Body of Lies (6 page)

"No fucking way. This guy is gold. Milk him now. But you've got to leave him in place for a while so we can see his network. Put one of the Preds on him. We can watch everyone he talks to and then nail them."

"But they'll kill him. I told you that. He's on the run."

"Tough shit. If they kill him, then we can at least see who's pulling the trigger."

Ferris looked through the window at Nizar, who was standing outside in the sun. There was a hint of a smile on his face. He thought he was going to be delivered into the protection of the Americans.

"I don't feel good about this, Ed. I feel we're doing this thing wrong. It's my case. Let me develop it."

"Sorry. No can do. Debrief him now. Get everything you can, in case he does get nailed. But cut him loose today when you're done. We'll watch him for a while and then bring him in. I hate to be a prick, but that's the way we're going to run it."

"Christ." Ferris put the phone aside for a moment. There was no point arguing the case, not with Hoffman. "Can I promise him money and resettlement, at least?"

"Sure. No problem. Whatever you like." Hoffman didn't even ask how much Ferris would be offering. He knew he would never have to pay it off.

F
ERRIS SAT
Nizar down in the house again and said he had a few more questions. The Iraqi was in a good mood now, relaxing, decompressing, imagining that his part of the nightmare would be over soon. Ferris had a little digital tape recorder going now, to capture the debrief. He asked Nizar for the names of his contacts in Al Qaeda in Iraq. He asked for the locations where he met with the members of his cell. He asked how he had been recruited, and the Iraqi explained that it had been in Amman--at a safe house near Jebel Al-Akhthar, on the southern edge of the city. He recited the address and Ferris wrote it down carefully in his notebook. If they could monitor the Amman safe house, maybe they could take down an entire network. Ferris asked for the SIM card of his cell phone, and Nizar handed that over, too.

The little Iraqi talked on for several hours. Ferris sent Bassam out to get some food, and he came back with some kebabs and Heineken beer brewed in Egypt, which Nizar devoured. It was midafternoon before they finished. Ferris was getting nervous that they had been at Bassam's uncle's house for so long. People in the neighborhood would know and tell others. When night fell, it would be dangerous for them here.

When Ferris had finished all of his questions, Nizar looked at him attentively.

"We are ready to go to Green Zone now, sir?" he asked.

"Not yet, Nizar." Immediately the Iraqi's hopeful smile dissolved. "It will take my friends a little while to arrange your departure from Iraq. In the meantime, you should go about your business. Be careful. Don't panic. Everything will be okay."

"But sir, they will kill me. I tell you that when we first talk."

"They won't kill you. We will be watching you and protecting you. We have big eyes and ears."

Nizar was shaking his head. "Sir, I am sorry, but you cannot protect anyone. Not even yourselves. How you protect me?"

"We will take care of you. Your friend Bassam will be close. But he cannot stay with you. Neither can I. Until we come to take you out, you have to take care of yourself."

The Iraqi made a low moan. He had given everything and gotten nothing. Ferris couldn't leave him like that. In his depression, he would wander into a trap and be dead before sundown.

"I am going to open a bank account for you now in America. Is that all right?

Nizar's eyes brightened slightly. "Yes, sir. How much please?"

"At first, a hundred thousand dollars. Plus we will resettle you and your wife and kids in America."

Now the Iraqi was really perking up. "One million, please. I do not have a wife."

Jesus, thought Ferris. A moment ago he was a goner, and now he's dickering over money. "We'll see about the million dollars. Right now I want to talk about how you're going to stay safe." He called over Bassam, and they talked through the security procedures Nizar would adopt over the next week. Ferris gave him a new cell phone to use in emergencies. The Iraqi took it greedily, as if it were a first down payment on the million dollars.

"I want to live in Los Angeles," he said. "I want a house on the beach. Just like on
Baywatch
."

"Sure," said Ferris. "No problem." He shook hands with the Iraqi, who slipped out the door and trundled across the dusty yard to his black BMW, thinking about girls in bikinis. He waved goodbye in their direction and drove off. That was the last time Ferris ever saw him.

