Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (73 page)

    
“Everyone all right?” Francesca called out.

    
“Think so,” said Raszer, feeling his eye
and finding it undamaged. “Just a headache, I guess. Blood vessels, maybe.
Altitude, probably.”

    
“The altitude, aye,” Dante echoed. “We’ll
be headed down soon.”

    
They came out from under the ledge, and the
vapor was instantly suffused with a white light that made it seem incandescent.
A rush of icy air followed. Ruthie called out from inside the cloud.

    
“Tell me there’s something on either side
o’ this path, dude . . . ”

    
“Just follow the sticks,” Dante counseled.
“Keep ’em lined up in the space between your ears, and you’ll be fine. Hold on
to Adi’s tail if you want.”

    
“So you’re saying there’s nothing there,
right? How long is the drop?”

    
“You don’t want to know,” said Francesca.
“Be quiet and listen.”

    
“Shit.”

    
They walked that way for another five
minutes. Suddenly, there was a ferocious updraft, and the cloud bank was
dispersed almost instantly. It was impossible not to feel a surge of carnival
vertigo on seeing that they were 9,200 feet above sea level, with a sheer drop
on either side of a path not more than four feet wide.

    
“Beautiful,” said Raszer.

    
“It’s savage, isn’t it?” said Dante. “And
look.” He raised his arm and pointed to the northeast. “There’s where we’re
going.”

    
“You won’t see it again until morning,”
Francesca said softly. “The angle is just right here, but after we drop a
hundred feet, it will disappear.”

    
“Jesus,” whispered Raszer, finally
registering the massive battlements and towering minarets rising from the
desert peaks some twelve miles distant, as the crow flew. Indeed, it was not
the ephemeral city he’d glimpsed from Ispiria, although if the light were just
right, a man could be fooled. “That’s it?” he asked. “El Mirai?”

    
“That’s it,” said Dante. “It sits a mile
above a southern branch of the Silk Road in territory claimed by three
countries—four, if you count Kurdistan—but occupied by none of ’em. It’s a
no-go zone, and it has been for at least a thousand years. It’s no’ even on a
map. Even Marco Polo had to find his way there by trusting a blind man.”

    
As Francesca had predicted, the fortress
soon vanished from sight, and as she had promised, a stream of cold, clear
glacier melt furnished water a mile on. They stopped for a lunch of dates and
flatbread, and by midafternoon they were on the lee side of the mountains, where
the look of the land was dramatically different. The three o’clock sun burned
unfiltered through a sky that was almost violet, and the rocks were the color
of rust. Patches of meadow were visible far below, but they were the golden
brown of Assyria and not the green of the irrigated west. At five o’clock, they
made camp for their last night in the familiar world.

    
After everyone else had crashed, Raszer
stirred the embers of the fire, lit a cigarette, and retrieved the gunmetal
ionophone from his pack. He’d used it on only one prior job, and had to
meditate for a few minutes on how to reprogram the thing to disguise his
location. It registered the latitude, longitude, and altitude precisely enough
to guide a missile, and as soon as he made a call, anyone spiked into Monica’s
line would know exactly where he was.

    
He disabled the autolocate function and set
his coordinates at the offset he and Monica had agreed on, which put
him—according to the readout—in the Alps somewhere east of Grenoble. Why not?

    
She picked up after four rings. It must be
five in the morning.

    
“How’s the skiing?” she asked, registering
his decoy location.

    
“Good at nine thousand feet,” he said. “How
are you?”

    
“I’d be better if I heard from you more
often.”

    
“As often as necessary, partner,” he said.
“No more than that.”

    
“Yeah, yeah. How close are you?”

    
“Within sight.”

    
“You made good time. Listen, I have more on
that black stone—”

    
“Good. Tell me in a sec. First: Sometime
tomorrow afternoon, we’ll make the lodge. I’ll send you the specs as soon as
I’m there, and then you can let our friends know. There’s a village south of
the base—the only one in the vicinity. That’s where I’ll bring her. I’d like to
chopper out. Do we have a pilot and a couple of freelancers?”

    
“We will by tomorrow. I’m cross-checking
references and verifying credentials.”

    
“Good girl.”

    
“It isn’t going to be cheap, Raszer.”

    
“It’s never cheap to salvage a career.”

    
“And you’ll never be rich. Not the way you
go at it.”

    
“Who needs money when they’ve got Monica?”

    
“Let’s get married,” she said.

    
“Book the church.”

    
“How’s Ruthie behaving?”

    
“Better than I expected. But I still can’t
connect the dots. Any luck tracing her ticket purchase?”

    
“Yeah. She paid cash. She had all her docs.
She was ready. And . . . her mother called yesterday. She suspects Ruthie’s
with you. Should I tell her?”

    
Raszer thought for a moment. “Yes. Tell her
she’s fine. See if
she
knows where
the money came from. Was that why she called? To find out where she was?”

    
Monica told him about the cryptic note with
the dated postmark.

    
“You’re breaking up . . . did you say,
‘AC/DC’?”

    
“No . . .
N, C
. . . ” The line went haywire with static.

    
“Monica? Monica?
Shit
.” He’d lost her. He tried a number of times before conceding
that he wasn’t going to get her back tonight.

    
Francesca
and Dante were up before dawn, and camp was broken by sunrise. The two Fedeli,
attended by Shaykh Adi, offered fifteen minutes of prayer to the big red ball
in the sky. Raszer joined them for the closing devotions, while Ruthie stood at
a distance, wrapped in a blanket and shivering.

