He spent most of the next few years in Afghanistan. And I was sent all over Europe and North Africa, chasing shadows.
Two days after the 9/11 attacks, the news broke that the lead suicide pilot, Mohamed Atta, had been living two hours away, in Hamburg. Suddenly I was on the biggest police story of my life.
On the train, a woman watched me as I read the International Herald Tribune. American? she asked. When I nodded, she grabbed my hand.
"We have to be strong," she said, repeating her words in beautiful, heavily accented English. She looked to be in her 70s. She laid out a multifront strategy for fighting extremism, urging vigilance, patience, and sensitivity, and I felt I was being welcomed into the world's arms.
The Germans had lived through terror attacks by the Red Army Faction. The French had withstood subway bombings by Algerian militants. The Brits had the IRA, the Spanish had ETA. Americans were exceptional no more. The world, she assured me, was with us.
In Hamburg, we learned that Atta and two of the other pilots had shared a three-room, furnished apartment with a high-speed Internet connection on Marienstrasse, near the technical university in a neighborhood of transients: students and immigrants.
I found Atta's academic adviser, who talked of the serious, rigid scholar who'd written an excellent thesis on urban planning in Aleppo, Syria. Later, a Moroccan student who knew the perpetrators told me he was shocked to hear what they'd done. Turns out he'd trained for jihad, too, and is now in prison, an accessory to murder.
A colleague reached a hausfrau who said that every night, when she cooked an egg for her husband, she looked out the window at Atta's apartment and the silhouetted members of his cell meeting behind drawn curtains.
Al-Qaeda in her backyard.
