“So he got me out of the hole. He shoved the magazine in my face and said, ‘What is this, Mr. Howell? What does it mean?’ He questioned me for hours—about what I knew, what I believed, what I suspected might be true—but it was just like the investigation into Gulf Syndrome: I could tell he’d already made up his mind what the answers were. If there really were two worlds, then the one where he was a heartbeat away from being the most powerful man on earth had to be the true one. And this world—the world where he was a glorified secret policeman in a dinky backwater country—this one had to be false. A cheat. A mirage.”

“His idea, then,” Mustafa said. “Not yours.”

Koresh shrugged. “It’s not that I disagreed, necessarily. I’d experienced the Syndrome too, remember, and that feeling, that sense that this world wasn’t right, it was very powerful—especially around the artifacts. Where I started to have doubts was with the Quail Hunter’s program for what to do about it.”

“He wanted to go back to the other world, of course,” Mustafa said.

“He believed it was his destiny to go back—and God help anyone who stood in the way,” said David Koresh. “I thought God might have other plans. If the mirage was a judgment, which seemed likely, then it stood to reason that judgment had something to do with the behavior of the leaders of that other world—that some sort of atonement was in order. But the Quail Hunter couldn’t conceive of having anything to atone for. We’re talking about a man who viewed torture and murder as legitimate tools, not just of statecraft, but of self-expression. What would count as sin to such a person?

“To the Quail Hunter the mirage was evidence of a crime, not against God, but against him. Someone was denying him his rightful place in history. The obvious thing to do was track down the guilty party and beat on them until the natural order of the universe was restored.” He shrugged again. “It wasn’t a coherent plan so much as a gut reaction.”

“But you didn’t try to argue against it,” Mustafa said.

“No, I didn’t,” said David Koresh. “God had already gone to some trouble to keep me alive, and there was no reason to make Him work even harder. I thought I could see how this was meant to play out: If the Quail Hunter wouldn’t repent, then like a wicked prince he would have to be brought down. Then someone else could step into his place and redeem God’s people from their exile.”

“Someone else,” Mustafa said. “A Cyrus, perhaps?”

Koresh spread his hands in a gesture of ersatz humility that reminded Mustafa very much of Saddam. “If that was what God was calling me to do, of course I would do it . . . So I pretended to go along. I told the Quail Hunter he could count on my full support and he put me back to work as if the whole waterboarding-and-imprisonment incident had never happened.

“Our first order of business was to learn as much as possible about how the world had changed. Then, by looking at who’d benefited most from the changes, we could start compiling a list of potential suspects. So we started conjuring more artifacts, but it was a slow process—like I said, the selection was random at that point, and for every news clipping or map or videotape we brought back, we got a slew of less informative items. Still, we were able to identify one glaring geopolitical anomaly very quickly.”

“The United Arab States,” Mustafa said.

“Yeah,” said David Koresh. “Of course that only narrowed the suspect list down to 360 million people, but it could have been worse. It could’ve been China. And it was enough for a start.

“The other big CIA project at that time was something called Operation Curveball. Ever since word had gotten out that the 11/9 hijackers used Texas passports, the powers in Austin had been worried about retaliation. Even after the World Christian Alliance claimed responsibility for the attacks, there were concerns that the UAS might not be satisfied with slaughtering mountain men in Aspen. What if you decided to blow up a real country as payback? Regime change in Texas would show the world you were serious about not tolerating even the suspicion of terrorism. Plus there’d be one less dissenting vote at the next OPEC meeting.

“So because of this fear, CIA had been tasked with finding an alternate target for Arabia to vent its rage on. The Company forged evidence of a link between LBJ and the Alliance, and bribed an expat engineer—Curveball—to make phony claims about America’s WMD program.

“That was the officially sanctioned part of the operation. But now the Quail Hunter added his own twist. Once it became clear that Arabia had taken the bait, he sent Company agents into America to make contact with militia groups and start laying the groundwork for the post-invasion insurgency.

“The idea was to create a proxy army,” Koresh explained. “The Quail Hunter hadn’t told anyone in Austin about the mirage, and even if he had, there was no way they were going to authorize violent action against Arabian citizens—they were trying to avoid a war between the UAS and Texas! But the Quail Hunter realized he could use Americans to do the job for him—it’s not like they’d need much encouragement to take up arms against occupying troops. He’d let them bleed the Arabians for a while, and be bled in return, and then once he figured out which specific Arabs had stolen his birthright, he’d have a legion of battle-tested crusaders with no direct connection to him . . . It was a cunning plan.”

“And what were you doing while this cunning plan was taking shape?” Mustafa asked. “Playing in your sleep lab?”

“Labs, by that point,” Koresh said. “Mount Carmel was still my base of operations, but the Quail Hunter had converted a spare building on the Crawford campus over to artifact production as well. I traveled back and forth between the two sites and met with an in-house think tank whose job was to collate information from the objects we recovered. I kept the Quail Hunter informed of our progress.

“But what I was really doing, of course, was working on my scheme to bring the man down. His perversion of Operation Curveball alone was enough to get him removed from power—if I could get proof to the right people. And that was hardly the only abuse he’d committed: The Quail Hunter ran the CIA the way I’d used to run the Center.

“Of course he was extremely paranoid about security breaches, but the reign-of-terror mode he operated in didn’t exactly breed loyalty. A lot of people at Crawford hated his guts, and I managed to recruit some of them to the Waco faction. They told me secrets and stole documents for me.

“By mid-2004 I’d collected enough hard evidence to burn the Quail Hunter for sure. All I needed was someone high up in the government to report him to. I didn’t know anyone in Austin, but I had a few names. In particular there was this one elder statesman, H., who Lee Atwater had been friends with and who he’d always spoken very highly of.”

“H.?” said Mustafa.

“One of his middle initials,” Koresh explained. “People called him that to distinguish him from his oldest son, who was a family embarrassment. I’d never been introduced to H., but I knew if I could show him what I had, he’d be able to help me. The problem was getting to him. He wasn’t the sort of man you could just drop by and see, and I was afraid if I tried to make an appointment the Quail Hunter would find out somehow.

“Then one day an Austin dignitary named James Baker made a surprise visit to Crawford. Baker was another name I knew from Lee Atwater; he and H. were supposedly close. When Baker showed up, I was giving the Quail Hunter a report on the latest crop of artifacts. Instead of dismissing me, the Quail Hunter had me wait in his outer office. One of Baker’s aides was cooling his heels out there too, and we struck up a conversation.

“The aide’s name was Irving Liebowitz. While we made small talk, I tried to work up the nerve to slip him a note to pass to Baker. Then the Quail Hunter’s secretary got called away for a minute, and as soon as we were alone I just blurted it out: ‘I need you to get your boss to get me a meeting with H.’ ‘What about?’ Liebowitz said. ‘I can’t tell you here,’ I said, and nodded towards the inner office door, ‘but it’s a matter of national security. Please.’ Then the secretary came back and I couldn’t say any more, but Liebowitz gave me his card and told me to call him the next time I was in the capital.