    
The prayer was simple and eloquent. It
invoked a number of avatars, including Sahak (the prophet Isaac), Nusayr (who
was Jesus, the Nazarene), and Mirza Husayn Ali, the founder of Baha’i faith,
and asserted that light can be summoned even from darkness. It ended with a
call to Khezr, the wandering green man of the ponds and rivers, to guide them
on the remaining journey.

    
They descended nearly two thousand feet in
just over three hours. It was hard on the knees, and Raszer felt his bad ankle
protest. The weakness had plagued him for a decade now, and at this stage of
his life, he acknowledged that he’d probably never shake it.
Life gives us pain to weigh pleasure against
,
he reminded himself, as he stepped badly onto a loose rock and felt the jolt
surge through his calf and all the way to his groin.

    
Half a mile ahead, the path widened and
rose slightly toward two natural pillars of tawny rock that were joined by an
arch at the top and formed a towering dolmen, a mineral portal to the promised
land of Na-Koja-Abad.

    
“Wait’ll you see this,” said Dante.

    
“Tell me it’s a Club Med with an open bar,”
said Raszer.

    
“Kind of, yeah,” Dante said with a grin.
“But it’s off-season.”

    
The topographical dish did not reveal
itself until they had passed through the pillars, but when it did, it summoned
awe. Spanning the field of vision and extending all the way to the next ridge
was a rippling field of green, budding stems, hundreds of thousands of them, each
just short of a meter in height. The flowers hadn’t blossomed yet, but the
large, wineglass-shaped buds were the powdery aquamarine of a Cretan mural.
Raszer guessed the field to be not less than twenty square miles.

    
“Jesus,” he whispered. “Poppies?”

    
“The largest field of opium poppies in the
known world,” said Dante. “And it belongs to no one because it’s claimed by
everyone. The tribal councils work out the division every spring, but always
with the understanding that the field belongs to Allah and he’s the final
arbiter. The Americans won’t touch it because it would blow up in their face,
but I bet they get their cut. And for the past twenty years—probably as payment
for services rendered in Afghanistan and other places—the Old Man has been able
to claim the entire eastern half. That’s his base. That’s where the juice comes
from.

    
“The Kurdish marksmen watch over the
southwestern quadrant, the Turks and the Iranians squabble over the
northwestern part and occasionally shoot at each other, and in the east, there
are mercenaries in the employ of el Mirai.”

    
“And we’re going to walk through the
middle?” asked Raszer.

    
“It’s the only way to go,” said Dante. He
pointed downward to the cut that bisected the center. “Any other route would
raise suspicion, make it look like we have something to hide. We’re just a
trekking party taking two clients on a pilgrimage, right?”

    
“Right,” said Raszer. “And you’ve done this
before?”

    
“Absolutely,” Dante answered. He unstrapped
his backpack, took out a tightly rolled Red Cross flag, and, after shaking out
the wrinkles, tied it to his snake stick and let the stiff breeze take it.
“First off, the mountains beyond the eastern ridge of the dish are popular with
climbers. Second, the crossroads at the base of el Mirai have become mythical.
You wouldn’t believe how many people will pay good money, risk the snakes and
the sharpshooters, just to know that they really exist. The cautious ones’ll
settle for a glimpse from the hills, just to say they’ve been there. The
serious trekkers, they want to experience the topographical inversion for
themselves.”

    
“Shams talked about that,” said Ruthie. “I
never knew what the hell he meant.”

    
“Some huge shift in perspective, right?”
said Raszer. “Is it . . . magnetic?”

    
“Not magnetic,” Dante replied emphatically.
“It’s metanoia. Turns your head.”

    
“The idea goes back at least to Ibn Arabi,”
said Francesca. “It happens about a mile before the crossroads . . . if
everything is right. When you cross into Na-Koja-Abad, Nowhere-Land. It can’t
be put into words. Best I’ve heard it described is that you stop seeing inside
out and start seeing outside in. The same landscape, but not the same, because
the vanishing point is . . . inside your head, or your heart, or wherever
active imagination is. I know, words are lame, but—”

    
“Active imagination . . . ” Raszer
repeated.

    
“Yes,” said Francesca. “But not like
imagining you’re a princess or a dragon slayer. This is when you realize that
the world you see outside is just a projection of the world God sees inside.
It’s plugging right into God’s imagination.”

    
“It sounds like tripping,” said Ruthie.

    
“Yeah, but . . . no,” said Dante. “You
don’t ever come down from this trip.”

    
“It’s the object of The Gauntlet, right?”
Raszer asked. “No reference points. Like Mach space. Everything flips and
you’re inside the game—just you and God.”

    
“And up is down and right is left and
everything is permitted,” added Dante. “And if you can come back from that and
still be on the path, nothing will ever knock you off it again.”

    
Raszer thought for a moment. “So how did
someone like Scotty Darrell get so far off the track? He must’ve passed through
here, too, right?”

    
“Yeah,” Dante replied. “But you have to
know where you wanna go before you go there. Have to have your bearings. Scotty
didn’t . . . and he had a bad trip.” He hoisted the pack onto his shoulders.
“Let’s go,” he said. “And don’t touch the flowers unless you want to get your
fingers shot off.”

    
The
buds were still too new to have come under the knife. When they were ripe,
their various tenders would descend from the ridges, blades in hand, and score
the delicate, blue-green pods to release the sweet resin inside. That resin
would become the salve for the world’s ravages, from toothache to childbirth to
cancer to despair about the very thought of life. In differing
formulations—heroin, morphine, laudanum, hydro-codone—it wrapped its users in a
chemical cocoon designed to make everything okay.