In the belated spirit of last week's Thanksgiving, I am very grateful for the nice and encouraging comments on my previous chapter. I probably shouldn't say it with seven more chapters to go, but that one was an overall subjective favourite in the entire plot - though I have my highlights in others - and I am glad it was an enjoyable read. The challenge now, of course, is not to bore you with the rest.
What I post now is the first three-quarters of the original Chapter 14; I have had this part finished for a few days but am still mustering the resolve to type up the rest of the chapter as plotted. Anyway, it is pretty much self-contained and saves me from posting a 10,000-word chunk. As a result, I am left with 21 total chapters (+ postscript) instead of twenty.
.
xxx
The newest member of the Ex-Jailbird Club requests the honour of your company at a celebration of his achievement at the pre-agreed venue sometime around 11 am. Black attire. RSVP not necessary.
The invitation arrives not by email or text, but by actual printed card in a sealed envelope hand-delivered to her room by a bellboy at half past ten, making her stagger groggily to the door. Once a prankster, always a prankster.
She yawns halfway through the smile, bleary-eyed from too little sleep: between creeping back to her room at a quarter to eight and then going for an early breakfast as a cover for a spot of necessary pickpocketing, she has since had about an hour's nap to add to the two hours she got last night. She would have skipped the nap altogether, given the latest developments, tired or not; but then Bruce assured her that once he had posted bail at the Singapore police HQ – for that was the location of Theo's sojourn last night – he'd be free to go, at least for the time being.
Any vestiges of worry are wiped from her mind when she gets to the suite, abaya and all, and, ignoring the Do Not Disturb sign hung outside the door, opens it using the lockpick. She tried it again on her own room lock a couple of times, and is now able to do it in a fluid enough motion that no one watching her at a few feet of distance could tell that she was not legitimately swiping a card to enter.
She steps into the middle of what sounds like a heated argument, except that she can tell that both parties are enjoying it. They cannot see her yet; the vast, over-decorated Stamford Crest suite has a separate bar area in addition to what looks like two enormous rooms, and that is where they seem to be, judging by the clink of china on a countertop.
"This is a really low blow. I didn't expect company ownership to take such a dim view of the situation."
"Says the man who has a wall of Batman memorabilia in his company office."
Ah; so company ownership refers to Bruce. And judging by this exchange, he does not just like his revenge cold but deep-frozen, and the concept of symmetric warfare is very much alive; the fact that Bruce rushed to post bail earlier does not mean he won't have fun at Theo's expense now.
Theo is defiant. "I'm not taking it down. Whatever you say."
"Then don't complain about a bit of reciprocal friendly publicity."
"You have interesting ideas of friendly. What if Sylvie finds out? Someone's bound to tell her…"
"Look at the positive side. This is definitive, 100% official proof that you're really in Singapore."
"Great. Why the fuck did you bring up pissing in elevators? I never did that or half the other stuff you warn about."
"So far being the operative words. Given what you have done, how could I put the rest past you?"
"Guys, what's the deal?"
They turn to greet her; once she has a coffee cup of her own – with the amount of sleep all three of them must have had, they will end up with a caffeine overdose before noon – she directs the next question to Theo.
"What has he done to retaliate?"
Theo responds with a theatrical scowl. "Have you checked your office mail this morning?"
Of course she has not, and now she regrets it. "I've kept my regular phone switched off. What did he send?"
"You'll see it sooner rather than later, I'm afraid. He's refusing to send a retraction or even an errata corrige.
OK, this is too much for her to resist. She left her phone in the room safe knowing that she would see both of her fellow conspirators upstairs, and now she is going to get it no matter what.
"You'd better go outside the hotel to check," Theo advises her, resigned to her upcoming discovery. "They shouldn't know about your regular number, but assuming you've had your mission phone switched on here, someone with the right equipment can triangulate its location and detect another SIM card active in close proximity."
So they'll also have to switch off their mission phones every time they get together. "You've remembered to switch off your phone, did you?" she asks Bruce.
"Didn't need to." He has his smug expression on as he pulls what looks like a pouch made of dense wire mesh out of his slacks pocket. "Thanks to Mr Jailbird, we now have Faraday cages for phones."
"Is that some kind of kinky bondage gear for electronics?"
