Sleuths (15 page)

I hailed one of the H.C.S. taxis that roam the streets of Singapore in droves. The driver, a bearded Sikh, did not ask any questions when I told him where we wanted to go, even though he wouldn't get many fares to the remote Jurong section of the island that I named. There was nothing much out there but mangrove swamps and a few native fishing
kampongs.

It was nearly eleven when he turned onto Kelang Bahru Road, leading toward the abandoned airstrip, Mikko Field. The moon was up and nearly full, lighting the road brightly enough so that you could have driven it without headlights.

When we neared the access road to the strip, the Sikh slowed and asked, "Do you wish me to drive to the field, sahib? The road is very bad."

"Go in as far as you can," I told him. "We'll walk the rest of the way."

He made the turn onto the access road. It was chuck-holed and choked with tall grass and tangled vegetation. We crawled along for about a quarter mile. Finally, in the bright moonshine, I could see the long, rough runway, raised some ten feet on steep earth mounds from the mangrove jungle on both sides. At its upper end, to our left, were the decaying wooden outbuildings, and farther behind them, the broken-domed hangar. The airstrip had been deserted since the end of the Second World War. Few people remembered, or cared, that it hadn't yet rotted into extinction.

The Sikh brought the taxi to a stop. The road was mostly impassable from this point; the marsh grass was tall and thick, and parasitic vines and creepers and thorn bushes had encroached thickly in places.

I paid the Sikh, and Tina Kellogg and I stepped out. The night was alive with the buzzing hum of mosquitoes, midges, the big Malaysian cicadas. There was the heavy smell of decaying vegetation, of dampness from the rain.

The taxi backed around a jog in the road, its lights making filtered splashes through the mangroves. I stood looking toward the airstrip, listening to the throb of the engine as the Sikh got turned around and headed away.

Tina Kellogg had not spoken during the ride out. Now she said, "The runway doesn't seem very well maintained. Are you sure it'll be safe to take off?"

"You let me worry about that."

I took her arm and pushed ahead through the grass. We hadn't gone far when I heard the engine sound. Not the taxi's; that one had faded to silence. This was a new, different sound—the unmistakable whine of a four-cylinder engine held in low gear—and it was coming this way. Coming fast and without headlights; when I turned to look back, all I could see was moonlight and thick shadow.

"That's not the taxi," Tina Kellogg said. Her fingers bit urgently into my arm. "Who—?"

"I don't know, but I've got a good idea."

We both started to run. We had to stay on what was left of the road; the mangroves were a dense snarl of roots and underbrush, home of a hundred dangers including poisonous snakes. The oncoming car was very close now, and even though the grass was thick here, it wasn't tall enough to hide us. We were clearly visible in the bright moonglow.

Headlights stabbed on behind us; I heard the familiar pig squeal of brakes. A vine or creeper caught Tina's leg and she stumbled and fell. I hauled her up again, pulled her along to the left where the grass was thinner and there were more bushes to cast shadow. A hoarse shout cut through the insect hum. I half-expected a gun to start popping, too, but that didn't happen yet.

Ahead the road curled to the left, paralleling the airstrip and leading to the hangar and outbuildings. Vines and wildly tangled shrubs clogged it completely after forty or fifty yards. If we couldn't get through, we wouldn't stand a chance. And even if we could, needle-sharp thorns would shred clothing and skin, slow us down.

The only other way to the buildings was the runway. We'd be exposed up there, but no more than down here. And it was a straight line to the buildings, no more than seventy-five yards to the first of them. Find a hiding place over there and we'd have a better chance than floundering around in the jungle.

I plowed through underbrush and ground cover, half-dragging Tina along with me. Something ripped at my bare arms; something else brushed my face, whispering, cold. Then we were out of the bushes and at the base of the embankment. The mounded earth was a quagmire from the evening rain, but we managed to fight our way up onto the strip without losing balance. A gun cracked somewhere close behind us, but neither of us was hit.

"Run" I said to Tina.
"Off
to the left!"

We ran. Our muddied boots slapped wetly on the rough concrete. There was another shout, another pistol crack. I glanced back. Two men were scrambling up the embankment. A third stood in the headlamp beams of a small car slewed on the road where the taxi had let us off. He was doing the shouting. I couldn't see his face clearly, but I knew it was Van Rijk.

I turned my head, just in time to avoid stepping into a pothole and maybe breaking a leg. We were almost to the first of the outbuildings now. There were no more shots. They'd finally figured out that you can't shoot accurately while you're on the run.

The closest building was a long, low-roofed affair that had been used to quarter duty personnel. All the glass had been broken out of its windows years ago, and some of the side boarding had rotted or pulled away, leaving shadowed gaps like missing teeth. Off to one side was a smaller, ramshackle shed of some kind.

I steered Tina that way. We ran around the corner of the low-roofed building, along the side of the shed. At its rear, a jagged-edged hole above the foundation yawned black, like a small cave opening.

I pulled up, fighting breath into my lungs. "Through there!"

She obeyed instantly, dropping to her knees and scuttling through the hole. I followed close behind her.

Thin shafts of moonlight made a pale, irregular pattern on the debris-ridden floor inside. The shed was empty. It was close, humid in there—a pervasive heat like that in an orchid hothouse.

Tina's breath came in thick gasps. She crouched on her knees with her head lowered. I left her and crawled to the front of the shed. When I peered through one of the smaller gaps there, I had a full view of the airstrip and part of the access road beyond.

Two sets of headlights, one tight behind the other, were coming fast along the road. Seeing them eased a little of the tension in me. I could not see the portion of the road where Van Rijk and his car were, but the two
orang séwaan-séwaan,
on the runway and pounding toward the low-roofed building, had a good sidewise look at both Van Rijk and the oncoming cars. They pulled up and danced around some, then began running back the way they'd come.

