ALICE MELVILLE FLEW BACK to Boston for the funeral of her aunt. Ferris drove her to the airport. She was dressed in a lime-green A-line skirt and a white blouse. She had a ribbon in her hair. The only thing that was missing to complete the effect was a circle pin. “What’s with the sorority-girl outfit?” asked Ferris. It was a side of her he had never seen. “I don’t want to scare my mother,” she answered. “She thinks it’s okay for me to be in Jordan because the king went to Deerfield.”
Alice had adored the dead aunt, a doughty public-interest lawyer who had applauded her decision to go off to Jordan when everyone else was telling her she was mad. “Aunt Edith was even crazier than me,” she wrote Ferris in an e-mail the night she arrived back home. She sent a few silly messages the first few days, including a short cartoon video she’d found on the Internet in which the United States drives Osama bin Laden crazy by hounding him with telemarketing calls. Then she went silent. She was too busy, evidently, or too sad about her aunt’s death. Or perhaps, back home in the nest of privilege, she had forgotten all about him.
Ferris buried himself in his work. Hoffman’s visit had been a shock to his system—a reminder that he was in a business where any action was sanctioned, so long as it worked. He asked himself whether he was doing everything he could to penetrate Suleiman’s network with the tools he actually had in hand. He had only one, really: the address of the safe house where one of Suleiman’s operatives had recruited Nizar, the unlucky young Iraqi who managed to get himself killed less than twenty-four hours after he met Ferris. The house was a villa in Jebel Al-Akhthar on the southern outskirts of Amman. The agency had maintained fixed surveillance there ever since Ferris first landed the intelligence. They had run a covert SIGINT operation to tap the phone line, and had data-mined every detail they could gather about the Jordanian family that lived there, looking for links to known Al Qaeda operatives. But so far it had been a dry hole.
The house was a simple villa, built of concrete blocks and surrounded by a dirty masonry wall. The owner was a Jordanian man in his early sixties named Ibrahim Alousi who had worked for an Arab construction company in Kuwait and recently retired. His two sons worked as engineers for the same construction company here, and their wives and children shared the villa. The family were all practicing Muslims. They went most Fridays to the mosque and rose each morning at dawn for the Fajr prayers, but they had no apparent connection with any of the Salafist groups in Jordan. Ferris’s men had watched and waited and tracked, but they hadn’t found any hint of a link to Suleiman or his network. Maybe the Alousis were just being careful, but the ops chief at NE Division had advised Ferris to end his surveillance. It was expensive, and it wasn’t producing any intelligence. But Ferris hated to give up his one good lead, purchased at the cost of several human lives. And he thought the Alousi family was too clean, so innocent-looking they became suspicious.
Ferris decided it was time to take the offensive. He had been waiting for Suleiman to show his hand; now he would provoke him. He would throw something at the Alousis—a tantalizing provocation—and see how they reacted. And it happened he had the right bait to dangle in front of this prey. His predecessor, Francis Alderson, had recruited a young Palestinian named Ayman from a town in the West Bank called Jenin. He was living in Amman now, and like most Palestinians, what he wanted most was a visa for America. The consulate had flagged him for the CIA station as a potential recruit, and Alderson had okayed a pitch right before he got booted. Now Ayman was on the books as an asset, but without any operational role. Ferris would give him one.
Ferris met Ayman in a room at the InterContinental Hotel at the Third Circle. Back in the 1980s, when the U.S. Embassy had been across the street, the hotel had been the hub of Amman’s social life, but now it was safely out of the spotlight. Ferris was waiting in an upstairs suite when Ayman knocked on the door. The sun was shining bright through the window, glinting off the water in the pool down below. Ferris could tell from the young man’s wide eyes that this was the fanciest room he had ever seen. He had the hard look of a young Arab: sinewy arms, taut facial bones, bad complexion partly hidden under the stubble of his beard. He was wearing a prayer cap of knitted white wool. He was perfect.
Ferris gave the young man his instructions. He was to go to the house in Jebel Al-Akhthar and ask to see one of the Alousi brothers. If they weren’t home, he should ask when they would be back and return. When he was with one of the brothers, he should tell them one sentence only. I have a message from Suleiman. If they asked what the message was, he should tell them to come to an address in Zarqa the following day at seven PM. That was a hook; if anyone in the house had any link to the network, someone would have to follow that message up—if only to confirm that it was bogus.
Ayman looked uneasy as Ferris went through the instructions a second time. Ferris tried to brace him. Do this right, he told Ayman, and you’ll have your visa to America. Make a mistake and we’ll turn you over to the GID.