The guys both laugh. "Faraday cages block out electromagnetic radiation," Theo explains. "Including phone signals. As soon as it's in the pouch, it looks like it's off." He walks over to the sitting room coffee table, which has a large metallic hard-shell suitcase lying open on top of it displaying an array of gear, and pulls out a pair of identical mini-pouches. "Here's your lot," he says as he hands them to Selina. "I've brought you the safecracking stuff as well, but we may want to keep it inside this suitcase for now. It's 90% titanium and has a six-digit combo lock and two key locks that require different keys, plus two built-in GPS trackers that can be set to alert me if it moves more than two meters, and is booby-trapped when locked, so it's probably a better bet compared to the room safe. And while on the subject of general paranoia, talking about these," he points to the pouches, "it's best to keep your regular phone inside one of them now when you aren't using it. Phones can transmit GPS location info even when switched off so long as the battery's inside, and this thingy blocks that out. And make sure you cover up your mission phone while you're still in your room before coming here, they now have an accuracy of less than a meter when locating GPS devices."
"Thanks. Now gentlemen, you'll have to excuse me while I go to satisfy my burning need for knowledge."
She does not need to go far; Singapore seems to have shopping as its national pastime, and there is a shopping mall complex attached to their hotel as well. It does not take her long to find a busy café where she is reassuringly surrounded by a crowd of phone-wielding patrons. She hurries through the password checks and is finally looking at the usual inbox screen.
She can sympathise with Theo, but the message is a thing of beauty. "WARNING!" its title proclaims in alarming all-caps. "Serious offender in our midst." As soon as she opens it, she is greeted by a typical police mug shot of her boss, followed by a description of his misdeeds and by dire warnings.
Mr Theodore Florian "Gumslinger" Reimann, currently released on bail awaiting trial and sentencing, was recently arrested in Singapore on charges of hacking, littering, and possession and improper disposal of chewing gum. Despite being able to narrowly avoid a vandalism charge, he nonetheless remains a suspect on the latter count pending further investigation. These grave offences carry a cumulative fine of SG $7,000, and the littering charge is further punishable by community service. If upheld, the vandalism charge could also entail an additional SG $2,000 fine and a possible prison term. Despite being freed, Mr Reimann presents a continuing danger to society. If you see him repeatedly committing any of the offences listed above, as well as any offences related to outrages on decency, possession of pornography, failure to flush public lavatories, jaywalking, or urinating in elevators, please report his location and details of the offence to the Singapore Neighbourhood Police Centre, Central district division (c/o Mr Brandon Wainwright, via al Municipio no. 15, Cernesio, Ticino, Switzerland, 91 5040781) – the Wainwright HQ address, followed by Bruce's office phone number.
She is still laughing when she shows up back at the suite. "Remind me not to piss you off," she teases Bruce. Granted, she gave it a very good shot last night and has got away scot-free so far, but after seeing this, she is not so sure anymore about possible long-term consequences.
"Don't worry." He winks at her. "It only applies to comic book hero fanboys. Especially ones who bring action figures and put up posters to display at the workplace."
"So fangirls are off the hook? That's a relief. Now it's my turn to ask; what's the deal with pissing in elevators?"
"It's one of the things that carry huge fines here," Bruce explains. "So is jaywalking and not flushing toilets and so on. They have most lifts equipped with urine detectors that block the doors and sound an alarm."
Theo feels compelled to interject. "I don't know how you came by that information, but I swear I didn't do any of that. Including the indecency and pornography. Just the three that I was charged with... or four, depending on interpretation."
"Well, we almost got caught at the indecency part last night, we could've ended up keeping you company." Bruce is glaring at her, but she has to offer a display of solidarity. "And Mr Wayn…wright has been previously arrested and fined here on the indecency-and-pornography stuff, didn't you tell me yourself last night, caro?" Caro does not look thrilled, knowing perfectly well that any such information may be used to devastating effect by his general manager. Still, she continues by putting the figurative icing on the cake. "He also served a prison term in China once, for stealing from himself."
Bruce jumps to his own defence. "I didn't steal under my own name. It was Wayne Enterprises merchandise I got caught taking and I was travelling under the radar; what could I do?"
"I didn't get caught under my own name either," Theo is quick to point out. "If I had, I could've called the Singapore Interpol HQ and been released in half an hour, I literally had a get out of jail free card as a former director arrested on ridiculous charges when I could give them an explanation. But I respected mission secrecy and stuck to my fake identity just in case."
"What did you do, anyway?" By now, her curiosity has been well and truly piqued.
