The Mirage

by Matt Ruff

  “Al Qaeda? I’ve heard of it. It’s an urban legend.”

  “No doubt,” said Mustafa. “But if Al Qaeda did exist, and if Bin Laden needed someone to run the day-to-day operations while he was busy in Congress, Abu Yusuf is the sort of man you’d expect him to pick.”

  “That’s just great!” said Samir. “The acting head of Al Qaeda, and we’ve gone and gotten him pissed at us. At me.”

  Half an hour later they were summoned back downstairs. As they filed into Farouk’s office, Idris regarded them coldly, his gaze lingering on Samir until Samir began to squirm.

  “Now that the jurisdictional question is settled,” Farouk said, “let’s get down to business. Abu Yusuf, I understand you’re already acquainted with Mustafa and Samir. And you’ve met Amal, though I imagine there was no formal introduction—”

  “I know who she is,” Idris said. “Are you certain the president would want you to involve a woman in this matter?”

  “Amal is a fine agent.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you employ the daughter of Anmar al Maysani for her fine skills.”

  “No doubt Senator Bin Laden has a similar appreciation for the skills of Abu Yusuf,” Amal said.

  “If I may, sir,” Mustafa spoke up, before another round of shouting could erupt. “What is all this about?”

  “It’s about the mirage,” Farouk said. “Earlier tonight, the prisoner Costello told you a rather incredible story. What you don’t know is that the story is not unprecedented. Other interrogation subjects have been spouting the same legend: that this world we live in is false; that God loves America, not Arabia.”

  “How many other interrogation subjects?”

  “Many. I can’t give you a more precise answer because—as the president was disturbed to learn recently—there has apparently been an effort by certain elements of the intelligence community to conceal the existence of this legend.”

  “There’s no cover-up!” Idris said. “This so-called legend is obviously propaganda dreamed up by Christian fanatics to inspire suicide bombers. If the president wasn’t informed about it, it’s because it isn’t important enough to merit his attention.”

  “The president does not agree with Abu Yusuf’s assessment,” Farouk said. “He desires an independent investigation into the question of the mirage.”

  “So he called you?” Amal said, immediately regretting it. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t mean to imply—”

  “No, it’s a fair point. I am a Christian, and as we all know, in the current environment Christians—even Egyptian Christians who have never had any connection with terrorism—are viewed with suspicion. But as one would expect of the leader of the Arab Unity Party, the president is a true ecumenist.”

  “And he’s from Cairo,” Mustafa said, having gotten it at “Egyptian.” He turned to Amal and explained: “Farouk and the president come from the same neighborhood.”

  “Yes,” Farouk said, with a small smile. “As it happens, my third cousin is married to the president’s half brother.”

  “Sir,” said Samir, still casting nervous glances at Idris, “about this investigation, I don’t think I—”

  “I know you are only too happy to do whatever your commander in chief asks of you, Samir,” Farouk said, “but please restrain your expressions of enthusiasm while I finish. The president has asked me to oversee a reexamination of all existing intelligence pertaining to the mirage legend. He wants to know where this story originated and how it’s being spread. He wants to know what it means. And he wants to know where these are coming from . . .” Farouk held up the newspaper Amal and Samir had found in Costello’s apartment. “Many of the most fervent believers in the legend have in their possession objects, like this one, that they claim are artifacts from the ‘real’ world. Forged props, obviously, but we need to find out who’s making them.”

  “Does Homeland Security have any more of these artifacts?” Mustafa asked.

  “Yes. In fact Abu Yusuf, in what I am sure will be a continuing spirit of cooperation, has just turned over a number of items that he obtained earlier today from the ABI office in Kufah. We have them down the hall, in Conference Room B.”

  One of Idris’s thugs—the same one who had tackled Amal in the apartment—stood guard outside the conference room door. When he saw them coming he moved to bar the way, but Idris waved him aside.

  There were four objects laid out on the table inside the room.

  The first was a small flag. The red-and-white stripes were familiar, but in the upper left-hand corner, the golden cross and the IESUS NAZARENUS REX IUDAEORUM motto had been replaced by a blue field with a plain array of white stars.

