Empire of Lies

by Raymond Khoury

  The fatigue and the drugs were toying with his mind, and worries were pulling him in all kinds of directions. They’re after the incantation. They want it. He knew what they were capable of, and he knew they’d end up getting it. He also knew he could escape at any time by simply uttering that sequence of words, but he suddenly realized that if they knew what he was capable of, they might gag him so he wouldn’t be able to use the spell to escape. Then they might drug him. They might force him to write it down.

  Whichever way he looked at it, it was a disaster. His mind was caught in a tempest of panic, and a fierce, stubborn survival instinct was battling to find him a way out. They were going to take him away. They were going to get it out of him, and he couldn’t let that happen. At any price. He had to do something, and he had to do it now. He had no choice. He had to make his move, immediately, before it was too late. He had to get the hell out of there while he still could, disappear, and go home and wait until he was fully recovered before coming back to clean up this mess. Starting with the surgeon and the other conniving ferret he was working with. He’d get his revenge on them. But that would wait.

  His eyes narrowed and flickered back and forth across the room to take stock of everyone’s position while Fonseca sutured the cut from the drain.

  When he was finished, the surgeon turned to the agents.

  “All done?” the agent with the pockmarked face asked.

  Fonseca nodded grudgingly. “I still think this is a mistake. You’re putting his recovery at risk.”

  “If anything bad happens, we’ll call you.” He turned to the nurse. “Let’s get a wheelchair in here and we’ll be on our way.”

  Rasheed shut his eyes and concentrated, preparing to make his jump. But his mind was still a jumble of thoughts, and a different plan elbowed its way front and center.

  I can get them, here, now. Take them out. Before this gets out of hand, before they spread whatever it is they know about me. And this way I won’t have to risk coming back.

  He tilted his head sideways to get a better look at the acne-scarred agent. Then he kicked into gear.

  He saw the agent turn to face him, and nodded at him, a small, pathetic nod. And in a weak, barely audible voice, he said, “Wait. Please. I’ll … tell you.”

  The agent cocked his face with curiosity as he edged closer. “You want to say something?”

  Rasheed nodded again, slowly, and whispered, “My name. It’s … Anwar.”

  The agent could barely hear him. He flicked a self-satisfied grin at his taller colleague and edged over to the bed, bending down so he could hear him better.

  “Speak up, effendi. We don’t have all day.”

  “I … my name,” Rasheed repeated, his muscles tensing, his pulse rocketing stealthily inside him.

  The agent bent down closer. He was now hovering mere inches over Rasheed.

  Rasheed lashed out.

  His arm flew out from under the covers and coiled itself around the pockmarked agent’s neck, yanking him in and squeezing hard, the man’s throat caught in the crook of Rasheed’s elbow. Everyone in the room reacted at the same time, but Rasheed’s attention was riveted on the taller agent, who was instantly bolting toward the bed while reaching for his handgun. Rasheed was moving just as fast as his other hand reached over to the belt of the agent he had in a choke hold and pulled out the man’s weapon. The charging agent had his gun out and leveled at the bed in time, but he hesitated at the sight of his partner blocking a clean shot at the bedridden man, which was all the split-second advantage Rasheed needed. He emptied two rounds into the advancing agent—head and chest. The man slammed against the edge of the bed before dropping to the floor.

  Rasheed didn’t waste a second. His focus was unaffected by the sudden scream of the nurse as he released the first agent from his grip, shoved him away violently before loosing two rounds into him. The man stumbled backward into the wheeled bedside tray table of monitors and crashed down to the floor with it.

  Rasheed yanked the IV catheter out of his arm, swung his feet out from under the covers, and sat up, but a sharp burn ignited in his chest, causing him to flinch from the unexpected pain. He steadied himself against the bed as he swept his gun around the room again, looking for his next target. Fonseca was frozen in place, his arms raised, his feet inching backward hesitantly, his face twisted with fear. He was mouthing, “No, please, don’t,” but to no avail. Rasheed ended his life with two more well-placed rounds, the headshot sending most of the contents of his skull splattering against the pristine white wall behind him.

