Singapore Sling Shot - Andrew Grant [111]
A nurse brought a razor. She carefully shaved my head, and then I shaved off my moustache. It was the first time in two decades I actually saw my upper lip. It came as a shock, but suddenly I looked nothing like the man in the media.
My good doctor Dr Chang was on his way to give me a final assessment. I was hoping to be released before lunch. I needed to get out. There were things I had to do. People I had to kill—just joking!
Dr Chang did give me the all clear with the instructions I was to contact him directly at the first sign of any problems. There was a stark white bandage turban on my head. I had some painkillers and sleeping pills. He wanted to see me in a week’s time. That, of course, was supposing I was still alive.
I thanked the doctor and was escorted down to a waiting taxi by a pretty young attendant. I gave the driver the Cairnhill Circle address Sami had given me and sat and undid my bandages as we travelled. I looked stupid in a turban. I would get a tanning agent to hide the vivid paleness of my scalp. It would glow in the dark the way it was.
We pulled up at the entrance to the condominium complex. It was imposing. There was a uniformed doorman. He made a call and K appeared in less than a minute and greeted me with a big grin as he took my bag and led me to one of the elevators. I noted that he pressed the button for “Penthouse Only”. It was key controlled. I wondered if Sami owned the apartment building. I suspected he probably did.
Sami’s domain was magnificent in every way. The rooms were large and airy, the furnishings expensive. There was much wood, but that was to be expected; Sami Somsak loved wood and used it extensively in all of his homes that I had seen. There were several of them I knew about but doubtless he had many more.
K showed me into a bedroom; or rather, into a suite, a large suite. The bedroom itself was the size of a normal lounge, plus there was a sitting room with a bar and a small kitchen off to one side. The bathroom had an enormous spa bath and double shower. It was magnificent.
The first thing I needed to do was meet the other residents. K gathered them in the main lounge. Apart from K, there was the accountant, Paul Wang. Following the firebombing, he had been relocated to the apartment. He had known Simone, so why hadn’t he been at the funeral? I couldn’t remember seeing him there, and what about his absence from the office when it had been attacked? These were things about Mr Paul Wang I would need to find out about.
That’s the thing about not trusting people. Everyone is a suspect. Everyone can be a traitor. That’s a great way to judge people.
Then there was Kaylin, the apartment’s housekeeper. She was a short, attractive Chinese woman in her mid-thirties. She was all smiles and helpfulness. There were two Thai minders, Quong and Dep. I’d met Quong before, of course. Dep, however, was new to me. He was a young guy, maybe thirty, handsome, with a physique that suggested a lot of hard gym work. He was potentially a real lady-killer. Regardless, he was too young to be one of Jo’s original core group of Special Ops people, so he had to be a new recruit. Maybe he was the traitor?
The last of the group was a young Singapore Chinese named George Hu. He was the live-in chef. A considerable waistline showed he loved his food. He was another who smiled easily. That’s the problem with smiles, of course; they are an easy shield and can hide a multitude of sins.
These, then, were the six people who had been in the apartment when Sami had phoned following the news of Simone’s death. He told me Kaylin had answered the phone and taken down his instructions, but had she personally made the funeral arrangements? I would be asking her that question when the opportunity arose.
I couldn’t help but think that because the arrangements that our Judas had made with Lu had been aimed specifically at killing Sami Somsak, he or she would assume there would be no follow-up. If the plot had succeeded in killing Sami, as intended, there would