Body of Lies (7 page)

Ferris grabbed the wheel and managed to steady the car, but he couldn't move his left leg past Bassam's to reach the gas. The car began to slow. This is how I am going to die, thought Ferris. He thought of his mother, his dead father. He did not think of his wife. The car was slowing and the pursuers were coming faster. He heard a loud noise, but he was too dizzy to know what it was. The noise was louder still, and then there was an explosive roar, like another missile coming at him, but his vision was dimming and he could no longer process the signals. This is it, he thought. I did it. That was the last thought he had before everything went black: I did it.

T
HE NOISE
Ferris heard was a helicopter gunship that had been dispatched from Balad when his call to the duty officer had come in. The Apache took out the yellow Chevy in an instant, and then destroyed the second chase car behind. Two more helicopters landed and formed a perimeter by the highway. They put Ferris on a stretcher, and were going to do the same with Bassam until they saw that he was dead, so they put him in a bag. Ferris was back inside the Balad perimeter a few minutes later--safely across the line that separated life from death--and he was in the emergency room of the Balad field hospital twenty minutes after that, where the doctors struggled to save his leg.

The first call Ferris received when he woke up was from Hoffman, and he said pretty much the same thing Ferris had said to himself: You did it. It sounded like an ending, but that was really the beginning of their story.

5

WASHINGTON

F
ERRIS WAS LUCKY
: They put his leg back together, got him out of Iraq and found him a private room at Walter Reed. Most of the soldiers in the nearby ward hadn't been as fortunate. They had lost arms, legs, parts of their faces, pieces of their skulls. Ferris was embarrassed by his good luck. He had come out of Iraq on a C-130 with the remains of a dead soldier--Private Morales, someone said--who had died from a mortar round at a forward operating base south of Baghdad. The box that contained what was left of him wasn't really a coffin; more like a metal locker, but it had an American flag draped around it. They received the body in Kuwait with a solemn ceremony, they called it the "Patriot Drill," but after they had saluted the dead soldier's remains, the honor guard hoisted the metal locker and shoved it into what looked like a meat truck. The soldiers fell out and the truck drove it away.

The director himself paid a call at Walter Reed soon after Ferris was airlifted home. He looked as sleek and sly as a Venetian aristocrat. Accompanying him was Ed Hoffman, big stomach and spiky crew cut, walking with a stiff-legged strut like a football coach from the 1950s. Ferris was still heavily sedated, and when he awoke, he realized that the director was holding his hand.

"How are you, son?" asked the director.

Ferris groaned, and the director squeezed his hand.

"We're proud of you. You hear me?" There was no response from Ferris, so the director continued. "I brought you something. It's a medal for bravery in action. Rarely given. Precious." Ferris felt something heavy land on his chest. He tried to say thank you, but the words didn't come out very clearly. The director was speaking again. He was talking about silent warriors. Ferris was trying to compose a reply when the director said perhaps he should be going so the patient could get some rest. He said the last bit in a jaunty voice: Get some rest, old boy. Ferris managed to say, "Thank you," and then closed his eyes. Before he fell back into his drugged sleep, he saw in his mind the faces of the two dead agents he had left behind in Iraq.

Hoffman came back a few days later. Ferris was feeling better now. The sedatives were wearing off, which meant his leg hurt more but his mind wasn't so dull.

"You did good," the Near East Division chief said. "Your father would be proud of you."

Ferris pulled himself up in bed so that he could see Hoffman better. "My dad hated the CIA," he answered.

"I know. That's why he would have been proud of you. You got some dignity back."

And it was true. Tom Ferris had worked in the agency's Science & Technology Division, laboring on the communications links for several generations of spy satellites--and he had disliked almost every minute of it. After he got fired in the Stan Turner housecleaning of the late 1970s, he had worked for the Washington office of an aerospace company, but he was drinking heavily and screaming at Ferris's mother late at night. Ferris knew that his father regarded himself as a failure, a once-talented engineer who had wasted his life in the agency's deadening secret bureaucracy. He would mutter about the CIA when he was drinking. "Mediocrity," he would say. "Mendacity." His words would slur. He was spared by an early heart attack from the knowledge that his only son had joined the enemy. Maybe Ferris's father would be happy to know his boy had gotten a medal out of the people who had tormented him, but he doubted it.

