The Mirage

by Matt Ruff

  “You should not refer so directly to the creature,” Mr. Rammal cautioned. This time he moderated his tone. Though he knew he was under Saddam’s protection, he also understood that there were limits to Uday’s self-control—and standing this close, the younger Hussein’s rage was palpable. “But to answer your question, no, this is only a lure. What it will do, if it works, is draw the creature into this city and compel it to reveal itself. Then while it is visible we must find it, and bind it.” He held up the shackles. “To incant it back into the bottle will require a final ritual.”

  “Do you actually believe this shit you’re spewing?”

  “Your father believes it.”

  “I’ll tell you what my father believes,” Uday said. “My father believes in making examples of people who try to cheat him. When he realizes you’re a charlatan—and he will—he’s going to want you hurt. And guess who he’s going to call on to hurt you.” He bent his head close to the sorcerer’s and exhaled sourly against his cheek. “Go ahead, guess.”

  A gust of air came through the window, causing several of the chimes to jangle. Uday reared back laughing at Mr. Rammal’s reaction. “Praise God the All-Compassionate!” Uday said. “The wind is ringing the wind chimes! It’s a miracle!”

  Then the breeze ceased, but the noise didn’t. It spread around the circle, an unseen hand gripping each stand, agitating the bells. The clean lines of smoke rising from the braziers twisted and dispersed. An incense burner near the window shot up a column of blue flame, as if a gas jet had been fired through the bowl; the flame rose to a height of a meter before flickering out. There was a pause, long enough for a heartbeat, or a whisper, and then another brazier spat fire, and another, and another—but only one at a time, as if it were really a single flame jumping playfully around the circumference of the circle. Uday, feeling as though the room were revolving, stayed rooted in place until the flame reached the brazier by his feet. Then he fell back shrieking all the way to the door, his spine fetching up painfully against the jamb.

  Mr. Rammal remained where he was, observing the progress of the fire and listening to the rustle of the chimes. A cold smile bloomed on his lips.

  “Go and get your father,” he said to Uday. “If you please.”

  The rally was being held just south of Ground Zero Plaza, on a wedge of land where the World Trade Center Number Seven building had once stood. In 2002 this property, cleared of debris and converted temporarily into a park, had been used for the memorial services commemorating the one-year anniversary of the attacks.

  The idea of erecting a mosque on the site had first been floated in April 2003 and had met with near-universal approval. The devil was waiting, as he always is, in the details, and soon enough a squabble had broken out between various Sunni and Shia factions over just who would be in charge of funding, planning, building, and administering the project. Public meetings called to discuss the matter ended in acrimony, and closed-door sessions between city, state, and religious officials fared no better; a visiting mullah compared the atmosphere of the latter to Prime Minister’s question time in the Persian parliament, “only not so friendly.”

  The politicking and debate over the mosque had continued for another six years—culminating in an announcement five months ago that a deal had finally been reached. Since then several deadlines for fixing a start date for construction had been missed, and new fault lines had appeared in the mosque coalition. Today’s rally was an attempt to get things back on track. Billed as a celebration, it was really more an act of sympathetic magic, the idea being to get all the principals together in public acting as if construction of the mosque were going forward. Then, assuming they made it through the ceremony without the world coming to an end, maybe they could bring on the builders and the cranes for real.

  Not everyone had been able to make it. The president, while offering a strong message of support for the mosque, had declined an invitation to the rally, promising instead to attend the actual groundbreaking, assuming there was one. He’d sent a group of Unity Party functionaries in his place, and the POG, not to be outdone, had dispatched a delegation of Sauds.

  Saddam Hussein had also respectfully declined to attend—and unlike the president, he hadn’t bothered to wait for an invitation before doing so. Given the identity of the woman in charge of the guest list, this was a tactically wise move.

  One other notable no-show was the Arabian senator, Osama bin Laden. He had planned to attend the rally and had come down from Riyadh with the Sauds, only to fall ill at the very last moment. He was presently recuperating at his hotel.

