Brute Force

105

The dying rays of the sun picked out the target as we approached. I parked the Audi in dead ground, some distance away from it.

The house was large, walled off and in the middle of nowhere, exactly where the sat nav had said it would be. Mansour had lied about needing to point it out. He'd just wanted to stall us until he could summon his black leather reinforcements.

The entire area was only accessible via rough tracks.

It looked as if we'd wandered onto a landfill site. Newspaper and old plastic bags blew around the Audi. We were surrounded by burned-out cars, old clothes, discarded mattresses and – even fifty metres from the sea – fist-sized chunks of tar. It wouldn't have picked up any golden beaches awards, but fuck it, I wasn't here for the sandcastle competition.

I left the keys in the ignition and told Lynn to take the driver's seat while I did a recce. I told him he should drive back down the dirt-road if I didn't return within an hour, turn towards Tripoli and wait for me at the ERV. I'd pointed out the spot, a wadi a kilometre before the turn-off. I also told him that if he had to get out, he should lock the car manually to avoid bright yellow flashes giving us away.

I got out and took a lungful of air. There was an underlying tang of petrochemicals beneath the smell of brine. I was slap in the heart of Libyan oil-country and the Great Guide clearly wasn't any closer to going carbon neutral.

The hundred-metre dirt-road we'd just driven up had no fresh track marks on it. Layla's villa was a big, single-storey affair set in a couple of acres of scrub surrounded by a three-metre-high perimeter wall. The sea beyond it glowed red as the sun dropped below the horizon.

Flares burned in the darkening sky above the refinery further along the coast. I could make out the lights of ships in the bay and the glare of the Russian oil terminal.

If you were going to put a bomb-school anywhere, then this was the place – as unobtrusive, miserable and out-of-the-way as you could imagine.

I covered the two hundred metres down to the target. No proximity lights came on as I did a 360 of the perimeter wall. A pair of rusty steel gates, padlocked from the outside, provided the only access. Through the gap between them I could see a tarmac drive, maybe fifty metres long, leading to the main entrance. The ground either side of it, as far as I could see in the starlight, was just sand, rocks and more windblown litter. The place was shuttered and seemed completely deserted.

The padlock hadn't been disturbed since the last sandstorm. I could see no white light seeping out from behind the shutters.

I moved back to the Q7, killed the interior lights and opened the boot. I double-checked the contents of my day sack. I had my passport, a bit of local currency and a good few thousand of Mansour's dollars.

I reloaded the Makarov and Lynn's .38 with the spare ammo from Mansour's study then checked the chamber on the Makarov before tucking it into my waistband. I wanted to make sure it was ready to fire when I was.

Whatever Layla's place revealed, I'd head off-road for Egypt. The 4x4 would allow us to slip across the border undetected. Once there, mingling in a world of tourism and semi-civilization, I'd plan my next step. We'd have to wait and see if Lynn was included.

I fired up the Q7 and drove, lights off, down to the villa. I tucked the passenger side against the wall and switched off the engine. I clambered out, day sack over one shoulder. As I readjusted to the silence, Lynn shuffled back into the driver's seat. 'Same as before – if I'm not back in an hour, it's the ERV.'

The crescent moon rose above the desert horizon. I jumped onto the bonnet and then onto the Q7's roof. I took a few more moments to study the villa then climbed onto the wall, checked below me and jumped.

Another few moments to assess the silence and I was on the move again.

I walked up the front steps and put my ear to the door. Nothing.

I edged around the back, giving each shutter a pull as I passed. No obvious way in there either, so I came back round to the front. I checked under the cactus pots to see if Layla had left a key for me, but she hadn't.

Only one thing for it: the roof.

The house had been built Mediterranean-style – normally there was no insulation; nothing between the roof and the room below.

I hopped onto a water-butt fed by a down pipe leading from the gutter and hauled myself up. If anybody was inside, this was the moment I'd find out. They certainly wouldn't think it was pigeons.

I started to peel off tiles and stacked them carefully alongside me. When I'd created a decent hole, I dug out the toolkit torch from the day sack and lay down on my stomach.

I was four metres or so above the marble floor of a large, open-plan lounge. I could see armchairs, a sofa, a fireplace, tables.

Grabbing a supporting beam, I lowered myself through the hole.

I checked each room. I found food in the fridge – long-life milk, salami, stuff that would keep – but the place didn't look like it had been lived in for a while. There was a light coating of sand on the floor and the bed and the furniture in the master bedroom had been covered with dust-sheets.

I found some keys hanging from a board next to the fridge. One of them unlocked the front door. The shutters opened easily from the inside. If I needed to leave in a hurry, I was spoilt for choice. I pocketed the keys and moved back into the lounge.

I didn't know what I was looking for so it was hard to know where to begin. I shone the torch around the room and its beam swept across a desk by the fireplace. I walked over and started removing the drawers. They were filled with the crap you usually find in desks: pens, paper, paperclips, rubber bands and correspondence – lots and lots of it. I flicked through the letters. Most were in Arabic, but some weren't.

I stuck the light in my mouth and pulled out anything written in a language I might understand. I found a compliments slip and an invoice in German from a clinic in Oberdorf, Switzerland, clearly addressed to a Fräulein Layla Hamdi, and a letter, in English, also to 'Ms Hamdi', from the Cancer Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Medical Science in Moscow.

Thank fuck for the international language. I checked the dates. The Swiss invoice, for treatment of some kind, had been sent in November. The letter from the Russian Academy of Medical Science was more recent and definitive – it was dated the first week of December and was confirmation of an appointment booked two weeks earlier.

The first sentence of the second paragraph jumped out at me.

Due to the urgent nature of the treatment, we suggest that you check yourself in as soon as possible . . .

I was just too fucking late.