Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  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.

  “Would it jog your memory if we shipped you back? It can be arranged. You wanted the Syrian ambassador—we’ll give you better. Of course, you might never come home. Not in one piece.”

  Borges’s voice broke the silence. “Whose dried blood is on your hands, Scotty? It is Harry Wolfe’s blood, isn’t it?”

  Scotty regarded his hands curiously and said nothing. Borges nodded to Raszer.

  “Why did Harry Wolfe have to die?” asked Raszer. “I can’t guide you on unless I know where you were coming from.” He felt the weight of the other men’s impatience. Even Borges would be forced to pull up his rope soon.

  “Who is Hazid?” Scotty replied, and laid his shackled hands on the table.

  Raszer held the boy’s eyes and slowly drew in a breath. Here was the passkey, and Raszer knew that Scotty would not offer the door a second time. The name Hazid had to have something to do with the “initiation” to this most deadly level of gaming. If Scotty himself hadn’t scrawled the name on the underside of Johnny Horn’s toilet seat, then some other would-be initiate had. The air pressure in the room seemed to increase, as on a rapidly descending airplane and Scotty was in the cockpit. Raszer chose omission as the lesser sin and ignored the question. Maybe—just maybe—Scotty would read it as complicity and let him in.

  “We’re at a border crossing, Scotty,” Raszer said. “You have no passport. You have only me to take you across. Turn back, and I can’t help you. Go forward, the game will be different, but at least you’ll be in it. What does a pilgrim ask of a new guide?”

  Raszer waited. It was another gamble. He was banking on the supposition that, in a pinch, Scotty would obey the rules of the game. They were all he had now.

  “How—” Scotty cleared his throat and swallowed. “How can I serve?”

  Raszer reached into his pocket and unfolded the printout of Katy Endicott’s picture. He laid it on the table. “By telling me if you’ve seen this girl.”

  Scotty stared at the picture, at first blankly. Then the look came back—the look of someone recalling a parallel existence, but now the frosting in his eyes had melted.

  “I saw her in the Garden,” he said, his voice thick. “I saw her in paradise.”

  “Where is this garden?” Borges asked.

  “Nowhere,” Scotty answered.

  “How did you get there?” Raszer continued. “You were playing the game, and then—“

  “They came for me. In winter.” He gripped himself. “I was cold.”

  The boy began to cry softly, and when Raszer put a hand on his shoulder, the tears escalated to sobs. He clenched his fists and raised his hands to his face in shame.

  “What is it, Scotty?” Raszer asked. “What’s happening?”

  “I peed my pants,” Scotty answered, pounding his forehead.

  “And before I do,” said Lieutenant Borges. “We’re all gonna take a break.”

  Raszer took the elevator to the plaza level for a smoke, and Borges found him seated on a stone bench beneath a solitary palm with a piece of garden gravel in his hand. The late-afternoon winds were beginning to whip the spiky fronds of the palm tree overhead. He’d scrawled the name Hazid on the pavement at his feet.

  “What’s it about, Raszer?” he asked. “Is it a person or a thing?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s not a red herring. I took a chance up on the roof based on something I saw in Azusa. He may’ve just picked up on that.” Raszer tossed away the rock. “I’m thinking it may be some kind of key. But Christ, Luis, it doesn’t even make sense that these two cases are related. How does life get that weird?”

  Borges smiled broadly and took a seat. “It just does, my friend. I was raised on the pampas in Argentina, where t
he gauchos used to make room at the campfire for the ghosts of the men they’d killed that day. Before I came here. I worked the Tex–Mex and Arizona borders, where nobody even knows what country they’re in.”

  “I guess you’ve been out there.” Raszer paused. “By the way, thanks for giving me some rope with Scotty.”

  “Just enough to dangle yourself over the cliff, amigo.”

  “That’s all I’ll ever ask,” said Raszer.

  “Anyway, I had to. Otherwise, giving you the bullhorn wouldn’t have made sense to the brass. I have to at least look like I do things for good reason.”

  Raszer laughed softly and rubbed out the letters H-A-Z-I-D with the toe of his boot. “All things considered, they’re going pretty easy on him, don’t you think?”

  “It’s only the beginning,” Borges replied. “And you and I are still in the room.”

  “I don’t know . . . I almost get the feeling—”

  “What?” Borges pressed.

  “Nothing. Just a thought. An unformed thought. Probably smoke.”

  They began to stroll back across the sprawling city hall plaza. The sun was already low in a pastel sky, and their shadows preceded them by a good ten feet.

  “It’s crazy. This kid I’ve been tracking for over a year suddenly parachutes into a case involving an abducted Jehovah’s Witness girl, two murdered Iraq vets, and some kind of trafficking ring using medieval terrorist techniques . . . where’s the link?”

  “You’re the link, for onething,” said Borges. “We both know everything’s just a jumble of possibilities until somebody draws them together. Like dropping a magnet into a bowl full of ball bearings. I’ve had cases where nothing—I mean nothing—happened until I went out and drew fire. Until I baited the trap with my own scent.”

  “You’re right,” said Raszer, remembering what he knew but so often forgot in the course of events. “There has to be an attractor.”

  “Another thing. You’ve got kids out there playing this game. Who knows what kind of connections they’ve made on the Net? Who knows how many Ishmaels there are? That’s a world beyond our jurisdiction. Anytime you’re near a border, you’ve got predators. If I didn’t know that before, I learned it cold in Nogales. The wolves wait there, between the known and the unknown.”

