'I'm a yacht-broker.'
'Not your boat, then?'
'Mine? Fuck no. I'm handing it over to a client. A Russian. He was meant to be here to take delivery last week, but the bastard hasn't showed. I was looking after it till he turned up . . .'
Electra's kiln-hardened glaze just got harder. 'What? This isn't your boat? I'm wasting my time with a fucking salesman?'
I left them to it and opened the door of the en suite and took a peek inside. The porthole was about ten inches long and five inches wide. The only way off the boat was the way I'd got on.
Both their mobiles were on a shelf behind the bed. I grabbed them and shoved them in my pocket, then gestured with the knife.
Electra stood and let her hands fall from her perfectly enhanced breasts, eying me defiantly. I bundled her into the bathroom and told her if she made a sound, I'd be back to give her some fresh tattoos.
Gary, meantime, was coming with me.
'Please.' I thought he was going to start crying again. 'Wh-What are you going to do?'
He bent down to pick up his black Speedo-style underpants.
'You got an account or credit card for fuel?'
Gary's Adam's apple bobbed like a yo-yo. He looked like he was about to be sick again. 'Sure. Company card.'
He produced his wallet and I nodded. A platinum Amex. That would do nicely.
'Get dressed and clean your face up. Then you're going to fill up the boat.'
'Yeah, sure. Just don't hurt me, OK? Please.' He started hopping around on one leg, trying to get the Speedos on.
Spratley was an idiot who'd give me no trouble at all.
The girl, though, I wasn't so sure about.
68
Hurtling across the ocean at speeds in excess of fifty miles per hour was an unnerving experience when your entire view forward came courtesy of Jack Shit. The sea was like treacle beneath the gunmetal sky. We'd been pounding through it for almost seven hours. At least there was no wind to speak of, and the mild conditions were forecast to stay with us at least as far as our refuelling stop: the port of Cagliari in southern Sardinia.
Every available headlight and spotlight on the Predator was switched on and angled forward, but at the speeds we were travelling, we'd only have a split second's reaction time if anything appeared out of the gloom.
Lynn sat at the wheel, in the big leather seat in the helm station, staring past the wipers into the blackness. Other shipping didn't worry him – he seemed confident the radar would take care of whatever was out there – but the other crap – the odd tree carried into the Med, or the occasional container washed off the deck of a cargo ship – transformed him into Colonel Doom and Gloom.
Now we were travelling at speed and well away from the mainland, there seemed little point in keeping the two below trussed up. I'd locked Gary and Electra in separate guest cabins. It wasn't quite what they'd been used to, but now her sugar-daddy dream had gone to rat shit it looked like Electra would tear him apart.
I sat next to Lynn at the driver's station, staring into the blackness, aware that, for him, this was all moving at a pace he was desperately uncomfortable with – and that it wasn't going to get any easier.
Lynn finally broke the silence, asking me how I intended to 'put ashore' when we reached Libya.
I told him I needed a stretch of coastline as close as possible to Tripoli. This wasn't as tough as it sounded. The rule when coming ashore was to head for the lights and then veer a little to the left or the right. If we ended up on some endless, sandy beach miles from nowhere, great, no one was going to spot us – but we'd look like a right couple of dickheads in the morning, scratching our arses and wondering what to do next.
Better to come ashore as close to civilization as possible, get into the city and blend in as best we could in a country where foreigners were still eyed with suspicion.
Either way, I reckoned that was going to be the easy bit. 'You still confident about finding a man who'd presided over Libya's foreign intelligence operations, in a country that's still effectively a police state?'
Lynn continued to stare straight ahead, only glancing down from time to time to check our course on the GPS.
'I know him extremely well.'
'You'd better tell me what to expect.'
Mansour was a few years older than Lynn. 'Like me, he was a classicist – he graduated from Tripoli university then joined the army, passing out from the Tripoli military academy. He spent the next four years as an ordnance officer, working extensively with the Soviet weapons advisers who were crawling all over Libya by then, busy arming Gaddafi to the teeth.
'Mansour is from the Al-Waddan tribe, whose power base is some Godforsaken hole out in the desert, several hundred kilometres south of Tripoli. Tribe matters in Libya, and the Al-Waddan family wasn't part of the elite that helped hoist Gaddafi to power, as far as I know. But somehow Mansour managed to transcend all that.'
Lynn started fucking about with a couple of dials; I thought he was actually starting to enjoy himself.
