Authors: David Ignatius
"My dear Roger," he said, rising and embracing Ferris. "You look quite satisfactory, considering what you have been through. Would you like a cigar? Please. You must have a cigar. You are a hero. You have saved more lives than you can imagine, perhaps more than we will ever know."
Ferris looked at Hani. For all the anger he was feeling, he could not help but smile as he watched the pasha: His moustache was finely trimmed. His hair was newly cut and freshly dyed, so that it had the sheen of a movie star's hair. He was wearing a new sport coat, blue cashmere with a thin yellow stripe, and he had on a gleaming new pair of shoes.
"Yes, I'll have a cigar," said Ferris. Hani handed him a Romeo y Julieta, in the long, fat size known as a Churchill. As Ferris put it to his lips, Hani lit a long-tipped match and held the flame to the end, so that it pulsed red-hot with each breath that Ferris drew.
Ferris puffed on his cigar and put his feet up on a padded stool that stood between them.
"You owe me a finger," he said.
"Yes, I do. That and a great deal more. But we will make it up to you, I assure you. I feel about you as if you were my own son. I always have. That has made this most painful for me, the necessity to deceive you. But as you Americans like to say, it was in a good cause. I console myself with that. But it will not bring back your lost finger. I am very sorry for that. I thought my men could get there in time. I did not think the interrogation would begin so soon. Not for the 'defector.' But as soon as we heard you cry out, we moved in."
"You did all of this," said Ferris, a touch of wonder in his voice mixed with the anger. "This was all your show. Hoffman didn't have a clue."
"Yes. It was my show." The Jordanian took a puff. "This is my world, you see. I understand it. You Americans are visitors. You try to comprehend, but it is really quite impossible. You only make mistakes. And you are arrogant, I am sorry to say. You don't know what you don't know. When I realized that, after that miserable business in Berlin, I knew I had to take over."
Ferris nodded. It was true, what he said. Ferris couldn't deny it. "And what was I?" he asked "Your pawn?"
"Not at all, my dear. You were my agent. My penetration of the CIA. I had my eye on you the moment you arrived. Except that I couldn't recruit you. You would never have agreed. So you were my virtual agent."
Ferris laughed out loud. "That's what Hoffman and I thought we were doing with Sadiki. We thought he could catch Suleiman by using Sadiki as a 'virtual agent.' I used the same words."
"But that was quite ridiculous, don't you think? I own Jordan. I can control everything and everyone in it. I have been using Sadiki myself for several years. Did Ed Hoffman really think he could play in my backyard like this without my knowing?"
"As you said, we Americans don't know as much as we think we do."
"Thank goodness you still have friends. Though I'm not sure why anyone still is willing to help you--other than the fact that you are so rich. But yes, I discovered that Ed Hoffman's men had been doing surveillance on Sadiki and his brother for some foolish new scheme. I decided then that things had gone far enough. And I had, in you, a perfect foil, Roger. A man I could dangle in front of Al Qaeda. A man who might pose as a CIA defector. A Muslim in the CIA, with the bona fides to prove it."
"How did you know that I was a Muslim? Assuming that's true, that you didn't have Sadiki feed them a bunch of forgeries."
"I knew it because I did my research. You Americans think you are the only people capable of meticulous work, but you are quite wrong. I had a hunch, and I did some checking. Quite a lot of checking, actually. I had people looking at census records in the United States, and the manifests of ships landing at Ellis Island. I had researchers in Bosnia visiting relatives you don't even know you have. I even sent one of my men to talk to your mother, to see if she had anything. And then I sent a team here to Tripoli, to consult the old Ottoman records. We needed documents, and we knew that Suleiman's men would come and check, too. They are not stupid, either, my friend. So it had to be real. And it was. Your grandfather's name at birth was Muhammad Fares. He kept it a great secret in America. But, my dear, this is the land where the secrets begin. We call it
taqiyya
."
"I borrowed that word from you," said Ferris. "I thought I understood it."
