Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (86 page)

    
From his
right came a bristling blur of limbs, muscles, and fur. Shaykh Adi opened his
jaws and sunk his teeth into the soft tissue behind the adder’s head. The snake
whipped furiously, but vainly. Adi had it where it lived, and after enduring a
minute of ferocious shaking, the serpent—to all appearances—decided to play
dead.

    
Adi
bounded down the slope toward the canyon floor, dragging the limp reptile over
the sharp rocks. At a distance of fifty or sixty yards, Raszer saw the snake
begin to writhe again. A few seconds later, dog and prey vanished behind a
small ridge.

    
Francesca
had come to his side, and lent her shoulder to support his battered body. They
waited, hearing and seeing nothing for an agonizing minute. Rashid and Rahim
joined their party. The Kurdish unit formed a phalanx behind them, allowing El
Mirai’s splintered forces to fall back into the fortress.

    
A dark
cloud rose from the desert floor and spun itself into a shape like smoke from a
stack on an arctic winter’s day. As it rose, it became a shadow on the barren
ground; the shadow traveled over the ramparts of El Mirai and grew until its
darkness blanketed the citadel. Shortly after that, the dog came trotting back.

    
Raszer
turned to Rashid. “You wouldn’t have a cigarette, would you?”

    
“If you
don’t mind Turkish tobacco . . . ”

    
“Any
kind,” Raszer said. “As long as it burns.” He eyed the helicopter, then the
surrounding area. “Where’s Greenstreet?”

    
Rashid
offered a cigarette to Rahim as well, and lit both. The question went
unanswered, or perhaps unheard.

    
“Forget
it,” Raszer said, half to himself. “Let’s just get Dante’s body . . . and get
the hell out of this place.”

    
A light snow fell on Massachusetts Avenue, making
cocoons of light around the streetlamps in the embassy district. It snows
infrequently in Washington, D.C., and two inches slow the city’s works
considerably. Raszer was on foot, having come from a meeting in a room at the
Mayflower Hotel. The subject had been Kurdistan, and certain impediments to its
nationhood, and none of the attendees had been there as a matter of record.
Raszer had been invited, but he had other business in town as well.

    
In the
street and lined up all the way to Wisconsin Avenue and beyond, police
barricades had been erected, diverting traffic from the National Cathedral and
making the city even more of a mess to get around in. That was one reason he’d
decided to walk, rather than taxi to the Cathedral. He walked with a limp and
wore a black silk patch over his right eye—or, more precisely, over where his
right eye had been. He’d always been told that to lose an eye is to lose depth
perception, and that made sense. But depth perception was the least of Raszer’s
problems, as now he saw the external world as a re-creation—and not an entirely
convincing one—of the world he saw internally. It required some legerdemain,
but he had found that if he superimposed one image on the other and observed
the interference pattern, he could recapture depth.

    
A
Mercedes limo navigated around the barricades and pulled up to the curb beside
him. Raszer stopped but did not flinch. He knew the car. He lit a cigarette and
waited. The rear door opened and the first Mr. Philby Greenstreet, resplendent
in a black cashmere topcoat, swung his six-foot-two frame out and crossed the
snow-dusted parkway to Raszer’s side.

    
“Sure
you wouldn’t like a ride?” he asked.

    
Raszer
nodded toward the cathedral, its spotlit spires looming less than a quarter of
a mile away. “Thanks, but no. I’m close, and I love snow on Christmas Eve.
Besides, I’ve developed a phobia about limousines.”

    
“Probably
a phobia worth keeping,” said Greenstreet. “Nasty things happen in limousines.”
He glanced at Raszer’s bad leg. “You sure you’re ready for this?”

    
“Never
better,” said Raszer. He cocked his head. “Didn’t I see you twenty minutes ago?
Do we have a problem?”

    
“I’ve
just gotten word. All three of the young men are in custody. They were
apprehended separately, two hours apart, wearing suicide jackets containing
enough explosives to take down a row of flying buttresses and a few hundred
parishioners.”

    
“So it’s
only the girl in there?” Raszer asked.

    
“Only
the girl. We don’t know for certain that she made it into the church, but we’ll
assume she did. And that she’ll burrow in and stay there.”

    
“Right.
Just reassure me that the bomb squad’s best is doing its thing. If the FBI has
the other three, then some genius should’ve figured out by now how the jackets
are wired.” Greenstreet nodded. “And in case things go badly . . . the police
have to keep pedestrians and cars at least fifty yards back on all sides.”

    
“You
have my absolute assurance,” said Greenstreet. “It’s all been handled with a
degree of discretion I wouldn’t have expected in this town. The service has
been canceled. The president and his family will spend their Christmas Eve at
home. The foreign dignitaries are in their hotel rooms, under heavy guard. The
SWATs are in place near the nave and transept doors.”

    
“How
long before the media get wise to all this? I’m concerned she might have a
phone with Internet access. If she knows they know she’s in there, she may—”

    
“As far
as the media know . . . at this moment,” said Greenstreet, stepping back into
the Mercedes, “the carol service is still on for ten, and the police presence
is more than warranted by the guest list. Merry Christmas, Mr. Raszer. And good
luck.”

    
“Merry
Christmas,” Raszer replied. “By the way . . . something I never sorted out:
That crack commando team that showed up to pull me out, the exotic choppers,
the guns—who paid for all that? Not the taxpayers, I’m guessing.”

    
“Just
one taxpayer,” Greenstreet replied. “The same man who paid for the jet. And the
technology we used to track you. You remember my mentioning a wealthy veteran
of The Gauntlet?”

    
“Sure, I remember,” Raszer answered.
 
