“Yes,” said Ferris. “More or less.”
“You want to tell me any more, sir?”
“No. I’ve told you everything I’m authorized to say. The only thing to add is that if you knew everything I know, you would say, ‘That’s a pretty fucking cool operation.’”
FERRIS LEFT Rome the next morning for Geneva, where he was to initiate contact with Omar Sadiki. Ferris’s cover name was “Brad Scanlon,” and he worked for a company called Unibank, as its site development manager for Europe and the Middle East. He had business cards, fax forms, an Internet address for e-mail. He reread the script he and Azhar had drafted. The bank was planning a new branch in Abu Dhabi…Islamic ambience…need to negotiate the contract quickly…schedule a time to meet at the site…need contact numbers…will send literature…must respond by week’s end. It looked seamless, but then it always did, until the seams pulled apart.
FERRIS PLACED the call to Omar Sadiki the next morning. When the architect came on the line, Ferris introduced himself as Brad Scanlon, and made a brief pitch about Unibank and its new branch. He asked if Al Fajr Architects would be interested in bidding on the project.
“I don’t know,” said a cautious voice on the other end of the phone. “Our clients are Arab companies.”
“You have been highly recommended by our Arab friends.” Ferris read off a short list of Arab companies that had retained Al Fajr, which Azhar had compiled when he first thought of using Sadiki many weeks ago. “If you’re interested in bidding, we would want you to come look at the site in Abu Dhabi. Would that be possible?”
“Perhaps. If my manager agrees.” He was cautious, but not unduly so. Business deals in the Middle East always began cagily. Ferris needed to make the link before he went any further.
“Who would represent Al Fajr, if you decide you are interested?” asked Ferris.
“That would be me, sir,” answered Omar. “I do all the on-site evaluations for new projects.”
Ferris didn’t want to sound too eager. He expressed regret that the general manager himself would not be coming and then offered to send the details of the project immediately, by e-mail or fax. Omar requested fax, and was assured the documents would be on their way from Geneva by the close of business. Ferris said he would need an answer within five days, and a meeting at the site in Abu Dhabi soon after that, if they were interested.
“May I ask, please, what is the fee associated with this project?”
Ferris named a handsome figure—a bit more than what such a project might normally command, but not so wildly generous that it would raise suspicion. Omar promised that he would respond within the week.
When he hung up, Ferris smiled. It had gone more smoothly than he expected. That was the only thing that made him nervous.
Ferris contacted Hoffman, through a new communications link they had established that bypassed NE Division. Hoffman congratulated Ferris and asked him where he was staying. Ferris gave Hoffman the name of the hotel. “Check your e-mail,” said Hoffman.
IT DIDN’T TAKE Sadiki long. Two days later, on a Wednesday, the architect called to say that Al Fajr wanted to bid on the Unibank project. There was a new tone in his voice, almost of enthusiasm. He wanted to arrange a date when they could meet in the Emirates. Ferris studied his imaginary calendar and then proposed they meet the following Thursday. Omar consulted his real calendar, proposed that they meet a day earlier or three days later. He wanted to be home for the Islamic weekend, evidently. Good boy. So the meeting was set for a week hence, in Abu Dhabi.
The only odd thing was that the Jordanian seemed to want to check his new client’s identity. He asked him to spell the name slowly, S-C-A-N-L-O-N, asked where he was from in the States, seemed almost to want to keep him on the phone. Ferris wasn’t worried; his cover identity was solid. Someone would have to know Ferris’s voice intimately to make any connection, and the chance of that was close to zero.
Ferris messaged Hoffman to report success and ask if he could stop in Amman on his way to the UAE. He wanted to see Alice, but Hoffman said no. That would be insecure. He needed to do his initial development of Omar outside Jordan, where Hani wouldn’t find any loose threads.
HOFFMAN SENT Ferris an encrypted e-mail a few days later. He had the body. Harry Meeker was on ice in a cold locker in Mincemeat Park. There would be time later to dress and barber him and fill his pockets with the debris of his imagined life. The poison pill had arms and legs and, soon, a personal history. Now it was Ferris’s job to create the provocation that would lead the enemy to ingest the pill and swallow it down whole.