"It's more a question of what I didn't manage to do," Theo explains. "I couldn't get to sleep when I came back from dinner, after I gave Bruce the lockpick, so I thought I might as well walk over to Suntec seeing how close we are to it, and take a look. I left my wallet up here, it was a good move because it had cards in three different names and the police would surely think they were stolen, and grabbed a couple of mini-cameras with GPRS transmitters and a retransmitter to relay the signal to my laptop here. I thought it would help us keep an eye on the guy now that we know what he looks like. It seemed like it was going well, I walked around the One Suntec tower, stuck one of my cameras near the garage entrance, then went to the main entrance and was about to stick the other one on a column right outside, and then I saw a pair of surveillance cameras above the door."
Bruce responds with an exaggerated groan and an eyeroll; he must have heard all this already but cannot pass up a chance to rub in his opinion of Theo's proficiency at covert tactics. Selina is feeling more charitable but still cannot help poking fun at her boss's carelessness.
"You install these things! How on earth could you miss them?"
Theo makes no attempts to hide his embarrassment. "Well, I admit I was a bit over-excited about the whole outing. At least I can promise that the one I put up outside the garage is in a safe spot."
"So what happened next, did the cops show up and grab you? How did you get those charges anyway? What I'm hearing so far would amount to nothing worse than loitering."
"It gets worse," Bruce jumps in.
"It does," Theo agrees. "I stepped behind the column as soon as I saw the cameras so I was sure I'd managed to stay out of the frame, and the lobby was empty, I mean it was about one AM by then, so I figured I might still have a shot at attaching my minicam so long as I managed to quickly disable at least one of their cameras to create a blind spot. I didn't figure they'd have a 24-hour security detail at an office building, I thought that unless an intruder alarm went off, they'd just review footage in the morning in fast forward, and by then it wouldn't matter. I had a packet of gum in my pocket and a pair of rubber bands I'd used to keep the camera cartons closed, so I chewed a couple of pieces of gum and made the bands into a slingshot to fling the gum blobs at the lens. I completely forgot about the Singapore chewing gum ban, the last time I was here was at least ten years ago. It looked like it would work, I'd just shot a third glob at it and was chewing the fourth and final one when the guards showed up. Turns out they were in a room right behind the reception, and once they saw the black patch appear onscreen they got out and saw me, if you wish, in flagrante, and called the cops. I tried to get away but I could see they'd catch up with me. At that point I remembered about the gum ban, so I spat out the gum, threw out the packet and the second camera, but had to stomp on the camera to make sure it was unrecognisable, or at least unusable, and that was when they got me. And then the cops arrived and arrested me for the gum and the littering, and said that my lens blocking trick could count as vandalism depending on how hard the gum was to get off. I was really lucky it came off easily when they tried to take it as evidence, vandalism is a non-bailable offence here so I'd be stuck in jail. But then to make it worse, when they searched me, they found the retransmitter and added the hacking charge, and that's a 5K fine. Now on the plus side, as I said, I had no ID on me, and I had two fake names I could tell them, but Al-Juhani and diplomatic immunity wasn't really an option given what I look like, especially without the lenses. So when they brought me to the police headquarters on New Bridge Road I said my name was Renner and asked if there was any chance of bail. They told me they could release me if I got someone to bring over my passport and post bail at the maximum amount of fines for all outstanding charges, which came up to seven thousand. I tried calling you at about one thirty to see if there was any chance of you bringing it last night..." He looks pointedly at Bruce.
"Sorry, I was... busy," he mutters. In reality he was still in Selina's room while his phone was left sitting on the bedside table in his own.
"Busy trying to get arrested for indecency."
Selina is compelled to take some of the responsiblity. "It was my fault... kind of. I'm sorry we kept you stuck in jail."
Theo makes it plain that his feud, if it be so called, is not with her. "No worries. It wasn't that bad. I'm sure it was nothing like what you two have been to. It was clean, I'd even say comfortable. And I had an entertaining companion in the holding cell who was arrested earler in the evening. A very, er, bright young man by name of Batman bin Suparman."
She sees Bruce's eyes go wide; she probably looks the same. "Who bin what?"
Theo grins at them. "That was my reaction when I heard it. Apparently it's his real name, the cops had his ID and were joking about it. Got caught on CCTV breaking into a snooker hall at a shopping centre for the second time in a row, stole 500 dollars' worth of stuff in total, and also... borrowed... his brother's bank card to make withdrawals. So in a way, my stay was kind of fun. Anyway, they said they'd let me try the call again in the morning, and I was lucky then."
"I know, I... heard it," she admits.
Theo looks at them the way an indulgent parent would regard a pair of mischievous kids. "Which kind of defeats the object of meeting in my room if you are busy, well, socialising inside the hotel already."
