A four-man crew of attendants pulling a steel cart appeared from a far alcove. Moving with well-practiced efficiency, they unfurled a white plastic sheet and placed it on the ground next to the lifeless, headless body. Three of them rolled the corpse onto the sheet and lifted it onto the cart while the fourth retrieved the head and placed it in a bag made of the same white plastic. Moments later, they were wheeling it all away.
The courtyard could now welcome its next victim.
Today’s ceremony would feature seven beheadings. The next three, coconspirators of the Algerian, didn’t trouble Kamal. After all, it was he and Taymoor who had uncovered the plot, identified the terrorists, and led the team that had tracked them down and brought them in after an intense, frantic manhunt.
The final two didn’t bother him either. He had played no part in their arrest, but they were tried and convicted murderers who, high on khat, had killed an elderly couple while robbing their mansion in Saint Germain.
The fifth prisoner, however, did.
His name was Halil Azmi, and he was a muderis—a teacher, in this case a university law professor. Agents from the Hafiye’s Z Directorate, the ever-expanding internal security force tasked with protecting the imperial order, had arrested him along with two others, a prominent journalist and a lawyer. The three men were accused of belonging to the White Rose, an underground subversive organization that the Z agents had recently uncovered, and a closed court had deemed them to be “colluding to instigate revolt.”
He was also her friend.
Which was why Kamal was now scouring the female grandstands again, looking for Nisreen, his brother’s wife, hoping she wouldn’t be there as the professor was paraded in to a chorus of suppressed gasps from the public stands.
Part of him begrudged Nisreen the unease that was needling him. He felt irritated by her ill-judged friendship, one that was spoiling his moment of glory. At the same time, he couldn’t help but empathize with what she must be feeling, knowing her friend would soon lose his life. He hoped she wouldn’t witness what was about to come, hoped it wouldn’t cement an indelible link between him, an agent of the Hafiye, and Azmi’s fate.
His heart seized as his eyes snagged something, a pair of eyes that were looking his way, and for a second he felt her there, watching him, loathing him from across the courtyard, the last vestiges of a friendship that had started when they were children about to be obliterated forever under the scorching sun. For a moment, he froze—then the woman turned, and, despite her light head scarf that also veiled the lower half of her face, he knew it wasn’t her.
He looked away. And with the high sun pummeling the courtyard, Azmi was positioned so that, like the others before him, he was kneeling no more than twenty kadems from Kamal.
The professor wasn’t cowering. He held his head high and seemed oblivious to everyone in the crowd. Instead, he was staring stoically at the official tribune.
Kamal couldn’t help but meet his gaze, couldn’t tear himself away from the man’s eyes, which seemed to have zeroed in on him, a silent, accusing glare that triggered a pounding inside the agent’s ears that drowned out the executioner’s voice along with the sound of his blade as it cleaved the air before slicing through the professor’s neck.
Which was when Kamal’s mobile phone buzzed in his pocket.
As did Taymoor’s.
3
For Sayyid Ramazan Hekim, being summoned away from the family that Friday wasn’t hugely unwelcome. The week had been a dark one, and he knew it would only get worse once Nisreen heard the inevitable confirmation that the execution of her friend Halil Azmi had been carried out.
He would have liked to be with her at that moment. But, at the same time, he knew there was nothing he could do to comfort her. They’d already said all that needed to be said. Better to leave her with the kids. They would distract her.
Ramazan wasn’t as strongly affected by Azmi’s fate as his wife was. He hadn’t even met the man. He didn’t know many of his wife’s law colleagues, and recently he’d purposely avoided them. But Nisreen had on several occasions related their dissenting views on what the state had become, and he knew they would attract trouble, trouble he was fully determined to steer clear of. He and Nisreen had argued about that, of course. It was one thing to disagree with what the sultan and his cronies were doing; it was quite another to be publicly vocal about it. Ramazan felt his primary duty was to his wife, his children, and the patients under his care. Sometimes, late at night, he would wonder if that meant he was reasonable and cautious or a coward. He stoically pushed back against the latter and prided himself on the former. It would all eventually pass—such periods of political strife always did. And when they did, he would have kept his family safe.
Under normal circumstances, this would have been the end of another week of routine, and the next day would have ushered in a new one. Ramazan knew routine all too well. He liked routine. Routine was order. Routine promoted peace of mind. It was the life he’d chosen. After all, being an anesthesiologist wasn’t particularly exciting. It wasn’t particularly glamorous either. In fact, it was quite the opposite: an invisible career. For even though he held his patients’ lives in his hands when they were in the operating room, even though they voluntarily relinquished all control of their bodies and minds to him, he’d long since got used to the fact that, afterward, they always remembered the names of their surgeon, never their anesthesiologist.
In the current climate, being anonymous was probably a good thing.
Today, however, as he walked down the halls of the cardiothoracic wing at the hospital that was part of the Hurrem Sultan Külliye on the Île de la Cité, Ramazan sensed something far from routine was brewing.
“You say he walked in early this morning, alone, in bad shape and coughing blood—but we don’t know anything about him?” he asked, moving briskly alongside Moshe Fonseca, a surgeon he’d worked with frequently.
“Nothing beyond the fact that he needs surgery rather urgently,” Fonseca replied.
The sprawling complex, the largest külliye in Paris, had more humble origins as the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, which dated back to the seventh century. It had grown a lot since the Ottomans had taken over the city. Like all külliyes, it was funded by a voluntary charitable endowment, known as a waqf. Charity was highly encouraged by Islam, and large waqf complexes became a key part of the Ottomans’ colonization of foreign lands. These pious bequests by the imperial family and the ruling class ranged from hostels, mills, factories, and caravanserais to entire villages and included all the revenue that these properties generated.
The Hurrem Sultan had been founded by the wife of a sultan and was named after her. Like the largest külliyes, it also housed a mosque, school, bathhouse, hospice, inn, and public soup kitchen. Its hospital was one of the most advanced in Paris, and Ramazan had a solid reputation as its star anesthesiologist.
“We don’t even know his name?” he asked.
“He hasn’t said a word,” the surgeon replied. “But that’s hardly the most unusual thing about him.”
“What then?”
Fonseca gave him a loaded sideways glance. “You’ll see.”
The surgeon’s reply didn’t just feed Ramazan’s confusion—it worried him. “Has he been reported to the Zaptiye?”