Empire of Lies

by Raymond Khoury

  “Because I was looking for you. Because they know that if anything happened to you or to Ramazan or to … They know I’d never stop until every last one of them was dead.”

  She said nothing.

  He gave her a moment. “Nisreen, we have to go. They’ll soon know something’s wrong. They’ll send others.”

  She didn’t react. After a long moment, she said, “We can’t leave them here. We need to bury them.”

  “Of course. But … where? We need to keep out of sight. They’re going to be looking for us.”

  She finally turned to face him. Her eyes were red and swollen, her pupils fully dilated, making them seem hollowed out. As painful as that was to see, it wasn’t what pained Kamal the most.

  It was the unmistakable accusation in her glare.

  “Not here,” she said. “Anywhere, but not here.”

  Kamal understood, and nodded. “We should get moving then.”

  * * *

  It was the hardest thing he’d ever done.

  It was much harder on Nisreen, of course. Hard beyond words, beyond comprehension. But it was also hard on Kamal, and in a different way. On top of the soul-wrenching pain of their deaths, he also had Nisreen and her devastation to contend with.

  She was still breathing, still moving, still responding, still alive … but she wasn’t there. Not anymore. Life, beyond the strict metabolic sense of the word, had been pounded out of her. Watching her, seeing the utter desolation carved into her face, wondering if this day would ever cease to cast its infernal pall over her every waking moment—it all gutted him. Layered on top of the accusatory undertow he could still feel from her, it was unbearable.

  He folded down the back seats of the agency SUV and carried the children over to it. Tarek first, then Noor. He lay them down side by side in the back, leaving enough room for his brother. He brought him over last, all the while shadowed and watched by Nisreen.

  It was all done in a deafening silence.

  Leaving Nisreen momentarily, he checked the two agents he’d killed. They had their creds on them. He pocketed them and took their weapons.

  He suspected he might need them.

  He left their phones, and pulled the battery from the phone he’d taken off the killer in his apartment to make sure it wouldn’t be used to track them from here on.

  There was a lot to process. He’d killed three Hafiye agents tonight and seriously maimed a fourth. He was now a wanted man, an enemy of the state, no question about that—an enemy of a murderous, barbaric state. He’d devoted his life to keeping it safe, but right now all he wanted to do was tear it down with his bare hands. But before he could do that, he needed to know what was going on. He needed to understand what had led to this, why his brother and his family had been targeted, why they’d also come after him. He needed to know what Nisreen knew. But it would have to wait.

  He had three burials to take care of.

  41

  “We have a problem. My men at the castle—they’re not responding.”

  Celaleddin was home in bed. From behind the edge of the curtains, he could see that dawn hadn’t yet broken, which meant that the call, coming at such an early hour, couldn’t be about anything good. Kuzey’s voice, and his tone, further confirmed that.

  His wife had stirred, grumbled, turned over, and fallen back asleep. Leaving her there, he climbed out of bed and padded out of their room barefoot in his nightshirt. “What about the team you sent to Kamal Agha’s?”

  “The same.”

  Celaleddin entered his study, his jaw uncharacteristically aimed low, his gaunt face twisted in a scowl. Maybe they had been careless by only sending two men to take care of him. Kamal had demonstrated his resourcefulness more than once. No one was more aware of that than his superiors at the Hafiye.

  “You’ve sent men out to the castle?”

  “They’re en route,” Kuzey confirmed, using one of the many old French expressions that had seeped into the Ottoman vernacular. “I’ve got the Zaptiye setting up roadblocks around the area.”

  “There are a lot of roads to cover. Country lanes and whatnot.”

  “I know.”

  “I want to know what they find the second they get there.”

  “We should know in the next ten minutes.”

  Celaleddin pressed the buzzer to summon one of his servants. He needed coffee. A lot of it. It looked as if it was going to be a long, and fraught, day.

  He thought about it for a quick second before his servant appeared at the door. “Coffee,” he said to him abruptly. “A large pot.”

  “Pardon?” Kuzey asked through the phone line.

  Celaleddin ignored it, waving his servant off. But he did have something pressing for Kuzey. “Find me Kamal’s partner.”

  “Taymoor Agha?” Kuzey asked.

  “Yes.” His mind was already putting various permutations of what he imagined was to come through their paces. “I think we’re going to need him.”

  * * *

  With the first glimmer of dawn infusing the horizon, Kamal drove on, the big black SUV powering east across empty country roads. He was avoiding the main highways, maintaining an inconspicuous speed, his eyes alert to any sign of a roadblock or a surveillance drone.

  Nisreen sat next to him, staring ahead, both of them observing a funereal silence, an unspoken rage smoldering inside them. Behind them, the three bodies were laid out side by side on their backs, covered by a tarpaulin Kamal had found at the castle.

  They needed to be buried, and soon. Islamic tradition called for burials to be carried out as quickly as possible following death. But where?