THE ALOUSIS’ HOUSE was built on the side of a steep hill. It had two stories. Rusting steel reinforcing bars on the second-floor roof suggested that the old man had planned to build three stories but had run out of money. The neighbors walked the streets with their heads down, wrapped in their abayas or kaffiyehs, deaf and dumb. The wind whistled up the dusty streets and blew loose pebbles off the hillsides. Ferris had fixed surveillance across from the house, so he could watch on his monitor as Ayman approached the door. A woman answered, and then the old man, and Ferris shook his head, thinking the boys must be away. But eventually a young man arrived at the front door, dressed in a dirty blue track suit. He looked at Ayman warily, and then invited him in the villa.
Ayman was inside for nearly an hour. Ferris wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. In an hour, they could ask enough questions to shred the thin legend Alderson had assembled for his young agent. But when Ferris debriefed Ayman late that night, he said the long wait hadn’t been anything important. In fact, nothing had happened at all. He had passed the message, just as Ferris had asked. I have a message from Suleiman. Meet us at this address in Zarqa. But the Alousi boys said they didn’t know anyone named Suleiman. How could there be a message from Suleiman, if they didn’t know any Suleiman? It must be a mistake. Ferris asked what had taken so long, then, if they didn’t understand his message. They had given him coffee and tea, to be friendly, Ayman explained, and asked him about his family in Jenin, and his friends, and if he had ever been arrested by the Israelis. Ayman seemed happy to have completed his assignment, whatever it was. When could he get his visa? Ferris told him it would be a few weeks, a month at most.
THE GID FOUND Ayman’s body three days later, stuffed in a metal dumpster near the address in Zarqa where the meeting was supposed to take place. His tongue had been ripped out, leaving a blood-crusted stump at the base of his mouth. There were other signs of torture: broken ribs, missing fingers. One of Hani’s assistants brought the pictures of the body to the embassy in an envelope, with a note that just said, “FYI.” They knew Ferris had been in contact with Ayman, obviously. Ferris made himself look at the photos. He owed the poor boy that much.
Ferris called Hani’s deputy and said he needed a favor. He gave him the address of the Alousi house in Jebel Al-Akhthar and asked him to raid it immediately and arrest anyone who was there. He said he would explain everything later to Hani. But when the GID team arrived at the villa an hour later, nobody was home. The residents seemed to have fled hurriedly in the night, out the back alley, throwing a few clothes in suitcases and running into the night. Hani’s deputy called Ferris and said the GID would try to find the Alousis. But Ferris suspected they were already across the border—to Damascus or Riyadh or maybe Fallujah.
Ferris’s dangle had worked: The safe house had been real, all right. But now it was blown. Whatever use they might eventually have gotten from their surveillance was lost. Hani never called, and Ferris was relieved he didn’t have to explain how the young man from Jenin had ended up in the dumpster. He had learned something from his operation. The adversary was even harder to penetrate than Ferris had imagined. He had reached a wall, and none of the bricks were lose. Perhaps Hoffman was right. The only way to get inside was deception, but he didn’t see how.
FERRIS WAITED for Alice’s return. He hated the bureaucratic side of his job. Everything needed reports and permissions and cables, sent in the cover identities CIA officers called “funny names.” In the cable traffic, Ferris was “Hanford J. Sloane,” a pseudonymous identity that would have allowed him to invent a whole imaginary life of bogus operations and recruitments, if he chose. But Ferris actually liked the job of espionage. It was the paperwork he found dull.
The office tedium was relieved by a classified cable from his best friend from The Farm, Andy Cohen, whose funny name was “Everett M. Farcas.” Cohen was a former grad student in Chinese who, like Ferris, had been suffering terminal boredom in the library before he joined up. He was tall and had a wispy goatee, which the instructors initially made him shave off but kept growing back. Cohen liked to bad-mouth everyone and everything. Unlike Ferris, who knew from his father how ordinary the agency could be, Cohen had imagined a world of Pierce Brosnans and Sharon Stones. When he met his dumpy, middle-aged instructors, he whispered to Ferris, “You gotta be kidding.” Life at The Farm convinced Cohen that something was deeply wrong with the CIA. The night before graduation, he told Ferris, “You know, these people are total losers.” But he had stayed in, sending Ferris regular reports on the incompetence and absurdity of his colleagues.
