Andrew rose early to go to class. Jahar was invariably asleep when he left. Andrew did most of his studying in the library or the common area in the dorm; when he returned to the room, it was always dark and Jahar was either absent or staring at his computer screen. Sometimes, the small television perched on a desk would be on. Very rarely, one of the boys would make a comment about something that was on television. Once, this was something about September 11, 2001, and Jahar said it had been a government conspiracy. A lot of people at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth believed a lot of different things. Andrew thought Jahar was a weird one, but not in any extraordinary way.
Andrew saw students come in and out of their room. Most came because Jahar was a campus pot dealer; a small group were Jahar’s friends. On occasion, one or two of them would hang with Jahar in their room; more often, their small clump moved off somewhere, in a thick cloud of marijuana smoke.
It was as tight and purposeless a group as any set of college friends ever was. At its core were Jahar and two kids from Kazakhstan who had come to Massachusetts to go to college. Dias Kadyrbayev was a skinny boy from a middle-class family in Almaty. His coming to the United States was a triumph of his and his family’s will. He was the only one in the group who had anything resembling ambition, but much of it was focused on a girl named Bayan, whom he had been dating in Kazakhstan since sixth grade. Bayan came from money and planned to get a business degree in the United States, so Dias beat her to it: the year she was finishing high school back at home, he was already a freshman at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and Skyping incessantly with her. His sophomore year, Bayan enrolled at Babson College, west of Boston, where she studied business with the sons of Middle Eastern sheikhs; Dias drove sixty miles north every Thursday to pick up Bayan to bring her to his off-campus apartment in New Bedford, next to Dartmouth, for the weekend.
Azamat Tazhayakov, a short boy with a face and broad-chested body that would surely, with age, become as perfectly round as his father’s, was the son of an oil executive who fancied himself one of the dozen most influential men in Kazakhstan and was probably one of a hundred. All the boys in the family would be educated abroad and all would go into oil—this was preordained—but probably because Azamat went first, he landed at UMass by mistake. His father had confused the University of Massachusetts with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and signed Azamat up for the Bachelor Pathway Program, the fancy name of a revenue-generating program for foreigners that does not guarantee admission to a degree program but does provide English instruction and a way to secure a student visa. Once Azamat arrived, it became clear not only that UMass was not MIT but also that it offered no major appropriate for a future oil magnate. His father wanted Azamat to transfer to the University of Texas, but Azamat, who disliked upheaval more than anything else, showed uncharacteristic resolve and convinced his father that all American universities were essentially the same for the first couple of years. He was allowed to stay.
Azamat and Dias met at the very beginning of freshman year, and both of them met Jahar a short time later. Both the Kazakhs spoke Russian as the second of their household languages, and this made them good and tolerant enough company for Jahar, who was re-Russifying himself. He was spending an increasing amount of time on Russian-language social networks, which provided not only virtual company but also copious amounts of pirated music and films in Russian.
Their first year, Dias and Azamat also made friends with a girl named Pamela Rolon, who introduced them, the following September, to her younger sister, Alexa Guevara, and a medical lab science major named Tiffany Evora. Robel Phillipos, Jahar’s friend from Rindge and Latin, rounded out the group. The Kazakhs managed to persuade their parents to allow them to rent the off-campus apartment in New Bedford starting their sophomore year. They claimed it would be easier for them to study there. By “study,” they—or at least Dias—meant “get stoned.” Jahar provided the weed for free in exchange for Dias’s acting as both a runner and a sort of customer liaison.
The boys furnished their apartment with a sort of 1980s panache that put one in mind of a café on the outskirts of the former Soviet empire. There was a fair amount of black lacquer, there was a plush sectional sofa, and there was a large television set. The group spent three or four evenings a week on that sofa, getting stoned, watching movies, and eating. The boys played FIFA, a soccer video game; the girls talked about which of the boys might be the hottest lovers, though it does not appear that anyone but Dias was getting much action. The group made several weekend runs to New York, though once they got it together to make the three-hour drive, they usually had just time enough to snap a picture in Times Square, or in front of the Statue of Liberty or the New York Times building, and post it on a Russian social network before making the drive back. On one of those trips, though, they found the time to go to New Jersey to buy a used BMW for the Kazakhs. Azamat’s father was bankrolling this purchase—Azamat had explained to him that it was too hard, always having to ask Jahar for a ride to and from campus—and Jahar helped pick out the car, using what Anzor had taught him. It is not clear who picked out the vanity license plate for the front of the car (Massachusetts requires only that the back plate be state-issued) or whether it was there from the start. It read TERRORISTA#1. It was funny.
The Kazakhs and Jahar were practically family. In fact, family was exactly what they were in the eyes of T-Mobile: because Jahar was the only person in the group who had a Social Security number, required to enter into any financial contract in the United States, all four of them—he, Dias, Azamat, and Bayan—had a family cellular plan, with Jahar as the primary subscriber.
At first glance, the group Jahar assembled at college was not dissimilar to the group he had in high school. His ability to make friends with kids different from him and from one another had been one of the qualities that impressed teachers, marked him as a “good kid” in Cambridge’s progressive hierarchy. But a closer look would have shown that something had changed, perhaps profoundly. He was no longer shifting effortlessly among groups. This tiny crowd was insular. And it was, essentially, a group of outcasts. Dias and Azamat were still fairly disoriented in their American life. All the Americans in the group came from difficult families except for Robel, whose mother had raised him resolutely alone. Jahar was the only member of the group who had the option of identifying as white—an option still important for fitting in at a state school in Massachusetts: UMass Dartmouth was roughly seventy percent white. Of course, Jahar was white only in the United States. In Russia his sharp features and curly black hair marked him as “black,” and though he had never experienced this himself, he would have heard from Tamerlan about the ordeal of moving through Russia while being recognizably Chechen in ethnicity; one need only spend a couple of hours in Moscow changing planes in order to feel the hostility and the heightened police attention.