by A. W. Hill
“In the native religions of the Kurdish people,” Francesca explained, “dogs symbolize harmony and unity; snakes stand for discord and separation. Not in a dualistic way, but as counterbalancing forces. You can’t have one without the other.”
Nearby was an elegant symbol from whose north pole seven gently arching ribs flowed like lines of longitude, passing through an array of seven beads at the equator and rejoining at the south end of the axis, where they formed a vortex leading back up the circle by way of a vulvalike ellipse at the center.
“And that,” Raszer said, indicating the symbol. “Tell me about that.”
“At the top,” Francesca replied, “is the Haq, the pearl of the godhead, and emanating from that is Khawandagar, the creator. The seven arcs are the seven avatars of each of the world’s ages. They’re our guides through all incarnations until we reach full humanity. Jesus was one of them; so was the Prophet, and Isaac, and Ali. We can flow back to the source through these, or we can, if our hearts are strong enough and the Khezr is willing to guide us, take a shortcut through the center—”
“And then what happens?”
“We learn to live simultaneously in two worlds,” she replied. “Our physical bodies remain in the world of zahir. But our subtle bodies pass through the eye of the heart”—she placed her finger in the center of the ellipsis—“and merge with the world of forms. We put on the psychic skin of our avatars, and evil can’t touch us—”
“Because you’ve shed your own skin?” Raszer asked.
“You’ve got it,” said Chrétien. “But it’s a real trick to maintain that state. The subtle body flickers on and off like a strobe . . . sometimes even like a dying bulb. Sometimes you lose it altogether, and you’re stuck back in the world, washing dishes and swatting mosquitoes.”
“And that can get dangerous,” said Dante. “Because when you walk the middle path, you can just as easily fall toward evil as good.”
“So we try to straddle,” said Chrétien.
“And you’re straddling now?” asked Raszer.
“Can’t you feel it?”
Shaykh Adi gave a soft but emphatic bark, and his eyes glowed. The dog seemed to know. The dog, Raszer could persuade himself, did seem to be in two worlds.
Francesca smiled at his recognition. “The Kurds who live between here and Hâkkari practice the oldest organized religion in the world. Organized, meaning it has a cosmology and shared ritual. It influenced the Essenes and early Christianity. It shaped the Romans when they came here as conquerors and turned them on to Mithras, who is one of its avatars. It nearly absorbed Shia Islam in the Middle Ages, and still colors it. It sent the crusaders back to southern France, singing troubadour songs to the Lady—who is our lady, the lady of the Fedeli. It branched off into Baha’i in the nineteenth century. And it’s the bedrock of the Bektash Sufis, who roam all over these lands. The Cult of the Angels, they call it. It’s the face behind the veil.”
“And what about the other cult?” asked Raszer. “The cult of the Old Man.”
“If you go back far enough,” said Chrétien, “it’s a graft from the same tree. But so were Cain and Abel. The original Ismaili Assassins—back in the eleventh and twelfth centuries—they were Gnostics, mystical terrorists. Omar Khayyám was down with them. So was Shams of Tabriz. And the Templars carried their wisdom back to Europe. On seventeen Ramazan—the eighth of August in 1164, Hassan II, the son of Hassan-i-Sabbah, declared the Qiyamat, the great resurrection. The chains of worldly law were broken, and every man and woman was freed to live in the spirit as the vassal of his or her own lord. Like the ’60s, only without the bad acid. Nothing is true, all is permitted.”
“But that was meant to apply to life in the resurrection body—the body without organs. The lords of this world misread the message…used it as a cover for lawlessness and greed. That’s the problem with the world—the rulers can’t read poetry.”
“So,” said Raszer, “the Old Man appropriates the belief system of the Nizaris, offers his followers a paradise on Earth, and rents his services out to Islamist and Christian fanatics alike, knowing that he’ll wind up in the catbird’s seat if he can mediate their common agenda. Is that about the size of it?”
“There’s a war on for the soul of the world,” said Francesca.
“Look at where we are now,” said Chrétien, picking up Francesca’s thread. “American troops and missile launchers all along the Iraqi border with Syria, Turkey, and Iran. The Yanks have lost the Kurds—if they ever really had them—because they reneged on their promises in order to placate Turkey. And they’ve catalyzed a regional war. Syria’s one big arms bazaar and a conduit for human traffic. Israel’s pincered between two conflicting Palestinian states. Everybody’s locked into conflict, with no way out. The world is in a preapocalyptic state.”
“Seems that way,” said Raszer. “Since you’re the crew that’s going to take me across this battlefield, I guess I should ask: Who are your friends and, more important, who are your enemies?”
“You’d be better to ask who isn’t our enemy,” Francesca replied. “We’re a threat to everyone from emperors to schoolteachers. Right now, we’re a particular threat to the Old Man’s recruitment effort, because pilgrims pass through here on their way to him.”
“As far as friends go,” said Chrétien, “we can count on the Yazdani spiritual leaders—the genuine ones—and the Bektash Sufis . . . when we can find them. And the Kurdish tribesmen…if they aren’t under the Old Man’s boot.”
