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years been one of Singapore’s most recognizable landmarks had
been cleaved exactly in half. It looked as if it had been sliced
straight through by a giant ax. He could see inside open hotel
rooms, a cut-away view that seemed more like a computer simulation
than reality.
    Right in front of him a bus with all its
windows blown out sat sideways across Orchard Road. Tay stopped
next to it and gaped at the Marriott. The bomb must have been
detonated in the driveway somewhere near its entrance. This was no
suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest. This had been a truck
bomb, a big one. But he had heard three separate explosions, Tay
remembered. Where had the other two occurred? And were they this
bad? If they were, God help them all.
    Tay took a couple of steps backward in an
involuntary retreat from the horror in front of him. His left foot
slipped in something slick and he stumbled over a tattered
mattress. He tried to steady himself, but he was off balance and
fell across the mattress and up against one of the bus’s big
tires.
    Tay’s first thought was how embarrassed he
was by that. Surrounded by so much misery, and here he was lying on
a mattress. It just didn’t seem right to him.
    ***
    And that was exactly where Tay was — lying on
the mattress, his back up against the bus tire — when the whole
world abruptly turned white.
    The first surge of light was followed a
moment later by the blast wave of a mammoth explosion from the
direction of the ION Orchard. A powerful pressure wave blew a
rolling wall of flames across what was left of Orchard Road
directly toward the Marriott. The very oxygen in the air ignited
and the release of gas, heat, and light felt to Tay like the world
was ending.
    And maybe it was.
    This fourth bomb collected the hundreds of
thousands of shards of broken glass at the shopping mall that had
been created by the first three explosions and hurled them back
like a cloud of razor sharp knives. Rescue workers caught in the
open were shredded. Most of them would later have to be identified
by DNA. Nothing left of the bodies was big enough to recognize.
    Tay’s body was protected by the heavy rubber
bus tire, and that was what saved his life.
    The tire was less effective in protecting Tay
from the compression wave than it was from the cloud of glass, but
it was effective enough. The wave rolled over the ground like a
tsunami, battering and in some cases entirely demolishing the
internal organs of those who took its full force. Tay did not take
its full force because of the big rubber bus tire.
    The wave snapped his head first one way and
then back the other way. He felt like he had been stabbed with
sharpened pencils in both ears. He wondered if his eardrums had
been broken.
    Then the nausea overcame him and he began to
lose consciousness. His last thought before he passed out was
this.
    Goddamned motherfucking barbarians. I’ll find
every last one of them and I’ll kill them myself.

 
     

FOUR
     
    WAKING UP IN a hospital is a disorienting
experience for anyone. And when Tay woke up, that’s exactly what he
was: disoriented.
    For a moment — pretty much like almost
everyone else who has survived a traumatic event, lost
consciousness, and awakened in a hospital — Tay’s first thought was
that he just had a horrible dream. But then he registered the drip
running into a vein in his left arm, the electrodes stuck to
various parts of his body, and the slightly ominous beeping of
medical equipment somewhere just out of sight, and he knew it had
not been a dream.
    “Hello, sir. Welcome back.”
    Tay rolled his head toward the voice and
found his Sergeant, Robbie Kang, sitting in a straight-backed chair
to the left side of his bed. Kang had been Tay’s sergeant ever
since he came to CID. He was tall and gangly for a Singaporean and
he wore black glasses that were forever sliding down his nose.
    “How bad?” Tay asked.
    “They say you’ll be fine, sir. A week or so
of rest and you’ll be right