The Mirage: A Novel (9 page)

That the warning hadn’t taken proved beyond all doubt that Farouk was right to be worried about his sanity. Who’s more dangerous to wrestle with, a suicide bomber or a senator? Clearly the latter: A suicide bomber only has one way to destroy you.

“Mustafa?” Amal said. “What’s going on?”

“That’s a very good question,” Mustafa replied. “Who’s handling the search of Costello’s apartment?”

“Sayyid and Abu Naji.”

“Why don’t you and Samir hurry over there and help them?”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” said Samir.

“Please, just do it.” Mustafa held out his hand. “Can I borrow your cell phone while you’re gone?”

“My cell phone . . .” Samir sighed and reached into his pocket. “And what about Amal’s cell phone, eh?”

Amal, who still didn’t know what was going on here, but was smart enough to guess at a few details, said: “My battery charge is very low. I may have to leave the phone switched off to conserve power . . . What are you going to do, Mustafa?”

“Keep talking to Dr. Costello. While he’s still with us.”

Mustafa stared through the glass at the man in the interrogation room. Something about you scares the men in power, he thought. It can’t be this crazy story you’re telling, so what is it? What secret are you hiding? What does Osama bin Laden not want me to know?

T
HE
L
IBRARY OF
A
LEXANDRIA

A USER-EDITED REFERENCE SOURCE

Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden
(born March 10, 1957), a
Sunni Muslim
, is a
senator
from the state of
Arabia
. He is a member of the
National Party of God
. Since the year 2001 he has been the chairman of the
Senate Intelligence Committee
.

EARLY LIFE

Osama bin Laden is one of 25 sons of
Mohammed bin Laden
, whose
Bin Laden Construction Company
(now part of the
Saud/Bin Laden Group
) is responsible for such projects as the expansion of the
Grand Mosque
in
Mecca
and the
Prophet’s Mosque
in
Medina
, and the restoration of the
Dome of the Rock
in
Jerusalem
.

Osama was born in a suburb of the
federal district of Riyadh
and grew up in
Jeddah
, Arabia. He attended Jeddah’s elite
Al Thagr School
and studied economics and business administration at
Jeddah University
.

HOLY WARRIOR AND STATESMAN

In 1980, displeased with the Arab government’s “tepid” response to the
Russian Orthodox invasion of Afghanistan
, Osama left school and traveled to
Peshawar,
Pakistan
. There along with
Abdullah Azzam
he founded the
Afghan Services Bureau
, an organization that helped deliver money, weapons, and recruits to the Afghan resistance. Desiring a more direct role in the conflict, Osama eventually established a camp within Afghanistan and became the leader of his own
mujahideen
unit.

Following the defeat of the Russians and the breakup of the
Orthodox Union
, Osama returned to Arabia a hero. In 1990 he ran for
Congress
, easily winning election as Jeddah’s representative in the
House
. He served two and a half terms, then in 1995 won his Senate seat in a special election held after the untimely death of the incumbent,
Wafah al Saud
.

FACTS ABOUT OSAMA BIN LADEN

·
At nearly two meters in height, he is the tallest man ever to serve in Congress.

·
He has been married five times and divorced once.

·
His personal worth is estimated at 50 million riyals.

·
An extremely religious man, he does not listen to music, attend movies, or watch any television programs other than news.

·
His relationships with both the
Party of God
and the
House of Saud
have been described as “complicated.” It is rumored that upon his return from Afghanistan, Osama initially intended to run for office as an independent candidate; only after numerous meetings with high-level party officials did he agree to join the
POG
.

·
He was an early, ardent supporter of the
War on Terror
and the
invasion of America
. He is one of very few invasion supporters not to have suffered politically as a result.

·
He is often mentioned as a potential presidential candidate; many pundits were surprised when he decided not to seek the POG nomination in 2008. When asked whether he would run for president in 2012, he said that he might, “if there still is a presidency.” Asked to explain what he meant by this statement, he replied, “The
Day of Judgment
may come at any time.”

