Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (57 page)

    
A number
of improbabilities passed through Raszer’s mind, each one more outlandish than
the one before, and each one in conflict with his bodily experience. It was a
credit to the spiritual training he’d undergone that he accepted fairly quickly
that he wasn’t going to get an explanation—or anything like the quotidian
truth—from the man seated opposite him, and that he might never see the second
Mr. Greenstreet again.

    
“All
right,” said Raszer, and downed the remainder of his beer. “So be it. If he’s
gone, then he must have told me all he could. But give me a second to
recalibrate. You and I are getting on a private plane for Gaziantep, right?”

    
“Yes,”
replied al-Khidr. “Just as I told you. In fact—”

    
“Just as
you
told me?”

    
Rashid
checked his watch. “It should by now be fueled and ready. Shall we go

collect your things and be on our way?”

    
“Why
not?” Raszer pushed back from the table. “I’ll take care of the check.”

    
“It’s
taken care of,” said the Kurd. “Everything is taken care of.”

    
The Cessna’s engine droned. Rashid had said little
so far; the pilot had said nothing at all. This had been all right with Raszer,
who was still far from clear-headed; he took the opportunity to rest his head
against the thick pane of glass. He dozed with one eye closed and the other
fixed emptily on the weirdly unfolding landscape below.

    
After a
minute, he felt Rashid’s eyes on him. “The Bektash Sufis,” said the Kurd, “say
that creation is continual. Now you see it, now you don’t.”

    
“So do
the Australian aboriginals,” said Raszer, without moving his head. But his
words were lost in the rumble of the engines.
    

    
After the landing and a brief rest in Gaziantep,
they boarded the
dolmus
. It was
evening by the time they reached the small city of
Sanliurfa
 
—‘Glorious’ Urfa—so named by Atatürk for its stiff
resistance to the French occupiers nearly a century before. In another epoch,
it had been Alexander’s Edessa, and before that, if three thousand years of
legend carried any historical weight, the Ur of the prophet Abraham, father of
the People of the Book. The same stories taught that Moses had stayed here, and
that still longer ago, when the land was green and wet, Eve had consorted with
serpents and heard God’s footsteps.

    
Urfa—Rashid
had told him on the bus—was believed by many pious Muslims to have been the
historical site of the Garden of Eden.

    
Paradise
or not, the massive dams and aqueducts erected on the Euphrates plain by the
Southeastern Anatolia Project had restored some verdancy to the arid land. As
far as the eye could see were fields of olive and pistachio and glacial
wrinkles of earth with new growth. En route, they’d passed no less than three
dams, the largest of them at what had been the Hittite city of Carchemish. All
around them was soil reclaimed from desert by governmental largesse. Only after
the stop at Birecik did the surroundings return to their naturally barren
state, and within thirty minutes, the windows had accumulated a coating of
rust-colored silt.

    
The
twilight sky over the town of Urfa seemed a different shade from what Raszer
had seen through the windows of the dolmus, a different shade from anything
he’d seen before. It was magenta at the horizon and deepest purple at the
zenith, and the shadows in the old medina were of the same hue.

    
The
pilgrim cities of Islam all seemed to come brazenly alive at night, as if Allah
had retired with the sun, allowing his unruly children to turn the streets into
carnival midways. And at the center of Urfa’s hubbub, in the oldest part of the
old city, was a colonnaded mosque of great age. Through the columns, Raszer
spied a sprawling rectangular pool, its waters roiling and flecked gold by
thousands of enormous, teeming carp. There were so many fish that the surface
appeared a living organism.

    
“The
fish are sacred,” Rashid explained. “They were once consecrated to Atargatis,
that same Syrian goddess we spoke of in Iskenderun. Now they belong to the
prophet Abraham. The legend is that when Nimrod threw Abraham from the tower,
Allah turned the burning pyre below to a pond full of carp, and Abraham was
saved.”

    
After
dark, they dined on a tiled terrace in the rear of the safe house, watched over
by an armed guard and tended to by a cook. They were served
lahmacun
, a local dish of spicy minced
lamb on wafer-thin bread, and Rashid had even managed to obtain a bottle of
Minervois. But Raszer, who usually savored food under even the worst of
circumstances, had no taste for it tonight. He was troubled by what the events
of the past twenty-four hours signaled regarding the reliability of his mental
processes.

    
He was
used to labyrinths, but how would he find his bearings in the mirror image of a
labyrinth?

    
“I have
a very strange feeling,” he told Rashid. “Clinically speaking, I’m not sure
it’s a lot different from paranoid schizophrenia, and that worries me a
little.”

    
“Describe
it to me,” said the Kurd. “I may be able to help.”

    
“That
may be a little tricky. I feel as if I’m in a borrowed body. As if my own body
never left that slab in your office back in Iskenderun. Maybe never left the
hangar in Colorado Springs. Maybe never left the bridge over the Rio Grande.”

    
“And
what would it mean if that were truly the case?”

    
“You
really want me to say? All right. It would mean that my consciousness is
occupying a kind of shadow person. It would mean that the gauntlet I’m running
is in a separate reality. I won’t say
virtual reality
, because that would imply a simulation.” Raszer’s gaze
shifted inward, and he spoke half to himself. “I wonder if this is how Scotty
felt.”

    
“How
else would you expect to feel, Mr. Raszer? You have experienced a profound
dislocation, and you have advanced very quickly to a high level of the game.”

    
“How?”
asked Raszer. “By what mechanism?”

