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 online. 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.