ON THE FIRST DAY of Karima’s new existence, a uniformed policeman arrived at her door and drove her to police headquarters at Bruno-Georges-Platz. At the daunting, five-pronged modernist building, she was escorted to its central core, taken to a top floor and down a long corridor, jammed with talkative detectives. As Karima passed through this scrum, their chatter subsided. Curiosity and recognition showed on their faces. At last, she came to a door where the small sign announced “Vice Kommissar Günther Recht, Chief of Counterintelligence.” A woman emerged to say that the kommissar would be with her as soon as he could.
The day became a blur of interviews in confined, smoke-filled spaces with Kommissar Recht and a procession of German and American authorities. Time and again, Karima described Sami Haddad: tall, glasses, athletic build, an intelligent face, a really handsome guy when he was clean-shaven, a charming smile, a raucous laugh. It was as she remembered him in the wonderful days. She described their stormy relationship, the good times and the breakups and the tearful reunions. She talked about his hot temper and sullen moods, about the change in his demeanor over the three years they had been together before he went off to America. She could sense their skepticism. How could she blame them? She was aware that she had lied to them. She felt herself losing her bearings, unsure anymore of what was true and what was not, what had really happened and what she was making up.
Late in the session, Kommissar Recht leafed through pages and pages of her telephone records in 2001. Eighty-three international calls from Sami! He let out a whistle. “He must have had some bill!” An average of every other day, sometimes twice in a day, the last one on September 11. What did they talk about? She tried to think of all the mundane things. He let her tick them off without interruption, but she could tell he was not really listening. And then he asked about Sami’s six trips back to Germany over the past two years, when he stayed with her for weeks at a time, and then about her last trip to see him in Florida.
“Isn’t it true, Dr. Ilgun, that you were closer to Haddad than anyone else?”
She paused. “I thought I was.”
“And you still say that you knew nothing whatever about his real purpose?”
“Yes.”
“When did you first meet him?”
“In Greifswald.”
She remembered the moment vividly. She was in the cafeteria, flirting with a clutch of Arab boys. They had stood around her, attentive and adoring, shyly giggling, vying for her attention, as she smoked and made fun of their awkward ways. And then she’d felt Sami’s steady stare from across the room.
“And you started dating one another immediately.”
“Yes.”
The memories flooded her brain. Her periodontics class in the fall term of 1997, and how things had developed from there. The crazy day trips to Rostock and to the nearby bay of Dänische Wieck. The bike rides along the river Ryck. The local döner joint and a pathetic little dive bar in Greifswald called Fly-Boy. “Greifswald is no Beirut,” Sami would say with a shrug. Sami the sophisticate.
“Did you meet his friends?”
“Yes.”
Karima despised his Moroccan friends, especially the religious ones. They were dirty and rude. It amused her to goad them. She flaunted her disdain for prayer and made fun of other Muslim girls who wore the headscarf. Deliberately, she violated all the taboos: smoking, drinking, eating pork. “How can you be German and not eat pork?” she had baited his friends.
“Did you go to the mosque with him?”
“No,” she lied.
Her rebellion had annoyed Sami. Occasionally, he’d asked her to tone it down, but his complaints had only made her more irreverent. Because they had so much fun together, he had chosen to ignore her quirks, at least early on. Karima’s mother had disapproved of the budding romance, and this had upset Karima. Sami had consigned her mother’s attitude to the superiority complex that Turks feel toward Arabs. Karima had asked him to be more generous. Her mother was old-fashioned, proud of the fact that the Ottomans had ruled the Arabs for four hundred years. Sami wasn’t having it, and Karima resented the way he had disparaged her parents in July. They fit a mold, he’d told her scornfully: immigrants in the great wave of the seventies, settling in Stuttgart, her late father with a good job in a chemical plant, trying to fit in, trying to be European.
Questions. More questions. She answered Recht flatly, giving only the bare minimum.
Eventually, mercifully, there was a break. Recht handed her a newspaper and left the room. Whatever she said could be so easily twisted. She rose from her seat and looked at herself in the mirror on the side wall. She had to be strong. Wasn’t that what Sami’s letter had said? Be strong as I always knew you. Remember always who you are and what you are. She had to be strong—and smart—and consistent. She returned to her seat, paper in hand.
As she thumbed through the newspaper, her eye fell on a story about German intelligence agents overhearing terrorists talk about a new operation involving thirty people. “As authorities around the world try to piece together the conspiracy, the inquiry is focusing more than ever on Germany, and more American FBI agents are being sent here,” the story read. Just then, Recht returned.
