Brad Thor Collectors' Edition #3 Page 8

  “Why?” asked Tracy.

  “Because Mohammed is viewed as the ‘perfect man’ in Islam. His behavior—every single thing he ever said or did—is above reproach and held as the model for all Muslims to follow. Basically, Islam teaches that the more a Muslim is like Mohammed, the better off he or she will be.

  “But, if Mohammed did in fact have a final revelation beyond Sura 9,” said Nichols, “and if, as Jefferson believed, it could abrogate all of the calls to violence in the Koran—”

  “Then its impact would be incredible,” replied Harvath, who after a pause asked, “You found all of this in Jefferson’s presidential diary?”

  “No,” replied the professor. “The diary was only a jumping-off point. Jefferson had been on the trail of the missing revelation long before he came into the presidency and he kept working on it until well after he had left the White House.

  “We’ve had to sort through many other Jeffersonian documents to try to find more information. The problem is that Jefferson died heavily in debt and his estate was broken up and sold. Certain key items have gone missing. That’s why the president dispatched me here to Paris.”

  “To locate more of Jefferson’s missing documents?” asked Tracy.

  “In particular,” said Nichols, “Jefferson’s first-edition Don Quixote. We believe it contains handwritten notes that can lead us to what we’re looking for.”

  “Where is it?”

  The professor took a deep breath and then replied, “That’s where things start to get tricky.”

  CHAPTER 20

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  President Jack Rutledge had just finished his morning briefing when his chief of staff, Charles Anderson, stuck his head back inside the Oval Office. “The Saudi crown prince is on the phone for you, sir,” he said.

  “Any idea what he wants?” replied the president as he walked behind his desk and sat down.

  “He didn’t say. Do you want me to tell him you’re unavailable?”

  “No. I’ll take his call.”

  When Anderson had left the room, Rutledge picked up the phone. “Good afternoon, Your Highness.”

  “Good morning, Mr. President,” said Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz from his residential palace in eastern Riyadh. “Thank you for taking my call.”

  “Of course, Your Highness. We are always happy to hear from our friends in Saudi Arabia.”

  “I trust you and your daughter, Amanda, are well?”

  “We are,” said Rutledge, ever mindful of the Arab custom to make small talk about the health and well-being of the conversation’s participants and their respective families before getting down to business. “How are you and your family?”

  “Everyone is well, thank you.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “Mr. President,” said the crown prince, “may I speak frankly with you?”

  “Of course,” replied Rutledge.

  “I understand that you may be searching for something that doesn’t belong to you.”

  The president waited for the crown prince to elaborate. When he didn’t, Rutledge asked, “Could you be more specific, Your Highness?”

  “Mr. President, Islam is one of the world’s three great religions. It brings comfort and solace to a billion-and-a-half people around the world. I am concerned that you may be attempting to shake the faith of those billion-and-a-half people.”

  “And just how exactly are we trying to do that?” asked Rutledge.

  “I’m not talking about America in general,” corrected the Saudi leader. “I’m talking about you specifically, Mr. President. You and the personal vendetta you seem to have against our peaceful religion.”

  The president reminded himself that he was talking to a foreign head of state; one whose country actively promoted and financed the radical Wahhabi ideology embraced by so many of the world’s terrorists, but a head of state nonetheless. “Your Highness, you asked me if we could speak frankly, so let’s do so. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  The connection was so clear, it was almost as if the overweight Saudi was standing right next to the president when he said, “There is no lost revelation of Mohammed, Mr. President.”

  Rutledge couldn’t believe his ears. How the hell did the Saudis know what he was looking for? “That’s good to know, Your Highness. Thank you.”

  “Saudi Arabia has been a very good friend to the United States,” cautioned the crown prince.

  Sure they had. The president wanted to thank him for the fifteen hijackers the Saudis sent over on 9/11, the countless Saudi nationals who had over-stayed their visas and had been picked up in the United States on terror-related charges, and numerous other examples that suggested Saudi Arabia was anything but a friend to the United States, but he kept his mouth shut. Until America pulled the oil needle out of its arm once and for all, it would have to deal politely with Saudi Arabia. “And America appreciates your country’s friendship, Your Highness. I think you’ve received some incorrect information, though.”

  The Crown Prince clucked his disapproval over the phone line. “My sources are very reliable. As is my warning, Mr. President. If you want what is good for our two nations; if you want what is good for America and the billion-and-a-half Muslims of the world, you will abandon your fruitless search. The lost revelation of 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-Élysées, 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-Élysées 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.

