Karachi is a reasonably modern, at times almost ordinary, place. Kids on bikes pass by on their way to school. Boys and girls giggle in one another's presence and listen to music that offends their parents' ears. Young hipsters scout the latest boutiques and restaurants with cool, enigmatic one-word names. Okra is one of the latest.
The city is by many measures a mess. It hasn't had a comprehensive development plan since the 1920s, the air is foul, but cars are smaller and traffic manageable. Important people ride Toyota Corollas to work, some with chauffeurs and bodyguards.
It has some of the vanity and swagger of cities accustomed to dominating their surroundings. It is in love with the myth of itself as a place of danger and deception.
So maybe it is not surprising how many people here can tell you where Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is, would be or has recently been. For a ghost, he has made many appearances. You can, in a couple of weeks, collect half a dozen addresses and a great many more stories.
The stories start in the Defense Housing Society, a large, newer group of neighborhoods between the old city center and the sea. It was at a Defense apartment building that a big shootout occurred in September. Defense -- it's named for its developer, army officers -- contains many of the finer districts in the city. Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, lives in one of them, a leafy area of big homes and older-model Mercedeses.
The shootout was just beyond the better neighborhoods, in a commercial-industrial tract full of five- and six-story buildings, most with low-rent light industrial tenants: textile plants, zipper and button factories and small machine shops. The streets are paved, but the buildings are separated by bare dirt and are shuttered in the front with metal roll-up doors. The night before, when police arrived, the streets were empty and dark.
Nothing happened that night. The police or, rather, the authorities -- there were more intelligence agents and army special forces than there were cops -- waited. This is the sort of thing that spawns rumors. Why did they wait? The simplest explanation, the one authorities give, is of course not trusted, but it is the one that makes sense. They waited because they didn't know what else to do. They didn't know what or who to expect and waited to see.
