Who Killed Daniel Pearl (18 page)

I reflect, one last time, upon all the bizarre things his friends have told me about him—I think about his phobia about pigeons, or of the period that went on for months when he told his friends, “I smell like a dead rat! Stay away from me, I smell like a dead rat! Once a rat died in my room, and he stank it up and I've never been able to get rid of the smell.”

I think about his terrible laugh, more menacing than joyous, enraged, that everyone mentioned—his friends, the schoolteacher in Sarajevo, Rhys Partridge.

It's the eternal enigma of this kind of individual and of his visible metamorphosis.

It's
the
great question we always come up against, and that, once again, stops me cold.

Either he's the character from the theory of two-lives-in-one, of discord, of heartbreak, and, basically, of conversion—someone who “changed their souls,” as it is said of great converts, the elected, the chosen, who wake up one morning and see the veil lifted and turn from their errant ways. Why shouldn't what applies to those who are called to turn from errant ways also apply to those who are not? Why not the same law for saints as well as great criminals, the damned, the monsters, the counter-converted?

Or, he's like the character in Roger Vailland's
Un Jeune Homme Seul
who says, in essence, that there are no “dissonances” in a man's life. “I operate on the principle that apparent clashes are the intermittent fragments of a counterpoint that I've missed or that is hidden from me.” So, “I play,” he says, to whomever he has before him, “I grope,” and “when I've found the counterpoint that makes sense of all the dissonances, I know all I want to know about the past and the present” of this person. He can even “predict his future.” All he needs to do is to “continue to play in the same key . . . ”

I don't know.

CHAPTER 6
RECONSTITUTION OF A CRIME

I have a clearer idea, though, of how Omar Sheikh spent his time in the days and weeks leading up to the crime.

I saw one of his close friends.

I read some of the Sindh police reports.

I walked in his footsteps and followed his tracks, whenever I could, as I would soon do for Daniel Pearl.

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 communiqués 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]—in 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 s
halwar 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 communiqués, 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.