Empire of Lies

35

With no particular destination in mind, Ramazan steered the family car north, along a wide boulevard, toward the road that circled the city. Nisreen was next to him, Tarek and Noor strapped into the back seats. The evening traffic was heavy but flowing. The evening prayers were done, and the sidewalks were crowded with people, mostly men, heading home from work.

“Where are we going, baba?” Tarek asked in a small, anxious voice.

Ramazan glanced in the rearview mirror. He could just about see the low, anxious eyes of his son peering back at him. He didn’t know what to answer and looked over at Nisreen.

She twisted around to face the kids and summoned up a smile and as much chirpiness as she could muster. “We’re—we’re just going for a drive, hayatim. Maybe we’ll get some ice cream. Would you like that?”

The kids both nodded in silence and with a hesitation that was a far cry from the usual delight such an announcement would bring.

Nisreen turned to Ramazan. She dropped her voice. “Where are we going?”

“I don’t know.”

A stifling silence smothered the car.

Nisreen cut through it. “Kamal called.”

“He’s been calling me, too.”

“He was looking for you.”

“Bok,” he cursed. “You spoke to him?”

“I had to, Ramazan. I—”

He interrupted her brusquely. “What did you say?”

“Nothing. But look at us. Look at what’s happening. I don’t think we have a choice. I think we need his help.”

“So he can turn us in and be an even bigger hero?”

“He’s still your brother,” she countered. “And I can’t see any other option.”

“My brother wouldn’t still be one of them,” he shot back bitterly.

“So what are we going to do?”

Ramazan didn’t have time to come up with an answer.

The police siren that ripped the air around them took care of that.

Kamal kept one eye on the screen of his phone as he cut through the traffic, weaving between slow-moving cars in fits and spurts and diving into any opening he could fit his car into as he chased after the moving red dot on the live map of the city.

He wasn’t in a department vehicle, which meant he didn’t have access to a radio and couldn’t monitor the progress of whoever else was following the same red dot. He also didn’t have a siren or a set of strobe lights to help cleave a path through the sea of cars ahead of him. The horn would have to do, but its effectiveness was limited; Ottoman drivers used their horns so frequently that they had grown immune to them.

He wondered where they were heading. They were about three blocks from the road that led out of the city. Wherever they were intending to go, Kamal had no doubt that they wouldn’t reach it. The people tracking them would undoubtedly intercept them before they went too far.

He needed to be there when they did.

The car in front of him slowed as it reached an intersection with a traffic light that turned red. Crushing the horn with his palm, Kamal swerved around it and streaked through the crossing, narrowly avoiding a crowded bus—and, as he did, he heard a siren in the distance, coming from his left, a police car that must have been crossing the next intersection at roughly the same time. That gave him an idea. He pushed ahead, eyes peeled for the next left turning, then dove into it when he spotted it. He blew up the narrow street, emerging onto a parallel avenue to the one he had been on. Up ahead, he could see his target’s white strobe lights. Just as the siren was different from that used by the police, so too were the blue and red spinning lights.

It was a Hafiye car, a big matte-black Kartal SUV. It had to be chasing after Ramazan and Nisreen.

The realization lit an even bigger fuse inside Kamal as he pushed ahead more aggressively and muscled his way through the sea of cars until he was right on the Hafiye vehicle’s tail.

Then he hit the redial button on his phone, scrolled back one number, and pressed it.

“How did they find us?” Ramazan burst out in a mad panic.

The realization struck Nisreen instantly. “The phones. The damn phones. They must be tracking them.”

Ramazan floored the gas pedal and sped on.

“Ramazan, what are you doing?” Nisreen yelled. “Stop the car.”

Ramazan didn’t reply. His attention was focused on staying ahead of the Zaptiye cruiser two car lengths behind them.

“Ramazan,” Nisreen yelled.

“Let me think,” he shot back, his eyes locked dead ahead, his face and forehead speckled with droplets of sweat.

“Anneh?” Tarek asked meekly from the back.

“Ramazan, please,” Nisreen insisted as she reached back and took hold of the outstretched hands of both children to comfort them—then her phone rang. It showed Kamal. She jabbed the screen to take the call.

“Kamal—”

“Where are you?”

She looked around frantically. “I don’t know, but they’re after us. There’s a police car right behind us.”

Kamal could hear the siren wailing in the background, behind Nisreen’s breathless voice.

It was a police car, not a Hafiye vehicle. Which was maybe better, although he didn’t think it would make much of a difference. There were undoubtedly some Hafiye cars converging on them, ones that would reach them before he did.

“I’m almost there,” he told her. “But you need to stop the car before somebody gets hurt.”

“He won’t listen.”

“Tell him I’m saying he should pull over. Tell him,” Kamal insisted.

“Ramazan, please—Kamal says we should stop. He’s coming,” he heard her say.

He heard Ramazan rasp, “Can he guarantee our safety?”

“What?” Kamal said.

“Ask him, can he guarantee we’ll be safe?” Ramazan repeated, the visceral desperation in his voice coming through loud and clear.

“What’s he talking about,” Kamal blurted as he floored the gas pedal to stay in the slipstream of the unmarked department car in front of him. “Nisreen. What’s he talking about? Of course I can keep you safe, but what is going on?”

She didn’t answer—then he heard a Hafiye siren barge into earshot, heard her shout, “No,” heard a deafening metallic crunch, then another, in quick succession, heard muffled thuds that sounded like the phone bouncing around the car’s cabin, heard the kids shriek, heard a shrill, terrified scream of “Ramazan” from Nisreen, heard him yelling back “Hang on,” with equal terror, then the piercing screech of rubber biting into asphalt right before a crashing sound and all going quiet.

“Nisreen? Nisreen!” he yelled into his phone.

No answer.

Then he heard frenzied, half-muffled sounds—of car doors opening, of movement, of “Nos” and pleas to be left alone. It all happened very quickly and with brutal intensity. Then all was silent.

“Bok,” he barked as he hammered the steering wheel angrily with his hand.

He darted a look at his screen, flipping it back to the map. The red dot wasn’t moving. They were stationary, six or seven blocks away. Not that far—only the traffic ahead of him was now getting heavier and slowing down, possibly because of whatever had happened to Nisreen and Ramazan’s car.

Kamal’s pulse was thundering in his ears. Every neuron in his body was focused on moving him forward faster, desperate to get to them, desperate to know that they were okay, that a disaster hadn’t happened. But the traffic was definitely getting snarled up, the patchwork of cars getting more dense and filling up every available inch of road, a gradual strangulation of forward momentum until any movement died out altogether and the road turned into a frozen sea of cars, trucks, vans, and buses.

Kamal couldn’t wait, couldn’t sit still, couldn’t remain a hostage to pressing down on his horn and shouting out his window. He swore aloud as he flung the car door open and charged ahead, zigzagging through the maze of vehicles, his legs propelling him as fast as they could, his lungs sucking in and burning every molecule of oxygen they could grab ahold of, his mind trying to ward off the frightening images being kicked up. Before long, he could see a carnival show of swirling lights up ahead: red and blue and white, flashing out of sync and lighting up the buildings around them. He kept moving as fast as he could until he reached the epicenter of the chaotic scene, which was Ramazan’s family car. It appeared to have been squeezed in, rammed, and forced to stop between an unmarked sedan to its left and a police cruiser to its right. Kamal could already make out a major dent in its left driver’s-side fender along with nasty scrapes down the sides of both doors. The car that had rammed it had extensive damage to its front right fender and its side. Ramazan’s car’s other flank and the police car alongside it had to be as badly damaged, but from where Kamal was standing, he couldn’t see how badly they’d come together.

What he could see was that none of them was anywhere near the car: not Ramazan, not Nisreen, not the children. There was a small gaggle of cops at the scene, two of whom were directing traffic down a narrow corridor to the far left of the wide boulevard, away from the crashed cars. There were two Hafiye agents, too, along with two others from the car Kamal had been chasing, who had decided to follow him on foot and were now coming up behind him.

Kamal zeroed in on the Hafiye agents, pulling out his badge as he caught up with them. “The people in that car,” he blurted as he pointed at Ramazan’s car. “The family that was in it. Where are they?”

“They’re in custody,” one of them answered, calm and proud. “We’ve got them.”

“Who’s got them? Where are they?” Kamal rasped.

His fury seemed to take the agent aback. He gave Kamal a confused, dubious look. Then he said, “They just drove them away. Calm down, will you? We’ve got them.”

“So they’re okay? No one got hurt?”

“They’re fine, brother. They’re fine.”

Kamal stared at him angrily, still processing it all. Then he nodded and walked away, deep in thought while instinctively drawn to the battered car.

He peered in through the driver’s window. There was nothing to see—just the mundane interior of a reasonably tidy family car, one that had undoubtedly hosted many happy occasions but now lay battered and cowered. He glanced at the back seat, at the unbuckled car seats, then at the front passenger seat, where Nisreen would have been sitting, all the while reliving in his mind’s eye the scene he had heard: the fear, the desperation, the terror.

Then something snagged his attention. Something small, the edge of something, poking out from under Nisreen’s seat. He walked around the car and pulled the passenger door open. It wasn’t damaged like the driver’s door and opened smoothly. Kamal bent down, reached in, and retrieved what he had seen. It was a mobile phone. Nisreen’s phone. He recognized the tan leather protective case she kept it in. Mentally replaying what he’d heard, he realized the phone had fallen out of Nisreen’s hand when the authorities had driven into the car.

He glanced around to make sure that no one was looking, then slipped the phone into his pocket, his trained fingers pulling its battery out quickly before he walked away, his entire consciousness focused on one thing and one thing only.

Finding them.