The Mirage: A Novel (50 page)

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.

“I know you want the canned food,” he said to it. “But you don’t get to decide what you eat.
I’m
the decider.” He flashed a goofy grin, impressed by his own wit, which the terrier couldn’t or wouldn’t appreciate. But the dog did seem to understand that it wasn’t going to get its wish, and bent its head reluctantly to the bowl of dry kibble. “Good boy,” the man said, and went to see about his own breakfast.

The man had slept poorly, plagued as usual by anxiety dreams in which he searched endlessly for something he had promised to find—though whether the something was a person or an object he could never quite remember. The sense of frustration continued to haunt him even now that he was awake. As he stood by the open refrigerator looking blankly within, he wondered, Where are they? and then, Where is what?

He was still staring into the fridge when he heard the patter of what he assumed was rain against the side of the house. The dog, facing the sliding glass patio doors and able to see what was really going on outside, let out a terrified bark and ran to hide in the pantry.

“You whine all you want,” the man said. “You’re still not getting the canned food.” As the storm intensified he shut the refrigerator door and went into the hall and called upstairs to his wife: “Hey Laur? You awake? You better go shut the windows in the spare room!”

Refresh . . .

Ninety miles away in Crawford, the man David Koresh called the Quail Hunter was in the CIA’s interrogation wing, extracting a confession from a recalcitrant Quaker. The basement torture room was windowless and soundproof, but even so he sensed the arrival of the storm as a sudden tremor in his heart.

“Sir?” asked a centurion who was holding a bucket of water above the prisoner’s head. “Should I go again?”

The Quail Hunter started to gesture Yes, yes, and something trickled onto the back of his hand. He looked up. A hole had appeared in the ceiling and sand was streaming down through it like the grains in an hourglass. He felt his heart give another kick.

“Sir?” the centurion said. “Sir?”

Refresh . . .

In Virginia, David Koresh sat at his desk with his Bible open to the Book of Revelation. He thought he understood what was happening and ought to have welcomed it, but now that he was getting what he’d prayed for he found himself in doubt, the rasp of the sand on the window behind him sounding more and more like the crackle of a fire.

Across the Potomac, Colonel Yunus stood in the dinosaur gallery of the Smithsonian, marveling at the sand sifting down through the growing cracks in the skylight. He felt no fear, even as the roof began to give way; in the dust cloud that came boiling towards him, he saw the outline of a house, and faces of a family that he knew. He said: “God willing.”

Refresh . . .

All around the globe—in Berlin and the occupied territories; in London and Tehran, Kabul and Denver, Chicago and Jakarta, Islamabad and Corpus Christi, Los Angeles and Mumbai; in Alexandria and Alexandria—the storm scoured the landscape, roaring through the homes and hiding places of the powerful and the meek like some mighty voice: Refresh. Refresh. This is the day the world changes . . .

And in Baghdad, a tall man stalking the halls of a mansion found himself suddenly outside, exposed to the storm’s full fury. The wind tore the rifle from his hands and the pelting sand drove him to his knees. Blind, he clawed his way forward, seeking shelter, a cave to crawl into. There was nothing. He quickly became exhausted. Sinking down, he felt sand piling up around him and prepared to be buried alive.

The storm abruptly ceased. The tall man raised his head and saw only darkness. He stood up in the black stillness, listening to his own labored breathing, and felt rather than heard the heavy footsteps coming up behind him. The back of his neck prickled. Hot breath whispered in his ear as someone taller even than he was leaned in over his shoulder.

“Who goes there?” Osama bin Laden said, and then he turned around.

Epilogue
The City of the Future

W
hen Mustafa comes back to himself he’s on top of a big pile of sand, one dune among many, a sea of sand extending to the horizon. He doesn’t know which desert this is. The Sahara is the obvious guess, but it could just as well be the Rub al Khali, or the Nafud, or something completely new.

He is kneeling as if to pray, and indeed it is about that time: When he looks up, the sun is directly overhead. But instead of prostrating himself, he stands, brushing sand from the robe he has somehow come to be wearing. The hem of the robe hikes up and he sees that his feet are clad in leather sandals, a good pair, nicely broken in.

Straightening, he continues to take inventory. Things he has: A robe. Comfortable shoes. The first hint of a beard. Things he does not have: Pockets. A wallet. A watch. A map. Food. Water. That last could be a problem, though he’s not thirsty yet. Supposing that he will be soon enough, he turns around, to see whether perhaps there’s an oasis behind him. There isn’t; just more dunes. He has all the sand he could wish for.

Continuing to turn, he spots something else, sticking up out of the dune a few meters away from him: a boot. He goes over and pulls it up, pours out the sand, and turns it over in his hands. It’s a tall boot, tan leather and nylon with a thick rubber sole. There are no markings on it, inside or out, but it looks military.

Well, Mustafa thinks, now I have a boot. But it’s the wrong size for him—he can see this, even before he measures it against the bottom of his sandals—and its mate is nowhere to be found, so after a few moments he tosses it, and watches it roll and bounce down the dune face.

As the boot comes to rest, he detects more motion in his peripheral vision: Amal and Samir, climbing up opposite sides of the dune. Amal is wearing a blue abaya that shimmers brightly in the sunlight. Samir is dressed in city clothes: socks and loafers, khakis, a cotton shirt that is already stained with sweat.

Mustafa nods hello to them and they nod back, everybody affecting a casual attitude, as if meeting in the middle of nowhere like this were a natural occurrence. As maybe, in this world, it is. They stand side by side at the top of the dune and look out over the high and rolling sands stretching far away.

Samir is the first to speak. “Well,” he says, “here we all are in the desert.” Looking down at his empty hands: “With nothing.”

“We are alive at least,” Amal offers.

“That is one theory,” says Mustafa. But he says it good-naturedly, feeling not so much optimistic as philosophical: If this is the same world he woke up in yesterday, then he hasn’t lost anything he hadn’t already lost. If it is a new world, it is as apt to contain good surprises as bad ones. He supposes he should consider the possibility that they are in hell, but the fact that he can still smile, however faintly, makes that seem unlikely. And in any case, whining will change nothing. “I guess we should start walking.”