My aim was to cull through the evidence, for the most factual account possible. By gathering the myriad of information that is available I hoped to etch a portrait of that which is unknown, the way negative space can define an object. And my object was to use the known facts to give an accurate reconstruction of the crime.
And when the tracks were missing, when the witnesses fled, or when there was no actual information because I was dealing with his inner existence or scenes in which he was the sole actor, I used the methods of investigation that had allowed me once before to reconstitute the last days of the poet Charles Baudelaire within the limits of my perspective- never give in to the imagination when reality is there and direct investigation should be able to find it, but give it a role when reality eludes you and circumstances are such that you are compelled to speculation.
Everything counts, in that case. The most infinitely tiny details. The most apparently useless information. As Leonardo Sciascia writes, again in Affaire Moro, "The most minute, almost imperceptible events contribute to the construction of every event which, then, is displayed in all its grandeur, rushing in a movement of attraction and aggregation towards an obscure center, an empty magnetic field where they take form and are, together, precisely the great event." And then-and how can one not agree?-"In this form, in the ensemble they create, no small event is accidental, incidental, fortuitous. The parts, even if they are molecular, find necessity and thus explanation in the whole, and the whole in the parts."
To begin at the beginning, it's the 11th of January, 2002, in Rawalpindi, in the Hotel Akbar, a modern place facing Liaquat Bagh Park, right at the top of Murree Road. Pearl's fixer, Asif Farooqui, has arranged a meeting there with Omar and it's the first contact, the first encounter, between the two men.
Omar has shaved.
He is wearing western clothes.
He was seen the day before, buying Ray Bans in an Islamabad store. They're like the ones he wore day and night last year in London, the ones his father had said made him look like a Bombay mafioso.
He was also seen at Mr. Books, the big Islamabad book store, right near the buildings of the Presidency and the Supreme Court of Pakistan. He was spotted chatting with Mohammed Eusoph, the proprietor, who had ordered a book in English for him a few months earlier. Omar was more or less the hero of the book, since it told the story of the Indian Airlines hijacking that led to his liberation from prison in India at Christmas, 1999. This time he was looking for a 1991 book on the war in Iraq and another on American Special Forces training, as well as Montgomery Watt's 1988 book Islamic Fundamentalism and Modernity, which Eusoph had to order, and a fourth by a certain Abu Saoud, "Muslim economist" and "Arab League counselor."
When Pearl arrives at the Akbar, Omar is already there, sitting at a table with three bearded men in the hotel restaurant, a small, ill-lit room across from the reception desk. He had cut off his beard and so reassumed his air of the perfect Westerner. That morning he had spent two hours doing his "accent exercises"-slipping from the most caricatured Punjabi into the most distinguished British accent in a second, a talent that always made his friends at Aitchinson College laugh. He would be in dire need of it today. Now he is going to pass two hours, maybe three, in a room on the fourth floor, doing his "Englishman" number for the journalist, answering his questions, providing all the clarifications he likes about the complex relations between various Pakistani jihadist groups, and promising to do everything possible to set up the interview he's dying to do with Sheikh Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, head of the sect Pearl thinks "shoe bomber" Richard Colvin Reid belonged to.
The chase is on-the terrible ballet, that will last twelve days, of the hunter and his prey.
The next day, considering Pearl hooked, Omar goes home to Lahore, to Sadia, the young scholar of English with a Master's from the University of Punjab, the first woman ever in his life and his wife for the past year, who has just given him a child.
I wasn't able to meet her. She was locked away, invisible, when Omar was free, and she still is now that he is back in prison. But I know that she is intelligent and pretty. I know that under her burqua she now has the pale but luminous complexion of newly secluded women who lived in the sun as teenagers. I believe, also, that she shares Omar's ideas and that she was "proud," like most Pakistanis I met, that he had "followed his ideas through."
After meeting Pearl he stays at home with her for two days.
