The Last Patriot

by Brad Thor

  Namir Aouad eyed the intruder’s weapon. “What do you want?”

  “Why was the American here?”

  “What American?”

  Dodd removed the suppressor from beneath his shirt and screwed it onto the threaded barrel of his pistol. “Why was he here?” he repeated.

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” Aouad stammered.

  The assassin didn’t like being lied to. He raised his H&K and fired, slamming a round into the wall just above the mosque director’s head. “Tell me why the American was here or I’ll find something other than the wall for my next shot.”

  Aouad studied the man’s thick beard, clothing, and distinctive Islamic cap. “You look like a Muslim.”

  “I am.”

  “Then you cannot shoot me,” declared Aouad. “It is forbidden for a Muslim to harm another Muslim.”

  For a moment, Dodd’s mind drifted to his deceased wife and child and what he imagined their deaths had been like. His eyes then went cold. “When you choose to aid an infidel over another Muslim, you are no longer a Muslim.”

  “I have not aided any infidels,” protested the director.

  “Tell me about René Bertrand.”

  Aouad’s eyes looked up and to the right. “I do not know this man.”

  Dodd had his pistol up before the man had even finished his lie. He pulled the trigger and drilled a round through the mosque director’s shoulder.

  Aouad screamed in pain as his hand flew to the wound. Within seconds, a dark, moist stain began to spread across his sweater. He drew his hand back and almost passed out from the sight of the blood. “The American came for the book,” he wailed. “He came for the book.”

  The assassin was amazed. “Bertrand left the book with you?”

  “Please, I need an ambulance,” pleaded the injured mosque director.

  “You’ll need a hearse if you don’t answer my questions,” threatened Dodd.

  “I was holding the book for its owners.”

  “You mean the men who stole it,” clarified the assassin.

  The mosque director nodded eagerly. He was losing a lot of blood and did not want to be shot again. “Please! I need an ambulance,” he repeated.

  Dodd wasn’t paying attention. He was too preoccupied with his own thoughts. The assassin was stunned that the book had been in the mosque all this time. If only he had known! “We would have paid you much more money for that book.”

  Aouad was confused. “You?”

  “Yes, you idiot,” yelled the assassin as he raised his pistol again. “Who was he? How did Bertrand make contact with him? I must have that book.”

  Aouad was starting to feel dizzy. “It’s gone. The American stole it,” he said pointing at the wooden box on top of the file cabinet.

  The assassin crossed to the cabinet.

  “Please,” moaned Aouad. “Let me call an ambulance.”

  “Shut up,” snapped the assassin.

  He opened the lid and looked inside. An old volume lay on top of an aged piece of cloth. The cover was rough and faded.

  Dodd was an expert on many things, but rare books wasn’t one of them. He only had the recollections of what René Bertrand had e-mailed him to go on. As he opened the Don Quixote and scanned the first several pages, he couldn’t understand what the mosque director was talking about. They looked exactly as he remembered them.

  Leafing beyond those pages, though, he soon figured out what had happened. The first few pages had been glued into the book instead of being stitched. It was a fake.

  “You fool,” he roared as he turned to face Aouad.

  The mosque director opened his mouth to reply only to have the enraged assassin fill it with four rounds from his silenced pistol.

  Matthew Dodd waited for his breathing to come back under control and then wiped his prints from all of the surfaces he had touched. Stepping out of the director’s office, he exited the mosque and stepped into the street.

  He blamed Omar for this, all of it. If only the man had listened to him from the beginning, this business with the book would have already been finished.

  A cold rain began to fall again, but it did little to cool Dodd’s anger. Nichols and his people had the book now. The assassin could lay the blame anywhere he wanted, but in the end, he had failed and he didn’t like the taste of failure, especially when something so significant was at stake.

  Dodd started walking. He needed to get himself under control. As he walked, he was so busy fuming that he almost missed the dark blue Opel driven by two North African–looking men as it sped past him.

  Deciding that it wasn’t a threat, the assassin filed the car and its two occupants away in the back of his mind and turned his attention to what he was going to do about that book.

  Up ahead, the Opel turned the corner and disappeared from sight.

  CHAPTER 46

  By the time Dodd got to the corner, he had come to the conclusion that if Nichols and the book hadn’t already left the country, they would very soon. The assassin was mulling how he might still head him off, when he arrived at the corner and the hair on the back of his neck stood straight up.

  Whether he saw the double-parked Opel or the fixed stock of the H&K MP-5A2 being swung at his head first made no difference. Dodd’s instincts had already taken over.

  As if two pins had been pulled, the assassin’s knees folded and his entire body dropped. His right fist exploded outward and connected with his attacker’s testicles. With the first of the two North African–looking men doubled over, Dodd grabbed the other’s pistol and wrenched his wrist outward. The man’s body followed and as it did, the assassin whipped his suppressed pistol out and put one shot behind the man’s ear, killing him instantly.

  Turning just as the other man raised his weapon to fire, Dodd pulled his trigger again, placing the round just beneath his assailant’s nose.

