and faded.
Dodd was an expert on many things, but rare books wasn’t one of them. He only had the recollections of what Rene Bertrand had e-mailed him to go on. As he opened the
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.
“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.
Going through their pockets, Dodd fished out two sets of credentials identifying them as Renseignements Generaux agents. They were tasked to the
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 cafe 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 cafe 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.
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.
