The Last Patriot

CHAPTER 50

Matthew Dodd’s balls weren’t simply big, they were enormous. Fooling the CIA into thinking you’d been killed was one thing, but living within fifty miles of Langley was the absolute height of hubris and Aydin Ozbek was positive that it was exactly what would lead to Dodd’s downfall.

The assassin had been very careful about covering his tracks, but not careful enough. Most of the dead drops and meeting places Dodd had established with Salam while posing as his FBI handler were in and around Baltimore. That had gotten Ozbek to thinking.

Why Baltimore? The most logical answer was because Baltimore was not D.C. There were too many people who could have recognized Dodd there. What’s more, Salam had ID’d Dodd directly from his CIA service photo which meant that Dodd had never disguised himself when they were together. The assassin was smart enough to know that few disguises held up under close scrutiny over long periods of time. So the more Ozbek thought about it, the more Baltimore made sense. Not only was it close to D.C., but it was probably easier to get lost in than anywhere else within an hour’s drive.

At the DPS office, Ozbek had his team map all of the dead drop locations and all of the rendezvous points Salam could ever remember having been to. There were a couple of dead drops in D.C., but those were only set up for emergencies.

The prevalence of activity in the Baltimore area made Ozbek certain that it was Dodd’s main base of operations. He had to be living somewhere close by.

Though he held out little hope of finding him, Ozbek ran title searches under Dodd’s name and any known or suspected aliases, including his Muslim name, Majd al-Din. When those came up empty, Rasmussen half joked that it wouldn’t have been beneath the assassin to buy something under the names of Sheik Omar, Abdul Waleed, or even Andrew Salam himself. Those names turned out to be busts as well, as were any real estate holdings titled under any of Omar’s mosques, FAIR, or the McAllister & Associates front.

More than likely, Dodd was renting something under a false name they didn’t know of, which made it all but impossible to trace him.

Or so they had thought.

It was Stephanie Whitcomb who had suggested they dredge the credit bureaus and Web-based tenant screening services. If Dodd was renting, unless he was living in an absolute fleabag, his landlord would have run a background check on him.

Their search resulted in three hits in the Baltimore area. Two belonged to a pair of female roommates who were interns at the Foundation on American Islamic Relations and the third was a man named Ibrahim Reynolds who listed the Um al-Qura Mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, as his employer.

A little further digging revealed that the original Ibrahim Reynolds, whose name and social security number were bogusly listed on the rental application, had died at two months old in San Diego, California. It was the break they had been looking for.

And as a reward, Ozbek had decided to let Whitcomb come along when they hit Dodd’s apartment even though Rasmussen had been dead set against involving her.

Had Ozbek been able to see what was coming, he would have agreed.