"I'm flabbergasted, the embassy couldn't have told you that-there was never any question of asking you for the least contact with Gilani!"
"Yes there was. That's exactly what your embassy said. I have nothing to say to you, don't try to contact me, that's it!"
The embassy-I immediately made sure-had obviously never spoken of a contact with Gilani.
Hamid Mir-I'm convinced, thinking it over now-spoke very loudly, to an audience, and with a brutality that can only be explained by the fact that he was not alone and wanted to convince the people around him of his determination.
Who? It doesn't matter. The fact, once again, is there. I prefer not to insist.
It's raining in Karachi. Under my window, I can hear the call of the ragman mixed with the muezzin's. Tomorrow is Christmas. I think of Pearl's last Christmas. I think of Mariane and this sad year's end she must be going through. Who told me she was leaving to spend the holidays in Cuba, with little Adam? It was probably her. It was her without a doubt. And me, here, following in their footsteps, at the tail end of this terrible comet, with all the bad signs accumulating.
Better, of course, not to give them more weight than they necessarily deserve.
And to avoid the trap that would consist, here as elsewhere, of giving meaning to things that have none, and to exaggerate the importance of an incident . . .
But at the same time, I can't help but be surprised that all this is happening this way, a spate of things, all in such a short time . . .
These doors that shut and then, on the contrary, open, but in a way that is even more suspect . . . These small provocations . . . This phony proposition for an interview . . . It's hard not to think that there's a thread that runs through all that, and that this thread is a message someone is trying to send me.
What message?
Without a doubt, that they've seen right through me.
That no one here is fooled any longer as to the real nature of my investigation, that also is without a doubt.
Well. We'll see. For the time being, I'm not dissatisfied with the progress I've made in the past year, it's true.
I began on the assumption that Omar was undoubtedly guilty, guilty and convicted, but without being able to completely exclude the possibility that he is too perfect a culprit, too little for a crime too great-and that focusing on his name could have the effect of throwing back into the shadows other names, names more important than his, more embarrassing. The Oswald syndrome, in a way, after the death of Kennedy. The eternal "it can't be him . . . there must be forces behind him that surpass him . . . " described by Norman Mailer.
Today, at the end of 2002, at the point of the investigation where I find myself, I know that's not true and that Omar, far from being this small-time criminal, this figurehead, this underling, is a considerable culprit, a prince in the universe of Evil, an absolutely central character since he stands at the exact intersection of some of the darkest forces of our times. I know that this name, Omar Sheikh, far from being advanced in order to protect others from being pronounced, is an enormously important name, much more significant than I had imagined in my most audacious speculations, and whose effect is not to hide but to summon some of the most terrifying figures in the modern encyclopedia of death. I know that, with Omar, we are in the presence of an unprecedented criminal configuration, where the two mutually exclusive theories of the Oswald case are simultaneously true: it's him and not him . . . not him because it is him . . . considerable forces, indeed, but his own force at the same time, which is their condensed version. I say "Omar Sheikh," and when I utter the words, I am naming the synthesis, in him, of the ISI and al-Qaida-that is the truth.
PART FIVE.
"OVER INTRUSIVE"
CHAPTER 1 A FELLOW OF NO.
COLLECTIVE IMPORTANCE.
So the question is, why?
Yes, why al-Qaida? Why first, the ISI and now, al-Qaida? More precisely, why the ISI inside al-Qaida, or al-Qaida inside the ISI? Why are they intertwined-why did they combine forces to set a trap for a lone man?
Not that the combination is, in itself, anything surprising.
And one theory of this book is that this union is in the nature of things, in ordinary life and politics here. The thesis of this book, if one can call it a thesis, is that there exists an axis, a bond of flesh and, alas, of blood between these two forces that dominate Pakistan, and that no one can tell any longer which is in command of the other. My thesis-but do we even need to call it a thesis, when it's a fact that's obvious with every step, at every instant!-is that there exists, in the way they exchange their crimes and their powers, a reflexive relationship that often makes them merge into one, which is an essential feature of this country and what makes it so dangerous.
