STANDING ON THE sidewalk outside of HSBC, Tay couldn’t remember what he had said to Mei Lin or Harry Lee after that. He was sure he had thanked them for their help, and no doubt he had shaken hands warmly with both of them when he left, but he had no real memory of any of it because his mind had been a thousand miles away.
On the umbrella man.
The umbrella man who was really Joseph Hysmith.
Well, probably not. Joseph Hysmith was just a name the man, whoever he really was, had used to access the safety box.
The box for which Johnny the Mover had had a key.
The box within which there were ledger sheets with his father’s initials.
His father, Johnny, and the umbrella man all connected to the same safety deposit box in a bank in Singapore thirty-five years after his father had died.
The buried past rising up from the ground. His father reaching out from the grave and pointing to…well, what?
That was still the question, wasn’t it?
***
Tay knew he wasn’t going to stumble over the answer standing there on the sidewalk. He had found out so much already, but it added up to so little. They needed a break of some kind. He would start by going to the Cantonment Complex to see if Kang had made any progress with either Immigration or Customs. Maybe he had. Maybe that would start the unraveling of it all.
Tay thought about walking since it wasn’t much over a mile. He actually liked walking whenever he could although everyone thought he was crazy to walk anywhere in Singapore’s relentless heat and humidity. The older he got, the more he thought those people might be right. They were certainly right today. It wasn’t even noon yet, and the air was already so thick Tay wouldn’t have been surprised to see someone painting graffiti on it. No, not a good day for a stroll.
He started looking around for a taxi.
And that was when he saw the woman who was watching him.
He would never have noticed her if he hadn’t suddenly swiveled his head around toward the Fullerton Hotel to see if there were any taxis parked in front of it.
She was standing just on the other side of Battery Road, about halfway along the narrow driveway that led to the Fullerton Hotel’s entrance. A middle-aged woman who looked entirely nondescript, she was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved black T-shirt and carrying a black shoulder bag that looked heavy. She was smoking a cigarette and staring directly at him. When Tay turned quickly and caught her out, she froze, which was probably what she had been taught to do in surveillance school. Maybe that would have been the right call in a crowd — after all, suddenly turning your head the moment someone catches you looking at them is pretty much a dead giveaway — but out in the open where this woman was, nothing could have made her more conspicuous once Tay saw her.
Tay didn’t know a great deal about surveillance. Actually, he knew almost nothing except what he had read in spy novels, but some instinct caused him not to react to the woman. Even after he spotted her, he continued looking in her general direction, turning his head a little back and forth and trying his best to look like any other man just trying to find a taxi.
Was he overacting? Maybe. He wasn’t sure. He’d had very little experience in pretending to ignore surveillance after he had spotted it. None at all actually.
As little as Tay knew about how this sort of thing was supposed to be done, he knew enough to realize the woman wasn’t alone. You couldn’t follow someone with just one person. You had to keep the subject in a box — at least one person in front of him and others on each side and behind — or he might suddenly turn in a direction you didn’t expect or be swallowed up in a crowd. And if that happened, whoever was responsible for running the surveillance operation would just end up looking like a jerk.
No, the woman wasn’t alone. There were others out there with eyes on Tay. At least two or three, maybe half a dozen even. Too many for him to do anything about.
***
Walking slowly away from the Fullerton and turning up Collyer Quay, Tay thought about what it meant to him to be under surveillance.
The first question to answer, he supposed, was exactly who it was watching him.
That was any easy one at least. It had to be some of Philip Goh’s goons at the Internal Security Department. John August had already told him ISD was keeping an eye on him, which was why August had set up that elaborate ruse with the stalled-out Volvo to cover the message he had sent to Tay. Who else could it be? No one ran a surveillance operation in a tight little society like Singapore other than the guys who made sure it stayed a tight little society. And that was ISD.
Okay, second question.
Why did it really matter to Tay one way or another that ISD had him under surveillance?
They already knew he was continuing the Woodlands investigation under the thinnest possible cover, and now they knew he had gone into the main branch of HSBC on Collyer Quay. So what? It was a bank. People went into banks all the time. And, as far as he knew, they hadn’t connected the safety deposit box where he found the first ledger sheets with his father’s initials on them to this particular bank, if they even knew about the box at all.
So what could ISD find out by watching him?
First, they would find out Samuel Tay was really a very dull man. He got up late, occasionally had breakfast out, went to the Cantonment Complex, talked to people all day, then went home and smoked cigarettes in his garden until it was time to go to bed. Surely none of that would interest anyone, at least not very much.
Still, it made Tay angry that ISD apparently though they could follow a senior CID inspector around Singapore without getting caught at it. Actually, if Tay were being completely honest, it was hard to get too self-righteous about that. The truth was he hadn’t caught them, not at least until he spotted that woman in front of the Fullerton entirely by accident.
Regardless, he didn’t much like being taken for a fool. Now that he knew they were there, maybe he ought to run them around a little just to stick a finger in their eye. Perhaps it didn’t really matter whether ISD had him under surveillance, but it did piss him off.