18
ABU DHABI
FERRIS WATCHED OMAR SADIKI make his way through the shimmering midday heat toward The Fishmarket Restaurant on Bainuna Street. He was tall, reedy man with a narrow face and a neatly trimmed beard. He was wearing a gray business suit for his meeting, but it was easy to imagine him in a white robe and kaffiyeh. The maître d’hotel seated him at the table Ferris had requested, while Ferris looked on from across the room, checking for surveillance. He studied Sadiki’s face: He looked composed, purposeful, as if he knew what he was after. The only thing that perturbed the Jordanian was the heavyset German man a few tables away who was drinking a beer and reading Stern. It must be the beer, thought Ferris. That was oddly reassuring.
Ferris emerged from the shadows and introduced himself as Brad Scanlon from Unibank. The name wasn’t his only camouflage. Ferris was in a disguise that would have confused his own mother. His hair and eyebrows were a sandy blond, rather than the normal dark brown. He had a thin moustache, and a pair of black-framed eyeglasses that overwhelmed his features and dimmed the spark of his eyes. Padding around his waist and bottom made him appear thirty pounds heavier. To anyone who knew Ferris from Jordan, he would be unrecognizable as Brad Scanlon.
The Jordanian offered a limp handshake, a sign of good manners in the East. Ferris apologized for being late; Sadiki apologized for being early. A Pakistani waiter was hovering behind them, menus in hand. Ferris studied Sadiki’s face: The Jordanian had a callus in the middle of his forehead from bowing so passionately in prayer each day. The prayer mark hadn’t been visible in the photo Azhar had displayed. He was ostentatiously devout. That was another good sign.
“I’m so sorry,” said Ferris, nodding toward the German. “I didn’t know they served beer here. We can go somewhere else.”
“This is not a problem, Mr. Scanlon. He is not a Muslim. He can do as he likes.” Sadiki offered a dour smile.
After the waiter took their orders, Ferris pulled from his briefcase some documents he had brought along. The first was an aerial view of an empty lot in an upscale Abu Dhabi neighborhood called Al Bateen, near the fancy downtown area that overlooked the Corniche and the Gulf. He had a drawing of the site, and pictures of some of Unibank’s other branch offices. Sadiki joined in; he emptied his own briefcase and displayed a sheaf of documents about his firm and its work.
Ferris saw that Sadiki had brought along his laptop computer. That was unfortunate; it would complicate things.
The Jordanian started his pitch awkwardly but gained confidence. He showed Ferris photographs of some of the buildings that Al Fajr had designed. A shopping center in Fahaheel in Kuwait; two offices buildings in Amman; a dormitory for the Jordanian College of Technology in Irbid. They were good, if uninspired, designs. Sadiki had a second folder of photographs, and Ferris asked to see them. This was Al Fajr’s Islamic portfolio: The firm had designed small mosques in the Palestinian towns of Halhul and Jenin in the West Bank; one in the Jordanian city of Salt, and a big one in Sanaa, in Yemen. Ferris remembered that he had seen the Yemen mosque when it was under construction, during his stint as a case officer in Sanaa. The last photos were of two big mosques in the Saudi cities of Taif, along the Red Sea Coast, and Hafr Al-Batin, near the Jordanian border. These were massive, domed structures, with spindly minarets that soared gracefully above the buildings.
“These are beautiful,” said Ferris. “Did the
Saudi government commission them?”
“We built them for a private Islamic charity,” Sadiki answered. “They are for the believers, not the government.”
Ferris nodded respectfully, and smiled inwardly. He was beginning to understand why Azhar had selected Omar Sadiki to star in their play. He was connected to the network of Islamic charities that had funded Al Qaeda in its early days. Indeed, he had all the necessary attributes of a member of the underground. When Sadiki finished his presentation and closed his portfolio, Ferris saw that his firm’s logo was a red Islamic crescent bisected by a bold blue triangle. Below the logo were the words “The Islamic Design Solution.”
