Empire of Lies

by Raymond Khoury

  Then there were the mirror-image tattoos.

  Ramazan couldn’t help but be intrigued. He’d often been told that he had obsessive traits—by Nisreen, who ribbed him about it often; by his father; and by his brother, back when they were close—and, given the precision involved in his work, such traits weren’t uncommon. His colleagues at the hospital often teased him about the ten-minute ritual he followed each time he put in an intravenous cannula. Whether or not he was obsessive, his eyes kept getting drawn to the tattoos throughout the procedure, which ended up taking almost five hours. Although the man’s chest had been freshly shaved by the nurses, Ramazan couldn’t really see much at all. The man’s chest area was open, and what skin was visible was folded and obscured by the retractor, antiseptic solution, and surgical drape.

  After watching Fonseca stitch the man up, Ramazan started weaning him off the main anesthetic. Ramazan would keep him intubated and heavily drugged, of course. The feeling of having a breathing tube down his throat, the discomfort, and the very nature of being a patient in intensive care would be as unpleasant as the operation itself. It would be hours before he would wake the man up—how long exactly, he couldn’t tell, since each situation was unique. Although there hadn’t been any complications during the surgery, given the mystery patient’s age and condition Ramazan didn’t expect him to be conscious soon, not before at least five or six hours had passed.

  Fonseca left the operating room, leaving the stranger and his recovery in Ramazan’s hands. By the time they wheeled him into the male patients’ intensive care unit, it was late, and Ramazan was exhausted. It was time to go home.

  But he couldn’t leave. Not just yet.

  He couldn’t resist wanting to know more, despite the voice deep inside him that was warning him to stay away.

  He needed to have one last look.

  Ramazan watched calmly as the cardiothoracic nurses hooked the patient up to various monitors and IV drips and looped restraints around his hands so he wouldn’t pull his breathing tube out. Nisreen needed to know that Ramazan would be home even later than he’d earlier assumed. He didn’t want to risk waking her up, so he pulled out his mobile phone and sent her a text message. She replied promptly and said she was going to bed. He replied with a “good night,” and the response was a solitary the texting shorthand for bawsa, meaning a kiss, common across the Ottoman Empire, as opposed to the x symbol used in the Americas, which had a Christian, religious origin. Not the most passionate exchange, but then again he didn’t expect her to be in the best of moods, not after the day’s events. And their marriage had long lost what little passion it did have. At least they were still together.

  He left the ICU and got himself a strong cup of coffee. By the time he came back to the patient’s room, the last of the nurses was leaving. He nodded to her as she passed him, then edged closer to the bed, riding a swell of trepidation.

  The stranger was still unconscious.

  Ramazan just stood there for a long moment, weary and woolly-headed, uncertain about what he was even doing there, the low beeps of the monitors and the gurgle of the breathing pump adding to his trance. Then he snapped out of it and, with hesitant fingers, reached over and pulled down the blanket and the hospital gown to uncover the man’s chest.

  The man had a wide dressing across the middle of his chest where the vertical incision had been made, but some tattoos were visible now on either side and below it.

  Ramazan stared at them, mesmerized. Then he looked over his shoulder, made sure no one was coming in, and pulled out his mobile phone. He took a series of quick pictures of the tattoos. He also took one of the man’s face, for no conscious reason. Then he put away his phone and covered the man up.

  He hovered there a bit longer, studying him, unsure about the hold this stranger had over him. Then he tore himself away, left the room, and made his way home.

  7

  After Taymoor left, Kamal ended up at home, a small top-floor walk-up three blocks east of the Halles Bazaar that was currently swirling in a haze of apple-and-honey-flavored tobacco smoke from a narguileh water pipe, cold raki, carryout pizza—a recent craze imported from the Naples eyalet that was sweeping the city—and bland escapist television.

