by James Reston
It was forty-eight hours to the Witnessing Day, and Karima was imagining the scene at the Lades Chicken joint at the busiest time of the day. What would her waiter look like? she wondered. What does a terrorist look like anyway? She rehearsed ordering Adana kebob and asking for wedding soup and then finally unburdening herself of Sami’s materials. What would she feel afterwards? Relief? Shame? Terror? The problem was, she would be giving his memoir to the wrong people and destroying her alibi.
Recht called. “I must come to see you tonight.”
When he came through the door, his face was grim. By now, she had come to read his moods well: his elation at good news from Afghanistan, his frustration with the overall investigation and with the Americans, most of all, his determined scowl when he was about to get tough with her. She knew immediately that this session would be one of those.
He got right to the point.
“You told me that you know nothing of Omar.”
“That’s right.”
“I do not believe you, Karima.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Let me make myself clear. You are underestimating the danger.”
“The danger to me? Oh, I’m very aware of that. You said you would protect me, Kommissar Recht.”
“We are dealing with very desperate people. There’s only so much we can do.”
“You’ve never put it like that before. What about my mother?”
“What about her?”
“I’m worried about her, about her safety as well.”
“Has something happened?”
“I’m nervous, that’s all. You talked about desperate people. Desperate people lash out.”
“We’re trying to cover all the bases.”
“Well, I think you should assign a bodyguard to my mother as well.”
“I would need a reason, Karima. I’d need to know what we’d be protecting her from. I’d have to brief my officers on a specific threat if there was one. And I’d have to convince the first kommissar that this is necessary.”
“Let’s face it, Kommissar Recht: you’re not really protecting me at all. Your Sergeant Braun is a clown. You’re spying on me.”
“Look, if you’re so worried about your mother, go see her. Put in some new locks or a new home security system.”
“Fine,” she said with a note of disgust. “Why have you come here tonight?”
He waited for her ire to cool.
“We know you received a package from Haddad after 9/11,” he said.
She looked at him quizzically. After a pause, she said, “I received a letter.”
“A letter?” he said with surprise. “Yes, a farewell letter. A love letter.”
“I would like to see it,” he said.
She rose from the couch without comment, went to her desk, and thumbed through her voluminous patient files.
“I intended to give it to you all along,” she said throwing the letter into his lap, “when the time was right.”
She watched him read it slowly, his lips moving as he whispered the words almost aloud. I do not leave you alone. Allah is with you….
He put it down on the table and looked at her sternly.
“We believe you received more than this letter.”
He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out Braun’s photograph of her removing Sami’s bulky package from the mail slot.
She took the picture, pondered it, and then burst into tears. At length, she rose again from the couch and went to her chest of drawers and her desk again.
“Yes,” she said, swirling around on him defiantly, “there was more. He sent me his Koran and his engagement ring and his mahr, his wedding gift. There!” she said throwing the items on the couch beside him. “Do the police want these too for their evidence file!”
He sat still for a moment, an inscrutable expression on his face. Slowly, he picked up the leather-bound, pocket-sized, gold-embossed Koran and leafed to its frontispiece to see the inscription: “For Karima Ilgun, My love. My beloved lady. My heart.” And his signature, “Sami Haddad.”
And then he picked up the jewelry case, opening it to see chandelier earrings with emerald studs.
“He bought them for me in Pakistan and kept them until the last day,” she blurted out.
He examined the gold coin and then opened the little case with the engagement ring. Closing its lid slowly, he stared at her for a long moment. Then he rose abruptly and turned on her harshly.
“Okay, Dr. Ilgun,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “I tell you this formally, as a police warning. Under no circumstances are you to have any contact whatsoever with Haddad’s associates. We’re going to tighten our surveillance of you to make sure that does not happen.”
She started to speak, but he held up his hand for silence. “Good evening,” he said sharply and left.
June 16, 2001
“Ahmad arrived today. Omar insists that he stay here with me in this tiny apartment. Need to be careful.
“Where was I? Oh, Omar …
“Soon enough I became a regular at Omar’s apartment. One day he announced that we were going to watch a video. ‘About Jihad. Atta is coming. And Marwan. Do you know him?’ I did not.
“‘He’s a Gulf States romantic,’ Omar explained. ‘Married. Very straitlaced. His wife wears the niqab. I’ve never seen her full face, but she has very lovely brown eyes. They live simply, and when he’s questioned about his lifestyle, he says, “Well, the Prophet lived very simply too.” He’s a little overweight.’
“‘Really.’
“‘And like you, he’s not much of a student. He’s nearly flunked out a bunch of times. But he’s very good value.’
