Body of Lies (19 page)

"We're driving them into our trap," said Hoffman, picking up the narrative. "We own the communications space. When we disrupt these guys, it's partly to make them nervous and push them into circuits we can track. Let's say we arrest a bunch of guys in London, or Uzbekistan, or Bumfuck, Indiana. What do you suppose we're after?"

"Interrogate them," said Ferris. "Send them to Gitmo. Send them to Hani. Whatever."

"Well, sure, interrogation," said Hoffman. "That helps. But that's not the real pop. Even if the guy we capture doesn't say shit, the bad guys have to assume he has blabbed. So they'll have to change their cell-phone numbers, and their Internet addresses, and even their hardware, and get new stuff. And sooner or later they're going to call someone on our watch list--even if it's a kebab place in Karachi. And then, blam, we've registered whatever new communications device they're using. They just have to touch one hot wire and the whole circuit lights up. Or we force them to change locations. And you know what? Movement is
dangerous.
We may be stupid, but we're not so utterly stupid that we can't monitor every airplane, bus and train that crosses a national border."

"But you haven't got Suleiman," Ferris cut in. "So Suleiman is different, obviously. These techniques you and Sami are describing that worked so well on other people haven't worked with him. He's still maintaining radio silence. That's why we need something new."

"Amen, brother," said Hoffman. "Now we have reached ground zero. But you already know the answer."

"
Taqiyya
," said Ferris.

"Just so. When you said it the other day, it was like, bing, a light went on. Just like you said: We have to make Suleiman think we have done the thing we in fact have been unable to do, which is to get inside his net. And then we can play with his mind. Jealousy. Vanity. Pride. Those basic emotions will crack Suleiman open like a fat oyster. We will introduce information into his sphere that is so upsetting, so confusing, so threatening that he must find out what it's about. And at that point, he must contact others.
Must.
And then he is observable. Quantifiable. Destructible."

T
HEY BROKE FOR
coffee. A message had come in for Hoffman from the director, urgently asking him to call about Frankfurt, so he excused himself and went into his office, adjacent to Azhar's, and closed the door. Ferris took advantage of the break to ask Azhar if he could see the operations room.

"I'll give you the tour," said Azhar, "but you have to understand that a lot of what we do here is to build illusions. We are backstopping a magic show. This room is the back office for the Al Qaeda Shopping Mall, which we have created to satisfy the needs of members of the underground--so that they lower their guard, unwittingly, and do their business through us. Let's start with the travel agency."

Azhar walked Ferris to a cluster at the far end of the room. At the desks sat a group of three young recruits, none of them more than thirty. From their pasty faces, it looked as if they hadn't been aboveground in months. To Ferris, they had the look of the super-nerds who had won all the science fairs back at George Marshall High School. Azhar turned to the oldest of them, a woman with a bad complexion and gel in her hair that made it spike like a punk rocker's.

"Adrienne, explain to our visitor what you're doing here. I told him you guys were the travel department."

"Well...okay." She looked distressed at the prospect of revealing anything to a new guy, but Azhar gave her a little wave of his hand. "So, like, the people in Al Qaeda have to travel, right? But they know we can monitor anything that has a computerized record. So they're looking for untraceable ways to make reservations. And we've, like, put ourselves in that business."

"Show him an example," said Azhar. Adrienne walked Ferris toward the next computer pod, where a young brown-skinned man was furiously typing.

"Right, so this is Hanif. He oversees our cutout in Karachi, whose real name we don't know, but we call him Ozzy. Like Ozzy Osbourne. Don't ask me why. Anyway, our man Ozzy in Karachi specializes in untraceable travel. He's very good. He went to a madrassa, he has good family connections in the Kashmiri underground. If you're a jihadi and you want to make a plane reservation to fly from Karachi to London under a phony name and passport, he's your guy. He'll handle all the arrangements. Cheap, too. People in the underground tell their friends. They love Ozzy. But the thing is, see, we look at all the bookings, so we can match up the travelers with people on our watch lists. Ozzy's place is set up with digital cameras, so we can monitor in real time everybody who comes into the shop and match faces with people we're interested in. Show him, Hanif."

