Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (45 page)

    
Lars
shook his head and shrugged. “I see nobody all the night, Miss Lord. I don’t
move. Not even to use bathroom. You see—” He reached behind him and grabbed
what seemed to be a kind of high-tech bedpan, shaped to be worn inside the
trousers. From the sloshing sound it made when he held it up, she gauged it had
gotten good use. “I have Stadium Buddy. Holds a full liter. Good for the long
watch.”

    
“Well,
somebody was up here, Lars,” she said, tearing open the envelope and unfolding
another photo print, this one of Raszer carrying what looked like a very unconscious
girl across the threshold of his motel room. This, she reasoned, must be the
infamous Ruthie. “I don’t like this, Lars. I think we’d better both go talk to
the FBI.”

    
Lars
narrowed his eyes. “Tonight,” he said, “I will wearing night-vision goggles and
set up listening post. No one will come close, even.”

    
He
smiled in a way that was probably meant to be endearing, so she handed him the
crumpled white bakery bag she’d been holding in her left hand.

    
“For
you, Lars,” she said. “Prune Danish. Your favorite, right?”

    
“Every
good day begins with prunes,” he said, opening the bag, and offered her one.
“You like to sharing?”

    
“I’m
doing yogurt and berries,” Monica replied. “Same effect, less carbs.”

    
The men
in the black sedan, Agents Strokh and Jiminez, likewise hadn’t spotted the
furtive photographer, but guessed that the picture had been taken from either
beside or inside the house directly across from Raszer’s. “We don’t have
wraparound or x-ray vision, miss,” Strokh said.

    
“Yeah,
well,” Monica said, “what’s to keep them from bashing in the side door, then?
Maybe one of you should get out and take a walk once in a while. Sheesh. Where
do cops get the idea that a stakeout is like a night at the drive-in?”

    
“We’ll
do our very best, miss,” Jiminez replied with training-school civility.

    
“Will
you let Agent Djapper know that we’re being stalked on both ends?”

    
“Yes,
ma’am. We will,” said Strokh.

    
Unsettled,
Monica booted up the office and made herself a cup of jasmine tea. She passed
up the berries for now and regained her composure by going methodically through
the morning routine: Interpol’s I-24/7 site, the State Department’s
human-trafficking bulletins, Homeland Security’s unreliable threat assessments,
the somewhat more reliable wire services, and the LAPD’s overnight arrest
reports, all of which she and Raszer had obtained hard-won access to.

    
In
addition, she checked out the weather, travel alerts, disease outbreaks, and
exchange rates for every country her boss might conceivably step into. Finally,
she went through email from thirteen different servers, six of them as
encrypted and snoop-proof as current technology allowed.

    
The
first set of graphs from the chaos mathematician in Santa Cruz had come
through. Depending on how one read the tea leaves, they might or might not be
revelatory. On the day Scotty Darrell had wounded a driver at Universal
Studios, the price of the company’s stock had dropped rather
dramatically—before the shooting had occurred. Disney and the corporate owners
of the Six Flags chain had also taken hits in the ripple effect that followed.
Up to that point, big entertainment-sector stocks had largely weathered the
economic shitstorm that had battered the country in recent years.

    
Also on
that day, and perhaps only whimsically related, the L.A. City Council had
banned lap dancing, and the French parliament had passed an ordinance requiring
Muslim girls to remove their veils in French public schools. There were other
simultaneities, some absurdly far-flung, including an IAEA announcement that a
significant quantity of enriched uranium had been reported missing from the
Ukraine.

    
She
emailed the mathematician her thanks and simultaneously began to download two
large files, one from the BBC and one from a Swiss blog–cum–pirate news service
known as Charlie Hebdo. Both reports dealt with the strange-bedfellow
relationships that American Christian evangelicals had cultivated with
Zionists, on the one hand, and with the sworn Islamist enemies of Israel on the
other.

    
The
dalliance between the Christian Right and the Israeli Right had been well
reported, but the kinship between crusade and jihad was murkier, not to say
counterintuitive. Understanding it required investigating at least as far back
as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when American evangelicals had found
common ground with the likes of the Taliban in their opposition to godless
communism, and employing the sort of tactical thinking that is common in
criminal organizations but foreign to most people.

    
What
seized Monica’s attention was a mention of a conference held in Damascus in
2002 by a group calling itself the International Interfaith Council. According
to the report, the IIC was a creation of the Chalcedon Foundation. The stated
goal of the conference was ecumenical outreach, but given its timing in the
wake of 9/11—Monica was thinking like a chaos theorist now—the secret agenda
might have been grander and more alarming.

    
Some of
the organizations represented at the conference were unfamiliar, but she
recognized its principal American sponsor. The Chalcedon Foundation was the
fountainhead of Christian Dominionism, the doctrine that held that Old
Testament law ought to be the final word on Earth in these end times preceding
the Second Coming. God’s law trumped man’s law, which meant that government
should, if necessary, become an instrument of divine rule.

    
Theonomy,
they called it, but there were other names. Western cosponsors of the
conference included the Christian Broadcasting Network, the Unification Church,
and the American Enterprise Institute, and among the attendees—cloaked in the
guise of something called the Admiralty Group—was what might have been a
deputation from the Church of Scientology. If this weren’t spooky enough, the
Swiss report went further. It alleged that on May 3, 2002, the last day of the
conference, a private jet had landed in Damascus and disgorged a passenger
registered as Morton Lutz, otherwise known as then assistant under secretary of
state Douglas Picot.

