Crossfire

Dom dropped to his knees and tried to pull up one of the floorboards. His hands scrabbled but his fingers couldn't grip. I grabbed him, sat him on the bed and draped the green sleeping-bag round his shoulders. 'Just concentrate on keeping warm, mate. This board, yeah?'

I worked my fingers into the gap. The board lifted. Beneath it was a black nylon holdall. I lifted it out and took it to the bed.

I had to unzip it for him.

'The laptop, Nick.'

It was among the clothes and overnight stuff.

Basma struggled in with a bowl of water and rags in one hand, a small suitcase in the other. 'This is all I can do until the girls get some more heated up for a bath. We've got antiseptic cream but no antibiotics. The hospital can't give us any — they ran out weeks ago. The Americans have stopped supplies.'

She tried to dab at Dom's wounds, but he was too busy sparking up the laptop.

'What happened, Dominik? How did Noah find you?'

His eyes never left the screen. 'They set me up. I thought I was going to meet the Taliban. I fell for it.'

She looked up at me hopefully. 'Is Noah dead?'

'All of them.'

She didn't bother to hide her smile. 'Good.'

I turned to Dom. 'Basma told me you were looking for the guy in the Taliban who supplies the Brits with the gear. But which Brits?'

He fished around and pulled out a washbag. Among the kit was a plastic carrier-bag. 'This one…'

He unfolded it and produced a memory stick.

The clip kicked off outside what looked like the front door of 10 Downing Street. A tall, good-looking young guy with long blond hair went in with bags of shopping.

Dom's finger hovered over the image. 'Finbar.' He almost choked as he said the word.

I watched as the camera panned up to the top window. An older man in a white shirt stood with his back to the lens. Finbar walked into the room. The older man held him in his arms and they kissed. A few moments later, they moved out of shot.

Dom pressed the soft screen so hard where the older man had last been that the picture blurred. The film cut and zeroed in again on the large black door. It opened. Both of them stood just back from the threshold, talking. The older one had an overnight bag at his feet.

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.

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.