and into darkness.
He saw the outline stop at the place he had described in his message to Al-Khalifa. Two people got out, a man and a woman. They looked around, checked that no other car had followed them off the highway, and slowly walked on, toward the place where a grove of trees covered a vacant lot.
Abu Fouad and the woman had been told to wait up to half an hour. If the Bedou had not shown up, they were to abort and go home. They actually waited forty minutes before returning to the car. Both were frustrated.
“He must have been detained,” said Abu Fouad to his companion. “An Iraqi patrol, perhaps. Who knows? Anyway, damn. I’ll have to start again.”
“I think you’re crazy to trust him,” said the woman. “You have no idea who he is.”
They spoke softly, the Kuwaiti resistance leader looking up and down the street to ensure no Iraqi soldiers had appeared while he was away.
“He’s successful and cunning, and he works like a professional. That’s all I need to know. I would like to collaborate with him, if he’s willing.”
“Then I have nothing against that.”
The woman uttered a short scream. Abu Fouad jerked in his seat.
“Don’t turn round. Let’s just talk,” said the voice from the back seat.
In his rearview mirror the Kuwaiti saw the dim outline of a Bedouin
“You move quietly, Bedou.”
“No need to make a noise, Abu Fouad. It attracts Iraqis. I don’t like that, except when I am ready.”
Abu Fouad’s teeth flashed under his black moustache.
“Very well. Now we have found each other. Let us talk. By the way, why hide in the car?”
“If this meeting had been a trap for me, your first words when you got back into the car would have been different.”
“Self-incriminating—”
“Of course.”
“And then?”
“You would be dead.”
“Understood.”
“Who is your companion? I made no mention of companions.”
“You set up the rendezvous. It was I who had to trust you also. She is a trusted colleague. Asrar Qabandi.”
“Very well. Greetings, Miss Qabandi. What do you want to talk about?”
“Guns, Bedou. Kalashnikov machine pistols, modern hand grenades, Semtex-H. My people could do so much more with that sort of thing.”
“Your people are being caught, Abu Fouad. Ten were surrounded in the same house by an entire company of Iraqi infantry under AMAM
leadership. All shot. All youngsters.”
Abu Fouad was silent. It had been a major disaster.
“Nine,” he said at last. “The tenth played dead and crept away later.
He is injured, and we are taking care of him. It was he who told us.”
“What?”
“That they were betrayed. If he had died, we would not have known.”
“Ah, betrayal. Always the danger in any resistance movement. And the traitor?”
“We know him, of course. We thought we could trust him.”
“But he is guilty?”
“It seems so.”
“Only seems?”
Abu Fouad sighed.
“The survivor swears that only the eleventh man knew of the meeting, and the address. But it could be there was a leak somewhere else, or one of them was tailed. ...”
“Then he must be tested, this suspect. And if guilty, punished. Miss Qabandi, would you leave us for a while, please.”
The young woman glanced at Abu Fouad, who nodded. She left the car and walked back to the grove of trees. The Bedou told Abu Fouad carefully and in detail what he wanted him to do.
“I will not be leaving the house until seven o’clock,” he finished. “So under no circumstances must you make the phone call until half past seven. Understood?”
The Bedou slipped out of the car and disappeared among the dark alleys running between the houses. Abu Fouad drove up the street and picked up Miss Qabandi. Together they drove home.
The Bedou never saw the woman again. Before the liberation of Kuwait, Asrar Qabandi was caught by the AMAM, rigorously tortured, gang-raped, shot, and decapitated. Before she died, she never said a thing.
Terry Martin was on the phone to Simon Paxman, who was still inundated with work and could have done without the interruption. It was only because he had taken a liking to the fussy professor of Arabic studies that Paxman took the call.
“I know I’m being a bother, but do you have any contacts at GCHQ?”
“Yes, of course,” said Paxman. “In the Arabic Service, mainly. Know the Director of it, come to that.”
“Could you possibly give him a call and ask if he’d see me?”
“Well, yes, I suppose so. What have you in mind?”
“It’s the stuff coming out of Iraq these days. I’ve studied all Saddam’s speeches, of course, and watched the announcements about hostages and human shields and seen their ghastly attempts at PR on the television. But I’d like to see if there’s anything else being picked up, stuff that hasn’t been cleared by their Propaganda Ministry.”
“Well, that’s what GCHQ does,” admitted Paxman. “I don’t see why not. If you’ve been sitting in with the Medusa people, you’ve got the clearance. I’ll give him a call.”
That afternoon, by appointment, Terry Martin drove west to Gloucestershire and presented himself at the well-guarded gate of the sprawl of buildings and antennae that constitute the third main arm of British intelligence alongside MI-6 and MI-5, the Government Communications Headquarters.
The Director of the Arabic Service was Sean Plummer, under whom worked that same Mr. Al-Khouri who had tested Mike Martin’s Arabic in the Chelsea restaurant eleven weeks earlier, though neither Terry Martin nor Plummer knew that.
The Director had agreed to see Martin in the midst of a busy day because, as a fellow Arabist, he had heard of the young scholar of the SOAS and admired his original research on the Abassid Caliphate.
“Now, what can I do for you?” he asked when they were both seated with a glass of mint tea, a luxury Plummer permitted himself to escape the miseries of institution coffee. Martin explained that he was surprised at the paucity of the intercepts he had been shown corning out of Iraq. Plummer’s eyes lit up.
“You’re right, of course. As you know, our Arab friends lend to chatter like magpies on open circuits. The last couple of years, the interceptable traffic has slumped. Now, either the whole national character has changed, or —”
“Buried cables,” said Martin.
“Precisely. Apparently Saddam and his boys have buried over forty-five thousand miles of fiber-optic communication cables. That’s what they’re talking on. For me, it’s an absolute bastard. How can I keep giving the spooks in London another round of Baghdad weather reports and Mother Hussein’s bloody laundry lists?”
It was his manner of speaking, Martin realized. Plummer’s service delivered a lot more than that.
“They still talk of course—ministers, civil servants, generals—right down to chitchat between tank commanders on the Saudi border. But the serious, top-secret phone calls are off the air. Never used to be.
What do you want to see?”
For the next four hours, Terry Martin ran his eye over a range of intercepts. Radio broadcasts were too obvious; he was looking for something in an inadvertent phone call, a slip of the tongue, a mistake.
