Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (52 page)

    
As if
they had been rehearsing it for centuries, the women set about tending to the
body. From the top of the butte, there was an unimpeded view of Pima Road and
two other fire roads ascending the range from the southeast. Dust rose in small
cyclones from all three roads, and from the dust emerged three long black cars.

    
Raszer
registered each car, then dropped his gaze and carefully peeled open the
envelope, working his fingers around Shams’ tongue. The note was written in
Arabic, and it took Raszer three or four readings before he had it.
    

The man who plays at both sides in the same
game

defeats
only himself. This is the end to which all

duplicity
leads. Fear the name with two faces.

    
It was a
warning, of course—but one he wouldn’t heed. Raszer took one more look at Shams
and realized that he no longer felt for him the thing known as pity—only a kind
of kinship.

    
So be
it.

    
That
meant he was ready for them. The protagonists of ancient myth sometimes seemed
absent of feelings. He thought it more likely that they allowed themselves to
feel only what they could afford to feel.

    
When it was all over, when all procedures had been
attended to, all reports filed, and the body of Shams of Taos lay still and
cold in the mortuary, Raszer returned to his room to pack his bag. The day had
turned overcast and gusty, and as it dropped into evening, cold enough to light
a small fire in the kiva. He wanted a drink—the only outward sign that he was
unsettled—but denied himself that anesthesia, knowing he had one more New
Mexican night to get through on his wits before departure.

    
Departure
for where, exactly, and by what mode of travel were undetermined. He’d counted
on one last dispatch from Shams. All he had was a direction to show up before
sunrise at the Rio Grande Gorge—like being told to go to the Sonoran desert and
wait for the saucers. It was so murky that he could not even bring himself to
brief Monica. She’d immediately suspect a set-up and make him question his
instinct, which was that he should be there, no matter what.

    
The
local cops were out chasing banshees in black limos, and had by now undoubtedly
called in the state police and the FBI. Raszer wasn’t expecting any arrests.
The killers weren’t out cruising old Route 66, waiting to be caught in the
snares of an APB. It was beginning to seem as if they could materialize anywhere
at any time. As if their black wings were beating the still air in a dead space
between two worlds.

    
Shams’
death, like Harry Wolfe’s, was on him. It had already begun to merge with the
larger stain on his soul, the one that spread like red wine on a tablecloth—a
disease of his psychic skin. He was going to have a lot to answer for when he
faced his maker, but the more pressing question was what he’d have to show. Was
the world safer for these deaths? Were the spiritual predators and soul thieves
any less likely to prey? It wouldn’t do to agonize. That was what they wanted.

    
The
Devil’s goal was to make sure that you thought of no one else but him. Jealous,
like a lover. Soul by soul, the ancient, protective magic was being snuffed out
in the world by the ardor of evil.

    
It was
impossible to know what sort of information they might have extracted from
Shams under torture, but Raszer guessed they had gotten an earful of artful
bullshit and nothing more. Shams had been a soldier long before and long after
his tours of duty. And, as the old Indian had said, he’d left his body behind.
The thing to do now was to follow his ghost, and that meant following his
directions.

    
Finding
Ruthie, and finding an ally in Shams, had briefly reignited Raszer’s passion
for the mission. That fire, and its warmth, were gone now. Ruthie had gone back
to the trailer with her mother, pale and voiceless, too shaken to say goodbye.
He reminded himself as he stuffed the last article into his pack that the
surest sign that the endgame had commenced was that comfort had fled. A certain
chill made itself felt, and a loss of equilibrium that he felt in his gut and
associated with going too high on the swing set as a child. Colors bled from
the world. It was the sensory experience of an animal.

    
All of
his provisions went into a collapsible mountain pack with a light aluminum
frame. It could be carried like a duffel or worn like a trekker’s backpack. He
carried three full changes of clothing and the standard survival gear for an
extended pack-in to a wilderness area. Along with these, Raszer had his
climbing kit; his combat knife; the gunmetal case containing his paralytic
darts; a store of antibiotics and disinfectants; ephedra for staving off sleep
and keeping his head clear; a selection of garden-grown herbs for teas,
unguents, and purgatives; and numerous sources of instant protein. The only
electronics he carried—aside from the tracer chip—was a wireless device dubbed
the Ionophone, custom-designed by a spyware company in Copenhagen. It served as
cell phone, web terminal, camera, GPS mapper, and general lifeline. This,
however, would be left behind at some point, because what oriented him also
exposed him.

    
Raszer
dropped off the Jeep at the Enterprise lot in Taos, leaving the keys and a note
on the front seat, and hired an all-night taxi service to take him to the Rio
Grande Gorge. It didn’t take the look on the driver’s face to tell Raszer it
was an odd destination: Who but a suicide plotter heads to a four-hundred-foot
gorge in the last bleak hour of night? Raszer had set off for stranger places,
but never with so little orientation.

    
It was
predawn when he pulled his pack from the taxi. They were on the bridge that
spanned the gorge, and the dark gave no hint of the vastness of the place. Only
the wind, roaring down the great gash of the Continental Divide, informed him
that he was in the midst of something biblically large. The wind masked even
the rumble of rushing water five hundred feet below. It tore at the skirts of
his duster and lifted his close-cropped hair. It filled his ears with the
seashell sound of a limitless ocean and chilled him to the bone. He was on top
of the world, on a suspension bridge, and he was alone with the alone.

    
This is it, Raszer
, he said to himself,
and laughed darkly.
This is what you live
for
. It occurred to him that he might actually be some sort of exotic
idiot. Who the hell lives for the frisson of holy terror?

