Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (61 page)

    
She set her cup down, rushed to the
console, and began frantically—and, she knew in her heart, pointlessly—trying
to hold off the invading armies. In all their years in this office, they had
contracted only one virus, and that had been in the days when there was little
to lose.

    
Within a matter of seconds, everything on
her hard drive was gone.

    
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” she screamed.

    
Then, with the empty screens and a ripple
of breeze through the open garden doors, the terror came. It spread over her
skin like a frost, leaving her fingertips numb and cold. “Lars?” she called
through the window. He ought to be just outside. He ought to answer right away.

    
But he didn’t.

    
She willed her legs to carry her to the
front door, and peered through the pane to his post on the balcony. The chair
was empty; his makeshift beach cabana had fallen over. Pulling a breath into
her lungs, she opened the door and stepped out. “Lars?” she called again,
feeling the name catch in her throat. Two houses down, where the green sedan
belonging to the FBI surveillance team ought to have been, was an empty space
at the curb.

    
“Shit,” Monica whispered. Empty hard
drives, empty chair, empty parking space. The next thing to be emptied, she
reasoned, would be her veins. Her impulse was to start walking and keep
walking—right down the middle of the street—until she’d reached Hollywood and
the safety of numbers.

    
But she didn’t want to get into her car.
They might have fucked with it. She didn’t want to go back into the house.
Monica understood in that moment of paralysis the difference between even
dedicated amateurs like her and professional soldiers and spies. Stress training
enabled them to make good decisions in situations like this one. They were
taught, fundamentally, how to stay alive, because that meant being able to
carry out the mission. All she had was her native wit and a loyalty to Raszer
that went beyond all rational explanation.

    
But she was also stubborn, and it was her
stubbornness that impelled her back into the office to shut down the system,
retrieve their two external hard drives, and lock the place up. She did all
this on autopilot because, as far as she could tell, her brain was not working.
Finally, she got into the car, tossed the drives on the passenger seat, and
turned the ignition with her eyes shut tight.

    
The Toyota started without a bang, the
brakes seemed to work all right, and she was so relieved that she failed to
notice as she turned onto Whitley Drive that a white delivery van had pulled
away from the curb behind her. After ten minutes’ driving, her pulse at last
left her throat, and she opened the glove compartment to retrieve the security
cigarette she kept there for bad dates, hormonal days, and moments like these.

    
Special
agent Bernard Djapper dried his hands, adjusted his bow tie in the mirror, and
prepared to leave the airport bathroom. Behind him, the stall door opened
quietly and the young man slipped out. Djapper felt reasonably calm—all things
considered—but he knew that soon enough, the tension would rise back into his
jaw. He dreaded that feeling, because he knew it meant he was not resolute.

    
The thing was not to show it. Whatever
transitory passions had, in the previous minutes, rippled the perfectly
composed landscape of his exterior must now be patted as neatly back into place
as his cowlick. He’d spent considerable time and effort making himself an
exemplary model. An exemplary model of
what
,
precisely, he could no longer remember. Some paragon of responsible masculinity
once glimpsed in an old movie or a children’s book. Someone always addressed as
Mister, or Sir, or Father. Not too many years ago, there had briefly been a woman
in his life (the corner of his mouth twitched at the memory of her). Before
leaving, she’d told him that he worked so hard at being “normal” that he’d made
himself anything but.
Bitch.

    
Something he glimpsed as he stooped to pick
up his briefcase disturbed him, and he turned back to the mirror. An unruly
eyebrow hair. He removed from his briefcase a small leather grooming kit, took
out a pair of tweezers, and plucked it out.

    
A smile flickered across his face, an
acknowledgment of the vanity of his vanity. He knew that the pride he took in
his appearance had no basis in beauty. But his ordinariness served to disguise
the extraordinarily complicated man beneath, and it was from this deception
that his pride flowed. If Oscar Wilde had been right to say that the mark of
intelligence was the ability to hold two conflicting ideas in the mind at the
same time, then Djapper might be a genius, for he could hold two minds in his
mind at the same time. He was, in his own estimation, an expert liar.

    
Nobody knew the real Bernard Henry Djapper.

    
Very little had ever come “naturally” to
Djapper; he’d worked hard for everything he had. Some men, he thought, hadn’t
earned their grace—the private detective, for instance. Even he, Bernard
Djapper, had been seduced, and he’d nearly given away the store. After years of
painstaking self-containment, he’d nearly spilled it all. Like that
grade-school guilt flush that made you want to confess that you’d put the tack
on Teacher’s chair, even when you hadn’t. Djapper hated himself for it, and
hated the detective. How nice to think that men could make themselves over. How
nice to think that a man could choose his “role.” Some men had destinies. The
possibility of friendship—of a connection—had almost detoured Djapper from his.
Never again.

    
The enemy was forever equating what was
“natural” with what was good. But nature was corrupt and corrupting. Likewise,
natural history—if allowed to run its course—would weaken human purpose.
History sometimes had to be redirected, even radically, if only to prevent
entropy and rot. No prospect was as exciting to him as being a shaper of
history, and no history could be more thrilling than the one being shaped right
now. It was the first thing he’d ever felt willing to die for.