Cohen’s first overseas post was Taiwan, where he had ignored the cautionary advice of his station chief and actually gone out and recruited Taiwanese agents. For that unforgivable display of initiative, he had been punished with an assignment to the Asset Validation Staff back at Headquarters. Created in the early 1990s to reduce waste and bureaucracy, AVS had become something of a cottage industry, providing employment for dozens of paper-pushing case officers. Its job was to vet agents and, where appropriate, decommission those who were no longer productive. Since Cohen regarded nearly all the agency’s assets as useless, he was ready to fire the whole lot, but he had no interest in the AVS paper chase and its tedious scrub of each agent’s Personal Record Questionnaire. So he did as little real work as possible, which left him time for trading foreign currencies online in his E*Trade account and sending tirades to Ferris.
“My colleagues in AVS are as dumb as bricks, Roger,” the latest missive began. “They frighten me. I mean, this is where the people from The Farm who were too stupid to read the maps ended up. And the scary thing is that they get to decide who’s worth keeping on the books. It’s fabulous, really. The man in the next office is a Mormon from Salt Lake named Stan. He told me yesterday that one of the case officers he was vetting should be bounced because he had admitted on a polygraph that when he was a kid on the farm in Nebraska he had sex with a sheep. Ridiculous, right? But Stan was really upset. He said the guy was a security risk. What did he think, that the sheep was going to blackmail him? Can you believe that? But just wait. Remember Aaron Fink from our CST class? Okay, next thing Stan decides that Fink’s recruitments in Lima may be bogus because so many of them have Jewish names. Holy shit! I mean, Aaron is definitely a member of the tribe, but does Stan think he was recruiting these guys on orders from Baron Rothschild? Scary. So I looked at the list of Aaron’s agents and most of the names were, like, ‘Sanchez’ or ‘Ruiz,’ just ordinary Spanish names, not Schicklegruber or Gottbaum, for God’s sake. So I said to Stan, ‘Hey, buddy, I think maybe you’re out of line here. These aren’t Jewish names and even if they were, so fucking what?’ And Stan says, ‘The names could have been changed.’ Yikes. This is what we’re dealing with here. Not just morons, but full-blown, anti-Semitic morons. I mean, really, the place is falling apart. Don’t come back. Stay in the field as long as you can and then trade that bum leg for a full disability. I’m going to go work for Fox News so I can make shit up for real! Love, Everett M. Farcas.”
Ferris sent him a brief reply and attached some jokes he’d found on the Internet. Cohen had a point. Much of the agency was laughably incompetent. But Ferris wasn’t, and Hoffman certainly wasn’t. So he would forget about the rest, and get on with it.
TO AMUSE HIMSELF, Ferris visited the library at the British Council. One of his hobbies was reading about World War II intelligence operations. He had read nearly every book there was about Bletchley Park, and the “wizard war” of the scientists, and the “Double-Cross System” the British used to deceive the Germans by manipulating their captured agents in Britain. The British had been losing that war, Ferris reminded himself. They had suffered the disastrous retreat at Dunkirk, and the ravages of the Blitz. Their enemies were stronger than they were, and more ruthless. The Brits had little in their favor, save one thing. They were good at puzzles. Ferris pulled books down off the shelves, hoping he would find something that would encourage him, or at least distract him.
A WEEK AFTER Alice’s departure, Ferris was in his big, empty apartment, eating another solitary meal. A late October wind was rattling the windowpanes, a cold, dry breeze off the desert that settled in his bones. Gretchen called, as she usually did each week around this time. The conversation was more than usually empty. Ferris couldn’t talk about work, and he didn’t know what else to talk about. Gretchen was whispering hoarsely, telling him what she wanted to do in bed when he came home. Ferris told her to stop. He said his line was probably tapped, but that only seemed to arouse her more. “I hate this,” Ferris said, by which he meant not just sex talk on a tapped line but the entirety of their relationship. “Oh, you’re just in a bad mood, honey,” said Gretchen. “Call me back when you’re not such a grouch.”
Admit it, he told himself when he had ended the call. You miss Alice. And there was something else: He was worried that she wouldn’t find him interesting anymore, after she’d been back home in Boston mingling with the overachiever talent pool. His life was a perverse mirror image. He was married to one woman, whom he didn’t love, and he was falling in love with another woman, who he was afraid might become interested in another man.
