Singapore’s Raffles Place.
The heart of Singapore’s financial district.
A place where world-class banks and investment firms stood clustered together.
And there, an enormous explosion occurred.
It was powerful enough to shake the buildings.
The aftermath was horrific.
Shards of broken glass had flown dozens of meters away,
and the roar of the blast had reverberated throughout Singapore.
Dozens of people had been killed or injured.
Dozens of ambulances bustled around the scene.
The smell of gunpowder still seemed to linger in the air.
It was a sight rarely seen in Singapore.
Tan Weiming arrived at the scene.
He was the chief investigator of the Singapore Police Force’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID).
He was in his mid-forties.
Though he had formerly been a military investigator, he was famous for his sharp analytical skills.
He quietly surveyed the scene.
The underground parking lot.
The point where the explosion had begun.
Blackened scorch marks remained on the floor,
while damaged vehicles and chunks of concrete lay scattered all around.
After inspecting the underground parking lot, Tan Weiming went up into the building aboveground.
And soon, he came to a stop.
The walls.
The pillars.
The floor.
The windows.
Everywhere he turned his gaze, there were bullet casings and bullet marks.
Dozens. No, it looked like there were more than hundreds.
These bastards hadn’t been careful at all.
They hadn’t been afraid of getting caught, nor had they even worried about it.
They didn’t seem to have any intention of handling things quietly or discreetly.
They had simply poured out everything they had.
All that remained was the intent to kill.
He could feel it in the bullet marks.
This hadn’t been suppression.
It had been revenge.
He went back down to the underground parking lot.
There was something extremely suspicious there.
A container that had no place in an underground parking lot.
Tan Weiming asked,
“What kind of explosives were used?”
“It’s complicated. Military-grade bombs mixed with C4, ammonium nitrate, diesel fuel, potassium chlorate, and so on.”
The forensic examiner answered.
As if he couldn’t understand, Tan Weiming asked,
“Is a combination like that even possible? And a military-grade bomb? In Singapore?”
“The container itself served as one enormous bomb. The military-grade bomb only acted as the detonator, while the ammonium nitrate, diesel fuel, and potassium chlorate amplified the explosion. It’s obvious at a glance that an expert worked on it.”
Tan Weiming muttered,
“An expert. Then it should be easier to narrow down.”
“On the contrary, it’s also a simple bomb that could be made with only basic chemical knowledge. For something supposedly made by an expert, it lacks safety measures and the like far too much. It’s an extremely dangerous thing. You never know when it might go off. The fact that they managed to bring it here without detonating it is astonishing in itself.”
In fact, it was the same kind of container used in the port explosion in Japan, but Japan had kept that information tightly concealed.
They had merely stubbornly insisted that it had been an explosion involving a movie prop.
Perhaps because of that, they had managed to prevent information about the incident from spreading outside.
“Could it have been made here?”
“Impossible. When we checked the CCTV footage from this morning, there was no container. The container was turned into a bomb and brought into the underground parking lot.”
Tan Weiming spoke as if the matter were simple.
“Either way, they would have had to pass through downtown Singapore to bring the container here. Let’s start by pulling the CCTV footage.”
“Yes. But…”
“But what?”
“All the nearby CCTV cameras went dead around the time of the explosion. We couldn’t find the trailer carrying the container.”
“What?”
“That’s not all. All the nearby base stations were knocked out during that period as well. Communications were completely impossible.”
“Does that… make any sense?”
“That’s why the police response was delayed.”
“Any witnesses?”
“When the police arrived, there were no survivors—only the dead. Not a single injured person or witness. Everyone was dead.”
“Everyone?”
“They died from gunshot wounds. In fact, every one of them had a hole in the head, as if they’d all been executed to make sure they were dead.”
“Who were the victims?”
“They were employees of a trading company that handled agricultural products.”
“You mean they killed civilians?”
Tan Weiming spoke in a slightly angry voice.
“But there are quite a few strange things about them for company employees.”
“Strange things? Like what?”
