The Last Patriot

by Brad Thor

  “It’s no wonder that those who knew about Mohammed’s final revelation were so careful not to reveal it.”

  “But al-Jazari did,” said Harvath, “right?”

  “Yes,” said the professor. “Even if it might not ever be widely disseminated, al-Jazari wanted to make sure that those Muslims who sought the truth about their religion and its patriarch would always be able to find it; even if they had to work hard to do it.”

  “I’m guessing that Jefferson had to work hard at it too.”

  “According to his journals,” replied Nichols, “the task was extremely difficult. He did, though, have one of the best resources in the world at his disposal: the United States Marine Corps.”

  “To the shores of Tripoli,” Harvath said as he remembered their conversation in Paris.

  “Precisely,” replied Nichols. “In his diary, Jefferson recounted how in 1805 he sent Army officer William Eaton along with a contingent of Marines under Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon to attack Tripoli and depose the pasha, who had declared war on the United States. It was America’s first battle to take place on foreign soil.

  “Eaton recruited the pasha of Tripoli’s brother, Hamet, the rightful heir to the Tripolitanian throne who was in exile in Egypt, to aid in a little eighteenth-century regime change. Their target was the wealthy and highly fortified port city of Derna.

  “After an hour of heavy bombardment from the USS Nautilus, Hornet, and Argus, under the command of Captain Isaac Hull, Hamet led his soldiers southwest to cut off the road to Tripoli while the Marines and the rest of their hired mercenaries attacked the harbor fortress.

  “Many of Derna’s Muslim soldiers were terrified of the Marines and quickly retreated, leaving their cannons and rifles unfired.

  “Through the chaos and pandemonium in the streets, a small unit of Marines split off from their colleagues on a top secret assignment from President Jefferson. Their job was to infiltrate the governor’s palace. There was a small snag, though.

  “Over the objection of Lieutenant O’Bannon, Hamet and his Arab mercenaries had identified the governor’s palace as their second objective after securing the road to Tripoli.

  “O’Bannon’s contingent of Marines was told they had to get in and get out before Hamet and his men arrived. Their primary objective was to recover a very important item for the president.”

  “Let me guess,” said Harvath. “This very important item had something to do with al-Jazari.”

  Nichols nodded. “The Marines fought run-and-gun, as well as hand-to-hand, battles all the way to the governor’s palace. Like their fellow Marines fighting at the harbor, their bravery was unparalleled and would set the standard for every Marine action from then on.

  “Within an hour and fifteen minutes of the initial ground assault, Lieutenant O’Bannon raised the American flag over the harbor fortress. It was the first time the stars and stripes had ever been flown over battlements outside of the Atlantic. Shortly thereafter, O’Bannon’s covert Marine unit returned, having successfully completed their assignment.

  “After holding the city and repelling a counterattack, Eaton wanted to press farther into Tripoli, but Jefferson held him back, preferring instead to conclude a peace treaty and secure the release of all Americans being held in Tripoli, in particular the crew of the USS Philadelphia, which had run aground in Tripoli Harbor eighteen months before.

  “Though Eaton, like O’Bannon and his Marines, returned home a hero he always felt that Jefferson had sold him out. He never knew of the Marines’ covert operation and the real reason for attacking Derna.

  “An interesting footnote is that after the victory, Prince Hamet presented Lieutenant O’Bannon with a scimitar used by his Mameluke tribesmen in appreciation of his courage and that of his Marines. This is the model for the saber the Marines still carry to this day.”

  Harvath stood up, set the puzzle box on the desk, and walked over to place another log on the fire. “Even as a Navy man,” he said, “I’m willing to admit that the Marines have an impressive lineage.

  “What’s interesting, though, is that I’ve never heard about the covert operation at Derna.”

  “Nobody has,” replied Nichols. “Not even Congress. I just decoded Jefferson’s writings about it. Per his orders, the Marines took the secret with them to their graves.”

  “So what about the item they were sent to retrieve from the governor’s palace in Derna? What happened to it?”

  The professor swept his hand over his notes and replied, “That’s the mystery we need to unravel.”

  CHAPTER 70

  “We now know,” said Nichols, “that what lay within the governor’s palace had been created by al-Jazari, had something to do with Mohammed’s final revelation, and had supposedly been there since Cervantes was a prisoner in neighboring Algiers. We also know that O’Bannon’s Marines succeeded in finding it and bringing it back to Thomas Jefferson. What it specifically was and what happened to it from there is what we need to find out.

  “And,” said Nichols as he looked over the desk cluttered with books and papers, “the answer lies somewhere in here. I hope.”

  Harvath smiled at him. “Then you’ll find it. In the meantime, I’m cooking tonight. Do you want to eat with us in the kitchen, or are you going to eat in here?”

  The professor thought about it for a minute. “I’m going to keep working.”

  “Understood. I’ll bring a plate in for you.”

  “And some coffee please,” said Nichols as Harvath left the study.

  Lawlor was sitting at the kitchen table with Aydin Ozbek when Harvath walked in. “While I don’t mind another set of experienced hands,” said Gary, “what this operation really needs is a lawyer.”

