The Mirage

by Matt Ruff

  “What was he?” Mustafa asked.

  “A freedom fighter,” Koresh said. “Oklahoma Territory, you know, it’s like New Mexico and Coahuila—Texas claims it as a dependency, but the residents beg to differ. Timothy was a demolitions expert for the rebels. He agreed to help us deal with the centurions on our tail. Afterwards, he and some of his friends decided to join us.

  “From Oklahoma we made our way east through Gilead, following a path God laid out for me in my dreams. Eventually we crossed the frontier into America, and we’ve been living underground here ever since. The Quail Hunter is still looking for us, but God keeps us one step ahead of the centurions, and we’ve sabotaged a lot of the Quail Hunter’s links to the insurgency. To the extent that they weren’t sabotaged already.” He arched an eyebrow. “Turns out the Quail Hunter isn’t the only foreign power using Americans as pawns.”

  “And V. Howell Industries?” Mustafa said. “What is that about?”

  “It started as a way of supporting ourselves,” Koresh said. “When we left Texas we didn’t have much cash, but we did smuggle out a bunch of mirage artifacts, along with a lifetime supply of Elefaridol. Then as we made our way across the Heartland, we discovered that to people with Gulf Syndrome, those artifacts were like pieces of the True Cross. We used them to barter for goods and services and to recruit new allies. Once we got here, we established a trade network with some local entrepreneurs God told us we could trust, and eventually expanded the business onto the Internet. The money’s not great—not after all the middlemen and cutouts take their share—but as you see, we live pretty cheaply. And in the end it’s less about commerce than evangelism: As the artifacts spread further around the globe, awareness of the mirage spreads with them.”

  “So your business plan is to infect the whole world with Gulf Syndrome?” Mustafa said.

  Koresh acknowledged the criticism in Mustafa’s tone with a crooked smile, but he said: “It’s what God wants.”

  “To drive other men mad, as your Quail Hunter was driven mad? As the crusaders have been driven mad?” Mustafa shook his head. “I thought you wanted to redeem God’s people. How does plunging the world further into chaos accomplish that?”

  “That was the hardest part to understand,” David Koresh said. “When I found out what kind of people were collecting the artifacts, when I thought about what that knowledge might inspire them to do, I asked the same question. I prayed about it: How can this be the road back from exile, Lord? As usual, what made the answer so difficult to see was that it was just too simple. But it had been there all along, from my very first vision.” He got up and went over to his desk and opened the big Bible again. Post-it notes fluttered from the margins as he turned to the back of the Book. He found the verse he was looking for and read aloud: “And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” Koresh looked at Mustafa. “Death,” he repeated. “I am become Death. You see? You get it?”

  “No,” said Mustafa.

  “Koresh. The name of my anointing. It means Cyrus, but it also has another meaning, a secret meaning. It means death.”

  “In what language?”

  “The language of the Seven Seals.” Koresh pressed his hand against the page of scripture. “This is what the mirage is. A period of chaos and tribulation, when the world turns upside down and then keeps on tumbling. I was wrong: It’s not a judgment, it’s the Judgment, and my job isn’t to find a road back from exile, it’s to prepare the way forward, to the Last Day. To break the seals, and blow the trumpets, and pour out the bowls.

  “It’s going to be terrible,” Koresh said smiling. “Not everyone will make it through the final storm. The Quail Hunter won’t. Not Saddam Hussein either, or any of the other walking dead . . . But those of us who are blessed, washed in the blood of the Lamb, will meet up again after the End, in a new world, the golden city of God’s kingdom.” His smile broadened and he looked off as if he could see what he spoke of, shining on a distant horizon.

  Madman, Mustafa thought, and recalled the words of Lieutenant Fahd: These fucking people. “And what about me?” he said.

  “You?” Koresh blinked, drawing back from his reverie. “You could still be saved. Any living man can be, if he accepts Christ.”

