Singapore Sling Shot (7 page)

On her way home by cab, Simone DeLue was smiling to herself. She was exhausted, sore and happy. She'd had no intention of inviting Daniel to seduce her. That had never been in her plans. She'd imagined a day out play-acting. She'd anticipated some nice food and a few laughs and that would have been that. A pleasant day away from her normal routine.

In fact, she admitted to herself at one point during the day that she hadn't really been sure she even liked the man she was with. However, somewhere along the way her perception of him had changed.

In her book, physically Daniel Swann was every woman's dream, or at least he was very close. He was good looking in a rugged sort of way. He had a great body and he knew how to use it. However it was the little things that made her really connect with him.

Throughout the day she'd had glimpses beyond that hard, almost callous exterior he presented and she knew there was a lot more to Daniel Swann than he was prepared to show the world.

She had seen immediately that he was smart and humorous, but she had felt that there was a very real sense of vulnerability about him. She had gone in search of it and in doing so she had experienced both the toughness and the gentleness of this man who she so much wanted to see more of.

“My spy,” she murmured as she stepped into the elevator at her Toa Payoh apartment block. She was still smiling when she eventually found sleep.

After a long lie-in I had a shower that probably drained the hotel's hot water system dry. A room service breakfast followed and then it was time for me to get serious. I had my Toshiba with me. I connected the camera to the laptop and started sifting through the hundred or so images I'd taken at Siloso. I saved a couple of good shots of Simone into a separate folder. I don't think there was one bad of her in the bunch, but these particular ones were very good and the romantic in me decided they were keepers.

Once I'd done that I started to analyse the remaining images and see if I could spot the surveillance types Sami thought would be somewhere around the fort. Now, I've got a jungle fighter's senses when it comes to watchers and the watched. I hadn't felt the burn of eyes on me throughout the hours we had spent either in the fort complex or on Sentosa itself.

I pulled up the images I'd taken on the spur above the watchtower and started to examine the bush edge, winding the magnification to maximum. Leaf by leaf, I quartered the jungle. It was taking me forever, but breaking down camouflage patterns and seeing the reality behind them is an art form. I switched the colour images to monotone and looked for human outlines, a head, an arm, a hand. If I had been colour blind it would have been easier. Conventional camouflage can often be completely useless against an observer with that condition. I didn't have that luxury or handicap, I just had to do it the hard way.

I was starting to think this was all a waste of time when I finally saw something. I had a fresh image onscreen and was still in colour mode when something caught my eye. It was tiny, black and shining against the green haze of the jungle background!

Looking along the right hand, or ocean side of the spur, there was an indentation in the jungle edge and situated in the small clearing was a tower, radio, cellphone or something. Its function didn't matter. What did matter was the fact that on a cross spar of the tower's skeleton frame, about ten feet above the ground, someone had mounted a small camera.

Now, without a bunch of megapixels and a trained eye, the camera, which was held in position with a strip of wide grey tape of about the same colour as the metal of the tower itself, probably wouldn't have been seen. Certainly not at a glance! What gave it away was the small, dark circle of the lens. The lens wasn't large. It was no bigger than a Singapore one-dollar coin, but it was black and there was a spark of reflected light on it. It was probably that spark that had caught my eye in the first place.

The camera, which I presumed had a wide-angle lens, was positioned so it was looking along the spur towards where I had been standing to take my photo. I was prepared to bet there was another pointing the other way looking down towards The QuarterMaster Store and the surrender rooms.

I looked for a telltale bulge on the corresponding crossbeam on the opposite side of the tower framework. Obviously I wasn't about to see a lens from this angle, purely because it would be pointing in the other direction. And yes, there was a grey bump on the straight edge of the beam on the far side. Camera number two.

“Clever!” I muttered, lighting a Marlboro. I was perhaps rewarding myself for being an eagle-eyed genius, or lucky bugger. But yes, the camera option was clever. By using the technology they—whoever they were—could mount a continuous watch while staying out of sight.