  It was a finely tuned spectacle of death for which Dodd had few peers. As the second man’s corpse hit the ground, the assassin’s breath and heart rate were already coming back down to normal. Killing was not an emotional experience for Dodd, it was physical.

  The assassin scanned up and down the street for witnesses. Not seeing any, he approached the running car and popped its trunk. Quickly, he gathered up each of the dead men and dumped them inside along with their weapons.

  Going through their pockets, Dodd fished out two sets of credentials identifying them as Renseignements Généraux agents. They were tasked to the Milleux Intégristes Violents or Violent Fundamentalist Environment Unit responsible for monitoring French mosques.

  Dodd closed the trunk, opened the driver’s side door, and slid inside. There were two bags on the back seat containing high-tech surveillance equipment. Mounted between the two front seats was a small computer known in law enforcement parlance as an MDT or Mobile Data Terminal.

  Like any police squad car, the MDT was tied into a wireless network that allowed RG agents to run names, photos, and other information as well as communicate with dispatch and headquarters personnel.

  The assassin pulled up the last series of communications. The two agents he had just killed had been assigned to observe the Bilal Mosque and videotape worshippers as they were leaving Friday prayers. They were on their way to the mosque when the shooting there was reported.

  Dodd had underestimated the response time of the French authorities. He knew the RG didn’t have enough manpower to monitor all 1,700 mosques and places of Muslim worship every day, so when he cased the Bilal for surveillance shortly before entering the café across the street and didn’t see any, he had assumed it wasn’t on the RG’s list for that night.

  That didn’t mean there couldn’t have been undercover operatives inside the mosque, though, but in the pandemonium that had ensued, they would have been hard-pressed to ID him as the shooter unless they had been standing right next to him and even then, he was wearing a disguise.

  Nevertheless, someone had given the RG a descript
ion of him, and the two dead operatives had started looking for him the moment they got the call. Their hastily mounted ambush had been a very bad idea and it was going to cost the RG more than just two dead agents.

  Having tried earlier to crack the RG’s servers without any luck, Dodd now had an open door. He pulled up all of the alerts that had been issued since the bombing that morning and studied them.

  In minutes, he was able to put together a picture of just about everything the French police and intelligence agencies knew.

  He noted that he had slipped up at the Grand Palais and had been caught on video, but it was only his profile. The authorities had perfect shots of Nichols, as well as the man and woman who were helping him.

  With this much of a manhunt on for them, they wouldn’t even be able to hop on a skateboard without being stopped.

  Still, the man in the café who was working with Nichols had been smart enough to disguise himself. He’d also been clever enough to slip away from the stampede in the mosque. Dodd needed to reassess who he was up against. Nichols had help and it was well trained help. This wasn’t something that had been planned for.

  The assassin scrolled to the most recent alert and learned to his surprise that the woman had been apprehended.

  Her name was given as Tracy Elizabeth Hastings, age twenty-seven, American citizen. The alert revealed that she was being held, pending medical treatment, at the American Hospital of Paris.

  Dodd thought for a moment about going to the hospital but then changed his mind. Though he could probably slip inside undetected, the risks associated with getting to the woman and smuggling her out were far too great.

  Even if he were successful, what would he do with her? Trade her for the book? What if Nichols had already copied the information from it that he needed? There were too many unknowns.

  Nichols was where Dodd’s focus needed to be. And before the assassin decided what to do about him, he needed to have the best view of the battlefield available. He needed to know as much of what Nichols knew as possible. But how to do that?

  Dodd’s eyes looked up to check his mirrors and the rest of his surroundings and then fell back to the MDT. As they did, something about its rugged, rubberized casing caught his attention.

  It reminded him of the laptop he had taken from Marwan Khalifa just after killing him in Rome and gave him an idea.

  Careful to cover his tracks through a series of intermediate servers, the assassin searched the Internet for any news of Khalifa’s death.

  Reports of the fire at the Italian State Archive Services were available in several Italian dailies, and while a handful of the articles mentioned bodies having been discovered at the scene, there was nothing yet that identified one of them as being that of Dr. Marwan Khalifa.

  With that knowledge, Dodd began formulating a plan. He remembered the e-mail Nichols had sent to Khalifa. If Nichols was successful in getting back to the United States, there was every reason to believe that he still planned on keeping his appointment with Khalifa at the Library of Congress on Monday.

  CHAPTER 47

  “Tell me everything you know about him,” said Harvath as he chased two aspirin with a glass of water.

  Bertrand had been moved to one of the vacant staterooms so Harvath and Nichols could speak in private.

  “Where should I start?” replied the professor. “Marwan Khalifa is one of the most respected Koranic scholars in the world. He’s a Georgetown professor and we had worked together before, which made him a perfect choice for this project.”

  “When had you worked together before?”

  “About five years ago. Right after 9/11, I wrote a paper about the First Barbary War and America’s introduction to Islamic terrorism. Marwan helped me with some of the finer points of Islamic history.”

