The Mirage: A Novel (44 page)

The words, unsubtitled, were just so much babble in Joe Simeon’s ears. He changed the channel again and prayed to God to speed the hour of his death.

Samir was waiting in the tea shop near the Israeli embassy. He had a dark bruise on his cheek and a split lip on which the swelling had only begun to go down.

“Samir, what happened to you?” Mustafa said when he saw him.

“Najat’s father,” Samir told him. He touched a fingertip to his lip and checked it for blood. “I went to Basra yesterday to warn Najat to take the boys somewhere safe. Getting punched in the face wasn’t part of the plan, but it did seem to convince her to take me seriously.”

Mustafa pulled out a chair and sat down. “Idris threatened your children?”

“Among other things.”

“Why didn’t you say something? We could have—”

Samir bristled. “Why didn’t I
say
something? You mean like, ‘Mustafa, I think it’s a really stupid idea to piss off the head of Al Qaeda?’ Something like that?”

“I’m sorry,” Mustafa said. “You’re right, I’m an idiot.”

“Yes, I’ve been thinking that too,” Samir said. Then his anger deflated and he shrugged. “What the hell, it doesn’t make a difference. That son of a bitch has had it in for me since grade school. Even if I’d walked away from this investigation—even if I’d convinced you to walk away—he still would have found a reason to ruin my life.”

Mustafa nodded at the suitcase in the chair to Samir’s right. “Is that from your trip to Basra, or are you going someplace else?”

“Keeping my options open,” Samir said. “When I got home this morning, someone had been in my apartment. I was going to make myself a snack and noticed a thumbprint on the refrigerator door. Lost my appetite . . . So I threw some things together and got out.”

“Where would you go? To be with Najat?”

“No, I don’t know where she is going. It’s better that way. I don’t expect to see her again.” His voice hitched. “Or Malik and Jibril . . . I was thinking I might go to Greece.”

“What’s in Greece?”

“A chance I was too cowardly to take.” He smiled sadly. “I’m still too cowardly, really. Really what will happen, I’ll slink around Baghdad for a couple of days until Idris catches up to me. Then my troubles will be over.” He sighed. “Mustafa, I’ve got something to tell you . . .”

“Before you do,” said Mustafa, “I’ve got something to ask you.”

“Go ahead.”

“Are you still my friend?”

“Not a very good one I suppose.”

“The same could be said of me, the reckless way I’ve been acting,” Mustafa pointed out. “And you did save me from being burned alive by that Minuteman.”

Samir shook his head. “That doesn’t count. You and I were supposed to be dead already, along with everyone else in the convoy.”

“But we didn’t die. God gave us another chance—and you made good use of yours. Now I would like to do the same. Tell me you’re my friend and I can trust you, and whatever happened in America—whatever Idris forced you to do—it’s behind us. Forgotten.”

“Just like that, huh?” Samir barked a laugh, but then his throat hitched again and he began to cry. His shoulders shook as he wept, all the fear and shame that had been weighing on him releasing in a torrent. Mustafa took his hand and held it.

“Fuck, man,” Samir said, when the storm had passed. He swiped water from his eyes, wincing as the heel of his palm pressed the bruise. “You know God didn’t really give us another chance, don’t you? Just a little reprieve. Idris is going to kill us both, Amal too probably.”

“God willing, that is possible,” Mustafa conceded. “But I choose to be optimistic.”

“Remember what we were just saying about you being an idiot?”

“Yes,” Mustafa said smiling. “Your idiot friend.”

They were both laughing a few minutes later when Amal came in the tea shop. She approached the table slowly and asked Mustafa: “Do you need more time?”

“No.” He gave Samir’s hand a last squeeze. “We are good.”

“Good.” Amal nodded to Samir, noting the bruise but not saying anything about it. She sat down. “The coast looks clear outside. Or at least, if Al Qaeda is following us, they’re doing a good job hiding the surveillance.”

“We shall have to trust to God about that too,” Mustafa said. “Now, speaking of Al Qaeda: Tell Samir what you told me, about Osama bin Laden.”

The noon prayer had just ended and men and women were coming out of a mosque adjacent to Zawra Park, exchanging the blessing of peace as they headed off to lunch or back to work. Joe Simeon watched them from the back of an air-conditioned cab. He wiped condensation off the window to get a clearer view and stared at the mosque’s entrance, wondering what it was like inside. Would they have stained glass, like a real church?

