Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  “Can I ask you something, Picot?” Raszer said, quietly intense.

  Picot nodded stiffly.

  “Are you comfortable in your skin? Do you like the role you’re playing?”

  For just an instant, the question appeared to create a hairline fracture from the top of Picot’s skull to the toes of his tasseled slip-ons. Then he quickly reconstituted himself and offered the weakest of smiles.

  “Scotty,” Raszer said, locking his eyes on the boy. “I’m going to try and get you some help. In the meantime, tell these men the truth. Not the truth you’ve been taught recently but the truth your body remembers. Where is the Garden, Scotty? The girl I showed you yesterday . . . where do I find her?”

  Scotty’s reply was a non sequitur. “Do you think I’ll be home for Thanksgiving?” he asked, his expression revealing nothing.

  Waiting until he was sure the boy had no more to say, Raszer nodded. “I hope so,” he said. And Scotty was taken away, the echo of his leg irons making the long hallway sound like the hold of a slave ship. Bruised, railroaded, and mindfucked, Raszer thought, but not stupid. “Will I be home for Thanksgiving?” Scotty had said.

  For Turkey.

  Borges led Raszer into the big room Scotty and his federal guard had just exited. Seated at the far end of a conference table, their postures as stiff as if waiting for someone to say, “At ease,” were Scotty’s parents. His mother was as regally long-necked and sculpted as Raszer remembered her to be, but her eyes were rimmed with red, and the cavernous space made her small form seem doll-like. Even so, her tensile strength registered—a dancer is always a dancer. Scotty’s father was twice her size, but similarly bony. His eyeglasses were askew, and it looked like he’d last combed his long gray hair three times zones away. Raszer doubted either of them had slept since getting the call.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Darrell,” Borges said softly as they entered. “I’m sure you remember Stephan Raszer.”

  Scotty’s mother looked up. Her eyes briefly flashed anger, then softened to pleading. “How . . . ” she asked, “ . . . how could you have let him stay out there for so long?”

  “I wish I could answer that, Mrs. Darrell,” Raszer said. “All I can say is that I’m sorry it’s come to this, and that I’ll find the people who used your son this way. That wasn’t Scotty on the roof yesterday. And I’m convinced he’s innocent of the murder.”

  Scotty’s father sat forward slightly. “What are you saying, Mr. Raszer? That he’s been framed, or that we should prepare to mount an insanity defense?”

  “That he’s not in possession of his will, Mr. Darrell. Or his identity. He was acting as his game avatar. That’s what he’s been taught to do. And if this is what I think it is, your son is only one of many. Soon enough, others will begin showing up.”

  A muscle in Mrs. Darrell’s cheek twitched. Otherwise, she was stone still.

  “Look at it this way,” said Raszer. “When the Marines send a boy into Fallujah, they give him moral immunity. So he kills anything that moves. Is he insane? Not according to the Marines. But if he did the same thing in a high school cafeteria . . . ”

  “I see your point,” said Scotty’s father. “Situational insanity.”

  Raszer nodded. “Still, something in Scotty’s makeup drew him deeper into the game to begin with. If I knew what it was, I might have better luck drawing him out.”

  “Is it really all about this ridiculous game?” Mr. Darrell asked. “One day he’s quoting Thomas Aquinas, the next he’s practicing jihad? How can this—”

  Raszer pulled out a chair opposite Scotty’s mother. “The Gauntlet is a bunch of brainy college kids exploring the limits of free will. Trying to find out where God steps out of the burning bush to say, ‘Thou shalt not.’ But at the higher levels, where Scotty was playing, you’re in a moral limbo. You have to be pretty centered to resist the friendly stranger who offers you a ticket to heaven. How do you know you haven’t, in fact, won the game?”

  Mrs. Darrell nodded silently and folded her arms, suddenly chilled.