    
The
feeling was on him as soon as the taxi’s taillights had vanished. Vertigo, body
and soul. Exacerbated by the darkness and the ever-shifting wind. He couldn’t
find his center, and he dropped to his knees, fearing that otherwise he might
get sucked over the rail. It was low here, a perfect place for jumpers. The
desert West was proceed-at-your-own-risk country. It swallowed up victims
without offering so much as a burp.

    
In his
mind’s eye, Raszer saw Shams on the stake and instinctively reached for his own
groin.
My cross will come
, he
thought.
I won’t come out whole
. He
crouched, clutching his belly like a World War I grunt on the Marne with a
bayonet wound in his gut. He heard Ruthie screaming in the back of his head and
took another hit.
Not so tough, are you,
Raszer?
Not so intrepid. The world at
its blackest is a shade too black for you.
Evil takes great pains to keep up with the times, while good recedes
into a paradisiacal past.
Can’t go
back. Can only go on to the end, and hope that the end is also a better
beginning.
C’mon
, he whispered to
the wind.
Amaze me. Show me something I
haven’t seen before
.

    
The wind began to have a pulse, the cyclical throb
of a truck engine laboring to turn over after weeks of subzero . He saw the
pulse as well as felt it: As first light broke over the eastern foothills, he
perceived the wind and the mineral grit it carried as incandescent and
wavelike, as if the giant trough of the Rio Grande Gorge had filled with a
primeval ocean of dust and he was about to drown. Wave after wave hit him, and
it was all he could do to pull himself upright to the rail. The pulse grew more
rapid, ricocheting off the canyon walls, deafening, and then suddenly the
surging stopped. A curtain of sunlit dust hung across the gorge like a veil,
and through it he saw a moving form: a black, avian form coming toward him with
its talons extended.

    
The skin
of the helicopter was as black and sleek as a licorice jellybean, its hull as
broad as a small gunship. It was clearly of military origin, but had been
stripped of any sort of emblem or identifying mark. It was a transport chopper,
but hardly utilitarian in design. It had the look of an exotic prototype,
probably commissioned by the Pentagon for a few hundred million and then pawned
off on the private sector. It was also a right-wing paranoid’s nightmare, down
to the dreadlocked pilot with the toffee skin and oversize sunglasses, who set
the ship down on the bridge so gently that the resulting
thump
felt like a giant cat’s paw.

    
The
passenger side of the bubble slipped open silently; the pilot turned and spread
his lips to flash a wide, brilliant smile.

    
Raszer
lifted his pack and walked slowly toward the chopper, one fingertip skimming
the railing. The giant propeller thrummed its oscillating, dragonfly tremolo,
beating the still air into sun-gilded froth. The pilot kept on beaming. Was it
a welcoming smile or a
we got you, fucker
smile? No way to tell, not even with his antennae up. No frame of reference for
something this bizarre. Here was the black chariot, comin’ for to carry him
home.
 

    
Inside
his skull, the land around him unrolled, its features flattening into shapes on
a gameboard. And it hit him that from this moment on, he
was
in the game, and that this was the only way to gauge things. In
the game, he would, of course, step into the black helicopter.

    
Shams
had made it so.

    
It was
written.

    
It was a
game but not a game. Just the sort of cognitive displacement the architects of
alternate reality gaming had aimed for. A mindfuck. And the only way to play it
was to leave himself behind. If he thought about what else he might be
leaving—if he thought about his daughter, or Monica, or Ruthie—he would not be
able to play. And so he put them all off the gameboard and proceeded alone.

    
The
pilot rose to help Raszer stow the heavy pack in the rear. Then he took his
seat, motioned for Raszer to buckle up, and prepared to ascend. He wore a white
cotton shirt and shorts, and sandals. He looked like Ziggy Marley at
twenty-four. How he’d come to fly a bird like this was anybody’s guess. There
was no sign of a weapon, but the instrument panel gave evidence of military
application. After a few minutes, the radio crackled into life, but the pilot
squelched the signal and moved instead to slip in a John Coltrane CD. They flew
straight up the gorge, skirting the pink canyon walls, riding so low that the
runners occasionally sliced through the crest of the Rio Grande’s waves.

    
In a
manner of speaking, they had already entered another country.

    
They
were headed north into Colorado. A private airfield was Raszer’s guess, but who
knew? He didn’t ask the pilot; he offered only the opinion that Coltrane’s
modal soprano sax and flying went well together.

    
“Nothin’
like the ’Trane to put ya head up in the air,” the pilot agreed. It occurred to
Raszer that the pilot might be good and stoned, an impression reinforced by the
faint perfume of hashish in the cabin.

    
Raszer
recalled The Gauntlet’s initiatory greeting, and inquired of his pilot whether
he knew of anyone who could make use of “a keen mind and a steady heart.”

    
“Matter
of fact, now,” the pilot replied, grinning, “I do.”

    
When the
southern Rockies appeared, they were like a levee of stone scooped into place
by giant hands, a massive dike to hold back the inland sea. There was snow on
the peaks, but not much. It had been dry again this year. After another twenty
minutes or so, the pilot turned to Raszer and said, “Almost home.”

    
Raszer
looked at the pilot and asked simply, “Will I be with friends?”

    
The
pilot lowered his glasses. “Unless I’m mistaken,” he replied. “You’re not here
to make friends.” He grinned. “But you might find some along the way.”

    
“Did you
know Shams?”

    
“Ev’rybody
who was in Babylon knew Shams,” the pilot answered. “Or knew about him. Nobody
ever went native like Shams. Shit, you could put me down naked with my
ancestors’ people in Ghana, and I couldn’t go as native as that motherfucker.
Some guys just got to see it from the other side. He hated what we were doin’
over there, but there wasn’t anybody you’d rather be next to when the bullets
flew.”