Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (55 page)

    
“What he
really wants is the subject of a great deal of conjecture. Power, guns,
land—certainly. Control over the global sex and opium markets—quite possibly.
He knows these appetites will abide even under a repressive regime. In the
beginning, everyone behaves, recites the Commandments—or the Sharia—but soon
enough, the rulers begin to indulge their vices, and it’s back to business.

    
“‘Business’
will be quite good, as it always is under fascism. Eventually, the whole thing
collapses from internal rot, like Rome did. Then you have a new dark age. And
that
—in my opinion—is what the Old Man’s
really after. There’s evidence that in the inner circles of his cult, among the
elite corps of soldiers, a pre-Islamic religion of Syrian derivation is
practiced. A religion demanding absolute and incontrovertible celibacy, if you
know what I mean.”

    
“Now it
begins to add up,” said Raszer. “All right. This escort you say I’ll have to El
Mirai—do they know they’re working for you? For the CIA?”

    
“They
know they’ve received their commission from Philby Greenstreet,” he answered
with a smile. “But, in short, no. They are stateless people, transnationals.
Their services have been engaged by an NGO that is in fact a front for a mirror
CIA station that exists only in the virtual topography of The Gauntlet. Its
existence is nothing more than artful illusion. Vapor. But if we prevail, it
will be actualized and eventually will replace the existing order. Many kings
begin as pretenders, you see, but if they pretend ardently enough, they
eventually claim the throne.”

    
“‘Only
in the topography of The Gauntlet?’ What the hell does that mean?”

    
“You
must bear in mind, Mr. Raszer, that you are now through the looking glass.
You’re heading into the gap between form and substance, and there’ll be times
when you simply don’t know what’s real. All creation begins as virtual, as
quantum potential. The Gauntlet is a game of becoming, and its players—the
serious ones, at any rate—seek to ride the wave of becoming without looking
back or forward. It’s a balancing act. Do you think you can pull it off?”

    
“I don’t
know. But I’ve been waiting all my life to try.”

    
“That’s
my boy,” Greenstreet said.

    
“One
little detail concerns me.”

    
“What’s
that?”

    
“These
people have been on my ass for a week. They know where I live. They know what I
look like, they probably know I’m coming, and somehow I doubt that a French
accent and a monk’s outfit are going to fool them.”

    
“Maybe
not,” said Greenstreet. “But without a cover, you have no recourse to
deception. You are, as we say, creating a ‘legend.’ You’ll receive instruction
on the other side. You’ll have to use all your craft to stay alive until you’ve
reached your destination. But once you’re there, you
will be
your avatar. You’ll be in the game, and whether you survive
or not will depend on how well you play it. You see, they’ll be playing, too.”

    
Raszer took
a moment to digest.

    
 
“Are you ready, Mr. Raszer?”

    
“Why
not?”

    
“Come
along, then. You’ll need a couple of inoculations if you’re going into eastern
Turkey.”

    
“I’ve
had them,” Raszer said. “I’ve got the papers to prove it.”

    
“You
haven’t had this one. There’s a particularly virulent new strain of H5N1 in the
mountains west of Hakkâri. Believe me, you don’t want it.”

    
“Avian
flu? All right,” said Raszer. “Just don’t put the needle in my ass.”

    
“We’ll
try to find a place that’s not so hard,” Greenstreet said.

    
Almost
before the spike entered muscle, Raszer knew he’d been doped. “This may leave
you a little drowsy,” the Asian medic had said. Within seconds, the hangar
began to spin, shapes and colors at its outer limits rushing off in a
centrifugal blur. He was hauled up from the chair and guided to the jet, the
pilot at one elbow and the medic at the other. He turned just before being
ducked into the dimly lit cabin and looked around for the CIA man, wearing an
expression that plainly said,
Why the
mickey? I would have gone quietly
. But the lanky old spook was at first
nowhere to be seen, and Raszer’s mind began to riff. Other figures began to
materialize and supplant the anonymous figures in the send-off crew. They
emerged like wraiths from the corrugated tin walls of the hangar, as if through
theatrical curtains the color of mercury, concealing a world waiting in the
wings of his imagination.

    
Among
those making the curtain call were Lieutenant Borges of the LAPD and Detective
Jaime Aquino, though not separately: They were one body, one form. Ruthie and
her mother showed, and likewise kept slipping in and out of phase: now one
woman, then two, then none at all. Emmett Parrish was there. And Silas Endicott
came in the person of the old squatter from the Coronado Lodge, wearing
Raszer’s duster and making sparks as he walked. For a couple of seconds, Raszer
actually tried to impose some rational order on the visions, and then it hit
him that if he truly was off to see the wizard, the residents of Oz might have
the look of familiars.

    
And
then, for the duration of a sneeze, his mind seemed to clear. Through the red
door on the far side of the hangar came a scowling Amos Leach, his hair piled
high, wearing an orange print sundress, followed closely by none other than
special agent Bernard Djapper. Raszer’s throat closed in panic, but not even a
surge from his adrenal glands could offset the effects of the dope. Before his
mind could verify what his eyes had seen, Philby Greenstreet leaned into the
cabin, gave his shoulder a squeeze, and whispered, “Bon voyage. Let’s hope for
better times.”

    
From
time to time during the long flight, little pieces of consciousness flared, and
Raszer would become aware of the engine’s muffled hum or the soft lighting in
his fiberglass cocoon of uncertain metamorphosis. At one point, he thought he
noticed that the fabric of the seats and the pattern of the wallpaper were a
matching design of Chinese characters and
I
Ching
hexagrams.

