The Last Patriot

Moving through the rest of the rectory as well as the church, Harvath made sure all the doors and windows were firmly closed and locked, then he set the alarm and settled in for his shift.

There were about a thousand things he would have liked to have done on his laptop, but he didn’t want to ruin his night vision. He needed to be able to sit inside his dark house and look out the window and discern things unimpeded. The laptop would have only hampered his ability to see and also would have silhouetted him in the glow of his screen making him a prime target if anyone wanted to take a shot at him. Not a smart thing to do.

Instead, Harvath sat quietly in the dark with his LaRue M4 across his lap, and thought about everything that had happened.

At the end of his watch, he woke Ozbek and passed the figurative baton. He filled him in on the alarm system and then checked on Nichols. The professor was several cups into the pot of coffee Lawlor had brewed for him and didn’t show any signs of slowing down any time soon. So much for jet lag, thought Harvath as he walked upstairs to his room.

After brushing his teeth with nothing more than a small night-light to illuminate the bathroom, he took one final look out the windows before going to bed.

He had absolutely no idea that out in the darkness, a pair of eyes was staring right back at him.

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.