The man whose hat he had knocked off was going on about it as the voices receded behind him, and Hale hoped any watchers would note the complaint and give extra scrutiny to any figure among the Texans who might look as if he had just put on the hat in question and joined the group.
Hale, meanwhile, was to at least a hasty glance a hunched, white-haired, pot-bellied figure in noiseless black footwear carrying a waste bin toward the nearest unmarked door; service personnel tended to be invisible, and when he had pushed open the door and stepped into a hallway lined with glass-windowed offices, none of the people at the desks gave him a second glance.
At the end of the hallway he set down the waste bin, pocketed the sunglasses and put his shoes back on, then hurried on through a series of corridors that eventually led to an outside door.
He was still tucking his shirt back into his trousers when he saw a cabstand, and he managed to wave as he hurried up to the first cab in line.
“Mina al-Ahmadi,” he panted when he had climbed in.
Before looking for the marine welding shop he walked around the diesel-reeking waterfront yards, frequently pausing to stare past the docks, and past the close harbor boats and the expanses of open gray water, at the vast Kuwait Oil Company tankers moored way out at the T-end of the mile-long quay. The nine pipes that extended the whole mile looked like the fallen pillars of a temple that could have held up the marble sky if they had been standing, and Hale thought the angular black hulls out on the ashy Persian Gulf horizon, overhung with long streaks of smoke as if from sacrificial fires, looked like the remote tents of gods.
The wind was shifting around to come from the west, as he had expected, and it was replacing the diesel-and-seaweed smell with the remembered scent of the yellow Arfaj-grass flowers that would be blooming in this season across the infinite miles of dunes and gravel plains at his back.
And in spite of the landscaped lawns around the newer pastel office buildings, and the tall fiberglass GULF OIL signs and the modern asphalt of the streets, at the south end of the docks Hale saw ragged Arabs crouched over the old checkers-like dama boards by the side of oiled-sand roads, and beyond them the teak hulls and reefed lateen sails of fishing dhows dragged up onto the shore slope.
Judging by the street numbers, he was now within a few doors of the welding shop’s address; and he was glancing around at the carpet-sellers’ shops and car-repair garages as he strode purposefully down an awning-overhung sidewalk, when a car horn in the street tapped out the old SOE code group that meant emergency attention.
It was a crazy old yellow Volkswagen weaving down the oiled road, and its Arab-dressed driver was convincingly trying to get the attention of someone over by the beached boats on the shore. The man tapped out another series of honks as he drove on past, looking squarely away from Hale, and the nasal electric beeps were the fugitive-SOE code for go to and W-I-N-D-O-W and here.
Hale had permitted himself only the most casual glance at the Volkswagen, and now he returned his attention to the shops he was passing. Obediently he looked at the windows, and behind the dusty glass display flanking the recessed doorway of a pearls-and-antiques shop he could dimly see a bearded figure in a black robe.
Hale walked on past, then stepped in under the awning and glanced up and down the street, shivering in the eddying wind and wishing he had not lost his jacket at the airport. When he glanced at the old man behind the window six feet away, he saw that the man had breathed a patch of steam onto the inside of the entryway glass, and with a fingernail had written in tiny English letters: STAND + DECLARE. The letters were painstakingly drawn, and Hale guessed that the old man probably didn’t even know the meaning of the symbols he was tracing in reverse on the glass.
Hale closed his eyes in a slightly protracted blink to show that he had understood; and then he looked the other way. This was fairly extreme caution-not even to go to the indicated address, and now to be redirected by this evanescent writing. And it occurred to him that only someone standing as close to the shop as he was would even see the old man in the darkness inside, much less the faint letters in the dampness on the glass.
Hale glanced back and saw that the old man had wiped out the two words and written, less legibly but still readably in the moisture: WATCHED-BRIEF IN BEIRUT.
Hale was apparently not being redirected, here.
His stomach churned, and his face was hot in the cold breeze as he turned away from the window. The planned briefing here in Kuwait had apparently been called off, with no fallbacks until he somehow got to Beirut. But he needed his script, he needed to know what story he was supposed to give the expected Rabkrin recruiter. Damn it, he thought worriedly, what am I supposed to say?
The unwelcome answer was written in a fresh patch of steam when he glanced back after another blind look in the other direction:
GIVE ’48 ARARAT MATH: ALL WRONG.
This time he looked away to hide his face, even just from this stranger behind the glass.
Hale was numb and dizzy, and for a moment his mind simply recoiled from comprehending the words he had read. The math-the strategy and the calculations and the orders given to the men he had led up the road below Ararat-had been of his own devising. “All wrong”? Was it actually possible?
With a desperate leap of logic he decided that it was not. Cold sweat of relief dewed his forehead as he told himself forcefully that his secret purpose here had been found out by the Rabkrin, that this was a gambit to trick him into revealing to their recruiter the valid deductions and strategy that he had assembled in ’48. His mission here was blown, Cassagnac had been shot uselessly, but at least Hale was not guilty of having killed his own men through a mistake fourteen years ago. It was obvious, so obvious that he didn’t need to prove it by trying to get confirmation of this “order,” even if he could make contact with Theodora…
But the thought of Theodora brought back the old man’s words yesterday morning-You’ll probably doubt its validity…this right now, what I’m telling you, is your confirmation-in-advance. If you hate it, it’s the genuine instructions.
Too obviously this was exactly what Theodora had been referring to.
Hale closed his eyes and let his thoughts collapse into an unvoiced shrill wail of abysmal dismay; and he didn’t realize that he was clenching his jaws until the pain in his teeth made him involuntarily open his eyes, and then he had to blink away tears to see the street clearly.
He remembered wondering who or what Theodora expected him to betray in his script. But apparently it was not to be a script after all, and the betrayal had happened fourteen years ago.
All wrong. The words seemed in this moment to describe Hale’s whole life.
He blotted his eyes on his shirt cuff and took a deep breath and forced his gaze to be blank as he looked back again at the window.
The old man was gone, and the word GO was barely visible in the fading steam. A moment after he had seen it, a wet squeegee drew an obliterating streak of runny cleanness across the inside of the glass.
All you can do now is justify the losses, avenge them, Hale thought emptily. If Declare knows the ’48 math was bad, Declare must have some better sort to work with now-there’s nothing for it but to push on and further that effort. Lines from a Bartholomew Dowling poem dirged in his head: ’Tis all we have left to prize. One cup to the dead already-hurrah for the next that dies!
He looked at his watch and then began trudging away on down the sand-gritty sidewalk. Forcing himself into the familiar cold professionalism, he considered whether it was likely himself or the welding shop that was being watched. Probably it was the shop-he was fairly sure he had evaded any watchers on the buses, or at the airport. He wondered what the rest of the missed briefing would have consisted of, and what “equipment” he would have been given.