Empire of Lies

21

Nisreen sensed that Ramazan was preoccupied the moment he walked in.

She knew it concerned what he’d been hiding from her. After all their years together, she could read the smallest hints in his facial expressions and his body language, even if he was never the most emotionally effusive person and had a frustratingly limited spectrum of reactions to most of what their coupled life threw at them. The signs were there this evening, and her read was that he probably wanted to continue with the previous night’s activities.

Which was hugely troubling.

She could sense danger in what he was doing. She’d been around it enough, through her work, to recognize it.

After clearing away his plates and putting away the leftover stew, she found Ramazan standing by the French doors in the family room, looking out in silence. She pushed back her unease and cozied up to him casually, placing a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“Are you okay?”

He turned, his expression uncertain. It took him a moment to reply. “Yes, of course. Why?”

She hesitated. She was bursting to confront him about what he was up to. But she knew Ramazan and knew she needed to broach it carefully. If she wanted to, she had a relatively innocuous way of bringing it up. She could say that she’d used the computer earlier, and when she’d brought up its search history looking for a website she’d visited previously, she came across his browsing and was curious as to why it was of interest to him. But given his reaction the night before, he’d probably brush it off, and she wouldn’t know any more than she did now.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “You seem a bit distracted.”

He gave her a gentle smile, but it wasn’t reflected in his eyes. “I’m just tired. That’s all. I hardly slept last night.”

“I know. You’ve never been up like that. Is everything okay?”

Again, a slight hesitation. “Yes, I told you. It’s just a complicated case—that’s all. I just need to get some rest. I’m sorry.”

“You’re sure?”

He ran a hand down her hair, to her neck. “Yes.”

She held his gaze, restrained herself, then nodded. “Okay.” She decided to give him some space—or, more accurately, some rope. “I’m tired myself. I’m going to run a bath and turn in early.”

“Take your time. I’ve got a bit of work to do here anyway.”

“Don’t stay up too late.”

He smiled again. “I won’t.” Then he leaned in and gave her a kiss—more of a sterile peck, really—before she left him in the family room and headed off to their bedroom.

Still hounded by an unshakable discomfort, she ran her bath, leaving the doors to their bathroom and bedroom open to give him a false sense of security. Once the bath was full, she turned the taps off and, more noisily than was perhaps the norm, got in.

Nisreen did, in fact, love her baths, both at home and out. Public hammams were a fixture in the social life of the city’s women, one of the select places outside the home where they could congregate and socialize. Time spent at the baths was an indulgent, centuries-old tradition and a pampering ritual that had spread to each conquered territory, even if, in its present-day evolution, slave girls and eunuchs were no longer a common sight within their meticulously tiled walls. In more insouciant days, Nisreen and her friends would while away the hours at the beautiful eighteenth-century hammam by the Samaritaine water pumps, but it had been a while since she had last enjoyed such an outing. Those carefree days were a distant memory.

Tonight, though, Nisreen’s bath was neither a public opportunity to catch up with friends nor a private one to unwind in the sanctity of her home. It was an uncomfortable deception, a tool of entrapment, and it felt deeply disrespectful to her husband, to the father of her children.

But it was also, she was convinced, necessary.

Ramazan heard the taps running at full blast, waited, heard Nisreen turn the taps off, heard her skin squealing against the back of the porcelain tub as she settled into the water.

By the time he’d been interrupted by Fonseca, he’d heard most of the man’s story, from his capture in the Baghdad region by American soldiers—a conceit that was so outlandish in itself—to his first appearance before the sultan in his bedchamber in the middle of the night to how he had intervened in the fields outside Vienna. But there was more he needed to know, a lot more. The man hadn’t told him much about what his world was like—the world he left behind, before he reset the clock. For Ramazan, that was as intriguing as his story, perhaps even more so. If the man was a fantasist, that part might be harder for him to conjure up. Beyond that was perhaps the most important part of all, and the key to deciding whether the man was delusional or some kind of magician: How did he do it? What was the method that allowed him to move across time?

He knew Nisreen’s bath ritual well enough to know that the sound of running water heralded a solid, uninterrupted half hour of privacy, which he could now put to good use.

He switched on the computer, opened the Hafiza browser, and typed in “Ayman Rasheed Pasha.”

As expected, he got thousands of hits. The eighteenth-century governor of the Paris eyalet, the huge Ottoman province that covered the territory of Louis XIV’s old kingdom of France, was an Ottoman titan. Like most educated people, Ramazan knew a bit about Rasheed Pasha’s history from his school days, but a long time had passed and his memory needed a refresher. But before he’d even had a chance to read a word, he saw something that tripped his senses, an image that snared his attention and turned him into a breathless, rigid, embalmed version of himself, his mind crashing against all kinds of logic walls in a desperate search for a workable explanation.

It was an image of an old oil painting, one that was done during the heyday of the famous governor, years after Paris had fallen, well into his highly successful reign over the great city, at the time the largest city in Europe after Istanbul, and the vast territories around it. The man in the painting was the epitome of imperial grandeur. He was depicted in three-quarter view looking over his shoulder while reclining on a large, luxurious divan and framed by a cusped arch. He was dressed in a white shirt with a cross-over collar under a sumptuous deep-red kaftan that had bands of elaborate frogging and a broad fur collar. On his head he wore the distinctly Ottoman tâj, a turban in which a length of white fabric is wound around a stiff ribbed cap made of red felt. A bejeweled sword hung on his belt while gold-colored slippers protruded from under his garments. But it wasn’t the opulence of the image that hit Ramazan. It was the man’s face. It helped that the painting was done in the Venetian style, rendering it lifelike because of the western shading that was more successful at suggesting volume in the face than the flat, unmodeled planes of earlier Ottoman art. The artist was talented, whoever he was—and no doubt he would be credited somewhere if Ramazan cared to look. For the stern, belligerent-looking face staring out from the screen at Ramazan was, without a doubt, the tattooed man.