"But my dear,
taqiyya
is not something you can unpack from a box of tricks. For a Muslim, it is a means of survival. Your grandfather understood
taqiyya
. Because of
taqiyya,
you are here today. That is what we understand in the desert. What matters only is survival. We do not risk our treasure for anything else."
Ferris thought of all the effort he and Hoffman had put into their deception--the meetings in Abu Dhabi, Beirut and Ankara, the photos and tapes. They had worked so hard, and it had worked--to Hani's benefit. Ferris was angry at Hani, but he couldn't help smiling at how totally the Jordanian had deceived them.
"When we built the legend for Sadiki, that just made your job easier, didn't it?"
"Much easier. We could ride on your back. When you first put Sadiki into play, I did the same. I had him call his real contact on the fringes of Al Qaeda--oh yes, he had one--to say that an unhappy CIA officer was offering to give him secrets. They didn't believe it, but they were curious. After that first meeting with you, he brought them real intelligence, supplied by me, of course. Most of it was dead--old cell-phone numbers, operations that had gone cold. I gave them a lovely story about the Berlin recruitment and all your games with Amary. That was when they began to think you were a real traitor, to give them that information. Each time you summoned Sadiki to a meeting, I had more material for them. All the while, my dear, you were running your little show and locking my story in place. It was so convenient to have surveillance photographs of Sadiki floating around Abu Dhabi and Beirut and Istanbul, not to mention London and Paris. A bit of luck, that was."
"You played us for fools."
"Not really. I just played you. I followed in your draft. You are a superpower, and you create so much turbulence when you move, even when you think you are being quiet and clever, that sometimes if we are lucky we can slip in behind you and catch a ride."
"And the call we picked up from Suleiman? And the text message for me on his cell phone? You did that, too?"
"Yes, I am afraid so. We had to draw the string tight, to make sure we could pull you toward that final rendezvous. You had to believe that your silly game was working. We had an old intercept of Suleiman saved in our databank. I am sorry, but it is not so hard to manipulate you."
Ferris put his hands together and gently clapped, as if the curtain were going down on a piece of theater.
"Very impressive. The only thing I can't forgive you for was manipulating Alice. She had a life in Jordan. She loved Amman. You've destroyed that. She can never go back now. They'll think she works for you."
"My dear Roger, everyone in Jordan works for me. Why should she be any different? But I must tell you honestly that you are deceiving yourself if you think that I was the one who put her in jeopardy. You did that. Al Qaeda might really have kidnapped her, if we had not taken her into, shall we say, 'protective custody.' You should not be angry with me. I had all the pieces in my hands." He took a big puff of his cigar and expelled a smooth round ring of smoke, but Ferris wasn't watching.
"I was so afraid for her, Hani. I was ready to die to save her. You used that. You counted on it. Without it, your plan wouldn't have worked. You turned my love for her into a weapon. How can I forgive that?"
Hani was silent. He looked toward the window of the hospital sunroom and the blue water of the Mediterranean, and then back toward Ferris. For the first time, there was a slight look of regret in his eyes, dimming his glow of contentment just a bit.
"I am sorry for that, Roger. I did count on your nobility, but really, you were doing what any man would do. I did not realize how much you loved her until you and I were together in her apartment. But I will tell you the truth: That just made me work harder to make sure everything went right. We were following you every minute. We put a powder on your shoes that had a signature we could follow; you had markers woven through the fibers of the jacket the driver gave you. We had the promise of help from the president of Syria himself, if anything went wrong."
Ferris nodded, but he was thinking of Alice. His cheeks reddened again with anger. "You beat her, when you kidnapped her from her apartment and took her to Hama. I saw the blood."
"First, my dear, she was not kidnapped. And we did not beat her, for goodness' sake. She had donated blood a month ago at the Palestinian Red Crescent, and it occurred to me that it might be useful later. We didn't even break into her place. She came with us willingly, for a simple reason, which is that she thought it would help you."
"You didn't have to force her?"
"Not at all. Alice is a more complicated woman than you seem to realize. She has a life that you do not understand. Do you think someone like that could work in Jordan, travel to and from the Palestinian camps, and not have contact with the Moukhabarat? I do not say this to upset you, but to please you. Like anything precious, she is veiled. She has been worried about you for a very long time, my dear. And for some perverse reason, she loves you as much as you love her."
