Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (34 page)

Well, that was a little harsh Tay had to
admit. Maybe he was just jealous of a man who could stash a
beautiful woman in a five million dollar apartment and keep her
there until he got tired of her. It was like keeping a pet, wasn’t
it? A pet who gave blowjobs. Probably.

So why had Mei Lin readily identified Ferrero
as Mr. Hysmith when Tay had shown her the picture on his phone? All
she had to do was say she didn’t recognize the man and that would
have been that. Tay would have had no way left to connect up the
dots.

But Mai Lin had served Vince Ferrero up to
him right on the proverbial platter. Why had she done that? He had
no idea. None at all.

***

When Tay returned to the table, the security
guard was picking nervously at a pile of rice and something that
looked like chicken curry.

“What’s your name?” Tay asked the guard after
sitting down again. He tried for a friendly tone of voice, but he
was less good at that than he was at nastiness and he thought it
came out sounding a little strangled.

“Rahul, sir.”

“Well, Rahul, here’s the deal. You and I
never had this conversation. Is that clear?”

The guard’s eyes darted nervously from side
to side and the Adam’s apple went up and down.

“If you do tell anyone, if either this man or
this woman find out I asked you these questions,” Tay went on
without waiting for an answer, “I
will
find out. I will see
that you lose your job, and I will make certain other even more
unpleasant things happen to you.”

Tay could see Rahul trying to figure out what
those more unpleasant things might be, which was okay with Tay,
because he actually had no idea what he was talking about
either.

After a moment, looking suitably cowed and
frightened, Rahul nodded quickly.

“Are you on a meal break?”

“No, sir. It is the end of my shift. After I
eat, I will be going home.”

“You will be going home now, Rahul. Forget
the food. Get out of here.”

The guard cast a disappointed look at the
plate in front of him and the nearly full bottle of beer, but he
nodded quickly again, then stood up and hurried away.

Tay hated depriving a man of a meal, but he
was going to have to go back to Gallop Green and have another talk
with Mei Lin and he didn’t want Rahul anywhere in the neighborhood
when he did. He had crawled way out on a limb with all this ISD
stuff. The fewer people there were around who knew what he had been
doing the happier he would be.

TAY WAS ABOUT halfway back to Gallop Green
when the dark blue Mercedes with blacked-out windows stopped
alongside him. The window slowly began to lower.

Tay wasn’t armed, and he didn’t really expect
somebody to shoot him in broad daylight right in the middle of one
of the best neighborhoods in Singapore anyway. Regardless, he
suddenly wished he had something better to defend himself with than
his American Express card.

Fleeing was always a possibility, of course,
but he didn’t want to look like a fool, and he didn’t immediately
see any effective way to do that as exposed as he was on the
sidewalk of a residential neighborhood. So he just stood there and
waited to see what was about to happen.

John August leaned toward the open
window.

“Get in, Sam,” he said.

“August?”

August said nothing.

“What are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“You could have called me. I’ve tried to call
you over and over and—”

“Sam, just shut the fuck up and get in the
car.”

***

They drove out to Farrer Road, turned right,
then continued in silence until they came to the Pan Island
Expressway, which August entered heading west.

“Where are we going?” Tay asked.

“Nowhere. I just didn’t want to have a
conversation with you standing there looking at me like I was about
to shoot you.”

“And are you?”

“Not right away, but I’m not taking it off
the table.”

Tay nodded, said nothing. He just waited for
August to tell him what was going on.

“By the way,” August continued, “you’re
clean.”

“Clean?”

“I mean nobody is following you. I wish I’d
been around to see you crawling over your back fence this morning.
That was so dumb it was brilliant.”

Tay shrugged. “I didn’t want ISD to know
where I was going.”

“They wouldn’t. I don’t think they care. They
haven’t been the ones following you.”

Now August had Tay’s full attention.

“And this you know exactly how?”

August gave Tay a long look, certainly far
longer than Tay thought appropriate while he was driving seventy
miles-an-hour down a six-lane freeway filled with traffic.

