Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (83 page)

    
Raszer
cursed the sun, and had momentary reason to wonder if it was any more real than
the one that shone on the Garden.

They had switched places.

    
When they had reached the sanctuary and stationed
their guard, he sat down with Katy not far from the vertical cave entrance, a
man-size rabbit hole that offered just enough light for her to see him. He
chose not to question her about the mechanics of the exchange. He didn’t
question her at all, because he didn’t yet know what answers he was looking
for. He could see that her own gates were drawing shut, and might remain closed
for a while. He’d seen it in so many of his strays: this icing over, this
pulling into the shell. There was shame to deal with, and rage, and fear, and,
most confusing of all, there was missing the devil you knew—in this case, a
devil with an opium fix—and the captivity you had come to trust. And so Raszer
took her hands in his, and after a while began to hum a tune to her. Francesca
and Dante sat nearby, their backs against the cavern wall, while the Kurdish
retinue covered the entrance. It would be dark in an hour, and Raszer had
decided they’d wait for morning.

    
Her
pulse, felt faintly through her palms, was as slow as a yogi’s. Her newly
dilated pupils made her eyes almost black, and soft. She seemed to like the
humming. He knew why: There was no drug quite like opium, nothing that made a
person feel as cozy and safe. All things became haloed with soft, diffuse gaslight.
None of this placidness, however, would survive Katy’s inevitable crash. Soon
she’d be climbing the cavern walls, clawing the dirt, and probably kicking him.
He began thinking about a new plan.

    
After a
long time, she decided to speak.

    
“Where’re
we going?” she asked.

    
“Eventually
. . . America,” he answered. “After that, where
you
want to go.”

    
“I don’t
know about that.” A pause. “I guess I’d still like to see Washington?”

    
“Washington
. . . ” he repeated. “D.C.?”

    
She
nodded. “We were going there. For Christmas. Does it snow there?”

    
“Sometimes,”
he said. “A field trip. Nice. Were they always that nice to you?”

    
She kept
her eyes on him for a long time in the fading light. Then she dropped her head,
shook it from side to side, and began to cry softly. He held her hands firmly,
feeling her pulse begin to spike up a little. After a while, he said, “Listen,
I’m going over to talk to Francesca for just a minute. Dante over there, he’ll
keep watch over you.”

    
He stood
and nearly toppled over. He was dizzy from hunger and exhaustion. He motioned
for Francesca to walk with him.

    
“What
did they do to you in there?” she asked, seeing him stagger.

    
“I’m not
ready to talk about it yet,” he replied. Beneath the cave entrance, he lit a
cigarette and fell back against the rock. “I can’t believe I didn’t think about
this . . . ”

    
“About
what?” she asked.

    
“They
got her strung out on high-grade black opium, and she’s going to crash real
soon. If she wigs out, they’re going to find this place, and I’m not the least
bit sure they won’t kill us all.”

    
“What do
you think?”

    
“I think
we send you and Katy ahead to the village with the soldiers. Dante and I will
keep two of them behind to guide us down later.”

    
“I don’t
understand. Why don’t we all go?”

    
“Two
reasons,” he said. “The first is the separate-boats strategy we’ve already
agreed to. The second is that I need to think . . . about Ruthie. About what to
do.”

    
“
What to do about Ruthie
?” she repeated,
moving in close on him. “She walked right in there, as she undoubtedly intended
to from the start. She made her choice. Excuse me . . . but
fuck her!
”

    
“I know I should go with your gut, Francesca. I
agree, her staying didn’t look coerced. That’s just the problem. There has to
have been some kind of deal made, but when . . . and with whom, and for what?”

    
“Stupido uomo!
” she said. “It’s not
enough to survive. You have to figure it all out. You don’t even see the answer
right before your eyes.”

    
He
exhaled a long plume of smoke and regarded her steadily. “Oh, I
see
,” he said. “Believe me, Francesca
of the Fedeli d’Amore. I
see
.” He
stamped out the cigarette. “What time did Monica say the helicopter would be
there?”

    
She
looked at her watch. “In a little less than eight hours: 4:00
am
.”

    
“I want
you to go. You speak Kurdish. I want you to ask the unit leader to radio ahead
to Rahim and ask him to meet you halfway. Then stay with him until the chopper
comes.”

    
“When
will I see you?”

    
“I’ll be
there by four, if not earlier. I just need to work some things through.”

    
“And if
you are
not
there?”

    
He took
her head in his hands. “I will be. But no matter what, you get her—and Dante—into
that helicopter before sunrise, back to the vehicles, and back to your base.
You promise me, okay? Monica will get me out. Promise me, Francesca.”

    
She reached
up to touch the scar she’d left him, then sucked in a breath and nodded.

    
It took
Raszer an hour to prepare Katy to leave without him, and it felt like the rush
job it was. He’d earned a small measure of her trust, only to turn her out into
a harsh world on her own. He was cutting corners with her soul. He did as much
of the restoration work as he could, but came up short. At some point, he
muttered words of apology. She looked at him oddly and said, “Just please don’t
put me in a truck, okay? I don’t like the dark.”

    
“A
truck?”

    
“If you
sell me or trade me to someone. Wherever it is I’m going.”

    
“You’re
not being traded to anyone, Katy,” he said, taking her hands. “You’re going
home.”

    
When they had gone and it was just and Dante and
Raszer and the two remaining soldiers, Raszer sat down beside the boy and let
out a long, low moan.

    
“It must
take a lot out of you,” Dante said, “someone that damaged.”

    
“I’m
pretty wrung out. But there’s so much more to do.”

