Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (70 page)

    
For the first part of the journey, they
were on paths well worn by trekkers before them. The grades were steep, the
stones sharp underfoot, and though the air remained dry and relatively cool,
the sun was merciless. A layer of sweat formed every few minutes, then was
blown dry by the next ferocious updraft. Dehydration was a real risk, and
so—Raszer was told—were human and animal predators.

    
All through the nineteenth century,
intrepid Englishmen had risked these mountains for the archeological treasures
of ancient Urartu and Assyria, and many had had their throats slit by nomadic
brigands. The treaties of spirit and flesh the Fedeli had made over seven years
of leading trekking parties through the highlands of the Kurdish homeland
offered some degree of protection, but only where the thieves were bound by
tribe. Danger might come from renegades and mercenaries of any stripe. The
greatest measure of safety came not from their alliances or from any makeshift
diplomatic immunity, but from the inhospitality of the land itself. It seemed
empty of life.

    
They made camp on a butte that rose like a
river lock from the valley floor and overlooked the next day’s stark journey
into nothingness. They broke a full two hours before sunset because they’d made
excellent time, because Francesca was concerned about dehydration, and because
travel late in the day invited thieves. They pitched two tents, bootleg versions
of Red Cross originals, which offered some degree of inoculation—one for the
men, and one for the women. Between them, they dug a fire pit and channels to
drain any sudden mountain cloudbursts. Then they scrambled down the runneled
sides of the butte to collect fuel from the dry brush and fallen walnut trees
that clung improbably to the loose rock. By five o’clock they had a good fire,
and by six thirty, Francesca had stuffed five eggplants with walnuts and dried
chilies for roasting, and, with grudging assistance from Ruthie, had made
flatbread from flour and water.

    
They ate only what they could consume
entirely. Their only intoxicants were fear and the hyperawareness it induced, a
kind of feral vision. All sensation was enhanced because all the usual
insulation was gone. The partial antidote for this animal edginess was—as it
had always been—to huddle close and swap stories. And so it was that Raszer
persuaded his two guides to tell him how the Fedeli had come to be.

    
Francesca had been on The Gauntlet for a
little better than a year, after having abandoned her graduate studies at the
University of Bologna. Her thesis work on semiotics, never completed, had dealt
with sexual signifiers in the visions of the saints. She was one of few women
who’d embraced the game’s gamble, and it had finally led her to the
international resort areas of southwestern Turkey.

    
“I was waitressing at a café in Bodrum.
Waiting . . . and
waiting
. You do a
lot of that in The Gauntlet. Day after day, I looked for my next guide.
Finally, I realized I’d been looking right at him for weeks. There was a little
man who came in every morning for espresso. Bald, plump, totally ordinary. One
day, for a laugh, I asked him if he could make use of a keen mind and a steady
heart. He was a trader, and I became his assistant. Three months later, I was
in the back of a truck full of girls—mostly Kazakh and Ukrainian—being
transported through the Caucasus to the Old Man’s harem. All of us doped up.
The truck stopped in a mountain pass. There was a melee. Shouting in Farsi and
Kurdish. I thought for sure we were going to be gang-raped and left in a ditch
with our throats cut. In a certain way—terrified as I was—I didn’t care. I was
over. Finished. Then the flap opened and let in this hard blue light, and
standing with the sun at their backs were Chrétien and Dante and four Kurds
with AK-47s.”

    
After a pause to refuel the fire, Raszer
turned to Dante.

    
“What about you, Dante? How’d you and
Chrétien hook up?”

    
“I’d only been on the circuit six months
from a POE in Glasgow. But I was fast. I’d been a gamer practically from the
cradle. Got started with the MMORGs when I was a wee bugger, ’n got so good at
it that me dad took me to California when I was eleven to see if the big game
developers wanted to pick my agile little mind.”