“Those are good friends to have in this neighborhood,” said Raszer. “And if we need muscle . . . to get Katy safely out of the country?”
Dante answered. “Hired guns aren’t hard to find here.”
“How large is the Old Man’s posse?” Raszer asked. “Hundreds? Thousands?”
“At least three thousand at El Mirai,” said Chrétien. “And more scattered around the globe.”
“Jesus. All from The Gauntlet?”
“No. Only his assassins-in-training. The others are captured, like your girl, or put into debt bondage—only he gets a little help in that regard. There are field agents—church pimps, to put it plainly—planted within theocratic ministries on both sides who single out the most alienated, most antisocial, most hopeless of their flock.”
An image of Amos Leach flickered onto Raszer’s mental screen.
“And,” added Chrétien, “he’s got mercenaries at his disposal—both local tribes-men and professionals.”
“I guess I should have figured that,” said Raszer. “When do we leave?”
“Soon,” replied Chrétien. “But first, we dance. And make you over.”
“Right . . . Dante mentioned a party. What’s the occasion?”
Dante grinned. “Ever hear of the Ayini Jam?”
“The spring equinox festival?”
The boys looked at each other. Dante answered. “It’s going on all over Kurd country. Peaks two nights from now. That’s when the candles get blown out.”
Raszer cocked an eyebrow.
“And,” concluded Francesca, “you’ll never be afraid of the dark again.”
TWENTY-SIX
Monica dragged her latest files into the folder named Ka’ba on her computer’s desktop. As was to be expected with web-based research, some of the material was dubious, some seemingly authoritative. A piece by a goddess scholar named Rufus Camphausen even came with pictures of the rarely photographed black stone, secured in the corner of the shrine by an oval-shaped silver band and looking—Monica had to admit—like a vagina. What a twist. The same puritanical Muslim men who wouldn’t allow their wives to leave the house unaccompanied, lining up to kiss the cunt of a pre-Islamic goddess. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and she decided it was time for tea.
Four monitors were arrayed at her workstation, each one with multiple windows open, each of them displaying information related to Raszer’s current assignment. Monica scanned them to be sure she’d saved anything newl
y written or discovered, then rose from the console, empty cup in hand. As she began making her way to the kitchen, the room grew suddenly dimmer. The effect was like that of a partial eclipse, but there were no acts of God scheduled for today that she knew of. The floor lamps in Raszer’s sunken living room had dulled to a sort of burnt umber, and she saw ahead that the light over his slate-topped bar was flickering.
“Shit,” she said out loud, and turned in alarm toward the office. “It’s a brownout.”
She hurried back toward her station, intent on saving and shutting down before there was a power spike—a constant hazard in L.A. She got to the threshold just in time to see the first of the viral worms crawling across the monitor screen on the left. It was computer language, but not one she recognized. The characters now gobbling up her research were none that had origins on her keyboard in any configuration she knew. They streamed in from the upper right-hand corner of the screens, leaving gibberish in their wake. Her throat tightened, constricting her windpipe.
She set her cup down, rushed to the console, and began frantically—and, she knew in her heart, pointlessly—trying to hold off the invading armies. In all their years in this office, they had contracted only one virus, and that had been in the days when there was little to lose.
Within a matter of seconds, everything on her hard drive was gone.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” she screamed.
Then, with the empty screens and a ripple of breeze through the open garden doors, the terror came. It spread over her skin like a frost, leaving her fingertips numb and cold. “Lars?” she called through the window. He ought to be just outside. He ought to answer right away.
But he didn’t.
She willed her legs to carry her to the front door, and peered through the pane to his post on the balcony. The chair was empty; his makeshift beach cabana had fallen over. Pulling a breath into her lungs, she opened the door and stepped out. “Lars?” she called again, feeling the name catch in her throat. Two houses down, where the green sedan belonging to the FBI surveillance team ought to have been, was an empty space at the curb.
“Shit,” Monica whispered. Empty hard drives, empty chair, empty parking space. The next thing to be emptied, she reasoned, would be her veins. Her impulse was to start walking and keep walking—right down the middle of the street—until she’d reached Hollywood and the safety of numbers.
But she didn’t want to get into her car. They might have fucked with it. She didn’t want to go back into the house. Monica understood in that moment of paralysis the difference between even dedicated amateurs like her and professional soldiers and spies. Stress training enabled them to make good decisions in situations like this one. They were taught, fundamentally, how to stay alive, because that meant being able to carry out the mission. All she had was her native wit and a loyalty to Raszer that went beyond all rational explanation.
But she was also stubborn, and it was her stubbornness that impelled her back into the office to shut down the system, retrieve their two external hard drives, and lock the place up. She did all this on autopilot because, as far as she could tell, her brain was not working. Finally, she got into the car, tossed the drives on the passenger seat, and turned the ignition with her eyes shut tight.
