“What’s wrong with your leg?” she asked when he returned to the table. “Are you hurt?”
“I was. Not anymore. I’m fine now.”
“What happened? If you don’t mind my asking.”
Ferris thought a moment. He did mind her asking, but if this relationship was going to go anywhere, he was going to have to tell her more about who he really was.
“I got shot in Iraq. That was my last assignment before here. I was riding in a car, and a grenade went off, and I got a lot of shrapnel in my leg. I’m fine now. I just have this limp sometimes. It’s made me much better in bed.”
She didn’t laugh at his joke. She was still studying him.
“What were you doing in Iraq?”
“I was in our embassy. I was supposed to be there for a year, but when I got wounded, they sent me here instead. Then I met you. See? I’m lucky.”
“You weren’t in the embassy when you got shot.”
“No. I was outside the Green Zone. On a road north of Baghdad.”
She took his hand, held it in the half-light and then let it go. “You don’t work for the CIA, do you?”
“Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. I used to work for Time magazine, before I joined the foreign service. Look it up on Nexis. They’d never let an ex-journalist work for the CIA.”
“That’s good,” she said. “Because then we’d have a problem.”
Ferris felt a tingle in his arms, the little hairs bristling. He normally didn’t mind lying about working for the agency; it was part of his job. But this was different.
“I admire you for being so brave, Roger. I just wish you could be brave for something else. I feel as if this war is destroying our country. People want to love America, but they see us doing these terrible things, and they wonder if we’ve become monsters. I’m frightened what’s going to happen.”
“I’m worried, too.” Ferris rose from the table and took her hand. “It’s a bad time.” He pulled her gently toward him. She stayed in his arms for a long moment, and then moved away.
Ferris drove her down Prince Mohammed Street toward her building in the old downtown quarter. She was quiet in the car, staring out the window. Ferris was worried that she was angry with him when she suddenly said, “Turn left. I want to show you a place you’ve never been.” She rattled a quick string of directions, back and forth in narrow streets of the old city, and in a few minutes they were several miles from the center of town, in a district that had none of the international patina foreigners usually saw. The streets were dank and ill-lit; donkeys carts trundled along the edge of the road. Walls were decorated with Palestinian flags and ancient, peeling posters of Yasser Arafat and crudely drawn anti-American graffiti.
“Stop,” she said when they reached the crest of a hill and a small road, not much bigger than an alleyway, which was the entrance to a warren of stucco and cinder-block houses. Ferris scanned the area warily. It was a Palestinian refugee camp, one of the old ones where people had first arrived after the wars of 1948 and 1967. Ferris recognized it from a security briefing. This was one of the places where an embassy official absolutely should not go, the security officer had advised.
“I work here,” said Alice, opening the car door. “I mean, it’s one of the places where I work. I wanted you to see it. I thought maybe you would understand me better. Intimacy, you know?” Was she mocking him?
Alice strode toward the entrance to the camp. Ferris peered down the dusty roadway. Strings of twinkling lights were hung along the scattered light poles like Christmas decorations; a café was open just inside the wall, along with a few stores down the way. A few men were sitting in the café sharing a nargileh, sucking on the stem and blowing out smoke. They had been talking, but when they saw Ferris and his big SUV, they stopped. Ferris was edgy. Common sense told him they shouldn’t be here this late at night.
“Come on,” said Alice, walking toward the café. “Maybe some of my friends are here.” Still Ferris lingered. It was like being in college, when someone who’d been drinking wanted to drive and you had to decide whether to be a spoilsport and say no, or go along.
“Come on, silly. I’ll protect you.” She grabbed Ferris’s hand and pulled him toward the café. They sat in two plastic chairs on the concrete terrace, under a wooden arbor that kept off the sun during the day. The other men looked at Ferris guardedly and then began talking again. Ferris saw one of them gesture in his direction and heard him say in Arabic, “Who’s the Jew?”