    
“Anyway, I found m’self in Berlin and heard
through the chatroom that an
anarkunst
cell had formed around this crazy Dutch engineering student in Sarajevo.
Anarchist art. Six or seven guys who plotted victimless terrorism, blowing up
statues and symbols of the new world order and such. I thought,
That sounds cool
.

    
“We pulled a few off, and then things got
hot and we had to split. Passage was arranged through Hazid. That’s the
crossover, mate. We all thought Hazid was just a moniker for the GamesMasters—a
synecdoche, if you know what I mean—but it’s the feckin’ wormhole to El Mirai.
It’s where the Old Man gets you. A small plane to Albania and then trucks to
Aleppo. This mercenary pronounced himself our new guide and said he was taking
us to the Lord of Time, the mother of all poetic terrorists. I thought he was
talking about bin Laden, and at the time, I thought,
Why not
?

    
“We drove the Black Sea coast and down
through the Caucasus into the Iranian borderlands and finally to Hakkâri. When
we got to the crossroads, we were starved and hallucinating. They took us up
this long, steep path. We kept catchin’ glimpses of this unbelievable castle,
built right into the cliff, and every time we stopped to rest we passed around
a pipe of hashish laced with opium. By the time we got to the gates, we had to
be carried in on litters. We were stone out of it. We woke up in the Garden. We
were fed and treated like kings. We had more women in a week than most men have
in a life. It was a dream, paradise.
Aye
—a
sham paradise.

    
“One morning, after a night of screwing and
cocktails of opium, E, and GABA, I woke up in total darkness. I mean,
total
. Imagine that: openin’ your eyes
and seein’ nothin’. The air was stale and still and I couldn’t move me legs . .
. ’cause I was in a feckin’ box. A coffin. I started to scream, and I screamed
until I screamed out the contents of my mind. Finally, the lid was opened and
this sheikh in black robes told me I was dead, and now my Qiyami
 
could
begin. My resurrection.”

    
“They took me and Chrétien and trained us
for six months in the art of
taqiyya
and
the guilt-free kill. We learned how to get in close enough to smell the pee in
our targets’ trousers and still get away clean. And we learned how to be
invisible, how to be so inside the game that we could work at the feckin’ FBI
for twenty years and nobody’d be the wiser. We couldn’t be killed, ya see,
because we were already gone.

    
“But one day—out in the courtyard during
exercises—Chrétien told me he’d seen the flaw in the whole scheme. ‘The crack
in the world where the light gets in,’ he called it.”

    
“What was it?” Raszer asked.

    
“The night before, he’d been doin’ this new
girl in the Garden. In the middle of it, she started callin’ him by a name
nobody’d called him since he was a kid. ‘Please, Nilfi . . . please, Nilfi.’
That’s what she said. Only, he was hearin’ it like from a very long way away,
through another pair of ears. His given name was Nils, but his friends and
family called him Nilfi when he was little. He looked at the girl, and went,
‘Oh my fucking God!” ‘cause he realized that some missing part of him knew her
from before, and that if he felt something like that, he couldn’t be dead. He
was in a borrowed self. So the motherfuckers had lied to us. Ergo, nothing
they’d told him was true, and everything we could do to escape was permitted.”

    
 
“How
did you get out?”

    
“We decided to be the perfect
fidais
until the time was right—until
they judged us ready for an assignment. Months went by. Finally, it came. Our
target was a Yarsani chieftain in the neighboring valley who’d refused to pay
tribute to the Old Man. We snuck into his camp with a trading party, but
instead of killing him, we became his pupils. He taught us piracy and he taught
us about the Bab—the prophet of the Baha’i faith. We started intercepting the
Old Man’s cargo shipments. That’s how we met Francesca: She was part of the
cargo. We brought ’er back with us, and for a while the three of us ran guns to
the Kurds in Hakkâri. Then we formed the Fedeli. It was Francesca’s idea—a good
one. To fight bad faith with good faith.”

