Brute Force ns-11

by Andy McNab

  Sure enough, there were footsteps ahead – the distinctive clip-clop of Cuban heels echoing off cobbles. They were coming from the alley that cut across mine.

  Darting into a doorway, I shrugged off my day sack and unzipped the side pocket. I reached in and pulled out the knife, then peered around the brickwork just as Lazy-Eye's cherry-red shirt moved across my line of sight. I put the knife in the pocket of my cargoes and hooked the bag back over my shoulders.

  As I reached the junction, Lazy-Eye rounded a bend in the alley, but I could hear the sound of his heels. He was no more than ten metres away.

  I glanced to the left. Lynn was making his way steadily towards me. There was no one behind him. The street was still free of people – as empty as it was ever going to be. It was time to close this thing down.

  I rounded the corner. Something made Lazy-Eye turn and he looked right at me. For a moment, he was frozen to the spot. Then he turned and ran.

  He was never going to outrun me in those heels. The day sack bounced up and down on my sweaty back as I closed in on him, and I caught him before the next intersection. I grabbed his shoulders, pulled him hard up against the brick wall, clamped one hand across his mouth and pressed the flat of the knife against the skin under his right ear with the other. He needed to see the blade as well as feel it.

  The good eye stared right at me, big and wide; the other swivelled in its socket like a compass in a magnet factory. I could smell the smoke on his clothes and the rancid odour of his skin.

  'English? You speak English?'

  I could feel Lazy-Eye's heart thumping against his ribcage as the weight of my body clamped him in place. He wasn't even going to shake his head too much to tell me he didn't.

  An interpreter would be handy. Where the fuck was Lynn?

  The good eye bulged and looked like it would jump right out of its socket. The bad one was in freefall. It looked like a fruit-machine wheel that wouldn't stop spinning.

  Lynn strode into view at last. He took a few moments to tune in – and he didn't seem to like what he saw.

  'Tell him what I'm going to do unless he complies.'

  Lynn spoke to him low and fast. I watched for signs that the Arab was taking it in, but his body remained as stiff as a board.

  Lynn gave him more hubba-hubba and Lazy-Eye spat into my hand in his rush to say yes. His good eye shuttled between me and Lynn. The blade moved a little as he did so, to give him an even better view.

  The alley was still clear, but there would be unseen eyes. There always are. Somebody, somewhere might already be calling the cops or rustling up a lynch mob.

  Lynn gobbed off again. Then, taking my knife-hand, he pulled it clear of the Arab's face. I felt Lazy-Eye's body give a little.

  'You can take your hand away from his mouth, Nick, and start walking towards the main street. He won't give us any trouble.'

  'How do you know?'

  'Because he has information for us. He wants to do business. He was looking for us . . .'

  'You established all that in thirty seconds?'

  'Start walking, Nick, or somebody is going to round that corner and we're screwed.'

  I pocketed the knife, but kept a sound grip on the handle.

  I gave Lazy-Eye a shove in the back and pointed him in the direction of Sharia Hara Kebir. As the heels started to click, Lynn fell into step beside him. I took up position behind.

  I just hoped we looked like two dickhead tourists accompanying a Libyan on our way to the market to buy a dodgy watch.

  84

  There were still plenty of people on the main street as we hit Sharia Hara Kebir and made a left.

  Lynn leant towards Lazy-Eye and asked him something.

  Lazy-Eye made an uncertain gesture with his hand and muttered a reply.

  Lynn asked more questions for a good ten minutes and they kept waffling between themselves.

  'What the fuck's he on about?'

  'I asked him if he speaks English. He said a little, so you can take that basically as a no – Arabs hate to lose face. Yes means no, no means yes and a little means next to nothing. His name is Fawad. Fawad Al-Waddan. You need to listen to his story.'

  I glanced between Lynn and Fawad. Lynn looked at Fawad and seemed to be asking for the Libyan's permission to continue. Fawad gave an almost imperceptible nod.

  'There's an Arab word – 'ayb – that's difficult to translate into English. I suppose the closest approximation is "disgrace" – but it's much, much more than that. It's to do with shame and it's to do with the family. Remember, family and tribe are everything here.

  'The idea that you can get on in life by succeeding is not a concept that's readily understood here. Despite all Gaddafi's reforms, blood is still thicker than water and probably always will be. It's not what you do in the Colonel's Libya, it's who you are and, far more importantly, who your father is – or was – that determines what you will be. Which is what made our man Mansour all the more remarkable.'

  He was talking as if the 'who you are' system only worked here. I doubted if Lynn had ever been to a job centre.

  'When Gaddafi grabbed power in 1969, the Al-Waddan tribe was not a part of the elite, his power base – they were outsiders. But then Mansour came along. He was refined, cultured, educated and exceptionally smart. He knew how to broker arms deals, he knew how to deal with the Soviets, he knew how to handle groups like PIRA; he even managed to keep the Libyans one step ahead of us and the CIA. Let's not forget he was the man who put together the whole Bahiti package.'

