Body of Lies (12 page)

"Amary." Hani thought a moment. "No. I don't think so."

"Well, he should be. Because we think Amary is very dangerous. He's connected with the operations planner who we think is running these car bombs in Europe. We call him Suleiman. If Amary is also linked to Karami, that means he's more in the operational line than you seem to realize."

"This is very interesting," said Hani. He looked off balance.

"Yeah," said Hoffman. "Isn't it, though?"

"Can I have those files?" asked the Jordanian. "They may be helpful to us. As you say, we share the same enemy."

"What's in it for me?"

"Same as before. You share the take. The point is, we'll run a better operation if we know more. And you'll get more out of it. If there are ways to share more of the operational planning down the road, why not? I do not think His Majesty will object. But for now, we will run it. And we will be most grateful for the help of the United States."

Hoffman picked up the file. Ferris wasn't sure whether he was going to put it back in his briefcase. But after several seconds he handed it to Hani. "I like you," he said. "You play tough."

"
Ahlan wa sahlan
," said Hani. "You are most welcome."

"Don't screw me on this," said the American.

"We are allies, my dear Ed. We have a common enemy. We treat each other with respect." He held the file close, as if he had just won it in a fight. They shook hands, talked a while more and the Americans eventually departed.

N
EITHER
H
OFFMAN
nor Ferris said a word on the ride back to the embassy or the walk down the corridors. They talked only when they were back inside the bubble of the secure conference room.

"How did you do that?" Ferris asked. "By the end you had him begging for the thing you came all this way to give him."

"Easy. You just have to be a manipulative son of a bitch. That has never been a problem for me."

"Were those intercepts real?"

"More or less. Amary and Karami have definitely been in contact. The first contact was, let me see, not long after the Jordanians started surveillance of Karami's apartment in Berlin."

"How did you know they had him under surveillance?"

"We're not completely stupid. Or at least, I'm not. You see, the Germans don't like people conducting unilateral operations on their territory. So when they noticed something, they let us know."

"Hani thinks the Germans are clueless."

"Well, that's one of his mistakes. He's a genius in his own environment, but that makes him a little arrogant when he leaves home base. Sorry to say."

Ferris was scratching his head. He was still trying to understand how the pieces fit together. "These conversations between Karami and Amary. Who initiated them?"

"Amary, of course."

"Why do you say of course?"

Hoffman pulled Ferris toward him. Even in the secure conference room, he couldn't be sure that he wasn't being bugged.

"I know because Amary is our guy," whispered Hoffman. "That's the game here. He's our guy. And the Jordanians are going to make his bones in Al Qaeda. They're going to plug him into Suleiman's network. And then it's showtime."

"Jesus Christ," said Ferris. "That's a nice piece of work. Except for tricking the Jordanians."

"Can't be helped. I tried to be reasonable and run the operation together, but your friend Hani refused. He shouldn't have, but he did. So we play it another way. I didn't make him take the intercepts. He practically grabbed that file. Anyway, this will be great for them. It will be the best operation of Hani's career. Yours, too. Wait and see. You just have to understand, your country is at war. Different rules now."

"That's what my wife keeps telling me."

"Well, she's right. We are at war with a ruthless enemy, and we cannot rely on the charity of our friends like the genial Jordanians anymore. We have to fight our own war, which means we need our own unilateral ops against Al Qaeda. Now. We have no choice. If we wait, people are going to get killed."

"I hope this works." Ferris closed his eyes as he said it.

"It will work. It's a good operation. And if it doesn't, we'll try something else. That's what you do in wartime. You improvise. So stop worrying, my boy, and get with the plan. I'm counting on you. Can I count on you?"

"Of course. Totally. And I'm not worrying. I'm thinking. They're different."

"Well, don't think too much. It's bad for the nerves." He put a meaty hand on Ferris's back. "Go get a bottle of whiskey and some ice. I need to get seriously drunk so I'll fall asleep on the flight back."

"You're flying back tonight?"

"Uh-huh. I promised Ethel I would take her to a show tomorrow night.
The Lion King
. I don't get it, frankly. I mean, how do you turn a kids' cartoon into a Broadway show? But she wants to go, and I'm a pussycat."

