by Brad Thor
Harvath watched as the man’s eyes stayed locked on the loaded syringe which Harvath set down on the table. He knew that a heroin addiction was one of the worst addictions a person could have.
When Bertrand finally spoke, his voice was hoarse. “There is a special place in hell for people like you.”
“Tell me where the Don Quixote is.”
The book dealer mustered up a Gallic snort along with a contemptuous roll of his eyes. “So you may steal it from me? What an appealing offer. Is this how American universities do business today?”
This time the snort and a roll of the eyes came from Harvath. “Yeah, it’s a new policy. We voted it in right after we decided to start carrying guns.”
Though his blood was on fire, Bertrand didn’t respond.
“René, we both know I don’t work for any university. We also know you have a book that doesn’t belong to you. It was stolen and I want it back.”
“And who are you?” the Frenchman demanded. “My clients discovered that book. What makes you the rightful owner?”
Harvath was done screwing around with this guy. Picking up the syringe, he held it in front of the book dealer’s nose and depressed the plunger, sending a stream of cooked heroin into the air.
“Putain merde!” the man yelled.
“Tell me where it is, René,” demanded Harvath.
Bertrand refused to comply.
Harvath looked at Nichols. “Open the porthole.”
“Excuse me?” replied the professor.
“Do it,” commanded Harvath, gathering up the book dealer’s drug paraphernalia along with the rest of his heroin.
Nichols opened the window and stood back as Harvath walked over and threw everything but the syringe into the river outside.
“Now,” said Harvath as he returned to his seat and held up the needle for the muttering book dealer to gaze at. “This is all that’s left. You tell me where that book is or else you can kiss this goodbye too.”
To emphasize his point, Harvath depressed the plunger again, squirting more of the mixture into the air.
The book dealer fixed Harvath with a look of rage and in his heavily accented English finally said, “Enough. Stop. I will tell you where it is.”
Harvath waited.
Bertrand looked at him like he was insane. “First give me the drug.”
“First tell me where the Don Quixote is.”
“Monsieur,” the book dealer pleaded. “You help me and then I will help you. I promise.”
“I want the book first,” stated Harvath.
“Putain merde!” the man yelled again. “Please!”
Harvath raised the syringe and threatened to eject more liquid.
“I don’t have it!”
“Where is it?”
“I can’t get it,” stammered Bertrand.
“Why not?” asked Harvath as he kept the syringe primed to spill its remaining contents.
“It is being held by a third party. They will not release the book until the money has been transferred.”
“But any intelligent buyer would want to see the book firsthand before parting with that kind of money.”
“But Monsieur—”
“He’s right,” injected Nichols. “Whoever wins the bid would be entitled to examine the book before transferring the funds.”
Bertrand’s face was like stone. “You must be aware that these people do not play around. If you do not pay them, there will be trouble.”
“I’ll take my chances,” said Harvath as he lowered the syringe and let it hover millimeters above the man’s arm. “Now where is the Don Quixote?”
The book dealer closed his eyes and exhaled. “It is being kept at a mosque in Clichy-sous-Bois.”
CHAPTER 29
Having served in Iraq and other world hot spots, Tracy Hastings had an exceptional mind for operations. Right now, though, all she could do was lie on the bed in the darkened stateroom with a damp cloth across her eyes.
“Nichols was right,” said Harvath as he used the computer to pull up information about the Bilal mosque in Clichy-sous-Bois. “We need to get you to a doctor.”
“I told you. It’ll pass,” she responded.
Pushing away from the small, wooden desk he turned his chair so he could face her. “Let’s drop this. Forget the president, forget the damn book; forget all of it.”
Tracy removed the cloth and raised herself into a sitting position against the pillows. “You can’t. Not because of me.”
“The headaches are getting worse, not better. Look at you. You need help.”
“So does Nichols. So does the president.”
“After everything that has happened, how can you even think about the president?” demanded Harvath. “You were almost killed because of him.”
“And I’ve let it go. Now it’s your turn.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You have to,” she insisted.
Harvath leaned forward in his chair. “Tracy, I don’t want my old life back. I want this life, the one I have now. I want you.”
“And you’ve got me. I’m not going anywhere.”
“You don’t understand what I’m trying to do,” Harvath began.
Tracy looked into his eyes. “Scot, I can’t promise you that everything between us is going to be perfect. I dropped my crystal ball the day I got shot. What I can tell you is that I understand who you are. The better part of your life has been devoted to taking America’s fight to its enemies, this enemy in particular. Now, without another person having to be maimed or killed, you have a chance to defeat one of the greatest threats civilization has ever seen. I’m not going to let you throw that away. I can’t.
“This is what you’re so good at. You know how these people play and you know how to beat them at their own game. You’re angry with the president because he made some secret deal that freed a terrorist who stalked your friends and family. It’s done. Get over it. This isn’t about him. This is about right and wrong. And you need to do the right thing here.”
“But you need help.”
“Okay,” she relented. “I need help. I’ll get it. But I’m going to get it without you. And that’s not open for discussion.”
