For once the dwarf doesn't laugh. He looks at me suspiciously without answering, apparently very surprised to see a foreigner, and makes gestures to indicate that I should ask at the reception desk, behind him, to the right.
"As I was saying, do you have any rooms?"
More suspicion from the desk clerk who takes a step back behind his counter, as if my simply coming in were an act of aggression. He's a man of about 40, dressed Western-style, clean-shaven with a slightly swollen face and hair that sticks up. Is he Aamir Raza Qureshi, the receptionist who was on duty on 11 January? Was he the one who first greeted Omar and checked him in, then later greeted Pearl? For now, I consider it useless- and unwise-to try to find out.
"Someone in France told me about your hotel. Because of the view on Liaquat Bagh."
The man takes my passport. And still without opening his mouth, acting as if he really wasn't looking for customers, he makes a gesture for me to go and sit over in the lobby, where there are pillows and low glass tables set on colored earthenware elephant feet.
At one of the tables, a strange child, all wrinkled, his forehead blotched with brown spots, wearing rags, stops drawing to stare at me.
At another, a group of five bearded men, in grubby white clothing, wearing turbans, suspicious.
All the tables, in fact, are occupied by bearded characters with not very engaging attitudes, who stop their conversations abruptly and look at me, not even trying to conceal their hostility.
Behind us, a small featureless room, very dark, that serves as the restaurant, and where I know that Omar, when Pearl arrived, was finishing dinner: the place is full, Chinese and Pakistani food, about forty people.
There are brown, fake-wool rugs everywhere, matching the curtains and the tapestries that go up to the ceiling-and everywhere the smell of haphazard housekeeping, of encrusted dirt and cigarette smoke that makes the air almost impossible to breathe.
The clerk has gone into the little office next to the reception desk, he's hanging on the telephone, flanked by a male housekeeper and a waiter from the restaurant who have just joined him, and seem equally intrigued, elbowing each other, sniggering.
Some of the time he's watching me, with a weird, murky look that could be threatening. Some of the time he's leafing through my passport. But mainly he seems very attentive to what he's being told over the telephone. After two minutes, unwillingly, almost angrily, he comes toward me.
"What floor?" Reluctantly he explains that the price is not the same- six hundred rupees for the first and second floors, twice that for the upper floors where the rooms have just been redone. I ask for the fourth floor, of course. And here I am, if not in Omar's room (it was number 411, but I'm told it's occupied), at least on the same corridor, facing it.
The difference is that my room looks out onto the Liaquat and from the window I can see, and hear, the kids coming out of school and further away, in the park, the neighborhood kids playing cricket with improvised bats, balls made from rags, and goals made from hastily stacked bricks.
The difference is that room 411, judging by the way the corridor is situated, must look out on the other side, onto a courtyard or a blank wall-it must be quieter, more peaceful, but also, and this was probably the idea, more isolated, and, in case of trouble, with no contact to the outside, and little chance of being heard.
Apart from that, it must have the same wooden bed, no pillows, with a blanket in the closet.
The same smell of cheap soap powder on the sheets.
The same dingy gray carpeting, and even dustier than on the ground floor. The same black formica on the walls, up to a man's height, and, facing the window, an engraving which depicts, like the one at the lawyer Khawaja's, Srinagar's snowy mountains. And, beneath the engraving, a minibar sits on top of a small television, which-incongruous luxury!- seems to get the regional cable channels.
The same laminated wood table where room-service put the club sandwiches, sodas, iced coffee, and, when night had fallen, when the conversation had become lively and an atmosphere of trust was beginning to prevail, more sandwiches and more iced coffee.
Pearl is there on the bed with his notebook open on his lap.
Asif, the fixer, who set up the meeting, is sitting on the floor, his back against the door.
Omar is sitting in the only chair, with Pearl 's and Asif 's tape recorders on the table in front of him.
