Brad Thor Collectors' Edition #3

by Brad Thor

  Harvath didn’t need to see any more to know what had happened. Matthew Dodd had found his house. The only question he had at this point was how.

  It would have to wait, though. Harvath left Gary with Ozbek and Nichols, grabbed a flashlight, and headed outside. The materials that had been taken were beyond priceless. Even though he was certain Dodd was long gone, maybe he had left behind some sort of clue. With so much at stake, Harvath couldn’t just let him vanish.

  Harvath swept the grounds until he found an area of bent grass and underbrush where the assassin must have been hiding. It was perfectly clean and devoid of anything useful.

  Harvath traced the man’s path back toward the main road to the spot where he must have tapped into the Bishop’s Gate alarm system. While Harvath could have someone out to dust for prints, he doubted Dodd would have been careless enough to leave any. Besides, he didn’t need some technician telling him what he already knew. Matthew Dodd had broken into his home, he was certain of it. The information Harvath most needed was where Dodd had gone.

  Harvath kept searching until Gary’s ambulance arrived, but he didn’t find anything else. Dodd had disappeared.

  With the theft of all the Jefferson material, Harvath and his colleagues, not to mention America, had been dealt a staggering setback.

  CHAPTER 74

  UM AL-QURA MOSQUE

  FALLS CHURCH, VIRGINIA

  Dodd had gone to great pains to try to explain to Sheik Omar that professional assassins did not kill indiscriminately. They killed only when necessary. But it was an exercise in futility. Though Omar was a devout and exceedingly intelligent man, he was incapable of grasping subtlety.

  He and Waleed hated nonbelievers more than anything else—and this included Muslims who didn’t follow their purist interpretation of the Koran. Nonbelievers were considered kuffar and deserved to die.

  Waleed was more pragmatic and would have understood the dangers inherent in trying to stumble through a dark house he wasn’t familiar with to attempt to kill everyone there. Neither man, however, would have understood why Dodd chose to strike a target across the back of the head with the butt of his pistol rather than kill him. So instead, he lied.

  Sheik Omar sat at his desk, spinning the wheels of Thomas Jefferson’s cipher device, which rested upon the Don Quixote. “What about the others inside the house? Are they dead?”

  “With the time I had available it wasn’t feasible,” replied the assassin.

  Waleed stopped leafing through the pages. “You had all night.”

  “I could have had two nights. It still would have been very problematic.”

  Omar raised his eyebrows. “Why?”

  “Whoever these men are, they are highly trained operatives.”

  “Even so,” interrupted Waleed.

  Dodd raised his voice and rolled right over him, “I wouldn’t expect you to understand what situational awareness means.”

  “They had no idea you were coming. You said so yourself.”

  The assassin had never liked Abdul Waleed. Nothing would have made him happier than to crush the man’s windpipe. “Killing a professional takes much care and attention to detail, especially when you intend to kill him on his own ground. Too many things can go wrong if you aren’t properly prepared.”

  “So by your own admission, it isn’t impossible,” stated Waleed as if he had scored a decisive debating point.

  Dodd turned his gaze to Omar. “We have everything now. They have nothing. That was my assignment and I completed it.”

  “No,” said Waleed from the couch. “Your assignment was—”

  “Be quiet,” ordered Omar raising his hand. He shifted his eyes from the wheel cipher to Dodd. “The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on.”

  The assassin looked at him. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, you cannot remove from their minds what they have already learned. Don’t assume that because you have taken away their material that you have taken away their will. They’ll keep going.”

  Dodd tried to interrupt, but Omar stopped him. “How do you know they even need this material anymore? Maybe they already have everything necessary to locate the final revelation.”

  The assassin didn’t need to look at Waleed to know the man was gloating.

  “We need to know,” said Omar, “beyond any doubt that the threat has been completely neutralized.”

  “What do you want done?”

  Handing over everything that had been taken from Bishop’s Gate the sheik said, “You need to solve this riddle and make sure the final revelation is never found.”

  Dodd reached out for the items, but as he tried to take them, Omar hung on to them just a moment longer. “Make sure there are no mistakes,” he added as he let them go.

  CHAPTER 75

  “Explain to me why Jefferson didn’t just come right out and say what this thing was and where it was hidden,” asked Ozbek as they drove south toward the last person who might be able to help them.

  Nichols didn’t answer. He was in a state of shock. Sitting on his lap was the folder he had taken to bed last night. Inside were two centuries-old documents—all that remained of his research. One looked like a blueprint and the other a mechanical schematic of some sort. The writing on each was only partially decoded. Had the professor left them in the study, they, like the wheel cipher and the Don Quixote, would be gone as well and they would have had nothing at all to go on.

  The professor was reliving in his mind how he had been on his way back to the study after only a couple of hours of sleep when he had found Gary Lawlor on the kitchen floor. Ozbek had to repeat his question two more times before he got his attention.

  “Excuse me?” replied Nichols.

  “Why didn’t Jefferson just spell everything out? Why go to all this trouble?”