  “The boys were leaving a meeting with the laborers when the French authorities decided to move in. They were hoping to get the two laborers who were the ringleaders, but the men gave them the slip. The boys were the next best thing. The authorities pursued the teens, but we know how that ended.

  “The laborers disappeared, presumably back to North Africa. The French are rumored to have retrieved some of the documents, but they never got the book—probably because they didn’t realize its significance and their focus was on the documents themselves.

  “A friend of one of the teens filled in the pieces for the security services, confirming most of what they’d already learned in their investigation. A CIA operative based out of the American Embassy was having dinner with a French counterpart who filled her in on the whole case. The Frenchman thought it would be amusing to her because of the Jefferson connection. She reported back to the head of station, who briefed Langley, and the report made it to the president, who shared it with me.

  “When I discovered that a rare first-edition Don Quixote was going to be on sale at this year’s International Antiquarian Book Fair here in Paris, I contacted the dealer, and without tipping my hand, made an inquiry into the provenance of the book. He was somewhat standoffish, but the book world is filled with strange characters.

  “He agreed to send me scans of the first couple of pages. There was an annotation and it looked to be a match for Jefferson’s handwriting. I made an appointment to see him so I could examine the book.

  “When I got there, he told me he had already decided to sell the book to someone else. Nothing I could do would persuade him. Someone had offered him a lot more money for it. The president couldn’t raise that kind of money; at least not right away.”

  Harvath raised an eyebrow. “The president had trouble getting funding?”

  “This isn’t a government operation. He has been financing this out of his own pocket. I asked the dealer to agree to wait until close of business today before he went through with the other party. He gave me until three o’clock.

  “I was leaving the meeting when I passed you and the bomb detonated.”

  “When we first saw you, you were coming out of a bookstore. Does the dealer work there?”

  “No, the store has a small café in back. He wanted a neutral place to meet. He’s very paranoid.”

  As he should be, thought Harvath. And so should you. Nichols was in way over his head. “Do you have any idea who is bidding against you?” he asked.

  “A first-edition Don Quixote with all of its original mistakes that Cervantes personally corrected for the next edition? It could be any bibliophile or lover of literary history.”

  “Or it could be the people who have been trying to kill you,” said Harvath as he looked at Tracy. “I think we need to find out.”

  CHAPTER 22

  CIA HEADQUARTERS

  LANGLEY,

  VIRGINIA

  “You’re sure that’s the whole list?” asked Aydin Ozbek as he walked into his office with Ste
ve Rasmussen and motioned for him to close the door.

  Rasmussen shut the door and dropped onto the couch with three file folders and a legal pad. “Selleck gave it to me personally,” he said as he reached over and picked up Ozbek’s wooden puzzle.

  Ozbek poured himself a cup of coffee and studied the printout. “He sure pulled it together fast, didn’t he?”

  “Make mine black,” said Rasmussen when his colleague failed to offer him any.

  Without taking his eyes off the list, Ozbek poured a second cup, walked to the sitting area, and set it down on the coffee table.

  Rasmussen picked it up. “Oz, if you had a small fleet of Lamborghinis, you’d know where they were 24/7, 365 too. Selleck was able to crank that out so quickly because Transept is a tight operation.”

  “So he can vouch for all of these operatives?” asked Ozbek as he sat down.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” said Rasmussen. “They’re all going to need to be interviewed. Hell, even the instructors for Transept will need to be interviewed. Anyone who has ever even been in the same room when the word Transept was uttered is going to get a knock on their door.”

  “What about this one here?”

  “Which one?” asked Rasmussen as he set the puzzle down and leaned across the table to see what Ozbek was looking at.

  “Matthew Dodd. Status KIA/NRL.”

  “I asked Selleck about that too. Killed in Action, No Remains Located.”

  Ozbek’s brow furrowed. “If there were no remains, why wasn’t he marked as MIA?”

  “Modern technology, that’s why. The guy was working in the northwest frontier province of Pakistan six years ago and called in an air strike. Either he was too close to the target or he fucked up the numbers. Either way the missiles landed practically on top of him and he got smoked. The Agency had a drone overhead and saw the whole thing. It stayed overhead the rest of the night but they never picked up any signs of survivors. No infrared, no nothin’. And despite how remote and hostile the area is, they eventually got a team up there the following spring, but all they found was a crater. Therefore, Killed in Action, No Remains Located.”