Crossfire

by Andy McNab

Genres: Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

Ex-deniable operator Nick Stone is bodyguarding a TV crew on the streets of war-torn Basra. He seems certain to die when insurgent gunmen attack. Only a reporter's swift action saves his life.

When the reporter vanishes within hours, presumed kidnapped, Stone is asked by the Intelligence Service to find him. The trail leads from Iraq to London, Dublin, and Kabul — the brutal city where governments, terrorism and big business collide.

Caught in the crossfire, Stone's nightmare is only just beginning — for the hunter has suddenly become the hunter...

A Random House UK audio production.

Release date: January 26, 2021

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 560

Sample

Prologue



60 miles west of Jalalabad, Afghanistan

17 June 1986

Last light

I didn’t know the name of the village, though we’d been through there many times. It was just a collection of mud huts on a plateau, three-quarters of the way down a mountain, in a snow-capped range halfway between Kabul and the Khyber Pass.

We had to be out again by first light, when the Hinds would be back to hand out the early-morning news. If they spotted us, the gunships would annihilate the place, and anyone inside. That was how they did things.

We were in-country because the Ivans were in-country, and the West didn’t want them to be. It wasn’t the invasion they objected to. It was Soviet troops massed so close to the oil-rich Gulf. The sheiks were flapping, so the bad boys had to be persuaded to fuck off back to the land of vodka.

The mujahideen – soldiers of Allah – had only put up weak resistance to start with. Fragmented, and armed with no more than rifles and pistols, all they had going for them was their lifelong knowledge of the terrain and an unshakeable faith in their God.

That was when dickheads like me were told to get the maps out and see where the fuck Afghanistan was, then get our arses over from Hereford and help. We came, we saw, we dropped bridges, attacked police stations, built IEDs, and blew up armoured convoys. I wasn’t wild about living in a cave, but other than that, I’d been having the time of my life.

‘See that?’

‘What, Nick?’

‘Over there, in the alleyway. Looks like a body.’

‘It will just be a girl,’ Ahmad grunted. He wore the kind of expression you use when someone’s just pointed out the shit on your shoe. ‘We go on, Nick. We need food.’

My new best mujahideen mate cut away and gestured to the others to sort themselves out before the long tab back to our holes in the rock above the snowline.

The girl’s body was lying between two mud-walled shacks. At least somebody had had the decency to drape the charred remains of her clothes over what was left of her. Going by the scorchmarks on the ground, it looked like she’d set herself on fire in plain view. When the flames died down, the villagers had probably just dragged her here out of the way and got on with their lives.

I nearly hadn’t come over. I’d seen it all too many times before. But this one was different – even in the fading light, I thought I’d seen movement. And, besides, the girl with the cheeky grin lived in one of these huts. I always looked out for her when we came this way. The landscape might be cold, harsh and unforgiving, but somehow her smile always made me think that what we were doing was worthwhile.

The people who scratched a living in these mountains didn’t have enough even to feed themselves, but that didn’t stop them sharing it with us. I’d never spoken to the girl with the cheeky grin. It would have been taboo. But she’d run up a couple of times and handed me a sliver of watermelon or a cup of water. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen.

Not so long ago, the cheeky grin had disappeared, as if someone had thrown a switch. ‘Yes,’ Ahmad had said. ‘Now she have husband.’ Apparently he was nearly three times her age and from another band of muj. Ahmad seemed to think her husband was having trouble teaching her respect.

She’d looked a little more desperate each time I saw her after that. The last couple of times, I’d noticed the bruises.

I squatted down by the heap of blackened material. There was a terrible stench of singed hair, burnt meat and kerosene, like the smell that hung in the air after the gunships had called.

I laid my AK on a rock and took off my Bergen. I lifted the charred clothes away from her head and gagged. The scorched skin was peeling from her face and neck. Blisters were still forming. The skin round her mouth stretched back to expose her teeth in a hideous parody of her cheeky grin. It wasn’t how I wanted to remember her.

She opened her eyes just a fraction, and when she saw me she murmured softly. There’d be no screaming out in pain for her. That stage was well gone. Her burns were so severe that even the nerve endings had evaporated.

Like Ahmad and his boys, I was in full Gunga Din gear and cowpat hat. I took off my waistcoat and tucked it gently under the back of her head to protect it from the rocks.