  “He had a lot of enemies.”

  “Including Congress,” added Harvath, “who went back to an appeasement policy of paying off the Muslims once Jefferson left office.”

  “What was the last phrase you decoded?” asked Ozbek.

  Opening the folder, Nichols fought back the car sickness that always overtook him when he tried to read while driving and replied, “It says that the prophet’s final revelation lies with the scribe.”

  “With the scribe,” repeated Harvath unenthusiastically from the front seat. “Not his scribe?”

  Nichols shrugged. “It says the.”

  “So what does that mean?” asked Ozbek. “Was that Jefferson’s way of saying the secret died with Mohammed’s scribe?”

  “Without the wheel cipher and the rest of my notes,” he replied, “it could mean anything.”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “Based on the little we have, I can’t be sure.”

  “But what we can be sure of,” stated Harvath, “is that it won’t take Dodd very long to figure out where we’re going. They have all of it now—your computer, your notes, the wheel cipher, everything.”

  “If this even means anything,” replied Nichols as he held up the folder.

  Harvath wasn’t listening. His mind had drifted to Gary. Together with Ozbek, they had supported his neck and had log-rolled him to assess his injuries. Head wounds were notorious for the amount of blood they produced, but even so, when Harvath saw that the man hadn’t been shot, but merely clubbed, he was shocked. Harvath couldn’t understand why, especially after considering all of the people that Dodd had already murdered, Gary hadn’t been killed.

  Shortly before the ambulance arrived at Bishop’s Gate, Gary regained consciousness. Having the good sense to be glad that he was still alive never occurred to him. He was too pissed off that Dodd had been able to sneak up on him. He may not be a spring chicken, but he was very good at what he did, and Harvath could tell he was embarrassed. The last thing Gary ever would have wanted to appear was old. In the world of counterterrorism, operators needed to possess both brains and physical ability. Any suggestion that you weren’t up to snuff
in either department was cause for concern, and Gary knew it.

  Within minutes of coming to, he wanted to take control. Though both Ozbek and Harvath assumed he had a skull fracture, he pushed them away and struggled to sit up. Gary was at his best managing difficult situations.

  He demanded a full rundown of what had happened. Harvath knew better than to deny him.

  Once he had a picture of what they believed had taken place and he understood the extent to which their operation had been compromised, he started issuing orders. Chief among them was the edict that Harvath would not ride to the hospital with him. Time was everything at this point.

  Harvath knew he was right. The only question was what their next move should be.

  Having finally discovered the small tracking device after sweeping his Denali, Ozbek was very much in favor of throwing hoods over the heads of Sheik Omar and Abdul Waleed, dragging them back to Harvath’s, and applying pressure until they gave up all that they knew.

  The idea did have a certain appeal to it, Harvath had to admit, but they were going to get only one chance to confront those two. He preferred to relegate kidnapping them to Plan B. Right now, the best possible outcome would be to get to the prize before Dodd. Hooking the jumper cables up to Omar and Waleed could very easily buy Dodd the time he needed to beat them to Mohammed’s final revelation. And once that happened, regardless of what Omar and Waleed might tell them, the chances were very good that Dodd would disappear and along with him the revelation.

  Harvath swung out from behind the slow-moving car in front of them and pushed down hard on the accelerator.

  CHAPTER 76

  Susan Ferguson, the curator for Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, met them a quarter mile past the estate in the circular blacktop drive of the International Center for Jefferson Studies. She was a tall, attractive brunette in her early forties casually dressed in blue jeans and a fleece with a walkie-talkie clipped to her waist.

  When the professor climbed out of the truck, the two shared an affectionate hug. “It’s good to see you, Anthony,” said Ferguson.

  “You too, Susan,” he replied. “Thanks for coming in on your day off.”

  “Well, you said it was urgent.” Ferguson’s voice trailed off as she noticed both of the well-built men Nichols was traveling with get out of the vehicle behind him. They had cop, or soldier, or something she couldn’t exactly describe written all over them. Though she didn’t see any weapons, she had a feeling that they were armed. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  Nichols pointed to his companions and said, “Susan, I’d like to introduce you to Scot Harvath and Aydin Ozbek.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Harvath. Ozbek stood to the side and nodded politely.

  Ferguson looked at Nichols and waited for a further explanation.

  “It’s a long story,” he said. “Maybe we can talk on our way inside?”

  The woman hesitated for a moment and then gave in. As they walked, Nichols gave her the short speech Harvath had rehearsed with him in the car about how he was working for a wealthy businessman who was obsessed with security. By the time they reached the library building, the woman seemed less tense about the armed men accompanying her friend and colleague.

  Harvath reached over and helped hold the door open as everyone filed inside.

  The main wing of the Jefferson Library was a dramatic two-story arcade punctuated by rows of polished bookcases and curved beams of matching wood across the ceiling capped off by a dramatic wall of mullioned glass at the far end.