C
ostello’s apartment was in one of four identical towers surrounding a dusty cul-de-sac. It was after 10 p.m. when Samir and Amal arrived, but a group of boys were still outside playing soccer. A pair of police cars were parked in front of Costello’s building, and a cop leaned against one car’s back trunk, smoking a cigarette and watching the game.

Samir pulled up beside the police cars, and he and Amal got out and showed their IDs. “Are our colleagues inside?”

“No,” the cop told them. “They cleared out twenty minutes ago. They said they were done.” His tone was accusatory, as if Samir and Amal were breaking a promise by showing up this way.

“So what are you still doing here?” Samir wanted to know.

“Securing the premises.”

Amal, only too familiar with the ways of the Baghdad PD, chuckled at this.

“We need to get into the apartment,” Samir said. “You want to take us up, or should we just ring for the super?”

“One moment,” the cop said. He stepped away, speaking quickly and softly into his walkie-talkie. A few minutes later, another policeman appeared inside the building lobby and opened the door for them.

Two more cops waited in the hall outside Costello’s apartment. A warning notice had been taped to the apartment door, and a red Homeland Security seal placed across the crack between the door and the doorframe. The seal was broken.

“ ‘Securing the premises,’ ” Samir said.

The first cop, who’d ridden up with them in the elevator, just shrugged. “They said they were done.”

“Yes, and now you’re done, too. Open this door for us and get the hell out of here.”

A whirlwind had been through Costello’s living room, yanking cushions from seats, knocking objects from shelves. A plastic date palm had been uprooted from its pot and now lay on the floor, pretending to be dead. A wooden hutch held a few DVD cases—all popped open, the discs tossed aside—but there was no player to go with them. Bolted to the wall above the hutch was a pair of reinforced bracket mounts that had, until quite recently, held a flat-screen TV.

“What do you think?” Amal said, gauging the size and spacing of the brackets. “One-and-a-half-meter widescreen?”

Samir nodded. “One of those nice plasma jobs, probably.”

Amal looked past a serve-through counter into the kitchenette. The whirlwind had been in there too, opening cabinets and dumping out cans and boxes. “I guess the microwave wasn’t worth stealing . . . So what are we looking for?”

“I don’t know,” Samir said. “But if we find a second plasma, it’s mine.”

A wooden cross hung on the wall in the apartment’s single bedroom. Samir checked the closet, finding only a few shirts and a threadbare suit. Amal peeked under the bed, then turned to the dresser—its contents had already been pawed through, but she removed each drawer in turn, checking to see if anything was taped to the backs or undersides.

Samir stepped to the window. There was a scatter of paperbacks on the sill and on the floor below it. The books were in English and German, neither of which Samir could read, but he recognized some of the covers. In addition to a Bible and what appeared to be some sort of catechism, there were several volumes of the
Left Behind
series and a new edition of Martin Luther’s 16th-century polemic,
On the Jews and Their Lies.

“Nothing here,” Amal said. “What’ve you got?”

“Typical Christian hate literature. No secret blueprints hidden between the pages.”

They checked the bathroom next. While Amal tugged at the mirror above the sink, Samir investigated the toilet tank, known colloquially to Halal Enforcement as a “Bavarian ice chest” because of its popularity as a hiding place for bottled beer. But the tank lid was askew, and any contraband had already been taken by the cops or the federal agents who’d been here before them.

“Hey,” said Amal. “I need a tall person here.”

Concealed near the top of the mirror frame were a couple of sliding catches; when Samir pressed on them, the mirror tipped forward and came loose, revealing a hole in the wall. Inside the hole was a pistol, a banded stack of riyals, a bottle of whiskey, and a wrinkled newspaper in a plastic pouch. “One of these things is not like the others,” Samir said.