She had an hour at the most. There wasn’t even a field clinic or a nurse up here. The nearest hospital was in Jalalabad, a couple of days away on foot, and the roads round the city were teeming with hammers and sickles.

I doubted she even had someone who cared enough to bury her. Treated like a slave, not only by the husband but also the rest of his family, I guessed she’d just had enough. Most of the women stuck at these shit marriages because that was the way things were. By tradition, every Afghan girl or woman had to be attached to some man – her father, husband, brother, son, uncle – and for all too many of them the kerosene trick was the only way out.

Boots scrambled towards me. ‘Nick! We have hut – come.’

I looked up. Ahmad’s beard was longer than mine, and he was proud of it. He hadn’t shaved these last seven years, ever since the Russians had arrived to ‘liberate’ his country. He was a hard fucker, like the rest of the muj, a good Muslim, a good fighter, a good man. I enjoyed working with them, but I could never understand why they were total arseholes to their women. They treated them like shit.

He didn’t even bother to glance at the girl. She might as well not have been there. ‘Come, leave it. We’re cooking.’

‘Go on, mate, you get stuck in. But maybe bring me something, will you?’

I knew there was fuck-all I could do for her, but there’d been enough killing up on the mountain. It seemed such a waste of a young life for her to have done it to herself.

She’d probably been sold into her marriage. Some of the muj I knew had sold their own daughters when they were twelve or thirteen. They even claimed a bride price as payback for raising the poor little fuckers in the first place. Others gave them away to repay bets or settle arguments.

After the girls got palmed off and married, they were raped continuously. If they complained, they might find themselves flung into prison. The ones that could afford it took overdoses. The poorer ones cut their wrists, hanged themselves or chucked themselves into the nearest river. But this one, she’d had spirit. She wasn’t going out with a whimper.

I pictured her sitting there, tipping the kerosene over her head and striking a match. But she’d fucked up. Maybe she couldn’t afford a full can. Now she was lying in the dust, waiting to die.

Ahmad came back with half a big green watermelon. ‘Nick, please, you not be long. The meat, he nearly gone …’

‘Thanks, mate.’ I took the melon off him. I couldn’t understand why these guys didn’t care. ‘She hasn’t got long. But I can’t leave her, can I?’

He eyed me as if I was a lunatic. ‘They say her name is Farah.’ He turned to leave, then stopped. ‘Of course you can leave her, Nick. This her choice. This what she want.’

He walked away.

I looked down at her. What she want? No, not really.

I pulled my AK bayonet from my belt and cut into the melon. The juice flowed down my fingers, which were black with weeks of grime.

‘Farah, here …’ I touched a sliver of the fruit to what was left of her lips.

She sucked it in. Her eyes flickered open again and I thought I could see something resembling a smile in them. She tried her best to swallow as the juice ran down the side of her ravaged face. Painfully slowly, she shifted her eyes towards me. She began to weep gently, but no tears fell.

I cut another slice of melon. I didn’t know what else to do.

The late-afternoon sun bathed her face for a moment, then disappeared. As darkness fell, we both waited for her to die.



8



Thursday, 1 March

1829 hrs

Basra Palace

‘I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about him.’ Pete sipped his brew, trying not to burn his lips and fingers.

We were sitting at the back of one of Saddam’s old state rooms as we listened to the CSM’s confirmatory orders. Dom had disappeared to a different part of the palace complex to have another go at the FCO. I’d offered to escort him, but he insisted he was fine.

‘I mean, there’s more chance of being struck by lightning than getting an interview with the spooks and the Foreign Office lot. Drac knows that, but he’s gone back for more. I don’t like the way they treat him. Particularly since he comes straight back and takes it out on me.’

I tried to make light of it. ‘Maybe that’s what pisses him off. Somebody actually refusing to be interviewed by Platinum Bollocks.’

Pete leant over to talk quietly in my ear. The CSM didn’t take kindly to people chatting in his Orders, even if they weren’t on his payroll. ‘He’s been really off, this last three or four weeks.’

‘You want me to have a word? It’s my job – I’m supposed to look after you. Whatever’s bugging him could affect his safety.’

He thought about it for a second. ‘Nah, I’ve been trying to work out what goes on in that head of his for years.’ He shrugged. ‘I just have a laugh with the bit of Dom I know.’

