In a panic, he killed the browser window and jabbed the computer’s power button. He watched the screen die out, then shut his eyes, furious at himself. Researching dynamite couldn’t be good. Not good at all. He might have some explaining to do. Which was not something anyone looked forward to. His heart was now kickboxing its way out of his chest, his mind ruing his overzealous curiosity—and yet he still couldn’t ignore the question gnawing at him: What did this all mean?
Ramazan couldn’t make sense of what he had uncovered—he wasn’t even sure he wanted to anymore—but it only added to the portentous feeling he had about the man. The tattoos could point to a dangerous psychotic, someone who should be reported to the authorities. An enemy of the state. If they asked, he could always excuse it that way. He was being a patriot. Then again, the tattoos could be dismissed as no more than the eccentric markings of an original or deranged mind, his odd outburst further proof of his imbalance. That was what a rational, calm mind would have concluded, and Ramazan was a rational, calm man. Too rational and too calm, perhaps. But he was also an intelligent man and an instinctive one, and, faced with what he had seen, he was finding it hard to dismiss them. Something didn’t feel right. And in some strange, unfamiliar way, it didn’t just scare him.
It excited him.
Sayyid Ramazan Hekim didn’t get excited too often.
There was a hidden story locked away inside that man. Ramazan thought about the dynamite again and wondered if the man wasn’t a threat to the people, to the city, to the empire. He had to find out more. He needed to investigate. And if the man did turn out to be an enemy of the state, one intent on causing death to the innocent, and if Ramazan were to be the one to flush him out and get him locked away before he could strike, it would be a massive coup. It would be life-changing, especially when it came to his marriage. He’d reap the praise and the high esteem that his brother Kamal had been basking in since the arrests. Even more important, he might even get to savor the kind of admiration Nisreen once held for his brother. He’d be the hero, without any of his brother’s taint.
The prospect was electrifying.
He checked his watch. It was almost five. Dawn wasn’t far off.
“What are you doing up this late? It’s the middle of the night.”
Her voice snapped him out of his reverie, and he looked up.
Nisreen was there, leaning against the doorjamb, looking half asleep with her tousled hair and eyelids that were struggling to stay open.
“I—I couldn’t sleep. The surgery was—it took forever,” he said, trying to smother any hint of deceit from his voice.
“Oh. Is your patient all right?”
“Yes. Well—yes, I think so. He is.”
She seemed momentarily confused. Then her features relaxed somewhat. “Good.” She studied him, then asked, “Are you going to stay up?”
“No. I mean—I don’t know. It’s…” He made a show of checking his watch again. “Actually, I should head back soon. He’ll be coming out of sleep, and I really ought to be there when he does.”
There was a lag in Nisreen’s reaction. He wondered if he should stay, be with her on this troubled night, comfort her. But he didn’t want to talk about Azmi’s death, which the conversation would inevitably drift to. And he needed to find out more about his mysterious patient. If there was something sinister to uncover, something that might turn him into a hero, his window of opportunity wasn’t unlimited.
Nisreen nodded slowly and asked, “You want me to make you a cup of coffee?”
“No, thank you. I’ll get one at the hospital.” He smiled, then regretted it instantly. She knew him too well not to notice that it was forced.
She nodded again. “I’ll see you later then.” She was about to turn, then said, “You should probably get out of those clothes. Why don’t you have a shower? It’ll wake you up.”
“I didn’t want to wake you.”
She gave him a sheepish look. “I already am.”
“Okay.”
He followed her to the bedroom. She got back into bed while he headed to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came out to get dressed, she was asleep again.
He said his fajr prayers, though they didn’t provide him with any of the clarity he was hoping for or give him any respite from the apprehension he felt about what he was doing. Then he slipped out of the apartment and headed back to the hospital.
He wanted to be there when the mystery man regained consciousness.
* * *
Nisreen heard the front door click shut and sat up.
She’d woken up when Ramazan came home, but she’d stayed in bed and acted asleep when she felt him approach the bedroom. She didn’t like doing that, and it wasn’t something she did on a regular basis. But she’d had a tough day and neither wanted to discuss it with her husband, risking one of their tense debates, nor felt like engaging in small talk about anything else.
It had surprised her that he hadn’t come to bed, which was his normal routine, especially that late, which was also unusual. Instead, she heard him walk off to the front of the apartment; heard the soft clink of ice cubes against glass, once and then again; felt the minutes turn into hours—and still he wasn’t back—all of which was highly unusual. And when she finally decided to get out of bed and investigate, just as she was about to reach the doorway to the family room, she heard his sharp intake of breath, his hissed, muttered curse, and the violent stab of his finger on the computer’s keyboard.
She’d stopped in her tracks, wondering whether to intrude on whatever was going on. Then she thought that he might have already heard her approach and maybe that was why he’d rushed to shut down the computer. When she did make an appearance, it was clear that he was being evasive. Being so principled and honest also made him a very bad liar, especially to someone who knew him as well as she did.
Lies were not part of their life together. She didn’t think so—at least, nothing more than the trivial white lies that were often necessary among all couples. But she was absolutely certain that Ramazan was hiding something, and this was beyond unusual. It was unheard of in their relationship. Her husband had always been unimpeachably scrupulous—a good man, even boringly so, she now thought, a feeling she wasn’t proud of, although that didn’t make it untrue.
She was still hurting from Azmi’s death, and wasn’t sure she was thinking clearly. But she couldn’t get back to sleep, not after what had just happened. The idea of Ramazan hiding something from her was so puzzling that she couldn’t stop herself from getting out of bed, making her way to the family room, and turning on the computer.
And pulling up its web search history.
* * *
She should have known better, but her tired mind got the best of her, because her husband’s web searches, which took her by complete surprise, weren’t just destined to feed her curiosity.
They also landed four fersahs away, the equivalent of around fourteen miles, to the east of their apartment, at a highly guarded compound no civilian had ever been allowed to enter.
The vast complex covered over ten dunams and comprised power stations with chiller plants and cooling towers to keep them running and a central windowless structure that housed endless banks of computers capable of storing and processing the communications taking place within the empire’s borders: Internet searches, emails, landline and mobile phone calls and texts, as well as all kinds of personal data—purchases, coffeehouse bills, parking receipts, travel itineraries, and other kinds of digital “pocket litter.”
For the favored few who knew about it, the compound was called the Comprehensive Imperial Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, and the exabytes of data on its servers were destined for two programs. The first was the Social Credit System, which rated all citizens and was accessible to the state’s officials and bureaucrats, allowing them to know at a glance who was late in paying bills, who had plagiarized schoolwork, who had health issues, or who had made inappropriate comments o
nline. A parallel set of data was destined for the Insider Threat Program, which was run by the Hafiye and was far more sinister. Running afoul of that program inevitably led to far more serious consequences than being refused an insurance policy or turned down for a job.
The programs sucked in data in ways that were known, assumed, rumored—and unsuspected. More often than not, they were effective in catching their subjects unawares.
As they already had that night.
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?”
Empire of Lies Page 8