'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 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 attaché 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.