THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 4) (7 page)

“Watch your butt out there, Sam. Watch
our
butt. Those sons of bitches are going to try to blame CID if this goes bad. I can feel it.”

Tay nodded, but he stayed silent.

The SAC tossed back the rest of his Irish whiskey and put the glass down on the table.

“That’s it, Sam. I’m going home. I’ll arrange for Sergeant Lee to meet you at New Phoenix Park tomorrow morning, but I’ll leave it to you to talk with Sergeant Kang. After the briefing call me and tell me what you think.”

Tay already knew what he would think. He would think this whole mess had the makings of a major cluster fuck and he was standing right on the bull’s eye.

At the front door, the SAC stopped and put a hand on Tay’s shoulder.

“Be damn careful, Sam. And look out for Kang and Lee, but don’t tell them any of this came from me. Just treat this as a routine assignment through normal channels.”

“I’ll do that, sir.”

Tay watched as the SAC walked to the front gate and let himself out. Tay raised his hand prepared to wave when the SAC looked back at him, but he never did. He just closed the gate and walked toward Orchard Road without turning around.

AT A LITTLE before nine the next morning Kang pulled up to the main gate of the Ministry of Home Affairs compound. He and Tay held up their warrant cards and the guard at the security post leaned down and flicked his eyes back and forth between their faces and the pictures on the cards until he was satisfied.

“Yes, sir.” The guard straightened up and saluted crisply. “You are to go to room 3271 in Block B. Do you know where that is?”

“No idea,” Kang said, since he was doing the driving.

“Follow the road until you come to a fork.” The guard stepped out of his hut and pointed toward the center of the compound. “Go to the right and continue straight ahead all the way to the end. You’ll be in a parking lot and you can park anywhere there you can find a space. Block B is the building right in front of you and room 3271 is—”

“On the third floor,” Kang cut in. “Got it.”

“Yes, sir,” the guard said.

He stepped back, tossed out another snappy salute, and pushed a large red button on the side of the guardhouse. The yellow and black striped anti-terrorism barrier sticking out of the road slowly lowered.

“Christ,” Kang muttered as they drove through the gate. “Is everyone around here like that?”

“Every single one of them,” Tay said.

When they got to the third floor of Block B, they saw that room 3271 was all the way down at the end of the corridor. It was as far from the elevators as you could walk and still be inside the building. Tay briefly wondered if ISD was holding the meeting there so they would have more time to examine people over CCTV as they walked the length of the corridor. That was probably silly, but anything to do with ISD just naturally kicked his paranoid instincts into high gear.

Tay opened the door to room 3271 without knocking and was surprised to discover it wasn’t an office or even a conference room, but what looked like a reception area of some kind. Two beefy Malaysian-looking men with military-style haircuts stood in an approximation of parade rest on opposite sides of a door directly opposite them and to their left a third man sat behind a mahogany desk. He looked so much like the other two they might all have been brothers.

“ID’s,” the man at the desk said, holding out his hand. “Please.”

He did say please at least, but Tay was pretty sure he didn’t mean it.

Tay and Kang handed over their warrant cards and stood quietly while the man scrutinized first one and then the other as if he suspected they might be forgeries. When he was apparently satisfied their warrant cards were genuine, the deskman turned and tossed them into separate compartments in a wooden rack mounted on the wall behind him. About six inches deep and divided into five rows of small compartments, it made Tay think of the key racks that were always behind hotel reception desks in old black and white crime movies from the forties.

“No phones, cameras, recording devices, or firearms permitted inside,” the deskman announced, holding out his hand again. “You can pick up your stuff when you come out.”

Tay and Kang surrendered their telephones, and the man put them into the compartments with their warrant cards.

“Any other electronic devices of any kind? Cameras, recorders? Anything like that?”

They both shook their heads.

“Are you armed?”

“No,” Tay said.

Kang nodded his head.

“Seriously?” Tay asked him.

Kang looked at Tay and shrugged. He reached under his shirt and unclipped an inside-the-waistband holster from which peeped the butt of what looked like a big semi-automatic and handed it over. The deskman reached back and plopped Kang’s holster and pistol into the same compartment as his mobile phone.

