The Rybinsk Deception (12 page)

L
OCATING 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?’

‘I know he is.’ To provide O’Halloran with a summary of what had happened, Coburn started with an account of the raid on the
Pishan
, explaining how and why it had failed before he went on to describe how the men who’d attacked the village had been issued with his photo. He avoided any mention of Heather, but thought it would do no harm to include Hari’s contribution to the events that had allowed them to obtain photographs of the driver, and why that in turn had led them to the decision to detonate the Semtex.

By the time he’d finished, the American was no longer frowning and some of his hostility was gone.

‘Good job you’re dead,’ O’Halloran said. ‘You’ve been pushing your luck a bit, haven’t you?’

‘Do you have any questions?’

‘Yeah, I do. Why tell me?’

‘So you can help me find the guy who was driving the truck. I’ve brought the photos of him for you to run through one of the CIA’s computer recognition systems. I need to know who he is, where he is and who he works for.’

‘I don’t owe you any favours.’ O’Halloran’s expression was unchanged. ‘Why would I want to do that?’

‘Because if you don’t, when the media get hold of the truth, you’ll come across as being one of the bad guys. I can make that happen with a single phone call. It was you who went to investigate the
Rybinsk
, and it was you who came up with the story of an illicit nuclear shipment from Russia to North Korea. Once the public hears how you and your government have been manipulating the truth and when they find out how many people have died for another great American cause that’s based on nothing more than another bunch of lies, you won’t just have
lost your wife and kids; you’ll have no job, no one’s ever going to give you one, and there’s even a chance you’ll get yourself locked up for longer than you want to think about. How does that sound?’

‘Pretty much like a threat.’ O’Halloran crushed his beer can and threw it across the room into a wastepaper basket. ‘You want to be careful. The crime rate around here isn’t getting any better. Be a shame if you met with a nasty car accident on your way back to wherever you’re staying.’

‘Will you run the photos?’

‘It’s not that easy. Counter-Proliferation reports to the Defense Department. The CIA doesn’t. We don’t do a lot of business with them.’

‘Yes you do.’ Coburn had anticipated the objection. ‘That radioactivity sensor I was supposed to use on the
Pishan
might have been developed by your people, but it was the CIA who sent it on to Armstrong.’

‘You’re not thinking straight. If you’re right about this being some kind of US conspiracy to inflame world opinion against North Korea, there’ll be people embedded in the CIA who know every damn thing about it. If I ask the wrong department to run a facial recognition search for me, I could wind up in as much shit as you are.’

‘Not my problem,’ Coburn said. ‘You’ll have to decide who you can trust and who you can’t. You must have some idea.’

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ O’Halloran paused. ‘You know, I hadn’t picked you right,’ he said. ‘That morning at the hospital in Chittagong I figured you were more interested in the girl than the
Rybinsk
.’

‘Answer the question. Are you going to run the photos, or aren’t you?’ Coburn looked at him. ‘If you can help expose this thing you might get a pat on the head from the President.’

‘Or end up at the bottom of the Potomac River.’

‘If you don’t want to rock the boat, say so.’

‘How do you know you can trust me?’

‘I don’t. But if it’s me who ends up in the Potomac, I promise you it’s not going to make any difference.’

O’Halloran smiled. ‘Where have I heard that before? Why do you
think it matters who else you’ve told? Insurance doesn’t do you a lot of good when you’re dead.’

‘I’m already dead – remember?’ Coburn was growing in confidence. The American had been taking longer to answer questions, thinking before he spoke and giving the impression that, even if he wasn’t guaranteeing anything, he might be willing to co-operate.