    
Every so often, things would reach a point
of confusion, and Djapper would begin to lose himself in his deception, become
so enamored of its craft, that he forgot why he was doing it. At such times, it
was necessary to remind himself of what he really wanted: He wanted things to
be clean. Uncomplicated. If someone had suggested to him that this presented a
paradox—that a man preferring black and white could live in shades of gray—he
would have answered, “No, I’m not a paradox. I’m a patriot.”

    
He left the bathroom and made his way out
of the Tom Bradley International Terminal. His cargo had been shipped and, when
it arrived at that distant port, would introduce viral agents into Stephan
Raszer’s game, as surely as one monkey could infect an entire zoo. These agents
would compel countermeasures on Raszer’s part, but nothing would kill the
contagion. There is no antibody for the unexpected. It wasn’t that Djapper
desired to see the PI dead; it wasn’t about desire at all. Raszer was simply in
the way of the particular history Djapper and his colleagues were trying to
effect. He looked forward to assuring them that the obstacle had been
eliminated.

    
There
was one more chore to do before he could assure them that everything was back
in place. From LAX, Djapper headed northeast on the I-5 toward downtown Los
Angeles, where a team of private security contractors in Douglas Picot’s charge
were now preparing to convey Scotty Darrell to Edwards Air Force Base, on the
wind-raked desert flats east of Mojave, California. From there, the plan had
been to rendition Darrell into hands less bound by law and convention. In U.S.
custody, he could only cause trouble. As an enemy combatant, he was effectively
disposed of.

But Agent Djapper had been informed that there was
more mischief afoot. The fabric had begun to fray even before the election, and
now, with less than two years left before the end date, there were seams
showing everywhere. If the boy boarded the plane, it would be the beginning of
the unraveling of everything. If he boarded the plane, he was going to
Greenstreet.

He could not be permitted to get there.

    
The
traffic was good, and after twenty minutes, he pulled into the underground
garage. At the last instant, he veered into the lane for valet parking.
What the hell
, he thought.
You only live once
. He pulled up and
stepped out, nodding stiffly to the attendant who held the door for him, then
breezed through the security doors on just a single flash of his badge. It was
true what they said: Act powerful, and people assume you are. If he’d
self-parked, they’d have run his credentials, maybe patted him down.

    
The
basement corridor Scotty was due to be brought down was long, wide, and dim,
and broken up by alcoves leading to file rooms and unused offices. In any case,
it was a Sunday, and not even the most dedicated civil servants were working.
It led directly to the parking garage; halfway down, there was an emergency
exit to the alley off Hill Street, an exit Djapper meant to use. He parked
himself in the alcove nearest the exit and dropped briefly into a squat. For
some reason, he thought it would be appropriate to pray, but he really had no
experience with it. He mumbled a few words about fortitude and then stood back
up. The gun felt good against his ribs. He wanted to put his hand on the grip,
but knew that if he did so, his palm would soon begin to sweat and make his
hold less than sure at the critical moment.

    
He heard footsteps.

    
As he
put his hand on the grip, he told himself that he was more than a Jack Ruby.
Ruby had slithered from beneath a rock and struck to prevent a great unmasking
of deep power. This was different. Wasn’t Djapper, like Picot and the others,
an idealist? The world they wanted was one in which the choices were clear,
where ideas and cultures in stark opposition were allowed to face off. As it
had been in the ’50s, with the Reds. How was the right side ever to win if
history continued to blur the distinctions?

    
With
regard to his own fate, he was realistic. They’d told him he’d do two years at
most. But they’d told Ruby that, too, and he’d died in his prison cell.

    
The
party turned the corner much sooner than he would have estimated based on
sound. The echo of jangling chains off linoleum and high-gloss institutional
paint had created an illusion of distance. Djapper was surprised to feel his
mouth go dry on first seeing the boy. He’d played this through so many times.
Scotty, shackled, had a DynCorp man at each elbow and two more behind. At the
rear were three NSA agents and Douglas Picot. For all the speed with which
they’d reached the main corridor, they now moved as if through water.

    
A
slowing of time occurs on the cusp of violent events, like a rallentando just
before the big finish in a symphony. Djapper had experienced this phenomenon
before drug raids, and once when thwarting an assassination. The ether through
which time flows suddenly attains a higher viscosity. When he stepped from the
alcove, his gun drawn, there was an instant of cessation within which he was
able to perceive the shape of things with absolute clarity. He could see the
secret thoughts concealed by each guarded expression and suddenly knew that
behind any conspiratorial act are as many differing agendas as there are
conspirators. In any case, he’d passed the point of retreat.

He took another step and aimed for Scotty’s heart.

    
While
the others seemed barely to register him at first, Scotty turned instantly, and
so did the course of events. The boy wore an expression Djapper had seen before
on the faces of the condemned. He smiled, and Djapper realized he’d been
trumped, and that Scotty would be the one to make history today. He felt a rush
of vertigo as two of the DynCorp men broke from the posse. They pinned his arms
against the wall and hammered the gun loose. Scotty dropped his chin to his
chest and mumbled something that might have been a prayer. Three seconds later,
the explosion came.

    
“How the hell did he get a bomb?” Raszer asked, on
a static-ridden connection between a hillock in Sogmatar and Lt. Borges in Los
Angeles.

    
“Obviously,
they had someone on the inside,” Borges replied.