“What’s that?” Ferris suppressed a frown.
“I can’t tell you,” said Hani. His face was so smooth, his black hair so full, his gray moustache so well trimmed. “That’s not true. Of course I could tell you if I wanted to, but I don’t.”
“Why not? We are chasing the same target here. I’m sure of it. Why not cooperate?”
“Because it’s my operation. You will share the take. But you need to let me run it the way I want. Because…let us be honest, my dear, because you have no choice.” Hani smiled. Ferris found him irresistibly charming, even when he was saying things that would make Ferris’s life difficult.
“Hoffman won’t be happy,” said Ferris.
“Ma’alesh. Too bad. He’ll get over it. Who loves the Americans more than me?”
“Langley is paying a lot of bills around here.”
“Is that a threat, my dear Ferris? How delightful. You are becoming a real chief of station now. Just don’t make the same mistake as your predecessor, or we will have to throw you out, too.”
The Jordanian smiled; the eyes sparkled with perfect confidence. Nobody wanted to talk about the transgressions of his predecessor, Francis Alderson, but nobody seemed to have forgotten them, either. Hani patted Ferris on the back. “You are representing the big boys at Langley. I understand that. But you are only showing your weakness when you threaten me in this way, so do not raise this subject again. And tell your division chief that if he so much as mentions money when he visits, he will regret it. We do not need to talk about this anymore, do we?”
“No,” said Ferris. “But I can’t predict how Mr. Hoffman will react.”
“He’ll be fine. You are at war. You have to trust your friends. Drink your tea.”
FERRIS WENT HOME that night to his apartment in Shmeisani. It was on the top floor of a building owned by a retired Palestinian engineer, with a nice view of the milk-white city and the hills beyond. Ferris walked to the balcony. It was early evening, and he could see the play of shadows across the hills of Amman. He poured himself a glass of vodka and sat on his terrace, staring toward the faint twinkle of light that was Jerusalem. He liked being alone, normally—returning to the warm emptiness of a solitary apartment. People need safe houses in real life, but not all the time, and for Ferris, not that night.
Ferris thought briefly of his wife. Gretchen sent him love letters that mixed romantic passages she might have cribbed from Cosmo with descriptions of life in the Office of Legal Counsel. She had a compartment for everything—sex, law, politics—and she was adept at all of them. He wanted to think fondly of Gretchen, but the image of her just drifted out of his mind. Ferris couldn’t hold on to it anymore. The Crazy Glue had come unstuck, and now her spirit presence floated away over the hilltops of Amman, back to America and her big oak desk at the Justice Department. Ferris realized that he didn’t care if she was having sex with someone else. Perhaps that was a sign that he was already unfaithful himself, in his heart.
INTO THE EMPTY space in Roger Ferris’s life had fallen a woman named Alice Melville. They had met three weeks ago in Amman. Ferris had liked her instantly, and he had removed his wedding ring before taking her to dinner, something he had never done before. He asked her home afterward. “Don’t push your luck,” she had said. When Ferris got a glum look, she kissed him on the cheek and whispered, “I take that back. Do push your luck. But not tonight.”
He liked Alice partly because she was so different from his wife. Gretchen was a person for whom life’s important questions were settled. Alice gave the sense that the basics were still up for discussion. She worked with Palestinian refugees and spoke about the suffering of the Arabs with great passion. Ferris’s colleagues in the station would have instantly mistrusted her if they had met her, which Ferris was determined they would not. Most of all, Alice was mysterious. With Gretchen, everything was right there, cash on the table—brains, beauty, ambition. Alice was more elusive; Ferris sensed that she was like the Arabs—beneath her seeming openness was a deeper guile, and she never told you everything she knew.
Alice had sent Ferris a letter just before he left for Berlin. It was a continuation of a conversation they had been having the last time they were together, when they were drunk and talking about politics. The tone was serious and frivolous at the same time; that was Alice’s style, Ferris suspected, but he didn’t really know her yet. He had been keeping the letter in his pocket. He took it out and reread it in the dim light of his terrace, suspended in the black night.
