‘If you work for the National Counter-Proliferation Centre you don’t spend your time breaking into places. Taking pictures of a Pakistani nuclear reactor or having a look round inside a uranium-enrichment plant in Iran might sound like a good idea, but nobody knows how to do that.’
‘You don’t know how to get inside Shriver’s house either,’ Coburn said. ‘Not yet, you don’t.’
‘Listen.’ O’Halloran kept his voice level. ‘If you and I start going over this again, we’re both going to get pissed off again. You worry about the munitions store — I can handle the break-in. If the place has closed circuit television cameras, I’ll work round them. If it has a security system, I’ll have a go at deactivating it, and if the password I’ve got for Shriver’s computer doesn’t work I won’t hang around any longer than I have to.’
‘What if Shriver’s been smart enough to change his password?’ The possibility hadn’t occurred to Coburn before.
‘He isn’t smart enough. Lucky for us he’s been using the same one for the last 18 months. According to the guy who ran Yegorov’s facial recognition search, if Shriver wasn’t in the habit of accessing his home computer when he’s away on trips, we wouldn’t have been able to get it at all. Not even his internet service provider would have known what it is.’
‘Your CIA friend made a call to Shriver’s ISP, did he?’
‘Not much point working for an intelligence agency if you can’t put the screws on to get what you need to keep the country safe.’
Coburn tried to see if the American was grinning, but in the dark it was hard to be certain. ‘Are you going to tell me what the password is?’ he said.
‘Sure. It’s SARIWON, the place where Shriver’s father got killed in the Korean War.’ O’Halloran paused for a moment. ‘Have you thought any more about how long it’ll take you to rig up your bang?’
Last night, after making his call to Heather, Coburn had spent nearly an hour trying to work it out, but without knowing the flow rate of the propane, and having to estimate the volume of the building, he’d eventually given up.
‘This is a guess,’ he said. ‘Starting from the time I drop you off, I figure it’ll take me twenty minutes to reach the clearing, and I’ll need another ten or fifteen to carry my stuff over the fence and get it ready. While I’m doing that, you’ll have to decide where you want to be. Then all you have to do is wait.’
‘That still doesn’t tell me how long I’ll have to wait, does it?’
‘No.’ Coburn knew that the problem wasn’t so much in the timing: it was whether or not the explosion was going to do what it was intended to do — something that had been bothering him for a while, and a doubt that was still nagging at him when they reached the intersection with highway 20.
Unlike yesterday, tonight with no logging trucks on the road and fewer cars to contend with, they made good progress, driving through John Day ahead of schedule at three minutes before ten o’clock, and reaching Canyon City shortly afterwards.
Except for two or three cars parked outside a bar and some late-evening revellers, the township was quiet, flanked on each side by shadows cast by the walls of the canyon and giving Coburn the impression that the whole place was preparing to go to sleep.
More conscious of his misgivings than he had been, and tired of telling himself that O’Halloran wouldn’t run into trouble, he concentrated on his immediate concerns, keeping an eye on the rising moon on the odd occasion when he could see it through the trees and mentally running through his checklist.
Except for a small LED flashlight and a box of waterproof matches, he’d doubled up on everything. In the boot of the car were two twenty pound cylinders of propane, two three-foot lengths of braided hose complete with fittings, four candles and four candle-holders to screen out any light and shield the flames from wind.
O’Halloran had made the holders last night, fabricating them from empty asparagus cans he’d found in a rubbish bin at the rear of the motel restaurant. Everything else they’d purchased yesterday afternoon from a sporting-goods shop on the main street of John Day — a store that had been displaying so many rifles and handguns that Coburn had almost considered adding an automatic to their inventory.
In the end he’d decided against it, not wishing to suggest that either of them might be in need of one.
Now though, sitting in the dark driving south towards the ranch, and knowing that the American was armed only with his camera and a laptop, Coburn was beginning to think O’Halloran was a little unprepared in the event of things taking an unexpected turn.
The American turned up the collar of his jacket. ‘Better start looking for a place to let me out,’ he said.
‘How about the entrance to the track?’ Coburn had already more or less decided. ‘There’s plenty of cover, and once you get yourself into the trees, no one’s going to see you walking back towards the house.’
‘If that’s where you’re going to wait for me afterwards, I’ll need time to get back.’
‘Have you got a better idea?’ Ahead of him in his headlights Coburn could see the stone pillars and the gates of the Long Creek ranch.
‘No.’
‘OK. We’ll be at the track in a couple of minutes. Are you ready?’
O’Halloran was too preoccupied to answer, trying to get a glimpse of the house as they drove past.
‘Did you hear what I said?’ Coburn began to slow the car.
‘Yeah, I heard. It’s not me who needs to be ready. It’s you. Drive yourself off a ridge before you get to the clearing and all this will have been for nothing, won’t it?’
This time it was Coburn who didn’t reply, keeping his thoughts to himself until he turned off the road at the track entrance and switched off the Chrysler’s lights.
‘I’ll see you in a bit,’ he said. Before he could think of anything else to say or had the chance to wish O’Halloran good luck, the American had opened his door and was gone, moving quickly towards the trees and disappearing into the shadows.
Coburn was less willing to rush, allowing his eyes to become more accustomed to the dark before he put the Chrysler’s transmission into low and set off along the track, discovering almost at once that his ability to remember the twists and bends was nothing like as good as he’d hoped it would be.
Trusting the ruts to guide him, he’d travelled no further than 200 yards when he made his first mistake, narrowly missing a tree that swam out at him from nowhere.
It was a lesson he was quick to learn, and equally quick to abandon whenever he became disoriented or on those occasions when the ruts became too shallow to be a reliable means of keeping the Chrysler on course.
Over the next 200 yards, despite proceeding far more cautiously, twice he found himself heading across flower-strewn knolls towards what would have been disaster had he been slower to react and not switched on his parking lights.
Whether the lights could be seen, he didn’t know. Even if they could be, where would they be visible from, he wondered? And at this late hour, who, if anyone, might be looking?
He was negotiating a steep section that he was almost certain he recalled when without warning everything in front of him turned black.
Had he been travelling downhill instead of uphill he’d never have stopped quickly enough. As it was he barely made it, slithering to a heart-stopping halt, this time hitting his headlight switch.
It was an elk, standing dazzled in the middle of the track until it came to its senses and bounded away.
Although Coburn had killed his headlights almost at once, much of his night vision had gone, and for the moment, along with it had gone his confidence.
No longer prepared to push his luck, for the remainder of the journey he kept his parking lights switched on, driving at a crawl and persuading himself that it didn’t matter how long O’Halloran was forced to wait provided the wait turned out to be worthwhile.