The young Pakistani-American toggled a switch on his computer, and they were instantly watching an Internet feed from a hidden camera in the bucket shop in Karachi. A swarthy man with a pock-marked face loomed into view, badgering the clerk about a ticket for Morocco.

"We'll find out who that is," said Adrienne. "We'll sell him the ticket, let him travel, watch where he goes. Maybe we'll grab his cell phone when he's not looking and copy the SIM card, so we know who he's been calling. We are so
bad.
"

Hanif and the other kids clustered around began laughing, and so did Ferris. This was a level of the game he had always hoped the CIA could play but suspected was beyond its reach.

Azhar led him to another cluster of desks, which he described as the banking section. Here again, it was the same basic mission. Members of the terrorist underground needed to move money around the world clandestinely. America and its allies had shut down all the easy ways--they had pressured the banks and the Islamic charities and even the
hawala
money changers. That made it harder for jihadists to move money from one cell to another, and they needed skilled people. To satisfy this demand, Azhar and his bizarre gang had created their own supply. Using a handful of people Hoffman and Azhar had strung together, they had created a chain of people who could move money covertly. Often, they didn't know about their agency contact. But all the information they collected came flowing into Azhar's databases.

"You have to think the way they do," explained Azhar. "That's my advantage. I grew up with them. I know how they think, what they need, how they move. And then, once I understand what they need, I figure out a way to provide it--airplane tickets, passports, money transfers, secret hideaways in strange cities, cell phones, computers. They never see my face. But I am there to serve them, every day, twenty-four/seven. That's my business plan."

The Egyptian gestured to his banks of computers and the hopeful young faces studying the screens--looking for ways to understand and deceive the enemy. Ferris had read about Bletchley Park--the collection of geeks, queers and other social misfits who had cracked the Nazi codes and allowed Britain to survive and win the Second World War. Hoffman and Azhar had created something equivalent--a system that would tag the cells of Al Qaeda and watch them as they moved through the bloodstream. It was brilliant, except for one thing. It hadn't forced Suleiman to the surface. Ferris had given him a name, and now he would have the job of luring him into the open.

15

LANGLEY

H
OFFMAN WAS BACK IN
Sami Azhar's office, wearily rubbing his eyes, when they returned from the tour of Mincemeat Park. "This is what happens when people think they're losing a war," Hoffman said, shaking his head. "Everyone starts screaming, 'Off with his head.'" He didn't explain, but Ferris could guess: The director had just chewed him out for the lack of progress on Frankfurt, but that was because the president had just chewed out the director, and the news media had just hounded the president. People didn't like being frightened. They wouldn't put up with it for very long. They wanted to fight back, and they felt powerless when intelligence officers couldn't find the enemy. All the shit seemed to be falling on Hoffman for the simple reason that he was the only person in the government who had a clue what to do. Some people tighten up under that kind of pressure, but it seemed to make Hoffman looser.

"The director is having a fit," said Hoffman. "The White House just ordered him to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee tomorrow on Milan and Frankfurt. 'Intelligence failures.' He told me to write his testimony. I could sympathize with him, really I could, if he wasn't so stupid."

"'A great empire and little minds go ill together,'" said Azhar. "That was the observation of Edmund Burke, I believe."

"Cut the crap, amigos. They want me back in the building soon, so we need to finish up. Okay, Roger, this is Taqiyya 101. We've been working stuff up the past few days to complement your man who never was, Mr. Harry Meeker. Your idea, with the blanks filled in by me and Sami. I think we've got something that will dig the knife in very deep." He motioned to Azhar to restart his computer.

"Okay, Sami, put up the Sadiki slide." Azhar clicked his mouse and a new image came up on the screen. It was a photograph of an Arab man in his late thirties, dressed in a business suit. He had a well-trimmed beard and the look of a man who took fasting and prayer seriously.

