by Brad Thor
Harvath tried to push the irritation from his mind and glanced at his Kobold. “Your pal Marwan is late.”
“He’ll be here,” said Nichols.
Standing next to the monument on the manicured grounds between the Naval Academy museum and the admissions office, Harvath felt like a sitting duck. His eyes kept sweeping the windows, doorways, and rooftops searching for anything unusual; any sign of trouble.
The O&F Club was known for its Sunday brunch and because of the exceptionally agreeable weather this morning, there were lots of people walking past the monument.
“We’ll give him ten more minutes,” replied Harvath. “That’s it.”
Nichols nodded and went back to scanning the faces of the people as they walked by.
Suddenly, Harvath’s earpiece crackled to life. “Heads up,” said Gary Lawlor. “You’ve got somebody headed in your direction across the grass from the south. Blue jeans, dark tennis shoes, hooded black sweatshirt with a bag slung over his shoulder.”
Harvath turned. “I’ve got him,” he replied. “Stay sharp.”
“Roger. Standing by.”
Harvath looked at Nichols and said, “Get behind me.” He then reached under his coat and drew his weapon, careful to keep it concealed.
He didn’t like any of this. The man in the sweatshirt had his hood up over his head so that his face couldn’t be seen. Instead of using the brick walk-way, he was cutting across the lawn. Whoever this guy was, he wasn’t a pro. No one would have announced themselves like that. Nevertheless, Harvath was definitely on his guard.
As the man approached, he slowly removed his hood. He was of average height and bland features. He had short hair and wore glasses. If Harvath had to guess his age, he’d put him somewhere in his thirties. “Is one of you guys Anthony Nichols?” the man asked.
“I’m Anthony Nichols,” the professor replied before Harvath could stop him.
At that moment the man slid his hand into the bag hanging across his shoulder.
“What are you doing?” demanded Harvath, his finger tightening on the trigger of his weapon.
The man looked at him like he was nuts. “I was told to come here and ask for an Anthony Nichols and then give him an envelope.”
With one eye on the man with the bag, Harvath quickly scanned their immediate area. He was about to ask him who had sent him when Lawlor’s voice exploded over his earpiece. “Scot! Watch out!”
CHAPTER 66
A new man burst out of a small group of people passing the monument and Harvath was just able to cover Nichols and knock him to the ground before the figure barreled into the hooded man with the bag.
Harvath had no idea what was happening. All he knew was that the new man was straddling the chest of the man with the bag and had a suppressed Beretta pressed up underneath his chin. That made him a threat.
Harvath’s training as a Secret Service agent was telling him to get Nichols the hell out of there, but he wanted answers. Ignoring Lawlor’s repeated demands to know what the hell was happening, Harvath pulled his pistol from beneath his jacket and pointed it at the man with the Beretta. “Drop your weapon,” Harvath ordered.
The man with the Beretta ignored him. With his free hand, he pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket and shook it open. From where Harvath was, he could see it was a picture of some sort. The man studied the face on the paper against the visage of the man underneath him. “Who the fuck sent you here?” he demanded as he scanned the area looking for heaven knew what.
“Drop your weapon,” Harvath ordered once more.
“I work for a messenger service,” stuttered the man with the bag. “I was told to come here and drop off an envelope.”
Harvath had had it. “Drop your weapon or I’ll shoot.”
The man relaxed his grip so that he was only holding the weapon via his index finger in the trigger guard.
“Now set it down,” ordered Harvath.
The man did as he was told.
“Now get the hell off that guy.”
The minute people had seen the weapons, they had cleared out of the area. Harvath knew that momentarily USNA Police would be all over the place.
“Don’t you want whatever this guy has in his bag?” asked the man after he set down his gun.
Harvath couldn’t believe the balls on this guy. “I want you off of him and on your knees,” he ordered. “Right there. Hands behind your head.”
“I’m a friend of Carolyn Leonard’s,” the man said.
