Empire of Lies

by Raymond Khoury

  Ramazan turned to his wife, not knowing what to say.

  Nisreen looked stupefied, her brain visibly struggling to process every word, every nuance of what she’d just heard. Ramazan had never seen her so profoundly unsettled. He felt the same.

  He glanced at his watch and then looked at her. She understood.

  He knew what she was thinking. He could have sat there for hours, too, listening to the mystery man, asking him questions about this strange alternative world he claimed to have lived in, but he knew they didn’t have that luxury. They were running down the clock on the man’s state of consciousness, and, besides, there was the hospital staff and a potential interruption to consider.

  It was the moment of truth. It was time to ask the key question.

  He checked the IV drips, tweaked them gently, and then turned to the tattooed man.

  “Your excellency,” he asked, “what you say is fascinating beyond compare. But tell me, how is it that you are able to do these things?” He sucked in a deep breath, then added, “How are you able to travel across time?”

  25

  Kamal had been irritable even before setting foot inside the Hafiye compound that morning.

  He didn’t head up to his desk. Instead, he cut through the atrium and across to the Z Directorate to find the two agents he still hadn’t heard back from.

  Banna and Goskun weren’t at their desks, which only fueled his irritation.

  He left them another message and stormed off, his veins flowing with fire. Today would not be a good day for any of the persons of interest who were on his and Taymoor’s radar.

  He didn’t make it to his desk. The desk sergeant informed him of something more urgent that required his presence.

  The bashafiye wanted to see him.

  Kamal had never had a one-on-one meeting with the commander before. He’d never been to his office. He hadn’t even been on that floor of the building. To his knowledge, very few agents had. The bashafiye never summoned mere agents to his inner sanctum. This had to be very, very serious.

  Kamal could think of two reasons for his being called there: one good, the other not. He hoped it wasn’t the latter.

  After being ushered through by the commander’s private secretary, Kamal poked his head through the tall carved door. “You asked for me, Huseyin Pasha?”

  Huseyin Celaleddin Pasha, the bashafiye—the head of the Paris division of the secret police—was studying some paperwork at his desk. He looked up and waved Kamal in.

  “Yes, yes, come in. Have a seat.” He gestured vaguely at the armchairs facing him.

  The office, as befitting the city’s most powerful law enforcement officer, was on the top floor of one of the modern additions to the old fortress. It was large enough to house a plush divan area that could comfortably seat a dozen men and had a commanding view of the ancient turrets and, beyond, the grand domes and minarets of the city’s main mosques, visible even through the partially angled blinds that blunted the intrusive morning sun. Celaleddin was tall and lean, which was unusual for a member of the askeri. The elite ruling class of clergy, military, and state officials was for the most part still dismissive of the staggering body of scientific evidence concerning the health risks of obesity. They still considered bulging bellies and plump limbs to be proud signs of prosperity.

  The expansive carved mahogany surface of his desk was as ruthlessly lean and precise as he was, cluttered by nothing more than a computer screen and keyboard, a mobile phone, a pen, and the printouts he had been perusing, which he now neatly arranged into a tidy pile and set down before him.

  The commander tilted his head upward, adopting his customary, probing pose and accentuating the unsettling effect of his deep-set, cavernous eyes. “Busy?” he asked. “I imagine you’re more fired up than ever after Friday’s ceremony.”

  “No rest for the vigilant, sir,” Kamal replied, channeling Taymoor’s expression.

  “Good.” The man studied him for a second. “I looked for you after it concluded, you know. They said you’d been called away.”

  “My profuse apologies, pasha. I didn’t know.”

  “The bey wanted to meet you.”

  “The bey?”

  “Oh, yes. He’s very grateful, as you can imagine. What you did, you and Taymoor. His daughter’s wedding … you saved us from a major, major disaster.”

  “I’m just glad we were able to stop them.”

  “There’s talk of you two getting the Nişan-i İftihar,” he said, referring to the Order of Glory, one of the highest awards an Ottoman officer could get.

  Kamal tilted his head in a small bow. “It would be a huge honor.”

  “And fully deserved. As would be your promotion to mulasim komiser. You’d be our youngest ever. How does that sound?”

  So the rumors were true. Lieutenant inspector. He bowed again. “I am most humbled, my pasha.”

  The tall man paused for a moment, then leaned in. “Tell me, Kamal. How are things with your family?”

  There it was. The question still caught Kamal off guard, but he managed to brush it off. “Fine. It’s very kind of you to ask.” He hesitated, then decided to say it anyway. “Why do you ask?”

  “You’ve been making inquiries about someone we arrested recently,” the bashafiye replied. “Someone I believe your sister-in-law has taken an interest in?”

  So that’s what this was really about.

  Kamal felt a ripple of concern. “His wife asked for her help in finding out what happened to him.”

