Empire of Lies

by Raymond Khoury

  After flashing his creds, Kamal said, “You’ve got someone here I need to see. Ibrahim Sinasi.”

  The desk sergeant consulted his screen, and then his face turned sour.

  “Is there a problem?” Kamal asked.

  The desk sergeant seemed to mull his words carefully before deciding on, “You don’t have the clearance.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a Z Directorate case. Only they can see him, and even that list’s restricted.”

  Kamal kept his anger in check, but his tone was clear. “He’s a person of interest in a case of ours, too. I need to see him.”

  “I told you. I can’t allow it,” the prison officer shot back just as firmly. “You need to take it up with the Z guys.”

  Kamal fumed. “We’re on the same side, aren’t we?”

  “You’re not listening, Kamal Agha,” the officer insisted. “It’s not up to me. I don’t set the protocol.”

  “Who are they? The agents in charge. What are their names? Or is that against protocol, too?”

  The desk sergeant glanced at his screen. After a small hesitation, he said, “Jamal Banna and Onur Goskun.”

  Kamal frowned. He didn’t know them. The odds were he wouldn’t. The Hafiye was a big place, with several hundred agents working out of the Citadel. They didn’t all know each other, much less what cases they were working on.

  He glared at the desk sergeant. The prison officer’s gaze didn’t waver. The man just sat there, stone-cold and unmoved. Then, as if with great reluctance, he leaned in, lowered his tone, and added, “I really shouldn’t say this, but … I wouldn’t push too hard on this.”

  “Why not?”

  “I hear he’s White Rose,” he told Kamal with a shrug. He didn’t add anything else. He didn’t need to.

  Kamal frowned. Another damned plotter. Connections lit up like fuses in Kamal’s mind—Azmi, Sinasi, White Rose—all with a connection to Nisreen.

  A connection that could put her in grave danger.

  “Bok,” he cursed, before nodding solemnly and walking away.

  He didn’t go back to his desk. Instead, he made his way back up and across the large glazed atrium to the Z Directorate’s building, oblivious to any familiar faces he crossed in the elevators or down the long corridors.

  The two agents, Banna and Goskun, weren’t in. He gave his name and number to the directorate’s desk sergeant and asked him to get them to call him as soon as possible.

  He had to try to fix this. For Nisreen’s sake.

  But something in the pit of his stomach told him it was already beyond his reach.

  16

  Sitting quietly at his patient’s bedside, Ramazan was transfixed.

  He had managed to grab a few more sessions with his patient, carving out the time in between surgeries, finding a way to be alone with him, managing the drugs carefully to make him just conscious enough to continue his story, but not to realize what was being done to him.

  The rest of the time, he kept the man who claimed to be Ayman Rasheed Pasha under heavy sedation. As his anesthesiologist, he was in charge of overseeing his recovery, and there was no reason for him to be challenged by the nurses, especially since he said there was nothing worrying and told them he just wanted to give the patient more time to heal before bringing him back to full consciousness. He knew he wouldn’t be able to get away with it for too long, but one day was easily within reason.

  And that day was now ending. He needed to get the rest of the story, and fast.

  Throughout, Ramazan still wasn’t sure what to believe. So far, the man’s tale was so fantastical it defied belief. And yet the detail throughout lent it such a potent veneer of credibility that Ramazan couldn’t resist coming back, prompting the man and listening to his mumbled replies. But, then again, how could it not be true? In addition to having the most prodigious imagination, the man would have to have an uncanny ability to be lucid and manipulative while heavily drugged and under the supervision of a highly capable anesthesiologist—which Ramazan knew was highly, highly unlikely—or, well, the alternative was unthinkable. But despite logic, despite the dictates of rational thought, it somehow felt to Ramazan as though what he was hearing was the truth, as if deep inside, the man was secretly delighted to be sharing his tale with someone, as if his ego had held on to it for so long that it needed to burst out and allow him to bask in his glorious achievement.

