Who Killed Daniel Pearl (50 page)

Go to Karachi then. Try this last trail, Sorhab Road, on the way to Gulzar e-Hijri, but deep into the neighboring slums, a maze of alleys and dirt paths in the heart of the metropolis, landscape of empty farms, ruins, shanties of corrugated iron and cardboard, bursting open-air sewers, makeshift bridges over pools of mud. “Who is he?” a skeletal Afghan refugee looming up from behind a crumbling wall, asks Abdul. “No one; a European; a Muslim from Bosnia; he's one of us.” And there, in these end-of-the-world surroundings, a house, not unlike the one where Pearl was held and where I see a man lying on a rope bed, wearing a jacket with ragged cuffs over his bare skin, a chamber pot at the foot of the bed, his eyes feverish, and a voice not long for this world. “I'm not Saud Memon. I'm his uncle. Saud was here. He'll come back. But the American police just arrested Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They're everywhere. He had to escape. Leave me alone. Can't you see I'm sick.”

Call Rawalpindi then, try to find out more about the story of Mohammed's arrest. According to the latest news, he's Pearl's assassin. Him, the “Yemeni” who held the knife. There's even an ex-CIA agent, Robert Baer, now a writer, who says: “That's what Pearl was doing . . . looking for Mohammed . . . he was on Mohammed's trail . . . well, Mohammed didn't like it . . . Mohammed got revenge . . . Mohammed, with Omar, planned the kidnapping and killed him with his own hands . . . ” To me the idea is less than plausible. I can't believe that bin Laden's number-three man, chief of al-Qaida operations, this rather distinguished Kuwaiti intellectual, could have done the job himself. I look at his official photograph, the one the CIA has circulated for the last two years and that everyone knows, neatly trimmed beard, pitiless but intelligent eyes, impeccable turban, and I say to myself: “No, not possible, I can't see this particular man carrying out the sentence.” But I turn to the other picture, the new one, published in this morning's papers, where we see him just out of bed, in the instant, I imagine, the Rangers burst in, his hair a mess, his eyes swollen and haggard, black body hair showing through a dubious undershirt, the grim mouth; this is not the same old Mohammed . . . for a moment I even think we might be in the midst of an umpteenth manipulation, another identity switch . . . but if it's really him then, yes, why not . . .
this
Mohammed could have killed Daniel Pearl . . . wasn't it said of Saddam Hussein that he reserved the privilege of killing with his own hands those opponents who personally offended him?

Besides, the whole Mohammed affair is bizarre. The officials in Islamabad crow. More than ever, the Pakistanis play the good allies, America's pals, antiterrorist, virtuous. Except that no one is able to say where he was arrested. Or how. Or even when. That is what is most extraordinary. Nobody seems to know if it happened today or eight days ago, or fifteen, or six months ago The number-three man of al-Qaida is arrested on the sly, secretly detained, “held but not charged” in the manner of most of the suspects in the Pearl case: and the authorities pull him out now, this devil, like a rabbit out of a hat, or an opportune gift to their great friend, America. When is the Security Counsel session on the war in Iraq? And how exactly will Pakistan vote? Once again, the impression of a wily power, expert at the double and triple game, having its secret stock of terrorists ready to trot out according to the needs and circumstances, the well-understood interests of the “three letters,” the political market . . .

Three photos of Hadi, Omar's baby, this morning, in my e-mail. He has a nice, round face. Big eyes. A white T-shirt, with “Hello Kiki” in green letters across the front, shows his plump arms. In one of the pictures he is strapped in his baby chair. In another, he cries, his little fist wiping a tear. In the third he chortles happily—but behind him, on the wall, is a large dark shadow. Who sent me these? How strange.

News of Omar himself. Also in my e-mail: the same sender, a London address that I try to reach, but no answer—a fictitious site that quickly disappears. It's a long interview given from his cell to an Urdu newspaper. The prisoner of Hyderabad recalls the death of Pearl. He talks about what he was doing in Kandahar, in “the house of friends,” on the eve of September 11. He talks about his experience in Bosnia, and India. He speaks as well of the war in Iraq, which clearly infuriates him. And what does he propose to stop this war? What is the ultimate weapon of the “favored son” of bin Laden to prevent this forthcoming “massacre”? His
idée fixe
. Always the same. This man is decidedly a maniac. I'd laugh if it weren't tragic—he suggests kidnapping the sons of Bush and Cheney.

Another man, one of my informants from last year, from whom I learn the existence of a new suspect, the eighteenth, a certain Qari Asad, emir of Lashkar i-Janghvi for the eastern part of Karachi, secretly arrested on 18 February, who gave the police a different version of Daniel Pearl's kidnapping. One car, not two. No Bukhari on his motorcycle. A second meeting, halfway, at the “Snoopy Ice Cream Parlor,” near the Sohrab Goth mosque, where Pearl has some ice cream before getting back in the car and leaving for Gulzar e-Hijri. I look for the “Snoopy Ice Cream Parlor” and can't find it.