  “Indeed. And your sister-in-law—she’s quite a strong-willed woman, isn’t she? Tenacious, shall we say?”

  “That she is.”

  The commander steepled his hands and drummed his index fingers against each other as he mulled over his next words. “Look, I know how it can be with family. What’s happening out there, the things we have to do … it’s not easy. And it’s causing problems for many of us. What you’re going through is by no means unique. But at some point, we all have to put our foot down and remind people, even those closest to us, that we’re doing this for them. We’re protecting their way of life, even if that means we sometimes have to do things we don’t enjoy. Or do things that they may not agree with. They need to understand that we’re the ones faced with making these tough decisions—not them. And they should be grateful for it.” He paused and watched Kamal, as if waiting to see if his message had got through.

  Kamal just said, “Yes, sir.”

  “This one might be particularly difficult for you. Given her interest in him.”

  “How so?”

  “Sinasi passed away last night. In his jail cell.” The commander’s tone was flat, unburdened by the slightest hint of emotion.

  His words jolted Kamal. “He’s dead? How?”

  “The coroner says it looks like a heart attack. Probably brought about by the stress of his guilt. It sounds like the man couldn’t handle what he’d got himself into. He confessed to being part of the White Rose.”

  A surge of emotion swept through Kamal. A heart attack while in custody? It wasn’t the first time that had happened at the Citadel, although on the occasion he’d heard about it, it was in a case involving a hardened terrorist suspect and had happened after intense interrogation. But his focus shifted quickly back to Nisreen. Her asking about a White Rose conspirator wasn’t good. A far deeper fear had him in its grip: could Nisreen herself have joined them?

  As if reading into his silent angst, Celaleddin added, “It’s very tragic, of course. But given his guilt, the outcome would have ultimately been the same for him.” The commander waved his hand sideways, dismissively. “In the long run, any agitation concerning this man’s unfortunate death will settle down and pass; we know that. It always does. But over the next few days, once the news gets out, we’re going to have to contain any”—he paused—“unpleasantness that might arise.” His cavernous eyes took on a subtle, heightened intensity. “I trust your sister-in-law won’t be a burden to us
on this matter. It could be dangerous for her. Especially when her interest in him raises its own questions.”

  His heart was now kicking furiously against his rib cage, as if it were trapped in a furnace. He shook his head. “She won’t, sir.”

  “Good. Because there’s only so much we can be expected to tolerate—and only so much leeway we can bestow, even on the sister-in-law of an illustrious hero. Do we understand each other?”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  The tall man studied Kamal for a beat, then nodded. “That’ll be all.”

  As he exited the commander’s office and headed for the elevators, Kamal could feel his temples throbbing. It was worse than he’d feared. Nisreen was on their radar.

  He needed to get to the bottom of it. Which was going to be much more difficult now that Sinasi was dead. Trouble was brewing; he could feel it. He had to do something.

  He pulled out his phone; glanced around furtively, more as a reflex than out of any real sense of threat; and dialed his brother’s phone. The call rang through until Ramazan’s voice mail picked up.

  “It’s Kamal. We need to talk. Give me a call back, would you?” He hesitated, then added, “I really do need to speak with you. Please call me.”

  * * *

  Two levels underground, not too far from where Kamal was standing, an analyst in the data analysis section of the Caves stared curiously at the report on his screen.

  Like all the other reports he and several dozen of his colleagues spent their shifts analyzing, it had originated at the Comprehensive Imperial Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, where servers conducted extensive data mining and applied advanced analytics to crunch the bulk data that was streaming in from all kinds of sources. Anything deemed suspect or threatening was forwarded on to the Cave for further—human—analysis.

  The computers went far beyond keyword scans and pattern-link analysis of known subjects and scattered bits of information. Voice recognition had reached a level of sophistication whereby the center’s algorithms could now cross-check digital data with transcripts of phone calls and wiretaps to seek out suspicious behavior and anticipate threatening intent. Over ten thousand target packages were forwarded to the analysis center every month. Some of these resulted in leads to law enforcement authorities such as the Hafiye, while the rest—the majority—was just human metadata that sank into a state of perpetual analysis limbo.

  In this case, the analyst was more intrigued than alarmed. The report in question, which had originated in a low-level surveillance order, was unusual. It was a link analysis between a batch of web searches and the transcript of a conversation that had taken place the night before at a residential address in Paris. Dynamite, detonators, Al Jazira and Al Sham, war, Americans, “Worried about what you’ve got yourself into”—these words and others had been enough to flag the conversation, in and of themselves. Once combined with the stress-analysis result of the voices engaged in the recorded conversation and the fact that one of the subjects was currently a person of interest, the data batch was elevated to an actionable level. Which was why it had landed in the analyst’s in-box folder with an orange—medium-level—threat rating.

