Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (4 page)

“What hospital is this?” Tay interrupted.

“Changi General.”

“By the airport?”

“Yes, sir. Mount Elizabeth was evacuated
after the explosions and Singapore General and National University
were both full, so…” Kang shrugged. “It’s a good hospital,
sir.”

One hospital closed, two others full?

Tay took a deep breath. “Tell me about it,
Sergeant. Tell me what happened. Tell me everything you know.”

So Kang did.

***

There had been four explosions altogether.
The first three were the ones Tay had heard standing in his garden.
The fourth was the one that got him.

As the police had reconstructed events,
around 7:45 pm on Wednesday night, two white, Mitsubishi L300 panel
vans had driven south on Scotts Road from Newton Circus, one
immediately in front of the other. At exactly the same time, a
third identical Mitsubishi van had entered Orchard Road from the
west, coming from the direction of the Botanic Garden.

No one paid much attention to any of the
vehicles. They were ordinary-looking Mitsubishi vans, identical to
the hundreds of other similar vans that plied Singapore’s streets
most every day. There was simply nothing memorable about them.

The few witnesses police could find who might
have remembered the vans at all described the drivers in widely
varying ways. Young, dark, and ordinary were the three words
witnesses used most often, but none of the descriptions were
particularly helpful. The only thing on which almost everyone
agreed was there had been no one visible in any of the vans except
the drivers, although one elderly Chinese man had firmly insisted
he had seen a second man in the front seat of the van heading for
the Hilton.

The lead van of the two driving southbound on
Scotts Road turned into the driveway of the Grand Hyatt, drove
straight up to the hotel’s entrance and stopped as if it were there
to unload the luggage of some tour group recently arrived from the
airport. The second van continued to the Marriott, which was just
next door to the Hyatt. When it turned off Scotts Road into the
Marriott’s driveway, it politely waited for a small band of
blue-uniformed schoolgirls to cross, then pulled up a little
further and halted in front of the Crossroads Bar. The Crossroads
Bar was about the closest thing Singapore could muster to a genuine
Parisian-style sidewalk cafe and it was a popular place. On this
evening, as on most, it was jammed full of both locals and visitors
who had gathered in the warm, liquid Singaporean dusk to enjoy a
beer or two.

The third van turned off Orchard Road into
the Hilton’s driveway. It stopped under the hotel’s front portico
and the driver cut the engine. It was only about two hundred yards
west of the Hyatt and the Marriott.

Less than a minute later, the vans parked in
front of the Marriott’s Crossroads Bar and the entrance to the
Grand Hyatt exploded almost simultaneously. And a few second after
that, the van parked at the Hilton exploded.

The explosive mechanism in all three vans was
the same: a commercial grade gel explosive called Tovex enhanced
with gas, probably bottled propane. The bombs had been constructed
inside of layers of marble in order to direct the maximum force of
the blasts directly upward into the structure of each hotel. They
weren’t particularly sophisticated devices — not much different
from the truck bomb that destroyed the American Marine Corps
barracks in Beirut almost thirty years before — but they were still
extraordinarily lethal.

The positioning of the three bombs and the
use of the marble slabs to direct the blasts had been almost
perfect. The explosions cracked the Marriott like an egg, peeled
the front off the Grand Hyatt, and gutted the Hilton. The
intersection of Orchard and Scotts Roads disappeared in a cloud of
smoke and a storm of debris.

The fourth explosion didn’t occur for another
ninety minutes, not until hundreds of civilian and military
personnel had gathered in the area and were clawing desperately at
the rubble in an ultimately futile search for survivors. That
explosion, too, originated in a Mitsubishi L300 panel van, but this
van had been parked for some time in the loading dock just
underneath the ION Orchard shopping mall. That blast travelled
upward just as the explosions at the three hotels had. For hundreds
of yards around, it turned the debris from the hotel blasts into a
lethal tornado that shredded whatever human flesh it
encountered.

***

“Who did it?” Tay asked.

