Body of Lies (43 page)

The car traversed the anti-Lebanon range along the Syrian border and in thirty minutes they were on the outskirts of Damascus. The city stretched for miles along the Syrian plain, a jewel of the East that had lost its sparkle. Ferris gave the driver the address of Al Jazeera's bureau in Abu Rummaneh, near the French Embassy. The office was in a bland, unadorned concrete building. Like most of Damascus it seemed to have fallen out of a time capsule from the 1960s. When they arrived, Ferris told the driver to wait; he would only be a few minutes and then they would return to Beirut.

Ferris clutched his little parcel with the original of the videocassette wrapped in brown paper. He had a copy in his coat pocket. He rang the bell marked "Al Jazeera," and when a secretary opened the office door, he asked for the office manager. A stocky man came out, wearing a George Raft double-breasted suit and a stained tie. The office manager scanned Ferris dubiously.

Ferris cleared his throat. He didn't want to seem nervous, but he couldn't help it. This was the end of a very long road.

"I have a tape for you, from Raouf," said Ferris.

"Who?" asked the station manager, backing away.

"From Raouf. That is the name he uses. He told me that you would be expecting a tape from him. A special tape that would be of great interest to your viewers."

The station manager looked ashen. He retreated quickly back into his office, and Ferris heard him talking on the telephone. His voice sounded submissive. Ferris heard him repeat the name "Raouf" several times, but he couldn't make out anything else. Eventually the manager returned. He looked relieved, and it was soon obvious why. He was getting rid of his troublesome guest. The manager handed Ferris a slip of paper, on which he had written an address in the Old City.

"You go see Hassan, if you have tape from Raouf," he said. "Not here. This address." He motioned with his hands, as if to shoo Ferris away from his door.

"Let me leave a copy for you," said Ferris, taking the cassette from his pocket and placing it on the table. "If anything happens to me and I cannot make my delivery, you will want to see it. It is very important, for all the Arabs. It is a special gift from Raouf."

The manager looked unhappy to be left with this worryingly important gift. But he didn't try to give it back.

T
HE ADDRESS
was in Bab Touma, in the Christian quarter of the Old City, of all places. Perhaps that was another form of
taqiyya
. The driver navigated the weaving traffic and beeping horns along Baghdad Street until he got to the turn for Bab Touma. They inched down an old street, past remnants of the ancient city wall. They finally reached a cobbled lane that was too narrow for the taxi. The driver motioned with a flick of his wrist. The address was down there somewhere, amid the donkey carts and dark alleys. Ferris told the driver to wait; he would return in a few minutes.

Ferris set out on foot. His leg was throbbing from the shrapnel wounds, but he willed the pain to go away. There was a stream of Syrians in the narrow street, out doing their shopping. A butcher was chopping a raw hunk of lamb in the open air; a few doors down, two young men were looking at a Syrian girlie magazine in a barbershop while they waited to get their hair cut. A couple was shopping for a wedding ring in a jewelry store. Dark-eyed children were coming out of the playground of an Armenian school down the street. Ferris felt as if he were disappearing into the anonymous swarm of this Arab city, but he knew that wasn't so. He stuck out like scar tissue. In every window Ferris saw a brooding icon of Jesus, a dark Eastern Jesus, one who truly knew what it was to suffer.

He saw the address just ahead. There was a little shop on the first floor, selling music and videocassettes under a colorful awning. Next to it was the entrance to a walkup apartment. There was a faint light upstairs, above the video shop. Ferris stopped and looked up and down the street. The bustling crowd seemed to have thinned. People were returning to their shops and homes. Perhaps they knew. That was the thing about a place like Damascus: It had a secret language. The moment something happened, or was about to happen, everyone knew it instantly. That was how people survived.

Ferris stuck his head in the door. It was dark inside, so he pushed the button for the hall light. A woman in a far doorway backed toward the darkness.

"Where does Hassan live?" asked Ferris.

