Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  The pilot pointed ahead. “Over that humpy ridge,” he said. “An old Army strip.”

  Scattered hangars and Quonset huts came into view in a flat-bottomed valley between two peaks. The base was small, but the landing strip was long enough for a jet. Beyond and far below, Raszer could just make out Interstate 25 and a settlement.

  “Where are we?” Raszer asked. “We can’t be that far over the state line.”

  “Closest town on the map is Trinidad,” said the pilot, pointing to the same settlement. “But I can’t say I’ve ever been there.”

  “Trinidad, Colorado,” Raszer said under his breath. He drew from the well of his brain an obscure factoid he’d come across in Monica’s research on castration: The town of Trinidad had earned some notoriety in the 1960s as the home base of the doctor who’d pioneered transgender surgery, and for a time after that, its sleepy Main Street had become a mecca for those seeking alteration, and a halfway house for those altered. That was before the business moved to places like Copenhagen. It was undoubtedly coincidental, but coincidence was never just a random shuffle; it was a clustering of potentialities around a single set of certainties.

  A helipad marked with a red X was adjacent to one of the larger hangars. There wasn’t another soul in sight, but as the chopper dropped delicately to the pad, two men in blue mechanics’ suits emerged from the hangar and stood clear of the propeller’s reach, waiting to escort the new arrival.

  “First leg of many,” said the pilot, and grinned again. Almost as soon as Raszer had hopped out and pulled his pack down, the helicopter lifted off again.

  “Take me to your leader,” Raszer said to the men, one of whom took his pack. The other smirked and gestured for Raszer to accompany him. A door with peeling red paint and a grimy little window led into the largest of the hangars. The door was common enough, but the scene inside was anything but.

  First, there was the aircraft: a corporate jet without a corporate logo. Like the helicopter, it hadn’t a single identifying mark. From the size of the fuel tank, Raszer gauged it to be good for domestic runs of a few thousand miles at most. It wasn’t going to get him all the way to Turkey, but it was impressive nonetheless: sleek, low, and blacked out. A small team of mechanics and a pilot were readying the plane, all wearing the same navy blue jumpsuits, nonepaying notice when he came in the door. And there was a send-off party of sorts, a delegation assembled, he presumed, to see him off: a gentleman rancher in flannel and denim, a technician in a lab coat, a graying Asian fellow with a doctor’s bag, and three men in suits, one of whom stood a head taller than the others and had a bearing that only the best old-school Yankee breeding could buy.

  Standing in the hard cone of light spilling from a suspended work lamp, Raszer found himself feeling—once the escorts had left his side—as if he’d just been beamed down from another galaxy.

  The tall man came forward.

  “Welcome,” he said. “You follow directions very well, Mr. Raszer.”

  Raszer looked the man over. He was perhaps sixty-two, with hair the shade of smoke combed fastidiously back from a high forehead, and piercing blue eyes. In the fine lines of his face, Raszer could almost trace his path from Exeter to Harvard Yard and into the corridors of power. Everything about him said directorate of operations.

  Raszer swept his arm across the hangar to the mechanics, the pilot, the jet. “Is this a federal operation?” he asked. “If so, I may be in the wrong terminal.”

  “Not the kind that comes under congressional oversight,” said the man.

  “How about the kind that comes under Douglas Picot’s purview?” Raszer asked.

  “Oh, no,” the man replied. “Picot would have every man in this room facing sedition charges.”

  Raszer held. The man had him pinned in the light, such that he couldn’t escape it without stepping sideways or backward. “Was Shams one of yours?”

  The tall man gave a bare nod.

  “Recruited in Iraq? In pretty deep, then, I guess . . . ”

  “As deep as it gets,” the man said.

  “How deep is that?”

  “So deep he didn’t know he was in,” the man from Langley replied.

  “Ah,” said Raszer. “Then I suppose he died for your sins.”