Kang took a deep breath and let it out again.
“We don’t know, sir.”

“No claims of responsibility yet?”

“No, sir. None.”

Why would anybody have wanted to set off
four truck bombs in Singapore?
Tay asked himself.
What had
his tiny little country done to anyone that would cause them to
retaliate against innocent people just going about their daily
business?

Well, he knew the answer to that. Nothing.
Singapore had done nothing.

No country was safe anymore. Not even an
insignificant place like Singapore.

“Who’s in charge of the investigation?”

“The Commissioner of Police.”

Tay looked at Kang in surprise. “Really?”

“I’m not sure, sir. That’s the official
story, but I know it’s probably not true.”

The security establishment in Singapore was
ferociously efficient and the police were only the visible part of
it. The police force was a part of the Ministry of Home Affairs,
but the really heavy hitter was another part of the Ministry of
Home Affairs called the Internal Security Division. ISD was
officially acknowledged to exist, but that was about all the public
knew of it. It didn’t even appear in the Singapore Government
Directory. Officially, ISD’s job was to collect intelligence and
protect Singapore against threats to its internal security like
espionage, terrorism, and subversion of all kinds. Unofficially,
ISD was a sort of Singaporean secret police.

“What are you telling me?” Tay asked. “That
ISD is running the investigation and we’re fetching coffee?”

Kang looked uncomfortable. He was a good
policeman, but candid discussions of how power was actually wielded
in the tiny island state made him uneasy. They made most
Singaporeans uneasy.

“I’m not sure, sir. Maybe you’d better ask
the chief.”

Tay said nothing. He was sure he would be
doing that soon enough, of course, but right at the moment he was
so tired he couldn’t turn thoughts into words anymore. He closed
his eyes, just for a moment, and almost immediately he was fast
asleep.

One minute he was talking to Kang and then
the next minute he wasn’t. His last thought before he slipped into
oblivion was that he should have thanked Sergeant Kang for coming
to the hospital to see him. But he hadn’t.

TAY’S DOCTOR WAS an Indian whose name was
Gupta. He and Tay argued every day until Tay finally badgered Dr.
Gupta into letting him check out of the hospital.

Tay kept telling Gupta he felt fine and that
his hearing had come back and was perfectly normal now, but Gupta
lectured him on the hidden effects of head injuries and refused to
release him. Gupta would have kept him there even longer, Tay was
certain, but he was such an obnoxious patient the hospital wanted
to get rid of him just as soon as they were absolutely certain it
wouldn’t kill him.

The hospital had insisted Tay call a friend
to take him home, but he told them he didn’t have any friends. He
noticed they didn’t seem surprised. Eventually they gave up arguing
with him and just called him a taxi.

Dr. Gupta equipped Tay with a bag of
medications and gave him so many different instructions for taking
them that Tay didn’t even try to remember what they all were. As
soon as he got into the taxi, he just chucked the whole bag out the
window without bothering to look inside.

***

Tay knew what little food he had in the house
would probably be spoiled by now and he had no cigarettes at all.
The ones that had been in his pocket were gone, doubtless seized by
the hospital and destroyed specifically to make his life more
difficult. He told the taxi driver to take him to the Cold Storage
market in Centrepoint on lower Orchard Road where he usually bought
his food and his cigarettes so he could get enough stuff to tide
him over for a few days.

“Closed,” the driver said.

Tay looked at his watch. It was only a little
after five. A supermarket wouldn’t be closed at five o’clock, would
it?

“Cold Storage is closed?” Tay asked, thinking
he must have misunderstood somehow.

“Don’t know. But Orchard Road closed.”

Tay struggled to get his mind around that.
How could one of the city’s major thoroughfares be closed?

“Orchard shut down from Napier Road all the
way to Queen Street because of the bombs,” the driver went on. He
twisted around and regarded Tay suspiciously. “Where you been?”

Where had he been, indeed?

“Just get me as close to Centrepoint as you
can,” he told the driver.

