Empire of Lies

by Raymond Khoury

  Kamal could only watch in muted frustration as she curled into herself, as if in defense against an unspeakably cruel world, and her silence turned to quiet sobs and shudders.

  He hesitated, an epic, gut-wrenching battle going on inside him. Then, carefully, slowly, like he was reaching for something incalculably fragile and precious, he slid his arms around her.

  She didn’t move at first; then, without raising her head, she melted into his brotherly embrace, her head tucked into his shoulder, her sobs now unleashed into a torrent of agony.

  * * *

  Taymoor felt apprehensive as he entered Celaleddin’s office.

  He’d never been inside the darkened room before and didn’t know what to expect. A lot had happened lately that he didn’t understand. He’d been kept in the dark about things and he needed answers.

  “Come in, Taymoor Agha, come in.” Celaleddin welcomed him, rising from behind his desk and ushering him to the divan to his right. “It seems you’ve had quite a day.”

  “Evet, my pasha,” he agreed as he angled toward the seating area.

  The office’s size, location, lighting, furniture, and finishings—everything about it projected power and was designed to intimidate. Through the blinds, Taymoor glimpsed the ancient turrets of the castle and, beyond, the city’s lit minarets and domes. Even from that limited perspective, the view was awe-inspiring. He could only guess how impressive it had to be in full view, with the blinds open, or from the balcony, perhaps at sundown, when the city was basking in golden glory.

  It had been a hell of a day. He’d been awakened in the middle of the night and ordered to lead an emergency manhunt for his partner. He’d discovered the dead bodies of four of his agency brethren in some godforsaken ruins in the middle of nowhere. He’d been shot at by his partner’s sister-in-law, who had then, it was claimed, vanished into thin air. Then he’d been summoned to the pasha’s inner sanctum. A hell of a day, indeed. And it didn’t feel like the onset of night was going to bring any respite.

  Celaleddin folded his tall frame into the plush seat across from the agent. He raised his hand and gestured breezily in Taymoor’s general direction with two slim fingers. “I understand you were shot?”

  Taymoor reflexively gave his head a gentle rub. “It’s just a graze, pasha. I was lucky. Thank you for asking.”

  “It’s unfortunate that they were able to escape,” Celaleddin added.

  Taymoor thought he detected a tinge of accusation in his boss’s tone. “He got the jump on me. It was a shameful failure on my part. One I’ll redress if you were to grace me with the chance to do so.”

  “Oh, I intend to do more than give you a chance, Taymoor. I’m going to need you to do something very, very important for us. We need you. The empire needs you. Your sultan needs you. You see, your history with Kamal Agha, your closeness to him, your knowledge about how he thinks—these make you the ideal candidate for this mission. But it’s going to require a lot of discretion on your part, and sacrifices. Sacrifices that could well turn out to be … permanent.”

  Celaleddin went silent, leaving the question implied but not voiced.

  Taymoor didn’t disappoint him. His brow twitched, but he tried to conceal any sign of confusion—or doubt. “My life is at the sultan’s disposal, for him to do with as he pleases, pasha.”

  “I expected nothing less of you, Taymoor.” Celaleddin nodded. “But this sacrifice also requires you to use extreme prejudice in a way that you might find … conflicting.”

  “There is no conflict when it comes to my duty to my sultan and to the empire, pasha.”

  “Even when it comes to your partner?”

  Taymoor’s hand instinctively pressed a bit harder against his wound. “There is no conflict, my pasha.”

  Celaleddin studied the young agent.

  * * *

  He’d had a long discussion with Kuzey and with Taymoor’s direct superior only moments earlier. The impression he’d been given was clear: yes, they were partners; yes, they were close and had each other’s backs when threatened. But there was a growing fault line in their outlook on the security situation facing the empire, one that must have widened after Kamal’s sister-in-law took a shot at him. Taymoor’s profile was ideal for the task at hand. He had the operational skills, and there was no one else who knew Kamal Agha as well as he did, who could think like him and second-guess his actions. And he was single, with no known emotional ties to anyone. He was the best man for the job. A job that, after much deliberation, Celaleddin had decided to entrust to a task force of one single man.

  The risks of doing otherwise were too great and too uncontrollable.

  He’d entrust it to a single man … for now. He knew he would always have the option of sending someone else, another task force, back to the same time and place if this approach failed. In fact, if what he believed was correct, he could do that as many times as he liked. Until it worked. At this point, though, it was all guessing. Until he tried it himself, he wasn’t sure about anything. But he had to try.

  He also realized he might never know if Taymoor succeeded in his task. He’d come up with a way for Taymoor to let him know, to send him a message from the past he would be stuck in, but he wasn’t sure it would work. He knew he was still far from fully understanding how this incredible machination worked.

  “Let me ask you … Kamal Agha. What do you know of what’s become of him and of his sister-in-law?”

  “Nothing, pasha.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “I have no explanation for their escape, for which I accept full responsibility.”

  “I’m not looking to assign any blame, Taymoor.”

  “Regardless, I should not have let it happen. But I still can’t explain it. No one saw anything.”

  “No one?”