Ferris blinked, and as he did so, his eyes grew moist. Had he understood anything? "I have to see her. Where is she?"
"She is nearby. She knows that you are fine. The flowers in your room are from her."
"Can I see her?"
"Of course, my dear. You are a free man. But first I think perhaps we need to talk about Ed Hoffman."
Ferris sat up with a start. It was a measure of how much he had been transformed by the cascade of events that he had barely thought of Hoffman since he awoke in his hospital bed. "Does he know what happened?"
"Oh yes, most of it. Some of it. He's in Amman. That's why I brought you here, actually. In addition to being your hometown, this is a place where you can be invisible until you decide what you want to do about Ed."
"He must be going crazy. This will ruin him."
"Not at all. This may be his finest hour. Or at least, his various bosses in Washington will perceive it as that. Together, we will exploit Suleiman's intelligence in Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Europe. I do not think I am flattering myself to say that this is the greatest success we have had against Al Qaeda. Suleiman was the man at the center of everything. Now that we have destroyed him, it will take Al Qaeda years to recover."
"And the world will think it's Hoffman's operation that did it?"
"Of course. Real intelligence operations stay secret forever. You Americans cannot understand that. You are incapable of secrecy, because you are a democracy. But we do not have that problem. When it comes to the glory,
ahlan wa sahlan
, it is all yours. Or Ed's, I should say. You are a bit more of a problem."
"Why should I be a problem? I'm the person who made this happen. With your help, of course, Hani Pasha."
"You are not thinking, my dear. Ed Hoffman is going to believe that you were working for me all along. You may have been my virtual agent, but he will think it was real. There are inconvenient details. You are from a Muslim family and your grandfather came from the Sunni town of Tripoli, Lebanon, and you never told the CIA about that. I fear that may be awkward."
"But I didn't know myself. You're the one who discovered it."
"Yes. But, honestly, will Ed Hoffman believe you? And even if he does, will the CIA counterintelligence staff, and the inspector general, and the chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees? They will have so many questions. And those questions will make it difficult for you to remain at the CIA. People will think that you were my agent. And they will be right."
Ferris closed his eyes and put his good hand to his head to massage his temples. He needed to think. Where was he, really? Where did he want to go? He had come a great distance, but not to sit in this sunroom in Tripoli with the pasha.
Hani took a last puff on his Churchill and put it aside. The big cigar was almost down to its stub.
"In your own mind, you do not believe you were an agent of Jordanian intelligence. But in objective terms, you were indeed my agent: I controlled you, targeted you, ran you. The fact that you were not consciously aware of it is a secondary point, I think. No matter what you say, no matter how many polygraph exams you pass, Hoffman and his friends will always have a suspicion. I am sorry, but that is the situation."
"That's crap, Hani. But assuming it were true, what do you think I should do?"
"The point is, you have won. You can do whatever you like."
F
ERRIS LOOKED
at the light through the windows, clear and clean, illuminating so many dark places. What Hani said was true, at least part of it. Ferris had passed through a portal that he could not reenter. Yet he felt a sense of unfinished business. He had survived, but so many other people were dead, and too many of the killers were still at large. He felt like a hand puppet. He had been played skillfully, but the story wasn't over yet. He knew that better than anyone. He was the one who had first discovered Suleiman's existence, from an Iraqi agent in a dirty shack south of Tikrit. This was his case. He owned it, not Hoffman, not even Hani. And it wasn't finished. Hani was wrong: He hadn't won, yet.
Ferris closed his eyes and saw the face of his adversary. He let himself remember the room in Aleppo, the chair, the plywood to which his fingers had been attached, the video camera in the background, the diabolical certainty in Suleiman's eyes that he controlled the situation. They were making a movie; that was what he had said, a movie they would show on Al Jazeera. But what was Suleiman's movie? As he turned the question over in his mind, it was suddenly obvious to Ferris what he should do. He turned back to the Jordanian, so immaculate in his dress and deceit.