The woman’s eyes flicked open. Mustafa, already discomfited by Koresh’s display of intimacy, took a half-step backwards. Then the woman started speaking Arabic and Mustafa’s arms broke out in gooseflesh again.

“Give me those two in the back,” she said, in a deep, masculine voice with the accent of a native Iraqi. A pause. Then: “No, no! That one there, on the left! Yes . . . Yes, that’s what I want!”

A woman on one of the other mattresses made a sharp clicking sound. Mustafa startled. Then another woman let out a honk, almost like a car horn. That seemed to get them all going, making clicks, rustling noises, whispers, shouts. The individual utterances seemed arbitrary and meaningless, but as they bounced off the walls and melded together, they began to paint a picture in sound, familiar-seeming background noise.

The red-haired woman went on speaking. “What’s she saying?” David Koresh asked. “Do you know?”

“She is haggling,” Mustafa said. “Bargaining over the price of something . . .” Then he realized what the background noise was: a souk. An open-air market, possibly in Baghdad.

The red-haired woman was sitting up. The EEG wiring stretched behind her and the blanket slid to her lap. She plucked her hand from Koresh’s grip and began to reach forward, focused on something that only she could see. She extended her arm slowly, as if reaching through a curtain or into a stream. Her hand rotated, palm upward, and her thumb and forefingers came together, grasping nothing.

Grasping something. A flicker, a flicker, and then a limp violet rectangle appeared between her fingers. A scarf, Mustafa thought at first. But it was too small for that, and it was made of paper. A banknote.

“Good girl,” David Koresh said. He laid one hand on her forearm and with the other prised loose the bill. As she lost contact with the object, the woman’s eyes fluttered closed and she sank back onto the mattress. The other women fell silent. Koresh held up the banknote and inspected it.

“Speak of the devil,” he said, laughing. “Looks like someone’s following you . . .”

He showed Mustafa the banknote. Saddam Hussein’s face was printed on the front. On the back was an engraving of what looked like hieroglyphs and the legend CENTRAL BANK OF IRAQ, TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY DINARS.

“Not legal tender in this reality,” David Koresh joked. “And not worth much in any.”

It was a big white Colonial Revival house, on a three-quarter-acre lot surrounded by a high brick wall. The lot was at the end of a dead-end street half a mile from the Herndon church.

The other houses on the street were more modest, but they were all well maintained, their lawns and gardens well tended, the cars in their driveways shiny and new. An observer standing lightheaded at the turn-in might have mistaken it for the other America, the one glimpsed only in dreams.

Now and then the war intruded. Earlier that morning, the street’s residents had heard the distant echoes of explosions on the Davis Pike, and the assaults on the McLean police and fire stations had made the mid-morning news (thirty-nine confirmed dead so far, including all of the attackers). But with the approach of noon, the illusion of peace had returned.

Sprinklers hissed gently on several of the lawns. A cat rubbed itself against the slats of a white picket fence, while a little boy in a coonskin cap pedaled his tricycle along the sidewalk. The guard at the gate in front of the Colonial house watched the boy and stifled a yawn.

The wind shifted. The boy stopped pedaling and coasted to a stop. He swung his head around, listening. A flock of birds exploded from the woods that ran behind the houses. That got the attention of the gate guard, who unhooked a radio from his belt and raised it halfway to his lips.

A moment passed. Another. The birds settled back to their perches. The guard relaxed and put his radio away, and the boy resumed pedaling. Only the cat wasn’t fooled: Tail held high, it raced away up the street in the direction of the church, like a sinner who’d just gotten a two-minutes’ warning of the Judgment Trump.

“So this was your breakthrough.” They were back in Koresh’s office and Mustafa was turning the Iraqi banknote over in his fingers, half expecting it to dissolve back into the ether. “You discovered how to conjure these objects. Out of your dreams.”

“It was a pretty awesome trick,” David Koresh said. “A miracle. Of course we had no idea how it really worked, or how to control it. Eventually we did learn how to steer the dreams, a little, to bring back specific kinds of objects, but that was later. In the beginning, we just took whatever God gave us.” He went over to his desk and lifted the cover of the great Bible. Pressed between the leaves of Genesis was a photograph, which he handed to Mustafa. “This was one of the first artifacts we recovered.”

The photo showed Koresh standing beneath the Jaffa Gate into Jerusalem’s Old City. He looked to be in his mid-twenties—too young for the picture to have been taken during his 1999 visit. “This is your ghost double,” Mustafa guessed. “The one you saw preaching at the Holy Sepulchre.”

Koresh nodded. “As soon as I saw that, I finally understood what the dreams were about. God wasn’t sending us coded messages. He was showing us another world, a world as real as this one. Maybe more real.”

“And how did that other world fit into your Christian theology?”

“Well, that was obviously the next big task,” Koresh said. “To make sense of that, and square it with the scriptures. But first I had to get my head off the chopping block.

“By the day I was due to deliver my report, we’d retrieved twenty-seven objects. I packed them up along with some videotapes of the dream sessions and a few PowerPoint slides, and got an escort over to the Crawford campus.

“The presentation didn’t go well. Usually I’m a natural as a speaker, but that day in the Quail Hunter’s office I was as nervous as Moses going in front of Pharaoh for the first time. The loaded revolver on the desk might have had something to do with that . . . Also, I could see in his face that he wasn’t buying a word of what I was saying. Half the time I was speaking, he looked at me like I was crazy, and the other half, like I was pulling his leg.

“It was the latter reaction that carried. When I finally got done, he put the revolver away in a drawer and I breathed a sigh of relief. But then he said, ‘No, Mr. Howell, don’t relax. I don’t know what possessed you to think you could come here and mock me in my own house, but you’ve made a very grave error in judgment. A bullet is too good for you, sir.’

“He called in the centurions and they took me away to the interrogation wing. They beat me black and blue and gave me a waterboard baptism. After I passed out they threw me in a cell.

“I fell into a dream. I was in the burning building again, trapped and alone, but then God came and lifted me up and whispered my new name to me. He told me I was going to live. When I woke up in the dark, I wasn’t afraid anymore.

“The staff at Mount Carmel got word of what had happened to me, and they were afraid, but they didn’t give up. They kept working in the sleep lab, and on the second day of my captivity God sent them another artifact. The bravest of them volunteered to deliver it to the Crawford campus. The Quail Hunter was still in a foul mood, so he had the deliveryman tortured and issued orders to have the rest of the staff rounded up—but he also looked at the artifact, and that night, I think, he had a dream of his own.

“In the morning, he sent for me.”

“What was the object your man brought him?” Mustafa asked.

“A newsmagazine, called Time,” David Koresh said. “In the politics section, there was a picture of the Quail Hunter with a caption describing him as America’s Vice President. Not this America.” Koresh waved a hand at the room. “The America of manifest destiny. The superpower.” He smiled. “I only wish I could have been in the room to see his face when he finally got it. He thought he was such a great man, a mover and a shaker in the kingdom of Texas. But now he saw how tiny that kingdom was, and how insignificant his office compared to what might have been . . . The shock of the realization must have nearly killed him. And when it didn’t kill him, it drove him insane.