  The CIA man nodded toward a card table in the corner, next to an old Coke machine that dispensed eight-ounce bottles. “Let’s get acquainted, shall we, while your coach is prepared. My name is Philby Greenstreet.”

  “That can’t be right,” said Raszer. “Unless some GamesMaster dreamed you up.”

  The tall man chuckled without turning as he strode toward the lightless corner, then fished in the pockets of his wool trousers for change.

  “Coca-Cola?” he asked Raszer. “I’ve always loved these little bottles. You can almost imagine that it’s still a drug.”

  “And a cheap drug, at that,” said Raszer, as Greenstreet dropped a dime into the machine. “No, thanks. But I would like something to get this bad taste out of my mouth. You wouldn’t have a stick of wintergreen gum, would you? Someone’s been leaving the scent all over Taos, and now I’ve got a yen for it. There’s even a certain FBI agent—”

  Greenstreet glanced briefly at Raszer, then pushed the bottle cap off his Coke with the nail on his right thumb as effortlessly as if he’d been flicking lint.

  “You’ve got a good nose, Mr. Raszer,” he said. “Oleum Gaultheriae. Oil of wintergreen. Chemically, methyl salicylate. Masks the breath and overpowers other odors—even the odor of internal decay. Suppresses sexual excitement very effectively. A remarkably small dosage is absolutely lethal. Its use goes back at least 150 years. It’s a cheap poison pill for men who want to keep their minds on their work and never, ever want to be caught alive. That would describe your adversaries, but I doubt very much that it describes your FBI agent. What makes you think he’s on your tail?”

  Raszer half smiled. “Maybe he’s got nothing better to do. You’re either very well informed or very fast on your feet, Mr. Greenstreet. ”

  The CIA man took a sip of his Coca-Cola and smiled. “Such pleasure for one thin dime,” he said. “Very few real bargains left in this world, Mr. Raszer.” He eyed the jet. “I’d venture to say that you’re about to receive another one of them.”

  “So that’s yours?” Raszer said. “The agency’s?”

  “God, no,” said Greenstreet. “Not even black ops would touch this mission. The jet is on loan from a philanthropist who happens to be a great fan of The Gauntlet. In fact, he owes his wealth to the game. In a sense, he’s never stopped playing. You might say he’s your next ‘guide.’ I hear you’re working for well below your usual fee, so I’m sure you’ll appreciate his munificence.”

  “I rarely look a gift horse in the mouth,” said Raszer. “But you worry me a little, Mr. Greenstreet. How do I know you’re any more trustworthy than Picot?”

  “You don’t,” Greenstreet replied. “Except that you evidently trusted Shams’ instructions, and wound up here.” He motioned for Raszer to take a seat at the card table, then set down his bottle and pulled out his own chair. “Some of us,” he con-tinued, “share more with you than you might imagine.” He paused. “We also share a keen interest in the place and the man you are soon—hopefully—going to meet.”

  “You mean Na-Koja-Abad,” said Raszer, recalling Shams’ citation. “And the Old Man.”

  “Na-Koja-Abad,” repeated the CIA man. “Curious name, eh? ‘Nowhere-Land.’ Does it exist only in the world of The Gauntlet? Or is it a real place—like Tora Bora—with coordinates a GPS device, or a tracker like yourself, can identify?”

  “You don’t know?” Raszer asked incredulously.

  “Na-Koja-Abad is a Sufi term for the middle world between form and substance. A numinous state of mind, or more precisely, a state of half-being. It was appropriated by advanced Gauntlet players to describe the mystical experience of those who make it all the way to the Ninth Circle on what they call the Urfa route. You wo
n’t find it in a CIA brief. But as you’ve already deduced, the Old Man’s people have taken over the game, and it appears they have a bait-and-switch operation going. Na-Koja-Abad is promised, but something else is delivered: El Mirai—the mountain stronghold of these thugs you’ve been playing cat ‘n mouse with.”