After a minute, the owner came out. Alice greeted him and he responded warmly. She asked in Arabic if Hamid was around that evening and the owner answered no, he was visiting his mother in Ramallah, thanks be to God.
“That’s too bad,” said Alice, turning to Ferris. “I wanted you to meet Hamid. He’s one of my main contacts in this camp. He’s one of the smartest people I know. You’d like him.”
“You think so?” asked Ferris. “How come?”
“Because he’s like you. He knows things, and he’s tough. People here respect him. I thought maybe he would say some things better than I could.”
“You know, Alice, I’m not sure your friend Hamid would want to meet someone from the American Embassy. We’re not very popular around here.”
“That’s okay. You’re with me. And I’m popular. I’ll protect you.” The look in her eyes said she meant it. This was her place.
“Yes, but he might get the wrong idea. Or other people might get the wrong idea.”
“What idea is that?” asked Alice. He had trouble seeing her face in the dark. Did she know what he really did? Was that what she was saying?
“Never mind.” Ferris was still tense. He scanned the perimeter, looking for signs of trouble, but it was quiet. Maybe Alice’s nonchalance—her obliviousness to the possibility that it might be dangerous to be sitting in a Palestinian refugee camp late at night—was her protection. Or perhaps it was something else. Maybe she really did belong here, and in a lot of other places that were closed to Ferris.
The café owner returned with Turkish coffee, bittersweet like a bar of dark chocolate. They drank it down slowly. Ferris let himself relax a bit.
“How come you don’t have a boyfriend?” he asked. “A girl as pretty as you must get asked out all the time.”
She didn’t answer at first. She took a last sip of her coffee and then turned over the cup and let the grounds dry for a moment on the side of the porcelain. She held the cup up to the light as if she were a fortune-teller.
“Good luck?” asked Ferris.
“Maybe. If you believe luck is written in coffee grounds. My old boyfriend believed that. And a lot of other crazy things.”
“So you did have a boyfriend.”
She looked away from Ferris, down the little alleyway and into the dark shadows. It was ten long seconds before she turned back to him.
“I loved him,” she said. “He was a Palestinian. Very proud, very angry. I loved him, but he mistreated me.”
Ferris reached out his hand for her, but she was too far away. “How did he mistreat you?”
“All the ways you can think of, and other ways, too.”
“My God. I cannot imagine anyone hurting you.”
“He couldn’t help it. He was so angry. It wasn’t me. It was everything. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. These people are really angry with us. We think we can lie to them and steal their land and treat them like dirt and they’ll just forget about it. But they don’t.”
“Why didn’t you leave Jordan after that? I mean, how could you stay here, after he had treated you that way?”
“I’m stubborn, Roger. That’s probably something we have in common. And the more I thought about him and his anger, I thought, No! Don’t run away. That’s what he would expect, and all the other Arabs, too. That we pretend to care about them and then, when real life bruises us a little, we run away. So I stayed. That’s how I got over it. I kept loving the people who had hurt me. I wouldn’t leave.
I won’t leave.”
Ferris felt the unfamiliar sting of tears. He wiped his eyes, trying to disguise the gesture, but she took his hand and smiled in a way she never had before. He kissed her on the cheek, his own still slightly wet.
Neither of them wanted to leave. Ferris asked about her work in the camps, and Alice tried to explain. Helping these people was a matter of logistics: She purchased schoolbooks and medical supplies; she funded water projects and dental clinics; she arranged scholarships at American colleges. It was a job; she was good at it. But the animation in her voice made clear that she was doing the one and only thing in the world that mattered to her.
Ferris looked down the ruined street, to the darkened houses and the hidden places an outsider could never enter. He wished he could share Alice’s belief that decent people could prevail, with enough schoolbooks and dental clinics. But he knew too much. This was a world seething with hatred. Its smiles were false ones; its true hunger was for revenge. The people had been damaged: by Americans, Israelis and the Arabs themselves. They were rats in a cage. Alice, brave as she might be, could not know the horror that was germinating in places like this. She didn’t understand that these people wanted to kill her. Yes, her. It wasn’t a misunderstanding that would be made right with more love. This was hatred. And it was the job of people like Ferris, who knew, to destroy the cells and networks and hiding places of the killers, so that people like Alice could survive.