"Last night was a special case," she points out.
"OK, we'll stick to outside the hotel from now on," Bruce quips, and she wonders whether the resulting indecency charges would take them in the direction of New Bridge Road sooner rather than later.
"Anyway, then you know the rest," Theo concludes.
"Pretty much." In fact she has participated in the rest: she took it upon herself to pinch a Singaporean ID card from the wallet of a local businessman having a business breakfast at the hotel, before playing nice and clueless and taking it to reception half an hour later as something she found at the restaurant, while Bruce got the cash advance and snuck into Theo's suite, picked up his Renner passport, and put the card cloner to the test by producing a fake Singaporean ID for his bailor role. "Except for how in hell Bruce got your mugshots."
Theo sighs. "I can't enlighten you on that. All I know is that he did get them. Unfortunately."
"It was just a matter of asking nicely," Bruce says with an evil grin.
"So now you're out on bail?"
"Now I'm about to treat the head of the Interpol office here to lunch at Hai Tien Lo, that's the best and most expensive Cantonese place in town, and take a shot at damage control while I'm at it. I already thought I owed it to him for the UNLPs, and now I have to tell him I'll need that arrest record discarded so you can get the bail back and I can get the Renner passport back so I can leave the country on it. We'll have to hand back the UNLPs once we're done and I'd rather not use my real passport as I travelled through Sinagpore as Renner just three days ago. Not to mention that I'd rather not do community service."
"How irresponsible of you. We also need to ask them to check this Brian's prints and try to run his picture through a facial recognition tool," Bruce reminds him. So far they have not heard back from Kettering, and cannot be sure when, or whether, he will respond. In the worst case they have to assume that he has not figured out the encrypted fake .jpegs with Mitchum's prints and photo and Theo's e-mail embedded within.
"At this rate I'll have to take him to lunch and dinner every day while we're here, at the very least."
"Ask him if they want to host a free training seminar on safecracking by an HQ consultant," Selina prompts. The week-long courses she runs at the Lyon HQ have been a runaway hit to a point where there is a waiting list of participants, and offering to hold one of those in Singapore as soon as they are free may just be a good enough bribe. "I can ask to have the soft copy of my manual e-mailed to them."
"Good idea. I hope it'll make him less mad at me. Anything else?"
"Anything you can get on the Suntec One building layout," she suggests. "The building blueprints and detailed designs would be ideal, if there's a way to get those. Plus a list of tenants and the firms they use as outsourced service providers, cleaners, caterers, your friends the security guards," she winks at Theo, "receptionists and so on."
"I'll see what I can do."
"I may be able to take care of that to save you begging for even more favours," Bruce offers. "I can try the city archives and the public disclosure records. Even if it isn't public-access info, I may find a way to extract it. If I don't manage to, then we have your contact as the fallback option."
"It's a deal. So I go to lunch, you go to the archives- "
"And I'll take a walk in this," she gestures to the discarded abaya, "and see what this Fort Knox place is like. I'll probably only get as far as the lobby, but it's worth a look before I have to go there tomorrow, whether or not we get the blueprints. I guess I'll grab a takeaway lunch at the mall. What time do you think you can be back here?"
"About two o'clock," Theo answers. "Our appointment is for noon, should be done by one thirty."
"That works for you?" she asks Bruce.
"Should do. By then I should either have the stuff or know how to get it, or failing that I should assume that it's too much trouble."
She pulls on the black cloak and lowers the veil. "See you guys at two, then."
xxx
She is the first to show up back at the suite, but by the time she has shed her disguise she hears the lock clicking. Bruce gets in looking very pleased with life, and she assumes that his foray into the city records has been successful.
"Got what we need?"
"Yep. Piece of cake." He grins. "And there's something else I need your help with."
"Not now," she chides. They don't want to put on a display for Theo to walk into.
"I didn't mean what you thought I meant." The grin is still there, though. He walks up to her and pulls out his phone to show her a message onscreen. "Don't worry, I swapped out the SIM card for a blank local one after I'd saved the text to memory."
She scrolls through the missive, not knowing whether to scowl or laugh. Ciao Rocco, this is Kitty :) I SO totally enjoyed yesterday's flight and our sweet little dinner! I wonder if you'd like to have dinner again tonight, this time it's on me :) We can go to Top of the M, the view is AWESOME! Is 9 pm OK for you? K xxx
Now that's what you'd call taking the bull by the horns. "What's Top of the M?"
