Brute Force (30 page)

'And they blame all of this on Mansour?'

Lynn put an arm around Fawad in a best mate sort of way.

'He's eaten up by his hatred of Mansour, but he's powerless to do anything about it. He can't kill him, because that would be a sin. However, if someone else were to do it for him . . . well, that would be God's will, wouldn't it?'

'That's why he thinks we're here – to kill his cousin?'

'I haven't exactly disabused him of that.'

'So where is he?'

Lynn stopped walking and gestured along the street with a sidelong glance. I followed his gaze. Ahead of us, at the end of the Sharia Hara Kebir, lay the Medina's boundary wall. In between I could see a mosque, a few tourist shops and a large square building festooned with balconies and shuttered windows. The building, which was around fifty metres away, immediately held my attention. With its onion domes and pencil-thin towers it was every Disney fan's idea of what a palace in this part of the world should look like. A crowd of people, all men, had formed around an archway that opened onto the street. There was a lot of jostling and some waved what looked like tickets.

Lynn spoke briefly to Fawad then he turned to me. 'Fawad does not know where he lives. The family has had no direct contact with Mansour for years. But that building ahead of us is a
hammam,
a bath house. According to Fawad, Mansour comes here on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.'

Fawad was treated to another hug.

'And if this cousin is to be believed, he'll be in there right now.'

85

We should either have silenced our new best friend or kept him with us – anything to stop him roaming the streets, free to tell all and sundry about his encounter with the two foreigners who'd rocked up in Tripoli wanting to kill his cousin. But there weren't exactly any quiet spots round here to carry out the first option, and as for the second, Lynn insisted Fawad was telling the truth; if we brought him with us, we'd be actively signalling our mistrust and putting his back up.

'This is all about honour and trust, Nick.'

'Honour and trust? We're putting ourselves at serious risk because you think this lad is some kind of good egg?'

'Not entirely.'

I couldn't tell which of us Fawad was looking at as the words bounced between us.

'Nick, his story gels with what I already know. You have to go with my instincts. I really do know these people.'

The only extra that was required, Lynn said, was a little something to seal the deal and then we could walk away from him and everything in the garden would be lovely.

We pulled into a doorway where Lynn peeled off a thick wad of American presidents and handed them over.

Fawad resisted the temptation to count the money in front of us, but I'd seen the spread of bills the same as he had. Lynn had presented him with at least $500.

We shook hands and Fawad walked away. I watched as he made his way through the traders, office-workers and shoppers clogging the main drag. Then he darted into a side street and disappeared.

Honour and fucking trust
. . .

'Now what?'

'The bath house. Let's see if we've got our money's worth.'

'You said you trusted him.'

He shrugged, and headed across the road. By the time I'd caught up with him at the entrance of the
hammam,
Lynn had already worked his way through the crowd of jostling punters. A moment or two later, he returned shaking his head.

'Problem?'

'Too many people wanting to get in, not enough room inside. There seems to be some dispute, too, about who's next in line.'

'What do we do?'

'We wait.'

I said I'd need to do a recce of the building for any other ways in or out, but Lynn was ahead of me. He'd already asked at the ticket booth. There was only one entrance and one exit, he said, pointing to a doorway just beyond the arch.

There was nothing else for it but to sit down on a bench in the shade of the building and wait. I didn't like this one bit. Tourists sightseeing on the move was one thing; tourists static on a bench outside a bath house was completely another.

The rumble of raised voices was punctuated by the high-pitched tweeting of small, almost invisible birds in the trees we were sitting beneath.

I studied the rabble. I tried, but I couldn't get my head around it: a bunch of guys that couldn't form an orderly line for a bath house had once tried to take on the British government. One minute Gaddafi was arming PIRA with some of the most sophisticated weaponry on earth; the next he was cosying up to his former enemies, renouncing violence. And Mansour, the one-time golden boy, the man who went on to bring
'ayb
upon himself and his tribe, had been right in the middle of it all. To my mind, that marked him out as dangerous.

'Why didn't Gaddafi just wipe the slate clean when Mansour helped out post-Lockerbie?'

Lynn waved a fly away from his face. He rubbed his chin, which now showed more hair than his head. 'I suspect that Mansour became a visible reminder to Gaddafi of his many failures, not to mention the billions he was forced to shell out in compensation. The Colonel would have been grateful, but not to the point of forgiveness.'

Politicians in the West were forced to swallow their pride the whole time. But here, if our new mate Fawad was anything to go by, pride, honour and tradition were everything.

'And Mansour? You saved his arse in London.'

Whether it was a triumph of principle and loyalty, or a calculated move to put Mansour in his and Vauxhall Cross's debt, didn't matter. All that did was that Mansour felt honour-bound to return the favour.

'How grateful will he be when he sees you again?'

We were here because apart from the Firm, Lynn and me, Mansour was the only person on the planet who knew the significance of Leptis. And also because, in the Lesser-Duff- Lynn-me equation, he was the last man standing. I wanted him to repay the debt with hard information.

Lynn nodded thoughtfully. 'Did I ever tell you about my father, Nick?'

'He a history bore as well, was he?'

'Yes he was, and you could say he was also a spook of the old school, I suppose. When I was a boy, we were posted to Cairo. Of course, I had no idea then what he was – as far as I was concerned, my father was simply the military attaché and we had a very nice life, thank you very much – trips to the pyramids and lunch at the Zamalek Club and all that. It was the time of Nasser – Egyptian nationalism was rampant, King Farouk was hanging on by the skin of his teeth, and so, I suppose, were we Brits. The Egyptians wanted the British out. I remember we had to check under the car for bombs every time we went for a drive – exciting stuff for a schoolboy.

