Andy McNab - Crossfire

Dom's voice grated with sadness. 'Finbar had come out to us when he was seventeen. Then, after about a year, he was getting into drugs.'

He looked down. 'We tried to get him to rehab, but he just pushed us away. He took to disappearing for days on end. Eventually he told us he was moving in with a friend.'

My eyes hadn't left the screen. Whoever the older man was, Finbar was kissing him again.

'He wouldn't tell us who the friend was, even where he was living. Siobhan was out of her mind. She needed to know he wasn't killing himself.'

He was breathing heavily. 'We eventually found him.' He pressed the screen again. 'Here, in St Stephen's Green. We just wanted to keep contact, try and help him… Can you imagine how Siobhan felt? Seeing her son smacked up like that…'

He pulled at his blood-matted hair. 'Finbar finally said his friend was a businessman who came to the city a couple of times a month. Said he was in property development, a firm from London.' His eyes blazed. 'I wanted to see his face, this arsehole property developer from London who supplies young boys with drugs so he can… so he can…' He shook his head helplessly.

'You got Pete to film?'

'Yes. He said he was coming on Friday, for the weekend.'

'And who was it?'

'I don't know. That's the bizarre thing, Nick. I had his photograph, but even with all the resources at my disposal I couldn't get anyone to put a name to the face.'

He pressed pause. 'Nick, if I don't make it out of here, I want you at least to have seen his face. I don't know who he is, but I found out he's an immensely powerful man. Maybe you can trace him. I got started before, well, before…'

He bit at a scab on his lip. 'Siobhan's father made his fortune in the property boom. You saw our house? His wedding present to us. There's not much he doesn't know about Dublin property. As one line of enquiry, he got his guys to do some digging. The Land Registry showed the flat was owned by a legit UK company, but then there was all kinds of smoke and mirrors with offshore trusts and stuff in the Caymans, Panama, you name it. Everything was shielded behind nominees and God knows what else. They hit a brick wall.

'I had other irons in the fire. I talked to a contact at the Inland Revenue. He came back promptly and said a very strange thing. They said it was unwise to keep digging, it was a government matter. A government matter? What's the government got to do with offshore trusts and property companies?

'Then the wheels really started to come off. Moira sent us to Iraq, and I had to do everything by phone and email. We'd only been there a couple of days and I got word that the FCO had something for me. Remember when I thought they were going to give me an interview?

'I went to the compound. Basically, the shit hit the fan. I was told my enquiries in Dublin and Kabul had to stop. The whole drugs thing, off the agenda. Just like that. I told them they had no right to tell me what to do. Next thing I knew, those two Irish bastards were in the room. They told me to do as I was told or else.

'The following day I spoke to Siobhan and she said Finbar had gone walkabout again. She was contacting drug outreach programmes, hospitals. Nothing. He'd vanished into thin air.'

His voice trailed off. He was exhausted. It seemed to take everything he had just to hit play again.

I watched as Finbar and the property developer kissed once more, then the older man picked 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.

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 you stoned to death.'

We started moving.

'And make sure you dump that wagon somewhere, preferably tonight.'

We rolled out on to the street, turned left and headed for the main.

Down by the market, the traffic was still paying no attention to the boys in the drunken-sailor hats, and they were still going berserk.