“Adrienne, explain to our visitor what you’re doing here. I told him you guys were the travel department.”
“Well…okay.” She looked distressed at the prospect of revealing anything to a new guy, but Azhar gave her a little wave of his hand. “So, like, the people in Al Qaeda have to travel, right? But they know we can monitor anything that has a computerized record. So they’re looking for untraceable ways to make reservations. And we’ve, like, put ourselves in that business.”
“Show him an example,” said Azhar. Adrienne walked Ferris toward the next computer pod, where a young brown-skinned man was furiously typing.
“Right, so this is Hanif. He oversees our cutout in Karachi, whose real name we don’t know, but we call him Ozzy. Like Ozzy Osbourne. Don’t ask me why. Anyway, our man Ozzy in Karachi specializes in untraceable travel. He’s very good. He went to a madrassa, he has good family connections in the Kashmiri underground. If you’re a jihadi and you want to make a plane reservation to fly from Karachi to London under a phony name and passport, he’s your guy. He’ll handle all the arrangements. Cheap, too. People in the underground tell their friends. They love Ozzy. But the thing is, see, we look at all the bookings, so we can match up the travelers with people on our watch lists. Ozzy’s place is set up with digital cameras, so we can monitor in real time everybody who comes into the shop and match faces with people we’re interested in. Show him, Hanif.”
The young Pakistani-American toggled a switch on his computer, and they were instantly watching an Internet feed from a hidden camera in the bucket shop in Karachi. A swarthy man with a pock-marked face loomed into view, badgering the clerk about a ticket for Morocco.
“We’ll find out who that is,” said Adrienne. “We’ll sell him the ticket, let him travel, watch where he goes. Maybe we’ll grab his cell phone when he’s not looking and copy the SIM card, so we know who he’s been calling. We are so bad.”
Hanif and the other kids clustered around began laughing, and so did Ferris. This was a level of the game he had always hoped the CIA could play but suspected was beyond its reach.
Azhar led him to another cluster of desks, which he described as the banking section. Here again, it was the same basic mission. Members of the terrorist underground needed to move money around the world clandestinely. America and its allies had shut down all the easy ways—they had pressured the banks and the Islamic charities and even the hawala money changers. That made it harder for jihadists to move money from one cell to another, and they needed skilled people. To satisfy this demand, Azhar and his bizarre gang had created their own supply. Using a handful of people Hoffman and Azhar had strung together, they had created a chain of people who could move money covertly. Often, they didn’t know about their agency contact. But all the information they collected came flowing into Azhar’s databases.
“You have to think the way they do,” explained Azhar. “That’s my advantage. I grew up with them. I know how they think, what they need, how they move. And then, once I understand what they need, I figure out a way to provide it—airplane tickets, passports, money transfers, secret hideaways in strange cities, cell phones, computers. They never see my face. But I am there to serve them, every day, twenty-four/seven. That’s my business plan.”
The Egyptian gestured to his banks of computers and the hopeful young faces studying the screens—looking for ways to understand and deceive the enemy. Ferris had read about Bletchley Park—the collection of geeks, queers and other social misfits who had cracked the Nazi codes and allowed Britain to survive and win the Second World War. Hoffman and Azhar had created something equivalent—a system that would tag the cells of Al Qaeda and watch them as they moved through the bloodstream. It was brilliant, except for one thing. It hadn’t forced Suleiman to the surface. Ferris had given him a name, and now he would have the job of luring him into the open.
15
LANGLEY
HOFFMAN WAS BACK IN Sami Azhar’s office, wearily rubbing his eyes, when they returned from the tour of Mincemeat Park. “This is what happens when people think they’re losing a war,” Hoffman said, shaking his head. “Everyone starts screaming, ‘Off with his head.’” He didn’t explain, but Ferris could guess: The director had just chewed him out for the lack of progress on Frankfurt, but that was because the president had just chewed out the director, and the news media had just hounded the president. People didn’t like being frightened. They wouldn’t put up with it for very long. They wanted to fight back, and they felt powerless when intelligence officers couldn’t find the enemy. All the shit seemed to be falling on Hoffman for the simple reason that he was the only person in the government who had a clue what to do. Some people tighten up under that kind of pressure, but it seemed to make Hoffman looser.
