Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  “Then no one will have you,” she breathed, and slipped from his body like a sheath of skin, coiling at his feet and flicking an adder’s tongue. The snake drew back its head and readied its attack. Raszer looked up and saw that the Kurdish forces had contained the fortress guard, and that the first chopper had landed.

  “Goddamnit!” he howled. “Will somebody kill this thing?!”

  From his right came a bristling blur of limbs, muscles, and fur. Shaykh Adi opened his jaws and sunk his teeth into the soft tissue behind the adder’s head. The snake whipped furiously, but vainly. Adi had it where it lived, and after enduring a minute of ferocious shaking, the serpent—to all appearances—decided to play dead.

  Adi bounded down the slope toward the canyon floor, dragging the limp reptile over the sharp rocks. At a distance of fifty or sixty yards, Raszer saw the snake begin to writhe again. A few seconds later, dog and prey vanished behind a small ridge.

  Francesca had come to his side, and lent her shoulder to support his battered body. They waited, hearing and seeing nothing for an agonizing minute. Rashid and Rahim joined their party. The Kurdish unit formed a phalanx behind them, allowing El Mirai’s splintered forces to fall back into the fortress.

  A dark cloud rose from the desert floor and spun itself into a shape like smoke from a stack on an arctic winter’s day. As it rose, it became a shadow on the barren ground; the shadow traveled over the ramparts of El Mirai and grew until its darkness blanketed the citadel. Shortly after that, the dog came trotting back.

  Raszer turned to Rashid. “You wouldn’t have a cigarette, would you?”

  “If you don’t mind Turkish tobacco . . . ”

  “Any kind,” Raszer said. “As long as it burns.” He eyed the helicopter, then the surrounding area. “Where’s Greenstreet?”

  Rashid offered a cigarette to Rahim as well, and lit both. The question went unanswered, or perhaps unheard.

  “Forget it,” Raszer said, half to himself. “Let’s just get Dante’s body . . . and get the hell out of this place.”

  FORTY

  A light snow fell on Massachusetts Avenue, making cocoons of light around the streetlamps in the embassy district. It snows infrequently in Washington, D.C., and two inches slow the city’s works considerably. Raszer was on foot, having come from a meeting in a room at the Mayflower Hotel. The subject had been Kurdistan, and certain impediments to its nationhood, and none of the attendees had been there as a matter of record. Raszer had been invited, but he had other business in town as well.

  In the street and lined up all the way to Wisconsin Avenue and beyond, police barricades had been erected, diverting traffic from the National Cathedral and making the city even more of a mess to get around in. That was one reason he’d decided to walk, rather than taxi to the Cathedral. He walked with a limp and wore a black silk patch over his right eye—or, more precisely, over where his right eye had been. He’d always been told that to lose an eye is to lose depth perception, and that made sense. But depth perception was the least of Raszer’s problems, as now he saw the external world as a re-creation—and not an entirely convincing one—of the world he saw internally. It required some legerdemain, but he had found that if he superimposed one image on the other and observed the interference pattern, he could recapture depth.

  A Mercedes limo navigated around the barricades and pulled up to the curb beside him. Raszer stopped but did not flinch. He knew the car. He lit a cigarette and waited. The rear door opened and the first Mr. Philby Greenstreet, resplendent in a black cashmere topcoat, swung his six-foot-two frame out and crossed the snow-dusted parkway to Raszer’s side.

  “Sure you wouldn’t like a ride?” he asked.

  Raszer nodded toward the cathedral, its spotlit spires looming less than a quarter of a mile away. “Thanks, but no. I’m close, and I love snow on Christmas Eve. Besides, I’ve developed a phobia about limousines.”

  “Probably a phobia worth keeping,” said Greenstreet. “Nasty things happen in limousines.” He glanced at Raszer’s bad leg. “You sure you’re ready for this?”

  “Never better,” said Raszer. He cocked his head. “Didn’t I see you twenty minutes ago? Do we have a problem?”

  “I’ve just gotten word. All three of the young men are in custody. They were apprehended separately, two hours apart, wearing suicide jackets containing enough explosives to take down a row of flying buttresses and a few hundred parishioners.”

  “So it’s only the girl in there?” Raszer asked.

  “Only the girl. We don’t know for certain that she made it into the church, but we’ll assume she did. And that she’ll burrow in and stay there.”

  “Right. Just reassure me that the bomb squad’s best is doing its thing. If the FBI has the other three, then some genius should’ve figured out by now how the jackets are wired.” Greenstreet nodded. “And in case things go badly . . . the police have to keep pedestrians and cars at least fifty yards back on all sides.”

  “You have my absolute assurance,” said Greenstreet. “It’s all been handled with a degree of discretion I wouldn’t have expected in this town. The service has been canceled. The president and his family will spend their Christmas Eve at home. The foreign dignitaries are in their hotel rooms, under heavy guard. The SWATs are in place near the nave and transept doors.”

