And with that, he raised the gun to the director’s head and pulled the trigger.
So many possibilities, Ayman Rasheed thought, as he sat in the trashed office of the director of antiquities.
So many possibilities and such a huge decision to make… but also so much to look forward to if he got it right.
As he stared out the window at the destruction and chaos outside the gates of the museum, Rasheed contemplated how much his world had changed. How outside factors, ones way beyond his control, had ended up with him here, in Palmyra, surrounded by strangers, fighting an enemy with many faces in a land that was not his own.
A week had passed since the fateful moment when he saw the hesitation and fear in the museum director’s eyes, and he could think of nothing else. He could barely sleep. Ever since he’d done it, ever since he’d tried it out for himself, his mind was drunk with excitement. The director’s secret had opened up a whole universe of possibilities, quite literally. Which meant Rasheed had to think hard and choose from his staggering array of options very, very carefully. The future of hundreds of millions of people—billions, even—rested on his shoulders.
Their future… or their past?
He was still having a hard time getting his head around it.
An incredible choice to have to make for any man, to be sure. A monstrous responsibility, and a gift that could, in the wrong hands, be easily squandered.
Rasheed wasn’t about to let that happen.
This prodigious gift, after all, hadn’t fallen into the hands of some illiterate, impulsive fool. It had found its way to him: an erudite, thoughtful man. A man whose career was built on intellect as well as instinct, a calculating strategist who appreciated the long view and never rushed into things, unlike so many of his peers.
And, most crucially, in the light of what he’d stumbled upon, an inquisitive man who also had a long-standing passion for a subject that would now serve him welclass="underline" history.
Allah worked in mysterious ways, indeed.
11
PARIS
“When are we going to the beach, “anneh?”
Tarek, Noor, and Nisreen were in the kitchen having breakfast. The sun poking through the slats was still low. Even this early, it was hinting at the blaze that was coming.
Nisreen hadn’t gone back to bed after her troubling discovery on the computer. She’d barely managed a couple hours’ snooze on the sofa before Noor had padded in and tugged her arm to wake her before giving up and snuggling up next to her.
“In two weeks’ time,” Nisreen replied with a smile.
Tarek beamed and held up Firas, his stuffed dinosaur. “Two weeks. You hear that?” He turned back to his mom. “I promised to build him a castle. A huuuge one,” he added excitedly, with arms stretched wide open and an even wider grin.
Nisreen chuckled. She and Ramazan had planned to take the kids to the south coast for the annual week of celebrations that marked the accession of the sultan to the throne. They tried to get away at least three times a year, either to the mountains or to the sea. Nisreen couldn’t wait, and its prospect managed to push some light into a small corner of her heart.
“Baba promised he would teach me how to swim,” Noor said in between focused bites of her cheese borek.
“You’re too young to swim,” Tarek countered.
“Tarek,” Nisreen said with a raised finger—then her phone rang.
“I only learned last year. She’s still five,” he protested. “Besides”—he grinned at his sister—“she looks so cute in her little pink armbands.”
Noor stuck her tongue out at him as Nisreen glanced at her phone and took the call.
Her face darkened almost immediately.
A few words were all it took to snuff out the light that Tarek’s question had sparked.
The Hafiye was a half hour’s brisk walk from Kamal’s home.
It was based in the old Grand Châtelet on the right bank of the Seine, across the river from the Île de la Cité. He often walked to work, opting for the lazy comfort of a taxi or the tram only on the harshest, darkest mornings of winter. Today, however, he’d ridden his motorbike in after waking up heavy-headed and running late. Cutting through the snarls of traffic made the heat and humidity a bit more bearable.
No one would be rebuking him for any tardiness today. Not after the ceremony the day before, which he was gleefully reminded of by almost every person he encountered while making his way through the labyrinthine compound to reach his desk. No, today Kamal could glide by on the kudos of his colleagues, from the security guards in the entrance lobby who almost apologized for having to scan his ID to the senior officers who gave him acknowledging nods as he walked past their glass-fronted offices. It should have felt great, but somehow it didn’t. He decided the best thing he could do was bury himself in his work and hope that he could soon ferret out another real enemy of the state, someone with lethal intent whose comeuppance could help shore up Kamal’s faith in what he was doing.
Even with the modern additions, the ancien régime stronghold was a grim place. It had been entirely rebuilt by Louis XIV in AD 1684, a decade before the Ottomans had swept into Paris and beheaded him. They were greatly aided by the fact that fourteen years earlier, in an act of unfortunate recklessness, Louis had declared Paris safe from foreign attack and ordered its ring of defensive walls to be torn down in order to expand the spread of the city, replacing them with grand boulevards. During his reign, the Grand Châtelet was a sprawling fortress with forbidding walls and a clutch of squat, turreted towers that housed the police headquarters, courts, and several prisons. Its dank subterranean dungeons had enjoyed a fearsome notoriety, far worse than that of the Bastille, which was a mile to the east. The Ottomans saw no reason to undermine that reputation. Under their rule, its prisons were just as full, its reputation just as sinister. It had grown over the centuries, with newer buildings seamlessly blended into the ancient fortress and its stone towers. The Ottomans preferred to keep historically significant structures, only altering them so that they became unquestionably Ottoman and Islamic in appearance, totemic reminders of the conquered past.
The Hafiye initially shared the compound, nicknamed the Citadel, with the Zaptiye, the police force that handled basic tasks like traffic violations, domestic altercations, alcohol and drug use, robbery, and the occasional homicide. Given that penalties under shari’a law were harsh and could easily lead to the loss of a limb or worse, crime rates were low. But with the ever-present dual threats of terrorism and civil unrest, the Hafiye had expanded and taken over the entire compound. Kamal and his brethren now ruled the streets, and the Zaptiye had to relocate to a building nearby, close to the old Hôtel de Ville.
Kamal’s and Taymoor’s workstations faced each other on the fourth floor of one of the new additions, in a low-ceilinged open-plan space that they shared with a dozen of their colleagues. There were several other areas of similar size, one per section, all of them buzzing with agents who were busy sifting through surveillance logs, recordings and transcripts, and informants’ reports. Runners hurried along the hallways, ferrying coffee and paperwork. There were no women around. The small department of female agents, which handled cases involving women, was housed in a small, separate building that had its own entrance. Male and female agents were only allowed to work together when it was deemed crucial to a case. Under Abdülhamid’s conservative agenda, fraternizing between the two was not only discouraged. It was banned.