But a thesis is one thing; experience another.
It is one thing to know something patently obvious; it is quite another thing to put this obvious fact to a concrete test.
It is one thing to say, as I often have during this investigation, and as others have before me, that there's been an intentional confusion of roles, an incessant passing off of responsibility from one to another: You look for the ISI, you find al-Qaida; you look for al-Qaida, you run into the ISI; the bearded men are free-floating agents, and the agents are bearded men without beards or turbans; when you think about it, was the Hotel Akbar run by one or the other? The Brigadier Ijaz, the Shah Sahab of the Indian kidnapping cell, Saud Memon, Masood Azhar-are they the service's men, or bin Laden's? And Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was he really working for, and who abandoned him at the last moment? It's one thing to say all this, to see all these questions cropping up-but quite another to see the grand alliance, this pincer action in the actual case of an actual man. And most of all, we may well have a thousand examples of this consubstantiality. We may well try to remember everything of the Taliban's history and their manipulation by the intelligence services. We may well recall the case of Hamid Gul, head of the ISI at the time of the Soviet war who, no sooner fired and relieved of his duty to preserve secrecy, immediately offered his services to the jihadist cause, never missing an occasion in the past few years to proclaim his love for bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and the jihad. We may well consider the case of Mahmoud Ahmad, Director General of the ISI on September 11-did he approve the transfer of $100,000 to Mohammed Atta in the name of the ISI, of which he was still chief at the time, or in honor of the jihad, for whom he would become an official propagandist as soon as he resigns from his post? I can't say. We may well consider Ahmad again, hand in hand with the rector of Binori Town, leading the delegation of holy men on a last-chance visit to Afghanistan to tell Mullah Omar his only remaining means of avoiding war was to hand over bin Laden-and we may well know that, on that day, both in what he said and in the way he said it, he was more jihadist than the jihadists, and perhaps blew on the flames instead of putting them out. Intelligence agencies of the West may well know, as does Islamabad, that on 8 October 2001, the day after Musharraf's new Chief of Staff, Mohammed Aziz, took office, his first act was to meet with the leaders of all the jihadist groups of the "Army of Islam," some of which, like the Jaish, were already on the Americans' blacklist of organizations linked to al-Qaida. We may well be aware of the personal role of Aziz- in principle a secular, military officer-in setting up the Harkat ul-Mujahideen in 1998. We may well have no doubt as to how things really are. It's nonetheless the first time the two organizations actually meet, combine their efforts, and concertedly mobilize all of their respective powers not in order to destroy a country (Afghanistan), or an empire (the United States), or even a symbol (the Assembly of Kashmir at Srinagar, or the Parliament of New Delhi), but a man (Daniel Pearl).
Of course there have been other cases of journalists kidnapped in Pakistan by ISI agents suspected of being backed up by al-Qaida: Husain Haqqani (of the Indian Express); Najam Sethi (of The Friday Times); Ghulam Hasnain (Time magazine). But none of them was executed.
On the eve of the American war in Afghanistan, there was the case of another lone man, Abdul Haq, who, having been sent to the interior of the country to negotiate the surrender of some Pashtun tribes, fell into a trap set by either the Pakistani intelligence services, bin Laden's foreign combatants, the Taliban, or all three-to this day, no one knows which. But it was, precisely, on the eve of a war. And there were military stakes involved in the liquidation of Haq.
There was also the example of Massoud, another man alone, abandoned by all, the elimination of whom, it is less and less in doubt, was the collective effort of the same ISI and al-Qaida. But Massoud was a military commander. He was alone, but he occupied an essential place on the board of the grand game at the time. He was weak, practically disarmed, but there was a considerable strategic interest in eliminating him and decapitating the Northern Alliance two days before September 11.
