Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (5 page)

Perhaps this time it would be different, he
told himself. This was too big, too brutal. It was a direct attack
on Singapore, so this time it
had
to be different, didn’t
it? This time his boss wouldn’t let people walk all over Tay and
his fellow policemen. Not ISD, and certainly not a bunch of
Americans with no last names.

Tay told himself that with all the conviction
he could muster. There was even, he honestly thought, at least some
remote possibility he might be right.

Tay smoked quietly and looked around his
garden. The brick pavers were littered with pieces of plant debris.
Several huge, flat leaves had broken off his banana trees and hung
grotesquely from their stalks. There must have been a storm while
he slept in the hospital, Tay thought. He wondered why Kang hadn’t
mentioned it.

It occurred to Tay then that he was in the
same spot where he had been when everything had begun, at least for
him. He had been in this very spot in his garden when he heard the
sounds he couldn’t identify, the sounds that turned out to be the
three huge truck bombs obliterating the Marriott, the Hyatt, and
the Hilton.

And now he was back in the same place and,
but for some broken limbs and scattered leaves, everything was
exactly the same for him now as it had been then.

Except, of course, it wasn’t.

Things would never be the same again for
anyone in Singapore.

***

Tay didn’t go inside until it was dark. When
he finally did, he searched through the kitchen cabinets until he
found a bottle of Bushmills he remembered he had and an unopened
bottle of mineral water. He poured a couple of fingers of each into
a glass, then he took the glass into the living room with him,
settled into a brown leather club chair, and lit another
cigarette.

He sat like that for a long time, sipping the
whiskey and smoking, and when he was finished he went to bed.

***

Tay had no idea what time it was when he
eventually slipped off to sleep, but he woke in the night to the
sound of rain splashing against his windows and bouncing off the
brick pavers in his garden.

He had just had that dream again.

There had been lights. There were always
lights. They swirled in the air likes pieces of a shattered mirror
propelled by a whirlwind. And his mother had spoken to him from
somewhere outside in the rain.

It was a dream he had had several times since
his mother died, but when he woke he could never remember what she
had said to him. Nothing good, he imagined. His mother had never
been happy with his career choice and after he became a policeman
she gradually seemed to lose interest in him altogether. After she
moved to New York and remarried, he seldom heard from her at all,
but to be fair she seldom heard from him either. Over the last
fifteen or twenty years they had just gradually slipped out of each
other’s lives. It seemed impossible that a man could lose track of
his mother, or a mother could lose track of her son, but that was
exactly what had happened.

Tay figured he and his mother had
communicated more in his dreams over the last year than they had in
life during all of the twenty years that had come before. The only
problem was, when he woke from his dreams, he could not for the
life of him remember what it was they had communicated
about
.

Tay hoped, at the very least, he had finally
said some of the things he should have said to his mother before
she died, some of the things he knew now he had wanted to say to
her all along. It was a phenomenon he found himself experiencing
more and more often recently. People kept dying before Tay could
tell them the things he wanted to tell them. The older he got, the
more distant his connections to the world became, and the more
people there were whom he knew he had failed to communicate with as
well as he should.

A progression like that, Tay knew, did not
bode particularly well for his future.

THE NEXT MORNING Tay was in his office at the
Police Cantonment Complex before seven. He had never been in his
office at seven before and he was mildly surprised to see it looked
pretty much the same as it did around ten when he ordinarily turned
up.

Actually, everything in the CID offices at
the Cantonment Complex looked pretty much like it always did, and
Tay couldn’t understand that either. He wasn’t sure what he
expected to find. People running around and shouting, perhaps;
telephones ringing everywhere, certainly; handheld radios crackling
with static, maybe. But he found none of these things. The whole
Cantonment Complex was quiet, almost sleepy. If Tay hadn’t known
better, he would have sworn nothing of any interest to the police
could possibly have occurred in Singapore in weeks, perhaps even in
months.

