The Mirage

  “Good girl,” David Koresh said. He laid one hand on her forearm and with the other prised loose the bill. As she lost contact with the object, the woman’s eyes fluttered closed and she sank back onto the mattress. The other women fell silent. Koresh held up the banknote and inspected it.

  “Speak of the devil,” he said, laughing. “Looks like someone’s following you . . .”

  He showed Mustafa the banknote. Saddam Hussein’s face was printed on the front. On the back was an engraving of what looked like hieroglyphs and the legend CENTRAL BANK OF IRAQ, TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY DINARS.

  “Not legal tender in this reality,” David Koresh joked. “And not worth much in any.”

  It was a big white Colonial Revival house, on a three-quarter-acre lot surrounded by a high brick wall. The lot was at the end of a dead-end street half a mile from the Herndon church.

  The other houses on the street were more modest, but they were all well maintained, their lawns and gardens well tended, the cars in their driveways shiny and new. An observer standing lightheaded at the turn-in might have mistaken it for the other America, the one glimpsed only in dreams.

  Now and then the war intruded. Earlier that morning, the street’s residents had heard the distant echoes of explosions on the Davis Pike, and the assaults on the McLean police and fire stations had made the mid-morning news (thirty-nine confirmed dead so far, including all of the attackers). But with the approach of noon, the illusion of peace had returned.

  Sprinklers hissed gently on several of the lawns. A cat rubbed itself against the slats of a white picket fence, while a little boy in a coonskin cap pedaled his tricycle along the sidewalk. The guard at the gate in front of the Colonial house watched the boy and stifled a yawn.

  The wind shifted. The boy stopped pedaling and coasted to a stop. He swung his head around, listening. A flock of birds exploded from the woods that ran behind the houses. That got the attention of the gate guard, who unhooked a radio from his belt and raised it halfway to his lips.

  A moment passed. Another. The birds settled back to their perches. The guard relaxed and put his radio away, and the boy resumed pedaling. Only the cat wasn’t fooled: Tail held high, it raced away up the street in the direction of the church, like a sinner who’d just gotten a two-minutes’ warning of the Judgment Trump.

  “So this was your breakthrough.” They were back in Koresh’s office and Mustafa was turning the Iraqi banknote over in his fingers, half expecting it to dissolve back into the ether. “You discovered how to conjure these objects. Out of your dreams.”

  “It was a pretty awesome trick,” David Koresh said. “A miracle. Of course we had no idea how it really worked, or how to control it. Eventually we did learn how to steer the dreams, a little, to bring back specific kinds of objects, but that was later. In the beginning, we just took whatever God gave us.” He went over to his desk and lifted the cover of the great Bible. Pressed between the leaves of Genesis was a photograph, which he handed to Mustafa. “This was one of the first artifacts we recovered.”

  The photo showed Koresh standing beneath the Jaffa Gate into Jerusalem’s Old City. He looked to be in his mid-twenties—too young for the picture to have been taken during his 1999 visit. “This is your ghost double,” Mustafa guessed. “The one you saw preaching at the Holy Sepulchre.”

  Koresh nodded. “As soon as I saw that, I finally understood what the dreams were about. God wasn’t sending us coded messages. He was showing us another world, a world as real as this one. Maybe more real.”

  “And how did that other world fit into your Christian theology?”

  “Well, that was obviously the next big task,” Koresh said. “To make sense of that, and square it with the scriptures. But first I had to get my head off the chopping block.

  “By the day I was due to deliver my report, we’d retrieved twenty-seven objects. I packed them up along with some videotapes of the dream sessions and a few PowerPoint slides, and got an escort over to the Crawford campus.

  “The presentation didn’t go well. Usually I’m a natural as a speaker, but that day in the Quail Hunter’s office I was as nervous as Moses going in front of Pharaoh for the first time. The loaded revolver on the desk might have had something to do with that . . . Also, I could see in his face that he wasn’t buying a word of what I was saying. Half the time I was speaking, he looked at me like I was crazy, and the other half, like I was pulling his leg.

  “It was the latter reaction that carried. When I finally got done, he put the revolver away in a drawer and I breathed a sigh of relief. But then he said, ‘No, Mr. Howell, don’t relax. I don’t know what possessed you to think you could come here and mock me in my own house, but you’ve made a very grave error in judgment. A bullet is too good for you, sir.’

  “He called in the centurions and they took me away to the interrogation wing. They beat me black and blue and gave me a waterboard baptism. After I passed out they threw me in a cell.

