The Mirage

by Matt Ruff

  They were inside a building that was still under construction. The outer plywood walls had been attached, but the windows were open holes covered with plastic sheeting and the interior was bare studs and concrete. The studs were furry with dust, as if construction had halted some time ago.

  “This way,” McVeigh said.

  The building was long and modular, each of its several sections consisting of a cluster of rooms surrounding a central corridor. Each section was more finished than the last—drywall appeared, then paint, fixtures, and carpeting—and the repetitive nature of the floor plan gave Mustafa the sense of a single office suite assembling itself around him as he walked. The final section had power. The sudden blast of air-conditioning caught Mustafa by surprise and he reacted as his father might have, clutching at the gooseflesh on his arms. “The director likes it cold,” Timothy McVeigh said.

  A door at the very end of the hall was adorned with an official-looking seal that on close inspection proved to be hand-painted. It showed an eagle with a lone star on its chest and a scrap of parchment in its beak; one claw held a cross and the other a Bowie knife. The motto around the circumference was a quote from the Gospel of John: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

  McVeigh knocked and opened the door. The office inside, like the building, was a work in progress. To the right as they came in were a mismatched sofa and chair that might have been collected off a street corner, along with a knee-high plastic table. To the left was a small pile of boxes. At the far end of the room was a desk, its top bare except for a massive leather-bound book that Mustafa assumed was a Bible, though which one he couldn’t say; stuck all around the edges of its pages and adding to its thickness were numerous slips of colored paper covered in writing.

  A man stood behind the desk with his back to them. He faced a window as if contemplating a view, but the glass was still covered with a protective film that rendered it opaque.

  “Sir?” McVeigh said. “I’ve brought Mr. Baghdadi, like you requested.”

  The man turned slowly around. He was dressed in jeans and a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He had thick, curly brown hair and brown eyes behind gold-rimmed aviator glasses. His dark stubble beard was fading to gray. Mustafa placed his age at around fifty.

  “Mustafa al Baghdadi,” the man said. “Thank you for coming. My name is David Koresh.”

  “Can I have Timothy get you anything, Mr. Baghdadi?” David Koresh asked. “Coffee? Tea? Ice water? We have beer too, if you indulge, but my understanding is you don’t.”

  “No thank you, I’m fine.”

  “All right . . . You can leave us now, Tim.”

  “Yes sir,” McVeigh said. “I’ll be waiting outside.” He left the room.

  “So, Mr. Baghdadi . . . May I call you Mustafa?”

  “Please.”

  “Thank you, Mustafa. Please call me David.”

  “David,” Mustafa said. “And ‘Koresh’? That is a Hebrew name too, is it not? Your family is Jewish?”

  “No.” Koresh laughed. “My family name is Howell. Vernon Wayne Howell, that’s my birth name. I changed it to David Koresh after my anointing, when I realized God’s plan for me.”

  “Ah. I see.” David for the prophet who slew Goliath, presumably. And Koresh—Cyrus—that would be the king who conquered Nebuchadnezzar’s empire. Mustafa pictured Koresh’s face on a statue, a hall full of statues. “I should tell you, David, if you seek the throne of Babylon, you’re going to have competition.”

  “Saddam Hussein, you mean?” He laughed again. “We’re not in competition. Mr. Hussein is a creature of the world. I’m not interested in earthly rewards or titles. Not anymore.”

  “Saddam is interested in you.”

  “I know. He’s the one who pointed you in my direction, isn’t he?” Mustafa nodded, and Koresh said: “He’s a clever man, in his way. Evil too, of course, and an egomaniac, which makes certain truths impossible for him to grasp, but still. He knows as much about the mirage as any other Arabian, and no one has done a better job at following my trail of breadcrumbs.”

  “You are talking about the artifacts?”

  Koresh nodded. “He’s hardly the only interested party, but no one else has come as far in tracing the source. Gaddafi’s people, they’re still chasing false leads in Europe. Al Qaeda too, until very recently . . .”

  “So it’s true, then. You are the creator of these objects? And of the mirage legend itself?”