When he took his seat again, he was almost a silhouette behind the desk beneath a window. She sat in a single chair in front of him, bathed in the sunlight from the window. She had to squint to see him clearly, occasionally holding up her hand to shade her eyes from the shaft of sunlight.
“Let me be frank, Dr. Ilgun,” he began. “There are still some very dangerous people at large.”
“Who? Here in Germany?”
“We will get to that. Many more lives could be in danger. We must know about others who might have been associated with Sami Haddad. Their motives are important, and in the past days a lot of thought has gone into this, both here and in America. You have acknowledged that you were closer to Samir Haddad than anybody else. We must know what motivated him. We need your help.”
Karima nodded, sitting erect, as she squinted against the glare of strong sunlight that streamed through the window.
“I’m not learning that much from you. We keep talking, but we don’t seem to be getting anywhere,” he said.
“But I’ve told you: he said nothing to me about any of this.”
“So you have said. If I am to believe you, I need you to try harder. There must have been clues, some side remark, some items inadvertently left behind, perhaps. Your Sami …”
“My Sami?”
He cleared his throat. “Haddad is a central figure in this calamity. He’s directly responsible for the deaths of forty people and by implication for another three thousand. He probably slit the throat of the American pilot with his own hand, the hand that you knew so well.”
She winced at the cruelty of his remark.
“If he had lived, he would have been tried in some dark and distant place for all those deaths,” Recht continued. “And then hanged in disgrace and buried in an unmarked grave.”
“He is already buried in an unmarked grave.”
Recht noted the snide remark. “I need you to try harder, Fräulein Ilgun.”
She sensed that he had restrained himself from adding the word otherwise. She struggled to control herself. A breakdown would not help her.
“Are you sure you have provided us with everything from Haddad?”
“Yes.”
“Every document?”
“Yes.”
She pulled a tissue from her purse. “I want to be helpful,” she said unconvincingly.
He leveled a skeptical stare at her and paused for a long moment. Finally, he said sharply. “This is no simple criminal investigation, Fräulein Ilgun. The Americans are frantic for answers. The FBI is pounding on my door. Another attack could happen at any moment. Your boyfriend was a ringleader. A ringleader! Do you understand the gravity of that?”
“Yes.”
“For the other eighteen hijackers, all of them, we have no one who was as close to them as you were to Haddad.”
“I’ve come to wonder how close I really was to him, to the whole man,” she replied.
“Yes, I’ve thought a lot about that in the last day.”
“In the years ahead,” he continued, as if he were speaking to the gallery, “thousands of Americans will go to that little town in Pennsylvania called Shanksville, where Flight 93 crashed, to pay tribute and to pay their respects. Little boys will look up at their fathers and say, ‘Why did they do it?’”
“It’s not for me to answer these little boys,” Karima muttered.
Recht stared at her coldly, holding her in an uncomfortable gaze, silent, disapproving.
Finally, she said, “If I was closest to him, I was more deceived than anyone.”
Again, there was an uncomfortable pause. “I will tell you bluntly, Dr. Ilgun,” he said at last, “we are not satisfied with your testimony. We don’t think you are telling us everything you know. I must warn you: you could be in very serious trouble.”
“I have told you everything I know,” she whimpered.
Karima returned to her apartment that evening to find her answering machine blinking ominously.
“Hello again, sister,” the eerie, distant voice intoned. “I hope you and your mother are well, God willing. Remember what Allah says: Do not backbite one another. Would one of you like to eat the flesh of your dead brother? Remember your dead brother, Karima. Let us honor his martyrdom and carry on his work. We know what you have.” The tape whirred and stopped. His time had run out. But there was no second call.
She felt the chill in the back of her neck and grabbed a robe, pulling it tightly around her, replaying his last words: We know what you have. The mention of her mother frightened her. Quickly, she picked up the telephone and called Stuttgart, but the call was unsatisfactory. Her mother was groggy from her sleep aid. Before Omar’s call, Karima had supposed that she would soon turn over the tapes to Recht. Now she realized she couldn’t.
Her thoughts returned—for the thousandth time, it seemed—to when all this had started for Sami. Greifswald, she thought. When he’d told her he’d realized he didn’t want to be a dentist.