“What’s his name?”

    
The
elegant spook gave a wink. “Philby Greenstreet’s his name.”

    
He began
to raise the tinted window.

    
“Wait,”
Raszer said, stepping forward. “I’d like to know, in case I don’t . . . in

case things don’t work out: Has anything we’ve
done put the brakes on what these people intended?”

    
“We’ve
set them back for now,” the spy replied. “We’re slowly weeding them out of
Defense and State and the NSA. But they always find a way to crawl back in. And
tonight is important. The National Cathedral is as potent a symbol as any. If
it blows, there’ll be a massive reaction—which is what they want. Whenever collective
fear can be induced and chaotic factors set in play, they regain control of the
game.”

    
With
that, the window was sealed, and he was gone.

    
Raszer
walked on until he stood beneath the church.

    
Like his
cast iron stove and steampunk decor, the National Cathedral was a beautiful
anachronism, and for that reason, if for no other, Raszer was fond of it. In a
city of eighteenth-century marble, it was a granite throwback to the Middle
Ages. Commissioned in the late 1900s and finished a hundred years later, it had
been painstakingly constructed, vault by vault, buttress by buttress, to the
specifications of High Gothic architecture.

    
Gothic
design excited something in Raszer: it was an architecture of the impossible,
designed to prove to man that God could hold up the sky with one finger. In one
sense, it was a mere replica, built out of its time and native place, but
Raszer found it beautiful and a thing worth preserving. Just as the world—also
a replica—was worth preserving.

    
If the
cathedral came down, there would be hell to pay.

    
But
while his adversary’s designs were grandiose, Raszer had learned to keep his
more modest. There was a girl inside the church who was also worth preserving,
though whether her mangled psyche could be restored was anybody’s guess. It was
true that she’d betrayed him to his enemies and was accountable for Dante’s
murder. If anything, this only put a keener edge on Raszer’s resolve.

    
Because
he still didn’t know
why
she had done
it.

    
Once he
was inside the cathedral close, and after presenting himself to the coordinator
of the joint security force, Raszer sought out a man named Davos, the FBI
liaison to the guys on the bomb squad. He’d been told they were bringing in a certified
explosives genius, a guy nervy enough, they’d quipped, to “defuse a nuclear
payload on its way down and then parachute to safety.” He wanted to meet this
prodigy, and he also wanted to know what sort of device they’d found the three
young Ishmaels carrying.

    
“That’s
just the problem,” said Davos, watching the snowflakes melt on his palm. “They
weren’t carrying. Seems they were s’posed to pick up their kits at four
different locations—one in each quadrant of the city. That way, if one of them
was nabbed—”

    
“Wait a
second,” Raszer broke in. “Greenstreet just told me they were loaded for bear
when they were caught . . . that each of them had enough to bring down the
church.”

    
“Who’s
Greenstreet?” the FBI man asked, wiping his palm.

    
Raszer
stared. His scalp prickled as the sweat broke.

    
“Whoever
he is had the wrong intel. Or he read it wrong. We got a
description
of the device from one of the three, but we still don’t
have the hardware. Based on that description, we
think
it’s the same rig that took out Bernard Djapper and Douglas
Picot in Los Angeles. If it is, the main thing you need to know is that it’s
not detonated by the carrier, and it’s not on a timer of any sort. It’s
radio-triggered from a long way off . . . ”

    
“Which
means,” Raszer said, his gaze drifting up to the stained-glass rose window
between the two towers of the west nave, “that she could be wired for sound.”

    
“Could
be,” said Davos.

    
“Where’s
your genius?”

    
“He’s
not here yet.”

    
“Jesus.
Where the hell is he?”

    
“He’s on
his way. Stuck in Dupont Circle. It’s the friggin’ snow. A sprinkle, and the
town falls to pieces. And the D.C. cops have roadblocks everywhere.”

    
“I can’t
believe I’m hearing this. He could jog from Dupont Circle. I’m going in.”

    
“You’ll
want this,” said Davos, offering what appeared to be a designer flak jacket,
complete with logo.

    
“And
what’s that going to do?” asked Raszer. “Keep my guts from spilling out when
the bomb goes off?”

    
“Suit
yourself,” said Davos, tossing the jacket back onto a pile.

    
The
bells in the high tower began to ring out “Adeste Fidelis,” on what cue, Raszer
couldn’t guess. There was no one in the church to hear, save for a renegade
Jehovah’s Witness girl for whom the tune would have little meaning and little
chance of inducing a change of heart.

    
“Do we
need the bells?” Raszer asked.

    
“Everything
as usual,” said the FBI man. “Hey, before you head in . . . can I ask you
something?”

    
Raszer
nodded.

    
“
Why
?”

    
“Why what?”

    
“I know
you’ve been cleared to go in. I’m not questioning that. But why would you want
to when there are guys who do this for a living?”

    
“I’ve
got a thing about closure,” Raszer said.

    
“Not
much of an answer.”

    
“Best
I’ve got. You’ve got my cell. And you’ll call me as soon as your guy gets here,
right?”

    
There
was silence.

    
“
Right
?”

    
Finally,
a nod.

    
Raszer
entered from the east, as instructed, through a subground service door that led
to a vast open space beneath the chancel. The bells were muffled, but still
quite audible.
O come let us adore him
.
O come let us adore him
. He’d had
plenty of time to study the cathedral’s floor plan, and knew that there were
three ways into the upper chamber. The one he wanted led via a retractable
stairway to a hatch that opened into the crossing, where the transept
intersected the nave. If she were in the chancel, the choir, or sitting in a
random pew halfway back from the altar, she’d see him.