  From the corner of his eye, Rasheed spotted the door of the room, wide open, the other doctor and the nurse rushing out. He fired at them as he pushed himself to his feet, but he wobbled under a surge of dizziness, and the bullets missed their marks, punching into the wall and doorjamb instead.

  He steadied himself against the bed for a second, closed his eyes, and inhaled a long breath, wincing at the searing sensation deep in his chest, taking it in the hope that the intake of oxygen was worth the pain.

  Then he pushed forward and charged after them.

  32

  Ramazan’s breath seized the instant the man who claimed to be Anwar Rasheed grabbed the Hafiye agent. The next few seconds were a blur of surreal noise and imagery, like nothing he’d encountered before. The violence rooted him in place, and then he snapped back to life. Just as the tattooed man’s gun pivoted toward Fonseca and spat out its rounds, he charged for the door, pushing the screaming nurse out in front of him.

  Outside, in the main ICU ward, panic had already spread as nurses and doctors scurried to take cover any way they could.

  “Call security,” Ramazan hollered as he sprinted away from the room in a directionless frenzy, straight at the two other Hafiye agents who were already rushing toward him, bodies coiled in low combat crouches, guns drawn.

  Without stopping, Ramazan raised one arm while jabbing the air frantically with the other in the direction of the room. “He’s got a gun,” he blurted to them. “He shot the others.” And as he spun his head to glance back at the room, he saw Rasheed stumble through the door, gun raised.

  Ramazan ducked to the side as one of the two agents yelled out, “Drop your weapon.” A split second later, more gunshots erupted. Ramazan dove to the ground, then twisted around quickly to see what was happening. The agents had taken cover, one behind a wheeled cabinet and the other behind a structural column, and were firing away relentlessly while bullets from Rasheed’s gun were flying past, drilling holes in the cabinet and kicking up chips of plaster from the column. He couldn’t see Rasheed at first. Then he spotted him, sheltering behind another column.

  “Drop your weapon,” the agent hollered again.

  Rasheed loosed off three more rounds; then Ramazan heard a quick succession of loud metallic snaps coming from his direction. He was no gun expert, but he knew enough to recognize that sound.

  Rasheed’s gun was empty.

  * * *

  Rasheed felt debilitated before he even exited the room.

  He’d moved too soon and hadn’t reckoned with how weak he still was and how much his body still needed to recover. Each step was like trudging through quicksand. He felt stabs of pain in multiple areas, with the worst in his chest, like someone was tearing his rib cage open. He was heavy-headed, his vision was woozy, and the gun in his hand felt like it weighed a ton.

  He’d misread the situation, misjudged his abilities. Despite the haze, he knew it now. He’d screwed up.

  And he was now out of bullets.

  But there was still a way out. It was what he should have done in the first place, instead of trying to clear the mess before leaving.

  It was time to go.

  “Okay, okay, don’t shoot,” he yelled back, raising his gun hand while remaining hidden behind the column. “I’ll drop my gun. Don’t shoot.”

  He bent down and set the gun on the floor, then gave it a good shove in the direction of the agents.r />
  “I’m unarmed. Okay? I’m coming out,” he shouted.

  * * *

  Ramazan watched as Rasheed stepped out from behind the column. He had his arms stretched upward, his palms open, his fingers spread.

  Twenty yards across the large room, the two agents also emerged from cover.

  “Get down, on the ground. Now,” one of them roared as they advanced carefully toward him, their guns still aimed at him through extended arms and two-handed grips.

  Ramazan flicked his gaze back at Rasheed. The tattooed man had stopped moving and was dropping to his knees. He also seemed disconcertingly calm. Which was when it hit Ramazan. He knew what the man was going to do.

