Body of Lies Read Online Free PDF Page B

and it was true. Ferris spoke Level Four Arabic; he had the dark hair and complexion that would allow him to pass as an Arab in his robes and kaffiyeh, and he had that essential hunger, which he thought he could satisfy by taking risks.
     
    O N HIS way in, Ferris spent a week with the ops chief in Baghdad. He was a burly Irishman named Jack, but when he dyed his red hair and moustache and put on a loose galabia, he could pass for a Sunni sheik. Jack gave Ferris a tour of the agency's hideaways in the Green Zone: the body shop where they repainted cars overnight; the hundreds of dummy license plates; the back entrances the agency used to slip its operatives out of the zone and into real life; the dozens of beat-up agency cars parked on the other side in the Red Zone, each raunchier than the last; the locations of safe houses across central Iraq, where Ferris would be operating. They drank and joked, to keep away the fear.
    "Don't get captured," Jack said on the last day, before Ferris went north. "That's the main rule here. If they capture you, they're going to kill you eventually, but first they'll make you spill your guts. So don't get captured. That's all. If you see a roadblock and you think they're going to try to stop you, start shooting, and keep shooting until you're out of there or you're dead."
    "My Arabic is pretty good," said Ferris.
    Jack shook his head. "I'll say it again. Don't get captured. You're not going to talk your way out of a fucking thing with these people. Shoot first. That's what they respect. Don't try to be smart. If you shoot enough of them, it won't matter whether your Arabic is good or bad."
     
    O N THE DAY Ferris got lucky, he had been in Iraq for almost three months. He was scared almost every day he was there, and this one was no different. The base was mortared early in the morning while he was showering, and he had to scramble bare-assed from the latrine near his trailer, with a towel barely covering his privates, and duck under the concrete barrier that served as a shelter. Two mortar rounds landed, one of them a quarter mile away. They didn't bother to sound an all-clear anymore, because it was never all clear. Ferris went back and finished his shower, but he thought--wrongly, as it turned out--that starting the day this way was a bad omen.
    He was heading back that morning into what his colleagues called "the shit," which meant anything outside the walls of the compound. His practice was to spend a week outside, then a week back in. Hoffman hadn't liked that--the most dangerous part of the job was transiting back and forth--and he wanted Ferris to meet his agents inside the perimeter. The NE Division chief was genuinely afraid that he might lose Ferris in Iraq, a fight he wasn't sure was worth it. But Ferris knew that caution was useless. Better not to have any agents than to rely on ones who made their way back and forth to an American compound. That was the point about Iraq: There was no way to be half in.
    Ferris put on his sweat-stained robe and his checkered kaffiyeh. He had grown the required moustache in Iraq and a stubbly beard, never quite shaven or unshaven. With his coloring, he could easily pass for an Arab. Not an Iraqi, perhaps, but an Egyptian, which was his cover identity. He had in fact first learned his Arabic in Cairo, during a semester abroad when he was at Columbia, and he still spoke with the soft "G" of the Egyptian dialect. Ferris wondered what his wife Gretchen would say if she could see him. She always imagined his spy life as a version of James Bond, with nice suits and martinis. If she saw him now, she would tell him to go change. Gretchen liked everything about Ferris except his real life.
    Ferris left the compound with the other Arab workers when the night shift ended and the day shift came on base. He knew they wouldn't talk to him; Iraqis who worked at American bases didn't talk to anyone. They were risking their lives for the extra money they could bring