THE DEAD AMERICAN (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 3) (7 page)

IT WAS STILL
at least an hour before sunset when they stepped out the front doors of the Ritz-Carlton and walked down the circular driveway to Raffles Avenue. The haze had reduced the sun to not much more than a giant orange sitting on the shelf of the western horizon, and lights were speckling the towers in the financial district.

No one jaywalked in Singapore, so they waited obediently for the light to change before they crossed the road to the edge of the bay. Tay offered Emma one of his Marlboro Reds. He took one himself and lit both their cigarettes, and then he blew out the match and tucked it back into the matchbox. No one littered in Singapore either.

“Why did we have to come outside to talk about Tyler’s job?” Tay asked after they were across Raffles Avenue and wal
king along the ba
y.

“I wanted to have a cigarette.”

Emma tilted her head at Tay.

“Did you think…”

She saw his earnest expression, and laughed.

“You thought I wanted to come out here because someone might be listening to us up in the lounge?”

“No, of course not,” Tay said a little too quickly, and Emma laughed again.

“What in the world is that?” Emma asked, pointing up ahead of them.

Tay followed her finger and saw she was pointing at the Helix Bridge, a pedestrian bridge that arched over a neck of Marina Bay to make it possible to walk from Marina Square to the Marina Bay Sands. The bridge was silver and shaped like a slightly corkscrewed tube made out of woven filaments of aluminum. It curved both up and sideways for no reason at all Tay could see other than because it could. He had walked across it once and had felt like he was sliding down a giant fallopian tube. He wondered if he ought to try to explain what it was called and how the shape connected to the name, but he didn’t care enough to make the effort.

“It’s a pedestrian bridge,” was all he said. “You can use it to walk to the Marina Bay Sands where the casino is.”

“You have casinos in Singapore?”

“Two legal ones,” Tay shrugged. “And a bunch of others that aren’t.”

“How exciting,” Emma said, but Tay didn’t think she looked excited at all.

When Emma started walking toward the Helix Bridge, Tay didn’t see that he had much choice but to follow. He had lost control of the conversation again, but this time he wasn’t going to struggle to get it back again and end up feeling silly. This time he was just going to drift with the current and see where it took him.

It took him to a little platform about halfway across the Helix Bridge that he gathered was there so people could stand and admire the view. He didn’t care about the view, but he had decided he would wait Emma out until she told him whatever it was she thought important enough to bring them out here. The little platform with the nice view was as good a place to do it as anywhere.

Tay did not think he was naturally a patient person, but he had learned patience and he had practiced its moves until he had them down perfectly. Patience was a skill like any other. Learning patience was like learning to fire a pistol into the center of a target or to shoot a sixteen-foot jump shot. It was something you worked out how to do, then you practiced over and over until it was etched into your DNA.

He and Emma stood side by side at the railing, smoking quietly, adding their own personal pollution to the greater whole that plagued Singapore. They watched the lights coming on in the towers of the financial district on the other side of Marina Bay, and Tay noticed that each of the brightly colored neon signs on the tips of the soaring structures seemed to trumpet the name of a different bank. International banking was Singapore’s lifeblood, Tay understood that, but he still wondered if there would come a day when Singapore was nothing but one enormous bank. It wasn’t a prospect he liked to consider.

The water was so smooth it looked like a sheet of pewter-colored glass. Tay felt like he could crack it with a pebble. If he had a pebble. Which he didn’t.

“I don’t know if Tyler was a genius or just a kid with a knack for writing software,” Emma said.

She drew on her cigarette without looking at Tay.

“It doesn’t really matter, I suppose,” she went on when Tay said nothing. “He was good at it. He was a star at Google. I don’t know why he quit to come here.”

Tay didn’t understand that either. Whatever could possess a young man to leave the golden light of California to live in the haze of Singapore? Of course, all Tay really knew about California came from watching the reruns of
Baywatch
he occasionally stumbled across on television, so he supposed it was possible there might be good reasons he couldn’t imagine.

