Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (29 page)

    
“Would
it jog your memory if we shipped you back? It can be arranged. You wanted the
Syrian ambassador—we’ll give you better. Of course, you might never come home.
Not in one piece.”

    
Borges’s
voice broke the silence. “Whose dried blood is on your hands, Scotty? It
is
Harry Wolfe’s blood, isn’t it?”

    
Scotty
regarded his hands curiously and said nothing. Borges nodded to Raszer.

    
“Why did
Harry Wolfe have to die?” asked Raszer. “I can’t guide you on unless I know
where you were coming from.” He felt the weight of the other men’s impatience.
Even Borges would be forced to pull up his rope soon.

    
“Who is
Hazid?” Scotty replied, and laid his shackled hands on the table.

    
Raszer
held the boy’s eyes and slowly drew in a breath. Here was the passkey, and
Raszer knew that Scotty would not offer the door a second time. The name Hazid
had to have something to do with the “initiation” to this most deadly level of
gaming. If Scotty himself hadn’t scrawled the name on the underside of Johnny
Horn’s toilet seat, then some other would-be initiate had. The air pressure in
the room seemed to increase, as on a rapidly descending airplane and Scotty was
in the cockpit. Raszer chose omission as the lesser sin and ignored the
question. Maybe—just maybe—Scotty would read it as complicity and let him in.

    
“We’re
at a border crossing, Scotty,” Raszer said. “You have no passport. You have
only me to take you across. Turn back, and I can’t help you. Go forward, the
game will be different, but at least you’ll be in it. What does a pilgrim ask
of a new guide?”

    
Raszer
waited. It was another gamble. He was banking on the supposition that, in a
pinch, Scotty would obey the rules of the game. They were all he had now.

    
“How—”
Scotty cleared his throat and swallowed. “How can I serve?”

    
Raszer
reached into his pocket and unfolded the printout of Katy Endicott’s picture.
He laid it on the table. “By telling me if you’ve seen this girl.”

    
Scotty
stared at the picture, at first blankly. Then the look came back—the look of
someone recalling a parallel existence, but now the frosting in his eyes had
melted.

    
“I saw
her in the Garden,” he said, his voice thick. “I saw her in paradise.”
   

    
“Where
is this garden?” Borges asked.

    
“Nowhere,”
Scotty answered.

    
“How did
you get there?” Raszer continued. “You were playing the game, and then—“

    
“They
came for me. In winter.” He gripped himself. “I was cold.”

The boy began to cry softly, and when Raszer put a hand on his
shoulder, the tears escalated to sobs. He clenched his fists and raised his
hands to his face in shame.

    
“What is
it, Scotty?” Raszer asked. “What’s happening?”

    
“I peed
my pants,” Scotty answered, pounding his forehead.

    
“And
before
I do
,” said Lieutenant Borges.
“We’re all gonna take a break.”

Raszer took the elevator to the plaza level for a
smoke, and Borges found him seated on a stone bench beneath a solitary palm
with a piece of garden gravel in his hand. The late-afternoon winds were
beginning to whip the spiky fronds of the palm tree overhead. He’d scrawled the
name Hazid on the pavement at his feet.

    
“What’s
it about, Raszer?” he asked. “Is it a person or a thing?”

    
“I don’t
know. I’m not sure it’s not a red herring. I took a chance up on the roof based
on something I saw in Azusa. He may’ve just picked up on that.” Raszer tossed
away the rock. “I’m thinking it may be some kind of key. But Christ, Luis, it
doesn’t even make sense that these two cases are related. How does life get
that weird?”

    
Borges
smiled broadly and took a seat. “It just does, my friend. I was raised on the
pampas
in Argentina, where the gauchos
used to make room at the campfire for the ghosts of the men they’d killed that
day. Before I came here. I worked the Tex–Mex and Arizona borders, where nobody
even knows what country they’re in.”

    
“I guess
you’ve been out there.” Raszer paused. “By the way, thanks for giving me some
rope with Scotty.”

    
“Just
enough to dangle yourself over the cliff, amigo.”

    
“That’s
all I’ll ever ask,” said Raszer.

    
“Anyway,
I had to. Otherwise, giving you the bullhorn wouldn’t have made sense to the
brass. I have to at least
look
like I
do things for good reason.”
 

    
Raszer laughed softly and rubbed out the letters
H
-
A
-
Z
-
I
-
D
with the toe of his boot. “All things
considered, they’re going pretty easy on him, don’t you think?”

    
“It’s
only the beginning,” Borges replied. “And you and I are still in the room.”

    
“I don’t
know . . . I almost get the feeling—”

    
“What?”
Borges pressed.

    
“Nothing.
Just a thought. An unformed thought. Probably smoke.”

    
They
began to stroll back across the sprawling city hall plaza. The sun was already
low in a pastel sky, and their shadows preceded them by a good ten feet.

    
“It’s
crazy. This kid I’ve been tracking for over a year suddenly parachutes into a
case involving an abducted Jehovah’s Witness girl, two murdered Iraq vets, and
some kind of trafficking ring using medieval terrorist techniques . . . where’s
the link?”

    
“You’re
the link, for onething,” said Borges. “We both know everything’s just a jumble
of possibilities until somebody draws them together. Like dropping a magnet
into a bowl full of ball bearings. I’ve had cases where nothing—I mean
nothing
—happened until I went out and
drew fire. Until I baited the trap with my own scent.”