The Toyota started without a bang, the brakes seemed to work all right, and she was so relieved that she failed to notice as she turned onto Whitley Drive that a white delivery van had pulled away from the curb behind her. After ten minutes’ driving, her pulse at last left her throat, and she opened the glove compartment to retrieve the security cigarette she kept there for bad dates, hormonal days, and moments like these.
Special agent Bernard Djapper dried his hands, adjusted his bow tie in the mirror, and prepared to leave the airport bathroom. Behind him, the stall door opened quietly and the young man slipped out. Djapper felt reasonably calm—all things considered—but he knew that soon enough, the tension would rise back into his jaw. He dreaded that feeling, because he knew it meant he was not resolute.
The thing was not to show it. Whatever transitory passions had, in the previous minutes, rippled the perfectly composed landscape of his exterior must now be patted as neatly back into place as his cowlick. He’d spent considerable time and effort making himself an exemplary model. An exemplary model of what, precisely, he could no longer remember. Some paragon of responsible masculinity once glimpsed in an old movie or a children’s book. Someone always addressed as Mister, or Sir, or Father. Not too many years ago, there had briefly been a woman in his life (the corner of his mouth twitched at the memory of her). Before leaving, she’d told him that he worked so hard at being “normal” that he’d made himself anything but. Bitch.
Something he glimpsed as he stooped to pick up his briefcase disturbed him, and he turned back to the mirror. An unruly eyebrow hair. He removed from his briefcase a small leather grooming kit, took out a pair of tweezers, and plucked it out.
A smile flickered across his face, an acknowledgment of the vanity of his vanity. He knew that the pride he took in his appearance had no basis in beauty. But his ordinariness served to disguise the extraordinarily complicated man beneath, and it was from this deception that his pride flowed. If Oscar Wilde had been right to say that the mark of intelligence was the ability to hold two conflicting ideas in the mind at the same time, then Djapper might be a genius, for he could hold two minds in his mind at the same time. He was, in his own estimation, an expert liar.
Nobody knew the real Bernard Henry Djapper.
Very little had ever come “naturally” to Djapper; he’d worked hard for everything he had. Some men, he thought, hadn’t earned their grace—the private detective, for instance. Even he, Bernard Djapper, had been seduced, and he’d nearly given away the store. After years of painstaking self-containment, he’d nearly spilled it all. Like that grade-school guilt flush that made you want to confess that you’d put the tack on Teacher’s chair, even when you hadn’t. Djapper hated himself for it, and hated the detective. How nice to think that men could make themselves over. How nice to think that a man could choose his “role.” Some men had destinies. The possibility of friendship—of a connection—had almost detoured Djapper from his. Never again.
The enemy was forever equating what was “natural” with what was good. But nature was corrupt and corrupting. Likewise, natural history—if allowed to run its course—would weaken human purpose. History sometimes had to be redirected, even radically, if only to prevent entropy and rot. No prospect was as exciting to him as being a shaper of history, and no history could be more thrilling than the one being shaped right now. It was the first thing he’d ever felt willing to die for.
Every so often, things would reach a point of confusion, and Djapper would begin to lose himself in his deception, become so enamored of its craft, that he forgot why he was doing it. At such times, it was necessary to remind himself of what he really wanted: He wanted things to be clean. Uncomplicated. If someone had suggested to him that this presented a paradox—that a man preferring black and white could live in shades of gray—he would have answered, “No, I’m not a paradox. I’m a patriot.”
He left the bathroom and made his way out of the Tom Bradley International Terminal. His cargo had been shipped and, when it arrived at that distant port, would introduce viral agents into Stephan Raszer’s game, as surely as one monkey could infect an entire zoo. These agents would compel countermeasures on Raszer’s part, but nothing would kill the contagion. There is no antibody for the unexpected. It wasn’t that Djapper desired to see the PI dead; it wasn’t about desire at all. Raszer was simply in the way of the particular history Djapper and his colleagues were trying to effect. He looked forward to assuring them that the obstacle had been eliminated.
There was one more chore to do before he could assure them that everything was back in place. From LAX, Djapper headed northeast on the I-5 toward downtown Los Angeles, where a team of private security contractors in Douglas Picot’s charge
were now preparing to convey Scotty Darrell to Edwards Air Force Base, on the wind-raked desert flats east of Mojave, California. From there, the plan had been to rendition Darrell into hands less bound by law and convention. In U.S. custody, he could only cause trouble. As an enemy combatant, he was effectively disposed of.
But Agent Djapper had been informed that there was more mischief afoot. The fabric had begun to fray even before the election, and now, with less than two years left before the end date, there were seams showing everywhere. If the boy boarded the plane, it would be the beginning of the unraveling of everything. If he boarded the plane, he was going to Greenstreet.
He could not be permitted to get there.
The traffic was good, and after twenty minutes, he pulled into the underground garage. At the last instant, he veered into the lane for valet parking. What the hell, he thought. You only live once. He pulled up and stepped out, nodding stiffly to the attendant who held the door for him, then breezed through the security doors on just a single flash of his badge. It was true what they said: Act powerful, and people assume you are. If he’d self-parked, they’d have run his credentials, maybe patted him down.