Declare

finally stuffed them into his front pants pocket.
    He looked at his watch and then strolled away to a recessed shoeshine booth under a sign in English and Arabic letters, consciously knocking the hard-leather soles of his shoes against the green linoleum floor in one of Elena’s old attention-deflecting rhythms; and after getting his shoes shined, and palming a bottle of liquid white polish while making Arabic small-talk with the proprietor, he stepped away from the booth, again carefully tapping his soles on the floor. He noted where the nearest men’s room was, and then walked across to a news kiosk and bought a pair of sunglasses and a copy of the London Times ; he tucked the sunglasses into his pocket and flipped open the paper as he walked thoughtfully back the way he had come. Pretending to read, he was not conspicuous leaning on a pillar near the men’s room.
    Arabs in snow-white robes swept past him, and pilots and European businessmen strode by, but always singly or in pairs. Hale kept staring at the newspaper, though his attention was focused in the periphery of his vision above the paper edges.
    At last he saw what he wanted—a group of Western businessmen hurrying this way, Texans by their accents, all wearing fedora hats. They clearly had no time to spare, and they would be trotting right past the men’s room door, so Hale did a restrained tap-dance in the old rhythms across the linoleum, pushed open the lavatory door and stepped inside.
    At the sink he quickly broke open the shoe-shine bottle and combed a couple of splashes of the white liquid liberally through his blond hair and eyebrows; then he whipped off his coat and tie— torso-cover being the inevitable primary flag in any surveillance— and dropped them on the floor. Finally he kicked off his shoes and shoved them inside his shirt, unfolded the sunglasses and slid them onto his nose, picked up the white metal waste bin and strode in his stocking feet to the door to listen.
    When the Texas accents were loudest, he crouched and pushed the door open, shoving it against elbows and ribs.
    “Hey!” came an annoyed yelp. “Steady, dipshit!”
    “ ‘Eh-sif!” Hale mumbled apologetically. “ Is mahlee! ” He waved his arm up in a placating gesture and succeeded in knocking one man’s hat off.
    And then Hale was walking rapidly away, his feet making no noise at all on the linoleum floor now, carrying the waste bin over his shoulder with a determined air of practiced ease.
    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