“I would like that very much.” A trace of a smile came across Ferris’s face. He saw the contour of the legend, even though he still didn’t understand who had constructed it or why. “I would like to go home. It has been a long voyage for me, to bring me here.”
“I know. Allah u akhbar. God is the greatest. Thanks for the God.”
“Allah u akhbar,” said Ferris. “La ilaha ill-Allah, Muhammad-urrasool-ullah.” He had just spoken the declaration of faith, the words that make a Muslim a Muslim: There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.
Now it was Suleiman’s turn to smile. He placed his hand over his heart and then leaned toward Ferris and kissed him three times on the cheeks.
“Your information has been very good, Fares. The numbers of our telephones that were on your watch list. The Web sites that were not secure. The games you have played with us, to make us show ourselves. The fact you knew our codes, even the code name I use with my couriers, Raouf. At first many of us thought it was a trick, like all the other CIA tricks. It made no sense. Why would a CIA man give such information to Al Qaeda, except to trick us? But the information was so good. And then when you sent us word that you were really a Muslim and we checked the records of your family, we thought that perhaps it might be true. That was a reason we could understand. What is worse than to be a Muslim in the land of the kufr and the jahil, the unbelievers and the ignorant ones?” He stopped and looked at Ferris, studying him with those black eyes.
“I am alone,” Ferris said. He was going to say more, but he stopped. He still didn’t know what the right answers were, but that much certainly was true: He was alone.
“And then when you said through your intermediary that you wanted to come to us, here, and be part of us, we thought either this man is crazy, or it is true. He is what he says he is. The only test is to meet you and see what you have for us. Then we can know if this gold is real.”
Ferris was quiet. He didn’t want to put a foot wrong, and he thought the silence would work better for him than too much talk. “It is true,” he said at last. “I am what I have told you.”
“Oh yes,” said Suleiman. “I am sure of it.” But Ferris could tell from his voice that the Syrian-born man was in fact far from certain of his bona fides.
Ferris needed more information. He was still feeling his way in the dark. It was obvious that the pleasantries were ending and the real interrogation would begin soon. He tried to think how he could learn more without giving himself away. He needed to know how Suleiman’s version of reality had been assembled. Now Ferris was only guessing. He needed to know more.
“I am glad that you listened to my intermediary,” said Ferris. “That was an important part of my plan.”
“Oh yes. We trusted Mr. Sadiki. We have known of him for a long time. He is the friend of our friends. And when he began giving us the messages from you, we were interested. And we understood the double game you had to play, so that your meetings with Hajj Omar would not be suspicious. Oh yes.”
“And the bombing in Incirlik?” asked Ferris, still probing to see how much Suleiman knew.
“That was very good. The fake bombing. And making everyone think Hajj Omar had done that, to cover your tracks. Very good. It took us some days to understand that.” His eyes narrowed down to slits, and his lips formed a thin, dubious smile. “I mean, I think that we understand. But we will find out later, yes? You are a friend, Fares. You are part of the umma, the Dar al Islam. You will help us.”
Ferris sat back in his chair. He saw more pieces now. Someone had been giving Sadiki messages to pass to the Al Qaeda network after each of his meetings with Ferris. They had created the appearance that Ferris was using Sadiki as a secret channel to Al Qaeda—which was right, in a sense, but someone had turned it inside out. And it was obvious now that Omar Sadiki hadn’t been kidnapped by Al Qaeda, as Ferris had believed, but by whoever was pulling the strings in this puppet show. But if Sadiki had never been kidnapped, why had they taken Alice? It was still too complicated for Ferris to understand. All he knew was that Alice was free. He came back to that centerline. She was alive. That was all that really mattered.
“Thank you for letting Alice Melville go,” said Ferris. The words tumbled from his mouth. It was the one emotion that was not contrived, the only element of this puzzle he thought he understood. “She is not a Muslim, but I love her very much.”
Suleiman cocked his head suddenly, like an animal that has heard a noise he doesn’t like. “I am sorry. What are you saying? Who is Alice?”
