The Last Patriot

by Brad Thor

  On that point, he and Waleed were in complete agreement. Cell phones were a necessary evil in modern life, but he had always agreed with the Islamic injunctions against dogs. They were impure, absolutely filthy animals and Mohammed had rightly forbade Muslims from keeping them as pets.

  After plugging in his headset, Waleed pulled away from the curb and dialed his office.

  The man had no idea that Steve Rasmussen had remotely accessed Andrew Salam’s phone in the evidence room at the D.C. Metro Police Headquarters and had downloaded its contents.

  Once Rasmussen had retrieved Waleed’s mobile number, Ozbek had been able to “hot-mike” his phone—a novel form of electronic surveillance which allowed him to remotely power up the phone and activate its microphone. He and Rasmussen had heard the entire conversation with Sheik Omar.

  It was the first solid lead the CIA operatives had. The covert forays into Dr. Khalifa’s home and office at Georgetown had been absolute busts.

  Ozbek was now on his phone issuing orders to the rest of the DPS. “That’s right,” he said. “I want the entire team focused on Paris. Everybody. Right now. We’ll meet in the conference room for an update in an hour.”

  As he hung up the phone, Rasmussen looked at him and said, “None of the intelligence we just gathered will ever be admissible in court.”

  Ozbek knew his colleague was right.

  “We’ve probably also just screwed the FBI on a major part of their investigation too.”

  That thought had crossed Ozbek’s mind, but he didn’t want to think about it. Instead, he turned his anger on Rasmussen. “This is twice now that you’ve informed me that I’ve stepped over the line. I get it and I don’t want to hear it again, okay? The more I hear his name come up, the more my gut tells me this al-Din was an Agency hitter.

  “Mahmood Omar and Abdul Waleed are dedicated Islamists that the FBI should have taken down a long time ago. Our country is at war and our job is to prevent the enemy from winning. And before you give me a speech about upholding the Constitution, I want you to take two seconds and think about what would happen to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights if America ever became an Islamic nation.”

  “I’m not saying any of that,” replied Rasmussen. “Relax.”

  “I know you’ve got your pals at the Bureau. They’re good people. But when you’re fighting against assholes who only punch below the belt, you need to have a few people on your side who don’t give a fuck about the Marquess of Queensberry.”

  “Listen,” said Rasmussen. “I agree with you. There’s no such thing as a fair fight. I understand that.”

  “But?”

  “No buts. We get paid to make sausage. Nobody wants to watch it being made. They only care about how it tastes.”

  “So we’re good?” asked Ozbek.

  “We’re good,” said Rasmussen as he stood. “I’ll see you in the conference room in an hour.”

  Ozbek watched him leave and hoped that if this thing got any uglier that he’d be able to count on him.

  CHAPTER 28

  PARIS

  Harvath made René Bertrand watch as he swabbed a spoon from the galley with hand sanitizer and then removed a small chunk of heroin from the man’s “cigarette” case.

  The drug smelled faintly of vinegar as he placed it on the spoon and added a tiny squirt of water from the book dealer’s syringe. Harvath then used Bertrand’s lighter to heat the mixture from underneath and pulled the stopper out of the syringe to act as a stir.

  When it was ready, he dropped a small, wadded up piece of cotton into the center of the spoon. The cotton ball was the size of a tic-tac and functioned like a sponge; sucking up the entire mixture.

  Bertrand’s previously dry mouth was wet with anticipation and his eyes were glued to Harvath’s every move.

  After cleaning the stopper, Harvath inserted it back into the syringe. He placed the needle in the center of the cotton and drew the stopper back ever so slowly. Though the process was designed to filter out any undesirable particles from the mixture, it also served to hone Bertrand’s craving.

  Even though he’d done so on multiple occasions, Harvath wasn’t a fan of torturing people. It had its place, but as far as Harvath was concerned it was only called for after all other reasonable alternatives had been exhausted. René Bertrand’s obvious drug problem had provided him a perfect alternative to torture.

  Although there probably would have been some who claimed that what Harvath was doing to the man right at this moment actually was torture, they’d be wrong. Harvath knew what real torture was and this wasn’t it. This wasn’t anywhere near it.

  Harvath pulled up the right sleeve of the book dealer’s suit jacket and then rolled up his shirt sleeve. Swabbing his arm with another piece of cotton that had been soaked with hand sanitizer he said, “We’ll dispense with the chitchat, Monsieur Bertrand. You have something I want. The sooner you cooperate, the sooner you and Aunt Hazel here can start dancing, understand?”

  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 u
ntil 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 detail, 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 mu
g 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?”