  For Amal’s brother Haidar, chief security coordinator for the event, the news of Bin Laden’s absence was a welcome relief. He only wished it could have come sooner. While all of the rally attendees were concerned about safety, Bin Laden’s advance team had been uniquely paranoid, questioning him repeatedly about every detail of the security arrangements. Haidar had no objection to thoroughness, but he did have a problem with people who obviously didn’t trust a Shia to do the job correctly.

  Now he had a bit more energy to devote to other problems, of which there was no shortage. The security setup consisted of three layers. The outer layer of barricades and checkpoints was being manned by the Baghdad PD. All the necessary bribes had been paid, so Haidar expected little trouble here—unless Saddam, miffed about his nonexistent invite, decided to arrange some sort of payback. The innermost security layer, directly around the stage, was composed mainly of bodyguards of the various attendees. Here the potential for mayhem was greater, since despite the ongoing show of solidarity, many of these people couldn’t stand one another. Haidar was particularly troubled by reports of new hostilities between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Corps, both well represented here, and he could only hope that the presence of news cameras would convince them to honor their good-conduct pledges.

  But his biggest concern was with the middle layer of security—armed men, some in uniform and some in plainclothes, whose job was to circulate through the crowd, looking for any threats that might have made it past the police checkpoints. Haidar had wanted to use only his own people for this, but several of the more high-profile guests had insisted on detailing additional personnel to the effort. Unable to refuse the help without precipitating a political crisis, Haidar had instead broken the park into separate patrol zones and assigned each group its own territory. The Mahdi Army got a strip on the far west end of the park, next to the Arab Telecom building, while the Badr Corps got the east end, alongside the post office. The Saudi security team was placed in the center, surrounded by members of other, more local Sunni groups, arranged according to Haidar’s understanding of their current relations with the Badrists and the Sadrists. Haidar’s own men were scattered throughout the park and instructed to watch the watchers.

  Haidar himself roamed freely, using radio, eye, and instinct to try to keep tabs on the whole show at once. As his mother stood onstage talking about The Moment, he stopped at one of the police checkpoints to get a head count on the crowd. Turnout was low, around two thousand people in a space that could hold five times that number. Not that it mattered for PR purposes: The estimate released to the press would be inflated to suggest a capacity crowd, and the cameras were all down front near the VIP seating, which was full.

  Senator Al Maysani finished her remarks and turned the podium over to the governor, Nouri al Maliki. Haidar walked the northern perimeter, scanning the park. Mist-spraying machines had been set up at various points to keep the crowd cool and to add a none-too-subtle rainbow effect to the proceedings, but they also interfered with the sight lines. As Haidar maneuvered to get clearer views, his suit went from dry to damp and back again.

  Al Maliki was followed at the podium by the man who also hoped to succeed him as governor: Muqtada al Sadr. Haidar, now standing among the Guardian Angels, made a quick radio call to the men he had monitoring the Badrs. “It’s OK,” came the reply. “We’ve got a few people here who look like t
hey just bit down on lemons, but nobody’s acting up.”

  “No problems by the stage, either,” added a second voice.

  “The Anbaris are starting to grumble,” said a third voice. “I hope we’ve got some Sunnis on the speakers’ list.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Haidar. “The mayor of Ramadi is up next.” He kept moving.

  The rally was approaching the fifty-minute mark, and a few bored spectators were beginning to drift towards the exits, when the only Christian scheduled to speak got up to use the microphone. The Patriarch of Babylon was an old man from Kurdistan. Like a number of the speakers before him, he seemed a bit off-balance at first, unsettled perhaps by the still-shocking emptiness above the plaza to the north. But he gripped the sides of the podium and steadied himself, and looked down at the crowd, and smiled.

  “Good afternoon,” he began. “I would like to say a few words about peace.”

  Haidar was over in Badr territory, hunting the source of a strange noise—a metallic bang, possibly a door slam—that he’d heard just a moment before. The murmur that went through the crowd at the Patriarch’s first words caused him to look up at the stage. As he was turning away again, he caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye: a figure, stepping out from the side of the post office. By the time Haidar turned all the way around the figure had vanished behind a spray of mist, leaving a jumble of impressions: White shirt. Dark vest. Pale skin. Straw-colored hair.