"Restaurant at the Meritus Mandarin, a couple of miles west of here. Fancy place."
Of course it will be a fancy place. She is probably expecting him to be the gentleman and pick up the tab anyway, despite promising to do it herself.
"Sorry tesoro, threesomes aren't really my thing." Unless I discover that you have a clone and I can get both of you in bed.
He laughs. "What I meant by your help was drafting the reply. Feel free to give her a send-off of your choice, you can take out the phone and put the card back in and send it yourself."
She is certainly tempted. The options range from the terse and chilly to the subtly sarcastic, and she could have a lot of fun with the drafting alone. But now that he has explicitly thrown in the towel, she does not feel the pressing need to rein him in. "You sure you don't want to go?" she teases, and almost means it. "The poor girl will be so, like, totally devastated," she adds, mimicking Kitty's voice.
"She probably will be," he admits. "But the dinner last night, and what went before it, served a purpose. Another dinner won't really have much of a point."
"The purpose being...?" The sort of purpose she suspected last night could be admirably served by a repeat encounter.
"Distracting her," Bruce explains, and she looks up sharply at the simple answer.
"From what?"
"From whom," he corrects. "Either I got it massively wrong, or she was looking for you so she could follow you in Singapore."
She continues staring at him, unsure whether he is being mega-paranoid or really creative with his excuses. Somehow the latter possibility seems less likely by the second.
"What made you think that?" she finally manages.
"You judge for yourself," he says with a micro-shrug. "I went to the business lounge, got in early as I took the train, and had an hour to kill before boarding. And the first thing I heard was her talking right outside the lounge, she must have gone out so she wouldn't be overheard. Ironic. What I heard was, I'm telling you she wasn't on that plane, you can check yourself if you can get into the records, what do you want me to do now? My first thought was that she could have been talking about you to this Brian guy who'd probably told her to follow you off that flight, and she'd lost you because you were flying as the Saudi wife. In any case I wanted to find out more about her for obvious reasons, so I walked away before she'd seen my face and pretended to be checking my phone, and then tailed her when I saw her leaving the lounge entrance. Sure enough, she went to the Thai counter and asked to issue the open standby ticket that she hadn't used for the earlier flight, to take the next one, the same 7:40 I was on and, as it happens, you were on as well. I didn't think you'd be on it, but didn't want her to catch sight of you just in case you were on it and had the veil off. Then I saw her going back toward the gates and did the only thing I could do to get her attention. I bought a cup of coffee and spilled it over her back, and acted the clumsy idiot who was instantly lovestruck, or at least lust-struck. A clumsy rich idiot, mind you, because I then dragged her into an Armani store and insisted that I buy her a new top to replace the T-shirt she had. I had my ticket in the De Stefano name and used the card in the same name so it made sense that I pretended to be my Italian alter ego. I did my best to charm her, and I guess it worked a bit too well. I kept trying to find out more about her and her whereabouts in Singapore, but she just kept flirting. I thought it would make sense to at least pick up her fingerprints, hence the dinner. I was wearing the Rocco print set I'd stuck on for my diamond shopping just in case, so I didn't have much to worry about, but try as I did, I couldn't steal a single piece of cutlery without her noticing."
Selina cannot manage a single word at this point, too busy burying her face in her hands to conceal what must be a rampant blush and wishing the ground would swallow her up. Now it all makes sense: the Rocco persona, lying to Kitty about not having a hotel booking, the shameless flirting, the dinner invitation... and she is a first-rate dumbass for the scene she pulled afterwards.
"Sorry," she finally mutters.
He sounds amused, of all things. "I tried to tell you last night but you wouldn't let me. Not that I'm complaining."
"That was stupid of me."
"Happens to the best of us," he says cheerily. "I can't throw stones where jealousy is concerned."
She manages a lopsided smile. "Modesty has always been your strong suit."
Luckily for her, the scene is interrupted at this point by Theo's arrival. Unluckily for her, he immediately picks up on the awkwardness.
"What's the matter?" He looks perplexed.
She shakes her head. "Don't ask. I've done something really dumb."
"You couldn't possibly top my monumental stupidity last night."
"I don't know, I'm a really close contender. See, he was flirting with this girl on the flight."
"Mr Wainwright likes living dangerously," Theo deadpans.
"Of course I got mad."
"Makes sense, if you ask me."
"Who turned out to be a possible spy tailing me."
Theo does not miss a beat. "So, Mr Wainwright, if you were flirting with her, where are her fingerprints?"