He spends these two days establishing two new mobile phone contracts and developing his relationship with Naseem and Saquib, two Afghanistan war veterans who are members of the Harkat ul-Mujahideen, a group he has close ties to. After the abduction, they will be responsible for sending out press communiques by e-mail. He also devotes some time to perfecting his disguise of a young Pakistani, friend of the West. In a downtown boutique he buys some Gucci loafers, a signet ring, a Breitling wrist watch, a navy blue rain coat he will sleep in so it won't look new, a suede jacket, a pair of jeans, another pair of Ray Bans (prescription), a pair of tortoiseshell glasses without smoked lenses, so that he'll look like the London School of Economics student he once was before plunging into the world of fanaticism and crime.
Is all this necessary for only the operation, or does he take some secret pleasure in it? In any case, he accumulates the signs of belonging to the West he has severed his ties with, that he is supposed to hate, and one of whose more successful representatives he is preparing to kill. He is, in this, like the September 11 terrorists, Atta, Majes Moqed, Alhazmi, and Khalid Almihdhar, whose last pleasures in this world, the FBI discovered to their astonishment, were a trip to Las Vegas, a fling with a Mexican whore, ten minutes in a sex shop, and an hour in one of the main streets of Beltsville, window-shopping for lingerie.
He goes to a garage to buy a Toyota, then thinks better of it and rents one instead.
It's the 15th.
He takes the rental car to Dokha Mandi, his father's birthplace and the village of his family's roots.
The next day, on his return to Lahore, he plays a game of chess, has lunch at the Liberty Lions Club, the watering-hole of the city's Punjabi elite, and goes to the dentist. He prowls around the area of Aitchinson College, but without making his presence known. He goes by the Anarkali bazaar, stops briefly to pray at the Sonehri mosque in the heart of the old city, and walks all the way to the Shalimar gardens, in the east, at the end of the Grand Trunk Road, where he strolls for a few hours between the fountains and the lanes of hibiscus and bougainvillea and the rose gardens.
His last moments of peace?
Ultimate tactical adjustments before the operation?
He apparently also makes contact with the people of Lashkar e-Janghvi, a group he does not belong to but hopes will assist with the operation.
At Badshahi, the old, red sand mosque near the Fort, he encounters a man who is in contact with Maulana Masood Azhar, Omar's old mentor, the chief of the Jaish e-Mohammed, who is now in prison, where Musharraf had him thrown.
And finally, he writes to Pearl. Five days have passed since their meeting in Rawalpindi and Omar sends him an e-mail from an address not, in retrospect, entirely devoid of humor: [email protected] Urdu, "no rascality." He tells Pearl, in essence: My wife is ill and has had to be "hospitalized" . . . That's why I'm a little late in responding in regard to this "meeting" with Gilani we discussed at the Hotel Akbar . . . But I've talked to the office of "Shah Sahab" and I "conveyed" to him the articles you mailed me; "I am sure that when he returns we can go and see him" . . . Please "pray for my wife's health," would you?
The machine is in motion.
The countdown has begun.
People who cross his path at this time are struck by his calm and determined demeanor . . . and sometimes, in his eyes, a sudden, instantaneous flicker of helplessness.
On the 17th he leaves the house on Mohni Road with Sadia and the baby and they get on the train for Karachi, one of the long Pakistani trains crowded to overflowing, without numbered seats, that passengers storm rather than board. He has had the strange good fortune to find a compartment that's nearly empty-just three passengers, no doubt merchants, apparently intimidated, who leave him one of the banquettes.
During the journey, he says his prayers on a rug in the corridor.
He has donned his new look-clean-shaven, a twill jacket over his shalwar kameez-but he misses none of the day's prayers.
The rest of the time he reads, meditates, sleeps. Sadia, veiled from head to toe, wearing uncomfortable shoes with low heels, is in the part of the compartment reserved for women, separated by a curtain, with the baby.
