'You see the man on the gangplank now?'

I nodded.

'Black leather jacket? Papers in his hand?'

'Yeah, I've got him.'

'That's Mansour.'

I knew plenty about Mansour from Lynn's briefing. He was in his forties and worked for Libyan intelligence. He was medium height and stocky, with brushed-back hair and a very neat moustache.

'He calls me Leptis.'

'Leptis?'

'Just a name he gave me.'

'You two mates?'

'Hardly.' He dropped his binos for a moment and turned to me. 'Need-to-know, Nick – and you don't need to.'

He was right. I didn't need to know – I didn't even want to. All this spookery was way beyond my pay scale.

'You sure that's him? He looks fatter than in the pictures.'

'Absolutely certain. He's over-indulged the falafels, that's all. A sign of privilege. He's overpaid.'

Mansour pointed and shouted, and generally seemed to take over the show as he walked up the gangplank. Two bodies emerged from the hold, headed for Mansour and started talking.

'Stand by – that's Two Cells.'

Lynn confirmed. 'Yes, that's Lesser.'

2

Benjamin Lesser – it didn't sound quite hard-core or Republican enough to belong to PIRA's top bomb-maker. I'd only just got over the Nelson history lesson when Lynn embarked on a lengthy explanation of the origins of the name. It boiled down to the fact that Benjamin was a Celtic name as well as an Eastern European one. It meant favourite son. Benjamin was also a Catholic saint, which qualified it for a place in The PIRA Book of Baby Names. In the year 424 he was tortured by the king of Persia for preaching. Reeds were thrust under his nails and into all the tenderest parts of his body. After this torture had been repeated several times, a barbed stake was shoved up his arse as a show-stopper. PIRA still did much the same thing to its victims fifteen hundred years later, so the history lesson wasn't a total waste of time.