Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  “The fish are sacred,” Rashid explained. “They were once consecrated to Atargatis, that same Syrian goddess we spoke of in Iskenderun. Now they belong to the prophet Abraham. The legend is that when Nimrod threw Abraham from the tower, Allah turned the burning pyre below to a pond full of carp, and Abraham was saved.”

  After dark, they dined on a tiled terrace in the rear of the safe house, watched over by an armed guard and tended to by a cook. They were served lahmacun, a local dish of spicy minced lamb on wafer-thin bread, and Rashid had even managed to obtain a bottle of Minervois. But Raszer, who usually savored food under even the worst of circumstances, had no taste for it tonight. He was troubled by what the events of the past twenty-four hours signaled regarding the reliability of his mental processes.

  He was used to labyrinths, but how would he find his bearings in the mirror image of a labyrinth?

  “I have a very strange feeling,” he told Rashid. “Clinically speaking, I’m not sure it’s a lot different from paranoid schizophrenia, and that worries me a little.”

  “Describe it to me,” said the Kurd. “I may be able to help.”

  “That may be a little tricky. I feel as if I’m in a borrowed body. As if my own body never left that slab in your office back in Iskenderun. Maybe never left the hangar in Colorado Springs. Maybe never left the bridge over the Rio Grande.”

  “And what would it mean if that were truly the case?”

  “You really want me to say? All right. It would mean that my consciousness is occupying a kind of shadow person. It would mean that the gauntlet I’m running is in a separate reality. I won’t say virtual reality, because that would imply a simulation.” Raszer’s gaze shifted inward, and he spoke half to himself. “I wonder if this is how Scotty felt.”

  “How else would you expect to feel, Mr. Raszer? You have experienced a profound dislocation, and you have advanced very quickly to a high level of the game.”

  “How?” asked Raszer. “By what mechanism?”

  “To begin with, things formerly hidden have been revealed to you. Things that alter the shape of the world. There is no psychotropic more potent than knowledge. What is it that the Gnostic Gospel says of the seeker? ‘When he finds, he will be troubled, and then astonished. And in astonishment, he will rule the world.”

  “I doubt I’m destined to rule, Rashid, but up to a point, I can navigate that world. I’m stuck on a couple of details. For one, if what I’m sensing is genuine, it would most likely mean that you don’t exist in any way the world would recognize as real. Has the CIA been messing around with stuff like counterfactuals and quantum detours?”

  “I could not say if I exist in a world separate from yours, Mr. Raszer, because as a resident of that world, I would not know that it was separate. It would simply be my world, you see. You would be a visitor. All I can say is that you should honor your intuition, and conduct yourself accordingly.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that.”

  “You probably know that the CIA’s most important work on remote viewing was done at the Stanford Research Institute in the ’60s. After that—after funding for the project was discontinued—work continued under the cover of various black operations. I do not know how far they got. Perhaps our meeting is evidence that they got very far indeed. Let me ask you, Mr. Raszer: Do you believe in the transmigration of souls?”

  “The short answer is yes. But I wouldn’t have thought it could be induced.”

  “But why not?” Rashid countered. “How else does the shaman enter the body of the man possessed by demons? Not everyone is capable of such slipping in and out of body, of course, but you would seem to be an ideal candidate. Is this not, in a sense, how you have rescued your lost ones in the past?”

  “Never thought of it that way, but—”

  “So if your government, or certain forces within your government, wished to put a man inside the fortress of these assassins—a man whose presence might, shall we say, introduce certain variables—would they not turn to someone like yourself?”

  “I’m a candidate, all right. Maybe the Manchurian kind. Maybe I’m the assas-sin—” Raszer shook his head. “What happens to the old me if they kill the new one?”

  “There are no guarantees,” said Rashid. “But let me say this from my own heart. Should that happen, my belief is that your soul, which is also your Rabb—your Lord—will find its way home. You see, in a spiritually developed individual, ascent and descent are continual processes. God descends to you and you ascend to Him. In this very moment, you are flickering like cinema between being and nonbeing. What we call reality is merely ‘persistence of vision.’ You will learn to walk with one foot in the occulted world and one in the revealed; one in fana and one in baqa. And you will receive tutelage in this matter from those you will visit next: the Fedeli d’Amore.”

  “I’ll do my best to walk that line. But just the same, I’m going to leave you something to post to my daughter if I don’t make it back from the other side.”

  “Of course.”

  “What time does this fellow Dante come to fetch me?”

  “He will come in the crack between night and dawn.”

  “When else, right? I’ll leave the letter here on the table.”

  “I envy you, Mr. Raszer. You are going to meet some quite remarkable people. In the land you’ll be traveling across—the land of the Alevis, the Yarsanis, the Yezidis, and the Bektash—if you scratch a Muslim, you will find a member of the Cult of Angels: the Yazdani. A faith older than Islam, older even than Judaism. Its survival relies upon deception. Across this landscape, many of its greatest prophets have been crucified. Crucified not by Romans or Crusaders, but by fellow Muslims. Before you reach your destination, God willing, you’ll encounter the green man, Khezr, the great trickster. Flowers spring up in his footsteps, and streams alter their course. Him, you may follow without hesitation.” Rashid scooped the last morsel off his plate and popped it into his mouth. “And now, I must get some rest—and you also.”