I looked around me. We were sitting just a few feet from the famous toilet that every newspaper in the world seemed to have printed a picture of. Sculptures of men and women with stern faces and square jaws were carved into the marble walls, pointing heroically skyward. They were a bit less heroic now they had dark glasses, moustaches and teeth, courtesy of a string of bored squaddies with marker pens.

The marble floors were cracked and scraped after years of abuse from boots, chairs and desks. Gaffer-taped cables snaked underfoot and up the walls. The rooms were subdivided into offices and briefing areas by sheets of 3x3-metre plywood. The partition doors, also made of plywood, were pulled shut by a two-litre water-bottle suspended on a length of paracord running through a hole in the frame.

Phones rang incessantly. Kettles boiled 24/7 alongside ration packs of brew kit.

‘Any questions?’ The CSM’s voice boomed round the room. He had some sort of northern accent, but at least it wasn’t Scouse. Even though he spoke at a million miles an hour, I could understand him. He may have been plain Dave to his wife and other civvies, but he was ‘sir’ to anyone in uniform below the rank of major, and he had everyone’s complete attention. It wasn’t just because the army insisted on it: piled on the floor to my left were the remains of some mortar rounds and rockets that had thumped into the compound over the months of their tour – we were in serious country.

The twenty or so team commanders for tonight’s strike operation, all NCOs, had had their formal orders earlier in the day, followed by full tabletop rehearsals. Dom had been present for those. Dave was now doing the final run-through.

‘No? Good. OK, the house we’re going to hit …’ He glanced at the huge wall map of the city behind him. Satellite photos and int briefs lined its sides. ‘The spooks over in the west wing have strong reason to believe it’s part of the supply chain between Iran and local insurgents. Weapons, ordnance, explosives – they think we’ll find the lot. No need to remind you, this affects us all. We’ve lost enough good people.’

He tapped the satellite photography with his steel pointer. ‘Take a lot of care. Look again at the junctions either side, look at the buildings all around. Before we move out, make sure your people are aware of where they need to be, what they need to do, where everyone else is and what they’re doing. There will be no fuck-ups.’

B Company’s target, in the Gazaya district of the city, the main stronghold of Muqtada Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, was a small two-storey building surrounded by a concrete-block wall with a steel door on to the street.

The strike was phase two of the operation to kill and disperse the insurgents in the Brits’ area of operations. They had also been gathering in Gazaya over the past two weeks, and their numbers would have kicked up a notch if any had managed to escape the Kingsmen’s attacks out in the sandpit.

It was obvious from the photos there hadn’t been any town planners around when Gazaya went up. Houses and apartment blocks up to four storeys high seemed to have been piled on top of each other with a warren of alleyways and wasteground between them.

Dave gobbed away about the outlying areas, the other houses that were going to be hit by the other rifle companies, where they’d had contacts in the past, where their guys had been shot. The team commanders nodded; so did the two female RMPs (Royal Miltary Police) and a medic. None of them could have been over twenty-five. Some things don’t change. I’d been a corporal in this very battalion when I was nineteen.

By comparison Dave was an old man. He must have been about forty; either he was using hair dye, or he was so laid-back he was almost horizontal. There wasn’t a grey hair in sight, and his face was almost completely unlined, except for a thin scar that ran from the edge of his top lip up the side of his cheek.

‘Number one on the door is Rifleman Duggan.’ He turned to his lads and stabbed a finger at them, more out of pride than aggression. He was the CSM, this was his rifle company, and the respect between them was so solid you could reach out and touch it. ‘You lot make sure you big him up before tonight. It’s a big deal for him. It’s a big deal for anyone.’ He paused to make sure it sank in. ‘He leads us in and we take on whoever’s there. We lift the targets, then the film crew come in to do their thing and make you all famous.’

A ripple of laughter spread round the room. They knew a couple of the young lads would be taking up fire positions a little more dramatically than usual if Pete and his camera were nearby.

‘And then we stay and fight. But remember, this is a hard-arsed area. They like to keep all their mortars and explosives to themselves. We’ve never left there without a contact.’

There was a loud thud out in the compound. We jerked down to tighten our body armour and get our helmets from under our seats. Nobody went anywhere without them.

Then, maybe fifty metres away, a second rocket exploded. We were being IDFd by 107mm Katyushas.