"I want to go back to Iraq," said Ferris.

"No way," answered Hoffman quickly. "Out of the question. You're burned. The bad guys know who you are. So forget it."

"Then I quit. Send me back in or I'm looking for another job."

"Don't be an asshole, Roger. And don't threaten me. It won't work. Anyway, I have another idea for you. How would you like to do something for me here that is a little, shall we say, unconventional?"

"At Headquarters? Absolutely not. If you try to make me, I won't just quit. I'll defect."

"It's not Headquarters, exactly. It's not even on the organization chart. Like I said, it's unconventional. You'd like it, I promise. It's made for a troublemaker like you."

"What is it?"

"I can't tell you unless you're in."

"Then forget it. I want back to Iraq. Like I said, it's that or I'm out."

"Stop it. And grow up. I told you Iraq is impossible. You're making a mistake turning down my proposal, but that's your problem. If you insist on going back in the field, I'm prepared to offer you the next best thing to Baghdad, which is Amman. It's better, actually, because you can do real operations--as opposed to being hunkered down hoping you don't get your ass shot off. I'm willing to send you in as deputy chief of station, which is unheard of at your age. So shut up. Actually, don't shut up. Say, 'Thanks, Ed. Amman is a plum. I really appreciate your confidence in me.'"

Ferris scratched his prickly beard. "When do I leave? If I agree to take Amman, that is."

"As soon as you can walk without falling over, which they tell me will be in about a month."

Ferris looked out the window, across the lawn and down toward the clog of traffic on 16th Street: Pizza Hut delivery boys and FedEx drivers and commuters racing home to catch their favorite shows on television. America was so normal. The bloody mess in Iraq might as well be on another planet. He turned back toward Hoffman, who was obviously waiting for an answer. Despite the Bear Bryant act, Hoffman was like anyone else. He wanted people to tell him good news. Ferris wasn't in the mood. His leg hurt too much.

"We're losing this war, Ed. You realize that, don't you?"

"Of course I do, assuming you mean the little war in Iraq. But we're not losing the big war, at least not yet. The one that could take down everything from Los Angeles to Bangor, Maine, and make ordinary folks so scared they will be crapping in their pants. In that war, we are still holding our own. Barely. That's why I want you in Amman. You came up with the real thing in Iraq, before you got your leg blown apart. The Suleiman network is for real. We've gotten collateral the past few days from other sources. We have to take him down.
Have to.
So stop feeling sorry for yourself and get mended. Do your physical therapy. I'm shipping you out as soon as I can--to Amman. Do we understand each other?"

Ferris offered a wan smile. "Do I have a choice?"

"Nope." Hoffman stood up to go, and then reconsidered and sat back down in his chair. He wanted Ferris to understand. This wasn't a consolation prize. He squinted one eye, as if he were trying to focus on something far away. "Remember the first time you showed up in my office, right after you got out of The Farm?"

"Sure. You terrified me."

"You flatter me. But here's the thing: From that first meeting, I knew I wanted you working for me. You know why? You had done well in training, obviously. They sent me a report. You aced everything."

Ferris nodded. He had met with Hoffman a few days after graduating from the training facility known as The Farm, perhaps the least-secret covert facility in the world. It was a vast, fenced tract of land in the swampy Tidewater area near Williamsburg, full of snakes and vermin and burned-out case officers who were assigned there as instructors when their covers got blown. Ferris had found it a kind of glorified scout camp, with training in map reading, high-speed driving, marksmanship, even parachute jumping--elaborately disguising the fact that most graduates were destined to spend their time going to embassy receptions. Ferris had excelled in his courses. He was a good athlete, which gave him an advantage in the brawny activities like hand-to-hand combat, and his tradecraft instructor said he was a "born recruiter."

