Empire of Lies

37

Sitting on the edge of the thin mattress in the windowless cell, Nisreen was struggling to stay awake.

She was beyond exhausted. More than her body, it was her mind that was spiraling toward a total shutdown. The events of the last forty-eight hours alone would have depleted the hardiest of souls. The way they’d ended had demolished her. Being locked up in this muggy, desolate cell without her children, not being able to comfort them and not knowing where they were or who they were with was like a slow-coursing poison that was killing her off, cell by cell.

Facing her on the other cot in the small room was Ramazan. He was hunched over, cradling his head in his hands, silent and shivering. They’d said all that needed to be said. All they could do now was wait—and hope.

Paralyzed by worry and without much else to contemplate, she found herself replaying the last couple of days’ events over and over in her mind’s eye, reliving each step, haunted by regret at having allowed herself to be swept up by that irresistible lure. She chided herself that she should have resisted. She should have known that digging into Rasheed’s secret was terribly dangerous territory, and she should have pulled away before it sucked her and Ramazan in and destroyed them. Because Nisreen was under no illusion what the inevitable outcome of all this was: destruction. Annihilation. She and Ramazan would never be allowed to walk out of there with that secret. Their fate was sealed. As was—she trembled—the fate of the children.

For a few delirious, hopeful seconds, she wondered if her disastrous foray into the world of the incantation might have a silver lining, if it might present an escape. She’d spent so much time researching it that she thought she might have memorized it, but she couldn’t be sure. It was long, and in a completely foreign language, and her notebook was now in her captors’ hands. Still, she imagined them all using it to travel back to a safer time, to a place where no one would know them or threaten them. She thought she would have risked using it, too, if Tarek and Noor were with them, but they weren’t, which made any notion of escape impossible. It was also probably why their captors were still keeping them apart.

She would have preferred to keep it from them, to hang on to it as a guarantee of her and Ramazan’s continued usefulness, to use it as their life preserver, however temporary. But she hadn’t been able to. Not even close. Not when her children were in the hands of those murderous brutes. Not when they were locked in a room with someone who had been proudly introduced as a psychotic butcher.

Another inkling of hope arose from the pit of despair into which she had sunk.

She thought of Kamal.

She imagined him out there searching for them, fighting to get to them. Despite everything, something she sensed in him when he appeared at the children’s bus stop the day before made her think he would. And as she slid back against the wall and curled into a ball, her arms tight around her knees in an effort to block the tremors that were rocking her, she held on to that thought for as long as she could.

Alone in his vast office, Huseyin Celaleddin Pasha had some major decisions to make.

He was standing at the picture window, looking out, lost in thought, his mind cosseted by the narcotic array of spotlit turrets, minarets, and domes that spread out before him and shimmered in the torrid humidity of the night.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been as consumed by a troubling situation. There had been crises of late, to be sure. The empire had been enduring some rocky times, and, as the head of the secret police, he had been at the epicenter of most of them. But this crisis had the potential to dwarf them all. If what he’d heard in that interview room was true, it was nothing less than a full-blown existential threat to the empire, one that could, at the whisper of a few words by the wrong person, lead to its being wiped off the pages of history.

The threat had a less monumental, less earth-shattering aspect to it that was no less dangerous. It had to do with the very being of the empire. The empire’s core religious tenet was the surrender to the will of God. This submission was the definition of its name, and the sultan, as caliph, was the defender of that faith. But if what Celaleddin had heard was true, it would mean that the empire’s glorious conquests weren’t due to the will of God. They weren’t part of a divine plan. Instead, they were simply the result of the machinations of one man, the ruse of a cunning time traveler, the ploy of a trickster. They were a cheat of history, and that revelation, if it were ever to come out, could cause an upheaval that might be impossible to contain.

Either way, the risks—of someone traveling into the past to undo what had been achieved or of the truth about how the empire had steamrolled its way across Europe coming out—were too great to ignore. This threat needed to be wiped out quickly, absolutely, and permanently.

He knew the anesthesiologist and his wife had told him the truth, the whole truth. He’d witnessed their terrorized reaction to the threat facing their children, and he had enough experience with prisoners to know that there was no chance they had held anything back. They had told him everything.

Which made them disposable.

There was no room for anything less than extreme prejudice toward anyone who had been exposed to it, and it had to be done now.

Tonight.

Everything—his entire world—depended on it.