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.