Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (38 page)

    
“Pull
down the map, would you?” he asked, and remained cantilevered against her desk
as she stood and smoothed her skirt, as was her habit. His eyes went distant as
she pulled a classroom-size political map of the world down over the scheduling
board that spanned most of the office’s north wall, but he missed neither her
practiced movement nor the fit of the knit fabric against her backside. The
truth was that he considered her essential. The truth was that he often heard
himself speaking from her lips. Raszer thought that knowing another human being
that well was possibly the sexiest thing on earth, especially when sex wasn’t
part of the package.

    
Odds and
ends from his last assignment remained in place on the map’s dry-erase,
magnetic surface: Scotty Darrell’s coordinates, as well as those of a handful
of other advanced Gauntlet players whose paths of pilgrimage he’d managed to
get from the GamesMasters before their disappearance. Many of the players had
left the North American continent. Some had gone south, into the Latin
countries. Others had inevitably tracked west to the great deserts of the
Southwest, the American Canaan. But a number of currents seemed to converge on
the ancient nexus: on ports like Alexandria, Haifa, Tripoli, Tarsus, and
farther inland, even to the frontiers of that black farce of a war that had
filled the rivers of Babylon with enough blood to ensure a bad harvest for six
generations.

    
To Iraq,
where Johnny Horn and Henry Lee had gotten their call.

    
“Do you
want me to clear it?” Monica asked.

    
“No.
Leave everything for now.” Raszer leaned forward, intent on the crisscrossing
trajectories. “So here’s what we’ve got so far, working backwards from today:
We’ve got an American college boy with a remapped mind in federal custody for
an alleged act of terrorism committed while wearing the garb of an
eleventh-century radical Shiite cult, which operated from bases in Syria and
Persia and murdered its political enemies with Syrian daggers at close range.
He claims to have been in the service of someone he calls the Old Man, and the
feds—at least this guy from counterterrorism—seem to know who he’s talking
about.”

    
“He just
happens
to be the same boy I tracked
down the rabbit hole of an alternate reality game based in the thesis that
absolutely everything is open to question except the existence of God. And now
he’s implicated in both the murder of the British DJ who MC’d the rave from
which Katy Endicott was abducted and at which Katy’s boyfriends, Johnny Horn
and Henry Lee, were killed,
and
the
attempted kidnapping of Layla Faj-Ta’wil—a Syrian woman and onetime consort of
same Johnny Horn—who was hiding out with the DJ and may have a history with our
killers as some kind of sexual terrorist—”

    
“Or at
least, that was your firsthand assessment of her skills,” Monica teased, taking shorthand with her right and moving
magnetic game pieces with her left.

    
“Not
just mine,” said Raszer. “Harry Wolfe, aka MC Hakim, deceased, affirmed it, and
Layla herself alluded to sexual espionage. That’s how she got involved with
Johnny. I think it’s possible she never left the payroll.”

    
 
“Whose payroll, exactly?”

    
“That’s
what we need to know. If I’m anywhere close, there’s quite a history.”

    
“So give
me a lesson, Professor.”

    
He got
up to join her at the map. “The MO in Harry Wolfe’s death is straight out of
eleventhand twelfth-century accounts of the Nizari branch of the Ismailis,
otherwise known as the Assassins. Its founding father was Hassan-i-Sabbah, the
original Old Man, a brilliant theoretician and strategist, and a kind of holy
anarchist. ‘Nothing is true; everything is permitted’ were purportedly his
dying words, the same words Henry Lee scrawled on the walls of the Kingdom
Hall.”

    
“Selective
murder for the purpose of terror was his strategy—maximum impact for minimal
effort. And he didn’t necessarily have to take out the king. A second fiddle
did just fine with far less risk. If our group has modeled itself on the
Assassins—if something with the reach and resources of a multinational but some
kind of quasireligious, maybe even anarchoreligious, agenda is recruiting smart
but malleable kids and persuading them they’re in God’s hands—think of the
trouble they could make. Especially if their operatives think they’re in
virtual reality with a license to kill.”