The woman jerked her head, pointing her eyes upstairs, and then closed her door. Ferris mounted the creaky stairs. Each floorboard seemed loose underfoot, and the wooden banister wobbled. At the top of the stairs it was dark, and Ferris couldn't find the light. He fumbled about, his palm feeling along the wall for a switch, when a door opened. A man's bearded face was half illuminated by the light behind.

"Are you Hassan?" asked Ferris. "I have something for Hassan."

The bearded man didn't answer. He motioned for Ferris to follow him into the dimly lit room. Ferris didn't like anything about the scene, but he had no choice now. It had all come down to this. He had to make the delivery; that was all. The tape would do the rest. Behind him, he heard the click of the door lock.

Inside the apartment stood another man. Like the first, he had a thick beard. He was wearing a knitted prayer cap. From the cool intensity of his eyes, he might have been Suleiman's brother.

"I am Hassan," he said. "Who are you?"

"I have a tape for you, from Raouf," said Ferris. "Raouf told me to give it to you, for Al Jazeera. That was his last wish. He said that I should give it to you, and that you would be waiting for it."

"You are the American? The one Raouf was waiting for?"

"Yes," answered Ferris. He was being drawn in deeper, but it didn't matter. All that mattered was that they take the tape.

Hassan nodded. He knew who Ferris was--that was why he had opened the door--but he was unhappy. "We were waiting for this tape a few days ago. But then we lost contact. Where is Raouf? Why haven't we heard from him?"

"I don't know," answered Ferris. "I just know he wanted you to have this." He handed the brown paper parcel to his host. Hassan carefully unwrapped it and then looked at the cassette. He checked some markings that were written in Arabic on the side. They must have been code words. Hassan read them twice and then nodded.

"Thanks to the God," he said.

"Thanks God," repeated Ferris. "I will go now. Raouf said I should leave when I gave you the tape."

"No," said Hassan. "First we look at the tape."

A liquid heat flooded into Ferris. The dimensions of the room seemed to shrink. He had to push the room back somehow before it crushed him.

"I must leave," said Ferris, backing toward the door. "When you see the tape, you will understand. This must be shown on Al Jazeera."

"We will decide that," said Hassan. He handed the tape to the other man, who turned on the television set in the little living room. It had a built-in VCR player. In a few moments they would put the cassette in the player and the images would be on the screen. Ferris knew that he was running out of time.

"I have to leave," he repeated. "Now."

Hassan moved behind Ferris to block the door. This is it, thought Ferris. He stole a glance at the window and remembered the shop below. He thought he remembered that it had an awning.

"Play the tape," said Hassan. His assistant put it into the slot, and an image began to flicker on the screen.

Ferris moved instinctively, ignoring his bad leg, his bruised muscles, the fear that was knotted in his limbs and joints. He turned so that his back faced the window and hurled himself at full force against the frame, shielding his head as best he could. He heard the wood of the window frame splinter and crack against the force of his body, and felt the shards of glass slicing his skin like a thousand paper cuts. And then he was floating through the air, not sure if his body would hit the sharp stone of the cobbled pavement or the soft cloth of the awning. It took only an instant, but the next thing he felt was a bounce against the awning frame, just enough to break his fall, and then he was on the ground.

People in the streets were screaming, pointing at Ferris. He didn't realize why until he put his hand to the back of his head and pulled it back, covered in blood. He had only a few more seconds before Hassan and his man would be down in the street after him. He tried to stand and staggered for a moment before gaining his balance. And then he began to run down the street, moving as fast as his bad leg would allow. People were still screaming, but he didn't care. The best thing that could happen to him was that the Syrian police would arrest him. But they left him alone.

As Ferris neared the gate of Bab Touma, he realized that Hassan and his man weren't following, either. Where were they? And then it was obvious. They had started the tape just as Ferris had made his leap. They had been transfixed by the image of Suleiman: shaken, stunned, paralyzed. The poison pill had touched the first node. Now it would continue and continue, passing up every nerve and synapse until it reached the center of the center. And then the lights would begin to go out, and the system would begin to recoil and wither, the skin would peel back against itself.

