The Last Patriot

“Why?” asked Tracy. “What does Don Quixote have to do with Islamic pirates?”

Harvath had read Don Quixote as a boy and hadn’t thought about it much since. He did remember something interesting that he’d been taught about its author, Miguel de Cervantes, and wondered if that might have been why Jefferson had been interested in the book. “Cervantes got the idea for his novel while in a Barbary prison,” said Harvath. “Didn’t he?”

Nichols nodded. “Miguel de Cervantes was a Spanish soldier who had fought in many battles against the Muslims, including the Battle of Lepanto, a decisive victory for European Christians over invading Islamic forces. Though he was wracked with fever, he refused to stay belowdecks and fought admirably, incurring two gunshot wounds to the chest and one which rendered his left hand, and some say his whole left arm, useless for the rest of his life.

“After six months of recuperation, Cervantes rejoined his unit in Naples and stayed with them until 1575, when he set sail for Spain. Off the Catalan coast, his ship was attacked by Muslim pirates who slew the captain and murdered most of the crew. Cervantes and the handful of passengers who survived were taken to Algiers as slaves.

“He suffered five years of barbaric treatment under his Muslim captors. He tried to escape four times and prior to his ransom finally being paid, Cervantes was bound from head to toe in chains and left that way for five months. The trauma provided much fodder for his writing, particularly the Captive’s Tale in Don Quixote.

“Jefferson was reading Don Quixote to learn more about the Barbary pirates, but right in the middle of it he discovered something else-a cleverly hidden cryptogram. It took him a while to crack it, but once he did, it revealed any incredible story hidden within the Captive’s Tale.”

“What was it?” asked Tracy.

“In sixteenth-century Algiers,” replied Nichols, “educated slaves like Cervantes were used by their largely illiterate Algerian captors as amanuenses to perform a variety of tasks, from accounting to transcribing documents.

“It was in the house of one of the city’s religious leaders that Cervantes first learned that the last revelation of Mohammed’s life had been purposefully omitted from the Koran.”

Just when Harvath thought the man couldn’t come up with anything more astonishing, he did. “What was Mohammed’s final revelation?” he asked.

“That’s exactly what the president and I have been trying to find out,” said Nichols. “According to Jefferson, Mohammed was murdered shortly after revealing it.”

“Wait a second,” said Tracy. “Mohammed was murdered? I never knew that.”

“632 AD,” replied Harvath, who in order to better understand his nation’s enemy, had studied Islam extensively. “He was poisoned.”

“Do they know by whom?”

“Jefferson believed,” said the professor, “it was one of Mohammed’s apostles; the men he referred to as his companions.”

“Jefferson didn’t exactly have access to the Internet,” said Harvath. “How could he have done any substantive research on this kind of topic?”

“Per his diary,” replied Nichols, “the task was extremely difficult. He did have help, though. Besides an incredible network of international contacts in diplomatic, academic, and espionage circles, the European monastic orders charged with ransoming prisoners from the Islamic nations proved very useful.

“These monastic orders were exceptional record keepers. They debriefed all of the prisoners they repatriated and recorded the accounts of their captivity verbatim. Many of these orders had representatives and in some cases even headquarters in France. Through them, Jefferson had access to an array of archives detailing what the prisoners did during their captivity, as well as what they saw and overheard.

“There were many prisoners like Cervantes who worked in the homes and businesses of their Muslim captors and picked up very interesting bits of the missing Koran story over the years. Jefferson’s task was to take that information and put it together with other avenues of research he was working on to tease out a bigger picture.

“What we’ve been able to piece together of that bigger picture includes several references to one man in particular,” said Nichols as he reached for a sheet of paper, wrote down the name Abk al-’Iz Ibn Ism’+l ibn al-Razz al-Jazar+, and held it up.

“Who’s he?” asked Tracy.

“Al-Jazari was one of the greatest minds of Islam’s Golden Age. He was the Islamic equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci; an incredible inventor, artist, astronomer, and highly regarded scholar who was also interested in medicine and the mechanics of the human body.