Daniel Pearl-he was nothing. To all outward appearances, he was neither what was at stake nor one of the targets. He was unarmed. Inoffensive. His vocation was neither that of martyr nor of hero. To quote the famous epigraph of Sartre's La Nausee, borrowed from Celine, Pearl was "a fellow of no collective importance, just an individual," who had no obvious reason to see this colossal, two-fold machinery set in motion before him. And the more I turn it over in my mind, there is something that seems enigmatic to me in this massive conspiracy against an individual of no importance, who represents only himself.
Political philosophers have contemplated the mystery of this "counter-one"-the production of a victim, a slave, or, quite simply, an "other," a mirror image of the despotic, dominating "One."
The theory of the scapegoat tells us about the mimetic urge that fixates on the blind spot embodied by the sacrificial victim: an innocent, sometimes anybody-and, at the end of the sacrifice, the calculated miracle of the group reconciled and producing its own innocence.
My generation (that of the struggle against totalitarianism) has known in the U.S.S.R. and elsewhere the case of these other solitary men, belonging neither to a community nor a party, without a clearly articulated political agenda, forbidden to express themselves, and incapable of airing their alternative point of view regarding the subjugated and sometimes dismembered society. We knew of so many of these individuals who were chosen, so to speak, by chance, without consideration of any real danger they may have represented. We called them "dissidents," but there was something almost inappropriate about this term and the way it suggested a split, even a subversion, that actually threatened the existing powers. And there was something especially disturbing about the spectacle of these immense, all-powerful, machines expending so much energy to silence adversaries that they had begun to exhibit and almost construct.
We knew (the same years, the same combats and, basically, the same pattern) the case of Cuba and its tropical Gulag. On one side, the "one man too many" (a saying of Solzhenitsyn's that Claude Lefort used in his commentary at the time)-a man condemned, thrown into prison, executed, for futile and often perfectly mysterious reasons. On the other, a politico-legal apparatus (the "granite ideology," from Solzhenitsyn again) throwing its enormous power into motion, against all reason, despite inevitable international disapproval and the resultant discredit, despite, as well, the political uselessness, demonstrated a hundred times over, of this polarization around the case of a simple individual-in order to shore up this regime of proscription. In short, the whole of Cuba transformed into an immense inverted pyramid resting, with all its enormous weight, not on the base, but on the point: the tortured or paralyzed body, the suffocating soul, of a poet, a homosexual, a Catholic, a Cuban.
Could Daniel Pearl be the equivalent, without the literature and in the landscape of the new world, of a Solzhenitsyn, a Pliouchtch, a Valladares-these other men alone, these "beings apart" of Mallarme, these victims at once absurd and necessary, whose cause inspired our youth and who were like the mirror image of the almighty tyrant?
Perhaps. I don't know. But we must admit, Pearl's is a decidedly strange situation.
All the more so because there's still something else.
In the course of telling this story, we have seen the protagonists emerge.
We've seen them introduced, one by one, as the investigation progressed, and then all together, in the organization chart of the crime.
Yet there is a detail I haven't discussed before, perhaps because, up until now, it wasn't entirely clear to me: It's the odd and, come to think of it, unprecedented fact that, when you consider the biographies of all of Omar's accomplices, when you go down the list of the names and the chief to whom each one, like all jihadists, has sworn allegiance, we realize that these seventeen men are not from one group, nor from two, but from all the groups, all the parties, all the factions of the Islamist movement of Pakistan.
Usually, there's one particular group behind a particular crime.
For the Sheraton, it's the Lashkar.
For the grenade attacks or the bomb at the bus stop of Kupwara, or the market at Chadoura, in Cachemire, it's the Jaish.
For the suicide bombing against the American consulate of Karachi, it's the Harkat ul-Mujahideen.
The Harkat ul-Ansar, become the Harkat ul-Mujahideen, for the kidnappings of tourists in Kashmir, at the end of the '90s.