Then he leaned his head back against the seat
and closed his eyes.

***

About twenty minutes later, the taxi stopped
on Penang Road next to Istana Park. Tay paid the driver and walked
across the small park to Orchard Road. Sure enough, the roadway was
deserted.

About a half mile to the west he could see
heavy equipment and vehicles scattered in the road among piles of
debris and building materials. The gathering didn’t appear
particularly sinister. It just looked like somebody was building
another of the huge shopping malls for which Singapore was famous
and had for some unaccountable reason decided to position it right
in the middle of the intersection of Orchard and Scotts Roads.

Where Tay was, nothing moved except for the
occasional pedestrian scurrying to cross Orchard Road as if it were
a place they didn’t want to be caught out in the open. Tay just
stood there and looked both ways in utter amazement. Traffic lanes
that were normally jammed with cars, buses, and trucks no matter
the time of the day or night were now utterly deserted. He thought
if he lived to be a hundred — and right at the moment that concept
sounded particularly unlikely to him — he knew he would never see
anything like that again.

It was only a short walk up Orchard to
Centrepoint and Tay was relieved to find the Cold Storage Market
was open. There was something about the market that never failed to
lend him comfort, and comfort was something that was in short
supply right about then. He liked the wide, clean aisles,
shimmering in the blindingly white florescent light, but most of
all he loved the orderliness of everything. It was almost enough to
convince him there was planning and purpose in the world, and that
we lived in a rational and logical universe after all. Almost.

He bought coffee, a bag of bagels, cream
cheese, a few frozen dinners, and two pints of Ben & Jerry’s
Cherry Garcia. Then, seized by a sudden fit of nutritional guilt,
he tossed four apples and a bag of dried mangos into his basket,
too. At the check-out counter he added six boxes of Marlboro Reds,
which was the real reason he had gone to the market in the first
place, and asked the cashier to give him several of the packs of
matches he saw tucked into the bottom of the rack below the
cigarettes. He could find a restaurant somewhere if he got hungry,
but he hadn’t had a cigarette in over a week. Priorities were
priorities.

***

Tay’s house in Emerald Hill Road was just
around the corner from the market so he was home in a few minutes.
He took the shopping bag into the kitchen and fished out all six
boxes of Marlboros and the matches. He thought about unpacking the
other things he had bought, but he couldn’t be bothered so he
shoved the entire shopping bag into the refrigerator and took one
of the boxes of Marlboros and a pack of matches outside to his
little garden.

Stretching out on a teak lounge chair, he
shook out a cigarette and lit it. The first puff was harsh and
bitter and for just a moment Tay thought about throwing the
cigarette away. But then the rush of the nicotine hit him and he
couldn’t imagine why he would even consider doing something
ridiculous like that.

Tay finished the first cigarette and
immediately lit another. For a long while, he sat and he smoked and
thought about what he knew about the attack. And what he didn’t
know.

***

Four large and sophisticated truck bombs. A
meticulously coordinated operation. No claims of responsibility. No
obvious motive.

The investigation was going to be a shit
storm. ISD had no doubt already taken control and Tay imagined he
and his fellow police officers would soon be reduced to running
errands and fetching coffee for the people doing the real work of
finding the bombers. Worse, the Americans would be right in the
middle of everything, no doubt trying to take over the
investigation themselves. Three American hotels reduced to rubble?
The American embassy and the FBI would have already decided it was
their case to solve.

Americans seemed to think terrorism anywhere
in the world was their personal territory. The last time Tay had a
case in which the Americans had an interest, they had decided that
was terrorism as well; and it all had been a bloody mess. His boss
had wanted to give the Americans the case and walk away, but Tay
knew the Americans would sweep it under a rug if they got control
of it and he wasn’t about to let that happen. Eventually he had
found a way to serve up a little justice in spite of the politics
involved, Tay remembered with a good deal of satisfaction. Not many
people knew Tay had been personally responsible for what had
happened, thank heaven. But
he
knew, and that was all that
mattered.