Singapore Sling Shot - Andrew Grant [23]
I decided on a swim. When I got outside, yes, it was hot, but for a change the humidity wasn’t pushing the high nineties. I went poolside for a couple of hours. The pool was virtually deserted but for a young Japanese couple with a pair of toddlers. I swam and dozed on a lounger in the shade. I ordered a sandwich and a solitary beer and that was it. I was tired. Tired from the brain draining, eye-sucking exercise on the computer, and physically tired from my bout with Simone.
I was sound asleep when my cellphone woke me. Sami had completed the funeral arrangements for Stanley, the family and his people. The bodies had been released to the undertakers. Now it was time for he and I to get together and have that long-overdue talk.
I returned to my room to shower and dress. Ed from Perth wasn’t going out this evening, Daniel Swann was. There would be a car waiting down the street. I would be spirited into a car park basement. All the usual secret squirrel stuff. However, if it meant the chance to see my old friend and help him fight this, his latest war, just one of the many we had fought together, so be it. I was in!
8
I’ve seen sophisticated models of various proposed developments before, but never one quite like the one that was set out in the office that Sami Somsak occupied. What had formally been Stanley’s domain was situated on the fifteenth floor of a building on Scotts Road just a hundred metres up from Orchard.
I’d seen the images of the Intella Island model in the newspapers and on television, but nothing had prepared me for the scale of the thing. It was massive! There was a fringe of buildings surrounding Marina Bay. A long wide bridge with four huge towers set along its length pushed out from the city. The bridge had three lanes going in each direction and between the separated bridge spans were two rail lines extending from Marina MRT to the island. The towers on the bridge structure were tall, very tall. They straddled the road and rail access, their feet plunging into the blue plaster water.
The bridge terminated inside the massive Intella Island rather than on it. The island itself was octagonal in shape. Scale was difficult for me to judge but it was huge, dwarfing two ocean liners moored on the seaward side. Tall buildings, many with helicopter landing pads on their roofs, dominated, but at the heart of the island was an open expanse, a large park. Streets bisected the buildings in neat grid patterns. I could make out models of tiny pedestrians and tram-like coaches. There were no cars in sight other than on the bridge.
“Impressive isn’t it,” Sami said, coming to stand beside me. “Twelve hectares of man-made island. On the upper level, parks and sunlight and offices, hotels, apartments plus a casino, of course,” he added without a hint of irony. “We estimate habitation for perhaps a quarter of a million people in these thirty acres, and in the apartment towers and hotels on the bridge itself.”
Thirty acres made sense to me while hectares didn’t. A quarter of a million people living on the island, now that was impressive, and I said so. Sami nodded. “To Singapore that is valuable space and it will be even more so because in effect, we are multiplying that thirty acres three times.”
“How the hell will you do that?”
Sami laughed. He pressed a button on a console on the side of the display and from somewhere below the model there was a click and a whirr. The entire top layer of the island model rose in the air on telescopic supports and moved a metre and a half towards the high ceiling.
Below the upper level, where the park and the buildings had been, was a whole other infrastructure. There were long arcades and malls. There were gymnasiums and retail shops, supermarkets and cinemas plus an MRT terminal. There were tram stops and the end of the bridge was here, one level down from the surface. The whole thing was a mind-boggling to me. There were dozens of other services and facilities mapped out and I was having trouble taking it all in