"What is it?" Tina asked. She was beside me now, trying to peer out. "What's happening?"

The sounds of jamming brakes, doors slamming, men shouting carried to us on the still night air. I said, "The
polis
are here."

"The polis?"

Van Rijk's men were dancing around again, over at the edge of the strip. One of them went into a crouch and fired a round toward the glaring headlights. In response I heard a short, sharp burst from an automatic weapon. The man fell sprawling. The other one veered to his right and disappeared onto the embankment. A few seconds later there was another chattering burst, two pistol shots, a third burst. After that, silence.

I turned away from the opening. "It's all over now," I said.

Tina's fingers bit into my arm. "The plane!" she breathed. "There might still be time to reach the plane, get away . . ."

"There isn't any plane."

"What? I . . . I don't understand . . ."

"There's no plane here. Hasn't been one here in a long time."

She stared at me. Her face was shadowed and I couldn't see her eyes. I didn't see the movement of her hand, either, until it was too late to stop her from reaching under her bush jacket and drawing the automatic she'd had tucked into her belt. A shaft of pale moonlight glinted off the surface of its barrel. Small caliber automatic aimed right at my belly.

I said, "Is that the gun you shot La Croix with? After you tortured him?"

She leaned forward slightly, and I could see her face then. It was as cold and hard as white jade. "All right," she said. "So you know."

"I've known since this afternoon," I said. "It was a nice little act you put on, but I didn't believe it last night and I saw all the way through it at the
godown.
You said your mythical informant told you I keep a DC-3 out here. But damn few people knew it when I did keep one, for obvious reasons. My former partner was one and he's dead. Another is a German named Heinrich and he's serving ten years in a Djakarta prison. The only man you could've gotten the information from was La Croix."

Nothing from her. The gun was steady in her hand.

"After I finished work this afternoon, I went down to the government precinct and talked to a
polis
inspector Tiong. He did some checking with the Canadian consulate. They never heard of a Luzon import-export dealer named Kellogg, or a Tina Kellogg. But the American consulate has a record of one Tanya Kasten. So does Interpol, because of the art theft you were implicated in last year in Amsterdam. Is that where you met or got put in touch with Van Rijk, Tanya?"

"A trap. All a damn trap."

"That's right. To catch you with the
Burong Chabak.
Tiong figured you were in on the theft, found La Croix before Van Rijk did, and got it from him. But I don't think you did get it. No luggage, no figurine. What happened? You lose your temper and kill him too soon?"

"Shut up," she spat at me.

"I think La Croix hid the figurine out here. You think so, too. And you think I know where. If Van Rijk hadn't been trailing me tonight and started his boys shooting at us, you'd have thrown down on me as soon as we reached the hangar."

"You do know where he hid it, don't you? All right. You're going to take me to it, right now."

"Don't be a fool. Tiong and his men will be here pretty quick. You can't get past them."

"
We'll
get past them," she said. "With the figurine."

"If you're thinking about using me as a hostage, you can forget it. The law doesn't give a damn about me."

"We'll see about that."

"No," I said, "we won't."

She made an impatient gesture with the gun—just what I wanted her to do. I swept my left hand out and up, palm open and driving against her hand and the automatic's barrel, knocking them upward. There was a crack and a flash as the gun went off; I felt heat along my forearm, but the bullet thudded somewhere into the shed's roof. I caught her wrist with my right hand, pressured it until she cried out in pain. The weapon fell thudding to the floor.

I picked it up, sliding back away from her. She stayed put, holding her wrist and cursing me steadily and bitterly. I tucked the automatic into my belt, moved to the jagged wall opening, and squeezed through it backward. Outside I stood and went to where I could see the airstrip.

Half a dozen men were fanned out and closing in on the runway, one of them brandishing an automatic weapon, the others with drawn pistols. Inspector Kok Chin Tiong was in the lead. I stepped out of the shadows into the moonlight, my hands up in plain sight.

Tiong was out of breath as he came running up. "You are all right, Mr. Connell?"

"Yeah."

"The woman?"

"In the shed. I don't think she'll give you any trouble." Tiong said something in Malay and two of his officers went to take Tanya Kasten into custody.

I asked, "What about Van Rijk?"

"Shackled and under guard," Tiong said. "The other two are dead."

"You could've been saying the same about me. You took your sweet time getting here."

He smiled faintly. "At the Esplanade we saw that Van Rijk was following you."

"So you decided to nab him along with the woman. But did you have to give him such a bloody big lead?"

"We did not wish him to realize that he, too, was being followed," Tiong said. "Now, Mr. Connell. The
Burong Chabak
."

I'd told him that I had a pretty good idea where La Croix had stashed it—a drop point we'd used in my black market days, where he'd leave cash for me when I brought in a shipment of contraband. I led Tiong to the rear of the hangar, between its back wall and two big, corroded tanks that had once been used for the storage of airplane fuel. Set into the ground there was a wooden box housing regulator valves for the airstrip's water supply.

The
Burong Chabak
was inside the box, all right, wrapped in chamois and canvas and tied with string.

I had my first clear look at the figurine later that night, in Tiong's office. It was very old and beautifully carved in intricate detail, depicting a nightbird—a
burong chabak—
in full flight, wings spread, head extended as if into the wind. The bird itself was of white jade, the purest, most valuable of all jade; the squarish pedestal upon which it rested was of the dark green variety.

"Is it not beautiful?" Tiong asked.

I didn't agree with him. It looked and felt cold to me—as cold as Tanya Kasten's face in the moonlit shed.