by Andy McNab
'Fucking hold on!'
I rammed the wheel to the left and moved out into the centre of the road then hit the brakes so hard Lynn's head banged on the dash.
The Golf had been coming up alongside. Now it nearly overshot us. The bonnet was ahead.
I hit the wheel hard and sharp, banging into it and turning immediately back to the centre. There was a screech of metal and its rear windscreen shattered. The driver's arms flailed at the steering wheel as the Golf lurched then disappeared into the ditch. It flipped twice, landing on the driver's side.
The Yamaha braked so hard his back wheel smoked as it slid out from underneath him. I racked the wheel hard and clipped him. The bike banged against the concrete wall that towered up to the autostrada. The rider fell off and tumbled end over end along the tarmac. His machine spun in mid-air.
I put my foot down to clear the area, tyres squealing. Little Fiat Puntos weren't made for this sort of thing. I pumped the brakes to slow down before I hit the exit booth, and came to a screeching halt just in time. I handed over my eighty cents to a woman who didn't even glance up. This was Italy, after all. She'd seen worse.
I was pouring with sweat as we hit the road. 'Tell me where to go. Somewhere to dump this fucking thing and get on a bus so we can get out of here. Tell me.'
59
We sat on the bus for Chiavari, still heading south along the coast, away from Santa Margherita. Our seats were halfway along the single-decker and out of view of any vehicles that followed. We'd dumped the Punto in a residential street and Lynn had navigated us to a bus stop. We'd bought our tickets at the roadside machine and jumped on.
His head hung down. He was feeling shit for compromising us, and so he should. But I had to keep him revved up. We still had a lot to do.
'Fuck it. Don't worry, it's done. We all fuck up. Besides, they were going to hit us anyway.' I leant over. 'I guess we now know it's the Firm.'
His head jerked up. 'Do we, Nick? It couldn't have been Skype. It's secure. All the Firm knew was our RV. They wouldn't have had operators scouring the whole length of the autostrada just to follow us in. Why bother, if they knew where we were going?'
He had a point.
'And if they'd got a fix on us from the call, why wait until we were on the road? Why not hit us at the flat? Why take the chance of the surveillance being compromised, why take the chance of us not going to the RV?'
He was right. We still did have a place to hide.
The bus stopped for a couple of waffling women and some kids with day sacks. The air conditioning kept everything nice and cool and calm. It was helping me, for sure.
We got to the edge of Chiavari and the bus stopped. I stood up and Lynn followed. We might as well stay on the outskirts of this place and move back to the flat once it was dark.
We went into a café to keep out of sight of the road. I nursed an espresso as I visualized the opening of my cache down on the Golden Lane Estate. I picked up the menu and gave it to Lynn. 'Might as well order some food, eh?'
I played with my coffee. In my mind's eye, the screws were still in place. The mortar was still in place. Even the clingfilm; everything was as it should have been. I swallowed the shot and shuddered – only partly because the coffee was so strong. Mainly it was the thought that whoever knew about my cache would have my passport details, and everything else would have followed. They would have trawled through any credit card movements. My passport would have been pinged by the biometrics as soon as it was put under the reader at Genoa, and that would have confirmed that the tickets I'd bought on the credit card weren't a decoy. The hire car would have turned up on their screens, and all they had to do was check the camera information coming out of the tollbooths.
It all pointed back to the Firm, no matter what Lynn believed.
They would have some intelligence-sharing agreement in place with the Italians. They'd be able to link into their cameras and access plate-recognition machinery at the tollbooths without even leaving their desks. The Italians wouldn't have had to know what was going on. The request would have been entirely routine, and submitted with a big pile of others.
Once they knew where we'd come off the autostrada, they would have had to start checking the old-fashioned way, and they wouldn't have involved the Italians in that, for sure. Meanwhile, they would have been looking for us electronically, waiting for credit cards to be pinged.
Lynn was busy waffling away to the waiter when I realized that there was someone I'd overlooked – someone else who knew about my passport.
The waiter left.
'Can you get me a phone card?'
'We calling Vauxhall Cross?'
'Fuck Vauxhall Cross.'
A few seconds later a couple of paninis appeared, along with glasses of chopped-up carrot and celery.
I asked for a cappuccino.
60
The phone rang six times.
I cut straight in when I heard her voice. 'Just phoning to say thanks for the ginger cake; it was lovely – as always.'
