Singapore Sling Shot - Andrew Grant [31]
Now Thomas Lu stopped pacing. He went and stood at the suite’s huge picture window. Below him lay Siloso Beach and beyond the breakwater islands was the grey ocean. As far as the eye could see there were ships of all sorts, all riding at anchor, waiting to enter the harbour and load or unload their cargo.
On board one of those ships Lu knew was a container that held two billion American dollars. One of those billions was for him. It was a combined finder’s fee and the balance of what he needed to secure his full share in Intella. The other billion was for the share he promised he would secure for the Colombians.
The problem now was that Lu hadn’t managed to secure that share from Stanley Loh to fulfil his end of the bargain, and unless he retrieved the recorder there was no guarantee he would have any shareholding whatsoever in the project himself, and certainly nothing for the South Americans. He needed that recorder and it’s damning evidence.
“They must come,” Lu whispered to his reflection in the window as dusk gathered outside. “They must come for it.”
11
Tonight we go!”
“Tonight it is,” I replied. “Have you got the odds and sods I asked for?”
“Yes, no problem. At 19:30 get the MRT to Marina Bay. When you come above ground just walk straight down the pathway. There’ll be a car waiting.”
“Got that,” I replied and we hung up. When the time came I would walk the couple of hundred metres from the hotel to City Hall MRT and grab the red line. Ed the Tourist mightn’t be up with the play on the MRT but his alter ego always used it in the past in preference to a car. The MRT is the quick, painless alternative to Singapore’s above-ground traffic and the system is easy to understand and use. In my wallet I had a travelcard from a previous visit and it still had a few dollars worth of travel on it.
“What should I do until evening? I asked myself. It was only a few minutes after ten in the morning. There was a long day stretching out ahead of me. I hate the pre-mission waiting around and always have. I guess it’s the same as a professional sports person. You want game on just as soon as you can. Once the ball is kicked off, the nerves go and the training cuts in. I hoped that despite my being out of shape, my training and instincts would get me through what lay ahead. Not for the first time, I promised myself that I would not get so far out of shape ever again.
It wasn’t as if I didn’t still have muscles. There was muscle, not flab. I hadn’t gone that far downhill, however my body felt heavy. My breathing, thanks to a constant diet of cigarettes, still wasn’t what it ought to have been.
Too late to remedy that now!
So what do you do when you have time to kill and you can’t, for the sake of your life, go hang out in a bar? Right, you go to the movies, which I did. I watched Sylvester Stallone save the world and just to rub it in, Bruce Willis did it all over again in Die Hard 49 or something similar.
When I left the movie complex in the late afternoon, I had seen more men die in those four hours or so than had died in two world wars. The explosions were getting bigger and bigger and louder and louder. I wished then that I could have the pair of them, Stallone and Willis, in character and with live ammunition at my side that night. Not really, but sometimes it’s depressing to be a mere mortal, even when you know that what you’ve just witnessed is pure Hollywood farce.
Back at the Carlton I ordered a light meal via room service. Pasta with fish, the perfect athlete’s food. Not that I’m an athlete as such. It’s just that if things didn’t go to plan I could be swimming further or running longer and faster than anticipated, and maybe, just maybe, a little dietary help would make things easier for me. Christ, enough of the soliloquys!
Casting my uncertainties into the darkest corner of my brain, I finished my meal. Then I showered and dressed for the night to come.
It was only 18:30 when I left my room. I couldn’t take it any more. I went for a quiet stroll just to try and keep the butterflies at bay. That