The Last Patriot

Having served in Iraq and other world hot spots, Tracy Hastings had an exceptional mind for operations. Right now, though, all she could do was lie on the bed in the darkened stateroom with a damp cloth across her eyes.

“Nichols was right,” said Harvath as he used the computer to pull up information about the Bilal mosque in Clichy-sous-Bois. “We need to get you to a doctor.”

“I told you. It’ll pass,” she responded.

Pushing away from the small, wooden desk he turned his chair so he could face her. “Let’s drop this. Forget the president, forget the damn book; forget all of it.”

Tracy removed the cloth and raised herself into a sitting position against the pillows. “You can’t. Not because of me.”

“The headaches are getting worse, not better. Look at you. You need help.”

“So does Nichols. So does the president.”

“After everything that has happened, how can you even think about the president?” demanded Harvath. “You were almost killed because of him.”

“And I’ve let it go. Now it’s your turn.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You have to,” she insisted.

Harvath leaned forward in his chair. “Tracy, I don’t want my old life back. I want this life, the one I have now. I want you.”

“And you’ve got me. I’m not going anywhere.”

“You don’t understand what I’m trying to do,” Harvath began.

Tracy looked into his eyes. “Scot, I can’t promise you that everything between us is going to be perfect. I dropped my crystal ball the day I got shot. What I can tell you is that I understand who you are. The better part of your life has been devoted to taking America’s fight to its enemies, this enemy in particular. Now, without another person having to be maimed or killed, you have a chance to defeat one of the greatest threats civilization has ever seen. I’m not going to let you throw that away. I can’t.

“This is what you’re so good at. You know how these people play and you know how to beat them at their own game. You’re angry with the president because he made some secret deal that freed a terrorist who stalked your friends and family. It’s done. Get over it. This isn’t about him. This is about right and wrong. And you need to do the right thing here.”

“But you need help.”

“Okay,” she relented. “I need help. I’ll get it. But I’m going to get it without you. And that’s not open for discussion.”

“Tracy, listen.”

“Scot, if I have to get up off this bed just to beat some sense into you I will. I won’t like it, but I’ll do it.”

Harvath smiled. Tracy Hastings was the most amazing woman he’d ever met. If they were blessed with a hundred years together, he could spend every single day of it telling her how much she meant to him without ever really coming close to how deeply he felt.

“I want to be happy and I want it to be with you. But for the two of us to work,” she continued, “you can’t stop being who you are.”

“Even if I’m the guy who disappears for weeks at a time and can’t tell you where I’m going or when I’ll be back?”

“As long as it’s not with a mistress, I think we’ll find a way to make it work.”

Harvath was at a loss.

“Now,” said Tracy, sitting up straighter, “bring that laptop over here and let’s figure out how we’re going to get you into that mosque so you can get that book back.”

CHAPTER 30

The book dealer had been careful in his dealings, very careful. Dodd had simply chalked it up to eccentricity. But it wasn’t eccentricity, it was an over abundance of caution and now he knew why.

Hacking the French servers had proven easier than he’d expected. The dossier on Rene Bertrand made for interesting reading. The man had a long history of offenses, most of them drug-related, but they had been escalating. Currently, the French police were looking into the book dealer’s association with a smuggling ring that operated between Morocco and France. The investigation had everything: money, women, weapons, drugs, and lots and lots of people who had turned up dead.

As far as the authorities were concerned, Bertrand was definitely a person of interest, but the most telling detail, at least for Dodd, was the fact that the book dealer seemed to be reviled by everyone he had ever come in contact with.

Rene, the heroin fiend, needed to disappear and was desperate for money. No wonder he risked having his face seen in Paris. He needed to move the Don Quixote so he could cash in and evaporate. Until the police had appeared at the Grand Palais, Dodd had never suspected Bertrand had such skeletons in his closet. He should have known better.

His plan had been to make contact with the book dealer and keep active surveillance on him until Nichols showed up. At that point, Dodd had wanted to simply move in and take the man out. He could have done it a number of ways, but a knife in close would have been best.

Instead, Omar had laid out the car bombing scenario. Though Dodd strongly objected, the sheik had insisted on making a statement. The statement had failed, as had its follow-up attempt. Nichols had survived and now the book dealer and the Don Quixote had been taken out of play.

Omar was painfully shortsighted. He had access to unlimited funds and could have made an overwhelming preemptive bid for the book, but his desire to make his “statement” had gotten the better of him. Nichols wasn’t as easy to kill as the sheik had anticipated.

Dodd had no idea who the man and woman helping him were, but he intended to see them die. Too much had gone wrong, and Dodd needed to end his string of bad luck. The most important thing, though, was getting that book.

The assassin had already tossed Bertrand’s hotel room and had come up empty. Combing the man’s dossier now, he searched for anything that might lead him to where the book dealer was keeping the Don Quixote.

Bertrand reminded him a bit of himself. He was a loner who had no family he could have left the book with. He had been living underground, moving from crappy hotel to crappy hotel, always a step ahead of the police. While Dodd didn’t have to go to quite such extremes, he knew what those places were like and didn’t relish the idea of having to visit each flophouse to conduct his own investigation. That said, he couldn’t rule it out.

The assassin was about to log off, when something about one of the book dealer’s drug arrests grabbed his attention. Bertrand was caught purchasing heroin in the violent Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. It was the same suburb that experienced rioting after French police chased two doomed Muslim teenagers into an electrical substation. It wasn’t his only arrest in Clichy-sous-Bois either.

Dodd began compiling a list of names of people arrested with the book dealer or named as being on the fringes of the police investigations. Several of them had very serious rap sheets. But more important than their criminal records was the fact that they were all of Moroccan descent and under investigation by the French internal intelligence service known as the Renseignements Generaux, or RG for short.

After spending considerable time trying to get in, Dodd realized that the RG’s servers were beyond his ability to hack. He would have to satisfy himself with what he could learn about the men from the French police. Along with their mug shots, Dodd compiled a list of last known addressees, the details of their various arrests and one final scrap of information the RG probably had no idea was on the French police servers.

France’s counterterrorism strategy was to disrupt violent attacks before they happened. To do that the RG had been monitoring every mosque, every cleric, and every Islamic sermon throughout France since the mid-