FERRIS LAY IN bed, waiting for sleep. As happened sometimes, the tape rewound to a moment in his life that was fixed in his memory. It was a wrestling match during his senior year at George Marshall High School in Fairfax. He was well ahead on points, and could have coasted to victory in the third period. His opponent was exhausted. But Ferris wasn’t taking it easy. He was determined to pin the other boy and win outright. He had his opponent in a headlock and was driving his arm down hard so he could push the shoulder blades onto the mat. There was groan from the boy, not quite a word. And then he heard a sudden snap and a piercing scream, and he knew he had broken the boy’s arm. The crowd was stunned and silent as the injured wrestler staggered off the mat cradling his wrist, and then a few people started to boo. Not many, but people had sensed that something bad was going to happen—that Ferris wasn’t just determined to win, but to destroy his opponent. What Ferris remembered, when this scene came back to him, was the moment just before he heard the snap—when the boy groaned and tried to tell Ferris to stop.
Ferris shut his eyes against the image. He had been living with this memory for almost twenty years, and it still upset him. Violence itself wasn’t the problem, it was the unintended violence—the possibility that he might unwittingly expose someone to harm. Ferris put the thought out of his mind—he could do that, will his conscious self away from what bothered him—and eventually he was asleep.
ALICE RETURNED AFTER ten days, and the first thing she did when she landed at Queen Alia Airport was call Ferris. “I’m sorry, but I missed you,” she said, as if she were admitting to a character defect. “I thought about you a lot while I was gone, Roger. All the time, basically. That’s why I didn’t call, I was nervous.”
“Yeah,” said Ferris. “Me, too. Is that good or bad?”
“I don’t know. Good, I think. But we’re going to have to find out.”
“Right. When do we start?”
“Well…” She paused, as if she were really deliberating the matter. “How about tomorrow night. I need to get some sleep. The man next to me last night snored all the way from Boston to London. And he had B.O.”
“What time should I pick you up?”
“I hate that ‘date’ stuff. Can you cook?”
“Sort of. Not very well.”
“That doesn’t matter. Buy a steak and two potatoes and some red wine and we’ll be fine. Can you do that? And some green beans, too, if they have them. Or broccoli. Or carrots. Okay?”
Ferris promised to do the shopping and hung up happily. He spent the next twenty-four hours in a pleasant state of desire, thinking not just about having sex with Alice, but about the pleasure of having her with him again—the bright blue, bottomless water that was Alice. He had the housekeeper throw away the old newspapers and other accumulated debris and sent her out to buy the food and lots of flowers. He put little candles in the bedroom and then decided that was too much, and put them away.
Alice arrived a half hour late. When Ferris opened the door and looked at her, he shook his head. Her face was radiant, with its own glow of anticipation, and her blond hair seemed almost to sparkle against the blue-black evening sky.
“God, you are so pretty,” he said.
“Let me in the damned door. It’s cold out here.”
She entered the apartment, gave him a kiss and said, “Be right back. I want to take a look.” She gave herself a tour, checking out every room—pausing in the master bedroom to give it a close review. She returned shaking her head. “God! You must be a big shot. This place is enormous.”
“Embassy housing. They assume people have families, so the apartments are pretty big.”
“Pretty big? It’s huge. I’ll spare you the lecture about how many needy Palestinian families could fit in here. So, come on! Do the host thing. What have you got to drink?”
“How about champagne?” She nodded, and Ferris fetched a bottle of Dom Pérignon he’d taken that day from a stock left by Alderson after his hasty departure. She studied the label.
“Is that supposed to impress me? Dom Pérignon? Because I have to say, it totally does impress me. A girl doesn’t trust a man who buys cheap champagne. What’s the point? It’s like a woman buying cheap underwear. Do you know what I mean? Of course you don’t.”
Ferris poured two glasses, which they drank quickly, sitting on the couch, while she talked about her trip home, and her parents, siblings and cousins. Ferris filled their glasses again, and then a third time while she talked. She had told the family about Ferris, she said, although she wasn’t sure why. That was why she had come back to Amman so eager to see him. She wanted to understand why she had missed him so much.
Ferris slid toward her on the couch and put his arm around her. She relaxed into his body and then pulled back to look at him.
“I know you, Roger. You think I don’t, but I do. You’re open, but you don’t talk about yourself. You’re brave, but you’re scared of something. You worry that you have to take care of everything. But you don’t. Tonight, you just have to be with me.”
Ferris didn’t answer. He put his hand to her face and gently traced the outlines of her cheek and lips. He pushed the hair back from her forehead. It was so soft and fine, almost like a baby’s hair. He pulled her toward him. She tensed for a moment, then relaxed and turned her lips toward his. His kiss was gentle, his lips just touching hers. She opened her mouth and their tongues met. Ferris was aroused, and he pressed closer to her.
