Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  Monica blinked. “Did you just ad-lib that whole thing, Raszer?”

  “I’ve been kicking it around a little,” he replied.

  “I’d hate to see them cut out your tongue. It does such nice work.”

  “And there’s another missing piece of the puzzle: Henry Lee’s testicles. I’m hoping Ruthie Endicott can help me there, if Henry had something to say about it in all those emails he sent her. Castration ties in with a number of our other threads. The old cult of the Phrygian mother goddess, Cybele, with its eunuch-priests; Turkey, again; and the black rocks that were found in Henry Lee’s collection, with the same mineral makeup as the baitylos—Cybele’s sacred meteorite.

  “Can we get those from pagan Turkey to Islamic Iraq, where Johnny and Henry made their connection? Sure, because Cybele is also Kuba, which relates to Ka’ba and another black meteorite—the Ka’ba Stone, the Al-Hajar—the one pilgrims on the hajj kiss on their circuits around the shrine. In pre-Islamic times, the Ka’ba was consecrated to the unsas, the Daughters of God of the Satanic verses, who had origins in Sumeria . . . which is Iraq, where the first accounts of ritual castration are found.”

  “It’s always a big loop, isn’t it, Raszer? Always spokes on the same wheel.”

  “And there’s always a woman at the center of it,” he said.

  “In this case,” she picked up, “a ball buster. We’ve got a Jehovah’s Witness tie-in, too. The business about ‘eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven, and the 144,000 virgins who make up the Little Flock. What if Henry Lee somehow conflated stuff he’d learned from the church with something new he picked up in Iraq? What if his castration was voluntary? And Katy . . . Katy . . . Katy is a virgin.”

  “Right,” said Raszer, the cigarette dangling from his lips. “I wonder . . . ”

  “You wonder what?”

  “Okay, let me work this through: According to Aquino and his CSI team, Katy was never raped. She would’ve lost her market value. That was the implication of Emmett’s story: that Johnny and Henry staged the rape to make her worthless to the bad guys, and that Johnny backed out of the trade. But it was too late. The limo pulled up and the killers preempted the gangbang, and that was the motive for murder—to preserve Katy’s value. Settle a score. Eliminate witnesses . . . except that they missed Emmett and let Layla slip. But they carried Katy away with her virginity intact.”

  “To this ‘Garden,’ right? Where Scotty Darrell says he saw her, and which you think is in Turkey? The Garden . . . which is what? Some sort of exotic sex park for rich sheikhs willing to pay big bucks to deflower an American virgin?”

  “That could be its cover and cash source,” said Raszer. “This does have the smell of an HT racket, at least on the surface, and, for reasons obscure to me, virgins have always fetched a good price.”

  “Why ‘obscure to you,’ Raszer? Pray tell . . . ”

  “I prefer experience. Even as a kid, I liked Mrs. Robinson better than Elaine.”

  “Mmm. That explains why your ex-wife couldn’t resist college boys.”

  “Or valet parking attendants,” Raszer added. “Anyhow, sex tourism doesn’t explain Scotty Darrell, or his reference to the Old Man’s being ‘lord over the all and the nothing.’ It doesn’t explain ritual murder. It doesn’t explain why they would go after Jehovah’s Witness kids, or how—if we can speculate—Amos Leach might be tied into all this. And frankly, it doesn’t explain why LAPD headquarters is crawling with counterterrorism people. I think they’re using these girls as ploys . . . to entrap, compromise, induce.” He paused to stub out the cigarette. “Where else have we heard about beautiful young virgins in a garden?”

  Monica glanced at the map, bit her lip, and replied, “9/11. The thing about the hijackers each being promised seventy black-eyed virgins.”

  “Right. The houris. The cup bearers in the Islamic martyr’s paradise. Offering all the goodies that pious Muslims can’t have in life. A garden flowing with rivers of milk, honey, and sex. That’s what Hassan-i-Sabbah tried to simulate in medieval Persia.”

  “Houris?” she asked. “That wouldn’t happen to be the origin of whore, would it?”

  “Let’s check it out,” said Raszer. “Linguistics is the key to almost everything, and sacred prostitution has a long history.”

  “But you don’t think this is an Al Qaeda sort of thing . . . ”

  “Meaning what?” Raszer asked. “An Islamist terror network? Maybe on the surface. Recruiting alienated, gullible young men from the border. Persuading them everything they’ve ever been told is wrong. It’s the way all secret societies work: hook them with status; draw them in with privileged knowledge; lock them in with fear. But this doesn’t feel overtly political or sectarian. They’re not claiming responsibility like Hamas. This feels like Islamic Scientology. They’re most likely after influence.”

  “What kind of influence? Like the kind superlobbyists have?”

  “On the surface, maybe. What the original Assassins seem to have wanted was ’special status.’ They claimed direct spiritual lineage from Muhammad. They were fanatics in a fanatical time, but they rarely killed Christians. In fact, they made political alliances with the Christians.” Raszer paused, then repeated it: “Alliances with the Christians. Alliances with . . . ”

  “‘The enemy of my enemy’?” Monica said softly.

