Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (37 page)

    
“Here
come the real paranoids,” Raszer said.

    
“Goddamnit,”
Borges muttered. “Why did they have to bring him to his parents in chains?
These guys don’t have a pisspot’s worth of class.”

    
Scotty
looked pale, stringy, and scared. Seeing his parents’ faces must finally have
clued him in to the fact that the gauntlet he was now running was all too real.
He stood accused of a robbery (the convenience store), a shooting (the tram
driver at Universal City), and a murder (Harry Wolfe), among other things. And
yet, if Raszer was right about the sort of programming he’d been subjected to,
Scotty hadn’t understood until very recently that these were real crimes
attributable to a real person. His ontological referents—his sense of
what was
and
what was real
—had been messed with. What elegant evil it was: as if
his captors had fitted both his consciousness and his conscience with a
drop-down screen that flashed:
Pay no
attention to that twinge in your gut—it’s only a memory of life
.

    
Scotty
glanced up and saw Raszer coming, and his eyes lit briefly with hope, dimming
again only when Raszer’s own face failed to affirm it.

    
“Well,
Mr. Raszer,” said Picot, “we meet again. No rooftop escapades today?”

    
“Not
before noon,” Raszer replied. “Where are you taking Scotty?”

    
“That’s
classified,” said Picot.

    
“Of course
it is,” Raszer shot back.

    
“You’ll
have to step aside,” Agent Djapper broke in. “We’re—”

    
“Not
quite so fast,” Borges countered. “I need a paper trail on this handover. Have
you finished processing—”

    
“Every
last form,” said Djapper. “It’s all in order.”

    
“I think
you’re making a mistake,” Raszer said, ignoring Djapper and stepping into
Picot’s path. “Give me a half hour, and I may be able to spare the taxpayers
some money and you a lawsuit.”

    
“That
won’t be possible,” Picot said unctuously, through the little hole in his face
that served as a mouth. “But we appreciate the offer.”

    
 
“Can I assume you have a federal judge in your
corner?” Raszer came back.

    
“Are you
presenting yourself as Scotty’s attorney, Mr. Raszer?”

    
“No, but
someone ought to. Has he seen one?”

    
Djapper
piped in, right in Raszer’s face. His breath smelled of tooth rot beneath the
mint. “Mr. Darrell is an unlawful combatant.”

    
“That’s
funny,” said Raszer. “He looks like a scared kid to me.”

    
“Even
mass murderers cry for their mothers, Mr. Raszer,” said Picot. “And there are
twelve-year-olds out there who can build an IED. It’s best not to think too
deeply about this. In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re at war. It’s a battle
between one kind of human—and another.” In contrast with Bernard Djapper, whose
prickliness came as quickly to the skin as the sweat that dampened his dusting
of baby powder, Picot seemed to have no internal heat. He was the sort of
Dorian Gray whose age would always be forty-four on the outside. “Now, if
you’ll excuse—”

    
“Can I
ask you something, Picot?” Raszer said, quietly intense.

    
Picot
nodded stiffly.

    
“Are you
comfortable in your skin? Do you like the role you’re playing?”

    
For just
an instant, the question appeared to create a hairline fracture from the
  
top of Picot’s skull to the toes of his
tasseled slip-ons. Then he quickly reconstituted himself and offered the
weakest of smiles.

    
“Scotty,”
Raszer said, locking his eyes on the boy. “I’m going to try and get you some
help. In the meantime, tell these men the truth. Not the truth you’ve been
taught recently but the truth your body remembers. Where is the Garden, Scotty?
The girl I showed you yesterday . . . where do I find her?”

    
Scotty’s
reply was a non sequitur. “Do you think I’ll be home for Thanksgiving?” he
asked, his expression revealing nothing.

    
Waiting
until he was sure the boy had no more to say, Raszer nodded. “I hope so,” he
said.
  
And Scotty was taken away, the
echo of his leg irons making the long hallway sound like the hold of a slave
ship.
Bruised, railroaded, and mindfucked
,
Raszer thought,
but not stupid
. “Will
I be home for Thanksgiving?” Scotty had said.

    
For
Turkey.

    
Borges
led Raszer into the big room Scotty and his federal guard had just exited.
Seated at the far end of a conference table, their postures as stiff as if
waiting for someone to say, “At ease,” were Scotty’s parents. His mother was as
regally long-necked and sculpted as Raszer remembered her to be, but her eyes
were rimmed with red, and the cavernous space made her small form seem
doll-like. Even so, her tensile strength registered—a dancer is always a
dancer. Scotty’s father was twice her size, but similarly bony. His eyeglasses
were askew, and it looked like he’d last combed his long gray hair three times
zones away. Raszer doubted either of them had slept since getting the call.

    
“Mr. and
Mrs. Darrell,” Borges said softly as they entered. “I’m sure you remember
Stephan Raszer.”

    
Scotty’s
mother looked up. Her eyes briefly flashed anger, then softened to pleading.
“How . . . ” she asked, “ . . . how could you have let him stay out there for
so long?”

    
“I wish
I could answer that, Mrs. Darrell,” Raszer said. “All I can say is that I’m
sorry it’s come to this, and that I’ll find the people who used your son this
way. That wasn’t Scotty on the roof yesterday. And I’m convinced he’s innocent
of the murder.”

    
Scotty’s
father sat forward slightly. “What are you saying, Mr. Raszer? That he’s been
framed, or that we should prepare to mount an insanity defense?”

    
“That
he’s not in possession of his will, Mr. Darrell. Or his identity. He was acting
as his game avatar. That’s what he’s been taught to do. And if this is what I
think it is, your son is only one of many. Soon enough, others will begin
showing up.”