“Don’t look so serious,” said Alice. “You’ll spoil the party.”
Ferris tried to smile. “Be careful, sweetie. That’s all. Just be careful. The world isn’t as nice as you are.”
“I know what I’m doing, Roger. You underestimate me. I know where the lines are. It’s you who has the problems. You’re the one who practically got his leg shot off, not me. You’re the one who needs to be careful.”
Ferris took her hand again and whispered in her ear, “I want to hold you, but I can’t here. Let’s go back to your place.” She smiled and rose from the little table. Something had changed.
THEY DROVE back past the old Roman ruins and the gold souk, and up the hill a few blocks to Alice’s building. Something told Ferris not to press his luck that night, but he didn’t want to let her go. As he walked her to the door, he asked if he could come up.
“Not this time, but maybe another time,” she said. “Tonight was special. I haven’t been this way with anyone for a long while. I just want to be sure I’m ready.”
“I really like you,” said Ferris. He wanted to say “love” but he knew that would sound crazy. He had only known her a few weeks.
“I like you, too, Roger. I’m glad you came with me to the camp tonight. Now you know who I am. A little.”
They moved into the shadow of her doorway, away from the light of the street. He kissed her on the lips and she responded, her lips parting slightly, and then wider. He took her in his arms and felt her body against his. As he kissed her, he could feel her moving, softening.
“I want you,” she said. Her voice was low and suffused with desire.
“You can have me.”
“Not yet.” She stepped back so she could look at him. “You’re strong, but I think you’re soft, too, in this place.” She patted his heart. “Are you? Do you have a soft heart?” He wasn’t sure how to answer that, so he just nodded. She kissed him on the cheek, her lips lingering on his skin, and then turned her back and walked up the stairs. He was standing there, looking up at her apartment, when he saw the light go on and a face in the window. He walked away in a kind of daze. It was partly the rush of emotion that he felt for her, but he was disoriented by what she had said. It had never occurred to him that he had a soft heart. He wondered if she was right.
8
AMMAN
ED HOFFMAN ARRIVED IN JORDAN a few days later. He was the Big American—big hands; big chest; big, ruddy face with the short bristle of hair on top. He was wearing sunglasses, which gave him the look of a Las Vegas tycoon—the sort of man who peels off cash from a wad of hundred-dollar bills. He arrived on a white Gulfstream jet whose only marking was the tail number. Ferris met him at the military airport, but Hoffman told him to go back to the office. The division chief went to his hotel to get some sleep, then to his favorite kebab restaurant. He finally arrived at the embassy in the early evening and immediately summoned Ferris to the secure conference room. He was waiting at the table, massaging his temples, when Ferris entered the room.
“My head hurts,” said Hoffman. “I should remember never to drink the red wine at that restaurant.”
Ferris extended his hand. Hoffman embraced him in a bear hug. “How’s the leg?” he asked.
“Pretty good. They have me doing exercises. I’m fine. I just feel bad for the guys left in Baghdad.”
“Well, don’t. They couldn’t begin to develop the rapport you’ve got with Hani. This Berlin thing is a big deal. You handled it just right.”
“Thanks, but I didn’t do anything except watch. It’s Hani’s baby.”
“Hats off to Hani. Definitely.” Hoffman pulled a foil package of peanuts from his pocket and popped a handful into his mouth. “But now it’s our turn. I want to run it.”
“You’ve got a problem, then. Hani wants to keep control. He wouldn’t even give me a transcript of the debriefing. He says it’s his operation, and we can share the take. That’s it.”