Sometimes, as in the case of the 13 December 2001 attack on the Parliament in New Dehli, two groups join forces, in this case the Jaish and the Lashkar e-Toba. But that's rare. Very rare. These organizations despise one another. They fight among themselves as much as they fight the common enemy. Remember the conflict over the control of the goods and real estate holdings of the Harkat ul-Mujahideen when Fazlur Rehman Kahlil and Masood Azhar split up, early in 2002. Consider the way the ISI itself operates, and the energy it spends not to unite, but to divide the groups that might be tempted to gain too much importance and do without its supervision . . . And there's the case of the Jamiat ul-Ulema e-Islam splitting, under the influence of the services, into three groups (the JUI-F of Fazlur Rahman, the JUI-S of Sami ul-Haq, and the JUI-Q of Ajmal Qadri) which, though ideological triplets, are engaged in a struggle that is all the more bitter. In short, it's every man for himself. The logic of a sect with schisms, crimes among friends, rivalries of proximity, mutual denunciations-to such a degree that the absolute rule is that of permanent and ferocious competition between organizations pursing the same goals but fighting over the same territory and the same sources of funding. The rule, with very few exceptions dictated by circumstance, is "one crime, one group"-one beautiful jihadist crime, like a rare resource not to be shared, at any price, with the brother enemy.
But here . . .
The strange thing about this particular crime is that it is impossible to attribute to this group or that; its distinctive characteristic in the history of Pakistani or bin Laden-style terrorism is that it has given rise to a concerted effort on the part of groups that are otherwise divided in every way.
Hyder, alias Imtiaz Siddiqui alias Amjad Hussain Farooqi alias Mansur Hasnain, is a member of the Harkat Jihad e-Islami.
Arif, alias Mohammed Hashim Qadeer, comes from the Harkat ul-Mujahideen.
Adil Mohammen Sheikh, the policeman, Suleman Saquib and Fahad Nasim, his cousins, from the cell in charge of scanning the photos and sending them by e-mail to the Wall Street Journal and to the news agencies, all belong to the Jaish.
Akram Lahori is the emir of Lashkar, which is also the group Fazal Karim and Bukhari belong to.
Asif Ramzi, Lahori's lieutenant for the Pearl operation, is the boss of the Qari Hye which is a sort of subsidiary of the Lashkar.
Abdul Samat, as far as we know, is a member of the Tehriq e-Jihad, a small group founded in 1997 by dissident elements of the Harkat.
Memon is from the Al-Rashid Trust.
And as for Omar, he has his own personal group: the Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty.
In short, every group, it seems, is there.
It's like a parliament of Pakistani Islamism.
It's a crime syndicate united around Pearl's body in life, and then his cadaver in death, as it has never gathered for any other.
On one side a lone man, fragile, representing only himself.
And on the other, the ISI, and al-Qaida-and now, the jihadist syndicate in full force.
Never seen before.
A matchless alignment for a murder that is decidedly one of a kind.
CHAPTER 2 THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH.
