Body of Lies (20 page)

"He's calmed down. He informed the embassy yesterday that you are still welcome as liaison to the GID. Actually, he said that you
alone
would be welcome--if we try to send someone else, no dice. He says it's too much trouble breaking in a rookie. Besides, he likes you. He's basically demanding that you come back. From a Mincemeat Park standpoint, it would be easier to run you as a singleton, undeclared to anyone. But we can't afford to fuck with Hani any more than we already have. So you'll be back in Amman when you aren't on the road. Don't worry about that."

"When do I leave?" Ferris was thinking about Alice and how many new secrets he would be keeping from her.

"Hell, I don't know. Whenever you're ready."

"I'm ready now. I want to get back to Jordan as soon as I can."

"Don't you want to see that wife of yours?"

"Not particularly. I told you back in Amman that we're sort of separated. I told her two days ago I want a divorce."

"Fine. Whatever. None of my business. Everybody else around here seems to fuck up their marriages, why not you? You can leave whenever you want. But I want you to stop on the way and see some folks in Europe."

"And who might they be?"

"Our ninjas in this operation. They're from MacDill. They are sitting in Rome, trying not to blow their covers while they wait for someone to tell them what to do. That's going to be you, with help from Sami. You'll get a kick out of them. They are some crazy fuckers. Much too out-of-control to work with our shop upstairs, which is why I like them so much."

Hoffman stood up suddenly. "I've got to see the director. I can't tell you how much I would prefer to stay here with you thinking of ways to mess with Suleiman's head, but duty calls. And Ferris, remember what Sam Snead said: If you aren't thinking about pussy, you aren't concentrating."

F
ERRIS SPENT THE
rest of that day and most of the next with Sami Azhar, preparing for his trip. He and Azhar worked up a script for the initial contacts with Omar Sadiki. They researched the places in Abu Dhabi where the meetings would take place. They got Support to prepare a disguise that Ferris could wear to his meetings with Sadiki. They began to weave the cloak of false information they would gather around Sadiki--that would make him appear to be part of a network to which he had no real connection. Azhar proved ingenious in tapping lawyers, computer consultants and financial intermediaries who could, in various ways, burnish the legend.

"I am afraid we will need explosives, to make him truly believable as a car bomber," said Azhar.

"Not a problem," answered Ferris. "I'll talk to the ninjas about that in Rome." Hoffman could not have said it with greater assurance. Anything was possible, once you decided to invent a new game.

As Ferris prepared to leave, Azhar seemed awkward. Ferris thought at first that he must be envious, that Ferris was going somewhere the ex-quant from Wall Street could never follow. But it wasn't that. He handed Ferris a little plastic box in the shape of a hemisphere, like the kind of box children use to hold their retainers or mouth guards. Inside was the gel bridge, containing its drops of deadly poison.

"This is in case...," said Azhar. "I trust you will never need it."

"Nothing bad is going to happen," said Ferris. "Don't worry, Sami." But he saw that his colleague's hand was shaking slightly when they parted, and he knew he was right to be worried. Ferris was headed into a space that had no boundaries or rules, where literally anything could happen. Ferris realized that he had one more thing to do before leaving Washington, which was to see his mother.

16

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA

J
OAN
F
ERRIS LIVED ON THE
western edge of Charlottesville in a rambling ranch house with a view of the Blue Ridge. She had bought it with her husband a few years before he died. He had tinkered and fiddled with it so that there were electrical outlets every few yards and a phone jack in every room and a hundred other ingenious features he never had a chance to enjoy. Tom Ferris never quite got the timing right. At his funeral, Roger had read "Sailing to Byzantium," which summed up his feeling that his father somehow had been born in the wrong country and wrong century, trying to please people who weren't worth the effort. Guests at the funeral congratulated Roger for getting through the poem dry-eyed, which made him feel worse.