“I told you he was working on Google’s driverless car project, didn’t I?”

Tay nodded. He still had no idea what a driverless car was, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. The whole idea sounded like something a whack-job wearing a tin-foil hat started telling you about while you frantically looked for a way to flee.

Tay caught Emma’s eye, and he realized she was smiling at him.

“It sounds like science fiction, doesn’t it?” she said.

Tay nodded.

“It’s not science fiction. Driverless cars actually exist. Google’s cars have done over half a million miles without a single incident. Most new cars these days are already covered in electronic sensors and cameras. Adaptive cruise controls, back-up cameras, lane warning indicators, satellite navigation systems, and a lot of others. All that’s required for a car to drive itself is for someone to write software that ties together the information collected by all those sensors.”

“And Tyler was the one writing that software?”

“Not exactly. He specialized in security protocols.”

Tay sighed and looked across Marina Bay to where most of the skyscrapers in the city’s financial district were now blazing with light.

He hated conversations like this since his own understanding of technology was minimal. Usually he didn’t care, but more and more often he found even straightforward conversations floundered on his lack of technological understanding. No, that wasn’t exactly right. What they floundered on was his lack of technological
interest
. It was supremely annoying to him to trip over things he didn’t care about and find they inhibited understanding things he did care about. Was that the way the world was going? That simply to conduct an ordinary conversation you had to understand at least basic principles of computer programing and automation and sensors and… driverless cars? If it were, Tay was pretty sure that world wouldn’t have a place in it for him.

“You look puzzled, Inspector. Would you like me to explain?”

Tay most assuredly did
not
want Emma to explain, but he knew it would be rude for him to say that. So he just nodded. Again.

“The operation of the car is dependent on the transmission of streams of data both from internal sensors and from GPS satellites. If those streams are interfered with, all sorts of bad things happen.”

Tay’s head was spinning, so he said nothing.

“You see, in theory at least, if someone can interfere with the data flows, they can—”

“Are you saying they’re worried about somebody hijacking one of these cars by hacking into the computer that’s driving it?”

“Accidental interference with the data stream is more likely, but you can’t altogether rule out intentional interference either. Tyler’s role in the project was to find ways to interfere with the data streams and then develop software to prevent the ways he had discovered from working anymore. He was very, very good at it. That’s why The Future wanted him so badly.”

“Because he knew how to hijack driverless cars?”

“No, because he knew how to prevent the hijacking of driverless cars.”

Tay shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He was so far out of his depth that he had no idea what to say next.

On the other side of Marina Bay, heavy traffic flowed over the mouth of the Singapore River on the twin bridges of Esplanade Drive. Tay was pretty sure that each of those vehicles had a human being driving it. Was it really possible that one day those vehicles would all be whizzing over those same bridges without the involvement of a human being? And that people were already worrying about how to keep other human beings from hijacking those vehicles? Tay was suddenly not so sorry to be fifty years old. Maybe it was better that most of his life was behind him already.

“When Tyler went to work for The Future, everyone says he was very excited,” Emma continued. “I don’t think he really liked Singapore all that much, but he loved his new job. That’s why his parents were so shocked when he suddenly announced he was quitting and coming home.”

“Did he tell them why?”

“After Tyler died, they found out he told Betty he discovered—”

“I’m sorry,” Tay interrupted. “Who?”

“Betty Lee. She was Tyler’s girlfriend. Or one of his girlfriends. I don’t really know.”

“Is she the one who—”

“Yes, she found his body.”

Tay nodded again. He knew he was nodding quite a lot, but he wasn’t sure what else to do.

“Tyler told Betty he had discovered something strange in the security tests he had devised.”

“Strange how?”

“He told her he had stumbled over connections that shouldn’t have been there.”

“Connections? What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. That’s all she told his parents.”

“Did Tyler say anything to them about these connections?”