  “A no-go zone,” Raszer said, half to himself. “You’ve given me an idea, Luis.”

  “You think maybe the kid—Scotty—was snatched, like your girl? That these guys wait for the lamb that strays from the herd?”

  “He said ‘they came for him in winter.’”

  “And took him where?”

  “That’s the question. The fed seems to be angling for Syria.”

  “You said you thought somebody had messed with his brain . . . ”

  “He’s been rewired, Luis. It’s like somebody’s commandeered this game at its highest levels, when the players are way out there. I’m not sure if Scotty knew whether what was happening to him in there was real or ‘virtual.’ To tell you the honest truth, on this case, I’m not so sure myself.”

  They had arrived at the revolving door, and Borges turned to him. “Tell me a little more about this crazy game. As many times as I’ve read the accounts, I still don’t really get how it moves from the Internet to the real world.”

  “It starts out like any game of make-believe. The thrill of danger without the physical risk. The target is college kids, or anyone from age seventeen to thirty in an institutional setting. You find your way to the main website and pick a character, only it’s a philosopher or a saint instead of an action hero. You learn to act as he would act, think as he would think. Then the Inquisition comes after you. Things start to get real. You get threatening text messages and think you’re being followed. It becomes what they call a ‘chaotic fiction.’ There’ve even been cases where mock torture chambers were set up in dorm rooms. You get a credit card you didn’t apply for, then an email saying you’ve run up ten grand in charges but they’ll let it slide if you confess. Your GPA suddenly drops to 2.0, and the dean is on the phone to your parents.”

  “They can do that?”

  “They’re hackers. As good as they get. It’s a massive Kafka-esque freakout, but the thing is, it’s exciting as hell. Because you are at the center of it. Somebody cares enough to give you nightmares. The only people you can trust are the Masters. Anyhow, there are hundreds of variations, but finally, the only way to escape your persecutors is to leave the Web, give up your ‘real’ identity, and slip into the false one. You go on the lam, all the while following the instructions you pick up at Internet cafés. Very glamorous, and very scary. You make yourself a servant of chance, and chance remakes you. You forget who you were.”

  “Unbelievable,” said Borges. “How can anybody forget who they are?”

  “You remember the Dungeons Dragons thing, don’t you?”

  “The kid who died hunting a monster in the high school ventilation ducts?”

  “Something like that,” said Raszer. “But the thing is, the monster had become real to him. When I was about ten, me and my friends invented a Halloween story about a man in a white trenchcoat who was snatching kids from swing sets. We did it to scare the seven-year-olds, but we wound up scaring ourselves. All of a sudden, parents wouldn’t let their children outside anymore. Then the cops started questioning men getting off the commuter trains in their Burberry raincoats. One day, they arrested the father of one of my buddies in the movie theater balcony—groping a sixteen year-old boy. He was wearing a white trenchcoat. That’s a ‘chaotic fiction.’”

  Borges rubbed his long chin. “You know how to get in touch with Scotty’s parents, right?”

  “Yeah. I’d like to call them, if it’s okay.”

  “Sure. But give me the number. I’m going to need them out here on a morning plane. I’m calling it a day on the interrogation. It’s late. I need to get the kid processed, get his clothes and the blood evidence to the lab, get the med guys to take a look at him. And I’m hoping our G-men will decide to go play in someone else’s yard for a while.”

  “Not much chance of that, now that they’ve got the scent,” said Raszer. “The NCTC guy’s already made his Al Qaeda connection, and that mouser from the FBI—”

  “Piece of advice: If you want to stay off the leash on your abduction case, you might want to make yourself scarce here for a day or two. Otherwise, you’re gonna have feds spitting down your neck all the way to the ‘Ninth Circle’ . . . or wherever it is you have to go to find your girl. ¿Comprende?”

  “Sí, comprendo,” Raszer replied. “But at some point, I have to finish what I’ve started with Scotty. That’s my covenant. Will you keep me briefed?”

  Borges nodded. “You do the same,” he said. “In the meantime, there’s the Syrian girl. She’s told my partners absolutely nothing worth squat.”

  “Is she a suspect?”

  “Not at the moment, but she’s a piece of work. I could hold her as a material witness, but right now I’m more interested in watching her next move. I’m letting her go as soon as we get her statement, but I’d like you to keep an eye on her for me. Take her home. Better yet, take her to a motel. I doubt she’ll want to go home.”

  A gust of wind from the northeast swept across the plaza, taking them both by surprise. Raszer shivered as it passed over his shoulders.

  “She’ll come out the Temple Street doors in about twenty minutes. You can pull into the alley that’s kitty-corner, where the squads park, and watch for her. I’ll tell her you’re her ride.”

  “Thanks, Luis. And thanks for the trust.”

  “If you can’t trust a man who died and came back, who can you trust?”

  THIRTEEN

  Twenty minutes came and went while Raszer waited in the alley, across the street and a hundred yards south of the building’s main entrance. Four lanes of coursing rush-hour traffic separated him from the revolving door through which Layla would exit. A couple of women had already come out, neither wear
ing a yellow dress. The door and the broad steps leading up to it were within shouting distance, but Temple Street ran one way southeast, and he’d have to circle the block to get to her. He might have waited curbside, but at this time of day, that would have put him in a traffic lane. He was concerned she wouldn’t see him, and had just about decided to walk over when there was a knock on his passenger-side window. He rolled it down.