'And Mansour was the enforcer?'
'One of them, yes. This, to me, was what made his remark about Septimus Severus so intriguing. You see, Nick, Septimus was proclaimed emperor by his own troops after the assassination of the emperors Commodus and Pentinax in AD 193. Septimus was a soldier, but a soldier with a vision – he saw Leptis Magna as a potential rival to the power of Rome. He saw Africa as the empire's real centre of gravity.'
'Like Gaddafi and Libya?'
'Precisely. Gaddafi was the Great Leader; the man who would unite Africa against the corrupt capitalism of the West. And, despite the blue suits, for a while he really did give us a run for our money.'
'Sounds like you admire him.'
'Gaddafi?' Over the relentless pounding of the waves on the bottom of the boat I caught Lynn's laugh. 'I think Gaddafi is a joke. But when I returned to London I wrote a brief, which I wanted the suits to take very seriously indeed. I pointed out that the Colonel was underpinned by some extremely smart people – people like Mansour. Plotters. Cultured, intelligent Arabs. Not the nomadic ragheads of Whitehall myth and prejudice. You see, Nick, Septimus Severus really was a visionary, and his city, which he renovated following his victory against the Parthians in AD 203, became a lasting testament to his achievements. That's why I'd always wanted to visit Leptis Magna; and that's what I told Mansour.'
'And the brief?'
'I told them that we needed to pay heed to the lessons of history. Mansour's remark about Severus betrayed his ambitions. It told me he was intent on seeing through the Colonel's vision – and that we needed to pay a great deal of attention to that.'
'Pound to a penny the suits shelved it.'
Lynn turned to me and smiled. 'Of course. What did some upstart Classics scholar, a major with ten years' army experience, know? But within a year, Gaddafi's revolutionaries had taken over the Libyan People's Bureau in London, poor Yvonne Fletcher was dead, the Berlin night club had been blown up, the Americans had bombed Tripoli, and, and, and . . .'
He wasn't wrong. The rest was history.
71
I pretty much had the whole picture now. Lynn's brief encounter with Mansour saw them bonding over ancient history at a diplomatic party in Tripoli in 1984. Not long afterwards, Britain's relations with Libya broke down over the death of Yvonne Fletcher and the embassy was pulled out. Meanwhile, Mansour accelerated his plans to arm Britain's Public Enemy Number One, PIRA – only we got wind of it and decided to shut down the arms pipeline once and for all. That's when somebody must have dusted off Lynn's brief and decided to send him back in – undercover this time.
'What happened to Mansour after the Bahiti?'
'Gaddafi had more than $300 million personally invested in those two shipments. The Eksund's seizure by the French was bad enough; but when the Spanish took the Bahiti . . .' Lynn checked the handheld GPS again and adjusted the Predator's course.
'The Eksund and the Bahiti were public relations disasters. Not just for the IRA, but for the Libyans as well. For Gaddafi, the final straw was Enniskillen – the only time PIRA deliberately targeted civilians. He had set himself up as the liberator of the masses, and at Enniskillen it was the innocent who died – eleven of them, God rest their souls . . .'
Ahead, I could make out a faint glow on the horizon – the lights of the Sardinian coastline.
Lynn saw them too, made another course adjustment and settled back into his seat. 'To cut a long story short, Nick, the Colonel threw Mansour into prison and he sat there under lock and key for the next five years. Not a particularly good time for him, no doubt, but it did tell us one very useful thing – that he had nothing to do with Lockerbie. In fact, prison, in a sense, was Mansour's saving grace.'
'What do you mean?'
'Because we knew he was clean, because he had to have been out of the loop over Lockerbie, we agreed to accept Mansour as an emissary when the Colonel decided in the late nineties he'd had enough of international sanctions. In 2001, Mansour flew to London on Gaddafi's orders and met with his counterparts in the Firm and the Agency.
'Because of what happened in '87, I obviously couldn't meet him personally, but I was there, in the background. By this time, the Colonel had already handed over the Lockerbie suspects for trial, enabling the UN-imposed sanctions on Libya to be lifted. But we wanted to take things further, especially after 9/11, by getting Libya to renounce its WMD and ballistic missile programmes.
'Unfortunately, the temptations of London proved too much for our old friend Mansour and he was covertly photographed in his London hotel suite with a prostitute. The Americans were all for hanging him out to dry, and because of his role in the PIRA shipments, there were a good many people on our side of the pond who'd have happily gone along with them.'
The look on Lynn's face in the reflection of the windscreen gave him away and in that instant the last remaining piece of the puzzle fell into place.
'You saved his arse?'
In his twisted, public-school view of the world, Lynn had believed that he owed Mansour one. Never mind that the Libyan had overseen shipments of weapons to the Republic. Never mind that Mansour was indirectly responsible for the death of God knows how many British troops – mates I'd served with and Lynn, too, in all probability.
This was why I hated spooks. Now I was lumbered with one that had gone soft in the head. And in a country where every pair of eyes would be on us and, if we put a foot wrong, we'd be dead.
'You still haven't answered the question. How are we going to find Mansour?'
'Oh, that's the easy bit. When we were monitoring him back in the eighties he showed himself to be a bit of a creature of habit. There was a shisha shop – a place where Mansour always used to go to smoke, day in and day out – in the Medina, the old walled city. It was called Osman's. His mosque was nearby. That's where we need to start looking.'
'He may not be sitting there with a welcome sign,' I said. 'If he's still a player, he might well disappear for the next couple of days – or be completely swamped by security.'
72
Cagliari in the cold drizzle of a winter morning was a shit-hole – the hangover after the glittering Italian party the night before. We approached the harbour just before first light. A blue and white ferry, long in need of a lick of paint, blew its foghorn mournfully as we threaded our way through a set of rusty marker buoys towards the marina. The town loomed above us: banks of nondescript, colourless apartment buildings stared back at me from a hillside devoid of greenery except for a few moth-eaten palm trees.
'What do you mean? Why would Mansour suddenly be in the limelight?'
I told him what I'd read at the café. The British Foreign Secretary was hitting Tripoli either today or tomorrow, so if Mansour was still the man Gaddafi turned to when he wanted somebody to talk turkey with the Brits, our man was going to be down at the embassy nibbling at the vol-au-vents, not toking away in the shisha bar and waiting to invite us home.