  While he was never much of a social animal, Kamal hadn’t always been that much of a loner. He lived alone, which was normal, given that he wasn’t married. Mixed cohabitation was, of course, out of the question in Ottoman society, given the strict limitations that tradition imposed on how men and women could interact. Dating wasn’t allowed; unmarried men and women could meet openly only for brief encounters in the company of chaperones and strictly as a prelude to marriage. Not even Murad and his reforms had been able to do much to loosen that. But, of course, human desire was impossible to cage entirely. Men and women found ways to see each other in secret, despite the risks involved. And in those instances, women often found the veil to be a useful ally in helping shroud their movements.

  Beyond the confines of his single lifestyle, things had become more complicated lately, making it harder for Kamal to be around some. Across the various strata of society, people were becoming edgier, more fearful, and more polarized. Now his job was even making some of his closest friends and family palpably less comfortable around him. To many, he was a hero and a protector—more than ever, after the recent arrests—but to others, he was a pariah, even though he was part of the antiterrorist unit and not the fearsome Z Directorate that handled internal security. More often than not, it didn’t bother him too much; he viewed their apprehension about him as misguided paranoia. What did bother him—what was causing him more anguish than he’d ever known—was the fact that the apprehensive group included his brother Ramazan and Ramazan’s wife, Nisreen.

  What did all the adulation in the world matter if those he loved most held him in such contempt?

  They’d stopped inviting him over or even speaking with him weeks ago, after yet another argument had degenerated into hurtful words. He hadn’t seen them or his beloved little nephew and niece for—how long had it been? He couldn’t remember. It was … insane. After all, he was putting his life on the line to protect them, to keep their way of life safe. How could they not see that?

  Taymoor was right. They were in the wrong. Nisreen had chosen her friends poorly. Azmi was a traitor, after all—a member of the White Rose. She ought to have known better. That’s all there was to it.

  They’d come around. They had to.

  And yet … Ramazan and Nisreen—they weren’t fools. Not by any stretch of the imagination. How could they be getting this so wrong?

  As if to taunt him, the evening news came on, and the first image was of the beheadings ceremony that morning. Kamal reached for the remote and switched channels, only to come upon an almost identical report. A third channel yielded the same result. He killed the screen, took a deep pull of his water pipe, and stared out the open French doors. The late-evening sky was awash with swathes of purples and pinks, bathed with a tranquility that seemed oblivious to his malaise.

  It hadn’t always been this way.

  As a child Kamal had known a gentler world. Of course, the cold war with the CRA—the Christian Republic of America—had always been there, but it hadn’t threatened to boil over as it now did. And the great war against Russia had simmered back to a tense stalemate, even though the tsar never missed an opportunity to rattle his tongue about the constant encroachment of Islam onto Orthodox lands, no matter how well Murad V had treated the Slavic people living under his rule in the Balkans.

  But there was peace, and there was prosperity: having long since subjugated their Persian adversaries and conquered Arabia, the Ottomans controlled the largest oil reserves on the planet, and the cheapest to produce. And with a virtual monopoly on the global supply of oil, they had, for almost a century, maintained a firm lid on the ambitions of their enemies.

  Under the previous sultan’s inspired leadership, the empire had thrived. Murad had been ambitiousl
y progressive. A tireless reformer, he championed the social, economic, cultural, and even religious transformation of his empire and only stopped short of political reform. He made cautious but marked progress in spreading education, improving the rights of women and the conditions of the poor, and encouraging the arts. Murad had also overseen the launch of the Internet across the empire, an invention that had originated in an Istanbul university lab and one that the staunchly Puritan Americans were still unwilling to embrace.

  He had set the empire on course for a fairer, brighter future. But it was a tightrope to walk. Relaxing the limitations of free speech, combined with the networking effect of the Internet, had allowed radical new ideas to blossom; Murad had let the genie out of the bottle, and he needed to make sure it didn’t overwhelm him and his rule. He also had to make sure any public debate of these reforms didn’t escalate into civil unrest, since facing off against the reforms and their supporters was an entrenched religious establishment that wasn’t easy to tame.