B
ASSAM PICKED
up word through one of his subagents that Nizar had been killed the following morning. Nizar had been taking his breakfast in a cafe off the main road in Samara, a place where people knew him. That was stupid--the opposite of what Ferris had told him to do. When he left the cafe, two cars had followed him. The only good news was that he hadn't been captured. He had his own gun and managed to fire enough shots at his pursuers that they had to kill him, which meant they hadn't been able to question him.

Ferris waited until late in the evening to call Hoffman. He hid out in a villa behind the police station. It wasn't just that he was angry, it was that he knew what Hoffman would say and he didn't want to hear it. When it was nearly midnight Iraq time, he picked up the satellite phone and dialed Langley. The watch officer put him through to Hoffman.

"He's dead," said Ferris. "The kid I recruited. They nailed him this morning."

"Already? Shit. That didn't take long. Did they interrogate him before they killed him?"

"Not from what we heard. But we weren't there when he took the bullet. I have it secondhand, from one of my guys."

"Fuck." Hoffman groaned. "What did you get out of him, before they got him?"

"Good stuff. He talked for a couple of hours before I let him go. How he was recruited in Amman. The address of the safe house. Who's in his network here. I have it all on tape. He couldn't stop talking, he was so excited. The poor fucker."

Even Hoffman could tell that Ferris felt guilty. "Sorry, Roger, but shit happens. I could apologize, but what's the point? He was going to get killed no matter what he did. Because he talked to you, maybe it will save some lives."

"Maybe," said Ferris. "Like you said, shit happens."

"The point is, now you've got to get out. We have to assume you're blown, whether this guy talked or not. I want you back to Balad. Then we'll see about getting you reassigned. You're too valuable to waste."

"I'm not leaving. There's a war on. I have other agents here. I'm not abandoning them just because we fucked up. That's our problem around here, if you hadn't noticed."

"Don't be sentimental, Roger. It's not safe. I am not losing my best young officer because he feels so guilty about a dead Iraqi that he decides to commit suicide. Sorry, no goddamn way."

"I'm not leaving," Ferris repeated.

Hoffman's voice went cold. He spoke slowly, with barely suppressed anger at the fact that Ferris was challenging him.

"I want you back in Balad tomorrow, Ferris. That is an order. If you don't obey it, you can find another job. Assuming they don't send you home in a bag. Is that understood?"

Ferris didn't know how to respond, so he broke the connection. When Hoffman called back, he didn't answer. That alone was enough to get him fired, but in that moment, Ferris didn't care. He tried to sleep, and when he couldn't, he read the dog-eared Charles Dickens novel he had brought along for moments like this.

B
ASSAM COLLECTED
Ferris the next morning outside his little villa. Ferris was wearing his robe and kaffiyeh--at a quick glance, he was just another scruffy Iraqi man in his early thirties. Bassam had his hair gelled, as usual, but it was obvious he hadn't slept much, either. He looked hollow-eyed and nervous--no color left in his cheeks. Stoicism in the face of danger was a code of honor for Iraqi men, so he did his best to sound buoyant.

"Hey, boss-man," he said when Ferris got in the car. "Everything's cool."

Ferris answered in Arabic. "No English today, Bassam. It's too dangerous." He looked in the side mirror. A BMW with three Iraqis had pulled up behind them. "Pull over, let the car behind pass," said Ferris. Bassam obeyed silently, no chatter now. The BMW idled, and Ferris was about to tell Bassam to gun it and make a run, but at the last moment the Iraqi driver pulled out and passed them. One of the men in the BMW stared at Ferris full in the face. Shit, he thought. They know. They've made me.

"Head south," said Ferris. "Go to the house Nizar told us about, the one he said is the local headquarters for his cell. If there's anyone there, I want to call in the Predator and take some pictures. See who's coming and going."

"You sure?" asked Bassam. He was nervous, Ferris could tell. He thought the American was pushing his luck. He was right, but Ferris didn't care. In that moment, he was determined to finish the job. He was still angry about Nizar, the little fireplug Iraqi who had trusted Ferris and now was dead. They headed south along the banks of the Tigris, a big ugly river that seemed more mud than water.

Bassam knew the directions--knew the house, even. In these parts, every family knew where every other family lived. Every space on the checkerboard was covered with something. They turned off the main road, past a grove of olive trees and toward a half-finished villa a mile distant. It was spooky--dead quiet in the stillness of the morning, no cars on the road, no birds in the air, even. Ferris got out his satellite phone and checked the GPS coordinates, so he could be sure of the location when he contacted Balad to call in the Predator.

