The 19th Hijacker Read online

  “In a few hours, I will do what I am supposed to do. They want me to think of this as an act of courage and nobility. But it feels more like an act of cowardice. I want to walk away, but I am not brave enough, even at this last moment.

  “For three months, even when I saw you in July, I was unsure if I would go forward. I was so torn between you and the mission. I got tired of my deception, both to you and to my comrades. You, and only you, must know the whole story. How I came down this path. I cannot bear the thought that I will disappear from your life forever without a word of explanation. And so, I put these recollections in the mail to you now. I have been recording them for you in the past few months, just so you will know, as I tried to figure things out and decide what to do.

  “Tonight, I think only about you, yahayati. I miss you terribly. My thoughts dwell on how we first met. Your lovely round face, your luscious brown hair, your sparkling green eyes. I can see them even now sparkle all the way across the room. You were wearing your favorite earrings, the ones with little emerald balls at the end, and that lace blouse with a collar covering your long neck. How I miss you! And your laugh. It was your laugh that first caught my attention …

  2

  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 w
ith 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.

  “The whole man?”

  “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.