“They were all carrying firearms. They were also wearing bulletproof vests. We found evidence that they had fired their weapons as well.”
Tan Weiming tilted his head, unable to make sense of it.
What kind of situation was this?
Men firing their weapons like madmen.
And employees of an agricultural-products trading company carrying guns and wearing bulletproof vests.
Nothing about it was natural.
There had to be a hidden reason.
He didn’t know what that reason was,
but even setting it aside,
there was no changing the fact that an enormous incident had occurred.
And yet there were far too few clues.
No—the gaps were far too large.
The police response was delayed, there was no CCTV, no communications records, and no witnesses?
It was bewildering.
Even counting his years as a military investigator
and his time serving in the police,
this was the first time he had encountered a case like this.
There was only one thing he was certain of.
It absolutely wasn’t a coincidence.
At that moment, another incident came to Tan Weiming’s mind.
The incident at the Marina Bay Sands hotel several days earlier.
That incident had resembled this one in many ways.
Dozens of black vans had appeared around the hotel.
People who weren’t soldiers had entered the hotel carrying firearms.
At the same time, the power had gone out,
the elevators had stopped,
and communications had been cut off.
They had asked the hotel to submit its records,
but the hotel had only said that no such records existed.
They claimed it had merely been a mechanical failure,
and issued only a brief statement saying that everything had been restored in less than five minutes.
There had been a death as well.
But the case had been closed as a suicide.
Tan Weiming had confirmed it through photographs,
and it really had been a suicide.
Tan Weiming looked around.
There were far too many similarities to the Marina Bay Sands hotel incident.
Above all, there were too many things that couldn’t be explained.
Then, all at once,
the thought occurred to him: Could they be the same people?
They were too similar.
The way they disabled the CCTV,
the way they cut off communications,
and the way they boldly carried out the incident without showing any fear.
Perhaps something enormous was happening in Singapore that even the Singapore Police didn’t know about.
Tan Weiming muttered under his breath,
“What on earth is happening in Singapore?”
.
.
.
Singapore Police Force Criminal Investigation Department (CID) Headquarters.
Tan Weiming was reviewing the case files in his office.
He had gone over them several times, but the conclusion remained the same.
There were simply too few clues.
No CCTV, no communications records, and no witnesses.
Around the time of the explosion, it was as if the entire city had come to a halt.
They were proceeding with the investigation using the few records that remained, but the situation seemed utterly hopeless.
The explosives had been constructed in a baffling way he had never seen before.
Military-grade bombs, C4, ammonium nitrate, diesel fuel, and potassium chlorate had all been mixed together.
The structure was simple, yet complicated.
The guns, by contrast, were far too common a model.
They weren’t military weapons, nor had they been specially modified, and they bore no markings.
They were guns that could easily be obtained anywhere.
There was no way to identify who had used them.
They couldn’t even get a sense of which country or organization was involved.
Still, the evidence had to be organized.
He was rearranging the evidence collected at the scene once more, putting everything in chronological order.
Then came a knock.
“Yes. Come in.”
“Busy?”
The door opened, and Li Chunhao, the deputy director of the CID, poked his head in and asked.
Tan Weiming shook his head.
“No. I was just organizing the files.”
Li Chunhao entered the office and looked at the documents on the desk.
“Raffles Place?”
“Yes. I don’t know how something like this could have happened in Singapore.”
“What do we have for evidence?”
“Nothing. An explosion that size, and we don’t have a single piece of evidence. They fired their guns without the slightest fear, yet they didn’t make one mistake. It’s clean.”
“I read the report too. So? What are you going to do?”
“What else? We have to catch the culprits.”
“With no evidence?”
“We have to dig through everything from the ground up, somehow. These bastards will be sentenced to death if they’re caught, but we can’t let them die that easily. If it were up to me, I’d have them caned. They need to be beaten every day to come to their senses. Firing guns in Singapore, of all places.”
Tan Weiming spoke with a faintly playful tone.
“Every day?”
