The Mirage: A Novel (40 page)

“I wanted to go back with him to see Baker, but he said that wouldn’t work, he needed me to stay in the hotel room and wait for his call. ‘Don’t worry, it’ll only be a few hours,’ he promised. ‘Then I’ll send somebody to take you to H.’ I was so relieved, I almost cried. ‘Thank you, Mr. Liebowitz,’ I said. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘call me Libby. All my friends do.’

“So I waited, but he never called. I started getting nervous again. To calm myself I got out a Bible, but it slipped out of my hand and when it hit the floor it opened to Matthew 26—the chapter where Judas Iscariot conspires with the high priests. My blood ran cold when I saw that. I picked up the Bible and closed it and flipped it open at random. Luke 22: Judas and the high priests.

“I didn’t need a third warning. I walked out of the hotel and got in my car and laid rubber for Mount Carmel. I’d already worked out an exodus plan with the staff in case the worst happened, and now I called them on my cell and told them to be ready to go as soon as I got back.

“I stopped for gas outside Troy. Another car pulled in while I was using the restroom, and when I came out I recognized the driver as one of the Quail Hunter’s centurions. Then before I could react three other men blindsided me. They grabbed me, tasered me, and threw me in the trunk.

“If they’d taken me to Crawford I’m not sure how I would have escaped. But after we left the gas station I could tell from the sound the tires made that we weren’t following the main highway. I figured we were probably headed out into the county and the centurions’ orders were to dispose of me in some farmer’s field.”

“What did you do?” Mustafa asked.

“The only thing I could do,” David Koresh said. “I took a nap. I didn’t have any Elefaridol on me but I thought this once God would let me work the trick without it. I closed my eyes, started reciting, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep,’ and by the time I got to ‘pray my soul to take,’ I was back in the burning building. Not trapped this time. Searching. Looking for a room where guns were kept . . . I found it just in time. Picked up a rifle, gripped it tight. Then the car stopped, the centurions opened the trunk, and I woke up and became death.

“One of the centurions managed to draw his own gun before I killed him.” Koresh placed a hand on his abdomen. “He got me here, same place Jesus was wounded. I was bleeding pretty bad, but I stayed conscious long enough to get back to the highway. I called the Center again and told them what mile marker I was at. Then I passed out.

“I woke up a day later in a caravan headed north. We’d already crossed the border into Oklahoma Territory and the staff told me everything was fine—we’d made a clean getaway. I knew that wasn’t true, though. While I was out, God had sent me another dream, a detailed prophecy. During the first stage of our exodus God had confounded our pursuers, made them think we’d gone south, but they’d realized their error now and the Quail Hunter was determined not to let us get away. His centurions were screaming up the road behind us with orders to kill us all . . . But God had arranged some reinforcements for us in Oklahoma City. I knew just where to go. And that was how we met Timothy.”

“What was he?” Mustafa asked.

“A freedom fighter,” Koresh said. “Oklahoma Territory, you know, it’s like New Mexico and Coahuila—Texas claims it as a dependency, but the residents beg to differ. Timothy was a demolitions expert for the rebels. He agreed to help us deal with the centurions on our tail. Afterwards, he and some of his friends decided to join us.

“From Oklahoma we made our way east through Gilead, following a path God laid out for me in my dreams. Eventually we crossed the frontier into America, and we’ve been living underground here ever since. The Quail Hunter is still looking for us, but God keeps us one step ahead of the centurions, and we’ve sabotaged a lot of the Quail Hunter’s links to the insurgency. To the extent that they weren’t sabotaged already.” He arched an eyebrow. “Turns out the Quail Hunter isn’t the only foreign power using Americans as pawns.”

“And V. Howell Industries?” Mustafa said. “What is that about?”

“It started as a way of supporting ourselves,” Koresh said. “When we left Texas we didn’t have much cash, but we did smuggle out a bunch of mirage artifacts, along with a lifetime supply of Elefaridol. Then as we made our way across the Heartland, we discovered that to people with Gulf Syndrome, those artifacts were like pieces of the True Cross. We used them to barter for goods and services and to recruit new allies. Once we got here, we established a trade network with some local entrepreneurs God told us we could trust, and eventually expanded the business onto the Internet. The money’s not great—not after all the middlemen and cutouts take their share—but as you see, we live pretty cheaply. And in the end it’s less about commerce than evangelism: As the artifacts spread further around the globe, awareness of the mirage spreads with them.”

“So your business plan is to infect the whole world with Gulf Syndrome?” Mustafa said.

Koresh acknowledged the criticism in Mustafa’s tone with a crooked smile, but he said: “It’s what God wants.”

“To drive other men mad, as your Quail Hunter was driven mad? As the crusaders have been driven mad?” Mustafa shook his head. “I thought you wanted to redeem God’s people. How does plunging the world further into chaos accomplish that?”

“That was the hardest part to understand,” David Koresh said. “When I found out what kind of people were collecting the artifacts, when I thought about what that knowledge might inspire them to do, I asked the same question. I prayed about it: How can this be the road back from exile, Lord? As usual, what made the answer so difficult to see was that it was just too simple. But it had been there all along, from my very first vision.” He got up and went over to his desk and opened the big Bible again. Post-it notes fluttered from the margins as he turned to the back of the Book. He found the verse he was looking for and read aloud: “And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” Koresh looked at Mustafa. “Death,” he repeated. “I am become Death. You see? You get it?”

“No,” said Mustafa.

“Koresh. The name of my anointing. It means Cyrus, but it also has another meaning, a secret meaning. It means death.”

“In what language?”

“The language of the Seven Seals.” Koresh pressed his hand against the page of scripture. “
This
is what the mirage is. A period of chaos and tribulation, when the world turns upside down and then keeps on tumbling. I was wrong: It’s not
a
judgment, it’s
the
Judgment, and my job isn’t to find a road back from exile, it’s to prepare the way forward, to the Last Day. To break the seals, and blow the trumpets, and pour out the bowls.

“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.