“Gary,” Harvath said over his radio. “I need you over here now.”
“On my way,” replied Lawlor from his hide site.
Harvath turned his attention to the hooded messenger. He actually did want to see what the man had for Nichols. “Very slowly,” he said as he trained his pistol on him, “open the top of your bag.”
The messenger did as he was told.
“Now,” continued Harvath, “lean forward, stick the bag out as far as you can, and shake the contents onto the ground.”
When the items spilled out, most of them the personal effects of the messenger, it wasn’t hard to spot the small, padded envelope with Nichols’ name written across it in thick, black ink.
“That’s it. I’m just a messenger. Seriously,” he said.
Harvath believed him, but he still frisked him and had him sit tight. Next he turned his attention to the other man. “How do you know Carolyn Leonard?”
“I’m the one who tipped her that Matthew Dodd was hunting you in Paris.”
“You know who we are?”
“Scot Harvath and Anthony Nichols,” replied the man. “But anything else should be discussed away from here,” he added as the sound of sirens grew closer. “I don’t want to spend the day being interrogated by the cops.”
“Where are you parked?” asked Harvath.
“Close,” replied the man.
A few minutes later, Harvath and Nichols climbed into the man’s black SUV. As it started up and pulled away from the curb, Harvath pulled out his BlackBerry. Keeping his weapon trained on the driver, he dialed Carolyn Leonard’s number.
When she answered he said, “Carolyn, it’s Scot Harvath. I have somebody here who says he’s a friend of yours.” Looking at the man he demanded, “What’s your name?”
With his eyes sweeping for any signs that the police were following them, he replied, “Aydin Ozbek. I work for the CIA.”
CHAPTER 67
Harvath didn’t know whether to laugh and admire the man’s audacity, or break his jaw for using them as bait.
“So you knew Marwan Khalifa was dead, that Dodd was most likely the person using his e-mail account, and yet you decided not to give us any heads-up whatsoever?” asked Harvath.
“If I had, you wouldn’t have gone to the meet,” replied Ozbek.
“Of course we wouldn’t!” exclaimed Nichols.
Harvath didn’t need the professor’s help on this. “Just check that thumb drive,” he said.
They were sitting in a small Internet café in Virginia. Leonard had vouched for Ozbek over the phone, but Harvath had insisted on a visual. His cell phone didn’t have a camera, so the final ID was achieved via a webcam at the café. The other reason Harvath had selected the café was because of the content of the envelope the messenger had brought for Nichols—a large-capacity flash drive.
“I’m telling you,” said Ozbek. “You were set up. Right down to the messenger. You think it was a coincidence that he bore such a resemblance to Dodd?”
Harvath looked at him. “Maybe from where you were standing, but from where I stood, he was an average, unremarkable guy. I think you over-reacted.”
“He picked that guy in order to flush us out.”
“Us?” said Harvath. “I was standing out in the open already.”
“He wanted to see if anyone was on to him and if so, how many people they saw fit to send after him. Everything Dodd does has a reason. Trust me.”
“If all of that’s
true, then you played right into his hands by jumping that messenger, didn’t you?” said Harvath.
Ozbek ignored the remark. “That flash drive is a trap,” he stated. “You know it is. Why would you want to keep it?”
“There’s no harm in seeing what’s on it. It might have material that was supposed to convince us that he really was Khalifa.”
“To what end? You said yourself that in the e-mails he sent Professor Nichols he was probing, trying to figure out how far along you are with your own assignment. I’m telling you that flash drive is trouble.”
“Listen,” said Harvath, “the drive could very well contain a Trojan horse of some sort. I agree. That’s why we’re using a public computer. If the drive is an attempt to sneak in and snoop around, we don’t have to worry about it.”
Nichols looked up from his terminal and said, “Everything looks like it’s in Arabic. I can’t read any of this.”
“Let me see,” said Ozbek.
