Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (39 page)

    
“Right.
The
houris
. The cup bearers in the
Islamic martyr’s paradise. Offering all the goodies that pious Muslims can’t
have in life. A garden flowing with rivers of milk, honey, and sex. That’s what
Hassan-i-Sabbah tried to simulate in medieval Persia.”

    
“
Houris
?” she asked. “That wouldn’t
happen to be the origin of
whore
,
would it?”
   

    
“Let’s
check it out,” said Raszer. “Linguistics is the key to almost everything, and
sacred prostitution has a long history.”

    
“But you
don’t think this is an Al Qaeda sort of thing . . . ”

    
“Meaning
what?” Raszer asked. “An Islamist terror network? Maybe on the surface.
Recruiting alienated, gullible young men from the border. Persuading them everything
they’ve ever been told is wrong. It’s the way all secret societies work: hook
them with status; draw them in with privileged knowledge; lock them in with
fear. But this doesn’t feel overtly political or sectarian. They’re not
claiming responsibility like Hamas. This feels like Islamic Scientology.
They’re most likely after
influence
.”

    
“What
kind of influence? Like the kind superlobbyists have?”

    
“On the
surface, maybe. What the original Assassins seem to have wanted was ’special
status.’ They claimed direct spiritual lineage from Muhammad. They were
fanatics in a fanatical time, but they rarely killed Christians. In fact, they
made political alliances with the Christians.” Raszer paused, then repeated it:
“Alliances with the Christians. Alliances with . . . ”

    
“‘The
enemy of my enemy’?” Monica said softly.

    
“‘A
battle between one kind of human and another,’” he whispered.

    
“Come
again?”

    
“Something
Douglas Picot let slip.”

    
“How’re
you going to connect all this into something I can put on an itinerary?”

    
“I don’t
know yet. The solution to a mystery is never an isolated piece of evidence, but
accumulated implications that ultimately become unavoidable conclusions.”

    
“And now
you want to go to Taos . . . to accumulate more implications.”

    
“I need
to hang with someone who knows Katy well. All the others are dead.”

    
“Let’s
get you properly equipped,” she said. “I may not see you for a while.”

    
“I’ll
need approach shoes, desert boots, my kits, and that GPS phone Geotech has been
begging us to try. Maps. And—” He paused. “I guess I should have the implant.”

    
“Right.
And if you’re going to be tramping around the Near East, you’ll need to see Dr.
Cutter before you go. I’ll find out what shots are current for that area.” She
smiled. “But first you see Dr. Monica.” She unlocked a cabinet and took out a
device that looked a bit like a popgun. “Loosen your pants and show me some
cheek. Time to

put the bug in your ass. I won’t lose you this
time.”

    
“Wipe
that grin off your face,” he said, exposing just enough flesh to allow access
for the tracer implant. “I’m about to give you some bad news.”

    
Ruthie Endicott had heard all the talk. Taos, New
Mexico was magical. Taos was holy. People saw Jesus here, and statues bled.
Taos got inside people’s heads and made them drunk with visions of psychedelic
sugarplums. It had even gotten to her mother, Constance. She was a “hearer,”
one of the 2 to 3 percent of the local population who lived with a distant
diesel engine known as the Taos Hum rumbling in her head. For relief, she’d
gone from medicinal teas to tequila and then, when the hangovers had only made
it worse, to a steady diet of OxyContin. It made her difficult to live with,
and so Ruthie spent most days in town and slept where she could find an empty
sofa or a bedmate she could buy off with oral sex.

    
For a
twenty-two-year-old whose body art mapped a trail of flight from her
evangelical roots and who lived in a more or less permanently altered state,
Ruthie was pretty rationalistic. She dismissed the Taos Hum as being “what was
there when noise wasn’t.” To her mother, she’d say, “Whaddayou expect? It’s so
damn quiet up here, you can hear yourself sweat,” and to another hearer, “Those
mountains move, right? You gotta figure they make some kind of racket.”

    
Ruthie’s
common sense did not innoculate her entirely against the Taos mindfuck. She
dreamed night after night that she was being swallowed up by the Rio Grande
Gorge, the titanic gash that cut through the planet about twelve miles west of
town. It didn’t seem to matter what drugs she took—the dream came. It had
started a year ago when Angel, her mother’s hombre, had told her of a local
myth about the fate of unrepentant souls. She’d figured he knew what he was
talking about because Angel himself was a
penitente
,
a member of a secret and exclusive
order of men from old Spanish families whose blood went back to the conquest,
community leaders who every Easter weekend reenacted the crucifixion of Christ
so realistically that women and kids were allowed to witness only from a
distant ridge, in case they tried to stop it.

This year, Angel had been selected by lot to play
the part of Jesus, which meant that he would be scourged, mocked, and forced to
bear his cross up the rocky path to Calvary. He’d told Ruthie and her mother
that this was a great honor, to suffer as Christ had, and that they would be
privileged to nurse him through recovery. Ruthie intended to make herself
scarce. As far as she could see, her mother had left one religious fanatic for
another, and this one a Catholic, which meant that he could behave badly on
Saturday night and still be graced on Sunday morning. Her father would’ve seen
through that. Silas knew you were either graced or not, and Ruthie knew which
side of that line she was on.

For her, Taos was an exile. She believed she was
dying on this seven-thousand-foot altar, where even the mountain streams were
said to run with the blood of Christ. She’d rejected her father’s gray-bearded
hanging judge God, only to face a far stranger one: a God who raised the red
dust from the streets and spun it into helixes of lavender, pink, and rusty
gold. Ruthie blamed the altitude, the Indians, and the old hippies who ran the
restaurants and shops and had probably spiked the drinking water.