Sergeant Kang hadn’t arrived yet, and Tay
wasn’t sure what he was going to do with himself until somebody
brought him up to date on the state of the investigation into the
bombings, so he headed straight upstairs to report to the Senior
Assistant Commissioner who commanded CID. That was jumping the
chain of command a little — the usual thing to do would have been
to go first to his immediate superior, the Officer in Charge of the
Special Investigation Section — but the OC wasn’t in his office and
the sooner Tay announced to somebody he was ready to go back to
work, the sooner he would
be
back at work tracking down the
bombers.

The SAC’s office was on sixteen, one floor
above Tay’s. Too impatient to wait for the elevator, Tay took the
stairs. The reception area was deserted so he walked straight to
the inner door that led to the SAC’s office and knocked. He heard
no response, so he knocked again and tried the door. When it
opened, he leaned in and saw the SAC’s office was empty, too.

What the hell was going on here?

Tay thought about going back to his own
office until everyone else turned up, but the only files he had
been working on before the bombings were matters that now seemed
utterly inconsequential. How could he waste time investigating a
policeman who had presumably groped a schoolgirl on a bus or a hit
and run that may or may not have involved a minor politician when
the heart of the city’s tourist district lay in ruins and hundreds
of dead bodies were piled up somewhere? It was unseemly.

Not being able to think of anything more
productive to do, Tay sat down in one of the blue upholstered
chairs in the SAC’s reception area to wait. The chair was as
uncomfortable as it looked and he shifted his weight around trying
to find a way to sit that didn’t hurt something. He would really
have liked a cigarette right then, but even the thought of smoking
in police headquarters was about as alien to him as trying to
imagine Sergeant Kang having sex. He looked at his watch and was
just trying to make up his mind how long to wait when the SAC’s
secretary came in.

“Why, Inspector Tay, what are you doing
here?” The young woman went to her desk and tucked her purse
underneath it. “We thought you were in the hospital.”

“They threw me out.”

The woman looked puzzled, as well she might
have.

The SAC’s secretary was Malay, Tay was pretty
sure of that, and he was desperately trying to remember her name,
but nothing at all came to him. She looked awfully young, and she
was certainly attractive — light brown skin and dark brown eyes
sparkling under her long black bangs — but she hadn’t worked for
the SAC very long and Tay simply couldn’t think of her name.

When it became obvious Tay wasn’t going to
say anything else, the woman sat down behind her desk and cleared
her throat uncertainly. “Is he expecting you?”

“I don’t know, but I’m ready to get to work.
And when I came in there was nothing on my desk so I’m here to get
my assignment.”

It seemed to Tay the young woman looked
decidedly uncomfortable at that, although he couldn’t imagine
why.

“We didn’t know you were available for duty
again. We thought…well, we heard your injuries were pretty
serious.”

“They weren’t.”

“Yes. Well…I can see that. I guess.”

Tay was still trying to work out what this
woman was so uncomfortable about when the SAC walked in.

“Sam! What the hell are you doing here? I
thought you were…”

“They discharged me yesterday, sir,” Tay
interrupted. “I’m ready to get back to work.”

“Are you?”

The SAC exchanged a look with his secretary.
Tay could see the SAC looked uncomfortable now, too. What in the
world was going on here?

“Well…okay, Sam, come on in.” The SAC pointed
to his office door as if Tay might not be certain where it was.
“Hold my calls for a few minutes, Rachel.”

Rachel?

Tay was reasonably sure he had met the SAC’s
secretary at least once or twice before — how could he not have? —
but he didn’t think he had ever heard the name Rachel. Maybe he had
never met this woman after all. Maybe he was thinking of somebody
else altogether. Maybe he was just getting old and starting to have
difficulty remembering things.

***

Tay took a straight chair and Deputy
Superintendent of Police Tan Kim Leng settled into the big leather
chair behind his desk. Tay had always thought the SAC looked more
like a professor at some not very prosperous college than he did a
policeman. He was small and slim and altogether unremarkable in
appearance. He habitually wore plain short-sleeved white shirts and
dark wash-and-wear slacks and his glasses were generally askew, the
frames heavy and black and inexpensive looking.