  Ramazan felt as if he had opened a subconscious floodgate, and he wasn’t sure what to make of everything that was pouring out.

  * * *

  By early 2016, Ayman Rasheed had left Syria and his days with ISIS well behind him and was deep into his research in Istanbul.

  It wasn’t difficult for him to disappear. Once he had the papers and the money he needed, he arranged for a meeting with his jihadist superiors in Raqqa, the Islamic State’s stronghold, which was conveniently north of Palmyra, more than halfway to the Turkish border. On a bleak November morning, he climbed into a Toyota pickup truck—ironically, the dead antiquities director’s own vehicle—and set off, alone, leaving the Venice of the sands in his dust.

  He never showed up at that meeting in Raqqa. And even though his body wouldn’t turn up riddled with bullets and discarded by the side of the road or mangled in the wreckage of a car that had been caught up in an airstrike, he knew his commanders wouldn’t ask too many questions: Syria had turned into a postapocalyptic wasteland, and Ayman Rasheed would simply become one more victim sucked up by the war’s black hole.

  It wasn’t too hard for him to get to Istanbul. The border between Syria and Turkey was a porous, 565-mile nonentity. Jihadists traveling to and from the war in Syria had been crossing it with little hindrance for years, and they weren’t exactly strapping on their hiking boots and struggling across rough terrain to do so. An extensive transport network, highly regulated and controlled on both sides of the border, had been long established to facilitate the steady stream of people—fighters going in and refugees coming out—along with shipments of guns, money, and oil.

  Once there, he found a small, inexpensive apartment in Istanbul’s bustling, centrally located Beşiktaş neighborhood. Comfortably and anonymously settled in, he could now begin his work.

  Most of his waking hours were spent at the Atatürk Library, hours that were long and mentally draining and devoted to one thing and one thing only: acquiring the necessary knowledge to allow him to carry out his world-altering plan. Draining but invigorating, beyond anything he’d ever experienced.

  At night, when he finally headed home, he would observe and contemplate everything around him as he formulated his vision for the future of Europe. Istanbul was a city that had successfully managed to reconcile its Islamic heritage with its modernity, and this gave him much food for thought. The muezzins’ calls to prayer would reverberate across the city like a tranquilizing wave, slowing down its collective pulse and giving the faithful one of five daily moments in which to pause and reflect.

  Rasheed loved the peaceful, sedative feeling that came over him whenever he heard the melodious azans, particularly when they were sung by imams who had the right talent for it.

  With Allah’s help, he thought, it won’t be long before all of Europe will learn to appreciate this inspiring ritual and kneel before its holy call.

  With Allah’s help—and his.

  It was all he thought about, day and night.

  At first, he’d thought he could use it to do something to fix the tragedy that had ended up with him in Palmyra. He could try to rewrite the recent history of his homeland: go back to before the Americans unleashed their attack, warn Saddam about what was to come, try to defuse the crisis before the cruise missiles were launched. But could he, really? How would he have convinced him? Would Saddam and his generals have believed him, or would they have thought that he had lost his mind, or more likely and far worse, that he was working for the Americans? Besides, what would it accomplish? He knew the Americans were determined to
attack them. History had shown him that with indisputable clarity. Anything he managed to achieve would only be temporary. They’d find another reason to attack, another excuse.

  In any case, it was a moot subject. There was the rule, the only rule that accompanied the gift, the crucial rule that shut down that idea: you couldn’t travel to any time within your own lifetime. You couldn’t land somewhere—some time—where you already existed. It didn’t allow it.

  There couldn’t be two of you at any one moment in time.

  No, even if it were possible, using this incredible gift to do that would be too simplistic and wasteful. He needed to think bigger. It deserved that he be more ambitious. And the fact that everyone he cared about was dead ensured that he wouldn’t miss any part of his current life.

  It also allowed his mind to roam free and explore the more distant past.

