Body of Lies (26 page)

22

THE KING'S HIGHWAY, JORDAN

W
HEN
A
LICE PROPOSED A WEEKEND
outing, Ferris happily agreed. They couldn't just sit in Amman and wait for the next car bomb. And he needed a rest. He was so wired when he left the embassy that it would take him an hour or two, and several drinks, to calm down. They were together almost every night now, switching back and forth between the two apartments. She quizzed him less about his work; people learn not to ask questions when they don't want to know the answers.

Alice suggested that they head south, along the ancient route known as the King's Highway, which had carried Hebrew wanderers, Christian crusaders and Muslim pilgrims across the wadis and barren hilltops of southern Jordan for more than two millennia. The embassy security officer would have objected to a route that took them through too many Bedouin towns in the restive south, but Ferris didn't ask him. As acting chief of station, he could go where he liked. Rather than commandeering one of the embassy's armored SUVs, he rented a little Mitsubishi.

"Cute car," she said when he picked her up. She noticed the Jordanian license plates and smiled. "Going native?"

She gathered up her maps and guidebooks and directed Ferris south out of the city onto the narrow winding road that skirted the Dead Sea rift. The landscape pitched down toward the shimmering surface of the salt sea, which had the misty unreality of a mirage. As the car descended toward the lowest spot on the planet, Ferris could feel his ears adjust to the change in air pressure. Across the Dead Sea was the West Bank and then, barely visible atop a far ridge, the urban thicket of Jerusalem. Alice directed him toward a Swiss resort hotel along the Dead Sea coast where she knew the manager.

"I'm taking you for a morning swim, my dear, except that you're not going to swim." She explained that the Dead Sea water was so salty you couldn't push your arms and legs under the surface, so you just floated. She pulled Ferris in to meet her friend the manager, a tidy Palestinian who had been polished to a Swiss shine in Lausanne. He gave them towels and the key to a cabana by the water. And soon Alice was tugging him into the luminescent Dead Sea water.

Alice floated away from shore gracefully. The suit molded to her body like rubber. Her nipples showed through the fabric, stiff and round.

Ferris dove into the water but, just as Alice had warned, his body bobbed like a cork. The water actually stung, burning into his skin as if it were rubbing alcohol. There was a sulfurous smell, too, but Alice didn't mind. She let the water carry her as if she were lying upon a liquid bier; she drifted under the November sun with a look of pure pleasure on her face. Ferris tried to relax with her, but his mind kept going back to bombs and bombers.

T
HEY SHOWERED
and changed, and soon they were back up on the ridge tops and tooling down the King's Highway. Alice wanted to show Ferris the Crusader castle at Kerak--the fortress where the odious Reynauld de Chatillon had made his headquarters. Alice walked him through the stone portals and along the walls and parapets, recounting stories of Reynauld's perfidy--how he used to plunder the poor Muslim pilgrims on their hajj journeys down the King's Highway to Mecca; how he encased the heads of his victims in wood before he threw them off the castle walls so that they would remain conscious and feel all the pain of their broken bones. That was what Muslims remembered when they called Americans "Crusaders."

They looked west from the castle walls toward the wadis that drained the rainfall off the hilltops. It was a landscape that hadn't changed much in a thousand years; effaced more by nature's hand than by man's. In the far distance where Jerusalem stood, the sky was sapphire-blue at midmorning. Alice cocked her head and turned toward Ferris. Tendrils of her long hair had escaped from her ponytail and were wisps in the wind.

"The Crusades began with a big lie, too," she said. "Did you know that?"

Ferris knew he was going to get one of Alice's lectures. He didn't mind them anymore. They were as much a part of her as the golden hair streaming in the breeze.

"Is that right?" he asked, playing the straight man.

"Yes, it is. Pope Clement didn't claim that the Muslims had WMD, but it was almost as bad. He preached that the Muslims were robbing and torturing poor Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. That was a complete fabrication, but it was the Middle Ages. People were gullible and superstitious and stupid, so they believed the pope and they all marched off to kill the Muslims. They went to war for a lie. Isn't that terrible?"

Ferris nodded. Yes, it was terrible.

