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initiate nor control.”
    Sitting across the desk listening to the Imam, David’s body vibrated as though a low-voltage current coursed through his muscles. He clasped his hands together so the Imam would not see them tremble.
    “Your father has witnessed this prescience firsthand. In a dream, I saw him leaving Lebanon and taking his family to America. The day after, your father called me for advice. He had received an offer from a Christian group that sponsored families, moving them from war-ravaged territories and giving them haven in Ohio. I told your father of the dream, and he followed the path Allah showed me.” When the Imam finished speaking, his eyes were closed, and he became still.
    In the silence, David heard the distant sounds of traffic—the world without. He waited, and when Ali opened his eyes again he smiled at David, as if he had just noticed him in the room.
    “Now you have come to me and yesterday, on the eve of your Hajj, I dreamed of you. In my dream, you were a warrior for Islam wielding a powerful weapon for Allah. I called your father and asked his advice. As always, he was wise beyond his years.”
    David thought his heart would burst with pride. This holy man had taken advice from David’s baba .
    “After your Hajj, I wish you to return to the mosque to meet another Imam.”
    ”If my father counsels this, I do it gladly. Who is this man, and why should we meet?”
    “This prescience is a vague thing, Dawud, a series of feelings, nuances, and hints shrouded in mist. I believe, at Mecca, you will find the knowledge you seek.”
    David walked back through the dark prayer-space guided by the light shining under the door of the conference room. He lay on his sleeping mat and pulled up his single cover. Unlike the previous night, the day’s worries did not churn in his mind. He did not dwell on the Imam’s words, nor think of the harlot on the plane. He had no fears. No qualms. He fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
    Tonight, he was in Allah’s hands.
     

 
    Chapter 5
     
    Fifteen men wrapped in white sheets and wearing open-toed sandals climbing aboard a bus at five in the morning would look strange in most parts of the world, but not Saudi Arabia. In Jeddah, they didn’t warrant a second glance.
    Each selected an empty double seat. With so few clothes on, David felt uncomfortable sitting close to another man. He wondered was it the same for the others, or had they turned inward to focus on the experience to come.
    The roads were choked with vehicles. The one-hour drive to Mecca became a five-hour crawl. The bus dropped them at a dusty parking lot.
    Thousands of pilgrims leaked like white liquid between the buses and flowed toward a distant grouping of tall, elegant spires. The outline of Mecca’s buildings was familiar to David; a picture of Masjid Al Haram, the largest mosque in the world, hung on his office wall in Arizona. Covering 360,000 square meters, the equivalent of sixty-six contiguous football fields, this holiest of all mosques housed the Ka’ba. The place that billions of Muslims faced each day as they prayed.
    David turned his back on the bus and walked with his fellow pilgrims. Once they cleared the chaos of the parking lot, they joined a human line of cloth and prayer that stretched for two miles to the outer walls of the mosque. David glanced around. Already there was no trace of the men he’d traveled with. They, and he, were one, blended into the white pilgrim trail.
    As he walked, he began to recite the prayers that had filled his mind since he woke. Imam Ali had said: “A haji speaks his prayers to Allah not in a quiet murmur, but as he would to a friend who takes tea with him.”
    “ Bism Allah, Allahu Akba (In the name of God, God is Great) . . . Allahu Akbar , Allahu Akbar (God is Great, God is Great) . . . wa lil Lahi Alhamd (and praise be to God).”
    Like spokes of a great wheel, his line and dozens more crept toward the principal mass of pilgrims, tens