“The director is having a fit,” said Hoffman. “The White House just ordered him to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee tomorrow on Milan and Frankfurt. ‘Intelligence failures.’ He told me to write his testimony. I could sympathize with him, really I could, if he wasn’t so stupid.”
“‘A great empire and little minds go ill together,’” said Azhar. “That was the observation of Edmund Burke, I believe.”
“Cut the crap, amigos. They want me back in the building soon, so we need to finish up. Okay, Roger, this is Taqiyya 101. We’ve been working stuff up the past few days to complement your man who never was, Mr. Harry Meeker. Your idea, with the blanks filled in by me and Sami. I think we’ve got something that will dig the knife in very deep.” He motioned to Azhar to restart his computer.
“Okay, Sami, put up the Sadiki slide.” Azhar clicked his mouse and a new image came up on the screen. It was a photograph of an Arab man in his late thirties, dressed in a business suit. He had a well-trimmed beard and the look of a man who took fasting and prayer seriously.
“This is Omar Sadiki. He’s a Jordanian architect from Ma’an in the south, a very religious and conservative city. He lives now in Amman, where he works for a firm that specializes in Islamic design. He’s a good Muslim, active in a bunch of charities the Saudis sponsor. For the past decade, he has traveled regularly to Zarqa, north of the capital, to attend Friday prayers. Several members of his Koran study group have disappeared, and we think they joined the underground. We think Omar himself was approached about going to Afghanistan when he was a kid, but he decided to stay in Jordan and study architecture. This is why people at the mosque trust him. Because he’s not knocking on anyone’s door, not pushing. Some people in Zarqa think he is already a member of Al Qaeda, but he isn’t. He’s just a smart, tough, religious guy.”
“Stop!” Ferris help up his hand. “I don’t want to sound petty, but how do you know so much about someone on my territory? Omar Sadiki, whoever he is, is not one of my agents. I’ve never heard of him. Did you find out about him from Hani? Are you running a parallel station? What the hell is going on?”
“Jesus, don’t be so turfy,” said Hoffman. “Hani is clueless about Sadiki. I’m not making the mistake of bringing him into anything again. Sadiki is one of the good Dr. Azhar’s projects. He was thinking of using him as a front for a Muslim architecture and construction ruse—so we could build Al Qaeda’s offices for them, in addition to making their travel arrangements and doing their banking.”
“Fine. But how did you guys spot him?”
“Well, let’s just say that Sami knows his family.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that his brother is on my payroll,” broke in Azhar. “He works in Dhahran, for UBS, and he’s doing a little business on the side. He doesn’t realize it’s for us. It’s what I believe you call a ‘false flag.’ Saudi investors in my old hedge fund began coming to him, and they brought their friends. Now many people are using him to launder money. That’s how I am building out the little counter-network I was just showing you, using friends of friends and cousins of cousins. The gentleman in Saudi Arabia told us about his pious Muslim brother in Jordan, and there we are.�
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Ferris studied the photo on the screen, and then smiled and shook his head. He saw it, in a flash, just as Hoffman had.
“Got it,” said Ferris. “He’s part of my taqiyya. We’re going to pretend he’s our guy, even though he isn’t. Are we on the same page?”
“Yes, indeed.” Hoffman reached over and patted Ferris’s cheek. “Honestly, I love this shit. I mean, it’s so totally off the wall, it might just work.”
“It will work, if we do it right,” said Ferris, his mind spinning. “We make it appear that Omar Sadiki is part of the enemy’s network. We move him around, send him on missions, burnish his legend. We make other people worry about him. Maybe we make it look like Sadiki is horning in on Suleiman’s territory. Maybe we make him a car bomber, too—a freelancer, competing with the master. We make Suleiman jealous. We make him nervous.”