“No, he just told them he had discovered something which frightened him and that was why he wanted to leave. So when Betty told them what he said to her about the connections he discovered, it seemed natural—”

“This girlfriend. Betty. Were they close?”

“His parents didn’t think it was serious, if that’s what you mean. Tyler never said anything to them about Betty coming back to the States with him.”

“So why would he tell her something that he didn’t tell them?”

“What are you saying, Inspector? That Tyler didn’t say that? That Betty just made it up?”

“I’m not saying anything, Emma. I’m just trying to understand what you keep telling me about Tyler discovering something that scared him. It seems strange to me that he’d tell a casual girlfriend something and not tell his parents, not if it were important. Why would he do that?”

“How should I know, Inspector? Maybe he didn’t think it was important at the time. Maybe he didn’t want to worry his parents. Maybe he didn’t want to talk about it on the telephone. Why does that matter?”

“Perhaps it doesn’t,” Tay shrugged. “I just don’t see how working on software security for driverless cars could make anyone want to kill you.”

“You want me to speculate?”

“By all means,” Tay said. “Speculate.”

“Security protocols work both ways. To keep somebody else from breaking in, you have to know how to break in yourself.”

“You’re saying that this company was really trying to learn how to break into the software that runs driverless cars?” Tay looked puzzled. “That doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“It wouldn’t to me either, but look at the same facts from a slightly different angle. What if Tyler discovered the security protocols he was working on had applications beyond their application to driverless cars?”

“Such as what?”

“I don’t know, but what if similar security issues were present in something else other than driverless cars? What if the protocols Tyler was writing could be used for some completely different application?”

“Are you saying The Future was really working on something other than what they told Tyler they were working on?”

“I think it’s a possibility. That could be what Tyler meant by saying he had discovered connections he didn’t know were there.”

The conversation was rapidly spinning into worlds Tay found basically incomprehensible to mortal men, so he tried to bring it back to something he could understand.

“Do you know anything about this company other than its rather odd name?”

“A little.”

“Do you know where the office is?”

Emma pointed and Tay’s eyes followed her index finger to the skyline on the other side of Marina Bay.

“It’s right there,” she said. “On Robinson Road.”

“Is it a public company?”

“No, it’s privately owned.”

“By who?”

“The Future is a Singapore corporation, but the shareholders are difficult to trace. Most of the shares seem to be held by other companies that are registered in the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg. The real owners could be anyone.” Emma paused, turned toward Tay, and folded her arms. “They don’t necessarily have to be individuals, you know. They could even be governments.”

“You’re saying some foreign government secretly owns a company developing software here in Singapore?”

“Who said anything about a foreign government?”

“You think the government of Singapore is secretly behind The Future?”

“I didn’t say that, but they could be. And if they aren’t, I’m willing to bet they know who is.”

Marina Bay had turned deep pewter gray and tendrils of light from the towers on the other side streaked it with bright lines of color. Tay leaned on the shiny aluminum railing of the bridge, took a final drag on his cigarette, and flipped the butt into the bay.

“You’re scaring me, Emma.”

“You asked me to speculate, so I speculated. But I can’t write anything until it’s more than speculation. Since you’ve read the police report about Tyler’s death, you know as well as I do that something is very wrong here. I need your help to find out what it is, and who’s behind it. Then I can write my story.”

“It could be nothing, Emma. Just lazy police work.”

“It isn’t.”

“I’m not as sure of that as you are.”

“Yes, you are. I can see it in your eyes.”

Tay turned around, leaned back against the railing, and folded his arms.

“I’m not a professional do-gooder, Emma. I’m not even an amateur do-gooder. I’m just a cop on leave because of a misunderstanding.”

“That’s not the way I see it, Sam. I think you’re a cop they’re trying to get rid of because you don’t like the way things work in Singapore. You can’t stand the hypocrisy or the rest of the crap that goes on here, and they know it. What’s more, you have your own money and you don’t need the job. That makes you dangerous to them.”