    
“To
begin with, things formerly hidden have been revealed to you. Things that alter
the shape of the world. There is no psychotropic more potent than knowledge.
What is it that the Gnostic Gospel says of the seeker? ‘When he finds, he will
be troubled, and then astonished. And in astonishment, he will rule the world.”

    
“I doubt
I’m destined to rule, Rashid, but up to a point, I can navigate that world. I’m
stuck on a couple of details. For one, if what I’m sensing is genuine, it would
most likely mean that you don’t exist in any way the world would recognize as
real. Has the CIA been messing around with stuff like counterfactuals and
quantum detours?”

    
“I could
not say if I exist in a world separate from yours, Mr. Raszer, because as a
resident of that world, I would not know that it was separate. It would simply
be my world, you see. You would be a visitor. All I can say is that you should
honor your intuition, and conduct yourself accordingly.”

    
“I was
afraid you’d say that.”

    
“You
probably know that the CIA’s most important work on remote viewing was done at
the Stanford Research Institute in the ’60s. After that—after funding for the
project was discontinued—work continued under the cover of various black
operations. I do not know how far they got. Perhaps our meeting is evidence
that they got very far indeed. Let me ask you, Mr. Raszer: Do you believe in
the transmigration of souls?”

    
“The
short answer is yes. But I wouldn’t have thought it could be induced.”

    
“But why
not?” Rashid countered. “How else does the shaman enter the body of the man
possessed by demons? Not everyone is capable of such slipping in and out of
body, of course, but you would seem to be an ideal candidate. Is this not, in a
sense, how you have rescued your lost ones in the past?”

    
“Never
thought of it that way, but—”

    
“So if
your government, or certain forces within your government, wished to put a man
inside the fortress of these assassins—a man whose presence might, shall we
say, introduce certain variables—would they not turn to someone like yourself?”

    
“I’m a
candidate, all right. Maybe the Manchurian kind. Maybe
I’m
the assas-sin—” Raszer shook his head. “What happens to the old
me if they kill the new one?”

    
“There
are no guarantees,” said Rashid. “But let me say this from my own heart. Should
that happen, my belief is that your soul, which is also your Rabb—your
Lord—will find its way home. You see, in a spiritually developed individual,
ascent and descent are continual processes. God descends to you and you ascend
to Him. In this very moment, you are flickering like cinema between being and
nonbeing. What we call reality is merely ‘persistence of vision.’ You will
learn to walk with one foot in the occulted world and one in the revealed; one
in
fana
and one in
baqa
. And you will receive tutelage in
this matter from those you will visit next: the Fedeli d’Amore.”

    
“I’ll do
my best to walk that line. But just the same, I’m going to leave you something
to post to my daughter if I don’t make it back from the other side.”

    
“Of
course.”

    
“What
time does this fellow Dante come to fetch me?”

    
 
“He will come in the crack between night and
dawn.”

    
“When
else, right? I’ll leave the letter here on the table.”

    
 
“I envy you, Mr. Raszer. You are going to meet
some quite remarkable people. In the land you’ll be traveling across—the land
of the Alevis, the Yarsanis, the Yezidis, and the Bektash—if you scratch a
Muslim, you will find a member of the Cult of Angels: the Yazdani. A faith
older than Islam, older even than Judaism. Its survival relies upon deception.
Across this landscape, many of its greatest prophets have been crucified.
Crucified not by Romans or Crusaders, but by fellow Muslims. Before you reach
your destination, God willing, you’ll encounter the green man, Khezr, the great
trickster. Flowers spring up in his footsteps, and streams alter their course.
Him, you may follow without hesitation.” Rashid scooped the last morsel off his
plate and popped it into his mouth. “And now, I must get some rest—and you
also.”

    
“Right.
But first, when am I briefed on this identity I’m supposed to assume? This
priest, and how he talks his way into El Mirai.”

    
“You will practice a subterfuge,” said Rashid,
with a little laugh. “You are good at that, are you not? His name is
frère
Gilles Deleuze. The Fedeli will
see to your transformation. It’s quite right to say that you have left Stephan
Raszer behind.”

    
“And why
should the Old Man—the self-proclaimed Lord of Time—do business with a humble
friar? If what you say is true, he has powerful friends.”

    
“Because—along
with Scotty Darrell—you have something else that he very much wants.”

    
“What’s
that? I’d like an ace in the hole, because I’m not keen on trading one hostage
for another, and even with a silver bullet, I wouldn’t kill the king for you.”

    
The Kurd
leaned in close, and his gaze bore into the pale blue iris of Raszer’s right
eye. “This eye of yours,” he said, aiming his finger. “It sometimes sees past
disguise, yes? Perhaps even beyond the curtain of death?”

    
“It goes
a little haywire every so often. Makes things much more complicated.”

    
“While
you wait tonight for the arrival of your escort, contemplate why pilgrims to
Mecca circle the Ka’ba seven times and kiss the black stone set in its eastern
corner . . . and why they have been doing so since long before Mohammed came.”

    
“That’s
all you’re going to give me? A Islamic koan?”

    
“Goodnight,
Mr. Raszer.
Bonne nuit, Frère Deleuze
.”

    
Raszer remained on the terrace for an hour after
Rashid had gone. When he’d finished the last of the wine, he made his way up to
the bedroom designated as his. He lay down, then got up and smoked a cigarette,
then lay down and got up again. He couldn’t seem to shake the feedback loop
that the phrase “since long before Mohammed came” had triggered in his brain.