Who Killed Daniel Pearl (20 page)

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.

Once again, I use my old diplomatic passport to facilitate my entry into Pakistani territory.

No stopping by the embassy.

No grand hotel, where you're instantly spotted.

Instead, a little guest house on the road to the airport, right near the place where the cab was pulled over and I was forced to pay a bribe to the policeman during my first visit.

And, in case of questions or trouble, a brand new story: Quite apart from my “novel” on Daniel Pearl, I've come looking for a printing press and paper supplies for the new Afghan newspaper
Nouvelles de Kaboul
, since those things are not available in Afghanistan.

“Don't kid yourself,” says Gul, my fixer from last spring who came to meet me in the lobby of the guest house, a small, smoke-filled room with cushions lining the walls, samovars of tea with milk on the center table, and the stuffed head of an animal on the wall. “Don't think they believe a word about your novel and, now, your paper for Afghanistan. They came to my place last June, after you left. They questioned my wife. Shut my kid in his room. Searched the whole house. They wanted to know what you did, what you were looking for, what I had told you, what you'd seen. They had me summoned by an old
uléma
at the other end of Rawalpindi, who gave me fair warning. You've got to be careful. They're everywhere.”

The “they” he is talking about is the dreaded ISI, the Interservices Intelligence Agency, the Pakistani secret service that, in principle, as in every country in the world, should be concerned with gathering foreign intelligence. But since the Bangladesh war and the nationalist uprising in Baluchistan under Bhutto, and since the Afghanistan war and the Shiite upsurge resulting from the Iranian revolution, the ISI is increasingly inclined to expand its activities. In internal matters, it has an increasing tendency to substitute itself for the Intelligence Bureau, suspected of separatist sympathies. But Gul does not say “ISI.” No one in Karachi ever says “ISI.” They just say “they,” or “the agencies,” or “the invisible government,” or even “the three letters,” just “the three letters.” Or even, when they can, they gesture with three raised fingers—as though the simple fact of saying those three cursed letters out loud was dangerous.

“Don't hold it against me,” he says, glancing nervously at the man behind the reception desk, a timid, toothless, little old man with a round face who cannot possibly hear us at this distance. “I can't go on working for you under these conditions. It's not just a question of their visits, you know…. I had weird phone calls, incessantly, after you left, which, given the circumstances, is perhaps even more worrisome than all the rest. Here in Pakistan, when you get a call on your mobile phone, the caller is always identified. Except . . . ”

The man from the reception desk walks over to us. He pretends to be arranging the cushions and asks us, in broken English, if we need anything. All of a sudden, Gul looks scared. His nostrils start to tremble, as if he were going to cry. What a new, strange way of talking to me without making eye contact! And now, while I answer the man from the reception desk, he stares at me, but surreptitiously, in fleeting, panicky glances. Clearly, something must have happened. This is not the same Gul I saw in the spring, cheerful and daring, casual and confident, ready to try anything, asking me about Reporters Without Borders, ready to be their correspondent if they asked him, making fun of paranoid journalists who saw bin Laden sneaking around every corner in Islamabad. The man from the reception desk returns to his post, and Gul continues.

“ . . . Except when it's people from the army or the services. I got several calls this morning, and there was never anyone on the other end of the line, just breathing. And the number wasn't on the screen. That's why we must part ways. It's better for me. But I think it will be better for you, too. Would you like me to find someone to replace me? I've got an idea. His name is Asif. You'll see, he's a good man.”

I'm thinking that Asif was the name of Daniel Pearl's fixer, and for some reason, that bothers me.

I'm thinking as well that Gul is probably right, and that the people from the ISI, if they are as well organised as everyone says, will probably think there's something fishy about my story of paper for the
Nouvelles de
Kaboul.

And then I think again about the two e-mails I received from him and from Salman, another one of my connections, this summer. In my absence, I had asked each of them to look for information on the bank accounts of the “jihadist” organisations outlawed by President Musharraf that Danny had been investigating when he was kidnapped. Salman had found me an informer who had immediately begun working on it, and Gul had recruited another. And then, an e-mail from Salman on July 25th: “My Karachi source has disappeared, I found out yesterday. He has been out of touch for several days. His family is very concerned, and so am I. I'll let you know when I have any news.” And then an e-mail from Gul, on August 13th: “I was on vacation. Before leaving, I had given your e-mail to the journalist and asked him to send the material to you directly. When I returned, I learned he had a serious accident and so could not accomplish his mission. I am really sorry for this loss of time. Would you authorize me to deal with someone else? It will take me another ten days or so. Best.”

It didn't register immediately; I didn't make the connection then, not between the two informers, and especially, not between them and me. But what if it was all related? What if someone was trying to prevent me from tracing Danny's path? What if, in other words, my story about a novel didn't fool anyone?

“No, no,” I said, “not Asif. It's better in this case to be really careful and avoid someone they can eventually trace back to you. I know of someone, an old friend from the days when I was reporting about Bangladesh. He's not exactly a Bengali, he lives in Peshawar. I never really lost contact with him. He's one of those extraordinary fellows who, like you, saves the honor of this country. I'll call him.”

