but with tropical touches such as wide, shady verandas. Only a few hundred were left now. Tucked away in genteel enclaves, they were throwbacks to the country’s colonial past.

“It’s owned by a shell company in the British Virgin Islands,” August offered. “The company even leased it out for a while to the Iranian ambassador. We had a lot of fun with that.”

August’s safe house was one of the most lavish black and whites Tay had ever seen. Surround by a rolling, emerald-green lawn mowed to the smoothness of a golf green, the two-story structure was capped with a sloped roof of red tile that overhung the house and cast it into deep, cooling shadows. A wide veranda on the ground floor had groupings of thick-cushioned rattan furniture scattered here and there, and the louvered windows around the upper floor rattled and clicked in the light breeze.

“Some people say these old houses are haunted, John.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that, too. The Japanese used this one as a prison camp during World War II.”

August pointed down to where the rolling lawn ended at a thick stand of long-leafed gum trees.

“One day the Japs are supposed to have dragged something like a hundred sick and wounded prisoners down there, lined them up, and shot them in retaliation for an attack on a Japanese officer. To this day, people claim to hear gunshots and screams coming from down there late at night. Never heard them myself. You don’t believe in ghosts, do you, Sam?”

Tay wondered if he had ever in a moment of weakness told August about his occasional visits with his mother. Surely he hadn’t, but he wasn’t absolutely certain.

To his relief, August dropped the subject without saying anything else and started walking across the lawn to the veranda. Tay followed.

They sat on two facing rattan couches that had big, fluffy cushions covered with white sailcloth. An elderly woman who looked to Tay to be Filipina sat a tray on the coffee table between them and immediately disappeared. The tray held a large pitcher of water with chunks of ice floating in it, three tall glasses, and three bottles of Tiger beer.

“Help yourself,” August said.

“I gather someone is joining us.”

“She’ll be along in a minute.”

“She?”

August half shrugged, but he didn’t say anything else.

Tay wasn’t a beer drinker, but the sweating bottles on the tray looked refreshing so he took one, tilted it back, and took a long drink. All at once it came back to him why he wasn’t a beer drinker. Was it just Tiger beer that tasted this bad, or did all beer taste terrible?

He set the beer down on the table and took his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket.

Tay looked at August. “Another United States government facility that is absolutely non-smoking?”

August nodded slowly and reached for a beer.

Tay shook out a cigarette, lit it, and sat smoking quietly. It certainly tasted a lot better than the beer.

“When are you going to tell me what’s going on here, John?”

August seem to consider the question for a moment, and then he grinned. “How about now?”

“Now would be good,” Tay said.

So August told him.

“YOUR INTERNAL SECURITY Department—"

“It’s not my Internal Security Department,” Tay said.

August even didn’t bother to smile.

“Regardless of whose responsibility ISD is,” he said, “they started running Suparman years ago. They believed he gave them access to the inner circles of—”

“Running?” Tay interrupted again. “You guys just love the spy movie bullshit, don’t you?”

“Would you feel less annoyed if I said Suparman was an informant for ISD?”

“How could Suparman be an informant for anyone? He’s one of the most hunted terrorists in Asia. He’s been responsible for bombings all over Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore.”

“Opinions on that vary. Some say he’s mostly a creation of the press, a bogeyman to frighten children, and he wasn’t really involved in most of the things people say he was.”

“He wasn’t involved in the hotel bombings here?”

“Some people think not.”

“What do
you
think?”

“I think the people who say he wasn’t are full of shit.”

Tay considered that for a moment. He took a final puff and flipped the butt of his cigarette into the grass.

“I don’t see the connection between ISD thinking Suparman was their informant and John August watching the Fortuna Hotel.”

“It started when we heard that ridiculous story from the Indonesians about his sister supposedly having cancer.”

“So it’s not true?”

“Of course it’s not true. The woman at the hotel wasn’t even Suparman’s sister. The real sister was grabbed a couple months ago trying to sneak into Australia. That’s when ASIO dreamed up this stunt. The idea was—”

“Wait…what? ASIO? The Australian Security Intelligence Organization?”

“Sure. Counterterrorism in Australia is their patch.”

“What’s Australia got to do with all this?”

“They think Suparman is as much a threat to them as he is to you. When they grabbed his sister, they saw an opportunity to lure him out into the open and take him. But that was when they discovered there are people here in Singapore heavily invested in the belief Suparman is really
your
guy. ISD didn’t want ASIO or anybody else to take him down.”

“So ASIO abandoned the whole idea?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Sam. That was when they decided to kill him instead.”

