Empire of Lies

10

The wards of the Hurrem Sultan were quiet, a fitting end to the day of rest.

Tomorrow, a new week would begin, and the halls would be heaving with activity.

Not tonight, though. And not in room 7 of the intensive care unit, where a tattooed man was blissfully adrift in an ocean of sedatives and painkillers.

His untethered mind had a lot of territory it could explore, for Ayman Rasheed had lived a life that was arguably fuller than any man had managed. That night, however, it had chosen to revisit the catalyst to everything that was to come, the fuse that exploded any barriers to the possible and sent him on his journey into the unknown, and the man who had provided him with that fuse.

It happened in Palmyra, Syria, in October 2015. Which wasn’t just a different place and time.

It was a different world altogether.

The prisoner held up his emaciated, filthy hands and stared at them. They still twitched uncontrollably. They hadn’t really stopped, not since that first beating from—how long ago had it been? Days? Weeks?

He wasn’t sure.

Any notion of time wasn’t really relevant anymore. Not to him. Or, he knew, to any of the other men he could hear getting beaten and tortured beyond the confines of the cold, filthy room he was being held in.

His hands, though, were an odd fascination for him simply because they were still there. And given that the rest of him was also still there, given that he was still a living, breathing mass of cells, given that he still existed, he wondered if his inner torment about what he’d done, about the great secret he’d been forced to divulge—and his fear about the forces his disclosure could unleash—was misjudged.

He’d held out reasonably well after the initial beating. He was, after all, seventy-three years old. In good shape, for sure, fit and youthful after all those years in the field, working the digs in the heat and the dust, running the show as the old city’s director of antiquities and the curator of its museum, excavating the treasures of its glorious past. Still, seventy-three and hosepipe lashings don’t mix well.

The next level of interrogation and suffering, however, was enough to break him.

He didn’t last half an hour when they put him through the shabah—the Ghost—which consisted of tying his hands behind his back before hoisting him off the ground from his cuffs. Simple, but ferociously effective. The first shoulder had popped out of its socket almost immediately, the second no more than ten agonizing minutes later. The pain had been excruciating and, in his experience, beyond compare. It was only after he’d lost consciousness that they’d brought him down. At least he’d been spared the more vicious of their torture techniques, the ones he and his fellow Syrians knew all too well, the ones the Asaad regime had used on its people for decades, the same ones that their ISIS nemeses, the Islamists who’d grabbed him, were now using on countless others. The sadistic contraptions with other disturbingly whimsical names like the Flying Carpet, the German Chair, or the Black Slave.

They weren’t necessary.

No, after the Ghost, he talked. He gave them what they wanted.

After watching the Islamists loot and destroy dozens of Syria’s most prized archaeological heritage sites and converge on Palmyra, he and his colleagues from the museum had spirited away hundreds of statues and ancient artifacts, Roman and Byzantine treasures that the barbarians wanted to plunder and sell to help finance their murderous rampage.

And now that he was no longer of any use to them, he knew they’d soon kill him.

It was a fate he could have avoided if he’d wanted to. He could have joined those who’d left before the ISIS militants had overrun the city. Many had. But Palmyra was his home. He’d devoted his whole life to it. Ancient Greek, Roman, Palmyrene, Byzantine, Umayyad, Mamluk, Ottoman—the city, first settled over ten thousand years ago, had flourished under a multitude of empires. He’d been instrumental in uncovering and preserving its epic heritage, and there was a lot here to protect: temples and shrines and statues and carvings that couldn’t be moved to safety or hidden. Palmyra had been his life, a city that had entrusted him with many of its secrets. He’d always assumed he would die there, although not like this. Not at the hands of these savages.

Perhaps his revelations would spare him the monstrous pain of a slow beheading, one that, he grimly imagined, would inevitably be plastered all over their YouTube and Facebook accounts. But death would be a small mercy at this point. He would welcome it, especially after hearing about what was to come from the demon now facing him in his grubby cell, sitting cross-legged on the floor.

His tormentor.

The man who, while questioning him, had read his expression perfectly. The inquisitor who had sensed that the old director of antiquities was hiding something else, something greater than the artifacts he’d helped bury, who’d known that he hadn’t given up his biggest secret. The brute who’d dragged the director’s nine-year-old niece into this hellhole, held a blade to her throat, and described every sordid act he and his men would do to her if the old man didn’t speak up.

He’d had no choice but to give the beast what he wanted. And now the beast was back, with a curious look in his dispassionate, calculating eyes. A look that presaged disaster.

The prisoner felt utterly helpless and at his mercy, a pathetic, crushed supplicant. How he wished he had memorized the incantation. It was complicated, a strange sequence of words from a long-lost language, and it wouldn’t have been easy, especially since the slightest mistake might stop it from working and could leave him stranded. Still, how he wished he could have used it to escape. He would have taken the risk of being stranded; he would have preferred to be anywhere but here. But it was too late for that now.

