Brad Thor Collectors' Edition #3

by Brad Thor

  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 description 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.

  Rutledge had no reason to expect a warm reception after what Harvath had been through. “We need to talk.”

  “Yes, we do,” replied Harvath, unashamed of his priorities. “What’s being done for Tracy?”

  The president looked down at the update Lawlor had handed him before initiating the call. “She has experienced some swelling of the brain. That’s where the headaches have come from. The doctors think it may have been brought on by stress. They are starting her on medication and will keep her for observation.”

  “What are you specifically doing to help her?”

  “Everything I can,” said Rutledge, “and in exchange, I need you to help me.”

  Harvath was silent.

  Rutledge waited for him to respond and when he didn’t, the president said, “I know you disagree with the way I handled things and I know you hold me responsible for what happened. I can live with that. But what you need to understand is that I made my decisions, as I always have, based on what I believed to be best for our country.”

  “People I care about were killed; even more were injured,” countered Harvath. “A terrorist with a vendetta against me was freed from Guantánamo and when he came after the people I care about, I was told to stand down and not do anything about it.”

  “And for that I am truly sorry, but it was a choice I had to make. We need to move past it.”

  “You’ll forgive me, Mr. President. I have a problem getting over things that fast.”

  Rutledge’s blood pressure was starting to rise. “Do you want me to give you an order? Is that what this has to come down to? My God, if we can’t come together to fight these people what’s going to happen to our nation?

  “Listen, you can dislike me all you want, but I know you dislike the enemy more. I also know that no matter how hard it has ever been, you’ve never said no when your country needed your help.”

  Rutledge took a long pause before continuing. “Scot, my presidency has been underwater from the beginning. It has been overrun by fundamentalist Islam since the day I took office. I have been hobbled by an inept, PC, partisan Congress more concerned with covering their own asses than doing the heavy lifting that needs to be done for America.

  “I have green-lighted more off-the-books operations than any president in history. Why? Because this Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, doesn’t have the guts to focus on the true threat our nation faces. They want to play their fiddles while Rome burns, but we’ve got a chance to be successful in spite of them.

  “I have spent two terms in office unable to take my eye off the war with fundamentalist Islam. I have no delusions about my legacy as president. I know I won’t be remembered for much, if anything at all, and I can accept that. At this point, I’m beyond worrying or caring about it.

  “But what I am worried about is doing everything I can with the limited amount of time I have left to help shore up our nation and weaken the enemy. No matter who succeeds me in this office, Democrat or Republican, they are going to get the shock of their life when they try to hit the ground running and realize that the best they can do is try to give up as little ground to radical Islam as possible. We have a chance to change that.”
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br />   Harvath studied the pistol sitting next to the computer. Beneath it was the list of hospitals he thought Tracy might be in.

  He hated being put in this position and resented the hell out of everyone involved, including Tracy, for putting him there. But regardless of how he felt about Rutledge and what had gone on between them, he couldn’t turn his back on what needed to be done. At the end of the day, Harvath always did the right thing. It was who he was, no matter how many times he’d been kicked in the teeth for it.

  Finally he replied, “What do you need me to do?”

  Rutledge’s sense of relief was evident in his tone of voice. “First, we need to get you up to speed on everything that has happened including who we believe is targeting Professor Nichols.”

  “And then?”

  “Then we need to figure out how the hell we’re going to get you and that book out of the country and back home as quickly as possible.”

  CHAPTER 49

  Anthony Nichols had arrived in Paris on a commercial flight, and that was exactly how Rutledge had planned on getting him back to the United States. There had been no margin of error built into the plan in case things went wrong. It wasn’t how a proper operation was run, but Harvath couldn’t blame the president. Rutledge wasn’t an operator.

  He was, though, extremely tight when it came to operational security. Normally, that was a good thing, but in this instance it meant that there were scant few resources he could tap for help.

  After his last phone call with Gary Lawlor, Harvath had learned two things. The first was that Dr. Marwan Khalifa had been fully vetted by the president and neither he nor Lawlor believed the Koranic scholar had anything to do with the attempts on Anthony Nichols’ life. For now, Harvath was going to have to take them at their word.

  The other thing was that President Rutledge wasn’t going to be able to get him and the professor out of the country any time soon. Harvath knew that the longer they remained in France, the greater their chances were of getting caught. He had to come up with his own plan and once he did, the first call he made was to Finney and Parker at the Sargasso Program.