  “‘A battle between one kind of human and another,’” he whispered.

  “Come again?”

  “Something Douglas Picot let slip.”

  “How’re you going to connect all this into something I can put on an itinerary?”

  “I don’t know yet. The solution to a mystery is never an isolated piece of evidence, but accumulated implications that ultimately become unavoidable conclusions.”

  “And now you want to go to Taos . . . to accumulate more implications.”

  “I need to hang with someone who knows Katy well. All the others are dead.”

  “Let’s get you properly equipped,” she said. “I may not see you for a while.”

  “I’ll need approach shoes, desert boots, my kits, and that GPS phone Geotech has been begging us to try. Maps. And—” He paused. “I guess I should have the implant.”

  “Right. And if you’re going to be tramping around the Near East, you’ll need to see Dr. Cutter before you go. I’ll find out what shots are current for that area.” She smiled. “But first you see Dr. Monica.” She unlocked a cabinet and took out a device that looked a bit like a popgun. “Loosen your pants and show me some cheek. Time to

  put the bug in your ass. I won’t lose you this time.”

  “Wipe that grin off your face,” he said, exposing just enough flesh to allow access for the tracer implant. “I’m about to give you some bad news.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Ruthie Endicott had heard all the talk. Taos, New Mexico was magical. Taos was holy. People saw Jesus here, and statues bled. Taos got inside people’s heads and made them drunk with visions of psychedelic sugarplums. It had even gotten to her mother, Constance. She was a “hearer,” one of the 2 to 3 percent of the local population who lived with a distant diesel engine known as the Taos Hum rumbling in her head. For relief, she’d gone from medicinal teas to tequila and then, when the hangovers had only made it worse, to a steady diet of OxyContin. It made her difficult to live with, and so Ruthie spent most days in town and slept where she could find an empty sofa or a bedmate she could buy off with oral sex.

  For a twenty-two-year-old whose body art mapped a trail of flight from her evangelical roots and who lived in a more or less permanently altered state, Ruthie was pretty rationalistic. She dismissed the Taos Hum as being “what was there when noise wasn’t.” To her mother, she’d say, “Whaddayou expect? It’s so damn quiet up here, you can hear yourself sweat,” and to another hearer, “Those mountains move, right? You gotta figure they make some kind of racket.”

  Ruthie’s common sense did not innoculate her entirely against the Taos mindfuck. She dreamed
night after night that she was being swallowed up by the Rio Grande Gorge, the titanic gash that cut through the planet about twelve miles west of town. It didn’t seem to matter what drugs she took—the dream came. It had started a year ago when Angel, her mother’s hombre, had told her of a local myth about the fate of unrepentant souls. She’d figured he knew what he was talking about because Angel himself was a penitente, a member of a secret and exclusive order of men from old Spanish families whose blood went back to the conquest, community leaders who every Easter weekend reenacted the crucifixion of Christ so realistically that women and kids were allowed to witness only from a distant ridge, in case they tried to stop it.

  This year, Angel had been selected by lot to play the part of Jesus, which meant that he would be scourged, mocked, and forced to bear his cross up the rocky path to Calvary. He’d told Ruthie and her mother that this was a great honor, to suffer as Christ had, and that they would be privileged to nurse him through recovery. Ruthie intended to make herself scarce. As far as she could see, her mother had left one religious fanatic for another, and this one a Catholic, which meant that he could behave badly on Saturday night and still be graced on Sunday morning. Her father would’ve seen through that. Silas knew you were either graced or not, and Ruthie knew which side of that line she was on.

  For her, Taos was an exile. She believed she was dying on this seven-thousand-foot altar, where even the mountain streams were said to run with the blood of Christ. She’d rejected her father’s gray-bearded hanging judge God, only to face a far stranger one: a God who raised the red dust from the streets and spun it into helixes of lavender, pink, and rusty gold. Ruthie blamed the altitude, the Indians, and the old hippies who ran the restaurants and shops and had probably spiked the drinking water.

  Over and through all of this, Ruthie heard a bomb ticking. One way or another, she wanted out. Any ticket would do.

  The altercation with Monica had come at the conclusion of the pretrip briefing, when Raszer informed her that she was to take her work home, as it wasn’t safe for her to remain alone in his house. He wouldn’t see her hurt, and he wouldn’t see her used to compromise his mission. His mind was made up.

  “No way, Raszer,” she said. “All my files are here. Our whole operation.”

  “That’s what external drives are for. We’re going to have to become as mobile as a carnival. I’ve lost my anonymity. It had to happen sooner or later.”

  “There isn’t enough time to turn this around, Raszer,” she protested. “I’m not set up. I’m not wired. I don’t even have a landline at home. I live in a studio apartment.”

  “You can do 80 percent of it from a laptop, and I’ll have the guys at Intelletech set you up. I don’t have a choice. If you’re here alone, you’re hostage bait.”

  “Then get me a bodyguard,” she said. “Maybe that big Dane from Aegis. No one would get past his pectorals.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he said. “Just you and Erik the Red, eating pastry.”