    
“What
kind of ‘persuasion’ would that take, Raszer? You’ve told me yourself you don’t
really believe in brainwashing.”

    
“I
don’t,” he said. “I agree with Goedel that the mind isn’t ultimately program-mable.
But I do believe it can be led through a series of deceptions to conclude that
it’s found a new truth on its own, even if that truth is that
there is no truth.
Zen masters use
trickery, too, but for good purpose: to get your consciousness unstuck. The
original Hassan may have done the same to prevent Islam from becoming rigid.
Legend was that he’d built a garden so much like Eden that his hashish-drugged
acolytes would wake up there convinced they’d drunk the nectar of heaven and
died to the flesh. After that, getting them to do suicide missions wasn’t
difficult. Think of that power in the hands of a criminal syndicate. What if
someone has rebuilt Hassan’s garden?”

    
“Go back,” she said. “Go back to Layla and Katy
and the trade, and why Johnny,

Henry, and Harry Wolfe had to die. Tell me why
they were a threat, and then tell me if we have anything you can drop in an
evidence bag.”

    
“I
will,” he said, “but first stick one of those red pieces on Turkey.”

    
“Okay,”
she said. “But why?”

    
“Because
when I saw Scotty this morning, I asked him where the Garden was, where he’d
seen Katy Endicott. You know what he said?”

    
“What?”

    
“He
asked me if he’d be home for Thanksgiving.”

    
“And . .
. ”

    
Raszer
aimed a finger at Turkey. “That was his answer. I’m going to assume he gave me
credit for being able to take a hint.”

    
“It’s a
stretch, Raszer,” she said, but moved the marker there anyway.

    
“Not
really,” said Raszer. “Not if you’d seen what I saw in his eyes. And besides,
it sort of adds up.”

    
“What
adds up, Raszer? Bring me in. You’ve been out doing, uh, fieldwork while I’ve
been stuck here researching eunuchs. What have you got?”

    
“For
starters, I’ve got an eleventh-century Syrian coin from the scene of Katy’s
abduction. Hold on a sec.” Raszer strode out of the office; when he returned,
he pressed the coin into her palm. “That was worn around somebody’s neck,
probably yanked off during the struggle. It stopped a bullet. Could it have
been Johnny’s or Henry’s? Doubtful. The year of its mint matches the peak of
the Nizari sect’s power. It likely belonged to one of the killers. By the way,
see if we can find out whose face that is on the head. A local goddess, I’m
guessing.”

    
“Okay.
You’ve got a Syrian coin, Syrian daggers, and a Syrian woman, all of which you
connect to these medieval Assassins, but how does that get you to Turkey?”

    
“All
right,” he said, and approached the map slowly. “I’ll give you a link: opium.”
He stroked the sandpaper stubble on his chin. “Actually, I just made that up,
but there may be something to it. The nexus of deep politics has always been
dope, sex, and economic power.

    
“Wherever
this group is operating, it has to be in a corridor that sees traffic in
illegal commodities and unorthodox ideas. Turkey borders Syria, Iran, and Iraq
in the southeast. Those borderlands were Assassin turf back in the day, and
this mountainous sector, running from the easternmost prong of Syria, skirting
across the top of Iraq and straight into Iran, has always been ungovernable, a
no-go zone that’s now a hornet’s nest, thanks to the mess we made of the
Kurdish problem. It’s what the Balkans were to World War I, and it may yet be
Armageddon.

    
“Now,
from what we know of their MO, this group looks to be nominally Shiite, but the
Syrian Alawites are too shrewd to give them sanctuary; same for the Iranians
and the Kurdish tribal leaders in northern Iraq. No one would embrace them
openly. Where would they set up shop? Unlike Syria, Iran, and Iraq, Turkey
isn’t in a state of war with the U.S.—not yet, at least. Trade—trade in opium,
arms, and people—is wide open. Eastern Turkey is on the Silk Road for human
trafficking. It’s the Wild West without Wyatt Earp.”

