Empire of Lies

44

It only took a minute or two for their SUV to chew up the rest of the winding road and reach a bigger lake deep in the forest.

It swerved to a halt in an angry cloud of dust by the water’s edge. Nisreen scanned her surroundings. The remote spot was deserted and quiet, a few park benches languishing empty under the late-morning sun. Which wasn’t unusual for a weekday.

Nisreen stared at her phone, thinking hard. Out of desperation, a crazy notion had blasted into her mind. It had latched stubbornly onto her consciousness the second she’d first voiced it back at the clearing, when her mind was in overdrive, and now it was screaming out at her. And maybe it wasn’t so crazy after all.

Maybe it was the only way they would live.

She fired up her phone.

“What are you doing?” Kamal asked.

“Find me a pen,” she said, her face locked in concentration, her tone urgent. “Anything I can write with.”

“Why?”

“Just do it. And switch on your phone.”

Kamal looked at her questioningly.

“Just do it,” she insisted.

The sirens were getting nearer.

He did as she asked, rummaging through the armrest storage box, then the glove compartment, while it powered up. He found a black ballpoint pen and handed it to her.

“Okay,” she said as she snatched it from him. “Open up Hafiza on your phone. Put in ‘Palmyrene language’ in quotes, then”—she did a quick mental calculation—“the words for ‘thirty’ and ‘thousand.’ Look for the result from the Damascus University website.”

Kamal seemed completely lost.

“Do it,” she ordered him. “It’s the only way.”

His eyes flared with realization. “Wait, you’re not thinking—thirty thousand days?” he blurted.

“We don’t have a choice,” she shot back. “We really don’t.”

Precious seconds were ticking away. The sirens, wailing through the dense forest, were getting ever closer.

“You’re not seriously saying you want to do this?”

“Do you have a better idea?”

He stared at her blankly but was lost for words. He was just breathing hard, same as her.

“We’re wasting time,” she pressed.

“What if—what if it screws up? What if it sends us somewhere wrong?”

“Anywhere’s better than here right now.”

“What if we get stuck there? What if we can’t get back? You said you don’t know how to travel forward in time.”

“You want to come back? To what?” She reached out and grabbed his hands. “They’ll kill us if they grab us, Kamal. You know that. And I don’t want to die here. Not at their hands.”

He was still frozen, his jaw visibly clenched.

“I don’t want to die,” she repeated.

He sucked in a deep breath and nodded. “Okay.” And he went to work.

While he did, she scrolled to the video file of the conversation with Rasheed and jumped to the part of it that she knew well, the place where he told them the incantation. She held her phone to her ear and, listening intently and pausing the recording, she used the pen to write the words down on her forearm in large, clear letters.

The sirens were cutting in and out through the trees, an eerie, wailing threat rolling in at them.

“Well?” she asked him as soon as she was done.

He showed her his phone. “This one?”

She grabbed it from him, and her eyes devoured the words on the screen. “Perfect,” she said as she wrote them down on her forearm, too, then she flung the car door open. “Let’s go.”

He hesitated, but she was already outside.

The sirens were much louder now. Then a black agency SUV burst out of the tree line.

Kamal drew his gun and rushed out after her.

He sprinted around the car and joined Nisreen by the front passenger door. They both ducked down and watched the approaching vehicle from over the car’s roof. Another car, a police cruiser, was hot on the Kartal’s tail. They were both coming straight at them.

Kamal waited until they were in range, then he sprang up, his handgun clenched tight in a two-fisted grip, and let off a volley of rounds at the lead car. Three of them drilled through the windshield while the rest punched into the front grille and the side fender.

As expected, the SUV spun sideways and came to a grinding halt. The cruiser chasing it did the same but veered off in the opposite direction before stopping, creating an open V formation.

The cops piled out of their vehicles and scurried for cover behind them. Taymoor wasn’t among them. Evidently, they hadn’t picked him up yet.

Kamal ducked back down and looked at Nisreen. “Are we doing this?”

Her face was in full nervous lockdown, too. “I guess we’re about to find out.”

“Kamal Agha,” a man’s voice rang out. “Our orders are to bring you in for questioning. Alive.” He paused, then added, “That’s our preferred outcome. But it’s not the only one.”

To make the point, they started firing, peppering the driver’s side of Kamal and Nisreen’s SUV with bullets.

Kamal waited, then darted up and fired back—then his gun’s slide recoiled back and locked. He was out of bullets.

“Damn it.” He glanced at Nisreen.

She was breathing hard.

“No time like the present,” he said.

She nodded, then turned to face him. She set the two phones on the ground beside her and reached out for him. “Hold my hands,” she told him.

He set his gun down and took her hands in his—then an urgent thought rocked him.

“Wait,” he said.

He pulled the phones closer and hammered them a few times with the grip of his gun, shattering their screens and sending bits of plastic flying. He picked up their cracked carcasses and tossed them into the lake, as far as he could.

“Kamal Agha,” the man’s voice bellowed out again. “This is your final warning.”

Kamal took Nisreen’s hands in his. “Do it.”

She twisted her grip so that her forearms were facing her, allowing her to read the words she’d written on them.

She stared into his eyes.

“Repeat after me. Exactly as I say it. Don’t send me back alone.”

“No chance of that,” he assured her.

“Kamal Agha,” the voice echoed. “Your time’s up.”

Nisreen’s eyes narrowed—then she started reading out the words of the incantation.

Slowly.

Clearly.

Pausing after every few syllables.

Giving Kamal time to repeat them after her.

Her grip tightening more with every word.

Every syllable.

Then, her eyes signaling that she had almost reached the end, she gave him a final, piercing look, a look that had a lifetime of love and hate and admiration and anguish in it, and shut her eyes and uttered the final words.

For a second, nothing happened.

Kamal shut his eyes.

And then, without notice, without artifice, without any kind of warning, with nothing more than a subtle swish of cloth and air, he felt her grip disappear. He was holding on to nothing.

He hazarded a quick glance.

She was gone.

Only her clothes were there, where she’d been crouched before him, a lifeless, empty clump.

He shut his eyes again.

Tight.

Took a deep breath.

And repeated her final words.