‘Remember.’ Dave scanned the room as the third and fourth rockets slammed into the compound. ‘The house is probably holding the guys who killed the Marines last Remembrance Day. That’s why the media are coming with B Company. We’re going to show some payback.’

He jerked a thumb at the vehicle-group commander, a Fijian corporal with a head the size of a watermelon and hands that made his notebook look like a postage stamp. ‘If they start firing, you hit them with everything you’ve got, you understand me? I want all our lads out of there alive – and that’s an order.’

This was a really tight company. You could feel it. Even if I’d told them I was from the Green Jackets and later the Regiment it wouldn’t have counted for anything. They were fighting a war together and didn’t give a shit about anyone else.

Dave was still going nineteen to the dozen; maybe he had his eye on another brew. ‘Once we’re in there, we’re staying. We’ll wait for the fuckers to try it on and see what happens. Corporal Barney,’ he pointed to the sniper commander, who looked up from his notes, ‘you tell your lot to get a few drops of that Optrex stuff down their eyes. I don’t want them missing anyone coming our way.

‘If it kicks off, don’t worry, I’ve got more brass in my wagon to resupply your lot than they had at the Alamo. We might need it. C Company were in there last week. Five fucking hours that contact lasted.’

His jaw tightened as there was another explosion in the compound. ‘Remember the two lads killed last week, and the poor fucker sent back to the UK with half his guts hanging out after one of those fucking things landed on him. Just make sure you look after your people and keep them alive, OK?’

There was a murmur as everyone stood. We headed for the brew area. Nobody was going anywhere until the attack had stopped and the munitions guys had got out there to clear the compound.



96



Dom hadn’t wasted his time. He’d wrapped a shemag round his head to hide his blond hair, and was studying the map spread out on his lap. He’d obviously done his stuff. ‘Couldn’t be easier, Nick. It’s east on Jadayi Suhl, then a left when we hit Jadayi Awalimay. It’s main road all the way to the Khyber Pass. A hundred miles, tops.’

I gunned the engine. ‘It’ll be a fucking sight less than a hundred if we’ve got a Predator overhead.’

I reversed down the alleyway and on to the street.

‘How can we tell?’

‘We can’t. First we’ll know about it is either ISAF putting in a flying roadblock up ahead, or a Hellfire missile up our arse.’

‘Up the Khyber?’ He grinned. ‘Either way, nice knowing you, Nick. And I still haven’t thanked you …’

‘Later, mate, later.’

We passed Flower Street. It was packed.

We drove through the embassy area and past the compound protected by the sangar. I was tempted to stop and ask the big lads hitting the weights inside if they cared to come and ride shotgun.

A couple of Toyota flatbeds screamed past, with four or five police on the back of each, weapons pointing out. None of them gave a fuck about a battered red estate.

We passed the high walls and razor wire that surrounded the British embassy. The barrels of SA80s paraded back and forth behind the sandbags. Nine times out of ten this would have been a safe haven. We could have driven to the barrier, declared ourselves, and the ordeal would have been over. But right now some of the grey men behind those HESCOs wanted us dead. How many? I wondered. How far and how deep had this thing spread?

The estate lurched across a pothole and we bounced in our seats. We came to the main. I turned left, heading north.

Dom tapped the map. ‘This parallels the airport road for a while, then veers north-east, then east.’

‘About a hundred and sixty K max, right? You might as well get your head down, mate. Fuck knows, those scabs of yours could do with some beauty sleep. But a few things first. Assuming we get over the border, Islamabad’s about the same distance the other side. We’ll get flights from there. We’ll go separately. You take British Airways, I’ll take any other carrier I can. It’ll make it harder for the Yes Man to lift us both. He has to do that to control the film, and it’ll be easier and cleaner for him if he can do it this side of civilization.’

Dom started to settle. ‘The Yes Man? The guy talking to me in the cell or the one with Finbar?’

‘Both, mate. They’re the same man. Listen, I know him. I knew the two Irish guys too. I don’t know his name, never have, but I know he’s dangerous, smart and doesn’t give a shit about anyone.’

He sat up, ready to question me to death.

‘Not now, mate. We’ve got too much real shit to deal with. Now …’ I paused as he settled down again. ‘Once in Dublin, we’ll aim to be at Bertie’s Pole at nine a.m. every day for three days. If neither of us turns up in that time, we have to assume the other’s been lifted or something’s gone wrong. You got that? I’m saying it now in case there’s a roadblock round the next corner and we get separated. If we do, then, yeah, it was nice knowing you, too. Who shall I send my invoice to? You or Moira?’

