Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  “Right. And if I’m busted, I’m on my own?”

  “Of course. But without the escort we’re offering, you don’t really stand a chance of getting within a hundred miles of your target.”

  “Escort?”

  “You’ll be briefed on the other side.”

  “Do I have a choice here?” Raszer asked.

  “Time is running out on us, my friend. It may comfort the voters to think that a new man in the White House means a new history, but history doesn’t change with a single election. Plots begun under previous regimes have momentum. Think about the Bay of Pigs. Wars begin and end long before and after their little ticks on the timeline. America is a stage trick. Elvis’s cloak is still on the stage, but Elvis has left the building. We’re on the road to Armageddon, and that suits the End Timers just fine. Now, you can ignore this and play out your little part, or you can be part of something bigger.”

  Raszer allowed himself to examine the man who’d called himself Greenstreet. Fat chance his name was Greenstreet, let alone Philby Greenstreet. On the other hand, it was almost too preposterous not to be true. His face spoke of the steel-core integrity of old spies, the sort who considered Ike and JFK the last presidents worth speaking of and still made yearly donations to the Harvard alumni fund.

  “Something bigger . . . ” Raszer repeated.

  “Worth mortgaging a piece of your soul for, Mr. Raszer?”

  “Worth more than my soul,” Raszer answered. “If what you say is true. The question is whether it’s worth risking Katy Endicott’s soul. You see, in the end, that’s all I can allow to count. I’ve had to keep it simple for myself. My job is to get her out.”

  “Saving the world one soul at a time?” Greenstreet ventured.

  “Maybe paying my debt one soul at a time.”

  “What debt is that?”

  “Do you believe in grace, Mr. Greenstreet?”

  “In my own fashion. Why?”

  “Years back, I made a fatal mess of my life—some old ghosts I couldn’t shake. The truth is, I’d already been counted out and was just waiting for the bell. I didn’t realize that every punch I’d taken had also bloodied the people around me. Then I nearly lost my daughter, the one thing that had any real value. That’s when I learned to pray . . . and learned that God doesn’t sit around waiting for the phone to ring. God has to be summoned from a bottomless pit inside your heart. My prayers were answered, but grace doesn’t come free. I made a deal. Her life for my promise to return lost sheep to pasture. A kind of indentured servitude, I guess.”

  “So, it’s true, then,” Greenstreet observed. “You do have a calling.”

  “Like I said: a debt. Now, I have three questions for you, Philby. The first is, this vast conspiracy you’ve described . . . even for a professional paranoid like me, it’s hard to swallow. How do you pull off a coup like that without the support of the generals? And how would you sustain it if the military lined up against you?”

  “The generals? The military? Think, Mr. Raszer. The Iraq war rendered the military irrelevant, emasculated it. It’s a shadow of what it was before. After all, that was the rationale for privatization, wasn’t it? Why do you need the military when you’ve created a private army and a worldwide network of arms merchants to drive it?”

  “Okay, let’s say you’re right. And let’s say you get me in there. What possible difference can one man make?”

  “The difference a candle always makes when lit against the darkness. To our knowledge, no Westerner we know of has ever gotten close to the Old Man, except as his captive, so you’d be a viral agent. His mystique lies in occultation. How does the song go? Got to be good-looking ’cause he’s so hard to see. Neither he nor the plot he’s furthering can survive open curtains. His power flows from his command of The Gauntlet; it subsists only so long as conditions of the game support it.”

  “In the early days, that power was mostly virtual. Its force lay in its potential: the absolute allegiance of the Old Man’s followers—the players who’d come to him seeking a truth beyond all other truths. Now, he’s begun to muddy the line between the virtual and the manifest by dispatching his acolytes to commit real acts of terror in the real world. But when you move pawns to attack, they also become vulnerable.

  “We understand that you’ve had considerable experience with role playing, Mr. Raszer. You’ve infiltrated more than a dozen highly secretive organizations under assumed identities. This is the role of a lifetime. You’ll travel with a small escort of veteran players who know the territory and can get you past hot zones, but you’ll enter the fortress alone as a French-Canadian Catholic monk. Your ‘avatar,’ if you like.”

  “And what do I have to offer in trade for Katy Endicott?”

  “You are authorized to offer the exchange of one of the Old Man’s captured operatives for her release.”

  “Which operative?” Raszer asked. “It’s not Layla Faj-Ta’wil, is it?”

  “No,” Greenstreet replied. “Your bargaining chip is Scotty Darrell.”

  “So, you guys have him?”

  “We will shortly. We’re waiting on one variable.”

  “That’s good, I guess. But your idea is a nonstarter. I won’t put Scotty back in there. Why would he have that much value in trade, anyway? Mother birds generally don’t take the babies back once they’ve fallen out of the nest.”

  “True, but Scotty has a mission, and the Old Man wants it accomplished.”

  “What’s the mission?”

