Empire of Lies

by Raymond Khoury

  Kamal barely nodded. Of course, he had questions. Why was the man killed? For his clothes? What else was the killer after? And what happened to his own clothes? Did he throw them into the river? The chef hadn’t seen him do that. Then there were the tattoos. Still, his mind was elsewhere.

  He was feeling antsy and checked his watch. “I need to make a quick call,” he told Taymoor before stepping away from him.

  He called the Z Directorate switchboard and asked to be put through to one of the agents handling the playwright’s case. The call went directly to voice mail. He left a blunt message virtually ordering the guy to return his call.

  His face was locked with anger. Taymoor saw it.

  “Whoa, you need to get a grip, brother.” Taymoor eyed him curiously. “What’s going on?”

  Kamal stared away and didn’t reply at first. Then he said, “I’ve got something I need to look into. I’ll catch up with you later.”

  Taymoor started to say something. Kamal paused for a second, but Taymoor seemingly decided against it and shook it away. “It’s nothing. Allah go with you, brother.”

  Kamal was happy to leave it at that and walked off.

  18

  It was a stab in the dark, but it paid off.

  He knew Nisreen usually did her best to meet the kids when they got off the school bus around the corner from their apartment building, and today proved no exception. He didn’t have to wait there too long.

  Her face registered surprise—and not the happy kind—when she spotted him. She hadn’t even reached him when she asked, “What are you doing here?”

  “You stormed off before even giving me a chance to—”

  “To what? Tell me they just pulled him in for a friendly chat over a cup of rose tea and some baklava? Cause that’s how you guys do things, right?”

  “Would you please take a breath and just give me a chance?”

  “A chance for what?”

  “I’m not the enemy, Nisreen. I’m trying to help you.”

  “Your uniform says otherwise.”

  “We stopped five guys who were going to attack the festival, the one for the beylerbey’s son’s wedding. They would have killed God knows how many people. Hell, you and Ramazan might have even been there. And Tarek and Noor, too. So maybe, just maybe, this uniform isn’t all bad, no?”

  His outburst stilled Nisreen. She looked totally dumbfounded and almost didn’t notice the school bus pull up.

  Several kids got off, including Tarek and Noor. Their faces lit up when they saw Kamal.

  Noor ran toward him with open arms and a huge smile. “Uncle Kamal.”

  He whisked her off her feet in a tight hug. “How’s my favorite little princess? I’ve missed you so much, hayatim.” The endearment meant “my life,” and nothing could have been more true.

  He gave her a big kiss on her forehead before setting her back down and crouching to get level with Tarek’s face. Kamal gestured him over. “And how’s my little şampiyon?”

  His little champion hesitated and glanced at his mother. She gave him a tentative, visibly strained nod that it was okay. Tarek stepped closer, and Kamal gave him a hug, glancing up at Nisreen as he did.

  “Are you staying for dinner?” Noor enthused.

  Kamal felt a tear through his heart, but he hid it and just gave her a warm smile. “I don’t think so, hayatim.”

  “I need to speak with Uncle Kamal, children,” Nisreen said. “Why don’t you go up to the house? I won’t be long.”

  The kids glanced uncertainly at them both, then nodded. With parting melancholy glances at Kamal and a small wave from Noor, they walked away.

  Kamal watched them go, then turned to Nisreen. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for them to see me. But it was the only way to—”

  “Why are you here?”

  He kept his tone soft. “I’m worried about you. Tell me what you know about Sinasi.”

  “I don’t need you to worry about me. Worry about him. He’s—”

  He cut her off. “Please, Nisreen, just … tell me.”

  She sucked in her reluctance. “He’s quite successful. I’m sure you’ve seen his work, if not in the theater, then maybe on TV. He was casting his new play, and one of the actors reported him.”

  “For what?”