One initial explanation is obvious. Pearl was a journalist. Just a journalist, working in one of the countries of the world where it is least propitious to be a journalist, where all journalists are, as such, in permanent mortal danger. Because they are insubordinate? Free agents? Because of their annoying tendency to disobey, to refuse to toe the line? No. The real reason is that they are perceived, on the contrary, as not being free, not in the least independent-the real problem is that, in the imagination of the Pakistani military man with the low forehead, or the Islamist militant on fire with his saintly hatred, they are, by definition, spies, and nothing distinguishes a Wall Street Journal reporter from a CIA agent. A free journalist? Contradiction in terms. A journalist who is not linked to the intelligence agencies, the "three letters," of his country? An oxymoron, unthinkable. I've seen what I'm talking about. I've felt it myself-the extraordinary difficulty of gathering information in Pakistan without giving the impression that you are an informer. I've observed it every time, these last few trips, when I tried to explain that, all right, perhaps this wasn't a novel in the classic sense, but at least I was independent, investigating on my own and researching only the facts. Every time I met the officials, the chiefs, and deputy chiefs of this insane police force, I observed the eyelids heavy with suspicion, the tarantula-like stare, the ill-humored air of mistrust dripping with sly innuendos, that seemed to say: "Cut the crap, we know very well that an independent writer is a term that makes no sense . . . " No one doubts that this is why Danny died. No one doubts that the bloodthirsty cretins who made him say he was a Jew actually believed he was also an agent of the Mossad or the CIA. From this standpoint, his death makes him a martyr for that grand cause which is freedom of the press. We have to add his name to the long list of journalists, Pakistani and non-Pakistani, imprisoned or dead so that the press, and its freedom, might live. To salute Daniel Pearl, to honor his memory and his courage, is to pay tribute to all those living who, after him, accepted the same risk as he had in going, whatever the cost, to do their jobs in Karachi: Elizabeth Rubin, Dexter Filkins, Michel Peyrard, Steve LeVine, Kathy Gannon, Didier Francois, David Rohde, Daniel Raunet, Francoise Chipaux, Rory McCarthy, and others whose names I am forgetting- the hot iron in the wound of Pakistan, the honor of this profession.
A second good explanation is that this entire event happened in a country-a region? a world?-where, since the Afghanistan war and in anticipation of the war in Iraq soon to come, Washington was generally looked upon as the capital of the Empire of Evil, the home of the Antichrist and Satan: Daniel Pearl was American. A good American? There are no good Americans, the sects of the assassins think and say. Opponent of Bush? Democrat? Appalled at the blunders of Dostom and of the American Special Forces at Mazar-e-Sharif? An American who, according to Danny Gill, his friend from Los Angeles, probably would have joined the clan of liberal minds who would have thought twice before supporting George Bush's absurd war? "Exactly," they insist. "That's almost worse. It's the Devil's greatest ruse, the trick of the Demon. It's the ploy they've found to disarm the Arab nation . . . " Wasn't he sympathetic to you? A friend of the dispossessed? Wasn't Daniel Pearl one of those Americans who object to hateful stereotypes, reject chauvinism, and take the defense of the downtrodden? "Right, thanks, we know. During those eight days, we had plenty of time to see that this sap wasn't even hostile towards us. But that's not the question. We don't care what an American does or doesn't think, because the crime isn't thought, the crime is America. We don't give a damn about what your Danny did or didn't do, because America isn't a country but an idea, and it's not even an idea but the very countenance of hell." Pearl was killed less for what he thought or did than for what he was. If he was found guilty of anything at Gulzar e-Hijri, it was the singular, unique, ontological crime of simply having been born. Guilty of being, and of being born . . . Guilt without a crime, essential, metaphysical . . . Doesn't that remind us of something? Can't we hear, behind this kind of trial, the voice of another infamy? Pearl is dead because he was an American in a country where being American is a sin, stigmatized with a rhetoric that echoes the sin of being a Jew. Pearl was the victim of this other crap called anti-Americanism and which also makes you, in the neo-fascist eyes of the fundamentalists, the dregs, the scum, a subhuman to be eliminated. American, hence a son of a bitch. America, or Evil. The old, European anti-Americanism blended with that of the religious fanatics. The rancid hatred of our French Petainists given a third-world damned-of-the-earth makeover. I finished this book at precisely this moment. In my ears, the planetary clamor, that made of America a region, not of the world, but of the spirit-and the blackest spirit, at that. Better to live as a serf under Saddam than free thanks to Bush, the global crowd proclaimed. One could, like me, refuse Bush's war but, nonetheless, find this clamor despicable. Daniel Pearl died of this.