  “That’s lovely to hear,” said Mustafa, “but I was thinking more of my role in your apocalypse. From your story, it sounds as if most people who come looking for you either don’t find you, or meet bad ends. Saddam told us all of his spies had disappeared. I doubt they converted.”

  “Oh,” Koresh said. “No. We killed them all.”

  “But not me,” Mustafa said. “You saved my life to bring me here and tell me all this. Why?”

  Koresh seemed momentarily nonplussed by the question. Then he shrugged and said: “It’s what God wanted. He doesn’t always explain His reasons to me . . . But if I had to guess, I’d say He intends you to do battle with the false prophet of the east.”

  “False prophet?” Mustafa said.

  Koresh nodded. “I told you, the Quail Hunter’s not the only one using Americans as pawns. Arabia has its own wicked prince.” He hesitated. “And there’s something else. You remember I told you about the think tank at Crawford?”

  “The one that was collating information about the artifacts?”

  “Right,” said Koresh, “to help refine the list of suspects. And of course, speculating about who caused the mirage leads naturally to speculation about how they caused it . . .”

  “Naturally.”

  “The Quail Hunter was never that interested in the mechanism. I guess because when violence is your answer to everything, the only question that really matters is, ‘Whose face do I stomp on next?’ But the members of the think tank were more intellectually curious. One of them, a Company Orientalist named Hank Wessells, came up with what he called the magic lamp theory, which is just what it sounds like: a theory that somebody somewhere in Arabia made a wish that changed the world.

  “It wasn’t a serious idea—it wasn’t Christian—but Hank made the mistake of writing the Quail Hunter a memo about it anyway. The Quail Hunter hit the roof.”

  “Why?” said Mustafa. “Because the theory was heretical?”

  “Probably the Quail Hunter thought Hank was making fun of him,” Koresh said. “That was usually what set him off. Or it could be he was worried that if the theory was true and it was just some anonymous Arab who stumbled over a magic lamp, we’d never be able to find the guy. Whatever the reason, the Quail Hunter fired off a memo of his own, warning the members of the think tank to stop wasting resources on ‘unproductive lines of inquiry.’ Hank got called to the interrogation wing and didn’t come back. After that, nobody ever mentioned magic lamps again.

  “But sometime later, we got an artifact in the Mount Carmel sleep lab that reminded me of Hank’s theory. I never showed it to the Quail Hunter. I put it with a secret stash of other artifacts that I’d held back for one reason or another. And last week, when I dreamed you were coming here, I dug it out.” He reached into his desk drawer.

  It was another photograph. The scene was an excavation, somewhere in the desert. Two grinning men stood in a shallow pit with their arms over each other’s shoulders. One of them was a blond in a gray ARMY T-shirt. The other was Mustafa, or a version of him, with a red, white, and blue bandanna tied around his head.

  In the foreground at their feet, a blanket held an array of objects: a small clay urn; a jumble of pottery shards; a rusted artillery shell casing; another rust-pitted artifact that might have been an old bayonet; and on the far right, set slightly apart, a stoppered brass bottle.

  “Does this ring any bells?” David Koresh asked. Mustafa didn’t answer; he’d dropped the photo in his lap and was gripping the sofa cushions with both hands. “Well,” Koresh continued after a moment, “I’ve got some other things to give you. Let me g
o get them, and then I’ll have Timothy take you back to the Green Zone.”

  “What?” Mustafa looked up, still holding on to the couch for dear life. “Wait. I have other questions . . .”

  “I’m sure you do,” David Koresh said. “But don’t worry. God’s got you covered.”

  The boy on the tricycle had stopped to listen again. This time the sound—diesel engines, approaching fast—was one that even adult ears could hear.

  A Humvee swung into the street. Mounted on its front end was a wedge-shaped steel plow like the cow-catcher on a Gilead locomotive. Two more Humvees with roof-mounted .50-calibers followed behind it. Then a troop truck pulled sideways across the street entrance and Marines with rifles began jumping out.