But she didn't screech with delight as she usually did at the sound of my voice, or launch into intimate details of her latest bingo adventure.
She was in shit state.
'Something terrible . . . I . . . It's . . .' She gulped in air.
'What's happened, Leena? Is it Brendan?'
There was a long silence.
The phone clattered to the floor.
Traffic raced up and down the coast road and I pressed my ear hard against the receiver.
'Leena?'
I heard a rustle as the phone was retrieved. I could hear her breathing.
'Leena?'
'They mugged him . . . right outside Costcutter . . . they killed him . . . He was only going to get his HobNobs.'
I wanted to commiserate with her, but there was no time. I needed information out of her before she dissolved. 'Who did it?'
'The police don't know yet. It's so awful. So many strange things today.'
'Strange things?'
There was another long silence.
'Talk to me, Leena. This is important.'
'Well . . . just this morning, he had some people from the old country turn up . . . and then this . . . I told him I'd go later, but he wouldn't hear of it. Said I had enough to do . . . and now . . .'
I heard her distressed breathing retreat as she replaced the receiver.
I redialled and got the engaged tone. She'd taken it off the hook.
The street lights had come on without me noticing. I walked fast to the café.
Lynn had waited for me to return before starting on his panini.
I took a bite and leant towards him. 'We're fucked.'
His eyes widened. 'What, more than we were ten minutes ago?'
'I'll explain later. We've got to take the passports as compromised. We've got to get to an ATM. I'll draw out as much as I can then I'll bin the card. Then it's straight to the flat.'
Within an hour we were back in the middle of a bus, this time heading north. My ripped-up card was buried in a couple of Chiavari bins.
Lynn's eyelids drooped and he kept rubbing his face. His stubble rustled under his fingers.
'It's going to get worse than this, believe me. We've tried it your way. There's only one place we can go now.'
'Where's that?'
'Libya.'
PART SIX
61
The warm breeze carried the smell of the sea and the sound of raised voices. Then I heard the rev of engines, the blast of a horn, more shouting and the squeal of tyres.
I opened my eyes. Lynn was sitting in his chair by the window that opened onto the Juliet balcony. He was staring out across the harbour. I wondered how long he'd been there.
I swung my legs off the bed, hauled myself into the kitchen and started going through the cupboards, but all I could find was some decaf. I heaped two big spoonfuls into a cup, waited for the kettle to boil and poured myself a small measure of water. I tried to kid myse
lf that the dark black stuff was the real McCoy, but it wasn't working, so I dragged a chair from the dining table and plonked myself next to Lynn. He had his binos stuck to his face and was tracking a large yacht as it made its way out to sea.
'Spotted him yet?'
He lowered the binos. 'Who?'
'Mansour.'
It didn't raise a smile.
'I hope you're right about this.'
'And our alternative is what, exactly? Apart from you and me, Mansour is the only man on the planet who knows the significance of the name Leptis – a nickname he coined for you. He's also one of very few who knew Ben Lesser was on board the Bahiti. Lesser's dead. Duff's dead. You're supposed to be dead, and I'm assuming I am too. In the whole equation, the only man left standing is Mansour. Either he's pulling the strings here, or he must know who is.'
Lynn pulled a face. 'Bomb-making wasn't part of his repertoire.'
'I told you last night, that's nit-picking. Training and supplying PIRA, the relationship with Lesser, the Bahiti shipment . . . they were all handled by Mansour. I don't give a shit whether it's the Firm or the Tellytubbies who are trying to kill me. Mansour will know what all this is about, and if not, maybe he'll know a man who does. We're going to find these fuckers and get them before they get us.'
We'd debated it long enough. He knew I was right.
He shrugged and handed me the binoculars. 'Magnificent, isn't she, don't you think?'
I lifted them to my face. The yacht was now under sail. 'How do you drive one of those things anyway? Does it operate like a car?'
Lynn scowled. 'Not "it", "she". If you insist on calling her "it" you will bring us bad luck.'
Like ours could get any worse.
62
Lynn had gone off on one last night about the sort of vessel we'd need for the trip. Even he had to confess we'd need something with more bollocks than a sailing yacht to get to Tripoli if we wanted to get there before the end of the year.
I was scanning the harbour for the kind of thing I thought might be up to the job – not that I had a clue what we were really looking for. But you didn't have to be an expert to appreciate some of the seriously Gucci kit that was out there. In amongst the fishing boats, the speed boats and the yachts were an array of gin palaces that told me certain people were riding out the recession just fine, thank you very much.