  He rose up, his eyes laser-focused on his patient, a cocktail of fear, disbelief, and anticipation crippling him, even more so when Rasheed leveled his gaze back at him and didn’t waver—then the man’s lips started moving.

  Ramazan wanted to shout out, wanted to warn the agents, wanted to stop Rasheed from doing what he knew he was going to do—but his legs weren’t cooperating, nor was his mouth.

  The only word it could eke out was a meek, whispered “No.”

  * * *

  Dizzy, in pain, his vision blurred and swirling, Rasheed fought hard to concentrate.

  Time to go. Time to get the hell out of here.

  He could see Ramazan Hekim’s face peering out from behind the advancing men, the doctor’s eyes wide with horror. Then he shut his eyes and started murmuring the incantation.

  It didn’t take long.

  And when he was done, he felt the familiar icy shiver race through his veins and the sudden prickle of thousands of tiny needles on the inside of his skull—and then he was gone.

  * * *

  Ramazan felt his entire body seize up.

  Even though he’d heard the man tell him about it, even though he’d discussed it with Nisreen, even though he’d thought about nothing else for the last couple of days, it still shocked the life out of him.

  One second, the man was there, in full view, on his knees, his arms outspread—then he was gone. Just like that.

  No sound, no wind, no pyrotechnics.

  He just vanished.

  The agents kept advancing, slower now, scanning the room, sweeping the area for what their brains were still having great difficulty processing.

  Then one clear thought burst through Ramazan’s daze and slapped him to attention.

  He had to run.

  He edged backward, away from them, one cautious, quiet step, then another, then a bit faster, until he was slipping through the double doors and rushing for the hospital’s exit.

  As he moved, he pulled out his phone, trying to keep it in his grip, trying not to let his jittery fingers lose hold of it, and somehow he managed to hit the right speed-dial key.

  Nisreen answered on the second ring.

  “Where are you?” he rasped.

  33

  Right from the very second Rasheed finished saying the spell, the jump felt different to him.

  They all triggered an instant shock to the senses—the terrifying sense of disembodiment, the dizzying weightlessness, the feeling of being ripped into an infinity of fragments before being instantaneously reassembled as an identical, exact replica a whole universe away. He wasn’t really used to it—it was too intense, too overwhelming for anyone to get used to—but he’d done it enough times to know what to expect.

  He hadn’t expected this.

  Visually, he hadn’t seen that vista before—a bird’s eye view of the zinc and slate-tiled roofs and, beyond, the towering twin spires and minarets of the great Fatih Mosque, its flying buttresses flanking the squatting domes that surrounded it.

  Beyond the visual, however, was the sensorial. Specifically, the feeling coming through the soles of his feet, which was no feeling at all. For there was nothing under his feet.

  He was in midair. And a split second after materializing, he started falling.

  Precipitously.

  The entire sensation lasted less than two and a half seconds. That was how long it took for gravity to yank him out of the sky and drop him a hundred feet to the ground.

  In his defense, he had no way of knowing that his windowless room in the ICU of the Hurrem Sultan Külliye was on the tenth floor of the building, in a location that, back in 1721, was only occupied by a landscaped garden adjacent to the old Hôtel-Dieu hospital, the precursor to the Hurrem Sultan. He knew the garden; after all, he’d been to the Ottoman darusshifa a few times over the years, most recently to be examined following flare-ups of his illness in the weeks before he had decided to jump to 2017 and get treated. He’d just never seen it from that vantage point: the old hospital was only four stories high.

  His mind also wasn’t at its clearest. The heavy, continuous sedation that he’d been subjected to over the last two days was still clogging vital pathways in his mind, heightening his paranoia and clouding his judgment.

  In those two and a half seconds, though, a lot did manage to break through the morass in his head. It was still an unresolved mystery of medicine how that actually happened, how our minds could unleash a cascade of images, thoughts, and memories in such a brief amount of time. And yet that’s what Ayman Rasheed experienced in the last two and half seconds of his illustrious and unique life. He just wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about them.

