Body of Lies by David Ignatius Page A

skin. When he began chasing radical Muslims for Time , she was one of the few people who got it. "They're dangerous, Roger," she said. "Do something about it."
    They stayed close because they were perfect. She always told him that. She was gorgeous, the sort of girl you would want to walk up Fifth Avenue with at Christmastime. She liked to wear red, listen to U2, get bikini-waxed at a fancy spa. She had a delightfully trashy, sloe-eyed, fuck-me look when she got drunk. And she was almost proprietary about her right to pleasure, as if she were depositing it all in a lifetime orgasm bank. When she wasn't making love, she slept like a cat, and Ferris would lie awake, wondering why he felt lonely.
    They got married because...it seemed like the right thing to do. Their friends were all getting married. It was like a momentum trade in the stock market; everyone else is buying, so you buy, too. He certainly didn't love anyone else. She had waited for him two years while he was off in Yemen, and when he returned, she said, it's "our time." They found an apartment in Kalorama, and she started working at Justice just before September 11, 2001.
    She had always been patriotic, but after 9/11 she had a sense of personal mission. There's something that happens when ambition fuses with principle that's like a chemical reaction, and it made her a subtly different person. At Justice, her ferocity began to attach itself to issues that Ferris dealt with in his own career, and it disturbed him. One evening she had asked Ferris about interrogation techniques. She was very specific about it. How much did you have to hurt someone before they would talk? How long did it take people to recover after interrogation? It wasn't an idle conversation about interrogation, if there could be any such thing, and Ferris suspected she must be doing legal research. He said he didn't know much, other than what they had taught him at The Farm, and she looked disappointed.
    She had pressed him, and Ferris had finally explained that the only time he'd seen a rough interrogation was in Yemen. The local security service had captured an Al Qaeda suspect and had beaten him over three days. With a cricket bat, that was the detail that stuck in Ferris's mind. They had let him stay just conscious enough to appreciate each new wave of pain that was coming. Finally, in a spasm of fear, the prisoner had begun shouting the answers he thought the interrogators wanted to hear. But that had only made them more angry, so they had beaten him harder. Eventually, he died from loss of blood and trauma to the head. Ferris had watched.
    "Did you tell them to stop?" Gretchen had asked.
    "No. I kept thinking it would work. But then he was dead."
    "Don't ever tell anyone else what you just told me," said Gretchen. "It was illegal. Technically."
    When Ferris asked why she was so interested in interrogation, she didn't answer. She went off and made some notes, and then came back with the top buttons of her blouse undone.
    The discussion had upset Ferris, and he wanted to believe that it had bothered Gretchen as well, but he wasn't sure. He had begun to realize that for her, the law was another kind of conquest. It was about removing restraints so that your client--in her case, the president of the United States--could do what he wanted. There was something sexual about it, a kind of reverse bondage. The law for her was about untying people so they could have their way.
    She was proud of Ferris when he got wounded in Iraq. He had thought the scars would disgust her, but she liked to touch them--almost as if she were experiencing the event vicariously. But she couldn't: Ferris had seen into the abyss in that moment on Highway 1 when he thought he was about to die, and he had realized that she wasn't there with him. How could he tell her that? The sense of separation stayed with him during his convalescence, and it made him realize that there were things he didn't share with Gretchen, and never