Empire of Lies

by Raymond Khoury

  The leader said, “I carry greetings from his eminence my lord padishah Mehmed the fourth, the sultan of sultans, khan of khans, commander of the faithful and ruler of the black and white seas and of Rumeli, and from his most valiant serasker in this holiest of campaigns, the grand vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha.”

  Sobieski studied the Ottoman as an interpreter translated his words. The envoy, a tall man who was not out of his twenties, was sweating profusely, but the king saw no fear in his eyes. It was clearly more from the long ride under the harsh summer sun while dressed in full ceremonial regalia: baggy salvar trousers, long boots, turban, and a flowing red coat.

  “My greetings to your eminent master, soldier. And what is the purpose of your venture?”

  The envoy bowed again. The two men with him did the same. Then he straightened and looked the king straight in the eye.

  “I have been sent to convey a message from my master.”

  Sobieski frowned. “And what would that be?”

  The man didn’t react at first. Then a wry, curiously serene smile seeped across his face and he said, “He wishes you a peaceful journey,” before adding, “Allahu Akbar.”

  And with that, he slipped his hands in his pockets, and before the king, the guards, or any of the commanders could even react, he blew up.

  As did the two other envoys and the camels—a massive explosion that ripped through the royal enclosure and reduced it and everything around it to flaming debris.

  Confusion and panic streaked across the gathered troops as they watched their leaders disappear in a raging fireball. The real horror, however, was yet to descend on them, the one that was now being heralded by the piercing war cries and the deep, ominous thuds of Ottoman kettledrums echoing out from behind the nearby hills.

  In that instant, in a blink of an eye, everything changed.

  History changed.

  Sobieski wouldn’t lead his winged hussars to a crushing defeat of the Ottoman army in the fields outside Vienna. He wouldn’t save the city, nor would he stand before the grand vizier’s ravaged camp in victory and proclaim “Venimus, vidimus, deus vicit” (“We came, We saw, God conquered”). The grand vizier wouldn’t flee to Belgrade, where, on the sultan’s orders, three months later—on Christmas Day, as church bells were ringing across Europe—he would be strangled, decapitated, and have his head skinned and stuffed and presented to the sultan at his hunting palace in Edirne. Three years later, the Duke of Lorraine wouldn’t retake Buda from the weakened Ottomans. Max Emanuel wouldn’t liberate Belgrade two years after that. Prince Eugene of Savoy wouldn’t deal a crushing blow to the sultan at Senta in 1697.

  There would be no miraculous victories, no “Age of Heroes.” They were all dead, blown to bits in the meadow outside Tulln, with no one to fill their illustrious boots.

  Nothing like this had ever been done before.

  The Ottoman envoy had used explosives that were twenty times more powerful than gunpowder. In fact, up until that day, the sticks strapped under his coat and stowed in the camel’s pouches had never been seen. And they wouldn’t have, not for another two hundred years. Not until 1867, in fact, when Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist, would invent his Extradynamit blasting powder.

  The sheer audacity of the method of attack was also unheard of. Until that day, the concept of a suicide bomber had not existed. It would only rear its ugly head for the first time even later, in Russia in the late 1800s, when Nobel’s invention would become the method of choice for suicidal revolutionary assassins.

  Which is how it all should have been.

  But wasn’t.

  And all because of a man who stumbled onto a great secret in an underground crypt in Palmyra.

  1

  PARIS

  Present Day

  Shawwal, AH 1438 (July, AD 2017)*

  The dizzy, light-headed feeling was vaguely familiar.

  Although Ayman Rasheed had done it before, the last time had been years ago. And the sensation was so bizarre, so intense, so overwhelming that after each trip he’d wondered if anyone ever got used to it. Not that he imagined many others knew about it, let alone had experienced it. There had to be some others, though, surely—after all, it had been out there for centuries, millennia even—but if so, where were they?

  Or, rather, when?

  He had no way of knowing, and he’d long since learned to avoid speculating about it. It only led down a bottomless rabbit hole of questions and infinite possibilities.

