“Yes, so I believe. They were brave but foolish. There are ways of doing these things. The point is not to kill hundreds, or be killed. The point is to make the Iraqi occupation army constantly nervous, always afraid, needing to escort every officer whenever he travels, never able to sleep in peace.”
“Look, Mr. English, I know you mean well, but I suspect you are a man accustomed to these things and skilled at them. I am not. These Iraqis are a cruel and savage people. We know them of old. If we do what you say, there will be reprisals.”
“It is like rape, Mr. Al-Khalifa.”
“Rape?”
“When a woman is to be raped, she can fight back or succumb. If she is docile, she will be violated, probably beaten, maybe killed. If she fights, she will be violated, certainly beaten, maybe killed.”
“Kuwait is the woman, Iraq the rapist. This I already know. So why fight back?”
“Because there is tomorrow. Tomorrow Kuwait will look in the mirror. Your son will see the face of a warrior.”
Ahmed Al-Khalifa stared at the dark-faced, bearded Englishman for a long time, then he said:
“So will his father. Let Allah have mercy on my people. What is it you want? Money?”
“Thank you, no. I have money.”
He had in fact ten thousand Kuwaiti dinars, abstracted from the ambassador in London, who had drawn it from the Bank of Kuwait, on the corner of Baker Street and George Street.
“I need houses to stay in. Six of them.”
“No problem. There are already thousands of abandoned apartments—”
“Not apartments. Detached villas. Apartments have neighbors. No one will investigate a poor man engaged to caretake an abandoned villa.”
“I will find them.”
“Also identity papers. Real Kuwaiti ones. Three in all. One for a Kuwaiti doctor, one for an Indian accountant, and one for a market gardener from out of town.
“All right. I have friends in the Interior Ministry. I think they still control the presses that produce the ID
cards. What about the picture on them?”
“For the market gardener, find an old man on the street. Pay him. For the doctor and the accountant, choose men among your staff who look roughly like me but are clean-shaven. These photographs are notoriously bad.
“Lastly, cars. Three. One white station wagon, one four-wheel-drive jeep, one old and battered pickup truck. All in lock-up garages, all with new plates.”
“Very well, it will be done. The ID cards and the keys to the garages and houses—where will you collect them?”
“Do you know the Christian cemetery?”
Al-Khalifa frowned.
“I’ve heard of it, I’ve never been there. Why?”
“It’s on the Jahra road in Sulaibikhat, next to the main Moslem cemetery. A very obscure gate with a tiny notice saying: For Christians. Most of the tombstones are for Lebanese and Syrians, with some Filipinos and Chinese. In the far right-hand corner is one for a merchant seaman, Shepton. The marble slab is loose. Under it I have scraped a cavity in the gravel. Leave them there. If you have a message for me, same thing. Check the grave once a week for messages from me.”
Al-Khalifa shook his head in bewilderment.
“I’m not cut out for this sort of thing.”
Mike Martin disappeared into the maelstrom of people who teemed through the narrow streets and alleys of the Bneid-al-Qar district. Five days later, under Able Seaman Shepton’s tombstone he found three identity cards, three sets of garage keys with locations, three sets of ignition keys, and six sets of house keys with addresses on their tags.
Two days later, an Iraqi truck coming back into town from the Umm Gudayr oil field was blown to fragments by something it ran over.
Chip Barber, the head of the CIA’s Middle East Division, had been in Tel Aviv for two days when the phone in the office they had given him at the U.S. embassy rang. It was the CIA’s Head of Station on the line.