TAY WAS ABOUT halfway back to Gallop Green when the dark blue Mercedes with blacked-out windows stopped alongside him. The window slowly began to lower.
Tay wasn’t armed, and he didn’t really expect somebody to shoot him in broad daylight right in the middle of one of the best neighborhoods in Singapore anyway. Regardless, he suddenly wished he had something better to defend himself with than his American Express card.
Fleeing was always a possibility, of course, but he didn’t want to look like a fool, and he didn’t immediately see any effective way to do that as exposed as he was on the sidewalk of a residential neighborhood. So he just stood there and waited to see what was about to happen.
John August leaned toward the open window.
“Get in, Sam,” he said.
“August?”
August said nothing.
“What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“You could have called me. I’ve tried to call you over and over and—”
“Sam, just shut the fuck up and get in the car.”
***
They drove out to Farrer Road, turned right, then continued in silence until they came to the Pan Island Expressway, which August entered heading west.
“Where are we going?” Tay asked.
“Nowhere. I just didn’t want to have a conversation with you standing there looking at me like I was about to shoot you.”
“And are you?”
“Not right away, but I’m not taking it off the table.”
Tay nodded, said nothing. He just waited for August to tell him what was going on.
“By the way,” August continued, “you’re clean.”
“Clean?”
“I mean nobody is following you. I wish I’d been around to see you crawling over your back fence this morning. That was so dumb it was brilliant.”
Tay shrugged. “I didn’t want ISD to know where I was going.”
“They wouldn’t. I don’t think they care. They haven’t been the ones following you.”
Now August had Tay’s full attention.
“And this you know exactly how?”
August gave Tay a long look, certainly far longer than Tay thought appropriate while he was driving seventy miles-an-hour down a six-lane freeway filled with traffic.
“I’m not just some guy, Tay. I get paid to know what’s going on.”
“Who are you really, John? I know you used to be CIA. At least I think I know that. But I thought you were supposed to be retired. And yet you seem to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. You’re certainly not just a guy who owns a bar in Pattaya. Are you still CIA?”
“That’s not the only possibility.”
“Then you’re telling me you’re not CIA?”
“It isn’t nearly that straightforward these days, Tay.”
“I think it is. Let’s try it this way. I’ll go first. I’m a cop. In Singapore. I work for Singapore CID. Now…it’s your turn.”
August looked over at Tay, once again Tay thought for rather longer than was either necessary or appropriate.
“I used to be an intelligence officer,” August said after a moment. “I once worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. I have retired from the Central Intelligence Agency. Occasionally people ask me to do things for them. Sometimes it’s government agencies who ask, sometimes it’s individuals. Sometimes I do it, sometimes I don’t. It wasn’t very long ago, Sam, that you asked me to do something for you as I recall, and I did it.”
“So the CIA asks you to do things for them?”
“Sometimes.”
“And you do them.”
“Sometimes.”
“Is this one of those times?”
“No. I’m just trying to help out a friend.”
“Vince Ferrero?”
August’s reaction to that wasn’t at all what Tay expected. He thought he would deny it, of course, make up some cockamamie story perhaps, but August looked genuinely startled at the idea.
“Ferrero? What? No, Sam, I’m not here to help Ferrero.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I’m here to help you, Sam.”
***
At the junction August moved over onto the Bukit Timah Expressway and sped up slightly. The BKE ran north to the Woodlands crossing point into Malaysia and Tay wondered if that was where August was taking him.
“I don’t have my passport,” Tay said.
“You don’t need it. We’re just driving. No place safer to talk than a moving car, if you’re sure it’s clean.”
“And are you sure?”
August didn’t respond, which was enough of an answer all by itself. They shifted into the right lane and blew by a line of cars patiently trailing behind a bus.
“I’m going to ask you a favor, Sam.”
Tay said nothing.
“Forget about Johnny. He’s dead and nothing can change that. What’s more, I’ll tell you here and now it’s probably for the best.”
“Why is that?”
“Johnny and Vince were into some stuff that got out of control. It caused a lot of problems.”
“Do they both work for the CIA, too?”
“Good God, no. I think they did once, but that was nearly forty years ago. They’ve been private ever since.”
“Doing what?”
“Logistics and support services mostly. They arrange deliveries of materials, set up financial structures, collect and disburse money. Like that. They’re not involved in intelligence operations, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“So they’re contractors.”
“Well…” August seemed to think about that, although off-hand Tay couldn’t see what there was to think about. “They’ve done some stuff for the Agency, it’s true, but their clients are mostly non-government. Paraguas Ltd is actually pretty well known in some circles.”
“Did Ferrero kill Johnny?” Tay asked.
It was a shot in the dark, he knew, but even in the dark you occasionally hit something if you just kept shooting.
“Yeah, he did.”
Bullseye.
“Do you know why?” Tay asked.
“Johnny screwed up. He was the one who got the explosives into Singapore that the bombers used. But then you’d already guessed that, hadn’t you, Sam?
“Aunt Jemima. HMX mixed with flour.”
“Very good, Sam. Very good indeed.”
“But why would Johnny smuggle explosives for people who wanted to attack Singapore?”
“Johnny thought it was a transshipment to Iran, to an insurgency movement there. He didn’t know it was actually meant to be used here.”
“That’s pretty hard for me to believe.”
August shrugged. “Believe what you want, but it’s the truth.”
“And you think Ferrero killed him because of what he had done?’
“Oh no, nothing like that. I think Ferrero killed him because he was about to go public about what he knew and that would have been the end for them both.”
“You mean some sort of public mea culpa?”
“Yeah, pretty much. You see, the thing was…Johnny was dying. It was some liver thing. He didn’t have much time and he was worried because he didn’t have a lot to leave his kids. So he took the Aunt Jemima job because it paid so fucking much. But he didn’t tell Vince about it.”