  This time, though, the sensations were far more intense for the simple reason that Ayman Rasheed wasn’t in good shape. In fact, he knew he was barely clinging to life, which was why he’d had to make the jump as quickly as possible.

  As his eyes struggled to adjust to the faint light of the streetlamps on the bridge looming over him, he felt the dizziness return. He muttered a curse and spat out some blood before huddling down and scanning his surroundings, alert to any potential threat, the cool air floating up from the river cutting a bone-deep chill into his naked body.

  For that was how he always arrived after a jump: bare-skinned, stripped of any clothing or possessions.

  The Paris he’d arrived in was very different, of course. Beyond what he could see, it was smelly, the air thick with pollutants, a stench that felt more disagreeable, even poisonous, compared with the stink from the lack of modern sewage that he’d grown accustomed to over the last couple of decades. It was noisy, too—that was the one thing that always hit hardest, even at this time of night, when the city was mostly asleep. An ambient buzz, a thrum, distant gears and pistons from cars, buses, generators, and all kinds of mechanical contraptions burrowing almost surreptitiously into one’s consciousness from everywhere and nowhere.

  He’d forgotten how noisy that world was.

  He coughed up more blood and felt a renewed onslaught of dizziness and nausea. This wasn’t good. He needed his strength and all of his guile to pull this off and save himself. He shut his eyes for a moment, concentrating on calming his racing heartbeat, willing his senses to fall into step and guard him from any potential threat. He just needed to get to the hospital. Just that. The rest would take care of itself. Any other outcome was inconceivable to him. After everything he’d been through, after everything he’d achieved, he couldn’t allow it all to come to a pathetic end, here, alone and anonymous, a naked, tattooed corpse curled up in a dark corner on the banks of the Seine.

  He slinked back to the dark cover of a stairwell that led down from the bridge and waited. He knew exactly where he was, of course. He’d been careful to arrive in a place that would minimize the risk of discovery and, worse, obliteration. Appearing in the middle of a busy road and getting hit by a bus, for example. Or somewhere that was now occupied by something solid, like a concrete wall or a parked car. Or in a crowded building, and causing a stir. Parks were a good option: open spaces, sparsely populated, although there was always the risk that, over time, they would be developed or that trees with thick trunks would have grown there in the intervening years. Another option was to choose a historic monument: an ancient, classic building, one that was most likely to be protected and maintained in its original form, one that stood a good chance of surviving the vagaries of time with little change.

  Rasheed’s first trip to this new world had been the most dangerous. He’d been curious to see the result of his work, but he’d be traveling blind. He’d never been to Paris in his time—before this had all begun, before he had ever done a time jump—and he hadn’t thought of researching it either back then. Going for extreme caution on that first jump, he’d decided to use the river as his port of arrival, thinking that in all of Paris it was the one thing he was reasonably certain would remain unchanged over time. It had been a hot summer’s day in the middle of August, so he assumed the water temperature would be bearable. And he wouldn’t have clothes to weigh him down. The only thing he had to worry about was being run over by one of the many commercial barges plying its waters, but on a Frida
y and close to the riverbank, it was a reasonable risk.

  It had worked out fine. And preferring not to get soaked on future visits, he’d sought out other safe landing spots. He was presently at one of those: a cobblestone quay on the right bank of the Seine, tucked away from the glare of the city’s surveillance cameras, under the old Pont Royal bridge, facing the side of the Palais des Tuileries, at the westernmost end of the Louvre courtyard.

  He had no way of knowing that the palace itself should not have been there. It had been burned down by the Paris Commune in 1871. Except, in the Paris he had just arrived in, there had been no Paris Commune. There had been no French Revolution either. Only an Ottoman conquest that had—as he had seen firsthand on his previous visits—survived and thrived for more than three hundred years.

  Thanks to him.

  Only this was no curiosity trip—it was not a victory tour. It was a matter of life and death.

  His own.

  He scanned his surroundings and saw no one. It was Friday, the holy day of rest and congregation. The busy docks that lined the riverbanks would be shut. People would rise late, have breakfast with their families, and then, shortly before noon, they would head off to the mosques for the big Salaat el Jumu’ah prayers. But that was later. It was still barely dawn. The city had yet to awaken, and the quays were quiet.

