‘Tomorrow will be fine. I can either pick it up here or from your place, or if you’re feeling like a drive, I’m staying out at the Pimmit Hills motel over on the Pine Ridge highway.’
‘So you’ve figured out which side I’m on, have you?’ O’Halloran finished the rest of his coffee and closed the lid of his case. ‘You’re dreaming,’ he said. ‘You stand about as much chance of proving the FAL are a subversive organization as I do of getting that pat on the head from the President. If I come across anything useful, I’ll give you a call. I wouldn’t hold your breath, though.’ Depositing a handful of change on the table he got to his feet, nodded a goodbye and walked away.
Since Coburn had nowhere in particular to go, and because he could think of nowhere in particular he wanted to be, he ordered a coffee and spent the next half-hour wondering whether it would be unwise to mention the FAL when he made the first of his phone calls to Heather, putting off his return to the motel until he’d convinced himself that hearing her voice again might help bring back some of the confidence that O’Halloran had successfully stripped away.
Stopping on his drive only to buy a large-scale map of Oregon, he went straight to his room and placed the call, hoping that wherever in the village she happened to be she’d have the phone with her as she’d said she would.
She answered on the second ring, sounding sleepy, but anxious to discover if it was really him.
‘Are you in bed?’ he asked.
‘Mm. The sun’s only just up here. Where are you?’
‘Where I said I’d be. Satellite links aren’t too private, so it’s best we don’t use names. Is everything OK?’
‘Sort of. Have you found who you went to find?’
‘Yep. If I hadn’t, I’d have gone on looking in the wrong place. I got things kind of wrong. It’s not the government. I’ll explain another time. What do you mean, things are only sort of OK?’
‘Nothing.’ She made an effort to sound brighter. ‘It rained yesterday so all the dust’s gone, and it’s much cooler.’
‘Hey,’ Coburn said. ‘Whatever’s wrong, I want to know what it is.’
‘It’s just that someone in the village was caught trying to sell methamphetamines. Indiri says the last time that happened, Hari shot the man who was doing it, so everybody’s kind of on edge.’
‘You’re not at a holiday camp,’ Coburn said. ‘Hari runs a tight ship.’
‘I know, but it’s different with you not being here. I’m all right, though — really I am. If it’s not the US Government, are you going to be able to get evidence to prove who else it is?’
‘I’m working on it.’
‘Don’t be too long. Indiri says if you are she can introduce me to a nice young fisherman she knows from up the coast.’
Coburn didn’t tell her he had no idea how many days this was going to take, nor did he explain what had brought on his sudden need to call her. Instead, after endeavouring to prolong their conversation by searching for words that wouldn’t come, he asked her to let Hari know that things were more or less in hand then said goodbye, unsettled and annoyed with himself for not waiting until he’d been in a better frame of mind before he’d made the call.
To combat a sense of anti-climax he spread out the map beside him on the bed and traced out highway 395 with his finger until he found Canyon City. It was in the middle of nowhere just south of the intersection with route 26 — a tiny dot on a map that meant no more to him than a dot on a map of Siberia would have done.
So where was the ranch, he wondered? And what were the chances of Shriver being there? Would Yegorov be there? And if one of them was, what then?
The more he tried to formulate a plan, the more unknowns there seemed to be, and the faster the questions came, so many of them that it was relief when he had to stop searching for solutions to answer his phone.
It wasn’t the motel restaurant calling to ask if he’d care to place an overnight order for breakfast, and it wasn’t Heather calling back to say something he hadn’t given her the opportunity to say.
It was O’Halloran, sounding artificially casual, and apologizing for interrupting Coburn’s evening.
‘You still planning on a trip out west?’ he asked.
‘Why?’
‘If you are, I’ve got a proposition for you. I got to thinking a bit more about your problem so on my way home I called in at the office and had another look at that information we were talking about.’
Coburn waited to be surprised.
‘You still there?’ O’Halloran’s voice changed.
‘Yeah, I’m still here. What did you find out this time?’
‘Quite a bit. According to US Immigration records, Yegorov went on a trip to Russia in early April of this year. There’s no information about why he went or where he went afterwards, but the timing’s right for him to have been in Vladivostok for a few weeks before the Rybinsk headed off for Bangladesh. If anybody had thought to ask him why he was going to Russia, I guess he could’ve always said he was visiting his brother there.’
‘How long was he away?’
‘He’s listed as arriving back in the US on July 14th. That matches pretty well with him being in Bangladesh in mid June when you first saw him, and after that he had all the time he needed to get those men on board the Pishan and organize that attack on the village you told me about.’
‘And leave me a present in my fridge.’ Coburn was wondering where all this might be leading. ‘What about Shriver? Did you find out any more about him?’
‘The CIA databases have pages of information on him and the FAL, but the interesting thing is what happened to Shriver’s parents when he was still a kid. His father was a US Army officer who died in the Korean War, and his mother was in Korea at the same time working as a nurse at a hospital in Pusan. She was there when the South Korean Army were overrun, and officially listed as missing in 1951. From the age of five, Shriver was raised by his grandparents at the family ranch in Oregon. If you go back and look at some of the early interviews he gave to the press before he retired, it’s pretty clear he’s inherited a deep hate of all things Korean and, like I told you yesterday, he’s on a crusade to stamp out anything he thinks is anti-American.’
‘And stamp on anyone who gets in his way.’ Coburn was still waiting to hear why O’Halloran had taken the trouble to make the call. ‘You’ve uncovered enough information to make you happy then, have you?’
‘Enough to make me think that maybe I ought to be giving you a hand. I could use a break, and I’ve already told you how far you’ll get trying to crack this by yourself.’
Whatever the real reason for the offer was, Coburn knew he was in no position to turn it down. Trusting O’Halloran could still be something of a gamble, he thought, but since the only other person he could trust was thousands of miles away in another country, and she was relying on him, all he could do was take the risk and hope like hell he was making the right decision.
CHAPTER 13
Had Eastern Oregon been easier to reach, Coburn would have had less opportunity to get to know his travelling companion. To begin with, during their flight from Washington to San Francisco, O’Halloran had offered little in the way of fresh information about himself, and on their subsequent flight to Portland and during the one that had brought them across to Pendleton, the American agent had been largely uncommunicative.
Since then, though, once they’d rented a car and checked themselves in to a small motel just north of the Malheur National Forest, he’d started to unwind, and by breakfast time that morning had opened up and become more friendly.
By leaving their motel early for their journey south, they’d hoped to reach the intersection with highway 20 by ten o’clock, but the number of logging trucks on the road was slowing them down, and although the Chrysler had reasonably good acceleration up to fifty miles an hour, at anything above that the engine seemed to falter. As a result, their progress had been poor, and for the last five minutes they’d been stuck behind a slow-moving Winnebago that Coburn had given up trying to overtake.