Haidar himself roamed freely, using radio, eye, and instinct to try to keep tabs on the whole show at once. As his mother stood onstage talking about The Moment, he stopped at one of the police checkpoints to get a head count on the crowd. Turnout was low, around two thousand people in a space that could hold five times that number. Not that it mattered for PR purposes: The estimate released to the press would be inflated to suggest a capacity crowd, and the cameras were all down front near the VIP seating, which was full.
Senator Al Maysani finished her remarks and turned the podium over to the governor, Nouri al Maliki. Haidar walked the northern perimeter, scanning the park. Mist-spraying machines had been set up at various points to keep the crowd cool and to add a none-too-subtle rainbow effect to the proceedings, but they also interfered with the sight lines. As Haidar maneuvered to get clearer views, his suit went from dry to damp and back again.
Al Maliki was followed at the podium by the man who also hoped to succeed him as governor: Muqtada al Sadr. Haidar, now standing among the Guardian Angels, made a quick radio call to the men he had monitoring the Badrs. “It’s OK,” came the reply. “We’ve got a few people here who look like they just bit down on lemons, but nobody’s acting up.”
“No problems by the stage, either,” added a second voice.
“The Anbaris are starting to grumble,” said a third voice. “I hope we’ve got some Sunnis on the speakers’ list.”
“Don’t worry,” said Haidar. “The mayor of Ramadi is up next.” He kept moving.
The rally was approaching the fifty-minute mark, and a few bored spectators were beginning to drift towards the exits, when the only Christian scheduled to speak got up to use the microphone. The Patriarch of Babylon was an old man from Kurdistan. Like a number of the speakers before him, he seemed a bit off-balance at first, unsettled perhaps by the still-shocking emptiness above the plaza to the north. But he gripped the sides of the podium and steadied himself, and looked down at the crowd, and smiled.
“Good afternoon,” he began. “I would like to say a few words about peace.”
Haidar was over in Badr territory, hunting the source of a strange noise—a metallic bang, possibly a door slam—that he’d heard just a moment before. The murmur that went through the crowd at the Patriarch’s first words caused him to look up at the stage. As he was turning away again, he caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye: a figure, stepping out from the side of the post office. By the time Haidar turned all the way around the figure had vanished behind a spray of mist, leaving a jumble of impressions: White shirt. Dark vest. Pale skin. Straw-colored hair.
“ ‘Christianity is a religion of peace,’ ” said the Patriarch. “We’ve all heard that sentiment many times over the past few years, voiced by well-meaning apologists. I’m sure to many Muslims it must seem an absurd, even an offensive, statement. And nowhere more so than here, in Baghdad, at Ground Zero of the War on Terror.” He raised an arm, waved a hand at the empty space where towers should be standing. “Christians, peaceful. How ridiculous!”
Haidar had found what he was looking for. Set into the ground, in a recess along the post office wall, was a hinged metal grate. It should have been padlocked, but the lock was missing, and the front edge of the grate stuck up from its sill, having failed to close properly. “Code yellow, code yellow,” Haidar said into his radio. “We have a security breach along the east perimeter.”
“How ridiculous,” the Patriarch repeated. “And you know, it is ridiculous, if by ‘religion’ we refer to the practitioners of faith. Congregations are not made up of abstractions like peace. They are made up of human beings. Go into any church in the land, any synagogue, yes, any mosque, and that is what you will find: human beings. A few saints, perhaps”—the Patriarch shrugged a shoulder—“and perhaps also one or two demons, hiding their wickedness behind a mask of piety. But the great majority, the body of the faithful, neither angels nor devils, but ordinary sinners: men and women trying to make their way in the world with God’s help and forgiveness . . .”
“Suleiman, kill the waterworks,” Haidar said, and after a brief hesitation the misters shut off. As the rainbows dissipated, Haidar breasted forward through the crowd, searching for a white man in a dark vest. He stopped to do a three-sixty and spotted something else, something extraordinary: Another man, an Arab in a white desert tunic, who appeared to be floating in midair. The black-and-white keffiyeh around the man’s neck fluttered madly in a breeze Haidar couldn’t feel, and his eyes were filled with blue fire.
Then Haidar blinked and saw more clearly. The man wasn’t levitating; he was perched atop a concrete planter box, bright marigolds clustered around his sandaled feet. His eyes, reflecting the afternoon sunlight, were focused on something in the crowd. Haidar followed the direction of the man’s gaze and saw Joe Simeon, headed towards the stage.
“When we speak of a religion of peace, we refer not to Christendom as it is, but as we would like it to be, as we aspire and strive, daily, to make it—a struggle that is not different from the daily struggle of the Muslims. And if we often fail in that struggle, it’s not because we worship a different or a lesser God; it’s because we are, like you, only human.”
Haidar spoke urgently into his radio. He glanced at the man in the white tunic again and saw he was no longer staring; he’d closed his eyes and bowed his head, and his lips were moving as if in prayer. Feeling a sudden chill, Haidar turned back to Joe Simeon, who had almost reached the edge of the VIP area. As Simeon twisted sideways to slip between two other men, Haidar glimpsed his torso in profile and in a flash of intuition realized what was concealed beneath his vest and shirt.
“Oh God,” Haidar said. “Code black! Code black!”
“And so in the name of the Merciful Creator of the Jews and the Christians and the Muslims, I offer you this hope, this wish: Peace be un—”
The Patriarch’s blessing was interrupted by a sudden scramble of security personnel on the stage. At the same moment one of Haidar’s men tried to grab Joe Simeon. Simeon turned, almost casually, and stabbed the man in the chest with a knife taken from his hotel room. Someone else screamed and the crowd began surging backwards in a panic, trapping the other security guards who were trying to rush forward. Joe Simeon took a few more steps towards the stage, uttering his own benediction. Then he set off the bomb.
The flash that followed dazzled every eye that looked at it and blinded all the cameras, too. No one could say, afterwards, exactly what had happened. But there was no thunderous blast, no shock wave—and, once the light had faded, no scene of carnage. The stage, and the crowd, remained intact, and what should have been a locus of death and destruction had instead become, through some conjuror’s trick, a whirring mass of life.
Birds. A flock of birds, arranged around the would-be suicide bomber like points on a globe, and each one holding, in its claws, a single shining nail.
As one they dropped their burdens. The ring of the nails falling harmlessly to the pavement could be heard throughout the park in that moment’s hush. Then the birds flew up screaming. They weren’t doves. They were ravens, carrion-eaters of the desert, and they were angry, for here today in Baghdad, against all expectations, there was nothing for them—even the man Joe Simeon had stabbed was struggling to his feet, hand pressed to a bleeding gash above his breastbone that was painful but not fatal.
Joe Simeon, his vest and shirt hanging in tatters, stared into the sky, his expression of rapture changing to puzzlement as he realized he too was still among the living. “Jesus?” he said. The ravens ignored him and flew higher. “Wait!” he cried, raising both hands as if to claw his way to heaven. But gravity buckled his knees, and then men with earpieces were tackling him from all sides.