The Last Patriot

“I still do,” said Harvath, and then he switched to French and began speaking to someone on the other end of the phone.

Nichols was in a panic. If he got handed over to the French authorities, it would all be over. He had to make a choice-either spill it all to the man in front of him or save it for the very interested French police. He prayed to God he was making the right decision. “Stop. I’ll tell you everything. Just hang up the phone.”

“You’ve got five minutes,” said Harvath as he hung up on the automated, Paris version of Moviefone and looked up at Nichols. “I suggest you make this worth my while.”

Nichols waited, hoping his captors would loosen his bonds a bit more, but when they didn’t, he began talking. “The president has brought me on board to help him take down fundamentalist Islam.”

Harvath looked at Tracy with a smile and then back to Nichols. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Nichols shook his head.

“How could a professor of history be capable of anything even remotely resembling counterterrorism work?”

Nichols was about to answer when his hotel room window erupted in a hail of broken glass.

CHAPTER 12

Dodd’s men had jumped the gun, again. Their only job was to keep Nichols in their sights until the assassin could get there. Instead, the men had shot up Nichols’ hotel room from across the street.

The men had seen three figures through the draperies and fearing it was the French authorities, had decided to act. If Nichols broke and told them what he knew, there’d be no containing this thing. It was a rash decision, worse than the car bombing, but he realized the men had been left with little choice. That didn’t mean, though, he had to like the situation. Now he had to play clean-up and make absolutely certain that Nichols was dead.

As far as Dodd’s men could tell, no one had been left alive inside the hotel room. Dodd ordered one man to keep an eye on the hotel while the others sanitized the apartment they’d been using for surveillance. It wouldn’t take the French police long to figure out where the shots had come from and he wanted to be long gone before they got there.

Dodd crossed the street and walked into the lobby of the Hotel D’Aubusson. Everything appeared normal; the staff oblivious to what had transpired only moments ago upstairs. Dodd kept moving and strode right to the elevator.

As the car ascended, he removed a.45 caliber Heckler amp; Koch pistol from a holster at the small of his back. From a pocket in his Barbour jacket came a Gemtech suppressor, which he affixed to the weapon’s threaded barrel.

When the elevator doors opened, Dodd tucked the hand holding the pistol inside his jacket and stepped out into the hallway. Had the pistol been out and ready, he might have been able to get off a clean shot.

All he caught was a shadow of a figure as it disappeared into the far stairwell. Dodd raced for the stairs at his end of the hall and burst through the metal fire door. He pounded down with tremendous force, taking the stairs three and four at a time.

At the ground-floor level, he tucked his pistol back beneath his jacket and stepped out into the lobby. He searched for Nichols, but didn’t see him.

Crossing the lobby, Dodd reached the far stairwell and opened the door, but no one was there. How was that possible?

Then he realized how presumptive he’d been. Maybe whoever he’d seen hadn’t gone down, but rather up. But what was up? There was only the hotel’s pitched roof.

He took the stairs just as fast going up as he had coming down and considered stopping on the third floor to check Nichols’ room. Maybe Nichols was still there? Maybe, but he doubted it. Dodd didn’t believe in coincidence. If he found the person he’d seen entering the stairway, he’d find Nichols, he was certain of it.

Dodd kept moving, picking up speed as he rushed up the stairs-his body in exceptional physical condition. At the top floor he raised his pistol, eased open the door, and swung out into the hallway. Nothing.

He found the roof access, but it was locked. The only way Nichols could have made it through was if he’d had a key, which Dodd considered highly unlikely.

Taking the stairs back down, he checked each hallway for signs of his prey. Finally, he reached the third floor, and Nichols’ room.

There was broken window glass everywhere. Pieces of a shattered lamp littered the bathroom floor and there was blood in the sink, but that was it.

Whoever had been in this room had gone and they had taken Nichols with them.

Dodd began tossing the room only to be interrupted by a blaring alarm.

CHAPTER 13

Harvath had acted quickly. His first instinct had been to grab both Tracy and Nichols and get out of the hotel as quickly as possible, but he knew better. The shots had been fired from a suppressed weapon, most likely from a building or rooftop across the street.

With the hotel room’s sheer draperies drawn, the shooter couldn’t have had a very good picture of what was going on in the room. Even so, he had taken the shot anyway. In fact, he had taken several. Whoever these people were, they seemed quite intent on making sure that Nichols and anyone else with him be taken out.

First the car bomb and now the shooting. Someone was trying very hard to kill Anthony Nichols, and Harvath wanted to know why. But before he did that, he had to get all of them to someplace safe.

While the shooter had probably packed up and taken off already, Harvath had to operate under the assumption that the threat still remained and that it might very well be closing in on them. Complicating matters was the fact that he was unarmed and the only backup he had was Tracy, who was also unarmed. Thankfully, none of them had been wounded in the shooting. Things could have been worse, much worse.

They avoided the elevator and ran into the stairwell closest to Nichols’ room. Harvath fought the urge to race all the way to the lobby. Whoever was gu

There they saw signs pointing toward the hotel’s conference room and Harvath headed for it.

Inside, a large U-shaped table had been set for an afternoon session with pads of Hotel D’Aubusson paper, ballpoint pens, and pitchers of water. At the back of the room was a sign marked Sortie de Secours, Exit.

The door opened onto a service area with a narrow set of stairs that led into the bowels of the hotel.

When they got to the bottom, they moved quickly through the basement. The whole time, none of them spoke.

A small service elevator brought them up to the receiving area at the south corner of the building. It was as far from the front of the hotel as they could get without going outside.

Near the door, Harvath discovered a clutch of chairs that sat among a handful of discarded cigarette butts. Atop a nearby time clock were stacks of matchbooks from the hotel bar. Must be the employee smoking lounge, he said to himself.

Sca

He dragged a large metal trash bin filled with newspapers and other paper products into the center of the room. Into it he dropped several oily rags he’d found in the corner.

Wrapping the last of the rags around a broom handle, he then tossed Tracy the matches and held his makeshift torch out for her to light.

Once it was going, he tilted it into the trash bin and set the contents on fire. It took a few moments, but soon the room was filled with thick gray smoke. Seconds later, the hotel fire alarm went off.