Empire of Lies
Page 50
“Forgive me, director, but … I need to talk to you about why I am really here.”
The director’s face clouded. “Why you’re really here?”
Kamal nodded, then, in as casual a tone as he could muster, he said, “I know about what you found. In the crypt, carved onto a wall.”
He waited to give his words time to sink in, then, seeing hesitation and fear in the director’s eyes, he pulled up the sleeve of his shirt, exposing the tattooed incantation.
The director sucked in a shocked breath, and his eyes shot wide. He studied the words on Kamal’s arm, then looked up at him.
“How do you know this?” he stammered. “Who are you?”
“It’s a long story, and I think it’s best I don’t burden you with it.”
“But you’ve used it? You’ve been … traveling?”
Kamal nodded. “Yes. A lot.”
Traveling. And learning. Kamal had spent hours upon hours studying the strange new world he had helped create—or, rather, re-create. Trying to understand it.
Deciding what he would do next.
Throughout, he thought of Nisreen. Her words, about how no man should decide for all others, ricocheted in his mind continuously. The idea was, after all, what had pushed them to reset the clock on history, to put the world back onto its natural course. But she didn’t know the full story. She didn’t know about all the horrors the world had endured in the centuries that followed Vienna and the extreme evil it had suffered.
If she had, he was sure that she would have changed her mind.
No decent man or woman could sit back and allow it to happen.
The director’s mouth went agape again. He was having trouble formulating his words.
“Into the past? The future?” he asked.
“Both.”
“My god,” the director gasped. His legs went weak, and he took a few steps to a fallen column and sat down on it.
“I take it you haven’t?” Kamal asked him.
“I used it once, after I first discovered it. I went back. It terrified me too much to try it again. So I never did.”
Kamal shrugged. “A wise choice, I would say.”
“But you’ve been using it.”
“Not by choice,” Kamal told him.
“Is that why you’re here?”
“Yes. There’s something you need to know,” Kamal said, his tone even. “I need you to listen to me very carefully.”
The director nodded.
“There’s a war coming. It’s coming here, to your country, and to your beloved Palmyra. And it’s going to be bad. Very, very bad.”
“When?” the director asked.
“Soon. Within months. You’ll think it’s hopeful at first. You’ll think it’ll lead to better things. It won’t.”
“The Arab Spring … it’s coming here, too?”
Mass uprisings had already happened in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. Syria would be next, only the uprising there would turn into a massive civil war that would suck in foreign powers and cause hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of dispossessed refugees.
“Think of it more like an Arab winter. It’s going to be a disaster.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“A man is going to come here. A brutal man. He’s going to make you tell him what you know about this,” he said, pointing at the tattoos on his arm. “Then he’s going to kill you and do terrible things with the knowledge you give him.”
The director’s eyes receded into themselves, sucked into black holes of gloom. “What should I do?”
“As soon as the troubles start, you must do two things. Destroy the crypt where you found this. And leave.”
“Leave?”
“Leave Palmyra. Take whatever treasures you want—hide them, bury them—then leave. If you stay, you will be killed. I can assure you of that. The men coming here are not fans of history. Not this history,” he added, gesturing at the glorious ruins around them.
The director just sat there, shaking his head slowly, lamenting the stranger’s news.
“Can I count on you to do that?” Kamal asked.
It was a question that had weighed heavily on his mind. Could he, in fact, trust the man to do as he asked? Could he risk leaving someone else in the world who knew what he knew, who could use that knowledge to change things himself?
Or should he use a more permanent way to neutralize that risk?
The idea had been swiftly strangled before it even caught its first breath. The director was an innocent, decent, well-meaning man, and Kamal was no cold-blooded killer. And now, after meeting him, Kamal felt confident that he could, indeed, count on him to do as he asked.
The director, as if reading Kamal’s internal deliberations, nodded. “I don’t really have a choice, do I?
“Not if you want to live. And not if you want what’s best for the world.”
He nodded again. “I’ll do as you ask.”
“Thank you,” Kamal said, and held out his hand.
The director stood up and shook it.
Kamal held his gaze. “Good luck.”
He began to walk away when the director called out after him. “What about you? What are you going to do?”
Kamal stopped, then turned, remembering the exact moment the realization had struck him at Orhan’s stall in Vienna, the realization that would guide the rest of his life from that moment onward.
“I’ve got work to do,” he told the director.
He gave him a small, pensive nod, then he turned and walked away.
END NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to time travel in books, movies, and TV. It wasn’t long before it was joined by my love of alternate reality stories. So you can imagine my delight when the idea for a book that combined both ambushed me late one summer night. Researching and writing it was going to be a lot of fun; that much was obvious from the start. But what made it irresistible to me was that it would be—it had to be—an unusual mirror to the times we live in—unsettling, troubled times. Because these last few years, no matter where I look, it feels like we’re spiraling down an ever-darkening episode of Black Mirror.
