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.