'He believed you?'
'He believed President Lincoln – and that's all that matters.'
80
The taxi pulled up beneath the thick defensive walls of a castle.
'The old citadel.' Lynn looked up at it like a kid admiring a Christmas tree. 'Tripoli's most famous landmark. Riddled inside with a maze of alleyways.' He tapped the driver on the shoulder and gave him a burst of hubba-hubba.
The driver's face registered some alarm until Lynn dug a small wad of dollars out of his pocket. He held them under the driver's nose before slapping a ten-dollar bill down on the front seat. The driver picked it up, held it to his eye and appeared to sniff it. He nodded, satisfied, and we stepped out onto the cracked and crumbling pavement.
Traffic hurtled in every direction. Vast portraits of Colonel Gaddafi, inscrutable behind his Aviators, stared down at us from every corner. The Great Leader was represented in a variety of roles and poses: in military uniform, in tribal robes, and even in a blue nylon suit with lapels you could land a plane on.
Lynn gestured around us. 'This used to be Martyrs' Square until Gaddafi cleared it so his people could hold mass rallies in praise of his genius.' He pointed to a gap in the walls. 'We're headed in there, into the Medina. Most of the buildings are sixteenth to eighteenth century, the heyday of Libya's Turkish occupation, but a lot pre-date . . .'
This was scarcely the time for a history lesson, but I let Lynn ramble on. Anyone watching us, and there seemed to be plenty of them, would think we were doing the guided tour.
I told him to lead on.
We entered the Medina through a tall stone archway. It was still fairly dark and our warm breath swirled in the flickering street lights. It didn't take long for the noise of traffic from the square to recede. A hundred metres in, all I could hear of the outside world was the occasional car horn.
Ahead of us was a long, straight cobbled street with shops on each side and a minaret at the end. The puddles would have to wait until midday before the sun would reach in and dry them out.
The wail of a bloke calling the faithful to prayer sounded up somewhere close by, and was immediately answered by rallying cries from tinny, crackling speakers all around us. The dawn chorus gradually gave way to the clatter of shutters being thrown open for the day and shopkeepers gobbing onto the pavement as we passed.
Lynn went back into tour-guide mode. There were a number of souks in this part of the Medina. We were currently passing through the copper market. The gold, silver, jewellery, carpet, shoe, and even grocery emporiums were close by. You could buy anything you wanted here, as long as you didn't mind too much if it worked. 'The Gaddafi watch was all the rage in my day; they never managed to tell the right time.'
Lynn stopped, and I took the chance to scan behind me. The only people who were out and about looked like they really did have a valid reason for being here, but there was only one way to be sure.
'Take a left.'
We headed down an alleyway that was too narrow for cars. An old man in a long gelabaya wobbled alongside us on a
pushbike then peeled away at the next turning. We passed three houses with big, thick wooden doors and heavy, ornate iron knockers. One door was open. I saw a courtyard with a dried-up fountain in the middle. A young boy sat on its edge playing with a toy. A woman hung washing on a line stretched between two wrought-iron balconies. She stopped what she was doing to stare down at us. As soon as our eyes met she retreated into the shadows.
We moved on. Lynn pointed out items of interest: the whitewashed walls, the tiles around the windows. He knew what he was doing: he pointed at stuff behind us occasionally, so I was able to do a scan. The only person who grabbed my attention was a guy with a load of cloth balanced on his head. I'd clocked him hanging around the main entrance to the Medina, seen him again on the main street, and now he was here.
Lynn pressed on. Copper-workers hammered plates into shape near the entrance to a mosque. I kept expecting to be pursued, as I'd been in every other Arab country I'd ever been to, by a small army of the curious and the persistent – kids, usually, tugging at your shirt and asking for baksheesh – but all we got here was the odd sidelong glance and the occasional stare.
We came to a crossroads. I nodded left down another narrow street, filled this time with shops and stalls.
We wove our way between food, shoe and CD stalls until we eventually reached another crossroads.
We took another left: the third side of the square. If the guy with the bundle of cloth on his head was still behind us, it was no accident.
He was nowhere to be seen.
81
We hit a wall of noise. Cars stretched nose to bumper down the main street, their exhausts belching thick, badly refined Libyan diesel. Horns blared. Pedestrians jostled past us and each other: office-workers in suits; old men in white robes; women in long dresses and headscarves.
Lynn glanced up and down the street, getting his bearings. 'Sharia Hara Kebir. The teahouse isn't far.'
'Mansour's local?'
Lynn kept going, talking as he walked. He kept his voice low. 'Went there every day. Military intelligence, the Istikhbarat, maintained a small office just off Sharia an-Nasr, about half a kilometre from here. It was from that office that Mansour ran the PIRA operation. We had it under surveillance. There wasn't much about the people who worked there that we didn't know.'
I thought about the images of Gaddafi I'd just seen. It was easy to rubbish these people as self-inflated; easier still to dismiss them as incompetent. But in Mansour the Libyans had found someone who had successfully given PIRA the ability to carry on its war.
'Every day, at about eleven, Mansour used to walk from that office, pretty much taking the route we just have. He'd take an outside table if the weather was fine, order himself a glass of shay and a nargileh, and chill out, as my children would say.
'Libya is very tribal and Osman's is – or, at least, was – a popular hangout for members of the Al-Waddan tribe. Mansour could let his hair down there. He didn't need to look constantly over his shoulder, which is more than you could say for the offices of the Istikhbarat. The walls there had ears and they'd shop you for looking at Gaddafi's portrait the wrong way.'
'Got a plan for when we get there?'
I never liked being in somebody else's control, but until we found Mansour this was Lynn's world.
'I haven't thought beyond just waiting for him to turn up.'
If I'd had a better suggestion, I would have made it. I had no idea how long it would be before Gary and Electra were picked up, but, worst-case, I reckoned, was twenty-four hours – maybe thirty-six if we were lucky – before some bright spark at Vauxhall Cross or wherever put two and two together and realized where we'd been headed in the Predator. It wasn't much of a window, and if Mansour didn't turn up because he was needed to schmooze Britain's Foreign Secretary, there wasn't a Plan B.