“Open up, you bastard,” he grumbled. “We need to talk.” He was quite drunk, and the alcohol had dulled his usual exuberance. He seemed almost melancholy. He sat down across the desk from Ferris and filled the glasses with champagne. Ferris waited for him to give some rascally, bravura toast, but he was silent. Eventually Ferris spoke.
“We did it,” Ferris said, raising his glass. “I didn’t think it was possible, but we pulled it off. We’re inside their DNA.”
“Yeah, maybe,” said Hoffman glumly.
“No maybe about it. Not after they picked up Suleiman’s call. He’s in trouble. Otherwise he never would have surfaced. We’ve picked up so many new leads in the last few days, we’re going to be able to roll up networks from London to Lahore.”
Hoffman was shaking his head. It wasn’t just the booze. Something was bothering him. Ferris didn’t want to worry about Hoffman’s problems, he wanted to think about his own.
“Lighten up, boss. Take a victory lap.”
“We haven’t won yet.”
“We’re a lot closer than we were a week ago. Drink up.” He clinked glasses with Hoffman and drained most of his own, but the older man didn’t drink.
“It’s too perfect,” said Hoffman. “Something has to be wrong.”
“What are you talking about? For chrissake, why don’t you take ‘yes’ for an answer? It worked. God only knows how, but we did it.” Ferris didn’t want to hear about self-doubt or loose ends. Now that his part of the operation was done, he was thinking about a new life. He wanted Hoffman to go away and leave him to his own future.
“Something’s not right. Suleiman should never have surfaced the way he did so quickly. I never expected that. It’s almost as if he’s probing us, trying to see how much we know.”
“Come on, Ed, you’re being paranoid. You’ve been living with this too long. You’re suffering postpartum depression. Let it go, man. You have a nice, perverted baby.”
“You think so? Why did Suleiman leave his cell phone for us to find? And who’s he talking to about betrayal? We still don’t have anything real. It’s making me crazy.”
Ferris laughed and poured himself another glass of champagne. He was tired and, in truth, he wasn’t interested in Hoffman’s problems. He gave him a kiss on both cheeks, close enough that he could feel the bristle of his whiskers and smell his sour breath. People outside the door were shouting and dancing and chanting the boss’s name: “Hoff-man! Hoff-man!” It was almost midnight. People were counting down the seconds. They wanted their boss.
Hoffman emerged from the little office. He was too much of a leader not to take this turn. He got up on a table, lifted his bottle overhead and shouted to the crowd, “Happy New Year! Thanks for so much hard work. More to come. I love you all.” He finished a few seconds before the clock ticked down to zero. Perfect timing, as usual. The crowd roared; they were drunk, happy and exhausted. People were singing, and a conga line was forming behind a voluptuous woman who targeted terrorist cells. In the frenzy, Ferris was probably the only one who noticed that Hoffman had slipped away to an empty office and closed the door.
OMAR SADIKI disappeared on New Year’s Day. Ferris heard the news as he was heading to the airport to catch his flight back to Amman. The Amman station had been monitoring Sadiki’s phones to make sure he didn’t get into any mischief. He hadn’t answered phone calls on New Year’s Day, and the Amman operations chief, who was running things in Ferris’s absence, eventually got nervous. Late that afternoon Amman time, he sent one of his Jordanian agents to Sadiki’s house to call on him. Inside, the agent found a roomful of confused women and children. Sadiki’s wife said her husband had gone out with some visitors that morning and hadn’t come back. They had asked for him at the office and at the mosque and at the coffeehouse where the members of Ikhwan Ihsan liked to sit in the afternoons. But there was no sign of him. The wife said her husband had been preoccupied about something. And now whatever it was had caused him to vanish.
Ferris called Hani on a secure phone after talking to the Amman station. Hani said he had already heard the news and apologized repeatedly. He didn’t know how Sadiki had slipped through his surveillance. It was his fault, he kept saying. The GID should have watched more closely. They shouldn’t have let him disappear. Ferris had never heard Hani sound so remorseful.