“I hate this war, Roger,” she began. “When did it begin, anyway? Did it begin in 2001, or the Crusades, or what? And who are these ‘bad guys’ your friends at the Embassy are always talking about? I assume it isn’t all Muslims, but even if it’s only the Muslims who hate America, that’s still a lot of people. What are we going to do? Kill them all? And how will we ever get any of them to like us, if we keep on killing them? Maybe I’m stupid, but I don’t get it. I hope we can have dinner again. We can go dancing at this new club in Shmeisani. Don’t work too hard. I miss you. Do you miss me, even a little?” She had signed with a dramatic flourish of ink under her name.
Sitting on the terrace, nursing his second glass of vodka, Ferris knew that he missed her quite a lot, actually. He tried her cell phone, but she wasn’t answering. Was she with someone else, or away traveling, or just mysterious?
Ferris knew he needed to write a letter. Not to Alice, whom he would be seeing soon enough, but to Gretchen. They were in an impossible situation. They both knew it, but neither wanted to admit it: If she had come with him to Amman, or if he had refused the assignment and stayed in Washington, they might have stood a chance. But in that case, they would have been different people. Gretchen didn’t really want to be his wife; she would never have admitted that, but in fact she was too busy to be anyone’s wife. She liked the idea of it, certainly. Being married to an intelligence officer fit her self-image—they were a couple of warriors, in her mind, except that they weren’t really a couple.
Do it now, Ferris told himself. He went inside and sat down at the laptop in his study and began typing: My dear Gretchen…no, Dear Gretchen. We said we needed to talk when I left Washington in June, but we never really did. Now I think we have to. Our marriage is broken…no, Our marriage is in trouble. We both know it. We’ve been living apart for months and there is no end in sight. You don’t want to leave your job and I don’t want to leave mine, especially after what happened in Iraq. There is no space for us to be together as husband and wife. If we are not going to be together, then it’s inevitable that we will meet other people…no. If we are not going to be together, then I think you should talk to a lawyer….
Ferris stopped writing. He thought about the lawyers, and the fight over money, and whole nuisance of getting divorced. He saved the document, and then deleted it. He hated the idea of negotiating with her. She was smarter than he was, and she would earn far more as a lawyer than he ever would as an intelligence officer. She would quit the Justice Department in a few years, join a fancy law firm and make $400,000 a year. The only way Ferris could make that kind of money was stealing operational funds, which wasn’t his thing, at least not yet. And she wouldn’t make it easy.
Gretchen’s problem was that she was intolerant of people who were weaker than she was, which included almost everybody. When they met at Columbia, she had told Ferris that she planned to vote Republican in the next presidential election. It wasn’t a test so much as a warning. Ferris didn’t care; politics bored him, whereas Gretchen excited him. She was dazzling in her self-possession—with the easy confidence that used to be associated with ambitious young men. What was it that had made Ferris fall in love with her? It was partly that sheen: She knew how to be successful, and she made him feel as if he were somebody, just being with her. But she also understood what was under his skin. When he began chasing radical Muslims for Time, she was one of the few people who got it. “They’re dangerous, Roger,” she said. “Do somet
hing about it.”
They stayed close because they were perfect. She always told him that. She was gorgeous, the sort of girl you would want to walk up Fifth Avenue with at Christmastime. She liked to wear red, listen to U2, get bikini-waxed at a fancy spa. She had a delightfully trashy, sloe-eyed, fuck-me look when she got drunk. And she was almost proprietary about her right to pleasure, as if she were depositing it all in a lifetime orgasm bank. When she wasn’t making love, she slept like a cat, and Ferris would lie awake, wondering why he felt lonely.
They got married because…it seemed like the right thing to do. Their friends were all getting married. It was like a momentum trade in the stock market; everyone else is buying, so you buy, too. He certainly didn’t love anyone else. She had waited for him two years while he was off in Yemen, and when he returned, she said, it’s “our time.” They found an apartment in Kalorama, and she started working at Justice just before September 11, 2001.