  “All we know is that it’s programmed to set off a chain reaction, the likes of which you can’t imagine. We suspect there may be close to two hundred sleeper agents across the globe whose own missions will be triggered by Scotty’s. At that point, the game will become horribly real. It’s even possible your girl has an assignment in hand already. They’re preparing to dispatch their young assassins as we speak. ”

  “Jesus,” said Raszer. “Suppose this lunacy works according to plan. Suppose all these human time bombs go off and we’re all terrorized enough to believe that only the muscle of an authoritarian state can restore order. We get a Christian theocracy in the West and an Islamic theocracy in the East. What does the Old Man want out of it?”

  “What he really wants is the subject of a great deal of conjecture. Power, guns, land—certainly. Control over the global sex and opium markets—quite possibly. He knows these appetites will abide even under a repressive regime. In the beginning, everyone behaves, recites the Commandments—or the Sharia—but soon enough, the rulers begin to indulge their vices, and it’s back to business.

  “‘Business’ will be quite good, as it always is under fascism. Eventually, the whole thing collapses from internal rot, like Rome did. Then you have a new dark age. And that—in my opinion—is what the Old Man’s really after. There’s evidence that in the inner circles of his cult, among the elite corps of soldiers, a pre-Islamic religion of Syrian derivation is practiced. A religion demanding absolute and incontrovertible celibacy, if you know what I mean.”

  “Now it begins to add up,” said Raszer. “All right. This escort you say I’ll have to El Mirai—do they know they’re working for you? For the CIA?”

  “They know they’ve received their commission from Philby Greenstreet,” he answered with a smile. “But, in short, no. They are stateless people, transnationals. Their services have been engaged by an NGO that is in fact a front for a mirror CIA station that exists only in the virtual topography of The Gauntlet. Its existence is nothing more than artful illusion. Vapor. But if we prevail, it will be actualized and eventually will replace the existing order. Many kings begin as pretenders, you see, but if they pretend ardently enough, they eventually claim the throne.”

  “‘Only in the topography of The Gauntlet?’ What the hell does that mean?”

  “You must bear in mind, Mr. Raszer, that you are now through the looking glass. You’re heading into the gap between form and substance, and there’ll be times when you simply don�
��t know what’s real. All creation begins as virtual, as quantum potential. The Gauntlet is a game of becoming, and its players—the serious ones, at any rate—seek to ride the wave of becoming without looking back or forward. It’s a balancing act. Do you think you can pull it off?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ve been waiting all my life to try.”

  “That’s my boy,” Greenstreet said.

  “One little detail concerns me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “These people have been on my ass for a week. They know where I live. They know what I look like, they probably know I’m coming, and somehow I doubt that a French accent and a monk’s outfit are going to fool them.”

  “Maybe not,” said Greenstreet. “But without a cover, you have no recourse to deception. You are, as we say, creating a ‘legend.’ You’ll receive instruction on the other side. You’ll have to use all your craft to stay alive until you’ve reached your destination. But once you’re there, you will be your avatar. You’ll be in the game, and whether you survive or not will depend on how well you play it. You see, they’ll be playing, too.”

  Raszer took a moment to digest.

  “Are you ready, Mr. Raszer?”

  “Why not?”

  “Come along, then. You’ll need a couple of inoculations if you’re going into eastern Turkey.”

  “I’ve had them,” Raszer said. “I’ve got the papers to prove it.”

  “You haven’t had this one. There’s a particularly virulent new strain of H5N1 in the mountains west of Hakkâri. Believe me, you don’t want it.”

  “Avian flu? All right,” said Raszer. “Just don’t put the needle in my ass.”

  “We’ll try to find a place that’s not so hard,” Greenstreet said.

  Almost before the spike entered muscle, Raszer knew he’d been doped. “This may leave you a little drowsy,” the Asian medic had said. Within seconds, the hangar began to spin, shapes and colors at its outer limits rushing off in a centrifugal blur. He was hauled up from the chair and guided to the jet, the pilot at one elbow and the medic at the other. He turned just before being ducked into the dimly lit cabin and looked around for the CIA man, wearing an expression that plainly said, Why the mickey? I would have gone quietly. But the lanky old spook was at first nowhere to be seen, and Raszer’s mind began to riff. Other figures began to materialize and supplant the anonymous figures in the send-off crew. They emerged like wraiths from the corrugated tin walls of the hangar, as if through theatrical curtains the color of mercury, concealing a world waiting in the wings of his imagination.

  Among those making the curtain call were Lieutenant Borges of the LAPD and Detective Jaime Aquino, though not separately: They were one body, one form. Ruthie and her mother showed, and likewise kept slipping in and out of phase: now one woman, then two, then none at all. Emmett Parrish was there. And Silas Endicott came in the person of the old squatter from the Coronado Lodge, wearing Raszer’s duster and making sparks as he walked. For a couple of seconds, Raszer actually tried to impose some rational order on the visions, and then it hit him that if he truly was off to see the wizard, the residents of Oz might have the look of familiars.