He was too scared to ask, but he couldn’t hold it back.

“You… you tried it, didn’t you?”

His captor responded only with a couple of slow, thoughtful nods.

The prisoner’s breath caught. “And…?”

The man remained silent for a moment, considering his reply, before his face widened in an unsettling, leery satisfaction. “It was… exhilarating. Beyond words, really. But then, you know that. You’ve tried it, too.”

The prisoner had only ever dared try his great discovery once, and very briefly at that. He’d been mystified, a couple of years earlier, when he’d first found the ancient writings that were carved into the walls of a small, hidden chamber at the edge of the Temple of Baalshamin, a second century edifice dedicated to the Canaanite sky god. He’d spent long hours trying to decipher their message, and, once he had, he’d checked his work over and over to make sure he’d got it right. What they told was impossible, he’d thought. Surely, impossible. And yet there it was, reaching out from the distant past, bewitching him, beckoning him with its tantalizing lure, and he couldn’t resist trying it.

No one could have resisted that.

And so, after much thought about how far back to travel, he’d done it. It had worked, but it had also scared the hell out of him. He’d never had the guts to try it again. Perhaps that was how any sane man would react.

The question was, Was his captor sane? Were any of them?

He wasn’t too sure they were.

In his more lucid, calmer moments, he tried not to be overly harsh on himself. He hadn’t given up his secret easily. No one could accuse him of that. Not after what they’d done to him

“Where did you…?” he asked his captor. “How far back did you—”

The man stilled him with a tut-tut from his mouth and a lightning quick, small wag of his finger. But he said nothing.

The prisoner froze.

The man studied him, his mind clearly running through some kind of internal deliberation. “You’ve given me something with limitless potential. For that I should be immensely grateful to you. But at the same time something with this much potential needs to be handled with care. Extreme care. And extreme discretion. I’m going to need time to think about it. A lot of time. As you can imagine, there are so many possible choices, so many possibilities. Which means I have a lot of work to do. A lot of reading, thinking, planning. And I can’t risk having anyone else know about this.”

He reached under his jacket and pulled out a knife. It was matte black, military spec, its blade ending in an upturned arc.

The director of antiquities went rigid at the sight.

“Besides,” the man said as he tapped the blade casually against his open palm, “killing you now won’t really change much in terms of your future. You won’t have one, not after I’m done. You won’t be around to witness it—at least, I don’t think you will. It wouldn’t make sense, would it?”

The director was unable to focus on what the man was saying. Every neuron inside him was focused on the blade. He tried to formulate some kind of plea, to prod his mouth to eke out something that might change his captor’s mind, but his senses were too jumbled to react. All he could manage was a meek, mumbled “please,” but even as he said it, he knew it wouldn’t change anything.

“It’s actually a shame you won’t be around to see it,” the man said as he set the knife down on the floor beside him and pulled a handgun out from his belt, “because I really do believe it’s going to be glorious.”

And with that, he raised the gun to the director’s head and pulled the trigger.

So many possibilities, Ayman Rasheed thought, as he sat in the trashed office of the director of antiquities.

So many possibilities and such a huge decision to make… but also so much to look forward to if he got it right.

As he stared out the window at the destruction and chaos outside the gates of the museum, Rasheed contemplated how much his world had changed. How outside factors, ones way beyond his control, had ended up with him here, in Palmyra, surrounded by strangers, fighting an enemy with many faces in a land that was not his own.

A week had passed since the fateful moment when he saw the hesitation and fear in the museum director’s eyes, and he could think of nothing else. He could barely sleep. Ever since he’d done it, ever since he’d tried it out for himself, his mind was drunk with excitement. The director’s secret had opened up a whole universe of possibilities, quite literally. Which meant Rasheed had to think hard and choose from his staggering array of options very, very carefully. The future of hundreds of millions of people—billions, even—rested on his shoulders.

Their future… or their past?

He was still having a hard time getting his head around it.

An incredible choice to have to make for any man, to be sure. A monstrous responsibility, and a gift that could, in the wrong hands, be easily squandered.

Rasheed wasn’t about to let that happen.

This prodigious gift, after all, hadn’t fallen into the hands of some illiterate, impulsive fool. It had found its way to him: an erudite, thoughtful man. A man whose career was built on intellect as well as instinct, a calculating strategist who appreciated the long view and never rushed into things, unlike so many of his peers.

And, most crucially, in the light of what he’d stumbled upon, an inquisitive man who also had a long-standing passion for a subject that would now serve him well: history.

Allah worked in mysterious ways, indeed.