She had always been patriotic, but after 9/11 she had a sense of personal mission. There’s something that happens when ambition fuses with principle that’s like a chemical reaction, and it made her a subtly different person. At Justice, her ferocity began to attach itself to issues that Ferris dealt with in his own career, and it disturbed him. One evening she had asked Ferris about interrogation techniques. She was very specific about it. How much did you have to hurt someone before they would talk? How long did it take people to recover after interrogation? It wasn’t an idle conversation about interrogation, if there could be any such thing, and Ferris suspected she must be doing legal research. He said he didn’t know much, other than what they had taught him at The Farm, and she looked disappointed.
She had pressed him, and Ferris had finally explained that the only time he’d seen a rough interrogation was in Yemen. The local security service had captured an Al Qaeda suspect and had beaten him over three days. With a cricket bat, that was the detail that stuck in Ferris’s mind. They had let him stay just conscious enough to appreciate each new wave of pain that was coming. Finally, in a spasm of fear, the prisoner had begun shouting the answers he thought the interrogators wanted to hear. But that had only made them more angry, so they had beaten him harder. Eventually, he died from loss of blood and trauma to the head. Ferris had watched.
“Did you tell them to stop?” Gretchen had asked.
“No. I kept thinking it would work. But then he was dead.”
“Don’t ever tell anyone else what you just told me,” said Gretchen. “It was illegal. Technically.”
When Ferris asked why she was so interested in interrogation, she didn’t answer. She went off and made some notes, and then came back with the top buttons of her blouse undone.
The discussion had upset Ferris, and he wanted to believe that it had bothered Gretchen as well, but he wasn’t sure. He had begun to realize that for her, the law was another kind of conquest. It was about removing restraints so that your client—in her case, the president of the United States—could do what he wanted. There was something sexual about it, a kind of reverse bondage. The law for her was about untying people so they could have their way.
She was proud of Ferris when he got wounded in Iraq. He had thought the scars would disgust her, but she liked to touch them—almost as if she were experiencing the event vicariously. But she couldn’t: Ferris had seen into the abyss in that moment on Highway 1 when he thought he was about to die, and he had realized that she wasn’t there with him. How could he tell her that? The sense of separation stayed with him during his convalescence, and it made him realize that there were things he didn’t share with Gretchen, and never would.
FERRIS CALLED Alice’s cell-phone number once again, and on the fourth ring, she finally answered. It was a sleepy voice. She had been dozing, and at first she seemed to have forgotten who Ferris was. He tried not to sound peeved. He had no right; she didn’t belong to him.
“I’ve been trying to reach you,” he said. “Where have you been?”
“Here mostly, and I went to Damascus for a day. I don’t answer my cell phone sometimes.”
“What were you doing in Damascus?”
“Shopping,” she answered curtly. “I was wondering what happened to you, actually. I thought maybe you didn’t like me.”
“I was away. I had to leave the country, too.”
“Mmmmm,” she said doubtfully.
“I want to see you. Soon. Are you free tomorrow night?” The next evening was Thursday, the start of the Muslim weekend. There was a long pause.
“I don’t know…,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Ferris held his breath.
“I don’t know if I can wait that long.” She laughed at the trick she had played on him.
When he put down the phone, Ferris went back to the terrace. Night had fallen, bringing the sudden chill of the desert. Amman was a bowl of light against the black sky. He felt, if not quite good, certainly less bad.
7
AMMAN
FERRIS PICKED ALICE MELVILLE up at her apartment. It was down in the old quarter by the Roman amphitheater. Ferris didn’t know any Americans who lived there. She was blond, wearing a sundress and sandals, with a sweater thrown over her shoulder. At first sight, her hair seemed to float in slow motion. “Hey, you,” she said, bounding into the passenger seat and immediately changing the channel of the radio. God, she’s beautiful, thought Ferris.