Ferris saw a little cloud of dust rise next to the villa when they were about a quarter mile off. It was a car coming or going, he couldn't tell which, but it was motion.

"Slow down," he told Bassam. He got on the phone to his base chief in Balad and asked him to dispatch
CHILI
,
SPECK
, or
NITRATE
. He gave the GPS coordinates and told the chief to hurry. This was a live target; the operating base of a confirmed terrorist cell.

Bassam had slowed the Mercedes to fifteen miles an hour. "Should I turn around now?" he asked.

"Why?" said Ferris. "We're almost there. Let's check it out."

"But sir, they are coming at us." There was a tremor in the Iraqi's voice Ferris had never heard before.

Ferris studied the dust cloud in the distance. It was getting bigger, and you could make out the car now. Bassam was right. Whoever was in the car was heading their way. Ferris couldn't know whether they were coming in pursuit, but he had to make an instant decision.

"Turn around," said Ferris, adding in English: "Gun it." Bassam threw the wheel over, swerved into a quick 180-degree turn and put the pedal to the floor. Bassam's Mercedes kicked up a plume of dust of its own, obscuring the view of the car behind.

As they neared the main highway, Ferris realized they were in deep trouble. The chase car was still behind them, but another car, a faded yellow Chevrolet, lay in wait on the shoulder of the paved road. Ferris popped the glove compartment of the Mercedes, where Bassam kept his gun. He hefted it in his hand. It was a small-caliber automatic pistol, almost useless. They were nearing the intersection.

"What you want, boss?" said Bassam.

"Turn south," said Ferris. "Toward Balad."

Bassam surged into the curve, barely missing an oncoming dump truck. The yellow Chevy parked on the shoulder roared to life and took off after them, followed by the car that had been pursuing them on the dirt road. Ferris got back on the satellite phone to Balad.

"You got that bird up? We have a problem out on Highway One."

"Roger that, sir," answered the duty officer. "
SPECK
is on the way to the coordinates you gave us. A few minutes away."

"Listen, we are in some serious fucking trouble here. I think some bad guys have made me and one of my agents. We are in an old red Mercedes south of Samara, coming down Highway One. We are being pursued by two cars. The lead car is a yellow Chevy. If you can get a gunship in the air you may save a couple of lives."

"Roger that," repeated the duty officer. "Stay on the line. We're calling down to the flight line for choppers. We'll see what we can do."

Ferris looked back toward the yellow car. He saw a man leaning out from the back-seat window on the driver's side. He had something big in his hands. It looked almost like a television camera and then Ferris realized: Fuck no, it's an RPG.

"Faster," he said to Bassam. "As fast as it will go." Bassam revved it all the way, pushing the needle past eighty, then ninety, but there were cars up ahead and he had to slow so that he wouldn't rear end them.

And then in an instant Ferris's world nearly flickered out for good. He didn't hear the roar of the RPG as it left the muzzle of the launcher. He saw a sudden burst of light to his left, just beyond Bassam, and then the shattering sound of the grenade exploding at the front wheel base, and then everything was white, and things went into slow motion. The car rocked up off its wheels from the concussion of the explosion, swaying once, twice and then settling back down on its tires. He heard a piercing scream in Arabic from Bassam, and saw that he was spurting blood from wounds across his chest. Oh, shit, thought Ferris, and he reached out his arm in a strobe-lit motion and then pulled back in horror. Where Bassam's stomach had been was a mess of blood and intestines. The shrapnel had carved into his gut like a surgeon's knife. Bassam was screaming, but somehow his hands were still on the steering wheel and his foot was on the gas pedal. Ferris felt a sharp sting, like he had been bitten by wasps up and down his leg, and only then did he see that the shrapnel of the grenade had hit him, too. His left leg was blood and bone, from midthigh down toward his calf. He put his hand to his balls to make sure they were still there.

"Can you drive?" shouted Ferris. All he heard back was the screaming, but Bassam managed to steer around the cars that had stopped up ahead because of the explosion and was accelerating into open highway. "Can you drive?" asked Ferris again, but the car was already weaving and he could see the life going out of Bassam's eyes and in a moment his body slumped over.