THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 4) (12 page)

Tay’s telephone began to buzz. He fished it out of his shirt pocket and looked at the screen. Kang.

“What have you got?” Tay asked.

“We’re in the Raffles Place MRT station, sir. She’s getting on a train.”

“Can you and Lee stay with her?”

“I don’t know, sir. We’ll try, but she may spot us. Neither one of us has much experience at this.”

“Have faith, Sergeant. Surely she doesn’t have any more experience at detecting surveillance then you have at doing it. Just don’t lose her.”

Tay disconnected the call and shoved the phone back in his pocket. He looked up in time to see they were coming up on the glass curtain walls of the ION Orchard Complex, still not completely rebuilt from the bombings. When he glanced back at the road ahead, he saw three blue Comfort taxis at different distances in front of them.

“Which one are we following?” Tay asked the driver.

“Right lane. Maybe one hundred feet in front.”

The traffic light at Paterson Hill Road changed from green to yellow and the taxi they were following accelerated through it. Then the light changed to red.

“Don’t slow down,” Tay snapped. “Run the light!”

The driver’s head began to rotate slowly toward Tay like a radar dish trying to fix on something unfamiliar and mystifying. Willfully disobeying the law was a foreign concept to every Singaporean, and Tay could see the man struggling to comprehend an instruction to do it.

“Run the fucking light! I’m the police!”

Disobeying the police was an even more foreign concept to every Singaporean.

The man floored the accelerator, slalomed between two buses, and shot through the intersection against the light. It was probably the most thrilling moment of his life.

The taxi they were following rolled along Orchard Boulevard. At the Camden Medical Centre, it turned right and headed north on Grange Road. Now they were moving away from the commercial district and nothing was in front of them but expensive apartments, even more expensive homes, and foreign embassy compounds. Did Suparman have wealthy supporters who had loaned him a house or an apartment to lie low in? That seemed unlikely, but Tay had seen stranger things.

Still heading north, the two taxis passed Tanglin Road, merged into Napier Road, and passed the American Embassy. The low-slung building was built out of giant blocks of stone that made the whole structure seem massively oversized. It sat well back from Napier Road atop a small, doubtless artificial rise and the grassy expanses surrounding it were a jangling contrast to its harshness of uncompromising gray stone structure. The American Embassy always reminded Tay of a cross between a Japanese warlord’s castle and the elephant house at a very prosperous zoo.

A minute or two later Tay saw the blue Comfort taxi slow and signal a left turn into Middlesex Road.

That’s strange,
Tay thought.
There’s nothing up there but…

Before Tay had even completed his thought, the taxi turned off Middlesex Road into the main entrance of the Australian High Commission and stopped at the security gate.

“Keep going, keep going!” Tay shouted at his driver. “Don’t slow down!”

The driver understood exactly what Tay meant and they rolled right on by Middlesex Road at a steady rate of speed. Just one more nondescript taxi plying the streets of Singapore.

As they passed the Australian High Commission, Tay watched the man he had been following get out of the taxi. He could see his face clearly now. The man was a Caucasian. He certainly wasn’t Suparman.

Tay swiveled his head as they passed and watched the man as he was quickly cleared to pass through the security gate. Obviously somebody who was well known at the Australian High Commission.

So who the hell
was
he? And, more to the point, why had he met Suparman’s sister outside the Temple Street Inn?

Oh, shit,
Tay thought.
What have I gotten myself into?

“TURN AROUND AND go back to Chinatown,” Tay told the taxi driver.

He pulled out his telephone and pushed the speed dial number for Kang. “Do you still have Suparman’s sister in sight?”

“Yes, sir. She got off the MTR at Farrer Park and took the steps up to Serangoon Road. She’s walking south now.”

“Has she spotted you?”

“I don’t think so. Linda…uh, Sergeant Lee got ahead of her on the other side of the street so I’ve dropped back now.”

“That sounds pretty slick.”

“It was Linda’s idea, sir. She’s really good at this.”

Tay lowered the telephone and leaned forward toward the cab driver. “Forget Chinatown. Take me to Serangoon Road.”