    
Later,
he saw only the uniform color of potter’s clay. Except for those few, vague
sensory impressions, he slept the dreamless sleep of suspended animation, an
Argonaut cryonically preserved for his voyage to an alternate cosmos. As for
the pilot, he never said a word.

    
The
fleeting vision of Leach and Djapper, Raszer could not, or would not, retain.
In fact, he found a gap where his short-term memory should have been, like the
erasure of a tape or the redaction of paragraphs from a classified document. As
with a dream on waking, the harder he tried to retrieve it, the further it
receded.

    
He had
no way of knowing the direction of travel, but some internal compass gave him a
vague sense of going northwest over the Siberian peninsula, rather than the
usual geosynchronous polar route. Still, the lack of certainty troubled him.
He’d forgotten about the little fragment of nanocircuitry in the left cheek of
his ass, forgotten for the time being that Monica could probably plot his
coordinates to within a few degrees. In the gray of predawn, in some cold,
bleak, and unvegetated part of the world, he was removed from the jet by the
pilot and a man in a balaclava, and deposited in the cargo hold of an old
military transport, an aircraft that—like the helicopter and the jet—bore no
mark of nationality or corporate identity.

    
He saw
these things as if watching himself in a video. He was in a world beyond
nations and logos. He was running The Gauntlet, and the luxurious part of the
trip was over. The rattle and roar of the transport plane upset his stomach and
shook a little of the pixie dust from his brain, and after a very long while, a
few of his baseline neural circuits began to hum intermittently.

    
He was
descending.

    
“Is that him?” a man speaking Arabic asked. “He is
not what I expected.”

    
“What
did you expect?” said another man, also in Arabic, but of the American Foreign
Service variety.

    
“
Je ne sais pas
,”
declared the first man, slipping seamlessly into French, then to
English. “I expected a soldier, but he looks like a guilty saint. Or perhaps a
thief.”

    
“Either
will serve us better than a soldier, Rashid. A soldier would only get shot at.”
After a pause, the second man said, “Wake him up.”

    
“But he
is awake,” said the first man. “At least, his eyes are open.”

    
Raszer
wasn’t awake in any sense he’d known outside the womb. The words spoken not six
feet from where he lay, in languages he knew reasonably well, had traveled over
his cortex like sounds in deep water. Like the chatter of dolphins, he knew
there was meaning there, but what it was lay beyond any conscious decryption.
Beside that, his larynx was paralyzed, as in those dreams you can’t dispel by
screaming. An oxygen mask was suddenly clapped over his face, and at the same
time, he received an electric shock that ran from the tip of his tailbone to
the top of his head.

    
The jolt
tripled his pulse rate, and he began to gulp down air hungrily. In less than a
minute, he was fully awake, and a minute after that, he was sitting up on the
cot.

    
“Jesus,”
he said. “What was that? And where the hell am I?”

    
“Don’t
try to gather up your thoughts too quickly,” said the American, a round,
fortyish man with an olive complexion and dark, wet eyes. “You may drop them.”

    
Raszer
pressed his fingers against his eyelids, shook the fog from his head, and
looked around. He was in a small room, empty but for the army cot, a writing
table, and an old-fashioned washbasin. It had the stark, scrubbed look of an
infirmary examination room. A single shuttered window let through the tiniest
bit of pink morning light, and an overhead fan spun noisily on worn bearings.
The floor was of worn cedar planks, dimpled by bootheels, and the walls were
administrative tan. If someone had said, “1908,” he wouldn’t have blinked.

    
His pack
and personal articles were parked against the wall near the door that led to
the larger office in which the men had earlier been talking. He spotted a GLOCK
automatic pistol beside a tumbler of water on a rolltop desk, and above the
desk hung a cheaply framed watercolor depicting an azure lake surrounded by
mountains and a crusader castle that appeared to grow out of the rock. On the
floor beside the desk was a hookah. Whether practical or decorative, it was
impressive. There must have been an unshuttered window, because a column of
light, whirling with dust motes, bisected the room and screened Raszer’s view
of whatever was beyond it.

    
“You’re
on land fought over by Greeks and Hittites and Urartians and Persians and even
the French,” said the American. “Trade routes and ports, the casus belli of the
ancient world. Now it’s oil, tribe, and religion. Not much progress to show for
twenty-five hundred years, eh? In any case, still apparently worth fighting
for. Right, Rashid?”

    
“If the
oil has not all turned to blood,” said the smaller, darker man, a Kurd who wore
khakis and a loose white cotton blouse that set off his vividly red headdress.

    
“Specifically,”
the American continued, “you’re in Iskenderun, Turkey, formerly Alexandretta.
The French got it in the carve-up after the First World War, and they still
parlent français
in the cafes.
Everywhere else, you’ll hear Arabic or some variety of Turkic. There also
happens to be an American air base nearby.”

    
“It’s
easy to get lost between cultures in the Hatay,” said the man called Rashid.
“Syria is only a few kilometers away, and it would be closer if she had her
way.”

    
“Lost is
right,” said the American. “That brings us to you, Mr. Raszer. I understand
you’re here to find a girl, and we can help you. But a woman as the object of a
quest is always more than a woman, right? Do you know what the stakes are?”

    
“You’ll
have to let the sap drain from my skull. How long have I been out?”

    
“A
while.” The American extended his hand. “Philby Greenstreet,” he said. “My
people had it changed from Greenblatt three generations ago, but that doesn’t
seem to have fooled anyone.”

    
Raszer
shook the hand and kept his game face, but felt a cold flush he associated with
taking psychotropics in the wrong setting.