The cabbie mistook the nature of his interest: “You are Muslim?”

“What?” said Joe Simeon. “No. I’m a Christian.” So there was no ambiguity: “I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.”

“Christian, I thought so,” the cabbie said nodding. “American?”

“Originally.”

“ ‘Originally,’ ” the cabbie repeated slowly, the word not in his lexicon. “This is your hometown, Originally?”

“Yeah,” Joe Simeon said. “Originally, New York. It’s just outside Manhattan.”

“Manhattan I have heard of.” The cabbie nodded again. “You know, the Muslims of Baghdad, we pray for the Christians of America, of Manhattan. Now that the war is over—now that you are free—we have very high hopes for you. That you will become, what is the word? Civilized!”

“Like the Arabs, you mean.” The crusader’s expression soured. “You really think we’re going to turn into you?”

“With God’s blessing, even the greatest miracle is but a trifle,” the cabbie said pleasantly. “You’ll see, my brother!”

Traffic began to back up as they got closer to Ground Zero. While Joe Simeon tracked their progress on his map, the cabbie switched on the radio, tuning in a flurry of Arabic that apparently constituted a weather report. “Shamal,” he said.

“What?”

“Sandstorm.”

Joe Simeon wiped off his window again. The sky overhead was blue and clear.

The cabbie chuckled. “Not yet. But it’s coming.”

“When?” A sandstorm, if it was anything like the movies, could disrupt the rally and screw up the plan. On the other hand, like the inside of a mosque, it’d be an interesting thing to see.

“A couple of hours,” the cabbie said.

He’d miss it, then. Or on second thought, maybe he wouldn’t—maybe he’d already be looking down when it happened. “OK,” Joe Simeon said. “Let me off at this next corner, here.”

“Are you sure? I can get you closer.”

“No, that’s all right, I’ll walk from here. I don’t want to be late.”

“According to Donald Rumsfeld,” Amal said, “in the real world Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization and Osama bin Laden is responsible for the September 11 attacks.”

“This is what Bin Laden has been trying to cover up?” Samir said. “The Americans think he did to them what they did to us?”

“I suppose it might be a political liability, if anyone in Arabia could be made to believe it.” Amal smiled. “Imagine the push-poll questions: ‘Would you be more or less likely to vote for Senator Bin Laden if you knew he had an evil twin?’ ”

“Not a twin,” said Mustafa. “The same man with a different history. Or the same history remembered differently.”

“Would it really be a liability, though?” Samir asked. “Suppose he did kill a bunch of Americans in some other reality. So what? In this reality, which is the only one most people care about, the Christians attacked us.”

“That is the official story,” Mustafa said. “And given the bloodthirstiness of some Christians, it might well be true. But remember a key element of the mirage legend: America is the real superpower, while the individual states of Arabia are just that, independent nations. Weak ones. When a weak state is drawn into a fight with a superpower, what happens to it?”

Samir shrugged. “It gets its ass kicked.”

Mustafa looked at Amal. “What did Rumsfeld say America did, in response to 9/11?”

“Invaded Iraq,” she said. “His story about what happened to the Hussein family was heartwarming, but when I asked what the war did to the rest of us he pretended not to understand the question.”

“Wait,” said Samir. “So you’re saying that in this alternate reality of Rumsfeld’s, Osama bin Laden is an Iraqi?”

“No, he’s still from Jeddah,” Amal said. “A ‘Saudi’ Arabian.”

“Then why the hell would America invade Iraq?”

“Because God put a Texan in charge,” Mustafa said. “The point I am getting at is this: A terrorist who attacks a Christian superpower in the name of Islam knows he is setting up his fellow Muslims for slaughter, because that is how superpowers react when they are struck. Which raises the question: If in one version of history, a man is willing to murder thousands of innocent Muslims by proxy, is it not plausible that in another version, he might be willing to commit the same sin more directly?”

“So we’re to become Truthers, now?” Amal said. “You think Osama bin Laden is responsible for the 11/9 attacks as well?”

“That is what I am suggesting.”

“But the November 9 hijackers were Christians. That’s documented—I don’t care what the conspiracy theorists say. And Al Qaeda won’t even recruit Shia Muslims, so how—”

“Oh God,” said Samir.