They opened up the newspaper. The ornate typeface at the top of the front page was opaque to Samir, but Amal, whose high school French had given her a firmer grasp of the Roman alphabet, was able to deduce that this was, or at least purported to be, an American publication:
“New York . . . Times,”
she read.

The above-the-fold photograph had an eerie familiarity: twin skyscrapers, one partially obscured by the black smoke pouring from its sides, the other wreathed in an expanding billow of flame. But these were not the Tigris and Euphrates towers, nor did the stone-piered suspension bridge in the foreground resemble any of Baghdad’s bridges.

“Something from the war?” Amal speculated, sounding doubtful.

“I’m leaning towards Photoshop,” Samir said. “I don’t think America has buildings that tall. Besides, it looks fake. Can you make out the headline?”

“ ‘U.S. attack . . . destroys towers,’ then something about a pentagon. And the last word is ‘terror.’ ”

“Wait.” Samir tapped his finger on the dateline. “What month is this?”

“September. September 12, 2001.”

Samir laughed. “September 12 . . . So the day before was September 11 . . . 9/11, get it? These towers, they’re located in the magical American superpower. And the guys flying the planes into them, they must be those poor loser third-world Arabs . . .”

There was a loud thump from the front of the apartment. They heard footsteps in the living room. “Maybe I spoke too soon about the microwave,” Amal said.

Frowning, Samir leaned his head out the bathroom doorway. “Hey!” he called. “Who’s out there?”

No answer but abrupt silence. More annoyed than concerned, Samir walked forward through the bedroom, saying: “This is Homeland Security! Whoever you are, if you don’t have a federal badge you’d better start running n—”

As Samir entered the living room, he was attacked from the side, punched in the head and spun around to face the wall. He tried to jab behind him with his elbow, but a sharp blow to the kidneys dropped him to his knees, and then he felt a gun muzzle press against the back of his neck.

A second assailant had darted into the bedroom to grapple Amal. Samir heard her cry out, and the clatter of her pistol being knocked to the ground. He watched from the corner of his eye as she was dragged by the hair into the living room and shoved to the floor; her attacker squatted on her and aimed a submachine gun at the base of her skull, commanding her to lie still. About the only good news in all of this was that the gunman was an Arab, which meant he probably wasn’t a terrorist.

A voice demanded: “Who are you?”

“I told you, we’re Homeland Security,” Samir said, then hissed at a jab from the gun muzzle. “Homeland Security, damn it! My ID is in my pocket.” A rough hand was already inside his jacket, removing first his pistol and then his identification.

“Homeland Security has been ordered off these premises. What are you still doing here?”

“We received no such order.”

“You are lying.” A pause, as the speaker examined Samir’s ID. “Samir Nadim . . . Where do I know that name from?”

“Oh God,” Samir said. That voice . . . “Idris?”

He was dragged to his feet, turned around, and shoved back against the wall. His assailant, like Amal’s, was armed with a submachine gun, but Samir barely glanced at the weapon before focusing his attention on a third man, a tall bearded figure who stood behind and slightly to the left of the gunman.

“Idris,” Samir said, not at all happy. “It is you.”

“Baby-fat Samir,” Idris said. “Not so fat anymore I see. But you still insist on trespassing where you don’t belong.”

Samir bristled. “We have every right to be here. We are conducting an investigation—”

“The investigation has been reassigned, as you well know. You are trespassing.” Idris bent to pick up the copy of the
New York Times
, which Samir had dropped during his brief scuffle. “Where did you get this?”

“We found it in the bathroom. Costello had a—”

“Who else has seen it?”

“No one,” Samir said. “We just—”

“I will tell you what I think,” Idris interrupted him. “I think you are not with Homeland Security. I think you are a common thief, one of the Shia riffraff who infest the slums of this city. I think you heard this apartment was vacant and broke in to see what you could steal.”

“Right . . . Fine then. Arrest me.”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“What, then? . . . Wait.” His eyes widened. “Idris. You can’t be ser—”

“Shoot them both,” Idris said.