The Mirage: A Novel (12 page)

Then one day in school, Mustafa’s class did a unit on the space program. Two questions arose: How do astronauts orient themselves towards the Qibla? And how do they know when to pray? The latter question baffled Mustafa. What, did they not have a clock in the lunar lander?

Mustafa wasn’t the only student confused about this, but he was the one who raised his hand, so he was the one who got to stand at the front of the room—while his more knowledgeable classmates snickered at his ignorance—and hold a flashlight above a spinning globe.

That evening Mustafa spoke to his father, who confirmed that, yes, time zones existed. “But then it’s not true that all Muslims pray together!” Mustafa said. “If it’s morning in Baghdad and midnight in Jerusalem . . .”

“I think you need to study your geography some more,” Abu Mustafa said. “As for God, He’s not a boy looking down at a globe. He need not perceive time the way you do.”

“But if God can see time any way He likes, why do I have to get up early?”

“Because it’s what God wants. And if that’s not good enough: Because it’s what your mother wants. You want to make your mother happy, don’t you?”

Well, of course he did. But doing something to please your mother is different from doing it to please God. Your mother isn’t always around. As a child in his parents’ house, Mustafa remained dutifully observant, but as he got older and more independent, he became more like his uncle Fayyad, who treated his religious obligations the way he treated his financial debts, as something to be honored at his own convenience. In his second year of college, after his mother died, Mustafa had for a long time stopped praying and going to mosque altogether. Since then, he’d been on again, off again. When he married Fadwa, who like his mother was pleased to see him behave like a proper Muslim: on. When he married Noor, and it became clear that pleasing Fadwa was no longer in the realm of possibility: off.

And now, in this strange changed world, with Fadwa dead and Noor estranged from him: on. Sort of. Looking back over the choices that had brought him here, Mustafa had no illusions about what God must think of him. He wasn’t sure what he himself wanted from God, or what he really believed. But whatever else was true, he knew he had a lot to make up for.

The sand from the previous night’s storm crunched beneath his feet as he stepped onto the roof. Mustafa arranged his prayer mat, then washed his face, hands, and feet at the spigot that jutted from the side of the stairwell enclosure.

He said fifty sets of prayers back to back: ten days’ worth, a lot to do all at once but fewer than he owed. When he began, the wound on his neck was smarting, but by the time he finished the pain was gone and his body felt light as air; he seemed to float up off the mat.

He drifted to the roof’s edge and looked out over the city. A warm breeze was blowing off the river; the thermometer atop the TransArabia building read 92 degrees Ferran, 33 degrees Khalis. Mustafa engaged in a brief staredown with city councilman Muqtada al Sadr, whose face graced the rooftop billboard at the end of the block. (
AL SADR FOR GOVERNOR, WITH GOD’S HELP
, the ad slogan ran, and beneath that, in smaller letters: Paid for by the Mahdi Army.)

Footsteps echoed in the street below, and Mustafa looked down to see a bobbing blond head. Another Hoffman brother? He checked for Mossad agents in pursuit, but the blond man wasn’t fleeing: He was jogging. He jogged to the corner, his pace slowing, and stopped to catch his breath under a streetlamp.

Metal tags dangled from a chain around the blond man’s neck as he bent and clutched his knees. When he straightened up again, Mustafa saw the word
ARMY
printed, in English, across the front of his T-shirt and along the edge of his running shorts. Not one of the Mahdis, Mustafa thought wryly, and considered calling down to ask if he was lost.

The blond man took a drink from an oddly shaped brass canteen. As he wiped his mouth, he saw Mustafa on the rooftop, and waved. Mustafa waved back, and once again thought to call down, but before he could speak the blond man continued on his way, rounding the corner out of sight. “Peace be unto you, brother,” Mustafa said.

“And also unto you, brother.”

Mustafa turned towards the voice, half expecting to see his father. But the speaker was a stranger, an Arab of uncertain age who stood on an unbroken stretch of sand to the right of the stairwell enclosure. He was dressed in a long tunic similar to the dishdasha Mustafa himself wore, but of a style more common in the south; a black-and-white keffiyeh was draped around his neck, and his feet were clad in leather sandals.

