When she answered he said, “Carolyn, it’s Scot Harvath. I have somebody here who says he’s a friend of yours.” Looking at the man he demanded, “What’s your name?”
With his eyes sweeping for any signs that the police were following them, he replied, “Aydin Ozbek. I work for the CIA.”
CHAPTER 67
Harvath didn’t know whether to laugh and admire the man’s audacity, or break his jaw for using them as bait.
“So you knew Marwan Khalifa was dead, that Dodd was most likely the person using his e-mail account, and yet you decided not to give us any heads-up whatsoever?” asked Harvath.
“If I had, you wouldn’t have gone to the meet,” replied Ozbek.
“Of course we wouldn’t!” exclaimed Nichols.
Harvath didn’t need the professor’s help on this. “Just check that thumb drive,” he said.
They were sitting in a small Internet cafe in Virginia. Leonard had vouched for Ozbek over the phone, but Harvath had insisted on a visual. His cell phone didn’t have a camera, so the final ID was achieved via a webcam at the cafe. The other reason Harvath had selected the cafe was because of the content of the envelope the messenger had brought for Nichols-a large-capacity flash drive.
“I’m telling you,” said Ozbek. “You were set up. Right down to the messenger. You think it was a coincidence that he bore such a resemblance to Dodd?”
Harvath looked at him. “Maybe from where you were standing, but from where I stood, he was an average, unremarkable guy. I think you overreacted.”
“He picked that guy in order to flush us out.”
“Us?” said Harvath. “I was standing out in the open already.”
“He wanted to see if anyone was on to him and if so, how many people they saw fit to send after him. Everything Dodd does has a reason. Trust me.”
“If all of that’s true, then you played right into his hands by jumping that messenger, didn’t you?” said Harvath.
Ozbek ignored the remark. “That flash drive is a trap,” he stated. “You know it is. Why would you want to keep it?”
“There’s no harm in seeing what’s on it. It might have material that was supposed to convince us that he really was Khalifa.”
“To what end? You said yourself that in the e-mails he sent Professor Nichols he was probing, trying to figure out how far along you are with your own assignment. I’m telling you that flash drive is trouble.”
“Listen,” said Harvath, “the drive could very well contain a Trojan horse of some sort. I agree. That’s why we’re using a public computer. If the drive is an attempt to sneak in and snoop around, we don’t have to worry about it.”
Nichols looked up from his terminal and said, “Everything looks like it’s in Arabic. I can’t read any of this.”
“Let me see,” said Ozbek.
While Harvath was a proficient Arabic speaker, his reading ability had never been as strong as he would have liked. “Be my guest.”
Ozbek studied a few of the files for a moment and then asked, “What’s the Great Mosque of Sana’a?”
“It’s a project Marwan was working on in Yemen,” replied Nichols. “It was a trove of documents, scrolls, and pieces of parchment believed to have been from the earliest Korans known to Islam.”
“There are descriptions of digital pictures and other items referenced as having been ‘archived’ or ‘preserved.’ Is this what he was working on in Rome?”
Nichols was still in shock from having learned that his friend and colleague had been killed, and his voice shook when he spoke about him. “He told me that it was one of the most exciting projects he had ever been involved with. He kept saying that the timing had been divinely ordained. I was miles away from anything in my research at the time, but he was confident that our two projects were going to come together at precisely the right moment and that what had been uncovered in Sana’a would lend even more legitimacy to the project I was working on.”
“And what exactly have you been working on?” asked Ozbek. “I understand why a Muslim radical like Dodd would want to kill Marwan Khalifa, but why you? Why go through so much trouble to kill an expert on Thomas Jefferson?”
Nichols looked to Harvath for whether or not he should answer that question.
“Not here,” replied Harvath.
“Where then?” Ozbek asked.
“You’ll see when we get there. In the meantime, I want all those documents printed out before we leave. I’m not letting that flash drive touch any of our computers.”
CHAPTER 68
It was several hours later when Ozbek took a break from the reams of Arabic documents he was studying from the mysterious flash drive and came into the kitchen.
“How’s it going?” asked Harvath. He was sitting at the kitchen table going over some information Nichols had brought in for him to look at. He filled him in that Lawlor had finally smoothed things over at the academy and was on his way back. He had taken a statement from the messenger, but it didn’t look like the man was going to provide any information that could be useful.
Ozbek pulled a beer out of the fridge, and Harvath signaled that he’d take one as well. He knew that having one of the operatives under Ozbek’s command killed and another put in the hospital with a very bad gunshot wound had been extremely hard on him. Green Berets were tough, but they were also human and cared deeply about the people they fought and served alongside.
“Khalifa was definitely on to something,” said Ozbek, referring to the documents that had been printed from the flash drive as he joined Harvath at the table. “The problem is that the information is incomplete. He talks about certain pieces of manuscript, but there’s no backup for it, no source.”
“Are you surprised?” said Harvath as he took a sip.
“Not really. It’s just enough information to whet your thirst, but nowhere near enough to quench it.”
“A hearty fuck-you from Mr. Dodd and his Islamist friends.”
Ozbek nodded and took a pull from his beer. “Considering the Italian State Archives all but burned to the ground, Khalifa’s copies of the Sana’a find are probably all that’s left. So if Dodd does have Khalifa’s computer, we can forget about any of it ever seeing the light of day.”
“Which makes the professor’s work even more important.”
“You know,” said Ozbek as he leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs, “this whole Jefferson story is amazing. If it’s true, Khalifa’s work really wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I mean it would have been a nice complement, but an actual missing revelation from the Koran that Mohammed’s closest confidants assassinated him over will be earthshaking in and of itself.”
Harvath agreed. “If it’s handled properly, it could tank the fundamentalists and propel the moderates into true control over their religion. The war on terror could be all but won.”
Ozbek nodded knowingly and took a sip of his beer. “Despite how confusing and contradictory I find that religion, I’ve worked with lots of good Muslim people. Frankly, I don’t think it can ever hack off the Islamist cancer without a huge bombshell being detonated from within. I really hope Professor Nichols finds what he’s looking for.”
“Speaking of which,” replied Harvath as he picked up several of the pages Nichols had decoded and given him to study, “I think he’s getting very close. Have you ever heard of a Muslim inventor named al-Jazari?”