"I was just telling Selina I tried to pick them up but I don't have her legendary skill at... covert appropriation." At least it makes her smile again.
"Did you at least take a picture of her?"
Bruce shakes his head.
"And this is the man who makes fun of me for a minor recon oversight..."
"The Singapore Police Force begs to differ. Vandalising a CCTV camera here isn't exactly minor, Mr Gumslinger."
Even Theo smirks at that. "You're forgetting that the vandalism charge didn't stick," he reminds his tormentor.
"The fact remains, you did it. You have an EMP device right here and you didn't think of bringing it along to disable CCTV cameras? You could have been done in five seconds before they even figured out it wasn't a power outage."
"Have you seen its size?" Theo counters. "It's portable, sure, but the thing still weighs something like five kilo. And you're suggesting I should have brought it along just in case when all I wanted was to stick a couple of minicams on the wall."
"You've seen what happens otherwise. Anyway, it would have been suspicious if she noticed me taking her picture last night."
"You can have a second chance tonight," Selina reminds him.
For a second, Bruce looks at her with undisguised suspicion. "You sure you want me to do it?"
"I'm sure," she insists. "Listen, I was stupid last night but you're right, we'd better find out more about this Kitty. If you don't write to her to accept the date, I will." Who would have thought twelve hours ago that she'd be saying this.
"And to make up for my earlier lapse," Theo adds, "I can go there for dinner and swipe her cutlery or something, and take a photo of her. Maybe I can pretend I'm a waiter..."
"Actually, you look more like a maitre d'," Selina teases. "But short of me going there, I guess you going as a diner is the best option. The easiest trick would be to distract her and make her look away while Bruce swaps the water glasses, then he can get up from the table carrying it, to make a call or something, and give it to you where she can't see you."
"Sounds good. And in the meantime I can ask my dear ex-employers for one more favour and try to tag her in the arrival records. What time did you land?"
"Eleven PM."
"And what time, roughly, did you pass through immigration?"
"About twenty minutes later. We were in a cab by eleven thirty."
"OK, I'll ask them to pull up a list of all female arrivals between 11:15 and 11:30 and aged between – how old is she?"
"Early twenties, looks like," Selina supplies.
"OK, let's say between 18 and 30, just to be sure, plus passport details, photos and registered addresses in Singapore if available, and see what they come with."
"Great. Did you have any luck with Brian's fingerprints?" she reminds him.
Theo makes a face. "Zero. Doesn't mean he's clean, just means he hasn't been caught yet, but it's no help either way. And this Kettering fellow is still silent. Did you guys say they gave you a contact in the region? Maybe we could try asking him?"
It is a tempting idea, but on the downside, it might come too close for comfort to conveying desperation – and Bruce seems to share the sentiment.
"We've been given the name of this Newell guy who has consultancy offices in Asia, including here, as a front, but I think we'd better wait until tomorrow. It's still about-" he checks his watch, "midnight in DC. It's true that he's had two days to look into it, but it's been only one working day that passed here. Even if he's been able to ID this guy, it won't be much use to us unless there is practical information like where he's staying or what his contact details are, and Kettering probably needs a series of data points to triangulate his movements before he can send us anything useful. Mind you, he'll also want to avoid sending a series of messages and will just put everything into one data dump."
"Let's hope you're right," she mutters. "Because otherwise we risk having him slip through our fingers." They agreed back in Bangkok that their best chance of recovering the database was not in buying it but in knowing where to find it in order to steal or at least destroy it. As a result they figured out what seemed like a mid-range bid for her to declare tomorrow, sure to be outdone by other bidders. They stand little chance of benefiting from placing a high bid anyway, both because they do not really have the money and because it could seem suspicious if a mid-size independent regional arms dealer came up with a huge amount, with or without a client's help. But it also means that once the bids have been placed tomorrow, the window of opportunity will be closing fast.
"If there's no news tomorrow, we'll try Newell in the afternoon," Bruce promises.
"OK. Now you said you've got the stuff we need. Let's take a look at it before my brain goes to sleep." She is not, strictly speaking, feeling tired, but with three hours' sleep between last night and now, she knows it to be a matter of time.
He hands a memory stick to Theo, who plugs it into the laptop sitting on the sideboard before bringing it over, and opens the blueprint file. "It would have been better to make a paper copy but I didn't want to be seen walking around here with a stack of paper," Bruce explains.
"It'll do," she assures him as they take places on the couch and adjoining armchair and peer at the files. If needed, they can always print these out.