  “Ever since they started hauling in every potential shoe bomber in sight,” Raszer went on, “the shrinks who work for federal grant money have been gathering pages and pages of data on what makes a would-be ‘terrorist’ tick. A lot of it’s useless, but two things are consistent enough to look right.”

  “What are they?” Mr. Darrell asked.

  “Humiliation is one. A pattern of humiliation. Uusally it’s tribal, or racial, or colonial, but it can also be personal.”

  Mrs. Darrell seemed to falter briefly, then asked, “And the second thing, Mr. Raszer?”

  “What they call a predisposition to suicide,’” said Raszer. “In other words, these kids don’t have to be persuaded to die, because they’re soul-dead already. What keeps them hanging on, living with Mother or suffering the nagging wife, is that they don’t want to die for nothing. What they need is the opposite of a raison d’être. I had hoped to find out what your son’s was.”

  “His reason not to exist?” asked Mrs. Darrell. “What are you saying?”

  “Scotty tried killing himself when he was only thirteen,” said his father. “He wasn’t smart enough to know that a vial of his mother’s Xanax wouldn’t do the trick.”

  “I remember you telling me that,” said Raszer.

  “So,” Borges interjected, “you don’t buy the government’s line that the boy’s a convert to Islam, or the Islamist cause?”

  “No,” Raszer responded. “Maybe to an Islamic myth . . . or to some ideal of insurrection. But Scotty doesn’t strike me as the least bit dogma driven. I think he’s seen heaven and wants to go back. I know a few good psychiatristswho work with federal prisoners and can do expert-witness duty. If I can convince Special Agent Djapper that one of them might be able to get the information he’s after, we may have a chance.”

  “Who took him away?” asked Mrs. Darrell. “Who are these people?”

  “That’s what I intend to find out, Mrs. Darrell,” Raszer replied. “Because, as I said, Scotty isn’t their only victim. There’s a young woman—”

  “Well, if it helps,” said Scotty’s father, “we’re dropping that lawsuit. Whatever else happened, you found our son alive, and we’re grateful.”

  “That means a lot,” said Raszer. “More than you know.”

  Raszer gave his statement to the police with Agent Djapper in attendance. His description of the limo and its driver was good enough to yield an APB and a strikingly accurate computer composite of the man’s face. He bought Djapper coffee and waffles at the Original Pantry, a downtown greasy spoon so ordinary it was chic, and told him just enough about his travel plans to ensure that the FBI wouldn’t be far behind him. Then he headed home in his battered Avanti to set up his itinerary and mission protocol with Monica.

  In fact, he knew she’d be two steps ahead of him, and that was exactly where he wanted her to be.

  SIXTEEN

  “You’ve got an eleven-forty to Albuquerque,” Monica told him, “and a Jeep to get you to Taos. But I have no idea where you want to sleep.”

  “Any motor inn along the Paseo. I’m on the budget plan. Speaking of . . . did we get paid yet?”

  “I’ve sent a courier,” she replied. “Thank God for that Sam Brown guy. The other one—Leach—he seems a little slithery. Imagine that: a snake in the revival tent.”

  “I think he’s in trouble. I overheard something last night. Fragments—but I think he may have a history with one or more of the boys. It was Sam Brown reading him the riot act. I got an inkling that Katy Endicott might be tied up in it somehow.”

  “Yuck,” Monica said. “When are we gonna wise up and give the priesthood back to women?”

  “Not soon enough,” said Raszer. “Anyhow, let’s get down to business.”

  “Well, we’ll have the check in the bank before you leave, and the second payment invoiced, and now that the Darrells have dropped the lawsuit, we can tap your dwindling reserves. But you’re ri
ght—you are on a budget. How far off the map are you headed this time, and what sort of resources are you going to need? You’ve been even more cryptic than usual about your travel plans, Raszer.”

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t have my bearings yet. But let me tell you what I do have, and you tell me if it looks like a web any spider you know would spin.”