  “So El Mirai is real. A physical place. Even though it means ‘The Mirage’?”

  Greenstreet hesitated, then gave an inscrutable reply. “For all intents, yes. But—“

  “—its locus is on the border of Na-Koja-Abad. Nowhere-Land.”

  “Now you’re getting the swing of it.”

  “Evil on the perimeter of the holy.”

  “If you were the Devil,” said Greenstreet, “wouldn’t you build your hot dog stand near the entrance to paradise?” He took a swig of Coca-Cola. “They’re designing a whole new kind of terrorist up there. The design isn’t perfected yet, but when it is, we’ll have an army of Takfiris, as diverse in appearance and ethnicity as a United Colors of Benetton ad. They won’t fit anyone’s ‘profile.’”

  “Something like that, I figured,” said Raszer. “But what’s the objective? I’m guessing it’s isn’t the restoration of the caliphate.”

  “The details will have to wait,” Greenstreet replied, “for your safety and ours. But I can give you a sense of what you’re up against.”

  He leaned in and placed his hand on the table, not two inches from Raszer’s own wrist. It was a surprisingly intimate gesture for a man of Greenstreet’s type.

  “Let me ask you this: As a child, did you ever find yourself wishing for the storm to end all storms? The one that would shut the whole world down?”

  “The snow day that lasts forever,” said Raszer. “Sure, it probably crossed my mind once or twice. And I always liked disaster movies.”

  “Me, too,” said Greenstreet. “There’s an apocalyptic urge in the human psyche. The desire for a clean slate. On the whole, it’s not unhealthy. It makes revolutions possible. But there’s a reactionary gene that often accompanies it. Some revolutionaries grow up to become Robespierres. Absolutists. Fundamentalists. I almost did. I worshipped my parents when I was a boy, thought they could do no wrong, and that every moral lesson they taught, they also exemplified.

  “When I got a little older and could see my father’s infidelity and my mother’s alcoholism, I hated them for it, hated them for revealing that the world wasn’t a tidy place. I resolved to clean it up, to cut out the rot. Eventually, I came to my senses. But suppose I hadn’t. Suppose my black-and-white view of the world had hardened until I couldn’t see shades, much less color. Until I believed that only a holy fire could sterilize the planet and restore God’s dominion. Suppose my goal was—through ten thousand small acts of terror—to bring society to a point of maximum entropy. To a condition that demands intervention . . . and a new kind of state.”

  “It’s not exactly breaking news that there are people at both the western and eastern poles who value order over freedom. But—”

  “The news would be that they’d joined forces, and employed a third force to foment the chaos. When you swallow fundamentalism whole, you ultimately conclude the world is unsalvageable. The end—restoring purity—justifies any means.”

  Raszer lit a cigarette and sat back. “I’m getting the outlines, but I’m still not sure I see how a Scotty Darrell or a Katy Endicott would serve the cause. Why not use pros instead of college kids?”

  “Because the Scotty Darrells and Katy Endicotts don’t need fake passports. Because we’d never see them coming. Think of it: ten thousand Ishmaels just as wired into an alternate reality as Scotty. A post office rampage here, a campus massacre there; an amusement-park ride runs amok, a security guard is shot, the BlackBerry wireless network crashes. Housing values crater and the Tokyo market dives. All basins of chaotic attraction, all portents of the End Times. And with each incident, the End Timers cry, ‘We told you so!’

  “A kind of spiritual vertigo kicks in once you accept apocalypse, and vertigo isn’t only a fear of falling—it’s an inclination to fall. Isn’t that what ‘Bring it on’ really means? And in every high school cafeteria, at every community college, in every miserable army unit assigned to police a prison, there’s some lonely, disaffected kid who grows more certain every day that the world is irredeemable and he may as well go out in a blaze of glory. What if someone devised a way to exploit that disaffection by means of a virtual reality? Wouldn’t that account for Scotty Darrell?”