He grinned. ‘Moira, definitely. Then me, once she’s rejected it.’ His grin faded as a new thought came into his mind. ‘Nick, there’s a real complication to all this. The Yes Man and his team didn’t ship their heroin into virgin territory. There’s a turf war going on in Dublin, and it’s him who sparked it.’

‘PIRA won’t be liking that one little bit.’

‘Haven’t you heard, Nick?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘PIRA have been disbanded! They’ve handed in every single weapon they ever had and taken up landscape gardening …’

If his aching jaw had let him, he’d have laughed as hard as I did.

‘A turf war is the best news I’ve had all week. It’s going to help us get Finbar back. Now grab some kip. I’ll wake you when we get to the border and I need your wallet. It’s the most corrupt spot on earth. Last time I crossed here it cost a hundred bucks.’

I wasn’t sure he’d heard the last bit. His shemag-draped head was banging against the window and he was snoring like a chain gun.

I checked the dash. The clock said it was midday. We had a full tank, and that was plenty for the distance we had to cover. We’d be going at a fuel-efficient pace anyway because I didn’t want to be conspicuous or get involved in even the slightest accident.

There was nothing much else I could do now but resist the temptation to search for Predator-shaped specks on the horizon.



97



Herbert Park, Dublin

Tuesday, 13 March

1017 hrs

Dom was standing at the kitchen island. He was on his fourth call and his third coffee since we’d arrived at the house an hour ago.

We’d met up that morning at Bertie’s Pole, as arranged, then jumped into a cab and headed straight here to flush out the Yes Man.

We still had our coats on. We weren’t staying long. I had a fake leather three-quarter-length number I’d bought in Islamabad, a really good pair of rip-off Levi’s and a shirt. The whole lot had come to all of about twenty dollars.

‘That’s no excuse, David.’ Dom was in short, sharp, aggressive, don’t-bullshit-me-I’m-the-Polish-Jeremy-Paxman mode. He wanted results. ‘He’s still missing. You said you’d move heaven and earth. I’ve been a good friend to you and the police in the past, given you good coverage. Now you’ve got to start helping me.’ He slammed his thumb on to the red button. Inspector David of the Gardai was a golf mate – or had been before this call.

Dom had called in another set of favours all over town. He and Siobhan had already hassled every man and his dog to find Finbar; they’d hit drug outreach programmes, fellow reporters, anybody with influence. Now he was calling them all over again. We wanted those ripples to spread. We wanted to spark up the Yes Man and bring him out into the open. The lines would still be monitored, and there’d probably been a trigger on the house from the moment he’d seen we were flying into town. That was just what we wanted. He knew where we were, and now he thought he knew what we were doing.

The only person Dom didn’t call was Siobhan. He’d done that from a call box in the city. She was fine and well holed-up, although if she took more than one bath a day it was cold. She must have left the house as soon as I’d called her. There was half a plate of scrambled egg on the side. It was congealed and rancid, but the flies seemed to like it.

Dom put the phone back into the charger, put his cup under the espresso spout and threw in another capsule.

‘Well done, mate. He’ll have followed us since we took off for Islamabad. Now we’re back together and searching for Finbar, he’ll show his hand.’

The Yes Man would want us dead, but it wasn’t going to happen in daylight on a residential street. Drive-by shootings of prominent newsmen or bundling people into vans without anyone noticing were the stuff of bad TV shows. This wasn’t Kabul. He would pick his moment, and it would be soon.

‘He’s like a human Predator, all-seeing, all-hearing. Any time now he’ll aim to take us out. But we’ll be waiting.’

‘Then what?’

‘This story can only have one ending, mate. Even if the plan works and we find Finbar alive, he’s never going to stop. You, me, your family, we’re in the shit – big-time. So we’ve got to nail the Yes Man, and to do that, we have to bring him to us.’

I unrolled the first of the three twenty-metre extension leads I’d bought in O’Connell Street. I ran it out to the end of the reel, then cut it away so I was left with the plug at one end and three bare wires at the other. ‘Where’s your broom cupboard, mate?’

He showed me. I grabbed a mop and a couple of long-handled brushes.