  His first thought was one of anger: that it would all come to an end here, now, like this, in a messy, bloody splatter, after all the risks he’d faced and the battles he’d fought. He’d survived the war in Iraq and its barbaric prisons; he’d survived the savage rampage into Syria and fierce firefights against a multitude of enemies there; he’d made it to Turkey unscathed and had survived installing himself by the sultan’s side along with the political intrigues, backstabbing, and skulduggery that had followed; he’d survived the many battles and campaigns that had begun in the fields outside Vienna in 1683 and culminated with the conquest of Paris a decade later. He’d survived all that—and he would die here, now, from nothing more epic or glorious than falling out of a window in time.

  And he was naked. That was how they would find him. Sprawled on the ground, limbs undoubtedly broken and bent in a grotesque arrangement, and naked. He pictured the pathetic, revolting sight in his mind’s eye. It was not how he had planned to be remembered.

  That fierce anger ripped through him as he plummeted, a rage at what he’d done, what he’d had to do, what had led him to have to do it. He cursed the anesthesiologist, he cursed the surgeon, but most of all he cursed himself, furious at his own stupidity, his own panic, his own misjudgment, his own failure.

  Beyond that, the other main thought that strangled his last breaths was regret. His secret—his world-altering, astounding secret—would die with him. It was how he had wanted it to be, but he now wondered if he had made the right decision.

  Right from the beginning, he had contemplated his eventual death and questioned how his knowledge ought to be handled.

  He’d initially been worried about how the sultan would react to his revelation. Beyond the fear and the suspicion, there was also the religious ban on what he was bringing. Magic was prohibited by Islam and was only allowed if used to block the evil intentions of a false claimant to prophethood. The hysteria surrounding sorcery was hardly limited to the Ottoman Empire: in America, the Salem witch trials were taking place at the same time. But the sultan had quickly seen the immense benefits of embracing Rasheed’s gift and had happily agreed to keep it secret from his viziers and everyone else.

  Once he’d achieved his plans and the Ottomans had conquered Europe, once he’d been rewarded with the governorship of France, Rasheed had spent many a moment contemplating how to handle his legacy. He’d mulled over sharing his secret with a chosen acolyte, someone he could mentor before entrusting him with it. It was one way to safeguard what he’d achieved; if, at some point in the future, something catastrophic threatened the empire, his heir could use the secret to
travel back in time and prevent it from happening. But then, what if his heir were to die unexpectedly? Did the secret deserve to have more robust safeguards protecting it? That concern had evolved into wondering whether to bestow his knowledge not on one heir but on two, or three; they could be the beginning of a cabal that could extend forever, a secret circle of protectors of the empire who would watch over it and guarantee its permanence. But other concerns challenged his thinking. What if it fell into the wrong hands? What if an enemy of the state or a foreign power like the Americans or the Russians got ahold of it? What if they used it against the Ottomans? What if they sent a team back to 1683 to undo everything he’d done?

  In the end, it was that fear, the fear that his achievement could be nullified and erased from history, that made him decide to keep it to himself. He wouldn’t share it with anyone; he’d use his knowledge of the future to warn those around him as much as he could about the potential dangers to the empire. He’d write, extensively, about different political, societal, and technological challenges that might arise. Beyond that, the empire would have to fend for itself. He would have given it a very solid foundation to achieve more longevity that any other civilization in history. If it did fail because of anything other than an act of God, so be it.

  He questioned his decision again in those final two and a half seconds of his life, his rush to meet the ground goaded by the regret and the rage. He didn’t want it all to be lost. He hadn’t told anyone about it. He hadn’t married, he’d never shared it with any of his many lovers, he hadn’t told any of the children he’d fathered. The only other person who’d known, the sultan, had already died. There was no one around who knew the extent of his extraordinary accomplishment. He would die here, now, a respected, admired leader, a visionary, a pillar of Ottoman history, but no one would speak of how he had single-handedly changed the world.