He got up and slipped out quietly. The hall outside the office brought him to a room painted with a mural of a deluge. Three of the walls showed only clouds and rain and wind-tossed waves; inset against the fourth was a scale model of an ark. A bearded white patriarch stood at the ark’s stern, gazing towards the center of the room, where a jagged pedestal like the tip of a drowning mountain jutted up from the blue carpet. The skeleton of a dinosaur with sickle-shaped claws on its hind feet was set on the pedestal, poised as if it were about to take a leap at the ark, but the placard at the pedestal’s base suggested it would not make it. “Velociraptor antirrhopus,” the placard read. “Extinct, 2349 B.C.”

A doorway in the wall opposite the ark led to a gallery containing the bones of many more of the Flood’s victims. The gallery had a skylight as well, and looking up Mustafa saw stars.

Wandering farther through the museum, he came upon Colonel Yunus in a room that looked like a tourism ad for Giza. “Good morning,” the colonel greeted him.

“So it is morning, then,” Mustafa said.

“Yes, about half past four. Were you able to sleep at all?”

“Some. The accommodations are quite comfortable.” Thinking of the velociraptor: “And unusual.”

The colonel smiled. “I don’t know how much you remember from our conversation last night, but this building really is a storehouse of wonders. During the initial occupation a large number of troops were housed here, in part to prevent looting. Now that the Americans have retaken control the museum is mostly unoccupied, but a few of us have been allowed to remain as unofficial caretakers until the new government has the money to reopen the place.”

“Thank you for sharing it with me.”

“You are welcome. I was just about to pray. Would you like to join me?”

“I would, thank you.”

“And your friend?”

“Samir is not observant, I’m afraid.”

“Ah. Well,” the colonel said, pointing, “there’s a washroom that way, and you’ll find some spare prayer rugs tucked behind Pharaoh’s palace.”

“You pray in here?”

“Sometimes, yes.” Smiling again: “I have a theory that a Muslim helped design this room. It turns out if you draw a straight line from the Sphinx to the part in the Red Sea over there, it corresponds almost exactly to the Qibla direction.”

“Interesting symbolism,” Mustafa said.

“Yes, there’s a lot of that in the Green Zone. It’s a weird place.”

Amal woke among lionesses.

At last night’s meeting with the colonel she’d been sufficiently alert to understand that Mustafa and Samir were being given VIP accommodations while she was being relegated to women’s quarters, which annoyed her until she realized which women she’d be bunking with.

The Women’s Combat Support Unit, aka the Lionesses, had been formed in 2007 as part of the broader counterinsurgency strategy known as the Surge. In addition to their reluctance to show gratitude, most Americans had a deep-seated cultural aversion to having their homes ransacked, but research had found that a feminine presence could help moderate this. Lionesses were assigned in pairs to accompany Marines on patrol in the Red Zone. When a house was searched for weapons or insurgents, it was the Lionesses who interviewed the occupants, preserving the honor of the women and keeping the men calm; they could often get answers where a male interrogator would be met by stony silence, or violence. The Red Zone being the Red Zone, violence did still sometimes occur, but as their nickname implied, Lionesses could also fight, and with a ferocity that took insurgents by surprise.

They lived along with the Marine garrison troops in the former residential and business complex adjacent to the Arabian embassy. Most of the male Marines occupied apartments in the Watergate East and South buildings; the Lionesses were housed on the top two floors of the Watergate Hotel, which had been turned into a high-security women’s dorm.

It was like college, but with more guns. Amal shared a room with a girl from Nablus named Zinat. Barely nineteen, Zinat had followed her six brothers into the military in order to earn a scholarship and pursue an engineering degree. When Amal asked what sort of engineering she was interested in, Zinat said, “Cars. Fast cars.”

Zinat kept a picture of her family taped above her bunk. A second photo showed Zinat and several other Lionesses gathered around the Persian war correspondent Christiane Amanpour, who’d done a special report on the women’s unit earlier this year. Zinat stood to Amanpour’s right, cradling a .50-caliber sniper rifle that was almost as big as she was. “Do you bring this weapon on patrol?” Amal asked.

“No, that was just for the photo,” Zinat said, sounding a bit wistful. “We were at the combat range and I talked the gunnery sergeant into letting me pose with it . . . If you’d like, I could probably take you over there for some practice shooting.” She raised an eyebrow. “They’ve got flamethrowers, too.”

“That sounds like fun,” Amal said, less interested in flamethrowers than in locating Salim. But perhaps this girl could help her with that. As for what she would do once she actually found her son . . . Well, Amal was still working on that. One step at a time.

Reveille for the troops was a muezzin’s call piped through the Watergate intercom system. After washing up, Amal followed Zinat to the top-floor lounge that served as the women’s prayer room. Attendance at prayer was voluntary, but it looked as though most of the Lionesses, save the few who were Christians or Jews, were there. The majority were Zinat’s age, but among them were a number of older career Marines.

The Lionesses’ commander was a fifty-two-year-old from Yemen named Umm Husam, who also served as the women’s prayer leader. As the last of her charges entered the room, she turned to face the northeast wall and raised her hands beside her head.

“God is great,” Umm Husam began.

The main banquet room in the Watergate Hotel was now a Marine chow hall. A portion of the seating area had been reserved for the Lionesses, and during Christiane Amanpour’s visit that section of the hall had been cordoned off by folding screens. Today, with no reporters present, the screens had been exchanged for orange traffic cones, and even these were largely ignored, the women and men fraternizing openly with only an occasional disapproving glance from Umm Husam.

At a table just on the men’s side of the divide, Mustafa, Samir, and Amal took breakfast with Colonel Yunus, Zinat, and two male Marines. Mustafa asked a question about the African-American civilians working the serving line; like the iconic homeowner in Amal’s pamphlet, they were all wearing tri-cornered hats.

“The tricorne is a symbol of the Minutemen,” Colonel Yunus explained. “Most of our support staff are former National Guard. We give them jobs to discourage them from taking up arms against us. The hats are a touchy subject—insurgents like to wear them, too—but we’re trying to win hearts and minds so we don’t make a fuss about it.”

“What kind of Christians are they?” Mustafa asked next. “My reading suggested that black Americans are more often Protestant than Catholic, but it didn’t say what denominations they favor.”

“I’m afraid I know nothing about Protestant denominations,” Colonel Yunus said. “But these men aren’t all Christian. Some of them are Muslim.”

“Muslim?” said Samir.

“Yes. Islam is still a minority faith in America, but it has made inroads, particularly among the marginalized.”

“Which sect of Islam?” Mustafa wondered. “Sunni or Shia?”

The colonel seemed disappointed by the question. “Surely that’s of no consequence. Islam is Islam.”

“I agree,” said Mustafa, “but still I’m curious.”

The colonel shrugged. “If it were considered polite to inquire, I imagine most would answer Sunni.”