  “No. The men on the scene can’t explain it. We have nothing apart from the ridiculous ramblings of a couple of deviants we picked up at the scene, but they don’t make any sense. I’ll get to the bottom of it though, pasha. I will find them.”

  Celaleddin considered him for a moment. Then he rose and crossed over to his desk. “I know you will, Taymoor. In fact, I’m going to give you the information you need to be able to do that. But we’re going to have to move fast. While the trail is still warm.”

  He picked up some things off the desk and came back to the divan. As he sat down, he placed them on the large table that separated them.

  Taymoor leaned forward for a closer look. There was a small plastic evidence bag, along with a stack of printouts. In the bag were two busted-up mobile phones.

  “You recognize these, of course?” Celaleddin asked, tapping the bag.

  The phones were the ones his divers had recovered only hours earlier from the bed of the lake.

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  Celaleddin leaned forward and studied him intently. “This mission needs to be undertaken in the utmost secrecy. No one can know about it. And if you accept it, your life will change irreversibly. There will be no going back.”

  * * *

  Taymoor knew that Celaleddin had left out the flip side to his statement: that if he balked at carrying out the assignment once he knew what it entailed, he would not be allowed to live.

  Taymoor didn’t flinch. Instead, he just reiterated his loyalty in the same solemn tone.

  “My life is at the sultan’s feet, pasha,” he told the commander. “For him to do with as he pleases.”

  49

  Shortly before dawn, the barge docked at the busy quay of Bercy.

  The largest commercial port in Paris, it owed its name to the small town to which it originally belonged, a town that had long since been swallowed up by the city.

  Even at that hour, it was humming with activity. Barges were jostling in and out, some of them docked five-deep along the wharf while awaiting their turn to load and offload their holds. On the quay itself, an army of dockworkers were busy making sure the voracious city’s stockpiles of
all kinds of goods, from wheat to orchids to ceramic fixtures, never ran out.

  Kamal and Nisreen stayed on board while the pallets and crates were winched off. It was still dark, and the captain had enough empathy not to abandon them to the night. But once day broke and the muezzins’ calls to prayer came and went, Kamal began to feel uneasy about staying put longer than necessary and told Nisreen it was time for them to leave. They thanked the captain for his generosity and set off.

  After they cleared the bustle of the quay, the change in the city from the time they’d come from was immediately evident. The air was the first thing they noticed; it was no different from the air in the forest and felt cleaner and more pleasant to breathe in than what they remembered of Paris. There were cars, buses, and tramways around—not many at that time of the morning, when the city was still at rest—but there were far fewer of them. The population of the city was much lower—at three million in its current incarnation, it was barely a third of what it was at the time of their escape.

  In fact, everything about it, especially at that hour, was easier on the senses. The sidewalks were cleaner and tamer to navigate, the streets devoid of any form of signage clutter. There weren’t even traffic lights. The body language of the people they crossed was different, too: more flowing, less jagged. Even the buildings were softer on the eyes: lower, less densely stacked, and more ornate. The city was palpably more tranquil in a thousand ways. Perhaps it didn’t seem that way to those who hadn’t traveled there from Kamal and Nisreen’s time—after all, they didn’t know any different, and it was still a crowded, bustling metropolis that was doubtless busier and noisier than it had been in years past—but it certainly did to them.

  Without money and with hunger now making its displeasure known, they set off for a place where they knew they could get food and a bed: a waqf complex, like the one Ramazan had worked at. Kamal had preferred not to ask the barge captain if any of the ones he knew from his time were already around. He knew the Hurrem Sultan was, but he felt it might be too obvious, and hence dangerous, to head there. But he was sure a couple of others were probably old enough to be around. The number of such complexes had grown, and their facilities had expanded in step with the wealth and power of the sultans, and this was a prosperous, peaceful time for the empire.

  The nearer of the two was the Haseki Sultan, on the Left Bank of the Seine, just beyond the Suleyman VI University. Not having any money to take any form of paid transportation, that’s where they headed.

  Half an hour later, they were walking through its gates.

  Like the Hurrem, the Haseki was also a huge complex of buildings. It housed a mosque, a fifty-room hospice, a medical clinic, and the two parts that Kamal and Nisreen needed: an imaret—a public kitchen—that led to a small han, the inn that welcomed travelers. Like all waqf complexes, the Haseki was a strictly run establishment. Imperial generosity didn’t stop the careful regulation of the benefits afforded to the guests of its facilities. With close to two thousand people being fed in the vast dining halls of its imaret three times a day, rigid rules of seniority had to be followed regarding what was on offer and how it was handed out.

  Kamal and Nisreen tried to interact as little as possible as they made their way to the reception office of the imaret, where Kamal made the careful introductions. He took on his father’s backstory and presented himself as a poultry farmer visiting from the Périgord. Nisreen was his subservient wife, who, true to form, didn’t say a word. He sensed some subtle doubting on the part of the clerk, perhaps triggered by their simple clothing. Kamal deflected it by adopting a humble demeanor and feigning to take the official into his confidence, confessing he’d fallen on hard times after his farm had caught fire a few months earlier, destroying his entire flock. He kept a self-effacing and stoic front as he told him he was in Paris to look for other opportunities. The ruse worked, and they were soon issued an induction document and ushered toward the dining hall, where they handed it to the marshal overseeing the meal and were invited to join the long queue.