"Once they got to Holy Land, they were in for a shock," she continued. "Because the Muslims actually fought back. And then the crusaders were stuck. They were far from home, and now they had a real war on their hands, so they had to keep sending more crusaders, and more, and more. And then, eventually, they were defeated and the ones who survived had to crawl home. Notice any parallels? Any remote connection with recent events?"

"No," said Ferris, smiling. "None that come to mind."

"Oh! You make me so angry." She stood on her toes and whispered in his ear, "Learn from history."

Ferris scanned the horizon. It was a landscape that contained sediments of nearly every epoch of the human experience. Many miles to the south was the incomparable Roman city of Petra, secreted away in a hidden valley and carved out of the rock in eternal perfection. To the north, several hours' drive, were the magnificent ruins at Jerash, Pella and Um Quaiss--three of the ten trading cities of the Near East that the Romans called the Decapolis. The ruins dotted this landscape, eerily intact. There were great plazas formed by stark Ionic columns, colonnaded streets with the original paving stones underfoot, Roman theaters in perfect order with stone seats surrounding the empty stages as if the audience and players had suddenly fled on the wind.

"What happened to them all?" Ferris said, half to himself, staring out at this landscape of time. "The Greeks, the crusaders, the Romans."

"They are dead," said Alice. "Or so I have been led to believe."

Ferris smiled and put his arm around her. "What I meant was, why did they disappear? The Romans built to last. Their cities are still here, two thousand years later. They were in total control. And then they lost it. What did they do wrong?"

Alice looked at him. "Do you
really
want to talk about this, Roger? Because I don't think you're going to like my answer."

"Yes. I want to know what you think."

"Okay, the Romans disappeared because they made mistakes. They had bad rulers. From Hadrian to Commodus is just sixty years. That was all it took for Rome to go from greatness to decline. That's how quickly it happens. So wise up." She poked him gently in the ribs, but Ferris wasn't ready to concede.

"Come on, it wasn't just that. The Romans got soft. They got weak. The Roman legions lost their discipline, and the barbarians were able to defeat them." He set his jaw. Didn't she understand? A warrior ethic was the best antidote to decay.

"Yes, my gimpy-legged darling. They did get soft, and that was part of their downfall. But that was much later. What started the death spiral was bad leadership. When the decline began, Rome was still a superpower--militarily. The Praetorian Guard had too much power, not too little. It was the political institutions that got weak. The corruption and ruin came later. Rome rotted from the inside out. Trust me on this. I did the extra-credit reading."

Ferris looked at her. She was shaking her head at Ferris's incomprehension. The ponytail swished from side to side like a horse's mane. What was it about her that captivated Ferris so? Was it the fact that she teased and taunted him, and talked back against his certainties? That she cared enough about him to tell him he was wrong? That she knew things he didn't, whole layers of experience that she veiled beneath her blond tresses and beguiling hazel eyes? In that moment, she was infinitely precious. He didn't care if the new barbarians destroyed every skyscraper in America, so long as they spared Alice. "I love you," he said.

"Oh good, he's admitting defeat." She tugged at his hand, pulling him away from the rough stone of the castle wall.

A
LICE HAD
packed a lunch of French bread, wine, cheese, prosciutto and melon. They found a perch in the late November sun, atop some rocks in the keep of the crusader castle, and sat down to eat. Ferris cut open the cantaloupe with a big pocketknife and layered the slices with strands of prosciutto. Alice laid out the bread and cheese and uncorked the wine--a Kefraya red from a hundred miles away in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. The flavors were perfect, each one registering its own precise notes on the tongue. When they finished the meal they lay on the ancient stones, basking in the sun.

A
LICE HAD
one more stop. She wanted to take Ferris to the town of Mu'tah, a few miles distant. It was famous in Muslim history as the site of one of the first battles between the Muslim army exploding out of Arabia in the seventh century and the legions of the Byzantine Empire. Mu'tah was a university town now, and like Zarqa to the north, it was a center for Muslim fundamentalists.