When they arrive at the Karachi train station, a place of intensely concentrated poverty, a strange incident occurs: Omar is shoved, almost accosted, by a beggar, one of the hundreds that sleep there on the ground, wrapped in moth-eaten blankets and stinking of old filth. What's going on? Did he bump into him without noticing? Did the beggar take him for a foreign businessman, an infidel? Or is this all an act, designating a message, and if so, what and why and to whom? A few heated words are exchanged, a policeman appears and Omar hands him a few rupees as if to say, I can handle this myself. Other beggars crowd around the first one, grumbling and threatening, appearing to challenge him. But either Omar's stature or his athletic build intimidates them, or else it's all an act, and they soon disperse. The spent traveller rushes for the nearest taxi, his wife following him with some difficulty, the squalling baby in her arms, and they head for the home of a beloved aunt, where he plans on staying until the kidnapping.
So now, he is in Karachi, ready to get down to work, in this city he doesn't know well, where he is scarcely known in turn, and where he can't go 'round boasting of his deeds as in Lahore-and it's all a little disconcerting.
The next day-the 18th of January, five days before the kidnapping- he spends the day at the famous and mysterious Binori Town Mosque, a place that has taken on cult status amongst Pakistani fundamentalists and where it is said the Taliban elite received their religious training.
He is alone, at first, concentrating intensely in the half-light of a study hall of the adjoining madrasa, separated from the pilgrims who have come from all over the country and all over the world-he speaks little, eats next to nothing, stops only to spend an hour at a nearby gym late in the afternoon, then returns to sit on his heels, hands at the nape of his neck like a prisoner, listening with a fixed stare to a preacher who has come into the room during his absence and is calling for a holy war.
In the evening though, four men come to see him-three of them are from Karachi and thus familiar with the city, its secret networks, its seedy quarters. According to the information I obtained, they are the men from Harkat ul-Mujahideen handling the electronic communiques, Fahad Naseem and his accomplices Salman Saquib and Sheikh Mohammed Adeel, and a certain Syed Hashim Qadeer Shah, alias Arif, who lives in Bahawalpur. Does Omar also see the others? Will he meet Bukhari, the man who will dictate to Pearl the things he must say in the video? Fazal Karim, the caretaker, who will hold Pearl's head at the instant the Yemeni decapitates him? The Yemeni executioner himself? The other Yemenis? It's an essential question, for the answer determines not only the degree of Omar's implication, but of his control and mastery of the entire plan.
Two indications lead me to believe that Omar did meet the others that night: Mobile phone calls traced by the police and by Jamil Yusuf, the former businessman who is now director of Karachi's Citizen-Police Liaison Committee, which specializes in the investigation of kidnapping cases; and a statement by the owner of a restaurant in Karachi's squalid Little Bangladesh neighborhood, who insists he saw Omar that night accompanied by a man in an Afghan hat whose description matches that of Bukhari.
The day after going to Binori Town, the 19th, Omar has lunch with Faheem and Saquib at the Village Garden, near the Hotel Metropole, where he plans to stage the kidnapping.
He spends the afternoon not far away, alone at the bar of the Marriott, adding up long columns of figures-the state of his finances? The estimated cost of the operation?
He meets Naseem again, in front of the Village Garden, both of them standing in the cold, whispering, discussing, walking to the Marriott to warm up, returning, then retracing their footsteps, perhaps to count how many, to measure and note the time it takes. Omar writes everything down. In fact, ever since the countdown started, he has been scribbling brief notes incessantly in a brown note pad he carries in the front pocket of his tunic. Where are these notes? What happened to them after his arrest?