    
“I don’t
know how you got her out of there so fast. I mean . . . I’ve
been
in there.”

    
“Well,
if they knew they were getting Ruthie, I may not deserve much credit.”

    
“There’s
always a trade-off, isn’t there? What matters is breaking even.”

    
“I don’t
think even’s going to be enough,” Raszer said, looking long and deep at Dante.
“But I wish I’d thought so when I was your age.” He paused. “You’re way ahead
of my station. You’re going to have a very interesting life.”

    
“Shit .
. . I hope it’s half as interesting as yours.”

    
Raszer
laughed softly. “Why don’t you try to get a little sleep while you can?”

    
In his mind, Raszer went back over every frame of
the time Ruthie had spent inside the fortress. He didn’t believe he had ever
fully taken his eyes off her. Yes, he’d left the sisters alone in the Garden,
but they’d always been in his sight and had never with a third person. Yet
Ruthie had stepped into her sister’s place as seamlessly as an understudy
replaces an actor in a Broadway production. Raszer was stuck on the why. And in
the far chambers of his mind, he was trying to figure out some way to avoid the
consequences it implied.

    
There
was the slightest ripple of sound around his ears, but not enough of a
signature for his brain to subject it to analysis. The Kurdish soldiers—who
knew, as hill fighters, that an unsuppressed sneeze could draw a bullet—made no
sound. He scanned the area surrounding the narrow slit of a cave entrance and
saw no movement. Dante was curled up nearby, but Raszer was certain he hadn’t
stirred. Now came another sound, this one defined enough for his mind to
replay: a stone skittering down the steep mountainside and landing with a
plunk
. Every hair bristled. There was
trouble. Raszer rose to a crouch and crossed the cavern to Dante.

    
“Hey!”
he whispered, and kept some distance so the boy wouldn’t wake with a shout.
“Listen to me now. You’ve got to go, got to get out of here.”

    
It took
a few seconds for Dante to put things in register. “What? Why?” he asked.

    
“No
time. Is there another way out of here? When I saw you this afternoon, it looked
like you’d . . . is there a rear exit?”

    
Dante
nodded, troubled. “For a skinny guy like me. But—”

    
“Then
go. Now. And whatever happens, make sure Katy’s on that first chopper out.” The
boy hesitated, and Raszer gave him a push. “Wake up. Go.” He paused. “And
live.”

    
Once
Dante was out, Raszer climbed into the main entrance, a near-vertical shaft on
the boulder-strewn mountainside. The moon had now risen level with the opening,
its pale glow illuminating his face. He hoisted himself into the chimney and
boosted himself up to its mouth, keeping his eyes at ground level. A second
later, he heard a whispered but percussive
pffftt-pffftt
,
followed by an exhalation and a thump. The first was probably the sound of a
high-grade silencer, at least 90 decibels of attenuation. The second was
unmistakable: a body hitting the hard earth.

    
There
was suddenly open gunfire, the second Kurdish soldier’s defense. A cascade of
silenced gunshots followed, and then the call, “He’s down.”

    
It was
the voice of the American mercenary.

    
It was a
nightmare’s conundrum. Raszer didn’t want to go back down, because he’d be
cornered like an animal. He didn’t want to run, because in open country he
would be too easy a target. And if he remained where he was . . .

    
His neck
was suddenly in a vise grip. They pulled him out of the chimney and tossed him
roughly onto the rocky ground.

    
“Right
where she said he’d be,” said the American, a gray lock of his center-parted
hair over one eye. “Six more weeks of winter for you, my friend. I hope you
brought a coat.” He dropped to one knee, leaned in, and said, “A piece of
advice: Never, ever trust a whore.”

    
The plateau from which the fortress of El Mirai
commanded the landscape had been heaved up from the earth a hundred million
years before. Its highest point, a mere 2,700 feet above sea level, made it one
of the lesser formations in the range, but its monolithic form—along with the
remarkable land ramp leading to its summit—more than compensated for its size.
Its reputation as a seat of supernatural (and malevolent) power stemmed from a
history enhanced by centuries of legend.

    
This
much was known: At some point in human memory, a meteor the size of a house had
slammed into the valley floor at the mountain’s base, throwing up a titanic
amount of earth and creating the land bridge that led to the gates. In the
annals of Islam, the fortress had over the centuries been host to more than one
form of exotic heresy, sometimes nominally Muslim, mostly not. The mountain’s
location in a remote wasteland claimed by everyone, but deeded to no one, had
made long tenancies possible. As far back as the tenth century, Islamic
cartographers had been known to say, “The land to the east belongs to the
Sassanids of Persia, and this to the north and west to the Seljuk Turks. This
to the south is Urartian, but this—this land in the center—belongs to Shaytan.”

    
Finally,
there was the light that gave the fortress its name. At certain times of day,
under certain conditions, one could look across the broad canyon from a nearby
vantage point and see nothing but brown rock and blue sky where the castle had
previously been. Inevitably, this vanishing act occurred when the viewer was
pointing out El Mirai to a skeptic.

    
In times
past, a party approaching El Mirai from the south would have seen—if the light
was right—the fortress spread like a medina in shades of pale green and saffron
yellow across the rocky crown. Below its massive walls, the cliff face was
sheer and striated, and dropped nine hundred feet to the slope. At a certain
point when ascending the land bridge, the angle of view would reveal the
scaffold—beside and below the enormous iron gates—where the enemies of El Mirai
were hung from the cliffside, sometimes headless or limbless, and left as
offerings to the huge black vultures who were the true gods of this place.