But first he had to get back to it. He continued along the hall, not just limping but lurching, and alert to every sound. Al Qaeda was definitely inside the house now—he could hear running, shouting, and sporadic gunfire as they encountered remnants of the Republican Guard—but it sounded as if they were still on the ground floor. It wouldn’t take them long to find their way upstairs, though, and he knew they would never stop searching until they found him.

He came to the gallery overlooking Nebuchadnezzar’s chamber. He heard movement below and tried to slip by unnoticed, but then a voice with a Gulf accent said, “I think it is the older son.” Saddam stepped to the balustrade and looked down. Two commandos stood next to a body on the chamber floor. One of them was shining a flashlight on the corpse’s face.

“Uday!” Saddam cried. The commandos looked up and he shot them both. The flashlight, now blood-spattered, rolled to a stop beside Uday’s head and continued to illuminate his features like some ghastly spotlight. “Uday,” Saddam said. “Wait there. Wait there. I will fix this . . .”

He turned to go to the prayer room and a rifle butt swung out of the shadows, catching him squarely in the face. He spun around, fell against the balustrade, and dropped his own gun over the rail. Another blow hit him in the lower back, fracturing vertebrae. Saddam fell to his knees, insensate with pain.

A rough hand gripped the top of his head and another grabbed the back of his collar. His attacker asked a question. “You,” Saddam hissed, disdain breaking through his agony as he recognized that voice. “You go to hell! You can’t have it—it’s mine! I am a king! A king, you understand? You’re not even a dog’s asshole!”

The grip on his collar tightened. As he was lifted up he tried to fight, but the blow to his spine had robbed him of his strength and he could only flail and curse. He tipped forward over the rail, the tightness at his throat and the drop below triggering an awful sense of déjà vu, and he began to cry out, affirming God’s greatness—a last desperate plea for salvation to which the answer was no.

Then the world turned upside down and he was falling. He landed with a great thud and a crack, and for a moment the whole house fell silent. Osama bin Laden leaned on the balustrade, looking down, the orange light gathered in his eyes making him appear like a demon.

A voice echoed from the hall beyond the gallery: “Oh God, let me out of here!” Bin Laden moved towards the voice, reaching the hall in time to see the narrowing wedge of torchlight as Samir swung the prayer room door closed. Bin Laden stood listening—to the door bolt sliding home, to Tariq Aziz’s receding footsteps, and to the soft whisper of his own intuition.

He slung his rifle and reached into his robe, pulling out a canvas satchel. He set the fuse as he was walking down the hall.

The jinn said to Samir: “You should come away from there.”

“Why?” Samir said. But he backed away from the door and stood with the others by the magic circle.

Captain Lawrence was hammering at the padlock, which stubbornly refused to break. Mustafa had gone behind the chair to examine the window shutters. “I wonder if we can climb down from here.”

“Don’t worry about it,” the jinn said.

An explosion blew the door apart. Hunks of splintered wood and metal came flying across the chamber and were met by a whirl of air that also extinguished most of the torches. When Mustafa regained his senses, he was slumped against the wall beside the window. Except for the ringing in his ears he wasn’t in any discomfort and didn’t seem to be wounded, but he couldn’t move.

Osama bin Laden came through the doorway cradling his AK-47. He spotted Amal lying facedown in the shadows, but the jinn said, “Leave her be, brother. I am the one you want.”

Bin Laden came forward and stood in the same spot Saddam Hussein had occupied not long before. He didn’t make a wish or say anything at all, just stared at the jinn with a mixture of curiosity and malice.

The jinn gazed back calmly into the face of death. “There are among us some that are righteous,” he said. “And some the contrary . . . Peace be unto you, brother.”

Bin Laden pulled the trigger. The jinn bled like a man, and he suffered like one, too—as the first bullets entered his body, he opened his mouth in a gasp and his arms and legs jerked helplessly against the bands that held them. Bin Laden continued firing until the gun’s clip was empty. By then the jinn’s limbs were still and his head lolled forward on his neck.

Mustafa found he could move again. He tried to stand, but vertigo hit him and he fell back with a groan. Bin Laden turned towards the sound and the two of them locked eyes a moment, the senator trying to decide whether Mustafa was worth reloading for. “God willing,” Mustafa said, and Bin Laden with an imperious tilt of the head turned and walked out of the room.

Mustafa slid sideways until he came to rest on the floor with his cheek on a fine layer of sand. From this position he saw the brass jinni bottle, discarded and forgotten beside the body of Saddam’s sorcerer. He watched the play of the flickering light on its curved surface, felt the world turn beneath him. Then the wind of the storm, rising to a hurricane fury, tore the shutters from the window and blasted into the chamber, snuffing out the last of the torches.

At that same moment, three thousand kilometers to the west in Tripoli, Wajid Jamil was demoing a software update for his Uncle Muammar. The virtual globe Al Ard—Earth—was one of the Libyan governor’s favorite computer programs, and since its introduction he’d made numerous suggestions for improvements. The number-one item on Gaddafi’s wish list—real-time updating of Al Ard’s satellite imagery—remained technically infeasible in a nonmilitary application, but Wajid had done what he could to make the program feel “live” in other ways.

The new feature presently being demonstrated pulled in data from weather stations around the world and projected it onto the globe, refreshing every fifteen seconds. Wajid had zoomed in on the northeastern UAS so that his Uncle could watch the sandstorm as it spread across Iraq towards the Kuwait and Arabia state lines. Gaddafi was fascinated, almost hypnotized—when Wajid tried to move on to the next phase of the demo, which involved highway traffic data, the governor asked if they could please stick with the weather a bit longer.

“Of course,” Wajid said, eager to please as always.

But as luck would have it, at the very next refresh the program hit a glitch: The yellow-crosshatch graphic that represented the sandstorm increased dramatically in size, expanding hundreds of kilometers in all directions. Al Gaddafi jerked his head back, blinking as though the computer monitor had poked him in the eyes. Wajid looked over at his main tech support guy, who winced in embarrassment and bent closer to another screen displaying raw code.

At the next refresh, the sandstorm expanded again. It covered the entire Gulf Peninsula now, as well as Persia, Turkey, and the Caucasus all the way north to Chechnya. Gaddafi chuckled, having regained his composure. “Global warming,” he quipped.

“Yeah, this is still a beta,” said Wajid.

Refresh. The storm spread through Afghanistan and Pakistan to India, surged into Russia and Eastern Europe, and crossed the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden to engulf Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, and Libya as far west as Benghazi.

“We are next,” said Gaddafi.

“Uh-huh,” said Wajid, shooting his tech guy another look. Then the computer monitors flickered as a heavy gust of wind struck the building and millions of tiny grains began pelting the windows.

Refresh . . .

In Texas it was early morning. In an undistinguished house in the Austin suburbs, a man stood in his kitchen, talking to his dog. Though no one would guess it from his current surroundings, the man was a son of privilege, his father one of the most powerful and respected elders in the Evangelical Republic; in his youth it had naturally been assumed that he too would achieve great things. But he had squandered the advantages of his birth, used up all his second chances, and so come to nothing. Now that his own children were grown, the little black terrier at his feet represented the pinnacle of his responsibilities.