F
ERRIS'S DRIVER
was waiting just where he had left him. He had a towel in the trunk, and Ferris used it to wipe away the blood. Instinct told him to stay away from a Syrian hospital or the American Embassy. He directed the driver to the French Embassy, the best and most modern in the city. He explained to the French military officer at the front gate that he needed to see the DGSE station commander. Perhaps it was the blood, perhaps the look of absolute determination in Ferris's eye, but the French soldier invited him inside, behind the embassy's heavy door, while he made a call. The DGSE man arrived a minute later with a nurse who cleaned Ferris's wounds in the embassy clinic and called a doctor. He had broken two ribs in the fall, and he needed more than forty stitches to close all the cuts, but he had been lucky. Ferris explained a little of what he had done--not much, but enough that the DGSE man wouldn't look ridiculous when he filed his cable. When the Frenchman asked why he hadn't gone to the U.S. Embassy, Ferris answered, "I'm retired," and the Frenchman smiled sympathetically.

The French officer offered a diplomatic car and a driver for the return trip to Beirut, and Ferris happily accepted. It was over. He had only one purpose now, and that was to find Alice.

T
HE VIDEO
ran on Al Jazeera twenty-four hours later. The announcer called it "a traitor's confession." It was like watching a public hanging. It might be appalling, but you couldn't take your eyes off it.

By the time the video ran, Ferris was back in Hani's care and protection. He didn't even bother to watch. He let Suleiman's "confession" do its work--let the shame and recrimination reverberate through the Muslim world, let the denials and countercharges percolate, let the spokesmen rant or gloat or simply duck for cover. It wasn't a story that would take days or weeks. It would require years before the network recovered from this toxin. For if the movement could not trust Suleiman, the sublime architect of the jihad, then it could not trust anything.

37

T
HE FIRST DAYS WERE AWKWARD
. Neither of them wanted to say too much, for fear that would set loose a cascade of raw emotion that would destroy any chance of happiness. They were careful with each other, like a couple who have the good sense not to probe about past loves. Ferris had promised he would unravel all the lies and live only the truth, but that wasn't so easy. His was a life in which nearly everything turned out to be lies. It was more a question of starting over than of rewriting what had gone before, and Alice seemed to understand that. And there were secrets she had kept, as well--mysteries of her life in Jordan that she could not have explained fully to Ferris, or even to herself.

They met back at the hospital in Tripoli, where Alice had remained during Ferris's absence. When she first walked into the sunroom, Ferris wept. He hadn't meant to, but he couldn't help himself. He tried to tell Alice what had happened and then gave up, and she just held him close. She saw the bruises across his face and neck; she moved to take the bandaged hand in hers, but she realized with a start that he was missing a finger, and she could imagine the rest. Ferris didn't bother to tell her about his final struggle in Damascus. That could come later, if at all.

Hani gave them a car and driver, and they walked out the door of the hospital into the radiant winter sunshine of northern Lebanon. There was snow on the mountain behind them, and the purest blue in the sparkling waters. The purity of sun and sea seemed to take away some of the stain in the moment they set foot outdoors. Ferris went to the mosque in Tripoli where, according to Hani, his great-grandfather had been a sheik. He wanted to see it. He showed Alice the stone house where his grandfather had been born, and she just smiled, as if she, too, had always known he was a Muslim.

They drove south that afternoon along the coast to the tarnished emerald of Beirut. Hani had reserved a suite for them in the Phoenicia, overlooking the curve of the harbor and the snow of the mountain beyond. Alice hung out the "Do Not Disturb" sign and they undressed each other slowly, Alice being very careful of his wounds. She led him to bed, and they didn't make love for a long while; just touched and remembered and let love and desire return. He waited for her; it wasn't for him to initiate, now, but for her to take him. And she did.

They stayed in bed that night and all the next day, ordering up meals from room service and sitting out on the porch of their suite that looked onto the sea. They had infinite time now, nowhere to be, no lies to tell. Ferris was half asleep that afternoon when he heard Alice singing him a lullaby. She stopped when he awoke, and then started again, stroking the wiry black hair atop his head. Ferris let his mind amble back in time. He had lived the story backward, in a sense, but did he understand it forward? He thought so.