Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (35 page)

    
Raszer
surprised even himself by politely putting on his turn signal and ramping onto
the 101 North at an even speed. The municipal district was in sight, offering
some measure of sanctuary. The arteries were thickening with traffic, and not
even jaded Angelenos could fail to note that a yellow Avanti with its entire
right side cratered was being chased by a Lincoln with a badly dented
grill.
 
He went back to plan one.

    
If the
police would not come to Raszer, he would come to the police. Borges was bound
to have a man or two stationed at the crime scene in Silver Lake. The place
where the killers had last struck might be the one sure place to elude or
entrap them.

    
If they
let him get that far.

    
Raszer
had begun to maneuver right for the Echo Park exit when the air around his ears
was buffeted by the full-bore pulse of the Lincoln’s engine. It came up on his
left without warning, and a pea would not have fallen through the gap between
its door handle and his. The rear window slipped down about six inches in what
seemed altered time, and Raszer felt his insides retract. From the window
emerged a man’s hand: a large hand with five long, fine digits, one adorned
with a silver ring set with a single ruby. Held between the thumb and
forefinger was a sixth digit, equally long and fine but feminine in provenance,
severed at the knuckle from its owner and still tipped with the dusky purple
nail that identified it as Layla Faj-Ta’wil’s.

Aiming the finger like a dart, the assailant shot
it through Raszer’s open window and onto his lap.
    

Raszer swerved and went metal to metal with the
Lincoln for an instant, sending it into a skid across one lane of traffic. He
wrenched the steering wheel right and shot down the Echo Park exit ramp while
the Lincoln flew ahead, remaining visible just long enough for Raszer to see
its brake lights glow. You didn’t back up on the Hollywood Freeway. He began to
wonder if going home wasn’t the more prudent course, and then realized with a
pang that home might not be any safer.

    
After
ten minutes of threading his wounded vehicle through the side streets of L.A.’s
most unnavigable district, he arrived at Sunset and Hyperion, two blocks east
of Layla’s apartment. All evidence suggested he’d lost the Lincoln, and it
seemed unlikely that it would show up here on its own. Since that had been the
whole point of the detour, he was no longer sure why he’d come. The cell phone
beeped: Borges, answering his page.

    
“Raszer,”
he said. “¿
Que pasa
?”

    
“Jesus, Luis,” said Raszer. “I paged you twenty
minutes ago.”

    
“
Lo siento
,” Borges replied, “but you’re
not my only guy. I was with the chief. The feds are moving Scotty to a secure
facility in Arizona. Some Air Force base. If you want a last word on this, get
down to the Federal Building at 9:00
am
. Room
626.”

    
“Moving
Scotty . . . as a detainee or as a material witness?”

    
“Both, I
think,” Borges answered. “I’ll tell you what Djapper told me. They think Al
Qaeda—or some offshoot of an offshoot of it—has gotten inside this crazy game
your kid was into. They think there’s some big human-trafficking operation
going on, so now they’ve got DOJ and even State Department people questioning
him.”

    
“I think
they’re onto something,” said Raszer. “But it isn’t about Al Qaeda. That’s the
standard bullshit. This is something new—or maybe something very old. And
moreover, it’s Shia, not Sunni. Haven’t these idiots figured out the difference
yet? I’m gonna take a different route, though. I need to get my stray back.”

    
Raszer
pulled up to the curb in front of the Tantra. The club was closed, but the
police tape stretched across the front of Layla’s building hadn’t otherwise
affected pedestrian traffic on the busy strip. “Meanwhile, the killers just
rode my bumper all the way down from Azusa . . . which means they followed me
there, too. I lost them at the Silver Lake exit from the northbound 101 and
came straight to the crime scene. Don’t ask me why, but I had the notion I
could draw them here.”

    
Borges
cleared his throat. “Are you sure it was them?”

    
“Oh,
yeah. I’m sure. They turned my car into scrap metal and tossed the Syrian
girl’s ring finger through my window. I’m assuming you took her prints, so
getting a match shouldn’t present a problem.”

    
“Can you
ID any of the men?”

    
“The
windows were tinted like Ray-Bans, but I did make the driver. It’s a face I
won’t forget, Luis.”

    
“Good.
We’ll do a sketch. When you were up in Azusa, did you leave your car for any
length of time?”

    
“Yeah,”
said Raszer. “I had dinner. You think they stuck a tracer on me?”

    
“Check
the underside of your gas tank,” said Borges. “And feel around inside the rear
bumper and wheel wells. The state-of-the-art transmitter’s about the size of a
quarter and not much thicker. If you find it, hand it over to the officer just
inside the building. Give me a description of the car, and we’ll go after it.
I’m sending men over there, but I doubt your friends are going to show up in
that part of town.”

    
“No,”
said Raszer, “I don’t suppose they will. Do you want me to stay put until your
guys get here?”

    
There
was a pause. “No,” said Borges. “I want you to go home.”

    
“Home?
My fondest hope is that these guys don’t know where I live yet.”

    
“They
know where you live, Raszer. And they’ve got business with you. I’m going to
put three of my best men on your house. You can sleep tight.”

    
“Sure,
Lieutenant,” said Raszer. “Like a baby, right?”

    
“Right.
And give that finger to the officer on-site, too. If you can find something to
wrap it up in, uh, it might be appreciated.”

    
“Right,”
said Raszer. “I’ll see what I’ve got. Until recently, I had a little velvet
jewelry bag that would have been just perfect.”