  “I fell into a dream. I was in the burning building again, trapped and alone, but then God came and lifted me up and whispered my new name to me. He told me I was going to live. When I woke up in the dark, I wasn’t afraid anymore.

  “The staff at Mount Carmel got word of what had happened to me, and they were afraid, but they didn’t give up. They kept working in the sleep lab, and on the second day of my captivity God sent them another artifact. The bravest of them volunteered to deliver it to the Crawford campus. The Quail Hunter was still in a foul mood, so he had the deliveryman tortured and issued orders to have the rest of the staff rounded up—but he also looked at the artifact, and that night, I think, he had a dream of his own.

  “In the morning, he sent for me.”

  “What was the object your man brought him?” Mustafa asked.

  “A newsmagazine, called Time,” David Koresh said. “In the politics section, there was a picture of the Quail Hunter with a caption describing him as America’s Vice President. Not this America.” Koresh waved a hand at the room. “The America of manifest destiny. The superpower.” He smiled. “I only wish I could have been in the room to see his face when he finally got it. He thought he was such a great man, a mover and a shaker in the kingdom of Texas. But now he saw how tiny that kingdom was, and how insignificant his office compared to what might have been . . . The shock of the realization must have nearly killed him. And when it didn’t kill him, it drove him insane.

  “So he got me out of the hole. He shoved the magazine in my face and said, ‘What is this, Mr. Howell? What does it mean?’ He questioned me for hours—about what I knew, what I believed, what I suspected might be true—but it was just like the investigation into Gulf Syndrome: I could tell he’d already made up his mind what the answers were. If there really were two worlds, then the one where he was a heartbeat away from being the most powerful man on earth had to be the true one. And this world—the world where he was a glorified secret policeman in a dinky backwater country—this one had to be false. A cheat. A mirage.”

  “His idea, then,” Mustafa said. “Not yours.”

  Koresh shrugged. “It’s not that I disagreed, necessarily. I’d experienced the Syndrome too, remember, and that feeling, that sense that this world wasn’t right, it was very powerful—especially around the artifacts. Where I started to have doubts was with the Quail Hunter’s program for what to do about it.”

  “He wanted to go back to the other world, of course,” Mustafa said.

  “He believed it was his destiny to go back—and God help anyone who stood in the way,” said David Koresh. “I thought God might have other plans. If the mirage was a judgment, which seemed likely, then it stood to reason that judgment had something to do with the behavior of the leaders of that other world—that some sort of atonement was in order. But the Quail Hunter couldn’t conceive of having anything to atone for. We’re talking about a man who viewed torture and murder as legitimate tools, not just of statecraft, but of self-expression. What would count as sin t
o such a person?

  “To the Quail Hunter the mirage was evidence of a crime, not against God, but against him. Someone was denying him his rightful place in history. The obvious thing to do was track down the guilty party and beat on them until the natural order of the universe was restored.” He shrugged again. “It wasn’t a coherent plan so much as a gut reaction.”

  “But you didn’t try to argue against it,” Mustafa said.

  “No, I didn’t,” said David Koresh. “God had already gone to some trouble to keep me alive, and there was no reason to make Him work even harder. I thought I could see how this was meant to play out: If the Quail Hunter wouldn’t repent, then like a wicked prince he would have to be brought down. Then someone else could step into his place and redeem God’s people from their exile.”

  “Someone else,” Mustafa said. “A Cyrus, perhaps?”

  Koresh spread his hands in a gesture of ersatz humility that reminded Mustafa very much of Saddam. “If that was what God was calling me to do, of course I would do it . . . So I pretended to go along. I told the Quail Hunter he could count on my full support and he put me back to work as if the whole waterboarding-and-imprisonment incident had never happened.

  “Our first order of business was to learn as much as possible about how the world had changed. Then, by looking at who’d benefited most from the changes, we could start compiling a list of potential suspects. So we started conjuring more artifacts, but it was a slow process—like I said, the selection was random at that point, and for every news clipping or map or videotape we brought back, we got a slew of less informative items. Still, we were able to identify one glaring geopolitical anomaly very quickly.”

  “The United Arab States,” Mustafa said.

  “Yeah,” said David Koresh. “Of course that only narrowed the suspect list down to 360 million people, but it could have been worse. It could’ve been China. And it was enough for a start.

  “The other big CIA project at that time was something called Operation Curveball. Ever since word had gotten out that the 11/9 hijackers used Texas passports, the powers in Austin had been worried about retaliation. Even after the World Christian Alliance claimed responsibility for the attacks, there were concerns that the UAS might not be satisfied with slaughtering mountain men in Aspen. What if you decided to blow up a real country as payback? Regime change in Texas would show the world you were serious about not tolerating even the suspicion of terrorism. Plus there’d be one less dissenting vote at the next OPEC meeting.

