Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (54 page)

    
Raszer
lit a cigarette and sat back. “I’m getting the outlines, but I’m still not sure
I see how a Scotty Darrell or a Katy Endicott would serve the cause. Why not
use pros instead of college kids?”

    
“Because
the Scotty Darrells and Katy Endicotts don’t need fake passports. Because we’d
never see them coming. Think of it: ten thousand Ishmaels
just as wired into an alternate reality as Scotty. A post office
rampage here, a campus massacre there; an amusement-park ride runs amok, a
security guard is shot, the BlackBerry wireless network crashes. Housing values
crater and the Tokyo market dives. All basins of chaotic attraction, all
portents of the End Times. And with each incident, the End Timers cry, ‘
We told you so!
’

    
“A kind of spiritual vertigo kicks in once you
accept apocalypse, and vertigo isn’t only a fear of falling—it’s an inclination
to fall. Isn’t that what ‘Bring it on’ really means? And in every high school
cafeteria, at every community college, in every miserable army unit assigned to
police a prison, there’s some lonely, disaffected kid who grows more certain
every day that the world is irredeemable and he may as well go out in a blaze
of glory. What if someone devised a way to exploit that disaffection by means
of a virtual reality? Wouldn’t
that
account for Scotty Darrell?”

    
“Jesus .
. . this is really happening. How many of him are out there?”

    
“We
don’t know. There were seven degrees of initiation for the original Nizari
Assassins, and the first required a keen understanding of what makes for the
best recruits. Each recruit brought in at least two more, until the growth of
the cult became exponential. We’re catching this early, but if the public had
any idea how many Iraq war vets are listed as MIA, how many milk-carton kids
and runaways had been sucked into this—if we don’t find out where this
operation lives and pull open the curtains on it—in three years’ time, the
U.S., Europe, and Israel will face an epidemic of terror. Not from Al Qaeda,
but from our own children.”

    
“You
know,” said Raszer, “I got pulled into this because a Jehovah’s Witness girl
had been abducted. Along the way, there’ve been hints that certain elders of the
sect may not have had clean hands. This . . . network of fundamentalists you
spoke of . . . are they pimping out their own kids for the cause?”

    
“Hardcore
fundamentalists are often supralapsarians—people who believe the
 
elect can do no wrong. They’re guaranteed
heaven, so there’s nothing to lose.”

    
“Are
there people in our government aiding and abetting this?”

    
Greenstreet
gave him a loaded look.

    
“Christ,”
said Raszer. “We really have gone off the deep end. What about the Islamic
establishment, the saner clerics and mullahs? Do they accept the Old Man and
his group? I mean, where the hell did he get his charter?”

    
“I’m
afraid he got his charter—in part—from us. In Afghanistan, in the ’80s, when we
made our bed with the Mujahedin in the fight against the Soviets. That’s where
the seeds of this theocratic alliance were sown, the root of the rot. He was
one of the warlords our money and guns found their way to, but unlike Massoud
and Hekmatyar, we never acknowledged him. He was an unidentified asset. Later
on, when we still thought we could control him, his men trained with
Blackwater, and Blackwater—as you may know—was midwifed by a consortium of
Christian Dominionist groups. We know what happened there. What did Nietzsche
say? If you gaze into the abyss for long enough, the abyss begins to gaze right
back at you.”

    
Raszer
blinked slowly.

    
“You’ll
connect the dots on the other side, and you’ll let me know what to call it.
He’s learned from the founding fathers of Islamism—Sayyid Qutb, Abu Faraj
al-Libbi, and Ayman al-Zawahiri—but he’s also gone to school on us. In 1953—at
roughly the same time Qutb was setting up
al
Takfir wal-Hijra
, the CIA circulated a top-secret manual entitled “A Study
of Assassination” to its operatives in Guatemala and Iran, where we were busy
orchestrating regime changes. The manual and the techniques it described were
based on a study of the original Assassin cult, and included a primer on how to
assimilate oneself to an alien culture. Just like Mohamed Atta did. I’ll wager
that manual sits on his bookshelf, right alongside
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
.”

    
“Who
exactly do you speak for? This can’t be the company line.”
   

    
“You’ve
heard the expression ‘The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is
doing’?” Greenstreet replied. “Superficially, we spies may all walk and talk
alike, but we practice our own version of
taqiyya
.
Dig deeper, and you’ll see that the intelligence community is full of heretics—heretics
who’ve bothered to read the Constitution.”

    
“The
loyal opposition,” said Raszer.

    
“Some of
us would like to be able to recognize this country ten years from now.”

    
“Right.
Tell me this. Do we know for certain that the Old Man of the Mountains is real,
not some myth created by this cabal to throw guys like you off the scent?”

    
“We
think he’s real, but the truth is that every account we have is hearsay. He’s
left footprints. There’s evidence of arms dealing on a massive scale—mostly old
Soviet-bloc weaponry, bought cheaply by traffickers and resold at a huge
mark-up to the U.S., among others. Hell, by 2008, how sure could we be that bin
Laden was real? Is the Old Man real? Well, you are going to let us know.”

    
“Why
should I succeed where you haven’t?”

    
“The
poor man passes where the king’s way is blocked. You have only one modest item
on your agenda: to get your girl out. That gives you credibility. Plus, you
speak passable Arabic, a little Farsi, and French. Most important, you speak
his
language.”

    
“Right.
And if I’m busted, I’m on my own?”

    
“Of
course. But without the escort we’re offering, you don’t really stand a chance
of getting within a hundred miles of your target.”

    
“Escort?”

    
“You’ll
be briefed on the other side.”