“Yes. Every day for as long as they’re alive. That’ll bring them to their senses.”
Tan Weiming gave a short, amused laugh.
But Li Chunhao, the deputy director of the CID, did not laugh with him.
He said nothing.
A brief silence passed.
After letting the moment linger for quite some time, Li Chunhao asked carefully,
“Didn’t you feel anything at the scene?”
“At the scene? That they weren’t afraid? That they didn’t care about anything else? That they were crazy? Something like that? They opened fire without giving a thought to getting caught. And I’m angry that they still managed to leave behind no evidence.”
Tan Weiming answered plainly, just as he had felt at the scene.
“Didn’t you sense any anger?”
“Anger?”
“Didn’t they look like people seeking revenge against someone?”
Tan Weiming recalled the scene once more.
Come to think of it, it really had felt like someone’s rage.
The bullet marks and shell casings.
The traces of gunfire as they chased after those who were fleeing.
The gunshot wounds to the heads.
The execution-style killings.
It hadn’t been the efficient movement of people carrying out a mission.
There had been a deep-seated emotion in it—a desire to kill every last one of them.
It had felt almost like retribution. Like a massacre.
“…Now that you mention it, I suppose it did. It was closer to a massacre than an operation.”
Li Chunhao nodded at Tan Weiming’s answer.
“That’s what I thought too. You could even feel the anger in the photographs.”
“But why are you asking me that?”
“I’m telling you this in advance…the case will probably be transferred to the Internal Security Department (ISD).”
“The ISD? Why? We can investigate it too.”
“That’s not the issue.”
“Because it’s a terrorist incident? If so, we should be the ones handling it, not the ISD.”
Tan Weiming spoke firmly.
But Li Chunhao shook his head.
“It isn’t terrorism.”
“What?”
“There’s a strong possibility it was an incident driven by a personal grudge.”
“An individual?”
“He may have lost his family. He may have been betrayed. So he killed every last one of them.”
“…”
Tan Weiming couldn’t continue.
He had never imagined the case taking this direction.
It was a development he hadn’t even considered.
This wasn’t a South American drug cartel,
but one individual in the middle of Singapore had escalated a personal grudge into something like this?
Set off a bomb and opened fire?
It was unbelievable.
“The issue is the power that person possesses. The power to shut down the city’s CCTV, cut off the communications network, bring in explosives, and fire indiscriminately. And yet there’s no evidence.”
“We can find the evidence, can’t we?”
“That isn’t all. Pressure is already coming down from above. They want us to wrap it up appropriately.”
“From above?”
“The Prime Minister’s Office.”
Li Chunhao said it briefly,
then continued.
“I don’t know who that person is either. But the power he possesses isn’t personal—it’s on the level of a nation. The government seems to be hoping he won’t become any angrier. If he does, it may not be Raffles Place that collapses, but all of Singapore. The government itself seems to be under pressure.”
“No way…”
“That’s why I’m telling you. Don’t dig too deeply. Wrap it up properly and pass it on.”
“Is that an order?”
Tan Weiming asked in a sharp voice.
“…It’s advice. You’re a pretty good investigator. I want to protect you. I just don’t want to see you get caught up in a case that isn’t worth it.”
Li Chunhao spoke gently.
When Tan Weiming merely stared blankly, Li Chunhao gave him a pat on the shoulder before leaving the room.
Left alone, Tan Weiming was unable to move for some time.
One individual’s anger?
The anger of someone who had lost his family?
No matter how he thought about it, it made no sense.
An individual’s anger had brought a city to a standstill?
The government was afraid of his anger?
They were trying to close the case quickly for fear of making him angry?
He couldn’t understand it.
Tan Weiming checked the documents on his desk again.
Among them were photographs of the Raffles Place explosion.
Separate from the case itself, Tan Weiming began to grow curious.
Who could he possibly be?
A person with this kind of power.
And the reason behind his anger.
He was intensely curious, but there was still no evidence.
Looking at the case files, he muttered quietly,
“Who are you?”