Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (28 page)

    
“Everything
old is new again,” said Borges dryly. “
Hashshashin
.
Anything to do with hashish?”

    
“So they
say,” Raszer replied. “Used as an inducement, and allegedly as part of a
mind-control program. It’s where we get the word
assassin
. Their MO was planting sleeper agents—
fidais
—among their enemies and killing up close on prearranged cue
. . . with daggers. In the ’50s, the CIA even based its own assassination
manual on their technique. The
fidais
were almost always killed, but it didn’t matter . . . they’d been promised
paradise and a harem of black-eyed virgins. They were the first suicide
bombers.”

    
“Jesus,”
Borges whispered. “It sounds just like—”

    
“I
know,” said Raszer. “The feds will go nuts with this. They’ll have the threat
level up to purple. I’ll tell you what I think. It’s not unusual for gangsters
or cultists with nonpolitical agendas to borrow the name, legacy, or methods of
some powerful military order for their own purposes. In this case, what I have
so far points to a criminal syndicate more interested in international drug and
sex traffic than in jihad.”

    
“As I recall, the FBI was pretty sure that your
boy Scotty had gone the way of that other kid—I forget his name now—the
‘American Taliban.’”

    
“That
kid,” said Raszer. “Lindh is his name. As mixed up as he was, he actually spent
time in an Al Qaeda training camp. Scotty was playing a fucking game.”

    
“What’s
the difference if it ends up this way? Anyway, I’ll have to brief our
counterterrorism unit, and that will probably flag both the FBI and the NCTC.”

    
“That’s
all right,” said Raszer. “There’s a field agent I’ve been wanting to meet.”

    
“Well,
you’re in it now, so you’ll stay in until they chase you out. We’ll interrogate
the boy together. You seem to speak his language:
Hazid sent me.
Ha! Liked the turban, too.”

    
Raszer
winced. “How’d you hear that bit?”

    
“That
audio system works both ways.” Borges grinned and draped an arm around Raszer’s
shoulder. “I had you on mic the whole time. Seems to me you speak the girl’s
language, too. She didn’t look all that bothered to have you between her legs.”
 

    
“You had to be there, Luis,” said Raszer.

    
“I’ll
bet,” said Borges, and turned to wave in the medical examiner and the CSI team.
“All right, folks. Let’s go to work. I want every hair—pubic or otherwise—in
the room. And toxins—check for evidence of a knockout drug. This bed is way too
neat.”

    
“One
thought,” said Raszer, who was calculating the odds that a strand of his own
hair—pubic or otherwise—might be found on the sheets.

    
“Let’s
hear it.”

    
“The
historical Assassins used poison-tipped daggers. Guaranteed to kill even if
they missed their mark.” Raszer aimed his finger at the knife rooted in Harry
Wolfe’s heart. “If that one was the first blow, and it delivered the medicine,
he wouldn’t have moved a muscle afterwards.”

    
“A
paralytic?” Borges asked.

    
“Something
like that,” said Raszer, who’d had some experience with them.

    
“We’ll
have the lab check it. You still carry those little needles around?
”

    
“Only when I expect to use them.”

    
“Still
no gun? Not even after what you’ve been through?”

    
“Not if
I can help it.”

    
During
the exchange of words, Raszer’s eyes had locked on Harry Wolfe’s serenely
closed mouth. It bothered him. There was artifice there.

    
“Doctor
Cho,” he said to the ME, who’d just removed Harry’s boots.

    
“Would
you mind taking a look inside the decedent’s mouth?”

    
The
examiner looked to Borges for approval and received a nod.

    
Cho
shuffled to the head of the bed and inserted a forefinger from each of his
gloved hands between Harry’s lips, finding the teeth, gently releasing the jaw.
The dead man’s mouth fell open. Raszer moved in closer. At first glance, it
looked like the petals of a crimson rose. The examiner removed a small, wadded
rag, saturated with blood, and stepped back. “Oh, my, my, my,” he said, shaking
his gray head.

    
Poor
Harry Wolfe had lost his tongue.

    
Lieutenant
Borges shook his head. “Jesus. It’s just like Nogales. They’d sneak up on you
while you sleep and pinch your nose, and when you’d open your mouth to breathe,
they’d grab hold of your tongue and—
ssssst
—one
slice.”

    
“It
seems to be a trademark,” said Raszer. “Let’s talk in the car.”

    
At the
threshold, Raszer turned and said, “Motherfuckers. Why’d they have to make him
suffer?” He shook his head. “I hope to God he was dead already.”

    
Harry
Wolfe, aka MC Hakim, knight-protector of Layla Faj-Ta’wil, lay still on his
bier, his soul on its way to Avalon—or someplace far from the the Lake District,
at any rate. Finding Katy Endicott alive had just become a decidedly longer
shot.

    
“I need to
make a call,” said Raszer, as they emerged into the lacerating sunlight. “Two
calls, actually.”

    
The
first was to Detective Aquino, towhom he owed an update.

    
The
second was to his daughter. Whenever evil showed its face, Raszer felt the need
to check on Brigit, and the feeling was never without its measure of remorse.
    

The interrogation room was one of five in the
sub-basement: small, stark, and one of the last public places in L.A. where
smoking was still permitted. Scotty was seated at the far end of the shiny
white table, his wrists cuffed and his ankles in irons, back against the wall.
At the moment, he seemed far more interested in who might be on the other side
of the two-way mirror than in the men gathered to hear his tale.

