Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (56 page)

    
“Why,”
he asked, “do I feel like I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole?”

    
“Because
you did,” replied his host. “You came out on the other side of the world.”

    
“Then I
guess the only thing to ask,” Raszer said, following the rules of the game, “is
whether you can make use of a keen mind and a steady heart.
”

    
“You bet
we can,” the man replied. He gestured toward his companion. “This is my
partner, Rashid al-Khidr. We pretty much run this I-double-R office.”

    
“I-double-R?”
Raszer repeated.

    
“International
Refugee Relief. We do our part to put a Band-Aid on the collateral damage from
the wars: displaced families, orphans, visa and sanctuary applications.”

    
“Human
trafficking?” asked Raszer.

    
“That
too. When we have the resources.”

    
“Right.
I have a hazy recollection of being told about you. Very hazy. You’re the
‘mirror,’ right? Should I expect to meet any more Philbys along the way?”

    
“You
never know,” said Greenstreet Number Two. “Not to worry; things will come back
to you when you need them—kind of like a foreign language. You were given some
of the geopolitical picture on the other side. In Islamic parlance, the
zahir
: the outer reality. Important for
keeping your bearings. But you won’t master the game without
batin
: the inner meaning. That’s what
we’re for.”

    
“Let’s
stick with
zahir
for a minute,”
Raszer said. “Tell me where it is I’m going.”

    
“That’s
not strictly a matter of geography,” Greenstreet answered. “On the map, you’ll
be going across the Mesopotamian flood plain of southeastern Anatolia.
Ethnographically speaking, it’s the land of the Dimili Kurds. Mostly Alevi
Shiites, which is to say, not really orthodox Muslims at all. The whole
region’s a war zone these days, but it’s a picnic compared with your
destination. You’re headed into some of the roughest, most lawless terrain on the
planet: the Hâkkari highlands, where Turkey, Iran, and Iraq meet. A piece of
turf claimed equally by the three nations and the Kurds, and currently
held—feudally speaking—by the Old Man.”

    
“On the
way there, time moves in reverse. You’ll see the world Alexander saw. You’re
going across the country of the Sin-worshippers, the fire jumpers, the sword
swallowers, dervishes, and the devotees of the Peacock Angel.”

    
“When do
I meet the lotus eaters?” Raszer asked.

    
“If it
lives and spouts heresy,” said Greenstreet, “it’s out there. The whole stretch,
from Gaziantep to the Iranian border, is a world apart. Like I said, nominally
Shia, but Islam around here is as much a matter of brand loyalty as shared
belief. You’ll cross the Tigris and enter the oldest continually inhabited
settlements on Earth. En route, you’ll pass by some of the best-kept secrets in
civilization. And just when you think maybe you’ve reached the source of it all
in the high country near Hâkkari, everything drops into nothing, like some huge
cataract falling straight to hell, and no satellite can map it, and no drone
can fly over it, and that, Mr. Raszer, is where your girl is. Literally, in the
middle of fucking nowhere.”

    
“Well,
let’s go, then,” said Raszer, slipping woozily off the table. “What’s the mode
of travel? And what sort of souvenir do you want me to bring back for you?”

    
“Other
than your skin, just an account. We’d like to know how these people turn bored
college kids and pissed-off hayseeds into sleeper agents and saboteurs. Ishmaels,
they call themselves. Or Isma’ils, after the son of the sixth imam, Jafar. Isma’il.”

    
“I’m
aware of the mythos. It’s all lifted from the Nizari Assassins, right?”

    
“That’s
all subterfuge. We know you know cults, Mr. Raszer, but believe me, this isn’t
Jonestown. It’s deeper, wider, and much, much slicker than that. This guy’s the
angel of the bottomless pit. His only religion is . . . ” He turned to the
Kurd. “Rashid?”