“Spending my whole life looking down people’s throats?” he’d said. “No disrespect, Karima. It’s not for me. I’m twenty-four, old enough to begin thinking about what I really wanted to do in life.” Why not go for what he really loved? He heard about a program in aeronautical engineering at Hamburg’s Faculty of Applied Sciences.
They had talked about his move from Greifswald to Hamburg and decided that they could manage the separation. Hamburg was not so far away. They could spend their weekends together. When Karima had offered to transfer to someplace closer by, perhaps to the University of Bochum, Sami was pleased. On one of his infrequent trips back to Beirut, he had discussed his ambition about a career in aviation with his father. As always, the old man had been supportive. For his only son, the future leader of his clan, to get his professional training abroad was a great and laudable thing. Sami could always depend on getting his monthly stipend right on time, Karima remembered.
Then, in September 1997, he had moved to Hamburg and met his new friends. With a gasp she remembered. Atta. She peeked out the window, then reached for Sami’s journal, flipping through to find the name. Mohamed Atta. One of the nineteen. The ringleader.
Her mind drifted back to her last session with Recht. Had she really been Sami’s accomplice? She remembered questioning him about his life in Hamburg, but it was true: she had accepted his evasions. And she had acceded to his constant demand to become “more Islamic.” She had put up with his flashes of anger and his sullen moods. Was that enabling? In all those telephone conversations that interested Kommissar Recht so much, she had been honest—technically—in saying that Sami had never conveyed the slightest hint of his plot. What would have happened if she had just insisted he shave and stop spending so much time at the mosque? With all that she had learned about him since his death, she could not see him as a religious fanatic. Something other than religion was driving him. Sami Haddad. Brave as a lion? She guffawed.
She gazed at his material on her coffee table and at the telephone and at the clock. She wondered if she shouldn’t tell Kommissar Recht about Omar’s call for her own protection. It was midnight. The kommissar would be asleep. There was no point in disturbing him now. If she told him about it, he would want to hear the message. He wouldn’t be available until office hours in the morning, if then. Kommissar Recht was an important man. She went to the answering machine and deleted Omar’s message.
She set the journal aside and began to leaf through the loose sheets of paper that had come in the package. For the most part, they contained passages from the Koran, with headings such as “Verse of Repentance” or “From the Family of Imran, Verses 123–125.” The notations were in Sami’s hand but written in his labored scrawl. Here he had formed his letters slowly, as if he had been struggling to be precise. Several passages were written in someone else’s hand—Was it Omar’s? she wondered—and this handwriting projected the elegance and command and easy grace of a master. One of the passages was entitled “Spoils of War, Verses 65–67,” and another, “Surah 74, Verse 31,” was underlined: “We have set none but angels as guardians of the Fire. And we have fixed their number as 19 only as a trial for the disbelievers …”
Perhaps, Karima thought, these were Sami’s favorite passages, or lines that he had wanted to commit to memory, or verses that his imam had assigned him to copy. By including these passages in his “gift” to her, had he wanted to show her what a diligent student of the Koran he had become, how sincere he was in his faith?
Her eyes fell on a passage marked as Surahs 55–56: “The Most Generous” and “The Event.” She recognized it as scripture dealing with paradise, because she and Sami had once discussed the two celestial gardens, redolent with fruit and pomegranates, populated with beautiful, brown-eyed maidens reclining on green cushions, nymphs with whom no man had had tamth. She had asked him how he imagined such a place, careful not to make fun of it for fear that he might fly off the handle, even if it caused her a twinge of jealousy. She’d wanted to know whether he really believed in the Koranic portrayal.
Toward the bottom of the pile, there were pages of a different sort. One was a letter to Sami from his father, Farrah, dated June 12, 2001. Dear, elegant Farrah, Karima thought, the dedicated public servant. He had been so kind to her, and so generous to Sami. The old man’s handwriting was scratchy, the swirly Arabic calligraphy, once so lovely and artistic, now uneven and inexact.
My dear Samir,
Here is your monthly installment of 2000 dollars. I am so proud of you, my son. When you complete your degree, you will be a credit to your name and your clan. You bear our family name, Samir, as your middle name, and this is your bond to our distinguished line, stretching back to the Prophet himself. It may not be too long before you will be asked to take the leadership of our family. Your sisters will help, but as my only son, you must carry on our traditions.
I am sorry to tell you that I have taken a turn for the worse. We are dealing with it as we can and must. I don’t want you to worry. I don’t want to interfere with your studies there, but I am hoping that you will be able to come home soon for a visit.
