‘The man who delivered this car,’ said Templar. ‘He works out of Kabul.’

‘What are the photos of?’

‘Sick-looking cattle,’ said Templar, ‘and video interviews of farmers saying the aquifer is fucked.’

‘Charlie just rolled up and starting shooting?’ asked de Payns. ‘And they started talking?’

‘Seems to be how it works,’ said Templar, starting the engine of the Passat. ‘Who knew journalism was so easy?’

‘So we have footage. What about notes?’

‘Grab that notebook I gave you and start writing about poison aquifers and low-yielding farms. And date it yesterday.’

They smoked cigarettes and drove across a landscape that was arid in some parts, verdant in others. It was physically beautiful and very rural, yet marked by burned-out trucks and piles of steel wreckage on the roadside.

De Payns let the kinks work out of his neck and back. ‘So where are we? And where are we going?’

‘We’re south of Kabul,’ said Templar, passing him a road map. ‘And we’re going to Zahedan, over the Iranian border, to the west.’

Zahedan was a large town in Iran. It looked like a twenty-hour drive, and they’d cross the border at Afghanistan’s western boundary.

‘We’ll pick up a flight at six-thirty tonight, booked and paid for in Paris, and we’ll fly home via Istanbul.’

De Payns needed information. ‘What happened back there? At the Timberwolf meet?’

Templar shook his head, his big neck showing piano string beneath the skin. ‘I think you and I have used up all our dumb luck.’

‘That bad?’

Templar sighed. ‘We have to talk.’

De Payns caught a new tone. ‘About what?’

‘We were compromised,’ said Templar.

‘Fuck!’ said de Payns, pushing back in his seat and looking for something to punch. ‘Fuck!’

‘Thankfully, not before the meeting. We managed to get a couple of wireless mics around the entry to Raven’s apartment,’ said Templar. ‘When you said goodnight and started walking, Timberwolf walked out behind you. You aware of that?’

‘No,’ said de Payns, tired. ‘I didn’t look back.’

‘So he’s standing on the street with his minders around him, and I was about to pull back and loop into the candles but his phone goes off.’

‘Dr Death’s?’

‘Yeah,’ said Templar. ‘He pulls a phone out of that horrible jacket of his, and answers it. And guess what he says?’

‘What?’

‘Bonjour,’ said Templar.

‘No!’ said de Payns. ‘No!’

‘He’s taking a call from a fucking Frenchman!’ Templar confirmed.

De Payns swallowed sandpaper. It was too much. ‘What did he say?’

‘He says, Aguilar? This playboy is Aguilar?!’

De Payns slumped. He was blown. Betrayed. Only a handful of people in the world knew—or were authorised to use—that name. ‘Anything else?’

‘He said something like, I’d rather have known that an hour ago, and then he hangs up and tells his bodyguards to follow you. That’s when I knew we’d be doing an emergency exfil tonight.’