Tay said nothing. He just waited for the rest, and he had no doubt there was a rest coming.
“Then when Johnny realized he’d been scammed, that there was no Iranian insurgency and that a few Paki’s pissed off over Singapore’s loyal support of the United States had actually used the stuff he had brought in to blow up half of your country, he was pretty distraught. He decided almost immediately to admit what he’d done and lead us to the people he had done the job for.”
“And Ferrero killed him to keep him from doing that.”
“Yeah, that’s about the size of it. Johnny may have been dying, but Vince wasn’t. And spending the rest of his life either in a prison cell or on the run wasn’t particularly appealing. So Johnny had to be silenced.”
“But you said Ferrero had nothing to do with bringing the Aunt Jemima into Singapore. That Johnny did that on his own.”
“Doesn’t matter. After forty years of doing the kinds of things Paraguas did, Ferrero and Johnny had a lot of enemies. A lot of people would have cheerfully hung the whole thing right around Vince’s neck, too. He couldn’t claim not to know about it. What happened here is too ugly and everyone wants to nail people for it. Vince would have been a big, fat sitting duck.”
“So why are you telling me all this?”
“Because you deserve to know the truth. You’ve been the biggest threat to Vince. That’s why he’s been trying to force you to walk away from the investigation. He’s even had his people keeping tabs on you to see how close you were getting.”
“Okay, so now I know. Thank you for telling me. But I’m sure you want something in return. What is it?”
“I want you to forget about everything I just told you and let us handle it.”
“Us?”
August gave a little shrug and let a half smile slide across his face, but he didn’t say anything.
“What are you going to do, John?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“What good will killing Ferrero do?”
“It will roll up Paraguas with all the shit inside. Then we’ll dump it in a hole so deep nobody will ever find it.”
“And you think that’s a good thing.”
“I know that’s a good thing.”
They drove on in silence for a while after that. When they reached the Singapore Night Safari Park, August swung off the BKE, U-turned back over the freeway on the bridge that led to the safari park, and then reentered it going in the opposite direction.
Tay knew that was it. August had come to the end of his pitch. Now it was Tay’s turn.
***
Tay knew August well enough to understand that now he was waiting for Tay’s response. And he would drive in silence until they ran out of gas if it took that long for Tay to give him one.
It didn’t take Tay nearly that long.
“I can’t do it, John.”
August nodded slightly, but he didn’t say anything.
“Ferrero committed a premeditated murder here in Singapore. I can’t just look the other way and let you kill him to even the score. What kind of a policeman would that make me?”
“You’ve done it before.”
Tay knew, of course, that eventually August would get around to mentioning that.
“Only when there was no hope of getting justice any other way,” Tay said. “This time there is hope.”
“No, there isn’t.”
“You don’t think I can find him and take him down for Johnny’s murder?”
“Maybe you can and maybe you can’t. But that still wouldn’t be justice.”
“Why not?”
“Because of the part I haven’t told you yet. The part I didn’t want to tell you.”
Tay cocked his head and waited.
August scratched his nose and seemed to reconsider for a moment. Then he gave a little shrug and just said it.
“Vince Ferrero killed your father.”
***
They were just five simple words. Tay knew what all of them meant. But arranged as they were in the sentence August had just spoken, they made no sense to Tay.
“My father died of a heart attack,” he said after a moment. “In Vietnam. Nearly forty years ago.”
“Your father died in Vietnam a long time ago. You have that much right. But he didn’t have a heart attack. Vince Ferrero shot him.”
“Why would Ferrero do that?”
“Vince and Johnny had already left the agency and started Paraguas Ltd. They were freelancing in areas the agency didn’t want to touch and making some real money at it. Your father had a share in the company and handled most of the financial stuff.”
“In other words, he was a money launderer.”
August shrugged. “It’s an expression.”
“Where are you going with this, John?”
“Your father was in love with a Vietnamese woman. He knew it was just a matter of time before South Vietnam fell. Everyone knew it. He tried to get this woman out, but he couldn’t. Somebody high up in the South Vietnamese government who she had offended blocked her exit visa. Your father couldn’t do anything about it. So he told Vince and Johnny he was going to stay with her.”
“Stay with her?”
“In Saigon. After the North Vietnamese took it over.”
“That’s crazy. He would have been arrested. At the very least he would have been labeled an American spy, thrown in prison, and tortured.”
“That’s what Vince thought, too. And that’s why he killed him. Your father knew too much about what Vince and Johnny had been doing, who had been paying them, and where their money was stashed. Vince didn’t want the North Vietnamese finding out.”
Tay turned away from August and looked out the window, seeing nothing.
“Vince did everything he could to convince your father to leave with them,” August continued, “but he wouldn’t because he couldn’t get this woman out. So Vince killed your father. It was the only way to make certain he didn’t tell anyone else what he knew.”
“Ferrero killed my father over some money.”
“It was a lot of money, Sam.”
Tay gave August a sharp look, but August didn’t appear to notice.
***
Neither August nor Tay spoke again until August had turned off the expressway, driven a short distance south to Dunearn Road, and stopped in front of the Botanic Gardens MRT Station.
“I think it would be best if I dropped you off here.”
Tay nodded. He unbuckled his shoulder strap and got out without saying a word. But before he closed the door he turned around and leaned back into the car.
“What happens now, John?”
“That’s pretty much up to you, Sam. I have a job to do and I’m going to do it. I just wanted you to understand why you ought to let me do it. And that you should be happy somebody’s going to get it done.”
“You going to kill Ferrero.”
“Would that bother you?”
Tay chewed on his lip and looked at August for a while, but he said nothing.
Then he straightened up, closed the car door, and walked away.