Your loving father, Farrah
There was also a clipping from the Sarasota Times-Herald, dated the same day, about the execution of Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh.
The last page seemed to come from some kind of aviation manual, printed in bold.
The 757 flight deck is designed with a fully integrated flight management computer system (FMC). The FMC uses flight crew-entered flight plan data, airplane systems data, and data from the navigation database to calculate airplane present position and generate the pitch, roll, and thrust commands necessary to fly an optimum flight profile. Automatic flight functions manage the airplane’s lateral flight path (LNAV) and vertical flight path (VNAV) from immediately after takeoff to final approach and landing.
The precision of global positioning satellite system (GPS) navigation is available as part of the FMC. Before each flight the flight crew enters the routing, including all way-points up to the destination into the FMC. These waypoints are defined by coordinates. Each waypoint is assigned an overfly altitude and speed. Upon engaging the autopilot the aircraft will fly to its destination along the green line in the Navigation Display. The active routing can always be changed during flight.
Sami had underlined the last sentence. Clipped to this page was another, in his handwriting.
My Check List: (Upon gaining control of B757)
(Row of middle level windows.)
In the event of emergency:
In event of passenger resistance:
WARNING: If control column is pushed forward for more than 15 seconds, dive will be so steep, may be impossible to regain control.
And then the last page.
To abort the mission and land safely
Why had he included that page? Karima wondered. Was he taunting her? She tried to imagine him in his motel on the last night, writing his love letter to her, gathering these random notes and his journal, and dropping this page in as an afterthought, stuffing the whole of it into the envelope and putting the stamps with the US Capitol on the right corner. Had he really thought of this as an act of love?
Sami had known the kind of microcassette player Karima used to record her patient notes. On her couch she slotted in the first cassette, dated June 5, 2001, and pushed play.
“I think it was in the residence hall that I first met Muhammad Atta,” Sami began. “He was wearing this tattered robe and flipflops. Pretty small guy, not much more than five feet. I think he had a full beard then. Not exactly a commanding figure. Not the leader type. But there was something unusual about him. It was his eyes. Piercing … you know, really intense.
“We exchanged pleasantries. I lent him some toothpaste. When he invited me to the mosque, I said no thanks. But Hamburg was lonely without you, albi. I had no friends. My courses were hard. I was struggling to get by. I had to call upon Allah and on the goodwill of my professors—‘Won’t you help this poor, dim-witted Arab?’ I wanted to ask them. At night, I felt down. We talked a lot on the phone in those days. We were just two lovers, honest and raw, longing to be with one another. In those days I had nothing to hide. But I guess talking with you was not enough.
“I take that back. Because I want to be honest with you. I’m embarrassed to tell you this now. But I did have something to hide. In my loneliness I began to mosey down to the Reeperbahn on a regular basis. On the street called Grosse Freiheit, I would run into Arab girls. At clubs like Café Reese and Thomas Reed I would just stay in a corner and watch the dirty dancing. And yes, I admit it: I did wander over to the other side of the Reeperbahn where the whores lounged in front of their picture windows. Just to look. I had my fantasies, but I never hired one. It would have cost me half the money my father was sending me every month, for one thing.
“Sometimes I went instead to the harbor. I’d walk along the promenade at Landungsbrücken and watch the great container ships leaving for some exotic location. Always a little afraid that I might run into some skinheads. I usually ended up at a club called Pupasch. It was a great flirting place, but I wasn’t very good at flirting with strangers. They hand out free condoms there. I came away feeling empty and wondering what I was doing with my life and feeling guilty as if I was cheating on you. I wasn’t really cheating though, Karima, just thinking about it.
“The next time I ran into Atta, he invited me to the mosque again. ‘Oh, well, okay,’ I said. Why not? I didn’t know anybody. I had nothing else to do. He said there was free food and a soccer game afterwards. The mosque called Al-Quds was run of the mill, even a little dumpy. The doors on Steindamm were unmarked, no sense of it being a religious place. Atta called it The Box. It was a box, all right, smelly and stuffy.
“I remember that first visit really well. In the small library of the mosque, about eight guys were sitting there, whispering in Arabic. One was dark-skinned, a Sudanese. There was also a Syrian, a Turk, an Algerian, and a big guy from the Emirates. Very international, a mixed group. When I came in, they stopped talking. Atta introduced me and said, ‘This is Samir. His friends call him Sami. He’s from Lebanon, and he knows a lot about the suffering of Palestinians. He’s studying aeronautical engineering.’
