The Last Patriot

CHAPTER 33

As if three cabdrivers refusing to take him there weren’t warnings enough, one look at Clichysous-Bois convinced Harvath that he’d made the right choice in leaving Tracy and Nichols back at the barge.

Not that he’d had much choice in the matter. Tracy’s headache had left her immobile, and that meant the professor was the only one who could keep an eye on René Bertrand. Nevertheless, having them along in such a rough neighborhood would have been more of a hindrance than a help.

Clichy-sous-Bois was a dilapidated hellhole of poverty-stricken French housing projects that didn’t even have its own Metro or RER train stop. Graffiti covered every surface and groups of tough young thugs wearing the latest gangster street wear sprouted like weeds from every corner. If it wasn’t for the language difference, this could have been any ghetto back home from Compton to Queens. It was someplace Harvath definitely didn’t belong.

The Bilal Mosque turned out to be a run-down, two-story warehouse attached to a butcher/pastry shop on one side and a public bath, or hammam, on the other. As they arrived in front, Harvath’s cabdriver, a young Algerian immigrant named Moussa, offered to wait for him.

Harvath politely refused, but the man wouldn’t take no for an answer. He liked Harvath. It was the first time he’d had an adult fare in his cab that didn’t ask him to turn his American funk music off and who could converse with him about it at length. Anyone who knew all seven tracks of Standing on the Verge of Getting It On was better than all right in his book.

And though Moussa didn’t live in Clichy-sous-Bois, he knew its reputation and made a persuasive argument that finding a cab once Harvath came out of the mosque would not only be impossible, but also could be extremely dangerous.

The young man was right. Harvath gave him a hundred euros and told him to stay close. The cabbie pointed to a café across the street and told Harvath if he wasn’t in his taxi when he came out, that was where he would likely be.

Harvath thanked him and stepped out of the cab with the briefcase and a small rolling suitcase he had purchased in preparation for his visit to the mosque.

Leaving the barge had been one of the most dangerous parts of the operation. He no longer wondered if the police had begun circulating his picture. With the shooting at the Grand Palais, he knew they would be. He also assumed they had connected him to the bombing that morning. Therefore, purchasing some off-the-shelf items to disguise his appearance had been his first priority.

The suitcase and briefcase had come next, then a trip to one of Paris’s ubiquitous art supply stores. With a visit to a used-book store and a computer equipment shop, his foray was complete and he had returned to the barge.

From his e-mail server, Nichols downloaded the high-resolution Don Quixote scans that Bertrand had sent him. They consisted only of the cover and the first five pages, but it would have to do. Playing with several different types of paper and the new printer Harvath had purchased, they got their work product as close to the real thing as possible.

Judicious use of the small oven in the galley added just the right patina of age to their decoy. Though it wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny, it didn’t have to. It only had to allow Harvath to get out of the mosque without anyone knowing he’d made a switch. How to create the proper distraction, though, had turned out to be the hardest part of their planning.

It was Tracy who had come up with the idea and she had given Harvath instructions on how to best retrofit the device as well as the suitcase to match his needs. An auto supply store on the outskirts of Paris was his last stop before finally finding the cab that brought him to Clichy-sous-Bois.

It wasn’t the most foolproof plan in the world, but no operation was ever one hundred percent airtight. You always had to leave room for the unexpected. Considering that they had little time and even less resources, it was their best hope.

Harvath doubted the members of the Bilal mosque would frisk him, but he didn’t want to be carrying a weapon if they did and decided to go unarmed. If he was caught with a gun, it would have instantly blown his cover and their chance at the book would be lost.

It was in wrestling with how to play up his role as a nerdy and somewhat naïve academic that they hit upon the perfect way to pull off their plan.

Now, as Harvath approached the mosque door, he took a breath and focused on what he needed to do. Once he stepped inside that door, there would be absolutely no turning back.