Empire of Lies

55

Kamal turned to stone as he saw Taymoor enter the far end of the dining car. He was looking his way, and their eyes met instantly, Taymoor’s expression neutral, his face an impassive mask as he ambled down the aisle toward him.

“No hysterics, please,” Taymoor said with open palms before he pulled Nisreen’s chair back and settled into it. “It’s just me, all right. Just me.”

Kamal was alternating glares at him with alert scans of the dining carriage, both behind Taymoor and around them, looking for Nisreen, looking to see who else Taymoor had with him, looking to gauge any alarming reactions from other diners.

He saw none of it.

Kamal felt a sudden dread constrict his chest. “Nisreen. Where is she?”

“She’s fine,” Taymoor replied. “She’s absolutely fine. I just bought her some snooze time. Figured it would be more productive to talk alone. One on one.”

Kamal glared at him, on the boil, all coiled up to lash out, but Taymoor raised his hands again in a calming gesture.

“Take it easy. I told you she’s fine,” he repeated.

“Where is she?”

“Safe. And sound asleep. So do us all a favor and get a grip and settle down. I just want to talk.”

Kamal sucked in a deep, frustrated breath. He was on the edge of yanking Taymoor out of his seat. “How’d you find us? How’d you even get here?”

Taymoor shrugged, looked around to assess who might be within earshot, then settled back. “Celaleddin sent me.”

“To do what? Kill us?”

Taymoor held Kamal’s burning gaze, then shrugged again, leaned in, and lowered his voice. “He told me what Nisreen and Ramazan discovered. He gave me the incantation and told me to use it to find you.”

“And kill us.”

“Brother, if I wanted you dead, you’d both be worm food already. I’m not here for that.”

Kamal sat back and said nothing. All kinds of questions were pelting him. “How’d you know where to—” Then it hit him. “My phone. You found my phone.”

Taymoor nodded. “We knew how far back you’d gone. The thinking was that it was a random, spur-of-the-moment escape, a date chosen purely for ease of translation. Correct?”

It was Kamal’s turn to nod.

“But how’d you find us? We had a big head start.”

“You had zero head start.”

“What are you talking about?”

Taymoor let out a little snort of derision. “You’re still even more of an amateur at this than I am, brother.”

Kamal just stared at him, confused.

“I got here before you,” Taymoor said. “We added an extra day to the incantation. To give me time to get here and prepare. I was here before you. I was out by the lake, waiting for you. I saw you and Nisreen appear. It was freaky. One second, there was nothing there. Then, poof—you’re both there. In the flesh. Literally. I watched you both run off into the woods. Not an unpleasant sight, I might add,” he said with a wry grin. “At least where she’s concerned.”

Kamal shot him a fierce look that cut short that avenue for banter. Taymoor was still keeping up the pretense. Even here, now… after all that had happened.

“I followed you all the way to the han,” Taymoor continued. “But when I decided it was time to talk to you, you went ballistic and jumped out the window.”

“How’d you convince them to work with you?”

“Who?”

“The Zaptiye. How’d you get them to believe you?”

Taymoor’s expression clouded. “What Zaptiye?”

“At the han. You had men with you. Local cops.”

“I was alone, brother. There were cops there, yes. I saw a few. But they were nothing to do with me. I was as wary of them as you were, especially after you punched your way out of that courtyard.” He eyed him curiously. “You really thought I had a whole crew with me? A local one?”

Kamal didn’t reply. He felt like a fool. Had he known it was only Taymoor, he wouldn’t have felt as vulnerable. He wouldn’t have bolted.

“You had a gun,” Kamal said.

Taymoor glanced around the wagon before easing his coat back a little to expose the holster he still had on his belt. “Have,” he corrected Kamal. “Let’s just say I requisitioned it. Same with the clothes and some extras. And the money to buy this train ticket.”

“So you then followed us to Montmartre? Why didn’t you approach me there?”

“I didn’t, actually. I lost you outside the han. I’ve been looking for you all week.”

“How’d you find us?”

“The library. I got lucky.”

“The library?”

“Celaleddin asked me to let him know once it was done. He came up with a way to do it from here—from this time. I was to go to the Sultan Majid Imperial Library, which we knew was around back then—well, back now—and leave him a message on the specific page of a book that was around in this time, one that’s rarely taken out. Some obscure, dusty old tome that he got his people to identify. Three of them, actually, to be safe. So after losing you and coming up blank all week, I figured I ought to go there to see if the books were there, thinking I should scribble the message before he decided to send someone else back, maybe even a whole team.” He then added pointedly, “I was going to tell him it’s done.”

Which intrigued Kamal. “Done? As in, we’re dead.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“All week, I’ve been thinking about things, a lot, since it sank in that I was really trapped here—I mean, we are trapped here, right? You don’t know how to travel forward in time?”

Kamal felt a prickle of alarm at the question, but masked it and just shook his head. “No. Ramazan was going to ask Rasheed about it when the Z guys showed up and the shooting started.”

“So that’s why you were researching Rasheed and Vienna? You want to go back and find him to get the rest of the incantation from him?”

The prickle grew into a stab. Taymoor hadn’t just seen them at the library—he’d looked into what they were doing there. But he’d given Kamal the perfect out, the perfect excuse to deflect attention from what their real purpose was.

“Yes,” Kamal told him, his tone as even as he could manage. “It’s the only way. He’s the only one who knows it. We have to go back and get it from him.”

“See, that’s what I thought. But then, I thought, why Vienna? And why all the research about the battle for the city?” He paused, as if gauging Kamal’s reaction, then pressed on. “You could go back to a more recent time than that. To Paris, after he became governor. It would be much easier—you wouldn’t have had to take a train anywhere—and it would have been a hell of a lot safer.”

Kamal felt skewered. Taymoor had been baiting him with his earlier suggestion regarding Vienna. He tried to backtrack without appearing flustered in any way. “Vienna after the invasion is also safe. But, of course, we considered Paris, too.”

“But you chose Vienna. That’s what’s on your tickets and that’s why you didn’t get off at Strasbourg or Munich.”

Kamal leaned forward. Taymoor had done his homework. “We know he was definitely there, we know the times and the places. It’s all well documented. The rest, Paris… we don’t have specific information.”

“How hard could it be? He was the governor. And he was sick. He couldn’t have been that hard to find or to approach. And yet you chose to go back to a war zone?”

Kamal tried to mask any semblance of feeling cornered, which he was. “Things might have changed after he went back. We don’t know how far back he went after he disappeared from the hospital after the shooting. But we know it can’t have been before Vienna. So we thought we’d go there to make sure we find him. Besides, after I saw you at the han and assumed you had the backing of the Hafiye and the police, Paris didn’t seem safe anymore, in any time. You could have gone back decades earlier and set up a whole load of wanted bulletins about us.”

Taymoor looked dubious. “That seems rather extreme.”

“Maybe. But you guys are obviously desperate to find us, so maybe extreme isn’t unreasonable. I just wanted us to get the hell out of there.” Kamal realized there were holes in his argument as it tumbled out, but Taymoor just sat back, stone-faced, and nodded. There seemed to be something else on his mind.

“Maybe… or maybe there’s something you’re not telling me.”

“I’m leveling with you, brother.”

Taymoor eyed him calmly for a beat, then shrugged. “Either way, let me ask you this. Why do you want to go back to our time?”

The question surprised Kamal. “Why?”

“Yes, why? You’re both wanted there. I can’t imagine Nisreen will be happy there, given what happened. And yet you’re taking this huge risk to get ahold of the rest of the incantation. For what?”

Kamal ran with it. “It’s home. Like you said—it’s our time.”

“Yes, but what about here, now?” Taymoor’s face was animated now—and markedly less antagonistic. “We could stay here. All of us.”

“You want to stay here?”

“I’ve been thinking about it all week after I lost you. Maybe it’s not a bad thing to be stuck here. Maybe it’s actually a great thing. Think about it. Things are good here. They’ve got a good sultan. It’s peaceful. No terror threat, no enemies of the state. Oil is starting to bring in piles of cash, and people are enjoying good times. And it’s not so backward that it’s uncomfortable… I mean, there’s electricity and cars and hot showers. And no one knows anything about us. And with everything we know about the future… we could live like kings. Right? We could get rich. Absurdly rich. Rich like we never dreamed.” His face tightened. “But I can’t have you and Nisreen jeopardize that for me. No way. Do you understand me, brother?”

Kamal let out a small chuckle. They weren’t partners for nothing. He’d had the same daydream, and it had appealed to him, a lot, but that was before Nisreen had changed his mind. And his mind was changed, even if Taymoor’s suggestion did stir a powerful questioning within him, a questioning he needed to make visible, because he couldn’t let Taymoor find out about their plan.

Taymoor’s ambition made perfect sense to Kamal. He wanted to reinvent himself, to carve out a life of comfort and wealth in this time and place—a time and place where, Kamal also knew, Taymoor wouldn’t need to hide his sexual preference as he did in their old life, where he wouldn’t have to keep up the charade of being a ladies’ man, where he wouldn’t fear the severe consequences that would befall him if the truth ever came out.

Kamal and Nisreen’s plan, on the other hand, would destroy that ambition. The present they were now in would no longer exist. An altered version would have replaced it, and Taymoor would get wiped out in the mix.

Kamal decided now might be the right time to use what he’d long known about Taymoor. “I know it might suit you more to live here. It would be… safer for you.” He looked at him pointedly. “You wouldn’t have to live a lie.”

A flash of surprise lit up Taymoor’s face; then he relaxed and shrugged. “We’ve all been living a lie, haven’t we?”

Kamal held his questioning gaze but decided to duck Taymoor’s point and move on. “The life you describe… I thought about it, too,” he offered, not having to lie to sound convincing. “It doesn’t sound half bad.”

“And…?”

“Nisreen doesn’t want to stay. She wants to get the reverse incantation and go back to get justice for Ramazan and her kids.”

“Justice? That’s crazy. You know she doesn’t stand a chance. Surely you told her that.”

“I did. She won’t change her mind. Given what happened, can you blame her?”

“No, but… you know what will happen. She’ll wind up dead, too.”

“She won’t hear of it. She wants to make them pay. But look, either way—it doesn’t affect what you want to do. We’ll go back and find a way to get the forward version from Rasheed. You stay here and live your life the way you want. If we get it, we’ll go back to our world, and I’ll do what I can to help Nisreen get the closure she needs. It won’t matter to you. It’s decades from now; you’ll be long dead by then.”

A skeptical expression clouded Taymoor’s face. “You could change things inadvertently when you go back. Mess up the timeline. Change the future. My future—this future. What happens to me then? What happens to this world?”

Kamal frowned. He felt the sides of the dining car close in on him. “She needs to try. Maybe we won’t even get near him. Maybe they’ll see these two naked people appear and think we’re djinn and just kill us on the spot.”

Taymoor’s expression grew darker. “I can’t take that risk, brother. I can’t live with that uncertainty hanging over me. Like my whole life could get wiped out just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

They faced off in silence for a moment.

Taymoor was the one to break it. “Help me out here. We need to find a solution, but I’m not seeing one. Not when all it takes is a few words for you to both disappear.”

Kamal was having a hard time thinking of ways to defuse him. “I can try talking to her again.”

“Sure, you could, but even if you did get her to change her mind now… how can I be sure that it’s going to last?”

“You’ll just have to trust me on that.”

Taymoor gave him a slow, regretful shake of the head. “Any other girl, I’d take that gamble on you, brother. But not with her. I know how headstrong she is. And I know what she means to you.”

“They took away her whole life,” Kamal told him, a familiar rage unfurling inside him.

“So you can understand why I can’t risk having you take mine away.”

Kamal just stared back at him, coolly, but said nothing.

Taymoor edged his coat open again, enough to expose the gun in its holster. He gave Kamal a sideways nod, aimed away from the table. “I wish there was another way, brother.”

“Me too.”

Kamal got up, slowly, his senses now operating at hyperalert.

He started walking down the aisle, passing the few remaining travelers who, unsuspecting, were enjoying the close of their evening, and headed toward the sleeper car that housed his cabin, Taymoor inches behind.