    
“
Nothing,
” said al-Khidr. “
Nihil
. He tells the Sunnis he’s their
man and the Shia he’s theirs, and collects tribute from the Kurds by telling
them he’s playing both for their benefit. His elite soldiers secretly pledge
fealty to an iteration of the Syrian-Nabataean goddess Atargatis—but his own
beliefs are more subtle. If indeed he has a God, it is the apotheosis of the nunc:
the crack between spirit and substance, where all ceases to be. The blackness
at the bottom of a well. Negation.”

    
“Atargatis,”
Raszer repeated. “Syrian. Negation.
Ex
nihilo, ad nihilo
. Shit.”

    
“They’re
oblivion seekers,” Greenstreet said. “A professor at Harvard once told me that
there are really only two belief systems in the world, coiled around each other
in the human psyche. A dyad, he called it. He said that philosophical truth
consists in believing both at the same time, and that dismissing one in favor
of the other leads to totalitarianism. One is the conviction that this is truly
the best of all possible worlds, and the other is that it’s the worst. Great
drama is all about the conflict.
To be,
or not to be
. The truth gets lost in translation, of course, but that’s how
you’ll slip through.”

    
“I just
hope I come out with my tongue,” said Raszer. “And my testicles.”

    
“I hope
so, too. You’re referring to their taste for dismemberment. Doctrinally, that comes from their pledge to this goddess, the
one Rashid mentioned. In her heyday, her devotees gelded themselves. At least,
that’s the line he feeds his troops.”

    
Raszer
strode over to his pack, squatted, and fished until he came up with the Syrian
coin he’d traded his duster for. He held up its face. “This goddess?” he asked.

    
His host
took the coin, eyed it, and nodded. “That looks like her.” Glancing at his
watch, Greenstreet said, “Let’s get a bite, shall we? Do you like your food
spicy?”

    
“I’d
like anything that’ll burn this fog from my brain.”

    
Greenstreet
went to the desk, parked the handgun behind his belt buckle, and slipped on a
sport coat. On the adjacent wall was pinned a large map of Turkey and the
bordering countries, dotted with dozens of colored tacks marking out routes
traveled by refugees and the traffickers who exploited them. Raszer retrieved
his cigarettes and Zippo and walked over to the map.

    
“May I ask your expert opinion, Mr. … Mr.
Greenstreet?”

    
“Sure,”
said his host. “You can ask.”

    
“Is there
something…anything…that connects Katy Endicott with the rest of the Old Man’s
milk carton kids? Some common quality he sends his scouts out to look for?”

    
“I can’t
say for sure,” Greenstreet replied, “never having seen them all in one place.
But I’ll give you a semi-educated guess.”

    
“That’s
good enough for me.”

    
“Remember
the Manson girls? Squeaky, Sadie, and the rest. Your turf, right?”

    
“I
suppose you could say that,” Raszer replied.

    
“Well…that
rare combination of physical appeal, native intelligence…and mal-leability. Add
in antisocial tendencies, some daddy issues, and stir. How’s that?”

    
 
“And the reason these abductions aren’t
causing more of a public outcry…”

    
“They
will. Once we shine a light on ‘em. But, for now, these are mostly the kids that
nobody misses a whole lot. Someone did miss your Katy. That’s why you’re here.”

    
Raszer
nodded, and returned his eyes to the map.

    
“Which
of those routes am I taking?” he asked.

    
“You and
Rashid will be flown to Gaziantep. You’ll take a
dolmus
to a safe house just outside of Urfa. In the morning, you’ll
be called for by a young man named Dante and bused to Harran—one of the
weirdest places in the world, for my money. From that point on, we don’t know
you, and you’ll be in the care of the Fedeli d’Amore.”

    
“I guess
Shams knew whereof he spoke. The Fedeli—”

    
Greenstreet
held up his palm, then tapped the face of his watch. This portion of the
briefing was over. “Let’s walk,” he said, “and eat. Rashid will cover the
rest.”