  He quickly latched onto the three moments in history when Islam had come tantalizingly close to achieving total victory over the Christian West—and failed: 732, when the Moors were a couple hundred miles from Paris; 1529, at the peak of the Ottoman Empire, which failed to siege Vienna, the seat of the Habsburg monarchy and unofficial capital of the Holy Roman Empire; and 1683, when the Ottomans staged a second unsuccessful attempt to take the Austrian city.

  Failures that he could influence and change.

  Failures that could be turned into successes.

  All three were possible target dates. He had to choose one.

  The first was in 732, when the Umayyad caliphate’s warriors had overrun North Africa, crossed the straits of Gibraltar, and taken over Spain, Portugal, and southwestern France. The emir, Abd al-Rahman, and his men were only two hundred miles south of Paris when they were finally stopped by Charles Martel and his army of Frankish and Germanic fighters in the fields between Tours and Poitiers. That defeat at the hands of a vastly outnumbered force that, historians believed, had no cavalry or chain mail, resulted in nothing less than the preservation of Christianity in Europe.

  From a historical point of view, 732 was interesting. Moorish southwestern Europe was firmly under Islamic control. Armed with the foresight he’d be bringing, along with knowledge of warfare and weaponry, he thought he could easily help the emir defeat Martel and continue to conquer present-day France. Adding to the appeal of 732 was that America had not yet been discovered; that was something he could potentially influence, too, and the vision of galleys flying the flag of Islam being the first to claim the great continent on the other side of the Atlantic was hard to resist. He imagined America as a Muslim continent, with mosques and minarets and muezzins’ calls echoing across the land the Americans now called home, and the thought bemused him greatly. But 732 had other things going against it. The available skills and tools in the eighth century—the technology, if one could call it that—were very far removed from what he would need to make it all happen. There were also far fewer sources of reading he could draw on to familiarize himself with what would probably be, he feared, an environment that was too radically different from anything he could imagine. Finally, he was also pretty sure that the later dates would be much more comfortable and enjoyable to live in.

  No, the Ottoman era was surely the way to go.

  He knew its history well. The empire had begun humbly in the thirteenth century, when a tribal leader by the name of Osman led his Turkish band of nomadic warriors out of central Asia and started chipping away at Byzantine territory. Two hundred years later, his descendent Mehmed II captured Constantinople, the Byzantine capital, earning him the sobriquet of Kaysar-i-Rum: emperor of Rome. The sultan’s ambition, and that of those who followed, were thus clearly announced: to reclaim the Roman Empire westward, all the way to Rome.

  It was an ambition that fired up Rasheed’s imagination.

  At its peak, the Ottoman Empire covered over a million square miles across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, and it was ruled by the same dynasty for over six hundred years. It was staggeringly wealthy and well organized, the undisputed superpower of its era. The sultan was the most powerful man in the world, a figurehead who inspired awe and fear in the West, his cavalry considered literal horsemen of the apocalypse. But the great prizes of Vienna and the more distant Rome still eluded them.

  Their armies reached the gates of Vienna twice. Although both attempts took place at a time when the empire was peaking and Europe was being torn apart by conflict between Protestants and Catholics, fate turned against them at the eleventh hour.

  If Rasheed could change the outcome of one of those sieges, everything would be up for grabs. The future of western Europe, and potentially the rest of the world, would be redefined in a radical new way.

  The question was, Which of the two campaigns to choose?

  In September 1529, Suleiman the Magnificent and his men besieged the Austrian city for a month, shelling it and digging trenches to undermine its fortifications. But by mid-October, just as it seemed like Vienna was about to fall, the torrential rain that had blighted the siege turned into a highly unseasonable early snow. The Ottoman army had to pull back in haste, retreating through deepening snowdrifts. Vienna and Christian western Europe were saved once more.