“Shit,” Ferris muttered to himself when he had finished the conversation with Hani. He had known that something bad would eventually happen to Sadiki, from the moment he had met him in Abu Dhabi. He was too vulnerable, too much a pawn in other people’s games. Ferris had willed himself not to worry about the consequences; if you thought too much about what might happen to your agents, you would never run an operation. But Sadiki wasn’t even an agent. He was a nothing. He knew nothing. Perhaps that would make it easier for him when his captors began to interrogate him. There was a deeper fear eating at Ferris. He barely wanted to admit it to himself. It wasn’t Sadiki he cared about, really, but the fact that Sadiki knew Alice Melville.
“WHY DIDN’T I take him out of Jordan to protect him?” Ferris asked Hoffman when he reached him an hour later. “Why did I just leave him there? He was a sitting duck.”
“He’ll be fine. They’ll bleed him, and he’ll say what he knows, which is nothing. He’ll deny that he had anything to do with Incirlik. He’ll say that he was in Turkey on an architecture project for an American bank. He’ll tell them about Brad Scanlon. They won’t know what to believe. They’ll beat the shit out of him, which will only make his confession weirder, and by the end they’ll be more confused than when they started.”
“They’ll kill him.”
“I doubt it, but so what if they do? Like I always tell you, shit happens. If we worried about every Joe who got burned, we’d never get anything done.”
“Jesus. You are a cold-blooded bastard.”
“So are you,” said Hoffman. “You just don’t want to admit it.”
Hoffman really didn’t care. The human beings involved might as well have been pieces of plastic on a checkerboard.
“They’ll make me,” said Ferris. “When they interrogate Sadiki, he’ll give me up, and they’ll have my identity.”
“No, they won’t. They’ll make your alias, but so what? The disguise was fabulous. The legend was tight. It’s backstopped all the way. Stop worrying. Omar will come back to work, maybe missing a few fingers and toes, but so what? You can hire him to build you a beach house.”
“They’ll interrogate Sadiki about other Americans in Amman. They’ll try to find if he had other connections to the embassy, through people who might have known me.”
Hoffman sounded exasperated. “Look, Roger, what are you trying to tell me? Because I’ve got other things to do.”
Ferris debated whether to tell Hoffman the black secret that was in his heart—that Omar Sadiki knew an American woman, who knew an American man who worked at the embassy. Whose name was Roger Ferris. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. That was the moment he stopped trusting Hoffman. When he hung up, Ferris began calling Alice Melville. There was no answer, at home or at work or on her mobile. Maybe she was out. Maybe she had a hangover. Maybe she was on a trip. Maybe she had a new lover. Ferris took the night flight for London in a growing panic. He had pushed the bone to the breaking point, and now it had snapped.
30
AMMAN
QUEEN ALIA AIRPORT HAD A stale, post-holiday feel when Ferris arrived late on the afternoon of January 2. The officer at passport control barely looked at the computerized watch list as he stamped him through. The Christmas displays were still up in the duty-free shop, hawking booze and cigarettes to Muslim travelers, but the store was empty. Even the porters who tried to hustle tips by pushing your luggage cart a few dozen yards seemed bored. Outside, a dust storm was blowing in from the desert; Ferris emerged from the terminal into an eerie half-light. The cars were phantoms, visible only at the last minute when they emerged from the brick-red dust. When Ferris br
eathed deeply, he could taste tiny grains of sand against his teeth.
Ferris called Alice when he landed, but she didn’t answer, so he decided to go straight to her place in the old city. He had his own key now, and she always said she liked surprises. He tried to stay calm and positive: If she was out, he would wait for her, yes—maybe make dinner, light the candles, gather the blanket of love around her. They would make a new start—an end, and then a new start. It would take an hour or two, and probably a few glasses of wine, to dissolve the awkwardness. But after a while, she would be making wisecracks about people at work and hectoring him about America and the Arabs. And as they relaxed, he would begin unraveling the lies and stitching something that was real.
