“Help me,” Kenan called out.
Taymoor ignored him. He looked heavily spooked. “How did this happen? What the hell is going on?” he asked Kamal.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
“Not enough time, brother. I doubt we’ll be alone here long enough. And Kenan needs your help.”
“Whatever it is, we can work it out.”
“It’s too late for that.”
They stared at each other, their gun barrels lined up on each other like two handles tugging at the ends of an invisible rope.
Then a voice cut through the standoff.
“Is he one of them?”
Kamal and Taymoor both glanced away for an instant to see Nisreen at the edge of the path, across from Taymoor. She was standing by Kenan, who was still squirming with pain. She was holding Kenan’s gun in a two-fisted grip and had it aimed right at Taymoor’s chest. It was shaking and looked uncomfortable and heavy in her hands.
“Nisreen, stay back,” Kamal yelled.
She didn’t flinch. “Is he one of them?” she asked again, her tone flat and hard as she tightened her grip on the gun.
“No,” Kamal told her. “Taymoor’s my partner. He didn’t know about any of this.” The instant he said it, his expression changed. He frowned uncertainly at Taymoor. “Am I right? Tell me I’m right.”
“Of course, I didn’t. Bismillah, Kamal. What’s got into you?”
“He’s still one of them,” Nisreen hissed. “He’s here to kill us, too.”
“No, he’s here to bring us in,” Kamal said.
“Same thing.”
“Nisreen, please,” Kamal insisted, then he turned to Taymoor, whose gun was flicking left and right, trying to cover them both, which was hard given that they were ninety degrees apart. “Taymoor, listen to me. Put your gun down. Kenan needs help. You need to put a tourniquet around his leg before he bleeds out.”
“You know I can’t do tha—”
A shot detonated through the trees, catching both men by surprise, but more so Taymoor, who ducked instinctively, only not before the round had whizzed by him and grazed his scalp. He spun around to face Nisreen, who looked as surprised as he was by the shot she’d just fired.
“You crazy whore,” he raged at her as he dabbed his head with his hand and checked for blood while swinging his gun arm up at her—but in that split second of chaos, Kamal grabbed his opportunity. He charged at Taymoor, reaching him just as Taymoor saw him coming, and caught him off balance.
Kamal tackled him, plowing into him and pushing his gun arm away while ramming his elbow full force into Taymoor’s jaw. Both men fell to the ground heavily, then Kamal followed through with a quick punch to keep up the sensory onslaught while wrenching the gun out of his partner’s hand and flinging it away.
He pulled back and sprang to his feet, covering Taymoor with his gun. Taymoor spat and rose to his feet more slowly. They were both out of breath and grunting heavily.
Taymoor glared at Kamal. “You’ve really lost your mind.”
“You didn’t leave me any other choice,” Kamal said as he picked up Taymoor’s gun and edged around to join Nisreen. “I’m going to need your phone, too. Both of you.”
He covered both agents while they grudgingly pulled out their phones and tossed them over to him. He didn’t bother to pick them up off the ground. He just put a bullet in each.
He looked over at Nisreen.
Her attention was still nailed on the agents, her gun sight still locked on them.
“Let’s go.”
She didn’t react at first.
“Nisreen. Time to go,” he called out more forcefully. He gave Taymoor a parting look. Only yesterday the man had been his partner and brother-in-arms. Clearly, the surreal moments were going to keep coming fast. “I’m sorry, brother,” he told him.
“So am I,” Taymoor shot back angrily.
Kamal nodded ruefully, then turned and walked away.
“I told you she was going to get you into trouble,” Taymoor called out.
Kamal glanced over at Nisreen, who was walking next to him.
He didn’t turn back or reply.
He picked up his pace and they reached the clearing. “Get in,” he told Nisreen, pointing at the SUV they’d arrived in. Then he turned to Taymoor’s vehicle and put a bullet in each of its left tires.
They drove off in a storm of dust, charging down the winding lane that led out of the forest.
“Where do we go now?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, leaning over to reach into the glove compartment. “But we’ll be lucky to get out. Others are probably on their way here already.”
He pulled out her phone and showed it to her. “This is it, right?”
She took it from him. “Yes.”
“Hang on to it,” he said as the road snaked left. “It could be our only lifeline—”
His eyes shot wide. Two cars were heading toward them at speed. Police cruisers, given the white hoods and the light bars on their roofs. No sirens or strobes, though—but they were rushing.
“Hang on,” Kamal rasped as he floored the pedal, charging toward them.
The move was unexpected—and the gap between them shrank so quickly they only had a second or two to react before impact.
Kamal didn’t waver, streaking straight at them like a missile.