  There was no stigma attached to eating at a public kitchen in the empire. Well-to-do families who were going through tough times did it as much as the poor. The rulers regarded the ability to feed vast amounts of people as a necessary, visible symbol of their power, their piety, and their legitimacy; the people viewed the food distribution as an enviable privilege. Those deemed more prestigious—visiting dignitaries, merchants, travelers, and scholars—ate first and better. The needy then followed. Women and children came last.

  Kamal and Nisreen ate heartily, polishing off their bowls of honey-and saffron-sweetened rice and their loaves of bread in no time. Wary of discovery as well as worried about leaving a trail, Kamal tried to keep any conversation with their neighbors at the long table to a minimum. They left as soon as they were done and crossed a colonnaded courtyard that led to the inn. This time, the introduction process went more smoothly, and the innkeeper soon saw fit to grant them a small room, one that overlooked the slanted tile roof of another walled sahn courtyard that was flanked by one of the mosque’s minarets.

  As travelers, they were entitled to three days’ hospitality. After that, they would need to fend for themselves. For now, though, they were exhausted, and they collapsed onto the narrow beds, neither of them moving or saying much.

  It was a lot to process, for them both.

  As Kamal glanced at Nisreen, he couldn’t help but feel his own fury rise at what had happened, at what had been done to her. And as much as he tried to engage with her, to comfort her and offer her a supportive ear, he found her distant and reluctant to talk, lost in her own thoughts, as if in a trance.

  He had a lot on his mind, too.

  They had no money, no papers, no friends or family or any kind of contacts. There was no one they knew at that time, no friendly door to knock on. It was as if they’d landed on a foreign planet. Of course, they could seek out distant relatives, ancestors, great-grandparents possibly, asking for help. But what would they tell them, and why would these people consider them anything other than the strangers they were? More troubling was the question of whether entering their ancestors’ lives risked altering their histories and affecting these ancestors’ choices from here on, which could then affect Kamal’s and Nisreen’s own histories in unknown ways.

  It was too uncertain and dangerous to consider.

  On the other hand, they had some advantages they could put to good use. They knew what the future held—they knew how events would unfold, and they could try to profit from them. In fact, if they were careful and clever, they could carve out a spectacularly successful life for themselves, even though gambling was outlawed and the stock market, back then, was still in its infancy. Still, there had to be plenty of opportunities they could exploit. Which was why part of him just wanted to ask, “What if we stayed here? What if we lived out the rest of our lives here, in peace?”

  He knew it was a pointless question.

  The profound sadness, the pain that was still mauling her—it was all there, etched in harsh strokes across her eyes, her mouth, her face. A subtle difference on a beautiful face, but an unmistakable one to someone who knew her as well as he did.

  Subtle and entrenched. As it was in him.

  Ever since they’d jumped back in time, and even if it was just for a passing, fleeting moment or two, when his mind had been able to wander, when he’d allowed himself to put aside his anger and hunger for revenge and to fall prey to naïve hopefulness, when he’d managed to abandon reality and let his imagination roam to an idealized world, he’d caught glimpses of himself imagining staying in this strange new land with Nisreen, creating a new life for themselves. It was a wonderful thing to imagine, and it wasn’t something that was unheard of in Ottoman society; far from it.

  As the brother-in-law of a widow, it was his duty to look after his surviving family. Marrying her would not have been frowned upon; it would have been celebrated. In normal circumstances, it would help keep
the fabric of the family together and keep any inheritance within it. Strictly speaking, they were only breaking with tradition in that widows were expected to observe a mourning period of four months and ten days, during which they were prohibited from interacting with any man they could potentially marry, even with a chaperone present.

  In those flights of fancy, Kamal had wondered if, with time, they might not forget about the tragedies that had upended their lives, if their memories might not eventually fade, if he and Nisreen might not, together, be able to forge an alternative existence to settle into. It was a selfish dream, for sure. He was the one who’d always wanted it, and he knew it. But he genuinely felt it would also undoubtedly be good for her, too—to find happiness again, to move past the pain, to enjoy waking up to a new day every morning.

  It was just that, though. A dream. An impossible one.

  He knew it wouldn’t happen, knew it couldn’t happen. Every furrow in her face confirmed what he knew, what he realized was the only way anyone in her situation and with her heart could possibly feel. He knew she would never find release from the purgatory that engulfed her. It would never let go. And if it were to ever let go, it would probably be because he wasn’t around to remind her of all that had happened.

  There could be no happily ever after for them together. Of that, he was certain.

  He pushed away the thought, deciding it was better not to dwell on it, deciding it was pointless to grind over that dismal notion, telling himself it was better to let the future play itself out and see what it held for them.

  And hope it wouldn’t be too unkind.

  It was a hope that didn’t take long to get crushed.

  50

  Even though the muezzin’s call to afternoon prayer was coming from the minaret close to their room, Kamal didn’t stir. Instead, its soporific, drawn-out cadences lulled him into an even deeper sleep.