  Paris would have been the normal port of call. It was where Kamal’s family hailed from, where the family mosque was, where Kamal and Ramazan’s grandparents and great-grandparents were buried. He knew it was where his brother should be laid to rest. He owed him that. But Paris was out of the question. Too many people who knew them, too many law enforcement officers prowling the streets, too many surveillance cameras trawling license plates and informants looking to ingratiate themselves with the authorities. Right now, Paris had to be avoided at all costs. As did smaller towns, malls—anywhere with lots of people, really.

  Which didn’t leave many options.

  Which was why Kamal was heading east toward Fontainebleau and its great palace, one eye on the road, the other on his rearview mirror, every sensor in his body on high alert.

  Not that there weren’t lots of people in Fontainebleau. It was home to a spectacular palace of over fifteen hundred rooms that was nestled among a vast expanse of gardens and parkland. The old château dated back to the twelfth century, but it had grown spectacularly in the 1500s and had long been a favorite residence and hunting lodge of many of France’s kings. After the Ottoman conquest, it had been converted into a sprawling madrasah complex that was home to a community of students, teachers, workers, and their families.

  It was also surrounded by acres of imperial forest.

  Kamal had been there before. As a child, his parents used to bring him and Ramazan for picnics by a small lake deep in the forest. They’d often dropped in at the madrasah for a sermon or a late meal before heading back to the city. More recently, it was a place he came to when he wanted to be alone. A place to think, to recharge.

  After a little more than an hour’s drive, they spotted the tall minarets that surrounded the palace and heard the dawn prayer calls wafting gently from them. A couple of fersahs from the madrasah, Kamal turned off the main road and guided the SUV deep into the forest. It was early; with a bit of luck, perhaps they wouldn’t come upon any of the madrasah’s students making their way to class or the men and women heading out to work in its citrus groves, olive gardens, and dairy farms.

  He followed the narrow path until he reached the clearing he knew. It was empty. He killed the engine and stared ahead.

  Vertical shafts of light speared the tree cover around them, lighting up scattered ballets of insects and butterflie
s. A soundtrack of birdsong further enhanced the majestic forest’s aura of tranquility.

  It was all wasted on them.

  He looked at Nisreen. Her face was locked dead ahead in anger. “I can’t do this. They need a proper burial. This isn’t right.”

  Kamal suppressed his own anger about that. “We can’t. You know we can’t. We can’t be around people right now. They’ll be looking for us.”

  “They.” The word came out like poison.

  He felt something cave in inside him. “I’m sorry. But we don’t have a choice.”

  He waited until she finally glanced over at him and nodded weakly.

  They got out of the car. There was a lot of work to be done. Long-held rituals to be followed.

  He carried the bodies down the path from the clearing to the edge of a small lake, one after the other, placing them gently on the soft, dry soil. Nisreen watched, shivering. Her wells of tears still hadn’t dried up.

  He stepped back, then asked, softly, “Are you sure you want to do this yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  He hesitated, then added, “Can I assist you?”

  She stared at him, jaw visibly clenched.

  “Let me help you do this. Please.”

  She held his gaze. Then she finally relented with a small nod.

  It was all done in tense, solemn silence, with only the occasional eye contact between Kamal and Nisreen. He was on edge throughout the ordeal, wondering if she was going to lash out at him or collapse in a heap of tears and cries. He was having a hard time holding in his own sorrow and anger. Remarkably, she held it together while they carried out the preparations, though not without a constant trickle of tears sliding down her cheeks and a tremble in her fingers at the touch of her loved one’s cold bodies.

  They used lake water to wash each of them three times, following the prescribed order—upper right side, upper left side, lower right, lower left. Nisreen was visibly at the edge of despair when she washed Noor’s hair, stopping several times before managing to complete the task and braiding it three times. Kamal kept having to stop himself from going to her and taking her in his arms, as much for himself as for her, but he held back, restrained by a cavalcade of conflicting emotions.

  She stepped back as he cleansed his brother’s body, his fingers shivering, his mind lost in a trance of sorrow, branding every pore of his dead brother’s face into his memory, taking his time despite the urgency coursing through him.

  Throughout, he was hounded by the most awful of thoughts: That he had failed them. That he hadn’t kept them safe. That despite being on the inside—the very notion flooded him with a burning, venomous self-hate—he didn’t see it coming.

  And now they were all dead.

  They didn’t have any burial shrouds—large, plain white sheets that would have been perfumed by incense five times—nor did they have ropes to secure the sheets once they were folded over them according to the prescribed rituals. Instead, Ramazan, Tarek, and Noor would be buried in their long shirts. Their left hands were placed on their chests, their right hands resting on their left hands, as in a position of prayer.

  Kamal and Nisreen then stood side by side for the funeral prayers. These would have normally been performed with Ramazan and Nisreen’s friends and with members of their immediate community, but that too was not to be.

  Facing the qiblah—Mecca—they recited the Salat al-Janazah.