“The concept stuck in my mind, Karima. What did that mean? Good value for what?
“‘But first you must do your homework,’ he said. ‘Atta has a present for you.’
“He handed me a simple, cardboard-bound book. The Sayings of Martyr Abdullah Azzam. ‘Look at the dedication,’ Omar said.
“In the frontispiece Atta had written in his florid calligraphy: ‘For Abu Tariq al Lubnani—’
“‘This must be for someone else,’ I said, closing it and starting to hand it back.
“‘No, my friend. He has conferred upon you a secret name.’
“‘My name for the struggle?’ I said, half-joking.
“‘You may call it that if you wish. This is not a joke, Sami.’
“‘I’m sorry.’
“‘Figuratively, the name means, “The Lebanese, father of one who knocks on the door.”’
“‘Am I knocking at a door?’
“‘Not yet.’
“‘I thought the name Tareq meant “traveler,” I said.
“‘Traveler—or conqueror. Or both. Atta has honored you with a connection to one of the greatest military leaders of the Umayyad age, Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād.’
“‘Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād?’ I was confused.
“Omar looked at me, amazed. ‘Sami, you confound me. All he did was conquer most of North Africa and then all of Al-Andalus in the eighth century. Glorious Al-Andalus, the highest expression of Islam in Europe. Gibraltar derives its name from Tareq, you know. The Rock of Tareq.’
“I turned again to Atta’s dedication.
“‘Someday, Sami, you will be our Rock of Gilbraltar,’ Omar said.
“I could feel my embarrassment. The inscription read:
In the name of Allah the blessed and the merciful.
I give you this book, asking God that it may be useful to you, that you understand it and act. That you act according to this book, after you have read the Koran. That you may do good and stay far from evil, that you be true to yourself, even if that should not please the unbelievers or if they should not be afraid as they should be.
“Omar had turned his back and was looking out the window.
“�
�This all comes with a price,’ he said at last.
“‘Oh? How much?’
“He turned back to me with a smile.
“‘You need to pull your grades up, Sami,’ he said. ‘And start attending your lectures again. You’re no good to us if you can’t stay in school.’”
5
ON THE NIGHT BEFORE her appointment with Omar at the Lades Chicken joint, Karima slept fitfully. It was time to unburden herself from this terrible weight, she concluded. She had to decide in favor of her personal safety, and that of her mother. To be sure, delivering Sami’s materials to one party or another had its consequences. They were precious to one side, and crucial evidence to another. Wasn’t jail preferable, the safer bet? She had to get rid of them one way or another, even if she didn’t yet know his full story.
When she awoke, she knew what she had to do: Let them have their sacred relics. Let them deposit the tapes in some ornate reliquary the way the Christians put the blood or bones of their ancient kings in a vessel of some sort and placed it on a pedestal. She could see the flowing inscription: “The Memoirs of Abu Tariq al Libani, hero of aththalatha, Djumade l-akhira 1422.” She imagined a dark cave deep in a high mountain like Tora Bora, an al-Qaeda museum lit by candlelight, a place of pilgrimage to those who hated the West and all westerners.
When she awoke, she dressed hurriedly, and when it was close to the time of the appointment, she wrested the tapes from their secret crevice. Spreading them out on her coffee table, she set the last two tapes aside and threw the rest in a tote bag. “Goodbye, Sami,” she said for what seemed like the twentieth time. “I’m sorry I don’t have time to hear your whole story. But I know how it turns out.”
As far away as three blocks from Lades Chicken, she could hear the murmurings of a crowd. The curious seemed to be streaming along the sidewalks of Steindamm in that direction, as the noise became louder, the concatenation of whisperings. Within a hundred yards of the place, the police held back the crowd.
“What’s going on?” she asked a man.
“They’ve arrested a terrorist in there,” he said.
Karima craned her neck to see over the people in front of her. By the entrance to the joint, she could see Recht and Braun. They were talking to a burly man who held a bullhorn and seemed to be issuing orders. Within minutes two policemen escorted a slender, diminutive, slumping figure out of the restaurant and placed him in an unmarked van. A towel covered his head. In the crowd there was a smattering of applause.
The man next to her turned to her.
“Well, that’s that,” he said with a shrug and a smirk. “Our great police force in action.” He swiveled to leave, and Karima followed him languidly, deep in thought, clutching her tote bag to her side more tightly than ever. What did this mean?