  After a spell, Rasheed sensed something off to his far left. Some movement. He crept deeper into the shadows, hugging the wall, and his chest tightened as he stifled a cough.

  He waited, then peered out, slowly, cautiously.

  A figure was approaching. A man out on a walk, smoking a cigarette.

  There was no one else around.

  Rasheed risked another look and sized him up. Height, broad size—he would do.

  He slid back against the wall and tensed up, waiting. From deep inside him, another geyser of blood threatened to explode, but he suppressed it, causing a burn to tear through his lungs. He tried to still his breathing, which was rising alarmingly, not out of fear but involuntary cardiac exertion. He would have rather waited a bit longer before striking, to allow the aftereffects of his trip to settle, but the opportunity was here, now, and to wait longer was to invite more risk.

  A charge of adrenaline fought back his dizziness as the man’s footfalls drew closer. When he judged them to indicate the man was within striking distance, he emerged, fast, blocking his target’s path.

  The man froze in place, thrown by the sight of a powerful nude man covered in markings standing before him. And before the man could react, before his brain had even processed the strange sight, Rasheed dredged up the force to lash out. A quick side kick to the groin caused the man to falter back, his face crumpled from debilitating pain. Rasheed moved in instantly and followed the first strike with a savage haymaker to the man’s left ear that almost made him lose consciousness. His legs buckled, and by the time he fell to his knees, Rasheed was already behind him, hooking one arm around the man’s neck, his other pressing against the back of his head.

  Then Rasheed squeezed.

  The man struggled to free himself, but Rasheed held him in place despite the burning sensation searing through his own biceps and forearm. He could smell the stink of tobacco, which mixed badly with the dizziness that suddenly roared back into his skull. He dredged up all the strength he could muster to keep the man in his grip. Seconds dragged into torturous minutes until the lack of oxygen caused the man’s resistance to wane and his body went slack.

  Rasheed stayed clamped around the man’s neck. He wasn’t after unconsciousness. He needed something more permanent.

  Moments later, he achieved his goal. He dropped the limp corpse to the ground just as the feeling of choking on his own blood surged within him, making him cough out violently. He wiped his mouth with his hand and steadied himself against the wall, struggling to stay upright from the dizziness. He couldn’t let it overcome him again. He had to move fast.

  He pulled the man’s clothes off—robe, shirt, sash, baggy trousers, and the loose turban that had already fallen off his head during the scuffle—then slipped them on. In a small pocket in the man’s pants, he found an ID card, a couple of banknotes, and a set of keys. He studied the card. The address meant nothing to him, but he memorized the name on it. He didn’t intend to use it, but details were important, and he knew it could come in handy.

  His head still throbbing, he dragged the man’s naked body to the edge of the water. He was about to roll him in when a scream shattered the peaceful night air.

  “Stop! What are you doing? Somebody stop him,” a woman cried out.

  He froze and glanced across the river. A man and woman were at the base of the bridge’s stairs directly across from him. The man was now edging closer to the water, pointing at him and shouting, too.

  Rasheed ignored them.

  He just flipped the body into the river, turned, and made for the stairs, dredging up another gob of blood as he stumbled off into the darkness.

  2

  By noon, the heavy sun had the city firmly in its grip, an oppressive presence over an auspicious Friday at the overcrowded Mehmediyye Mosque.

  Across Paris, the unrelenting heat wave was suffocating. In the shade of a coffeehouse by the banks of the Seine, it might have been slightly more tolerable, but under the towering dome of the prayer hall, with the midday sun at its most potent and the massive hall filled to capacity, it felt like being in a hammam. Or perhaps Kamal Arslan Agha of the counterterrorism directorate of the sultan’s Tashkeelat-i Hafiye—the secret police—was feeling it more acutely than any of the other supplicants around him. He was in full uniform, which didn’t help. He was also a key player in the events that were scheduled to follow today’s noon prayer. A lot of eyes would be on him.

