Brute Force

70

Lynn was in full flow now. Maybe it reminded him of the old days.

'I'd read his file, seen photographs of him, knew his vices, and then, blow me, I went and ran straight into him. At some diplomatic do or other. It must have been a month before the Yvonne Fletcher shooting. What an impressive fellow he was, too. Think Omar Sharif . . .'

'Did he know who you were?'

Lynn shook his head. 'Unless, of course, we seriously underestimated the Libyan intelligence machine.'

'So what did you talk about?'

'He simply asked me who I was, what I was doing in Libya and how I liked his country. I told him I'd just visited Leptis Magna – the most majestic place I'd ever been to on God's earth. The only place I've got hopelessly lost – lost in the beauty of my surroundings. I knew, of course, that we shared a common enthusiasm – Classics; him at Tripoli, me at Cambridge – but I meant every word. Not unnaturally, that's what we spoke about for the rest of the evening: the Romans in Libya. But something about my enthusiasm for Leptis Magna tickled him. He christened me "Leptis". Never called me anything else.'

'That was it?'

'There was a bit more to it than that. He told me he was a great admirer of Septimus Severus. Severus was born in Leptis and went on to become emperor.'

The list of O-levels I'd never got close to was headed by Latin and Greek, but a little voice in my head told me that, ancient history or not, I should listen to every word of this – not just because Lynn was a real anorak when it came to this sort of stuff, and I could see how his passion for it bound him to Mansour, but because I knew there was a whole lot more to it than met the eye.

'So Leptis Magna is a ruin, basically – and you told him that it was the hottest thing you'd visited since you'd been in Libya?'

'My dear fellow, you have to understand that Leptis isn't any old ruin – it is the finest surviving example of a city of the ancient world, and by far the best preserved. When we were at Cambridge, my wife and I dreamed of visiting Leptis together, knowing full well that it was damn-near impossible to get near it.'

'Because by then Gaddafi had taken control?' Lynn's wife was at Cambridge with him. I made a mental note.

'Precisely. Gaddafi took over in '69 after executing a perfectly planned coup. He came to power on a particularly interesting ticket: a mix of Arab pan-nationalism and egalitarianism that saw almost all traces of Western influence in Libya washed away within the next few years. He chucked out the British and Americans, closed down their military bases, threw out the Jews and the Italians, nationalized all the banks and threatened to do the same with the foreign oil companies.

'Then, in the mid-seventies, he disappeared into the desert, emerging months later with a manifesto for the Arab revolution, enshrined in something he called "The Third Universal Theory" – the Colonel's view on how to solve the ills of global society.

'The West looked on Gaddafi as a joke, with his loop shades and light blue suits, but it didn't appreciate – I guess none of us did – that the Third Universal Theory wasn't just for the Libyan masses; it was supposed to be a blueprint for everybody. Which was why, when the world didn't embrace his ideas, the Colonel decided to implement them by force.'

'And Mansour was the enforcer?'

'One of them, yes. This, to me, was what made his remark about Septimus Severus so intriguing. You see, Nick, Septimus was proclaimed emperor by his own troops after the assassination of the emperors Commodus and Pentinax in AD 193. Septimus was a soldier, but a soldier with a vision – he saw Leptis Magna as a potential rival to the power of Rome. He saw Africa as the empire's real centre of gravity.'

'Like Gaddafi and Libya?'

'Precisely. Gaddafi was the Great Leader; the man who would unite Africa against the corrupt capitalism of the West. And, despite the blue suits, for a while he really did give us a run for our money.'

'Sounds like you admire him.'

'Gaddafi?' Over the relentless pounding of the waves on the bottom of the boat I caught Lynn's laugh. 'I think Gaddafi is a joke. But when I returned to London I wrote a brief, which I wanted the suits to take very seriously indeed. I pointed out that the Colonel was underpinned by some extremely smart people – people like Mansour. Plotters. Cultured, intelligent Arabs. Not the nomadic ragheads of Whitehall myth and prejudice. You see, Nick, Septimus Severus really was a visionary, and his city, which he renovated following his victory against the Parthians in AD 203, became a lasting testament to his achievements. That's why I'd always wanted to visit Leptis Magna; and that's what I told Mansour.'

'And the brief?'

'I told them that we needed to pay heed to the lessons of history. Mansour's remark about Severus betrayed his ambitions. It told me he was intent on seeing through the Colonel's vision – and that we needed to pay a great deal of attention to that.'

'Pound to a penny the suits shelved it.'

Lynn turned to me and smiled. 'Of course. What did some upstart Classics scholar, a major with ten years' army experience, know? But within a year, Gaddafi's revolutionaries had taken over the Libyan People's Bureau in London, poor Yvonne Fletcher was dead, the Berlin night club had been blown up, the Americans had bombed Tripoli, and, and, and . . .'

He wasn't wrong. The rest was history.