The personal history ended in 2002, but attached to the file folder was a memorandum on United States Army stationery dated July 9, 2003. Written by a Captain Edward Lawrence, the memo requested that Mustafa al Baghdadi be cleared for work as a field translator, citing his strong language skills and “obvious anti-Baathist sentiment.” The memo said nothing about treasure-hunting in the desert, but given the proximity of Al Hillah to Baghdad, it wasn’t hard to imagine a scenario where Captain Lawrence and his translator, grown restless perhaps after several years of nation-building, decided to go off-mission. Mustafa also suspected—Koresh had hinted as much—that if he kept this artifact near him, he might start to remember details. He wondered if he really wanted to.
The section of the file marked FAMILY listed only one spouse, Fadwa bint Harith. Mustafa wasn’t surprised by this—he sensed that Saddam’s Iraq didn’t have many Internet IPOs, so an honest cop probably couldn’t afford more than one wife. What he didn’t know was whether that would have made him a kinder and more devoted husband, or a more bitter one. He wished he could believe it was the former.
The reading packet also contained a Mukhabarat file for Samir Nadim, another Baghdad cop who worked in the same precinct as Mustafa. Samir’s police career had been less rocky than Mustafa’s, though it appeared their friendship had gotten him into trouble on more than one occasion.
Like Mustafa, he’d had a second career, but not with the U.S. Army. From 1997 through 2002, Samir had been an informant for the Mudiriyat al Amn al Amma—the General Security Service, which, as best Mustafa could tell, was another arm of Saddam’s secret police force that ranked somewhere below the Mukhabarat but still well above the ordinary street cops.
Samir had not volunteered to be a spy. A report included in the file explained what had happened: After an unnamed source had accused him of meeting in secret with “subversive elements,” Samir had been placed under surveillance and followed on several late-night excursions to see whether the subversives in question were Kurds, Turks, Iranians, or dissident Iraqi Shia.
The answer, as the accompanying photographs showed all too clearly, was none of the above. The report concluded there was no treason here, but recommended that Samir and his fellow “subversives” be conscripted into the Amn’s informant network. “To avoid public exposure of their vice, we expect they will be most obedient.”
We expect they will be most obedient . . . Mustafa looked across the seatbacks to where Samir was once again tossing and turning in his sleep. He considered waking him, asking what his nightmare was about, asking some other questions too. Then he took another look at the photographs and decided that midair over the Atlantic wasn’t the right place to broach this subject.
The last, and lengthiest, of the items in the packet was an August 2001 report by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Bin Laden Issue Station titled METHODS AND GOALS OF AL QAEDA. David Koresh had affixed a Post-it note to the cover reading, “Not my CIA! . . . But a wicked prince in one world is a wicked prince in all worlds.” Mustafa turned to the first page and began to make some notes of his own.
At the Azores refueling stop, the harshly lit tarmac had the bleak look of a gas station after midnight. No one got on or off the plane. Mustafa used the lavatory in the passenger cabin, then went back to the cargo bay to check on how the interrogation was coming. He stayed out of sight at the top of the stairs and listened to the high whining voice of Donald Rumsfeld. The man’s accent was almost impenetrable; the only phrase Mustafa could make out was “majahil marufah”—“known unknowns”—which made no sense to him. But then Amal asked a follow-up question, her confident tone making it clear that she understood. Sensing he could only cause trouble by interrupting, Mustafa returned to his seat.
As the cargolifter taxied back onto the runway, he opened his wallet and took out the 250-dinar note. He studied Saddam’s smiling face and saw, in his mind’s eye, a stoppered brass bottle.
Known unknowns, Mustafa thought.
The sun reappeared as the cargolifter approached the North African coast. Mustafa was dozing, but the pink light reflecting off the seatback in front of him invaded his sleep.
In the dream, he was crossing the Sahara on foot. He had traveled a long way over a sea of sand dunes, but now the sea ended, giving way to a rocky plain that was pockmarked with blast craters. He knew without being told that this was Site Yarbu, the testing ground where the first atom bomb had been detonated, and where the military had continued setting off larger and more powerful devices throughout the 1950s and ’60s. Located in a remote part of southern Algeria, Yarbu was named for the hopping desert rodents that were, according to the government propaganda of the day, the only living things endangered by the bomb tests. Of course that hadn’t been true: Berber nomads occupied the fallout zone as well, as did a number of former French soldiers who’d remained in the Maghreb after the war. Comedians sometimes joked about this latter group, the gerboises françaises, Legionnaires who glowed in the dark.
Mustafa walked to the lip of one of the blast craters and looked down into it. It was surprisingly deep, so deep that its bottom was hidden in shadow. He wondered what kept it from filling up with sand, and in answer a wind devil started on the crater’s far rim, vacuuming up loose grit as it moved. In the waking world, the cargolifter banked to change course and Mustafa’s lolling head turned away from the window; in the dream, the wind devil circled the crater, gaining size and substance until it blotted out the sun.
Then Mustafa was walking again, through a haze of blowing sand. All about him was formlessness and void, but soon enough the sand began to condense into the trunks and crowns of eucalypti. He passed a sign: REALITY REORGANIZATION TEST PLOT #99.
In a clearing beyond the trees lay a hybrid shrine, an amalgam of Cairo’s Nasser Memorial and one of the monuments Mustafa had visited on his tour of the Green Zone. Shallow steps mounted to a platform on which burned a guttering Flame of Unity. Behind this, a half-circle of fluted marble columns supported a curved slab chiseled with the words I TREMBLE FOR MY COUNTRY WHEN I REFLECT THAT GOD IS JUST.
Another wind devil started, seizing hold of the Unity Flame and drawing it up into a twisting pillar of blue smokeless fire. Then the fire vanished, and in its place stood a figure in a white tunic whom Mustafa recognized from another dream.
“Hello again,” the jinn greeted him. “Have you sorted out your time zones yet?”
Mustafa held up the photo of the dig site. “Al Hillah,” he said. “I found your bottle.”
“Not mine,” said the jinn. “It belonged to a prince of Babylon. So did I, for a time.”
Mustafa heard a hiss of windblown sand and turned to find the eucalyptus forest transformed into a mighty metropolis, its skyline dominated by twin towers. New York, Mustafa thought, but already a second transformation had begun, changes cascading through the cityscape, turning it into Baghdad. And even though he watched it happen, once the transformation was complete and the Tigris and Euphrates towers were standing there so familiar, it was hard to imagine the scene had ever been different.
“Did I do this?” Mustafa said. “Was this my wish?”
The jinn seemed to ponder the question. “To remake the whole world would be an act of extraordinary pride. Does that sound like you?”