A lot of the disturbing stuff that’s happening in Kamal’s world is happening in our world. Truth and freedom of speech are under threat across the globe. The Social Credit System is a reality in China. Article 275 of the criminal code, which deals with treason, is a reality in Russia, as was the Z Directorate, now part of the post-KGB SVR. The Comprehensive National—not Imperial—Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center is a huge NSA data storage facility located in Utah. The Insider Threat Program, which deals with whistleblowers, is up and running in the US. Other winks at our world and at our history are peppered throughout the book, in names of characters, places, and organizations, and in events—but I’ll leave it to you to have fun digging them up if you’re so inclined.
Most of the history you’ll read here is true. The horrendous siege of Vienna, and all the names and events associated with it (apart from my time travelers’ interference), is faithfully depicted. The statue of Kolschitzky, commemorating the debatable story of his bringing coffee to Vienna, hangs there above the street that bears his name. ISIS was indeed born in the prison camps of Iraq, after the 2003 invasion. Its raiders did capture Palmyra and execute the director of the ancient city’s museum. Kara Mustafa was executed under the sultan’s orders on Christmas Day, 1683.
And if researching this book was truly a blast, the most challenging part, however, was trying to picture what the Ottoman Empire might look like in the twenty-first century. It was challenging because I couldn’t simply extrapolate forward from its last days, when it collapsed at the end of World War I. I had to start much further back—in 1683—and project forward from there. This was simply because the failure in Vienna was the beginning of the Ottoman empire’s decline, and although it did last another two and a half centuries before it finally died out, its evolu
tion over those centuries was very much informed by the Ottomans’ efforts to catch up with a Europe that was charging ahead with the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, not to mention the effects of more than one major revolution. In Kamal’s world, none of these took place, which meant I needed to imagine how three hundred years of history might have evolved in a vacuum with none of those seismic events to shape it. I hope you find it to be a credible take on how that might have unfolded.
The other challenge in the research was figuring out how Ayman Rasheed could plausibly lead the Ottomans to not just conquer the rest of Europe, but hold it—and hang on to it for more than two centuries. Again, I hope I managed to do a convincing job. I would have loved to include all the fruit of my research on all those fronts, but that might have undermined the page-turning experience I was aiming for.
A lot of people helped me along this journey—friends, experts, and colleagues who helped me through brainstorming or sharing their knowledge of all things Ottoman with me. I’m grateful to them all, but specifically, I’d like to single out my agents, Mitch Hoffman and Eugenie Furniss, the high priest and priestess of perseverance; my editors and friends at Michael Joseph in London: Rowland White, Ariel Pakier, and Sarah Kennedy; and their equally stellar counterparts at Tor/Forge in NYC: Bess Cozby, Devi Pillai, Linda Quinton, and Lucille Rettino.
Last, but far from least, I’d like to thank everyone who worked on this book in sales, marketing, and publicity at Michael Joseph and at Tor/Forge for all their hard work in getting this book on the shelves and on your attention radar. I’d also like to thank all the booksellers who welcomed it into their stores and championed it with their customers. In our Facebook/Instagram/Netflix/Fortnite-consumed times, neither one sounds like an easy task. My thanks to you all again.
ALSO BY RAYMOND KHOURY
The Last Templar
The Sanctuary
The Sign
The Templar Salvation
The Devil’s Elixir
Rasputin’s Shadow
The End Game
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Raymond Khoury is the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Templar, The Sanctuary, The Sign, The Templar Salvation, The Devil’s Elixir, Rasputin’s Shadow, and The End Game. His novels have been translated into more than forty languages and, in the case of The Last Templar, adapted into a comic book and an NBC television miniseries.
Visit her online at https://raymondkhoury.com, or sign up for email updates here.
www.facebook.com/authorraymondkhoury
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Epigraph
Prologue: Topkapi Palace, Istanbul
1. Paris
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11. Paris
12
13
14. Paris
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45. Fontainebleau
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59. Vienna
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76. Vienna
77
78
Epilogue: Palmyra
End Note and Acknowledgments
Also by Raymond Khoury
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
EMPIRE OF LIES
Copyright © 2019 by Raymond Khoury
All rights reserved.
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
120 Broadway
New York, NY 10271
www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-21096-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-21095-1 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250210951
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First Edition: October 2019
*AH: anno Hegirae (“in the year of the hejira”), referring to the lunar-based Islamic calendar, which begins its count from the Islamic New Year in AD 622, the time of the hejira, the migration of the prophet Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina to escape an assassination plot. The Islamic calendar was used across the Ottoman Empire for religious matters alongside the Rumi calendar (“the Roman calendar”), which was based on the Julian calendar but also adjusted to begin in AD 622.
*1100 in the Islamic hijri calendar, or AD 1689.
*1094 in the Islamic hijri calendar, or AD 1683.
*AD 2017.
*AD 1683.
*AD 1935.
*September, AD 1683.