“And what was it really?” Mustafa asked.
But Koresh only shook his head. “By the time we were down to three weeks, it had gotten so bad nobody could sleep anymore, which is a problem if you’re trying to study dreams. Of course we had plenty of conventional sedatives on hand, but I decided to call psychopharmacology at Crawford and see if they’d cooked up anything new since the last time we’d done drug trials. They sent over a variety pack of experimental hypnotics. The first one we pulled out of the box was Elefaridol tartrate, a non-benzo sleep aid with some very interesting side effects. It turned out to be the breakthrough we’d been praying for.”
“Why?” said Mustafa. “What did it do?”
Koresh stood up. “This part’s easier if I show you.”
They entered the basement through a room containing several large portable generators. The noise of the machines’ operation, reflected off bare cinderblock walls, was deafening, but at least it was warmer than Koresh’s office.
One generator had stalled. Terry Nichols, now wearing a tool belt, had detached the generator’s exhaust hose and was examining it. The faint haze of diesel smoke in the air seemed to alarm David Koresh, who went over and shouted something in Nichols’s ear. Nichols responded with a gesture that might have meant, “Don’t worry, I’ve got this,” or possibly, “Nothing you can say will make me more miserable than I already am.”
The new sleep lab was in another, quieter, part of the basement. There were no bed frames yet, just a score of mattresses, arranged in two rows of ten along the room’s longer walls. Each sleeping figure was attached by a web of electrodes to a battered EEG, and blankets had been drawn up over them, though these seemed more ceremonial than practical; the bodies, flushed and feverish, were throwing off more waste heat than the generators had.
Mustafa scanned the sleeping faces. They were of various races and ranged in age from early teens to late middle age, but they were all women. “Division of labor,” David Koresh said, when Mustafa asked about this. “I don’t know if it’s body chemistry or the predilections of the Holy Spirit, but we get more consistent results with female subjects.” He smiled. “Aren’t they beautiful?”
Like a harem in a mad scientist’s bomb shelter, Mustafa thought. “What is it they do, exactly?”
“I’ll show you.” Koresh went over to the room’s only other waking occupant, a man in a long-sleeved cardigan who was leafing through a Scofield Reference Bible. “Hey, Steve,” Koresh said. “Anyone close?”
Steve nodded towards a young woman whose red hair had spread in a fan on her pillow. “Lily’s thetas and gammas have been spiking for a while.”
Koresh sat down on the edge of the mattress and lifted the woman’s right hand from the blanket. “What have you got for me, darling?” he said, in an exaggerated drawl. He bent his head, pressed his lips against her knuckles, and then reached up to brush his thumb beneath the electrodes on her forehead.
The woman’s eyes flicked open. Mustafa, already discomfited by Koresh’s display of intimacy, took a half-step backwards. Then the woman started speaking Arabic and Mustafa’s arms broke out in gooseflesh again.
“Give me those two in the back,” she said, in a deep, masculine voice with the accent of a native Iraqi. A pause. Then: “No, no! That one there, on the left! Yes . . . Yes, that’s what I want!”
A woman on one of the other mattresses made a sharp clicking sound. Mustafa startled. Then another woman let out a honk, almost like a car horn. That seemed to get them all going, making clicks, rustling noises, whispers, shouts. The individual utterances seemed arbitrary and meaningless, but as they bounced off the walls and melded together, they began to paint a picture in sound, familiar-seeming background noise.
The red-haired woman went on speaking. “What’s she saying?” David Koresh asked. “Do you know?”
“She is haggling,” Mustafa said. “Bargaining over the price of something . . .” Then he realized what the background noise was: a souk. An open-air market, possibly in Baghdad.
The red-haired woman was sitting up. The EEG wiring stretched behind her and the blanket slid to her lap. She plucked her hand from Koresh’s grip and began to reach forward, focused on something that only she could see. She extended her arm slowly, as if reaching through a curtain or into a stream. Her hand rotated, palm upward, and her thumb and forefingers came together, grasping nothing.
Grasping something. A flicker, a flicker, and then a limp violet rectangle appeared between her fingers. A scarf, Mustafa thought at first. But it was too small for that, and it was made of paper. A banknote.
“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.”