The layout plans confirm what she saw on her recon walk; the tower starts as a square cross-section with a rectangular internal corridor that continues for 30 floors before the two opposite corners are lopped off to produce a sort of flattened hexagon for the top ten floors, at which point the corridor becomes a single straight line down the centre. It stands a hundred yards away from Two Suntec mirroring it, its own flattened-hexagon top at a 45-degree angle, with the similarly-designed Three and Four Suntec further to the east and apparently under renovation. The four buildings together form a semicircle and are linked by passages connecting parts of the shopping mall occupying the first five floors separated from the tower by CCTV-equipped closing doors, with a singularly ugly tubular structure called the Fountain of Wealth, looking more like a bare-bones tealight holder than a fountain of anything, half-heartedly spewing water in the circular open space in the middle of the complex.
Brian's message said the meeting would be on the penultimate 39th floor, which puts it firmly into single-corridor territory, meaning that once she is up there she will have no corners to hide behind for eavesdropping and the like. On the plus side, there are fire escape stairs next to the lift and restrooms at either end of the corridor - she may pop in there before the meeting without raising suspicions and leave a retransmitter there, safe so long as she can conceal it inside a disposable carton and throw it in the trash.
A look at the building maintenance company records that Bruce has managed to hack into shows the building to be open six days a week, 7:30 am to 9 pm Monday through Friday and until 3 pm Saturdays, and guarded 24 hours a day, as Theo has had a chance to discover. The list of outsourced service providers is relatively short: receptionists, an office cleaning company, window washers, security guards, and gardeners - with the tower adjacent to the shopping mall, there must be no need for caterers as office workers surely go to the mall food court for lunch. With the unfortunate exception of the guards, these services are only available Monday through Friday, which rules out the easiest ways Bruce could sneak in or smuggle in gadgetry on Saturday after her meeting, but it can't be helped. Maybe he can pose as a pizza delivery boy at lunchtime for someone pulling a weekend office shift.
The list of tenants looks like a garden-variety collection of law firms, accountants, and traders; the 39th floor is allegedly occupied by a Dubai-based engineering consultancy and a PR firm with three large rooms each, and half a dozen Deloitte & Touche partners' offices with a common reception and a boardroom - their rank and file toil away on the floors below. Accountants may not be averse to shady practices, but imagining Brian to be a Deloitte partner selling top secret databases on the side is something of a stretch. They check out the consultancy and the PR firm; the PR firm looks alive and kicking with a string of recent press clippings, but the consultancy no longer lists a Singapore office on their site; they probably signed a long-term lease and are, in all likelihood, now subleasing to shorter-term tenants, Brian presumably being the current one.
For now, she has seen what she needed; the rest will have to wait until she has been to the meeting. "OK, I guess we're done for now. Do you guys know someplace nice I can go for a walk where I'd be unlikely to attract attention? I might as well see a thing or two while there's a bit of time." There isn' a lot she can do otherwise, and she'd rather avoid a daytime nap for fear of staying awake at night; it will be better to go to bed early.
"You could go to the bird park," Bruce suggests. "Can't remember the name but it's a nice place. They have a few acres covered in this huge net so the birds fly free. It's away from the centre so there's no risk of bumping into Kitty and Co in the street, and you can take a cab there."
A check on Theo's laptop tells her that the place is named Jurong and is open until six. It is a quarter to three; if she gets out now she'll have about two and a half hours there, a good way to spend the afternoon. "OK, I'm out of here, then." She picks up the abaya again. "Wait... when are you going to give me the diamonds for tomorrow morning?" Considering that her meeting is at eight AM, Bruce has the dinner date in the evening, and they'd better try to stay apart at night, now may be the only chance.
"I can take them to your room while you're at the park," he offers.
Makes sense; he can easily do it with the lockpick. "OK. The safe code is the last six digits of the Wainwright switchboard number." She took the habit of using it as a code combination, also because it gave her a chance to hint to associates what it was in the presence of strangers without giving it away; her Tessuti Varese emergency phone call experience showed her the value of that.
"You think I know it by heart?" Bruce quips.
"You can look up that Wanted email you sent, you put your number in there," she teases. "Swap out the last two digits for 63 and you've got it."