And then, finally, there's a third reason. Pearl was a Jew. He was a Jew in a country where Judaism is not a religion, and even less an identity, but another crime, another sin. He was a positive Jew. He was a Jew in the way Philip Roth or Albert Cohen are Jews. He was proud of it. Affirmative. Didn't one of his colleagues tell me the story of this scene in Peshawar, an Islamist fiefdom, where, in a group of journalists asked about their religion, he placidly replied "Jewish," which turned the atmosphere glacial. He was a Jew like his father, like his mother. He was a Jew like one of his grandfathers, Cham Pearl, who gave his name to a street in B'nei Brak, Israel. He was this sort of Jew able, at the moment of supreme martyrdom, to proceed in the sanctification of the name of Jew. And he is most surely a victim of modern anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitism that starts, in fact, with B'nei Brak, ties the name of Jew to the name of Israel and, without renouncing any of its timeworn cliches, readapts them to a new set of charges, reintegrates the whole thing into a system where even the name of Israel has become a synonym for the worst of this world-making the figure of the actual Jew the very face of crime (Tsahal), of genocide (the theme, trotted out ever since Durban, and even before then, of the massacre of the Palestinians), of the desire to falsify history (the Shoah as a lie designed to conceal the reality of Jewish power). From Durban to B'nei Brak, the new clothing of hatred. From "one Jew, one bullet," chanted by some NGO members in Durban, to the Yemeni knife that actually murdered Daniel Pearl, a sort of a sequence. Daniel Pearl is dead because he was a Jew. Daniel Pearl is dead, victim of neoantiJudaism that is blossoming before our eyes. I've been talking about this neoantiJudaism for the past twenty-five years. There are a few of us who have sensed that the processes of legitimization of this ancient hatred are being profoundly reworked, and who have written about this fact for the past quarter century. For a long time, the rabble said the Jews are hateful because they killed Christ (Christian anti-Semitism). For a long time because, on the contrary, they invented him (modern, anticlerical, pagan anti-Semitism). For a long time it was because they are supposed to be a race who will always be foreigners in any land and this race must be erased from the face of the earth (birth of modern biology, racism, Hitlerism). Well, my sense is that that's all over. I have a feeling we will hear less and less that the Jews are hateful in the name of Christ, the anti-Christ, or racial purity. And what we see is a reformulation, a new means of justification for the worst which, as in France during the Dreyfus Affair, but on a more global scale this time, will associate hatred of Jews with the defense of the oppressed-a terrifying stratagem. That, against the backdrop of the religion of victimization, using this transformation of the Jew into executioner and the Jew-hater into the new Jew (that's right, the rabble is intimidated by nothing, slander is nothing new to them, they can very well lift towards real Jews the pure image of a victimized "Jew" now embodied by others) will legitimize the murder of a Jew as the henchman of Bush and Sharon: "Busharon" as they would say. Again, Daniel Pearl died, of this.
So there are three explanations that might satisfy me.
Three reasons to kill Daniel Pearl, each one separately and all the more so together, are adequate to explain the outcome of this drama.
Except that it doesn't work.
No, none of these reasons, however strong and solid they may be in and of themselves, manages to convince me.
None of them explains why it is this particular Jew, this journalist, this American, and not some other, whom al-Qaida, the secret services, and the entire syndicate decided to eliminate on the morning of 31 January 2002.
And that, because of a detail which, for the past year, has unceasingly intrigued me: Daniel Pearl was kidnapped on the 23rd; on the 23rd, the kidnappers know that he is a Jew, a journalist, an American; on that day, they are perfectly conscious of this hyperbolic triple guilt; and yet, they wait until the 31st, eight days after the kidnapping, to decide to punish him for being this triple culprit, which is bound to mean that something happened during those eight days-an element appeared that was not there on the 23rd but that would be there on the 31st and would make the ultimate decision to kill him inevitable.
I know what they say: The assassins didn't discover that Danny was Jewish until the 30th, from an article by Kamran Khan in the News- that's the new element, then, his Jewishness, that they weren't aware of before. But it doesn't jibe. Knowing Danny, knowing, through all those who knew him, especially in Pakistan, that he made a point of honor of never dissimulating his Judaism, I cannot for an instant imagine that he didn't inform Omar of this during their initial meeting, at the Hotel Akbar. And isn't that what Omar himself declared to the police? Isn't it what Fazal and Bukhari also said, during their respective interrogations: "Omar called to tell us, there's a man here who's an American and a Jew . . . come quickly, we're going to kidnap him"?