“I am thanking you, that’s all. For letting Alice Melville go free in Hama at the waterwheels. I was very grateful. That’s all.”
Suleiman stretched out his hands toward Ferris, palms up, in a gesture of innocence.
“But Fares, we did not release this person, Alice. How could we? Because we did not take her in the first place. In fact, I do not know who she is. Alice? Now you are worrying me. I wonder if you are playing a trick on me.”
“My God,” said Ferris. It was barely a whisper. He saw it now. It was obvious. There was only one man who knew enough about the CIA’s most secret intelligence to send tantalizing bits of it to Suleiman. There was only one man who knew enough about Omar Sadiki to reprogram him—reverse his polarity so that he appeared to other eyes to be performing an entirely different secret mission. There was only one man who could know enough about Alice Melville to fake her kidnapping as a way of drawing Ferris in. It had to be Ed Hoffman. He had dangled Ferris like a shiny lure, a shimmering reflection in the hall of mirrors. Ferris hated Hoffman now in a way that he had never hated anyone.
“You are confused about something, Fares, and I am asking, why?” Suleiman said. He had been doing some thinking, too, in the moment of silence when the patterns had rearranged themselves in each man’s mind. He moved his chair closer to Ferris and put a hand on his throat—not squeezing hard, but enough to remind Ferris that he had total power over him.
“Let me look in your eyes,” the Syrian continued. “Look at me and tell me that what you say is the truth. This is my lie detector. To put my hand on your throat and look in your eyes. Say it.”
“I am telling the truth,” said Ferris. He tried to deaden his emotions down to nothing. And he almost succeeded. But there was a flutter in his eyelids, not quite a blink, but almost. He was trying too hard, and Suleiman could see that something was wrong.
“I think you lie, Fares. Something in you is false. Is it only a little? Is it everything? I do not know, and that makes me uncomfortable. But it is good that I am here with you, you see? Because soon I will know where the lies are. May God forgive me, but you are not my guest anymore. I am sending you away, in my heart.”
“What am I, then?”
”You are my prisoner.”
Suleiman shouted out a name, and the Egyptian man came running into the room, along with a second man who was wearing a black ski mask. Suleiman told the two in Arabic that it was time to question the CIA man. They would shoot the video for Al Jazeera later, when they knew what story it would tell. Then he stood, leaned over Ferris, spat in his face and walked out of the room.
THEY MADE Ferris sit down in a wooden chair, and across the arms of the chair they attached a big piece of plywood in which holes had been drilled. With thick duct tape and metal wire, they attached Ferris’s arms and legs to the chair, and then they attached his two hands to the plywood, wiring down the fingers separately so that each one was exposed as a distinct target. When they had finished trussing him, the Egyptian brought a big metal hammer and laid it on the table between Ferris’s immobile arms and fingers.
“Welcome to Guantánamo,” he said.
They left Ferris there for twenty minutes. From the talk in the other room, the men seemed to be eating. Ferris felt his fingers throb in anticipation of the pain. Would he use his poison now, if he still had it? The suffering that lay ahead of him was pointless. He had come here to die, in the belief that by doing so he coul
d save Alice. But she had never needed saving, because she had never been Al Qaeda’s prisoner. Someone had tricked him out of his life for nothing. Ferris remembered a scene in a novel by André Malraux he had read in college. Two devout Communist partisans are facing torture, and one, in a beau geste of selfless heroism, decides to give the poison pill he has been hiding to the other man, who is weaker. He gives the capsule to his frail comrade—who drops it and lets it skitter away down a crack in the floor so that it is useless to both of them. For Ferris, that scene had been the measure of a meaningless death, until now.
SULEIMAN ENTERED the room, followed by the Egyptian and the man in the black mask. He sat in a chair across from Ferris, while the other two arrayed themselves on either side. Suleiman had put on a pair of gloves, to give him a better grip on the hammer and to spare his own smooth hands from the blood.
“We are not so good at this,” said Suleiman, hefting the hammer in his gloved hand. “We do not have so many prisoners to practice on, but we learn from you. You teach us. Why do Americans not see, when you torture us, that someday we will use the same torture on you? You must be very stupid, not to know that when you break the rules of war, you will suffer the most. Maybe you lack imagination. I think that is it. You cannot imagine that it could be done to you, so you do not think about doing it to others.”