It was him.

He stared at the portrait for ages, unable to move his mind past its blunt implications. His thoughts bounded in all kinds of directions, looking for an answer to how this was possible. Was the tattooed man at the hospital simply someone who looked very much like Rasheed, someone obsessed by the great man, a psychotic who lived in a delusion about being him and who had gone as far as to tattoo his body to make his story more potent? Was it even someone who’d gone to the trouble of having facial surgery to look like him? But for what reason? And why the tattoos?

He opened another browser window and searched for a mention of the tattoos but couldn’t find any. He ran a separate, specific search about them, but also came up empty-handed. Were they simply more evidence of the man’s unhinged mind? That had to be the logical explanation. Then there was the accent, that ancient manner of speaking that no one used anymore. Where was that coming from? Was it fake? Was it an attempt to give his story authenticity? Would it stand up to analysis by an expert in linguistics? More than anything, though, there was the casual detail, the storytelling that felt so authentic, so honest, so real. But that could be faked, too, he told himself. If the man was obsessed with Rasheed, he’d know everything about his life. He’d be convincing.

But why? Why would someone do that? What possible reason could he have to try to pull off a stunt like that? He wasn’t faking his illness—that much was certain. As for the rest… that he was an imposter was certainly easier to swallow than the alternative, which was simply that the tattooed man really was Ayman Rasheed Pasha and that he had come across an ancient secret in Palmyra, which was now a popular tourist spot, and used it to change history.

Impossible.

He scrolled through more images of Rasheed, other paintings from the era. There weren’t many, and none were as accomplished or as lifelike as the first one he’d seen, but they served to reinforce its stupefying message. Desperate for more information, Ramazan dived ravenously into articles about Rasheed and his life, speed-reading about him while trying to match it to what the man had said.

The details about Rasheed’s life before the conquest of Vienna were sketchy and obviously didn’t tally with what he’d heard at the hospital. If Rasheed had indeed materialized out of thin air in the sultan’s bedchamber as he said he had, his backstory would have needed to be invented: where he was born, who his parents were, his education. He would have been helped by the fact that, at that time, information was scarce. A few key details were all that mattered. Beyond that, the lack of information would have also helped feed his mystique.

Then, of course, after Rasheed’s appearance and after the campaign to take Vienna had begun, there would have been plenty to write about. Rasheed had burst into the very highest echelon of Ottoman power and cemented himself as the advisor the sultan could not do without—his philosopher-royal. Beyond his direct influence in military affairs, the real, historical Rasheed Pasha had spoken and written a lot about a wide range of topics: history, military strategy, political theory, sociology. He was even regarded as a technological visionary given the inventions he introduced and his descriptions and sketches of what the future might bring. Reading about him, Ramazan came across the most telling line about him, one he now remembered from his days at school, about Ayman Rasheed Pasha’s being the Ottoman Leonardo da Vinci, his prodigious and inventive mind considered superior to that of the Italian polymath.

“What are you doing?”

Ramazan’s head snapped up.

Nisreen was by the door, wrapped in a flowing robe, its hood down. She didn’t look happy.

“How long have you been standing there?” He could barely formulate the question.

“Awhile.” She stepped into the room and approached him. Her tone got more accusing. “Ramazan, what are you up to?”

His finger went to kill the browser window, but she quickly raised a finger in a halting gesture.

“Don’t. Don’t shut it down. And don’t lie to me.”

He stilled his hand over the keyboard. “Darling, there’s nothing to lie about. I told you. Just work.”

She stopped so she was facing him from in front of the table, the screen between them. “Don’t lie to me,” she said. “I’ve seen it. Dynamite? Detonators? Trains? What the hell are you involved in?”

The words were like a slap. “What?”

“Your search history. Last night. It’s all there.”

Panic flooded his face. “So you’re spying on my internet searches now?”

“I’m not spying on you,” she shot back. “I’m worried. About you. About us. If I saw that, you think they didn’t, too?”

“They?”

“You know they watch everything. Did you forget that I’m on their watch list? You don’t think they see every keystroke that’s typed on this computer?”

He stumbled for words, but before he could formulate an answer, she pressed on.

“What have you got yourself into?”

He stared at her, a crippling dread nailing him in place. “I haven’t got myself into anything.”

Her anger flared through. “Don’t give me that. And don’t be naïve. You’re putting us at risk. All of us.” She was steaming, her fierce glare unrelenting. “I need to know. Now.”

He let out a long, weary exhale, and nodded slowly. In a way, it was a relief. A huge, welcome relief. He wasn’t sure he could handle something this momentous on his own. It had come out of nowhere to bear down on him like a gargantuan weight, something so big and so unheard of that it would inevitably, he worried, drown him.

“Sit down,” he said, softly. “You’re going to need to sit down.”

And then he told her.

Everything.

Ramazan and Nisreen’s words weren’t confined to their home.

What they didn’t know and what they wouldn’t have suspected was that the built-in microphone on their home computer, its embedded webcam, and the voice-activated speaker unit in their kitchen had all been remotely activated that morning.

Which was why nothing prevented their words from being snatched up the second they left their mouths and funneled out of the city almost instantly to the Comprehensive Imperial Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center’s server banks, where rapacious algorithms would chew them over in ever-more inventive ways before spitting out their reports.

Reports that, in many cases, could devastate a life within hours.