Roger had grown up in Fairfax County, just off the Route 50 highway that connected the Virginia suburbs to Washington. Most of the families in their subdivision were linked in some way with the Pentagon or the CIA. His father had raised the flag in front of the house every morning when Ferris was a boy, and then stopped, as if he had lost faith in the enterprise. Ferris asked him why and he pointed down the street to the neighbors' houses. "We have too many flags around here," he said bitterly, "and not enough patriots." Ferris's mother took a job teaching English at George Marshall High School, the same school Ferris attended. He grew up with the sense that something was wrong and that his All-American life had a hidden flaw. His father would lose the job he could never talk about; his mother would tire of her husband's sullen despair and just not come home one afternoon.

Ferris wanted to make his parents happy, partly to protect against the risk of family meltdown. He was one of the top students in his graduating class, in addition to lettering in football and wrestling. In both sports, he was known for "gutting it out." He was starting linebacker on defense, but he had also played offense the second half of his senior year after the starting fullback got hurt. In wrestling, he had reached the state championships by outlasting better opponents who collapsed in the third period, when Ferris always seemed to be able to summon a last gulp of effort. The "favorite quote" next to his picture in the high school yearbook was Vince Lombardi's motto, "Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing." His problem in high school, to the extent he had one, was that he was too smart to be a jock and too athletic to be a wonk. That put him in between the various cliques, and he learned to suppress his emotions so that people never knew exactly what he thought. His main secret back in high school was how much he wanted to lose his virginity, but once he put that behind him senior year, he found other things to conceal--especially his ambition. He had no secrets from his mother, however, least of all the fact that he wanted to escape her suburban household and the sense of failure that had settled into the walls.

Ferris didn't like coming home, even to the new house in the Blue Ridge. It reminded him of his father, whose memory was an unfinished conversation. Another discomforting thing about the Blue Ridge house was that it was full of memories of Gretchen. They had come here often before and just after they were married, and had made love in almost every room, and much of the outdoors, as well. Thinking of Gretchen gave him a chill. He wanted to call Alice, but she had been unreachable the past few days. She was off somewhere, or not answering her phone. Ferris missed her.

Joan insisted that he stay for dinner. She made him what she always claimed was his favorite dish--a concoction of ground beef, canned peas and tomato sauce that she called "wheezing hash." It had never been his favorite dish, or even close to it--something about the name made him wonder if it was very healthy. But he hated to disappoint his mother, who seemed to take such pleasure in making it, as if it proved she was a good mother, after all. She was odd that way. "I sometimes feel as if I'm a fraud and everyone knows," she would occasionally say late at night, talking in the kitchen after dinner. Ferris would try to talk her out of it, but she would get a faraway look in her eye that conveyed that he didn't really understand what she was talking about.

Joan Ferris was a genuine intellectual; she read widely and deeply, and Ferris always thought that she would have made an ideal college professor. She loved ideas and would discuss them for hours with Ferris while his father was off puttering in his craft shop, turning out meticulous woodworking pieces that had absolutely no practical use. Theirs was a house in which no one ever turned on the television Sunday afternoons to watch the Redskins. Joan Ferris had loved it when Roger went to work for
Time
, and been mystified when he left to go work for the "State Department." But she could see that he liked his new job, and of course she knew, after all those years with her secret-keeping husband, where Roger really worked. What was more, she understood that he was evening a score.

After dinner, Ferris wandered over to the photo albums stacked neatly in the pantry. He tried to disguise his limp around his mother, but it never worked.

"Your leg isn't getting any better, is it?" she said.

"It's fine," said Ferris. "I'm healthy as a horse."

The albums were stacked and shelved in neat rows, with dates and places marked on the spines. Ferris pulled down the volume marked "Grandma and Baba." Those were his father's parents, who had lived outside Pittsburgh. His mother's parents, who had lived in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, were genteel folk known as "Honey" and "Gramps." There weren't that many pictures; Grandma and Baba had mostly kept to themselves. Ferris had always thought they were embarrassed: that they lived in Pittsburgh; that Baba had worked in the steel mills; that they hadn't melted into the pot enough to suit their assimilated son and his WASP wife.