  For a while, Murad managed to maintain order and stability and safeguard his empire’s hayba—its stature and prestige—without having to resort to excessive coercion. But the reform tightrope proved to be trickier far from the capital, in a remote corner of the empire: the Diriyah eyalet of the Arabian peninsula.

  There, long-simmering Islamist resentment boiled over into outright rebellion.

  The resentment had its roots three centuries earlier, when Saud ibn Muhammad ibn Muqrin, the local emir of Al Diriyah, became a vocal critic of the Ottomans who had conquered his lands. He considered Mehmed IV, who was sultan at the time, unworthy of his position as caliph—the leader of the world’s Muslims and defender of the faith. After all, most Ottomans didn’t even speak Arabic, the language of the holy Koran, and many elements of their culture and daily life were at odds with the strict teachings of orthodox Islam. Furthermore, no sultan had ever made the hajj pilgrimage, which was every Muslim’s sacred duty. Saud set about to liberate his homeland from Ottoman control and wipe out what he perceived as the Ottomans’ heretical practices. The sultan, who considered himself the shadow of God on earth, was infuriated. Fresh from his conquest of Vienna, Rome, and the rest of western Europe, he sent his Egyptian vassals in, took control of the peninsula, and had Saud and several of his Salafi scholars, most notably a preacher by the name of Abd al-Wahhab, publicly berated and humiliated before they were put to the sword.

  Three hundred years later, Saud’s ideas resurfaced with a vengeance. Abd al-Wahhab’s descendants rose up against Murad’s reforms, angrily believing they distanced the empire from its Islamic roots, only this time their tactics were different. Armed attackers and suicide bombers began to strike random targets across the empire. Then they hit Istanbul itself, hijacking a commercial airliner and crashing it into the Topkapi Palace.

  The sultan had been out on an unannounced hunting trip that morning, but over two hundred of his subjects were killed.

  Murad responded ferociously. As his ancestor had done, he sent in another Egyptian force, this time supported by air strikes and aerial drones, to subjugate the rebels. The troops met stiff resistance, countless civilians were killed, and the campaign was trumpeted as a success, even though the fanatics’ scattershot attacks never stopped.

  The plane strike also had a ripple effect in a quiet home in Paris. It was there that Kamal, fresh out of school at eighteen, decided to enroll in the military academy at Poitiers and not, following his older brother, the university.

  He’d never been particularly academic. His interest in life was more visceral, and the idea of defending his family and fellow countrymen was too strong to resist. But by the time he graduated and joined the Hafiye’s counterterrorism directorate, everything had changed.

  After forty years of dignified rule, Murad V succumbed to a brain aneurysm at the age of seventy-one.

  Abdülhamid III, the petulant tyrant who grabbed the throne as his successor, turned out to be everything his father was not.

  And in an unfortunate synchronicity of terrible luck for the empire, the Americans’ energy revolution took hold, choking the life out of the Ottomans’ golden goose and gutting their economy almost overnight.

  It galled Kamal that a people the Ottomans had long derided for being backwardly racist—the CRA was exclusively Christian and exclusively white; no one else was allowed in—had pulled the economic rug right out from under them. But the truth was that the Americans’ alternative to oil shouldn’t have hit the Ottomans as hard as it did. After all, their elected monarch, Elijah Huntington, had announced his intentions publicly long before they actually managed to make it happen.

  A decade earlier, Huntington had decided that his people couldn’t, and wouldn’t, remain reliant on a foreign empire—much less a Muslim one—for their energy needs. He proclaimed that America had to come up with an alternative, one they could produce themselves. He also decreed that it shouldn’t harm the environment. His vision wasn’t just shaped by his strategic foresight; it was also driven by his faith. As a devoted servant of Christ and a passionate follower of the long-standing Puritan tradition that guided his rule, he fervently believed that doing everything in his power to protect the planet—God’s creation—was his sacred duty.

