Flight Path: A Wright & Tran Novel (23 page)

Changi Airport, Singapore. Thursday 26
th
November.

Passport control, baggag
e
reclaim and customs were uneventful and Jacob followed Thierry out to the waiting faces of a large crowd standing along the edge of a wide walkway. Jacob had always considered the passage through waiting crowds at an airport arrivals a strange experience. Even when he knew there was no one waiting for him he couldn’t help but look at the faces and read the printed names on cards. Just in case. This time, although he knew someone was waiting, he still had no reason to scan the faces or read the cards. He wouldn’t be recognising anyone. So he didn’t try. Instead he watched Thierry and saw him give a subtle nod to a pair of smartly dressed, middle-aged, Asian men near the end of the greeting line. Both men walked towards the exit door at the furthest corner of the terminal building. Jacob followed them, and Thierry, outside.

The wall of heat and humidity hit him like a physical blow. There was a smell that he couldn’t identify. It somehow reminded him of smoke, but he could taste it, like a bitter-sweet heaviness in the air. By the time he walked the modest distance to the short-term parking and the silver Nissan Teana the two Asian men were standing beside, he was drenched in sweat. He remembered the heat of Kandahar and Basra, but it had never felt this oppressive. A weight of hot dampness was pressing down on him. He looked across at Thierry, who had removed his heavy sweater on the plane. He may well have escorted lots on this journey, but the big Frenchman’s face was beaded with perspiration and dark stains were already showing under his arms.

The man on the driver’s side, dressed in a business suit that Jacob thought would have melted him to a puddle had he been wearing it, leant in and released the boot catch.

“Put your bags in there Jacob, then get in the back please,” he said in an accent that surprised Jacob as much as the man’s ability to wear a shirt, tie and jacket in this climate. There was no trace of Chinese, or other stereotypical Asian pronunciation. The man spoke like he had been born and raised in Surrey, or Hampshire.

The other man, on the passenger side of the car, who also wore a suit but with no tie, held the rear door open for him. Jacob did as he was asked. Outside, he could hear the driver speaking to Thierry in French. He twisted around and saw Thierry hand over a single piece of paper. There were a few more words in French then Thierry walked over to a taxi rank on the other side of the road. Jacob guessed that his part in this was over.

The driver got in and turned to face him. “Good afternoon Jacob. My name is Gerard and this,” he held his hand towards the passenger who was just taking his own seat, “is Lim. You will be staying with us for a short time. Then I shall accompany you on your next flight.”

“When will that be?”

“Tomorrow morning, very early. We shall be back at the airport by ten tonight.”

“Can I ask where we’ll be going?”

Gerard just smiled, “All in good time. What I would like you to do now is two things. In the door compartment next to you is a black hood. Do you see it?”

Jacob held the heavy cotton material up.

“Good. Now I’d like you to lie down on the back seat and slip that hood over your head, if you would be so kind.”

Jacob considered it the most polite and potentially most threatening thing ever said to him. He stared back at Gerard, who must have easily read the astonishment on his face.

“I assure you, my dear chap, you are in no danger. We are simply the latest steps on the Flight Path. It is a necessity that we keep things as isolated as possible. There are only a few links, like our French friend there,” he gestured in the direction of the taxi rank, “who know people at either end of a step. Even then it is limited. I do not know his name, he does not know mine. But, the men who pass from one end of the Path to the other, men like you, get to see all of us. We need to have safeguards if we can. One such safeguard is that you do not know where you will be staying for the next few hours. It is safer for everyone. Do you understand?”

“Right, of course. That’s a good idea. Much safer.”

“Good. I am glad you agree. Hood on then, and lie down please. I shall turn the air conditioning up to full so you will be more comfortable.”

In reaching up to slip the material over his head, Jacob managed to get a quick glimpse of his wristwatch. It was 16:10. The car pulled away, but never having been to Singapore, he had no concept of a mental map to refer to. The little he knew of the place was the circumstances of its surrender in the Second World War, the fact it once had an RAF base and that there was a bar called Raffles; somewhere.

He decided to start a count of lefts and rights, but other than the initial right turn out of the car park and another long sweeping right-hander that Jacob reckoned felt like an on-ramp to a major highway, the rest of the journey, for a long time, was without any noticeable deviations. Eventually, the car decelerated and stopped. He heard the tell-tale ticking of an indicator and the noise of other cars around him. ‘Traffic lights’ he thought and then the car moved off again, turned right, drove a short distance, turned right again, stayed straight for another few minutes, and went up a considerable incline. As it levelled out, it took a pair of left turns in quick succession then slowed and stopped, before reversing back and left. He felt the bump of the wheels as the car mounted a low kerb, heard the handbrake being applied, the engine switched off and sensed Gerard and Lim step out of the car. The rear door was opened and a hand was placed on his arm.

“Now, Jacob, please keep your hood on, but sit up and shuffle this way,” Gerard said and helped him out. He was guided forward, told to step up and guided forward again. He immediately felt the coolness of air-conditioning. He heard a door close behind him and the hood was removed.

Blinking rapidly, he ran his hands through his hair. His wristwatch told him it was twenty-seven minutes since he had put the hood on. He considered the information he had gained about the journey was likely worthless.

As his eyes adjusted he could see he was standing in a small open plan living area with two steps leading up to a kitchen on his left, a dining table with six chairs to his front and a lounge area with a red leather sofa and matching armchairs, two steps down to his right. A coffee table was in front of the sofa and triangularly offset was a low television unit on top of which was a flat-screen TV that Jacob thought was twice as big as the room needed. Other than it, an electric kettle that sat on the kitchen bench, and a white fridge jammed into the corner next to the sink, he noted a lack of any other appliances, pictures or ornaments. The three windows, one for each section of the space, looked out onto what he assumed was a high-walled courtyard. He could hear nothing of interest and neither could he smell the tang he had at the airport. He felt a waft of cool air pass across his head and looking up, saw two air-conditioning vents in the ceiling.