'Shortly before he died my father told me a story. Nasser knew, apparently, that my pa's mission in Egypt was to break up the cabal of young officers plotting to throw the British out. They put a price on his head – on the head of "Al-Inn", as they called him. A man named Sha'aban was the chief instigator behind the effort to kill my father and my father, in turn, was authorized by London to use any means necessary to "terminate" Sha'aban's operation.

'For a whole year they stalked each other like a couple of snipers. They came close to killing each other on a number of occasions, too. Sha'aban arranged once for a poisoned bottle of Nefertiti – the wine my father used to drink – to work its way onto his table at the club; my father responded by trying to blow up Sha'aban's plane. But they both survived.

'Years later, towards the end of his life, my father travelled to Cairo to meet Sha'aban. They talked for hours, apparently, about the old days, and at the end of the meeting they embraced and told each other they wouldn't have had it any other way – that it had been a good, clean fight. Old enemies, you see; mutual respect. That's the way the old school fought, and Mansour, Nick, is of the old school. The Middle East is a hugely nuanced environment – they're not all brainless diehards, as some people would try to have us believe. The British have always understood this of the Arabs.'

I was getting pissed off. 'Johnny Arab' was a lot more switched on than he'd been in the good old days, and a number of not insignificant events – 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan for starters – signalled that the world had moved on . . . if, which I doubted, it had ever been where Lynn thought it had been in the first place – spy poisoning spy down at the country club.

Fundamentalists, rogue states, the cult of the suicide bomber and weapons of mass destruction had all conspired to make our world a very different place from the one Lynn romanticized about. There wasn't any call any more for Al-Inn, junior or senior, rewriting Lawrence of fucking Arabia.

But I wasn't able to take Lynn up on this – not here, at least. Because at that precise moment the crowd parted and Mansour made his appearance on the steps of the
hammam.

86

I'd only ever had a fleeting glimpse of the Libyan, despite spending days studying him from Lynn's yacht before the
Bahiti
job, and that was why I knew he wouldn't have a clue who I was.

As Lynn dropped his gaze and pretended to rummage in his day sack for something, I lifted mine. The crowd parted further to allow Mansour to make his way down the steps. His light blue linen suit, without a hint of dodgy, Gaddafi-style lapels, looked expensive. It had been tailored in Savile Row, not the
souk.
And he might have put on a few pounds since 1987 and added a lot of grey to his hair, but he carried himself well. He looked distinguished – Omar Sharif stepping out of the Monte Carlo casino after a night at the gaming tables.

The sweat he'd worked up in the
hammam
glistened momentarily on his brow. As he took in the air, he produced a handkerchief from his top pocket and dabbed at his forehead a couple of times before moving away from the crowd.

The golden rule of surveillance is never make eye contact with your target – and I'd already allowed mine to rest too long on the man we'd crossed the Mediterranean to find. I lowered my eye-line as Mansour reached the bottom of the steps and, like Lynn, busied myself looking for something in my day sack. By the time I extracted my sun-gigs, Mansour had moved past us out onto Sharia Hara Kebir.

Lynn already had his day sack on, ready to move.

'No, he might recognize you. You've done your bit. Go back to the hotel, buy a guidebook. Wait in the lobby for me.'

Tightening my shoulder straps, I moved out onto the main drag. I made sure I kept him about thirty metres ahead of me and that plenty of bodies remained between us. The closer we got to Green Square, the louder the honking of car horns became. It was soon joined by the squealing of tyres, the hissing of air-brakes and the general hubbub.

As Mansour crossed under the archway in the Medina wall and moved into Green Square, he turned left and disappeared from sight. In the moment that I lost him, I wondered how he made his regular commute to the
hammam.
Did he have a car parked outside? Did he take a taxi? A bus?

The sun was high in the sky as I hit the square. I slipped my day sack off my shoulders and pulled out my printout of the Google Earth map. I caught sight of Mansour's light blue suit again, about halfway across. The giant portraits of the Great One looked down upon him.

He nipped between the converging lines of traffic. He was making for the opposite side of the square, where six large avenues spread out into the city like the ribs of a hand-held fan.

Just over two hundred metres further on, Mansour took a right, past a large cemetery and into a quieter road, Sharia Sidi Al-Bahul.

I sat down at a bus stop by the entrance to the cemetery, watching Mansour as he moved steadily away from me.

The moment he disappeared from view, I jumped up and dodged a bus.

Tall trees shaded the pavement. A hint of a breeze blowing in from the harbour gave some relief from the heavy heat and the smells of diesel, sewerage, dust, decay and rubbish that had hung in the air since Green Square.

I found myself in a quiet residential area. The cars had transformed themselves from old rust-buckets into new-model BMWs and Mercedes. Apart from the occasional burst of birdsong, the street was quiet. I moved past three-storey houses shielded from the street by high walls and ornate railings.

I reached a junction and glanced to the left. Mansour was seventy-five metres away by a wrought-iron gate set into a high wall. He stood in a pool of bright sunlight, busy with a set of keys.

I slipped behind a tree and pored over my map until I heard the clang of the gate behind him. I stepped back onto the pavement and did a walk-past.

The wall was three metres high with broken glass set into the cement along its top. I glanced through the gate. The house – an old villa – stood in a lush, well-watered garden about six metres back from the street. It looked like a wedding cake, with white walls and pink window surrounds. I couldn't see the lower floor, but the windows on the upper two levels were securely barred.