    
As soon
as they stepped outside, Raszer smelled the Mediterranean. There were other
scents, too, of olive and citrus rind and fig, but the primeval tang of that
most ancient of seas overpowered them. Farther down this great fishhook of
coastline lay Beirut, Haifa, Gaza, and, at the barb, the once great city of
Alexandria.

    
They
walked three abreast up the steep, narrow street toward the old quarter,
casting long shadows. Raszer struck a match on stone and lit a cigarette.
Little was said, because too much needed saying. After a few minutes,
Greenstreet gestured and said, “Here we are. The Saray. Best restaurant in
Iskenderun. And the best view.”

    
A dozen
small tables spilled onto the street from the canopied double doors of the
restaurant, each one with fresh flowers and a million-dollar panorama of the
curving coastline and the turquoise sea. Greenstreet took the most isolated
table and gestured for Raszer to sit. He did so gratefully, because his legs
had suddenly turned to soft clay. The entire setting—the solid, cloudless sky
that merged seamlessly with the water, the whitewashed buildings, the
cobblestone street—began to evanesce, then flicker back into register like a
silent-movie image. He was accustomed to arriving in a foreign country and
feeling oddly out of whack, as if he’d been teleported and hadn’t yet fully
reconstituted, but this state was profoundly unsettling. In a word, trippy.

    
Greenstreet
must have seen the uneasiness cross Raszer’s face, because he smiled and said
merely, “You’ll get used to it.”

    
Used to
exactly what, Raszer had to wonder, for of all the strange places he’d toured
his mind to, this was perhaps the strangest. A question passed over his lips
without any forethought. “How close is the world to disaster, Mr. Greenstreet?”

    
Greenstreet
shot a glance at the Kurd, then said, “At any given time in history, Armageddon
hovers, waiting just on the other side of the curtain. It could take the form
of a comet, plague, climatic shift, or barrage of dirty bombs going off in
major cities, and all it needs is a little encouragement. In the years leading
up to 9/11 and the months and years that followed, that encouragement was
given. The most reactionary elements in Christian and Islamic fundamentalist
circles lay down together, blessed by the agencies of state in which they’d
entrenched themselves, and conceived a beast.”

    
He
summoned the waiter. “Let’s take a meal together and hope for better times.”

At four forty-eight in the afternoon on that April
day, after they had nourished themselves with generous helpings of flatbread
slathered with
cevizli biber
—a paste
of walnuts, chilies, and cracked wheat—and washed it down with cold beer,
Raszer glanced at his watch, then at the lengthening purple shadows of their
three seated forms, angling sharply away from the table and merging in the
middle of the street. His eyes traveled up a minaret to the place from which
the muezzin would cry at eventide, then down the steep hill to the sea, and
finally back to the middle of the street.

    
At that
point, he saw that there were just two shadows, his own and that of the
red-turbaned Kurd named Rashid al-Khidr. He returned his gaze to the table and
confirmed that, indeed, the chair formerly occupied by the man who’d called
himself Greenstreet was empty. Moreover, it was pushed in snugly against the
table as if it had never been occupied at all.

    
“Where’d
Philby disappear to?” Raszer asked, his tongue slowed by the beer.

    
“Sorry?”
Rashid replied.

    
“Mr. Greenstreet,” Raszer repeated. “Men’s room?
Or is he getting the bill?”

    
“I think
you must be confused, my friend,” the Kurd said. “Perhaps the travel, or the
time shift. You came to us from Mr. Greenstreet, but Mr. Greenstreet is not
here.”

    
“Now,
wait a second,” Raszer insisted. “I know the CIA is good with smoke and
mirrors, but I can still hear his last words. He said, ‘Let’s hope for better
times,’ right?”

    
“Indeed,
indeed. You were telling me of your conversation in the airplane hangar, and of
how you came to be delivered to us, and of the vision you had just before the
hatch was closed. It will not be the last such vision, I am sure.”