The SAC flicked some imaginary dust off his
desk blotter and cleared his throat. He swiveled the chair slightly
left and then back to the right again. It squeaked softly in the
silent office.

Tay waited.

“Are you sure you’re ready to go back to
work, Sam?”

“Yes, sir. Absolutely certain. I assume you
need all the men you can get right now.”

“Well…” The SAC appeared to ponder. “We’re
not really all that busy. You could take another couple of weeks if
you like. It wouldn’t be a problem. Make sure you’re fit. Wouldn’t
want to come back too soon, would you?”

Tay wasn’t certain he had heard right.

“Not busy?”

The SAC shook his head.

“You’ve arrested the bombers already?”

“Well…no.”

“Then I don’t understand.”

“ISD’s doing most of the heavy lifting on
that, Sam. We’re just…well, we’re acting in more of a support
role.”

The Internal Security Department. Those
little pricks had already grabbed the most important case CID would
ever have.

“CID isn’t investigating the bombings at all,
Chief?”

“I didn’t say that. We’re helping out ISD, of
course.”

“Who are you looking at?”

The SAC looked confused. “You mean at
ISD?”

Tay took a deep breath and tried again. “For
the bombings, sir. Who are you looking at for the bombings?”

“Oh, I see,” the SAC said. “ISD figures it’s
Jemaah Islamiyah. I mean, who else could it be?”

When the CIA had grabbed Hambali, the
publicity-seeking leader of the Indonesian terrorist group, Jemaah
Islamiyah, most people wrote JI off as a spent force, if it had
ever been a force at all. Tay knew people who knew better. With
Hambali out of the picture, his slot had quickly been filled by his
brother, Rusman Gundawan, a man known for very little other than
his all too appropriate nickname: Gun Gun.

Gun Gun kept the organization going for a
while and even moved it in some new and frightening directions.
When the CIA got Gun Gun, too, he told them about a
seventeen-member JI group called the Guraba Cell which had been
trained in Karachi to undertake broad-based attacks all around the
Pacific rim. The world was on alert for Arabs, not Asians, which
allowed the all-Asian membership of the Guraba Cell to approach
targets in ways other terrorists could only dream of. Gun Gun had
insisted they were preparing for 9/11-style attacks on the American
west coast, but a fair number of people believed then, and still
believed, the real targets of the Guraba Cell were closer to home.
Places like Jakarta, Bali, and…Singapore.

“Do you have any firm evidence that points to
JI, sir?”

“Well…” The SAC scratched his necked and
consulted the ceiling. “That would be mostly on ISD’s plate, Sam.
We’re stuck with the less glamorous part of the investigation.”

“Such as what?”

The SAC cleared his throat and looked away,
but he didn’t say anything.

“It doesn’t really matter to me, sir. Just
bring me up to speed on whatever it is you need and I’ll get right
on it.”

The SAC rubbed at his eyes and yawned. Tay
finally registered how exhausted he looked. Red-rimmed eyes, sallow
skin, sagging jowls. Tay could only imagine why.

***

The SAC shifted his weight in his chair and
studied a spot in the air that was about a foot above Tay’s
head.

“A call was referred to CID this morning,” he
said. “A body at the Woodlands HDB Estate. I sent Danny Ong and
Sergeant Lee. But I’ll bring them back and put them on something
else. Why don’t you and Kang take it?”

“A body, sir?”

The SAC nodded.

“At the Woodlands HDB Estate?”

The SAC nodded again.

“What’s that got to do with the
bombings?”

“Well…nothing, as far as I know. But I’ve got
plenty of people on the bombings, Sam. ISD is calling the shots
there anyway. You probably wouldn’t be very happy working with
them.”

“These bombings are the biggest case we’ve
ever had in Singapore, sir.”

The SAC said nothing.

“This is the worst thing that’s ever happened
to Singapore.”

The SAC said nothing.

“And you want me to investigate one dead body
found about as far away from here as it’s possible to get and still
be in the country?
Are you out of your mind?
”