Who Killed Daniel Pearl (30 page)

I'm reflecting on the article by Kamran Kahn, in the
News
, which had so much impact at the time, that evoked his ties to General Mohammad Aziz Khan, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee of the Armed Forces as of 8 October 2001. Was it true that he had gone with Musharraf and Aziz to the headquarters of the Lashkar e-Toiba, in Muridke, near Lahore, before Musharraf's visit to India in July? Is it true that he knew Aftab Ansari, the mafia man, and that their relationship had the blessing of the ISI?

I'm thinking about what is known of the personality of Mohammed Adeel, one of the three plotters of cell number two, the one that took care of writing and sending the e-mails: policeman in Karachi; former member of a counter-terrorist unit; former intelligence officer; directly tied, therefore, to the ISI.

I'm thinking about the remark Musharraf made to the U.S. ambassador who had just expressed to him the USA's wish to see Omar extradited: “I would prefer to hang him myself than to have to extradite him.” Resentment? Anger? Hatred overcoming him, making him capable, with his own hands, etc.? No doubt. But it's hard not to hear as well in his exclamation the willingness to do anything, absolutely anything, to avoid a public trial and the possible exposure of the murky connections between Omar and the ISI.

I'm thinking about the story of the taxi driver who claims he drove Omar to the Hotel Akbar, and the account I got from him: he was stopped at a checkpoint in much the same way I was the evening I first arrived. Armed soldiers—this is in the middle of Musharraf's phase of pro-American anti-terrorist zeal—hustle the driver out of his taxi, push him up against a wall with his arms outstretched, and search him. But when it is Omar's turn to show his papers and be searched, a word seems to suffice, maybe a document he stuck under their noses—and the embarrassed soldiers let him go on: “No problem, welcome, you can go.”

I'm thinking of Saquib again, the friend from London. It was a little story that at the time hadn't really struck me. But now, in the light of what I know . . . This story takes place in April 1996. Saquib has finished school. He has a job at a big bank—I think the HSBC—and he's been sent on business to Pakistan. And there he is one night at dinner, in Islamabad, at the home of a vice-admiral whose name he forgets, seated next to a brigadier who is known to belong to the ISI, who says to him: “You went to the London School? Bravo! Perhaps, then, you know Omar. Maybe you were in the same class.” Not Omar Sheikh. Just Omar . . . As if there were only one, the one everybody knew in Islamabad, and who was, in any case, close to the brigadier . . .

And then finally I think, one last time, about his first meeting with Pearl, at the Hotel Akbar in Rawalpindi, 11 January, twelve days before the abduction. Well . . . What is this Hotel Akbar, exactly? What does it look like? Why in fact did he choose it? And why is it that no one, as far as I know, has asked these questions? How come no one has had the idea to take a closer look and to spend an hour, or why not a night, in the room where contact was made?

I go to the Hotel Akbar.

I leave Islamabad and its wealthy districts.

I take the Aga Khan Road with its beautiful opulent houses and its look, common to most of the avenues in this perfectly artificial city, of having come straight out of a de Chirico painting.

I pass the Super Market, which is lively and animated and where, among photo shops, perfume boutiques, an “Old Books Sell and Buy,” and a Konica camera shop, the “Mr. Books” bookstore is located.

I get to Murree Road, the main avenue of Rawalpindi, which is clear and open at first, and then, as soon as you get into town, choked with traffic. The cars move at a snail's pace. Clusters of kids are hanging from the ladders that climb to the roofs of multicolored buses. The group taxis bursting with people still manage to suck in more passengers. A horse cart. Women in headscarves, not burqas, headscarves, uncovered smiling faces under the headscarves—I note that Rawalpindi is the only place that I see women's faces. The vast fabric shops. The jewellery district. The chemists district, where I suspect they also do the major drug deals. The signs for Habib Bank and for Honda and Suzuki shops. The beggars. The hovels. The side streets where you can sense the disease of the decaying neighborhoods. Just in front of the English Language Institute, the sign that identifies the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. And then at the end of Muree Road, on the right, at the entrance to the old city, where the houses take on shades of ochre and the colonial style of all the old Indian cities, is the Liaquat Bagh, very green, with its flamboyantly colored flowers, and its spacious esplanade where they've been holding mass meetings since independence. And facing the Liaquat, set back, stuck between a boys' school and the Khawaja's Classic Hotel Executive—the windows, adorned with dark green balconies, of the Hotel Akbar.

At the door—it's a bizarre (and quite cruel) custom in midrange Pakistani hotels—a dwarf is greeting guests, his antics intended to cheer up weary travelers.

“Do you have any rooms?”

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.