“I’m not just some guy, Tay. I get paid to
know what’s going on.”

“Who are you really, John? I know you used to
be CIA. At least I think I know that. But I thought you were
supposed to be retired. And yet you seem to be everywhere and
nowhere at the same time. You’re certainly not just a guy who owns
a bar in Pattaya. Are you
still
CIA?”

“That’s not the only possibility.”

“Then you’re telling me you’re
not
CIA?”

“It isn’t nearly that straightforward these
days, Tay.”

“I think it is. Let’s try it this way. I’ll
go first. I’m a cop. In Singapore. I work for Singapore CID.
Now…it’s your turn.”

August looked over at Tay, once again Tay
thought for rather longer than was either necessary or
appropriate.

“I used to be an intelligence officer,”
August said after a moment. “I once worked for the Central
Intelligence Agency. I have retired from the Central Intelligence
Agency. Occasionally people ask me to do things for them. Sometimes
it’s government agencies who ask, sometimes it’s individuals.
Sometimes I do it, sometimes I don’t. It wasn’t very long ago, Sam,
that
you
asked me to do something for you as I recall, and I
did it.”

“So the CIA asks you to do things for
them?”

“Sometimes.”

“And you do them.”

“Sometimes.”

“Is this one of those times?”

“No. I’m just trying to help out a
friend.”

“Vince Ferrero?”

August’s reaction to that wasn’t at all what
Tay expected. He thought he would deny it, of course, make up some
cockamamie story perhaps, but August looked genuinely startled at
the idea.

“Ferrero?
What?
No, Sam, I’m not here
to help Ferrero.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I’m here to help
you
, Sam.”

***

At the junction August moved over onto the
Bukit Timah Expressway and sped up slightly. The BKE ran north to
the Woodlands crossing point into Malaysia and Tay wondered if that
was where August was taking him.

“I don’t have my passport,” Tay said.

“You don’t need it. We’re just driving. No
place safer to talk than a moving car, if you’re sure it’s
clean.”

“And are you sure?”

August didn’t respond, which was enough of an
answer all by itself. They shifted into the right lane and blew by
a line of cars patiently trailing behind a bus.

“I’m going to ask you a favor, Sam.”

Tay said nothing.

“Forget about Johnny. He’s dead and nothing
can change that. What’s more, I’ll tell you here and now it’s
probably for the best.”

“Why is that?”

“Johnny and Vince were into some stuff that
got out of control. It caused a lot of problems.”

“Do they both work for the CIA, too?”

“Good God, no. I think they did once, but
that was nearly forty years ago. They’ve been private ever
since.”

“Doing what?”

“Logistics and support services mostly. They
arrange deliveries of materials, set up financial structures,
collect and disburse money. Like that. They’re not involved in
intelligence operations, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“So they’re contractors.”

“Well…” August seemed to think about that,
although off-hand Tay couldn’t see what there was to think about.
“They’ve done some stuff for the Agency, it’s true, but their
clients are mostly non-government. Paraguas Ltd is actually pretty
well known in some circles.”

“Did Ferrero kill Johnny?” Tay asked.

It was a shot in the dark, he knew, but even
in the dark you occasionally hit something if you just kept
shooting.

“Yeah, he did.”

Bullseye
.

“Do you know why?” Tay asked.

“Johnny screwed up. He was the one who got
the explosives into Singapore that the bombers used. But then you’d
already guessed that, hadn’t you, Sam?

“Aunt Jemima. HMX mixed with flour.”

“Very good, Sam. Very good indeed.”

“But why would Johnny smuggle explosives for
people who wanted to attack Singapore?”

“Johnny thought it was a transshipment to
Iran, to an insurgency movement there. He didn’t know it was
actually meant to be used here.”

“That’s pretty hard for me to believe.”

August shrugged. “Believe what you want, but
it’s the truth.”

“And you think Ferrero killed him because of
what he had done?’