  “Incitement to riot—that’s what your guy at the Hafiye said.” Nisreen frowned, then added, “It’s the play.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s the story of a Polish farmer who lives in a small town on the edge of the empire. A place that’s ignored by the state. A band of Russian guerrillas are harassing the townspeople. They extort money and food from them. They take women. They kill a couple of farmers who stand up to them. The ra’ayah”—the folk—“implore the bey who governs the region for help, but he can’t be bothered to lift a finger. They’re small and far, and he doesn’t want to risk a military conflict that might disturb his lush life and cost money. So the farmer decides to take things into his own hands. He goes around from town to town asking people to speak out. He asks them to stand up and choose who they want for their bey. If he’s chosen, he would have control of the local armed regiment—and use it against the guerrillas.”

  This got Kamal’s attention. “Which he does, and he saves the day?”

  “No,” Nisreen said. “The bey has him killed. The uprising is put down. The Russians move in unopposed and rape and pillage; then they leave. Order is restored.”

  Kamal shook his head.

  “It’s a play,” Nisreen insisted, her anger back. “A story. It’s people exploring ideas on a stage. Sinasi wasn’t plotting to blow anyone up.”

  Kamal let out a tense breath. “You don’t know what else he’s involved in.”

  His words fed Nisreen’s anger. “It’s about the play, Kamal.”

  He hesitated, then decided to say it. “They’re saying he was White Rose.”

  “That’s bullshit.” Nisreen snorted, but it was a nervous snort that did little to cover up a clearly deep-seated fear.

  “What if he was?” Kamal objected.

  “White Rose, White Rose … What is this mysterious White Rose that everyone is part of all of a sudden?” Nisreen scoffed. “What do you really know about it? And why are all the cases involving it dealt with by a closed court?” She shook her head slowly, then stared away, a sunken look in her eyes, before facing Kamal again. “The attack you stopped … of course I’m grateful. Everybody is. Of course, I think you’re doing the right thing. But that’s only part of the fight we’re in. And maybe you’re too close to it to see what’s really happening. The people you work for, the ones you have all this blind faith in? They’re the ones who should be in jail, not Sinasi. Abdülhamid and his gang … they’re robbing us blind and shutting down anyone who speaks up about it. And the rampant corruption and the graft, my God, they’re bad enough, but then when you throw in the sheer incompetence—can’t you see? They’re undoing all the progress Murad achieved; they’re destroying our faith in government and setting us back a hundred years. Hell, they might even drag us into a war with America if it suits them. You need to wake up, Kamal. If people like you don’t, what hope do we have?”

  Her words sank in like depth charges detonating deep within him, and he couldn’t find the words to answer her. Instead, he just nodded and retreated to the issue at hand. The rest could wait.

  “Okay. Give me a chance to look into Sinasi,” he told her. “If he’s not part of anything bad, I’ll do everything I can to make sure they release him as quickly as possible.”

  Nisreen let out a breath that was drowning in skepticism.

  “But if he is, I’m going to need you to be much more careful from here on,” Kamal insisted. “These people are dangerous.”

  “White Rose? Or you and the rest of your people?”

  Kamal let it slide. “Please … I’m serious.”

  She met his gaze. A couple of seconds, no more. But it was enough to rekindle a whole histo
ry of closeness between them.

  “I miss you. All of you,” he said.

  “We do, too.” She paused, then added, “All of us.”

  He felt the tear rip wider. “I should let you go. I’ll be in touch as soon as I hear anything.”

  Nisreen nodded.

  He didn’t want to go. He wanted to stretch the moment, he wanted to accompany her home, to see his brother, his nephew, his niece. Most of all, he just wanted to be around her longer. But now wasn’t the right time.

  He caught her wistful look, felt the tear rip open, and walked away.

  19

  Nisreen had dinner with Tarek and Noor—her special artichoke, lamb, and coriander stew, a family favorite and the kind of comfort food she badly needed tonight.

  They ate as they always did, at the square table in their kitchen. The French tradition of eating that way, using individual plates and utensils, had survived the conquest and resisted the encroachment of the old Ottoman tradition of sharing food from a central bowl with one’s fingers while sitting on cushions on the floor.

