“And this is no trick?” It was a cruel question, but given what had happened months before, not an unreasonable one. At some level, Hani was still angry. Ferris sat on the bed, his head in his hands again, the picture of powerlessness and remorse.
“Forgive me, Roger. I am sorry I said that.” He put his arm around Ferris’s shoulder. “Of course I will help. We have a few deep contacts in the Al Qaeda network we can reach on short notice. We use them only in emergencies, but this is an emergency. They can tell me if she has been taken. I am sure of that. Whether they will know where she is, I cannot say. But let me go now and talk to my men, and begin.”
He pulled Ferris to his feet. “Come on. Stand up. God is testing you. He has the power, and you are his slave. Abd-Allah. The slave of God. That is what we say. You cannot escape your fate. You must only have trust and faith. So come out with me and talk to my team. We will get started now. You must be strong. If people see that you are weak, they will only be more frightened.”
Ferris rose from the bed, went to the bathroom and washed his face, and then walked back to the group that was gathered in the salon.
31
AMMAN / WASHINGTON
THE WIND ROSE OVERNIGHT and the dust storm grew worse. It was a hot wind, blowing in from Saudi Arabia and the Sinai, carrying the Arabian sands in a vast cloud that stretched hundreds of miles. Traffic in Amman slowed to a crawl that evening. Cars put on their blinkers, but even then they were barely visible until you were on top of them. The traffic backed up on the main streets and traffic circles, and the ghostly fleet of motionless automobiles looked like freighters at anchor in a deep fog. The few pedestrians out on the streets wrapped their heads in checkered kaffiyehs and leaned against the wind; all you could see of their faces were the eyes through the narrow openings of the scarves. Nothing could fly, nothing could move. It was kidnappers’ weather, a gritty, red-brown world in which you could hide almost anything.
Ferris stayed up most of the night at the embassy, waiting for information. He called Hoffman on the secure phone that evening, when he finally left Alice’s apartment. Hoffman was angry at first because of the delay, but when he realized how upset Ferris was, he backed off. He didn’t try to apologize. He said the agency had mobilized every asset to try to locate Alice Melville. The trick was to conduct the search in a way that didn’t reinforce her captors’ belief that she was, as he put it, “a person of interest.”
“We’ll find her,” Hoffman said. He was trying to sound hopeful, but for some reason, his words sank Ferris to a deeper level of despair. He had to put the phone aside for a moment as Hoffman called out, “Hello, are you there?” When Ferris came back on the line, Hoffman told him to get some sleep. Ferris said he would, but he knew that if he lay down on the couch in his office, all he would see were images of Alice: bound and gagged in the trunk of a car, or in a dank basement. Or worse, images of her being interrogated—of an arm being twisted to the breaking point and then snapping.
“You should have told me about Alice, buddy. The fact that she knew Sadiki, I mean. We could have put her on ice for a while.”
Ferris didn’t answer. He knew it was a lie. Hoffman wouldn’t have done anything. He was just covering himself now, after the fact. Ferris’s voice was shaky; he was having trouble holding on.
“Now listen to me,” said Hoffman. “The most important thing is to let all the normal things happen. The embassy needs to announce that your Alice has been taken. Someone needs to call this outfit she works for, the Near East whatever, and have them issue an appeal. And the person who calls them shouldn’t be you, for chrissake. Get the embassy PAO to do it. He should contact the Jordanian papers and give them a handout about Alice. Her boss at this center should call the Arab papers, too, and Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, and tell them people have kidnapped a woman who spends all her time helping Arabs. That’s what’s going to get her freed, okay? The truth. The CIA doesn’t have a goddamn thing to do with her. I’ve talked to the State Department, and the ambassador is going to contact prominent Palestinians and see if we can open up some private channels. He’ll say we won’t pay to get her released, but obviously we will. Everybody knows that. So sit tight.”