Tay didn’t much like carrying a gun and he seldom did. It wasn’t that he harbored high-minded scruples that prevented him from shooting people. He had a long list of people in mind he thought could
use
shooting. It was more a matter of not wanting to be tempted.

Most of the time, Tay left his service revolver at home in the top drawer of his bedside table. It was an old-fashioned wheel gun, a Smith & Wesson .38, five shots with a two-inch barrel, and it marked him as even more of an old fart than most people already thought he was, which was really saying something. The Smith & Wesson .38 hadn’t been issued to CID detectives in nearly fifteen years. It was practically an antique. Carrying it now was like making telephone calls with a rotary dial phone.

These days most CID cops carried Heckler & Koch forty calibre semi-automatics, but Tay had never bothered to qualify with one and just stuck to his old-fashioned .38. He knew his colleagues snickered about it. It’s a great weapon if you ever get into a gunfight in an elevator, they had joked so often Tay had decided to smack the next guy who said it, but he almost never carried a gun anyway so it didn’t matter much to him what it was. To tell the truth, he was such a lousy shot he figured one gun was pretty much as useless to him as another.

The deskman pointed to one of the heavies flanking the door and the man stepped forward and held out a black plastic paddle Tay recognized as a handheld metal detector. He didn’t speak, but he gestured to Tay and Kang to hold their arms out from their sides.

“You don’t trust us?” Tay asked.

“Standard procedure,” the man muttered.

“Standard procedure for everybody or just for CID people?”

“Look, pal,” the deskman said, “We only work here. We just do what we’re told. I suggest you do the same thing.”

Tay and Kang stood silently while the security man ran the wand over them with what Tay thought was grossly exaggerated care under the circumstances. Each time it beeped, they were forced to pull out whatever they had in their pockets for examination.

“Okay,” the deskman said when the procedure finally finished. “Go straight in. You’re the last. They’re waiting for you.”

“And you’ve made them wait longer,” Tay said.

When he walked through the door, Tay didn’t find himself in a conference room as he had been expecting, but rather in what seemed to be a small lecture hall. He was looking down on it from behind the top row and saw about two dozen people scattered over four rows of theater seats arranged in tiers that rose up from a small platform. On the platform was a long wooden table with four chairs behind it, three of which were occupied.

Tay was surprised to see he knew one of the men on the platform although he tried not to show it. He had encountered Philip Goh several times in cases he was working. Goh did something or another at ISD, but Tay wasn’t sure what it was and he had never gotten Goh to give him a straight answer to the questions he had asked him about that subject.

If Tay were feeling generous, he could probably say he and Goh had worked together, but saying they had worked together would be stretching it a bit. It would be more accurate to say they hadn’t worked against each other. At least, not that anyone would notice.

Goh was a man of average height and weight and mostly forgettable appearance. He could have been the manager of a grocery store or a guy who worked at an insurance company. Perhaps it was that very anonymity which qualified him for ISD. He had a square Chinese face and black, badly cut hair. His most prominent feature was a scar that started somewhere inside his hairline above his left ear, meandered more or less diagonally across his cheek, and then disappeared below his jaw. It looked like a dueling scar on the face of some nineteenth-century German aristocrat and seemed completely out of place on a man like Goh who was otherwise so ordinary.

“Inspector Tay,” Goh called up from the front of the room. “So glad you could join us. We’ve been waiting for you.”

Tay said nothing. He merely nodded and sat in the first empty seat he saw. Kang glanced around, spotted Sergeant Lee one row further down, and slid in next to her.

“Not back there, Inspector,” Goh called out. “You’re down here.” He pointed to the empty chair on the platform right next to him.

Kang glanced over his shoulder at Tay, who gave a half shrug. Tay stood up and walked down to the platform and sat in the chair Goh had indicated.

“What am I doing up here, Goh?” Tay asked in a low voice.

“You’re in charge of the CID people. I figured you should be down front with me.”