I know what they say: It's the escape attempt that set everything off; when he tried, for the second time, to escape, his jailers lost patience and decided to put an end to this-that's the new element, that's where everything went haywire, right? Isn't it, according to the FBI people, the absolute rule in these cases: "never try to escape! Never, never ever!" I don't believe that either. First of all-as I said-these escape attempts are not confirmed, especially since the bullet in the knee hasn't been found by any of the coroners' teams that have examined the dismembered body. And, beyond that, because I can't imagine Bukhari, Lahori, Farooqi and the others reasoning like this. We are talking about, I repeat, the Karachi chiefs of important groups, the best of jihadism, serious people, militants, the Pakistani representatives of al-Qaida-who could imagine they would follow such a puerile line of reasoning? Who could convince us that they said to themselves, "as punishment, we'll kill him"? How could anyone suppose a murder of such importance, decided and committed by men of this caliber, could be decided on the reaction of an annoyed jailer?
It's also been attributed, I've heard it said myself, to the passing of time: it's just the time that elapsed . . . the lassitude . . . the impasse . . . here we have this guy on our hands, we don't know what to do with him any more, so let's kill him and cut him up into ten pieces and then put them all back together again, that will be the simplest thing to do . . . Right. Once again, anything is possible. Except that this scenario isn't plausible either. Don't forget, until otherwise informed, we have to assume these were Yemenis who killed him. But someone had to make the decision to send for them, these Yemenis. They had to be located, contacted, brought to Gulzar e-Hijri and, finally, ex-filtrated again. How could this have been done lightly? How could this succession of tasks have been the result of a fit of anger and impatience? Does one actually set in motion such forces and events, expend the necessary amount of energy, just like that, on a whim, by default, or out of sheer irritation?
No.
Anyway you look at it, you cannot avoid thinking that something else happened during those seven days of detention other than a wave of weariness, an aborted escape, or an article by so widely respected a journalist as Kamran Khan.
Better still: Since all of this is happening in seclusion, since they are all, captors and captive, living in total confinement, cut off from the world, since all they have to do for seven days is to talk and talk and talk, one can't help but wonder if this other thing was something that was said rather than something that happened, and that it's something Danny said that led his jailers to conclude that he could not walk out of Gulzar e-Hijri free.
Then what is it that was said? What could Pearl have said that would have prompted his captors to call for three professional murderers to come execute him? Since I can't imagine it had anything to do with small talk, life in Los Angeles, his profession, or even his general perception of Pakistan, the United States, or the world, and since I think as well that Pearl took advantage of that time to continue his work, and advance his research into the Islamist milieu-in short, to pump these political and human specimens, which bad fortune had put in his way, once more, I can think of only one solution.
At the same time that he got them to talk, they, in turn, made him talk.
When he asked them questions, he revealed himself, through his way of questioning.
He thought he would get the truth from them, but they, in a sense, and without his necessarily being aware of it, verified what he knew and thus debriefed him.
Or else, another aspect of the hypothesis, slightly different but equally credible: given his extraordinary professionalism, he attracted confidences, confessions, details-it's entirely possible that he succeeded beyond his expectations, and that his captors, without realizing it or at least without really wanting to, gave him sensitive information that, afterwards, they regretted having so blithely offered.
My feeling is that, during their conversations, during the long nights of collective solitude, in the heat of his exchanges, for example, with Fazal Karim, his guard, it became evident either that the prisoner of Gulzar e-Hijri already knew far too much, or else that he had succeeded in gleaning still more from his jailers-and that, in either case, there was no longer any question of letting him walk out of there, carrying his secrets.