“Oh no, nothing like that. I think Ferrero
killed him because he was about to go public about what he knew and
that would have been the end for them both.”

“You mean some sort of public
mea
culpa
?”

“Yeah, pretty much. You see, the thing
was…Johnny was dying. It was some liver thing. He didn’t have much
time and he was worried because he didn’t have a lot to leave his
kids. So he took the Aunt Jemima job because it paid so fucking
much. But he didn’t tell Vince about it.”

Tay said nothing. He just waited for the
rest, and he had no doubt there was a rest coming.

“Then when Johnny realized he’d been scammed,
that there
was
no Iranian insurgency and that a few Paki’s
pissed off over Singapore’s loyal support of the United States had
actually used the stuff he had brought in to blow up half of your
country, he was pretty distraught. He decided almost immediately to
admit what he’d done and lead us to the people he had done the job
for.”

“And Ferrero killed him to keep him from
doing that.”

“Yeah, that’s about the size of it. Johnny
may have been dying, but Vince wasn’t. And spending the rest of his
life either in a prison cell or on the run wasn’t particularly
appealing. So Johnny had to be silenced.”

“But you said Ferrero had nothing to do with
bringing the Aunt Jemima into Singapore. That Johnny did that on
his own.”

“Doesn’t matter. After forty years of doing
the kinds of things Paraguas did, Ferrero and Johnny had a lot of
enemies. A lot of people would have cheerfully hung the whole thing
right around Vince’s neck, too. He couldn’t claim not to know about
it. What happened here is too ugly and everyone wants to nail
people for it. Vince would have been a big, fat sitting duck.”

“So why are you telling me all this?”

“Because you deserve to know the truth.
You’ve been the biggest threat to Vince. That’s why he’s been
trying to force you to walk away from the investigation. He’s even
had his people keeping tabs on you to see how close you were
getting.”

“Okay, so now I know. Thank you for telling
me. But I’m sure you want something in return. What is it?”

“I want you to forget about everything I just
told you and let us handle it.”

“Us?”

August gave a little shrug and let a half
smile slide across his face, but he didn’t say anything.

“What are you going to do, John?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“What good will killing Ferrero do?”

“It will roll up Paraguas with all the shit
inside. Then we’ll dump it in a hole so deep nobody will ever find
it.”

“And you think that’s a good thing.”

“I
know
that’s a good thing.”

They drove on in silence for a while after
that. When they reached the Singapore Night Safari Park, August
swung off the BKE, U-turned back over the freeway on the bridge
that led to the safari park, and then reentered it going in the
opposite direction.

Tay knew that was it. August had come to the
end of his pitch. Now it was Tay’s turn.

***

Tay knew August well enough to understand
that now he was waiting for Tay’s response. And he would drive in
silence until they ran out of gas if it took that long for Tay to
give him one.

It didn’t take Tay nearly that long.

“I can’t do it, John.”

August nodded slightly, but he didn’t say
anything.

“Ferrero committed a premeditated murder here
in Singapore. I can’t just look the other way and let you kill him
to even the score. What kind of a policeman would that make
me?”

“You’ve done it before.”

Tay knew, of course, that eventually August
would get around to mentioning that.

“Only when there was no hope of getting
justice any other way,” Tay said. “This time there
is
hope.”

“No, there isn’t.”

“You don’t think I can find him and take him
down for Johnny’s murder?”

“Maybe you can and maybe you can’t. But that
still wouldn’t be justice.”

“Why not?”

“Because of the part I haven’t told you yet.
The part I didn’t want to tell you.”

Tay cocked his head and waited.

August scratched his nose and seemed to
reconsider for a moment. Then he gave a little shrug and just said
it.

“Vince Ferrero killed your father.”

***

They were just five simple words. Tay knew
what all of them meant. But arranged as they were in the sentence
August had just spoken, they made no sense to Tay.

“My father died of a heart attack,” he said
after a moment. “In Vietnam. Nearly forty years ago.”