"You were a star," continued Hoffman. "But that wasn't it. A lot of people who do well at The Farm are disasters as case officers. It's like high school. There's a sort of inverse relationship between early success and the real thing later on. No, it was something else that caught my eye. Something so rare, I worried it had disappeared in our line of work."

"Okay. I give up. What was it?"

"You were a natural. That's the only way I can put it. You hadn't even started yet, but you already knew what you were doing. You knew there were some scary people out there who wanted to kill Americans. You had studied them. You spoke their language. You knew they were coming at us, which was more than ninety-nine percent of the people in the agency understood back then. And you had that journalism thing. Most people come to us from the Marines or the FBI or someplace like that, where they learn to take orders and conform to the culture. But you didn't fit the pattern. You were a smart, rebellious kid who had studied Arabic in college and worked for
Time
magazine, of all things--and realized the goddamn house was on fire, and that you had to do something about it. That was what I liked about you. You understood what was going on. And you still do."

"I always thought you hated reporters."

"I do. They're losers. But I like you."

Ferris shook his head, thinking of all the braggarts and armchair generals he had worked with at
Time
. The news business was still riding high when he had joined the magazine in 1991. They had sent him to Detroit to cover what was left of the American auto industry. He had been bored stiff and was going to quit after a year, but the barons of
Time
were interested in sending him abroad eventually because of his Arabic, so they brought him back to New York to cover Wall Street. That was worse than Detroit, and Ferris was going to quit for sure when
Time
assigned him to do a short piece on the radical Muslims who had surfaced in the 1991 attempt to bomb the World Trade Center. Ferris began reading the Arabic papers and visiting mosques. The more he talked to the sheiks, the more obvious it became: These people hate us. They don't want to negotiate anything. They want to kill us. Ferris knew he had stumbled into something important, but
Time
only ran a thousand words and when he complained, his editor lectured him about being a "team player." Ferris thought of writing a book about radical Islam, but he couldn't find a publisher who would give him an advance.

So he quit and went to graduate school. That was the only way he could follow what had become an obsession. His Arabic professors at Columbia were happy to have him back, although they disapproved of his studying Islamic extremism, as opposed to writing love letters to the downtrodden Palestinians. And then, six months in, there occurred one of those accidental encounters that in retrospect seem preordained: A former dean who had taken an interest in Ferris invited him to lunch. He beat around the bush for a while and at last, over coffee, asked Ferris if he ever thought of working for the Central Intelligence Agency. At first Ferris laughed. Thought about it? Hell, he'd been running away from it his whole life. Then it occurred to him: Stop running. This is who you are. And now, a decade later, he was in a hospital bed, with a steel pin in his leg, pleading to get back in the field.

Hoffman was smiling at him. "You remember what you said to me at that first meeting?"

Ferris tried to remember. The day he had graduated from The Farm, the director of training had summoned him and said that the head of the Near East Division wanted to meet with him. Right away. He made it sound like a very big deal. Ferris had been planning to spend a week in Florida, baking in the sun and drinking beer, but evidently that was out. He drove like a maniac up I-95, playing loud music the whole way, thinking how cool he was. When he got to Headquarters, the guard sent him to an office on the fourth floor. There was an ordinariness about the place that was suddenly obvious, now that Ferris was in. There were bulletin boards with notices of after-hours meetings that reminded him of high school. And there were little signs on the doors--"Electrical Closet," "Utility Closet"--as if they were worried that people would stumble into the wrong one by accident. At The Farm, they had told the Clandestine Service trainees they were joining the most elite intelligence organization in the world. But looking at the lumpy, hollow-eyed men and women plying the halls at headquarters, Ferris knew that could not possibly be true. He was wondering if he had made the biggest mistake in his life.

And then he met Ed Hoffman. What struck him in that first encounter was Hoffman's size. He wasn't overweight, just bulky, one of those people who took up a lot of space even when he was sitting at his desk. He kept his hair in a buzz cut, like a Marine recruit, but he was probably in his early fifties. He peered over the top of his reading glasses when Ferris entered the room, in a look that suggested surprise and impatience, as if he had forgotten that he had summoned Ferris. But that wasn't it. He was curious.