I unscrewed the heads and took the sticks over to the roll of gaffer-tape and six forks waiting on the island.

I scored the plastic sheath of the three-core cable with a pair of kitchen scissors, then peeled away about six inches of the plastic. I left the earth wire intact, but exposed about the same amount of the live and the neutral. I twisted each round a fork, and bound them with tape for good measure. By the time I’d repeated the whole procedure with the other two extension leads, each of the three twenty-metre lengths of cable had a pair of forks dangling from its end.

I grabbed a headless broom handle and taped a fork either side of one end, making sure the heads curved outwards. I didn’t want current arcing between them; I wanted it zapping into a target and fucking him up big-time.

When all three poles were ready, I picked up my coffee and gulped it back in one. We had to get moving.

He’d watched me fuck about with broom handles and cutlery with a look of deepening gloom. I slapped him on the shoulder, trying to cheer him up a little. ‘He might be like a fucking Predator, but we’ve got some tricks up our sleeves, you and me.’ I grinned.

Although we’d have the PIRA weapons, I wouldn’t want to risk using them immediately. If we killed the men who came after us, their information would die with them.

We’d have to be a bit careful with my homemade tasers for the same reason. The commercially manufactured ones contain a step-up transformer that produces a short burst of high voltage to catapult a small amount of current. The domestic electricity supply uses a much higher current, pushed by a lower voltage. Tasers aren’t designed to kill, but ours easily could. We’d be wiring our targets into the mains.

‘A two-second prod will be enough to drop anybody.’ I headed for the door. ‘Another two seconds and they won’t get up. It’ll fuck them up worse than a badly earthed fridge.’

Dom hesitated at the island. His knuckles whitened as he gripped the edge of the worktop.

‘I know you’re worried about Finbar, mate. But that ain’t going to get him back. Come on. She’s waiting.’



98



We sat in the lobby of Jury’s Hotel with three nice frothy cappuccinos. We’d taken a cab back to Bertie’s Pole, then continued on foot, doing anti-surveillance all the way. We’d wandered through a shopping precinct and bought two pay-as-you-go mobiles, circled a block, stopped in the middle of a couple of streets and doubled back on ourselves. We’d ended up in a florist’s, bought a big bunch of red and white roses, then left by the rear exit. The Yes Man could get his eyes back on us later. For now, we didn’t want anyone to see who we were meeting.

Kate was sitting next to Dom on the sofa. She was even more excited to be out of the office doing something secret for him than she had been with her flowers. This was her chance to prove she could make it.

She handed me a folder. ‘The file is on Councillor Connor McNaughten. I called his office first thing, and told them about the new programme.’

‘What’s it called?’

‘Dublin Let’s Go. That’s what I told him, anyway. His office phoned back within the hour saying yes, he’d be delighted to be interviewed. I said one thirty – is that OK?’

She looked at Dom, but I jumped in. ‘Great job, Kate. When you get back to the office, could you ring them back and say there won’t actually be any filming today? Dom just wants to come over and talk round the idea, get it fixed in everyone’s heads. We’ll probably bring the cameras along on Friday, at some city location. You know, dramatic backdrop, that sort of thing. Can you do that? I don’t want them expecting men with furry microphones and all that shit.’

She nodded and drank the last of her cappuccino.

Dom handed her the flowers. ‘Katarzyna, Moira doesn’t need to know what’s happening yet. It must stay completely secret until we have the foundations of the story. Once that’s done, I’m going to make sure you’re on my team and not sitting at her beck and call any more.’

She smiled her thanks to us both. The thought of not working for that bitch must have been the best news she’d had in weeks.

I stood and shook her hand. ‘Thanks, Kate. You’ve been fantastic.’

She left and we sat down to finish our brews.

Dom’s brow furrowed. ‘What’s the score if we didn’t shake them off? Aren’t we putting her in danger?’

‘Even if they follow her back to the station, all they’ll want to know is what she handed over. They’re not going to com promise themselves by lifting and threatening newsroom staff. They’re pond-life, mate. They‘ll want to keep all this down in the weed.’

He took another sip and wiped the froth from his scabby top lip. We still looked like a couple of crash victims but, fuck it, there was nothing we could do about that. And on the upside, it meant Dom wasn’t getting recognized every time he turned round.

‘What now?’

I flicked through the printouts in Kate’s folder. Judging by . . .