Brute Force

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 attache 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.

86

I'd only ever had a fleeting glimpse of the Libyan, despite spending days studying him from Lynn's yacht before the Bahiti job, and that was why I knew he wouldn't have a clue who I was.

As Lynn dropped his gaze and pretended to rummage in his day sack for something, I lifted mine. The crowd parted further to allow Mansour to make his way down the steps. His light blue linen suit, without a hint of dodgy, Gaddafi-style lapels, looked expensive. It had been tailored in Savile Row, not the souk. And he might have put on a few pounds since 1987 and added a lot of grey to his hair, but he carried himself well. He looked distinguished – Omar Sharif stepping out of the Monte Carlo casino after a night at the gaming tables.

The sweat he'd worked up in the hammam glistened momentarily on his brow. As he took in the air, he produced a handkerchief from his top pocket and dabbed at his forehead a couple of times before moving away from the crowd.

The golden rule of surveillance is never make eye contact with your target – and I'd already allowed mine to rest too long on the man we'd crossed the Mediterranean to find. I lowered my eye-line as Mansour reached the bottom of the steps and, like Lynn, busied myself looking for something in my day sack. By the time I extracted my sun-gigs, Mansour had moved past us out onto Sharia Hara Kebir.

Lynn already had his day sack on, ready to move.

'No, he might recognize you. You've done your bit. Go back to the hotel, buy a guidebook. Wait in the lobby for me.'

Tightening my shoulder straps, I moved out onto the main drag. I made sure I kept him about thirty metres ahead of me and that plenty of bodies remained between us. The closer we got to Green Square, the louder the honking of car horns became. It was soon joined by the squealing of tyres, the hissing of air-brakes and the general hubbub.

As Mansour crossed under the archway in the Medina wall and moved into Green Square, he turned left and disappeared from sight. In the moment that I lost him, I wondered how he made his regular commute to the hammam. Did he have a car parked outside? Did he take a taxi? A bus?

The sun was high in the sky as I hit the square. I slipped my day sack off my shoulders and pulled out my printout of the Google Earth map. I caught sight of Mansour's light blue suit again, about halfway across. The giant portraits of the Great One looked down upon him.

He nipped between the converging lines of traffic. He was making for the opposite side of the square, where six large avenues spread out into the city like the ribs of a hand-held fan.

Just over two hundred metres further on, Mansour took a right, past a large cemetery and into a quieter road, Sharia Sidi Al-Bahul.

I sat down at a bus stop by the entrance to the cemetery, watching Mansour as he moved steadily away from me.

The moment he disappeared from view, I jumped up and dodged a bus.

Tall trees shaded the pavement. A hint of a breeze blowing in from the harbour gave some relief from the