Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (46 page)

    
“I just
wanted to check your rates,” Raszer said. “Maybe see a room. I’m planning a
special occasion. Would you mind showing me—”

    
“I don’t
think that will be a problem,” she replied, and turned to a young Latina in a
print vest. “Lourdes, would you cover the desk while I show Mr. . . . ”

    
“Rose.”

    
“ . . .
Mr. Rose one of the rooms?”

    
The girl
nodded and stepped to the front.

    
“So . .
. ” said Mrs. Endicott, coming around to Raszer’s side. “A single? Double? A
suite? You said a special occasion . . . ”

    
“Yes.
Yes, a kind of reunion, I guess. Let’s see a suite. Why not?”

    
“Our
suites are very nice,” she said, and led him through a native garden fragrant
with cactus flowers, and then up a short flight of stairs. “A reunion,” she
repeated. “Family? An old fl . . .
friend
?”

    
“Someone who was lost and now is found,” Raszer
answered. “Someone I’d like to welcome home properly.”

    
She
paused at the top of the stairs and turned halfway, her face in shadow.

    
“Oh, I
see,” she said softly. “Well, I’m sure that she . . . or he . . . will love it
here. Everyone does.”

    
“She . .
. actually,” said Raszer. “And I’m sure you’re right. Have you lived in Taos
long? Or are you a newcomer, like me?”

    
“Not
long,” said Constance, taking out her passkey. “But it feels like home.”

    
“Yes, it
does. It’s beautiful and rugged and spiritual all at the same time.”

    
She
pushed open the door of room 233, and sandalwood wafted into the hall.

    
Raszer
stepped in. A fire was laid in the hearth, and fresh fruit and a bottle of wine
were on the table. The mountains made a living mural on the west wall.

    
“It’s
perfect,” said Raszer. “And probably costs it, right?”

    
“Two
sixty-five a night,” she said. “It’s our best. We do have less—”

    
“That’s
all right. Like I said, a homecoming.” He wandered over to the window. “I’m
thinking,” he said without turning, “of bringing my family here to live, but I
worry a little about the isolation. Do you have children?”

    
She
cleared her throat and jingled the keys. “I have two grown daughters, but only
one is with me. I can’t say that she—”

    
Raszer
turned. “Grown daughters? I wouldn’t have guessed—”

    
She
smiled modestly and took a step backward, out of the sunlight. It occurred to
Raszer that Constance Endicott might never have been flirted with. Married and
pregnant at seventeen, and now nursing the wounds of a Latin flagellant—when
had she had the time and the opportunity? She pressed her fingers to her temple
and shuddered slightly.

    
“Are you
okay?” Raszer asked, taking a step toward her.

    
“Yes,”
she said. “It’s just a sinus headache. The altitude. I’m still not used to it.”

    
“I know
what you mean. The altitude, the dry air. And then, on top of that, you have to
deal with that rumbling that goes on all the time . . . ”

    
She
trained one eye on him, and for an instant, it seemed to offer him something.
Raszer gave back what he could. All he wanted was for her not to feel crazy.
Too bad
, he mused,
that I can’t turn on this thing in my eye at will
.
Wouldn’t it be nice
to be able to validate somebody’s psychic intimations with a look?

    
He
couldn’t have known that, for Constance Endicott, that was more or less exactly
what had happened.

    
The day turned warm for about two hours after
noon. Raszer thought about lunch, then considered an hour or so of bouldering
in the rugged foothills Ruthie had identified as the site of the Good Friday
ritual. Getting heart, lungs, and mind in shape for the austerity of the Middle
East had been another part of his rationale for spending three to four days in
Taos.

    
But the
sun was high and he was feeling oddly spent, almost as if the signs of
premature aging Ruthie’s mother had evinced had made him feel his own age more
keenly. And lurking somewhere beneath this fatigue was the awareness that he
was a target, and that venturing alone into the wilderness might be foolhardy.
So he returned to the inn to call Monica.

    
Out
front, he found his Jeep waiting. The keys were dangling from the ignition,
pinning a note that said:
Remember: Meet
me at the Taos Inn at cocktail hour. We’re going to see a friend
. He went
inside to make the call.

    
“Everything
quiet at home?” he asked her.

    
“Everything
except my nerves,” Monica replied.

    
“I told
you we should’ve locked the place up.”

    
“You
know damn well I couldn’t have tracked you as effectively from my place.
Besides, with a 260-pound Norseman and the FBI on-site, how much safer could a
girl be? If they’d put SWATs on the neighbors’ rooftops, we could probably nail
these guys the next time they come around.”

    
“Maybe,”
said Raszer. “And maybe not. How’s Lars?”

    
“I think
he has some issues with the FBI. He practically accused the two agents of
taking my picture, and he stands out there with his chest out, like he’s daring
them to come closer. I wonder if he had a run-in with the feds at some stage of
his career.”

    
“Maybe
it’s an alpha-male thing,” said Raszer. “He
is
a Viking. And with you being an athletic blond, you’ve got the Brunhilde thing
going. I can almost picture you with a breastplate.”

    
“Yeah.
Anyhow, I’m glad he’s here. How’s Ruthie? Has she come across?”