  “It’s no legend,” David Koresh said. “And I’m not a creator, just a messenger.”

  “Will you tell me what you know?”

  “Of course. It’s why I had you brought here. But it’s a long story.” Koresh gestured to the couch. “You should make yourself comfortable. Are you sure you don’t want anything to drink?”

  “Perhaps some hot tea, if it’s a long story,” Mustafa said. “It’s chilly in here.”

  “Agent McVeigh said you were CIA,” said Mustafa. “He called you the director.”

  “And you’re wondering, if that’s true, what’s the head of the Texas CIA doing hiding out in Virginia?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well you know,” David Koresh said, “it’s traditional for both sides in a church schism to claim they represent the true religion.”

  “There was a schism in the CIA?”

  Koresh nodded. “Between what you might call the Crawford faction and the Waco faction. My side—the Waco faction—lost, so we had to leave. But we still think of ourselves as the real deal, the true Christ in Action, wandering in the wilderness of America.” He stirred milk into his tea before continuing: “I’m no stranger to life on the road. I started out as a musician-evangelist. I had my own touring band and Bible study group. We went all over Texas, spreading the Word. Then one night at a revival meeting I met a CIA recruiter named Lee Atwater. He brought me in to work as a scriptural analyst for the Company’s theology division—and to jam with him on the weekends.”

  “Scriptural analyst?”

  “Part of CIA’s unwritten charter is to provide biblical support for the government elite in Austin,” Koresh explained. “If they need justification for a new policy, or an explanation for something like mad cow disease, they turn to the Company. That was my job, for seven years. Then after the Mexican Gulf War, I was promoted and put in charge of a new Company research facility called the Mount Carmel Center, in Waco.

  “Texas at that time was experiencing the first epidemic of Gulf Syndrome. The war created all kinds of headaches—even though we weren’t invaded, the knowledge that we could have been, would have been if not for the help of the Muslims, led to a huge crisis in confidence. Insurrection was up. Heresy was up. And people—including some really senior people—were having nightmares and hallucinations about a secret American takeover. The mayor of Galveston announced on live TV that Texan independence was a myth and we’d actually been part of the CSA all along. A dozen officers in the Texas Air Guard resigned their commissions on grounds of mental instability. They said they kept having dreams that they were American pilots, flying sorties against targets in what appeared to be West Texas.

  “Rumors circulated about a mind-control project infecting people with LBJ’s vision. I know there were other CIA research teams that looked at that as a literal possibility, some sort of virus engineered to affect the subconscious. But our focus at Mount Carmel was on mystical explanations. We were told to evaluate the dreams as prophecy—or as evidence of demonic possession.

  “We brought in volunteers with especially severe cases of Gulf Syndrome. We conducted sleep studies, tested the effects of different stimuli on their dreams. We used prayer, hypnosis, fasting, drugs, sensory deprivation, exorcism, electroshock. Anything and everything we could think of, that might crack the doors of revelation a little wider.”

  “And what did you learn?” Mustafa asked.

  “Nothing,” David Koresh said. “I mean, the content of the dreams was fascinating,
but we didn’t know how to interpret what we were getting. The answer was too straightforward, that was the problem—we were expecting parables. Then when we asked God to please speak more plainly, He just gave us more of the same.

  “I was frustrated by the lack of progress, but the folks at the main office didn’t seem bothered by it. Eventually I realized they’d already made up their minds that Gulf Syndrome was a product of mass hysteria. The Mount Carmel Center, the other research initiatives, all of that was just bureaucratic butt-covering. They weren’t concerned with results.

  “Then after a while, they forgot about us. The crisis passed, but our program was never shut down.” He laughed. “I stopped filing reports and nobody in Crawford even noticed. Meanwhile I still had access to Company funds with no oversight, and you know, the flesh of a man is weak . . .

