Empire of Lies

by Raymond Khoury

  “I’m not spying on you,” she shot back. “I’m worried. About you. About us. If I saw that, you think they didn’t, too?”

  “They?”

  “You know they watch everything. Did you forget that I’m on their watch list? You don’t think they see every keystroke that’s typed on this computer?”

  He stumbled for words, but before he could formulate an answer, she pressed on.

  “What have you got yourself into?”

  He stared at her, a crippling dread nailing him in place. “I haven’t got myself into anything.”

  Her anger flared through. “Don’t give me that. And don’t be naïve. You’re putting us at risk. All of us.” She was steaming, her fierce glare unrelenting. “I need to know. Now.”

  He let out a long, weary exhale, and nodded slowly. In a way, it was a relief. A huge, welcome relief. He wasn’t sure he could handle something this momentous on his own. It had come out of nowhere to bear down on him like a gargantuan weight, something so big and so unheard of that it would inevitably, he worried, drown him.

  “Sit down,” he said, softly. “You’re going to need to sit down.”

  And then he told her.

  Everything.

  * * *

  Ramazan and Nisreen’s words weren’t confined to their home.

  What they didn’t know and what they wouldn’t have suspected was that the built-in microphone on their home computer, its embedded webcam, and the voice-activated speaker unit in their kitchen had all been remotely activated that morning.

  Which was why nothing prevented their words from being snatched up the second they left their mouths and funneled out of the city almost instantly to the Comprehensive Imperial Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center’s server banks, where rapacious algorithms would chew them over in ever-more inventive ways before spitting out their reports.

  Reports that, in many cases, could devastate a life within hours.

  22

  Curled up in bed in his top-floor walk-up, Kamal was waging another losing battle against insomnia.

  He was still heavy-headed from the raki and the narguileh that had kept him company for hours, both before and after Leyla had paid him another impromptu late-night visit. He wasn’t pleased with himself—not for allowing her in, not for ravaging her with such ferocity, even though he knew she enjoyed it more that way, and not for crassly hustling her out of his apartment after they were done.

  Two separate conversations from that day were still hounding him, dueling voices pulling him apart.

  He could still hear Taymoor’s words, spoken in the parking lot at the Hafiye earlier that evening, after he’d told Taymoor what Nisreen had said about the missing playwright.

  “You, me, a lot of the people in this city,” Taymoor had said, “we can handle new ideas. Our education protects us. But the rest, the simple folk out there in the villages and farmlands, they can be easily seduced by lies. And they’re an army. A huge, dormant, volatile army, one that’s easily awakened—and easily manipulated. We have to protect them from themselves.”

  “With bullying and intimidation?” Kamal had replied.

  “We’re protecting the system. A system God bequeathed us that is based on wisdom and reason and that works. You know that and I know that, because we know what the alternative is. Chaos. Or did you forget what we studied at the academy?”

  “Of course not.”

  “People like your playwright are easily seduced by this delusion that men can be governed and yet be free,” Taymoor had argued. “But history’s shown us repeatedly that that’s a fallacy. We’re just too selfish and greedy. It’s human nature. We need limits. We need fear to protect us from our own instincts, because the kind of freedom they’re talking about just allows corruption and decadence to creep in, just like it did in Greece and in Rome. Is that what you want for us? To bring about our downfall?”

  Then Nisreen’s words would storm back in and smother Taymoor’s arguments. He knew she wasn’t prone to hyperbole or to being swept up in nonsensical theories. Which was why her words were so hard to ignore, despite Taymoor’s rant.

  What is this mysterious White Rose that everyone is part of all of a sudden? What do you really know about it?

  What did he really know about it, beyond what little the Z Directorate had shared?

  You need to wake up, Kamal.

  Seeing her again had hit him hard. Twice, in the same day, after the painful self-imposed exile that had lasted forever.

  It was brutal. Everything he missed, the memories of being with her, Ramazan, and the kids, all those magical moments he yearned for, came hurtling back into view, only to be snatched away again.

  God, how he missed them. All of them.

  He needed to get them back into his life.

  * * *

  Across the river, on the small island of Île de la Cité, the halls of the intensive care unit at the Hurrem Sultan Külliye were quiet that night.

  Nowhere was quieter than room 7, where, aside from occasional gentle beeps from a monitor, nothing stirred.

  Ayman Rasheed was heavily sedated and sleeping soundly.

  His mind, however, wasn’t at rest. Questions and more questions had stoked it into exploring moments he hadn’t thought about in years. They were making him relive all kinds of long-lost experiences, from the most visceral to the most contemplative, which is what was presently going through his mind: the months in Istanbul, at the library, immersed in books, and the long walks along the Bosphorus, at dawn or late at night, pondering, strategizing.

  Imagining how he’d make the impossible possible.

  * * *

  Rasheed’s third area of study was even more of a challenge: identifying and finding ways to neutralize any eventual threats to the empire.

