‘It’s all right.’ She was unconcerned. ‘I’ve seen plenty of butchered bodies.’
Hari smiled at her. ‘But not inside a suitcase.’
‘No.’ She put a hand over her nose. ‘How long is this going to take?’
‘You don’t have to stay.’ Coburn went to fetch her carryall. ‘I can handle things by myself. Wait with Hari in the car.’
Hari passed him a small box. ‘You will need this timer you ask me to purchase for you,’ he said. ‘Since it was made in China and cost less than twenty dollars, it would be prudent for you to check its operation before you use it.’
‘I will. Anything else?’
‘Only that you could perhaps consider putting your watch on the wrist of the body. It is a small idea, but one that might be helpful.’
‘OK.’ Coburn was anxious to get on with it. He gave the carryall to Heather and squeezed her hand. ‘I’ll see you down at the car.’
‘You’ll be careful, won’t you?’ She took her hand away from her face and attempted a smile.
‘Sure. Go on, both of you. The quicker you’re out of here the sooner I can get to work.’ He watched her leave the room, knowing that with too much left unsaid between them he’d need her to himself for a while before he boarded his flight, but beginning to wonder if he’d have the opportunity to do so.
To test the timer, he set it for ten minutes then, after connecting a table-lamp to it and plugging it into the wall socket in the kitchen he switched on the power.
Instead of sitting around counting down the minutes, he went through the apartment again to make certain he had everything he needed before he returned to the kitchen and tried to decide what he should do about the body.
The timer turned out to be reasonably accurate, switching on the lamp after eleven and a quarter minutes – a long enough delay, he thought, which meant he didn’t need to readjust it.
He turned off the wall switch and wound back the dial to zero then went to unpack the suitcase, but had got no further than unzipping part of the lid when he was forced to retreat, first by a trickle of foulsmelling liquid that ran out on to the floor, and then by such a revolting smell of putrefying flesh that he came close to gagging.
For his second attempt he was better prepared. Holding a wet towel over his face, he used the handle of a broom to finish opening the lid, and quickly tipped the case over on to its side.
A severed leg fell out, but the top half of the torso remained in place until he used the broom again and managed to dislodge it.
The body was in an advanced state of decomposition. Although the skin colour wasn’t a bad match, he couldn’t tell how old the victim had been, or even what had caused his death. Where the teeth had been smashed, the lips were peeled back in a grotesque grin and it looked as though whoever had attended to the fingertips had been over-enthusiastic with a blowlamp.
Coburn didn’t hang around. Holding his breath he replaced the lead to the table-lamp with the one for the fridge, flipped on the switch again and backed away, remembering to open the fridge door and throw his watch on top of the disgusting mess before he washed his hands in the bathroom and left the apartment for the last time.
Once outside in the street, he spent a moment or two gulping in fresh air, glad the job was done and ready now to embark on the more difficult part of what he’d kept telling Heather was his plan, but that if he was honest with himself, he knew was little more than a poorly thought-out step into the unknown.
For a weekday morning the street was quiet. A group of people was waiting at the pedestrian crossing at the corner, but not close enough to be in danger, he decided, and unless the explosion was to be a good deal more violent than he expected, even passing cars were unlikely to suffer anything worse than superficial damage from fragments of flying glass.
Lin had wisely parked his Mercedes some distance away. Standing beside it, Heather was talking to Hari through an open window and was slow to see Coburn coming.
Indicating that she should remain where she was, he hurried over and suggested it might be best if she watched from inside the car.
‘It’s facing the wrong way.’ She didn’t move. ‘I want to see what happens. How long do we have?’
‘Five or six minutes. You never know though. A lot of bombmakers blow themselves up with cheap timers.’
She glanced at her watch. ‘You are absolutely sure about the people in the other apartments, aren’t you?’