  “Jesus . . . this is really happening. How many of him are out there?”

  “We don’t know. There were seven degrees of initiation for the original Nizari Assassins, and the first required a keen understanding of what makes for the best recruits. Each recruit brought in at least two more, until the growth of the cult became exponential. We’re catching this early, but if the public had any idea how many Iraq war vets are listed as MIA, how many milk-carton kids and runaways had been sucked into this—if we don’t find out where this operation lives and pull open the curtains on it—in three years’ time, the U.S., Europe, and Israel will face an epidemic of terror. Not from Al Qaeda, but from our own children.”

  “You know,” said Raszer, “I got pulled into this because a Jehovah’s Witness girl had been abducted. Along the way, there’ve been hints that certain elders of the sect may not have had clean hands. This . . . network of fundamentalists you spoke of . . . are they pimping out their own kids for the cause?”

  “Hardcore fundamentalists are often supralapsarians—people who believe the elect can do no wrong. They’re guaranteed heaven, so there’s nothing to lose.”

  “Are there people in our government aiding and abetting this?”

  Greenstreet gave him a loaded look.

  “Christ,” said Raszer. “We really have gone off the deep end. What about the Islamic establishment, the saner clerics and mullahs? Do they accept the Old Man and his group? I mean, where the hell did he get his charter?”

  “I’m afraid he got his charter—in part—from us. In Afghanistan, in the ’80s, when we made our bed with the Mujahedin in the fight against the Soviets. That’s where the seeds of this theocratic alliance were sown, the root of the rot. He was one of the warlords our money and guns found their way to, but unlike Massoud and Hekmatyar, we never acknowledged him. He was an unidentified asset. Later on, when we still thought we could control him, his men trained with Blackwater, and Blackwater—as you may know—was midwifed by a consortium of Christian Dominionist groups. We know what happened there. What did Nietzsche say? If you gaze into the abyss for long enough, the abyss begins to gaze right back at you.”

  Raszer blinked slowly.

  “You’ll connect the dots on the other side, and you’ll let me know what to call it. He’s learned from the founding fathers of Islamism—Sayyid Qutb, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, and Ayman al-Zawahiri—but he’s also gone to school on us. In 1953—at roughly the same time Qutb was setting up al Takfir wal-Hijra, the CIA circulated a top-secret manual entitled “A Study of Assassination” to its operatives in Guatemala and Iran, where we were busy orchestrating regime changes. The manual and the techniques it described were based on a study of the original Assassin cult, and included a primer on how to assimilate oneself to an alien culture. Just like Mohamed Atta did. I’ll wager that manual sits on his bookshelf, right alongside The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

  “Who exactly do you speak for? This can’t be the company line.”

  “You’ve heard the expression ‘The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing’?” Greenstreet replied. “Superficially, we spies may all walk and talk alike, but we practice our own version of taqiyya. Dig deeper, and you’ll see that the intelligence community is full of heretics—heretics who’ve bothered to read the Constitution.”

  “The loyal opposition,” said Raszer.

  “Some of us would like to be able to recognize this country ten years from now.”

  “Right. Tell me this
. Do we know for certain that the Old Man of the Mountains is real, not some myth created by this cabal to throw guys like you off the scent?”

  “We think he’s real, but the truth is that every account we have is hearsay. He’s left footprints. There’s evidence of arms dealing on a massive scale—mostly old Soviet-bloc weaponry, bought cheaply by traffickers and resold at a huge mark-up to the U.S., among others. Hell, by 2008, how sure could we be that bin Laden was real? Is the Old Man real? Well, you are going to let us know.”

  “Why should I succeed where you haven’t?”

  “The poor man passes where the king’s way is blocked. You have only one modest item on your agenda: to get your girl out. That gives you credibility. Plus, you speak passable Arabic, a little Farsi, and French. Most important, you speak his language.”