Authors: David Ignatius
When Smite arrived at Azzam's house, he followed the same routine as on his last visit to the village four months before. He waited in the Land Rover while a village boy fetched Azzam, and the Pashtu emerged after several minutes with his bodyguards. Smite stepped down from the Land Rover and beckoned for Azzam to join him, and the tribal leader came, just as he had previously. He wanted his money.
"Easy, baby, easy," said Hoffman as he watched the image on a monitor and listened to the sound transmissions. It was like sitting in a tree over the village, peering down on the action.
Smite spoke to Azzam in Urdu, loud enough to be heard by the tribal leader's men, standing twenty yards away. He said he had a special visitor from Washington who wanted to speak to him privately. He had come a long distance to meet the great leader of Kosa and to bring him greetings.
Azzam walked slowly and ceremoniously toward the car. You could imagine him thinking: Why not take the money of these fools from America? Smite held the door for the tribal leader to climb into the back seat of the Land Rover. When Azzam was seated, Smite triggered an electronic lock that prevented anyone inside the vehicle from opening the doors. Then he walked calmly toward the lead SUV and got inside.
When Azzam saw Harry Meeker's body propped up in the back seat, he must have sensed something was wrong, but it took a few moments to register. Perhaps he was avoiding eye contact, being deferential in the manner of the East to a visitor who was going to give him money. Or perhaps they had done such a good job with the disguise that Azzam just waited for the man in the parka to say something. After about five seconds, it registered: A piercing scream was audible on the circuit transmitting from the Land Rover back to Langley. By then it was too late. Azzam couldn't get out.
The Special Forces team heard the scream through their earphones. At that signal, their commander shouted to Azzam's chief bodyguard to put down his weapon. The Pashtu shouted back, and weapons were raised around the clearing. Armed standoffs happened all the time in the frontier areas, and usually the tension was defused with some more shouting and, occasionally, warning shots fired in the air. But this time there was a sudden rip of automatic weapons fire, and two of the Pashtu guards fell to the ground. The other guards opened up on the SUVs, but their small-caliber AK-47 rounds couldn't penetrate the armored skin. As the barrage increased, the thin-skinned Land Rover was pierced with bullets, and then raked stem to stern. To the Pashtus, it felt like a ferocious battle, but it was a setup.
Azzam's men couldn't have known that the initial volley of fire had come from the second Special Forces team behind the SUVs. The hidden Americans had kept the bodyguards in their sights the whole time. One of them carried an AK-47; he concentrated his fire on the Land Rover, spraying a few shots on Harry Meeker's side of the vehicle to make sure he would be hit, too. Azzam's body bounced wildly inside the Land Rover as the bullets tore through him. That was also part of the plan. They wanted Azzam dead, so that the documents in Harry Meeker's briefcase would be the only explanation for what had happened. Harry's body didn't bounce, and it didn't bleed much. But it did ooze.
Smite and the two SUVs retreated under fire back to the main road; the hidden team quickly pulled back into the hills, where their own vehicles were waiting. On the way out, they left behind a battlefield souvenir: an American body, flown out of Afghanistan a few days earlier. The local boys would feel better if they thought they had killed an American soldier in the exchange. Another body would reduce the likelihood that anyone who analyzed the events later would doubt their authenticity.
Smite and his two SUVs roared out of town. Helicopter gunships arrived several hours later, in what seemed a mission to evacuate the American body from the Land Rover--and any sensitive papers he might have had with him. They landed in the village clearing, established a perimeter around the Land Rover and searched the car for twenty minutes. But by that time Harry Meeker was gone. The body and the briefcase had been carried into the mountains by Al Qaeda men, as Hoffman knew they would be. In a few hours, one of the organization's trusted lieutenants would be breaking open the metal briefcase and trying to make sense of its contents. And then they would begin to wonder.
Wire service reports later that day confirmed the ambush of U.S forces and said that an American soldier had been killed. No mention was made of a second American, in civilian clothes, who had been gunned down in his car while meeting with a local tribal leader in the outer circles of Al Qaeda. But no broadcast was needed for that report. By that night, Azzam's meeting with the American was the talk of every village in the border region, and it was openly whispered that Azzam must have been working for the CIA. The hook was in.
