One day, following a particularly violent sandstorm, he fell in with a band of Berber camel-herders who told him that they had recently passed some partially revealed ruins on the edge of a wadi around ten kilometres from the Misrata–Waddan road.
Following their directions, Mansour came across some half-buried columns. Then he found pieces of pottery and mosaic. For several weeks he excavated what he could, but in the wake of the US raids on Tripoli, the decision was taken to shift the 'freedom fighters' to camps further south.
Before he deployed with them, Mansour carefully triangulated the location of his find against some local landmarks, did what he could to conceal what he had uncovered, and promised himself that one day he'd be back. In the meantime, he told no one.
After his release from prison, he scrutinized archaeological notices for signs that his discovery had been compromised. It hadn't.
Recently he'd decided to return to the site and start excavating again. When he did, he realized that his discovery was even more significant than he'd first imagined.
To begin with, the complex was big. It comprised the ruins of a palace, a number of state rooms, a temple and a library. It had housed a dignitary of high rank.
I checked the sat nav. Another ten kilometres and we'd reach the petrol station. Good timing. From the rising note of excitement in Mansour's voice, I got the sense we were heading for the big reveal.
'I found inscriptions to a woman – a woman called Fulvia Pia, Al-Inn. Fulvia Pia . . .'
Lynn smiled. 'The mother of Septimus Severus.' He leant towards me. 'She was Roman. His father was of Berber descent . . .'
Mansour broke through into what looked like an entranceway to an underground chamber. It turned out to be the opening of a tunnel. Imperial palaces employed them so that slaves could move around the complex without being seen by the emperor and his family.
'The bust had been wrapped in a leather cloth and placed in the tunnel, I believe, to conceal it from Berber raiders. I had found the remains of the palace of Rome's African emperor, Al-Inn.'
99
Twenty minutes after we filled the Q7 with fuel, costing all of about $8, Mansour's site loomed up on the sat nav, ten kilometres from the main road.
I turned off the highway. The terrain changed from flat as a billiard-table to rocky and undulating. After just ten minutes, the ground fell away dramatically and we drove down into a wadi. I swerved to miss a rock the size of a basketball and didn't see the pothole waiting to swallow the nearside tyre.
The Audi lurched and I heard the axle crunch. I put my foot down and powered out of it, but, with the car rearing, gave another huge boulder a glancing blow. As we grounded again the Q7's nose dipped and slewed. I braked to a halt.
'We've blown a tyre.'
I switched off the engine and got out. Our only piece of good luck was that the edge of the wadi kept the Audi below the level of the horizon, in case anyone happened to be playing I-spy from the road.
I opened the boot and the doors to allow what little breeze there was to blow through the car. 'You two need to get out while I jack it up.'
I took the .38 from Lynn. I didn't want him to hand it to Mansour on a plate while I changed the tyre.
The Libyan fucked around in the boot for a moment or two and came up with a foam-filled toolkit with cut-outs for the adjustable spanner, the screwdriver, the torch . . . all the things you'd need if you were unlucky enough to break down in the middle of nowhere.
'No point us getting in your way,' he said cheerfully. 'We might as well stretch our legs . . .'
They moved further down the wadi towards the clearly visible foundations of a house.
100
I found the hole in the tyre as I loosened the first nut. It was small, but deep. I eased the wheel off and struggled to replace it with the spare. It took a long, hot twenty minutes. I was soaked in sweat by the time I'd finished, and gagging for a drink.
I heaved the old wheel round to the boot. Lynn had stashed the water next to a large clear plastic box of tiny scrapers and trowels and stuff that the people on Time Team use to dig up Viking shit. Like the Q7 tools they each had their own little moulded spaces.
Voices drifted up from the wadi as I ripped the top off one of the bottles and got a litre or so down my neck. I peered around the back of the 4x4 and saw the two of them sitting on what remained of a wall. Mansour was waving his arms enthusiastically, pointing out various features of the site. Even at this distance I could see that Lynn was glowing with pleasure.
As I heaved the wheel aboard, I glanced again at Mansour's Time Team kit. Something wasn't quite right. A little voice started screaming in my head. I lifted the lid and took a closer look.
There was an empty 3cm by 10cm recess in the top right-hand corner. A Nokia car-charger sat snugly in the space alongside it.
Fuck . . .
He had a back-up mobile for emergencies. I didn't want him to know that I knew – not yet, anyway. I called Lynn up from the wadi. He joined me, still looking like his head was somewhere in ancient Rome.
'Has he been on his own at all while you've been down there?'
'Why?'
'Has he?'
'Yes . . . He needed to relieve himself. He went round the corner, but not for long.'
I showed him the empty space next to the charger. 'Did he have long enough to make a call?'
'Maybe, but I would have heard him.'
'A text, maybe?'
'There can't be a signal out here.'
'Wrong, mate.'
I showed him the phone I'd taken from Mansour's bedroom. Three bars registered on the left-hand side of the screen – a nice, fat signal.
'You can pick up a signal in the depths of fucking Afghanistan. Polar bears can get a fucking signal . . .'
'Well, maybe . . .'
Confronted by some old bricks, a few pillars, some shattered pieces of pottery and a two-thousand-year-old mystery, Lynn had abandoned any idea that Mansour might represent a threat – and had taken his eye off the ball.
'He's giving us the fucking run-around. That business about him trying to call you is bullshit. He's bullshitting about the Russians, too, and all this antiquities trading. And as for all his old enemies being his new best friends . . .'
Lynn's face flushed a deep shade of red. 'You know what, Nick? All your suspicions of Mansour are born of your myriad prejudices. They have a term for it; they call it paranoid projection. Any half-decent psychologist will tell you all about it if ever you have the good sense to go and see one.'
He paused for a moment, checking that Mansour was still out of earshot. 'There is no mobile phone, Nick. If Mansour had been bullshitting, there would have been nothing to see out here – no ruins, no imperial palace. We passed through that checkpoint because he bluffed it with the Kata'eb Al-Amn. I know. I listened to every word. What he told us about the Russians exactly matched what he told the officer at the checkpoint. He is trying to help us and I'm damned if I'm going to let you ruin everything with your paranoid delusions.'