up his overnight bag and walked out on to the street.
He walked towards the camera, until he nearly filled the screen.
It was then that I realized who he was.
93
So much now made sense, and the little that didn't could wait.
We had to get moving.
'Basma, that red estate of yours – it still work?'
Dom jumped in before she could answer. 'Where are you going? To dump the body?'
'No, mate. The Gandamack.'
He made as if to stand, but the old guys outside the war-victims hospital would have got off their benches quicker. He sat down again and started ransacking his bag for clothes. 'I'm coming with you.'
'No. You're fucked. Look at the state of you.'
'Been past a mirror yourself lately?' He grabbed a pair of brown cargoes and shook them out. Basma pulled them over his feet. 'You going to upload the film to him from there?'
'The film? Why the fuck would I want to do that?'
'In exchange for Finbar's life. It's not such a bad deal . . .'
I shook my head. 'That's not the way it works, mate. It's not just the film that's the problem. It's everything that Finbar, you and Siobhan know. To them, Finbar's just a volatile, unreliable junkie. You're a journalist on a crusade. And Siobhan joins the dots. Will he let any of you, or me, stay alive? Will he fuck. It has to end here. Basma – the keys.'
Dom wetted his hair and tried to push it back. He could have had a full day at Champneys and it wouldn't have made much difference. He wasn't going to be back on the cover of Polish Hello! any day soon.
I splashed my face with water and tried to sort myself out. The Gandamack wasn't the Serena, but the way we looked we wouldn't even get past the gate.
I pulled a blue shirt from his bag and dumped the fleece. 'OK, Big Boy, if you're in, you do what I say when I say to do it, OK?'
He looked at me for a long time, then nodded.
I went to the rickety old wardrobe in the corner and opened the door. There weren't any clothes on the two or three wire coat-hangers that hung from the single wooden bar, but I wasn't after a coat.
I had to shield my eyes against the sunlight as I hit the yard. I looked up and gave the Predator the finger.
Dom wasn't too light on his feet but he was moving quicker down the path than he had when we'd come up it. I helped him into the back of the estate as Basma reappeared with an armful of maps. 'I'm coming too. You might need Pashtun. You'll have to drive, though. This country might have a new set of liberators, but we women still can't sit in the driver's seat. The police would pull us over. Everyone would stare. The older ones would throw stones. I'll sit in the back.'
I lifted a hand. 'Basma, you must stay here. I need you to make waves. I need you to put the word round that Dominik Condratowicz is going to expose corruption and drug-trafficking at the highest level. And we need you to keep Dom's laptop safe. We'll take the memory stick, but if anything goes wrong, if you don't hear from one of us within seven days, I want you to contact Kate at Dom's office and get the film to her. Email it, whatever she says. Tell her everything.
'And there's one other thing. The guy in the GMC . . .'
She smiled. 'My girls have already taken care of him. There's no shortage of willing hands round here when it comes to dumping men in holes in the ground.'
'Right here?'
'We have a cemetery round the back. We collect suicide victims from the hospitals and villages and give them a decent burial. We're the only ones who seem to care . . .'
I took the keys from her as two pepper-pots hurtled past us. As they swung the gates open I climbed into the wreck of a car and rolled down the window. 'Basma, thank you. But you're wrong about one thing. You're not the only ones . . .'
She leant in through the window and kissed us both on the cheek. 'May Allah protect you. He always makes sure the tank is full, so that's a good start.'
I fired up the protesting engine. 'Yeah, well, let's just hope the Taliban weren't watching, eh? That peck on the cheek could get