Body of Lies (32 page)

Hani stubbed out his cigarette. He still had a curious look in his eye, or maybe Ferris was just imagining it. "We are allies. How can we not help each other?"

The two men shook hands. Ferris asked Hani if he needed any technical help in the surveillance of Sadiki. That was one area where the Americans always had something to offer. But the GID chief said he would be fine, unless Sadiki started moving outside Jordan. Ferris asked Hani if he would be informing the Turks or any other friendly services, and the Jordanian gave another half smile.

"Not for now," said Hani. "This will be our secret."

W
HEN
F
ERRIS
narrated the conversation for Hoffman forty-five minutes later, he got nervous all over again. Hoffman kept saying, "Shit!" as if he knew bad news was coming. When Ferris got to the end and Hani's promise to leave Sadiki in place, Hoffman's response was a relieved, "Thank God." Ferris realized then just how nervous his boss had been that the operation might be blown.

"Do you think he knows?" asked Hoffman.

"What do you mean?"

"Do you think he realizes we're playing games with Sadiki?"

"Maybe. He's smart. But I don't think so. The collateral is all there. The more he goes looking, the more he'll see the trail I've laid."

"The legend is there, for sure. And Hani isn't a genius, as I keep telling you. I think we're okay. You want me to come out and talk to him?"

"Not unless you plan to read him into the operation. He would just get suspicious if you came out. He would think you were pulling some razzle-dazzle stunt on him again."

"Which I am."

"Right. But let's not make it too obvious."

"Merry Christmas," said Hoffman. For it was, in fact, Christmas Eve.

F
ERRIS MET
Alice that night at her apartment. She was wearing a red Santa hat, askew, and she had rouge on her cheeks, making her look slightly like a woman who might appear in the Christmas ads for Scotch whiskeys or snow blowers. Ferris had been away for several weeks, and he had worried she might go home to Boston to spend Christmas with her mother. But here she was, better than any imagining.

She clasped her arms around his neck, stood on tiptoe to kiss him and then hugged him tight. Ferris could feel her hands against his bony ribs.

"What happened? Did you stop eating? You feel ten pounds lighter."

"I've been busy. Skipped a lot of meals."

"Well, you're down to skin and bone. Just so long as you've got a little left for tonight." She gave him a sly smile.

She led him upstairs to the secret garden of her apartment. She had a Christmas tree in the living room, a bent-over cedar that had barely survived the trip from Lebanon but was aglow with lights and glass ornaments and even tinsel. Where had she found that in Amman? The King's College Choir was singing Christmas carols on the CD player, and a half dozen brightly wrapped presents were under the tree. Ferris had just found time to go shopping himself that afternoon, and he took his gifts from the bag and laid them gently down.

Alice retreated to the kitchen and returned with two glasses of wine. They drank enough to feel slightly tipsy, and then Alice began to trace her finger along the seam of his trouser, and then his zipper.

"Not yet," said Ferris. "I'm still getting in the Christmas spirit." In truth, he wasn't ready for intimacy. There was too much he hadn't told her since he had left Amman so suddenly. In his few phone calls, he hadn't wanted to say much--he was sure Hani had her phones bugged by now--so he had been clipped and tight. "Can't talk now," he would say. "Explain later." And she would understand. She had fallen into the rhythm of his life to that extent--that she realized he had secrets, and that there were times when she had to give him space and wait until he could say more.

So he told her. Not everything, not even a full slice of everything, but a taste. He explained that he had gone home to face a legal investigation. His wife had threatened to retaliate when he first demanded a divorce, and she had taken her revenge by digging up some dirt from his previous assignment at the U.S. Embassy in Yemen. He'd had to convince her to back down and stop making trouble before she would agree to the divorce.

"What did you have on her?" asked Alice.

"Just dirt. It doesn't matter. Mostly financial things. Anyway, I made it go away."

"How?" She still wanted to know.

"By convincing her that it would be unwise to continue."

"That sounds like blackmail."

"Sort of. Let's just say that my wife, my ex-wife, left a lot of loose ends. She knew I was aware of them, but I don't think she expected I would use them. Too gallant."

"So you
did
blackmail her. That's a little scary, isn't it?"

