The Last Patriot

Mohammed is nothing more than a fairy tale. The Loch Ness monster of the Islamic world.”

It was a monster, all right, thought the president, and if the crown prince was calling to dole out such “friendly” advice, it had to mean that he and Anthony Nichols were getting close. And the closer they got, the more dangerous all of this was going to be.

CHAPTER 21

PARIS

The professor cleared his throat and said, “On October 27 of 2005, the worst rioting in France in the last forty years erupted and spread across the country when two Muslim teens from a poor housing complex east of Paris were killed. The teens thought they were being chased by police and attempted to hide in an electrical substation, where they were electrocuted. The riots lasted for nearly three weeks during which over nine thousand cars were torched, a fifty-year-old woman on crutches was doused with gasoline and set on fire, and weapons were fired at police, firefighters, and rescue personnel.

“An internal French investigation gave conflicting reports that the police were after two other men who were either evading an identity check or had trespassed at a building site. Either way, that differed with a statement given by a friend of the deceased teens who claimed the boys had been accused of burglary and were running because they feared interrogation.”

“So what was it?” asked Harvath.

“All of it actually, but we didn’t learn that until much later.”

“How can it be all of it?” asked Harvath.

“French immigrants of North African descent who are normally Muslim are often hired as day laborers on construction jobs, much in the same way Mexican laborers are in America. Their employers pay them off the books in cash and turn a blind eye to their residency status.

“According to intelligence picked up by the American embassy in Paris, two such workers from Clichy-sous- Bois, the flashpoint of the riots, were hired to help renovate a building not far from the Luxembourg Gardens.

“During the demolition phase, the two laborers stumbled across a strange wooden box hidden behind a false wall. Though the men had no idea what they had discovered, after forcing it open they realized its contents were old and most likely valuable. So, in hopes of making a little extra money on the side, they smuggled it out of the building and began selling it off in bits and pieces in an attempt to avoid drawing any unwanted attention. It wasn’t long, though, before the French security services began looking into it.”

“Back up,” said Harvath. “The French security services?”

“Why them?” added Tracy. “Why not the police?”

“Good question,” replied Nichols as he took a sip of his drink. “What got them interested was who the box belonged to.”

“Thomas Jefferson.”

Nichols nodded.

“How did they know that?” asked Harvath.

“An antiquities dealer they tried to sell documents to got suspicious and contacted French authorities,” said the professor.

“What was a box filled with Jefferson’s stuff doing hidden in a building near the Luxembourg Gardens?” asked Harvath.

Nichols swirled the liquid in his glass. “In addition to his home on the Champs-Elysees, Jefferson kept a small suite of private rooms at the Carthusian monastery in the Jardin du Luxembourg, where he could work and think in peace. The Carthusians observed a strict vow of silence and expected their tenants to do the same. The arrangement was perfect for Jefferson.

“His house on the Champs-Elysees had been broken into three times in 1789,” continued Nichols. “In fact, the robberies had gotten so bad that he had to request private security.”

Tracy massaged her temples with her index fingers. “What were the robbers looking for?”

“No one knows for sure. It may have been as simple as petty theft, or it could have been government sponsored espionage. The fact is that the monastery was much more secure and it is likely that Jefferson would have felt comfortable leaving important items there.”

“That still doesn’t explain why the French security services were so interested in the box, or what the box was doing walled up in some building in the first place,” said Harvath.

Nichols attempted to explain. “The box belonged to the third American president and many of the documents inside were encoded. The French have an obsession with codes. They never broke any of Jefferson’s, so when the opportunity to get their hands on items he had encrypted popped up, they jumped on it. The only problem for them, though, was that the codes were created using an ingenious machine Jefferson had invented while living in Paris called the wheel cipher.”

“What’s a wheel cipher?”

“Imagine twenty-six wooden discs, like donuts or circular coasters with a hole drilled through the center of each. They were a quarter of an inch thick and four inches in diameter with the letters of the alphabet printed randomly around the edge. The donuts slid onto a metal axle, the protruding edges of which allowed it to be placed in a special rack. From there the discs could be rotated at will to spell out the desired message.

“For the message to be decoded, the recipient not only needed their own wheel cipher, but they also needed to know the order in which to place the wooden wheels along the axle. Without that information, any encoded message was useless.”

“And along with the encoded documents,” said Harvath, “Jefferson’s copy of Don Quixote was in that box?”

“Yes,” replied Nichols.

“What was in the documents?”

“From what we can tell, some of his early work on the missing Koran text. The bulk of what we have been able to piece together from other documents is all encrypted and our best guess is that he used his wheel cipher to do it. To unlock that information, though, we need to know how he ordered his discs.”

“Which means you have a Jefferson wheel cipher,” said Tracy.

“We do.”

Harvath was impressed. “And the key to placing the discs on the axle is what’s inside Jefferson’s Don Quixote?”

“Yes,” said Nichols. “For whatever reason-the sensitivity of the information or concern over what his many enemies might do with it-Jefferson encoded most of his research. In fact, some of the entries in his presidential diary, as well as most of the pages of notes that President Rutledge has acquired and hopes may pertain to Mohammed’s missing revelation are encoded. That’s a large part of why I was hired.”

“To help the President decipher the codes?” asked Tracy.

The professor nodded.

“But why would Jefferson have left the box behind when he returned to America?” inquired Harvath.

“Because,” said Nichols, “when he left, he didn’t know he wouldn’t be coming back. He was barely off the boat back in America before George Washington asked him to accept a position as his secretary of state. Congress moved quickly to approve the appointment and Jefferson’s life changed in the blink of an eye.”

“But he would have sent for his things.”

“Of course he did. But in 1789 he couldn’t just pick up a phone. Arrangements had to be made and they took time. The French Revolution was in full swing and before he could claim his belongings from the Carthusian monastery, it had been sacked and burned by the Parisian mobs.”

“And with it, presumably, the belongings Jefferson had left there,” said Tracy, “including the hidden box.”

“So where’s the Don Quixote now?” asked Harvath. “Do the French have it?”

“No. The laborers suspected they were under surveillance and recruited the two teens that were killed to deliver the rest of the cache to several intermediaries.