“What place on Serangoon Road?”

“I’ll tell you when we get there.”

“Sir? Sir? Are you still there?”

The tinny scratching of Kang’s voice from the telephone caused Tay to lift it back to his ear.

“Yes, I’m here, Robbie.”

“She turned off to the right on some side street and I lost sight of her, but Linda is coming back toward me now. Maybe Linda saw where she went.”

Tay listened to the murmur of conversation between Kang and Lee, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying.

“Sir?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Linda says Suparman’s sister went into the Fortuna Hotel. It’s over—”

“I know where it is.”

Tay was as familiar as he wanted to be with the neighborhood where the Fortuna Hotel was. He thought it didn’t have much to recommend it. It was…well, it wasn’t anything really. Block after block of old shophouses had been razed a decade or so back in a harebrained rush to modernize the city, and all that had been put in their place were new buildings of no particular design. These days that part of Serangoon Road wasn’t a real neighborhood at all, just a jumbled looking collection of unrelated buildings separated by empty lots and connected by mostly empty sidewalks. Serangoon Road carried a lot of traffic, but most of it was heading somewhere else as fast as it could.

“Just a minute, sir,” Kang said.

The sound of murmuring started up again and Tay waited.

“Linda says there’s a vegetarian restaurant on the other side of the street where we can watch the entrance to the hotel. What do you think?”

“Do it. Does the hotel have a back door?”

“I don’t know, sir. It must. Doesn’t everything in the world have a back door?”

Kang’s question raised a metaphysical issue Tay had no interest in pondering, at least not right then. So he kept his response simple and practical.

“One of you check the hotel for other exits.”

“Right, sir. Did you ID the man you followed? Was he Suparman?”

Tay hesitated. The story about following his man to the gate of the Australian High Commission was too strange to get into over the telephone, so he decided to keep it simple for now.

“No. Turned out to be just some guy.”

“Then we don’t—”

“I’m coming to you,” Tay interrupted. “We’re only a few minutes away.” He broke the connection before Kang could say anything else.

Did ISD lie to him about Suparman’s sister being sick, or did someone lie to ISD about it? And who was the man she met outside the Temple Street Inn? He could only enter the Australian High Commission as quickly and easily as Tay saw him enter it if he were someone who worked there. And it was probably safe to assume he didn’t handle visa applications. If he was working on the street and involved in counterterrorism operations, he had to be either a cop or a spook.

So why was some Australian who was either a cop or a spook meeting with the sister of one of the world’s most wanted terrorists? And Tay thought he had seen the man give her something. If he had given her something, what in the world could it have been?

Tay was sure he could detect the unmistakable odor of a set-up. But, if it was a set-up, that raised a much harder question.

Who
exactly was being set up, and by whom?

Tay remembered a poker player’s maxim he had heard somewhere once.
Look at the other players at the table
, the saying went,
and figure out who the sucker is. If you can’t, it’s you.

The taxi driver’s voice cut into Tay’s reflections. “Serangoon Road just up here.”

“Do you know the Fortuna Hotel?”

“I know.”

“Quickly, please.”

The driver looked at Tay over his shoulder and grinned. Then he slammed the accelerator to the floor.

Tay got out of the taxi across the road from the Fortuna Hotel, paid off the driver, and strolled slowly up the sidewalk to give himself enough time to look over the area.

The Fortuna Hotel was on the upper five floors of a reasonably modern six-story building facing Serangoon Road where it met Owen Road in a T-junction. A nondescript, four-story apartment building faced the hotel from the other side of Owen Road.

The ground floor of the hotel building was painted a dazzling shade of red in a vain effort to make it look more cheerful and the street-level space was entirely occupied by local businesses. There was a travel agency, a convenience store, a Western Union money transfer office, a fruit and vegetable stand, and a restaurant with a large sign in Arabic. The hotel lobby was also on Owen Road, but there wasn’t much to it. No doorman, no grand staircase, no decoration at all. Just a pair of glass doors tucked between the travel agency and the convenience store. The Fortuna Hotel looked like a respectable tourist hotel, but the Ritz-Carlton it wasn’t.