  The analyst was used to dissecting transcripts and data dumps that appeared to be, and ended up being, nothing more than angry domestic rants or harmless nonsensical ramblings about sensitive subjects. On more than one occasion, conversations between people working in publishing or in film and television were red-flagged because of the fictional ideas they were exploring. People were feeling increasingly polarized about the unrest rippling across the empire and being more vocal when they assumed they weren’t being monitored. This report, however, felt different. It was hard to dismiss it that easily.

  Its overview had snared the analyst’s attention enough for him to pull up the transcript of the conversation and read it in its entirety.

  The transcript left him perplexed.

  Rereading it didn’t change that first impression. He decided to listen to the source material. He pulled up the audio file, put on his earphones, and hit the play button, scribbling notes as he listened to the two subjects, a married couple.

  Their voices didn’t sound unbalanced. It didn’t sound as if they were messing around and having a laugh or drunk or under the influence of some other banned substance. They sounded levelheaded and rational, despite the elevated stress levels in their readings.

  He thought about dismissing the report, but something about it just wouldn’t let him do that. He’d listened to enough conversations and read enough transcripts to have honed a strong sense of the potential consequence, or lack of one, in the reports that came through his system. This one, he felt, merited further examination.

  The anesthesiologist and his wife clearly believed it. The question was whether the source of the story was reliable. Was this tattooed man a creative raconteur who was just having fun and messing with his doctor’s mind? Was this nothing more than a very artful deception?

  He tapped his keyboard and checked the primary subject’s file. He noted the hospital where the man worked. He then peeked into the hospital records and pulled up its operating-room scheduling records. Sure enough, the primary subject was a frequent collaborator of the surgeon he had mentioned in the recorded conversation, Fonseca. And one of the procedures they had carried out two days earlier was on a patient who was only listed as an “unidentified male walk-in.” The man had had heart surgery and was still at the hospital, in its intensive care unit. All of which matched what the man had discussed with his wife.

  Weird.

  He debated what to do about it. On the one hand, it sounded like an elaborate prank, a wild tale, a delusion. Some kind of game, perhaps, or a lie to cover some sordid misdeed—he’d heard some pretty unusual things said between people, even, or perhaps especially, between married couples. On the other hand, it had an ineffable and yet intense ring of candor about it. His gut was telling him that. It was also telling him something else: that sending it upstream would probably usher some hassle into his life.

  Hassle or not, he didn’t have much of a choice. He couldn’t risk not reporting it. If it turned out to be something bad and if they discovered he’d missed it or chosen to disregard it, he’d have more than just hassle to contend with.

  He picked up his phone and pressed his supervisor’s number.

  “My bey,” he told him, “forgive the intrusion, but I’ve got something I feel you should look at.”

  26

  “It’s an incantation,” the tattooed man said. “A spell.”

  Standing by the bed in the windowless room at the hospital, Ramazan glanced at his wife, his mouth agape. “A spell?”

  “My prisoner found it, in Palmyra.” He spoke in a slow tone, the semiconscious haze he was under making his words stumble out in a slight slur. “In an old temple. Carved into the wall. I made him give it to me…” His face tightened under a disturbing frown. “Then I killed him. To make sure. No one else knows.”

  Feeling his pulse throbbing inside his ears, Ramazan asked, “How does it work?”

  “It’s Palmyrene. Just … words.”

  “So you just say these words and you … you travel across time?”

  “There’s only one rule. You can’t travel to a time when you already exist. It won’t work. And it’s … it’s…” The man went quiet as his face clouded with discomfort, and his eyes roamed the room in a wider arc than before.

  Ramazan’s pulse quickened as worry flushed through him. Was the man getting too conscious? Was he having reservations about the information he was divulging? Moving fast, Ramazan’s hand reached across to the IV lines and slightly increased the flow of the drugs that were keeping his patient at the edge of full consciousness. He flicked a quick look at Nisreen, whose expression was also gripped with uncertainty and worry, then turned back to the man in the bed.

  “Something this remarkable can’t be simple, of course,” Ramazan cajoled him. “And yet you mastered it
.”

  The man’s eyes roamed the ceiling for a moment, then settled back on Ramazan. “Yes,” he said, his voice lower than before.

  “Please explain,” Ramazan prompted him.

  “You say the words and put in the number of days—moons, yes, the number of moons—that you want to travel. In a specific place, in the incantation … and, voilà.” The frown turned into a slanted half smile. “Without clothes. Naked.”

  Ramazan was struggling to stay focused. Too many questions were crowding his mind—then he noticed the man’s eyes turn to him and stare, his brow furrowing with consternation.

  “Who are you, again?” he mumbled.

  He was gaining consciousness. His gaze sharpened, suffused with more clarity than before, his expression taking on a hint of the menace he had shown before the surgery. “What day is this? Where am I?”

  He turned his head slowly, as if drawn to something he remembered. To Nisreen.