“Tracy, listen.”
“Scot, if I have to get up off this bed just to beat some sense into you I will. I won’t like it, but I’ll do it.”
Harvath smiled. Tracy Hastings was the most amazing woman he’d ever met. If they were blessed with a hundred years together, he could spend every single day of it telling her how much she meant to him without ever really coming close to how deeply he felt.
“I want to be happy and I want it to be with you. But for the two of us to work,” she continued, “you can’t stop being who you are.”
“Even if I’m the guy who disappears for weeks at a time and can’t tell you where I’m going or when I’ll be back?”
“As long as it’s not with a mistress, I think we’ll find a way to make it work.”
Harvath was at a loss.
“Now,” said Tracy, sitting up straighter, “bring that laptop over here and let’s figure out how we’re going to get you into that mosque so you can get that book back.”
CHAPTER 30
The book dealer had been careful in his dealings, very careful. Dodd had simply chalked it up to eccentricity. But it wasn’t eccentricity, it was an over-abundance of caution and now he knew why.
Hacking the French servers had proven easier than he’d expected. The dossier on René Bertrand made for interesting reading. The man had a long history of offenses, most of them drug-related, but they had been escalating. Currently, the French police were looking into the book dealer’s association with a smuggling ring that operated between Morocco and France. The investigation had everything: money, women, weapons, drugs, and lots and lots of people who had turned up dead.
As far as the authorities were concerned, Bertrand was definitely a person of interest, but the most telling det
ail, at least for Dodd, was the fact that the book dealer seemed to be reviled by everyone he had ever come in contact with.
René, the heroin fiend, needed to disappear and was desperate for money. No wonder he risked having his face seen in Paris. He needed to move the Don Quixote so he could cash in and evaporate. Until the police had appeared at the Grand Palais, Dodd had never suspected Bertrand had such skeletons in his closet. He should have known better.
His plan had been to make contact with the book dealer and keep active surveillance on him until Nichols showed up. At that point, Dodd had wanted to simply move in and take the man out. He could have done it a number of ways, but a knife in close would have been best.
Instead, Omar had laid out the car bombing scenario. Though Dodd strongly objected, the sheik had insisted on making a statement. The statement had failed, as had its follow-up attempt. Nichols had survived and now the book dealer and the Don Quixote had been taken out of play.
Omar was painfully shortsighted. He had access to unlimited funds and could have made an overwhelming preemptive bid for the book, but his desire to make his “statement” had gotten the better of him. Nichols wasn’t as easy to kill as the sheik had anticipated.
Dodd had no idea who the man and woman helping him were, but he intended to see them die. Too much had gone wrong, and Dodd needed to end his string of bad luck. The most important thing, though, was getting that book.
The assassin had already tossed Bertrand’s hotel room and had come up empty. Combing the man’s dossier now, he searched for anything that might lead him to where the book dealer was keeping the Don Quixote.
Bertrand reminded him a bit of himself. He was a loner who had no family he could have left the book with. He had been living underground, moving from crappy hotel to crappy hotel, always a step ahead of the police. While Dodd didn’t have to go to quite such extremes, he knew what those places were like and didn’t relish the idea of having to visit each flophouse to conduct his own investigation. That said, he couldn’t rule it out.
The assassin was about to log off, when something about one of the book dealer’s drug arrests grabbed his attention. Bertrand was caught purchasing heroin in the violent Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. It was the same suburb that experienced rioting after French police chased two doomed Muslim teenagers into an electrical substation. It wasn’t his only arrest in Clichy-sous-Bois either.
Dodd began compiling a list of names of people arrested with the book dealer or named as being on the fringes of the police investigations. Several of them had very serious rap sheets. But more important than their criminal records was the fact that they were all of Moroccan descent and under investigation by the French internal intelligence service known as the Renseignements Généraux, or RG for short.
After spending considerable time trying to get in, Dodd realized that the RG’s servers were beyond his ability to hack. He would have to satisfy himself with what he could learn about the men from the French police. Along with their mug shots, Dodd compiled a list of last known addressees, the details of their various arrests and one final scrap of information the RG probably had no idea was on the French police servers.
France’s counterterrorism strategy was to disrupt violent attacks before they happened. To do that the RG had been monitoring every mosque, every cleric, and every Islamic sermon throughout France since the mid-1990s.
When the French police had mounted their own investigation of the men from Clichy-sous-Bois and had bumped up against the RG, they’d made mention of it in a memo. While details of the RG’s investigation had been scrubbed, the source of overlap hadn’t. The men associated with René Bertrand all attended the same mosque.
After printing out their pictures, Matthew Dodd shut down his computer and checked his watch. Depending on how long it took him to get ready and to get to Clichy-sous-Bois, he might even be able to attend evening prayers.
CHAPTER 31
CIA HEADQUARTERS
LANGLEY,
VIRGINIA
“What do we have?” asked Ozbek as he entered the crowded room and set his coffee at the head of the conference table. He’d been in his office talking with his veterinarian about his dog when the message from Steve Rasmussen came in on his BlackBerry.