"This is Omar Sadiki. He's a Jordanian architect from Ma'an in the south, a very religious and conservative city. He lives now in Amman, where he works for a firm that specializes in Islamic design. He's a good Muslim, active in a bunch of charities the Saudis sponsor. For the past decade, he has traveled regularly to Zarqa, north of the capital, to attend Friday prayers. Several members of his Koran study group have disappeared, and we think they joined the underground. We think Omar himself was approached about going to Afghanistan when he was a kid, but he decided to stay in Jordan and study architecture. This is why people at the mosque trust him. Because he's not knocking on anyone's door, not pushing. Some people in Zarqa think he is already a member of Al Qaeda, but he isn't. He's just a smart, tough, religious guy."

"Stop!" Ferris help up his hand. "I don't want to sound petty, but how do you know so much about someone on my territory? Omar Sadiki, whoever he is, is not one of my agents. I've never heard of him. Did you find out about him from Hani? Are you running a parallel station? What the hell is going on?"

"Jesus, don't be so turfy," said Hoffman. "Hani is clueless about Sadiki. I'm not making the mistake of bringing him into anything again. Sadiki is one of the good Dr. Azhar's projects. He was thinking of using him as a front for a Muslim architecture and construction ruse--so we could build Al Qaeda's offices for them, in addition to making their travel arrangements and doing their banking."

"Fine. But how did you guys spot him?"

"Well, let's just say that Sami knows his family."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning that his brother is on my payroll," broke in Azhar. "He works in Dhahran, for UBS, and he's doing a little business on the side. He doesn't realize it's for us. It's what I believe you call a 'false flag.' Saudi investors in my old hedge fund began coming to him, and they brought their friends. Now many people are using him to launder money. That's how I am building out the little counter-network I was just showing you, using friends of friends and cousins of cousins. The gentleman in Saudi Arabia told us about his pious Muslim brother in Jordan, and there we are."

Ferris studied the photo on the screen, and then smiled and shook his head. He saw it, in a flash, just as Hoffman had.

"Got it," said Ferris. "He's part of my
taqiyya.
We're going to pretend he's our guy, even though he isn't. Are we on the same page?"

"Yes, indeed." Hoffman reached over and patted Ferris's cheek. "Honestly, I love this shit. I mean, it's so totally off the wall, it might just work."

"It will work, if we do it right," said Ferris, his mind spinning. "We make it appear that Omar Sadiki is part of the enemy's network. We move him around, send him on missions, burnish his legend. We make other people worry about him. Maybe we make it look like Sadiki is horning in on Suleiman's territory. Maybe we make him a car bomber, too--a freelancer, competing with the master. We make Suleiman jealous. We make him nervous."

"We make him
crazy
!" said Hoffman. "We make Sadiki seem like such a player that the big man
has
to find out what he's up to. It's driving him nuts. He's wondering if he's been cut out of the action, or if we've turned his network, or what the fuck? How can he not know about this Omar Sadiki? And then Suleiman surfaces. He contacts his people. He has to. He thinks he's been penetrated. He doesn't know what's going on. He's acting weird, Suleiman is. His people are starting to wonder about him. Maybe
he's
the mole. And then, pow! We drop the ringer. The proof that Suleiman is a rat."

"Harry Meeker?"

"Just so. And then we've got him. Sami, next slide."

The screen displayed a building facade in downtown Amman. It was white stone, like everything else in the city. There was a neat sign out front that said in English and Arabic, "Al Fajr Architects," over a corporate logo that showed a rising sun.

"This is where Omar works," said Hoffman. "His company does a lot of business in the Gulf. We have the address and phone number for you." Another slide appeared. "And here is a picture of Omar's brother, Sami's friend who works for UBS in Dhahran. I don't think you'll ever need to meet him, but here's what he looks like, in case you get in trouble and we have to bust his balls."

"Let's do it," said Ferris.

"Work with Sami. He has pulled together some basics. He has you working for a bank that wants to hire Sadiki to design a new branch in the UAE. When you get back to Jordan, you'll have to put together the other parts of the operation, but Sami can help you with the starter kit."

"You keep saying 'when you get back to Jordan.' How do you know that Hani will let me back in? He was seriously pissed when I left. He said he never wanted to talk to me again."