  “I started making personnel changes, kicking out anyone who didn’t see eye-to-eye with me and bringing in more loyal recruits to replace them. A lot of people who’d come to Mount Carmel as research subjects ended up on staff. The ‘research’ got more and more self-indulgent. Lee Atwater had died a few years earlier, so I hadn’t jammed in a while, but one day I decided to put a new band together, in-house, ‘to explore the effects of Gospel rhythm-and-blues on REM-sleep alpha-wave patterns.’ That’s what I wrote on the sign-up sheet, anyway . . . I dropped two hundred grand in government funds on instruments and a recording studio. We even had our own label.

  “And there were other indulgences. I organized ‘fact-finding’ trips all over the world, anyplace that had some vague connection to sleep research, or religious prophecy, or music. In December 1999 I took the whole Mount Carmel staff to Jerusalem to celebrate the new millennium in the Holy Land.

  “Jerusalem was strange,” David Koresh said. “I mean, we had a great time, but from the moment we landed at Nashashibi Airport, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been there before. On Christmas morning we went to the Old City to visit the Holy Sepulchre, and there was another tour group there. They were just outside the church, gathered around a man who was standing up on a stone, preaching about Revelation and the prophecy of the Seven Seals. I recognized that preacher. He was me, maybe ten or fifteen years younger . . . And I looked at him, and he looked back at me, and then I had this fit, like an attack of—”

  “Vertigo?”

  “—epilepsy. I fell down thrashing, hit my head. By the time I recovered, the preacher was gone, and when I asked about him, no one else knew what I was talking about.” He shook his head. “Gulf Syndrome. That was my first personal experience of it. But not my last.

  “After we came home from that trip, I went through an especially self-indulgent patch. The best way I can think to describe it, I’d been given a glimpse of my true destiny and my inner Adam was rebelling against it. I was already treating Mount Carmel like my private amusement center, but now I really started acting out. I did things, decadent things I’m not proud of . . .

  “Then 11/9 happened and the country went crazy again. That’s what finally put Mount Carmel back on the Company radar. The video of the planes hitting the towers triggered an avalanche of new Syndrome cases. Austin wanted answers, and when CIA started organizing a new research initiative, they realized they still had an active facility in Waco that hadn’t made a progress report in years.

  “I would have been in hot water no matter what, but what made it worse, since the last time I’d checked in, the Company had appointed a new director. A nasty piece of work . . .” Koresh uttered a name that Mustafa recognized from Saddam Hussein’s list. “His nickname was the Quail Hunter,” David Koresh said. “Texas humor. The joke is, if you’ve got an enemy you want to get rid of, you invite him out shooting and mistake him for whatever game you’re after. The Quail Hunter had actually done that once. And he’d stepped over a lot of bodies, climbing the Company ladder.

  “So this was the man I now had to justify myself to. He sent armed agents to haul me over to the Crawford campus. They took me to his office and he showed me a stack of accounting records and ordered me to explain what the hell I’d been spending all that money on.

  “I lied. I told him we were still following our original research mandate, looking into dreams. I told him we were close to a major breakthrough with serious national security implications. All we needed was a little more time. Six months, a year.

  “He gave me two months. He took a bullet out of his breast pocket and put it on his desk blotter. He told me that in sixty days, one of two things would be true: Either there’d be a report about this major breakthrough sitting where the bullet was now, or the bullet would be in the part of my brain that controlled bowel function. He also told me that I was under house arrest; if I tried to leave Mount Carmel before the report was ready, I’d get the bullet early.

  “His centurions took me back to the Center. I called the staff together, and we formed a circle and prayed to God for my salvation. Then we dusted off our old research notes and got to work.

  “For forty days and forty nights, we got nowhere. Every morning I got down on my knees in the chapel and said, ‘Please, God, forgive me my pride and throw me a bone here,’ and He heard me, He answered, but I still didn’t understand. Nightmares,” Koresh said. “We all started having nightmares, the same nightmare, about being trapped in a burning building surrounded by armed men.” He tugged at his collar and closed his eyes a moment, breathing through his nostrils while the air-conditioning hummed in the background. “I thought it was just stress . . .”

  “And what was it really?” Mustafa asked.