Gul, both sorry and relieved, gets up and leaves. I watch him as he walks out to the street and melts into a crowd of pilgrims approaching a neighboring mosque, a head taller than all of them. Is it my imagination, or did I really see two men get up and follow him, the ones I had taken for passing shopkeepers who had come in to sit down at the far end of the room while we were talking?

I call my old friend Abdul, who works for a western NGO in Baluchistan and who, amazingly, is free for the next few weeks.

“Such a long time later,” he says, in the same deadpan tone I remember, pretending not to be surprised at my call and taking up our conversation as if we had seen each other only yesterday instead of 30 years ago. “It's funny. What do you look like, after all these years? With me, it's my hair, you'll see. Give me two days to get there.”

And so here I am alone, idle, wandering around to kill time, in chaotic, feverish Karachi, with its wet, smoky autumn sky, its rainy light, humming with rumors of last night's crimes or the latest adventures of the war between the Haji Ibrahim Bholoo and the Shoaib Khan gangs. Karachi is one of the only cities in the world where the mafia are so much a part of the mainstream of life in the city that their clashes, their incessant split-ups, their compromises, have the same importance as episodes of political life back home in the West.

Here I am in the
souk
of Lea Market in the north of the city; in the market of Little Bangladesh, in Ziaul Hoque Colony, where you can buy an adolescent Bengali girl for seventy thousand rupies (ten percent for the police). I'm in Sainab Bazar, the great cotton market, the best echo chamber, the best source, if you want to know what's going on and what's being said in Karachi.

Three hundred virgins arrived last night, via India, to be sold in Dubai . . .

The nocturnal fantasies of the “gunmen,” the private security agents in orange caps you can hire for the day and who sometimes fight among themselves at night . . .

The results of a gangland killing they found this morning in the Karachi boat graveyard at Gadani: an entire family, father, mother, two grandmothers, three children including a baby, all dead, undoubtedly for weeks. The baby had been skinned and one of the old ladies quartered, the others crucified. The corpses had been left to rot in the hold of an abandoned and stripped tanker . . .

Danny again, still Danny, the invisible trace of Danny every moment, with every step—did he come by here? Or here? Or why not here, in front of this fishmonger who gives me pleading looks, like a beggar? Or here, on Jinnah Road, before Binori Town, the grand mosque where Omar spent so many long hours in the days before the kidnapping and that I cannot imagine escaped Danny's radar.

And then this other bit of news I don't imagine attracted much attention in France but that everyone is talking about here—last week, on the night of 10 to 11 September, the Pakistani police, backed up by the Americans, raided an apartment building in the residential neighborhood of Defence. They found computers with maps of American cities stored on their hard drives, and piloting manuals; some documents proving the presence, at the heart of command structure of al-Qaida, of three of bin Laden's sons, Saad, Mohammed, and Ahmed; they found and arrested ten Yemenis who had entered Pakistan illegally; and among them was Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mohammed Atta's roommate in Hamburg, who had planned on being the twentieth World Trade Center highjacker, but whose entry visa to the United States, like Zacariya Essabar, had been refused at the last minute . . .

“A victory for democracy!” says a rickshaw driver.

It's a defeat for the “dogs of al-Qaida,” repeats the pistachio vendor before the Jinnah mausoleum, wagging his finger.

And the press, even if they're incapable of finding out whether bin al-Shibh has been sent to the United States to go to Guantanamo or if he is temporarily being held at the base at Begram in Afghan territory, call him “the first high official of the Organisation to have been neutralized since the arrest of Abu Zubaydah, at Faisalbad, in March.”

I go there, to 63C 15th Commercial Street, in the middle of Defence, the residential area in the middle of the city where I remember—because it seemed strange to me—that immediately after independence, fifty years ago, most of the apartments were allotted to military personnel.

I don't really know what I'll find there.

For the moment, I don't see any connection with my investigation.

But I'm all alone, I have two days to kill while I wait for my new fixer, and so I decide to go see the neighborhood where the Pakistani police raided an al-Qaida hideout.

There is still a certain amount of activity there.

There are still a handful of journalists and onlookers, a squad of “gunmen” wearing black T-shirts marked “No Fear” in English, and a cordon of policemen guarding a metal barrier.

But life goes on. The Igloo ice cream shop across the street has reopened, and so has the real estate agency. Three men, naked from the waist up, white loin cloths floating on their skinny hips, their ribs and bony backbones showing under the skin, with long hair pulled back in pony tails—probably Christians or Hindus—are busy working on the sewer pipes that were damaged during the raid. A gang of children who are playing around the site hang on to me and ask if I know Leonardo DiCaprio. A teenager is filming me with an video camera. Another one asks if I want some black-market cigarettes. No doubt about it, a nice area. This is not one of those fleabag suburbs where I could imagine al-Qaida fugitives hiding. Approaching the apartment building where it all happened, recognizable because of the hundreds of bullet and grenade holes that have pockmarked the façade, I see a handsome, proper, four-story building with a rather well-to-do air, standing next to the local electricity company.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” an employee from the real estate agency asks, obviously happy to meet and talk with a foreigner.