Still together, they walk to a neighboring cybercafe. (By coincidence, it is the same cafe where Pearl had gone to wrap up his investigation of the "shoe bomber," looking for the place where Reid had received his final instructions to take the Paris-Miami flight.) There, Omar sends a second e-mail to Pearl: Sorry, he says, to have taken so much time in getting back to you . . . but I mislaid your number . . . My wife . . . the hospitals, in Pakistan, are so "miserable and harassing" for "poor people" . . . it "made me realize once again that our family has a lot to be grateful for" . . . But "I have good news" . . . I spoke to "the Sheikh's secretary yesterday" and "he told me that the Sheikh Sahab has read your articles and that you are welcome to meet him" . . . He is in Karachi for the moment . . . Do you wish to wait until he returns to Rawalpindi? Do you want to "put some questions to him," to "mail them to me" and "I will pass the printout to his secretary"? Or else, "if Karachi is on your program" you may also "see him there."
Then they wait in front of the computer screen. Five minutes . . . ten . . . Questions by e-mail, what a great idea! Omar tells his companion. He thinks it the mark of a professional to act as if he's asking for nothing and to appear indifferent about the meeting with Gilani! And, sure enough, in barely the time it takes for the message to route through the Journal 's network, Pearl replies yes, of course, with pleasure-he has another good reason to come, with his wife, to Karachi, and he readily opts for the meeting. Are you in Karachi yourself? Will you be at the meeting?
Omar jumps for joy.
The bait has been taken.
Afterward, without Naseem, he goes to a general store in the old city and comes out with a package wrapped in newsprint under his arm, which he takes back to his aunt's house-a gun?
That evening, he is seen near the Marriott again, buying a set of slides from a street vendor. (Scenes of Kashmir? Crimes of Americans and Russians in Afghanistan? Bosnia?) He is seen as well in the hotel cafeteria, relaxed and seemingly carefree, writing postcards to his little sister, Hajira Sheikh, and his brother Awais, and a third to an Indian doctor, perhaps the head of the Ghaziabad hospital in the state of Uttar Pradesh, where he was taken in 1994 after being arrested by the New Delhi police, the setting of the pseudo-Guevara photo.
That evening he returns to Binori Town but only for an hour. A final contact? With whom?
Finally, I imagine him afterwards mailing a letter that evening, a real letter, addressed to a lawyer or a journalist or a friend-I can't believe there doesn't exist somewhere, in a strong box, in some safe place, a handwritten document detailing, just in case, the origins of the operation, the number of accomplices, his own role, as well as the network of complicity ultimately reaching to the high places he will have needed to successfully accomplish his task.
Sunday the 20th he sends another message to Pearl, a third one, from another cybercafe. "Gilani can see you Tuesday, maybe Wednesday. His secretary is still in Rawalpindi and will give me the phone number of one of his followers you will call when you arrive and who will take you to him. Give the sheikh my best, tell him not to forget me in his prayers, and tell him we miss him a lot here in Rawalpindi and wait impatiently for his return. What a shame you have to leave Pakistan so soon! I hope you have enjoyed your stay."
Monday the 21st he meets two of his accomplices in an apartment in the upscale Defence Society neighborhood, and he gives them money to buy a camcorder, a scanner, and a camera. When Naseem returns with the camera, a little Olympus, they go to Clifton Beach, a stretch of gray sand in the middle of the city where the sewers empty out. Omar takes the pictures: A 4x4 Rodeo, a group of silent women hobbled by their burquas, in stockings, getting their feet soaked as they try to avoid the gobs of tar. Another woman, unveiled, with the waxy, anemic complexion of those who have been shut away too long, who cries "rape" when he snaps the photo. A child on a camel. A snake fight. A sign reading, "No photos allowed." He finds all this highly amusing. He exults. At the end of the afternoon, he walks through the change stalls of Jinnah Road and then back to Binori Town for a meeting with an unknown person, perhaps one of the Yemenis.