  I checked Fawad's face to see if any of this was registering with him as he stumbled along beside us, but either the guy was up for an Oscar or his English was as good as my Arabic.

  'So what?'

  'So, on his own merits, Mansour rose to become part of the power elite. And as he gained Gaddafi's favour, so did the Al- Waddan tribe. My bet is that this guy' – Lynn jabbed a finger at Fawad – 'was twiddling his thumbs and minding his own business, when one day somebody told him he'd won the jackpot – that he'd landed a job in some ministry or other in Tripoli with a five-figure salary and an apartment chucked in. Not only that, but his brothers and cousins and uncles were all coming with him and they all had jobs, five-figure salaries and apartments too. And I bet some of them could barely even read or write . . .

  'This is what Mansour did for them. It was like winning the lottery. Every member of the Al-Waddan tribe ended up with a winning ticket.

  'Mansour also bought them the one thing that money couldn't buy: he bought the tribe the respect that it craved. He brought them into the Gaddafi elite.

  'So you can imagine how they all felt, when – having tasted what it was like, having tasted the high life – the Bahiti operation went pear-shaped. Mansour was thrown into jail and everything was taken away from them. You see, Mansour brought 'ayb upon the whole Al-Waddan tribe. He literally cast them back into the desert. It's clear that Fawad hates his cousin's guts.'

  'He's Mansour's cousin?'

  'Fawad's father is the brother of Mansour's father. He wants to help – and some cash reward at the end of it all, of course.'

  Of course. We kept walking, away from the arch, edging ever closer to our point of entry into the Medina: Green Square.

  Lynn and Fawad carried on walking and talking. It was as if they had known each other for years. The only words I understood were 'aiwa' – 'yes' – and 'la' – 'no' – which batted back and forth between them.

  Eventually, Lynn seemed satisfied. He turned to me. 'After the Bahiti operation, Fawad and his family were woken in the middle of the night and taken to a detention centre at the edge of the city. Fawad was separated from his wife and children and he was tortured. If there's a cock-up the suspicion is always that it's deliberate, orchestrated in some way – a conspiracy; a conspiracy by the Al-Waddans against the Supreme Guide . . .

  'By the time they were released, Fawad had lost the sight in his right eye. His wife had been raped. Because of the 'ayb on the en
tire tribe, it meant, too, that picking up work in the city was difficult, if not impossible. As a result, Fawad has relied almost entirely on charity for his and his family's survival for the past twenty-odd years. He's a proud man. You can imagine what it's done to him.'

  'And they blame all of this on Mansour?'

  Lynn put an arm around Fawad in a best mate sort of way.

  'He's eaten up by his hatred of Mansour, but he's powerless to do anything about it. He can't kill him, because that would be a sin. However, if someone else were to do it for him . . . well, that would be God's will, wouldn't it?'

  'That's why he thinks we're here – to kill his cousin?'

  'I haven't exactly disabused him of that.'

  'So where is he?'

  Lynn stopped walking and gestured along the street with a sidelong glance. I followed his gaze. Ahead of us, at the end of the Sharia Hara Kebir, lay the Medina's boundary wall. In between I could see a mosque, a few tourist shops and a large square building festooned with balconies and shuttered windows. The building, which was around fifty metres away, immediately held my attention. With its onion domes and pencil-thin towers it was every Disney fan's idea of what a palace in this part of the world should look like. A crowd of people, all men, had formed around an archway that opened onto the street. There was a lot of jostling and some waved what looked like tickets.

  Lynn spoke briefly to Fawad then he turned to me. 'Fawad does not know where he lives. The family has had no direct contact with Mansour for years. But that building ahead of us is a hammam, a bath house. According to Fawad, Mansour comes here on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.'

  Fawad was treated to another hug.

  'And if this cousin is to be believed, he'll be in there right now.'

  85

  We should either have silenced our new best friend or kept him with us – anything to stop him roaming the streets, free to tell all and sundry about his encounter with the two foreigners who'd rocked up in Tripoli wanting to kill his cousin. But there weren't exactly any quiet spots round here to carry out the first option, and as for the second, Lynn insisted Fawad was telling the truth; if we brought him with us, we'd be actively signalling our mistrust and putting his back up.

  'This is all about honour and trust, Nick.'

  'Honour and trust? We're putting ourselves at serious risk because you think this lad is some kind of good egg?'

  'Not entirely.'

  I couldn't tell which of us Fawad was looking at as the words bounced between us.

  'Nick, his story gels with what I already know. You have to go with my instincts. I really do know these people.'

  The only extra that was required, Lynn said, was a little something to seal the deal and then we could walk away from him and everything in the garden would be lovely.

  We pulled into a doorway where Lynn peeled off a thick wad of American presidents and handed them over.

  Fawad resisted the temptation to count the money in front of us, but I'd seen the spread of bills the same as he had. Lynn had presented him with at least $500.

  We shook hands and Fawad walked away. I watched as he made his way through the traders, office-workers and shoppers clogging the main drag. Then he darted into a side street and disappeared.

  Honour and fucking trust . . .

  'Now what?'

  '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.