    
“Do I
have a choice here?” Raszer asked.

    
“Time is
running out on us, my friend. It may comfort the voters to think that a new man
in the White House means a new history, but history doesn’t change with a
single election. Plots begun under previous regimes have momentum. Think about
the Bay of Pigs. Wars begin and end long before and after their little ticks on
the timeline. America is a stage trick. Elvis’s cloak is still on the stage,
but Elvis has left the building. We’re on the road to Armageddon, and that
suits the End Timers just fine. Now, you can ignore this and play out your
little part, or you can be part of something bigger.”

    
Raszer
allowed himself to examine the man who’d called himself Greenstreet. Fat chance
his name was Greenstreet, let alone
Philby
Greenstreet
. On the other hand, it was almost too preposterous
not
to be true. His face spoke of the
steel-core integrity of old spies, the sort who considered Ike and JFK the last
presidents worth speaking of and still made yearly donations to the Harvard
alumni fund.

    
“Something
bigger . . . ” Raszer repeated.

    
“Worth
mortgaging a piece of your soul for, Mr. Raszer?”

    
“Worth
more than
my
soul,” Raszer answered.
“If what you say is true. The question is whether it’s worth risking Katy
Endicott’s soul. You see, in the end, that’s all I can allow to count. I’ve had
to keep it simple for myself. My job is to get her out.”

    
“Saving
the world one soul at a time?” Greenstreet ventured.

    
“Maybe
paying my debt one soul at a time.”

    
“What
debt is that?”

    
“Do you
believe in grace, Mr. Greenstreet?”

    
“In my
own fashion. Why?”

    
“Years
back, I made a fatal mess of my life—some old ghosts I couldn’t shake. The
truth is, I’d already been counted out and was just waiting for the bell. I
didn’t realize that every punch I’d taken had also bloodied the people around
me. Then I nearly lost my daughter, the one thing that had any real value.
That’s when I learned to pray . . . and learned that God doesn’t sit around
waiting for the phone to ring. God has to be summoned from a bottomless pit
inside your heart. My prayers were answered, but grace doesn’t come free. I made
a deal. Her life for my promise to return lost sheep to pasture. A kind of
indentured servitude, I guess.”

    
“So,
it’s true, then,” Greenstreet observed. “You
do
have a calling.”

    
“Like I
said: a debt. Now, I have three questions for you, Philby. The first is, this
vast conspiracy you’ve described . . . even for a professional paranoid like
me, it’s hard to swallow. How do you pull off a coup like that without the
support of the generals? And how would you sustain it if the military lined up
against you?”

    
“The
generals? The military? Think, Mr. Raszer. The Iraq war rendered the military
irrelevant, emasculated it. It’s a shadow of what it was before. After all,
that was the rationale for privatization, wasn’t it? Why do you need the
military when you’ve created a private army and a worldwide network of arms
merchants to drive it?”

    
“Okay,
let’s say you’re right. And let’s say you get me in there. What possible
difference can one man make?”

    
 
“The difference a candle always makes when lit
against the darkness. To our knowledge, no Westerner we know of has ever gotten
close to the Old Man, except as his captive, so you’d be a viral agent. His
mystique lies in occultation. How does the song go?
Got to be good-looking ’cause he’s so hard to see
. Neither he nor
the plot he’s furthering can survive open curtains. His power flows from his
command of The Gauntlet; it subsists only so long as conditions of the game
support it.”

    
“In the
early days, that power was mostly virtual. Its force lay in its potential: the
absolute allegiance of the Old Man’s followers—the players who’d come to him
seeking a truth beyond all other truths. Now, he’s begun to muddy the line
between the virtual and the manifest by dispatching his acolytes to commit real
acts of terror in the real world. But when you move pawns to attack, they also
become vulnerable.

    
“We
understand that you’ve had considerable experience with role playing, Mr.
Raszer. You’ve infiltrated more than a dozen highly secretive organizations
under assumed identities. This is the role of a lifetime. You’ll travel with a
small escort of veteran players who know the territory and can get you past hot
zones, but you’ll enter the fortress alone as a French-Canadian Catholic monk.
Your ‘avatar,’ if you like.”

    
“And
what do I have to offer in trade for Katy Endicott?”

    
 
“You are authorized to offer the exchange of
one of the Old Man’s captured operatives for her release.”

    
“Which
operative?” Raszer asked. “It’s not Layla Faj-Ta’wil, is it?”

    
“No,”
Greenstreet replied. “Your bargaining chip is Scotty Darrell.”

    
“So, you
guys have him?”

    
“We will
shortly. We’re waiting on one variable.”

    
“That’s
good, I guess. But your idea is a nonstarter. I won’t put Scotty back in there.
Why would he have that much value in trade, anyway? Mother birds generally
don’t take the babies back once they’ve fallen out of the nest.”

    
“True,
but Scotty has a mission, and the Old Man wants it accomplished.”

    
“What’s
the mission?”

    
“All we
know is that it’s programmed to set off a chain reaction, the likes of which
you can’t imagine. We suspect there may be close to two hundred sleeper agents
across the globe whose own missions will be triggered by Scotty’s. At that
point, the game will become horribly real. It’s even possible your girl has an
assignment in hand already. They’re preparing to dispatch their young assassins
as we speak. ”

    
“Jesus,”
said Raszer. “Suppose this lunacy works according to plan. Suppose all these
human time bombs go off and we’re all terrorized enough to believe that only
the muscle of an authoritarian state can restore order. We get a Christian
theocracy in the West and an Islamic theocracy in the East. What does the Old
Man want out of it?”