Singapore Sling Shot - Andrew Grant [21]
“My spy,” she murmured as she stepped into the elevator at her Toa Payoh apartment block. She was still smiling when she eventually found sleep.
After a long lie-in I had a shower that probably drained the hotel’s hot water system dry. A room service breakfast followed and then it was time for me to get serious. I had my Toshiba with me. I connected the camera to the laptop and started sifting through the hundred or so images I’d taken at Siloso. I saved a couple of good shots of Simone into a separate folder. I don’t think there was one bad of her in the bunch, but these particular ones were very good and the romantic in me decided they were keepers.
Once I’d done that I started to analyse the remaining images and see if I could spot the surveillance types Sami thought would be somewhere around the fort. Now, I’ve got a jungle fighter’s senses when it comes to watchers and the watched. I hadn’t felt the burn of eyes on me throughout the hours we had spent either in the fort complex or on Sentosa itself.
I pulled up the images I’d taken on the spur above the watchtower and started to examine the bush edge, winding the magnification to maximum. Leaf by leaf, I quartered the jungle. It was taking me forever, but breaking down camouflage patterns and seeing the reality behind them is an art form. I switched the colour images to monotone and looked for human outlines, a head, an arm, a hand. If I had been colour blind it would have been easier. Conventional camouflage can often be completely useless against an observer with that condition. I didn’t have that luxury or handicap, I just had to do it the hard way.
I was starting to think this was all a waste of time when I finally saw something. I had a fresh image onscreen and was still in colour mode when something caught my eye. It was tiny, black and shining against the green haze of the jungle background!
Looking along the right hand, or ocean side of the spur, there was an indentation in the jungle edge and situated in the small clearing was a tower, radio, cellphone or something. Its function didn’t matter. What did matter was the fact that on a cross spar of the tower’s skeleton frame, about ten feet above the ground, someone had mounted a small camera.
Now, without a bunch of megapixels and a trained eye, the camera, which was held in position with a strip of wide grey tape of about the same colour as the metal of the tower itself, probably wouldn’t have been seen. Certainly not at a glance! What gave it away was the small, dark circle of the lens. The lens wasn’t large. It was no bigger than a Singapore one-dollar coin, but it was black and there was a spark of reflected light on it. It was probably that spark that had caught my eye in the first place.
The camera, which I presumed had a wide-angle lens, was positioned so it was looking along the spur towards where I had been standing to take my photo. I was prepared to bet there was another pointing the other way looking down towards The QuarterMaster Store and the surrender rooms.
I looked for a telltale bulge on the corresponding crossbeam on the opposite side of the tower framework. Obviously I wasn’t about to see a lens from this angle, purely because it would be pointing in the other direction. And yes, there was a grey bump on the straight edge of the beam on the far side. Camera number two.
“Clever!” I muttered, lighting a Marlboro. I was perhaps rewarding myself for being an eagle-eyed genius, or lucky bugger. But yes, the camera option was clever. By using the technology they—whoever they were—could mount a continuous watch while staying out of sight.
The cameras, of course, didn’t mean there was no one in the jungle itself. Perhaps there was even a Japanese death squad left over from the war bivouacked in the seemingly dense bush waiting to come out and take Singapore for a second time. Whatever, Sami had been right with his call so far.
Cameras of the type that were set up on