    
Raszer
sat on Scotty’s left, the wrinkled linen shirt restored to his back. Borges was
on the right, his tie still squared, his suit jacket on. Hovering over the
table, his breath on Raszer’s shoulder, was Bernard Djapper of the FBI, deputy
to the special agent in charge of the L.A. field office, the man whom Aquino
had described as having the face of a Pekinese. He was pear-shaped and
baggy-fleshed, but groomed and tailored like a London banker, as if to
compensate for nature’s sloppiness. He wore a pin-striped vest with a watch
pocket, from which he occasionally drew and pointed what appeared to be a
solid-gold toothpick. He was agitated, and paced the room like a D.A. working
the jury box. Everything about his bearing said
by the book
, yet his dress and affectation made him something of an
eccentric.

    
Lending
a very different presence to the proceedings was the man from National Counterterrorism,
Douglas Picot. Had this been Sioux City, or even Sacramento, the NCTC might not
have had a deputy on hand, but L.A. was a state unto itself. His carefully
chosen and perfectly enunciated words issued from the round mouth and outcurled
lips of a child rooted in the oral stage, and his fingers were as smooth and
small as a porcelain doll’s. Somehow, he’d survived the regime changein
Washington. His “expertise,” Raszer learned, was profiling sleepers in local
Muslim communities.

    
They
were midcourse on the first round, and Scotty Darrell had not yet asked for an
attorney, or to call his parents, or even to use the toilet. From the moment of
his capture, he had emptied out. He was not especially nervous now. He wasn’t
rude or recalcitrant or surly. He wasn’t anything, really.

    
Deprived
of his game identity by Raszer’s
outing
,
he wasn’t yet able to relocate any element of his former self. He was either
the perfect assassin or the perfect fool.

    
After a
full minute of silence, punctuated by the second hand of an old IBM wall clock,
Raszer said: “On the roof, you asked for the Syrian ambassador. Why?”

    
Scotty
cocked his head. “Does anyone hear a ticking sound?”

    
“Were
you bluffing, Maimonides?” asked Raszer.

    
“It’s
Ishmael,” Scotty answered.

    
“Ishmael
the son of Abraham and Hagar, Ishmael the Seventh Imam, or Ishmael the narrator
of
Moby Dick
?” Raszer asked.

    
“Or the
Ishmael who blew away those kids at Virginia Tech?” said Djapper.

    
Scotty
said nothing.

    
“Screw
this!” Djapper spat. “We have himon video shooting a tram driver and holding a
gun to a hostage’s head. There’s blood on his hands, and when the lab matches
it to the dead man’s, he’ll be put away. In the meantime, let’s either get busy
or hand him over to the truth squad. You heard him. A clock is ticking.” He
stared bullets into the back of Raszer’s head. “Why is this guy here, anyway,
Lieutenant?”

    
Raszer
remained still and lifted his eyes to Borges for intercession. He strongly
suspected that Scotty was still “playing” in some way and would shut down
unless someone played along. It was all in the eyes, which were sheeted over
with a kind of psychic sugar glaze. They were the eyes of a person occupying an
internal landscape. For Scotty, it might be this room and the people in it that
were a virtual reality.

    
 
Borges spoke up, gently motioning Agent
Djapper back into his corner.

    
“I
understand that the FBI has a role to play in this case, Agent Djapper,” he
said softly. “But it’s my interrogation. I’d like to hear the suspect answer
the question.”

    
Raszer
offered Djapper a chair. “Why don’t you have a seat, Special Agent? Take a load
off. We need to help Scotty make the right move.”

    
“Are you
an assassin, Ishmael?” he continued.

    
“If you
want me to be,” said Scotty.

    
“What do
you
want to be?” Raszer asked.
“Someone who knows something—
anything
—for
certain.”

    
“An
honest answer. And a good one. I may have a new assignment for you, Ishmael.
You pulled off the last one. Killing Harry Wolfe . . . ”

    
Scotty’s
eyes gave the slightest flicker of dissent.

    
“You did
complete your mission, didn’t you?”

    
Scotty
mumbled something that sounded like a no, and lowered his head.

    
“I think,”
said Picot with a snort, “it’s time to take this in a new direction.”

    
Raszer
held up a hand. “Just one more; then he’s all yours.”

    
“The men
who really put those knives into Harry Wolfe . . . who do
they
serve? Who gave them their mission?”

    
Scotty smiled
the faintest of smiles.

    
“You
know, don’t you?” he said to Raszer, then assayed the other men in the room,
one by one. “
They
know. They think
he
serves
them
, but he serves no one. The Old Man is Lord over the All and
the Nothing.”

    
“The Old
Man.” Raszer nodded, but did not ask for the answer he guessed he was already
supposed to know.

    
Douglas
Picot cleared his throat. “You actually seem to know a lot of things for
certain, Scotty. If you’re as close to the ‘Old Man’ as you say, then you ought
to know his name.”

    
“No one
gets close.”

    
Picot
leaned forward.

    
“You’re
right. No one gets close. So, how do we know he’s real?”

    
The
faint smile returned.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” Picot continued,
drumming the table with his doll fingers. “I think this is all a fairy tale. An
elaborate cover story. A new spin from our old enemies. How did you get here,
Ishmael
?”

    
“I don’t
remember,” said Scotty, with the look of a man trying to gauge the authenticity
of a videotape in which he appeared but did not seem to be quite himself.