Singapore Sling Shot - Andrew Grant [0]
Stanley Loh is running for his life. He is sixty-five years old. The desperate jump he made from the hotel patio into the surrounding jungle ended in a heavy landing. With a badly bruised hip, he bites back on his agony and scrambles through the tangled, thorny undergrowth to the beach road. Here he runs, but the injury, combined with his age and the onset of an asthma attack, is making movement extremely difficult for the fleeing man.
Loh lurches along the road in an ungainly, shambling, hobbling motion, trying to overcome the pain in his hip and to fight the giant burning fist that is gripping his chest. He is wheezing like a man being slowly strangled.
He looks back over his shoulder. Three men emerge from the shadows of the scaffolding that shrouds the front of the Silver Sands Hotel. They run out into the sunlight, pause, see their quarry two hundred metres away along the tram road and start after him.
The men are young, fit and armed. Just a few moments before they had been waving their guns at Loh. Now the weapons are hidden under their clothing, but their threat is just as real.
The trio begin to close in on their prey. Running like hounds chasing down an injured stag, they are gaining on Loh. Gasping with pain and struggling for breath, the injured man hobbles on.
Clutched in Stanley Loh’s left hand is the object that the hunters desperately want. It is a small digital recorder, little more than a simple electronic toy. However, the value of what is contained on the device can be measured in billions of dollars. Its true significance is that the information captured in its digital heart will either establish the dominance, or the downfall, of the master of the hounds who are relentlessly running down their quarry.
1
The fleeing man had been duped into coming to the hotel alone, and for that he accepted he was totally to blame for what happened. He knew he should have expected a trap. The others, his business associates, were supposed to have been there for a group meeting. They weren’t. He should have realised they had not come to the meeting. Their customary fleet of chauffeur-driven limousines had not been lined up in the hotel car park. Loh had missed the implication of their absence and he was now paying the price.
When he had driven in to the hotel car park there had been no vehicles parked but for a solitary dark-coloured panel van and the gold Bentley, the car he well knew belonged to Thomas Lu—the man who would have him killed.
Under renovation, the hotel had been deserted when Loh entered. Deserted but for Thomas Lu, his three henchmen and their guns.
Lu had offered Stanley Loh a deal, but it was the one deal that he could never accept. The deal was not his to make, and by not accepting it, he effectively signed his own death warrant.
Loh’s refusal had been signalled by his desperate attempt to escape from Lu and his henchmen by crashing through a patio door and throwing himself into the jungle that pressed in around the hotel.
Now Loh was cut off from his car. Unlike his missing business associates, Loh had driven himself, and because of this, he had no chauffeur or bodyguard to come to his aid.
The Mercedes, which was still sitting in the hotel car park, had a Terbutaline inhaler in the glove compartment. His other inhaler, the one he habitually carried with him at all times, was in the briefcase he had abandoned in the hotel when he had taken flight.
Stanley Loh needed help, but more than that he needed to hide the recorder that he was still clutching in his left hand. What it contained was the one thing that could wreck Thomas Lu’s grand plan.
The fleeing man knew full well that with him dead and the recorder safely in his hands, Lu would most assuredly win the billion-dollar game that was being played out.
It was mid-morning on this grey Singapore day. It was Wednesday, and it was raining. Siloso Beach to Loh’s left was deserted, but as he ran down the tram road, he could see people ahead. They were above him, milling about on the concourse beyond the Delifrance