If I add it all up, have I made much progress in a year?

Do I see things more clearly than at the very beginning of my investigation, when things seemed simpler—an American Jew, Muslim extremists, a video playing in a loop in the militant shock mosques?

Sometimes I think yes. I hang on to my conclusions. I remind myself it's not every day you find a killer who is both in the upper ranks of al-Qaida and agent of the ISI. And I think that the Pearl affair is much more than The Pearl Affair and that we're here, between Washington and Islamabad, against a backdrop of weapons of mass destruction gone mad, in the very eye of the hurricane.

Sometimes, on the contrary, I wonder if I didn't go too far in this investigation; if I haven't been sucked into a whirlpool; if I shouldn't have left Omar to his banality and his oblivion; if, by wanting too much to untangle the web, peel away too much, I didn't lose myself in a dust storm of facts; I wonder if I wasn't a victim of my own fascination for crime writers, piling up notes, poring over reports, obsessional clerks, rummagers of overlapping clues that contradict each other, eternal seekers of inconsequential witnesses, people mad for the reverse side of things and the depth of souls, these dreamers who incessantly rerun the film searching for the ignored detail, the unseen connection, the perspective that could pry open the truth, the fortuitous corroboration, the forgotten thread—but who, in the end, see the mystery unravel only to resurface further on, from another angle, misleading in a new way.

For the last time I'm in front of the Marriott.

For the last time, in front of the Village Garden, the first station of Daniel Pearl's cross, with its sign in red letters that, from a distance, resemble Chinese characters.

I know now that I'll never return to Karachi, or not for a very long time—I know there's little chance, after this book, that I'd still be welcome. So I fill my eyes and ears with the life of this city that I detested, where I was afraid, where it was often gray and dreary, where I met so few friendly faces but where I also have a few good memories and that I sometimes liked very much.

The face of Jamil Yusuf, head of Karachi's Citizen-Police Liaison Committee, relentless in his high-risk quest for Danny's killers and those of others.

The journalist and the embassy employee whose names I can't cite but who helped me so much and who I know are among the last of the just in this modern Nineveh.

The airport road where this time I find the guest house I had looked for in vain the first day, when the cop with the kohl-lined eyes stopped my taxi before letting the representative of the Levy Malakand go his way.

My chauffeur today, with his forthright look, his jovial smile, the first in a year not to ask the eternal questions: “Where are you from? What is your religion?”

And the mosque where he asks permission to stop: “It's the hour of the fourth prayer, do you mind if we stop? You can come along, by the way . . . two minutes . . . you are most welcome, anyway you're ahead of schedule . . . ”

It's a small prayer room. A humble neighborhood mosque. But the men aren't aggressive. After the first moment of surprise, they offer me a cushion and make a motion for me to sit against the wall while they pray. And it's the first time that I enter a religious space in Karachi without feeling the wind of imprecation, of hatred.

I think, as I'm on my way again, of this other face of Islam, made of tolerance and moderation, disfigured by the fanatics of God, or rather the Devil.

I think of this familiar Islam, steeped in life and piety, friendly toward others, consoling to the humble, tolerant of man's weakness, but sullied by the gang of “combatants of the true faith.”

I remember my friends in Bosnia and Panshir: Izetbegovic and his citizen Islam; Massoud on a mountain over the plain of Chamali praying to his God, facing the most beautiful view in the world.

I remember my Bengali friends who, already thirty years ago, warned against the Torquemada they saw rising in their ranks. They are an insult, they said, to the God of knowledge, of wisdom and of mercy who is the God of Muslims.

I remember the blue domes of the mosque in Mazar e-Sharif, the arabesque arches of Boukhara and their columbine sweetness, the marble lacework of the Saadian tombs that Michaelangelo would have admired—I hear the murmur of water from a rivulet in the Ghardaia oasis and the sage ecstasies of Sohravardi whose beauty cedes nothing to the greatest passages of Isaac Luria or of Pascal.

There is this other face of Islam.

There is this gentle Islam towards which, in spite of everything, until the last minute, Daniel Pearl wanted to believe, as I want to believe.

Who will prevail, the sons of Massoud or Pearl's killers?

Who will prevail: the heirs of this ancient commerce of men and cultures that stretches from Avicenne to Mahfouz by way of the sages of Cordoba—or the madmen of the Peshawar camps who call for jihad and, belly strapped with explosives, aspire to die as martyrs?

It's the beginning of the grand struggle of the century.

I think it was, in fact, that grand struggle for Pearl when he inveighed against the ideologues of a war of civilizations that promises the worst.

It was the true subject of this book—homage to my posthumous friend and a call for the sharing of light.