All Ferris could do was mumble his assent. He was glad in that moment that Hoffman in his cold-blooded way knew what to do. The announcements were made; the quiet calls went out. By the next morning, Alice’s kidnapping was front-page news in every paper in Jordan and America. Most of the stories quoted Alice’s boss, the director of the Council for Near East Relief, saying that Alice Melville was “the best friend the Arab people could have” and that her kidnapping was “a terrible mistake.” An Agence France-Presse story was the first to mention that Alice Melville had a boyfriend who worked as a political officer at the U.S. Embassy. The AFP story quoted an unnamed “Western diplomat,” who had to be from the French Embassy, speculating that Melville’s relationship with the unnamed American diplomat might be a factor in her kidnapping.
HANI’S MEN from the GID were efficient and, under the circumstances, relatively quick. They matched the blood on the kitchen floor against strands of hair on Alice’s brush. The lab technicians at King Hussein Hospital stayed up late and they eventually reported a DNA match: The blood was Alice’s. They found lots of prints in the apartment, but most of them turned out to belong to Roger Ferris. They had hoped to find prints in the kitchen, where Alice had evidently been seized, but there weren’t any good ones, and the FBI agent said the people who had abducted Alice had probably worn gloves. There were several of them; they had ascertained that from footprints on the floor. The kidnappers had picked the locks downstairs and at the apartment door carefully, with minimum damage. They were skillful professionals, rather than amateur bunglers. Ferris didn’t know whether that made it better or worse for Alice.
Hani came to see Ferris at the embassy the next morning. That was unusual; normally the pasha insisted that people come to him. But this was different. They met in a secure conference room the station used for meeting with GID liaison officers. Ferris had a ruined look; the skin of his face, usually taut and tan, was sallow and baggy. The circles under his eyes looked as if they had been drawn with charcoal. He was an image of stress and suffering. These were no longer the same eyes that had once danced with curiosity. Now they had looked to the bottom of the well.
The GID chief embraced Ferris, kissed him three times on the cheeks and then once on the forehead. He could see that the younger man was in pain, and that there was no way to relieve it until Alice was found. Hani tried to stall, out of a habitual politeness, or maybe his fondness for Ferris, but the American took his hand imploringly. He was under Hani’s protection now.
“Tell me what you’ve heard, no matter how bad.”
“We reached one of our contacts in the network. He is in Syria, but he knows about operations in Jordan.”
“What did your source say?” A note of hope crept into Ferris’s voice. He didn’t intend it, but he could not stop himself from wanting to hear good news.
“He said it is true. An American woman was seized in Amman. It is just as you said. They have been watching her for some time. They wanted to understand her connection with Omar Sadiki. They do not understand Sadiki. It is very important for them. They took her yesterday morning and moved her quickly out of the city. They put her in the trunk of a car. It is a very high-level operation. Whoever wants this information about her must be very senior. That is good news.”
“Why?” Ferris looked at him desperately.
“Because the big ones will be more careful than the little ones. They are not thugs. They want information. They will not hurt her for no reason. So ease your cares a little, my friend. It will be all right.”
Ferris dabbed at his eyes with his sleeve. It embarrassed him to cry. “Where is she?” he asked. “Do you know?”
“I cannot say. Our contact would not answer that. I don’t think he knows. When we pressed him, he said he thought she w
as in Syria. I suspect she was taken across the border last night during the dust storm. They would not keep her in Jordan. It would be too dangerous. I think they have taken her to Syria, to talk to her.”
“And then what will they do?”
Hani leaned toward the American. He spoke quietly, soothingly. “They will release her. When they realize she can’t give them the information they want, they will let her go and try to get it some other way. They are killers, these people, but they are not stupid. That is one thing we have learned.”
“What can I do?” asked Ferris. It was his powerlessness that weighed most on him. He felt the same way a parent would feel toward a child who is in mortal danger: Let it be me, not her. Take me. Let me suffer. Why should an innocent person suffer for something she would have despised, if she had known about it?