  “When was the last time you spoke with him?” asked Harvath.

  “I sent him an e-mail shortly before I left for Paris to confirm a meeting we have Monday in D.C.”

  “How much did he know about what you were working on for the president?”

  “Everything,” stated Nichols. “He was practically my partner on this project. He knows more about the Koran and its history than anyone else I can think of.”

  “And the president was okay with this?” asked Harvath.

  “Of course. In fact having a scholar of Marwan’s standing on board will lend much needed weight to this discovery.”

  “Why would you and the president need any additional weight?”

  Nichols looked at him over the top of his mug. “First of all, the president doesn’t want any recognition for the discovery.”

  Harvath chuckled. “Almost every single violent conflict around the world right now involves Muslims, yet with this discovery virtually overnight, all of these conflicts have the potential to come to a halt and Jack Rutledge won’t want to take any credit for it? Please.”

  Nichols thought Harvath was being rather disrespectful, but he chose not to engage in an unproductive confrontation. “The president is worried that his involvement might politicize the discovery and detract from its true importance.

  “If we find what I think we are going to find, there will be many elements within Islam who will do everything they can to discredit the discovery.”

  “You mean the radical fundamentalists,” said Harvath.

  Nichols nodded. “They won’t go easily and unfortunately, they are masters at perverting the truth and creating conspiracy theories. The president decided it would be best if he wasn’t seen to have any involvement with this at all. The last thing he wants to do is empower the Islamists.”

  “If this turns out to be that threatening, orthodox Muslims are not going to take it lying down.”

  “No, they won’t. The Danish cartoon riots were nothing compared to what this will look like. It will be an outright attack on their legitimacy, and they will do everything they can to discredit it. What’s more, as crazy as it sounds, they have God on their side.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Harvath.

  “The mere suggestion that the Koran is incomplete runs absolutely counter to what every Muslim is taught. To accept the premise that the Koran is incomplete would mean accepting that it is not perfect. And from there it is not a huge leap to wonder what else might be incorrect or incomplete about their holy book.

  “It’s a test of faith that many, no matter how moderate, may not want to accept,” said Nichols.

  “So how do you win? Just go public with the information and hope that the truth wins out?”

  “That’s what we’ve been wrestling with. The Islamic regimes that could be most helpful in publicizing this message will probably be threatened as well. Most likely, they’re going to be lining up to discredit the find.”

  “So then how do you win?” repeated Harvath.

  Nichols set his mug down, took a deep breath, and said, “This is where we have to trust the moderates and by that I mean the true moderates, like Marwan. If the reform movement doesn’t come from within the Islamic faith, it will never be accepted as legitimate. We in the West can demand reform all we want, but we can’t force it upon the Muslim community. But if we can get to the bottom of what Jefferson was after, we will be handing the moderates the biggest broom they’ve ever had with which to sweep clean.”

  Harvath wished he shared the man’s optimism. “Who else besides Marwan and the president know about what you’re working on?”

  “No one,” replied Nichols.

  “No assistants? No grad students? No girlfriend?”

  “Don’t I wish,” said Nichols as he rose and crossed to the galley.

  “Where did you do your research?” asked Harvath.

  The professor filled the kettle with water and turned on the stove. “Everywhere. The UVA library. Monticello. The Library of Congress.”

  “The White House?”

  “Off and on,” said Nichols. “I also brought a lot of source material home with me, but per the president, I
didn’t keep any handwritten notes. All of my work was kept on a flash drive.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Hidden in my office.”

  Harvath shot him a look.

  “Very well hidden,” he added.

  “Is it encrypted?” asked Harvath.

  “I used an open-source, on-the-fly encryption program called True Crypt. Even if I was forced to give up the password, it provides two levels of plausible deniability. The president signed off on it.”

  “Did you pay any research firms to conduct research on your behalf?”

  “Again, no,” said Nichols. “I bought articles about Jefferson off the Web and paid for them with my own credit card and reimbursed myself out of the account the president had established for me. Any books I needed and didn’t want to check out of the library, I purchased over the Internet and paid for the same way.”

  “Chat rooms? Lectures you attended? Other scholars you reached out to besides Marwan?” inquired Harvath.

  “Nope,” said Nichols as he retrieved a spoon from a drawer in the galley.

  “Then Marwan has to be your leak. Whoever is on your tail is there because he said the wrong thing to the wrong people.”

  “That’s impossible. Marwan wants this project to be successful just as much as we do.”

  Harvath was about to reply when the laptop in his stateroom started beeping with an incoming call.

  CHAPTER 48

  The caller ID on the incoming VoIP call showed up as unavailable. Having given the number for this account to only one person, Harvath assumed it was Gary Lawlor. He was wrong.

  “Hello, Scot,” said the voice as Harvath put his headset on and accepted the call. “It’s been a while.”

  Not long enough, thought Harvath as he recognized the voice of President Rutledge. Several emotions coursed through his body, including anger at Lawlor for blindsiding him with this phone call. “Hello, Mr. President,” he said flatly.