Just across Serangoon Road from the hotel and the apartment building a row of old shophouses had somehow survived. Some looked to be abandoned and some housed small shops, but in the middle of the row was an open-fronted restaurant with inexpensive metal tables and plastic chairs scattered around the cool dimness of its interior. The sign read,
The Vegetarian Restaurant
. Tay smiled at the admirably economical use of language and he decided that was where Sergeants Kang and Lee had to be waiting for him.

The table Lee and Kang had claimed offered a clear view across Serangoon Road to the entrance to the Fortuna Hotel.

“Is she still inside?” Tay asked as he walked up.

The metal folding chair was an unattractive shade of brown and when Tay pulled it out it scratched noisily across the cement floor.

“Yes, sir. The only exit other than the lobby door is right there.”

Tay sat down and looked where Kang was pointing across Serangoon Road.

“See that gray metal door next to the Western Union office? It’s some sort of emergency exit from the hotel. There’re no exits on the other side of the building at all.”

Tay nodded.

“What do you want to do, sir?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

Tay picked up a menu lying on the table. It was torn and stained and altogether unappealing. He was hungry, but what did you order in a vegetarian restaurant? A plate of green beans? Kang had nothing in front of him except a bottle of Coca-Cola and Lee had only a bottle of water. Perhaps that answered his question right there.

An Indian-looking woman in a maroon sari materialized beside the table and looked hopefully at Tay. She was very short, not even five feet in height, and had the wizened, deeply lined face of someone who had lived through a great deal. Tay didn’t have the heart to tell her he didn’t want any food so he picked something at random on the menu and pointed to it. Then he pointed to the Coca-Cola in front of Kang. The woman remained expressionless, but she nodded and walked away.

“Shouldn’t we call this in now, sir?” Kang asked.

“Call in what?”

“We should tell ISD the sister is here now.” Kang pointed unnecessarily at the Fortuna Hotel to indicate what he was talking about. “They think she’s at the Temple Street Inn, but she’s not.”

“Forget it. We’re not here, remember?”

“But, sir—”

“Besides, Sergeant, have you forgotten the radio is back in that building from which we were watching the inn, the one where we weren’t supposed to be? So even if I agreed with you that we should contact Mr. Goh, how would you propose we do that? Perhaps telephone ISD and leave a message for him?”

Kang didn’t say anything, but he didn’t look happy.

“We are on our own here, Sergeant. We either figure out what to do, or we eat some broccoli and go home.”

The woman in the maroon sari returned just then and plunked down in front of Tay a bottle of Coca-Cola and a blue plastic plate. The plate had something on it that was long and flat and looked brown and slimy.

What in God’s name had he ordered?

It certainly wasn’t broccoli or even green beans, which were the only two vegetables that came readily to mind. Tay tried to remember which line he had pointed to on the menu so maybe Lee could explain to him what he ordered, but he couldn’t remember.

At least the Coca-Cola looked safe enough. He took out a handkerchief, wiped the mouth of the bottle, and took a long pull.

It was warm.

THE MOMENT SHE saw the woman walking toward her on Serangoon Road, she was pretty sure it was the rabbit.

She picked up her phone, scrolled through the photographs, and glanced back and forth between the phone and the woman. She didn’t have much doubt, and when the woman turned on Owen Road and pushed through the glass doors into the lobby of the Fortuna Hotel, she had no doubt at all.

But what was going on? Her people were supposed to have eyes on the woman and give her a heads up when she headed this way. Did she give them the slip somehow? Or was something else going on, something she didn’t quite yet understand.

And where the hell was the target? Maybe he was already inside the hotel. She was certain she hadn’t seen him go in, absolutely certain, but it was possible he got past her. She couldn’t keep her eyes on those doors twenty-four hours a day. She was good, but nobody was
that
good. It would have been lousy luck for the target to walk into the hotel when she was in the toilet or napping, but was it possible? Of course it was possible. Every operation came with a little bit of lousy luck. Perhaps this was hers.