  “How long before the media get wise to all this? I’m concerned she might have a phone with Internet access. If she knows they know she’s in there, she may—”

  “As far as the media know . . . at this moment,” said Greenstreet, stepping back into the Mercedes, “the carol service is still on for ten, and the police presence is more than warranted by the guest list. Merry Christmas, Mr. Raszer. And good luck.”

  “Merry Christmas,” Raszer replied. “By the way . . . something I never sorted out: That crack commando team that showed up to pull me out, the exotic choppers, the guns—who paid for all that? Not the taxpayers, I’m guessing.”

  “Just one taxpayer,” Greenstreet replied. “The same man who paid for the jet. And the technology we used to track you. You remember my mentioning a wealthy veteran of The Gauntlet?”

  “Sure, I remember,” Raszer answered. “What’s his name?”

  The elegant spook gave a wink. “Philby Greenstreet’s his name.”

  He began to raise the tinted window.

  “Wait,” Raszer said, stepping forward. “I’d like to know, in case I don’t . . . in

  case things don’t work out: Has anything we’ve done put the brakes on what these people intended?”

  “We’ve set them back for now,” the spy replied. “We’re slowly weeding them out of Defense and State and the NSA. But they always find a way to crawl back in. And tonight is important. The National Cathedral is as potent a symbol as any. If it blows, there’ll be a massive reaction—which is what they want. Whenever collective fear can be induced and chaotic factors set in play, they regain control of the game.”

  With that, the window was sealed, and he was gone.

  Raszer walked on until he stood beneath the church.

  Like his cast iron stove and steampunk decor, the National Cathedral was a beautiful anachronism, and for that reason, if for no other, Raszer was fond of it. In a city of eighteenth-century marble, it was a granite throwback to the Middle Ages. Commissioned in the late 1900s and finished a hundred years later, it had been painstakingly constructed, vault by vault, buttress by buttress, to the specifications of High Gothic architecture.

  Gothic design excited something in Raszer: it was an architecture of the impossible, designed to prove to man that God could hold up the sky with one finger. In one sense, it was a mere replica, built out of its time and native place, but Raszer found it beautiful and a thing worth preserving. Just as the world—also a replica—was worth preserving.

  If the cathedral came down, there would be hell to pay.

  But while his adversary’s designs were grandiose, Raszer had learned to keep his more
modest. There was a girl inside the church who was also worth preserving, though whether her mangled psyche could be restored was anybody’s guess. It was true that she’d betrayed him to his enemies and was accountable for Dante’s murder. If anything, this only put a keener edge on Raszer’s resolve.

  Because he still didn’t know why she had done it.

  Once he was inside the cathedral close, and after presenting himself to the coordinator of the joint security force, Raszer sought out a man named Davos, the FBI liaison to the guys on the bomb squad. He’d been told they were bringing in a certified explosives genius, a guy nervy enough, they’d quipped, to “defuse a nuclear payload on its way down and then parachute to safety.” He wanted to meet this prodigy, and he also wanted to know what sort of device they’d found the three young Ishmaels carrying.

  “That’s just the problem,” said Davos, watching the snowflakes melt on his palm. “They weren’t carrying. Seems they were s’posed to pick up their kits at four different locations—one in each quadrant of the city. That way, if one of them was nabbed—”

  “Wait a second,” Raszer broke in. “Greenstreet just told me they were loaded for bear when they were caught . . . that each of them had enough to bring down the church.”

  “Who’s Greenstreet?” the FBI man asked, wiping his palm.

  Raszer stared. His scalp prickled as the sweat broke.

  “Whoever he is had the wrong intel. Or he read it wrong. We got a description of the device from one of the three, but we still don’t have the hardware. Based on that description, we think it’s the same rig that took out Bernard Djapper and Douglas Picot in Los Angeles. If it is, the main thing you need to know is that it’s not detonated by the carrier, and it’s not on a timer of any sort. It’s radio-triggered from a long way off . . . ”

  “Which means,” Raszer said, his gaze drifting up to the stained-glass rose window between the two towers of the west nave, “that she could be wired for sound.”

  “Could be,” said Davos.

  “Where’s your genius?”

  “He’s not here yet.”

  “Jesus. Where the hell is he?”

  “He’s on his way. Stuck in Dupont Circle. It’s the friggin’ snow. A sprinkle, and the town falls to pieces. And the D.C. cops have roadblocks everywhere.”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this. He could jog from Dupont Circle. I’m going in.”

  “You’ll want this,” said Davos, offering what appeared to be a designer flak jacket, complete with logo.

  “And what’s that going to do?” asked Raszer. “Keep my guts from spilling out when the bomb goes off?”

  “Suit yourself,” said Davos, tossing the jacket back onto a pile.

  The bells in the high tower began to ring out “Adeste Fidelis,” on what cue, Raszer couldn’t guess. There was no one in the church to hear, save for a renegade Jehovah’s Witness girl for whom the tune would have little meaning and little chance of inducing a change of heart.

  “Do we need the bells?” Raszer asked.

