Brute Force

87

2212 hrs

'How are we going to do it?'

There was an edge to Lynn's voice. He almost sounded excited.

We were looking into the garden of Mansour's house from a second-floor window in the building site. The windows had been stripped of their frames, all the wiring had been pulled out of the walls, light switches and power sockets had been removed. The place was a shell.

The front of Mansour's house was shielded by pull-down blinds, but there were plenty of lights on at the back: in the hallway on the ground floor, in what was probably a sitting room off the hallway on our side of the house, and in what was clearly a kitchen.

'Don't know yet. Wait.'

There was movement behind the kitchen window, and I could see that Mansour wasn't alone. Through the bug-screen on the kitchen window, in the glare of an unprotected strip-light, disembodied hands were preparing food.

I nudged Lynn. 'Is Mansour married?'

'He was married. We knew she was receiving treatment for cancer in Riyadh when Mansour was in London. She died around the time of the Lockerbie settlement.'

Staring out across Mansour's lush garden, looking at his big fuck-off house, remembering the cut of his suit, hearing that his wife had received expensive cancer treatment in Riyadh . . . none of this seemed to gel with the profile of a public servant living out his retirement.

Lynn's take on this had been that Mansour had either skimmed off a few quid from the arms deals he negotiated with the Soviets, or he'd been given an unofficial thank-you present by Gaddafi after Lockerbie for making things sweet with the Brits and Americans.

Lynn watched through the binos as the owner of the hands revealed himself to be a boy in a gelabaya. He busied himself with some drying up.

'I'd say that the house-boy is Pakistani – Indian or Sri Lankan maybe. No Libyan I met here ever employed another Libyan, for fear they'd kiss and tell.'

I had other concerns. 'Will he have weapons?'

'Expect handguns – one in the bedroom and at least one elsewhere. They love cash. Mansour will have a bag of dollars hidden away, in case he has to make himself scarce.'

There was no street lighting so the garden remained largely in shadow. The light from the sitting room fell across a welltended lawn, maintained by a sprinkler, which was switched off but visible in the middle of the garden. There was plenty of barking from around the neighbourhood, but none from down below, and I didn't see any turds on the grass. Things were looking up.

The only other sounds were distant traffic, the odd car on the street and an occasional aircraft taking off from Tripoli International a few Ks away.

A shadow moved behind the blinds at the front of the house. The kid was still in and out of the kitchen – worked off his feet. It was close to midnight by the time the light was switched off.

I waited. The boy didn't exit via the front door, as I expected. Instead, there was a creak from the back and a second later an outside light went on, spilling down a set of steps and some bins between the back of the house and the wall. There was a shriek of metal-on-metal, the tell-tale protest of a rusty hinge, as the boy paused to lift the lid on one of the bins, dropped a sack of rubbish into it, then turned and headed towards the gate.

So the kitchen quarters at the back of the house had their own separate entrance – and an outside light with a motion sensor.

I heard the click of the lock and saw the gate swing inwards.

If Mansour had ever rigged a light-sensor to the gate it was broken, or the bulb was, because it never triggered as the boy moved through it. The lights over the front door never picked him up either, which meant the sensors were angled inwards, specifically to cover the entrance. The ground from the side of the house to the gate was unmonitored by any kind of surveillance. Even better, the gate was fitted with a lever-lock: opened by a key from the outside, a latch on the inside.

I turned to Lynn. 'Here's the plan. You're going to help me over the wall and then come back here. I'm going to lie low in the garden for a bit and see what else I can pick up inside the house. When Mansour heads for bed, I'll open the gate and let you in. Keep watching me and I'll signal you. As soon as you see it, make your move. OK? Once I let you in, sit tight, watch what I do and do what I say. Got it?'

His eyes gleamed. His jaw tightened and jutted. The fucker really was enjoying this. Maybe he relished being back in the world of spookery. Maybe it helped keep his mind off Caroline, and the life he thought he should have given her. It must surely have beaten the hell out of mushroom farming.

The lights in the front of the house were still burning brightly. I couldn't be sure, because I'd seen no movement behind the blinds for at least forty minutes, but I was almost positive Mansour was still on the ground floor. I'd been monitoring the window on the stairs, and no one had moved past it. It was conceivable that he had guests or bodyguards, but I'd been watching the boy prepare the food and, from the quantity, I was pretty sure he was on his own.

It was coming up to 12.30. I needed to get moving. The best moment to enter the house was within an hour and a half of lights-out – the time when Mansour, like the rest of us, entered the deepest period of his night's sleep.

I picked up a plastic carrier bag and part-filled it with builder's sand. 'OK, let's roll.'