On Tuesday, the 22nd of January, he sends a last message to Pearl confirming an appointment for tomorrow, Wednesday, around seven. It's certain, Gilani has decided; they'll have half an hour for the interview and then an hour, if he likes, with the followers who live with him. Omar gives Pearl the phone number-00 2170244-of one of the young disciples who will be in charge of driving him there: His name is Imtiaz Siddique. "He will arrange to meet you." I am "sure you will gain a lot from the meeting." Don't forget to tell me "all the details." After that he goes, ironically, to the Pearl Continental Hotel to change another bunch of dollars, makes a call from the lobby, another from his mobile phone, leaves, notices a storm drain, and throws the mobile phone away.
He sleeps badly that night.
He sleeps alone in a tiny room at the back of his aunt's apartment. In spite of the raincoat, in spite of the relatively mild climate, he shivers with cold-and he sleeps badly.
He spends the night wide awake, alert, his lips moving as though he were praying. As soon as he tries to shut his eyes, images loom in his mind, like nails driven into his soul-his kind aunt tried everything yesterday to lighten the bad atmosphere, but no, the thoughts are still there . . . A puddle of congealed blood in the Sarajevo snow. A wounded man he saw at Zenica, in the throes of death. Another near Thathri, in Kashmir, whose head and face had been bashed in with blows from rifle butts and boot heels-all he could remember was a wound, a pulp, with one ferocious, suffering, gaping eye still shining. The shrieks of a comrade in a neighboring cell, one night at Tihar Jail. Pearl's face the other night at the Hotel Akbar, less disgusting than he had expected, rather frank for a Jew, and clever for an American . . . strangely curious, too, about what a sincere jihadist could be thinking. Unless he was pulling a number, an American Jew trick-play it sly, lull your vigilance, all the better, then, to betray you. He dreams about Pearl, with his skull smashed in, his brains coming out his ears . . . He dreams of Pearl dead before even killing him and can't tell if the idea pleases or scares him . . . Sometimes he has the impression of feeling pain in Pearl's place . . . Then he finds the idea absurd and curses him . . . Sometimes, on the contrary, he is jubilant, and his jubilation makes him shiver . . .
He is groggy, his head heavy when he rises on the morning of the 23rd of January.
He drinks three cups of coffee, one after another, but he still cannot seem to warm up or clear his head.
He tries to eat something, but everything he puts in his mouth tastes like cardboard.
He shaves, and notices that the mirror is cracked-he's sure it wasn't that way last night . . . And this shadow on my face, it's the first time I've seen that, too . . . And what if the son of a bitch had understood everything? What if that was the explanation for his unbelievable gullibility? And what if he were an agent, really a cop, and he came with other cops to the appointment at the Village Garden? What if he's the one, smarter by half, who is setting a trap for us?
The day has come, and he's worried.
Is Omar there at the actual time of the kidnapping? Is he at the Village Garden with the others when Pearl arrives at seven p.m. and gets into the red Suzuki Alto? Or has he invented a last-minute alibi? Has he taken the train back to Lahore in the afternoon, as he stated at the trial, and as his wife confirmed?
I don't know for certain.
On one hand, there's the statement of Nasir Abbas, the taxi driver who picked Pearl up at the Sheraton, drove him to the Village Garden and who, in his second deposition, declared that yes, of course, Sheikh was there. With his own eyes, he saw Sheikh get out of the Suzuki that drove up in front of his cab just as Pearl was paying. He saw them shake hands, and saw Omar open the rear door for Pearl to get in. Moreover, says the prosecutor, how could it be otherwise? How would Pearl have gotten into the car had he not seen the now familiar face of Omar? Would he have been foolish enough to get into an unfamiliar car, with a driver he did not know?
But on the other hand, apart from the Omar's own statements and those of his wife, there is defense lawyer Abdul Waheed Katpur's objection, expressed at the trial and in an interview with The Guardian, that Nasir Abbas is a cop, and in Pakistan you can't send a man to the gallows on the sole strength of testimony from a cop. All the more so because- and this is the major argument-Omar had more or less announced in his last two e-mails that he would not be there ("my best to the Sheikh, don't forget to tell me the details of the interview"). Unless there was a counter-order that day, or if Pearl himself thought better of it at the last minute and requested, in one of his two phone conversations with Imtiaz Siddiqui on the afternoon of the 23rd, that Omar be present, it is not absurd to suppose that the American came to the appointment knowing full well that Omar would not be there.