Hani looked at him with knowing eyes. He wanted to be reassuring, but he could not be. “There is nothing you can do, my dear. Except wait.”
THE CIA STATION chief in Vienna called it “Suleiman’s Nokia.” It was the cell phone the Austrian police had seized, after the NSA had picked up the voice of the Syrian master planner following the uproar over Harry Meeker in Pakistan. The head of Austrian intelligence had turned it over to the station chief, who had sent it back to Langley on the first plane out. Hoffman’s technicians had examined it in minute detail, but they had failed to find anything useful. The SIM card, it turned out, had been used to make only the one call they had been able to trace. But Hoffman plugged the phone into a charger to keep it alive, just in case.
On January 4, “Suleiman’s Nokia” rang, just once. It wasn’t a person calling, but a text message. When Hoffman read it on the display, he was dumbfounded, and then worried. It was as if a plumbing line had clogged and the sewage was backing up, through the telephone, right into his office. The text message said: “Mr. Ferris, please call Miss Alice, 963-5555-8771.” It was a mobile telephone number in Syria. The NSA and the agency could hunt down the Syrian paperwork about who had purchased the SyriaTel SIM card for that number, but not the caller himself. The phone number was like a onetime pad. It had been used once and then discarded. Hoffman thought for a long while about what to do, and then decided he had no choice, operationally. He called Ferris and read him the message.
32
AMMAN / DAMASCUS
AS HOFFMAN READ THE BRIEF text message, all Ferris could think was that it meant she wasn’t dead. The people holding her knew about her link to Ferris. They wanted to trade her, to release her in the hope they could entice her CIA boyfriend. They realized now that she didn’t know anything, and so they would use her as bait. But to save Alice, someone had to take her place. Ferris had written down the number as Hoffman spoke, and now he stared at it. He was sweating in the winter cold of his office.
“She’s alive,” murmured Ferris.
“Probably she’s alive,” Hoffman cautioned him. “At least, they want you to think she’s alive. That’s the good part.”
“What’s the bad part?”
“Well, they know about you. They know you work for the agency. They’re sending you a message on Suleiman’s phone, which they know we have. So that tells us two things: That the people who have Alice are high up in the network, close to Suleiman. And that they’ve learned enough from ‘Miss Alice’ to know that she’s your pal. Which is to say, they have interrogated her.”
A shiver spiked through Ferris. His mind raced through different scenarios, each darker than the one before.
“I have to call the number,” said Ferris. “I have to talk to her.”
“I agree. You should call the number. At first I thought it would be a bad idea. It’s obviously a trick, to lure you in. But then I decided, so what? We have to play out the hand. But first we have to set things up, okay? We have to have everything in place and ready. This may be our only chance—to get Alice, obviously, and to get a line on Suleiman. This is our best shot. So we want to do it right.”
“What does that mean? Do it right? What I care about is Alice.”
“I know you do. And if I were in your position, that’s all I would care about, too. But there’s so much riding on this. You may not realize it right now—and I understand that, really—but our little operation is actually working. They’re confused; they don’t know what’s going on. That’s why they grabbed Sadiki. That’s why they grabbed Alice. That’s why they sent us this weird message. They don’t know which end is up. We are getting close.”
“I don’t care about that anymore. I just want to save Alice. If we wait, she could get killed.” Ferris waited for Hoffman’s assent, but it didn’t come. “For God’s sake, don’t you understand? I got her into this nightmare.”
“Slow down, Roger. We’ll do anything to save her—except one thing, which is to screw up this operation. I understand that you feel guilty about putting her in harm’s way. And you should feel guilty. You made a mistake not telling me you were involved with a woman who knew Sadiki. That compromised your girlfriend, and all of us. But you aren’t going to make it better by going off half cocked. People’s lives are at stake. Shit, millions of lives. The country is at war. This isn’t just about you and your girlfriend. Are we clear on that?”
Ferris’s head was pounding. He didn’t say anything, and the silence built on the secure phone line until it was almost a voice itself. Ferris was listening, not to Hoffman, but to that other voice. And then it was obvious.