The cameras, of course, didn't mean there was no one in the jungle itself. Perhaps there was even a Japanese death squad left over from the war bivouacked in the seemingly dense bush waiting to come out and take Singapore for a second time. Whatever, Sami had been right with his call so far.

Cameras of the type that were set up on the tower were not standard CCTV. These were small mil-spec devices. Expensive and cutting-edge technology. They were the sort of thing I'd seen the US Special Forces guys using what now seemed like years ago in the jungle in the Thai highlands. With long-life batteries and remote sender devices, they could remain
in situ
for long periods of time and still function. They also operated in extreme low-light conditions. I had to figure that if the unknown watchers had two cameras set up, they probably had a whole bunch more.

I checked all the other images I'd taken to try and spot any other cameras. I looked at all the hard sites like railings, posts and buildings. Even the artillery pieces and the big stand-alone trees that dotted the hillside above The QuarterMaster Store. I had one possible hit.

Behind the store on the steep hillside there was an outdoor display showing how heavy cannon barrels were hoisted up the slope to the top of the fort. Beyond that there was an object sitting in the crook of a tree branch. This was little more than just another bulge where possibly one should not be. It was green and brown and matched the colour of the tree. However, the green lump had a circular black centre. Under maximum magnification, the pixels onscreen were almost the size of bricks and they all but destroyed the image, but I was prepared to bet that, yes, it was a camera. If I was right, positioned where it was it would cover the back of The QuarterMaster Store building and any approaches up the roadway from the main gate below.

With a transmitting range of several kilometres, our adversary's screen-watchers could be in the jungle, in a vehicle parked somewhere on the island or even sitting in the harbour basin in a launch. They could even be across the harbour in an apartment for that matter. However, I figured that wherever they were, they would have people within easy reach of the surrender rooms and whatever Stanley Loh had secreted there.

The watchers had one big advantage. Because the fort is situated at the narrow end of the island, anyone attempting to leave and reach the train, bus, car, cab or whatever had to pass through the concourse outside the aquarium. I was sure that the guys using the cameras had people stationed right there to intercept their target if anyone made the pick-up and tried to get away.

I switched to the images of the two surrender rooms. I'd photographed the panels to the right of the door over a smiling Simone's shoulder. There were five boxes in all. One was a black-fronted keyed unit, below that a standard digital alarm box. To the right a small keyed box, a faceless panel, possibly hiding fuses. There was a red box below that, a fire alarm control box, I had to assume.

I was figuring there was a general sensor movement system for the entire floor as a whole. That theory matched the sensors I'd spotted. The second alarm system was probably the infrared trip alarm around the displays. Fire alarm and fuse box aside, the remaining two boxes probably related to the air conditioning and the lights. Short of actually getting right up close and personal with them that was my best guess.

I skipped through the images in the Allied surrender room and started in-depth in the Japanese room, looking at everything in high resolution. As with my study of the exterior shots, it took time. I ordered a pot of coffee and a sandwich and smoked my way through half a pack of cigarettes before I finished.

Whatever Stanley had hidden in the room, I didn't find it on my image search. All I found were a lot of waxy faces of various shades of the rainbow attached to stiff mannequins dressed in the ill-fitting uniforms of a dozen countries and services. Apart from the glazed-over eyes, nothing leapt out at me and said, “This is it!”

It was after midday when I finally shut down the computer. My own eyes were glazed and red from the strain of trying to rearrange millions of pixels into some sort of meaningful order. I stood at the suite window and watched the world roll by below. The day outside looked like another very warm one. Was there really anything else here?

I decided on a swim. When I got outside, yes, it was hot, but for a change the humidity wasn't pushing the high nineties. I went poolside for a couple of hours. The pool was virtually deserted but for a young Japanese couple with a pair of toddlers. I swam and dozed on a lounger in the shade. I ordered a sandwich and a solitary beer and that was it. I was tired. Tired from the brain draining, eye-sucking exercise on the computer, and physically tired from my bout with Simone.