Ferris had the airport taxi drop him at her building on Basman Street. He rang the bell downstairs but there was no answer, so he let himself in and climbed up a flight to her apartment. Alice’s door was ajar, and at first Ferris was relieved—thinking that she must be home after all. He pushed the door open wide and called into the apartment. When she didn’t answer, he went to the bedroom, hoping she might be there, and then the bathroom, calling out her name every few steps. Alice’s cat, Elvis, was flopped on the bed, but otherwise the room was empty. The bathroom door was closed, and when he saw that, he imagined that she must be inside and that in a moment he would hear her singing a bluesy Joni Mitchell song. But the bathroom was empty, too, and Ferris began to worry in earnest.
He retraced his steps, pacing each room and calling for her as if she were hiding in the walls. He hadn’t looked closely at the apartment on the first pass, but now he noticed things that weren’t right. The rug in the entry hall was askew. Alice was a natural tidy-upper; she would never have left it that way. In the salon, the bookshelves were messy. Some of the books had been pulled down and left on a table; others had been shoved back on the shelf upside down or with the spines against the wall. In the kitchen, a breakfast meal was half made—a box of cereal was open, and a carton of milk left out on the counter. Ferris smelled the milk; it hadn’t gone bad yet.
Ferris walked down the hall to the small room Alice used as an office; the drawers of her desk were open and some of the files were strewn on the desktop. And her laptop was gone. That was the moment his real fear began—when he realized that whoever had been in the apartment had taken Alice’s computer and its electronic files. Perhaps it was a burglary: Alice had gone to work that morning in a rush, left her breakfast half eaten because she was late, and then after she left, a thief had broken into the apartment. Ferris used the phone in the kitchen to dial Alice’s number at work; her office phone was ringing, but nobody answered.
It was only as he was hanging up the phone that he saw the blood marks on the floor below the counter. Ferris’s cry was almost soundless, a scream of white anguish. He saw more drops of blood just beyond the kitchen, and then a trail every few feet toward the door. Oh Jesus. Where was she? He struggled to keep himself from screaming. The worst thing he could imagine, the thing he had seen in the far distance like a speck on the horizon, was now hurtling toward him. He sat down on the couch and tried to think. Don’t panic, he told himself. Make sure she’s really missing. He called the main number of the Council for Near East Relief and asked for Hoda, a Palestinian woman who was Alice’s assistant. She sounded frightened, too. Alice had never arrived for work that day, she said. Everyone at the office was worried, because that wasn’t like her. But then they thought maybe she was with her American boyfriend.
“This is her American boyfriend,” said Ferris, trying to control his voice. He told Hoda not to summon the police or do anything else until he called her back. He had to think, but on what template? Hoffman’s or his own?
The weight of it pressed against him. He had let this happen. Alice had been kidnapped. Someone had broken into her apartment and taken her away. Ferris tried to think rationally. Should he call the embassy security officer and have him contact the Jordanian police? That would be standard procedure for an American abroad. Or call the CIA station and get his deputy over to the apartment now with the FBI man at the embassy, to do the forensics right away before the Jordanians screwed them up? Or call Hani and ask for special help? In the end, he did all three. He didn’t care any more about operational cover. That set of worries had disappeared along with Alice. The only mistake now was not doing enough to save her.
THE TEAM from the embassy arrived first. The FBI agent did a quick sweep of the apartment, taking several blood samples from the floor and dusting for prints in the kitchen, where the assault seemed to have begun. Ferris sat on the couch, his head in his hands, while they gathered the evidence. The ops chief from the station who was acting as his deputy sat down beside him. He was older than Ferris, and had sometimes been prickly in the past, but not now.
“This is your girlfriend, right? What can I do? Just tell me. No rule book on this one.”
“I don’t know,” answered Ferris. “I’m scared something really bad has happened.”
“Can you talk about it?”
“Not now. It’s too complicated. There’s too much you don’t know, that nobody knows. But I think she’s been kidnapped.”
“Hoffman wants to talk to you. I called him right after I heard from you. He wants you to call him ASAP on a secure line.”
