Brute Force

They both shrugged.

Then Mansour kicked off again. 'There are certain things I would like to clarify to enable us, you and me, to move forward, Al-Inn . . .'

I glanced at the Libyan, distrusting him more by the minute.

'Prison gives you a lot of time to think. The Bahiti operation was watertight. I know: I set up the whole thing. After the Eksund compromise, we were especially careful. I say we – but in truth there was no 'we'; it was all down to me. In the Istikhbarat al- Askaria, we did things very differently. Security came first for me – always. The Soviets taught me the value of compartmentalization – people knowing only what they needed to know. MI6, the CIA, the GRU . . . I had studied them all. Gaddafi expected the very best; he put his trust in me, and I swore I would not let him down. So many things in life come down to trust, wouldn't you say, Al-Inn?'

I looked in the mirror. Lynn shifted uncomfortably. 'Yes, I suppose so, Mansour.'

The old alarm bell started to ring somewhere in my head.

Mansour pressed on. 'For the Bahiti operation, I was the only person in Libya who possessed all the pieces of the puzzle: the contents of the shipment, the date of sailing, the identity of the crew, the route – everything. We knew you'd have our transmissions and codes covered. But there are advantages to working in a country that the West considers backward. Sometimes, simplest is best. No word of the operation was ever transmitted by any form of electronic medium.

'I was the only person who could have betrayed the operation – and I didn't. But the Great Leader had become so used to betrayal he assumed that the Bahiti had been compromised from within. When I heard the mission had failed, I knew it would only be a matter of time before they arrested me.'

I made to look in the rear-view to clock Lynn's reaction to all this, but Mansour swept his hand across the road ahead, as if the desert held all the answers. 'In my cell, by the Will of God, I knew that as the traitor wasn't Libyan, there was only one place we'd find him.'

The alarm bell in my head started to get a whole lot louder.

By now, Mansour was in full flow. 'But this raised another set of questions, Al-Inn. I knew, for example, that the Bahiti shipment, like the Eksund before it, had been planned by a small handful of men within the Provisional IRA's senior command structure. So who stood to gain from such a betrayal? I knew these men. They were all loyal, trusted Republicans. If this was a betrayal, it was not driven by the usual impulses. No one was being blackmailed. No one had been bought. I was looking at an infinitely more complex, infinitely subtler scenario. But subtlety, of course, is a British speciality, isn't it?

'I re-examined the events either side of the Bahiti and I noticed something interesting. In May, the IRA received one of its biggest military setbacks when eight members of the East Tyrone Brigade, several of them highly experienced, were killed in an SAS ambush when they tried to attack an RUC station at Loughgall.

'The Provisional IRA always maintained it had been betrayed; something the British denied, of course – the line MI6 takes to this day is that Loughgall was a result of communications intercepts.

'And that would be a very reasonable thing for the world to believe were it not for the Eksund and the Bahiti. These three events on their own, coming in rapid succession, were almost enough to cripple the IRA. But not quite . . .'

He paused.

'The IRA delivered the coup de grace themselves.'

102

I'd had enough of this.

'You know what? I don't remember PIRA saying 'enough' in '87. Enniskillen happened between the Eksund and the Bahiti – eleven dead; the biggest loss of civilian life in a single incident. PIRA wasn't exactly rolling over.'

Mansour's eyes sparkled. 'I was just coming to Enniskillen. What happened after the massacre? The entire world expressed its revulsion for what PIRA had done.

'Here, even our Great Guide declared his sympathy for the bereaved and his contempt for those who had perpetrated such a wanton, callous act.

'Despite their denials then and since, you can wager it was approved at the very highest level of the Provisionals' leadership. The most devastating blow to the Republican movement and it was approved from within . . .'

Mansour looked me right in the eye. 'Who in their right mind would have done this? Surely it could only have been an Irishman intent on bringing the reign of the bomb and the Armalite to an end . . .'

I said nothing. Lynn said nothing. Over the water, I'd just been a squaddie at the sharp end. But Lynn had occupied a privileged position within the intelligence community. He'd have been in a position to know.

Something clicked into place.

The car bomb. Ireland. Leptis . . .

When I turned up at Lynn's farm, convinced that the only organization with the means and the motive to kill me was the Firm, it had only been a gut-level assumption based on events stemming from the death of the Yes Man, and then fuelled by the instruction to seek out Leptis – the man with the answers. But Lynn's first and only thought was that it must have been the Firm that was going for me – that was going for us. He'd been expecting this to happen . . .

Why?