“We make him crazy!” said Hoffman. “We make Sadiki seem like such a player that the big man has to find out what he’s up to. It’s driving him nuts. He’s wondering if he’s been cut out of the action, or if we’ve turned his network, or what the fuck? How can he not know about this Omar Sadiki? And then Suleiman surfaces. He contacts his people. He has to. He thinks he’s been penetrated. He doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s acting weird, Suleiman is. His people are starting to wonder about him. Maybe he’s the mole. And then, pow! We drop the ringer. The proof that Suleiman is a rat.”
“Harry Meeker?”
“Just so. And then we’ve got him. Sami, next slide.”
The screen displayed a building façade in downtown Amman. It was white stone, like everything else in the city. There was a neat sign out front that said in English and Arabic, “Al Fajr Architects,” over a corporate logo that showed a rising sun.
“This is where Omar works,” said Hoffman. “His company does a lot of business in the Gulf. We have the address and phone number for you.” Another slide appeared. “And here is a picture of Omar’s brother, Sami’s friend who works for UBS in Dhahran. I don’t think you’ll ever need to meet him, but here’s what he looks like, in case you get in trouble and we have to bust his balls.”
“Let’s do it,” said Ferris.
“Work with Sami. He has pulled together some basics. He has you working for a bank that wants to hire Sadiki to design a new branch in the UAE. When you get back to Jordan, you’ll have to put together the other parts of the operation, but Sami can help you with the starter kit.”
“You keep saying ‘when you get back to Jordan.’ How do you know that Hani will let me back in? He was seriously pissed when I left. He said he never wanted to talk to me again.”
“He’s calmed down. He informed the embassy yesterday that you are still welcome as liaison to the GID. Actually, he said that you alone would be welcome—if we try to send someone else, no dice. He says it’s too much trouble breaking in a rookie. Besides, he likes you. He’s basically demanding that you come back. From a Mincemeat Park standpoint, it would be easier to run you as a singleton, undeclared to anyone. But we can’t afford to fuck with Hani any more than we already have. So you’ll be back in Amman when you aren’t on the road. Don’t worry about that.”
“When do I leave?” Ferris was thinking about Alice and how many new secrets he would be keeping from her.
“Hell, I don’t know. Whenever you’re ready.”
“I’m ready now. I want to get back to Jordan as soon as I can.”
“Don’t you want to see that wife of yours?”
“Not particularly. I told you back in Amman that we’re sort of separated. I told her two days ago I want a divorce.”
“Fine. Whatever. None of my business. Everybody else around here seems to fuck up their marriages, why not you? You can leave whenever you want. But I want you to stop on the way and see some folks in Europe.”
“And who might they be?”
“Our ninjas in this operation. They’re from MacDill. They are sitting in Rome, trying not to blow their covers while they wait for someone to tell them what to do. That’s going to be you, with help from Sami. You’ll get a kick out of them. They are some crazy fuckers. Much too out-of-control to work with our shop upstairs, which is why I like them so much.”
Hoffman stood up suddenly. “I’ve got to see the director. I can’t tell you how much I would prefer to stay here with you thinking of ways to mess with Suleiman’s head, but duty calls. And Ferris, remember what Sam Snead said: If you aren’t thinking about pussy, you aren’t concentrating.”
FERRIS SPENT THE rest of that day and most of the next with Sami Azhar, preparing for his trip. He and Azhar worked up a script for the initial contacts with Omar Sadiki. They researched the places in Abu Dhabi where the meetings would take place. They got Support to prepare a disguise that Ferris could wear to his meetings with Sadiki. They began to weave the cloak of false information they would gather around Sadiki—that would make him appear to be part of a network to which he had no real connection. Azhar proved ingenious in tapping lawyers, computer consultants and financial intermediaries who could, in various ways, burnish the legend.
