With the warm afternoon sun pouring in and the rhythm of the road, Sofia felt herself drifting off, only to be pulled out of a dream by the sound of conversation. Fighting to wake up, she sat up straight and blinked a couple of times before looking out the window to see they were coming into Kandahar.
‘Ah, you’re awake,’ Daniel said, turning around to look at her.
Sofia put a hand over her mouth to stifle a yawn. ‘How long did I sleep?’
‘A couple of hours. You must’ve been tired.’
‘I was.’ She looked down at her phone to see if she’d missed any messages. There were none.
‘We’ve made pretty good time so we’ve decided to stop at a café that belongs to a friend of mine for something to eat then we’ll drop Clem off at the hospital and we can go to Fatima’s together, if that’s okay with you?’
‘Sure,’ she said as her phone began to ring.
‘Chief Wasim’s raid was a failure. No one was there,’ Jabril said.
‘No!’ She felt her emotions collapsing in. She had pinned everything on the success of the raid. How would they ever find the boys now? ‘Damn it, Jabril, how could they escape if the place was being watched? Damn it. Fuck.’
‘He’s saying they must have left before his men began watching the place. The good news is they found fresh food and girls’ clothing and make-up, so it was probably the right place, especially when the neighbours said there were only little boys there and men.’
‘No! Fuck. ’ Sofia wasn’t so sure that was good news at all, other than the fact that they had been given good information.
‘We’re close,’ Jabril said.
‘We were close. Bloody Wasim. You know what this means, don’t you? Either Chief Wasim is completely incompetent or someone warned them.’
‘Chief Wasim is thinking the latter.’
‘He would! Why the hell didn’t he raid the house when you first told him?’ Daniel had turned around in his seat again and was watching her, as was Clementine. ‘I don’t understand who would have warned them.’ She shook her head at Daniel to let him know the raid was unsuccessful.
‘There’s always the possibility it was one of Chief Wasim’s men, or even the man who told you and Tawfiq about the house. He could have been happy to take your money and then take some more from these men by warning them? I’m hoping that’s the explanation.’
Sofia considered this. ‘I suppose that’s possible. He was pretty sleazy. What now?’
‘We’ll think of something.’
Sofia couldn’t see how they’d think of anything. ‘Shit!’ she said, her anger at Chief Wasim boiling up again.
‘About your visa … I spoke with Iman and I still don’t think we need to worry yet. It has to be a mistake but, in any case, we should give the minister a couple of days to see what he can do, and if he can’t do anything then we’ll think of something else.’
With Jabril in the habit of shouting a little down a phone line, Sofia was aware that Clementine, who was sitting next to her on the back seat, might have been able to hear everything he said. Hanging up, she dropped the phone back into her lap.
‘They didn’t find them. Sounds like they were warned,’ she said to Daniel. ‘In any event, your information was good.’
‘Who do you think could have warned them?’
Sofia put her hands in the air and shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ ‘I’m sorry. I’ll ask my friend again. Maybe he’s heard something new.’
‘I’d really appreciate that.’
Sofia worried that the leak had come from someone in their circle, although she had no idea who it could have been or why. It just didn’t make sense. Perhaps it was innocent and one of them had spoken to someone they shouldn’t have. She thought it was more probable that the leak was at Chief Wasim’s end than that Afzal had sold them out, but whatever the reason, she was going to be more circumspect about who she spoke to next time, if there was a next time.
32
IT WAS A hot, windless afternoon with a dense soup of exhaust fumes and smoke settling over Kandahar as they slowly made their way into the centre of town behind a long line of almost stationary vehicles. A man with a high black turban and a bushy grey beard sitting atop an overladen donkey took the opportunity to cross the slow-moving traffic in front of them. Kicking the donkey’s sides with his sandalled feet and giving its neck a flick with a stick, he tried to make the scrawny animal move faster, but the donkey only had one pace. A fluffy white dog that looked to be a Maltese but was clipped like a poodle wandered out in front of them, closely followed by a second donkey, who was riderless and possibly ownerless. As the traffic began to move and Tawfiq waited for this donkey to pass, a brightly painted three-wheeled car and three men on bicycles pushed in front of him.
‘Amaq,’ Tawfiq said, annoyed. ‘Am I supposed to let all of Kandahar cross the road in front of me?’ As he held his hand down on the horn, the last donkey was the only one who bothered to look back to see what all the commotion was about.
Eventually they parked in front of a small café behind yet another donkey attached to a tray loaded with empty plastic water bottles. Slowly turning its head to look at them, the scrawny animal swished the flies away with his ears before lifting his tail and dropping a pile of grassy turds on the road. Having finished his business, the donkey turned back again to stare desolately at