Mustafa, assuming the man was another of the building’s tenants, spent a moment unsuccessfully trying to place him. Before the silence could grow awkward, the stranger said: “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

“Not at all,” said Mustafa. “I’m sorry, have we met before?”

The stranger chuckled. “If you have to ask that, I can’t have made a very strong impression.” He bent to light a cigarette. The jet of blue flame with which he did this reminded Mustafa of the suicide bomber Travis’s lighter, but some trick of perception—the way the man held his hands, perhaps—made the fire seem to come directly from his fingertips.

“Did you,” Mustafa asked next, “come up here to pray?”

“Here?” The stranger shook his head, exhaling smoke. “I wouldn’t pray here.” It wasn’t clear whether he referred to the rooftop or the city. “My family has a mosque in the Empty Quarter. I prayed there this evening. At the proper hour.”

“The Empty Quarter? But that’s fifteen hundred kilometers away,” Mustafa said. “It’s not that late. How could you have gotten to Baghdad so quickly?”

“You’re forgetting about the time zones.”

“Ah, of course.” Then: “No . . . Wait . . .”

The stranger chuckled again. “I’m just teasing you. You’re right, it’s a long way to travel.”

“Then how—”

“I suppose I must have flown. Like this . . .” Raising his hand, he flicked the lit cigarette into the air. It described an arc of sparks through the night sky, growing in size and fury as it did so, until, passing above Mustafa’s head, it changed into a screaming missile. The missile continued along its arc, diving towards the TransArabia building, which had itself been transformed from an elegant tower into a squat concrete box bristling with antennae.

The box became a pillar of fire. A visible pressure wave swept outward from the blast, seeming to gain rather than lose force as it expanded. Mustafa backpedaled from the roof’s edge but the wave caught him and threw him off his feet; the roof gave way and he tumbled into darkness, sand and debris raining down after him. Then he was back in his bed, fighting free from a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets.

“Mustafa?” His father stood at the bedroom door, looking in concerned, the two of them having swapped roles for once. “Are you all right? You were shouting.”

Driving into work, Mustafa heard a news report that shed some light on his dream. Saddam Hussein’s not-guilty celebration, held at his riverfront estate in the Adhamiyah district, had included an unlicensed fireworks display. The midnight barrage of star shells had woken up the neighbors and prompted a number of alarmed 911 calls. Saddam had already issued a public apology and promised to pay a fine for disturbing the peace.

At headquarters, Samir had more details about the “disturbance.” After the fireworks had run out, Saddam and some of his guests had broken out hunting rifles. “At first it was the usual yahoo shit, firing into the air,” Samir said. “But then Uday had one drink too many and decided to take potshots at boats on the river. He put a tug pilot in the hospital with a burst femur.”

“Where did you hear about this?” Mustafa asked.

“From Abu Naji. His brother-in-law is the police watch commander for Adhamiyah. He and a bunch of his patrolmen were at the party.”

“But Uday’s not under arrest.” A statement, not a question.

Samir shrugged. “You know how it is. They’re treating it as an accident. The tug pilot will get some money to keep quiet—or if the leg turns septic, his family will.”

Amal sat nearby, sifting through a box of folders marked
TOP SECRET
. “So here’s a crazy thought,” she said. “Is there any way we could pin a terrorism charge on Saddam? Get him and his family declared enemies of the state and ship them off to Chwaka Bay?”

“Believe me, it’s been discussed,” Mustafa said. “The problem is, Saddam is the wrong kind of terrorist.”

“What would it take to make him the right kind of terrorist?”

Samir laughed. “First we need to convert him to Christianity . . .”

“Speaking of Christians,” Mustafa said, “are those the mirage files from Riyadh?”

“ ‘Files’ may be an overly generous description. You know that old joke about the intelligence service having stock in companies that make toner cartridges?” Amal held up a sample sheet from the folder she was leafing through. Everything except the page number had been blacked out.

“Idris warned us there would be redactions,” Mustafa said.

“It looks like they’ve redacted anything of substance,” Amal told him. “For example, I
think
this is an interrogation transcript. It’s got the prisoner’s name, his nationality, and his religious sect, but the actual Q&A—forty-nine pages’ worth—is a solid wall of black.”

“And they’re all like that?”

“Most of the ones I’ve looked at. With a few, the pages are missing entirely.”