  In the summer of 1683, the Ottomans were outside Vienna again. The Sultan Mehmet IV and his grand vizier, Kara Mustafa, who was leading the charge, had learned the lessons of previous failed attempts to take the city: the imperial army had set off from Istanbul as soon as the spring thaw in the Balkans allowed it and reached the gates of Vienna by mid-July. The siege lasted two months, and the Ottomans came close—very close—to taking their prized “Golden Apple.” But history was against them yet again, and their defeat in the battlefields outside the city’s walls ushered in the long, slow death of the empire.

  As days turned into weeks, Ayman Rasheed’s thoughts kept zeroing in on that third date: 1683.

  The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that it was the perfect choice. But to say that it would need a lot of preparation would be the understatement of the millennium.

  He needed to learn everything he could about that time. He needed to read everything he could get his hands on and plan very, very carefully. Only then would he launch his audacious plan.

  He would help the Ottomans conquer Vienna in the summer of 1683.

  And after Vienna, he would make sure the rest of Europe fell under the sword of Islam.

  17

  The CCTV footage from the riverbank had allowed the analyst at the surveillance center to track the target couple from where they’d been filmed shouting and pointing at something all the way back along their walk upriver to where they’d parked their car. A few taps of a keyboard were all it took to tie an address to its license plate. Which was why Kamal and Taymoor were presently standing outside the service entrance to a restaurant and talking to its sweaty chef.

  “The quays? Yes, I was there yesterday morning,” the man was saying a bit too casually. “My wife and I usually take a walk before work, before it gets too hot. Why?”

  “You didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary on your walk?” Kamal asked.

  He and Taymoor could have handed it to the Zaptiye cops to look into, but they didn’t. Kamal had decided he could use the distraction.

  He wasn’t having one of his best days. The morning altercation with Nisreen had pretty much ruined it from the start. Some data logs from an Arabian bank that he’d hoped would give them an actionable money trail linking one of their executives to a mosque on their watch list turned out to be a dud. He still hadn’t heard from the two Z Directorate agents he’d sought out that morning, which was grating on him. Especially now, the day after Friday’s executions, when his name should have instilled enough respect in them to spur them to get in touch promptly. And yet silence. And the case of the body in the river wasn’t proving to be the distraction he needed right now.

  The man was clearly jittery. Nowadays, no one liked talking to the police, secret or otherwise. He fei
gned a disinterested shrug and said, “Not really. Why?”

  Kamal rolled his eyes and held out his phone to him. It showed the clip of the man and his wife shouting and pointing.

  The man visibly stiffened. “I … it’s just—”

  “You should have reported it,” Kamal pressed. “You do know it’s also a crime to fail to report a crime.”

  “Was that really your wife with you? Should we confirm it with her?” Taymoor asked.

  “Of course, it was my wife. Please”—the man’s voice cracked as he nodded—“I know, we should have called someone. But…” His words trailed off. He didn’t need to explain it. Calling in a crime could get you sucked into a dangerous swamp of inquiries. The presumption of innocence had been badly undermined since Abdülhamid had assumed power.

  “So what did you see?” Kamal asked.

  He hesitated, then said, “There was a man there, on the opposite quay. He was bent down over another guy who wasn’t moving—I think he was dead. He was undressing him and putting on his clothes.” He was no longer hiding the confusion and fear he was feeling. “The guy was naked.”

  Kamal looked a question at Taymoor.

  “At first, we were confused and just shocked, really. It was so … weird. Then when he started pulling him to the edge of the quay, we understood what was about to happen. That’s when my wife screamed, and he saw us.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “He looked across the water at us. Scared the hell out of us, too. But he didn’t panic. He just dumped him in the water and ran.”

  Kamal and Taymoor were intrigued. And that was before the man added, “Oh, and one other thing. This guy? He had markings all over his body.”

  “Markings?” Kamal asked.

  “Yes. Like … tattoos. All over his chest.”

  This was turning into more than a mere distraction.

  “We definitely need to track down this guy,” Taymoor said as they walked back to the car. “If only to get a look at those tattoos.”