He's feeling awkward, at the beginning. Evasive. He can't bring himself to look at Danny directly and punctuates his answers with big embarrassed gestures. His missing beard, perhaps . . . This new chin, smooth and clean-shaven, which he's no longer used to . . . The thin, somewhat weak mouth which looked so strange to him that morning in the mirror, and which he's afraid will arouse suspicion-how absurd! The idea was to give himself a reassuring look, and now he's wondering if it isn't his shaved face that will betray him! No. Danny is trusting. He has a way of listening, of asking multiple questions, of letting the answer come, of extracting everything it means to reveal, then of coming back to a detail, and from this detail, starting up the questioning again. He has this very characteristic way of holding his breath when the other person is talking, or else of nodding his head in encouragement, accompanying the speaker almost as if he were an orchestra conductor-Ah, Danny and music! Danny and his violin! Those photos I saw in Los Angeles, of him with his violin, are coming back to me!-until he succeeds in putting Omar at ease and getting him to open up. And that's why, very quickly, they decide to relax and turn off their mobile phones and embark on a four-hour frank and open conversation about the Jaish e-Mohammed, the Lashkar I-Janghvi, the Harkat ul-Mujahideen, the Lashkar e-Toiba, the Gilani sect, the whole galaxy of Islamist organisations proliferating all over Pakistan; the relationships between them fascinate Danny.
It takes a long time for me to fall asleep that night.
I'm here to play the game and to experience this hotel from the inside, the full experience, in the hope of seeing a sign, I don't know what kind of sign but a sign, something which has yet to be revealed to the investigators or the press-but I confess to great difficulty in passing a normal night.
A swarm of questions are buzzing around in my head. Pearl's thoughts? His reactions? Was Pearl greeted the way I was, with the same visible suspicion? Or, on the contrary, were the people at the reception and in the lobby accomplices, briefed by Omar and so on his side? Was Pearl suspicious? Did he wonder, too, what was this strange place he'd happened upon? Did Omar have to provide explanations, justifications? How, in general, did their first meeting go? Did they talk about London and Los Angeles? About their babies? Their wives? Was the room service waiter the same little bearded guy in a djellaba, with one leg shorter than the other, making him walk hesitantly? Did it take him two hours to get up to Pearl's room, as well?
I am obsessed and tormented by the same doubts, which, with the night, take on awesome dimensions: Who were those men downstairs? Why was the desk clerk, when the hotel is visibly empty, so reluctant to give me a room? Why, in an empty hotel, do I hear the sound of footsteps, of stairs being climbed softly, those creaks of an old spring mattress in the room next door, these whispered conversations outside my door? Are they conversations, in fact? Or labored breathing? Moans of pain? Or the sound of furniture being moved? Why do I feel as if I am not alone? As if I'm being spied on even in my room? What if this Hotel Akbar, in other words, was not exactly a normal hotel?
The next day, as I'm paying my bill, I get the first part of an answer to my questions.
In front of me are some of the same men from yesterday, also waiting to pay-except that they present a card and repeat an identical phrase as they do so, a phrase which I don't understand but which seems to give them the right to a substantial discount.
Further away, in groups of five or six around the low tables, are other men, less prosperous, who don't seem to have rooms but are there nonetheless, regulars, silent, getting warm and drinking large cups of tea with milk, very hot, without saucers, with endless refills.
And finally in the restaurant, which has been rearranged during the night with the tables set up as if it were a classroom, thirty other men, who also look poor, with beards, are listening to a man of military bearing give a lecture.
The truth, I'm starting to realize, is that I have fallen into-or more importantly Daniel Pearl fell into-an unusual hotel, a refuge for visiting Kashmiri militants and fighters when they're in Rawalpindi.
The truth-I learn in the hours that follow when I find my local source-is that Kashmiri fighters get rooms at a discount (those rooms on the third and fourth floors, in fact) and free tea in the morning.
The truth-from the same source-is that, besides these fighters and fierce peasants who come here seeking a bit of warmth, other much more important men are regulars here, men who have in common a close tie to the country's special services: prominent advocates of the Kashmiri cause, like the journalist from Jammu, Ved Bhasim, or the pro-Pakistani Indian politician Bzaz; Abdul Ghani Lone, another notorious Kashmiri, who housed the guests to his son Sajjad's wedding here; all the big jihadist leaders, who, until the recent wave of restrictions, would organize their press conferences here, with the blessing of the ISI.
