“After six months of recuperation, Cervantes rejoined his unit in Naples and stayed with them until 1575, when he set sail for Spain. Off the Catalan coast, his ship was attacked by Muslim pirates who slew the captain and murdered most of the crew. Cervantes and the handful of passengers who survived were taken to Algiers as slaves.

“He suffered five years of barbaric treatment under his Muslim captors. He tried to escape four times and prior to his ransom finally being paid, Cervantes was bound from head to toe in chains and left that way for five months. The trauma provided much fodder for his writing, particularly the Captive’s Tale in Don Quixote.

“Jefferson was reading Don Quixote to learn more about the Barbary pirates, but right in the middle of it he discovered something else-a cleverly hidden cryptogram. It took him a while to crack it, but once he did, it revealed any incredible story hidden within the Captive’s Tale.”

“What was it?” asked Tracy.

“In sixteenth-century Algiers,” replied Nichols, “educated slaves like Cervantes were used by their largely illiterate Algerian captors as amanuenses to perform a variety of tasks, from accounting to transcribing documents.

“It was in the house of one of the city’s religious leaders that Cervantes first learned that the last revelation of Mohammed’s life had been purposefully omitted from the Koran.”

Just when Harvath thought the man couldn’t come up with anything more astonishing, he did. “What was Mohammed’s final revelation?” he asked.

“That’s exactly what the president and I have been trying to find out,” said Nichols. “According to Jefferson, Mohammed was murdered shortly after revealing it.”

“Wait a second,” said Tracy. “Mohammed was murdered? I never knew that.”

“632 AD,” replied Harvath, who in order to better understand his nation’s enemy, had studied Islam extensively. “He was poisoned.”

“Do they know by whom?”

“Jefferson believed,” said the professor, “it was one of Mohammed’s apostles; the men he referred to as his companions.”

“Jefferson didn’t exactly have access to the Internet,” said Harvath. “How could he have done any substantive research on this kind of topic?”

“Per his diary,” replied Nichols, “the task was extremely difficult. He did have help, though. Besides an incredible network of international contacts in diplomatic, academic, and espionage circles, the European monastic orders charged with ransoming prisoners from the Islamic nations proved very useful.

“These monastic orders were exceptional record keepers. They debriefed all of the prisoners they repatriated and recorded the accounts of their captivity verbatim. Many of these orders had representatives and in some cases even headquarters in France. Through them, Jefferson had access to an array of archives detailing what the prisoners did during their captivity, as well as what they saw and overheard.

“There were many prisoners like Cervantes who worked in the homes and businesses of their Muslim captors and picked up very interesting bits of the missing Koran story over the years. Jefferson’s task was to take that information and put it together with other avenues of research he was working on to tease out a bigger picture.

“What we’ve been able to piece together of that bigger picture includes several references to one man in particular,” said Nichols as he reached for a sheet of paper, wrote down the name Abk al-’Iz Ibn Ism’+l ibn al-Razz al-Jazar+, and held it up.

“Who’s he?” asked Tracy.

“Al-Jazari was one of the greatest minds of Islam’s Golden Age. He was the Islamic equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci; an incredible inventor, artist, astronomer, and highly regarded scholar who was also interested in medicine and the mechanics of the human body.

“In 1206, he published The Book of Knowledge and Ingenious Mechanical Devices. In it he documented an amazing host of mechanical inventions including programmable automatons and humanoid robots, but he was best known for creating the most sophisticated water clocks of his time.”

“He sounds impressive,” said Harvath, “but how does he fit in with the missing verses from the Koran?”

The professor put up his hands. “That’s the problem. We don’t really know.”

“Even if you did, how could discovering something like this have any impact on fundamentalist Islam?” asked Tracy.

“Good question,” replied Nichols. “You see Muslims believe that the Koran is the complete and immutable word of God. To suggest anything else is considered blasphemy and an outright attack on Islam. Nevertheless, about a fifth of the Koran is filled with contradictions and incomprehensible passages that don’t make any sense.

“For example, in the beginning of Mohammed’s career as a prophet in Mecca, Allah revealed to him through the Angel Gabriel the concept of living peacefully with Jews and Christians. Later when Mohammed, who had been shunned by the Jews and Christians, became a warlord and raised a powerful army in Medina, Allah supposedly revealed that it was every Muslim’s duty to subdue all non-Muslims and not rest until Islam was the dominant religion on the planet.”

Tracy nodded. “That never made sense to me.”

“You’re not alone. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that the Koran isn’t organized chronologically. It’s organized predominantly from the longest chapters, or suras, to the shortest. The peaceful verses from the beginning of Islam can therefore be found throughout. The problem, though, is that the violent verses take precedence due to something called abrogation.”

“What’s abrogation?”

“Basically, it says that if two verses in the Koran conflict, the later verse shall take precedence. The most violent sura in the Koran is the ninth. It is the only chapter in the Koran that doesn’t begin with the phrase known as the Basmala-Allah the compassionate, the merciful. It contains verses like slay the idolaters wherever you find them and those who refuse to fight for Allah will be afflicted with a painful death and will go to hell as well as calling for warfare against and the subjugation of all Jews and Christians.

“Although it’s the next-to-last chapter, it’s the last true set of instructions Mohammed left to his followers and it’s those verses that have been driving violence in the name of Islam ever since.”

“The difficulty for peaceful Muslims who do not espouse violence,” clarified Harvath, “is that they don’t have a contextual leg to stand on in their religion. When Mohammed said ‘go do violence’ and when he himself committed violence, Muslims are not allowed to argue with that. In fact, they are expected to follow his example.”

“Why?” asked Tracy.

“Because Mohammed is viewed as the ‘perfect man’ in Islam. His behavior-every single thing he ever said or did-is above reproach and held as the model for all Muslims to follow. Basically, Islam teaches that the more a Muslim is like Mohammed, the better off he or she will be.

“But, if Mohammed did in fact have a final revelation beyond Sura 9,” said Nichols, “and if, as Jefferson believed, it could abrogate all of the calls to violence in the Koran-”

“Then its impact would be incredible,” replied Harvath, who after a pause asked, “You found all of this in Jefferson’s presidential diary?”

“No,” replied the professor. “The diary was only a jumping-off point. Jefferson had been on the trail of the missing revelation long before he came into the presidency and he kept working on it until well after he had left the White House.

“We’ve had to sort through many other Jeffersonian documents to try to find more information. The problem is that Jefferson died heavily in debt and his estate was broken up and sold. Certain key items have gone missing. That’s why the president dispatched me here to Paris.”