The notion of Hoffman being henpecked by a wife named Ethel pleased Ferris. He thought, not of his own wife, but of Alice, and how much he would like to take her to a Broadway musical, or a movie, or anything that would help them forget they were living on the sharp end of a knife in these dry, dusty hills. Ferris departed to go get the whiskey, leaving Hoffman smiling beatifically in the secure conference room, like an anti-Buddha.

9

AMMAN

A
LICE
M
ELVILLE FLEW BACK
to Boston for the funeral of her aunt. Ferris drove her to the airport. She was dressed in a lime-green A-line skirt and a white blouse. She had a ribbon in her hair. The only thing that was missing to complete the effect was a circle pin. "What's with the sorority-girl outfit?" asked Ferris. It was a side of her he had never seen. "I don't want to scare my mother," she answered. "She thinks it's okay for me to be in Jordan because the king went to Deerfield."

Alice had adored the dead aunt, a doughty public-interest lawyer who had applauded her decision to go off to Jordan when everyone else was telling her she was mad. "Aunt Edith was even crazier than me," she wrote Ferris in an e-mail the night she arrived back home. She sent a few silly messages the first few days, including a short cartoon video she'd found on the Internet in which the United States drives Osama bin Laden crazy by hounding him with telemarketing calls. Then she went silent. She was too busy, evidently, or too sad about her aunt's death. Or perhaps, back home in the nest of privilege, she had forgotten all about him.

Ferris buried himself in his work. Hoffman's visit had been a shock to his system--a reminder that he was in a business where any action was sanctioned, so long as it worked. He asked himself whether he was doing everything he could to penetrate Suleiman's network with the tools he actually had in hand. He had only one, really: the address of the safe house where one of Suleiman's operatives had recruited Nizar, the unlucky young Iraqi who managed to get himself killed less than twenty-four hours after he met Ferris. The house was a villa in Jebel Al-Akhthar on the southern outskirts of Amman. The agency had maintained fixed surveillance there ever since Ferris first landed the intelligence. They had run a covert SIGINT operation to tap the phone line, and had data-mined every detail they could gather about the Jordanian family that lived there, looking for links to known Al Qaeda operatives. But so far it had been a dry hole.

The house was a simple villa, built of concrete blocks and surrounded by a dirty masonry wall. The owner was a Jordanian man in his early sixties named Ibrahim Alousi who had worked for an Arab construction company in Kuwait and recently retired. His two sons worked as engineers for the same construction company here, and their wives and children shared the villa. The family were all practicing Muslims. They went most Fridays to the mosque and rose each morning at dawn for the Fajr prayers, but they had no apparent connection with any of the Salafist groups in Jordan. Ferris's men had watched and waited and tracked, but they hadn't found any hint of a link to Suleiman or his network. Maybe the Alousis were just being careful, but the ops chief at NE Division had advised Ferris to end his surveillance. It was expensive, and it wasn't producing any intelligence. But Ferris hated to give up his one good lead, purchased at the cost of several human lives. And he thought the Alousi family was too clean, so innocent-looking they became suspicious.

Ferris decided it was time to take the offensive. He had been waiting for Suleiman to show his hand; now he would provoke him. He would throw something at the Alousis--a tantalizing provocation--and see how they reacted. And it happened he had the right bait to dangle in front of this prey. His predecessor, Francis Alderson, had recruited a young Palestinian named Ayman from a town in the West Bank called Jenin. He was living in Amman now, and like most Palestinians, what he wanted most was a visa for America. The consulate had flagged him for the CIA station as a potential recruit, and Alderson had okayed a pitch right before he got booted. Now Ayman was on the books as an asset, but without any operational role. Ferris would give him one.

