Brute Force

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.