  “Right. But first, when am I briefed on this identity I’m supposed to assume? This priest, and how he talks his way into El Mirai.”

  “You will practice a subterfuge,” said Rashid, with a little laugh. “You are good at that, are you not? His name is frère Gilles Deleuze. The Fedeli will see to your transformation. It’s quite right to say that you have left Stephan Raszer behind.”

  “And why should the Old Man—the self-proclaimed Lord of Time—do business with a humble friar? If what you say is true, he has powerful friends.”

  “Because—along with Scotty Darrell—you have something else that he very much wants.”

  “What’s that? I’d like an ace in the hole, because I’m not keen on trading one hostage for another, and even with a silver bullet, I wouldn’t kill the king for you.”

  The Kurd leaned in close, and his gaze bore into the pale blue iris of Raszer’s right eye. “This eye of yours,” he said, aiming his finger. “It sometimes sees past disguise, yes? Perhaps even beyond the curtain of death?”

  “It goes a little haywire every so often. Makes things much more complicated.”

  “While you wait tonight for the arrival of your escort, contemplate why pilgrims to Mecca circle the Ka’ba seven times and kiss the black stone set in its eastern corner . . . and why they have been doing so since long before Mohammed came.”

  “That’s all you’re going to give me? A Islamic koan?”

  “Goodnight, Mr. Raszer. Bonne nuit, Frère Deleuze.”

  Raszer remained on the terrace for an hour after Rashid had gone. When he’d finished the last of the wine, he made his way up to the bedroom designated as his. He lay down, then got up and smoked a cigarette, then lay down and got up again. He couldn’t seem to shake the feedback loop that the phrase “since long before Mohammed came” had triggered in his brain.

  It had to do with the strange tale Ruthie Endicott had spun when she’d returned Henry Lee’s black rock to him on the night be
fore Shams’ murder. It was a story his research had at least partly prepared him for, but its implications were explosive. Henry had filched the talisman from right under the nose of the mysterious Black Sheikh after seeing it used to conjure a bit of chaos magick in the tent outside Najaf—the tent where he and Johnny had sworn fealty to the Old Man.

  But it wasn’t only the stone’s magical potency that Henry had risked losing his head for. It was what the sheikh had revealed about its origins. If true, the two-pound chunk of meteoric rock was more than a relic. It was a key to the germination of Islam in something that didn’t resemble Islam at all. Something that would shake every mosque from here to Amsterdam and make much of the Islamist cause look like one enormous act of masculine overcompensation.

  He decided to check in with Monica, who was surely beside herself by now. It had been forty-eight hours.

  The ionophone, which had at least a dozen features he’d never use, was fancier gear than he liked to carry, but it did have one utility of great value, though to access it he had to open a small plate on the backside and use a jeweler’s screwdriver to adjust a tiny set screw. This effectively disabled the phone’s GPS capability by scrambling the outgoing signal, a form of data encryption.

  “What the hell, Raszer?” Monica said. “I lost you over the Bering Strait, then I picked you up again over the Caucasus. I had you as far as the Euphrates, and now you’re off the grid again. That $2,000 transmitter in your ass doesn’t seem to be working as advertised. How did you get there? None of the commercial flights—”

  He explained as best he could.

  “I don’t like this,” she said flatly.

  “I’m not crazy about it either, but there you have it. I could have wandered around southeastern Turkey for weeks and not gotten this close to Katy Endicott.”

  “Yeah, but at what price? You’ve made yourself part of someone else’s agenda.”

  “How else do we ever really get what we want?”

  “What can I do?” Monica asked. “I feel useless.”

  “For one thing, you can call in a favor with our guy at the DIA, and pinpoint American and Turkish troop deployments and Kurdish separatist hot zones along the Turkey–Iraq border. I want to steer clear of combat as best I can.”

  “That’s not going to be easy where you are.”

  “I know. Kurdistan isn’t even a real country, and it’s in a state of war with three of them. Only in the New Age can you make war on a virtual nation.”

  “Men make war on their nightmares. Always have. What else?”

  “Go back into those threads you started on pre-Islamic cults. Let’s see if we can get an inkling of where that black stone in the Ka’ba is supposed to have come from.”

  “The one that looks like a vulva?” she asked.

  “Right. According to Islamic legend, it was given to Abraham by the angel Gabriel. There are feminist scholars—and others—who say it’s a meteorite used in pre-Islamic worship and later co-opted. There’s a connection with the Satanic Verses. Go into the related etymology: Kubaba, Kybele, and Koran. Qur’an. I remember something about Mohammed’s tribe being the Quraysh, devotees of Q’re. Kore . . . the same one worshipped at Eleusis? Does that make the Koran the word of Kore? And see if you can tie in a Syrian or Nabataean goddess named Atargatis. That’s whose head is on the coin I found, and reportedly she’s the mascot for the Old Man’s fedayeen, his most loyal soldiers.