H
OFFMAN KNEW
it was working. They picked up the chatter on cell phones and Internet links. Suleiman's men were struggling to make sense of what they had found, but they were too junior to make decisions. The senior operational leaders in Al Qaeda would have to decide what to do. ISI captured a courier heading to Karachi. The message was an urgent call for a council, a meeting of the
ulema
, about a matter so serious it might require a decision by the
khalifa
himself. The NSA began to pick up voices it hadn't heard in several years. The members of the network had been forced to break their usual operational security. The worst thing that could happen was happening to them.
Luck is the residue of good planning. Hoffman had done plenty of the latter, and he began to get a bit more of the former. The voiceprint of an NSA intercept from a cell phone in Vienna showed a voice that resembled one on the agency's highest-priority watch list. There was static on the line, but careful technical examination showed that it was the voice of a Syrian-born operative from Hama, Karim al-Shams, who had taken the operational name Suleiman. The master planner was surfacing. The meaning of the call was hard to understand because it was spoken in a private code, but he talked about the martyrdom of Hussein, who was tricked into his death by jealous rivals. Hoffman's analysts thought they understood the essence of what Suleiman was saying: He had been the victim of a trick.
With the NSA's help, the Austrian police were given the likely radius from which the cell-phone call had been made. They cordoned off the neighborhood that night and raided a half dozen apartment buildings. Just before dawn they found the phone, but the man who had been using it evidently had fled.
F
ERRIS WANTED
to get back to Amman for New Year's Eve with Alice, but Hoffman asked him to stay another day. He wanted a celebration. The problem was that the revelers, who knew the secret, were all part of Mincemeat Park. The very fact they worked together was a secret. So Hoffman decided to bring New Year's Eve in to them. He smuggled booze and food into the office. He designated bartenders from among the analysts, and for DJ, he picked a case officer who had always dreamed of being a hip-hop singer. Ferris tried to lose himself in the drink and the music. He even danced with a drunken young woman who worked for Azhar, who slid up and down against his body as if he were the pole in a strip joint.
But Ferris wasn't really there. He felt wasted, now that the operation was over. Whatever would happen now Ferris couldn't control, couldn't even see. The only thing that filled that void was the thought of Alice. He had sometimes wondered, in the years he was with Gretchen, what it felt like to be in love. Now he knew. It came to him that this New Year's Eve he needed to make a resolution. He looked for Hoffman, thinking he should say something to him, but he had disappeared.
Ferris had spoken with Alice earlier in the day, as she was getting ready to go to a party at the Four Seasons with some Jordanian friends. She hadn't tried to make him feel guilty for not being there. She had passed beyond that, into a silent space. Ferris had called her cell phone at midnight Amman time, but she hadn't answered, and it had upset him not to be able to say her name as the year turned and to kiss her by telephone, at least. He had left a message; his cell phone didn't work inside Headquarters, so he couldn't tell if she had tried to return the call.
Ferris left the New Year's revelers and walked to an empty office and dialed Alice's number. Even with the door closed, you could hear the thump-thump of the amplifier. Alice answered on the third ring. She sounded sleepy, a little groggy, even, as if she had taken a sleeping pill.
"There's something I have to tell you," Ferris said. "I've made a New Year's resolution."
"What?" she answered. It was obvious she wasn't really awake.
"I'm ready."
"What?"
"I'm ready for us to be together. The rest doesn't matter."
"Everything matters. When are you coming home?" Her voice was faraway; she sounded almost lost.
"Tomorrow," said Ferris. "I'll fly back New Year's Day and be there late on the second. I'll make you dinner. I'll love you. I'll give you what you wanted."
"That's nice." She was waking up now. "What do you mean?"
"I'll tell you the truth. I won't live any more lies. I don't have to anymore. That's over."
"I don't know what you're talking about, but it sounds sweet."
"That's okay," said Ferris. "I know what I'm talking about."
