Empire of Lies

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 butterflies. 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?”