Tay thought back to the man in the alleyway behind the Temple Street Inn who appeared to slip something to the woman they thought was Suparman’s sister.

“The woman worked for the Australians?”

August nodded.

“And the Australians provided the weapon?”

August nodded again.

“But this woman screwed it up and didn’t kill Suparman,” Tay finished.

“It was a stupid fucking idea from the beginning,” August shrugged. “Australian Intelligence dreamed it up. That’s an oxymoron if I ever hear one. What else do you need to know?”

“I still don’t understand what you were doing at the Fortuna Hotel.”

“The Australians convinced ISD the sister was for real, but ISD wanted to use a little misdirection in setting up the meet to give them an extra layer of deniability. ASIO was happy enough with the plan when they heard it. It gave them a nice quiet location to stage their stunt.”

“You haven’t answered my question yet.”

“We wanted Suparman taken down,” August said. “We’ve been trying to get ISD on board to do that for nearly a year and we had come to the conclusion it wasn’t going to happen. When we found out about this Aussie shit show, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. We decided we’d solve the problem ourselves if they didn’t.”

“You mean you were going to try to take Suparman away from ISD?”

“Don’t be silly, Sam. We wanted to kill him, too. ISD thinks he’s their bitch, that he’ll tip them off to all kinds of nefarious shit. Personally, I’m convinced they know they’ve been had, but you’ve got people at high levels here who don’t want to admit they made a mistake.”

“How high?”

August wiggled his hand in a gesture that could have meant almost anything.

“So you were…what, John? Planning to sit in that apartment until you saw Suparman and then run down and shoot him?”

“I don’t do manual labor anymore myself, Sam. Haven’t you heard? I’m an executive now. Besides, we decided on a sniper shot and there are better people for that than me.”

“So why didn’t whoever you had up there take the shot?”

“Why, funny you should ask, Sam. At the last minute these three Singapore cops showed up. We were already coping with Suparman being surrounded by his ISD security detail and the crazy female assassin the Aussies had running around. The cops made it all just a little too complicated for us so we decided to fold our tent and wait for a better day.”

“But you haven’t given up?”

“Not a chance, my friend. Especially not now that it’s gotten personal.”

“Personal?”

“That body you pulled out of the Singapore River was our man in Indonesian intelligence. Suparman found out and killed him. You lost one of yours, and we’ve lost one of ours. That makes it personal in my book.”

“Do you know about the hotel manager?”

“Of course I know about him. Suparman did him, too. The bastard’s got a good gig here. He’s willing to do whatever he needs to protect it.”

“Then Suparman was responsible for all the murders? It wasn’t ISD cleaning up, eliminating anybody who knew they were protecting Suparman?”

“ISD might be a bunch of clowns, Sam, but they don’t murder their own. At least not as far as I know.”

“So why was ISD waiting for me when I went home, John? They were in a van parked up the street. I would never have seen them if I hadn’t walked home from an unusual direction. Otherwise, I would have walked straight into their trap.”

“It wasn’t a trap, Sam. They were just keeping an eye on you. They were afraid Suparman might come after you, and two CID detectives going down in the same day would have been downright embarrassing.”

Tay reached for the beer he had abandoned. He didn’t want it, but he needed a second to let what August had just told him sink in. He sipped at it absentmindedly, but it was warm and he almost spit it out.

“You haven’t told me yet why I’m here, John. You didn’t go to all this trouble just to explain everything to me.”

“You’re right, Sam. You’re here because I need your help.”

“With what?”

“I don’t see how we can get this bastard without you.”

“I’m flattered, John, but what do you need me for? I’m sure you have all sorts of capabilities I can’t even imagine. I’m just a local cop.”

“There’s somebody I want you to meet and then we’ll talk about that.” August stood up. “I’ll be right back.”

Tay was halfway through another Marlboro when August returned with the woman who had been in the front passenger seat of the van when they picked him up.

She was relatively tall and her long blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She was lean and fit looking with a tanned face, and the khaki shirt, jeans, and aviator sunglasses she wore gave her a slightly masculine look. Tay assumed she was an American, but nothing about her appearance confirmed it. That was only one of many things that disconcerted Tay about Americans. There was no template for an American. They could look like anything.

“This is Claire,” August said. “She’s my best sniper.”

“Inspector,” Claire nodded and sat down on the couch opposite him.

Tay wasn’t sure whether he should stand up and offer his hand or not. What was the etiquette on shaking hands with a sniper? Then he noticed that August was sitting down so he decided that was the end of the greeting portion of the program and let it go.