He raised the metal hammer high, and then brought it down in a splintering crash onto the plywood, just beyond Ferris’s right hand. Ferris screamed, even though the hammer did not hit him. The men on either side laughed, but not their leader.
“A practice swing,” said Suleiman. “So this is what we will do. You have ten fingers. I will ask you ten questions, then ten more, then ten more. Each time you do not tell the truth, I will break one of your fingers. When we are done with the fingers, then we will start on your legs, and your eyes, and your tongue, and your teeth. When the hammer breaks from too much pounding, we will get another one.”
“And if I tell the truth?” asked Ferris.
“But you are a liar,” snorted Suleiman. He raised the hammer, held it poised in the air for a moment and then brought it down with hideous force on the little finger of Ferris’s right hand. It hit at the middle joint, crushing the bone and skin almost flat against the wood. The pain was so searing that Ferris tore at his bonds in agony. But the only release was his scream.
“Too loud,” said Suleiman. “Someone will hear.” He turned and looked up to the Egyptian. He walked to the window and pulled back the thick curtain. “Who found this house? There are people in this neighborhood. I can see them, right there, out the window. This is a bad place. Before the next finger, you must put a gag on him, so that people will not hear.” The Egyptian nodded.
Ferris was still moaning. He looked at the pancake of flesh that had been his little finger. Both hands would soon be destroyed, never again to hold anything, touch anything, feel anything.
“Shut up, please,” said Suleiman. Ferris’s moaning quieted down to a whimper. “Thank you. Now, I think, we begin. I ask question, you answer question. Each lie and I call my friend Mr. Hammer. Understand?”
Ferris croaked out an assent.
“Okay, first question. Who was the CIA man Harry Meeker? Why was he carrying those documents, please?”
“He didn’t exist,” said Ferris. As he spoke, Suleiman began to raise the hammer and Ferris screamed, “Stop! Please stop. It’s true. Harry Meeker was fake. He was a dead body that we found. We put it together to look like he was a CIA man going to visit an agent in Al Qaeda.”
“But he was carrying a message for me, this Harry Meeker.”
“Yes, but it was fake, too. So that people in Al Qaeda would think you were working with us.”
“W’Allah!” It was a raw, throaty cry of rage. Suleiman’s face reddened, and in a reflex of anger, he raised the hammer again and brought it down on the finger next to the one that had been crushed. It wasn’t as hard a blow; he seemed to pull back at the last moment, realizing that Ferris wasn’t gagged yet. Ferris screamed, as much in fear as in pain. This time, he didn’t stop screaming.
“Gag him,” ordered Suleiman.
The Egyptian grabbed a rag and shoved it in Ferris’s mouth. The man in the black mask was trying to attach a piece of duct tape when suddenly he heard a noise from outside the room and snapped his head around. They all did, and downstairs there was a sudden rip of automatic weapons fire, and all Ferris thought was: Maybe I will die quickly.
IT HAPPENED in one dense moment: The splintering sound of glass breaking, then the crack of an explosion, a sudden burst of light that blinded Ferris, the sounds of doors crashing in, and people shouting, and the fire of more automatic weapons. The room filled with smoke, and they were all gasping and choking. Ferris could hear men storming into the room. A blinded Suleiman was screaming curses and groping his way toward the window, but the men tackled him and the other two captors to the floor. The gunfire continued down below, but after fifteen seconds it stopped. All the guards were dead. The smoke began to clear, and Ferris’s vision slowly came back. He saw Suleiman on the floor, bound and gagged. Men dressed in black uniforms were stuffing him into a large body bag and then carrying him out the door. Other black-clad men were doing the same to the other two, putting them in body bags and dragging them away.
A moment later, when the three Al Qaeda men had been hauled off, someone came for Ferris. He was dressed in ninja black, too, but he appeared to be a medic. He gently cut Ferris’s fingers free from the torture table and then began working on the crushed fingers.