  Kamal then left Nisreen and chose a clearing at the edge of the great forest. There, using tools he scrounged from the SUV’s trunk, he dug the graves—gouging the earth angrily, pounding it until his muscles ached, punishing it along with himself, carving wide clefts first, straight down, then narrower ones down the middle in which the dead would be placed. Following tradition, these were perpendicular to the qiblah. With Nisreen watching in stricken silence, Kamal placed the bodies in the graves on their right sides, facing the qiblah—Ramazan first, then Tarek, then Noor, with Nisreen reciting the supplications as he did so. They had no clay bricks to place over the wrapped bodies to prevent direct contact between them and the soil that would fill the grave. Instead, Kamal just placed as many rocks as he could gather, then he and Nisreen approached each grave and placed three handfuls of soil into it before Kamal added more until each grave was topped by a slightly elevated mound of earth.

  No markers were placed over the graves. Islamic tradition allowed small markers or stones but prohibited large monuments or decorations to be placed at grave sites, an anonymity that, given their circumstances, suited Nisreen and Kamal.

  They stood by the graves while the whole planet around them seemed to melt into a respectful, eerie silence that was only broken by Nisreen’s gentle sobs.

  Without looking at her, Kamal said, “I have no doubt that angels with faces as bright as the sun are already guiding them into the gardens of paradise.”

  She wiped her eyes dry and said, “I can think of none who would be more deserving of that.” Then she couldn’t keep it in anymore. She dissolved into a mess of tears and sobs and stumbled away from Kamal, one arm held up to keep him back before she disappeared through the trees.

  Much as it killed him to do so, he respected her request and decided to wait for her on an outcropping by the water’s edge, channeling his fury to a different vision of the afterlife altogether, with him as the dark-faced angel who would send those responsible for their deaths to the gates of hell.

  But first they had to survive. He needed to put his rage on hold and think things through. He knew they needed to put as much distance as possible between them and the Chevreuse castle, as fast as possible. The bodies he’d left behind at his apartment and at the castle had probably already been discovered. They’d be hunting Kamal and Nisreen, and he knew how quickly security cordons were put up.

  But he needed to give Nisreen any time she needed, even though he could feel the weight of every passing second.

  When she finally emerged from the forest, he could see how broken she was, and he knew her suffering wasn’t going away anytime soon. Still, he couldn’t delay asking any longer. He needed to understand what they were facing in order to figure out what their next move should be.

  He turned to her. She was facing the lake, her eyes as glassy as its surface.

  “Nisreen…” He had to wait, then repeat it, three times. Softly. Patiently. Three words that felt like three deaths.

  Slowly, she finally turned to face him.

  “I need to know,” he said. “What the hell happened? What’s going on?”

  42

  They sat on a large flat outcropping by the water’s edge.

  Speaking in a dazed, distant tone, Nisreen told Kamal what had happened, right from the beginning.

  The tattooed man appearing at the hospital.

  Ramazan’s suspicions.

  His first late-night internet search session. The words he typed in.

  “That would have tripped some alarms,” Kamal said.

  Nisreen shrugged. “They were probably already monitoring our online activity because of me. Because of what I do. He knew that.”

  Her words trailed off, as if she felt sudden remorse that what she’d said sounded like she was blaming Ramazan. Kamal didn’t press it. He could see how hard it was for her to be reliving every moment of the last few days, putting it under a microscope wouldn’t do her any favors. He also knew people got complacent when they didn’t think they were doing anything worthy of being monitored, even when they were aware that every keystroke of theirs was most likely under watch.

  He also tried not to dwell on how she probably included him among them when she said “they.”

  She found the strength to tell him about the second night, about confronting Ramazan about his searches. Then she told him what he had told her. About the man. About what he’d told Ramazan.

  Kamal, riveted by her every word, didn’t interrupt.

  She told him about her going to the hospital with Ramazan the next morning, a
bout their conversation with the tattooed man, about him telling them what the incantation was. Then she concluded with what Ramazan had told her on the phone, about the agents showing up at the hospital, the shootout, and—crucially—what happened next.

  It took Kamal a moment to process this. “He actually saw him disappear?”

  “That’s what he told me. He was very clear about that.”

  “Like disappear disappear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nisreen—”

  “Kamal, I’m telling you the man just vanished”—said with a cutting, impatient spike of anger.

  Kamal clammed up. He wasn’t sure how to continue the conversation. He could see that she was barely holding it together, and he needed to tread softly. Part of him wasn’t sure she was thinking clearly at all given what she had just told him. But he also had too much respect for her and for her intellect to dismiss what she was saying. “Could it have been a trick? Or something he missed? The guy ducking out and slipping away while he wasn’t looking?”

  “No. I pressed him on that, too. It happened right in front of him. The others also saw it. That’s what shook him so hard. That’s why he ran.”

  “It’s not possible. People don’t disappear.”

  “They don’t travel across time either. But this man did.”

  “He claims he did. There has to be another explanation for it.”

  “Look where we are, Kamal. Why do you think this is happening? Why do you think they came after us this hard? Why do you think Celaleddin himself interrogated us? Why—”

  “Wait, Celaleddin interrogated you?”

  Nisreen nodded, visibly pained by the memory.

  She told Kamal about their episode at the Citadel.

  “Why else would they want us dead? It’s because of what we know. What Ramazan saw. You said the two dead men at the castle were agents who were also at the hospital when it happened. That’s obviously why they killed them, too. To keep them quiet. To stop any of it from coming out.”