Tay was walking along the side of Chevron House when he saw Raffles Place up ahead and an idea occurred to him. Raffles Place was a small, grassy plaza in the middle of the financial district. Mowed as tightly as a putting green, the grass somehow contrives to appear completely artificial. Too bright, too thick, too perfect. Closed in on all sides by soaring and utterly nondescript towers of stone and glass, the grass of Raffles Place looks as stern and unnatural as everything around it. But Tay’s mind wasn’t on the grass right then. It was on what is underneath the grass.
A hundred feet below Raffles Place is one of the largest stations in the Singapore Mass Rapid Transit System.
The MRT is exactly what anyone would expect a Singapore mass transit system to be. Clean, quiet, and incredibly efficient. Air conditioned trains that offer mobile telephone service whisk passengers between pristine stations kept free of beggars and religious pitch men, stations which had been thoughtfully hardened to do double duty as bomb shelters in case Singapore ever comes under aerial bombardment from, say, Papua New Guinea. Like the rest of Singapore, the MRT has numerous and strict penalties for almost every form of human endeavor other than standing quietly and doing exactly what you’re told. Eating or drinking brings an automatic fine of five hundred dollars. Smoking, however, is the greatest sin. It brings a fine of a thousand dollars.
Tay hated the MRT. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had ridden on it.
His shadows wouldn’t be expecting him suddenly to join the crowds surging into the Raffles Place MRT entrance, a little white pavilion in the center of the plaza that looked vaguely Egyptian for some reason Tay had never been able to work out.
Entering the MRT would break the surveillance box they had around him, and the only alternatives left to them would be either to let him go or form up behind him and follow him in. Raffles Place was a mother of a station where two lines crossed, either one of which could be ridden in two directions. They would need a lot of people to cover him in there. If he was lucky and could jump right onto a train, they would lose him.
And then they would have to explain to their boss exactly how one rapidly aging and slightly overweight policeman had given the slip to a whole squad of strapping young ISD superheroes.
This might be fun.
***
Tay took the steps down two at a time. When he got to the line of shiny, aluminum turnstiles guarding the entrance to the platforms, he held his warrant card over his head, planted his butt on top of the nearest one, and swung his legs over the barrier. Some people looked at him, but no one said a word. Singaporeans didn’t much like getting involved in things they didn’t have to get involved in.
He took the first set of stairs he saw down to a platform without pausing to check which train he would catch there. He supposed it didn’t really matter.
When he emerged on the platform, he saw he was going to be lucky. A red and white train was just sliding to a stop behind the stainless steel and glass doors that walled the tracks off from the platform. The MRT was so hermetically sealed the experience was more like getting on an elevator that moved sideways than it was catching a train.
The long rank of doors rumbled open and Tay joined the surge of passengers into the nearest car. Once inside, he turned and watched the bottom of the staircase he had come down, but there were too many people and they were moving too quickly for him to decide if any of them might be following him.
It was no more than fifteen seconds before the platform doors rumbled closed again, the train doors clicked shut right behind them, and Tay’s train moved out of the station. Were any of his followers fifteen seconds or less behind him? He doubted it, but he couldn’t be sure.
***
The train glided in near silence into the darkness of a tunnel and Tay looked up at the electronic map just opposite where he was standing. It took him a minute, but finally he worked out that he was on a Green Line train headed for City Hall, another busy station. He could stay on the train there, or even get off and take another Green Line train going in the opposite direction and go right back to Raffles Place. He could also change to the Red Line, of course. Tay’s eyes traced both lines on the map and he thought about what he ought to do.
All at once he knew.
The train pulled into City Hall Station and he allowed the crowds to carry him out the doors and across the platform to where a Red Line train bound for Dhoby Ghaut was waiting with its doors open. Thirty seconds later it was moving out of the station. Tay could have gotten off at Dhoby Ghaut since that station was only a short walk from his house in Emerald Hill, but he didn’t. He stayed on the train there, and he stayed on it through Somerset, Orchard, and Newton as well. He didn’t leave the train until he reached the Novena station.
Tay rode the escalator up to ground level and emerged under a long, rectangular green glass roof supported by bright green tiled columns. He supposed somebody had chosen the color in the hope it would make the station look more natural and friendly, but it looked about as natural and friendly as the grass in Raffles Place, which was to say not natural and friendly at all. What it looked was really green.
Regardless, Tay wasn’t at the Novena station to admire its color. He was there because it was just off Irrawaddy Road. And about a quarter of a mile to the north was a large compound of office buildings that were collectively identified with the address 28 Irrawaddy Road. Taken together, those buildings added up to a collection of glass and marble so humorless and overblown it would have embarrassed Albert Speer. Those buildings were where the Ministry of Home Affairs did whatever it did. It was where the Internal Security Department’s offices were, and where Tay could find Philip Goh.
Tay figured this was as good a time as any to pay a friendly call on Mr. Goh. After all, where were his watchers less likely to look for him than in their boss’s office?
He knew he was going to have a real heart-to-heart with his new friend Phil eventually. And sometimes, for the kind of heart-to-heart Tay really wanted to have, making a surprise out of it was the best thing to do.