Ferris met Ayman in a room at the InterContinental Hotel at the Third Circle. Back in the 1980s, when the U.S. Embassy had been across the street, the hotel had been the hub of Amman's social life, but now it was safely out of the spotlight. Ferris was waiting in an upstairs suite when Ayman knocked on the door. The sun was shining bright through the window, glinting off the water in the pool down below. Ferris could tell from the young man's wide eyes that this was the fanciest room he had ever seen. He had the hard look of a young Arab: sinewy arms, taut facial bones, bad complexion partly hidden under the stubble of his beard. He was wearing a prayer cap of knitted white wool. He was perfect.

Ferris gave the young man his instructions. He was to go to the house in Jebel Al-Akhthar and ask to see one of the Alousi brothers. If they weren't home, he should ask when they would be back and return. When he was with one of the brothers, he should tell them one sentence only.
I have a message from Suleiman.
If they asked what the message was, he should tell them to come to an address in Zarqa the following day at seven
PM
. That was a hook; if anyone in the house had any link to the network, someone would have to follow that message up--if only to confirm that it was bogus.

Ayman looked uneasy as Ferris went through the instructions a second time. Ferris tried to brace him. Do this right, he told Ayman, and you'll have your visa to America. Make a mistake and we'll turn you over to the GID.

T
HE
A
LOUSIS' HOUSE
was built on the side of a steep hill. It had two stories. Rusting steel reinforcing bars on the second-floor roof suggested that the old man had planned to build three stories but had run out of money. The neighbors walked the streets with their heads down, wrapped in their abayas or kaffiyehs, deaf and dumb. The wind whistled up the dusty streets and blew loose pebbles off the hillsides. Ferris had fixed surveillance across from the house, so he could watch on his monitor as Ayman approached the door. A woman answered, and then the old man, and Ferris shook his head, thinking the boys must be away. But eventually a young man arrived at the front door, dressed in a dirty blue track suit. He looked at Ayman warily, and then invited him in the villa.

Ayman was inside for nearly an hour. Ferris wasn't sure if that was good or bad. In an hour, they could ask enough questions to shred the thin legend Alderson had assembled for his young agent. But when Ferris debriefed Ayman late that night, he said the long wait hadn't been anything important. In fact, nothing had happened at all. He had passed the message, just as Ferris had asked. I have a message from Suleiman. Meet us at this address in Zarqa. But the Alousi boys said they didn't know anyone named Suleiman. How could there be a message from Suleiman, if they didn't know any Suleiman? It must be a mistake. Ferris asked what had taken so long, then, if they didn't understand his message. They had given him coffee and tea, to be friendly, Ayman explained, and asked him about his family in Jenin, and his friends, and if he had ever been arrested by the Israelis. Ayman seemed happy to have completed his assignment, whatever it was. When could he get his visa? Ferris told him it would be a few weeks, a month at most.

T
HE
GID
FOUND
Ayman's body three days later, stuffed in a metal dumpster near the address in Zarqa where the meeting was supposed to take place. His tongue had been ripped out, leaving a blood-crusted stump at the base of his mouth. There were other signs of torture: broken ribs, missing fingers. One of Hani's assistants brought the pictures of the body to the embassy in an envelope, with a note that just said, "FYI." They knew Ferris had been in contact with Ayman, obviously. Ferris made himself look at the photos. He owed the poor boy that much.

Ferris called Hani's deputy and said he needed a favor. He gave him the address of the Alousi house in Jebel Al-Akhthar and asked him to raid it immediately and arrest anyone who was there. He said he would explain everything later to Hani. But when the GID team arrived at the villa an hour later, nobody was home. The residents seemed to have fled hurriedly in the night, out the back alley, throwing a few clothes in suitcases and running into the night. Hani's deputy called Ferris and said the GID would try to find the Alousis. But Ferris suspected they were already across the border--to Damascus or Riyadh or maybe Fallujah.

Ferris's dangle had worked: The safe house had been real, all right. But now it was blown. Whatever use they might eventually have gotten from their surveillance was lost. Hani never called, and Ferris was relieved he didn't have to explain how the young man from Jenin had ended up in the dumpster. He had learned something from his operation. The adversary was even harder to penetrate than Ferris had imagined. He had reached a wall, and none of the bricks were lose. Perhaps Hoffman was right. The only way to get inside was deception, but he didn't see how.