F
ERRIS STAYED
in the empty office for a while, thinking about Alice and about what he would do in the New Year, if he was serious about his resolution. He would tell her everything. That meant he would have to resign from the agency. There was no other way. It was getting near midnight when Hoffman banged on the door. He was carrying a bottle of champagne and two glasses.
"Open up, you bastard," he grumbled. "We need to talk." He was quite drunk, and the alcohol had dulled his usual exuberance. He seemed almost melancholy. He sat down across the desk from Ferris and filled the glasses with champagne. Ferris waited for him to give some rascally, bravura toast, but he was silent. Eventually Ferris spoke.
"We did it," Ferris said, raising his glass. "I didn't think it was possible, but we pulled it off. We're inside their DNA."
"Yeah, maybe," said Hoffman glumly.
"No maybe about it. Not after they picked up Suleiman's call. He's in trouble. Otherwise he never would have surfaced. We've picked up so many new leads in the last few days, we're going to be able to roll up networks from London to Lahore."
Hoffman was shaking his head. It wasn't just the booze. Something was bothering him. Ferris didn't want to worry about Hoffman's problems, he wanted to think about his own.
"Lighten up, boss. Take a victory lap."
"We haven't won yet."
"We're a lot closer than we were a week ago. Drink up." He clinked glasses with Hoffman and drained most of his own, but the older man didn't drink.
"It's too perfect," said Hoffman. "Something has to be wrong."
"What are you talking about? For chrissake, why don't you take 'yes' for an answer? It worked. God only knows how, but we did it." Ferris didn't want to hear about self-doubt or loose ends. Now that his part of the operation was done, he was thinking about a new life. He wanted Hoffman to go away and leave him to his own future.
"Something's not right. Suleiman should never have surfaced the way he did so quickly. I never expected that. It's almost as if he's probing us, trying to see how much we know."
"Come on, Ed, you're being paranoid. You've been living with this too long. You're suffering postpartum depression. Let it go, man. You have a nice, perverted baby."
"You think so? Why did Suleiman leave his cell phone for us to find? And who's he talking to about betrayal? We still don't have anything real. It's making me crazy."
Ferris laughed and poured himself another glass of champagne. He was tired and, in truth, he wasn't interested in Hoffman's problems. He gave him a kiss on both cheeks, close enough that he could feel the bristle of his whiskers and smell his sour breath. People outside the door were shouting and dancing and chanting the boss's name: "Hoff-man! Hoff-man!" It was almost midnight. People were counting down the seconds. They wanted their boss.
Hoffman emerged from the little office. He was too much of a leader not to take this turn. He got up on a table, lifted his bottle overhead and shouted to the crowd, "Happy New Year! Thanks for so much hard work. More to come. I love you all." He finished a few seconds before the clock ticked down to zero. Perfect timing, as usual. The crowd roared; they were drunk, happy and exhausted. People were singing, and a conga line was forming behind a voluptuous woman who targeted terrorist cells. In the frenzy, Ferris was probably the only one who noticed that Hoffman had slipped away to an empty office and closed the door.
O
MAR
S
ADIKI
disappeared on New Year's Day. Ferris heard the news as he was heading to the airport to catch his flight back to Amman. The Amman station had been monitoring Sadiki's phones to make sure he didn't get into any mischief. He hadn't answered phone calls on New Year's Day, and the Amman operations chief, who was running things in Ferris's absence, eventually got nervous. Late that afternoon Amman time, he sent one of his Jordanian agents to Sadiki's house to call on him. Inside, the agent found a roomful of confused women and children. Sadiki's wife said her husband had gone out with some visitors that morning and hadn't come back. They had asked for him at the office and at the mosque and at the coffeehouse where the members of Ikhwan Ihsan liked to sit in the afternoons. But there was no sign of him. The wife said her husband had been preoccupied about something. And now whatever it was had caused him to vanish.
Ferris called Hani on a secure phone after talking to the Amman station. Hani said he had already heard the news and apologized repeatedly. He didn't know how Sadiki had slipped through his surveillance. It was his fault, he kept saying. The GID should have watched more closely. They shouldn't have let him disappear. Ferris had never heard Hani sound so remorseful.