‘I’ve told you.’ He’d explained this to her before. ‘The building’s made out of reinforced concrete slabs. Anyway, you were the one who said you heard the couple next door leaving at half past eight this morning, and the young guy on the other side only ever uses his place in the evenings when he has a new girlfriend to sort out.’
‘Like you, you mean?’
‘Yep.’ Coburn grinned. ‘How much cash do you need for your airfare?’
‘You don’t have to pay for it.’ She looked awkward. ‘I don’t need a ticket. I’m not going back to England.’
‘Yes you are.’
She shook her head. ‘I’m going back with Hari to the village. I can stay with Indiri and her husband. Hari’s already phoned to see if it’s all right. He thinks I’ll be safer there than I would be in Europe.’
Coburn didn’t say anything.
‘Don’t look at me like that.’ She frowned at him. ‘Last night doesn’t mean you can tell me what I can do or where I can go. Hari’s lending me his sat phone so you can call me from the States whenever you want. I promise I’ll carry it with me all the time.’ She handed him a piece of paper. ‘There you are. I’ve written down the number for you.’
‘Is that really where you want to go?’ He was trying to think. ‘Do you really want to stay at the village?’
‘Mm. I’ve still got Hari’s little gun, and if you let me have yours as well, I’ll have two.’ She smiled. ‘You don’t have to worry about me. I’ll be fine.’
Hari had been pretending not to listen. He was also growing impatient. Climbing out of the car he shielded his eyes from the sun and peered back at the building as though he thought something might have gone wrong.
‘It’s OK,’ Coburn said. ‘Another couple of minutes.’
‘Miss Cameron has informed you of her decision?’
‘Whose idea was it – hers or yours?’
‘While we are waiting for you, she asks me if such an arrangement would be possible. I tell her that for as long as she wishes to be a guest at the village, she will be welcome and kept safe.’
‘You might have to bolt her down. If she ever wants to go out with you on a night raid, don’t let her.’
‘Of course not. I think that—’
Coburn never discovered what Hari thought.
In a deafening roar, the whole front wall of his apartment blew out in a sheet of flame, shattering into door-sized chunks before what was left of it crashed harmlessly on to the lawn below.
For several seconds all he could hear was the ringing in his ears, vaguely aware of airborne debris bouncing off the car and raining down around him, and not appreciating the true violence of the blast until the smoke began to clear and he had his first glimpse of the blackened hole where his kitchen once had been.
People were standing bewildered in the street not knowing where to run. At the corner, a nose to tail car accident was forcing traffic to back up, and already in the distance he could hear the wail of sirens – the aftermath of an explosion that no one in the apartment could have possibly survived, he thought, in which case, for a while at least, he had an opportunity to settle the account, and more importantly, a chance to see if he could guarantee some kind of future for himself and for the girl beside him.
Three days later, on a warm summer evening in Maryland he was ready to find out just how difficult that was going to be.
CHAPTER 11
LOCATING O’HALLORAN had been easy. Of the twenty-three listings for O’Halloran in the phone directory, only four had
the letter L in their initials, and last night when Coburn had left his motel to make anonymous calls to each of the numbers from what he’d hoped was an untraceable pay phone, only one of them had been answered by a man whose voice had been immediately recognizable.
But if discovering where the American lived had been easy, deciding how to approach him wasn’t. His home was situated in what Coburn had first supposed was a quiet street in Chardrock Springs, a leafy, middle-income suburb some seven miles west of downtown Bethesda, but now that people were starting to return home from work, cars were pulling into the driveways of neighbouring houses at increasingly frequent intervals, and children were running about who hadn’t been around ten minutes ago.
On the positive side, the activity was helping him to keep awake, he decided, something that over the last hour while he’d been sitting here in his rental car he’d been finding it more and more difficult to do.
After the long haul from Singapore to New York, and after missing his connecting flight to Washington, Coburn had been tired before he’d arrived and, since then, he’d either been too busy, or had too much on his mind, to catch up on any sleep let alone adjust to the time difference.