Or did Pearl think better of it?
Did he demand expressly that Omar be there?
To know, you would have had to meet Nasir Abbas, the driver.
And in order to judge whether it was materially possible for Nasir Abbas, cop or not, to recognize Omar at fifty feet, you would have to know what the weather was like that evening, when the sun set, the quality of the light, whether there was any haze. I know it was nice out. The day's weather report announced sunny, dry skies, and I even found a waiter at the Village Garden who says he remembers "it was like summer in January, that's what we all said that day, and since that doesn't happen very often, it stood out in our minds." Summer weather until the end, all the way up until the evening?
How can one know if Omar was there?
The truth is, I have no idea and on this point I am, more than ever, reduced to conjectures.
My guess, then?
My bet, since I am condemned to bet?
My bet is that Omar was there and not there at the same time.
Not there, because he said it was agreed upon with Pearl and I have no reason to believe that either he or Pearl changed their minds.
But there, at the same time, inevitably there, at a distance, where he could see and make sure that the operation was going smoothly as planned, but without being seen, because, after all, he's risking everything! His freedom! Perhaps even his life! Faced with all this and the anxiety that's eating at him, how could he calmly buy a ticket for Lahore and wash his hands of the whole thing? Moreover, how could this kidnapping zealot, this ace, this artist, not be tempted to supervise, right to the very end, the scenario he crafted and that he's certainly not going to leave in the hands of a Siddiqui or a Bukhari?
There are two possible positions for this.
After several scouting sessions, simulations, and reconstitutions, I found two places he could have hidden so as to observe the entire operation without actually participating in it.
A half-demolished wall, opposite the restaurant, where a man can easily stand and watch the entire area where the cars stop.
Or else, inside the restaurant itself, behind the door to the garage, a recess that lends a better perspective of the avenue but has the drawback of affording a view of only half the broad parking lane, since it follows a curve.
I picture him behind the wall.
I imagine him standing there, his face turned toward the sun setting over the city, watching the taxis, thinking, "That's it, he can't be far off now," or, "What if he doesn't come? What if he gets scared at the last minute and decides not to come?" I suppose that part of him, at this instant, is surprised to find himself hoping that Pearl will not come, or that he'll come with Mariane, or with his fixer, or with a someone from the American consulate. But if this is what I suppose, I also know that it's just a fleeting thought and that, deep down, he realizes that the die is cast and it's a good thing.
Things don't happen, he thinks, they wait for you. And this instant, and all the rest to follow, is waiting, as it has been since the time, such a long time ago, when I was a good old "Paki bastard" who smelled like a rat, aped the little Englishmen, and made such pathetic efforts to please them and become one of them.
"Salvation lies in disaster," Convoy of Mercy organizer Asad Khan used to say, when he would urge his young comrades on to action by describing the apocalypse awaiting the Western world. At the time, Omar didn't really understand what his new friend meant. Now he sees, and he understands. He knows he is on the road to ruin, but that ruin will save him. He senses that, one way or another, something will go wrong with this affair-but how can he not, at the same time, feel God's finger upon his forehead?
He isn't cold any more.
He's not even really afraid.
He feels as light as a feather, relieved of his own self.
I was, he tells his wife, like a new mother who sees her baby.
What is the meaning of a life? Well, this is it. He has the feeling, even more than in India, of having fulfilled his mission. He is bursting with joy. He exults.
PART THREE.
CRIME OF STATE.
CHAPTER 1 MYSTERIES OF KARACHI.
19 September 2002.
Second trip to Karachi.