Farook had harbored carnage fantasies for years. He already had the weapons. Now, in Malik, he had a willing partner. Illustration by Matt Chase; Source: FBI / Getty (portraits); Justin Sullivan / Getty (building, trees)

Jennifer Thalasinos lay motionless across the altar steps, her head and upper body covered by a white prayer shawl. Around her, the Shiloh Messianic congregation, eighty or ninety strong, sang and prayed. Worshippers turned toward Jerusalem, their arms raised. The pastor, Bruce Dowell, strummed a guitar and, in a warm baritone, sang, “These are the final days.” The shawl that covered Thalasinos had belonged to her husband, Nicholas. He and thirteen others were killed by gunfire in the December 2nd attack on a county workers’ holiday party in San Bernardino, California.

Nicholas Thalasinos was fifty-two. He was a restaurant inspector who, according to his widow, loved Godzilla—he once took his two sons to a Godzilla convention in Chicago. Raised in New Jersey, Thalasinos had been a county health inspector in Cape May, and a member of a Greek Orthodox church in North Wildwood, before moving to California in 2002. He and Jennifer, who teaches second grade, liked to watch the Food Network, particularly cooking-competition shows. A few years ago, they joined Shiloh Messianic. Its members study both the Torah and the Bible, with the aim of uniting Judaism and Christianity. They take their inspiration from Paul, in Ephesians: “Joining Jew and Gentile together as One New Man.” Nicholas became a deacon. At his office, he was known for his red suspenders, bright button-down shirts, and fedora. He liked to think of himself, Jennifer told me, as “the gentleman inspector.”

“Keep Torah, and you will succeed in all that you do,” Pastor Dowell intoned. Jennifer Thalasinos had returned to a front-row seat. She still had the prayer shawl over her head and shoulders. All the women wore head scarves of some kind. The building wasn’t actually a church but a rented space in Calimesa, a small city in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains, seventy miles east of Los Angeles. Just across a frontage road, Interstate 10 rumbled with Saturday-morning traffic. It had been exactly a month since the attack. “We will be reunited,” the pastor promised from the stage.

But the service, a Shabbat, was more rocking and joyous than condolatory. A drummer and two electric guitarists drove most of the songs, with lyrics projected high above the altar, while women danced, holding hands in a circle. Men prostrated themselves on the floor. This was charismatic worship, and there were meet-your-neighbor intervals where big men embraced me and women touched my face, looked into my eyes, and asked me what I was searching for. A sweet-smelling grandmother asked where I was from, laughed when I told her New York, and said that she was a “Jewish American princess” from Long Island. There was an abundance of praise of Yeshua, and much passionate, less than fluent Hebrew.

“It’s like a marriage, like husband and wife,” Pastor Dowell had told me. “Nicholas fit right in. He had just discovered, or concluded, that he was Jewish. He was growing in the Lord, growing in his spiritual walk. He became an important servant in the congregation. He was thrilled to be here. Everybody knew where Nick went to church. He had come home.”

Dowell’s sermon was relaxed and funny, at his own expense, but also apocalyptic. “Today is very much a warfare message,” he said. “We’re preparing for battle. Prepare for whatever the enemy may throw at you this year.” He gave practical advice. “Don’t get tattoos—your body is a temple, not a scratch pad.” For some of his members, the advice was too late. But Dowell’s main theme was strife and reckoning. “There are two bloodlines running through the world,” he said. “So there’s going to be a fight. Where we’re going, the apostasy is going to be great. Do you believe in the Last Days?”

“Yes!”

“Then the apostasy is going to be great.” Dowell spoke about “the battlefield of Armageddon, where the blood is going to run as deep as the horse’s bridle.”

After the service, I sat with Jennifer Thalasinos. She is soft-spoken, pale-skinned, forty-one. She wore large-framed glasses. Her eyes are green. She and Nicholas had been married nine years. It was his second marriage. He had been an extraordinarily gentle man, she said, and a serious student of the Bible. “I have his iPad,” she said. “He took an incredible number of notes, literally thousands, all Biblical.” The couple had renewed their marriage vows last winter. Nicholas had been in a rush to do so. “He said he felt like something dark would happen. He was preparing for Armageddon, or whatever was coming.” She added, “We’re preppers, from even before he was saved.”

After joining Shiloh, Nicholas, who described himself as a Messianic Jew, wore tzitzit, the knotted tassels sometimes worn by observant Jews, and a Star of David tie pin. He had been confronted once by an anti-Semite in a parking lot. “Nick was very outspoken about his faith,” Jennifer said. “But we agreed we were going to stay strong. I wear my Star of David all the time, and it has the Cross in it, which makes it even more controversial.” Jennifer had belonged to an evangelical megachurch in Colton, her home town, which borders San Bernardino to the south, before she and Nick began worshipping at Shiloh Messianic. “We just found out, through ancestry.com, that we’re both part-Jewish,” she said.

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Jennifer believes that her husband was one of the principal targets of the December 2nd attack. He had been particularly outspoken—vitriolic, really—about his beliefs on Facebook and Twitter, and he had been arguing about religion in the preceding weeks at his office with another county health inspector, Syed Rizwan Farook. In an irony too grotesque to unpack, Thalasinos had refused to agree with Farook, a devout Muslim, when Farook insisted that Islam is a religion of peace. Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, were, of course, the two attackers. Jennifer did not know for certain that their rifle fire was concentrated on her husband. No forensic report has been released, and she chose not to go to a debriefing held by the F.B.I. for the families of the fourteen dead. “A woman who was wounded contacted me, and she told me that my husband, who was already mortally wounded, told her to get under the table,” Jennifer said. “She thinks that he saved her life. That was all I needed to know.” Nicholas had spoken to her about Farook, Jennifer said, but he hadn’t seemed wary of him. “I knew Nick and Syed talked. I knew Nick tried to bring him to Christ several times.”

Why did the attack happen? Farook and Malik did not make a martyr video or leave a manifesto. They didn’t wear suicide vests or scream “Allahu akbar” when they opened fire. Malik did post to Facebook a short, garbled, last-minute shout-out to the leader of the Islamic State. But their families, neighbors, former classmates—and, in Farook’s case, colleagues and fellow-worshippers—expressed only astonishment after the attack. There had been no displays of anger, no indication. Only growing piety.

Farook, born in Chicago to Pakistani immigrants, grew up in the sprawling, sunny suburbs of Riverside, just southwest of San Bernardino. Malik, born in Pakistan, had been raised largely in Saudi Arabia, where her father was an engineer. She earned a degree in pharmacology in Pakistan in 2012, met Farook on a matrimonial Web site called BestMuslim.com, married him, and moved to the United States in 2014. A daughter was born in May, 2015. He was twenty-eight and she twenty-nine when they died in a storm of police gunfire after a car chase.