  Noor was unusally chirpy, which was a welcome deflection from the unease gnawing away at Nisreen. She’d sent a text message to Ramazan earlier, asking when he’d be back, and he’d said that he was working late again, which only added to the distress she felt after seeing Kamal. What she’d seen in his internet search history was still worrying her, and she even wondered if her husband really was at the hospital after all or if he was involved in something else. Which then gave way to an even more uncomfortable thought: the coincidence of Kamal showing up now. Surely not, she thought. She had her misgivings about him, but she knew that she could still read him and still believed in the goodness at his core.

  Or did she?

  The children put away the plates. Then she gave them their baths, and they were ready for bed.

  “Are you okay, anneh?” Tarek asked as she tucked him in.

  She pulled out as comforting a smile as she could. “Of course, hayatim. Why?”

  He hesitated, then asked, “Why don’t we ever see Uncle Kamal anymore?”

  She struggled for words. “It’s just … he’s very busy these days. That’s all.”

  Tarek nodded. “The guys in class … they were saying what a big hero he is. But you and baba don’t seem to be happy when people mention his name.”

  Nisreen let out a ragged breath. “It’s not that simple, hayatim. Maybe when you’re older, you’ll understand.”

  “But he’s a hero, isn’t he?”

  She wasn’t sure how to answer that. But there was only one answer she could give him. “Of course he is.”

  Tarek looked at her uncertainly, doubt clouding his face, then nodded.

  Nisreen leaned in and kissed his forehead. “Sleep well, my little şampiyon.”

  * * *

  At the ICU nurses’ station, Ramazan handed in the last of his paperwork and checked his watch.

  It was late. Very late. But he couldn’t pull away. Not yet. There was more story to come, and tonight might be the last chance he would have to get the rest of it.

  All day, he’d kept wondering if it could really be true, if he’d allowed his desperation and his imagination to push him to such a level of foolhardiness as to have done what he’d done. Wondering if it was all going to backfire on him like a big, bad joke, one that, if it ever came out, might turn him into an object of ridicule, if not cost him his career.

  He wasn’t sure. Still, he’d come this far. He couldn’t leave the rest of it unanswered.

  “All done, hakeem?” Anbara asked as she emerged from the hallway. She was obviously doing the night shift.

  “Yes, pretty much.” He smiled.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.” She gave him a little wave and headed off.

  He waited for her to disappear from view, nodded vaguely at the nurse sitting behind the counter, then walked away in the opposite direction.

  Back to room 7, which housed a very special and unusual patient.

  20

  At first, the idea seemed unimaginably daunting.

  An undertaking of this scale, on his own—a Herculean task, to be sure. This would be one of history’s boldest projects, perhaps the most ambitious, and Ayman Rasheed was going to try to accomplish it without anyone else’s help.

  There was arrogance there, certainly, some likely delusion, too, perhaps even lunacy. Imagining it was irresistibly addictive and energizing, like having an adrenaline drip tapped directly into his brain. Rasheed was fully aware of the gargantuan goal he’d given himself, which was why he set himself no target date. He would only launch his plan once he was fully prepared.

  Ever methodical and analytical, he chose to divide his work into three parts.

  The first was the conquest of Vienna. This involved learning everything he could about the siege of 1683 and why it had failed, then devising a strategy that would work.

  This task was the easiest part of the puzzle since it dealt with existing history. He was going to influence a specific event, a past battle. So much had been written about the siege, entire books devoted to analyzing every detail of that campaign and dissecting its failure, written by Ottomanists who had access to numerous firsthand accounts. Very quickly, he felt highly confident that he could easily turn that failure into victory, assuming he could get the sultan to accept his help and follow his advice, which was something else he needed to figure out.

  He already had some ideas about that.

