“My apartment.”
“Out of the question. We have to assume they have it under surveillance.”
“They?”
“Lester. The people he’s working with. The ones who sent a man to kill you.”
“We can go to my mother’s. She has a small home ten minutes from here.”
Simon shook his head. “We can’t bring her into this. Don’t you have a friend? Someone who’s not a relation.”
London considered this, then barked orders to the taxi driver. The car made a U-turn and headed south, toward the water. “I know just the place.”
“Where are we headed?” asked Simon.
“Sentosa Island. A friend’s apartment. It’s a security building. We’ll be safe there.”
Simon looked at the reporter. She stared back, arms crossed, eyes beseeching the world.Why is this happening to me?
And he hadn’t even told her about the cat yet.
The apartment of Mr. and Mrs. Michael Blume took up one half of the forty-second floor of the Drake Court Luxury Condominiums on Sentosa Island. Three bedrooms, four baths, in three thousand square feet. A mogul’s palace by Asian living standards. And decorated like one. Ming vases, lacquered screens, marble floors, jade carvings.
Simon and London sat with Mandy Blume in the living room. A picture window offered a view of the Singapore Straits. Vessels of every size plied the water from shore to horizon. Tugs, freighters, motor yachts, cutting white swaths through the dark blue seas. But mostly there were the big boys. The Panamax-class container ships—nine hundred fifty feet long, piled to tipping with thousands of rectangular containers—and the supertankers, low and sleek, longer still, some reaching fifteen hundred feet, moored to offshore gas lines or heading to all points bearing cargos of Indonesian and Malaysian oil. It was a view into the bloodstream of international commerce.
The time was just past six in the evening. Mandy had arrived ten minutes after them, heeding London’s plea for a safe place to rest up. She gave them a second cup of tea and a third dram of Irish whiskey as Simon explained in a level of detail appreciated by the two journalists (both taking notes as he spoke) the events that had brought him from England to Thailand, and now to Singapore. He concentrated on what he considered the salient moments: the meeting at the Bangkok Remand Prison and Colonel’s Tan’s evident allegiance to a higher master, his retrieval of the flash drive secreted in a bottle at the Little Havana, the feeling even then that he was being followed, and then the shooting at the Spanish embassy. He saw no need to describe the horror of it, instead drawing attention to the moment Tan received the call from an Italian named Luca, how everything spun out of control after that. He touched only lightly on the rest: his flight from Bangkok, the call to Arjit Singh (no names given, of course), his subsequent capture by Shaka and loss of the flash drive, and finally his escape out of Thailand.
London, in turn, briefed Simon on the fruits of her investigation thus far, though most of it he already knew from his conversations with Rafa and his more recent perusal of the files stolen from PetroSaud’s servers. She was as smart as she was pretty but cold and machine-like in her summation. Impressive and a little intimidating. A force.
“This story promises to be the biggest instance of financial fraud in the past fifty years,” she said in closing. “We’re looking at over thirty billion dollars of stolen money.”
London gauged him and Mandy for their response. Mandy expelled a breath, though she hardly looked pleased. If HW went down, and there was a good chance it would given the scope of Hadrian Lester’s malfeasance, her husband would be out of a job, and all this—the vases and teak and jade—might vanish in the blink of an eye. Or rather, the bang of a judge’s gavel.
“He can’t be doing it alone,” said London. “He’s got to have help, in compliance for one.” Compliance, the much-hated division of any financial institution charged with making sure its employees follow the letter of the law. “No way all of those funds’ investments with PetroSaud pass muster without someone looking the other way. This has been going on for too long to keep hidden. Lester has to have men at every level of the operation.”
“Agreed,” said Simon. “But there’s more to the picture. This isn’t just about money. There’s something else tying all these countries, these fund managers, together. PetroSaud is only one side of it.”
“It’s Lester,” said Mandy Blume. “He’s behind it all. Scoundrel.”
“He’s part of it,” said. Simon. “Maybe a big part, but not all.”
“How do you know it’s about more than money?” asked London.
“A couple of things,” said Simon. “Hear me out.”
London and Mandy nodded, pens at the ready.
“The involvement of Colonel Albert Tan, for one. His behavior made clear he wasn’t acting only as a representative of the Thai police. He wasn’t there to oversee Rafa’s arrest. He had skin in the game. Why else would he fly to Ko Phi Phi to personally take Rafa into custody? Why would he leave a board meeting to make sure he was present when I met with Rafa in jail? Why all the goons following me? I don’t know if I can explain. He had orders to make sure Rafa didn’t get out of the country. My guess is that they came from Luca. Oh, and I checked…Thailand isn’t one of Hadrian Lester’s, HW’s, or PetroSaud’s clients. It’s something else entirely. Then there’s Juan Llado, the Spanish naval attaché killed at the embassy. Llado knew what was going down. In fact, I’d bet he was the one who disabled the cameras. He had a clean shot at Shaka…or whatever his real name is…He didn’t take it. He hesitated.”
“But Shaka killed him,” said London, checking her notes.
“He also killed Tan and Rafa and George Adamson. Like he tried to kill you and me. ‘No more questions.’ His words.”
“What will happen to him?” asked London.
“Jail, I hope,” said Mandy. “For a bloody long time.”
“I called a contact in Thailand,” said Simon. “The man who helped me get out.”
