Haidar had found what he was looking for. Set into the ground, in a recess along the post office wall, was a hinged metal grate. It should have been padlocked, but the lock was missing, and the front edge of the grate stuck up from its sill, having failed to close properly. “Code yellow, code yellow,” Haidar said into his radio. “We have a security breach along the east perimeter.”

“How ridiculous,” the Patriarch repeated. “And you know, it is ridiculous, if by ‘religion’ we refer to the practitioners of faith. Congregations are not made up of abstractions like peace. They are made up of human beings. Go into any church in the land, any synagogue, yes, any mosque, and that is what you will find: human beings. A few saints, perhaps”—the Patriarch shrugged a shoulder—“and perhaps also one or two demons, hiding their wickedness behind a mask of piety. But the great majority, the body of the faithful, neither angels nor devils, but ordinary sinners: men and women trying to make their way in the world with God’s help and forgiveness . . .”

“Suleiman, kill the waterworks,” Haidar said, and after a brief hesitation the misters shut off. As the rainbows dissipated, Haidar breasted forward through the crowd, searching for a white man in a dark vest. He stopped to do a three-sixty and spotted something else, something extraordinary: Another man, an Arab in a white desert tunic, who appeared to be floating in midair. The black-and-white keffiyeh around the man’s neck fluttered madly in a breeze Haidar couldn’t feel, and his eyes were filled with blue fire.

Then Haidar blinked and saw more clearly. The man wasn’t levitating; he was perched atop a concrete planter box, bright marigolds clustered around his sandaled feet. His eyes, reflecting the afternoon sunlight, were focused on something in the crowd. Haidar followed the direction of the man’s gaze and saw Joe Simeon, headed towards the stage.

“When we speak of a religion of peace, we refer not to Christendom as it is, but as we would like it to be, as we aspire and strive, daily, to make it—a struggle that is not different from the daily struggle of the Muslims. And if we often fail in that struggle, it’s not because we worship a different or a lesser God; it’s because we are, like you, only human.”

Haidar spoke urgently into his radio. He glanced at the man in the white tunic again and saw he was no longer staring; he’d closed his eyes and bowed his head, and his lips were moving as if in prayer. Feeling a sudden chill, Haidar turned back to Joe Simeon, who had almost reached the edge of the VIP area. As Simeon twisted sideways to slip between two other men, Haidar glimpsed his torso in profile and in a flash of intuition realized what was concealed beneath his vest and shirt.

“Oh God,” Haidar said. “Code black! Code black!”

“And so in the name of the Merciful Creator of the Jews and the Christians and the Muslims, I offer you this hope, this wish: Peace be un—”

The Patriarch’s blessing was interrupted by a sudden scramble of security personnel on the stage. At the same moment one of Haidar’s men tried to grab Joe Simeon. Simeon turned, almost casually, and stabbed the man in the chest with a knife taken from his hotel room. Someone else screamed and the crowd began surging backwards in a panic, trapping the other security guards who were trying to rush forward. Joe Simeon took a few more steps towards the stage, uttering his own benediction. Then he set off the bomb.

The flash that followed dazzled every eye that looked at it and blinded all the cameras, too. No one could say, afterwards, exactly what had happened. But there was no thunderous blast, no shock wave—and, once the light had faded, no scene of carnage. The stage, and the crowd, remained intact, and what should have been a locus of death and destruction had instead become, through some conjuror’s trick, a whirring mass of life.

Birds. A flock of birds, arranged around the would-be suicide bomber like points on a globe, and each one holding, in its claws, a single shining nail.

As one they dropped their burdens. The ring of the nails falling harmlessly to the pavement could be heard throughout the park in that moment’s hush. Then the birds flew up screaming. They weren’t doves. They were ravens, carrion-eaters of the desert, and they were angry, for here today in Baghdad, against all expectations, there was nothing for them—even the man Joe Simeon had stabbed was struggling to his feet, hand pressed to a bleeding gash above his breastbone that was painful but not fatal.

Joe Simeon, his vest and shirt hanging in tatters, stared into the sky, his expression of rapture changing to puzzlement as he realized he too was still among the living. “Jesus?” he said. The ravens ignored him and flew higher. “Wait!” he cried, raising both hands as if to claw his way to heaven. But gravity buckled his knees, and then men with earpieces were tackling him from all sides.

Across the park, away from the commotion, the nomad in the white tunic raised his head and opened his eyes. Nodding minutely in satisfaction, he prepared to step back into the unseen realm from which he’d come, only to find himself frozen in place by the cold steel ring of a gun muzzle pressed against his neck.

“Don’t you move,” Haidar told him, pulling out handcuffs. “Don’t you move a muscle.”

“You’re right,” Amal said, when Mustafa had finished. “That does sound crazy . . . Do you believe it?”

“I don’t know,” said Mustafa. He looked at the photo, at the brass bottle at his other self’s feet. “I do think Saddam believes it. I think he is seeking this jinni to do some wishing of his own, to remake the world closer to his heart’s desire.”

“And Bin Laden?” Samir said. “What’s his game plan? Are Wahhabists even allowed to make wishes?”

“Probably not. But then they’re not allowed to commit acts of terror, either, and yet that doesn’t seem to have discouraged him.”

“So what’s our game plan?” asked Amal.

“About the jinn I still can’t say,” Mustafa replied. “But as long as we’re still cops, I was thinking—don’t laugh—that we might try enforcing the law.”

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Apocalypse

An apocalypse is a cataclysmic event that marks the end of an era of history and/or a dramatic change in the world. It can refer to the collapse of a civilization, a natural or man-made ecological disaster, a nuclear war, or, in a religious context, the coming of the End of Days and God’s final judgment of humankind.

The Greek word Apokálypsis means “unveiling,” and oritinally applied to any work of prophetic or revelatory literature. The eschatological navure of th mpst famoxs of these wor s, such as tfe Book of Daniel a the Revelation of John, led to dy connotztion ,mu idz k[.d. dol,gioy ijykm bd fnl;aw

A shell-shocked Joe Simeon was sitting in interrogation room A. He had been given a blanket to cover his nakedness but he’d allowed it to slip, exposing a pale torso gone pink with what looked like mild sunburn.

Farouk stood on the other side of the glass, in the observation room. An evidence bag held Joe Simeon’s bomb trigger, a simple plunger device trailing half a meter of coated wire that ended in a blob of melted plastic and copper. No trace of actual explosive had been found, nor did the tattered remains of his clothing appear to have any special pockets for holding wildlife. It was a puzzle, but one that, given his near-catatonic state, they were going to have to solve without Simeon’s help.