"I had no choice. And it shouldn't scare you. You're as clean as the snow on the North Pole."

She poured them both another glass of wine. The choir was singing "The Twelve Days of Christmas" on the stereo.

"Where did you go then, after Washington? Not to the North Pole, I bet."

"I went to Turkey," said Ferris.

"Oh God. I hope you weren't there when that terrible bomb went off. They still haven't said how many Americans were killed. There must have been a lot. That's why they're trying to cover it up."

Ferris flinched. That was a measure of the success of his operation. He had managed to hoodwink his girlfriend.

"I was in Ankara. The bombing was at an air base in the south. I was nowhere near there. I did my business, and then I came home. To my girl."

He drank some more wine, but it didn't taste right on his tongue. "How about you? How were things here in Amman while I was gone? Everything good at work?"

"Pretty good. The Palestinian kids got out of school for winter holiday--they're not supposed to say 'Christmas.' Some of them came around the office. And we got a new grant from the Malcolm Kerr Foundation, which will help pay for those computers. These nice people from Cisco Systems say they'll put in broadband connections at all the schools. That was sweet. They must have wanted to put it in their corporate Christmas card. The only bad thing was that we lost some of our Jordanian volunteers. That made me sad."

"Oh yeah? Who?" Ferris's body reacted as if a switch had been flipped.

"That group you didn't like. The Ikhwan Ihsan. The architect man I told you about came by yesterday to give us a check. He said it was their last gift. And then today we got a visit from a man from the Moukhabarat. He said he was sorry, but we couldn't have any more contact with the Brothers. He said they were going out of business. New rules for Muslim groups. Too bad for us. We need the money."

"You talk to the Moukhabarat?"

"Of course, silly. This is Jordan. Everyone talks to the Moukhabarat."

Ferris felt a perverse sense of relief. He wished the Jordanians weren't cracking down quite so obviously on Sadiki's friends, but he was glad that Alice wouldn't be in contact with them anymore. It had been too messy the other way. People could get the wrong idea if they realized that Alice knew Sadiki, and Alice knew Ferris. They might make a connection.

"Maybe it's for the best," he said. "Those Muslim groups can get freaky."

"Not these guys. They were sweet. Sadiki even gave me ideas for projects."

Ferris spoke cautiously. "He's dangerous. The GID wouldn't have come to see you if he wasn't. Trust me. You'll find other donors. There are plenty of fish in the sea."

She pulled back from the warmth of his chest and sat up straight on the couch.

"What aren't you telling me, Roger? Don't lie. Do you think I'm stupid? Every time this guy's name comes up, you get the willies."

"Don't ask me that. There are some questions I can't answer. You know that. Forget I ever asked about Sadiki. Forget everything."

"Tell me, Roger. If you love me, you'll tell me."

Ferris felt a kind of vertigo. He wanted to pitch himself over the lip of all his lies and into the release of confession. But he knew he couldn't, and he steered himself back into the deception that would protect her.

"I'm sorry. There are just some things we can't talk about. It would be dangerous."

"What do you mean? How can the truth be dangerous? It's lies that are dangerous."

Ferris put his arm around her. At first she pulled away, but he tried a second time and she let the arm rest on her shoulder. He held her gently, until her body relaxed and she gave up on the questions, or at least on the hope they would be answered.

"Stay away from this war, Alice. Please. It's destroying too many people already. Nothing good can come from it, except when it's over."

She went away to the bathroom, and when she returned, she was quieter and more careful. Something had changed. Ferris knew it, but he couldn't do anything about it. They opened their presents that night under the tree. Alice had bought him a beautiful Arab robe, embroidered with gold and fit for a prince, and a red tarboosh to wear on his head, like the old Ottoman pashas. Ferris had bought her clothes, too--a beautiful Ferragamo dress that he'd found in a boutique at the Four Seasons. But the main gift he saved for last. It was in a small box, and it was a diamond engagement ring.

When Alice opened the box and saw what it was, she began to cry. She left the room for a moment and composed herself. When she returned, she kissed Ferris and said she loved him. Then she put the ring back in its box and returned it to him. "I can't accept this now, Roger. Not until I know who you are."

