“I started making personnel changes, kicking out anyone who didn’t see eye-to-eye with me and bringing in more loyal recruits to replace them. A lot of people who’d come to Mount Carmel as research subjects ended up on staff. The ‘research’ got more and more self-indulgent. Lee Atwater had died a few years earlier, so I hadn’t jammed in a while, but one day I decided to put a new band together, in-house, ‘to explore the effects of Gospel rhythm-and-blues on REM-sleep alpha-wave patterns.’ That’s what I wrote on the sign-up sheet, anyway . . . I dropped two hundred grand in government funds on instruments and a recording studio. We even had our own label.

“And there were other indulgences. I organized ‘fact-finding’ trips all over the world, anyplace that had some vague connection to sleep research, or religious prophecy, or music. In December 1999 I took the whole Mount Carmel staff to Jerusalem to celebrate the new millennium in the Holy Land.

“Jerusalem was strange,” David Koresh said. “I mean, we had a great time, but from the moment we landed at Nashashibi Airport, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been there before. On Christmas morning we went to the Old City to visit the Holy Sepulchre, and there was another tour group there. They were just outside the church, gathered around a man who was standing up on a stone, preaching about Revelation and the prophecy of the Seven Seals. I recognized that preacher. He was me, maybe ten or fifteen years younger . . . And I looked at him, and he looked back at me, and then I had this fit, like an attack of—”

“Vertigo?”

“—epilepsy. I fell down thrashing, hit my head. By the time I recovered, the preacher was gone, and when I asked about him, no one else knew what I was talking about.” He shook his head. “Gulf Syndrome. That was my first personal experience of it. But not my last.

“After we came home from that trip, I went through an especially self-indulgent patch. The best way I can think to describe it, I’d been given a glimpse of my true destiny and my inner Adam was rebelling against it. I was already treating Mount Carmel like my private amusement center, but now I really started acting out. I did things, decadent things I’m not proud of . . .

“Then 11/9 happened and the country went crazy again. That’s what finally put Mount Carmel back on the Company radar. The video of the planes hitting the towers triggered an avalanche of new Syndrome cases. Austin wanted answers, and when CIA started organizing a new research initiative, they realized they still had an active facility in Waco that hadn’t made a progress report in years.

“I would have been in hot water no matter what, but what made it worse, since the last time I’d checked in, the Company had appointed a new director. A nasty piece of work . . .” Koresh uttered a name that Mustafa recognized from Saddam Hussein’s list. “His nickname was the Quail Hunter,” David Koresh said. “Texas humor. The joke is, if you’ve got an enemy you want to get rid of, you invite him out shooting and mistake him for whatever game you’re after. The Quail Hunter had actually done that once. And he’d stepped over a lot of bodies, climbing the Company ladder.

“So this was the man I now had to justify myself to. He sent armed agents to haul me over to the Crawford campus. They took me to his office and he showed me a stack of accounting records and ordered me to explain what the hell I’d been spending all that money on.

“I lied. I told him we were still following our original research mandate, looking into dreams. I told him we were close to a major breakthrough with serious national security implications. All we needed was a little more time. Six months, a year.

“He gave me two months. He took a bullet out of his breast pocket and put it on his desk blotter. He told me that in sixty days, one of two things would be true: Either there’d be a report about this major breakthrough sitting where the bullet was now, or the bullet would be in the part of my brain that controlled bowel function. He also told me that I was under house arrest; if I tried to leave Mount Carmel before the report was ready, I’d get the bullet early.

“His centurions took me back to the Center. I called the staff together, and we formed a circle and prayed to God for my salvation. Then we dusted off our old research notes and got to work.

“For forty days and forty nights, we got nowhere. Every morning I got down on my knees in the chapel and said, ‘Please, God, forgive me my pride and throw me a bone here,’ and He heard me, He answered, but I still didn’t understand. Nightmares,” Koresh said. “We all started having nightmares, the same nightmare, about being trapped in a burning building surrounded by armed men.” He tugged at his collar and closed his eyes a moment, breathing through his nostrils while the air-conditioning hummed in the background. “I thought it was just stress . . .”

“And what was it really?” Mustafa asked.

But Koresh only shook his head. “By the time we were down to three weeks, it had gotten so bad nobody could sleep anymore, which is a problem if you’re trying to study dreams. Of course we had plenty of conventional sedatives on hand, but I decided to call psychopharmacology at Crawford and see if they’d cooked up anything new since the last time we’d done drug trials. They sent over a variety pack of experimental hypnotics. The first one we pulled out of the box was Elefaridol tartrate, a non-benzo sleep aid with some very interesting side effects. It turned out to be the breakthrough we’d been praying for.”

“Why?” said Mustafa. “What did it do?”

Koresh stood up. “This part’s easier if I show you.”

They entered the basement through a room containing several large portable generators. The noise of the machines’ operation, reflected off bare cinderblock walls, was deafening, but at least it was warmer than Koresh’s office.

One generator had stalled. Terry Nichols, now wearing a tool belt, had detached the generator’s exhaust hose and was examining it. The faint haze of diesel smoke in the air seemed to alarm David Koresh, who went over and shouted something in Nichols’s ear. Nichols responded with a gesture that might have meant, “Don’t worry, I’ve got this,” or possibly, “Nothing you can say will make me more miserable than I already am.”

The new sleep lab was in another, quieter, part of the basement. There were no bed frames yet, just a score of mattresses, arranged in two rows of ten along the room’s longer walls. Each sleeping figure was attached by a web of electrodes to a battered EEG, and blankets had been drawn up over them, though these seemed more ceremonial than practical; the bodies, flushed and feverish, were throwing off more waste heat than the generators had.

Mustafa scanned the sleeping faces. They were of various races and ranged in age from early teens to late middle age, but they were all women. “Division of labor,” David Koresh said, when Mustafa asked about this. “I don’t know if it’s body chemistry or the predilections of the Holy Spirit, but we get more consistent results with female subjects.” He smiled. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

Like a harem in a mad scientist’s bomb shelter, Mustafa thought. “What is it they do, exactly?”

“I’ll show you.” Koresh went over to the room’s only other waking occupant, a man in a long-sleeved cardigan who was leafing through a Scofield Reference Bible. “Hey, Steve,” Koresh said. “Anyone close?”

Steve nodded towards a young woman whose red hair had spread in a fan on her pillow. “Lily’s thetas and gammas have been spiking for a while.”

Koresh sat down on the edge of the mattress and lifted the woman’s right hand from the blanket. “What have you got for me, darling?” he said, in an exaggerated drawl. He bent his head, pressed his lips against her knuckles, and then reached up to brush his thumb beneath the electrodes on her forehead.