The Last Patriot

CHAPTER 71

Even though he knew he couldn’t be seen, Matthew Dodd didn’t move a muscle; he didn’t even breathe. With his night-vision monocular pressed up against his eye, he studied Scot Harvath until the man stepped back from his window and disappeared from view.

Dodd lowered his monocular and looked at his Omega. It was just past the hour. The men inside were apparently taking shifts. That was fine. He could wait.

Leaning against a tree at the edge of Scot Harvath’s property, Dodd retrieved a bottle of water from his backpack and took a long swallow.

In his mind, he replayed the last conversation he’d had with Sheik Omar. Despite the man’s past assurances that he would allow Dodd to handle the problem as he saw fit, Omar had tried to take control again. He wanted Nichols killed and if that meant killing the man who was protecting him, as well as any civilians who happened to get in the way, then so be it. Delicacy and finesse were alien to him.

Dodd had tried to explain that killing Nichols wouldn’t solve their problem. Jack Rutledge would simply find someone else to do the work. They needed to gather intelligence. They all knew what Mohammed’s lost revelation was rumored to contain. They also knew that if it was revealed, true, pure Islam would cease to exist.

The focus now needed to be on how much Nichols knew and how close he was to discovering the prophet’s final revelation.

The assassin knew from his prior surveillance that without the Don Quixote, Nichols had no hope of success. Then the professor had located it and despite all of Dodd’s efforts, he was now using it to complete his work.

Be that as it may, before the meeting in Annapolis, Dodd had learned by posing as Khalifa in his e-mail exchange with Nichols that the book had not provided immediate answers. The professor was still connecting the dots and fitting the pieces together. Yet despite that candor, Dodd felt that the man had not been completely forthcoming with everything he knew. That’s when he had hit upon the idea of the flash drive.

It had been infected with a sophisticated Trojan horse that was virtually impossible to detect. Called an “echo program,” as soon as the drive was connected to the professor’s computer, the program would have inserted itself inside. Then, the next time the professor went online, regardless of whether or not the flash drive was still connected, the contents of his computer would have been compressed and transmitted to Dodd.

The echo program would have kept on transmitting information such as key strokes, Web searches, e-mails, and newly saved files every time Nichols went online. The program would have also given the assassin remote access to the professor’s computer, including the ability to control any attached peripherals such as a webcam or microphone.

Unfortunately, the drive had been activated only once, at an Internet café outside Annapolis. Dodd credited that misfortune to the presence of the CIA operative who had been at his apartment two nights before.

The assassin had waited for the device to be activated again, but it never happened. That was okay, though, as the CIA operative had made a tragic mistake in Annapolis that had blessed the assassin with a contingency plan.

Dodd had done more than just send a messenger to the Naval Academy. He had been there as well, watching. The professor was working with two men — the man from the Grand Palais whom Dodd had seen again at the Bilal Mosque and another, older man. The older man had tried to remain out of sight, but Dodd had made him early on. He stood around afterward to watch him flash some sort of credentials and handle the academy police officers; eventually leaving in the front seat of one of their cruisers. Dodd had no idea, though, who he was.

Then there was the CIA operative. Dodd hadn’t seen him until he leapt out of a group of people to knock the messenger to the ground, but he had known he was there. He had seen his Black GMC Denali.

It was the same Black GMC that had been parked near his apartment in Baltimore two nights ago — its engine warm to the touch and the pavement beneath it wet. The man hadn’t even bothered changing license plates. He must have assumed that Dodd had neither noticed his vehicle before their run-in, nor remained behind afterward to watch him put his injured colleague in the front seat and the lifeless body of his female colleague in the cargo area in back.

Discovering the CIA operative’s vehicle at the Naval Academy had been an unexpected dividend. Dodd had arrived with a small transmitter just in case Nichols’ car presented itself, which it never did. The black Denali turned out to be the next best thing.

Dodd had been operating by the CIA maxim that action begets intelligence. His plan all along had been to flush Nichols into the open in order to glean information from him. Tracking him back to where he was staying had been icing on the cake. Now, all he had to do was pick the right time to enter the house.