“Shall I quote you another psalm?” asked the jinn. “The twenty-third perhaps?”
Aziz paced the room, coming to his own decision. “Quote it to yourself,” he said finally, and headed for the door. But before he could escape, an armed party burst in.
“Hello, Mr. Aziz,” Amal said. “Doing a little frontline reporting?”
Mustafa and Captain Lawrence pushed past the terrified news publisher and ran over to the jinn. The iron bands that held him in the chair were secured with modern steel padlocks. Mustafa asked Aziz: “Do you have the keys for these?”
“What?” Tariq Aziz said. “Certainly not! I have nothing to do with this! Nothing at all!”
“We’ll have to smash them off,” Lawrence said.
“Don’t bother,” the jinn said. “There isn’t time.”
Outside, down the hallway, a voice bellowed in terror: “GOD IS GREAT! . . . GOD IS GREAT! . . . GOD IS GREAT!” There was a blood-curdling scream that cut off abruptly.
“Oh God, let me out of here!” Tariq Aziz cried. Ignoring the rifle Amal had pointed at him, he darted through the open doorway.
“Let him go,” Mustafa said, before Amal could chase after him. “Samir, shut and lock that door.”
The jinn flashed a mischievous smile at Captain Lawrence. “So. How are you enjoying your wish?”
“You already know the answer to that,” Lawrence said. “I’ve learned my lesson. I’m willing to take it back, if that’s what you’re offering.”
Mustafa, watching Samir bolt the door, spun around at this. “Wait just a minute,” he said.
“Yes,” Amal said. “Hold on.”
“Seriously, dude,” said Samir. “That’s what Osama bin Laden wants.”
“Maybe it’s what God wants, too,” Lawrence suggested. “Put things back the way they were. The way they’re naturally supposed to be.”
“Supposed to be?” Mustafa said. “And you say you’ve learned your lesson, have you?”
The jinn was laughing. “Arabia in a state of nature, untouched by the dreams of the West. Now that would be an alternate reality . . . Alas, I can’t oblige you. That doorway is shut and cannot be gone back through.”
“All right then,” Lawrence said. He placed the butt of his shotgun against one of the padlocks. “I’ll have you out of this in a minute . . .”
But the jinn shook his head. “I already told you. It’s too late.”
Sand flew through a gaping hole in the wall of a formal bedroom, dusting the corpses of Guardsmen whose flesh had been torn by rocket fragments. The bedding had been ripped by shrapnel as well, and the mattress ticking was on fire, though the sand had begun to smother the flames.
The lid of a large hardwood chest opposite the bed creaked open and Saddam Hussein peeped out. When he was sure he could hear no more incoming missiles, he shoved the lid up all the way and half crawled, half rolled out of the chest, the slipped disk in his back making him groan. He grabbed a rifle off one of the dead Guardsmen and used it as a crutch to get to his feet.
He limped into the hall, limped to the dining room where Qusay had been stationed. What Saddam saw, looking in through the shattered doorway, made him groan again.
He shook it off. The jinn, he thought. The jinn could fix this. The creature claimed to be a Muslim: Very well, he would throw himself on its mercy, say whatever it took to get it to protect him. Then later, once he was safe, he would find a way to bend it truly to his will, and undo this nightmare.
But first he had to get back to it. He continued along the hall, not just limping but lurching, and alert to every sound. Al Qaeda was definitely inside the house now—he could hear running, shouting, and sporadic gunfire as they encountered remnants of the Republican Guard—but it sounded as if they were still on the ground floor. It wouldn’t take them long to find their way upstairs, though, and he knew they would never stop searching until they found him.
He came to the gallery overlooking Nebuchadnezzar’s chamber. He heard movement below and tried to slip by unnoticed, but then a voice with a Gulf accent said, “I think it is the older son.” Saddam stepped to the balustrade and looked down. Two commandos stood next to a body on the chamber floor. One of them was shining a flashlight on the corpse’s face.
“Uday!” Saddam cried. The commandos looked up and he shot them both. The flashlight, now blood-spattered, rolled to a stop beside Uday’s head and continued to illuminate his features like some ghastly spotlight. “Uday,” Saddam said. “Wait there. Wait there. I will fix this . . .”
He turned to go to the prayer room and a rifle butt swung out of the shadows, catching him squarely in the face. He spun around, fell against the balustrade, and dropped his own gun over the rail. Another blow hit him in the lower back, fracturing vertebrae. Saddam fell to his knees, insensate with pain.
A rough hand gripped the top of his head and another grabbed the back of his collar. His attacker asked a question. “You,” Saddam hissed, disdain breaking through his agony as he recognized that voice. “You go to hell! You can’t have it—it’s mine! I am a king! A king, you understand? You’re not even a dog’s asshole!”
The grip on his collar tightened. As he was lifted up he tried to fight, but the blow to his spine had robbed him of his strength and he could only flail and curse. He tipped forward over the rail, the tightness at his throat and the drop below triggering an awful sense of déjà vu, and he began to cry out, affirming God’s greatness—a last desperate plea for salvation to which the answer was no.
Then the world turned upside down and he was falling. He landed with a great thud and a crack, and for a moment the whole house fell silent. Osama bin Laden leaned on the balustrade, looking down, the orange light gathered in his eyes making him appear like a demon.
A voice echoed from the hall beyond the gallery: “Oh God, let me out of here!” Bin Laden moved towards the voice, reaching the hall in time to see the narrowing wedge of torchlight as Samir swung the prayer room door closed. Bin Laden stood listening—to the door bolt sliding home, to Tariq Aziz’s receding footsteps, and to the soft whisper of his own intuition.
He slung his rifle and reached into his robe, pulling out a canvas satchel. He set the fuse as he was walking down the hall.
The jinn said to Samir: “You should come away from there.”
“Why?” Samir said. But he backed away from the door and stood with the others by the magic circle.
Captain Lawrence was hammering at the padlock, which stubbornly refused to break. Mustafa had gone behind the chair to examine the window shutters. “I wonder if we can climb down from here.”
“Don’t worry about it,” the jinn said.
An explosion blew the door apart. Hunks of splintered wood and metal came flying across the chamber and were met by a whirl of air that also extinguished most of the torches. When Mustafa regained his senses, he was slumped against the wall beside the window. Except for the ringing in his ears he wasn’t in any discomfort and didn’t seem to be wounded, but he couldn’t move.
Osama bin Laden came through the doorway cradling his AK-47. He spotted Amal lying facedown in the shadows, but the jinn said, “Leave her be, brother. I am the one you want.”
Bin Laden came forward and stood in the same spot Saddam Hussein had occupied not long before. He didn’t make a wish or say anything at all, just stared at the jinn with a mixture of curiosity and malice.
The jinn gazed back calmly into the face of death. “There are among us some that are righteous,” he said. “And some the contrary . . . Peace be unto you, brother.”
Bin Laden pulled the trigger. The jinn bled like a man, and he suffered like one, too—as the first bullets entered his body, he opened his mouth in a gasp and his arms and legs jerked helplessly against the bands that held them. Bin Laden continued firing until the gun’s clip was empty. By then the jinn’s limbs were still and his head lolled forward on his neck.