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 . . .