    
A muscle
in Mrs. Darrell’s cheek twitched. Otherwise, she was stone still.

    
 
“Look at it this way,” said Raszer. “When the
Marines send a boy into Fallujah, they give him moral immunity. So he kills
anything that moves. Is he insane? Not according to the Marines. But if he did
the same thing in a high school cafeteria . . . ”

    
“I see
your point,” said Scotty’s father. “Situational insanity.”

    
Raszer
nodded. “Still, something in Scotty’s makeup drew him deeper into the game to
begin with. If I knew what it was, I might have better luck drawing him out.”

    
“Is it
really all about this ridiculous game?” Mr. Darrell asked. “One day he’s
quoting Thomas Aquinas, the next he’s practicing jihad? How can this—”

    
Raszer
pulled out a chair opposite Scotty’s mother. “The Gauntlet is a bunch of brainy
college kids exploring the limits of free will. Trying to find out where God
steps out of the burning bush to say, ‘Thou shalt not.’ But at the higher
levels, where Scotty was playing, you’re in a moral limbo. You have to be
pretty centered to resist the friendly stranger who offers you a ticket to
heaven. How do you know you haven’t, in fact, won the game?”

    
Mrs.
Darrell nodded silently and folded her arms, suddenly chilled.

    
“Ever
since they started hauling in every potential shoe bomber in sight,” Raszer
went on, “the shrinks who work for federal grant money have been gathering
pages and pages of data on what makes a would-be ‘terrorist’ tick. A lot of
it’s useless, but two things are consistent enough to look right.”

    
“What
are they?” Mr. Darrell asked.

    
“Humiliation
is one. A pattern of humiliation. Uusally it’s tribal, or racial, or colonial,
but it can also be personal.”

    
Mrs.
Darrell seemed to falter briefly, then asked, “And the second thing, Mr.
Raszer?”

    
“What
they call a predisposition to suicide,’” said Raszer. “In other words, these
kids don’t have to be persuaded to die, because they’re soul-dead already. What
keeps them hanging on, living with Mother or suffering the nagging wife, is
that they don’t want to die for nothing. What they need is the opposite of a raison
d’être. I had hoped to find out what your son’s was.”

    
“His
reason not to exist?” asked Mrs. Darrell. “What are you saying?”

    
“Scotty
tried killing himself when he was only thirteen,” said his father. “He wasn’t
smart enough to know that a vial of his mother’s Xanax wouldn’t do the trick.”

    
“I
remember you telling me that,” said Raszer.
 

    
“So,”
Borges interjected, “you don’t buy the government’s line that the boy’s a
convert to Islam, or the Islamist cause?”

    
“No,”
Raszer responded. “Maybe to an Islamic myth . . . or to some ideal of
insurrection. But Scotty doesn’t strike me as the least bit dogma driven. I
think he’s seen heaven and wants to go back. I know a few good psychiatristswho
work with federal prisoners and can do expert-witness duty. If I can convince
Special Agent Djapper that one of them might be able to get the information
he’s after, we may
 
have a chance.”

    
“Who
took him away?” asked Mrs. Darrell. “Who are these people?”

    
“That’s
what I intend to find out, Mrs. Darrell,” Raszer replied. “Because, as I said,
Scotty isn’t their only victim. There’s a young woman—”

    
“Well,
if it helps,” said Scotty’s father, “we’re dropping that lawsuit. Whatever else
happened, you found our son alive, and we’re grateful.”

    
“That means
a lot,” said Raszer. “More than you know.”

Raszer gave his statement to the police with Agent
Djapper in attendance. His description of the limo and its driver was good
enough to yield an APB and a strikingly accurate computer composite of the
man’s face. He bought Djapper coffee and waffles at the Original Pantry, a
downtown greasy spoon so ordinary it was chic, and told him just enough about
his travel plans to ensure that the FBI wouldn’t be far behind him. Then he
headed home in his battered Avanti to set up his itinerary and mission protocol
with Monica.

    
In fact,
he knew she’d be two steps ahead of him, and that was exactly where he wanted
her to be.

“You’ve got an eleven-forty to Albuquerque,”
Monica told him, “and a Jeep to get you to Taos. But I have no idea where you
want to sleep.”

    
“Any
motor inn along the Paseo. I’m on the budget plan. Speaking of . . . did we get
paid yet?”

    
“I’ve
sent a courier,” she replied. “Thank God for that Sam Brown guy. The other one—Leach—he
seems a little slithery. Imagine that: a snake in the revival tent.”

    
“I think
he’s in trouble. I overheard something last night. Fragments—but I think he may
have a history with one or more of the boys. It was Sam Brown reading him the
riot act. I got an inkling that Katy Endicott might be tied up in it somehow.”

    
“Yuck,”
Monica said. “When are we gonna wise up and give the priesthood back to women?”

    
“Not
soon enough,” said Raszer. “Anyhow, let’s get down to business.”

    
“Well,
we’ll have the check in the bank before you leave, and the second payment
invoiced, and now that the Darrells have dropped the lawsuit, we can tap your
dwindling reserves. But you’re right—you
are
on a budget. How far off the map are you headed this time, and what sort of resources
are you going to need? You’ve been even more cryptic than usual about your
travel plans, Raszer.”

    
“To tell
you the truth, I don’t have my bearings yet. But let me tell you what I do
have, and you tell me if it looks like a web any spider you know would spin.”

    
Monica
watched as he took a cigarette from the floppy front pocket of his cotton
shirt: silver-gray, short-sleeved, open to the breastbone, nicely wrinkled. The
kind she liked best on him. She liked him very much, in fact, but was careful
not to let him take her affection for granted.