Lim and Gerard, both standing behind him swapped a few sentences in what Jacob assumed was Chinese. He turned to see Lim carrying the suitcase and backpack up a flight of stairs that rose from the right hand side of a small hallway.

“Come, Jacob,” Gerard said with a sweep of his hands towards the stairs, “I will show you your room. I am sure you are tired and would like to have a shower, then some rest perhaps?”

Jacob was suddenly aware of how tired he was. He hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep since before Amsterdam and a flight to the other side of the world hadn’t helped. He nodded and followed behind Lim.

The room he was shown into had a double bed, a single bedside cabinet with a lamp and, like downstairs, no ornaments nor pictures. It did have a window that was shuttered on the inside and secured with a padlock in the same manner as the room in Paris had been.

“The bathroom is shared, I am afraid, but please, feel free to use it first. Lim and I shall prepare some food. Do you care for pizza?”

Again Jacob’s surprise must have been evident in his expression. Gerard gave a discrete, polite laugh, “You thought maybe I would offer you some noodles, or rice, or fish head curry?”

“I... well, I…”

“Come, come now Jacob. I am not offended, but I find that our western guests need carbohydrates and familiarity after they have endured the rigours of a long-haul flight. We have Dominos, just like in the UK, so what would you like, Hawaiian, chicken, peperoni?”

“Umm, peperoni would be great,” Jacob said, still struggling with the weirdly amusing prospect of being in a tropical Asian paradise and getting a fast-food pizza delivered like he would in Essex.

“And to drink?”

“A Sprite?”

“Very good. I will make the arrangements. Now, before we eat you must shower, change and relax. Get out of those heavy jeans and put on something cooler, but first, I need you to give me your wallet and passport, if you would be so kind.”

Jacob didn’t hesitate. He reached both over and Gerard put the passport and the contents of the wallet, except for the picture of the woman, into his own jacket pocket. From the drawer of the bedside cabinet he took an envelope and handed it and the wallet to Jacob. “This is your new identity. There are also some Singaporean dollars. Just enough to look like you have been here for a while. Lastly, the backstory that you will need to know. I’d like you to read it and be familiar with it please. Now wash, change and rest. I will call you once we are ready to eat.” Gerard turned and ushered Lim out of the room.

Jacob opened the envelope to find a similar collection of items to the ones he had been handed in Paris, but with enough differences to lose Jacob London for ever and introduce Jacob Poole.

His passport was Canadian. His driving license, still from the UK, but the address had shifted to Clacton-on-Sea and Maple Road had morphed into Maple Close. His date of birth was the same, but now he had a Boots Advantage Card, an Air Canada loyalty card called ‘Aeroplan’, one credit card and three other bank cards. The last item was a single sheet of paper that transformed Shu Ying Tan, his girlfriend of one year, into Audrey Huang, his fiancée of two years. She was English and he had met her when she worked in London for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. Now, she was temporarily working in Hong Kong and he had come out to visit her in a block of apartments on Tai Man Street in somewhere called the Chai Wan district. Jacob had less clue about Hong Kong than he had about Singapore, but at least he knew where he was headed next. Not that the information was of any use to him. He had resigned himself to the fact that he might well be screwed. Even if he could find a way to get a message back home once he found out his final destination, the chances of Tien and Kara being able to get there before he did were next to none.

Filling his wallet with the new cards and putting his passport away, he listened at the door to make sure both Gerard and Lim were downstairs. Recovering his washbag from his suitcase he quietly eased the bedroom door open and stepped cautiously into the landing. Any thought that the other rooms might have held secrets was dispelled immediately. There were two other bedrooms in the house and a bathroom with a toilet. All their doors were wide open. The other bedrooms were furnished and shuttered like his. The bathroom, stocked with fresh towels, shower gels, soaps and a new pack of disposable razors, also boasted a shuttered window. ‘Nothing to search if there’s nothing to hide,’ he thought, shutting the bathroom door and starting the shower.

ɸ

The Nissan pulled back out of the driveway and Jacob, once more hooded in the back seat, was happy in his own abilities as he managed to reverse plot the turns they had taken earlier in the day. As the car came down a sweeping left-hander, that he presumed would lead them off the major highway and back to the airport, Gerard told him he could sit up and remove the hood.

He checked his watch. Twenty two minutes this time. He figured the traffic, at what was now approaching ten at night, was less congested. In the almost six hours since he had left the airport, he had showered, changed, eaten pizza, fell asleep for a couple of hours, then showered again. In all that time Lim had said nothing directly to him and only a few sentences in Chinese to Gerard. Conversely, Gerard had been the politest host he could have wished for. He struggled to remind himself that this man was in every way as culpable as Rik, or the small man or Thierry. He and, the mostly silent, Lim, were paid to smuggle evil men out to a freedom they didn’t deserve. Yet the middle-aged man in the tailored suit, with the accent of an Eton school boy and the manners to match, neatly presented with trimmed black hair, conservatively cut, cleanly shaven and with no jewellery, could have passed for… Jacob wondered at just what Gerard could have passed for. He physically shuddered as clarity dawned on him. This man could have passed for almost anything. He was the trusted neighbour, friend, teacher, role-model that you wanted your children to be like. He was the man you’d let look after your kids when you were late home from work. Jacob understood that of all the men he had met so far, Gerard could well have been the most dangerous, because of his normality. He was shaken out of the darkening thoughts by a sudden realisation Gerard had been talking to him.

“I’m sorry, Gerard, what did you say?”