  “ ‘Christianity is a religion of peace,’ ” said the Patriarch. “We’ve all heard that sentiment many times over the past few years, voiced by well-meaning apologists. I’m sure to many Muslims it must seem an absurd, even an offensive, statement. And nowhere more so than here, in Baghdad, at Ground Zero of the War on Terror.” He raised an arm, waved a hand at the empty space where towers should be standing. “Christians, peaceful. How ridiculous!”

  Haidar had found what he was looking for. Set into the ground, in a recess along the post office wall, was a hinged metal grate. It should have been padlocked, but the lock was missing, and the front edge of the grate stuck up from its sill, having failed to close properly. “Code yellow, code yellow,” Haidar said into his radio. “We have a security breach along the east perimeter.”

  “How ridiculous,” the Patriarch repeated. “And you know, it is ridiculous, if by ‘religion’ we refer to the practitioners of faith. Congregations are not made up of abstractions like peace. They are made up of human beings. Go into any church in the land, any synagogue, yes, any mosque, and that is what you will find: human beings. A few saints, perhaps”—the Patriarch shrugged a shoulder—“and perhaps also one or two demons, hiding their wickedness behind a mask of piety. But the great majority, the body of the faithful, neither angels nor devils, but ordinary sinners: men and women trying to make their way in the world with God’s help and forgiveness . . .”

  “Suleiman, kill the waterworks,” Haidar said, and after a brief hesitation the misters shut off. As the rainbows dissipated, Haidar breasted forward through the crowd, searching for a white man in a dark vest. He stopped to do a three-sixty and spotted something else, something extraordinary: Another man, an Arab in a white desert tunic, who appeared to be floating in midair. The black-and-white keffiyeh around the man’s neck fluttered madly in a breeze Haidar couldn’t feel, and his eyes were filled with blue fire.

  Then Haidar blinked and saw more clearly. The man wasn’t levitating; he was perched atop a concrete planter box, bright marigolds clustered around his sandaled feet. His eyes, reflecting the afternoon sunlight, were focused on something in the crowd. Haidar followed the direction of the man’s gaze and saw Joe Simeon, headed towards the stage.

  “When we speak of a religion of peace, we refer not to Christendom as it is, but as we would like it to be, as we aspire and strive, daily, to make it—a struggle that is not different from the daily struggle of the Muslims. And if we often fail in that struggle, it’s not because we worship a different or a lesser God; it’s because we are, like you, only human.”

  Haidar spoke urgently into his radio. He glanced at the man in the white tunic again and saw he was no longer staring; he’d closed his eyes and bowed his head, and his lips were moving as if in prayer. Feeling a sudden chill, Haidar turned back to Joe Simeon, who had almost reached the edge of the VIP area. As Simeon twisted sideways to slip between two other men, Haidar glimpsed his torso in profile and in a flash of intuition realized what was concealed beneath his vest and shirt.

  “Oh God,” Haidar said. “Code black! Code black!”

  “And so in the name of the Merciful Creator of the Jews and the Christians and the Muslims, I offer you this hope, this wish: Peace be un—”

  The Patriarch’s blessing was interrupted by a sudden scramble of security personnel on the stage. At the same moment one of Haidar’s men tried to grab Joe Simeon. Simeon turned, almost casually, and stabbed the man in the chest with a knife taken from his hotel room. Someone else screamed and the crowd began surging backwards in a panic, trapping the other security guards who were trying to rush forward. Joe Simeon took a few more steps towards the stage, uttering his own benediction. Then he set off the bomb.

  The flash that followed dazzled every eye that looked at it and blinded all the cameras, too. No one could say, afterwards, exactly what had happened. But there was no thunderous blast, no shock wave—and, once the light had faded, no scene of carnage. The stage, and the crowd, remained intact, and what should have been a locus of death and destruction had instead become, through some conjuror’s trick, a whirring mass of life.

