The French officer offered a diplomatic car and a driver for the return trip to Beirut, and Ferris happily accepted. It was over. He had only one purpose now, and that was to find Alice.
THE VIDEO ran on Al Jazeera twenty-four hours later. The announcer called it “a traitor’s confession.” It was like watching a public hanging. It might be appalling, but you couldn’t take your eyes off it.
By the time the video ran, Ferris was back in Hani’s care and protection. He didn’t even bother to watch. He let Suleiman’s “confession” do its work—let the shame and recrimination reverberate through the Muslim world, let the denials and countercharges percolate, let the spokesmen rant or gloat or simply duck for cover. It wasn’t a story that would take days or weeks. It would require years before the network recovered from this toxin. For if the movement could not trust Suleiman, the sublime architect of the jihad, then it could not trust anything.
37
THE FIRST DAYS WERE AWKWARD. Neither of them wanted to say too much, for fear that would set loose a cascade of raw emotion that would destroy any chance of happiness. They were careful with each other, like a couple who have the good sense not to probe about past loves. Ferris had promised he would unravel all the lies and live only the truth, but that wasn’t so easy. His was a life in which nearly everything turned out to be lies. It was more a question of starting over than of rewriting what had gone before, and Alice seemed to understand that. And there were secrets she had kept, as well—mysteries of her life in Jordan that she could not have explained fully to Ferris, or even to herself.
They met back at the hospital in Tripoli, where Alice had remained during Ferris’s absence. When she first walked into the sunroom, Ferris wept. He hadn’t meant to, but he couldn’t help himself. He tried to tell Alice what had happened and then gave up, and she just held him close. She saw the bruises across his face and neck; she moved to take the bandaged hand in hers, but she realized with a start that he was missing a finger, and she could imagine the rest. Ferris didn’t bother to tell her about his final struggle in Damascus. That could come later, if at all.
Hani gave them a car and driver, and they walked out the door of the hospital into the radiant winter sunshine of northern Lebanon. There was snow on the mountain behind them, and the purest blue in the sparkling waters. The purity of sun and sea seemed to take away some of the stain in the moment they set foot outdoors. Ferris went to the mosque in Tripoli where, according to Hani, his great-grandfather had been a sheik. He wanted to see it. He showed Alice the stone house where his grandfather had been born, and she just smiled, as if she, too, had always known he was a Muslim.
They drove south that afternoon along the coast to the tarnished emerald of Beirut. Hani had reserved a suite for them in the Phoenicia, overlooking the curve of the harbor and the snow of the mountain beyond. Alice hung out the “Do Not Disturb” sign and they undressed each other slowly, Alice being very careful of his wounds. She led him to bed, and they didn’t make love for a long while; just touched and remembered and let love and desire return. He waited for her; it wasn’t for him to initiate, now, but for her to take him. And she did.
They stayed in bed that night and all the next day, ordering up meals from room service and sitting out on the porch of their suite that looked onto the sea. They had infinite time now, nowhere to be, no lies to tell. Ferris was half asleep that afternoon when he heard Alice singing him a lullaby. She stopped when he awoke, and then started again, stroking the wiry black hair atop his head. Ferris let his mind amble back in time. He had lived the story backward, in a sense, but did he understand it forward? He thought so.
“You were part of it,” he said.
“At the end, yes.” She had stopped singing, but she kept stroking his hair. “I had been to Syria before. I knew what I was doing.”
“For Hani?”
“Yes. He helped me stay in Jordan, so I helped him sometimes. But this last time, I did it for you. He said that you would be safe. And that otherwise you would never be free.”
“Is there anything you need to tell me?”
She thought a long while. “No,” she said. She touched his face and smiled, and after a time she fell asleep beside him.
THEY FLEW back to Amman in Hani’s private jet. Hoffman was waiting, and though he may have been angry, he didn’t show it. He was taking credit for everything, just as Hani had predicted, even the video on Al Jazeera. Hoffman wanted a full debriefing, and Ferris gave it to him. He left out nothing, and the story took nearly three hours in the bubble, start to finish.
“I want to resign from the agency,” Ferris said when he had finished the story. Hoffman didn’t try to talk him out of it. He mumbled something about how he understood entirely. Obviously he was relieved. Ferris was the only American who knew all the facts. In that respect, he was the last person Hoffman would have wanted to see at the CIA.
Hoffman offered Ferris a generous farewell package, not quite a golden handshake but at least silver-plated. There would be lifetime disability payments, plus a special early retirement deal because he had been wounded on duty, plus a special award from the director’s unvouchered “Performance Fund,” plus accumulated back pay for all the vacation hours Ferris had never used, and overtime and hazardous-duty pay he hadn’t collected. It wasn’t a fortune, but it was handsome. Hoffman said they wanted to give Ferris a medal, in secret, and asked if he would come back to Headquarters so the director could present it. But Ferris said no, they could keep the medal for him in a lockbox, next to the one from Iraq.
ROGER FARES and Alice Melville were married in Amman that June. He had disguised his appearance a bit, let his hair grow and worn a beard. Alice said he looked even handsomer. It was a simple ceremony. Ferris hadn’t become a Muslim, but there was a Sunni sheik at the wedding, along with the Episcopal priest who said the vows. Alice’s family flew out, along with Ferris’s mother. He wasn’t going to have a best man and then decided to ask Hani, who exulted in this confirmation that he had been forgiven for his manipulation. After the wedding, Alice continued her work with Palestinian refugee children. Ferris joined her, and the people in the camps were happy to have him. He spoke their language, and he listened to what they said. They worked happily through the fall, settling into Alice’s apartment in the old quarter and teaching each other to cook.
One day in September, just over a year after they had met, they had a visit from Hani. He asked at first to talk to Ferris alone, but Ferris refused a private conversation, saying that was all over. So Hani told them both: He’d had an inquiry from a British journalist from the Sunday Times about a shoot-out in Aleppo involving a recently retired American diplomat based in Amman named Roger Ferris. Hani said he could turn the story off—he had enough friends in London, and in Beirut, Paris and Tel Aviv, too, for that matter, if that’s where the leak had begun. But the word was out. That meant Ferris and Alice were no longer safe in Amman. Hani would protect them, but he wanted them to know.
They moved in early October to another city in the Arab world, where there was a relief agency that needed volunteers. They didn’t tell even their friends where they were going. Before they left Amman, Alice learned that she was pregnant. The child was born in the Arab world, and in that sense, Roger and Alice had gone into the land itself, been penetrated by it, bled into its veins. They could not escape the enchanting, afflicted culture that had drawn them into its arms, and they did not want to. So they lived.
Body of Lies Page 34