The front car’s driver blinked first. He veered away at the last moment, but lost control of the car, which fishtailed as he twisted the wheel and slammed sideways into a big tree, the violence of the impact causing its trunk to punch its way halfway through the cabin.
The second cruiser stayed the course, but angled away sharply at the last second, narrowly avoiding a frontal collision. It scraped against the SUV as it shot past, metal crunching against metal, but both cars made it past each other without critical damage.
“Bok,” Kamal raged as he eyed the mirror angrily and saw the second cruiser’s brake lights lit up, saw it spin around as its driver pulled a handbrake turn, saw it surging after them, its siren and strobes blaring away furiously.
Nisreen was also twisted around in her seat, eyeing the pursuing car nervously. “They’re coming back.”
“I know.” His mind was already scanning ahead, calculating, assessing, evaluating options. He was trained for this. Only he never expected to be using it in these circumstances. Not while being chased by his own brethren.
He eased off the gas just slightly, not enough to be noticeable, but enough to let them think they were reeling them in. He watched as the cruiser grew bigger in his mirror, watched as it ate up the gap between them until it was right on their tail. Then he went for it.
He yanked the wheel hard, a quick right-left flick, like he was changing lanes violently, and at the same time, with one eye in the mirror, he slammed the brakes. The cruiser did as expected—it swerved left to avoid plowing into the SUV’s tail, but it didn’t brake fast enough and ended up right alongside it. Which was when Kamal hit the gas again and flung the steering wheel left.
The heavy SUV rammed the cruiser sideways, and Kamal kept it there, wrestling the police car off its trajectory and sending it flying head-on and full force into another one of the big oaks that lined the forest lane. Then he felt something in his hands. A violent shake, a vibration coming from the steering wheel. The collision had caused some damage, twisted something. The front wheels were juddering wildly.
And in the far distance, from the edge of the forest: more sirens.
Far, but closing in.
Converging on them.
“Bok, bok, bok,” he roared. Then he saw a turnoff coming up to their right, another lane heading into the forest in another direction.
Without hesitating, he dove the SUV into it.
“Where does this lead?” Nisreen asked as she darted nervous looks behind and ahead.
He glanced at her, his scowl sinking in deeper. “We’ll soon fi
nd out.”
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.
45
FONTAINEBLEAU
Muharram, AH 1354 (April, AD 1935)
The instant of travel was just that—instantaneous. But despite its extreme brevity, it hit Kamal like a cosmic slap and tore through him with the most intense and fearsome sensations he’d ever experienced.
He felt as if his body had been hollowed and turned inside out, his eyes crushed into grains of sand,
and his brain sucked inward and compressed to nothingness before suddenly exploding outward and expanding as if to fill the entire universe. He wanted to scream, needed to yell out his agony, and yet weirdly there was no pain and no time to scream, just a cold, silent nothingness. Every cell in his body had been ripped apart and reassembled in the blink of an eye. The journey was over the very second it began.
He was alive. On the ground, somewhere—sometime—but alive.
He felt heavy-headed and sweaty, his senses dulled by a high-pitched thrum in his ears, his eyes swimming as they struggled for focus. But he knew he was definitely alive.
Once, just over a year earlier, he’d got caught up in an unexpected explosion in a Paris apartment building. He and Taymoor had gone there to arrest a suspected extremist, and the man had blown himself up inside his apartment just as they entered it. They’d managed to leap back into the hallway a split second before the detonation and had both escaped serious injury. It had been the most debilitating, shattering sensation he’d ever felt, in mind and in body, and yet it paled in comparison to what he’d just experienced. But what he felt right now—confused, numbed, reduced to only the most basic levels of sentience—reminded him of the explosion’s aftereffects.
This time, though, the fog cleared much faster—and she was there. Crouched on the ground, facing him, just as she had been in what his mind was now reminding him was only a moment ago.
Alive, shaking, glistening with sweat—and naked. Just as, he now realized, he was.
Her face fell further into focus, her expression wild with shock and uncertainty—and the same realization evidently hit her, spurred by the sight of him. She flung her arms around herself to cover her breasts and pulled her thighs together, but her mouth was still ajar, just as Kamal dropped his hands to cover his genitals.
She looked around, her face now alive with wonderment. “Are we…?” She took in the emptiness surrounding them. “It worked,” she added, half stating, half questioning, in a breathless, amazed whisper.
They were in the exact same spot, by the edge of the lake, with the same dense forest breaking off and giving way to the secluded clearing that led to the green, still water. The sun was still out, a bit lower and less potent perhaps but unchallenged in a crisp blue sky.
Empire of Lies Page 28