“Yes,” Ferris said. “We’re clear on that. You can count on me.”
“Attaboy. I know how stressful this must be, but it will work out. You’ll get your girlfriend back, and a medal, too.”
“A medal,” Ferris repeated. But he was already somewhere else.
FERRIS TOOK the Syrian mobile telephone number he had written down and put it in his wallet. He told his deputy he was going home to shower and get some rest. Then he left the embassy and drove himself to GID headquarters. He arrived unannounced and told the chief of staff, who came downstairs in a dither, that he needed to see Hani Pasha immediately. He was asked to wait, but only for a few minutes, before he was escorted to Hani’s spacious office.
Hani studied Ferris when he entered the room. Instead of a kiss, there was a handshake, which in the moment was more intimate. “You look terrible, Roger,” he said. “I am very sorry for what has happened to you.”
“Thanks for the concern, but don’t worry about me. I am not the issue. I may be the problem, but I want to be the solution. That’s why I’m here.”
Hani looked at the American curiously, as if assessing his state of mind. “What are you talking about, habibi? You are not making sense today.”
But Ferris knew exactly what he was talking about. It had become obvious to him, in a moment of absolute clarity. The light went on in his head and all the elements there had shifted their coordinates slightly to form a new pattern, one quite different but no less precise.
“Ground rules,” said Ferris. “This conversation did not happen. I am speaking only for myself, not as an employee of the United States government. You will not inform anyone at the agency about my visit or what we discussed. Ever. Agreed?”
“Unusual rules. Perhaps I can agree. But you tell me so little.”
“‘Perhaps’ isn’t good enough. This one has to be ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ What I want to do won’t hurt Jordan, and it probably will help. And you will have the advantage of knowing what I’m doing and using it however you want. I don’t care. But I need your absolute promise that you will protect me.”
Hani tilted his head to one side and lit a cigarette as he pondered the request. He eyed Ferris as if he were measuring him. He took several puffs on the cigarette. The Jordanian seemed almost pleased.
“My dear Roger, I have always said you are one of us. That means you put people before things, and that you put personal honor before anything else. I thought I knew that about you, but until now I could not be sure. So the answer is yes. Of course I will protect the
confidence of this conversation. The room is ours alone. But now you must tell me what you want.”
Ferris drew near Hani. His voice became low. So far as he knew, the agency wasn’t bugging Hani’s office. But then, there were many things he did not know.
“Can you make me disappear? So that nobody will find me—including and especially the U.S. government. And then, can you get me into Syria, so that no one will know?”
“I suppose so. That is not difficult for us. We control this space. But what is it that you want to do?”
“I want to contact the people who have kidnapped Alice Melville. I want to offer myself to them as a trade. They don’t want her. They want me.”
“W’Allah!” Hani opened his palms. “Are you crazy, my friend?”
“No. I just got sane, as a matter of fact. Before, I was crazy.”
“But how will you contact them? They are not in the Yellow Pages, Al Qaeda. They are not so easy to find. Even for me.”
“They contacted us. They sent a message to me, supposedly from Alice, asking me to call a mobile phone in Syria. Hoffman wants me to wait, so he can figure out some game. Some sting that he thinks will trick them. But his games are all bullshit. You know that better than I do. The only ones we’re fooling are ourselves.”
“But this is very dangerous, Roger. You know too many secrets. They will want them. It will be…unpleasant.”
Ferris touched his pocket, and the plastic box that contained the dental bridge and its poison. He had kept it with him for these months, but he had never really imagined he would need it.
“I’ll deal with that. But it’s the only way to get her out. They won’t let her go unless I offer myself in trade. That’s obvious, isn’t it? Hoffman will never let me do that, which means she’s going to die. I have no choice. I have to do this. And I’m going to do it, no matter what you say. But I want you to help me. That way, I’ll have a better chance of saving Alice.”
Body of Lies Page 28