A few days after her missed appointment at Lades Chicken, she received her summons for her first formal investigative session. At first, there would be “executive” sessions with a senior judge, Recht informed her, closed to the public and conducted at BKA headquarters. When the time came, Recht ushered her into her now-familiar interrogation room. This time, the inquisitor was a judge of criminal court, named Gerhard Leicht. As she made her way to her seat, she felt faint and had to be supported. But her first glimpse of Judge Leicht was reassuring. Elderly, kind-faced, and mannerly in a musty, old-fashioned way, he was a senior jurist whose first words to her exuded sympathy.
“You may refuse to answer any questions if you think your answers could endanger yourself or your family,” he said in a gravelly voice. “If you should answer falsely, the consequences would be severe. Please do not accuse anyone without evidence, and please do not try to protect any other person from possible punishment.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” she whispered.
From many weeks of fear and self-examination, she was exhausted, she told the judge. She knew nothing of the diabolical plot, since Sami Haddad had said nothing to her about it and had shielded her from his friends. With dismay, she had watched her lover change before he went to Afghanistan.
“Then upon his return he seemed to have miraculously recovered his old, carefree self.” At this statement members of the court exchanged meaningful glances.
Karima acknowledged that they had had countless phone conversations when he was in Florida for his flight training, but their conversations dealt only with ordinary things, like their future life together after he became an airline pilot. His involvement in the attack had come as a complete shock to her, she professed.
“I’m still trying to come to grips with this, Your Honor,” she said. “My life is in a shambles.”
The old judge listened attentively. He asked her only a few questions—about the members of the Haddad family with whom she had become acquainted, about a few phone numbers in her address book. Then abruptly, as if he were late and had been held up in traffic, a bald, younger man with a pointed goatee entered the room, apologized perfunctorily for his tardiness, and introduced himself to the witness/suspect as Judge Henning Schneider. Judge Leicht deferred immediately to him, and Judge Schneider took over the questioning. Peering at her through thin, rimless lenses, he dispensed with the pleasantries.
“There is this extraordinary letter that you have provided to Kommissar Recht,” he said crisply. Karima stiffened. He proceeded to read lines from it in a stage voice, enunciating the tender parts with particular scorn. Through his performance she was able to control her emotions until he came to the line, “You should be very proud of me. It’s an honor, and you will see the results, and everybody will be happy.”
“You remember these words?” he asked.
An answer formed somewhere deep in her throat, but it came out in an unintelligible gurgle. The judge waited for her to pull herself together, his eyes down at his desk on the sheaf of papers before him.
“May we proceed?”
She nodded.
“Why did you not immediately hand this letter over to the authorities?” he asked, still looking down at his papers and then up at her.
“I was frightened,” Karima said.
“You were frightened, Fräulein?” his question carried a note of mocksurprise.
“And besides—”she began.
“Besides what?”
“Nothing, Your Honor.”
“Now—” he started, but she cut in.
“I’m exhausted. I would like to end this testimony now and continue at a later time.”
As the senior judge, Judge Leicht nodded. A second hearing was set for days later.
When she got home that night, she paced around her apartment. She turned on the radio. “Under a clear sky lit by moonlight, a steady American bombardment of Kabul began Sunday night—” She turned it off. Omar dominated her thoughts, his specter now even greater and more terrifying. He would be livid that she had not shown up for Adana kebab and wedding soup. Not only had he not received Sami’s materials. He had lost a valued member of his cell. There could be no doubt that Karima was responsible. Omar would be even more dangerous to her now, she realized. Was there any way he would hear that she had surrendered Sami’s precious letter to Recht? The vice kommissar had called it an executive session. Supposedly, that meant all testimony was secret. But who could be trusted anymore?
Now she regretted not asking Recht to keep the letter’s content secret. It would have been her right under German law. She had only handed it over to gain points with him … and with the hope that he would be satisfied. But her long delay in doing so looked bad. Imagine their reaction if they ever learned about the tapes! she thought. And yet nothing Recht or the court could do to her now was as horrifying as her nightmare at what Omar might do, to her or to her mother, if she hung onto the tapes much longer.
She had to get Sami’s tapes out of Hamburg. She decided to take them to her mother’s place in Stuttgart. Maybe not the last tape or two. That was her ultimate exoneration, she fe
lt. Her trump card. In a pinch she might need it close at hand.
June 19, 2001
“Only a month before we’re together, my love. Perhaps I will give you these tapes then, and years later, we will listen to them together and laugh and wonder how I became involved with such a thing.
“Atta preached that we all had a moral duty to jihad. As my father’s only son, I’d escaped military service, you know, because Lebanon values the importance of the single male as the head of a family, and I was excused. I’d had never fired a rifle in my life before now. If I was an unlikely holy warrior, Atta was even less so. With his gimpy leg and spindly arms and unhealthy ways, he would not last long.