He took her to dinner at the Italian restaurant at the Hyatt Hotel. It was the most romantic place he could think of. They sat outside under the stars, with a gas heater next to them to ward off the evening chill. It glowed yellow and blue, like the embers of a fire. Ferris ordered a bottle of wine, and when they finished that, another one. The wine made her talkative, although Ferris didn’t think that would be a problem even if she were stone sober. She was describing her work with Palestinian refugees. That was her job; she worked with an NGO that did relief work in the camps that still housed many poor Palestinians. Ferris referred to it as “Save the Children,” though it was actually called the Council for Near East Relief.
“The refugees have no hope, Roger,” she whispered, as if that were a secret. “What keeps them going is rage. They listen to the sheiks from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They buy those bin Laden cassettes. When they go to sleep at night, I think they must dream about killing Israelis, and Americans. And now Italians, for heaven’s sake.”
“But not you,” said Ferris. “They don’t want to kill you.” She was being so serious, but all he could do was look at her. The light of the gas lamp was giving her hair a reddish glow. He leaned over the table toward her, as if to listen. When she talked, he could see her breasts rise and fall through the opening of her dress.
“No, not me. They respect me…because I listen to them. Do you listen to them, Roger? Does the American government listen to them? Or do we just want to shoot them?” Ferris had told her that he worked in the political section at the embassy, which was his cover job.
“Of course I listen to them. The ambassador listens to them. We all listen to them. I even talk to them.” He rattled off a few sentences in fluent Arabic, telling her that she was very beautiful in the moonlight and that he hoped she would come back to his apartment that night.
To his surprise, she answered in decent Arabic. She told him that he was handsome, but that his fate depended on the will of God. Then she added in English: “And don’t try to sweet-talk me, Ali Baba. More people have tried to hit on me than…” She thought a moment. “Than Curt Schilling. And it won’t work.”
“Red Sox fan?”
“Of course.”
“I won’t sweet-talk you. I just have this problem that I am irresistibly attracted to blondes who speak Arabic.”
Alice rolled her eyes and looked at the Arab men seated around the restaurant. “Welcome to the club. But seriously, Roger, I want to know what the embassy tells people. Do you tell them you’re sorry that America is killing Muslims? Do you tell them you’re sorry
their houses have been bulldozed and their children have been killed? Do you tell them it only looks as if we’ve allied with these right-wing kooks in Israel? Do you tell them we made a mistake invading Iraq and busting it into a million pieces? What do you tell them, anyway? I’d like to know.”
Ferris groaned. He wasn’t a diplomat; he was an intelligence officer. “Do we have to talk about this?”
“No. You can tell me it’s none of my business. Then I’ll go home.”
Ferris was startled at the thought that she would leave him. “Okay. Let me think. When people complain, I tell them I appreciate their point of view. I tell them I don’t make U.S. government policy. Sometimes I say that I’ll put their views in a cable. How’s that? I’ll put your views in a cable.” He was trying to make a joke, but it didn’t work.
“You really don’t get it! You sit in the embassy all day and I’m out on the firing line. I mean it, Roger. I have to listen to these people screaming at me every day. Do you know they cheered in the camps this week when they heard the news about the car bombing in Milan? Cheered. Friends had to come over and protect me. They want to kill us. Don’t you see that?”
The argument had colored her cheeks, so they, too, had the reddish glow of the gas fire. He knew he should be giving her better answers, but one of Ferris’s problems was that he was bad at policy debates. They reminded him of what he had hated about journalism. Policy debates were for real State Department officers, or op-ed columnists, or people like this mysterious Alice who worked in refugee camps and wore a sundress to dinner. But he had to say something, or she would give up on him.
“I do see it, Alice. More than you might think. I’m on the firing line, too. We all are. That’s what life is now.”
She looked into his eyes, as if she were searching for something. Did she know what he really did? Had she guessed it? The thought made him uneasy. He excused himself to go to the toilet. As he walked there and back, he tried to disguise his limp, but his leg was bothering him in the evening cold, and she noticed it.
Body of Lies Page 7
