Singapore Sling Shot - Andrew Grant [85]
I knew that despite gloves, protective clothing and everything else, there would be something of me somewhere. That’s the problem with DNA. The Singapore police and government authorities were pulling out all the stops to find the perpetrators of the crime wave that had suddenly hit the island-state. It would just take one little piece of evidence and the game would be over. You can’t continue indefinitely doing what we had been doing in such a confined area without something going seriously wrong. Despite their portrayal in many movies, cops ain’t stupid. They have systems and eventually those systems are going to pick up a thread and turn it into a rope with a noose at the end. So Ed Davidson, sans the beautiful Mavis, was going to move back to Hong Kong.
I’d heard that Thomas Lu was still alive in a warehouse in Pasir Ris. Whatever plans Sami and Carlos Mendez had for him, I had no idea and I wasn’t particularly concerned. I’d come here and done what Sami had needed me to do. The irony, of course, was that in the end, retrieving the digital recorder from the surrender room had virtually been all for nothing. But hey, that’s life; sometimes things just turn out that way.
I was packed and ready to go. There was a 13:50 flight out and I was planning on being on it. There was a knock at the door. I hadn’t called to have my luggage, such as it was, picked up. I went to the door and checked through the peephole.
There was no porter waiting at the door. It was Simone! It seemed I was going to miss my flight.
Thomas Lu had been sitting in his own urine for forty-eight hours. He had been given nothing to eat, just warm bottled water. His shoulder was on fire. Infection was beginning to set in.
No one had been to see him, to torture or torment him, or even to re-dress his wound or kill him. His keeper, an unsmiling Chinese man, simply opened the door, shone a torch inside and then shut and locked the door again. Twice the guard had tossed a water bottle at Lu’s huddled form but nothing else.
Despite being sick and hurting, Thomas Lu was still thinking coherently and clearly. He had gone beyond the initial shock of both his injury and capture. Now it was time to try and survive. Thinking helped him deal with the pain in his shoulder. People slipped out of handcuffs easily on magic shows and television. He had no illusions that it would be that easy, but could he open the handcuff attached to his good arm? Or rather, could he open the cuff that was attached to the water pipe?
The floor of the room was covered in debris, much of it windblown leaves and grasses pushed through the wide gap under the door. However, there was more. The inner walls of the room had once been lined with wood and many of the planks had rotted and fallen or were hanging. There were nails and nails could be used as lock picks.
Lu used his foot to drag the nearest fallen plank to him. There were nails, several of them. The wood was old and brittle. Using his leg and hip, he forced the plank to within the reach of his tethered hand. He reached for one of the three nails in the end of the plank. The first didn’t move, however, on the second, the wood had splintered. The nail came free easily. Lu grunted and examined both the nail and the handcuff. It had to be a simple lock. The only problem was managing to work on it with only one hand. The solution was to use his chin to hold the band of the cuff as far up his arm as he could to hold the chain taut, while he held the nail between his thumb and forefinger and worked on the lock on the other cuff.
Lu started his attempt to open the cuff with wretched determination. He knew that unless he got free, he was dead. It was a simple equation.
Simone apologised for what she’d said to me. It was shock, she said, and I quite believed her. Who the hell wouldn’t have been shocked after what she’d been through? We made up. Guilt or whatever produced a passion in her that was far in excess of any of the highly charged lovemaking we had enjoyed together in the past. It was torrid.