Andy McNab - Brute force

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.'

He strode off downhill to collect his mate.

I closed the tailgate and jumped back behind the wheel. I signalled I was ready to leave by firing up the engine.

When Mansour appeared, he beamed at me like a cat that had swallowed not just the cream, but a whole fucking dairy farm.

He opened the door, ready to hoist himself into the passenger seat. I was tempted to grab him, spin him round and frisk him to within an inch of his life. But he wouldn't still have it on him. He was too clever for that. And besides, I knew I couldn't risk alienating him any more than I had already; he was the only one who could identify the Palestinian's house.

I put my foot down and we accelerated away in a shower of grit. Paranoid projection, my arse. I wasn't the one who needed the shrink here.

As the Audi bounced back onto tarmac I checked the sat nav. Ajdabiya was a little under 300 kilometres away – less than two hours.

I had no idea what we'd find when we got there. I had to hope that Mansour's line about Layla and Lesser wasn't just another king-size helping of bullshit.

All along, I'd operated on the assumption that the Chinese pigtails had been Lesser's signature, but if Layla had taught him, then Layla was the connection to the bomb under my car. Ghosts didn't make bombs. If Layla was real, she'd either be the bomb-maker, or know where I could find him. Then I'd keep following the trail until I knew who'd set us up.

If, if and when.

I checked the fuel gauge as another filling station loomed out of the desert. Masses; no need to stop. A BMW 4x4 sat by the pumps. We weren't the only gas-guzzler in this neck of the woods.

Mansour eyed the vehicle. He was probably reassuring himself he'd made the right choice in the Q7. He shifted in his seat and turned to face Lynn. 'Al-Inn, I would like you to share something with me… in the spirit of cooperation and friendship that exists between us.'

Lynn nodded. 'Shukran, ya siddiqi.'

'Afwan, y'effendi.'

In the spirit of cooperation and friendship that existed between me and Mansour, I offered my own little contribution.

'No fucking Arabic!'

They both shrugged.

Then Mansour kicked off again. 'There are certain things I would like to clarify to enable us, you and me, to move forward, Al-Inn…'

I glanced at the Libyan, distrusting him more by the minute.

'Prison gives you a lot of time to think. The Bahiti operation was watertight. I know: I set up the whole thing. After the Eksund compromise, we were especially careful. I say we – but in truth there was no "we"; it was all down to me. In the Istikhbarat al-Askaria, we did things very differently. Security came first for me – always. The Soviets taught me the value of compartmentalization – people knowing only what they needed to know. MI6, the CIA, the GRU… I had studied them all. Gaddafi expected the very best; he put his trust in me, and I swore I would not let him down. So many things in life come down to trust, wouldn't you say, Al-Inn?'

I looked in the mirror. Lynn shifted uncomfortably. 'Yes, I suppose so, Mansour.'

The old alarm bell started to ring somewhere in my head.

Mansour pressed on. 'For the Bahiti operation, I was the only person in Libya who possessed all the pieces of the puzzle: the contents of the shipment, the date of sailing, the identity of the crew, the route – everything. We knew you'd have our transmissions and codes covered. But there are advantages to working in a country that the West considers backward. Sometimes, simplest is best. No word of the operation was ever transmitted by any form of electronic medium.

'I was the only person who could have betrayed the operation – and I didn't. But the Great Leader had become so used to betrayal he assumed that the Bahiti had been compromised from within. When I heard the mission had failed, I knew it would only be a matter of time before they arrested me.'

I made to look in the rear-view to clock Lynn's reaction to all this, but Mansour swept his hand across the road ahead, as if the desert held all the answers. 'In my cell, by the Will of God, I knew that as the traitor wasn't Libyan, there was only one place we'd find him.'

The alarm bell in my head started to get a whole lot louder.

By now, Mansour was in full flow. 'But this raised another set of questions, Al-Inn. I knew, for example, that the Bahiti shipment, like the Eksund before it, had been planned by a small handful of men within the Provisional IRA's senior command structure. So who stood to gain from such a betrayal? I knew these men. They were all loyal, trusted Republicans. If this was a betrayal, it was not driven by the usual impulses. No one was being blackmailed. No one had been bought. I was looking at an infinitely more complex, infinitely subtler scenario. But subtlety, of course, is a British speciality, isn't it?

'I re-examined the events either side of the Bahiti and I noticed something interesting. In May, the IRA received one of its biggest military setbacks when eight members of the East Tyrone Brigade, several of them highly experienced, were killed in an SAS ambush when they tried to attack an RUC station at Loughgall.

'The Provisional IRA always maintained it had been betrayed; something the British denied, of course – the line MI6 takes to this day is that Loughgall was a result of communications intercepts.

'And that would be a very reasonable thing for the world to believe were it not for the Eksund and the Bahiti. These three events on their own, coming in rapid succession, were almost enough to cripple the IRA. But not quite…'