Ferris shook his head. “Not yet. I have to think.”
“Whatever, man. He’ll be pissed.” The deputy put his hand on Ferris’s shoulder. He was going to say more, then stopped himself. Ferris was right. There was too much he didn’t know.
Hani Salaam arrived a few minutes later with a technical team from the GID. They secured the scene, put on their plastic gloves and went to work. The radios crackled with calls for additional help. From what Ferris could hear, they were already setting up roadblocks and checkpoints, to stop any cars that might be carrying Alice. Out the window, Ferris could see men in the dark blue uniforms of the Jordanian special forces.
Hani walked toward Ferris, who was at the far end of the salon, back among the mirrors and rosewood. The Jordanian kissed the young American on both cheeks. Ferris could see the concern in the Jordanian man’s face, and for the first time, he let himself go a bit. His eyes filled with tears and he put his head on Hani’s shoulder, the way he might have on his own father’s, and Hani patted his back gently, the way you might do with a child. “It will be all right,” he said several times.
Ferris was silent for long while, eyes closed, trying to think what to do. When he opened his eyes again, he asked Hani to come with him to the bedroom, where they could talk. His deputy and the FBI man made to follow, but Ferris waved them off. He closed the door and retreated deep into the bedroom. He reached for the phone at Alice’s bedside and detached the handset from the base, and then unplugged the phone itself from the wall. Nobody should overhear what he was about to say. He sat down on the bed and motioned for Hani to sit next to him.
“I need help,” Ferris said, his voice shaking slightly. “Will you help me? I need to know that before we talk.”
The Jordanian nodded. He was dressed in his usual elegant way, but his manner was grave.
“I think I know what happened,” said Ferris. “I’m scared.”
“Tell me. We can find her, if you help us.”
“I think Al Qaeda has her. They kidnapped her.”
Hani shook his head benignly. “Why would they do that? She’s a social worker, your girlfriend. She works with Palestinian children. Isn’t that right? Why would anyone want her?”
Ferris was entering forbidden territory. He should call Hoffman first and figure out a game plan. But as Ferris considered the CIA’s rules and requirements, he tapped a well of self-disgust. That was the thought process that had put Alice in jeopardy. He needed to talk to Hani now and get him mobilized before it was too late.
“Listen to me, and please try to forget about the parts that don’t help Alice. Be my friend, please. Can you do that?”
“Of course, my dear.
I have always been your friend. Even when you were not mine.”
“Okay. The reason they grabbed Alice is that she knows a man we have been working with. He’s the Jordanian architect we talked about, Omar Sadiki.”
Hani’s eyes widened. “She knows him? The Sadiki who is a suspect in the Incirlik bombing? But how have you been working with him? How can that be, my dear? Are you telling me he was your agent?”
“Don’t ask. Not now. But I’m certain that when Sadiki went missing New Year’s Day, it wasn’t an escape. The Al Qaeda network must have grabbed him, to find out what he knows. They will be pumping him for any connections he has with the United States. They won’t see our hand—it’s pretty well hidden. But they will find out that he was friendly with Alice Melville. She met him often through her charity.”
“Oh dear,” he said abruptly, “I am sorry.” It was the worst thing he could have said, for it confirmed Ferris’s sense of the extreme danger that surrounded Alice. The Jordanian said nothing for a moment, then spoke again.
“Does she work for you, this Alice? Is she under nonofficial cover?”
“God no. She hates the CIA. She works for that NGO, trying to help people. That’s not her cover. It’s real. She’s exactly what she looks like.”
“But someone might think she was working for the agency?”
Ferris stared at Hani. “Yes.”
“They might think that, because she knows this fellow Sadiki. And because she knows you.”
“Yes.” Ferris’s voice was barely audible, smothered in the bitterness of his regret.
“And now you need to find her quickly. Before they use any unusual methods to gather information from her.”
Ferris was shaken by those words, “unusual methods.” He reached for the Jordanian’s hand. “Please, Hani. Please help me. I can’t get her out without your help.”
Body of Lies Page 27