While Harvath was a proficient Arabic speaker, his reading ability had never been as strong as he would have liked. “Be my guest.”
Ozbek studied a few of the files for a moment and then asked, “What’s the Great Mosque of Sana’a?”
“It’s a project Marwan was working on in Yemen,” replied Nichols. “It was a trove of documents, scrolls, and pieces of parchment believed to have been from the earliest Korans known to Islam.”
“There are descriptions of digital pictures and other items referenced as having been ‘archived’ or ‘preserved.’ Is this what he was working on in Rome?”
Nichols was still in shock from having learned that his friend and colleague had been killed, and his voice shook when he spoke about him. “He told me that it was one of the most exciting projects he had ever been involved with. He kept saying that the timing had been divinely ordained. I was miles away from anything in my research at the time, but he was confident that our two projects were going to come together at precisely the right moment and that what had been uncovered in Sana’a would lend even more legitimacy to the project I was working on.”
“And what exactly have you been working on?” asked Ozbek. “I understand why a Muslim radical like Dodd would want to kill Marwan Khalifa, but why you? Why go through so much trouble to kill an expert on Thomas Jefferson?”
Nichols looked to Harvath for whether or not he should answer that question.
“Not here,” replied Harvath.
“Where then?” Ozbek asked.
“You’ll see when we get there. In the meantime, I want all those documents printed out before we leave. I’m not letting that flash drive touch any of our computers.”
CHAPTER 68
It was several hours later when Ozbek took a break from the reams of Arabic documents he was studying from the mysterious flash drive and came into the kitchen.
“How’s it going?” asked Harvath. He was sitting at the kitchen table going over some information Nichols had brought in for him to look at. He filled him in that Lawlor had finally smoothed things over at the academy and was on his way back. He had taken a statement from the messenger, but it didn’t look like the man was going to provide any information that could be useful.
Ozbek pulled a beer out of the fridge, and Harvath signaled that he’d take one as well. He knew that having one of the operatives under Ozbek’s command killed and another put in the hospital with a very bad gunshot wound had been extremely hard on him. Green Berets were tough, but they were also human and cared deeply about the people they fought and served alongside.
“Khalifa was definitely on to something,” said Ozbek, referring to the documents that had been printed from the flash drive as he joined Harvath at the table. “The problem is that the information is incomplete. He talks about certain pieces of manuscript, but there’s no backup for it, no source.”
“Are you surprised?” said Harvath as he took a sip.
“Not really. It’s just enough information to whet your thirst, but nowhere near enough to quench it.”
“A hearty fuck-you from Mr. Dodd and his Islamist friends.”
Ozbek nodded and took a pull from his beer. “Considering the Italian State Archives all but burned to the ground, Khalifa’s copies of the Sana’a find are probably all that’s left. So if Dodd does have Khalifa’s computer, we can forget about any of it ever seeing the light of day.”
“Which makes the professor’s work even more important.”
“You know,” said Ozbek as he leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs, “this whole Jefferson story is amazing. If it’s true, Khalifa’s work really wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I mean it would have been a nice complement, but an actual missing revelation from the Koran that Mohammed’s closest confidants assassinated him over will be earthshaking in and of itself.”
Harvath agreed. “If it’s handled properly, it could tank the fundamentalists and propel the moderates into true control over their religion. The war on terror could be all but won.”
Ozbek nodded knowingly and took a sip of his beer. “Despite how confusing and contradictory I find that religion, I’ve worked with lots of good Muslim people. Frankly, I don’t think it can ever hack off the Islamist cancer without a huge bombshell being detonated from within. I really hope Professor Nichols finds what he’s looking for.”
“Speaking of which,” replied Harvath as he picked up several of the pages Nichols had decoded and given him to study, “I think he’s getting very close. Have you ever heard of a Muslim inventor named al-Jazari?”