“You will lose the little one,” he said. “Maybe we can save the other.” He spoke English with an Arab accent, Ferris noticed. He had an awful fear that he was going from one hell into another—exchanging captivity in an Al Qaeda safe house for the same thing in a Syrian prison. The medic swabbed Ferris’s arm with an alcohol pad, then jabbed it with a hypodermic needle. After a few moments Ferris drifted into ethereal semiconsciousness, and then he was out.
35
TRIPOLI, LEBANON
FERRIS AWOKE IN AN INSTITUTIONAL bed, crisp white sheets, metal rails like a crib. He didn’t know whether he was in a prison or a hospital. He looked down at his right hand and saw one finger in a splint. The little finger was gone; it had been amputated, evidently. He tried to move, but there was a leather belt tied across his chest as a restraint. He turned his head and saw an elaborate spray of flowers in a vase on his bedside table. He breathed in the fragrance and knew that it could not be a prison if there were flowers in his room.
Ferris had been awake ten minutes or so when a nurse came into the room. She was speaking in Arabic to a colleague standing in the hall. Ferris turned his head and saw, through the open door, that she had been talking to a dark soldier who was guarding his door; he knew then that wherever he was, he must still be in the Arab world. When she saw that he was awake, she removed the leather restraint from his chest and propped him up in bed. The nurse asked him if he was comfortable, and Ferris answered yes. She checked the dressing on the splintered finger, and the one on the stump, and said that he was healing well.
“Someone would like to see you, if you feel that you are well enough,” she said. She helped Ferris to stand. Though he was weak from his ordeal, Ferris was able to walk about the room. The nurse handed Ferris some clothes. As he looked at them, he realized that they were his own, taken from the bedroom closet of his apartment in Amman. That was interesting, but he had no idea what it meant.
“Where am I?” Ferris asked.
“You are in Tripoli, sir,” said the nurse. “In Lebanon.”
Was he dreaming? The nurse told him to put on his clothes and said she would be back in five minutes to take him to see his visitor. She returned, as promised, and led Ferris down a long hall to a big oak door. She knocked once and called out, “Ya, Pasha.” A voice answered in Arabic, and she pushed the door open.
HANI SALAAM was waiting for him in one of two big easy chairs at the f
ar end of the room. He was smoking a cigar, and had on his face a look of immense satisfaction. Indeed, gazing at him, Ferris was not sure he had ever seen a man more content. The play was over. Before him was the Arab Prospero who had ordered up the sea and sky and wind, who had set the cast of players in motion, created monsters and fantasies—whose unseen hand had directed every instant of the drama that others imagined they were directing, who had turned white into black into white.
“My dear Roger,” he said, rising and embracing Ferris. “You look quite satisfactory, considering what you have been through. Would you like a cigar? Please. You must have a cigar. You are a hero. You have saved more lives than you can imagine, perhaps more than we will ever know.”
Ferris looked at Hani. For all the anger he was feeling, he could not help but smile as he watched the pasha: His moustache was finely trimmed. His hair was newly cut and freshly dyed, so that it had the sheen of a movie star’s hair. He was wearing a new sport coat, blue cashmere with a thin yellow stripe, and he had on a gleaming new pair of shoes.
“Yes, I’ll have a cigar,” said Ferris. Hani handed him a Romeo y Julieta, in the long, fat size known as a Churchill. As Ferris put it to his lips, Hani lit a long-tipped match and held the flame to the end, so that it pulsed red-hot with each breath that Ferris drew.
Ferris puffed on his cigar and put his feet up on a padded stool that stood between them.
“You owe me a finger,” he said.
“Yes, I do. That and a great deal more. But we will make it up to you, I assure you. I feel about you as if you were my own son. I always have. That has made this most painful for me, the necessity to deceive you. But as you Americans like to say, it was in a good cause. I console myself with that. But it will not bring back your lost finger. I am very sorry for that. I thought my men could get there in time. I did not think the interrogation would begin so soon. Not for the ‘defector.’ But as soon as we heard you cry out, we moved in.”
Body of Lies Page 31