GOING WITHOUT A PRAYER

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When Mir Aimal Kansi heard a soft knock on his hotel-room door at 4 a.m. last Sunday, he thought it was a call to prayer. Like most observant Muslims, Kansi prays five times a day, beginning at around 4:30 a.m. And certainly Kansi had a lot weighing on his soul. An accused killer, he was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list, and had been on the run for four years. Now he was holed up in the Shalimar Hotel, a seedy establishment in Dera Ghazi Khan, a city in central Pakistan. He groggily opened his door.

Five Americans, dressed in the flowing cotton shirts and pants of the region, burst through the door: Jimmie Carter, second-in-command at the FBI's Washington metropolitan field office, agent Brad Garrett, and three members of the bureau's hostage rescue team. They shoved the slight, bearded, Pakistani-born Kansi, 33, to the floor, cuffed his hands behind his back and identified themselves as FBI agents. "Who are you?" one of them demanded. "F___ you," Kansi snapped in his lightly accented English, and began screaming for help in his native Pashto language. Garrett knelt beside Kansi and took a thumbprint. A Midwesterner with a Ph.D. in criminology and a powerful memory, Garrett recognized the ridges and whorls. "We got him," he said. The G-men hustled their captive out of the hotel and into a waiting four-wheel-drive vehicle. By that night, Carter was able to send out a brief report to Tom Pickard, head of the FBI's Washington field office and the man who had ordered the team in. The message: "The package has been delivered."

Thus ended the search for one of the most notorious accused terrorists in the world. On Jan. 25, 1993, during the morning rush hour, a lone gunman pulled out an AK-47 and opened fire on commuters outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., killing two CIA employees and wounding three other people. Kansi, whose prints were allegedly found on the spent shell casings, was identified as the prime suspect. However, the day after the shooting, he left the U.S. on a one-way ticket to Karachi. Soon he made his way to Quetta, Pakistan, capital of the province of Baluchistan, an area in which Kansi's Pashtun tribal clan has long exercised great political influence. Allegedly aided by family, friends and sympathizers, Kansi was initially hard to trace, and opportunities to apprehend him were nearly impossible to arrange. Locating and capturing Kansi became a high-priority project for FBI and CIA personnel in Pakistan, a rare joint venture by the rival agencies. Several times, when agents thought they were close to nabbing Kansi, President Clinton became directly involved, contacting leaders in southwestern Asia to obtain clearance to send in U.S. agents--only to have them fail to get their man.