  “That rough at UVA, huh?” replied Harvath as he walked over to the fridge and started pulling things out.

  “Nothing compared to Paris, but it was still rough. The cops were plenty pissed off.”

  “Any word on Tracy?”

  “Someone from the embassy is staying in the room with her now.”

  Harvath set a head of lettuce on the counter and turned. “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong, the French were just getting a little overzealous in wanting to question her. Some of them feel she’s had enough time to rest and be on her pain medication and that there’s no reason she shouldn’t be talking. Her doctors don’t like it, though. They don’t want her exposed to any stress until they can completely get the brain swelling stopped. The French authorities were getting a bit too pushy, so the doctors tried to bar them from her room. When that happened, the French threatened to move her out of the American Hospital to another that would be more cooperative.

  “Tracy’s doctors reached out to the embassy and they now have someone in her room around-the-clock to run interference and act as a buffer.”

  “Do you think that’s going to work?” asked Harvath, concerned for Tracy.

  “For now, yes.”

  Harvath didn’t want to ask about later. He just wanted Tracy back home. He found the iPod he had used before Tracy bought him the bigger and better version he’d left behind in his hotel room in Paris and dropped it into the audio station near the stove.

  Tracy loved listening to Pachelbel’s Canon in D when she cooked. He was tempted to play that now, but knew it wouldn’t do much to brighten his mood. He needed something else; something more upbeat.

  Scrolling through his list of artists, he pulled up the Zapp Band, and as “More Bounce to the Ounce” began to play, he started cooking and tried to forget about his problems for a while.

  Later, once dinner was finished and all the dishes had been cleaned and put away, Harvath brought up one last point of business for the evening. After learning everything he had about Matthew Dodd, he thought it made sense to post a watch. Lawlor and Ozbek agreed and Harvath divided up the shifts. He would go first, then Ozbek, and then Lawlor.

  With everything decided, Lawlor took Ozbek upstairs to g
et him settled while Harvath made his rounds. He closed the drapes in the study and restricted Nichols to a small desk lamp.

  Moving through the rest of the rectory as well as the church, Harvath made sure all the doors and windows were firmly closed and locked, then he set the alarm and settled in for his shift.

  There were about a thousand things he would have liked to have done on his laptop, but he didn’t want to ruin his night vision. He needed to be able to sit inside his dark house and look out the window and discern things unimpeded. The laptop would have only hampered his ability to see and also would have silhouetted him in the glow of his screen, making him a prime target if anyone wanted to take a shot at him. Not a smart thing to do.

  Instead, Harvath sat quietly in the dark with his LaRue M4 across his lap, and thought about everything that had happened.

  At the end of his watch, he woke Ozbek and passed the figurative baton. He filled him in on the alarm system and then checked on Nichols. The professor was several cups into the pot of coffee Lawlor had brewed for him and didn’t show any signs of slowing down any time soon. So much for jet lag, thought Harvath as he walked upstairs to his room.

  After brushing his teeth with nothing more than a small night-light to illuminate the bathroom, he took one final look out the windows before going to bed.

  He had absolutely no idea that out in the darkness, a pair of eyes was staring right back at him.

  CHAPTER 71

  Even though he knew he couldn’t be seen, Matthew Dodd didn’t move a muscle; he didn’t even breathe. With his night-vision monocular pressed up against his eye, he studied Scot Harvath until the man stepped back from his window and disappeared from view.

  Dodd lowered his monocular and looked at his Omega. It was just past the hour. The men inside were apparently taking shifts. That was fine. He could wait.

  Leaning against a tree at the edge of Scot Harvath’s property, Dodd retrieved a bottle of water from his backpack and took a long swallow.

  In his mind, he replayed the last conversation he’d had with Sheik Omar. Despite the man’s past assurances that he would allow Dodd to handle the problem as he saw fit, Omar had tried to take control again. He wanted Nichols killed and if that meant killing the man who was protecting him, as well as any civilians who happened to get in the way, then so be it. Delicacy and finesse were alien to him.

  Dodd had tried to explain that killing Nichols wouldn’t solve their problem. Jack Rutledge would simply find someone else to do the work. They needed to gather intelligence. They all knew what Mohammed’s lost revelation was rumored to contain. They also knew that if it was revealed, true, pure Islam would cease to exist.

  The focus now needed to be on how much Nichols knew and how close he was to discovering the prophet’s final revelation.

  The assassin knew from his prior surveillance that without the Don Quixote, Nichols had no hope of success. Then the professor had located it and despite all of Dodd’s efforts, he was now using it to complete his work.

  Be that as it may, before the meeting in Annapolis, Dodd had learned by posing as Khalifa in his e-mail exchange with Nichols that the book had not provided immediate answers. The professor was still connecting the dots and fitting the pieces together. Yet despite that candor, Dodd felt that the man had not been completely forthcoming with everything he knew. That’s when he had hit upon the idea of the flash drive.

  It had been infected with a sophisticated Trojan horse that was virtually impossible to detect. Called an “echo program,” as soon as the drive was connected to the professor’s computer, the program would have inserted itself inside. Then, the next time the professor went online, regardless of whether or not the flash drive was still connected, the contents of his computer would have been compressed and transmitted to Dodd.