  Pointing to one of the library’s several work tables Ferguson said, “Okay, let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Nichols removed the file folder from under his arm and produced the two yellowed documents. The curator pulled out one of the chairs, sat down, and removed a pair of glasses from her pocket. “You’re positive these are authentic Jefferson?” she asked as she put her glasses on.

  “Positive,” replied Nichols.

  She studied each of them for a few moments. “None of this writing makes any sense.”

  “They’re encoded.”

  “Have you been able to decipher any of it?” she asked.

  The professor shook his head. “Only partially.”

  “Interesting. Very interesting. Where did your client get these?”

  “He has been a collector of Jefferson documents for many years,” replied Nichols. “He has resources most would kill for.”

  “That must be nice,” said Ferguson, who then stood up. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I want to gather a few reference materials. There’s something familiar about these drawings.”

  The curator disappeared and came back a few minutes later with a stack of books and a handful of other items, including an oversized magnifying glass. Setting everything down on the table, she picked up the magnifying glass and returned to her investigation.

  Harvath kept a watchful eye over her and Nichols while Ozbek kept an eye on the door.

  Ferguson made notes on a small pad as she flipped back and forth through the pages of her reference books. Occasionally, she would stop to ask Nichols a question and then would return to studying the documents.

  It went on like that for over half an hour until she removed her glasses and set them on the table.

  Nichols stopped pacing and came over to the desk. “Well? What do you think?”

  Tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear, the curator looked up at him. “This first set of drawings here,” she said, pointing at the paper, “is mechanical. They appear to be schematics of some sort.”

  “I figured as much. Do you have any idea what for?”

  Ferguson smiled. “With Jefferson, it could be anything. The man was constantly inventing things. The handwriting and drawing techniques definitely seem to be his, but this first page is odd.”

  “How so?” asked the professor.

  “This is a cutaway of some sort focusing on a very unique set of gears. In all of Jefferson’s mechanical drawings, I’ve never seen gears that look like this. Also, gears are normally housed out of sight. You don’t usually see them. Yet these gears are intricately stylized and decorated.

  “Also the schematic seems more like a set of directions for switching out or maybe rebalancing the gears. Does that make sense?”

  Nichols shook his head. “Not really.”

  “There’s something else,” said Ferguson as she handed the professor her magnifying glass. “If you look very closely at this particular gear here, you can see that it’s different from the ones above it.”

  “It is?” said Nichols as he took the magnifying glass from her and looked where she was pointing. “I thought they all looked the same.”

  The curator shook her head. “For the most part, they do, but the decoration changes ever so slightly on this one and its shape seems a little different than the others.”

  “You’re right,” replied the professor.

  Harvath had been listening to the exchange and approached the table. “May I?” he asked.

  Nichols handed him the magnifying glass.

  Harvath had not seen either document until a couple of hours ago and even then—in the wake of the break-in, with what had happened to Gary and deciding to leave for Monticello—he had not studied them that extensively and certainly not with a magnifying glass.

  After studying the drawing of the gears for a few more seconds he called Ozbek over. “Take a look at this,” he said as he handed him the magnifying glass.

  “What do you think?” asked Harvath as Ozbek studied the drawing and more importantly the gear in question. “Is that a rendering of the Basmala?”

  Susan Ferguson didn’t know who Harvath and Ozbek were, but they definitely weren’t just the bodyguards. Her curiosity, though, was piqued. “What’s a Basmala?”

  “Every sura or chapter of the Koran except for the ninth,” explained Harvath, “begins with the phrase In the name of
Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. In Arabic that phrase is known as the Basmala and it can be rendered artistically in different ways.”

  “And that’s what’s on that gear?”

  Harvath looked at Ozbek, who nodded.

  “You said that the ninth chapter doesn’t start with ‘Allah the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.’ Why not?” asked Ferguson.

  “It’s Mohammed’s next-to-last known revelation and contains the most violent passages in the Koran. The peaceful passages that Muslims point to as indications of how tolerant and gentle their religion is come from the early part of Mohammed’s prophetic career only to be abrogated by the verses in sura nine.”

  “So Jefferson was sketching a set of gears with Arabic writing on them?” said the curator, more to herself than anyone else.

  “Do you know if Jefferson owned any Arabic or Islamic instruments or objects?” asked Nichols.

  Ferguson shook her head. “Just the Koran that the Library of Congress has now.”

  “Are you aware of him being given anything by the Marines or more specifically by a Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon after the First Barbary War?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Do you know if Jefferson ever referenced an inventor from the Islamic Golden Age named al-Jazari?” asked Harvath.

  Ferguson paused. “What the hell is this all about?”

  There was silence around the table.

  “Unless you answer the question,” said the curator, “I’m not going to be able to do anything else for you.”

  This time it was Harvath who looked at Nichols for guidance. He knew the professor had a lengthy history with her, but what Harvath needed to know was if Susan Ferguson could be trusted.

  When the professor nodded, Harvath began speaking.

  CHAPTER 77

  Scot gave Susan Ferguson as many details as he dared, and as he spoke, the curator of Monticello sat riveted.