Umbrella Man (9786167611204) Read Online Free Page A

as rain.”
    “Not me.” Tay lifted a hand weakly and
pointed a finger in the direction where he thought the outside
world probably was. “Out there. How bad?”
    Kang took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes
with his free hand. Tay could see now how tired he looked.
    “Bad,” Kang said. “Really bad, sir.”
    Tay said nothing. He just waited for the
rest.
    “They find more bodies every day,” Kang went
on, rubbing his eyes some more. “Two days ago the death toll was
about two hundred. Now it’s over three hundred with several hundred
missing and a thousand more injured.”
    “Two days ago? How long have I been in
here?”
    “Since Wednesday, sir. The night it
happened.”
    “What’s today?”
    “Saturday.” Kang put his glasses back on. His
mouth formed a smile, but his eyes didn’t join in. “You had us
worried there, sir. The doctor said you’d be fine, but…well, when
you didn’t wake up, we all started to wonder if—”
    “What hospital is this?” Tay interrupted.
    “Changi General.”
    “By the airport?”
    “Yes, sir. Mount Elizabeth was evacuated
after the explosions and Singapore General and National University
were both full, so…” Kang shrugged. “It’s a good hospital,
sir.”
    One hospital closed, two others full?
    Tay took a deep breath. “Tell me about it,
Sergeant. Tell me what happened. Tell me everything you know.”
    So Kang did.
    ***
    There had been four explosions altogether.
The first three were the ones Tay had heard standing in his garden.
The fourth was the one that got him.
    As the police had reconstructed events,
around 7:45 pm on Wednesday night, two white, Mitsubishi L300 panel
vans had driven south on Scotts Road from Newton Circus, one
immediately in front of the other. At exactly the same time, a
third identical Mitsubishi van had entered Orchard Road from the
west, coming from the direction of the Botanic Garden.
    No one paid much attention to any of the
vehicles. They were ordinary-looking Mitsubishi vans, identical to
the hundreds of other similar vans that plied Singapore’s streets
most every day. There was simply nothing memorable about them.
    The few witnesses police could find who might
have remembered the vans at all described the drivers in widely
varying ways. Young, dark, and ordinary were the three words
witnesses used most often, but none of the descriptions were
particularly helpful. The only thing on which almost everyone
agreed was there had been no one visible in any of the vans except
the drivers, although one elderly Chinese man had firmly insisted
he had seen a second man in the front seat of the van heading for
the Hilton.
    The lead van of the two driving southbound on
Scotts Road turned into the driveway of the Grand Hyatt, drove
straight up to the hotel’s entrance and stopped as if it were there
to unload the luggage of some tour group recently arrived from the
airport. The second van continued to the Marriott, which was just
next door to the Hyatt. When it turned off Scotts Road into the
Marriott’s driveway, it politely waited for a small band of
blue-uniformed schoolgirls to cross, then pulled up a little
further and halted in front of the Crossroads Bar. The Crossroads
Bar was about the closest thing Singapore could muster to a genuine
Parisian-style sidewalk cafe and it was a popular place. On this
evening, as on most, it was jammed full of both locals and visitors
who had gathered in the warm, liquid Singaporean dusk to enjoy a
beer or two.
    The third van turned off Orchard Road into
the Hilton’s driveway. It stopped under the hotel’s front portico
and the driver cut the engine. It was only about two hundred yards
west of the Hyatt and the Marriott.
    Less than a minute later, the vans parked in
front of the Marriott’s Crossroads Bar and the entrance to the
Grand Hyatt exploded almost simultaneously. And a few second after
that, the van parked at the Hilton exploded.
    The explosive mechanism in all three vans was
the same: