Empire of Lies

42

They sat on a large flat outcropping by the water’s edge.

Speaking in a dazed, distant tone, Nisreen told Kamal what had happened, right from the beginning.

The tattooed man appearing at the hospital.

Ramazan’s suspicions.

His first late-night internet search session. The words he typed in.

“That would have tripped some alarms,” Kamal said.

Nisreen shrugged. “They were probably already monitoring our online activity because of me. Because of what I do. He knew that.”

Her words trailed off, as if she felt sudden remorse that what she’d said sounded like she was blaming Ramazan. Kamal didn’t press it. He could see how hard it was for her to be reliving every moment of the last few days, putting it under a microscope wouldn’t do her any favors. He also knew people got complacent when they didn’t think they were doing anything worthy of being monitored, even when they were aware that every keystroke of theirs was most likely under watch.

He also tried not to dwell on how she probably included him among them when she said “they.”

She found the strength to tell him about the second night, about confronting Ramazan about his searches. Then she told him what he had told her. About the man. About what he’d told Ramazan.

Kamal, riveted by her every word, didn’t interrupt.

She told him about her going to the hospital with Ramazan the next morning, about their conversation with the tattooed man, about him telling them what the incantation was. Then she concluded with what Ramazan had told her on the phone, about the agents showing up at the hospital, the shootout, and—crucially—what happened next.

It took Kamal a moment to process this. “He actually saw him disappear?”

“That’s what he told me. He was very clear about that.”

“Like disappear disappear?”

“Yes.”

“Nisreen—”

“Kamal, I’m telling you the man just vanished”—said with a cutting, impatient spike of anger.

Kamal clammed up. He wasn’t sure how to continue the conversation. He could see that she was barely holding it together, and he needed to tread softly. Part of him wasn’t sure she was thinking clearly at all given what she had just told him. But he also had too much respect for her and for her intellect to dismiss what she was saying. “Could it have been a trick? Or something he missed? The guy ducking out and slipping away while he wasn’t looking?”

“No. I pressed him on that, too. It happened right in front of him. The others also saw it. That’s what shook him so hard. That’s why he ran.”

“It’s not possible. People don’t disappear.”

“They don’t travel across time either. But this man did.”

“He claims he did. There has to be another explanation for it.”

“Look where we are, Kamal. Why do you think this is happening? Why do you think they came after us this hard? Why do you think Celaleddin himself interrogated us? Why—”

“Wait, Celaleddin interrogated you?”

Nisreen nodded, visibly pained by the memory.

She told Kamal about their episode at the Citadel.

“Why else would they want us dead? It’s because of what we know. What Ramazan saw. You said the two dead men at the castle were agents who were also at the hospital when it happened. That’s obviously why they killed them, too. To keep them quiet. To stop any of it from coming out.”

Kamal looked away and acknowledged her words with some thoughtful nods as the impossible started to, if not sink in, then at least slip under the surface. “And you’re saying Rasheed—whoever he was—he gave you the incantation?”

“Yes. Well, sort of. Half of it. He told us how to travel back into the past, but we didn’t get the way he came here. To the future.”

“So you know it?”

“Not by heart. I mean, I should. I read and reread it and listened to it so many times while trying to translate it… But it’s in Palmyrene. It’s not related to any language we use.”

“Why were you trying to translate it?”

“I wanted to see if there was any part of it that was specific to going back in time, to the past. I thought that maybe substituting that part with a word that relates to the future or to going forward might be how one travels that way. Like he did. I had it all written down in my notebook along with what I’d managed to translate so far.”

“Which you gave to Celaleddin?”

“Yes. I didn’t have a choice. Which is why they don’t need us anymore.” A haunted, questioning look imbued her face. “Why did they react so violently? Why the need to…” Her breath caught as she stumbled over the words. Then, looking away, she added, in a low voice, “They’re monsters. Just… monsters.”

Kamal averted his gaze from her as well and stared down at his feet. Once again, even though he’d just lost his own brother, even though she had to know how much he loved them all, he couldn’t help but feel included in her contempt, but he chose to let it die out rather than give it any oxygen. It helped that he was still trying to understand what had happened.

“This man. The one you’re saying was Ayman Rasheed,” he said. “If everything he said is true… he changed history. He went back, and he changed everything. And if he could do that, someone else could do it, too. That kind of knowledge, that kind of power… I can’t think of a more dangerous weapon. And they knew you and Ramazan had it.”

“But they had no reason to think we would be a threat to the empire. Not in that sense. This is our world. Our whole existence.” She paused, then added, “Or at least, it was.”

“Even so. For them, the risk is too great. You could go back and change things without meaning to. You could tell someone, and they might decide to use it to destroy all this.” He spread his arms wide. “Besides, even without acting on it, the knowledge of it alone is dangerous.”

“What do you mean?”

“The empire. The caliphate. We’ve always believed it to be the will of God. The empire’s success, the defeat of the Christians, the fall of Rome before the sword of the sultan. It’s all part of a divine plan, right? That’s what we hear in the sermons, that’s what history tells us. Now imagine if this came out.”

“That it wasn’t God’s will at all. That it was just the will of one man.”

“Exactly.”

She thought about it for a second, then said, “Unless you consider him a tool of God, doing His bidding to fix the world. Maybe this is how it was all supposed to be. Maybe Rasheed brought it back to how it was supposed to be. I mean, how do we know someone else hadn’t gone back long before Rasheed did and changed things, perverted history, and turned the world into the one Rasheed knew?”

He was surprised by her clearheaded response and wanted to keep it going. Any distraction he could get her engaged in, no matter how brief, was surely helpful—for them both. “We don’t. But if you’re going to open that door, the possibilities become infinite. And it all leads to the same problem: why would God allow so much meddling with His divine plan? Why isn’t He in control? That kind of questioning is just as problematic and dangerous.”

She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter anyway. We are where we are.” Her expression retreated into a distant, even more drawn look. “Nothing’s going to change that.”

Kamal said nothing at first. Then he found himself unable to stop pondering something that sounded so incredible he couldn’t believe he was about to say it out loud.

“If you had the incantation, if you knew for sure that you had the right wording—and assuming it works—couldn’t we use it to go back and fix things? Like go back, I don’t know, a week? Before any of this happened?”

“No. He said you can’t go back to any time within your lifetime. Which makes sense, I suppose. There’d be two of you around, right? Besides, like I said, I’m not sure I remember the exact wording. They have my notebook, and I lost my phone.”

“Your phone? What’s that got to do with it?

“I recorded it. Rasheed, what he told us—I have it on video. All of it. But I lost it when they grabbed us.”

“It’s on your phone? Everything Rasheed said?”

“Yes.”

“I have your phone. I found it in your car.”

“Where is it?”

“It’s here, in the car.” All kinds of possibilities were now flaring up inside his brain. “Having the incantation… it gives us leverage. We can threaten them. Say we’ll go public with it.”

“How? They control everything. And even if they didn’t, no one would believe it.”

“They’re desperate to keep it under wraps. That’s leverage.”

“They’ll never let it get that far.” She was shaking her head ruefully. “They’re not going to stop until we’re dead.”

“Not if I can help it.”

She shook her head, dejected. “You won’t stand a chance. We both know how effective they are at dealing with anyone they consider a threat.”

He tried not to read anything accusatory in her words. “Let me worry about that. But I have to get you to safety first.”

“I don’t care about that.”

He reached out to grab her by the shoulders, but stopped himself. “You can’t say that.”

Her eyes took on a faraway, chilling tightness. “If I want to be safe, it’s only so I can get back at them. So I can make them pay. Starting with Celaleddin.”

“Let’s start by making sure you’re safe.”

She turned her gaze on him. “Where? Wherever I go, nowhere is safe.”

“Wherever we go,” Kamal corrected her. “We’re in this together now.”

She gave him a curious, uncomfortable look; then her face softened fractionally.

He was grateful for it. Under the circumstances, he was glad she’d even managed that.

“It would have to be far,” he said. “Beyond the border. Out of their reach. England, maybe. That’s the nearest option. I’ll find a way to get you across the channel.”

“The sultan has agents there, doesn’t he?”

Kamal frowned. England wasn’t part of the empire, never had been. But the English and the Ottomans had a long history of cooperation, one that went all the way back to 1570, when the pope excommunicated their Protestant queen, Elizabeth I. The rest of Catholic Europe shunned her, too, leading her to forge an alliance with the Ottomans against their mutual enemies. Despite the fact that this alliance was rooted in cold political and economic reasons, Elizabeth eventually came to believe that Protestantism had more in common with Islam than with Catholicism.

“The English would hand me over to them,” Nisreen added, “assuming they don’t find out what’s really going on and want me for themselves.”

“Then maybe we use it as a stepping stone to moving on.”

“To where?”

“America?”

Nisreen scoffed. “Oh, they’d welcome us with open arms, wouldn’t they?”

