“Go and get your father,” he said to Uday. “If you please.”

The rally was being held just south of Ground Zero Plaza, on a wedge of land where the World Trade Center Number Seven building had once stood. In 2002 this property, cleared of debris and converted temporarily into a park, had been used for the memorial services commemorating the one-year anniversary of the attacks.

The idea of erecting a mosque on the site had first been floated in April 2003 and had met with near-universal approval. The devil was waiting, as he always is, in the details, and soon enough a squabble had broken out between various Sunni and Shia factions over just who would be in charge of funding, planning, building, and administering the project. Public meetings called to discuss the matter ended in acrimony, and closed-door sessions between city, state, and religious officials fared no better; a visiting mullah compared the atmosphere of the latter to Prime Minister’s question time in the Persian parliament, “only not so friendly.”

The politicking and debate over the mosque had continued for another six years—culminating in an announcement five months ago that a deal had finally been reached. Since then several deadlines for fixing a start date for construction had been missed, and new fault lines had appeared in the mosque coalition. Today’s rally was an attempt to get things back on track. Billed as a celebration, it was really more an act of sympathetic magic, the idea being to get all the principals together in public acting as if construction of the mosque were going forward. Then, assuming they made it through the ceremony without the world coming to an end, maybe they could bring on the builders and the cranes for real.

Not everyone had been able to make it. The president, while offering a strong message of support for the mosque, had declined an invitation to the rally, promising instead to attend the actual groundbreaking, assuming there was one. He’d sent a group of Unity Party functionaries in his place, and the POG, not to be outdone, had dispatched a delegation of Sauds.

Saddam Hussein had also respectfully declined to attend—and unlike the president, he hadn’t bothered to wait for an invitation before doing so. Given the identity of the woman in charge of the guest list, this was a tactically wise move.

One other notable no-show was the Arabian senator, Osama bin Laden. He had planned to attend the rally and had come down from Riyadh with the Sauds, only to fall ill at the very last moment. He was presently recuperating at his hotel.

For Amal’s brother Haidar, chief security coordinator for the event, the news of Bin Laden’s absence was a welcome relief. He only wished it could have come sooner. While all of the rally attendees were concerned about safety, Bin Laden’s advance team had been uniquely paranoid, questioning him repeatedly about every detail of the security arrangements. Haidar had no objection to thoroughness, but he did have a problem with people who obviously didn’t trust a Shia to do the job correctly.

Now he had a bit more energy to devote to other problems, of which there was no shortage. The security setup consisted of three layers. The outer layer of barricades and checkpoints was being manned by the Baghdad PD. All the necessary bribes had been paid, so Haidar expected little trouble here—unless Saddam, miffed about his nonexistent invite, decided to arrange some sort of payback. The innermost security layer, directly around the stage, was composed mainly of bodyguards of the various attendees. Here the potential for mayhem was greater, since despite the ongoing show of solidarity, many of these people couldn’t stand one another. Haidar was particularly troubled by reports of new hostilities between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Corps, both well represented here, and he could only hope that the presence of news cameras would convince them to honor their good-conduct pledges.

But his biggest concern was with the middle layer of security—armed men, some in uniform and some in plainclothes, whose job was to circulate through the crowd, looking for any threats that might have made it past the police checkpoints. Haidar had wanted to use only his own people for this, but several of the more high-profile guests had insisted on detailing additional personnel to the effort. Unable to refuse the help without precipitating a political crisis, Haidar had instead broken the park into separate patrol zones and assigned each group its own territory. The Mahdi Army got a strip on the far west end of the park, next to the Arab Telecom building, while the Badr Corps got the east end, alongside the post office. The Saudi security team was placed in the center, surrounded by members of other, more local Sunni groups, arranged according to Haidar’s understanding of their current relations with the Badrists and the Sadrists. Haidar’s own men were scattered throughout the park and instructed to watch the watchers.

Haidar himself roamed freely, using radio, eye, and instinct to try to keep tabs on the whole show at once. As his mother stood onstage talking about The Moment, he stopped at one of the police checkpoints to get a head count on the crowd. Turnout was low, around two thousand people in a space that could hold five times that number. Not that it mattered for PR purposes: The estimate released to the press would be inflated to suggest a capacity crowd, and the cameras were all down front near the VIP seating, which was full.

Senator Al Maysani finished her remarks and turned the podium over to the governor, Nouri al Maliki. Haidar walked the northern perimeter, scanning the park. Mist-spraying machines had been set up at various points to keep the crowd cool and to add a none-too-subtle rainbow effect to the proceedings, but they also interfered with the sight lines. As Haidar maneuvered to get clearer views, his suit went from dry to damp and back again.

Al Maliki was followed at the podium by the man who also hoped to succeed him as governor: Muqtada al Sadr. Haidar, now standing among the Guardian Angels, made a quick radio call to the men he had monitoring the Badrs. “It’s OK,” came the reply. “We’ve got a few people here who look like they just bit down on lemons, but nobody’s acting up.”

“No problems by the stage, either,” added a second voice.

“The Anbaris are starting to grumble,” said a third voice. “I hope we’ve got some Sunnis on the speakers’ list.”

“Don’t worry,” said Haidar. “The mayor of Ramadi is up next.” He kept moving.

The rally was approaching the fifty-minute mark, and a few bored spectators were beginning to drift towards the exits, when the only Christian scheduled to speak got up to use the microphone. The Patriarch of Babylon was an old man from Kurdistan. Like a number of the speakers before him, he seemed a bit off-balance at first, unsettled perhaps by the still-shocking emptiness above the plaza to the north. But he gripped the sides of the podium and steadied himself, and looked down at the crowd, and smiled.

“Good afternoon,” he began. “I would like to say a few words about peace.”

Haidar was over in Badr territory, hunting the source of a strange noise—a metallic bang, possibly a door slam—that he’d heard just a moment before. The murmur that went through the crowd at the Patriarch’s first words caused him to look up at the stage. As he was turning away again, he caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye: a figure, stepping out from the side of the post office. By the time Haidar turned all the way around the figure had vanished behind a spray of mist, leaving a jumble of impressions: White shirt. Dark vest. Pale skin. Straw-colored hair.

“ ‘Christianity is a religion of peace,’ ” said the Patriarch. “We’ve all heard that sentiment many times over the past few years, voiced by well-meaning apologists. I’m sure to many Muslims it must seem an absurd, even an offensive, statement. And nowhere more so than here, in Baghdad, at Ground Zero of the War on Terror.” He raised an arm, waved a hand at the empty space where towers should be standing. “Christians, peaceful. How ridiculous!”