  “I confess I have a thing for big lugs . . . and pastry.”

  “A big man just makes a broader target,” said Raszer. “And if they drop him, they’ve got you and access to this office. Nope. I’m locking up the house and double-encrypting everything. I want this place as useless as an empty missile solo.”

  “Raszer, I won’t—”

  The phone rang. She answered without breaking her glare, then handed him the phone. “It’s the FBI,” she said. “For you.” Monica crossed her arms and put the toe of her high-rise sneaker forward, a signal that the matter wasn’t settled.

  “Agent Djapper,” said Raszer. “How are you?”

  “Can we meet before you leave?” Djapper’s tone was more than a little furtive.

  “What did you have in mind?” Raszer replied.

  “There’s a Starbucks at Highland and Franklin.”

  “I guess you know where I live, too,” Raszer said with resignation. “Anyhow, I have a better place, a little less public. The Bourgeois Pig, at Franklin and Cheremoya.”

  “The what?”

  “Next to the Daily Planet bookstore. Across from the Scientology celebrity center. You know, the big chateau. The Pig is the only café in L.A. with any atmosphere.”

  “I’m not big on atmosphere,” Djapper said pointedly. “But if the coffee’s good--”

  “How about three o’clock?” Raszer asked.

  “See you there,” Djapper said, and hung up.

  Raszer gave the phone back to Monica. “I’ve got a meeting,” he said. “And you need to get me on Dr. Cutter’s list. We’ll discuss this, uh, other business later.”

  Raszer’s security worries were not lessened by what Agent Djapper had to tell him over coffee.

  “We’re going to put a couple of men on your house,” said the FBI man, spooning up the topping from his double decaf mocha. “And I’m going to offer you some advice.”

  “What’s that?” asked Raszer.

  “If you like being alive, walk away.” Djapper dropped a dollop of whipped cream into his coffee and began to stir. “This whole mess falls into a jurisdictional crack between what we can do, what local can do, and what Langley can do. If you insist on crawling into it, we can’t help you. In fact, we might just have to plaster over the hole and leave you in there. We’d know a lot more, but ever since the NSA flap, everybody’s dainty about the Internet, which is where this thing lives, an area my boss calls virtual conspiracy: stuff that gets plotted in alternate reality games but hasn’t happened—may not happen—in the real world. It turns the whole idea of probable cause on its head.”

  “The new frontier,” Raszer said, tossing back his espresso. “It’s why an amateur like me can make a living.”

  “You may think you know what’s going on here, Raszer, but—”

  Raszer shook his head. “I don’t even pretend to know. But I’ll bet you do.”

  “No,” said Djapper. “Not entirely. But, unlike you, I know enough to know what I don’t want to know. I can tell you this: This game your boy Scotty was into, it spread like cancer. It metastasized and went global, and somewhere along the line, it became terrorism. You see, the wrong people began to take notice of it, saw there was profit in it. Just like the way the mob took over the heroin trade.”

  “Nothing of value stays independent, does it?” Raszer said. “Who’s Hazid?”

  Djapper didn’t miss a beat. “Hazid might as well be the Wizard of Oz.”

  “And the crew in the limo? They’re not munchkins—the dents on my car attest to that. You’ve sure got probable cause there. Is that another crack you won’t crawl into?”

  “This may sting a little bit, Raszer,” Djapper replied, “but no one except you and that crazy kid in Azusa have seen this ‘black limo’ or the phantoms riding in it, and an abundance of evidence suggests you’re both certifiable paranoids.”

  “Bullshit. Whose script are you reading from? Douglas Picot’s?”

  Djapper ran a paper napkin over his lips. “I’m offering advice that could save you and your family a lot of grief. If you’re not interested—”

  Rasze’s tone was stiff. “What do you mean by ‘my family,’ Bernard?”

  “Oh.” Djapper shrugged. “I just assumed that you . . . that they’d rather see you alive.” The agent leaned in and scooped a chocolate biscotti off the plate. “Let me tell you why I think the Coronado case went cold: maybe because the ‘victims’ were guys you don’t want in your neighborhood anyway. Like Scotty Darrell. Maybe because there are certain curtains you open up and then realize you should close. They might look like a crime, but they’re actually a work in progress.”

  An ink-haired girl with the pallor of a corpse strolled by, jangling face jewelry. An aspiring screenwriter at a nearby table looked up from his laptop as she passed, then hammered out a few words, folding the girl neatly into his scenario. The girl vanished into the daytime blackness of a billiard room with purple walls.

  “
I would’ve preferred Starbuck’s,” Djapper snorted. “I really stick out here.”

  Raszer smiled, keeping silent his thought, which was that Bernard Djapper would stick out anyplace but his mother’s living room.

  “Nah,” Raszer said. “The worst that’ll happen is that one of these writers will spot your designer suit and pitch you his movie.” He paused. “I hear what you’re saying, and it’s not the first time I’ve heard it. But you know I’m going to go after the girl. So let’s help each other. Where is she?”