  The boy on the tricycle watched in awe as the Humvees roared past. The gate guard spoke frantically into his radio and then reached for his gun, but a .50-caliber cut him down before he got a shot off. The front door of a house halfway down the street banged open and a man came running onto his porch. A burst from an assault rifle knocked him back through the doorway.

  A loudspeaker on the troop truck began blaring a recorded message: “STAY IN YOUR HOMES! . . . STAY IN YOUR HOMES! . . . THIS IS A POLICING ACTION! . . . STAY IN YOUR HOMES!” The Marines fired warning shots at a couple of the other houses.

  The lead Humvee crashed through the gate and drove onto the lawn of the Colonial house. The other Humvees pulled in and flanked it, the machine gunners killing two more guards on the balcony above the Colonial’s front door.

  As the Marines deployed from the Humvees, other militiamen began shooting at them from the second-floor windows and the dormers on the roof. The militiamen tried to duck in and out of cover, but the Colonial’s wood siding might as well have been cardboard for all the protection it offered, so they generally only got off a shot or two before being killed. Still, there were a lot of them, and the Marines were being careful—because they hoped to take prisoners, they could not simply rake the building with fire from end to end. They picked their targets and lobbed tear gas grenades in between gun volleys.

  While his men gave their lives to delay the Marines, the militia leader fled out the back of the house. The attack had caught him in the shower and he came out wrapped in a damp bathrobe, his gray hair tucked under a blue shower cap and water beading his glasses. His bodyguards formed a protective circle around him and they made for a wooden gate in the wall at the rear of the yard.

  The Marine snipers hiding in the trees behind the wall let them get most of the way there and then killed all the bodyguards at once. The militia leader stopped short, scowling at the suddenly dead men as if their mortality were proof of incompetence.

  The firefight at the house ended moments later. A Marine leaned out of an upstairs window, stripping off a gas mask and calling out, “All clear!” More Marines appeared around the sides of the building.

  The wooden gate opened. Umm Husam, Zinat, and Amal stepped through. Amal marched straight up to the militia leader, who still stood glowering amid the circle of corpses.

  “Mr. Rumsfeld,” Amal said. “The mothers and daughters of Baghdad would like a word.”

  THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA

  A USER-EDITED REFERENCE SOURCE

  Jinn

  A jinn is a supernatural being. According to Holy Quran and Hadith, God created jinn from smokeless fire, as He created human beings from clay and angels from light. Like humans, jinn possess free will and thus are capable of both sin and submission to God: “There are among us some that are righteous, and some the contrary: We follow divergent paths.” (Quran chapter 72, verse 11)

  Jinn occupy a parallel universe hidden from human eyes—though they can see us, and may choose or be compelled to reveal themselves. Evil jinn may be enslaved by human masters, while good jinn may volunteer their service. The nature and magnitude of their powers is disputed, but they can do nothing contrary to the will of God . . .

  JINN IN WESTERN MYTHOLOGY

  In Christian Europe and the Americas, jinn are referred to as genies. The Western conception of the creatures comes primarily from adaptations of stories from One Thousand and One Nights, combined with elements of non-Arabic folklore such as the Greek myth of King Midas.

  Western tales typically strip jinn of their moral agency, turning them into anthropomorphized wish-granting machines. The wishes invariably go wrong, resulting in tragedy or lasting humiliation for the wish-makers. Although commonly read as parables about the dangers of hubris, literary theorist Edward Said has argued that such genie stories also serve as propaganda reinforcing Western authoritarianism: “This message, that the natural order mustn’t be tampered with, encourages blind deference to one’s leaders—even as those same leaders show no compunction about imposing their own magical thinking on the world.”

  The flight home left Andrews Air Force Base in the early evening. After takeoff, Mustafa rested his head against the window and watched America drop away over the horizon.

  Amal was in the cargo bay, interviewing the prisoner. By default this should have been Mustafa’s job, but in his extreme annoyance at being apprehended, Donald Rumsfeld had revealed something he might better have kept secret: He spoke Arabic. Not well, and not willingly—but Amal had evinced a knack for goading him into talking and she’d wanted first crack at the interrogation.

