Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (53 page)

    
“I
would’ve guessed that,” said Raszer.

    
 
“Hang on,” said the pilot. “I’m takin’ you
down.”

    
Raszer
took one look outside the bubble and felt his pulse rise. In the space of their
brief conversation, the chopper had descended dramatically, and the serrated
edges of at least a dozen peaks were within shaving distance of the runners.
How that had happened, he couldn’t guess. “Down where?” Raszer asked, seeing
only steep runs caked with hard, perennial snow. “Are we going to slalom into
the airfield?”

    
The
pilot pointed ahead. “Over that humpy ridge,” he said. “An old Army strip.”

    
Scattered
hangars and Quonset huts came into view in a flat-bottomed valley between two
peaks. The base was small, but the landing strip was long enough for a jet.
Beyond and far below, Raszer could just make out Interstate 25 and a
settlement.

    
“Where
are we?” Raszer asked. “We can’t be that far over the state line.”

    
“Closest
town on the map is Trinidad,” said the pilot, pointing to the same settlement.
“But I can’t say I’ve ever been there.”

    
“Trinidad,
Colorado,” Raszer said under his breath. He drew from the well of his brain an
obscure factoid he’d come across in Monica’s research on castration: The town
of Trinidad had earned some notoriety in the 1960s as the home base of the
doctor who’d pioneered transgender surgery, and for a time after that, its
sleepy Main Street had become a mecca for those seeking alteration, and a
halfway house for those altered. That was before the business moved to places
like Copenhagen. It was undoubtedly coincidental, but coincidence was never
just a random shuffle; it was a clustering of potentialities around a single
set of certainties.

    
A
helipad marked with a red
X
was
adjacent to one of the larger hangars. There wasn’t another soul in sight, but
as the chopper dropped delicately to the pad, two men in blue mechanics’ suits
emerged from the hangar and stood clear of the propeller’s reach, waiting to
escort the new arrival.

    
“First
leg of many,” said the pilot, and grinned again. Almost as soon as Raszer had
hopped out and pulled his pack down, the helicopter lifted off again.

    
“Take me
to your leader,” Raszer said to the men, one of whom took his pack. The other
smirked and gestured for Raszer to accompany him. A door with peeling red paint
and a grimy little window led into the largest of the hangars. The door was
common enough, but the scene inside was anything but.

    
First,
there was the aircraft: a corporate jet without a corporate logo. Like the
helicopter, it hadn’t a single identifying mark. From the size of the fuel
tank, Raszer gauged it to be good for domestic runs of a few thousand miles at
most. It wasn’t going to get him all the way to Turkey, but it was impressive
nonetheless: sleek, low, and blacked out. A small team of mechanics and a pilot
were readying the plane, all wearing the same navy blue jumpsuits, nonepaying
notice when he came in the door. And there was a send-off party of sorts, a
delegation assembled, he presumed, to see him off: a gentleman rancher in
flannel and denim, a technician in a lab coat, a graying Asian fellow with a
doctor’s bag, and three men in suits, one of whom stood a head taller than the
others and had a bearing that only the best old-school Yankee breeding could
buy.

    
Standing
in the hard cone of light spilling from a suspended work lamp, Raszer found
himself feeling—once the escorts had left his side—as if he’d just been beamed
down from another galaxy.

    
The tall
man came forward.

    
“Welcome,”
he said. “You follow directions very well, Mr. Raszer.”

    
Raszer
looked the man over. He was perhaps sixty-two, with hair the shade of smoke
combed fastidiously back from a high forehead, and piercing blue eyes. In the
fine lines of his face, Raszer could almost trace his path from Exeter to
Harvard Yard and into the corridors of power. Everything about him said
directorate of operations
.

    
Raszer
swept his arm across the hangar to the mechanics, the pilot, the jet. “Is this
a federal operation?” he asked. “If so, I may be in the wrong terminal.”

    
“Not the
kind that comes under congressional oversight,” said the man.

    
“How
about the kind that comes under Douglas Picot’s purview?” Raszer asked.

    
“Oh,
no,” the man replied. “Picot would have every man in this room facing sedition
charges.”

    
Raszer
held. The man had him pinned in the light, such that he couldn’t escape it
without stepping sideways or backward. “Was Shams one of yours?”

    
The tall
man gave a bare nod.

    
“Recruited
in Iraq? In pretty deep, then, I guess . . . ”

    
“As deep
as it gets,” the man said.

    
“How
deep is that?”

    
“So deep
he didn’t know he was in,” the man from Langley replied.

    
“Ah,”
said Raszer. “Then I suppose he died for your sins.”

    
The CIA
man nodded toward a card table in the corner, next to an old Coke machine that
dispensed eight-ounce bottles. “Let’s get acquainted, shall we, while your
coach is prepared. My name is Philby Greenstreet.”

    
“That
can’t be right,” said Raszer. “Unless some GamesMaster dreamed you up.”

    
The tall
man chuckled without turning as he strode toward the lightless corner, then
fished in the pockets of his wool trousers for change.

    
“Coca-Cola?”
he asked Raszer. “I’ve always loved these little bottles. You can almost
imagine that it’s still a drug.”

    
“And a
cheap drug, at that,” said Raszer, as Greenstreet dropped a dime into the
machine. “No, thanks. But I would like something to get this bad taste out of
my mouth. You wouldn’t have a stick of wintergreen gum, would you? Someone’s
been leaving the scent all over Taos, and now I’ve got a yen for it. There’s
even a certain FBI agent—”

    
Greenstreet
glanced briefly at Raszer, then pushed the bottle cap off his Coke with the
nail on his right thumb as effortlessly as if he’d been flicking lint.