  Next were two maps, one of Iraq, the other a regional map of the entire Middle East. Mustafa studied the latter, feeling like a child working one of those puzzles in which the goal is to spot all the mistakes in a picture: The state of Arabia was, at least technically, misnamed. Persia had become Iran, “Land of the Aryans,” and Kurdistan had disappeared, its territory divided between the state of Iraq, “Iran,” and the sovereign nation of Turkey. Most curious of all—and impossible to ignore, once he’d noticed it—Palestine had also vanished, leaving in its stead a Christian fundamentalist prophecy come true. “I’m beginning to understand why the president is concerned,” said Mustafa.

  The fourth and final artifact was the top half of a front page torn from another newspaper, the Paris Le Monde. It was dated September 13, 2001. The banner headline read “L’Amérique frappée, le monde saisi d’effroi”—“America attacked, the world seized by fear.” In a column to the right was a smaller headline: “Nous sommes tous Américains.”

  He must have made a sound. Amal looked up from the Iraq state map and said, “What is it?” Mustafa didn’t answer, just shook his head, caught in a moment of vertigo.

  Nous sommes tous Américains.

  We are all Americans.

  Book Two

  The Republic of Nebuchadnezzar

  A sandstorm had blown through Baghdad overnight, leaving a thick layer of grit on the streets and rooftops. Clerks arriving at the state courthouse found that the filters on the building ventilation system had become clogged. Mindful of the celebrity trial that was scheduled to conclude today, they made an emergency call to maintenance; by 9 a.m. the filters had all been replaced, and the air-conditioning was once more functioning properly.

  Nevertheless, when the judge in Part 14 gaveled court back into session shortly before noon, there were a dozen men in the room whose faces were sheened with sweat.

  “Members of the jury,” the judge said. “Have you reached a verdict?”

  “By the grace of God, your honor, we have.”

  “Are you quite certain?” The judge didn’t try to keep the disgust out of his voice. “You’ve just heard five weeks of testimony, yet you deliberated for less than an hour. Wouldn’t you at least like to wait until after lunch?”

  The lead defense attorney rose to object: “Your honor—”

  “Shut up, you.” Glaring at the jury foreman: “Well?”

  “We’re . . . We’re very sure, your honor.”

  The judge signaled the bailiff, who stepped forward to take the folded verdict sheet from the foreman’s trembling hand. The judge examined the paper. “This is your unanimous decision?”

  “It is, your honor.”

  “And . . .” The judge let out a sigh. “ . . . you come to this decision freely?”

  “We do, your honor.”

  The judge passed the sheet back to his bailiff, who returned it to the jury box. “The defendant will rise.” Smiling confidently, the defendant did so. “Please read the verdict for the record.”

  “Y-yes, your honor . . . On the charges of conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to transport and sell forbidden substances, conspiracy to promote and profit from immoral activities, usury, bribery of a public official, bribery of a police officer, and conspiracy to suborn perjury, we find the defendant, Saddam Hussein, not guilty
.”

  The street in front of the courthouse had been closed to regular vehicle traffic, and the police had set barricades along the far curb to keep pedestrians at a distance. A limousine idled near the foot of the courthouse steps, ready to whisk the man of the hour away to his victory celebration.

  But Saddam was in no hurry to leave. As he came out of the courthouse—flanked by his sons, his legal team, and his buddy Tariq Aziz—he raised his arms and called to the crowd behind the barricades: “Hel-lo, Baghdad!” A cheer went up. Saddam’s most fervent supporters—Baath organizers receiving bonus pay for their presence here—raised signs bearing his picture and the phrase LONG LIVE THE KING! A chant began: “Saddam! Saddam! Saddam!”

  Saddam kept his right arm in the air, rotating his hand in a regal wave. His eyes grew distant as he soaked in the adulation. After about a minute, Tariq Aziz touched him gently on the shoulder, as if waking a sleepwalker, and guided him down the steps towards a waiting gaggle of reporters and news cameras.