  The wounded Marine, Salim, was stretched out asleep in the rear of the passenger cabin. His presence on the flight was also Amal’s doing, although Mustafa, who’d been elsewhere when Amal and Umm Husam had spoken to Colonel Yunus, didn’t know the details.

  Samir was sleeping too—or pretending to. Upon Mustafa’s return to the Green Zone, Samir had tried to quiz him about his meeting with the CIA director, but Mustafa had put him off, saying he could read about it in the official report. Samir was startled at first by Mustafa’s brusqueness, but then a sad understanding seemed to dawn in him and he nodded, saying, “Yes, perhaps that’s best . . . Perhaps that’s what I deserve.” Since then he’d been withdrawn and uncommunicative, keeping his head bowed during the ride to Andrews, his expression recalling the one he’d worn on the trip into the Red Zone: the look of a condemned man.

  When it was too dark to see anything more outside, Mustafa sat up and got out the new reading packet that David Koresh had given him. It contained three artifacts, dispatches from beyond the mirage.

  Item number one was a file from the archives of the Jihaz al Mukhabarat al Amma—the General Directorate of Intelligence of the Republic of Iraq—concerning an Iraqi National Police officer named Mustafa al Baghdadi. Mustafa had read it several times already, but now he began again, reviewing the details of his other life: a life recognizable in its broad strokes, yet bound and shaped by a very different set of constraints.

  As in this world, he’d been a cop, trying to do good. But “good,” in the Republic of Saddam, was defined more by loyalty and submission to the Baath Party than by any normal measure of virtue. From a promising beginning—top marks in his class at the Baghdad police academy—he’d fallen swiftly. He was reprimanded repeatedly for being soft on suspects, using talk rather than more direct methods to obtain confessions and refusing to pursue cases against people he believed to be innocent. Then, in what should have been the end of his career, he’d attempted to arrest a Party official for the murder of a young girl. Mustafa had himself been arrested and held in Abu Ghraib for several months. Upon his release, he’d gone after the official again, this time turning up evidence not of murder, but of anti-government conspiracy—a much more serious crime. The official had been arrested by the Mukhabarat; Mustafa had received a personal commendation from Uncle Saddam, been restored to his former police rank, and warned to watch his step in the future. But the reprimands and brushes with Party authority continued.

  The personal history ended in 2002, but attached to the file folder was a memorandum on United States Army stationery dated July 9, 2003. Written by a Captain Edward Lawrence, the memo requested that Mu
stafa al Baghdadi be cleared for work as a field translator, citing his strong language skills and “obvious anti-Baathist sentiment.” The memo said nothing about treasure-hunting in the desert, but given the proximity of Al Hillah to Baghdad, it wasn’t hard to imagine a scenario where Captain Lawrence and his translator, grown restless perhaps after several years of nation-building, decided to go off-mission. Mustafa also suspected—Koresh had hinted as much—that if he kept this artifact near him, he might start to remember details. He wondered if he really wanted to.

  The section of the file marked FAMILY listed only one spouse, Fadwa bint Harith. Mustafa wasn’t surprised by this—he sensed that Saddam’s Iraq didn’t have many Internet IPOs, so an honest cop probably couldn’t afford more than one wife. What he didn’t know was whether that would have made him a kinder and more devoted husband, or a more bitter one. He wished he could believe it was the former.

  The reading packet also contained a Mukhabarat file for Samir Nadim, another Baghdad cop who worked in the same precinct as Mustafa. Samir’s police career had been less rocky than Mustafa’s, though it appeared their friendship had gotten him into trouble on more than one occasion.

  Like Mustafa, he’d had a second career, but not with the U.S. Army. From 1997 through 2002, Samir had been an informant for the Mudiriyat al Amn al Amma—the General Security Service, which, as best Mustafa could tell, was another arm of Saddam’s secret police force that ranked somewhere below the Mukhabarat but still well above the ordinary street cops.