Body of Lies

by David Ignatius

  FERRIS 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

  FERRIS 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.

  IT 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.

  “Time to bait the hook. This was your idea, Roger. What do you want in his briefcase? What should Harry Meeker, CIA case officer extraordinaire, be carrying with him when he is shot trying to make contact with an access agent in Al Qaeda? Run me through the drill.”

  Ferris closed his eyes and tried to put himself into the fantasy world they had worked so hard to create.

  “He’s carrying a message for Suleiman,” said Ferris. “That’s the detonator. He has a message from the CIA to Suleiman. When other people see it, they will think Suleiman is working for us. You have that ready?”

  Hoffman nodded. “A message for Suleiman, to be delivered via an access agent in Pakistan.”

  Ferris continued, “Harry will be asking Suleiman for help in dealing with a dangerous new threat. And that threat is Omar Sadiki, whose dossier Harry has been assembling.”

  “Precisely,” said Hoffman. “Sadiki has crossed a line. Suleiman had just been killing Europeans, but the new man is killing Americans at the air base in Turkey. So Harry is contacting his super-secret source in Al Qaeda. He wants Suleiman to stop the new splinter group Sadiki is running, outside Suleiman’s control.”

  Ferris shook his head in wonder. “I just hope they will believe we’re this devious. And this smart.”

  “Of course they will. They think we’re Superman. That’s why they hate us so much.”

  “Do you have the paperwork ready?” asked Ferris.

  “Yup, but I want you to look at it before we load the torpedo.”

  Ferris walked along the row of manila folders, looking at the contents, and then returned to one folder. He pulled a grainy photo that showed Sadiki meeting with Bulent Farhat in Ankara. “We use this one, for sure. This proves Sadiki was in contact with an Al Qaeda guy in Turkey just before Incirlik. If the agency was making a dossier against Sadiki, this would be Exhibit A.”

  “Into the briefcase,” said Hoffman, placing the photo inside. “What else?”

  Ferris took a second photo from one of the early folders. It showed Sadiki in Abu Dhabi, meeting with the lawyer who had once been part of Al Qaeda’s money-transfer system. “We need this. This is Harry’s proof that Sadiki moved the money for the Incirlik bombing.”

  “For sure. What else?”

  Ferris pulled a document on FBI letterhead and date-stamped that day. It purported to be an analysis of the plastic explosive used at Incirlik, matching it with the explosive used at the HSBC and Israeli consulate bombings in Istanbul in 2003. “Harry Meeker would want this one. It nails the Al Qaeda connection.”

  Hoffman laughed as he took the document. “This will make Suleiman’s people crazy. How could they not know about a guy who has the same stash of plastic explosive they used for earlier ops? How could they be in the dark? Unless…unless…Suleiman is jerking them around. Unless Suleiman is not what he appears. Unless a worm has been eating at their insides. They won’t know what to think!”

  Ferris studied a third photograph. A caption said it was the office used by the Brothers of Awareness in Amman. Ferris recognized the neighborhood. It was near Alice’s office, in the old part of the city.

  “What’s that?” asked Hoffman.

  Ferris was still looking at the picture, lost in thought. “You don’t need this one,” he said very quietly, his voice barely audible. He put the photo back in the folder.

  “What’s the problem? Photo not interesting enough?”

  “No. Leave this one out. It doesn’t do anything for us.”

  Ferris added a few more items. H
e found a surveillance record from the UAE intelligence service about Sadiki’s movements in Abu Dhabi. Harry Meeker would have studied that. And he added the airplane receipts, to and from Ankara. Those would have been in the dossier. And he had the report from the Turkish immigration authorities, forwarded to the agency by Turkish liaison, about Sadiki’s entry and departure on December 21. It made a neat kit—evidence that Sadiki was part of an important new breakaway cell of Al Qaeda, which the CIA urgently wanted to contain. He took the briefcase in his hands and held it, feeling its weight.

  “I hate these bastards,” said Hoffman. “That’s why I love this play. Because it will make them destroy themselves. The stuff in that briefcase gets passed up the chain, and it makes all of them wonder if the CIA is running their main man. We introduce that seed of doubt in the organization, and then we just let it do its work. They begin to doubt everything. Their whole world gets turned upside down. This is the poison pill. If they swallow it, they are dead.”

  Ferris nodded. It was his idea. He wanted to believe it, but he worried that they had missed something.

  “So I’m Harry,” said Ferris, holding the briefcase. “I’ve been working the Incirlik case for the agency. I’ve got all the evidence I need to prove that Omar Sadiki did it. I want Suleiman’s help. How do I get to Pakistan?”

  “Here’s the itinerary,” said Hoffman. “First, Harry goes to London and Paris to brief the allies. We’ll have someone in a Harry disguise brief midlevel people at SIS and the DGSE to backstop the legend. He’ll be flying on the same Gulfstream that’s carrying the corpse. We’ve got pocket litter for London and Paris. Restaurant receipts for dinners, taxi receipts, all that shit. Harry will go see Cats in London, and he’ll send a text message to his girlfriend on his cell phone, telling her how great it is. When the Al Qaeda boys find Harry’s phone, they’ll like the Cats thing. So American. We just added that yesterday.”

  “Lovely. But when does Harry get to Pakistan? That’s all that really matters.”