Body of Lies by David Ignatius

of a conversation they had been having the last time they were together, when they were drunk and talking about politics. The tone was serious and frivolous at the same time; that was Alice's style, Ferris suspected, but he didn't really know her yet. He had been keeping the letter in his pocket. He took it out and reread it in the dim light of his terrace, suspended in the black night.
    "I hate this war, Roger," she began. "When did it begin, anyway? Did it begin in 2001, or the Crusades, or what? And who are these 'bad guys' your friends at the Embassy are always talking about? I assume it isn't all Muslims, but even if it's only the Muslims who hate America, that's still a lot of people. What are we going to do? Kill them all? And how will we ever get any of them to like us, if we keep on killing them? Maybe I'm stupid, but I don't get it. I hope we can have dinner again. We can go dancing at this new club in Shmeisani. Don't work too hard. I miss you. Do you miss me, even a little?" She had signed with a dramatic flourish of ink under her name.
    Sitting on the terrace, nursing his second glass of vodka, Ferris knew that he missed her quite a lot, actually. He tried her cell phone, but she wasn't answering. Was she with someone else, or away traveling, or just mysterious?
    Ferris knew he needed to write a letter. Not to Alice, whom he would be seeing soon enough, but to Gretchen. They were in an impossible situation. They both knew it, but neither wanted to admit it: If she had come with him to Amman, or if he had refused the assignment and stayed in Washington, they might have stood a chance. But in that case, they would have been different people. Gretchen didn't really want to be his wife; she would never have admitted that, but in fact she was too busy to be anyone's wife. She liked the idea of it, certainly. Being married to an intelligence officer fit her self-image--they were a couple of warriors, in her mind, except that they weren't really a couple.
    Do it now, Ferris told himself. He went inside and sat down at the laptop in his study and began typing: My dear Gretchen...no, Dear Gretchen. We said we needed to talk when I left Washington in June, but we never really did. Now I think we have to. Our marriage is broken...no, Our marriage is in trouble. We both know it. We've been living apart for months and there is no end in sight. You don't want to leave your job and I don't want to leave mine, especially after what happened in Iraq. There is no space for us to be together as husband and wife. If we are not going to be together, then it's inevitable that we will meet other people...no. If we are not going to be together, then I think you should talk to a lawyer....
    Ferris stopped writing. He thought about the lawyers, and the fight over money, and whole nuisance of getting divorced. He saved the document, and then deleted it. He hated the idea of negotiating with her. She was smarter than he was, and she would earn far more as a lawyer than he ever would as an intelligence officer. She would quit the Justice Department in a few years, join a fancy law firm and make $400,000 a year. The only way Ferris could make that kind of money was stealing operational funds, which wasn't his thing, at least not yet. And she wouldn't make it easy.
    Gretchen's problem was that she was intolerant of people who were weaker than she was, which included almost everybody. When they met at Columbia, she had told Ferris that she planned to vote Republican in the next presidential election. It wasn't a test so much as a warning. Ferris didn't care; politics bored him, whereas Gretchen excited him. She was dazzling in her self-possession--with the easy confidence that used to be associated with ambitious young men. What was it that had made Ferris fall in love with her? It was partly that sheen: She knew how to be successful, and she made him feel as if he were somebody, just being with her. But she also understood what was under his