  Monica watched as he took a cigarette from the floppy front pocket of his cotton shirt: silver-gray, short-sleeved, open to the breastbone, nicely wrinkled. The kind she liked best on him. She liked him very much, in fact, but was careful not to let him take her affection for granted.

  “Pull down the map, would you?” he asked, and remained cantilevered against her desk as she stood and smoothed her skirt, as was her habit. His eyes went distant as she pulled a classroom-size political map of the world down over the scheduling board that spanned most of the office’s north wall, but he missed neither her practiced movement nor the fit of the knit fabric against her backside. The truth was that he considered her essential. The truth was that he often heard himself speaking from her lips. Raszer thought that knowing another human being that well was possibly the sexiest thing on earth, especially when sex wasn’t part of the package.

  Odds and ends from his last assignment remained in place on the map’s dry-erase, magnetic surface: Scotty Darrell’s coordinates, as well as those of a handful of other advanced Gauntlet players whose paths of pilgrimage he’d managed to get from the GamesMasters before their disappearance. Many of the players had left the North American continent. Some had gone south, into the Latin countries. Others had inevitably tracked west to the great deserts of the Southwest, the American Canaan. But a number of currents seemed to converge on the ancient nexus: on ports like Alexandria, Haifa, Tripoli, Tarsus, and farther inland, even to the frontiers of that black farce of a war that had filled the rivers of Babylon with enough blood to ensure a bad harvest for six generations.

  To Iraq, where Johnny Horn and Henry Lee had gotten their call.

  “Do you want me to clear it?” Monica asked.

  “No. Leave everything for now.” Raszer leaned forward, intent on the crisscrossing trajectories. “So here’s what we’ve got so far, working backwards from today: We’ve got an American college boy with a remapped mind in federal custody for an alleged act of terrorism committed while wearing the garb of an eleventh-century radical Shiite cult, which operated from bases in Syria and Persia and murdered its political enemies with Syrian daggers at close range. He claims to have been in the service of someone he calls the Old Man, and the feds—at least this guy from counterterrorism—seem to know who he’s talking about.”

  “He just happens to be the same boy I tracked down the rabbit hole of an alternate reality game based in the thesis that absolutely everything is open to question except the existence of God. And now he’s implicated in both the murder of the British DJ who MC’d the rave from which Katy Endicott was abducted and at which Katy’s boyfriends, Johnny Horn and Henry Lee, were killed, and the attempted kidnapping of Layla Faj-Ta’wil—a Syrian woman and onetime consort of same Johnny Horn—who was hiding out with the DJ and may have a history with our killers as some kind of sexual terrorist—”

  “Or at least, that was your firsthand assessment of her skills,” Monica teased, taking shorthand with her right and moving magnetic game pieces with her left.

  “Not just mine,” said Raszer. “Harry Wolfe, aka MC Hakim, deceased, affirmed it, and Layla herself alluded to sexual espionage. That’s how she got involved with Johnny. I think it’s possible she never left the payroll.”

  “Whose payroll, exactly?”

  “That’s what we need to know. If I’m anywhere close, there’s quite a history.”

  “So give me a lesson, Professor.”

  He got up to join her at the map. “The MO in Harry Wolfe’s death is straight out of eleventhand twelfth-century accounts of the Nizari branch of the Ismailis, otherwise known as the Assassins. Its founding father was Hassan-i-Sabbah, the original Old Man, a brilliant theoretician and strategist, and a kind of holy anarchist. ‘Nothing is true; everything is permitted’ were purportedly his dying words, the same words Henry Lee scrawled on the walls of the Kingdom Hall.”

  “Selective murder for the purpose of terror was his strategy—maximum impact for minimal effort. And he didn’t necessarily have to take out the king. A second fiddle did just fine with far less risk. If our group has modeled itself on the Assassins—if something with the reach and resources of a multinational but some kind of quasireligious, maybe even anarchoreligious, agenda is recruiting smart but malleable kids and persuading them they’re in God’s hands—think of the trouble they could make. Especially if their operatives think they’re in virtual reality with a license to kill.”