  The tactical mistakes Kara Mustafa had made were clear. Victory would have been his had he not squandered it. Hindsight was truly a wonderful thing, especially when Rasheed had three centuries of other battles filled with brilliant and disastrous campaigns to learn from. A few carefully chosen moves would be enough to change everything. A few moves—and some unexpected game changers he had in mind—would make taking Vienna an easy fix.

  The second part of his research dealt with a far bigger challenge: taking over the rest of western Europe.

  It was one thing to conquer Vienna; it was quite another to hold it, which was necessary well before thinking of conquering territories beyond it. The city was almost a thousand miles from the empire’s capital, at a time when travel was slow and arduous. Rivers and chains of mountains stood between it and Istanbul. The Ottoman army that laid siege to Vienna was a mammoth force made up of over a hundred thousand men. When on the move, it formed a convoy six miles long and kicked up a cloud of dust that could be seen for miles. Keeping it there to hold the city and bringing forward its supply lines risked overstretching the empire’s resources while making its eastern border vulnerable to its old rival Persia.

  Rasheed needed to shrink the landscape and make moving armies and equipment faster and more manageable.

  Trains were the answer. The steam engine was in its early stages of development at the time. He needed to dramatically accelerate that. He’d need to lure the brilliant, pioneering inventors from England, France, and Holland and have them work for the sultan. Money, or kidnapping, would bring them to him. Bringing forward technological advances that wouldn’t have happened for decades, if not centuries, would give the Ottomans a titanic advantage.

  With Vienna firmly under Ottoman dominance and well supplied, he could turn to conquering the rest of Europe, which was Rasheed’s greatest challenge. Unlike the siege itself, this would be a venture into the unknown, an endless diagram of theoretical actions, reactions, and outcomes, since once Vienna fell, history would be changed and everything he was reading about would be altered.

  The scope of the exercise facing him was mind-boggling. He immersed himself in studies of those who had attempted something of that scale before him and ended up focusing on Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Hitler. He aimed to be squarely in their league and he found inspiration in their ambition, but he also took heed of their mistakes. This was research that the consummate strategist in Rasheed relished. It was the simulation to end all simulations, and soon it woul
dn’t be a simulation at all. It would become reality.

  He’d need to bring in new weapons and military tactics, of course.

  Early in his research, he’d remembered something that had come up in a lecture at the military academy in Iraq, an anecdote that had stamped an indelible impression on his mind. It concerned the Spanish conquest of South America, a notorious day in November 1532, in the highlands of Peru. His instructor had explained how on that day Francisco Pizarro and 168 Spaniards had faced off against the Inca ruler Atahuallpa and his entire imperial army. The Spaniards rode horses and had rapier swords and harquebuses, a type of early musket. The Incas, a primitive people who still fought with spears, had never encountered mounted men or firearms. Before the day was out, Pizarro and his men had killed over seven thousand Incas and taken their emperor prisoner—and they’d done it without suffering a single fatality in their own ranks.

  Superior weaponry was key, and the Ottomans weren’t alien to this line of thought. Not since their first major conquest, when they took Constantinople in 1453. At the time, the Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, had a Hungarian engineer by the name of Urban working to build him a great cannon. Foolishly, the Byzantines skimped on Urban’s payments, leading him to offer his services to the sultan, who was more than delighted to have the brilliant Christian engineer on his side. The result of his work was the Imperial, at the time the largest cannon ever built. It had a bore twenty-nine feet long, fired massive stones that weighed over a thousand pounds, and was so heavy it needed a team of sixty oxen to haul it. It was this cannon that brought down the ancient fortified walls and allowed the Ottomans to take the city.

  More than two hundred years later, Rasheed would give the Ottomans an even bigger advantage. His knowledge of what weapons the Ottomans were using in the seventeenth century was pretty basic, but he did know that muzzle-loading flintlock muskets were a far cry from the AK-47s he was used to. He needed a weapon that would completely overwhelm the Ottomans’ enemies and bring them to their knees, but one that could realistically be produced at the time. He found his answer in Richard Gatling’s American design from 1861, an ingenious weapon that used relatively simple technology.