28

BERLIN

F
ERRIS WAS CALLED BACK
to Headquarters the day after Christmas. He had spent the holiday with Alice, long silences, sentences that began but didn't finish. What does a man say to woman who has rejected his proposal of marriage? What does a woman say to a man she knows is lying to her? How does the man convey that if he tried to answer the woman's questions, it would make everything much worse? "For the sake of kindness, I cannot be kind," wrote the poet Bertolt Brecht. For the sake of truth, Ferris could not speak. Alice tried to be festive, roasting a turkey she had managed to find in the markets of the city; she wore her red Santa hat until Ferris made her take it off. And then Hoffman called on the cell phone, which he never did, and told Ferris to come home as quickly as possible. To Ferris, it was a relief to leave. He wanted to believe that Alice was safer with him not around.

There was heavy snow back in Washington. Cars were skidding out along the George Washington Parkway, and even the entry to CIA Headquarters was slick with ice. Ferris ran his rented car into a drift in the North Parking Lot (which the agency administrators, in their cheery, color-coded way, had renamed the "Green" lot) and made his way to Hoffman's high-tech rat hole. He had his own biometric badge now, one that scanned him past the hidden doors and down the elevators that didn't exist to Mincemeat Park. The chief was more manic than usual; his face was red, and Ferris at first thought he'd had too much to drink at holiday parties, but he was actually pumped up by something else.

"Ho, ho, ho," said Hoffman. "Merry Christmas."

"Very funny," said Ferris, jet-lagged from the long flight home. "This had better be good."

"Good? I should say so. '"The time has come," the Walrus said, "to talk of many things: Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax--of cabbages and kings. And why the sea is boiling hot--and whether pigs have wings." ' To quote the estimable Lewis Carroll."

Oh Jesus, thought Ferris, he has gone completely, barking mad.

"To be precise," continued Hoffman, "I am quoting
Through the Looking Glass,
and that is where we are about to go, my friend, through the looking glass. With our guide, Mr. Harry Meeker."

A smile dawned on Ferris's face, a walrus smile. They had arrived. Hoffman took him by the arm and pulled him down the corridor, past the desks of analysts and officers manipulating their imaginary jihadist Web sites and tracking their targets around the world. He got all the way to the end of the room, to a set of glass doors that, in Ferris's memory, had always been closed. Hoffman put his badge on a reader attached to the wall, put a keycard in the slot and the door opened. He continued down a dark corridor and made a right turn, where he opened another door.

It was freezing inside this last room, literally. Azhar emerged from the shadows, wearing a thick coat and gloves to stay warm. It was dark, except for a fluorescent glow from the corner. The low light had a crystalline quality, as if they were seeing through tiny chips of ice. Ferris followed Hoffman toward the light. There on a table he saw the body of a man, rigid as a piece of wood, the pale skin coating the bones of his face like a layer of paraffin. He was dressed in casual clothes, a pair of pleated slacks and a white shirt.

"Here's your boy," said Hoffman.

Ferris touched the cold, waxy skin. He was so dead. This was his first actual encounter with the body he had encouraged Hoffman to procure, and he had the peculiar sensation that he had killed the man himself. Ferris thought of the
The Man Who Never Was,
the dog-eared British intelligence book that had given him the inspiration for his plot. Sixty-five years ago, the corpse's name was Major William Martin of the Royal Marines, and he had washed up on a beach in Spain. It had worked then, but the Germans were stupider than Suleiman.

"I love this guy," said Hoffman, patting the corpse's icy cheek. "He's my kind of case officer. Goes where you send him, doesn't talk back. Keeps his mouth shut, permanently."

But Ferris wasn't listening to the banter. Looking at the stiff and lifeless body, he wondered whether it would work--whether the series of reflecting mirrors they had assembled would all point in the right directions.

I
T WAS TOO
cold to stay with the corpse for very long, so Hoffman and Ferris adjourned to a conference room nearby, leaving Azhar to minister to the dead man. On the conference table stood an open metal briefcase that was dented and discolored from frequent use. Attached to the handle of the case was a metal chain, connected at the other end to a thick metal bracelet, like a handcuff. Arrayed nearby was a series of manila folders. Hoffman stood at the head of the table.