"We're all set, then," Theo concludes. "You write to this Kitty as soon as you're out of here and accept the invitation. I wait until the Interpol calls me to go pick up my passport and the bail money, they said they'd get it from the police and give it to me sometime this afternoon. Then I go to the Top of the M at eight thirty, you and Kitty show up at nine or thereabouts, I try to create a distraction while you swap the water glasses, I call you and you take the glass with you when you get up to talk away from the table, I pick it up and take it to the Interpol." He turns to Selina. "Then we meet here tomorrow morning after you've been to Suntec. And please, the two of you, try not to follow my example and get arrested in the meantime."
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TBC
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P.S.
This is totally off topic, and apologies if you've heard enough in the past few days, but I am very sad over Paul Walker's death. The Fast & Furious films have been a major and enduring guilty pleasure since my late twenties when I saw, and loved, the first film in July 2001, and were my one remaining film fandom that still had upcoming films that were guaranteed to be fun [I used to be a Star Wars fan but that was ages ago and I am sceptical about Disney]... and Paul was the emotional core of those films. He was not in Christian Bale's league acting-wise, but was known as a genuine and kind man, a humanitarian and conservationist, an overall decent human being. He was gorgeous too, but that is another matter. For fuck's sake, he was a year younger than me and has lived a much more meaningful life than mine. Shame it ended too soon for him. Tragic death has a way of making stars into legends; at least in this case it has taken a deserving candidate.
If you are not too tired of the recent press coverage, take a look at two stories that only surfaced after he died, [http www] dailymail*co*uk/news/article-2518431/Paul-Walkers-charity-work-Tinseltown-tsunami-zone*html and [http www] dailymail*co*uk/news/article-2518156/Paul-Walker-secretly-bought-Iraq-war-veteran-9-000-wedding-ring*html – he would have made a worthy counterpart to the fictional Bruce Wayne as a real life humble hero.
And while most people here probably won't be Fast & Furious fans, I can recommend Fast Five to anyone who likes a good heist film with a big helping of adrenaline and epic bromance. Despite being the fifth in the series, it makes for fun watching as a standalone film.
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Notes
The chapter title is a reference to Singapore's popular nickname due to its draconian laws. You can check out [http] singapore-the-fine-city*blogspot*it/ or [http www]
businessinsider*com/absurd-laws-of-singapore-2012-6#ixzz2dSJR6Xzn for a quick recap - or just google "Singapore Fine City". I've looked at other articles, criminal laws, and police procedures, and can promise that all the stuff mentioned above is true to fact according to my sources.
I realised I set myself up for a minor continuity error in the last chapter when I said Bruce and Theo met in the lobby when Theo was getting out for dinner. Considering that Bruce had landed at 11 pm and had just had dinner with Kitty, no matter how quick, the time was going to be about half past midnight, leaving just enough time for Bruce to borrow the lockpick, drop by at his own room, and sneak into Selina's room before she got back from the gym at about 1 am. Either way, it would be kind of late to be going *out* for dinner and Theo should have been coming back from dinner instead. I've tweaked that bit in the previous chapter now, but had to say it here for readers who follow in real time.
The address Theo gave Bruce at the end of the previous chapter, 391 New Bridge Road, is the Singapore police HQ. Should you want to get to know them better, you can look up [http www] spf*gov*sg/abtspf/anf*htm
The Swissotel is found here: [http www] swissotel*com/hotels/singapore-stamford/ There is a link to the room and suite types I mention here - Stamford Crest, the Grand Room, and executive suites. The final picspam I made last year for this story, at [http]01cheers*livejournal*com/7888*html, has a panorama photo of both the Swissotel and the nearby Raffles, which will come into play a couple of chapters later.
The Faraday cage to protect phones and the like is real and can be bought: [http www] popsci*com/gadgets/article/2013-08/how-protect-yourself-your-phone
Amazingly, Batman bin Suparman is a 100% true story and was a nice bijou gift to my plot. If you want to see more details and a photo of his ID, take a look at [http www] dailymail*co*uk/news/article-2502491/Batman-bin-Suparman-thief-jailed-stealing-bank-card-brother*html#ixzz2kRWodrsK
My description of Suntec is the best representation of wht I saw of it online and on Google Earth; I have been to Singapore but have no firsthand recollection of it. The general layout is found at [http www] sunteccity*com*sg/store_directory*php; a photo, including the ugly Fountain of wealth, is here: [http www] sunteccity*com*sg/images/suntec-mall*jpg
There are numerous articles showing how cell phone tracking using GPS is widely used by the NSA et al. The most recent is this one: [http www] theguardian*com/world/2013/dec/04/nsa-storing-cell-phone-records-daily-snowden
And the Jurong bird park is really a great place to visit: [http www] birdpark*com*sg