Ferris frowned when Alice proposed the side trip. Mu'tah was thought to be a dangerous place for outsiders. During the time of his predecessor, Francis Alderson, a CIA case officer had tried to pitch a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Mu'tah and had briefly been kidnapped by friends of the enraged man who had been his target. It was also rumored to be a center for the Ikhwan Ihsan, the Brothers of Awareness.

"Let's go home," he said. "I'm tired. I want to take a nap, and then make love."

"But you
must
see Mu'tah. It's charming. And there are shrines nearby in El Mazar for the Prophet's son Zaid bin Haritha and his deputy Jaffar bin Abi Talib. This place is famous to Muslims. How are you going to understand them if you don't know their history, Roger? It's like being in Boston and not stopping to see Faneuil Hall."

"I've never been to Faneuil Hall. Let's go home and make love."

Alice pouted. "If you force me to go home, you can forget about sex. And not just tonight. Besides, I have a letter I want to give to one of the teachers in Mu'tah. He has been helping some of our students part-time. I brought it all this way to give it to him. So we have to go."

Ferris knew by her tone that she wouldn't be budged. They got back in the Mitsubishi and bounced the few miles down the road to Mu'tah. Alice sang "Big Yellow Taxi," hitting almost all the notes. She was happy to be drawing Ferris deeper into her world; and perhaps she sensed, too, that she had made the right bet about him. Ferris hid his worries, but he scanned every house as they entered the outskirts of Mu'tah. There were no Jordanian special forces here; only a few useless police. The women wore headscarves; some were fully veiled. The men had the flinty look of Bedouin, and many of them had long beards--an outward sign that they wished to be, not of this world, but of the seventh century.

"I don't like the feel of this place," said Ferris, interrupting Alice in the middle of her song.

"It's
fine
."

"I don't know. I definitely feel like we're outsiders here."

"I'm not an outsider. I have a letter to deliver to a friend named Hijazi. He's in this religious group. The Ikhwan Ihsan, or something like that. He has been so helpful. If you're nervous, I'll just drop off the letter and then we'll go. How's that?" They were pulling into the center of town now. The university was a hundred yards away.

"Jesus, Alice. You didn't tell me this guy was Ikhwan Ihsan. They're bad news."

"You really don't know what you're talking about, Roger. They're not bad news at all. Quite the contrary. They are very helpful to our projects. They send teachers and professional people. I work with them, and a lot of other people you wouldn't like, and I'm just fine. Now, you sit here in the car and I'll be right back." Ferris protested once more that he wasn't comfortable here, but she was out the door and striding down an alleyway that led to the university.

Ferris turned off the engine and went to get a coffee in the cafe just ahead. It was only when he opened the door of the Mitsubishi that he noticed a half dozen men off to his right, seated outside the local mosque. Their heads moved in unison as they watched Ferris walk across the square. They had the hard-eyed, intense look of people who studied, prayed and trained together. Ferris had seen dozens of groups like them during his time in Iraq, along the roads, gathered in alleys. It was intuition, rather than anything specific, that told him they were trouble.

"Alice!" he called out. "Come on. We need to go. Now!"

She had disappeared from view and either couldn't hear him or wouldn't respond. His call had been useless in terms of getting her back, but it had focused the attention of the group by the mosque. Now they knew from Ferris's voice that he was American, and that he was worried.

Ferris continued toward the cafe, eyes down, hoping to avoid any move that would call further attention. An old man was sitting outside, smoking a nargileh. He edged away when Ferris approached. The whole town was sullen. This was a place, Ferris remembered, where the people rioted when the king tried to remove subsidies on common staples like bread, a town of professional malcontents. Ferris ordered a Turkish coffee from the waiter, medium sweet. He drank it slowly, waiting for Alice. The young men across the way huddled a last time and then dispersed. Where were they going? And where was Alice?

Ferris had to piss. He wished now he had drunk less of the Kefraya red. He stood and entered the dark of the cafe and asked where the toilet was. The barman didn't answer; he had a look of fear and confusion, and his eyes darted into the shadows. Ferris sensed danger, and he was turning to leave when he felt a sharp blow to his head. His vision went black and then exploded into white rays of pain as he tumbled to the floor of the cafe.