The Last Patriot

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 doubled-parked Opel or the fixed stock of the H amp;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.