Brute Force

no direct contact with Mansour for years. But that building ahead of us is a hammam, a bath house. According to Fawad, Mansour comes here on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.'

Fawad was treated to another hug.

'And if this cousin is to be believed, he'll be in there right now.'

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