  “Everything as usual,” said the FBI man. “Hey, before you head in . . . can I ask you something?”

  Raszer nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “I know you’ve been cleared to go in. I’m not questioning that. But why would you want to when there are guys who do this for a living?”

  “I’ve got a thing about closure,” Raszer said.

  “Not much of an answer.”

  “Best I’ve got. You’ve got my cell. And you’ll call me as soon as your guy gets here, right?”

  There was silence.

  “Right?”

  Finally, a nod.

  Raszer entered from the east, as instructed, through a subground service door that led to a vast open space beneath the chancel. The bells were muffled, but still quite audible. O come let us adore him. O come let us adore him. He’d had plenty of time to study the cathedral’s floor plan, and knew that there were three ways into the upper chamber. The one he wanted led via a retractable stairway to a hatch that opened into the crossing, where the transept intersected the nave. If she were in the chancel, the choir, or sitting in a random pew halfway back from the altar, she’d see him.

  His thinking was sound, but when he stepped quietly up into the heart of the great cathedral, he felt no eyes on him. He wasn’t all that surprised. It was a place anyone could disappear into, a place to make anyone feel small. The intricately ribbed vault of the nave arched to heaven, 140 feet above. The polished oak railings of the choir and clerestory, luxuriantly wrapped with twinkling evergreen boughs, were high enough to induce vertigo.

  Far above the choir, the massive pipes of the organ rose to lengths of more than twenty feet. In the stillness of the place, Raszer could hear the pipes breathing as imprisoned air whistled softly through them. Everything was prepared. Everything as usual.

  Except for one thing: A candle was burning on the altar.

  He stood at the crossing and watched its flame strobe at the tempo of a bird’s heartbeat. The lighting of candles was sacramentally proscribed. No acolyte, much less a priest, would leave one burning in an empty church. He padded up the broad, thickly carpeted steps to the altar. The candle’s penumbra formed a circle eight feet across, but within the circle, there was little light. Stepping carefully into the dark center, Raszer moved behind the altar. Despite his caution, he kicked something light and metallic. It chimed like a copper kettle, and in the aftermath, he heard the swishing of liquid.

  He froze. “Ruthie?” he said softly. When there was no answer, he took the candle from the altar and brought it down to the floor.

  The sound had come from a brass washbowl, used by the celebrant to ritually cleanse his hands before administering Holy Communion. Some of its content had splashed onto the carpet; it had an acrid odor. Raszer knelt and put his nose into the bowl, and his nostrils closed reflexively. Urine. “Jesus, Ruthie,” he whispered.

  In the pulsing light, he saw further evidence of her ceremony. She’d jimmied open the cabinet containing the Communion wine and downed at least one carafe. The chalice lay overturned nearby, and scattered around it were a few white Communion wafers. It wasn’t the obvious sacrilege that stunned him so much as the feral urgency of it. She had accomplished her own transubstantiation: holy wine into piss.

  He stood, taking up the candle and spreading its light into the sanctuary. If she’d been following the apostate’s path, that’s where she would have headed next: to the holy of holies. He thought he might find her passed out there, but he did not.

  Raszer set the candle back on the altar and descended to the nave’s central aisle. He called her name again. The tower bells had begun to chime O come, o come, Emmanuel, when he heard a distant siren. A stray headlight illuminated the rose window above the west entrance. He counted off each row of pews, passing his hand over the smooth, scrolled wood as he walked. He had now left the candle’s outer ring, and the nave fell into shadow.

  A shape registered a second after he saw it. He stopped, backed up two rows, and revisited what he’d seen. It was a body, prone on the pew on his right, about halfway down the row. He heard the deep, measured breathing of sleep.

  She was on her side, her right hand beneath her head, her left resting protectively on the bulky explosive pack she wore against her stomach. He said her name again, so as not to alarm her when he got close.

  Then he sat down beside her and waited.

  “Still trying to save my soul?” she asked after a few minutes.

  “You tell me, Ruthie. Does it want to be saved?”

  “Oh, I don’t guess so. My daddy sure didn’t think it did. He said I was beyond salvation. Said there was never a teaspoon of good in me, even when I was a baby.”

  Raszer shook his head. “You spend the first twelve years of life seeking your father’s blessing. If you’re still looking for it after that, you’re in trouble. Grace has to come from somewhere else.”
<
br />   “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” The sarcasm was there, but halfhearted.

  “Yeah, I’d say you have. But that’s not the end of it.” He slipped a worn copy of the Book of Common Prayer from the back of the pew and began to leaf through it. When he’d come to the Reconciliation of the Penitent, he read: “The Lord be in your heart and upon your lips that you may truly and humbly confess your sins.”

  “There are too many of ’em,” Ruthie said.

  “Katy’s with your mom in Taos,” he told her. “She’s working at the inn.”

  “That’s perfect. Clean white sheets every day. That’s where she belongs. This is where I belong. Some girls answer to heaven, some girls answer to hell.”