by Brad Thor
“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.”
Ozbek and the team watched as a mid-fifties man exited what looked like a bookstore and bumped into the American and his female counterpart. The man then walked toward the café while the American and his companion walked in the opposite direction. Suddenly, the American seemed to notice something out of view. He then turned and ran after the man who had left the bookstore. He caught him right before the café and knocked him to the ground, covering him with his own body, just seconds before the car bomb exploded.
A hush fell over the conference room.
Ozbek was the first to break the silence. “What made the American run after the man from the bookstore?”
“No idea,” replied Rasmussen. “It looks like he might have seen something—”
“Or someone,” interjected Whitcomb.
“But whatever, or whoever, it was, it wasn’t captured by any of the cameras. They did, though, capture this,” said Rasmussen as he rewound the video feed to a much earlier point on its time code.
The team watched as a thin man in a white three-piece suit came up the sidewalk and looked up and down the street before entering the bookstore.
“René Bertrand,” said Ozbek. “So he and the American were at both the bombing and the shooting. What about Dodd?”
“If he was there, he was very careful not to get recorded by any of the cameras.”
Ozbek took a sip of his coffee as this new information played in his head. “What do we know about the American?” he asked. “He seems to have had foreknowledge of the bombing. But why chase the man from the bookstore down and risk exposure like that?”
“We’re doing a facial recognition on him right now,” said Whitcomb as she worked her own laptop.
“The American’s female counterpart and the man coming out of the bookstore match the description of the duo the American was seen speaking with in English at the Grand Palais right before the shooting,” said Rasmussen.
“If they were at the Grand Palais, the French should have them on video, shouldn’t they?” asked Ozbek.
“They probably do, but they’ve got a lot of footage to comb through. It’s going to take some time to find it.”
“I want the faces of Ms. American and Mr. Bookstore run through the databases as well.”
Rasmussen nodded. “Already on it.”
“We need every scrap of information we can get,” said Ozbek. “I want to know everything about these people. Who are they? Where are they from? Where have they been? Where are they now, and how the hell are they connected to Matthew Dodd? Also, I want to know what, if any, connection they have with Marwan Khalifa. That’s it. Let’s get to work.”
Ozbek tossed his empty cup into the trash and was halfway to the door when Stephanie Whitcomb suddenly said, “I’ve got a hit.”
Team members that had been filing out of the conference room turned and quickly came back in.
“On whom?” asked Ozbek.
“Our American,” said Whitcomb. “His name is Scot Harvath. Scot is spelled with
one T. United States citizen. Age thirty-seven. Hair brown. Eyes blue. Five-foot-ten. 175 pounds. We’ve got a passport number and place of issuance. I’ve also got a Social Security number and a handful of matches for newspaper and magazine articles for a U.S. ski team member with the same name from about twenty years ago. After that the trail goes dark.”
“How dark?”
“This guy’s a black. There’s nothing else. No tax returns, nothing. I think it’s been scrubbed,” replied Whitcomb.
“Isn’t that interesting?” replied Ozbek.
“Wait’ll you see this,” stated Rasmussen who had abandoned his subjects and had begun a search on Harvath through the CIA’s proprietary database.
Tilting his head toward the monitor, he said, “Check it out.”
Ozbek and the others watched as Harvath’s passport photo materialized and then next to it, a more recent picture from what appeared to be a closed-circuit security camera.
There was something familiar about the background. “Where was that taken?” asked Ozbek.
Rasmussen looked at his CIA colleagues and then after double-checking his information replied, “Downstairs.”
CHAPTER 33
As if three cabdrivers refusing to take him there weren’t warnings enough, one look at Clichysous-Bois convinced Harvath that he’d made the right choice in leaving Tracy and Nichols back at the barge.
Not that he’d had much choice in the matter. Tracy’s headache had left her immobile, and that meant the professor was the only one who could keep an eye on René Bertrand. Nevertheless, having them along in such a rough neighborhood would have been more of a hindrance than a help.
Clichy-sous-Bois was a dilapidated hellhole of poverty-stricken French housing projects that didn’t even have its own Metro or RER train stop. Graffiti covered every surface and groups of tough young thugs wearing the latest gangster street wear sprouted like weeds from every corner. If it wasn’t for the language difference, this could have been any ghetto back home from Compton to Queens. It was someplace Harvath definitely didn’t belong.
The Bilal Mosque turned out to be a run-down, two-story warehouse attached to a butcher/pastry shop on one side and a public bath, or hammam, on the other. As they arrived in front, Harvath’s cabdriver, a young Algerian immigrant named Moussa, offered to wait for him.
Harvath politely refused, but the man wouldn’t take no for an answer. He liked Harvath. It was the first time he’d had an adult fare in his cab that didn’t ask him to turn his American funk music off and who could converse with him about it at length. Anyone who knew all seven tracks of Standing on the Verge of Getting It On was better than all right in his book.
And though Moussa didn’t live in Clichy-sous-Bois, he knew its reputation and made a persuasive argument that finding a cab once Harvath came out of the mosque would not only be impossible, but also could be extremely dangerous.
The young man was right. Harvath gave him a hundred euros and told him to stay close. The cabbie pointed to a café across the street and told Harvath if he wasn’t in his taxi when he came out, that was where he would likely be.
Harvath thanked him and stepped out of the cab with the briefcase and a small rolling suitcase he had purchased in preparation for his visit to the mosque.
Leaving the barge had been one of the most dangerous parts of the operation. He no longer wondered if the police had begun circulating his picture. With the shooting at the Grand Palais, he knew they would be. He also assumed they had connected him to the bombing that morning. Therefore, purchasing some off-the-shelf items to disguise his appearance had been his first priority.