  Birds. A flock of birds, arranged around the would-be suicide bomber like points on a globe, and each one holding, in its claws, a single shining nail.

  As one they dropped their burdens. The ring of the nails falling harmlessly to the pavement could be heard throughout the park in that moment’s hush. Then the birds flew up screaming. They weren’t doves. They were ravens, carrion-eaters of the desert, and they were angry, for here today in Baghdad, against all expectations, there was nothing for them—even the man Joe Simeon had stabbed was struggling to his feet, hand pressed to a bleeding gash above his breastbone that was painful but not fatal.

  Joe Simeon, his vest and shirt hanging in tatters, stared into the sky, his expression of rapture changing to puzzlement as he realized he too was still among the living. “Jesus?” he said. The ravens ignored him and flew higher. “Wait!” he cried, raising both hands as if to claw his way to heaven. But gravity buckled his knees, and then men with earpieces were tackling him from all sides.

  Across the park, away from the commotion, the nomad in the white tunic raised his head and opened his eyes. Nodding minutely in satisfaction, he prepared to step back into the unseen realm from which he’d come, only to find himself frozen in place by the cold steel ring of a gun muzzle pressed against his neck.

  “Don’t you move,” Haidar told him, pulling out handcuffs. “Don’t you move a muscle.”

  “You’re right,” Amal said, when Mustafa had finished. “That does sound crazy . . . Do you believe it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mustafa. He looked at the photo, at the brass bottle at his other self’s feet. “I do think Saddam believes it. I think he is seeking this jinni to do some wishing of his own, to remake the world closer to his heart’s desire.”

  “And Bin Laden?” Samir said. “What’s his game plan? Are Wahhabists even allowed to make wishes?”

  “Probably not. But then they’re not allowed to commit acts of terror, either, and yet that doesn’t seem to have discouraged him.”

  “So what’s our game plan?” asked Amal.

  “About the jinn I still can’t say,” Mustafa replied. “But as long as we’re still cops, I was thinking—don’t laugh—that we might try enforcing the law.”

  THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA

  A USER-EDITED REFERENCE SOURCE

  Apocalypse

  An apocalypse is a cataclysmic event that marks the
end of an era of history and/or a dramatic change in the world. It can refer to the collapse of a civilization, a natural or man-made ecological disaster, a nuclear war, or, in a religious context, the coming of the End of Days and God’s final judgment of humankind.

  The Greek word Apokálypsis means “unveiling,” and oritinally applied to any work of prophetic or revelatory literature. The eschatological navure of th mpst famoxs of these wor s, such as tfe Book of Daniel a the Revelation of John, led to dy connotztion ,mu idz k[.d. dol,gioy ijykm bd fnl;aw

  A shell-shocked Joe Simeon was sitting in interrogation room A. He had been given a blanket to cover his nakedness but he’d allowed it to slip, exposing a pale torso gone pink with what looked like mild sunburn.

  Farouk stood on the other side of the glass, in the observation room. An evidence bag held Joe Simeon’s bomb trigger, a simple plunger device trailing half a meter of coated wire that ended in a blob of melted plastic and copper. No trace of actual explosive had been found, nor did the tattered remains of his clothing appear to have any special pockets for holding wildlife. It was a puzzle, but one that, given his near-catatonic state, they were going to have to solve without Simeon’s help.

  At least they knew his name. Farouk walked around Mustafa’s Bible cart to the window of interrogation room B, where the second suspect was being held. The man in the white tunic was alert, and as Farouk approached the glass the fellow appeared to stare at him as if he could see through the mirror.

  The observation room door opened and Abdullah came in, his arm in a sling. “Hey boss,” he said. “I was just looking for you.”

  “Do we have an ID on this one yet?”

  “No. His fingerprints aren’t in the system. We’re trying a facial-recognition match now.”

  “Has he said anything?”

  “Not about who he is. He did say he’d talk to you, though.”

  “He asked for me by name?”