    
“You’ve
got a good nose, Mr. Raszer,” he said. “
Oleum
Gaultheriae
. Oil of wintergreen. Chemically, methyl salicylate. Masks the
breath and overpowers other odors—even the odor of internal decay. Suppresses
sexual excitement very effectively. A remarkably small dosage is absolutely
lethal. Its use goes back at least 150 years. It’s a cheap poison pill for men
who want to keep their minds on their work and never, ever want to be caught
alive. That would describe your adversaries, but I doubt very much that it
describes your FBI agent. What makes you think he’s on your tail?”

    
Raszer
half smiled. “Maybe he’s got nothing better to do. You’re either very well
informed or very fast on your feet, Mr. Greenstreet. ”

    
The CIA
man took a sip of his Coca-Cola and smiled. “Such pleasure for one thin dime,”
he said. “Very few real bargains left in this world, Mr. Raszer.” He eyed the
jet. “I’d venture to say that you’re about to receive another one of them.”

    
“So
that’s yours?” Raszer said. “The agency’s?”

    
“God,
no,” said Greenstreet. “Not even black ops would touch this mission. The jet is
on loan from a philanthropist who happens to be a great fan of The Gauntlet. In
fact, he owes his wealth to the game. In a sense, he’s never stopped playing.
You might say he’s your next ‘guide.’ I hear you’re working for well below your
usual fee, so I’m sure you’ll appreciate his munificence.”

    
“I
rarely look a gift horse in the mouth,” said Raszer. “But you worry me a
little, Mr. Greenstreet. How do I know
you’re
any more trustworthy than Picot?”

    
“You
don’t,” Greenstreet replied. “Except that you evidently trusted Shams’
instructions, and wound up here.” He motioned for Raszer to take a seat at the
card table, then set down his bottle and pulled out his own chair. “Some of
us,” he con-tinued, “share more with you than you might imagine.” He paused.
“We also share a keen interest in the place and the man you are
soon—hopefully—going to meet.”

    
“You
mean Na-Koja-Abad,” said Raszer, recalling Shams’ citation. “And the Old Man.”

    
“Na-Koja-Abad,”
repeated the CIA man. “Curious name, eh? ‘Nowhere-Land.’ Does it exist only in
the world of The Gauntlet? Or is it a real place—like Tora Bora—with
coordinates a GPS device, or a tracker like yourself, can identify?”

    
“You
don’t know?” Raszer asked incredulously.

    
“
Na-Koja-Abad
is a Sufi term for the
middle world between form and substance. A numinous state of mind, or more
precisely, a state of half-being. It was appropriated by advanced Gauntlet
players to describe the mystical experience of those who make it all the way to
the Ninth Circle on what they call the Urfa route. You won’t find it in a CIA brief.
But as you’ve already deduced, the Old Man’s people have taken over the game,
and it appears they have a bait-and-switch operation going. Na-Koja-Abad is
promised, but something else is delivered:
El
Mirai
—the mountain stronghold of these thugs you’ve been playing cat ‘n
mouse with.”

    
“So El
Mirai is real. A physical place. Even though it means ‘
The Mirage’
?”

    
Greenstreet
hesitated, then gave an inscrutable reply. “For all intents, yes. But—“

    
“—its
locus is on the border of Na-Koja-Abad. Nowhere-Land.”

    
“Now
you’re getting the swing of it.”

    
“Evil on
the perimeter of the holy.”

    
“If you
were the Devil,” said Greenstreet, “wouldn’t you build your hot dog stand near
the entrance to paradise?” He took a swig of Coca-Cola. “They’re designing a
whole new kind of terrorist up there. The design isn’t perfected yet, but when
it is, we’ll have an army of Takfiris, as diverse in appearance and ethnicity
as a United Colors of Benetton ad. They won’t fit anyone’s ‘profile.’”

    
“Something
like that, I figured,” said Raszer. “But what’s the objective? I’m guessing
it’s isn’t the restoration of the caliphate.”

    
“The
details will have to wait,” Greenstreet replied, “for your safety and ours. But
I can give you a sense of what you’re up against.”

    
He
leaned in and placed his hand on the table, not two inches from Raszer’s own
wrist. It was a surprisingly intimate gesture for a man of Greenstreet’s type.

“Let me ask you this: As a child, did you ever
find yourself wishing for the storm to end all storms? The one that would shut
the whole world down?”

    
“The
snow day that lasts forever,” said Raszer. “Sure, it probably crossed my mind
once or twice. And I always liked disaster movies.”

    
“Me,
too,” said Greenstreet. “There’s an apocalyptic urge in the human psyche. The
desire for a clean slate. On the whole, it’s not unhealthy. It makes
revolutions possible. But there’s a reactionary gene that often accompanies it.
Some revolutionaries grow up to become Robespierres. Absolutists.
Fundamentalists. I almost did. I worshipped my parents when I was a boy,
thought they could do no wrong, and that every moral lesson they taught, they
also exemplified.

    
“When I
got a little older and could see my father’s infidelity and my mother’s
alcoholism, I hated them for it, hated them for revealing that the world wasn’t
a tidy place. I resolved to clean it up, to cut out the rot. Eventually, I came
to my senses. But suppose I hadn’t. Suppose my black-and-white view of the
world had hardened until I couldn’t see shades, much less color. Until I believed
that only a holy fire could sterilize the planet and restore God’s dominion.
Suppose my goal was—through ten thousand small acts of terror—to bring society
to a point of maximum entropy. To a condition that demands intervention . . .
and a new kind of state.”

    
“It’s
not exactly breaking news that there are people at both the western and eastern
poles who value order over freedom. But—”

    
“The
news would be that they’d joined forces, and employed a third force to foment
the chaos. When you swallow fundamentalism whole, you ultimately conclude the
world is unsalvageable. The end—restoring purity—justifies any means.”