    
“Yes, it was,” said Raszer, and gave the
dark-eyed girl a nod through the woodsmoke. “So none of you ever came face to
face with the great Lord of Time . . . ”

    
“Only the ninth level
fidai
ever see him. And even they can only look at him in a mirror
. . . so they say, anyway.”

    
“Good way to maintain mystique,” Raszer
commented. “Or a fraud.”

    
“They also say,” added Dante, “that to get
to him, you have to pass through as many doors as there are rooms in heaven,
and that ordinary men are old by the time they reach his threshold. But he can
travel the same distance in the blink of an eye.”

    
“Keep in mind,” said Francesca, “that none
of this is ‘real’ in the way that a market stall in Istanbul is real.”

    
Raszer sighed. “Right. It reminds me of how
you can make the moon disappear from the sky by putting a hand over one eye.”

    
Ruthie, who might have been expected to
snort in the face of all the obscurity, was again silent. Raszer’s gaze settled
on her and stayed until she felt it.

    
“You killed that guy,” she said. “That
soldier. He couldn’t fight you. You shot a guy with no arms or legs to fight
you off with.”

    
“Chill, Ruthie,” said Dante. “He was
seconds away from an agonizing death. We couldn’t leave him and we couldn’t
take him. What would you have done?”

    
She ignored him. “How’s it feel to blow
someone’s brains out, mister?”

    
Something was going on. It was as if she
were looking for a good reason to hate him.

    
“It feels . . . ” Raszer replied slowly,
“like a fist closing around your heart, Ruthie. Because in the end, a human
soul isn’t private ground, really; it’s common ground. So when you kill
someone, it’s like ripping them out of the same soil your own roots are in. And
you feel that. If you’re human, you feel it. Does that answer your question?”

    
A dog howled from a canyon that might have
been miles away, and was answered by one nearer. There were drums after that,
rumbling like thunder, and finally, voices on the wind, raised in sung
lamentation.

    
“What are we hearing?” Raszer asked, his
ear turned into the current.

    
“Kurdish hill fighters,” said Francesca.
“They must have a camp up in those peaks. When one of their men is killed, they
keep vigil through the night. They dance and sing. They want their enemy to
know that nothing can kill their thirst for freedom.”

    
“I’d like to have them on my side in a
fight. If you’ll all excuse me, I think I’ll turn in.”

    
The
scream came first inside Raszer’s dream, but within some fraction of a second
pierced the membrane of sleep and brought him to his knees. There was an
instant when he thought it might be an animal, so alien was the sound of a
full-grown woman’s shriek. It was Ruthie. He fumbled for the pistol and rolled
through the tent flap. The temperature had dropped fifteen degrees, and the
chill conspired with her second scream to stiffen the hair on his neck. Dante
and Shaykh Adi, who had been taking their turn at sentry duty, were now racing
down from the crest of the butte, the dog leaping in and out of the flashlight
beam.

    
“Slow down!” Raszer said in an urgent
whisper. “Keep it quiet and circle around to the right side of the tent. Back
me up. Do you have your knife?” Dante nodded mutely. “Good.” Raszer dropped to
one knee and addressed the animal, already bristling with instinctive alarm.
“And you . . . ” He stroked its back firmly. “Be cool.”

    
It occurred to Raszer as he padded toward
the tent, the dog at his side, that if there were indeed another human being in
there, he probably would have stifled Ruthie’s second scream. The thought that
he might be about to corner some nonhuman predator was, in a way, more
unsettling. These mountains had once been home to tigers, and there were many
varieties of wildcat still in the region. He’d had experience with men, but
little with animals.

    
A flashlight had been turned on in the
women’s tent. He saw Ruthie’s stiff-backed silhouette against the canvas. There
were no other forms. Francesca must still be flat.
Stay that way
, Raszer said to himself.
Stay that way
. He wondered if it could be a scorpion, a big spider.
Or something more fantastic—a djinn. A servitor.