“It’s going to be terrible,” Koresh said smiling. “Not everyone will make it through the final storm. The Quail Hunter won’t. Not Saddam Hussein either, or any of the other walking dead . . . But those of us who are blessed, washed in the blood of the Lamb, will meet up again after the End, in a new world, the golden city of God’s kingdom.” His smile broadened and he looked off as if he could see what he spoke of, shining on a distant horizon.

Madman, Mustafa thought, and recalled the words of Lieutenant Fahd: These fucking people. “And what about me?” he said.

“You?” Koresh blinked, drawing back from his reverie. “You could still be saved. Any living man can be, if he accepts Christ.”

“That’s lovely to hear,” said Mustafa, “but I was thinking more of my role in your apocalypse. From your story, it sounds as if most people who come looking for you either don’t find you, or meet bad ends. Saddam told us all of his spies had disappeared. I doubt they converted.”

“Oh,” Koresh said. “No. We killed them all.”

“But not me,” Mustafa said. “You saved my life to bring me here and tell me all this. Why?”

Koresh seemed momentarily nonplussed by the question. Then he shrugged and said: “It’s what God wanted. He doesn’t always explain His reasons to me . . . But if I had to guess, I’d say He intends you to do battle with the false prophet of the east.”

“False prophet?” Mustafa said.

Koresh nodded. “I told you, the Quail Hunter’s not the only one using Americans as pawns. Arabia has its own wicked prince.” He hesitated. “And there’s something else. You remember I told you about the think tank at Crawford?”

“The one that was collating information about the artifacts?”

“Right,” said Koresh, “to help refine the list of suspects. And of course, speculating about who caused the mirage leads naturally to speculation about how they caused it . . .”

“Naturally.”

“The Quail Hunter was never that interested in the mechanism. I guess because when violence is your answer to everything, the only question that really matters is, ‘Whose face do I stomp on next?’ But the members of the think tank were more intellectually curious. One of them, a Company Orientalist named Hank Wessells, came up with what he called the magic lamp theory, which is just what it sounds like: a theory that somebody somewhere in Arabia made a wish that changed the world.

“It wasn’t a serious idea—it wasn’t Christian—but Hank made the mistake of writing the Quail Hunter a memo about it anyway. The Quail Hunter hit the roof.”

“Why?” said Mustafa. “Because the theory was heretical?”

“Probably the Quail Hunter thought Hank was making fun of him,” Koresh said. “That was usually what set him off. Or it could be he was worried that if the theory was true and it was just some anonymous Arab who stumbled over a magic lamp, we’d never be able to find the guy. Whatever the reason, the Quail Hunter fired off a memo of his own, warning the members of the think tank to stop wasting resources on ‘unproductive lines of inquiry.’ Hank got called to the interrogation wing and didn’t come back. After that, nobody ever mentioned magic lamps again.

“But sometime later, we got an artifact in the Mount Carmel sleep lab that reminded me of Hank’s theory. I never showed it to the Quail Hunter. I put it with a secret stash of other artifacts that I’d held back for one reason or another. And last week, when I dreamed you were coming here, I dug it out.” He reached into his desk drawer.

It was another photograph. The scene was an excavation, somewhere in the desert. Two grinning men stood in a shallow pit with their arms over each other’s shoulders. One of them was a blond in a gray ARMY T-shirt. The other was Mustafa, or a version of him, with a red, white, and blue bandanna tied around his head.

In the foreground at their feet, a blanket held an array of objects: a small clay urn; a jumble of pottery shards; a rusted artillery shell casing; another rust-pitted artifact that might have been an old bayonet; and on the far right, set slightly apart, a stoppered brass bottle.

“Does this ring any bells?” David Koresh asked. Mustafa didn’t answer; he’d dropped the photo in his lap and was gripping the sofa cushions with both hands. “Well,” Koresh continued after a moment, “I’ve got some other things to give you. Let me go get them, and then I’ll have Timothy take you back to the Green Zone.”

“What?” Mustafa looked up, still holding on to the couch for dear life. “Wait. I have other questions . . .”

“I’m sure you do,” David Koresh said. “But don’t worry. God’s got you covered.”

The boy on the tricycle had stopped to listen again. This time the sound—diesel engines, approaching fast—was one that even adult ears could hear.

A Humvee swung into the street. Mounted on its front end was a wedge-shaped steel plow like the cow-catcher on a Gilead locomotive. Two more Humvees with roof-mounted .50-calibers followed behind it. Then a troop truck pulled sideways across the street entrance and Marines with rifles began jumping out.

The boy on the tricycle watched in awe as the Humvees roared past. The gate guard spoke frantically into his radio and then reached for his gun, but a .50-caliber cut him down before he got a shot off. The front door of a house halfway down the street banged open and a man came running onto his porch. A burst from an assault rifle knocked him back through the doorway.

A loudspeaker on the troop truck began blaring a recorded message: “STAY IN YOUR HOMES! . . . STAY IN YOUR HOMES! . . . THIS IS A POLICING ACTION! . . . STAY IN YOUR HOMES!” The Marines fired warning shots at a couple of the other houses.

The lead Humvee crashed through the gate and drove onto the lawn of the Colonial house. The other Humvees pulled in and flanked it, the machine gunners killing two more guards on the balcony above the Colonial’s front door.

As the Marines deployed from the Humvees, other militiamen began shooting at them from the second-floor windows and the dormers on the roof. The militiamen tried to duck in and out of cover, but the Colonial’s wood siding might as well have been cardboard for all the protection it offered, so they generally only got off a shot or two before being killed. Still, there were a lot of them, and the Marines were being careful—because they hoped to take prisoners, they could not simply rake the building with fire from end to end. They picked their targets and lobbed tear gas grenades in between gun volleys.

While his men gave their lives to delay the Marines, the militia leader fled out the back of the house. The attack had caught him in the shower and he came out wrapped in a damp bathrobe, his gray hair tucked under a blue shower cap and water beading his glasses. His bodyguards formed a protective circle around him and they made for a wooden gate in the wall at the rear of the yard.

The Marine snipers hiding in the trees behind the wall let them get most of the way there and then killed all the bodyguards at once. The militia leader stopped short, scowling at the suddenly dead men as if their mortality were proof of incompetence.

The firefight at the house ended moments later. A Marine leaned out of an upstairs window, stripping off a gas mask and calling out, “All clear!” More Marines appeared around the sides of the building.

The wooden gate opened. Umm Husam, Zinat, and Amal stepped through. Amal marched straight up to the militia leader, who still stood glowering amid the circle of corpses.

“Mr. Rumsfeld,” Amal said. “The mothers and daughters of Baghdad would like a word.”

THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA