Bhutto's Last Day, in Keeping With Her Driven Life

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That night, Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, called from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates to say he was nervous. He wanted her to stop attending the rallies and let him go in her place, sources said. She refused.

But by next morning, she was having doubts. She was due to hold a rally that afternoon in Rawalpindi, and the city made her nervous, friends said.

For one thing, it was the home of a military she had distrusted her entire life. For another, her father -- former prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto -- had died there, hanged in 1979 by the man who had overthrown him, Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq. And Pakistan's first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, had been assassinated in 1951 in the very park where her rally was to take place.

For Bhutto, who could be superstitious, those were bad omens.

More came later in the day. In the afternoon, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif's supporters had been gathering on a street corner in Rawalpindi when a sharpshooter began firing from a nearby rooftop. Four Sharif activists were killed. Five others were injured. Sharif's party quickly blamed Musharraf's allies, alleging in interviews that they believed the attack marked the beginning of a campaign of political violence designed to scare opponents away from the polls.

But whatever her reservations, Bhutto decided to go ahead with her rally.

In the early afternoon, she huddled with her inner circle at her Islamabad home, eating a lunch of potato curry and chapati bread, said Babar Awan, a top official in Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) who had been at her side for two weeks.

Her aides were anxious, thinking ahead to the rally. But she was calm.

"She kept telling me to relax and eat," Awan said.

The agenda for the lunch was to review the prepared text of her speech. Bhutto seemed intent on not rushing, enjoying the moment.

"She was so overly satisfied that day, so overly confident and full of jubilance," Awan said. "She looked so beautiful that day, in all the ways that a woman like her -- bright, energetic, bursting with ideas and hope -- could look beautiful."

At one point, Bhutto brought her notes for her speech to the large picture window overlooking the mountains and read them there quietly. "I call on my homeland of Pakistan to come out and fight for Pakistan's future," Awan said her notes read. "I'm not afraid. We cannot be afraid."