In short, the place Omar chose for his first meeting with Pearl is a place where the Pakistani secret services are at home.
The hotel he chose for their first encounter was not in fact an ordinary hotel, but rather one controlled, almost managed, by the ISI.
There are three hotels of this kind in Pakistan. Surely there are others. But I spotted at least three: the Sangam in Mazzafarabad; the Margalla, in Islamabad, two kilometers past the French embassy on the Serena road; and the Hotel Akbar, which I discovered belongs, officially, to a Kashmiri named Chaudhary Akbar but which is one of the ISI's locations in Rawalpindi.
Everything converges.
From the organization of the crime to the biography of its authors, from Omar's past to that of certain of his henchmen, from India to Pakistan, from Lahore to Islamabad, from backstage at the plane hijacking in Kandahar to backstage at the Hotel Akbar, everything points to the direct and close involvement of the Pakistani secret service.
No more psychology, at this point.
Yes, Mariane was right, at this level you can no longer see how analyzing the psychology, the moods, of Omar could have any effect on the obvious reality.
Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and then murdered by Islamist groups who were manipulated by a single fringe group of the secret service-the most radical, the most violent, the most anti-American of the factions fighting for control of the services; but how can it be denied that this faction behaved, from the beginning to the end of the affair, as if it were perfectly at home in Musharraf's Pakistan?
This crime was not petty, a murder for nothing, an uncontrolled act of fundamentalist fanatics-it's a crime of state, intended and authorized, whether we like it or not, by the state of Pakistan. As Aldo Moro, to quote him again, said in his tragic letter to his wife Noretta, in which he announced to the likes of Cossiga, Zaccagnini and Zizola that his blood would fall on them, it's a "state massacre." The paradox, of course, is that it implicates a country which is a friend to the United States and the West, an ally in the fight to the death against the "Axis of Evil," in other words, a full-fledged member of the antiterrorist coalition.
That's the provisional conclusion of this book, in October 2002.
At this stage of the investigation, that's my first and terrifying conclusion.
PART FOUR.
AL-QAIDA.
CHAPTER 1 RETURN TO THE HOUSE OF THE CRIME.
But that's not all.
I was far from finished being surprised.
And I had yet to discover the most extraordinary, and edifying, aspect of the story.
It is now November 2002.
I am, again, back in Pakistan.
This time I'm here officially, with a visa, a stamp, I go through the whole business: visit to the ambassador in Paris, meeting in Islamabad with the Minister of the Interior, to whom I have to show at least part of my hand-"I am writing a novel about the death of Daniel Pearl . . . yes, yes, don't worry, a novel . . . we're like that, in France, we produce works of imagination based on reality . . . "
The idea is in fact to see as many officials as possible.
As soon as I arrived, I asked to see everybody who had any knowledge of the case, from Musharraf to the fourteenth sergeant of the Lahore police force.
Your version, Sir?
What are your reasons for thinking that Omar might be an Indian agent?
Can you show me the transcripts of his interrogations? The Indians did-are you going to do less than the Indians?
Why don't you extradite him to the United States? Did they demand him as forcibly as they say they did? Which of you is the more reticent to extradite him?
So, I'm waiting for appointments. And while I wait quietly, I decide, again with Abdul, to revisit some of the obscure areas of my earlier investigations, particularly the very beginning, the point of departure-I decide, without really knowing why, to visit again the farm where the body of Daniel Pearl was found. I decide, in fact, to seek out a character whom the Pakistani press had talked about a great deal at first, but who seems to have been completely forgotten since: the owner of the land, the house, and the entire complex where the drama took place-the millionaire Saud Memon.
Who is Saud Memon?
Why do the terrorists end up there, at his house?
To what degree is he involved in the logistics of the crime?
And how come no one, either in Pakistan or anywhere else, seems to be interested in getting his testimony?
First surprise: Saud Memon is not to be found.