So far he’d observed no obvious signs of life at the O’Halloran residence, an unprepossessing single-storey brick-faced house with nothing to distinguish it from other houses in the street except for it being a little run down and a path of decorative paving stones that looked as though it was still under construction.
Was there a Mrs O’Halloran, Coburn wondered? And if so, where was she? Would she arrive home before or after her husband – or was she already home?
He was considering whether to go and find out when an approaching Dodge Avenger started to slow down.
A moment later, triggered by a remote control, the garage door began to open.
Although Coburn was able to get a look at the man behind the wheel, so swiftly were things happening that he had little time to prepare himself.
He waited until the Avenger had pulled into the driveway and entered the garage, then got out of his car, waving a greeting for the benefit of any neighbours who could be watching, before he hurried over to the garage as though going to meet a friend.
He was barely quick enough. Already the door was closing, forcing him to duck beneath it and almost trapping him by one of his ankles.
Trying not to cough on the exhaust fumes, he stayed crouching behind the car until the engine was switched off and the driver’s door swung open.
O’Halloran never saw him coming. Before the American knew it, Coburn had him by the wrist, twisting his arm behind his back and slamming his face hard into the nearest wall.
The American froze, making no attempt to struggle. ‘Easy there,’ he said. ‘Billfold in my back pocket. Should be a couple of hundred bucks in it. Take what you want.’
Coburn used his free hand to pad down O’Halloran’s jacket, not expecting to find a gun, but wanting to be sure before he spun him round and let him go.
‘Surprise,’ Coburn said. ‘Remember me?’
The American’s reaction was mostly one of shock. He was astonished, massaging his arm while he stared at Coburn. ‘You’re dead,’ he said.
‘Who told you that?’
‘Armstrong. He sent me an email. What the hell’s going on? What the fuck are you doing in my garage?’
‘How did Armstrong know I was dead?’
‘Who knows? Maybe the same way he heard about that stuff on board the Rybinsk.’
‘From Sir Anthony Fraser?’ Coburn was relieved, guessing he had Heather to thank for communicating the news and pleased that her godfather had thought to pass it on to the IMB.
‘I don’t know where Armstrong got the information. He didn’t say.’ Now O’Halloran was recovering, his expression had become openly hostile.
‘Is your wife waiting for you inside?’
‘I doubt it.’ The American stopped rubbing his arm. ‘She lives with her boyfriend in Arlington. Why? What the hell has she got to do with anything?’
‘Tell you what,’ Coburn said, ‘we can either carry on standing here while you decide whether it’s worth trying to smack me over the head with that fire extinguisher you keep looking at, or we can go inside so you can listen to what I have to say.’
‘Why would I want to listen to you?’
‘Because if you don’t, you won’t know whose side you’re on, and if you don’t know that, and you’re on the wrong one, you’re going to be in the deepest shit you’ve ever been in.’
O’Halloran raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s why I get jumped in my own garage, is it – so you and I can find out which side I’m on? Haven’t you heard of phone calls and emails?’
‘If it wasn’t for phone calls and emails between your department and the International Marine Bureau, a whole lot of people wouldn’t be dead.’ Coburn kept his voice level. ‘Why do you think I didn’t visit you at your nice office? Until I hear what you have to say for yourself, I’m not trusting you, and I’m sure as hell not trusting the security of your department’s communication systems.’
‘OK.’ O’Halloran paused to think. ‘If you’ve got a story to tell me, it better be good.’ Collecting his keys from the floor where he’d dropped them, he went to unlock an interior door. ‘Next time you get resurrected and you want to say hello, try knocking on my front door.’
Coburn followed him inside, telling himself that things were going as well as could be expected, and that at least O’Halloran seemed willing to accept that there was a story to be told even if he showed no sign of comprehending what it might be about.