  “So because of this fear, CIA had been tasked with finding an alternate target for Arabia to vent its rage on. The Company forged evidence of a link between LBJ and the Alliance, and bribed an expat engineer—Curveball—to make phony claims about America’s WMD program.

  “That was the officially sanctioned part of the operation. But now the Quail Hunter added his own twist. Once it became clear that Arabia had taken the bait, he sent Company agents into America to make contact with militia groups and start laying the groundwork for the post-invasion insurgency.

  “The idea was to create a proxy army,” Koresh explained. “The Quail Hunter hadn’t told anyone in Austin about the mirage, and even if he had, there was no way they were going to authorize violent action against Arabian citizens—they were trying to avoid a war between the UAS and Texas! But the Quail Hunter realized he could use Americans to do the job for him—it’s not like they’d need much encouragement to take up arms against occupying troops. He’d let them bleed the Arabians for a while, and be bled in return, and then once he figured out which specific Arabs had stolen his birthright, he’d have a legion of battle-tested crusaders with no direct connection to him . . . It was a cunning plan.”

  “And what were you doing while this cunning plan was taking shape?” Mustafa asked. “Playing in your sleep lab?”

  “Labs, by that point,” Koresh said. “Mount Carmel was still my base of operations, but the Quail Hunter had converted a spare building on the Crawford campus over to artifact production as well. I traveled back and forth between the two sites and met with an in-house think tank whose job was to collate information from the objects we recovered. I kept the Quail Hunter informed of our progress.

  “But what I was really doing, of course, was working on my scheme to bring the man down. His perversion of Operation Curveball alone was enough to get him removed from power—if I could get proof to the right people. And that was hardly the only abuse he’d committed: The Quail Hunter ran the CIA the way I’d used to run the Center.

  “Of course he was extremely paranoid about security breaches, but the reign-of-terror mode he operated in didn’t exactly breed loyalty. A lot of people at Crawford hated his guts, and I managed to recruit some of them to the Waco faction. They told me secrets and stole documents for me.

  “By mid-2004 I’d collected enough hard evidence to burn the Quail Hunter for sure. All I needed was someone high up in the government to report him to. I didn’t know anyone in Austin, but I had a few names. In particular there was this one elder statesman, H., who Lee Atwater had been friends with and who he’d always spoken very highly of.”

  “H.?” said Mustafa.

  “One of his middle initials,” Koresh explained. “People called him that to distinguish him from his oldest son, who was a family embarrassment. I’d never been introduced to H., but I knew if I could show him what I had, he’d be able to help me. The problem was getting to him. He wasn’t the sort of man you could just drop by and see, and I was afraid if I tried to make an appointment the Quail Hunter would find out somehow.

  “Then one day an Austin dignitary named James Baker made a surprise visit to Crawford. Baker was another name I knew from Lee Atwater; he and H. were supposedly close. When Baker showed up, I was giving the Quail Hunter a report on the latest crop of artifacts. Instead of dismissing me, the Quail Hunter had me wait in his outer office. One of Baker’s aides was cooling his heels out there too, and we struck up a conversation.

  “The aide’s name was Irving Liebowitz. While we made small talk, I tried to work up the nerve to slip him a note to pass to Baker. Then the Quail Hunter’s secretary got called away for a minute, and as soon as we were alone I just blurted it out: ‘I need you to get your boss to get me a meeting with H.’ ‘What about?’ Liebowitz said. ‘I can’t tell you here,’ I said, and nodded towards the inner office door, ‘but it’s a matter of national security. Please.’ Then the secretary came back and I couldn’t say any more, but Liebowitz gave me his card and told me to call him the next time I was in the capital.

  “A few days later I had the Mount Carmel staff cover for me while I drove down to Austin. I called Liebowitz from a hotel and he agreed to come see me on his lunch hour. The deal was, I’d show him what I had, and if he agreed about the implications, he’d take my evidence to Baker and set up a meeting between me and H.

  “I told him everything. I was worried how he’d react to the stuff about the mirage, but I’d brought some artifacts with me, and they made enough of an impression that at least he didn’t dismiss me as a nut. And he was very interested in my documents about Curveball and the other operations the Quail Hunter had subverted. ‘You were right to come forward with this,’ he said finally. He told me his boss had suspected for some time that the Quail Hunter was up to no good, but until now there’d been no way to pin anything on him.

  “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 c
old 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.”