She frowned. ‘And on their way back they just decided to kill and maim those children?’
‘If you’re in the business of running guns and smuggling nuclear waste, you don’t much care who gets in the way.’
‘Really. That’s something else you’re an expert on, is it?’
He pretended not to have heard, getting to his feet with his head pounding from the heat inside the hole and unwilling to spend any more time in the deckhouse. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘That’ll do us.’
It wasn’t until he’d escorted her back along the corridor and waited while she returned the crowbar to a worker that he remembered to ask her for the labels.
‘Why?’ She laid them on a hatch beside her. ‘What are these going to tell you?’
‘I have no idea.’ He studied the torn piece first. No larger than a cigarette packet, all it had written on it were the letters UROH and the number 39.
It was hardly worth keeping, Coburn thought, and seeing as how the other two labels had come off nothing more sinister than a couple of crateloads of AK47s, London weren’t likely to be interested in them either.
Wondering if he was missing something, he picked up one and had another look at it:
ZAKAZ, PZ16B, SKLAD 17, ZAVOD 38,
HUICHON, JAGGANG
On the second label the PZ16 was followed by a C instead of a B, but was otherwise the same — an indication that, unless he was jumping to conclusions, crate A was the one that had disappeared.
‘Have you ever heard of Huichon or Jaggang?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘They don’t sound like places in Bangladesh, though. The names look more like Chinese than Bangladeshi or Bengali.’
‘Yeah, they do.’ Coburn gathered up the labels and stuck them in his pocket. ‘I guess that’s it. I’ll write London a report and fax them copies of these when I get back to my hotel. From there on if the IMB still figure they have a problem they can sort it out by themselves.’
‘So your job’s done, is it?’ She glanced at him. ‘Does this mean you’re just going to walk away?’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Don’t you care about what happened to those children today?’
‘Look,’ Coburn said, ‘wherever that radioactive stuff has gone, no one’s going to find it now, and whoever those bastards were who took it, no one’s going to find them either. The world’s a nasty place. You know that as well as I do. You’ll go crazy if you spend all your time trying to make it better.’
‘I know exactly what a nasty place the world is, Mr Coburn, and I don’t need a lecture from you about how many nasty people there are in it.’ Turning her back on him she walked away, endeavouring not to let him see how painful her leg had become, but having to stop and rest before she reached the top of the steel steps.
Coburn let her go. Now that things at the beach had quietened down and he was able to look back on his day, in more ways than one it had been something of a surprise, he thought. As well as being unexpectedly eventful, it had been quite interesting — made more so by the presence of Heather Cameron, the self-assured young woman who’d been responsible for bringing him here, and who, as he’d started to realize over the last half hour, was not only self-assured but also rather pretty.
CHAPTER 3
Three days in Chittagong hadn’t been long enough for Coburn to get a fix on the city’s roads. Yesterday evening on the return drive from Fauzdarhat, the worst of the downtown rush hour had been over, and with Heather acting as a navigator, the hospital hadn’t been too difficult to find.
Today, though, driving by himself and lost in yet another maze of narrow back streets he was beginning to regret his offer to take her back to the beach this morning.
The hospital had been her idea — quicker and easier than searching for a doctor, she’d claimed at the time. It had been easier, but because they’d inadvertently chosen the hospital that had admitted the victims from the beach, the staff had been struggling to cope and were overloaded to the point where by ten o’clock, and having still not been attended to, she’d insisted on Coburn leaving her there for the night.
He’d felt guilty returning to his hotel, where he’d spent the rest of the evening trying to figure out why he did and wondering what it was about her that seemed so different.
By this morning he’d decided that events were colouring his opinion, and it was nothing more than her abrasiveness that was making it hard to get her off his mind.
Ahead of him, an impatient passenger in a rickshaw had persuaded the hapless driver to pull out in to the face of oncoming traffic, forcing an approaching taxi to take to the sidewalk and causing a chain reaction in the line of vehicles behind it.
The opportunity was too good to miss. Ramming his car into gear, Coburn dropped the clutch, following the rickshaw as closely as he could for the entire length of the street, and easing off only at the last minute when he turned left at a monument he thought he recognized.
It was the wrong monument, but by making the turn he found himself travelling along the north shore of Foy’s lake on a wider and altogether more familiar road.
Ten minutes later he was parking the car outside the visitors’ entrance of Chittagong’s Bina Das hospital.
She was waiting for him in the foyer. But she wasn’t alone.
Standing beside Heather Cameron was a tall, smartly dressed man. Black and in his early thirties with closely cropped hair, he was carrying a slim laptop computer and wearing a business suit, a crisp open-necked white shirt and expensive-looking shoes.
He’d seen Coburn and was already coming to say hello.
‘David Coburn, right?’ He shook hands. ‘I’m Luther O’Halloran.’
By the way he spoke, and with a name like that, he was almost certainly American, Coburn decided, someone with a bit of Irish or Scottish in his background. What he was doing here was more difficult to guess.
O’Halloran opened a wallet and removed a small identity card. ‘This is me,’ he said. ‘I work for the US National Counter-Proliferation Centre. I’m based at the Radiobiology Research Institute at Bethesda in Maryland, but a couple of days ago I was told to cancel my weekend and get on a plane to Bangladesh.’
Coburn didn’t bother to inspect the card. ‘If you’re interested in the Rybinsk, you might as well turn round and go home,’ he said.
‘It’s not that simple.’ O’Halloran showed no signs of being disappointed. ‘Particularly now Miss Cameron’s filled me in a bit more.’
‘How did you know she was here?’
‘Same way we heard about the ship — through your people at the International Marine Bureau in London. I didn’t get in to Chittagong until after midnight, so I had a bunch of faxes waiting for me at my hotel. One of them was a transcript of the report you sent to the IMB last night — the one where you said Miss Cameron was in hospital.’
‘You didn’t have to bother her,’ Coburn said, ‘not if all you want is a run down on what happened yesterday. You could’ve called me. The IMB know where I’m staying.’
O’Halloran smiled. ‘I kind of figured you wouldn’t appreciate me waking you up in the middle of the night. It was easier for me to leave a message for Miss Cameron saying I’d meet her here this morning.’
‘And she told you I was coming to pick her up?’
‘She’s explained a few things while we’ve been waiting for you.’