Some of them were huge, with double funnel stacks, tenders as big as Lynn's apartment and more radars than Heathrow airport. One of them even had a helicopter on the back.
Lynn picked himself up from his seat and wandered into the apartment. I heard him clattering around in the kitchen. 'We're going to need a boat that's fast and has range. How far is it to Tripoli, anyway?'
'No idea.' I carried on scanning the harbour. It was another world out there. How did these people make so much fucking money?
Then, in amongst the kitchen noises, I heard the sound of Bill Gates' welcoming Windows ditty.
Lynn was hunched over the laptop, still surfing off his neigh-bour's signal. A few moments later his printer whirred and the first of the Google Earth maps of Tripoli landed on the table. I'd been impressed with his work this morning. With nothing to go on except seriously out-of-date information, he'd pulled up the Libyan Yellow Pages online and started burning through his Skype credit, giving it hubba-hubba to all and sundry.
Fuck knows who he was calling, but he managed to get some kind of confirmation that Mansour was still alive and living in Tripoli. I had to trust him on the Skype front. Whatever the risks, they were less than him showing his face on the way to a public phone – which the Italians would probably have been monitoring anyway.
I went back to studying the harbour. Lynn had pointed out the little dinghy he pottered about in. I tracked on down the line of boats on the far side of the marina. The bigger the boat, the closer it was to the open sea. By the time I'd panned down to the end of the sea-wall, adjusting the focus as I went, I half expected to see Roman Abramovich waving at me.
The really big numbers were crawling with crew. Hulls were being scrubbed down, decks swept and paint applied to metalwork.
My binos swept past them and headed out towards the open water.
More boats bobbed up and down just beyond the marina, a mixed bag, all of which still cost more than your average house – on second thoughts, make that ten average houses. I tried to work out whether there was any significance to them being out there, and decided that their owners were too tight to pay harbour fees.
I kept panning, then stopped. Something sleek and dangerous slipped into the field of view – not as big as anything I'd seen on Abramovich Row, but probably no less damaging to the bank account.
It had a matt black hull and a shiny grey upper deck. Antennae sprouted from the roof. A radar revolved on a beam just above and behind the main cabin. The thing looked like an ocean-going Ferrari. And to top it all, there was a really good-looking woman sunning herself on the front deck. I adjusted the focus again. She looked Chinese or Japanese; it was hard to tell at this distance. Oriental, anyway. Her eyes were closed and her face angled towards the weak, wintry sun.
A guy suddenly appeared on deck. I followed him as he edged round the cabin, crept up on her and dropped something down her sweater. Even though the boat was 500 metres away, I heard her squeal.
She jumped up, pretending to be cross, and threw it back at him. Ice-cube attack. The guy ducked and it splashed into the sea. Too bad he didn't follow it. Now that would have been funny. He was neither young nor beautiful. But then with a boat like his he didn't have to be. I narrowed my eyes and peered at him. Well fed, comfortable, tanned and pushing fifty. Lucky fucker.
'What did you say?' Lynn was back, standing beside me, holding two cups of coffee.
I hadn't realized I'd spoken aloud.
I took one and sniffed it. It didn't smell any better than the last cup. 'What's that black and grey Batship out there?'
He peered out to sea.
I pointed.
'That thing?' He made it sound like we were looking at the boating equivalent of a Ford Fiesta. 'It's a Predator 95-100.' His lip curled. 'A Sunseeker.'
All of a sudden it was an it, not a she. 'How fast does it go?' I kept my eyes on the deck. The girl was running after Fatman, arms and legs flailing like windmills. I watched as the two of them disappeared below deck. A moment or two later somebody drew the curtains on a porthole just above the waterline.
'Fast. Probably in excess of thirty knots – forty mph to you, Nick. Why do you ask?'
63
'The confidence and power of this craft is simply awe-inspiring. Performance levels can be adjusted depending on your preference of engine and drive systems. Accommodation is as generous as it is comfortable, whilst an immense upper deck saloon is fitted with a stylish bar and galley. On deck, ample sunbathing space and a retractable bimini top over a huge cockpit area make for effortless entertainment.'
Lynn had pulled the blurb for a Sunseeker Predator 95-100 off the web and read from it as he paced the room. We'd already established he was wrong about one thing. The Predator had a top speed of fifty knots. In excess of sixty-five mph. We could almost be in Tripoli tonight, if we wanted.