Access to Gulzar e-Hijri having been denied to me this time, I ask Abdul to take a casual look around-the place, he tells me, is in exactly the same state as when I was there in May. Neither Memon nor any other member of his family has reappeared since. The big house on the edge of the farm is empty, abandoned-shutters closed, big, rusty padlock on the iron gate, and the front garden overgrown.
Then, I obtain from the Sindh police headquarters the interrogation transcripts of Memon's brother-in-law, who teaches at the neighboring madrasa, and of his brothers-there are three-all arrested by the Rangers at the end of May, in their house in Nazimabad. None of them seems to have the vaguest idea where Saud could be now; despite the harsh methods I know are customary in these circumstances, nothing further has been extracted from them than "no, we know nothing, we haven't seen Saud since last May, maybe he's in Dubai, or Ryad, or Sanaa, or maybe even London, he has so many friends in the world, you know, so many friends . . . " I have in front of me the statements made by all and sundry, as well as the text of the Supreme Court appeal lodged by Najama Mehmood, wife of one of the brothers, protesting the "illegal detention" of her husband- and I could be wrong, but I find in every single one of them a tone of sincerity in their way of protesting that the man has disappeared.
I go to Peshawar, a city of three and half million inhabitants connected to the famous tribal zones that are like a sieve between Pakistan and Afghanistan and which, for all practical purposes, elude the control of the central powers. I was told that Memon was hiding not far from there, in a madrasa in the province of North Waziristan. A professor from the madrasa next door to his home told Abdul: "This Pearl affair was an ordeal for him. Imagine! It all took place on the Memon clan's land, and therefore you could even say under his roof, so he's devastated. And because he's devastated, he wanted to get some distance, to forget, to be forgotten . . . " But no one in Peshawar has the slightest idea of where he is. Nowhere did I find any evidence of his passage. Not a trace of the billionaire stricken with remorse and commending his soul to God, which is the idea that is being promoted. (Meanwhile, it's true that bin Laden himself seems to have succeeded in entering the city, in the second week of December 2001, with a guard of fifty men without, apparently, attracting the attention of the authorities.) So here's a man about whom you can say, at the very least, that his name is known in Karachi. Here's a personage whose influence is great- the Memon clan, everyone assures me, rules a part of the Punjabi business world-and everyone knows of their comings and goings and what they're up to. Here's an entrepreneur who personally manages-as does Omar Sheikh's father-a clothing export company that is entirely aboveboard and that has a warehouse in another building at Gulzar e-Hijri, very close to the farmhouse where the murder took place. That man has disappeared. He has vanished into thin air with wives and children. He's faded into the scenery like one of the minor thugs: like Mussadiq and Abdul Samat, the two unidentified members of the detention cell; like Hyder, a.k.a. Mansur Hasnain, who made the last two telephone calls on the afternoon of the 23rd, and whose family, we recall, told the police that he had just been "infiltrated into the Jammu Kashmir"; like Arif, a.k.a. Hashim Qader, supposedly off to the Afghan front, leaving the household in Bahawalpur in mourning, bereaved . . .
Another surprise.
I'm in the office of one of the deputies of the Minister of the Interior of Sindh.
He is a tall man, vain, all uniform and moustache, who looks at me suspiciously and seems very concerned about the honor of his police force.
"Tell me, Mr. Chief of Police, about the famous antiterrorist operation conducted by your men last September 11, at the end of which you arrested ten Yemenis, including Ramzi bin al-Shibh. Tell me how the Rangers came to be outside the Defence building that morning. Tell me about the raid and the surrender of the terrorists. Tell me how all that was organized-did the Americans help you? Was it their agents who had tracked down Ramzi and his gang? Their satellite systems for intercepting and wiretapping? The CIA? FBI?
And him, vexed: "Why always the Americans? Do you think we're not capable of conducting our own antiterrorist operations? As it happens, this affair had nothing to do with the CIA. It was Pakistani intelligence sources that did the preliminary groundwork. Here, listen . . . "
And he tells me how everything started two days earlier in the Badurabad district when they broke up a fake-ID ring involved in the exfiltration of al-Qaida members. How, from there, they followed the trail of a smuggler who dealt not only in fake documents, but also in the export of illegal workers to Ryad-children from Dacca to be used as jockeys for the camel races of Dubai. He specialized, last but not least, in getting al-Qaida fighters out of the country to Yemen, and other countries of the Middle East. That man, the Minister's deputy told me, was the real target of the antiterrorist raid on the 11th-he's the one, even more than Ramzi bin al-Shibh or the flashy Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that we wanted to capture; his name is "Mr. M.," and Mr. M. is none other than . . . Saud Memon.
