When de Payns returned to the Passat, Templar was sitting in the driver’s seat, an orange envelope in his hand.
‘You’re now Georges Morel,’ said Templar, hitting the map light.
‘Great—where are we?’
‘Afghanistan.’
De Payns opened the envelope and found a French passport in the name of Georges Antoine MOREL, with his photo in it. There was an EU identity card and a French driver’s licence, along with a Nokia phone and charger.
‘Let’s get the old ID off you,’ said Templar.
They went through his wheelie cabin case and tore up the Sébastien Duboscq passport, and destroyed boarding passes, receipts and baggage barcode stickers from his flights, and a tourist map from New Delhi. Then Templar made him turn out his pockets and consigned to the rubbish bin every piece of paper that de Payns was carrying. He took his shirt and windbreaker and dumped them, and gave him a black sweatshirt and a brown leather jacket that was badly aged.
‘The Company has a Facebook account for you, and apparently if you search Georges Morel on the internet, Google has you at the fourth ranking. You’re listed as a journalist who is interested in social justice and climate action.’
‘I like me already,’ said de Payns.
‘You came across the border yesterday from Turkmenistan, and you were travelling with me. I’m the photographer,’ said Templar. ‘You’re a freelance journalist who is currently researching the effects of climate change around the region.’
‘Okay.’
‘If anyone asks, northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan have some problems with aquifer mismanagement. There’s salt coming to the surface and the livestock don’t like the groundwater.’
De Payns was always surprised by what his friend could pull out of a hat.
Templar asked, ‘Does it sound plausible?’
‘You had me at hello,’ said de Payns. ‘What magazine are we writing for?’
‘A webzine called Socialist Climate Action,’ said Templar. ‘You’ll fit right in.’
De Payns laughed. ‘Have they run our stuff?’
‘Brent did a thing back at the Bunker,’ said Templar. ‘When you search the SCA webzine, you’re sent to a mirror site where our photos and stories are featured. It won’t last longer than a week, but that’s all we need.’
‘Who wrote the stories?’
‘Remember how Thierry put together our script for Lake Forgiveness?’
De Payns nodded.
‘Well, he did his AI trick again and he came up with a story on plastic bottles in the ocean, saving the whales and how great Cuba is.’
‘You’ve got some photos?’ asked de Payns.
‘Back there in the camera,’ said Templar. ‘Charlie’s taken care of it.’
‘Who’s Charlie?’ asked de Payns.
‘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.’
De Payns’ brain roared. Not just with the possibilities of who in Paris had sold them out in the middle of an operation, but the probabilities of the ISI going after Romy, Oliver and Patrick. He couldn’t contact them to tell them to get out of the apartment. And where would they run? And who could he ask at the Company to keep them safe? He could ask Shrek but that just begged the question—who was the mole?
Another thing occurred to him. ‘If the operation is blown, maybe the exfil is too?’
Templar nodded. ‘I booked the flight in cash, but I did it in Paris.’
‘We have to change it,’ said de Payns. ‘We have to go back into Paris separately.’
‘You want the car?’ asked Templar.
‘What will you do?’
‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’ said Templar. ‘There’s a town up ahead—about two hours’ drive—called Gardez. I’ll get out there, you keep driving.’
They smoked in the dark as they closed on Gardez, through a zone that had been bombed, judging by the craters alongside the road.
‘Tell me about Dr Death,’ said Templar. ‘What happened in there?’
‘He’s a nutter,’ said de Payns. ‘Said there was something off about me …’
‘Imagine that.’
‘Accused me of dishonouring his sister, cuckolding his best friend.’
‘So we’ve got our guy? We had eyes.’
‘Timberwolf is confirmed. He’s the head scientist at the MERC and he’s evil.’
Templar looked at him sideways. ‘What else?’
‘Don’t worry,’ said de Payns, annoyed that someone could know him so well.
‘Tell me. What did else did he say?’
De Payns took a breath. He was feeling very anxious about his kids. ‘The reason he doesn’t have kids is he wouldn’t want them to live in a world where he’s making his bioweapons, is basically what he said.’
Templar laughed. ‘Oh shit. Now I really need a drink.’