  The chief defense lawyer had prepared a statement, but Saddam cut him off almost immediately and began to take questions: Yes, praise be to God, he was pleased with the trial’s outcome. No, he wasn’t surprised that the jurors—“honest Baghdadis”—had chosen to do the right thing. No, he held no ill will against the prosecutors, though as an honest citizen himself, he did wish the district attorney would focus more on actual criminals . . .

  While his father held court with the press, Qusay Hussein kept his eyes on the crowd. His older brother was supposed to do the same, but Uday’s attention focused instead on a young female journalist who’d been shoved to the back of the gaggle. Uday circled around to her and asked if he could answer any questions.

  Across the street there was a commotion as someone in the crowd held up a new sign, a homemade placard showing a caricature of Saddam with bloodstained hands, its one-word caption reading BUTCHER! The nearest Baathists reacted furiously, using their own signs as bludgeons. As the police moved in to prevent a riot, a portion of the barricade was left unguarded.

  Two men slipped through the gap. They crossed the street undetected and approached along the sidewalk, drawing snub-nosed pistols from their waistbands. Qusay spotted them just as they were taking aim; he cried out a warning and knocked his father to the ground.

  The press scattered as the men opened fire. Uday, his face registering glee rather than shock, turned towards the gunshots. He drew his own pistol and shot the closest assassin twice in the chest. The second gunman panicked and tried to flee back into the crowd. Heedless of the other people in the line of fire, Uday squeezed off several more shots, one of which connected. The gunman stumbled and fell to his knees; before he could get up, the police piled onto him.

  Qusay helped his father to his feet. Saddam checked himself carefully for bullet wounds; finding none, he looked around at his entourage. “Tariq?”

  “I’m OK,” Tariq Aziz said, though in truth he looked ill. He was staring at Saddam’s lead attorney, who lay gushing blood from a hole in his Adam’s apple. One of the other lawyers bent down with a wadded handkerchief, saying, “Put pressure on it, put pressure on it.” Aziz turned away and vomited, and Saddam raised a hand to his own throat, feeling a sudden chill. “God is great,” he whispered. He said it again, louder: “God is great!”

  Uday meanwhile strolled over to where the cops were sitting on the second gunman. As he approached, more police moved in around him, forming a ring that screened him from the view of the cameras. He held out his hand, and an officer passed him a wooden baton.

  “Please,” the gunman begged. “Mercy! In the name of God, mercy!”

  “Hold him tightly,” Uday said.

  THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA

  A USER-EDITED REFERENCE SOURCE

  Saddam Hussein

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  The factual accuracy of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page.

  Saddam Hussein Abd al Majid al Tikriti (born April 28, 1937), a Sunni Muslim, is an Iraqi labor organizer, philanthropist, bestselling novelist, and reputed gangster and bootlegger. Though he emphatically denies having anything to do with the manufacture or sale of alcohol, he is more coy on the question of whether he has other ties to organized crime. To date, he has been indicted nine times on various felony and racketeering charges. He has never once been convicted.

  EARLY LIFE

  Saddam was born in the village of Al Awja, near Tikrit. His father, Hussein Abd al Majid, died while Saddam was still in the womb, so Saddam was raised by his maternal uncle, Khairallah Talfah, in Baghdad.

  In 1957 Saddam became an organizer for the Baath Labor Union, which represented construction, garbage collection, and river transport workers in Iraq and Syria. The Arab Bureau of Investigation suspected that the Baathists were also engaged in smuggling and other illegal activities, but did little about it. At the time, the ABI was far more concerned with investigating corruption among two other, much more powerful Iraqi labor unions: the Royal Order of Hashemites, which was controlled by the Hashem family, and the Free Officers Union, led by retired Iraqi state police colonel Abd al Karim Qasim.

  THE LABOR DAY MASSACRE AND THE RISE OF THE BAATHISTS

  On the morning of July 14, 1958, the Hashem clan leader Faisal II was on his way to a Labor Day celebration when he was approached outside his Baghdad home by a group of men in police uniform. Faisal, his bodyguards, and several other Hashem family members were ordered to stand against a wall with their hands raised; when they did so, they were machine-gunned. By the time the real police arrived on the scene, reports were flooding in from all over Iraq of other Hashemites being murdered or simply disappearing.

