Brute Force

100

I found the hole in the tyre as I loosened the first nut. It was small, but deep. I eased the wheel off and struggled to replace it with the spare. It took a long, hot twenty minutes. I was soaked in sweat by the time I'd finished, and gagging for a drink.

I heaved the old wheel round to the boot. Lynn had stashed the water next to a large clear plastic box of tiny scrapers and trowels and stuff that the people on Time Team use to dig up Viking shit. Like the Q7 tools they each had their own little moulded spaces.

Voices drifted up from the wadi as I ripped the top off one of the bottles and got a litre or so down my neck. I peered around the back of the 4x4 and saw the two of them sitting on what remained of a wall. Mansour was waving his arms enthusiastically, pointing out various features of the site. Even at this distance I could see that Lynn was glowing with pleasure.

As I heaved the wheel aboard, I glanced again at Mansour's Time Team kit. Something wasn't quite right. A little voice started screaming in my head. I lifted the lid and took a closer look.

There was an empty 3cm by 10cm recess in the top right-hand corner. A Nokia car-charger sat snugly in the space alongside it.

Fuck . . .

He had a back-up mobile for emergencies. I didn't want him to know that I knew – not yet, anyway. I called Lynn up from the wadi. He joined me, still looking like his head was somewhere in ancient Rome.

'Has he been on his own at all while you've been down there?'

'Why?'

'Has he?'

'Yes . . . He needed to relieve himself. He went round the corner, but not for long.'

I showed him the empty space next to the charger. 'Did he have long enough to make a call?'

'Maybe, but I would have heard him.'

'A text, maybe?'

'There can't be a signal out here.'

'Wrong, mate.'

I showed him the phone I'd taken from Mansour's bedroom. Three bars registered on the left-hand side of the screen – a nice, fat signal.

'You can pick up a signal in the depths of fucking Afghanistan. Polar bears can get a fucking signal . . .'

'Well, maybe . . .'

Confronted by some old bricks, a few pillars, some shattered pieces of pottery and a two-thousand-year-old mystery, Lynn had abandoned any idea that Mansour might represent a threat – and had taken his eye off the ball.

'He's giving us the fucking run-around. That business about him trying to call you is bullshit. He's bullshitting about the Russians, too, and all this antiquities trading. And as for all his old enemies being his new best friends . . .'

Lynn's face flushed a deep shade of red. 'You know what, Nick? All your suspicions of Mansour are born of your myriad prejudices. They have a term for it; they call it paranoid projection. Any half-decent psychologist will tell you all about it if ever you have the good sense to go and see one.'

He paused for a moment, checking that Mansour was still out of earshot. 'There is no mobile phone, Nick. If Mansour had been bullshitting, there would have been nothing to see out here – no ruins, no imperial palace. We passed through that checkpoint because he bluffed it with the Kata'eb Al-Amn. I know. I listened to every word. What he told us about the Russians exactly matched what he told the officer at the checkpoint. He is trying to help us and I'm damned if I'm going to let you ruin everything with your paranoid delusions.'

He strode off downhill to collect his mate.

I closed the tailgate and jumped back behind the wheel. I signalled I was ready to leave by firing up the engine.

When Mansour appeared, he beamed at me like a cat that had swallowed not just the cream, but a whole fucking dairy farm.

He opened the door, ready to hoist himself into the passenger seat. I was tempted to grab him, spin him round and frisk him to within an inch of his life. But he wouldn't still have it on him. He was too clever for that. And besides, I knew I couldn't risk alienating him any more than I had already; he was the only one who could identify the Palestinian's house.

I put my foot down and we accelerated away in a shower of grit. Paranoid projection, my arse. I wasn't the one who needed the shrink here.