  “There’s something really ancient at work here,” Raszer continued. “We need to look again at how any of this could possibly relate to the deep history of the Witnesses, to Henry Lee, to castration—to the whole idea of becoming a ‘virgin.’”

  “Are you going to tell me why the stone in the Ka’ba has anything to do with you . . . or Katy Endicott? It’s in Mecca. You’re in Turkey.”

  “Because I’m betting it can be used to work some very powerful magic, and because—as crazy as this sounds—it’s just possible that I have a piece of it, or at least what someone thinks is a piece of it.”

  “The rock you lifted from the evidence room?”

  “And that—according to Ruthie—Henry Lee stole from the Black Sheikh.”

  “Jesus. Well, it makes sense they’d want it back. But I still don’t—”

  “Look at it this way. Suppose what you discovered about that conference in Damascus is really the nightmare it seems to be: a movement of Christian and Islamic fanatics and their proxies in government to trigger a series of catastrophes that would usher in a rigidly masculinist theocracy, east and west. How much mojo would that movement have if it were revealed that the foundations of Islam lie in the worship of a castrating goddess? How much juice would Pat Robertson have as a eunuch?”

  “Before I met you, Raszer, the world was a much simpler place.”

  “Sorry, sweetheart.”

  “And whose side is this ‘Old Man’ on?”

  “Neither. And both. He’s a broker. A profiteer. And probably a sorcerer.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m on it. And when will I hear—”

  “As soon as I’m settled with the Fedeli d’Amore, who seem to be the same guys Shams referred to as running a hostel near old Harran. But I don’t know what to expect. Not after being briefed by two CIA men who are both named Philby Greenstreet.”

  “Philby Greenstreet?” Monica repeated.

  “That’s right.”

  “Two spooks with the same name?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Expect double the fun, then. Or twice the trouble.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Raszer awoke at 4:44 am and, for a few plummeting moments, had absolutely no idea where he was. A sharp, pinging noise pricked his ears, and he realized he’d been stirred by the sound of someone throwing pebbles at the French window. He swung out of bed, stretched the deathlike sleep of long travel from his limbs, and went to the window, half expecting to see a street urchin straight out of Dickens.

  Dante was not a boy, but he wasn’t quite a man, either. Twenty-two, twenty-three at most, shaggy haired, round faced, and as saucer-eyed pretty as a Renoir child. He had wound up and was getting ready to hurl the next pebble when he noticed that Raszer had stepped through the window and onto the narrow balcony.

  The first light of a false dawn had begun to filter into the old city, painting everything in a watercolor wash of palest blue. Even Dante’s fair skin looked bluish.

  “Frère Deleuze?” the boy called up. There was a soft Scottish burr in his accent.

  “C’est moi,” Raszer answered. “But English is my second language.”

  “That’s good,” Dante said. “Because my French is crappy.”

  “Did they tell you why I’m here?”

  “To find a missing girl, right?”

  “I need to get to El Mirai. Can you help me?”

  “If anyone can,” replied the young man. “Are you ready to go? The Harran dolmus leaves the otogar in forty-five minutes. At Harran, my crew will come for us in the pickup. It’s a thirty-minute ride to Suayb, and another twenty to Sogmatar. We’d better get going. Big party tonight.”

  “I’ll be right down,” said Raszer. “But I didn’t bring my party dress.”

  Quietly and quickly, he repacked his things, then took a minute to compose a note of thanks to Rashid al-Khidr, the latest of his guides on this, the strangest of his journeys. He couldn’t be sure that he would ever see the man again. He slipped the note under Rashid’s door and padded down the stairs into the cool of the new day.

  The sun broke over the distant hills as they were entering the outskirts of Harran and sat like a half-exposed pewter dish for what seemed a long time. By the time they reached the old town center, it had risen fully, and the honeyed light it cast on the ancient beehive huts made them look like marzipan. The huts—dozens of them—were constructed of mud brick, without even the most rudimentary frame, and were entirely uniform in design. Like desert igloos, they had been built straight up from the soil to their pointed
tops, and seemed so much a part of the landscape that it surprised Raszer to see human forms emerge from them. Harran had been continuously occupied for six thousand years. The huts were not quite that old, but they might as well have been. The settlement had the look of Afghanistan in Appalachia: rugged people with skin like tarnished brass instruments, and children who seemed far too young for them, playing amid detritus: rusted bicycles, ironing boards, and the odd piece of exercise gear.

  “Is this home?” Raszer asked his guide.

  “Used to be,” answered Dante. “Used to run the outfitting business out of two of the beehives, side by side. But we outgrew them. Needed elbow room.” He paused.

  “Abraham lived here,” Dante continued. “Before he was called to Canaan. The Greeks came through. So did the Romans and the Mongols. They all left it be. It’s a godly place. And the people are good-hearted. But we didn’t quite fit in. You probably wouldn’t either.”