  The echo program would have kept on transmitting information such as key strokes, Web searches, e-mails, and newly saved files every time Nichols went online. The program would have also given the assassin remote access to the professor’s computer, including the ability to control any attached peripherals such as a webcam or microphone.

  Unfortunately, the drive had been activated only once, at an Internet café outside Annapolis. Dodd credited that misfortune to the presence of the CIA operative who had been at his apartment two nights before.

  The assassin had waited for the device to be activated again, but it never happened. That was okay, though, as the CIA operative had made a tragic mistake in Annapolis that had blessed the assassin with a contingency plan.

  Dodd had done more than just send a messenger to the Naval Academy. He had been there as well, watching. The professor was working with two men—the man from the Grand Palais whom Dodd had seen again at the Bilal Mosque and another, older man. The older man had tried to remain out of sight, but Dodd had made him early on. He stood around afterward to watch him flash some sort of credentials and handle the academy police officers; eventually leaving in the front seat of one of their cruisers. Dodd had no idea, though, who he was.

  Then there was the CIA operative. Dodd hadn’t seen him until he leapt out of a group of people to knock the messenger to the ground, but he had known he was there. He had seen his Black GMC Denali.

  It was the same Black GMC that had been parked near his apartment in Baltimore two nights ago—its engine warm to the touch and the pavement beneath it wet. The man hadn’t even bothered changing license plates. He must have assumed that Dodd had neither noticed his vehicle before their run-in, nor remained behind afterward to watch him put his injured colleague in the front seat and the lifeless body of his female colleague in the cargo area in back.

  Discovering the CIA operative’s vehicle at the Naval Academy had been an unexpected dividend. Dodd had arrived with a small transmitter just in case Nichols’ car presented itself, which it never did. The black Denali turned out to be the next best thing.

  Dodd had been operating by the CIA maxim that action begets intelligence. His plan all along had been to flush Nichols into the open in order to glean information from him. Tracking him back to where he was staying had been icing on the cake. Now, all he had to do was pick the right time to enter the house.

  CHAPTER 72

  The assassin had watched the man from the Grand Palais take the first four-hour watch and then the CIA operative the second. The third would be the older man. That was when Dodd would make his move.

  Based on the sign at the front of the driveway, it wasn’t hard to figure out who provided alarm coverage to the small estate. It took the assassin about an hour after tapping into the phone line to create a digital intermediary between the house and the alarm company via his laptop.

  As the second shift ended, Dodd watched through his night vision device as the younger CIA operative was replaced by the older man. The man entered the kitchen, put on coffee, and then moved from room to room with some sort of tactical rifle, ostensibly making sure everything was still secure.

  When he returned to the kitchen, he set his weapon on the table and remained still.

  The assassin removed a Powerbar from his backpack, opened it, and took a bite. As he watched the man inside the house, his mind began to drift to his dead wife and child. He had been warned about the damage that reviewing the police file on the accident could cause but not having been at either of their funerals, he had needed closure. Now, when he thought of them, all he could see was the twisted hulk of steel that had been their car and the bloody, lifeless bodies of the two beautiful souls that had meant more to him than anything else in the world.

  The accident photos snapped through his mind—one after another after another—in a sick, never-ending loop. It was all he could remember when he thought of them. He could no longer access who they were, who he was, before the accident. Even that had been taken from him.

  Dodd didn’t want to think about them now and forced himself to focus on something else. He needed to concentrate on what he came to do.

  Half an hou
r later, the man got up again and did another sweep of the house and then returned to the kitchen. Dodd remained in place, watching.

  At the top of the hour, the procedure was repeated. It was all that the assassin needed to see. He had no doubt the man would keep getting up to sweep the structure every half hour.

  Leaving his hide site, he crept back to his laptop. The Achilles’ heel of most home defense systems was their alarm. Few people could afford truly impregnable, unhackable setups. Even the most sophisticated operatives were limited by what their budgets allowed and often chose industry stalwarts like Brinks or ADT.

  Dodd had cracked some of the best security systems in the world and while this one was good, it wasn’t impossible. Activating several strings of code, he stared intently at his laptop as the alarm system invisibly shut down. To anyone monitoring at the alarm company or anyone in the house looking at the alarm panel, nothing would appear to have changed. It was now time to make his approach.

  The assassin had seen enough of the house to know that the perimeter was ringed with motion sensors that would have been separate from the main alarm. When tripped, they would activate exterior lighting and probably sound some sort of audible warning inside.

  After he returned to his hide, he observed the house for several more minutes to make sure nothing had changed. Confident that everything was as he had left it, Dodd removed two canisters from his pockets and moved forward in a low crouch.

  When he had gotten as close as he dared, the assassin slowly moved his face from side to side as he searched for any indication of a breeze.

  Dead calm.

  He looked at his watch. It was time. Popping the first canister, Dodd stood just long enough to overhand it toward the far side of the rectory. He followed suit with the second canister, locked in his bearings, and then waited.