Singapore Sling Shot - Andrew Grant [46]
“Good,” Mendez purred. “I hope everything goes smoothly.”
The not-so-subtle threat wasn’t lost on Lu.
“I’m sure it will,” he responded.
“And the arrangements for processing the money?”
“They are all in place.”
These arrangements meant that when the money was delivered to Lu, he would then use an intricate combination of ghost companies and a dozen other financial devices to launder it over time and channel it into the Intella coffers as required.
“It will be good doing business with you,” Carlos Mendez said. “I will come to Singapore and we will celebrate in style when the business is done.”
“I look forward to that,” Thomas Lu lied yet again as the line went dead. He hung up the telephone and sat, his pale face positively ashen. Lu had returned to his luxurious Nassim Hill Road penthouse only an hour previously while the hunt for any remaining gunmen continued on Sentosa. He had been delayed for only a few minutes at the roadblock on the bridge while his car was searched.
Now, sitting upright in his thickly padded leather executive chair, Lu’s eyes didn’t register the trappings of his wealth. They couldn’t see beyond the bloody image of Raymond Mendez’s dismembered victim. Raymond’s unfortunate victim’s hands and feet lay scattered, along with legs severed at the knee and thigh, arms at the wrist and shoulder. The man’s genitals had been taken first and apparently stuffed in his mouth while he was still alive. The torso, bearing deep saw cuts, lay in a pool containing litres of blood. Raymond had used the severed head as a football, reputedly laughing as he kicked it around the warehouse, all the time shouting, “I am Maradona, I am the greatest.”
Thomas Lu shuddered. The whole slaughter house scene had come straight from the archives of hell itself. While Lu himself was a cold-blooded killer, Raymond Mendez was a complete and utter sadistic maniac.
“What am I going to do?” Lu whispered. He now had no access to Stanley Loh’s Intella development share. Every one of the partners had received, by special delivery, a letter from Loh’s solicitors indicating that control of their deceased client’s shareholding in the development had reverted to Stanley’s brother and business partner. The letter didn’t indicate who that person was, saying at the earliest opportunity a meeting of all the parties should be convened and at the meeting, their new partner would be revealed. The letter suggested a meeting on Friday night. That was two nights away. Thomas Lu had two days to find the recorder or track down the unknown business partner.
Lu had absolutely no idea that Stanley Loh had a brother, especially one he had been in partnership with. Who was the brother, and how could he, Thomas Lu, find him and persuade him to sell before the meeting? Did the brother have the digital recorder? Had it been his people in the battle at the fort? Lu had people desperately trying to find the identity of the brother.
Lu stood and went to the bar. He seldom drank, but now he poured himself a large tumbler of Chivas. He gulped at his drink, leaning against the bar for support. At the sound of the telephone he started, slopping the liquid. He slammed his glass down and crossed to his desk, shaking the whisky off his hand as he reached for the receiver of the ornate, old-style telephone.
“Yes?”
Thomas Lu listened to the person at the other end of the line in silence. If his face had been ashen before, now his complexion was a sickly grey. Lu’s eyes, unprotected by the dark glasses he habitually wore, bulged in his head. He blinked several times and hung up the phone without a word.
“Sami Somsak,” Lu whispered. For a moment he swayed like a drunk. He had to grab the edge of the desk for support.
“Of all the people,” he whispered, “of all the people in the fucking world, it had to be him.”
16
It took me twenty long minutes to swim from one side of the harbour to the other. Apart from almost being run down by a tugboat