“Within the last hour, there was a shooting in Paris,” said Rasmussen as he gestured to the flat-panel monitor at the other end of the room. On it was a feed from a French television channel that showed police, news crews, and first responders outside an ornate building. “It happened at an antiquarian book fair at the Grand Palais. The shooter used a large-caliber handgun. He took three shots. His targets were three French police officers. Two are dead and one is in critical condition.”
“If this was a Transept operative, the third cop would have bought it as well,” said Ozbek.
“The hospital says he’s as good as dead anyway.”
Ozbek worked the pieces in his mind as he spoke. “So we’ve got a car bombing earlier today outside a small café well off the beaten tourist track. Then, this. Do we have a description of the shooter?”
“Not much.”
“What about video? The Grand Palais must have CCTV footage.”
“They do and I’m almost ready to upload it,” offered Rasmussen.
“Give me the details about the shooting.”
One of the unit’s few female operatives, an attractive, fiercely intelligent brunette in her mid-thirties named Stephanie Whitcomb, responded, “According to preliminary reports, the shooter was seen with two other men. One is a French National and sometimes rare-book dealer named René Bertrand.
“Bertrand has a long history of drug-related offenses. He was being sought for questioning in relation to a smuggling ring out of Morocco.”
“So the police spotted him at the book festival,” said Ozbek, “and that’s when the shooting began?”
“Correct,” she replied. “The other man in the shooter’s party is presumed to be an American.”
“How do we know?”
“A witness overheard him earlier speaking English with a woman and a man, also presumed American. The shooter had the book dealer and the other man walk directly in front of him and probably had his weapon drawn, but hidden somehow. When the police ID’d René Bertrand and ordered him to stop, the guy started firing.”
Rasmussen jumped in, pantomiming an elbow to the back of his chair. “At that point, the American turned and struck the shooter, knocking him down.”
“Interesting,” replied Ozbek.
“In the chaos,” said Whitcomb, “the book dealer fled into the exhibit hall. The American chased after him and fired a shot from his own weapon into the air. Less than a minute later, the American fired two more shots. He then grabbed the book dealer by the neck and they were seen exiting the Grand Palais via a fire door.”
“What happened to the first shooter?”
“He disappeared,” she said.
“We’ve got our video,” said Rasmussen as he directed the unit’s attention back to the monitor. “According to our liaison with the French internal security service, the first shooter was very careful not to let his face be seen, but he screwed up.”
The group watched as Rasmussen ran the footage and continued to narrate. “The man in the white suit is René Bertrand. The other man is our American. And right behind them is the original shooter.”
Ozbek peered at the monitor. “I can’t see his face.”
“Keep watching,” said Rasmussen.
They watched as the shooting unfolded. There were several different angles included with the feed. “Here it comes,” he said. “Right as he gets elbowed by the American, he doubles over and goes down. Everyone is running by this point; mass pandemonium. But when our shooter straightens up and searches for the other two men, he accidentally reveals his profile for a fraction of a second.”
“Can you enhance that?” asked Ozbek, thinking he recognized the face.
Rasmussen isolated
the image and then enlarged it.
“Now run it against the Transept images. Start with our Killed in Action No Remains Located pal. Pull up his left side profile.”
Rasmussen found it and put it up in a split screen. Nobody said a word. After a pause, Rasmussen combined the images by sliding one on top of the other. It was a perfect match.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Ozbek. “Matthew Dodd aka Majd al-Din.”
“Holy shit,” replied Whitcomb.
“Holy shit indeed,” repeated Ozbek as everyone stared at the screen. “Now, our next question is, what the hell is he up to?”
Rasmussen tapped a few keys on his laptop and said, “Thanks to the French, we may have an idea.”
CHAPTER 32
Rasmussen uploaded another stream of CCTV footage to the conference room monitor. “This is from the scene of the bombing earlier today. It was taken from a bank across the street.”
The Dead Poets Society team members watched as the first car was stolen and then replaced with the Mercedes carrying the bomb.
Rasmussen split-screened the footage with a feed from another camera and using a laser pointer said, “See these two customers sitting outside at the café? Once the Mercedes is in place, they get up and leave.”
“Almost like they knew what was about to happen,” said Whitcomb.
“Who are they?” asked Ozbek. “Can you enhance that?”
Rasmussen shook his head. “The footage is from a bank camera meant to monitor an ATM, not the café across the street. It gets too blurry, but it doesn’t matter. Look at this.” Clicking a few more keys, Rasmussen brought up the café from a different angle. “This is from a hotel security camera right up the street.”
Ozbek stood up and walked over to the monitor. “Stop it right there. Can you go in tighter?”
Rasmussen did.
“That’s him. Our American from the Grand Palais.”
“It gets better,” said his colleague. “Watch this.” Rasmussen clicked his keys again and another angle came up. “This is from a second bank across the street.”