SADIKI WENT to the men’s room to wash his hands before the meal, and Ferris was left staring out the window, almost in a trance. Through the glass, he could see the white hulls of some of the yachts that were docked in a marina behind the breakwater. The big boats sparkled in the sun. They must have cost tens of millions of dollars each, yet Ferris suspected they were rarely used. They were for decoration; perhaps once every few months, a prince of the desert would take a retinue of pliant Western ladies out for a pleasure cruise—have them strip down to the buff and entertain his business clients. The marina was part of the show—the theme park of modern life made possible by the shower of oil wealth. It was hard to imagine that the older men seated at this restaurant had, as boys, lived in the harsh desert with their camels and sheep, or dived for pearls, or smuggled cargoes to Persia in their dhows. The Emirates had been so poor in the 1930s that people had worried its economic fortunes would be destroyed forever by the rise of the Japanese cultured pearl industry.
Ferris thought of Alice while he waited for the food. The loneliness snuck up on him again—a wish that he could share the place with Alice, a yearning for the sound of her laugh or the touch of her hand. He wondered what she would think if she could see him in his disguise—other than that he looked fat. It would be nice if she could laugh out loud at how preposterous it all was, but he knew she would have a different thought: Ferris was living a lie, wrapped in a lie; his whole world was lies. How could a liar ever make her happy?
THE WAITER brought a traditional Arab mezzeh of ground chick-peas and eggplant, stuffed kibbeh, tabbouli and halloumi cheese. That was followed by a grilled hammour from the Gulf and some grilled shrimp. Ferris made small talk, but not much. He let Sadiki fill the silences with polite questions about Ferris’s family. The Jordanian offered reassurance when Ferris said he had a wife but no children. Eventually, Sadiki got around to what evidently was bothering him.
“Why do you want to hire Al Fajr for this job? We are good for mosques, not office buildings.”
Ferris had anticipated this question when he and Azhar wrote their script. He explained that the building site was in a neighborhood that had been very Islamic, with only a few expatriates from the West. Now that was changing with completion of the gleaming Emirates Palace Hotel a mile away. Unibank wanted to put its local branch in the newly fashionable Al Bateen area, but also be respectful of the Islamic character of the neighborhood. And Al Fajr came highly recommended. So the choice was easy.
Sadiki praised God and mumbled something appropriately humble in Arabic. He seemed content with Ferris’s answer and sat back and cleaned his teeth with a toothpick. He was easier than Ferris had expected.
Ferris’s fake moustache was itching and he was ready to go back to the hotel, but he had several more items on the agenda. He invited the Jordanian to visit the site, and Sadiki readily agreed. He had brought along a digital camera and an architectural sketchbook. They headed down Bainuna Street in the rented Lincoln Town Car, turned left on Sheik Zayed the First Street and then parked in front of a fenced lot with a sign that said “Unibank” in big bold letters. The Abu Dhabi station had done its set decoration handsomely.
The afternoon sky had a hazy quality—a pinkish white at the horizon rising to a thin blue. The asphalt was soft under Ferris’s feet, and his scalp was sweating under the wig. A few Mercedes and BMWs plied the streets, their windows rolled up tight, but most people had gone home for their afternoon naps.
Sadiki toured the property, took a soil sample, shot photographs from various angles and made some measurements. He spent nearly an hour examining the site, and then asked some technical questions. The Jordanian seemed almost to be putting on a show of his own. They sat in Ferris’s rented car with the air conditioner blasting while Sadiki went through his list: How many employees would be using the office? How many customers it would serve? What floor space was desired? How many stories tall? Had Unibank already contacted a local construction contractor? Did it have building permits? Ferris had answers for most of his queries, all drawn from the briefing book Azhar’s team had prepared.
The Jordanian mulled the matter, but not for very long. When Ferris explained that Unibank had an option to buy the property that would expire at the end of next week, he agreed to submit a bid and some very preliminary sketches by next Thursday noon, before the Islamic weekend. Ferris asked if Sadiki could meet him in Beirut, where he had other business next week, and the Jordanian agreed to that, too.
Ferris had just one more request. He wondered if Mr. Sadiki could come to the office of Unibank’s local lawyer, Adnan Masri, and sign a letter of intent. It was a formality, but a necessary one for any new vendors of services. Sadiki balked at first, but after a cell-phone call to someone in Amman, he said yes, Al Fajr would sign. Ferris apologized that the lawyer’s office was in the Al Markaziyah district, near the old souk, rather than in the fancier part of town. Sadiki shrugged; it made no difference to him.