The house was untidy. Unwashed dishes were piled up on the draining board in the kitchen, numerous magazines were scattered around the place, and in the lounge where a number of pot plants were wilting from the heat and lack of watering, it had been some time since the windowsills and the shelves of a large bookcase had received a dusting.
Standing between a matched pair of porcelain deer on the bookcase, a framed picture showed O’Halloran sitting in a garden with what looked like twin baby girls balanced on his knees.
‘Yours?’ Coburn asked.
‘They live with their mother. If I’m not working or overseas, I get to see them at weekends.’ The American went to the kitchen. ‘Do you want a cold beer?’
‘No, thanks.’ During his flight from Singapore, when he hadn’t been thinking about Heather, he’d occupied himself by trying to decide how O’Halloran would react when he learned that, despite the best efforts of the US Government, another of their ugly secrets was no longer the secret they believed it to be. So this is where the crunch would come, Coburn thought. This is where he’d find out where the American’s sympathies lay.
O’Halloran returned carrying two cans of beer. ‘Sure you can’t use one of these?’ he said.
‘I’m sure.’
‘OK. Sit wherever you want.’ The American slumped down in a chair. ‘Are you going to tell me the Pishan was shipping fifty kilogrammes of enriched uranium from Pakistan to North Korea, but your pirate friends offloaded it and sold it on to someone else?’
‘Is that what Armstrong said?’ Coburn remained standing.
‘No. He said you didn’t find anything and that you’d run into some kind of problem.’
‘It was a trap. And the only people who could have set it up were you or the IMB. No one else knew about the raid.’
‘You’ve forgotten Heather Cameron. She knew.’ O’Halloran swallowed some beer. ‘What’s happened to her?’
Coburn shrugged. ‘No idea. Never mind Heather Cameron. I’m not here to talk about her, I’m here to talk about you.’
‘You’d better start then, hadn’t you?’
‘OK. What do you think about this? The day before you showed up in Chittagong, while I was driving down to Fauzdarhat I stopped in a lay-by. I’d only been there a minute when a truck pulled up behind me. It was the truck that half an hour later was used to cart the radioactive
crate away from the Rybinsk. I got a look at the driver and I saw him make a phone call.’
‘So?’
‘The same guy turned up on board the Pishan. I saw him. He was the reason you couldn’t find out who’d phoned the Bangladeshi Army. It was him who made the call. He wanted the army to go to the beach.’
‘What for?’ O’Halloran frowned. ‘Why would he have wanted that to happen?’
‘Because your government told him to create as much mayhem as he could while he was there. That’s why he let his men go ape shit with their guns, and why he ran over those kids. The US wanted saturation media coverage so the whole world would think the Rybinsk had been transporting nuclear material to North Korea. You were part of the set-up.’
‘To do what?’
‘Prove that North Korea is building nuclear weapons. Your government is running a covert programme to make sure the Koreans look like the biggest threat to world peace since the rise of Germany before the last World War.’ Coburn paused to allow the information to sink in. ‘Washington needs an excuse to go in and flatten North Korea, but without United Nations approval, and with no mandate from the American people, right now they haven’t a snowball’s chance in hell of getting one.’
‘But they will have once this covert programme of theirs starts to cut in?’ O’Halloran looked unimpressed. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’
‘You read the papers. For the last four weeks, every time an arms shipment is intercepted somewhere, it just happens to have a big label stuck on it addressed to North Korea.’
‘Like those labels you and the girl found on the Rybinsk?’ O’Halloran drank some more beer. ‘Sounds like a clever idea. Pity about the facts.’
‘I’ll give you facts.’ Coburn cleared away some magazines from a chair and sat down. ‘I’ve got enough facts to know that as soon as your government heard I’d been asking the wrong questions about the Rybinsk, they decided I’d better be stopped from asking any more.’
‘And seeing as how this Fauzdarhat truck driver showed up again on the Pishan, you figure he’s the guy Washington sent to shut you up?’
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