  It was widely believed that Abd al Karim Qasim had organized the massacre, but local law enforcement would do nothing against him, and federal agents found their own investigation stymied at every turn. Meanwhile, the surviving Hashemites decided to take matters into their own hands. An orgy of violence ensued, with the Hashemites taking the worst of it; by the end of the year, most members of the clan had either died or left Iraq.

  In October 1959 masked gunmen ambushed Qasim as he left the Free Officers Union Hall. This was only the most recent of a series of attempts on Qasim’s life, and like the previous attempts, it failed. What was different was that this time the attackers were not Hashemites, but Baathists. Five of the six gunmen were killed by Qasim’s bodyguards; the sixth escaped. An hour later, Saddam Hussein showed up at a nearby hospital with a bullet wound in his leg. He claimed to have been mugged.

  Qasim went into seclusion and Baathists began to die in large numbers. Saddam boarded a plane to Egypt, where he remained for the next four years. In interviews he has said he went to Cairo University to study law, “something I had long planned to do,” and that his departure from Iraq on the eve of a major gang war was a coincidence in timing.

  The Free Officers and the Baathists traded bullets and bombs until February 1963, when Qasim was caught in another ambush and shot 82 times at close range. Following Qasim’s death, ABI agents—having received a mountain of incriminating evidence from an anonymous source—swooped in and arrested over two hundred Free Officers, effectively breaking the union’s back. Most of the professions that had been represented by the Free Officers now switched their allegiance to Baath.

  In March 1963 Saddam Hussein returned to Baghdad and was appointed secretary treasurer of the Baathists. In 1968 he was promoted to union vice president. Finally, in 1979, after the surprise resignation of union president Ahmed Hassan al Bakr, Saddam was elected leader of the Baathists, a position he holds to this day.

  PHILANTHROPIST, NOVELIST . . . AND PROFESSIONAL DEFENDANT

  1979 also marked the first time Saddam was indicted by the federal government. The case, which concerned the bribery and intimidation of workers on an oil pipeline between Kurdistan and I
raq, never went to trial. A furnace malfunction at the hotel where the government’s witnesses were sequestered flooded the guest floors with carbon monoxide, asphyxiating four dozen people.

  In 1982 the government tried again, accusing Saddam of having rigged the election in which his uncle Khairallah became mayor of Baghdad. On the morning of the second day of jury deliberations, the jury foreman was found hanged in a courthouse restroom. An alternate juror was summoned and deliberations continued; Saddam was acquitted.

  By 1986, with two additional acquittals to his name, Saddam had become a national celebrity. He gave regular press interviews and went on television to proclaim, with a wink, his innocence. He suggested that his legal troubles were a result of “high and mighty persons in Riyadh” failing to understand “the rough and tumble nature of life in Iraq.”

  In 1987 Saddam established the Saddam Hussein Foundation, a charitable trust that gave money to schools, mosques, and hospitals, and the Baath Union Scholarship Program, which helped Iraqis from poor families attend college. Federal prosecutors, noting that Saddam’s personal charity donations exceeded his declared income by a factor of ten, charged him with tax evasion. He was found not guilty . . .

  In December 1998 Saddam held a press conference to announce he was publishing a pulp-fiction novel. “For years, government lawyers have been telling outrageous stories about me,” he said. “I thought it was time to try telling one of my own.” The book, Zabibah and the King, concerns a labor organizer from Tikrit who reluctantly turns to a life of crime after his mistress, Zabibah, is murdered by gangsters; in due course, having exacted revenge on the killers, he becomes the (benevolent) king of the underworld.

  The Baghdad Post called Zabibah and the King “sublime,” but most other reviews were lukewarm at best, and initial sales were disappointing. Then the Baghdad district attorney attempted to use the book as the basis for a murder conspiracy charge, arguing that the climax of the story was a thinly fictionalized account of the killing of Abd al Karim Qasim that included details only someone privy to the murder plot would know. A grand jury rejected the DA’s request for an indictment, but the resulting publicity pushed Zabibah onto the bestseller lists.