Body of Lies (24 page)

"Yes, yes. Don't worry. I am not going to try to 'recruit' you. I will not be as rude as your predecessor, Francis Alderson, and try to suborn a member of a friendly intelligence service. Put away that fear, please. But I want you to understand something. We are not as stupid as you and Mr. Ed Hoffman seem to think we are. Truly. Do not make that mistake."

"I know you're not stupid. The truth is that I have great respect for you. You are my teacher,
ustaaz
Hani."

"How nice," said the Jordanian. "I will remember that expression of friendship. This is a part of the world where friendship matters. But you know that. You are an Arab yourself. Or so we like to think."

F
ERRIS WAS
in the embassy later that morning, trying to clear his desk of all the accumulated cables and reports, when his secretary pushed open the door and asked if he had heard the news from Saudi Arabia. Ferris shook his head.

"Two bombs exploded in a little while ago in Riyadh. One outside the Four Seasons, another near the local branch bank of HSBC."

"Oh shit," said Ferris, shaking his head. "How many people are dead?"

"They aren't saying. The news is just coming over now."

Ferris turned on CNN and went to his secure computer. The television network had better information at that moment than the CIA, as usual. Ferris called Hani, who had gotten back to his office a few minutes before Ferris. The Jordanian said he had already ordered a lockdown of everything he could in the country. Extra security was on its way to the American Embassy and every other potential target in Amman.

The next call Ferris made was to Alice. He tried her office number, but she was out, so he called her cell phone. He could tell from the sound of the wind that she was outside somewhere. He told her the news from Riyadh, and she didn't say anything for a few seconds.

"This is going to keep happening, more and more," she said. "Don't you see? Milan, Frankfurt, Riyadh. Afghanistan, Iraq, the West Bank. We won't stop, and they won't stop."

"Where are you?" asked Ferris.

"I'm at one of the Palestinian camps outside the city. I'm trying to get them new computers for their school."

"I think you should go home, or at least back to the office. It's dangerous today. I'm worried about you."

"I'll be okay. It's dangerous every day. And there are lots of people here to protect me." She paused. "You know, Roger, this is the sort of day when I shouldn't be hiding. I should be here with people, to show them that we aren't all crazy, that I'm their friend, and I won't be scared away. Tell me you understand that."

This is why I love her, Ferris thought. "I do understand. I'm just anxious for you. I can't help it. I love you."

"I love you, too," she said slowly. "Pick me up tonight. I'll cook dinner for you. We can stay at your place, if that makes you feel better. I'll even let you hold the TV remote control. How's that?"

"Better." Ferris smiled. He knew that she was right. This was a day when she should be out with her Arab friends--unless it wasn't, but you would never know that until it was too late. He went back to CNN and the secure CIA computer, and spent the day bouncing messages around the world and pretending that he was making a difference. By the end of the day, nineteen people had died at the hotel, and another dozen outside the bank. On a day like this, you operated on autopilot, running through a series of procedures that were laid down like a script.

Ferris was worried about Alice, but he was on the roller coaster now. The long clanking climb up the hill was past. The car had crested the top and now it was all gravity and momentum. Alice could make nice to every Palestinian on the planet, but it wouldn't stop people like Suleiman. Ferris was going to take him down. He was going to find a way into his viscera, inside his bloodstream. He would destroy him from the inside out. Otherwise, this would never end.

20

BEIRUT / AMMAN

O
MAR
S
ADIKI LOOKED SHEEPISH
when he arrived at Ferris's suite at the Phoenicia Hotel in Beirut. He seemed impressed by the hotel, which kept its sheen amid the ruined majesty of Beirut. The Jordanian kept smiling awkwardly, and as the grin grew wider, it had the effect of compressing the prayer mark on his forehead into a red dimple. Ferris wondered why he was acting so oddly, until he saw the bid. Al Fajr had estimated a project cost that was nearly double what Ferris had expected. He could only imagine the kickbacks that would be flowing from contractors in Abu Dhabi back into the pockets of Al Fajr's principals in Amman. No wonder Sadiki had the shit-eating grin: He was ripping off the infidels. Ferris had to think a moment how Brad Scanlon would react. He stroked the tufts of his false moustache as he thought about what to say.