The Christian Republic guarded its religious exclusivity fiercely. There were no mosques, no synagogues, no temples there. Visitors who were already Christian and could prove it under rigorous vetting, converted on arrival and agreed to be held in “Saviour Camps” for months until they were deemed to be fully reborn, or not allowed in. It was that simple.

“Well… I could be useful to them.” As he said it, Kamal couldn’t believe the words coming out of his mouth—the mouth of a fêted Hafiye hero, casually discussing betraying his people. But he was more than ready to do that. Right now, he was ready to do whatever it took to bring the whole empire crashing down on its murderous, lying self.

“I’d be the useful one if they ever found out what happened. If anyone would want to change history, it’s them.” She mopped her face with her hands and let out a long, weary breath. “And maybe they should. Maybe they need to know about this. Maybe they should send someone back to change it to how it was supposed to be.”

“And none of us would be here, right?”

She shrugged and looked at him squarely. “Would it matter?”

Kamal said nothing. The only person out there that still mattered to him was his father, who was farming his chickens quietly in the Périgord and was likely oblivious to any of this. Perhaps it was better that way, Kamal thought, although he knew he’d need to tell him the truth about how his son died, and soon.

After a quiet spell, she said, “I pushed him.”

“What?”

“Ramazan. I should have told him to stop. I should have made him stop asking questions.” Her voice cracked, and she teared up again. “Instead, I pushed him to talk to him again, to get the incantation. I insisted on going in with him. Maybe if I hadn’t, maybe if I’d—”

“No,” Kamal interjected. “You can’t blame yourself. His curiosity triggered it, and they came after him. They caused this. This is on them, not on him, not on you. They’re responsible. And I’m going to make sure they pay for it.”

She calmed her sobs and nodded passively, an internal debate going on.

“I don’t want to run,” she finally said.

“I don’t think there’s much of a—”

“I don’t want to run,” she insisted. “I don’t want to live in hiding. I’ve seen it. I’ve been around people who’ve had to do it. It’s not a life. It’s not for me. Not matter what.”

He let it sink in. “What then?”

“I don’t know.” She fell silent; then her face hardened again. “I want them dead. I want them all dead. I want them to suffer for what they did.”

He looked at her. She was shivering.

“That makes two of us. But that’s my job from here on.”

“No. I want to be part of it. I want to do everything I can to make it happen.”

Her shivering gave her words a steely tinge. She meant every syllable.

“Then that’s what we’ll do,” he told her. “We’ll make them pay.”

She nodded and looked away.

He sat there for a moment, then got up. “We’d better get moving.”

“And go where?”

“We don’t have money. And we need new papers. IDs to allow us to move around a bit more freely. The only place I know where to get both is in Paris.”

“You want to go back to the city?”

“Yes. It’s dangerous, but we might stand a better chance of getting lost in the crowds than out here. We’ll need to ditch the car and find another way there. But not yet. We’ll wait until it’s dark. I think I know a way into the city they won’t expect.”

Nisreen didn’t comment, but she was visibly uncomfortable with his thinking.

“I want to see that recording,” he added, and got up. “I’ll go get it.”

She pushed herself to her feet. “I’ll come with you.”

They walked through the woods, back to the SUV. She looked like she was about to say something, held back, then said, “This is so… insane.”

“What?”

“Everything. All of it. And now listening to you. Doing the same things that those you normally hunt would do.”

“I don’t hunt people, Nisreen.”

She gave him a skeptical shrug.

“Yes, of course, I’ve hunted people,” he told her. “But they were terrorists. Nutjobs who were out to kill innocent people.”

“And lawyers and professors who were saying things you didn’t like.”

He nodded ruefully. “I wasn’t part of—well, I hope I wasn’t. The truth is, I’m not so sure anymore.” Anger and regret were dueling inside him. “Kuzey and his people… they were murderers. The White Rose… it was all a lie.”

Nisreen looked at him in wide-eyed shock as he filled her in on what the Z Directorate hitman had told him earlier that evening.

“I’m so sorry, Nisreen. I know you can never forgive me for even being—”

“Please.” She raised her hand and cut him off. “Not now. It’s all too much to bear already. Please.”

He said nothing more as all the long weeks and months of distance, anguish, and pain came rushing back to the surface, propelled by a far greater pain. One that, he knew, would never let them go.

Then, slowly, they plodded on through the maze of oaks, heading for the car.

They were almost at the clearing when Kamal saw something up ahead through the trunks and foliage, a flash of movement that caught his eye.

Men, moving around the SUV.

They’d found them.