Over and through all of this, Ruthie heard a bomb
ticking. One way or another, she wanted out. Any ticket would do.

    
The altercation with Monica had come at the
conclusion of the pretrip briefing, when Raszer informed her that she was to
take her work home, as it wasn’t safe for her to remain alone in his house. He
wouldn’t see her hurt, and he wouldn’t see her used to compromise his mission.
His mind was made up.

    
“No way,
Raszer,” she said. “All my files are here. Our whole operation.”

    
“That’s
what external drives are for. We’re going to have to become as mobile as a
carnival. I’ve lost my anonymity. It had to happen sooner or later.”

    
“There
isn’t enough time to turn this around, Raszer,” she protested. “I’m not set up.
I’m not wired. I don’t even have a landline at home. I live in a studio
apartment.”

    
“You can
do 80 percent of it from a laptop, and I’ll have the guys at Intelletech set
you up. I don’t have a choice. If you’re here alone, you’re hostage bait.”

    
“Then
get me a bodyguard,” she said. “Maybe that big Dane from Aegis. No one would
get past his pectorals.”

    
“You’d
like that, wouldn’t you?” he said. “Just you and Erik the Red, eating pastry.”

    
“I
confess I have a thing for big lugs . . . and pastry.”

    
“A big
man just makes a broader target,” said Raszer. “And if they drop him, they’ve
got you
and
access to this office.
Nope. I’m locking up the house and double-encrypting everything. I want this
place as useless as an empty missile solo.”

    
“Raszer,
I won’t—”

    
The
phone rang. She answered without breaking her glare, then handed him the phone.
“It’s the FBI,” she said. “For you.” Monica crossed her arms and put the toe of
her high-rise sneaker forward, a signal that the matter wasn’t settled.

    
“Agent
Djapper,” said Raszer. “How are you?”

    
“Can we
meet before you leave?” Djapper’s tone was more than a little furtive.

    
“What
did you have in mind?” Raszer replied.

    
“There’s
a Starbucks at Highland and Franklin.”

    
“I guess
you know where I live, too,” Raszer said with resignation. “Anyhow, I have a
better place, a little less public. The Bourgeois Pig, at Franklin and
Cheremoya.”

    
“The
what
?”

    
“Next to the Daily Planet bookstore. Across from
the Scientology celebrity center. You know, the big chateau. The Pig is the
only café in L.A. with any atmosphere.”

    
“I’m not
big on atmosphere,” Djapper said pointedly. “But if the coffee’s good--”

    
“How
about three o’clock?” Raszer asked.

    
“See you
there,” Djapper said, and hung up.

    
Raszer
gave the phone back to Monica. “I’ve got a meeting,” he said. “And you need to
get me on Dr. Cutter’s list. We’ll discuss this, uh, other business later.”

    
“We’re
going to put a couple of men on your house,” said the FBI man, spooning up the
topping from his double decaf mocha. “And I’m going to offer you some advice.”

    
“What’s
that?” asked Raszer.

    
“If you
like being alive, walk away.” Djapper dropped a dollop of whipped cream into
his coffee and began to stir. “This whole mess falls into a jurisdictional
crack between what we can do, what local can do, and what Langley can do. If
you insist on crawling into it, we can’t help you. In fact, we might just have
to plaster over the hole and leave you in there. We’d know a lot more, but ever
since the NSA flap, everybody’s dainty about the Internet, which is where this
thing lives, an area my boss calls virtual conspiracy: stuff that gets plotted
in alternate reality games but hasn’t happened—
may not
happen—in the real world. It turns the whole idea of
probable cause on its head.”

    
“The new
frontier,” Raszer said, tossing back his espresso. “It’s why an amateur like me
can make a living.”

    
“You may
think you know what’s going on here, Raszer, but—”

    
Raszer
shook his head. “I don’t even pretend to know. But I’ll bet you do.”

    
“No,”
said Djapper. “Not entirely. But, unlike you, I know enough to know what I
don’t want to know. I can tell you this: This game your boy Scotty was into, it
spread like cancer. It metastasized and went global, and somewhere along the
line, it became terrorism. You see, the wrong people began to take notice of
it, saw there was profit in it. Just like the way the mob took over the heroin
trade.”

    
“Nothing
of value stays independent, does it?” Raszer said. “Who’s Hazid?”

    
Djapper
didn’t miss a beat. “Hazid might as well be the Wizard of Oz.”

    
“And the
crew in the limo? They’re not munchkins—the dents on my car attest to that.
You’ve sure got probable cause there. Is that another crack you won’t crawl
into?”

    
“This
may sting a little bit, Raszer,” Djapper replied, “but no one except you and
that crazy kid in Azusa have seen this ‘black limo’ or the phantoms riding in
it, and an abundance of evidence suggests you’re both certifiable paranoids.”

    
“Bullshit.
Whose script are you reading from? Douglas Picot’s?”

    
Djapper
ran a paper napkin over his lips. “I’m offering advice that could save you and
your family a lot of grief. If you’re not interested—”

    
Rasze’s
tone was stiff. “What do you mean by ‘my family,’ Bernard?”

    
“Oh.”
Djapper shrugged. “I just assumed that you . . . that they’d rather see you
alive.” The agent leaned in and scooped a chocolate biscotti off the plate.
“Let me tell you why I think the Coronado case went cold: maybe because the
‘victims’ were guys you don’t want in your neighborhood anyway. Like Scotty
Darrell. Maybe because there are certain curtains you open up and then realize
you should close. They might look like a crime, but they’re actually a work in
progress.”