CHAPTER 69
Harvath reached for a box of matches from the study’s mantelpiece. It was going to be a cold night. If he didn’t start a fire now, the room would never get warm. It was both a drawback and part of the charm of living in such a historic structure.
Once the fire was going, Harvath took a seat near the desk where the professor was working, picked up the puzzle box, and asked, “Now that you have decoded some of Jefferson’s notes, how does al-Jazari fit into all of this?”
Nichols scanned several pages on the desk until he found the one he was looking for. “Al-Jazari’s work was well known throughout the Islamic world and his inventions were highly coveted. Like da Vinci, al-Jazari relied on patronage as well as commissions for his livelihood.
“Also like da Vinci, al-Jazari was a dedicated man of science. Even as early as the twelfth century, Muslim scientists and academics were aware of multiple errors throughout the Koran such as Mohammed’s incorrect explanations of the workings of the human body, the earth, the stars, and the planets, which he had communicated as being the true words of God. There were also the satanic verses.”
Harvath knew all too well about the satanic verses. Desperate to make peace with his family’s tribe, the Quraysh, Mohammed claimed that it was legitimate for Muslims to pray before the Quraysh’s three pagan goddesses as intercessors before Allah.
But when Mohammed realized what he had done and how he had compromised his monotheism to get his family’s tribe to join him, he took it all back and claimed the devil had put the words in his mouth. The abrupt about-face acted like gasoline being poured on a smoldering fire with the Quraysh and remained a fascinating retraction, which many throughout history, Salman Rushdie included, have found quite notable.
“There is belief that, like da Vinci,” continued Nichols, “al-Jazari was skeptical of the infallibility of the faith that dominated the society in which he lived.
“Supposedly, when al-Jazari first learned the story of Mohammed’s final revelation and its exclusion from the Koran, he became obsessed with finding it.”
“And did he?” asked Harvath.
Nichols took a breath. “According to what Thomas Jefferson uncovered, yes, he did.”
Harvath waited for the professor to continue.
“Al-Jazari’s notoriety and not insignificant celebrity provided him access to anyone and everyone throughout the Muslim world. He traveled far and wide and met with Muslim heads of st
ate as well as their ministers, scientists, and court officials, as well as merchants, pirates, traders, and numerous scholars.
“By al-Jazari’s time, Mohammed’s final revelation was thought by many who knew the tale to be no more than a myth; more fiction than fact. If such a thing truly existed, why hadn’t it been brought to light?
“Al-Jazari supposed that if Mohammed had indeed had a final revelation that got him assassinated, then there still could have been forces in the Muslim world that would kill to keep it quiet. If these same forces got their hands on it, the revelation would undoubtedly be destroyed.
“So al-Jazari went looking among the people most likely to know about the revelation and where it might be hidden—the scientists and scholars of his day. The more he probed, the more he believed the secret was being kept alive somewhere.
“It took him many years, many journeys, and many intrigues but al-Jazari finally located it—the original copy of Mohammed’s final revelation as dictated to his chief secretary and sealed by the prophet himself shortly before he died.”
“Where did he find it?” asked Harvath.
Nichols shook his head. “I haven’t decoded that part of Jefferson’s notes yet. What I have decoded, however, says that al-Jazari was so impacted by what he read that he was moved to make sure the revelation was preserved and passed on to those who thirsted for the truth.
“The Islamic tradition is pretty well known for the penalty it imposes on those who blaspheme Islam or apostasize themselves from the faith.”
“Death,” replied Harvath.
“Exactly. There are many lay people and scholars alike, both within and without the Muslim community, who feel that the pure, orthodox Islam of the fundamentalists could never survive outside the context of its seventh-century Arabian origins. Apply twenty-first-century science, logic, or humanistic reasoning to it and it falls apart.
“They believe this is why Islam has always relied so heavily on the threat of death. Question Islam, malign Islam, or leave Islam and you will be killed. It is a totalitarian modus operandi that silences all dissent and examination, thereby protecting the faith from ever having to defend itself.
