Brad Thor - The Last Patriot

“We need to make sure any passengers that missed the flight are rebooked as soon as possible,” stated Omar.

“Same airline as before, or can this be a private charter, as I originally suggested?”

It took a moment, but the cleric relented. “Private charter will be fine. Just make sure that our passengers get to their destination.”

“Understood,” stated Dodd. “Anything else?”

“Yes,” replied the sheik, almost as an afterthought. “You mentioned another man who was rushing for the plane as it left the gate.”

“I did. He had a woman with him. Do I need to be concerned about them?”

“I’m not sure,” said Omar. “I’ll leave it to your discretion, but should you happen to see them again, I’d like them treated as VIPs.”

“Understood,” replied Dodd as he stood up from the bench. “I’ll make sure they’re booked on the next flight as well.”

He ended the call and removed the phone’s battery and SIM card, then broke the phone into several pieces, all of which he dumped into a series of storm drains as he exited the Parc Monceau.

Dodd had his orders. He needed to find Anthony Nichols and finish the job. If the man and woman from outside the café got in his way again, he would kill them too. And this time, he would do it his way.

Harvath glanced at his Kobold Chronograph. He and Tracy had spent twenty minutes searching for Anthony Nichols. They had no way of knowing if he’d walked away of his own accord or if he’d stumbled off as a result of his head wound and was bleeding in a doorway somewhere. Harvath, though, had a hard time believing it was the latter.

He stopped walking and turned to Tracy. “This guy obviously doesn’t want to be found. I’m inclined to support his wish.”

“Then what do we do now?”

Harvath could see a Metro stop at the end of the block and he pointed at it as it began to rain. “How about onion soup? I’ll take you to a nice little restaurant called The Foot of the Pig in Les Halles.”

“Scot,” insisted Tracy. “We have to find this guy.”

“No, we don’t,” replied Harvath. “Maybe he was CIA after all. But whoever he is, he’s a grown man and he can fend for himself. He didn’t come about the president’s private phone number for nothing. He’ll have people who can help him out.”

“And who’s going to help us out?”

“Out of what?”

“ Out of what ?” repeated Tracy incredulously. “I’m suddenly the only person who knows how the investigation into that bombing is going to unfold? In that block alone, there were two banks-each with ATMs and a hotel. Once the area is secure, the French police, or more likely the internal intelligence service, the Renseignements Généraux, is going to pull all the surveillance tapes from their cameras.

“They’ll see the car get stolen, the Mercedes come in and take its place, and then they’ll see you and me beating a hasty exit from the café, only to have you rush back and knock that Nichols person to the ground a split second before the bomb goes off. Then they’ll see us help him up and evac him from the scene.”

Tracy didn’t say anything else. She just closed her mouth and waited.

“Shit,” said Harvath. This wasn’t his fight and he didn’t want any part of it, but Tracy was right. The French authorities were eventually going to be looking for the two of them whether they liked it or not.

They hadn’t done anything wrong, but their behavior was suspicious and could be construed as an indication of foreknowledge of the attack. Whether “gut feelings” counted as a reasonable defense in France was not something Harvath was terribly eager to find out.

Nichols was the reason the attack had happened. Harvath was sure of it. He was also sure that without Nichols, he and Tracy were going to have a lot of trouble with the French authorities.

For a moment, he thought they might be able to hop onto a train and leave the country, but Harvath knew he was deluding himself. This was a major terrorist attack. French citizens were dead and France would stop at nothing to get to the bottom of it.

Harvath knew how good the French intelligence services were. He and Tracy might make it out of the country, but they wouldn’t be safe anywhere. Besides, running would only make them look guiltier.

They needed to track down Nichols. Harvath looked at Tracy. “How long do you think until they have our pictures isolated from the CCTV footage?”

It was a rhetorical question and Tracy knew it, but she pieced it together for him anyway. “They’ll take witness statements from as many people as they can. If someone mentions our behavior as being out of the ordinary, that’ll make them instantly scrutinize the camera feeds for more than just who the bombers were.

“Once they’ve got our faces, they’ll enhance them and then run them through every database they have access to while simultaneously sending our pictures out to every law enforcement officer up and down the chain of command in France. At best, we’ve got two, maybe three hours.”

“And at worst?”

“I don’t want to think about it,” responded Tracy. “It’s giving me a headache.”

Harvath retrieved Nichols’ hotel key card from the man’s wallet and said, “Then I guess we need to get moving.”

The Hotel d’Aubusson was located on the Rue Dauphin in the Paris neighborhood of St. Germain des Prés. Stopping at a nearby department store, Harvath and Tracy purchased a change of clothes and wore them out of the store.

They carried their old clothes in the shopping bags they had received from the department store. Though the hotel probably wouldn’t have stopped them from passing through the lobby, Harvath felt that by carrying the bags, they looked even more like hotel guests.

Just to be sure, Harvath had Anthony Nichols’s key card out and in hand as they crossed the Hotel d’Aubusson’s stone lobby and headed for the elevator. The only interaction they had was a quick smile from a harried front desk clerk.

Harvath and Tracy got off the elevator on the third floor and walked down the hallway to Nichols’ room. They had decided that Tracy would knock and pretend to be a staff member with a fax for him from the front desk. If Nichols answered, Harvath would take him. If he didn’t, Harvath would use the key card to let them in.

After listening at the door for any signs of life, Tracy gave the door three sharp raps. She announced in both French and lightly accented English that she had come with a fax. There was no response. She repeated the procedure once more and then stepped back.

Harvath dipped the key card into the reader. The mechanism beeped twice and the door unlocked. Slowly, he pushed it open and stepped inside.

The bathroom was to his right, its door slightly ajar. Harvath nudged it open with his foot and his eyes were immediately drawn to the marble vanity. Sitting on top of a plastic pharmacy bag were a bottle of antiseptic, some gauze pads, a box of bandages, and an open package of Steri-Strips. Nichols had obviously been back to his room, and recently.

But if that was the case, the key card shouldn’t have worked. Any new card issued by the front desk would have come with a new code, rendering the previous card inactive. Harvath was wondering how the hell Nichols had gotten back inside his room when he heard Tracy scream.

Harvath turned just in time to see the lamp come crashing down. Raising his left arm, he absorbed the brunt of the blow with his forearm as the lamp shattered against it. Instinctively, his right hand drew back in a fist and came sailing forward, connecting with his attacker’s jaw and sending Anthony Nichols to the bathroom floor.