The Last Patriot

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.