  Huntington’s fiery speeches galvanized public opinion; public officials and big business, despite fierce lobbying by the coal and auto industries, had no choice but to follow suit. The best minds up and down the Americas went to work, and in less than a decade they turned his vision of clean energy into reality: wind farms, ocean-wave generators, and solar power became the primary sources of energy across the Christian nation. While the Ottoman Empire obstinately clung to its reliance on fossil fuels, the Americans, with an eye on weakening their Muslim rivals, aggressively pushed the spread of their new technologies in the Far East and Africa, whose inhabitants happily joined in the revolution.

  The price of oil—the empire’s main source of revenue—collapsed, dropping from a high of well over a hundred kurush to its present level of ten.

  As a consequence, the empire started to hurt. Badly.

  In such a time of crisis, the Ottomans would have benefited from the stewardship of a wise and noble leader, someone with a calm temperament and a reasoned mind. Someone like Murad V. But he was now gone, and Abdülhamid III was anything but calm and reasoned.

  The new sultan was forty-six when he seized power after his father’s death. He had not been chosen for rule, nor was he the sultan’s eldest son. Ottoman imperial succession still followed a centuries-old tradition of having no appointed heir to the throne. The many sons of the sultan, brothers and half-brothers born in the harem to a multitude of Christian slaves who were never wed to the monarch and who were raised by these slaves in the palace, would have to fight for the throne. Whoever emerged victorious would then have his rivals killed—siblings, cousins, uncles, any male with a potential claim to the throne. This “law of fratricide” ensured that only the most ruthless of princes acceded to power.

  Unfortunately for the empire, Abdülhamid had little to offer beyond a narcissistic craving for power. Guided by a monstrous ego, a fiery temper, and a rigid, incurious mind, he was far from qualified to deal with the economic tsunami caused by Huntington’s vision.

  With the empire’s currency collapsing and its economy buckling under severe strain, Abdülhamid and his cabinet of self-serving sycophants put into place a series of measures that hit hard. Taxes were raised, although, much to the distaste of the populace, the askeri—the privileged ruling class of clergy, military, and state officials—were still exempt. Social services, particularly for schooling and medical care, were caught in a spiral of cuts. Inflation rose. Imperial public spending shrank, and the little that remained was earmarked for Istanbul, seat of the sultan, and its surroundings, where it was eaten away by the inflated price-rigging of the sultan’s cronies.

  Unrest, inevitably, began to stir.

  Some of it manifested physically: demon
strations and riots, which were swiftly shut down by the authorities using violence and mass arrests.

  A different reaction to the economic crisis was far more insidious and harder to stifle: the questioning of absolute rule.

  Galvanized by the widespread discontent, intellectuals across the empire—and nowhere more so than at the far reaches of the empire, in the ancient capital of arts and culture of Paris—began to explore alternatives to the centuries-old status quo. The whispers got louder. Radical ideas weren’t just being aired in private discussions anymore; previously unthinkable questions were finding their way into print and even into radio and television broadcasts.

  The state hit back.

  Mass surveillance, aided and abetted by the state’s mandatory “social credit system,” was expanded indiscriminately. Television and radio stations were nationalized and placed under the control of the Supreme Council for Radio and Television. Newspapers that questioned the state’s actions were vilified and purged of their best reporters before ending up under the stewardship of government insiders. Countless university professors and lawyers lost their jobs.

  Back when Kamal was enrolled at the academy in Poitiers, those who were brave enough to risk criticizing the Divan or the ruling elite could expect a hefty fine, a set of lashings, or a short prison sentence. Those days were long gone. The prisons were filled with “enemies of the state” whose families were offered no information since all charges under statute 275 of the Ottoman Criminal Code, the one dealing with treason, were classified.

  Kamal was right in the thick of it. As a patriotic, faithful subject of the sultan, his duty was to protect the state from all threats, and the state was certainly under threat. He knew that extreme measures were called for. But a growing number of people whose opinions he valued—Nisreen and his brother at their forefront—were claiming otherwise. For them, these extreme measures were nothing more than a cynical ploy; Abdülhamid and his corrupt viziers were using the specter of Islamic terrorism to blur the lines between extremism and dissent, allowing them to brand anything that threatened their rule as “ideological subversion” and treason.