    
 

 FIFTEEN

    

 

Raszer stood numbly in the driveway and mourned
his battered car. It was worse than he’d imagined. On one level, the cratered
metal was a map of grace. Had they hit him on the driver’s side, he might have
looked worse than the Avanti. But at the moment, this gave him no consolation.
He loved the car, and it had been cruelly violated. As much as it pained him,
he couldn’t stop examining and reexamining each and every gash, like a jilted
lover obsessing over the details of his betrayal.

    
Finally,
the descending chill of night—a chill that no one who lives in L.A. is ever
really dressed for—drove him inside, but even then, he stood silently at the
front window and continued to stare at the torpedoed hulk of his car. After a
short while, the emptiness of the dark house at his back made him realize that
part of the reason he’d lingered outside was an unreadiness to be inside and
alone. There was nowhere to run if his assailants did come to finish their
“business” with him.

    
He
thought about Harry Wolfe, and about the bloody stump the killers had left in
his mouth. Raszer didn’t want to die in bed, much less pinned to the mattress.
He hadn’t found a transmitter on his car, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t
find him. He wondered how long it would take for Borges’s men to assume
stakeout positions. These were the times when he wished he owned a gun. At all
other times, he was glad he didn’t. It would offer
 
temptations he did not want to court.

    
He found
his way to the bar in the dark. He hadn’t turned on the recessed lighting, or
the floor lamps whose familiar spill patterns made him feel welcome. In the
darkness, he felt like an intruder in his own home, but he didn’t want to swim
about in front of lightedwindows like a big fish in an aquarium. It was only
the third or fourth time in ten years that such caution seemed warranted.
Raszer didn’t use letterhead stationery or hand out business cards, and he
billed from a P.O. box. He wasn’t listed in the Yellow Pages. He and Monica had
kept everything except their command of cyberspace deliberately old school, and
for the most part, it had meant that he could take his meals in peace, invite a
woman to spend the night, and let his daugh-ter play in the garden. He wondered
now if his home would ever be safe for Brigit again.

    
The
thought of losing his house hit him with the same kind of animal panic as the
thought of giving up cigarettes, and he knew that, sooner or later, both fig
leaves would have to fall. You finally had to face the world the way Adam and
Eve had faced the wrathful god whose footfalls had shaken Eden: naked. It
wasn’t a pleasant prospect, and as he straddled his stool at the slate-topped
bar, he took refuge in a glass of port and a Cuban cigar. It was too late in
the evening for red wine.

    
Raszer’s
bar was a study in anachronism and a key to his psyche. At his right was a
rotary phone whose number was known to only two dozen people in the world. It
was a safe line that he used mainly for outgoing calls, but when it rang, he
answered. To the left of that was a tricked-out MacBook Pro that was networked
to his front office, the security system, and a matrix of international police
and nongovernmental agencies, some of which tracked missing persons, others the
emergence of new religious and pseudoreligious movements worldwide. It was when
the two phenomena conjoined that Raszer received a bulletin.

    
Directly
in front of him was a bookstand on which his current reading was opened: an
1826 edition of the Koran he’d purchased from an antiquarian bookshop in
Hampstead, with the Arabic on the left and an English exegesis on the facing
page. Overhead was a lensed halogen track lamp whose beam encompassed the
dimensions of the bookstand, and no more. On Raszer’s left was a cedar inbox in
which Monica placed the day’s research and any important messages, and farther
to the left were his ashtray, his wine glass, and a candle.

    
He set
the cigar in the ashtray and fished through his inbox. Clipped together were
three documents: a printout of the Argonauts.com homepage, a page of related
links for “Advanced Immersion Reality Field Gamers,” on which Monica had
circled the sub-link
gtlt7+
, and the login page on which she’d entered
the name
sdarrell
and the password
Hazid
. In a dialogue box below appeared
the reply: “Gaming privileges for sdarrell have been suspended.” A fourth page
lay by itself, highlighted in yellow. It was the most intriguing of all. She
had given
sraszer
as a user ID and
once again entered
Hazid
as the
password. The reply was:

 

hello sraszer. welcome to altgtlt8. to verify your status as

gauntlet L7 we will need
your poe, present locus, and ema of

your GM. you will receive a
response within 24 hrs. remain in

position and do not reply to
this message. allah be praised.

    
 

    
Raszer felt suddenly that others were present,
that the darkness held dozens of germinal forms, waiting to be invoked into
being. They could be summoned with as little as an email, and all they needed
was a locus and a poe, which was Gauntletargot for
point of entry
, the place (in time and space) from which a player
had entered the game. In Raszer’s case, it was right here, right now.
Hazid
was the rail switcher, the detour
to a different kind of game.

    
One
small but significant detail in the altgtlt8 posting caught his eye. Despite
the near universal use of lowercase letters in Internet communication, Raszer
could not imagine an Islamic fundamentalist spelling the name of Allah with a
small
a
. Behind one mask was another,
and another, and even the wearer had probably forgotten his true face.

    
He got
up from the stool and walked into the kitchen, wanting something he’d forgotten
by the time he got there. It was dark, and the big cast iron stove creaked and
pinged with the heat of its pilot lights. He checked to see that the door
leading to his rear deck was securely locked. Outside in the canyon, the
northeast wind was whipping up an L.A. sirocco, and even the coyotes were
quiet. It was going to be a long night. He returned to the bar, then decided
he’d better sleep while he could.

    
The desert wind tugged at the big tent’s
moorings. A lantern swung, casting oversize lunar shadows on silk.
Raszer sat with Harry Wolfe on a sand floor
laid with carpets. They were close enough to whisper, but what passed between them
was instantly consumed by the wind’s howl. The flap opened slightly, revealing
a black sky pinpricked by starlight. For an instant, a face appeared, not
unfamiliar. Like Scotty’s, but darker. Harry motioned Raszer closer and
whisperered, “Everything is permitted.”