  This wasn’t about orchestrating the fall and subjugation of Christian Europe. It probably wouldn’t even affect events during his lifetime. But he felt a duty to do everything he could to ensure the empire’s survival well into the future—a future he would be able to visit at will to enjoy the fruits of his efforts, if he succeeded.

  He began by trying to understand what had led to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. After the failure to take Vienna, the Ottomans were pushed back by the Habsburgs, whose counterattacks allowed them to retake lands that had been lost for centuries. This dramatically shrank the empire’s territory, but that was only the beginning of the bigger problems facing the Ottomans because it was happening at the same time that Europe—Christian Europe—was evolving and innovating in many key ways. Industrialization, progress in education, advances in military weaponry and tactics—these were areas where the Ottomans had fallen behind, clinging stubbornly to their past and held back by religious and intellectual conservatism that resisted novelty, despised original thought, and mistrusted science.

  An early example of this was the printing press. Denounced as “the devil’s invention” by the Islamic clergy, it arrived in Istanbul more than fifty years after it had been invented by Gutenberg in 1440, and only because the Jews brought it with them after being kicked out of Spain in 1492. The sultan, Bayezid II, sent his navy to evacuate them and invited them to resettle across his empire. Even then, because of the clergy’s resistance, Muslims were not allowed to make use of the printing press until the eighteenth century. Such reactionary, regressive attitudes to progress, more than anything, led to the empire’s demise. It struggled to keep up and then fell apart as it half-heartedly tried to figure out how to adapt to this rapidly evolving world.

  This was something Rasheed would need to fix. In his world, the Ottoman Empire wouldn’t be struggling to follow Europe’s lead. It would be the leader.

  The deeper he dug, the more Rasheed came to realize that, at the core of it all, the single biggest threat to the empire would be the human mind. At the time of his intervention, European thought would be in a crucial state of flux, evolving from a subjugated acceptance of autocratic rule to a yearning for freedom.
In that context, he began to focus on the Enlightenment, and—in many ways an extension of it—the revolutions in France and America and, with those uprisings, the spread of liberalist and republican thinking.

  The philosophical seeds of the Enlightenment would have already been sown by the time of the siege of Vienna, but the Enlightenment’s main thrust would not have yet occurred. He would need to tackle that head-on, since many of the movement’s ideals, like individual liberty, constitutional government, and the separation of state and church, were at odds with the basis of a caliphate. Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz—some of their work would already be out there by the time he arrived, and he would need to have them killed to snuff out their work. Other central figures of the Enlightenment would either be infants or would not have been born yet at the time he would arrive. He would need to wipe them out before their dangerous ideas could sprout, even though he realized they might turn out to be harmless, given the entirely different reality in which they would grow up. Regardless, names like Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Beccaria, Hume, Kant, and Smith were firmly in his crosshairs. He would have assassins kill them in infancy. He would see to it that books like the Two Treatises of Government and the Encyclopédie, the most influential publications of the Enlightenment, would never come into being.

  Of course, he knew other thinkers might rise in their place. The key was to identify them as early as possible and eliminate them, and to create an environment that wasn’t conducive to such thoughts in the first place.

  By smothering the ideas of the Enlightenment, he would defuse a potential ticking bomb for the empire. Even if the fix wasn’t permanent, it would at least buy time for the Ottoman Empire to grow, prosper, and settle into its new expanse. Without the spreading of revolutionary ideas, it would be easier to rule a conquered Europe. There would be no French Revolution, no guillotine for the monarch, no questioning of imperial rule and divine right. The ripples of his disruption of history would be felt far beyond the caliphate’s shores, precisely because it would happen at the time when ideals of freedom and human rights were just starting to take hold.

  Would England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 still take place, or would the Ottoman invasion divert the attention of William of Orange to defending his Dutch territories? With the main thinkers of the Enlightenment snuffed out before they could even pen their revolutionary ideals, would the American Revolution still happen? And if it did happen, would the British be so preoccupied by what the Ottomans were doing in Europe that they would let their colonies go without a fight, or would the revolution make them want to hang on to the colonies even more?

  The very notion that his act would be so hugely disruptive and far-reaching supercharged Rasheed’s excitement, particularly when it came to America. He obviously couldn’t foretell the effects of his intervention on these great historical cataclysms, and he was very conscious of the fact that, at some point in the future, the human instinct for freedom would still inevitably threaten his caliphate. To head it off, he’d need to figure out how to strike a balance between modernity and Islamic rule—which, by definition, couldn’t allow the separation of mosque and state—that would ensure the empire’s longevity. For that, he delved into the works of groundbreaking Islamic modernists such as Rifaa al-Tahtawi and Al-Afghani and tried to imagine an empire that espoused multiethnicity, culture, and modernity but, unlike the Baathist movement in the Iraq he grew up in, didn’t belittle the importance of religion.

  It wasn’t an impossible task. Although no one in the twentieth century had managed it, it had happened under several sultans and, long before that, in the days of the Convivencia in Islamic Spain.

  Although this part of his work dealt with the empire’s distant future, he still needed to research it fully before embarking on his journey. Once he did, he would never be able to come back and do further reading. By then, these sources of knowledge would be gone, since everything would—he hoped—be different.