The lawyer Masri was an older man, bearded and dressed in the traditional white robe and gold-threaded black cloak of the region. He spoke with Sadiki in Arabic, offered him tea, explained the papers to him. Soon enough, the paperwork was done. If Sadiki was suspicious, he didn’t show it. And why should he be? He could not have imagined the deception that Azhar and Hoffman had assembled behind this façade: He could not know that Adnan Masri was part of Azhar’s network of money changers who moved funds for the underground; or that as Masri talked with Sadiki, a camera installed secretly in his office was taking pictures of the encounter; or that one of the photographs would soon find its way to the UAE’s intelligence service as part of its regular surveillance of Masri; or that a copy of the photograph would land on the desk of an Al Qaeda sympathizer inside the UAE security service who was always looking for ways to protect fellow members of the organization; or that this local Al Qaeda sympathizer would transmit a copy to his contact in the organization, to warn him that one of the brethren had been caught in a surveillance by the local Moukhabarat.
Sadiki knew none of it. That was the point. He existed in other people’s imaginations now more precisely—and certainly more potently—than he did in his own.
FERRIS LINGERED at Masri’s office before saying goodbye to the Jordanian architect and wishing him a safe flight home the next morning. He wanted to give the Support team that had been working over Sadiki’s hotel room time to finish. They were collecting and copying everything they could find—date book, address book, all the useful pieces of paper in the pockets of the clothes Sadiki had brought from Jordan.
In his finicky architect’s way, Sadiki had been carrying his laptop with him everywhere. But Support took care of the computer problem in the middle of the night. Around three A.M., one of Hoffman’s boys pulled the fire alarm at Sadiki’s hotel. The Jordanian groggily followed directions from the fire marshals down to the lobby. He wasn’t gone long, only fifteen minutes or so, but that was time enough for the CIA team operating out of a room down the hall to download everything on his hard drive. They got his e-mails, his personal files, the list of pious Muslim friends to whom he sent cards of welcome at the Eid al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan, even the members of the Ikhwan Ihsan, the Brothers of Awareness, which appeared to be a study group of believers at his mosque. When the new day dawned, the men and women of Mincemeat P
ark had the additional fabric they needed for their cloak of illusion.
19
AMMAN
FERRIS’S FLIGHT OUT OF Abu Dhabi was delayed by a sand-storm, and it was past midnight when he landed at Queen Alia Airport. He presented his diplomatic passport to the control officer; usually he was whisked through, but not this time. They made him wait a good thirty minutes, politely of course, plying him with tea and sweet biscuits in a shabby anteroom on the second floor of the airport while a GID captain made frantic telephone calls. Ferris protested loudly—his passport was in order, his residency stamp was valid, he should be free to enter the country. He asked to use his cell phone so he could call Alice and tell her he was back, but the captain ignored him. The Jordanian officer kept gesturing with his thumb and forefinger—shway, shway, slowly, slowly—for Ferris to be patient. Finally his phone rang and, after a muffled conversation, he handed it to Ferris. It was Hani.
“My dear Roger, I wanted to welcome you back to Jordan myself. I am so glad you have decided to return to your true home.”
“Thank you, Hani Pasha. I’m afraid your welcoming committee at the airport wasn’t informed that I was such an esteemed guest. They’ve held me up for half an hour. I want to go home and get some sleep.”
“Take it as a sign of flattery. We only harass important people. The rest—well, who cares? And it is my fault, really. I wanted to welcome you back myself. I would have come to the airport to greet you personally, but it is so late, and I have such an attractive guest with me at the moment. But we need to talk, don’t we? Yes, I think so. Let us have breakfast the day after tomorrow. You Americans always like breakfast meetings, don’t you? We’ll meet at eight-thirty at the Officers’ Club in Jebel Amman. Near the British Council. Do you know it? I’m quite sure we won’t be disturbed there at that hour. Arabs detest breakfast meetings. Now let me speak to the captain.”
Body of Lies Page 17