I realize that this version of events does not coincide with my thesis.
It exonerates, if I can put it that way, Yosri Fouda, the Al-Jazeera journalist, by making his interview-or at least the timing of its airing- no longer the catalyst for the Rangers' decision to conduct the raid.
It allows one to imagine, instead of the comedy I had envisioned, an investigation, a real one, with suspicion, witnesses, prolonged shadowing of the suspects, multiple phases, and at the end of the road, the final raid on the al-Qaida hideout.
But for the moment, that's not the crux of the matter.
The crux is that Memon, in all likelihood, is far from being an honest and nave merchant whose good faith has been taken advantage of by a gang of terrorists squatting on one of his properties.
The important thing is that we have here a man with two faces, much more complex and mysterious than his peers in the Karachi Chamber of Commerce suspect. On one hand, the innocent importer-exporter of textiles, serving as cover-and on the other, a darker and more troubling character, which leads one to believe that it is not by chance nor unbeknownst to him that a gang of jihadists took up residence on his property to murder Daniel Pearl.
Need I add Abdul's discovery when he returned to the Gulzar e-Hijri farm? The property, like a number of its neighboring properties, had been bought fifteen years earlier, taking advantage of legislation that allows tax breaks for "industrial and commercial profits reinvested into agriculture." Except that not the slightest sign of an agricultural project was ever seen there. Agricultural activity on the property, according to witnesses, never went beyond the bamboo and acacias that grew wild. And Memon seems to have become very quickly involved in other, infinitely less legitimate, missions. Starting with this one, in fact, long before Pearl: serving kidnappers and hosting prisoners in need of a prison. Specialite de la maison. Premises for rent, furnished and equipped, for needy jihadists. Memon as a dealer in abduction. Amateurs need not apply. A millionaire at the heart of the Islamist murder industry in Karachi.
And the third and last surprise: the al-Rashid Trust, of which Memon is one of the administrators, and which is tied to the property, although I don't know from what angle.
In theory, it's quite clear.
Al-Rashid is a Pakistani organization that has taken on the task of helping Muslims in need all over the world.
There's the All-Party Hurriyat Conference, the United Jihad Council, the Markaz al-Dawah al-Irshad with headquarters in Lahore. There are a number of more or less well-known and powerful charities. And then there is al-Rashid, the most important of these NGOs that collect from all over the country the famous "zakat" or "Islamic tax," which is then redistributed to great and noble causes of Muslim human-rights: Kosovo, where the organization apparently gave away the equivalent of $35,000 in 2002; Kashmir, its burning obligation; Chechnya, where, indignant over the systematic embezzlement of funds provided by the UN, al-Rashid used its own networks to bring in $750,000 worth of food and medical supplies over two years; Afghanistan, where for the annual cost of $4 million, it prides itself on running a network of bakeries all over the country, capable of providing bread daily to 50,000 men, women and children. And that's not including the sewing machines for war widows, the computer training centers for Kandahar youth, the ultramodern clinics set up in Ghazni, Kandahar and Kabul, or, in Pakistan itself, the free distribution of sheep for the Ad holiday. Is not charity the first duty of the pilgrim on the path to God?
The problem is that when you dig a little-as I did by going to the headquarters of the charity in Rawalpindi, and examining its books, and questioning one of its "volunteers"-you discover some very troubling details.
The date the Trust was set up, for example: 1996. Which is when the Taliban come to power.
