Brute Force

71

I pretty much had the whole picture now. Lynn's brief encounter with Mansour saw them bonding over ancient history at a diplomatic party in Tripoli in 1984. Not long afterwards, Britain's relations with Libya broke down over the death of Yvonne Fletcher and the embassy was pulled out. Meanwhile, Mansour accelerated his plans to arm Britain's Public Enemy Number One, PIRA – only we got wind of it and decided to shut down the arms pipeline once and for all. That's when somebody must have dusted off Lynn's brief and decided to send him back in – undercover this time.

'What happened to Mansour after the Bahiti?'

'Gaddafi had more than $300 million personally invested in those two shipments. The Eksund's seizure by the French was bad enough; but when the Spanish took the Bahiti . . .' Lynn checked the handheld GPS again and adjusted the Predator's course.

'The Eksund and the Bahiti were public relations disasters. Not just for the IRA, but for the Libyans as well. For Gaddafi, the final straw was Enniskillen – the only time PIRA deliberately targeted civilians. He had set himself up as the liberator of the masses, and at Enniskillen it was the innocent who died – eleven of them, God rest their souls . . .'

Ahead, I could make out a faint glow on the horizon – the lights of the Sardinian coastline.

Lynn saw them too, made another course adjustment and settled back into his seat. 'To cut a long story short, Nick, the Colonel threw Mansour into prison and he sat there under lock and key for the next five years. Not a particularly good time for him, no doubt, but it did tell us one very useful thing – that he had nothing to do with Lockerbie. In fact, prison, in a sense, was Mansour's saving grace.'

'What do you mean?'

'Because we knew he was clean, because he had to have been out of the loop over Lockerbie, we agreed to accept Mansour as an emissary when the Colonel decided in the late nineties he'd had enough of international sanctions. In 2001, Mansour flew to London on Gaddafi's orders and met with his counterparts in the Firm and the Agency.

'Because of what happened in '87, I obviously couldn't meet him personally, but I was there, in the background. By this time, the Colonel had already handed over the Lockerbie suspects for trial, enabling the UN-imposed sanctions on Libya to be lifted. But we wanted to take things further, especially after 9/11, by getting Libya to renounce its WMD and ballistic missile programmes.

'Unfortunately, the temptations of London proved too much for our old friend Mansour and he was covertly photographed in his London hotel suite with a prostitute. The Americans were all for hanging him out to dry, and because of his role in the PIRA shipments, there were a good many people on our side of the pond who'd have happily gone along with them.'

The look on Lynn's face in the reflection of the windscreen gave him away and in that instant the last remaining piece of the puzzle fell into place.

'You saved his arse?'

In his twisted, public-school view of the world, Lynn had believed that he owed Mansour one. Never mind that the Libyan had overseen shipments of weapons to the Republic. Never mind that Mansour was indirectly responsible for the death of God knows how many British troops – mates I'd served with and Lynn, too, in all probability.

This was why I hated spooks. Now I was lumbered with one that had gone soft in the head. And in a country where every pair of eyes would be on us and, if we put a foot wrong, we'd be dead.

'You still haven't answered the question. How are we going to find Mansour?'

'Oh, that's the easy bit. When we were monitoring him back in the eighties he showed himself to be a bit of a creature of habit. There was a shisha shop – a place where Mansour always used to go to smoke, day in and day out – in the Medina, the old walled city. It was called Osman's. His mosque was nearby. That's where we need to start looking.'

'He may not be sitting there with a welcome sign,' I said. 'If he's still a player, he might well disappear for the next couple of days – or be completely swamped by security.'