The suitcase and briefcase had come next, then a trip to one of Paris’s ubiquitous art supply stores. With a visit to a used-book store and a computer equipment shop, his foray was complete and he had returned to the barge.
From his e-mail server, Nichols downloaded the high-resolution Don Quixote scans that Bertrand had sent him. They consisted only of the cover and the first five pages, but it would have to do. Playing with several different types of paper and the new printer Harvath had purchased, they got their work product as close to the real thing as possible.
Judicious use of the small oven in the galley added just the right patina of age to their decoy. Though it wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny, it didn’t have to. It only had to allow Harvath to get out of the mosque without anyone knowing he’d made a switch. How to create the proper distraction, though, had turned out to be the hardest part of their planning.
It was Tracy who had come up with the idea and she had given Harvath instructions on how to best retrofit the device as well as the suitcase to match his needs. An auto supply store on the outskirts of Paris was his last stop before finally finding the cab that brought him to Clichy-sous-Bois.
It wasn’t the most foolproof plan in the world, but no operation was ever one hundred percent airtight. You always had to leave room for the unexpected. Considering that they had little time and even less resources, it was their best hope.
Harvath doubted the members of the Bilal mosque would frisk him, but he didn’t want to be carrying a weapon if they did and decided to go unarmed. If he was caught with a gun, it would have instantly blown his cover and their chance at the book would be lost.
It was in wrestling with how to play up his role as a nerdy and somewhat naïve academic that they hit upon the perfect way to pull off their plan.
Now, as Harvath approached the mosque door, he took a breath and focused on what he needed to do. Once he stepped inside that door, there would be absolutely no turning back.
CHAPTER 34
The first thing Harvath noticed upon entering the mosque was its sad state of disrepair. Though the congregation had done its best to spruce the place up, nothing could hide the fact that they were worshipping in an old warehouse that probably should have seen the better end of a wrecking ball twenty years ago. Whoever the founders of the mosque were, they obviously weren’t getting any of Saudi Arabia’s free-flowing cash; probably because the Bilal Mosque’s version of Islam wasn’t “pure” enough for their Wahhabist wing nuts.
Harvath despised the extremist Saudi state religion, Wahhabism, and how the Saudis zealously exported their poison around the globe, supporting it with billions of dollars every year.
Right behind the Wahhabis were the radical Deobandis, who controlled over fifty percent of the mosques in Great Britain and counted among their most devoutly faithful Afghanistan’s notoriously evil Taliban regime.
Militant, orthodox Islam, be it of the Wahhabist, Deobandi, or any other flavor, was the biggest ideological problem the world faced. Muslims made up a majority in sixty-three countries around the globe. And of the thirty major conflicts under way in the world, twenty-eight involved Muslim governments or communities.
While people outside of Islam spoke of the need for it to reform, next to nothing was being done on the inside of Islam—where the commitment and desire really mattered. If Thomas Jefferson had been successful in discovering lost Koranic texts and if those texts could uncouple Islam from its militant, supremacist tendencies, then the entire world needed those texts now more than ever.
Harvath’s thoughts were interrupted by a middle-aged, bearded man wearing gray trousers and a black cardigan sweater.
“As sala’amu alaikum,” said the man, extending his right hand.
“I’m sorry,” replied Harvath, careful to remain in character. “I don’t speak French.”
The man smiled. “It means, Peace be upon you. And it is not French; it is Arabic.” His English was accented, but understandable.
“Oh,” said Harvath, feigning ignorance as he returned the smile and shook the man’s hand. “Thank you.”
“How may I help you?”
“I am looking for Monsieur Namir Aouad, the mosque director?”
“And you have found him,” said Aouad. “You must be Professor Nichols’ assistant from the University of Virginia.”
“Kip Winiecki,” said Harvath recycling an old alias.
The mosque director pointed at Harvath’s rolling suitcase. “Do you plan on staying with us long?”
Harvath looked at the suitcase and laughed politely. “No, sir. Professor Nichols has me booked on a flight home tonight. He wants me to begin getting things ready for the arrival of the Don Quixote.”
Namir Aouad was charming. Harvath had to remind himself to remain on his guard.
“I was surprised when Monsieur Bertrand told me that Professor Nichols would not be coming himself,” remarked Aouad. “For something of such great value, doesn’t the professor want to authenticate it in person?”
It was a question Harvath had been prepared for. “Novels in the picaresco style of the late sixteenth century are not exactly the professor’s forte.”
“Which is why he selected you?”
“Precisely,” replied Harvath as he pushed the glasses he was wearing back up his nose.
Whether the mosque’s director was suspicious of the response or not, he didn’t let on. “You can leave your bag here,” said Aouad. “No one will touch it.”
Harvath didn’t doubt him, but he needed it with him. “I have some materials in it I may need while examining the book.”
“As you wish,” said the man as he gestured toward his office.
Harvath followed. Along with the glasses and wig he had purchased, Harvath had adopted a slightly stooped posture. He completed his hopefully disarming disguise by placing a stone in his right shoe, which gave him a pronounced limp. Right now, Scot Harvath looked like anything but a counterterrorism operative.
Aouad’s office was fronted by a traditional Islamic door—shorter and wider than those normally found in the West. The door seemed to be one of the only upgrades that had been made.
Inside, the office looked much like Harvath imagined it had for more than sixty years, the main furniture consisting of a cheap metal desk at one end and two metal chairs. A somewhat rusty gooseneck lamp sat atop the desk and aided the sputtering fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling above.