“Very well,” said Mustafa. “If Idris and Senator Bin Laden insist on being difficult, we’ll just have to go to Riyadh with a presidential order granting us access to the original files.”

“And pray we don’t end up like Costello,” Samir added.

Gabriel Costello had been transferred to the maximum-security wing of Abu Ghraib. Less than a day after his arrival—and before Mustafa could conduct a second interview—he’d been found in his cell with his prison-issue jumpsuit wrapped around his neck and tied to the edge of his bed frame. The official cause of death was suicide by self-strangulation, though the autopsy showed unexplained bruising on his wrists and ankles.

“I don’t think we have to worry about Al Qaeda murdering us,” Mustafa said. “Not yet.”

“And why is that?”

“Because unlike Costello, we’re replaceable. If we die, the president will assign other agents to continue our investigation—and he’ll know there’s something for them to find. I doubt the senator wants that. So he’ll use delaying tactics, threats, perhaps bribery and extortion. But unless we uncover something truly devastating, he won’t send assassins.”

“Such comforting logic,” Amal said laughing.

“Don’t forget about Idris,” Samir said. “What if he decides to make this personal?”

“We’ll just have to hope his Al Qaeda training instilled him with a sense of discipline . . . Now come on, let’s take a closer look at these files and see if there’s anything the censor missed.”

Amal shook her head. “I’m telling you, there really isn’t much here.”

“Nationalities and religious affiliations, you said. Let’s make a list.”

Prior to 11/9, national security experts had only had to concern themselves with a handful of Christian denominations.

The biggest and the baddest were of course the Russian Orthodox. The Orthodox Union had had a multimillion-man army, a dream of world domination, and from 1952 onward, the ability to split atoms. Moreover, their church was part of the same eastern branch of Christendom that had produced many of Arabia’s Christians, a fact that caused no end of paranoia during the Cold Crusade. But those fears had ultimately proved overblown. Capable of ending the world, the Russians chose not to; instead of attacking Arabia directly, they fought a series of proxy wars—in Yugoslavia, in Chechnya, in Tanzania—before making their last, fatal lunge into Afghanistan, after which defeat their Union had simply evaporated. Though the church lived on and the men who ran Moscow still worshipped under an onion dome, their real god, these days, was Mammon.

Farther west, and so far proving more intractable, were the Lutherans and Roman Catholics of Germany and Austria. The creation of the modern state of Israel had displaced many northern German Protestants into the largely Catholic south. In hindsight, it was clear that the Allied architects of postwar Europe should have given more thought to the consequences of this; instead, they’d simply taken it on faith that the defeated Christians would learn to embrace one another, and their Jewish neighbors, in a spirit of true Muslim brotherhood. It hadn’t quite worked out that way.

The British Revolution of 1979 had added Anglicans to the list of Christians to watch out for. Their nuclear ambitions were worrisome, but they were really more of an annoyance than anything else, being content for the most part to stay on their rainy island, chanting “Death to Arabia! Death to Israel!” and defiling images of the Prophet in a pathetic bid for attention.

Orthodox, Lutheran, Catholic, Anglican: a simple enough taxonomy to keep straight. And then the events of November 9 had thrown North American Protestantism into the mix, making everything a thousand times more complicated.

The list that they compiled from the mirage files contained Methodists, Pentecostals, Baptists, Disciples of Christ, Adventists, and a few members of more obscure sects that even Mustafa had never heard of, like the Branch Davidians.

“What is ‘PMD’?” Amal asked, indicating one of the more cryptic sect designations. “ ‘MD,’ that’s the English abbreviation for doctor, isn’t it? Is there a Christian denomination composed of medical students?”

“I wouldn’t rule out the possibility,” Mustafa said. “But in this case I think ‘PMD’ stands for ‘premillennial dispensationalist.’ ”

“Heh.” Samir chuckled. “Try saying
that
three times fast.”

“Dispensationalism isn’t actually a sect,” Mustafa explained. “It’s an apocalyptic belief system—a prophecy—shared by multiple sects. A lot of these Methodists and Baptists are probably dispensationalists as well.”

“This is that rapture thing?” said Samir. “Where the Jews return to Palestine?”

“That’s part of it.”