    
“You’re
right,” said Raszer, remembering what he knew but so often forgot in the course
of events. “There has to be an
attractor
.”

    
“Another thing. You’ve got kids out there playing
this game. Who knows what kind of connections they’ve made on the Net? Who
knows how many Ishmaels there are? That’s a world beyond our jurisdiction.
Anytime you’re near a border, you’ve got predators. If I didn’t know that
before, I learned it cold in Nogales. The wolves wait there, between the known
and the unknown.”

    
“A no-go
zone,” Raszer said, half to himself. “You’ve given me an idea, Luis.”

    
“You
think maybe the kid—Scotty—was snatched, like your girl? That these guys wait
for the lamb that strays from the herd?”

    
“He said
‘they came for him in winter.’”

    
“And took him where?”

    
“That’s
the question. The fed seems to be angling for Syria.”

    
“You
said you thought somebody had messed with his brain . . . ”

    
“He’s
been rewired, Luis. It’s like somebody’s commandeered this game at its highest
levels, when the players are way out there. I’m not sure if Scotty knew whether
what was happening to him in there was real or ‘virtual.’ To tell you the
honest truth, on this case, I’m not so sure myself.”

    
They had
arrived at the revolving door, and Borges turned to him. “Tell me a little more
about this crazy game. As many times as I’ve read the accounts, I still don’t
really get how it moves from the Internet to the real world.”

    
“It
starts out like any game of make-believe. The thrill of danger without the
physical risk. The target is college kids, or anyone from age seventeen to
thirty in an institutional setting. You find your way to the main website and
pick a character, only it’s a philosopher or a saint instead of an action hero.
You learn to act as he would act, think as he would think. Then the Inquisition
comes after you. Things start to get real. You get threatening text messages
and think you’re being followed. It becomes what they call a ‘chaotic fiction.’
There’ve even been cases where mock torture chambers were set up in dorm rooms.
You get a credit card you didn’t apply for, then an email saying you’ve run up
ten grand in charges but they’ll let it slide if you confess. Your GPA suddenly
drops to 2.0, and the dean is on the phone to your parents.”

    
“They
can do that?”

    
“They’re
hackers. As good as they get. It’s a massive Kafka-esque freakout, but the
thing is, it’s exciting as hell. Because
you
are at the center of it. Somebody cares enough to give you nightmares. The only
people you can trust are the Masters. Anyhow, there are hundreds of variations,
but finally, the only way to escape your persecutors is to leave the Web, give
up your ‘real’ identity, and slip into the false one. You go on the lam, all
the while following the instructions you pick up at Internet cafés. Very
glamorous, and very scary. You make yourself a servant of chance, and chance
remakes you. You forget who you were.”

    
“Unbelievable,”
said Borges. “How can anybody forget who they are?”

    
“You
remember the Dungeons Dragons thing, don’t you?”

    
“The kid
who died hunting a monster in the high school ventilation ducts?”

    
“Something
like that,” said Raszer. “But the thing is, the monster had become real to him.
When I was about ten, me and my friends invented a Halloween story about a man
in a white trenchcoat who was snatching kids from swing sets. We did it to
scare the seven-year-olds, but we wound up scaring ourselves. All of a sudden,
parents wouldn’t let their children outside anymore. Then the cops started
questioning men getting off the commuter trains in their Burberry raincoats.
One day, they arrested the father of one of my buddies in the movie theater
balcony—groping a sixteen year-old boy. He was wearing a white trenchcoat.
That’s a ‘chaotic fiction.’”

    
Borges
rubbed his long chin. “You know how to get in touch with Scotty’s parents,
right?”

    
“Yeah. I’d
like to call them, if it’s okay.”

    
“Sure.
But give me the number. I’m going to need them out here on a morning plane. I’m
calling it a day on the interrogation. It’s late. I need to get the kid
processed, get his clothes and the blood evidence to the lab, get the med guys
to take a look at him. And I’m hoping our G-men will decide to go play in
someone else’s yard for a while.”

    
“Not
much chance of that, now that they’ve got the scent,” said Raszer. “The NCTC
guy’s already made his Al Qaeda connection, and that mouser from the FBI—”

    
“Piece
of advice: If you want to stay off the leash on your abduction case, you might
want to make yourself scarce here for a day or two. Otherwise, you’re gonna
have feds spitting down your neck all the way to the ‘Ninth Circle’ . . . or
wherever it is you have to go to find your girl. ¿
Comprende
?”

    
“
Sí,
comprendo
,” Raszer replied. “But at some point, I have to finish what I’ve
started with Scotty. That’s my covenant. Will you keep me briefed?”

    
Borges
nodded. “You do the same,” he said. “In the meantime, there’s the Syrian girl.
She’s told my partners absolutely nothing worth squat.”

    
“Is she
a suspect?”

    
“Not at
the moment, but she’s a piece of work. I could hold her as a material witness,
but right now I’m more interested in watching her next move. I’m letting her go
as soon as we get her statement, but I’d like you to keep an eye on her for me.
Take her home. Better yet, take her to a motel. I doubt she’ll want to go
home.”

    
A gust
of wind from the northeast swept across the plaza, taking them both by
surprise. Raszer shivered as it passed over his shoulders.

    
“She’ll
come out the Temple Street doors in about twenty minutes. You can pull into the
alley that’s kitty-corner, where the squads park, and watch for her. I’ll tell
her you’re her ride.”

    
“Thanks,
Luis. And thanks for the trust.”

    
“If you
can’t trust a man who died and came back, who can you trust?”