“And why are you down front?”

“I’m running ISD’s operation.”

“You mean you and I are jointly in charge of this?”

“I guess we’d better get this straight right now, Tay. ISD and CID aren’t partners and CID isn’t here to help me. If I had my way, you wouldn’t be here at all. But to get the snatch approved, we had to agree to have you here. If it becomes necessary to make arrests under Singapore law, that’s your department. Everything else is my department.”

“Snatch?”

Goh looked annoyed. “What?”

“You used the world
snatch
. I just thought that was an odd way to characterize an operation to arrest a man.”

“I should have guessed having you here was going to be a joy, Tay. I ought to have my head examined for not refusing to let them stick me with you.”

“And yet here I am.”

“Look, ISD is taking down Suparman and holding him under the Internal Security Act. That has nothing at all to do with CID. But if anyone interferes with us, you might actually be useful. Something like that wouldn’t fall under the Internal Security Act. That would be a breach of civil law and CID will be responsible for making an arrest, if one is necessary.”

“In other words, you’re saying—”

“Can I conduct my briefing now, Tay? Would that be okay with you? If you have any questions, I’ll try to answer them when I’m done.”

Goh flashed a grin he probably thought looked nasty. Tay just thought it made Goh appear constipated.

“Who are they?” Tay asked, jerking his head at the other two men sitting on the platform.

“Everything in this operation is on a need to know basis. And you don’t need to know that.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Goh, give it a rest. Where do you guys get all this spy crap?”

“How much do you know about this operation, Tay?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Then, for once in your life, keep your mouth shut and listen. You’ll find out everything you need to know, and nothing you don’t.” And then Goh winked at him, actually
winked
. “That’s what need to know means.”

Tay gave a little wave with one hand that could have meant almost anything. Then he leaned back, folded his arms, and waited.

“AS ALL OF you already know,” Goh told the room, “we have intelligence Abu Suparman has either already slipped into Singapore or soon will. We’re going to take him down the moment he shows his face, and you’re the people who are going to do it.”

No one said anything or offered any obvious reaction to Goh’s announcement. There was no applause, certainly no pumping fists. These people were all far too professional for that. But there was electricity in the air, and Tay could feel it.

“We’re setting a trap for him,” Goh continued. “His sister has been diagnosed with third-stage breast cancer. Her doctor in Indonesia recommended a radical mastectomy and the surgery is scheduled here in Singapore on Saturday. Even with the procedure, she has only been given a fifty-fifty chance of survival. We are therefore certain that Suparman will try to see her sometime before the surgery.”

Suparman was a dangerous terrorist and taking him out of circulation was absolutely necessary, Tay knew, but going about it this way gave him a moment of pause. Using a man’s sister who was dying of cancer to lure him into a trap? Somehow that didn’t seem decent.

The lights in the room abruptly lowered and a large screen on the wall behind Goh came alive. A photograph of a pleasant but unremarkable looking middle-aged woman appeared on the screen. Tay thought she looked Malaysian or Indonesian.

“This is Atin Hasan,” Goh said. “She is Abu Suparman’s sister.”

The woman was of medium height and slightly plump with the chubby red cheeks of a healthy baby. She had on a dark red hijab with strands of black hair peeking from beneath it and was wearing jeans and what looked like a man’s shirt with the tails hanging down over her waist. The woman had a white plastic carrier bag in her left hand and on it Tay could just make out the Cold Storage Market logo. The photograph had the oddly flattened look of one taken through a long telephoto lens.

“Atin Hasan will be arriving at Changi Airport from Jakarta around eleven-thirty this morning. We will have eyes on her from the moment she leaves the airplane. The intelligence we have now is that she will be staying at the Temple Street Inn in Chinatown until Friday, when she will check into Mount Elizabeth Hospital for her surgery on Saturday morning. Because of her condition, we assume she will go straight to the hotel on arrival, but if she goes anywhere else we are prepared for that, too.”

“Do we know who she is traveling with?” The question came from a Caucasian man on the left side of the room and Tay thought he detected traces of an Australian accent.