“A long drive,” Mustafa said.

The colonel laughed. “Alexandria, Virginia, not Egypt . . . It’s right across the river, just south of here. In the dream I have a house there, a big yellow house by the water. I live there with my wife and four children. It’s nice . . . And then I wake up and I’m here in the house of war, not a citizen but an invader. And my head spins . . . But prayer helps.”

They’d reached the museum. A drowned tyrannosaur welcomed them back.

The colonel asked: “Have you been to Mecca, Mustafa?”

“You mean on hajj? Yes,” Mustafa said. “My wife Fadwa insisted on it . . . What about you?”

“I want to go,” the colonel said. “When I am done here . . . I’ve spoken to other Marines who’ve gone, and they all seem very grounded, in a way I would like to be.”

“Grounded?”

“At peace,” the colonel said. “Mecca is peace.”

“What about Alexandria?” asked Mustafa. “Have you ever gone across the river to look for your dream house?”

“No. That would not be wise.”

“Really? I would be tempted.”

“I am tempted,” the colonel said. “But it’s the Red Zone. Not a good place to go chasing after dreams. You should remember that on your foray tomorrow.”

“You’re not coming with us, then?”

“No, I have business here. But I’ll ask God to look out for you.” Then he smiled, for even as he spoke these words they entered a hall decorated with another mural, showing the prophet Daniel standing untouched in the den of the lions.

“Thank you,” Mustafa said, looking from Daniel’s calm expression to the frustrated snarls of the beasts. “I would appreciate that.”

THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA

A USER-EDITED REFERENCE SOURCE

T.A.B.

T.A.B. is an abbreviation of the English-language phrase “That’s America, baby.” During the reign of Lyndon Johnson, it was common for American citizens to say “T.A.B.” in response to bad news, particularly bad news that the government was in some way responsible for, a usage captured in this protest song by Jewish folk singer Robert Zimmerman:

Power’s out in the city tonight . . . T.A.B.

Shelves at the co-op store are bare . . . T.A.B.

Gas lines stretching out of sight . . . T.A.B.

LBJ don’t seem to care . . . T.A.B.

Following the Coalition invasion of America in 2003, the expression took on a new meaning of defiance towards the occupying troops. “T.A.B.!” became a popular chant at protest marches and a rallying cry for insurgents; Coalition soldiers have reported finding it scrawled on the side of unexploded roadside bombs. In July 2005 an attempt by the Coalition Authority to discourage the use of T.A.B. as a graffiti tag led to a gun battle in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C., in which 17 Coalition soldiers and at least 400 Americans were killed.

The church was located in the town of Herndon, in western Fairfax County. The men of the militia began assembling there after midnight, arriving singly or in pairs and dispersing their vehicles throughout the surrounding neighborhood so that their gathering would not be noticed from the air.

By 2 a.m. there were sixty men in the pews. The church lights were kept low and there was no music or singing, just the soft voice of the preacher reading from the climax of the New Testament: “The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up to prepare the way for the kings from the East. Then I saw three evil spirits that looked like frogs; they came out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet . . . They gathered the kings together to the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon.”

The sermon that followed was long and full of assertions that a more critical Bible scholar might have taken issue with. But the men of the militia, many of whom expected to die this coming day, listened attentively and without objection.

Sitting alone in a pew at the back of the nave was a man with a plain silver cross in his lapel. He was the militia’s chief strategist and he had provided the intelligence that had resulted in this gathering being called, although he had lied about where his information had come from.

The strategist’s Christian name was Peter Lightfield. He claimed to be a descendant of Thomas Jefferson; in truth he knew nothing of his ancestry, having been raised in a series of foster homes. To his secret masters in Al Qaeda, he was known as Ibn Abihi, “his father’s son,” and Ibn Abihi was also how he thought of himself, though for reasons of personal amusement he preferred the Aramaic rendering: Bar Abbas.

Bar Abbas sat through the reading of the scripture and the first few minutes of the sermon, but got up before the preacher could start blaspheming against Islam. If anyone had asked, Bar Abbas would have said he was going to check on the progress of the bomb-laying team, which was true—but first he had a different call to make.

He stepped out into the narthex and went downstairs to the church basement, which was divided into three rooms. The front room contained mostly paper: old church newsletters, handbills attacking the Coalition Authority and threatening retaliation against collaborators, and stacks and stacks of comic-book tracts that explained, using crude images and semiliterate prose, the connection between the Antichrist and the Arab and Persian governments.

A padlocked door gave access to the church armory. As was the American custom, every weapon carried a scriptural reference—either an actual Bible verse or a coded citation. The sights of the assault rifles racked along the front wall were all engraved with the legend JER50:14 (“Take up your positions around Babylon, all you who draw the bow. Shoot at her! Spare no arrows, for she has sinned against the LORD.”). The grip of a .45-caliber handgun was stamped PSA110:5 (“The LORD is at your right hand; he will crush kings on the day of his wrath”) and the stock of a machine gun read JDG15:16 (“Then Samson said, ‘With a donkey’s jawbone, I have made donkeys of them. With a donkey’s jawbone, I have killed a thousand men.’ ”). The lid of a crate of hand grenades had been stenciled with the words of 1st Samuel, chapter 17, verse 45: “David said to the Philistine, ‘You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the LORD Almighty, whom you have defied.’ ” And a case holding the militia’s prize possession, a Scorpion man-portable surface-to-air missile launcher, was painted with a verse from Revelation chapter 12: “Satan was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.”

The third room was a disused janitor’s closet that now held random junk. Sitting on a chest-high shelf was a dusty laptop; it looked like it hadn’t been touched in a long time, but its battery was fully charged and it started up immediately when Bar Abbas pressed the power button. While the operating system loaded, Bar Abbas retrieved a webcam from behind a box of crèche figurines and plugged it into the laptop. He opened a videoconferencing window and entered a series of passwords. There was a burst of sand-like static, and then he was staring into the face of Idris Abd al Qahhar.

“You are late,” Idris said.

“I had to wait until the service started.” Bar Abbas glanced at the armory’s outer door, which he had bolted behind him. “We’re less likely to be interrupted this way.”

“Did you locate Samir Nadim?”