I was sound asleep when my cellphone woke me. Sami had completed the funeral arrangements for Stanley, the family and his people. The bodies had been released to the undertakers. Now it was time for he and I to get together and have that long-overdue talk.

I returned to my room to shower and dress. Ed from Perth wasn't going out this evening, Daniel Swann was. There would be a car waiting down the street. I would be spirited into a car park basement. All the usual secret squirrel stuff. However, if it meant the chance to see my old friend and help him fight this, his latest war, just one of the many we had fought together, so be it. I was in!

8

I've seen sophisticated models of various proposed developments before, but never one quite like the one that was set out in the office that Sami Somsak occupied. What had formally been Stanley's domain was situated on the fifteenth floor of a building on Scotts Road just a hundred metres up from Orchard.

I'd seen the images of the Intella Island model in the newspapers and on television, but nothing had prepared me for the scale of the thing. It was massive! There was a fringe of buildings surrounding Marina Bay. A long wide bridge with four huge towers set along its length pushed out from the city. The bridge had three lanes going in each direction and between the separated bridge spans were two rail lines extending from Marina MRT to the island. The towers on the bridge structure were tall, very tall. They straddled the road and rail access, their feet plunging into the blue plaster water.

The bridge terminated inside the massive Intella Island rather than on it. The island itself was octagonal in shape. Scale was difficult for me to judge but it was huge, dwarfing two ocean liners moored on the seaward side. Tall buildings, many with helicopter landing pads on their roofs, dominated, but at the heart of the island was an open expanse, a large park. Streets bisected the buildings in neat grid patterns. I could make out models of tiny pedestrians and tram-like coaches. There were no cars in sight other than on the bridge.

“Impressive isn't it,” Sami said, coming to stand beside me. “Twelve hectares of man-made island. On the upper level, parks and sunlight and offices, hotels, apartments plus a casino, of course,” he added without a hint of irony. “We estimate habitation for perhaps a quarter of a million people in these thirty acres, and in the apartment towers and hotels on the bridge itself.”

Thirty acres made sense to me while hectares didn't. A quarter of a million people living on the island, now that was impressive, and I said so. Sami nodded. “To Singapore that is valuable space and it will be even more so because in effect, we are multiplying that thirty acres three times.”

“How the hell will you do that?”

Sami laughed. He pressed a button on a console on the side of the display and from somewhere below the model there was a click and a whirr. The entire top layer of the island model rose in the air on telescopic supports and moved a metre and a half towards the high ceiling.

Below the upper level, where the park and the buildings had been, was a whole other infrastructure. There were long arcades and malls. There were gymnasiums and retail shops, supermarkets and cinemas plus an MRT terminal. There were tram stops and the end of the bridge was here, one level down from the surface. The whole thing was a mind-boggling to me. There were dozens of other services and facilities mapped out and I was having trouble taking it all in at once.

“A whole other world,” Sami said, “and there's more.” There was another click and the sound of electrics at work and the level I was looking at was whisked away skywards after the other. Now I was looking at cars, little models of cars, hundreds perhaps thousands of them. This new level was a giant car park. The support columns and foundations of the buildings above separated dozens of car-parking areas. It was like looking down on the compartments of a giant beehive. Access roads, like veins, led to arteries which in turn led into a huge concourse that fed up and onto the entrance and exits to the bridge.

“Car parking for ten thousand vehicles on two levels,” Sami said. “No vehicles on the streets above but for electric trams and, of course, the Grand Prix racers and other events.”

“You what?”

“Using the bridge, the roads around Marina Bay and the island, we envisage the world's most unique Grand Prix circuit. We can dock eight of the world's largest luxury liners at one time and provide a racing circuit that can be as long as twelve kilometres with possibly the best spectator viewing of any.” He paused. “Those are just some of the many little innovations that have been designed into the project. Under the car parks we have a desalination plant and a fresh water storage reservoir the size of the island that goes right to the sea floor. Fresh water, of course, floats on salt water, so the sea itself will provide the actual base for the water storage area.