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 to 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.