  But Koresh only shook his head. “By the time we were down to three weeks, it had gotten so bad nobody could sleep anymore, which is a problem if you’re trying to study dreams. Of course we had plenty of conventional sedatives on hand, but I decided to call psychopharmacology at Crawford and see if they’d cooked up anything new since the last time we’d done drug trials. They sent over a variety pack of experimental hypnotics. The first one we pulled out of the box was Elefaridol tartrate, a non-benzo sleep aid with some very interesting side effects. It turned out to be the breakthrough we’d been praying for.”

  “Why?” said Mustafa. “What did it do?”

  Koresh stood up. “This part’s easier if I show you.”

  They entered the basement through a room containing several large portable generators. The noise of the machines’ operation, reflected off bare cinderblock walls, was deafening, but at least it was warmer than Koresh’s office.

  One generator had stalled. Terry Nichols, now wearing a tool belt, had detached the generator’s exhaust hose and was examining it. The faint haze of diesel smoke in the air seemed to alarm David Koresh, who went over and shouted something in Nichols’s ear. Nichols responded with a gesture that might have meant, “Don’t worry, I’ve got this,” or possibly, “Nothing you can say will make me more miserable than I already am.”

  The new sleep lab was in another, quieter, part of the basement. There were no bed frames yet, just a score of mattresses, arranged in two rows of ten along the room’s longer walls. Each sleeping figure was attached by a web of electrodes to a battered EEG, and blankets had been drawn up over them, though these seemed more ceremonial than practical; the bodies, flushed and feverish, were throwing off more waste heat than the generators had.

  Mustafa scanned the sleeping faces. They were of various races and ranged in age from early teens to late middle age, but they were all women. “Division of labor,” David Koresh said, when Mustafa asked about this. “I don’t know if it’s body chemistry or the predilections of the Holy Spirit, but we get more consistent results with female subjects.” He smiled. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

  Like a harem in a mad scientist’s bomb shelter, Mustafa thought. “What is it they do, exactly?”

  “I’ll show you.” Koresh went over to the room’s only other waking occupant, a man in a long-sleeved cardigan who was leafing through a Scofield Reference Bible. “Hey, Steve,” Kor
esh said. “Anyone close?”

  Steve nodded towards a young woman whose red hair had spread in a fan on her pillow. “Lily’s thetas and gammas have been spiking for a while.”

  Koresh sat down on the edge of the mattress and lifted the woman’s right hand from the blanket. “What have you got for me, darling?” he said, in an exaggerated drawl. He bent his head, pressed his lips against her knuckles, and then reached up to brush his thumb beneath the electrodes on her forehead.

  The woman’s eyes flicked open. Mustafa, already discomfited by Koresh’s display of intimacy, took a half-step backwards. Then the woman started speaking Arabic and Mustafa’s arms broke out in gooseflesh again.

  “Give me those two in the back,” she said, in a deep, masculine voice with the accent of a native Iraqi. A pause. Then: “No, no! That one there, on the left! Yes . . . Yes, that’s what I want!”

  A woman on one of the other mattresses made a sharp clicking sound. Mustafa startled. Then another woman let out a honk, almost like a car horn. That seemed to get them all going, making clicks, rustling noises, whispers, shouts. The individual utterances seemed arbitrary and meaningless, but as they bounced off the walls and melded together, they began to paint a picture in sound, familiar-seeming background noise.

  The red-haired woman went on speaking. “What’s she saying?” David Koresh asked. “Do you know?”

  “She is haggling,” Mustafa said. “Bargaining over the price of something . . .” Then he realized what the background noise was: a souk. An open-air market, possibly in Baghdad.

  The red-haired woman was sitting up. The EEG wiring stretched behind her and the blanket slid to her lap. She plucked her hand from Koresh’s grip and began to reach forward, focused on something that only she could see. She extended her arm slowly, as if reaching through a curtain or into a stream. Her hand rotated, palm upward, and her thumb and forefingers came together, grasping nothing.

  Grasping something. A flicker, a flicker, and then a limp violet rectangle appeared between her fingers. A scarf, Mustafa thought at first. But it was too small for that, and it was made of paper. A banknote.