Ferris led Sadiki to the terrace and sat him down in a wrought-iron chair. The view was splendid--across the Bay of Beirut to Jounie and the rugged slope of Mt. Lebanon. It was a late fall day, but the sun was bright and the air so crisp and clean you could see to the top of the mountain. The generations of bomb damage were invisible. Ferris ordered coffee from room service and then sat down with the cost estimates and contractors' bids. He kept shaking his head as he studied the numbers. Occasionally he would take out his calculator and do some imaginary estimates of his own, jotting sums down on a white legal pad. When he had reviewed it all, Ferris took off his thick black glasses and rubbed his eyes.

"This is too expensive," he said. "My manager will never approve this."

"Mr. Scanlon, please. With Al Fajr, you know you will get the best. That is why we have our good reputation. Because our work is high-quality. That is why you came to us. Yes?"

"Listen, Omar, my friend. Of course we want the best, but we are not building a palace here. You have to understand, we are a bank, and we have to be careful about money or people won't trust us. And as I said, I could never get this approved, even if I accepted it. It would be the most expensive Unibank branch in the world. We need to negotiate this down."

Sadiki nodded, and Ferris thought he had done the right thing. Of course the initial estimate was inflated. Life was a bazaar. If the Americans were stupid enough to pay too much, why stop them?

"With any design, changes are always possible, sir. We could ask some of the subcontractors in Abu Dhabi to rebid their estimates. You gave us very little time, so the numbers are a little rough. What did you have in mind, when you were thinking about how much to spend for this project?"

Ferris studied his white legal pad, punched some more numbers in his calculator. He was winging it, hoping Sadiki wouldn't become suspicious. "The number I could get approved would be about twenty-five percent lower, I think."

"You don't know too much about the construction business, I think, Mr. Scanlon." Ferris moved uneasily in his chair. There was something in his tone that made him worry that Sadiki was on to his game.

"What do you mean by that?" said Ferris sharply.

The Jordanian immediately backed away. "Twenty-five percent is a big cut, Mr. Scanlon. You would have to sacrifice quality. I do not think you would be happy, at that price."

"Well, tell you what. You give me your best price. Come as close as you can to my twenty-five percent reduction. I won't hold you to every penny, but try as hard as you can to make economies. If you can do that and get me a better number, I am sure we will end up happy."

Sadiki said he had to call Amman and talk to the general manager. He haggled with him in Arabic for a while, made some notations on the sheets of his bid estimate, then called a number in Abu Dhabi. In the midst of this second call, the muezzin's call to prayer sounded from a nearby mosque and then echoed from a half dozen other mosques in West Beirut. Sadiki excused himself and went off to pray.

When he returned, he looked refreshed. He was a believer, no question about that. He apologized for the delay and resumed his telephone calling. After badgering two subcontractors in the Emirates, he went back to his work sheets and a few minutes later he proposed a reduction in price that was about half what Ferris had requested. That was where Ferris had suspected they would end up when the process started, so he agreed, and proposed an additional meeting in two weeks, in Amman, to go over final estimates and construction plans. Meeting in Jordan would violate the operational rules he had established with Hoffman, but it would be just once, and he didn't want to leave Alice any more than necessary.

"There's one more thing," said Ferris, as they were about to shake hands on the deal. "While you're in Beirut, I want you to meet our security consultant, Hussein Hanafi. He's an unusual fellow. I think he used to be involved with the...well, you know, the extremists." Now Hanafi did consulting for international companies, Ferris explained. He knew everything about firewalls, electronic funds transfer, Internet security. Because he would have to sign off on the final designs, it would be useful to get his recommendations now. Sadiki nodded and smiled. Nothing seemed to bother him.

The consultant worked in the Fakhani district of West Beirut, long ago the headquarters of Yasser Arafat's guerrilla fighters and in recent years an informal gathering point for Beirut's small circle of Sunni fundamentalists. Sadiki seemed slightly uncomfortable as the driver took them deeper into the warren of alleyways--worried not for himself, but for his host. This was bandit country, not a place for an American like Mr. Brad Scanlon.