    
“Little
bits at a time. The Johnny-Henry dynamic is clearer. And there’s an unnamed
someone she wants me to meet tonight. About what happened in Iraq, I think. She
stole my car, but then she brought it back. She seems to be her own woman.”

    
“Just
don’t sleep with her.”

    
“I have
no plans to sleep with her, But, you know, if women would stop looking for
affirmation through sex, that advice would be a lot easier to follow.”

    
Monica had
no retort, and when she resumed, she chose a new subject. She told Raszer about
the first set of chaos graphs, and the odd fact that Universal Studios had
taken a beating on Wall Street
before
its tour had suffered Scotty’s assault.

    
“And
you’re thinking somebody triggered a little foreshock in the market,” Raszer
said. “A little panic wave whose real purpose might be somewhere else?”

    
“I’m not
sure I took it that far,” she replied, “but basically, yeah.”

    
“Hmm.”

    
Then she
told him about the conference in Damascus.

    
“Well,
now,” Raszer said, after a pause. “That’s pretty interesting. And you say no
major news organization covered it?”

    
“They
weren’t invited,” Monica replied. “It sounds more like a meeting of the
families. This renegade BBC reporter—the same guy who stirred up so much
trouble a
 
few years ago by claiming that
Al Qaeda was a trumped-up Western bogeyman—he got the scoop, and then the Swiss
blogger ran with it and did an exposé.”

    
“So let me understand: We’ve got a secret meeting
organized by Christian theocrats and attended by Islamic theocrats and an
assortment of faith peddlers, all of them with an authoritarian bent and
connections in Washington, which is represented in the person of Douglas Picot.
A meeting of the faithful, to seek common ground in the strife-torn Middle
East. And there’s not a Jew in sight.”

    
“That’s
about it, Raszer,” Monica said. “No Jews, no Catholics, no mainline
Protestants, and, if I’m reading this right, they pretty much excluded the
three-quarters of the Muslim world who consider themselves moderate. So . . .
what do you make of it?”

    
He lit a
smoke and stepped out onto the portal, then spied a hammock strung between two
pine trees twenty yards distant and took the phone there. It was exposed, but
it was also in plain sight of every room at the inn, and therefore as safe as
any place he was likely to perch.

    
“Let’s
begin with what
isn’t
hidden.
Hardcore evangelicals and hardcore Shiites both see themselves as alienated
from the mainstream. Marginalized by the modern world. They’re Abrahamic in
their outlook. The Sharia is basically Old Testament law: clean, severe,
unambiguous. Both are distinct minorities within their traditions, but
minorities with muscles and weight. The Nusayris run Syria with only about
eleven percent of the population; fundamentalists controlled Congress with less
than that. So much for the surface.

    
Beneath
that it gets weird, like it always does with Puritans—especially when they get
a whiff of power. I picked up something a long time ago from guys like Adler
and Reich: When a group’s been on the outs for too long, its way back in is
usually some kind of fascism, using the state as a spiritual bludgeon.”

    
“Okay,”
Monica said. “I get all that. But what were they brokering so soon after 9/11?
What was going on in the private suites and the sheiks’ tents? That’s what I
want to know. And
why
was the State
Department there?”

    
“I think
the answer depends on whether they saw what was coming. If you’d known in 2002
that this whole thing was going to degenerate into global sectarian war and
cripple the ruling parties on both sides, then you might have wanted to move
into position to grab the spoils, negotiate the peace, even before the war was
over.”

    
“What
kind of peace, Raszer? What would the terms be?”

    
“You
want the paranoid answer?” he asked.

    
“It’s
usually the closest to the truth, isn’t it?”

    
“Let me
think about it before I speak it.”

    
“Do you
want me to keep digging?” Monica asked.

    
“Oh,
yeah. And see if you can find out if the Jehovah’s Witnesses sent a rep.”

    
“Raszer?”

    
“Yeah?”

    
“How
about we have the professor run a chaos graph on the conference dates?”

    
“Good
idea.”

    
“Raszer?”

    
“Uh-huh.”

    
“What if
nothing is true? What if these people who call themselves fundamentalists
aren’t Christians at all? What if they’re something else altogether?”

    
“Ah,” he
said softly. “Now you’re standing in my shoes.”

    
She
swallowed hard. “And how do you know what’s genuine and what’s fake?”

    
“You
don’t always.”

    
“Does
anybody know the truth?”

    
“Those
who know don’t say. And those who say don’t know.”

    
For a few minutes after Raszer signed off, he sat
in the hammock with his feet on the ground, feeling dizzy. He realized he
hadn’t eaten. An aching melancholy, something like loneliness, came over him
with the change of light in the west. He knew what she was going through. It
was one thing to say this stuff, and another to feel it deep inside.

    
He then
did something that he never, ever did when there were killers in the tall
grass. He laid back, watched the sun play hide-and-seek with the pine boughs,
and slept. He dreamed of eggs. Eggs in pale yellow and speckled blue, gilded
eggs and eggs bejeweled with rubies, ostrich eggs and serpents’ eggs, all
rolling down an expansive grassy steppe that sloped dramatically to the desert
floor far below, where a man in a white robe with a red sash waited.

    
Raszer
might have slept the day away, if not for the trace of wintergreen that drifted
through the pines at about four o’ clock. He’d never especially liked the
smell, and now he was beginning to hate it.