Time Bomb.(Benazir Bhutto's death)(Correction notice)

Correction appended.

At around noon on December 27, 2007, Benazir Bhutto arrived at a fourth-floor suite in the Serena Hotel in Islamabad to meet with Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan. She "was in a very good mood," Karzai told me recently. She admired his cape, and they laughed as he recounted how he had acquired it--an improbable tale that involved a visit to the exiled King of Afghanistan. They sipped tea and coffee and discussed the region's gathering political violence. Militant Islamic leaders had named both of them as targets for assassination; suicide bombings had escalated in their two countries during 2007, and in Pakistan had reached an unprecedented rate of about one a week. The targets included politicians, Pakistani Army soldiers, Air Force cadets, intelligence-agency employees, paramilitaries, and civilians. Bhutto had been attacked in Karachi in October, as she returned from exile in Dubai; she escaped, but more than a hundred and forty people died. "I am not afraid of death," she told Karzai. The Afghan President, who had never spoken with her in person, found her "to be a very, very brave woman--too courageous for her own good," he recalled.

That evening, Bhutto was to meet with two American officials, Senator Arlen Spector and Representative Patrick Kennedy. After seeing Karzai, she went to her Islamabad home and summoned Farhatullah Babar, a close aide, and asked him to prepare a short briefing memo for the Americans about Pakistan's large and influential intelligence agencies. The spy services, particularly the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, which is run by the military, have a long history of collaborating with Islamist militias to wage covert war in Afghanistan and India. The I.S.I. also collects foreign intelligence, represses separatist movements inside Pakistan, monitors loyalty in the country's armed services, and involves itself in electoral politics on the military's behalf. A national parliamentary vote was less than two weeks away; Bhutto asked Babar to describe in his memo how the intelligence services "were directly interfering in the elections, with some specific examples--what she felt, her fears," Babar recalled.

She ate a light lunch and then climbed into her armored white Land Cruiser to drive to the nearby city of Rawalpindi, where a political rally had been organized in a park called Liaquat Bagh, an irregular oval surrounded by brick walls and metal railings. The park is named for Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan's first Prime Minister, who was assassinated there in 1951. A few pine and eucalyptus trees shade its lawn. A banner hung above a raised platform where Bhutto and local leaders of the party she headed, the Pakistan People's Party, were to speak; it depicted Bhutto and her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a former President and Prime Minister of Pakistan, who, in 1979, was hanged in a military prison a mile away.

As Bhutto sat on the platform and listened to the opening speeches, her aides' cell phones began to ring. Sherry Rehman, a senior political and media adviser, leaned over to relay the news: elsewhere in the city, gunmen had killed election workers for Nawaz Sharif, a political rival of Bhutto's who heads a branch of the Pakistan Muslim League, and who, like her, had served twice as Pakistan's Prime Minister. "O.K.," Bhutto said. "We must phone him," to offer sympathy and support. She asked Rehman to remind her to make the call.

She was hoarse from campaigning, but, in Rehman's estimation, she delivered "one of the most resounding and exceptional speeches" she had made since her return. Bhutto praised local Party workers and promised to help the poor and to lead a national struggle against religious extremists.