When they reached Hanafi's address, they saw a sign in the second-floor window for his business, "HH Global Solutions." Sadiki took Ferris's arm protectively and steered him toward the small office building and up the stairs. Who's in charge here? Ferris wondered, but he let Sadiki take the lead. The office was brightly lit and recently painted; the furniture was new and clean. At a desk sat a woman in a headscarf. She buzzed the intercom as soon as they entered, and a beady-eyed Arab man with thick glasses emerged to greet them. He introduced himself as Hussein Hanafi and led them back to his inner office, which had several computers and a bookcase filled with technical manuals from Microsoft, Oracle and Symantec.

Hanafi was a computer nerd; that much, at least, was no illusion. The Lebanese Deuxieme Bureau had kept an eye on him ever since he returned from Afghanistan in 1998. He ran his little business and did some consulting for jihadist Web sites--which was how Sami Azhar learned about him. If he had any suspicions who he was really working for when Azhar recruited him into his string of covert service providers, he didn't voice them. He was a valuable catch--a real face and name that people in the movement would recognize. Hoffman's team had secretly wired the office, installing two tiny cameras and a microphone.

Hanafi spoke to the architect in a mix of English and Arabic, banging through a list of computer-security issues that were relevant to the design of a new building. Ferris feigned difficulty in understanding, and after ten minutes he excused himself and said he would leave the two of them to figure out what was best for the Abu Dhabi project. After Ferris left in his car, Sadiki and Hanafi talked for another hour, occasionally laughing and joking. It turned out they even had a few friends in common. All the while the tape rolled and the digital cameras made their record.

F
ERRIS HAD
a new assistant in Amman named Ajit Singh. He was a small, lithe Indian-American, with burnished brown skin and a perpetual, opaque smile. In the manner of people his age, he liked to wear a baseball cap, sometimes backward, sometimes frontward, sometimes sideways. Azhar had sent him to Amman to help with technical details.

Ajit was an interesting case: His father had made a good-sized fortune in Silicon Valley, initially by creating an inventory management program that he had sold to Wal-Mart, later by investing his money wisely in companies where his Indian engineer friends were working. Young Agit, fresh out of Stanford and heading for some fantastically lucrative career himself, had joined the agency as an act of vengeance. He had spent a family holiday in Kashmir after graduating from university. Six months later, several of his relatives were murdered by an Al Qaeda suicide bomber. After discussing the matter with his father, who was deeply patriotic in the way of successful immigrants, Ajit Singh applied to the CIA. Because of his unusual computer skills--even in his first months, he was one of the agency's best hackers--he soon came to the attention of Azhar, who lured him into his brainy black hole.

Ajit Singh could do anything with computers. He had a similar facility with languages, which were just another set of symbols to him, like a computer program. He had taught himself to read and write Arabic in the months after he made payback his life's mission. Singh could create Web sites, manipulate Web sites, tag Web sites with special "cookies" so the intelligence community could track who went in and out. When he set up shop in Amman, Ferris gave him Francis Alderson's old office, which was still empty. Singh filled it with servers, flat-screen displays, peripherals of various descriptions. The local NSA listening post had to send over a technical team to get him fully wired up.

Singh had hung a little sign on his wall that said: "People Are Stupid." That was the secret of his success. People were stupid enough to type their passwords into computers that had been rigged to monitor every keystroke; stupid enough to forget that when they visited a Web site, they picked up an electronic marker that accompanied them from site to site; stupid enough not to understand that when their computer was online, its hard drive was open for the picking; so stupid, in fact, that they failed to realize that every laptop or cell phone with a Bluetooth connection was effectively a broadcasting antenna. Best of all, it was in the moments when people thought they were being clever and taking special precautions that they were likeliest to do the stupidest things of all.

Singh's job in Amman was to manage the electronic side of Ferris's operation. He had gathered up all the names and addresses that had been picked up from Omar Sadiki's hotel room in Abu Dhabi. He had taken the data on the hard drive of Sadiki's computer and turned it inside out, looking for bits of information that could be manipulated and redirected. His colleagues wondered if he slept on the floor, because he always seemed to arrive before anyone else and still be there when they left. Occasionally, members of the station would see him in the cafeteria, listening to music on his iPod and eating french fries. But otherwise, he was a ghost.