Her eyes widened, and then closed. “Not yet. I have to make you dinner.”
Alice cooked the steak and potatoes, and the lima beans, which was what the maid had brought back from the market. She sang “It’s Raining Men” while she cooked, in a surprisingly good voice. Ferris thought she was the most unselfconscious person he had ever met, and he tried to imagine what such a woman would be like in bed.
She caught the expression on his face. “Open the wine! Make yourself useful,” she said, and Ferris went looking for the corkscrew.
They dined on the enclosed terrace. “Turn out the lights,” she ordered. That side of the apartment faced away from the city, and in the inky desert night it seemed you could see every star in the heavens.
“Hold my hand,” she said.
“Why?” Ferris was hungry.
“Because we have to say grace. Pay attention, Roger. This grace has been in my family for three hundred years. I want to say it because this is a special night. You have to learn it yourself by Thanksgiving. Close your eyes. For thy tender care, dear Father, and thy blessings free, we would now, with loving hearts, render thanks to thee. Amen. Say ‘Amen.’”
“Amen,” said Ferris.
She gave his hand a squeeze and then let it go. Ferris opened his eyes and looked at her. He felt suddenly guilty. She was so loving, and so trusting, and he knew that he hadn’t been honest with her about something important—the most important thing, maybe. They ate for a while, as Alice talked about her trip home. She devoured her steak and potato but left the lima beans. When she had finished, she pushed the plate away and gazed dreamily at the stars, then turned back to him. She kicked off her shoe and began running her toes gently up his calf.
“I have to tell you something,” Ferris said awkwardly.
“What’s the problem? Don’t you like girls?” She giggled.
“No, it’s something serious.”
“Oh, good. What is it?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know how to say this. I’m ashamed to say it. But I’m married.”
“I know that.” She shook her head. “God! How dumb do you think I am?”
“How did you know? I never mentioned it. And I haven’t worn my wedding ring since I met you.”
“Because it’s obvious. A single guy would have tried to jump me on the first date. But you were more patient. Mature. Married, like. That was one thing.”
“I did want to jump you on the first date, and the second, and the third.”
“It’s not just that. There’s something sad about you, even when you’re having a good time. Like you need something that somebody hasn’t given you. Not sex, but love. So that says to me, unhappy married man.”
“That’s true. I do need love. And I am an unhappy married man.” He reached out his hand to touch hers, but she pulled it back.
“Plus, I asked.”
“What do you mean, you ‘asked.’”
“I asked at the embassy. One of the secretaries goes to my yoga class. I said I had met this really cute guy named Roger Ferris and she said, ‘Watch out. He’s married.’ So I knew. But the other stuff is true. That’s why I waited so long. I wanted to see if you were worth the trouble.”
“You’re not mad at me, for not telling you right away that I was married?”
“No. Because you did tell me, eventually. I might not have been willing to go to bed with you otherwise. No, that’s not true. I still would have. But it’s better this way. And you’re going to dump your wife.”
“It’s true. I’m asking her for a divorce. I’m going to tell her, when I go back to Washington the next time.”
“You should get a divorce, Roger, if you’re not happy. But it’s not about me, it’s about you.”
“I’m happy now.”
“Yes, but not as happy as you’re going to be.” She took his hand and led him back toward the bedroom. There was a candle next to the bed. She had put it there secretly, when she made her first tour of the apartment. Now she lit it.
“Hold me,” she said.
Ferris touched her hair, and then her lips, and pulled her toward him. As they kissed, she fumbled at his belt. While she tugged at his trousers, he put his hand under her dress. The soft fabric between her legs seemed to have dissolved. Their clothes came off in a pile, and he laid her body gently down on the bed and looked at her in the candlelight. Her cheeks were alabaster smooth in the light of the flickering candle. One hand modestly covered her breast, but she let it fall. She saw the wounds on his leg; in the candlelight, the welts of scar tissue were little hillocks, soft to the touch.
She opened herself to him, to his eyes and his gentle hands and the heat of his skin against hers. “I want you,” she said, the words muffled in the breath of desire. She took him in her hand and guided him toward her.
He entered her slowly, but she pulled him deeper. Her body moved quickly, and she cried out for him. Before he could answer, their bodies reached the same sudden precipice of desire. He could feel her tightening around him, and then he lost himself in a shudder of pleasure that carried them together into white space. He laid his head on her breast, wet with his saliva, and listened to the beat of her heart.