  “What kind of ‘persuasion’ would that take, Raszer? You’ve told me yourself you don’t really believe in brainwashing.”

  “I don’t,” he said. “I agree with Goedel that the mind isn’t ultimately program-mable. But I do believe it can be led through a series of deceptions to conclude that it’s found a new truth on its own, even if that truth is that there is no truth. Zen masters use trickery, too, but for good purpose: to get your consciousness unstuck. The original Hassan may have done the same to prevent Islam from becoming rigid. Legend was that he’d built a garden so much like Eden that his hashish-drugged acolytes would wake up there convinced they’d drunk the nectar of heaven and died to the flesh. After that, getting them to do suicide missions wasn’t difficult. Think of that power in the hands of a criminal syndicate. What if someone has rebuilt Hassan’s garden?”

  “Go back,” she said. “Go back to Layla and Katy and the trade, and why Johnny,

  Henry, and Harry Wolfe had to die. Tell me why they were a threat, and then tell me if we have anything you can drop in an evidence bag.”

  “I will,” he said, “but first stick one of those red pieces on Turkey.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But why?”

  “Because when I saw Scotty this morning, I asked him where the Garden was, where he’d seen Katy Endicott. You know what he said?”

  “What?”

  “He asked me if he’d be home for Thanksgiving.”

  “And . . . ”

  Raszer aimed a finger at Turkey. “That was his answer. I’m going to assume he gave me credit for being able to take a hint.”

  “It’s a stretch, Raszer,” she said, but moved the marker there anyway.

  “Not really,” said Raszer. “Not if you’d seen what I saw in his eyes. And besides, it sort of adds up.”

  “What adds up, Raszer? Bring me in. You’ve been out doing, uh, fieldwork while I’ve been stuck here researching eunuchs. What have you got?”

  “For starters, I’ve got an eleventh-century Syrian coin from the scene of Katy’s abduction. Hold on a sec.” Raszer strode out of the office; when he returned, he pressed the coin into her palm. “That was worn around somebody’s neck, probably yanked off during the struggle. It stopped a bullet. Could it have been Johnny’s or Henry’s? Doubtful. The year of its mint matches the peak of the Nizari sect’s power. It likely belonged to one of the killers. By the way, see if we can find out whose face that is on the head. A local goddess, I’m guessing.”

  “Okay. You’ve got a Syrian coin, Syrian daggers, and a Syrian woman, all of which you connect to these medieval Assassins, but how does that get you to Turkey?”

  “All right,” he said, and approached the map slowly. “I’ll give you a link: opium.” He stroked the sandpaper stubble on his chin. “Actually, I just made that up, but there may be something to it. The nexus of deep politics has always been dope, sex, and economic power.

  “Wherever this group is operating, it has to be in a corridor that sees traffic in illegal commodities and unorthodox ideas. Turkey borders Syria, Iran, and Iraq in the southeast. Those borderlands were Assassin turf back in the day, and this mountainous sector, running from the easternmost p
rong of Syria, skirting across the top of Iraq and straight into Iran, has always been ungovernable, a no-go zone that’s now a hornet’s nest, thanks to the mess we made of the Kurdish problem. It’s what the Balkans were to World War I, and it may yet be Armageddon.

  “Now, from what we know of their MO, this group looks to be nominally Shiite, but the Syrian Alawites are too shrewd to give them sanctuary; same for the Iranians and the Kurdish tribal leaders in northern Iraq. No one would embrace them openly. Where would they set up shop? Unlike Syria, Iran, and Iraq, Turkey isn’t in a state of war with the U.S.—not yet, at least. Trade—trade in opium, arms, and people—is wide open. Eastern Turkey is on the Silk Road for human trafficking. It’s the Wild West without Wyatt Earp.”