Amal looked at him. “What?”

“There
are
Christians in Al Qaeda. Or at least people pretending to be Christian . . .”

“What are you talking about?”

“The ambush on our convoy in Fairfax County,” Mustafa explained. “Al Qaeda was behind that.”

“No, that was Rumsfeld’s militia. I told you, he admitted to it. And Rumsfeld was
not
Osama bin Laden’s ally.”

“That does not preclude him from being Osama bin Laden’s stooge. If anything, his fear and hatred of Al Qaeda would have made him easier to manipulate.”

“To what end, though?” Amal said. “Why would Osama bin Laden want to provoke a war between Arabia and America, or between Islam and Christendom? What would he be hoping to accomplish?”

“I think,” said Mustafa, “that he wants to turn the clock back. Undo modernity and the Republic, and usher in a new Caliphate.” He brought out the CIA report David Koresh had given him and laid it on the table. Then he continued: “Imagine you are Osama bin Laden. A son of privilege, heir to one of the wealthiest men in Arabia. Like many a rich kid before you, though, you’re not content to thank God for your blessings. You become disaffected, contemptuous of what you see as a decadent society and a corrupt political culture.

“Eventually you drop out, go to Peshawar and then Afghanistan. The harsh life of a holy warrior suits you, and your experiences on the battlefield lead you to a dark epiphany. The people of Afghanistan have never lacked for hardship and their suffering has only multiplied under the Russians, yet despite or perhaps because of this, the men you fight alongside practice what seems to you a much purer form of Islam, untainted by latter-day heresy. At some point you ask yourself what a dose of the same suffering might do for the state of the faith in your own country.

“Of course you can’t turn Arabia into Afghanistan. But perhaps you don’t need to. Modern living has made your countrymen so soft, maybe a hard shock to the system is all it would take to herd them back onto the righteous path. God willing, anything is possible; and if there’s one thing being a holy warrior has convinced you of, it’s that you know the will of God.

“So you go home, a hero. You pretend to make peace with the political elite of Riyadh, let them help you into a position of power. Behind the scenes you assemble Al Qaeda, the foundation of a new world order. You send scouts into Christendom to find the crusaders who will serve as your pawns, to make unprovoked war against Islam.

“And so November 9, 2001: The plan is set in motion and succeeds beyond your wildest dreams. Three planes out of four reach their targets. The carnage is spectacular. Even the downing of the fourth plane—the one you’d hoped would kill the young Saudi president—turns out to be a blessing. That same president, horrified by the destruction and his own close brush with death, declares a jihad against terrorism—the holy war you wanted, and then some. Political opinion tilts sharply towards the Party of God. Citizens return to the mosques in droves. God’s will, as you’ve conceived it, is about to be made manifest.

“And then, somehow,” said Mustafa, “it starts to unravel. The Republic trembles but does not fall. As the shock of 11/9 recedes, doubts are raised about the wisdom of some of the president’s actions. And it’s not just the die-hard secularists in the Unity Party asking questions. As the occupation drags on, as word of certain abuses is leaked to the press, fatwas are issued from some surprising quarters: fatwas condemning torture, condemning the erosion of civil liberties, condemning the persecution of Christians—condemning, even, the attack on America.

“To you, for whom devotion to God and devotion to liberal democracy are mutually exclusive, this must all be very baffling. Clearly the rot goes deeper than you realized. More shocks are needed. Fortunately the crusaders are ready to provide them. The Americans are spoiling for vengeance and the Europeans are happy to help. You don’t even have to do anything, just sit back and watch them converge on Baghdad with their bombs and their scriptures. But the guardians of the homeland are alerted now, and a lot of these would-be martyrs are captured and interrogated. And they tell a very strange story.

“As head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, you are one of the first people in Arabia to learn about this peculiar legend the crusaders have latched on to. The parallels between the mythical September 11 and the real November 9 are alarming, to say the least. Some of these people are naming you as the architect of the attack, and even though they’re talking about a different attack, even though they’re madmen, that doesn’t mean your secret won’t be exposed.

“You need to bury this story. You put Al Qaeda on alert and start monitoring interrogation sessions. Crusaders who say the wrong thing are made to disappear, along with whatever artifacts they possess. In the course of this cover-up you become an expert on the mirage legend, and the more you learn the more familiar it all seems, like something from a half-remembered dream.