“I know, I know.” Hoffman ate more peanuts. “And that’s fine, because we don’t really have to run it. We just have to manipulate it a little. That’s why I’m here.”
“I don’t follow you.” That was the truth. Ferris had no idea what Hoffman was talking about.
“Play it. Influence it. Make use of it.”
“Sorry. But if it means screwing Hani, I’m against it.”
Hoffman smiled. “Touching sympathy for your liaison brother. But you’ll see. We can steer your pal Hani by controlling the information he gets, so he sees what we want him to see. Simple! Actually, it’s not simple, it’s pretty goddamn complicated. But the idea is simple. Believe me, he’ll thank us for it when it’s over.”
“But Hani owns the agent. He can target him however he wants. And we don’t have diddly.”
“There’s where you’re wrong, junior. We have more than you think. I’m going to tell you a secret. You probably know it anyway, but you’re not supposed to. The fact is that since September 11 we have captured a whole lot more Al Qaeda members than you realize. We have done all sorts of unpleasant things to get them to talk, which everyone is indignant about, but fuck them. And by the way, thanks very much to your wife for helping write the cover-our-ass memo. She is still your wife, right?”
“Yes, I guess so. We’re sort of separated. By the distance.”
“Whatever. The point is that we have a lot of information. We know which of these little bastards hates the other. We know who’s paying off whom, and who thinks he got a raw deal in the payments, who’s screwing who else’s ‘temporary wife.’ We know where the rivalries are, where to plant the seeds of doubt. We have invisible strings on these guys, because we know so much about them—and because they don’t understand how much we know. See, they don’t even know who’s been captured. They don’t know if Abdul-Rahman from Abu Dhabi has been captured, or quit, or taken a better offer, or just decided to jerk off full time. They keep getting e-mail messages from people they think maybe we’ve busted, but they don’t know. That’s the thing. Which allows us certain opportunities for deception. Oops. I said it. We have never been very good at that fancy-dan stuff, but you know what? We’re getting better. And with the help of our Jordanian friends, we’re going to get better still. And it’s going to take us to you know who.”
“Suleiman?”
“Amen, brother. This is your case. You have a leg full of shrapnel to prove it. Hani is chasing the same thing you are. We’re just going to give him a little help.”
Ferris was silent for a moment, thinking about what Hoffman had sai
d. Beyond all the razzle-dazzle, he was proposing that they deceive Hani. That sounded like a bad idea.
“You’re the boss,” he said. “But if you’re planning to play games with Hani, my advice is don’t. We need our friends now. After Rotterdam, Milan, the next Milan. Jerking Hani’s chain sounds like a mistake to me. In this part of the world, you have to trust people or you don’t get anywhere.”
“Wrong. In this part of the world, you can’t trust anybody, because they’re all liars. Even Brother Hani. Sorry, but that’s a fact. I have been in the Camel Corps a hell of a lot longer than you have. And you’re right. I am the boss.”
Ferris shook his head with resignation. “He’ll be pissed if he finds out. And I’ll have to take the flak. Until he throws me out. The way he did my predecessor.”
“Well, obviously he would be pissed, if he knew. But he’s not going to find out. Because we won’t tell him, will we? America is paying the freight here, so it seems to me we can do what we like. And please. You are not Francis Alderson.”
Ferris had wanted to ask the question for several months and had never had a chance, until now. “Why did the Jordanians PNG Francis? Nobody has ever explained that to me. There’s nothing in the files, and nobody back at NE Division will tell me anything. What did he do?”
“Um, um, um…” Hoffman closed his eyes and thought a moment. “I’m not going to tell you. For your own good.”
“Why? What did he do? Screw somebody’s wife?”
“Hell, no. Everybody in Jordan does that. I wish it were that simple.”
“So what is it?”
“Ask Hani.”
“He won’t tell me.”
Hoffman smiled as he pushed his chair away from the table and got up to leave. “That’s a good sign.”
Body of Lies Page 8