  With the last rak’at finished, the horde of men rose to their feet and moved to collect their footwear. All around him, the hall reverberated with portent, the shuffling noise amplified by the heat. Kamal caught the eye of his partner, Taymoor Erkun Agha, who had arrived earlier and had been a few rows closer to the pulpit. By the time the slow wave of worshippers reached the main doors, Taymoor had caught up with Kamal.

  “That was painful,” Taymoor said. “This new imam—the man’s a human sleeping pill.”

  “Another late night?” Kamal asked, instantly regretting it.

  Taymoor recoiled slightly with mock indignation. “Not here, brother. Where’s your respect?”

  Kamal gave him a slight roll of the eyes. “Spare me.”

  “All I can say is, thank God for text messaging. How did our parents ever manage to hook up with anyone without it?”

  “I’m pretty sure they didn’t,” Kamal replied.

  “That’s just sad.”

  “But thanks for the inspiring imagery.”

  Taymoor’s boasts about his nocturnal pursuits had become tiresome to Kamal. He’d suffered them ever since the beginning of their partnership within the Hafiye, a partnership that began three years ago, when they were both fresh out of the military academy. But now, with the two young agents’ newly growing notoriety within the service, the boasts had got worse. Both men were unmarried, despite being thirty years old, naturally blessed with handsome physiques that had been further enhanced by years of hard training, and, as officers of the state, highly eligible—a fact that Taymoor was certainly exploiting to the fullest, oblivious to the more conservative, repressive tide that the new sultan had ushered in. Kamal couldn’t conceive of him ever entering into a marriage contract, which was probably a blessing for the aspiring brides of the city. As for Kamal, marriage was something he did aspire to, but it wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon.

  The one woman he wanted above all others was the one he could never have.

  Taymoor gave him a slap on the shoulder and ushered him out. “Come on. Our legions of admirers are waiting.”

  In the large vestibule, the two agents retrieved their boots and their börk headgear—tall tubes of white felt t
hat rose at the front before folding back like a sleeve to below the neck. Even though it was the day of communal prayer and rest, the formal proceedings that were to follow the prayer meant Kamal and his partner had to be in uniform: baggy shalvar trousers, a long-sleeved tunic, and a short-sleeved kaftan with elaborate frogging all the way up the chest, all of it in ominous blacks and grays. On the right collar of the kaftan was the emblem of the Hafiye: three interlocked crescents, each with a small, five-pointed star cradled between its sharp tips. The left collar displayed rank—in Kamal and Taymoor’s case, chaouch komiser, or sergeant inspector—which was confirmed in tattoos on the right arm and leg of each agent, a tradition that dated back several centuries, to the earliest days of the janissaries, when it was both a symbol of brotherhood as well as an aide to identifying corpses after battle. The two men weren’t likely to be caught up in battle anytime soon, but the war they were engaged in, a war of suicide bombers and car bombs, did carry a real risk of putting their tattoos to use.

  They also wore wide belts that held holsters for their standard-issue Galip automatic handguns and loops that housed their khanjar daggers.

  The two men followed the crowd out to the vast rectangular courtyard fronting the mosque. Two floors of semicircular vaulted arcades lined all four sides of the monumental space, which had managed to retain its original name of cour d’honneur in common parlance, even though Ottoman Turkish had, after three hundred years of foreign rule, long since replaced French as the city’s main language.

  The vast compound’s original name, Les Invalides, was of course long gone. Its renaming had posed a dilemma for Mehmed IV, the sultan whose army had conquered the French capital in the summer of 1100.* Besides the magnificent domed chapel at Les Invalides, Paris also boasted the sublime cathedral of Notre-Dame. Mehmed couldn’t put his name to both. In his infinite wisdom, he decided to bestow his name on the former, which became the Mehmediyye—as had Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome after the Papal States had fallen and the pope had been beheaded, but that was acceptable since they were in different cities. Notre-Dame, on the other hand, would have to settle for basking in the splendor of the sultan’s nickname: the conqueror. Shorn of its stained glass windows and other Christian iconography, dressed in domes, and flanked by minarets, it had become the Fatih Mosque.