    
On the
Muslim side of the table were arrayed clerics and sheiks of all stripes, from
the ultra-orthodox Shiite mullahs of Iran to Sunnis whose strident Wahabism
would not have displeased Osama bin Laden. There were renegades from schismatic
sects like the Nusayris, and militant pan-Islamists affiliated with Hezbollah
and the SSNP. There was no mention of the Ismailis, the radical branch of
Shi’ism that had spawned the Assassins and inspired the MO of the organization
with which Stephan

Raszer was now playing hide-and-seek.

    
But the
mix was weird enough. Televangelists, Christian reconstructionists, neocons,
and midlevel American diplomats had broken bread with Islamists in the heart of
a country the United States had then been rattling sabers with.

    
Monica
was about to digest the Swiss blogger’s theory about why the “moderate” Sunnis,
who in all but a few countries still constituted the Muslim ruling class, had
been underrepresented at the conference, when there came a sudden gust of wind,
an aroma of sage, and the sound of pages rustling from around the corner in
Raszer’s library. Monica’s throat tightened. She knew immediately that the
French doors leading to Raszer’s herb garden had blown—or been pushed—open.

    
“Lars!”
she managed to croak out. He was on the other side of the front door, or should
have been, and it panicked her further when he didn’t answer. She rolled slowly
back from her workstation, stood, and entered the short hallway connecting the
office with the library. For good measure, she called out. “The gun is loaded,
so don’t make me jump.”

    
She did
not, of course, have a gun. She didn’t have even her pepper spray.

    
On the
bookstand Raszer kept by the door, the pages of the Qur’an lifted one by one,
fanned by the steady northeastern breeze. The door was wide open. The sunlight
reflected from the vellum made her squint.

    
“Lars?”
Monica called out again.

    
She
stepped out into the little garden, where the ma huang shared root space with
moonlight sage and mint. She was alone, and the outside gate remained locked.
She stood for a few moments, watching the wind make waves over the plant tops,
and then something came to her, the sort of thing that only crazy people think.
The sort of thought you don’t give breath to, because breath marries wind and
wind carries thoughts into the world of real things.

    
She
shuddered, wishing she had a lover’s ear to whisper it into, and a lover’s arms
for sanctuary from its implications.
It’s
coming down
, she said to herself,
a
bigger lie than has ever been told, a bigger scam than has ever been worked
.

    
“Miss Lord?” Lars called out from behind her. She
spun around, mouth open to cry out. “I thought I hear something in back,” he
explained. “But everything’s quiet.”

    
“Yes,”
she replied, composing herself. “It is for now.”

 

    
Raszer spent the morning hunting for Easter eggs.
He’d been remiss. By the Christian calendar (at least, in the world west of
Rome), it was Maundy Thursday, tomorrow was Good Friday, and Sunday was Easter.
Brigit would have her egg only if he found it today. He might’ve finessed it by
telling her that he was headed into the Byzantine world and observing Easter
later this year, but she’d have seen right through it. No, he had to find the
egg, and it had to be right, because she would measure his devotion by it.

    
Easier
said than done.

    
The
boutiques of Taos had iguanas, dancing shamans, and coyotes, but eggs seemed to
have no place in Southwestern iconography. Strange . . . it wasn’t as if birds
didn’t lay on the mesa as they laid on the steppes, or that the egg was any
less a symbol of regeneration. Maybe here, regeneration was symbolized more
aptly by the snake shedding its skin.

    
He
stopped at the newsstand on the plaza to inquire about books by local authors
on the subject of the
penitentes
, and
was directed to the historical society, where he found what the curator assured
him was the only reliable account, a slim volume called
Brothers of Light
, by Alice Corbin Henderson. In a glass case of
Pueblo artifacts dressed up and priced as objets d’art, he saw what he wanted
for Brigit. A petrified snake egg encased in a geode with crystals as blue as
the shadows on the Sangre de Cristo slopes. It wasn’t Russian, and it wasn’t
painted, but he closed his eyes and saw her placing it proudly on her bedroom
shelf. When he opened them, he found he had to wipe the right eye dry. Until
that moment, he hadn’t seen how worried he was, how heavily it weighed on him
that this assignment might leave his daughter fatherless.

    
Just
across the way, partially masked by a pine grove, was the Fechin Inn, the most
beautiful hotel in Taos. Beautiful not in the Mediterranean way, but like a
fine, handmade chair, labored over and loved and rubbed and oiled until it
looked more like wood than the trees from which it was made. He had some time
before hunger got the best of him, and wasn’t due to brief Monica until two, so
he crunched across the fallen pine needles and pushed open the art deco glass
doors, wondering if he would know Constance Endicott when he saw her.

    
She was
smaller than he’d imagined, though it shouldn’t have surprised him. Both of her
daughters were the size of those 40’s film stars who looked so grand on the
screen but stood barely taller than children. He’d pictured her being closer to
the stature of her late husband, Silas, who’d been a veritable oak. But this
made sense, too: a china doll, its features all in miniature, like a human
banzai tree whose limbs had been kept trimmed to the length of perfect,
preadolescent beauty, so as not to intimidate the menfolk. She stood behind the
registration counter, a large oil painting of Taos in snow on the wall at her
back, and watched him walk up.

    
“Good
afternoon,” she said. “Checking in?”

    
“No,
actually. Wish I was. I—”

    
She was
lovely, like her daughters, but it was a loveliness more lined and bleached
than her forty years should have shown. It wasn’t the overbaked-clay look that
some desert Caucasians have, but the grayed porcelain of an antique left in the
attic. All the fervor was in the eyes and chin, and there Raszer found the only
clue to how she’d ended up in a trailer in Taos with a penitential Catholic
named Angel Davidos. Ruthie’s leonine fierceness was nowhere in evidence, as it
had been in Silas, who, oddly enough, had dismissed Ruthie as “her mother’s
daughter.” Freud had been right: We hate most what resembles the incorrigible
qualities in ourselves.