    
Monica
blinked. “Did you just ad-lib that whole thing, Raszer?”

    
“I’ve
been kicking it around a little,” he replied.

    
“I’d
hate to see them cut out your tongue. It does such nice work.”

    
“And
there’s another missing piece of the puzzle: Henry Lee’s testicles. I’m hoping
Ruthie Endicott can help me there, if Henry had something to say about it in
all those emails he sent her. Castration ties in with a number of our other
threads. The old cult of the Phrygian mother goddess, Cybele, with its
eunuch-priests; Turkey, again; and the black rocks that were found in Henry
Lee’s collection, with the same mineral makeup as the
baitylos
—Cybele’s sacred meteorite.

    
“Can we
get those from pagan Turkey to Islamic Iraq, where Johnny and Henry made their
connection? Sure, because Cybele is also Kuba, which relates to Ka’ba and
another black meteorite—the Ka’ba Stone, the Al-Hajar—the one pilgrims on the hajj
kiss on their circuits around the shrine. In pre-Islamic times, the Ka’ba was
consecrated to the
unsas
, the
Daughters of God of the Satanic verses, who had origins in Sumeria . . . which
is Iraq, where the first accounts of ritual castration are found.”

    
“It’s
always a big loop, isn’t it, Raszer? Always spokes on the same wheel.”

    
“And
there’s always a woman at the center of it,” he said.

    
“In this
case,” she picked up, “a ball buster. We’ve got a Jehovah’s Witness tie-in,
too. The business about ‘eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven, and the 144,000
virgins who make up the Little Flock. What if Henry Lee somehow conflated stuff
he’d learned from the church with something new he picked up in Iraq? What if
his castration was voluntary? And Katy . . . Katy . . . Katy is a virgin.”

    
“Right,”
said Raszer, the cigarette dangling from his lips. “I wonder . . . ”

    
“You
wonder what?”

    
 
“Okay, let me work this through: According to
Aquino and his CSI team, Katy was never raped. She would’ve lost her market
value. That was the implication of Emmett’s story: that Johnny and Henry staged
the rape to make her worthless to the bad guys, and that Johnny backed out of
the trade. But it was too late. The limo pulled up and the killers preempted
the gangbang, and that was the motive for murder—to preserve Katy’s value.
Settle a score. Eliminate witnesses . . . except that they missed Emmett and
let Layla slip. But they carried Katy away with her virginity intact.”

    
“To this
‘Garden,’ right? Where Scotty Darrell says he saw her, and which you think is
in Turkey? The Garden . . . which is what? Some sort of exotic sex park for
rich sheikhs willing to pay big bucks to deflower an American virgin?”

    
“That
could be its cover and cash source,” said Raszer. “This does have the smell of
an HT racket, at least on the surface, and, for reasons obscure to me, virgins
have always fetched a good price.”

    
“Why
‘obscure to you,’ Raszer? Pray tell . . . ”

    
“I
prefer experience. Even as a kid, I liked Mrs. Robinson better than Elaine.”

    
“Mmm.
That explains why your ex-wife couldn’t resist college boys.”

    
 
“Or valet parking attendants,” Raszer added.
“Anyhow, sex tourism doesn’t explain Scotty Darrell, or his reference to the
Old Man’s being ‘lord over the all and the nothing.’ It doesn’t explain ritual
murder. It doesn’t explain why they would go after Jehovah’s Witness kids, or
how—if we can speculate—Amos Leach might be tied into all this. And frankly, it
doesn’t explain why LAPD headquarters is crawling with counterterrorism people.
I think they’re using these girls as ploys . . . to entrap, compromise,
induce.” He paused to stub out the cigarette. “Where else have we heard about
beautiful young virgins in a garden?”

    
Monica
glanced at the map, bit her lip, and replied, “9/11. The thing about the
hijackers each being promised seventy black-eyed virgins.”