Singapore Sling Shot - Andrew Grant [120]
Kaylin said he had been wearing a gun. Even in Thomas Lu’s murky world, legitimate businessmen did not wear guns.
Lu tapped a button on the computer keyboard in front of him. A face came into focus. It was an image taken by one of his people in the cemetery. It showed the dead woman’s mourners carrying the coffin from the hearse to the graveside. Lu used the mouse to isolate the figure of the tall man and enlarge it.
Although the image was grainy, the head and shoulders filled the screen. Thomas Lu sat and studied it. This was not the man the media said was David Crewe. This was another man altogether.
The man onscreen had his face to the camera. He was of indeterminable age. He could have been late twenties or he could have been fifty. He had medium-length fair hair, and a thick moustache of the same colour that extended to just below the corners of the hard-looking mouth. The chin was square and shaven. It was the eyes, however, that held Lu’s attention. They were cold and blue and they appeared to meet the camera with an unflinching directness that distance could not disguise. The eyes spelt “danger” in every way.
“Killer, not businessman,” Lu blurted. “You’re an assassin and you’re here because of the girl and because of me.” Thomas Lu fell back into his seat. This was the man who had saved Somsak’s life and almost caught the woman Kaylin. This man was exceptionally dangerous and he was smart, that much had already been proven. No matter what his real name was, the man called David Crewe would be looking for him.
“I need to find you first,” Lu said. Decision made, he again reached for his phone.
45
It was the morning of the next day. I was walking down Cairnhill Road and had decided to kill time by taking a constitutional the length of Orchard Road before meeting up with Sami.
We had—or rather I had—one day to kill before Thomas Lu met his maker. Perhaps his soul, if he had one, had come straight out of hell via FedEx the moment he was born. Maybe he had been doomed to stoke the devil’s furnace all his living days. Either way, I frankly couldn’t wait to do whatever Sami had in mind. The moment that was accomplished, I would be away—Thailand, Hong Kong, anywhere.
When you are being watched, you can feel the eyes. Sometimes they just stroke your senses and drift on. Those are the eyes of a professional; they don’t focus for more than a nano second, and unless your senses are particularly acute or you are trained in martial arts, you may not notice them. When you are being watched by an amateur or someone consumed with a passion, whether it be love, hate or anything in between, the eyes fix and literally burn holes in the air and your psyche.
It was the latter that I felt. It wasn’t the caress of a passing gaze. This was intense. I knew that I had a tail.
It was a few minutes to 09:30. There were a lot of people around and plenty of traffic. I had no idea where the watcher was. He or she could be in a building, on the footpath or in a vehicle. Probably not a vehicle, given the difficulty of trying to match a pedestrian’s pace while on wheels in heavy traffic. Anyone kerb crawling was going to get a going over from the traffic. Singapore drivers don’t take prisoners.
I was walking for the sake of it. Later, I would be meeting Sami for lunch. This time, we were going to eat at the Newton Circus Food hawker centre. If the tail stayed with me I would beg off the lunch and attempt to draw the watcher into a position where I could identify him and do whatever I needed to.
The point here, of course, is that I could be under observation from someone other than Lu’s people. I could have a bunch of special police or security types on my tail, or maybe someone from the old days. I had a lot of enemies in Asia, people who would happily dice me with a blunt knife and feed me to the sharks piece by piece.
How to draw the watcher