  Weeks stretched into months as he read, mulled, scribbled, and plotted, his thoughts filling several notebooks.

  There were so many names and dates for him to remember, so many ideas and strategies, so many technical specifications. He would soon be ready, but he’d need to remember all this information, which was possibly the most daunting task of all, given that he couldn’t take anything physical back with him: no books, no notes, not even a single sheet of paper.

  He would have to rely on his memory—or so he thought, until one night, while sitting at a café near Taksim Square, he noticed a beefed-up man in tight jeans and crew cut who was chatting a bit too amiably with two similarly well-built men.

  It wasn’t the fact that he was—in Rasheed’s eyes—undoubtedly gay that caught his attention.

  It was his arms.

  They were strong. Sculpted.

  And they had paragraphs of words and all kinds of imagery tattooed across their taut, hairless skin.

  The final piece of the puzzle had fallen into place.

  It wouldn’t be long now. He would soon be ready to go.

  He already had that part of his plan mapped out.

  Once he was ready, he’d visit the Topkapi Palace, posing as a tourist. He’d find a hiding spot and stay behind after its gates were closed to the public. Then, at the right hour, in the middle of the night, he’d make his way to the imperial bedchamber, where it would all begin.

  The sultan, and history, were waiting.

  23

  It ended up being a sleepless night for Nisreen and Ramazan.

  How could it not? There was so much to discuss, to explore, to bat around.

  At first, Nisreen couldn’t accept it as fact. Her reaction went from anger, to incredulity, to thinking Ramazan was spouting some wild tale to hide something bad that he was involved in, then back to disbelief, although with a growing undercurrent of fear.

  They mulled and debated and pulled it apart for hours. By the end of their discussion, after they had moved into the bedroom, Nisreen with her back against the headboard, Ramazan reclining in an armchair that faced the bed across from her, they were both utterly drained in body and mind.

  After a long silence, Ramazan said, “So where do we go from here?”

  “It’s like you said. If he’s faking it … why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Nisreen steepled her fingers in front of her mouth and shut her eyes, thinking. “But if it’s true … if he’s not a pathological liar…” She reset her fierce gaze on her husband. “He didn’t say how he does it? How he travels through time?”

  “I was going to ask him tonight, but Fonseca interrupted me and I couldn’t.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “Can you imagine?”

  “What?”

  “If it’s true … can you imagine what one could do with that kind of knowledge? With that power?”

  Ramazan gave her a rueful shake of the head. “It’s limitless.” The enormity of what he’d got himself into seemed to suddenly sink in. “What have I done? If anyone finds out…”

  “No one needs to find out. And besides, we don’t know if he’s telling the truth. But if he is … it’s got to be something he can pass on. To us. Something you and I could try.”

  Ramazan snapped forward in surprise. “You’d want to try it out?”

  “Wouldn’t you? I mean, if it’s safe—who wouldn’t? Besides, how else can we be sure he’s not faking it?”

  Ramazan shook his head. “This is insane.”

  “He says he came from another world, right? Another version of history. Another 1438.”*

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what was his 1438 like? Don’t you want to know? What was the world he left behind like?”

  “He didn’t say much about it beyond the war he was in.”

  “A big war in the east, right?”

  “He called them Iraq and Syria, which I think mean Al Jazira and Al Sham.”

  “A war that was started by the Americans,” sh
e said, her tone questioning. “But then he did say one crucial thing. That the empire—our empire—didn’t exist anymore.”

  “Yes,” Ramazan confirmed. “He said it got weaker after they failed at Vienna; then it broke up, and other powers took its place.”

  “Which means that world, his world, had three hundred years of a very different history.” She paused. “If that’s true … I want to know what that world was like.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Of course,” Nisreen insisted. “I want to know how it was different. And why he wanted to change it. Don’t you see? That’s how the world was supposed to be.”

  “Assuming no one else had gone back and changed things before he did.”

  She thought about it. “Maybe. But I still want to know if his world was better or worse than ours.”

  “He was caught up in a big war.”

  “We’ve had wars. And unless you haven’t noticed, we’re in the thick of one right now. A worse kind of war. A silent one. A war where anything we say can get us killed by our own people. Don’t you want to know if there was a better world out there?”

  “Maybe we should leave it alone. This talk of another world is crazy.”

  Nisreen studied him. “Are you happy with the way things are?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you happy with how our lives have changed these last few years?”

  Ramazan shrugged. “Well, if you’re talking about you and me and the kids, and—”

  “I’m talking about the world Tarek and Noor are growing up in. A world that corrupts everyone, that turns one brother against another, against family—a world that sucks the sense and decency out of people. If there was a better version of the world out there, don’t you want to know about it?”

  Ramazan knew full well whom she was referring to, and he felt a tinge of jealousy. As much as he loved his brother, he was always aware of how Nisreen and others like her were drawn to him. Before, of course. Before the world had shifted unexpectedly under them. Before his brother had fallen from grace.