  And then, for the duration of a sneeze, his mind seemed to clear. Through the red door on the far side of the hangar came a scowling Amos Leach, his hair piled high, wearing an orange print sundress, followed closely by none other than special agent Bernard Djapper. Raszer’s throat closed in panic, but not even a surge from his adrenal glands could offset the effects of the dope. Before his mind could verify what his eyes had seen, Philby Greenstreet leaned into the cabin, gave his shoulder a squeeze, and whispered, “Bon voyage. Let’s hope for better times.”

  From time to time during the long flight, little pieces of consciousness flared, and Raszer would become aware of the engine’s muffled hum or the soft lighting in his fiberglass cocoon of uncertain metamorphosis. At one point, he thought he noticed that the fabric of the seats and the pattern of the wallpaper were a matching design of Chinese characters and I Ching hexagrams.

  Later, he saw only the uniform color of potter’s clay. Except for those few, vague sensory impressions, he slept the dreamless sleep of suspended animation, an Argonaut cryonically preserved for his voyage to an alternate cosmos. As for the pilot, he never said a word.

  The fleeting vision of Leach and Djapper, Raszer could not, or would not, retain. In fact, he found a gap where his short-term memory should have been, like the erasure of a tape or the redaction of paragraphs from a classified document. As with a dream on waking, the harder he tried to retrieve it, the further it receded.

  He had no way of knowing the direction of travel, but some internal compass gave him a vague sense of going northwest over the Siberian peninsula, rather than the usual geosynchronous polar route. Still, the lack of certainty troubled him. He’d forgotten about the little fragment of nanocircuitry in the left cheek of his ass, forgotten for the time being that Monica could probably plot his coordinates to within a few degrees. In the gray of predawn, in some cold, bleak, and unvegetated part of the world, he was removed from the jet by the pilot and a man in a balaclava, and deposited in the cargo hold of an old military transport, an aircraft that—like the helicopter and the jet—bore no mark of nationality or corporate identity.

  He saw these things as if watching himself in a video. He was in a world beyond nations and logos. He was running The Gauntlet, and the luxurious part of the trip was over. The rattle and roar of the transport plane upset his stomach and shook a little of the pixie dust from his brain, and after a very long while, a few of his baseline neural circuits began to hum intermittently.

  He was descending.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “Is that him?” a man speaking Arabic asked. “He is not what I expected.”

  “What did you expect?” said another man, also in Arabic, but of the American Foreign Service variety.

  “Je ne sais pas,” declared the first man, slipping seamlessly into French, then to English. “I expected a soldier, but he looks like a guilty saint. Or perhaps a thief.”

  “Either will serve us better than a soldier, Rashid. A soldier would only get shot at.” After a pause, the second man said, “Wake him up.”

  “But he is awake,” said the first man. “At least, his eyes are open.”

  Raszer wasn’t awake in any sense he’d known outside the womb. The words spoken not six feet from where he lay, in languages he knew reasonably well, had traveled over his cortex like sounds in deep water. Like the chatter of dolphins, he knew there was meaning there, but what it was lay beyond any conscious decryption. Beside that, his larynx was paralyzed, as in those dreams you can’t dispel by screaming. An oxygen mask was suddenly clapped over his face, and at the same time, he received an electric shock that ran from the tip of his tailbone to the top of his head.

  The jolt tripled his pulse rate, and he began to gulp down air hungrily. In less than a minute, he was fully awake, and a minute after that, he was sitting up on the cot.

  “Jesus,” he said. “What was that? And where the hell am I?”

  “Don’t try to gather up your thoughts too quickly,” said the American, a round, fortyish man with an olive complexion and dark, wet eyes. “You may drop them.”

  Raszer pressed his fingers against his eyelids, shook the fog from his head, and looked around. He was in a small room, empty but for the army cot, a writing table, and an old-fashioned washbasin. It had the stark, scrubbed look of an infirmary examination room. A single shuttered window let through the tiniest bit of pink morning light, and an overhead fan spun noisily on worn bearings. The floor was of worn cedar planks, dimpled by bootheels, and the walls were administrative tan. If someone had said, “1908,” he wouldn’t have blinked.

  His pack and personal articles were parked against the wall near the door that led to the larger office in which the men had earlier been talking. He spotted a GLOCK automatic pistol beside a tumbler of water on a rolltop
desk, and above the desk hung a cheaply framed watercolor depicting an azure lake surrounded by mountains and a crusader castle that appeared to grow out of the rock. On the floor beside the desk was a hookah. Whether practical or decorative, it was impressive. There must have been an unshuttered window, because a column of light, whirling with dust motes, bisected the room and screened Raszer’s view of whatever was beyond it.

  “You’re on land fought over by Greeks and Hittites and Urartians and Persians and even the French,” said the American. “Trade routes and ports, the casus belli of the ancient world. Now it’s oil, tribe, and religion. Not much progress to show for twenty-five hundred years, eh? In any case, still apparently worth fighting for. Right, Rashid?”

  “If the oil has not all turned to blood,” said the smaller, darker man, a Kurd who wore khakis and a loose white cotton blouse that set off his vividly red headdress.