She shook her head. ‘Not exactly. It’s the village where you’re working in Sumatra. I wouldn’t have known it existed if O’Halloran hadn’t mentioned it while he was driving me back. He only learned about the place himself because of the phone call the IMB made to him.’
Irrespective of how attractive she happened to be — and now she was sitting less than a foot away from him, it was hard not to be reminded — Coburn knew this wasn’t just another complication. As well as the idea being utterly impractical, it was so ridiculous it was out of the question.
‘So that’s your new assignment, is it?’ he said.
‘It was easier to arrange than I thought it would be. All I did was phone my godfather again and asked him to go and see your Mr Armstrong at the Marine Bureau. Mr Armstrong said he’d speak to a contact he had at the UN, and yesterday morning I got a call back from UNICEF.’
‘Giving you the OK?’
‘Mm — as long as I email them my report on Fauzdarhat by the end of next week. I think I saved them the trouble of deciding where I ought to be sent next.’
Although the smile she was giving him was less artificial, she was apprehensive and had yet to regain all of her confidence.
‘You’re out of your mind,’ Coburn said. ‘You don’t understand and you’re not going. Either get off the plane now or wait until you get to Singapore and catch another one to wherever you want to go.’
‘Aren’t there children at the village?’
‘Of course there are children.’
‘Well then, I can write a report on them. You don’t have to be so angry. I took you out to the Rybinsk, so why shouldn’t you show me round this village of yours?’
‘It’s not my village.’ How the hell he was going to explain, he didn’t know. All he did know was that either the IMB had gone mad, or that a senior member of the board must have owed her godfather some enormous favour.
‘I nearly forgot,’ she said. ‘Mr Armstrong says that if you’re not happy about this, you should call him from Singapore.’
Coburn didn’t trust himself to reply, keeping his thoughts to himself until the plane had taken off and only then reopening the conversation.
‘You and I need to sort out a few things,’ he said.
‘We don’t have to do that now, though, do we?’ She pointed out the window. ‘Look.’
Stretched out below and obscured by smoke was the curving shoreline of the shipyards. Here and there he could make out the shapes of half-broken hulls and see bright pinpoints of light where the fires were burning.
The smoke was the best reminder, he decided, a dark, evil-looking shroud smothering a Bay of Bengal beach that was slowly dying in its own filth, and a means of concealing a forgotten part of the world that any self-respecting God would have long ago abandoned and given up for good.
CHAPTER 4
Until today, for the whole of the time Coburn had been based in Singapore, not once had he entertained a young woman in his apartment. There had been plenty of young women, two with apartments of their own, and another whose name he couldn’t remember who had a self-contained flat on the ground floor of her parent’s home. But he’d invited none of them back here, nor had he bothered to see any of them again.
With Heather Cameron he’d been forced to make an exception. She’d arrived on time five minutes ago and was sitting by the window holding the cup of coffee he’d made her while she waited to discover if anything had changed in the two weeks since he’d seen her last.
‘Is your hotel OK?’ he asked.
‘After Fauzdarhat, anywhere with running water is better than OK.’
‘And your leg’s healed up all right?’
‘Yes, thank you. Are you still angry about having to take me to the village with you?’
‘Depends how much trouble you’re going to be when you hear about where you’ll be staying.’
‘You didn’t say anything about that when you phoned.’
‘I hadn’t spoken to Hari then. Hari is the guy who runs the village.’
He took her empty cup and put it on the counter. ‘Did you get your shipyard report off to UNICEF?’
‘One day late, but it won’t matter. I’ve been spending too much time catching up on what’s happening in the rest of the world. I can’t believe the media are still making such a fuss about the Rybinsk. The Singapore Strait Times have been running stories about it almost every day — you know, about North Korea being a threat to world peace unless somebody stops them. The Americans are the worst. They’re paranoid — either that or they’re trying to get other countries on their side.’
‘They think they’ve got the most to lose,’ Coburn said. ‘Or maybe they think they might not have got things right.’
‘How? In what way?’
He didn’t feel like explaining. In the days immediately following his return to Singapore he’d been curious enough to make a few enquiries, but once the new shipping manifests had started arriving from London he’d largely lost interest in the Rybinsk and wasn’t in the mood to go over the ground again.
She was waiting for him to answer her question. ‘Was there something O’Halloran didn’t tell us?’ she asked.
‘No. I just figured that seeing as how I got talked in to babysitting you, Armstrong ought to be happy to tie up a couple of loose ends for me.’
‘What loose ends?’
‘For a start, find out how well the Japanese coastguard got on. The only time the Rybinsk was anywhere close to Japanese territorial waters it was two hundred miles south of North Korea, so I thought I’d see how many Koreans had been caught up in their anti-piracy sweep.’
She frowned. ‘Is that what you asked Armstrong to do — find out?’
‘He asked the CIA to check with the Japanese, then phoned me back to say the whole campaign had been pretty much of a disaster because of a storm that hit the Sea of Japan at the wrong time. The coastguard spent the best part of four days rescuing fishermen who were trying to make it back to Honshu. Do you want to guess how many of them were Korean?’
She shook her head. ‘If there weren’t any, what do you think it means?’
‘I have no idea.’ Coburn had long since given up wondering. ‘O’Halloran was happy to worry about the missing crates, so he can worry about the missing Koreans.’
‘You said loose ends. What else did you ask Armstrong?’
‘Not a lot — just that I figured it might be an idea to see if O’Halloran had spoken to whoever it was who made that call to the army. They’d have had a better look at the truck driver than I did, so there’s a chance they might have recognized him.’
She smiled. ‘I know what you’re going to say. O’Halloran couldn’t find anyone who’d admit using the phone because they would have been scared of making more trouble.’
‘That’s what the Americans told Armstrong.’ Coburn decided it was time to change the subject. He pointed to the carryall at her feet. ‘What have you got in there?’
‘Clothes, antibiotics, electrolytes for diarrhoea, paracetamol, hydrogen peroxide and eye ointment. I didn’t know how much stuff to bring because when we spoke on the phone you didn’t say how many days we’d be away.’
‘As long as the freighter comes through the Strait when it’s supposed to, and if Hari doesn’t change his mind at the last minute, we ought to be back here by the weekend.’
‘Is this a freighter the CIA think might be shipping nuclear material from Pakistan to North Korea?’
‘Apparently.’ He wished he could be certain. ‘According to the manifest, a whole lot of zinc ingots have been put on board as well. Pure zinc is worth around seven thousand dollars a ton, and ingots are easy for Hari to trade. That’s why he’s going after them.’