“That got their attention. Then he said, ‘Technically, he’s Sunni, but he admits that he’s not a very good Muslim. Isn’t that so, Sami?’
“Of course, I didn’t really like being introduced that way to these guys, but it was true. One of them said something like, ‘God willing, we can show him the light.’
“That was the night I met Omar. Atta called him the defender of the faith, and he’s the one who led the instruction. Omar is taller than Atta, broad shoulders, has a full beard. I liked him right away. He pretty much took charge.
“‘Stand straight!’ he commanded, and everyone stood up. ‘May Allah have mercy on you.’
“He spoke very fast. ‘Welcome, Brother Sami. My name is Omar. I come from Hadhramaut, the region of Yemen. Today we’re continuing our consideration of the Battle of Badr. Do you know about it?’
“Of course I did. Who doesn’t know about Muhammad’s first decisive battle? This tiny Muslim army attacking the caravan of the superpower, the Quraish, as it came across the desert from Syria to Mecca. The overwhelming odds. The divine intervention. The battle that made Muhammad and Islam a force to be reckoned with. Even I knew this story, right?
“The lesson was Surah 3:123–125, which I know a lot better now, believe me. First he read it in Arabic. And then, a German translation. ‘Allah helped you when you were a pathetic little force.’
“The Syrian guy asked, ‘How big was the prophet’s army?’
“‘Three hundred thirteen,’ Omar said. ‘Three hundred thirteen that brought down a superpower. They were outnumbered at least three to one.’ And then he finished reading. ‘Remember, faithful, is it not enough for you that Allah should help you with three thousand angels? If you remain firm and act properly, even if the enemy shall rush you in hot haste, your Lord will help you with five thousand angels, and you will make a terrific onslaught.’
“People liked this story, and we talked about why it was important.
“Someone said, ‘He was raiding the caravan of the wealthy and the powerful, and that’s like attacking the economic might of the superpower. The caravan was the symbol of Mecca’s wealth.’
“Of course, Atta had to have his say, so he interrupted the discussion with a quote from a magazine—the Jihadist.
“‘Listen to what the Sheikh has written. ‘Those who kill excellently are they who fight in the front row. They do not withdraw until they are killed. They will sit in the upper ranks of paradise.’”
“I was a little confused. Were they talking about the Battle of Badr, or something else? Sheikh? What Sheikh? But Omar took over again before I could ask anything.
“‘Allah said in his Glorious Book, Why fear the Infidels? Now Allah hath more right that you should fear Him, if you are believers. Fight them! So that Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them and give you victory over them and heal the breasts of a believing people.’ Everyone was quiet, and you could tell we were all feeling the power that Omar and Atta were channeling. Then Atta got up, and his eyes were even more intense.
“Looking at each of us, he shouted, ‘Are you ready to fight for your belief?’ When he got to me, he screamed—seriously, he was screaming at me, yahabibti—‘How strong are you, anyway?’
“Then the Turk tried to calm him down. ‘Take it easy, Mohamed, for God’s sake. They’ll hear you in the prayer room.’ Atta turned on him viciously. ‘You’re too weak for this! You’re too weak to follow the path. I know wimps like you. I’ve worked with many of them. You cease to exist for me. You are dismissed. Leave!’
“People looked at one another uncomfortably. I wondered if I was supposed to leave too. So, the Turkish guy, he stood up and shouted at Atta, ‘You son of a donkey … May you burn in hell’ and stalked out of the room.
“It was really embarrassing. I felt bad for the guy who was getting Atta’s broadside. And then the other guy, the Syrian … he snickered—you know, nervously—and Atta turned on him as well and shouted, ‘How can you laugh when people are dying in the intifada!’
“And the guy was like, ‘What has Palestine got to do with it?’
“And Atta goes, ‘Talk to Samir here. He will tell you. Tell him, Sami. Tell him why Palestine is everything. Tell them about Sabra and Chatila!’
“I didn’t say anything. I was not about to get tangled up with these people. I was there for the food and the soccer. It was awful, yahabibti. But Atta didn’t care.
“‘It’s obvious. It’s obvious,’ he said to the Syrian guy finally, seeing that I would be no help. ‘You are too small for this matter,’ and then he sat down.
Karima switched off the machine. “I don’t have the strength to finish this segment,” she said to herself. “Perhaps I will in the morning.”