The context of its activities. The money, in Chechnya, is given to Sheikh Omer Bin Ismail Dawood, who is one of the fundamentalist chieftains opposed to the authority of Maskadov. In Kashmir, it goes to terrorist organizations and the most fanatical and criminal combatants. And, as for the bread distribution in Afghanistan, the only thing that isn't mentioned in the Trust's annual report is the fact that the withdrawal of the World Food Program and the subsequent takeover of its 155 bakeries in 2000 and 2001 was linked to the prohibition against women working. At the time, it was the height of the confrontation between Western NGOs and the Taliban authorities, and the NGO's policy was to say "ease up on the status of women, let them work, and we'll maintain aid." The fact that the Trust took over the bakeries from the WFP was a political gesture that supported the position, the ideology, of the Taliban.
Its premises. The al-Rashid Trust, like all the big NGOs, has headquarters, offices, warehouses, and just simple addresses where donors are invited to send their money. But something else that goes unmentioned- yet is supported by a 22 November ad in the newspaper Zarb-e-Momin, for example, detailing where to send donations for "Afghan victims of U.S. terrorism"-is that in a lot of medium-sized cities, such as Mansehra, Mingora, and Chenabnagar, or even in the really big cities such as Lahore, Rawalpindi or Jalalabad in Afghanistan, the Trust shares its offices (and therefore probably its staff, its fund raising structure, and even its bank accounts) with a party, the Jaish e-Mohammed, whose humanitarian mission is not so obvious. What the report is careful to avoid saying is that, like a number of Islamic NGOs whose do-gooder mission is often only a cover (although it's rare to have blatant proof, as it in the newspaper ad), the al-Rashid Trust has links with a terrorist organization, which itself is linked to al-Qaida. These links are not merely ideological but structural, forged in organizational and financial logic. The Trust claims that these links were severed the day after September 11. The "volunteer" I speak to even gives me the account numbers and the names on the Jaish accounts at the Allied Bank in the Binori district of Karachi. Except there is the aforementioned issue of the Zarb-e-Momin with their joint advertisement-send your donations . . . cut along the dotted line . . . Jaish and al-Rashid, common cause and same struggle.
Its newspapers. Al-Rashid has newspapers, real ones. A daily in Urdu, Islam. And a weekly, the Zarb-e-Momin, which is also published in Urdu, every Friday in two versions, paper and internet, and whose circulation, in Pakistan and Afghanistan combined, adds up to 150,000 copies for the paper edition alone. (Another version comes out in English with the title Dharb-el-Momin.) It so happens that Zarb-e-Momin, until 2000, was the central organ of the Taliban leaders. Since their fall, it has become one of the outlets-along with Al-Hilal, which is more linked to the Harkat ul-Mujahideen, and the monthly Majallah al-Daawa-for all the hacks who are to some degree nostalgic for the black order the newspaper advocated. And it's in Zarb-e-Momin, finally-and not, for instance, in the bimonthly Jaish e-Mohammad, supposedly the official paper of the party-that a man like Masood Azhar, boss of the Jaish, Omar's mentor, and high dignitary in the assassins' sect, has continually published his prison writings for the last eight years. What does this have to do with humanitarian aid? Is it the role of an NGO to publish, every Friday, appeals to murder Jews, Hindus, Christians, Westerners?
Its finances. They are opaque, naturally. They are opaque neither more nor less than those of most NGOs, Islamist or not, and it is therefore very difficult to calculate how much of its resources come from individuals or states, from Pakistan or some country in the Middle East, from a big private donor in South Africa or Indonesia. But several things are certain. Here's one: it is the al-Rashid Trust, on the strength of its international contacts and also, I imagine, its competence in these fields, that manages the foreign holdings of a certain number of terrorist organizations, such as the Jaish or the Lashkar e-Toiba. Here's another: until November 2001, that is to say until the fall of the Taliban, the Trust systematically shared bank accounts in the Afghan branches of the Pakistani Habib Bank with another NGO, the Wafa Khairia, which has the distinction of having been founded by Osama bin Laden himself, as a sign of gratitude for the hospitality offered to him by Mullah Omar and his relatives. A charitable organization functioning as a banker for criminals? People who swear that all they care about is caring for the dispossessed, who are themselves associated with one of the al-Qaida organizations? Curiouser and curiouser . . .