Baba was muscular like Ferris, but darker. His skin had a rich tone, a color like virgin olive oil, and his hair had the tight bristle of a scouring brush. "I wish we knew where Baba's family came from," said Ferris. He had asked his father often enough, but the answers had always been vague. The Balkans. Someplace that ended up as part of Yugoslavia. The closest he ever got to a precise location was, "Maybe Bosnia."

"There's a guy I know in Jordan who tells me I must be an Arab. Maybe he's joking, I don't know."

"I think not." She laughed. "Baba said he was from the former Ottoman Empire, which covered a lot of territory. I always imagined he was from someplace unpronounceable east of the Danube, like Bosnia-Herzegovina, or Abkhazia. He said his family had Muslim neighbors, I remember that. But he didn't like to talk about it, and your father didn't press him. Everybody got jumbled together in Pittsburgh, and I guess they didn't like being called 'Bohunks,' or 'Polacks,' or whatever they happened to be. So they just thought of themselves as Americans. Or so I always imagined."

"'Ferris' doesn't sound like an Eastern European name, though, does it? Dad told me once it had been changed, but he said he didn't know what it was before."

"He told me the same thing, before we were married. I think he was embarrassed. He always said there were papers somewhere, but he never wanted to dig them out. I thought that was sad, that your father seemed to care so little about his background, but that's what he loved about the agency: Whoever you had been before just disappeared. I tried to get him to help me do a family genealogy once, but he wasn't interested."

"Baba's family was Catholic, right?"

"I think so. He always went to Mass with Grandma. He didn't mind that I was a Protestant, but Grandma did. When I told her I was a Congregationalist, she said, 'Not Jewish?' to make sure. They were both quite rare in Pittsburgh, I gather."

Ferris studied the photo of his grandfather again. "He looks like me, doesn't he?"

"A bit. Though you are better-looking, my dear."

Ferris put away the album. He had been stalling, wanting to put something off, but it was getting late, and he would be driving back to Washington early the next morning.

"I've told Gretchen I want a divorce," he said. "We aren't living together anymore. And we weren't very happy before, when we were. So I think it's time to be honest and make a break, before we have kids and it gets any more complicated."

"I see. And what does Gretchen say?"

Ferris remembered all the different versions of "no" that had emerged during his evening with Gretchen. He was still ashamed that he had allowed her to seduce him so easily, and in her mind, at least, to obliterate the resolve he had tried to express about ending the relationship.

"She wasn't happy. She claims we're a good match. I'm sure she doesn't want to be bothered looking for another husband. She's very busy."

"Oh yes, I've always known that about Gretchen. She looked busy the first day I met her, at your graduation."

"So what do you think, Mom?"

"Gretchen is a very successful woman. I wish I had her drive. But I was never sure she made you happy. So if you have decided to make a change, and you're ready for all the pain, then you should do what you think is right. Follow your heart. And since I'm being motherly, I'll go ahead and ask the obvious: Is there another woman?"

"I don't know yet. Maybe. I would want a divorce in any event. But I did meet someone I like a lot in Amman. I hope things work out with her. We'll see."

Ferris gave her a kiss and said he was going up to bed. His mother said she would just stay a moment and tidy up the kitchen, but she remained motionless at the table. There was a look of worry and helplessness on her face that Ferris had seen every time he had said goodbye.

G
RETCHEN HAD
been calling Ferris's cell phone. He had ignored the calls from her home, office and mobile numbers, and he hadn't responded to any of the various messages she left. But the phone rang again as he was driving back to DC, and since he didn't see one of her numbers on the display, he answered. He recognized her voice immediately. She was using someone else's phone, and she was almost shouting.

"Where are you, Roger? Damn it! Why haven't you answered my calls? You can't do this to me. You can't. I'm your wife. Everybody knows."

"I'm driving back from my mom's. I told her we're getting divorced."

"We aren't getting divorced. You love me. You know you do."

"Let's not go through a whole show, Gretchen. I don't love you. I want a divorce."