“I am afraid we will need explosives, to make him truly believable as a car bomber,” said Azhar.
“Not a problem,” answered Ferris. “I’ll talk to the ninjas about that in Rome.” Hoffman could not have said it with greater assurance. Anything was possible, once you decided to invent a new game.
As Ferris prepared to leave, Azhar seemed awkward. Ferris thought at first that he must be envious, that Ferris was going somewhere the ex-quant from Wall Street could never follow. But it wasn’t that. He handed Ferris a little plastic box in the shape of a hemisphere, like the kind of box children use to hold their retainers or mouth guards. Inside was the gel bridge, containing its drops of deadly poison.
“This is in case…,” said Azhar. “I trust you will never need it.”
“Nothing bad is going to happen,” said Ferris. “Don’t worry, Sami.” But he saw that his colleague’s hand was shaking slightly when they parted, and he knew he was right to be worried. Ferris was headed into a space that had no boundaries or rules, where literally anything could happen. Ferris realized that he had one more thing to do before leaving Washington, which was to see his mother.
16
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA
JOAN FERRIS LIVED ON THE western edge of Charlottesville in a rambling ranch house with a view of the Blue Ridge. She had bought it with her husband a few years before he died. He had tinkered and fiddled with it so that there were electrical outlets every few yards and a phone jack in every room and a hundred other ingenious features he never had a chance to enjoy. Tom Ferris never quite got the timing right. At his funeral, Roger had read “Sailing to Byzantium,” which summed up his feeling that his father somehow had been born in the wrong country and wrong century, trying to please people who weren’t worth the effort. Guests at the funeral congratulated Roger for getting through the poem dry-eyed, which made him feel worse.
Roger had grown up in Fairfax County, just off the Route 50 highway that connected the Virginia suburbs to Washington. Most of the families in their subdivision were linked in some way with the Pentagon or the CIA. His father had raised the flag in front of the house every morning when Ferris was a boy, and then stopped, as if he had lost faith in the enterprise. Ferris asked him why and he pointed down the street to the neighbors’ houses. “We have too many flags around here,” he said bitterly, “and not enough patriots.” Ferris’s mother took a job teaching English at George Marshall High School, the same school Ferris attended. He grew up with the sense that something was wrong and that his All-American life had a hidden flaw. His father would lose the job he could never talk about; his mother would tire of her husband’s sullen despair and just not come home one afternoon.
Ferris wanted to make his parents happy, partly to protect against the risk of family meltdown. He was one of the top students in his graduating class, in addition to lettering in football and wrestli
ng. In both sports, he was known for “gutting it out.” He was starting linebacker on defense, but he had also played offense the second half of his senior year after the starting fullback got hurt. In wrestling, he had reached the state championships by outlasting better opponents who collapsed in the third period, when Ferris always seemed to be able to summon a last gulp of effort. The “favorite quote” next to his picture in the high school yearbook was Vince Lombardi’s motto, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” His problem in high school, to the extent he had one, was that he was too smart to be a jock and too athletic to be a wonk. That put him in between the various cliques, and he learned to suppress his emotions so that people never knew exactly what he thought. His main secret back in high school was how much he wanted to lose his virginity, but once he put that behind him senior year, he found other things to conceal—especially his ambition. He had no secrets from his mother, however, least of all the fact that he wanted to escape her suburban household and the sense of failure that had settled into the walls.
Ferris didn’t like coming home, even to the new house in the Blue Ridge. It reminded him of his father, whose memory was an unfinished conversation. Another discomforting thing about the Blue Ridge house was that it was full of memories of Gretchen. They had come here often before and just after they were married, and had made love in almost every room, and much of the outdoors, as well. Thinking of Gretchen gave him a chill. He wanted to call Alice, but she had been unreachable the past few days. She was off somewhere, or not answering her phone. Ferris missed her.
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