The Last Patriot - Brad Thor [123]
“I thought so,” replied Ramadan as he tightened his grip on his pistol.
“Imad, I’m not going to give you another warning,” said Harvath. “Drop your weapon or I’m going to drop you.”
Again, Ramadan ignored him and posed another question to Dodd, this time using his Muslim name. “Majd,” he said, softer, as if addressing a small child, “has the al-Jazari device been disposed of properly?”
Harvath watched as Dodd’s swaying grew worse. His lips were moving, but no sound was coming out. Though the swaying was due in large part to the amount of alcohol he had consumed, there was an additional reason for it.
Many Muslims rocked back and forth during their prayers. Harvath had seen it again and again in mosques and also with suicide bombers right before they blew themselves up.
Harvath refocused on Ramadan. “How did you know about the al-Jazari device? What’s your connection to all of this?”
“Do you think Sheik Omar and Abdul Waleed were just two men working all alone? This is much bigger than you will ever know.”
Harvath didn’t doubt that, but his attention was focused on Ramadan’s eyes. They had changed and his expression had become more resolute. He was going to kill Dodd even if it meant he would be killed as a result. Harvath could feel it. He had no choice but to act.
Harvath began applying pressure to his trigger just as Dodd rocked backward once more and suddenly came forward in an explosion of movement. He threw the wooden table in front of him into the air.
Ramadan was barely able to get a shot off before Dodd and the table were on top of him.
Harvath fired as well, but it was too late. Dodd was dead. A single round from Ramadan’s weapon had drilled through his nose and out the back of his head. Harvath’s shot had been equally well placed. Imad Ramadan’s lifeless body lay on the veranda, the weathered floor boards turning bright red with his blood.
CHAPTER 89
ST. MARTIN
It took Harvath less than a day to sail from the Bitter End to St. Martin—the nearest overseas administrative division of France. En route, he contacted the president to give him a full debriefing on everything that had happened and to strategize what their next course of action should be. Like it or not, and neither Harvath nor the president did, the al-Jazari device and all of the promise it contained was lost. They needed to focus on moving forward.
Though Rutledge didn’t expressly request the disposal of Ramadan’s body, Harvath knew how to read between the lines. The president didn’t want what little time remained in his administration to be taken up by a scandal. The Pentagon official was a traitor to his country, and now he was dead. As far as the president and Harvath were concerned, justice had been served.
Harvath thought it a fitting end that Imad Ramadan should go the way of the al-Jazari device, though he doubted the device had been torn apart by Caribbean reef sharks.
When Harvath arrived in St. Martin, his contact from France’s Direction de al Surveillance du Territoire, also known as the DST, which was the counterintelligence/counterterrorism branch of the French national police, was extremely unhappy at being presented with the dead body of Matthew Dodd.
After the Paris bombing and the killing of three French national police officers, the French were justifiably out for blood.
The DST operative, a rather intense man about Harvath’s age, asked how the hell they were supposed to put a corpse on trial. Harvath appreciated his anger and held his own in check in order to not make things worse.
He knew it looked bad. Dead men tell no tales, and this American ex-CIA operative had been whacked by Americans before being turned over to the French. The DST man had every reason to be suspicious.
The man’s anger continued to build. Not only did this put their whole agreement in jeopardy, but maybe he was going to have to take Harvath into custody as well too. He wasn’t shy about revealing the fact that he was armed. So was Harvath, but he kept that to himself.
Harvath offered the man the only other thing he had. Through