CIA HEADQUARTERS

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

“You’re sure that’s the whole list?” asked Aydin Ozbek as he walked into his office with Steve Rasmussen and motioned for him to close the door.

Rasmussen shut the door and dropped onto the couch with three file folders and a legal pad. “Selleck gave it to me personally,” he said as he reached over and picked up Ozbek’s wooden puzzle.

Ozbek poured himself a cup of coffee and studied the printout. “He sure pulled it together fast, didn’t he?”

“Make mine black,” said Rasmussen when his colleague failed to offer him any.

Without taking his eyes off the list, Ozbek poured a second cup, walked to the sitting area, and set it down on the coffee table.

Rasmussen picked it up. “Oz, if you had a small fleet of Lamborghinis, you’d know where they were 24/7, 365 too. Selleck was able to crank that out so quickly because Transept is a tight operation.”

“So he can vouch for all of these operatives?” asked Ozbek as he sat down.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Rasmussen. “They’re all going to need to be interviewed. Hell, even the instructors for Transept will need to be interviewed. Anyone who has ever even been in the same room when the word Transept was uttered is going to get a knock on their door.”

“What about this one here?”

“Which one?” asked Rasmussen as he set the puzzle down and leaned across the table to see what Ozbek was looking at.

“Matthew Dodd. Status KIA/NRL.”

“I asked Selleck about that too. Killed in Action, No Remains Located.”

Ozbek’s brow furrowed. “If there were no remains, why wasn’t he marked as MIA?”

“Modern technology, that’s why. The guy was working in the northwest frontier province of Pakistan six years ago and called in an air strike. Either he was too close to the target or he fucked up the numbers. Either way the missiles landed practically on top of him and he got smoked. The Agency had a drone overhead and saw the whole thing. It stayed overhead the rest of the night but they never picked up any signs of survivors. No infrared, no nothin’. And despite how remote and hostile the area is, they eventually got a team up there the following spring, but all they found was a crater. Therefore, Killed in Action, No Remains Located.”

“So what you’re telling me is that one of the Agency’s finely tuned Lamborghinis all of a sudden developed engine trouble?”

Rasmussen knew where Ozbek was going. “Doesn’t make much sense, I know.”

“You and I have both called in air strikes,” replied Ozbek. “I usually make sure my math is right on the money.”

“Agreed,” replied Rasmussen as he slid one of the files from his stack and handed it to his colleague. “That’s why I thought you might want to see this. It’s the incident file along with the investigation’s findings.”

Ozbek took his time reading through it. When he was done, he closed it and handed it back. “How come our department doesn’t have a file on this guy?”

Rasmussen held up his hands. “As far as the Agency is concerned, the guy’s dead. Selleck said that if we wanted, he’d have the Predator footage pulled and we could watch it ourselves. Apparently, it’s pretty convincing.”

Ozbek shook his head. “Let me see his personnel file.”

Rasmussen handed it to him.

The first thing he looked at was Matthew Dodd’s official CIA photo. “The guy’s definitely got Ernst and Young written all over him,” he said.

Rasmussen raised a hand to his mouth and wiggled his fingers. “All the better to slip into your country undetected, my dear.”

“What’s behind door number three?” asked Ozbek as he finished leafing through Dodd’s dossier and pointed at Rasmussen’s final folder.

“Nura Khalifa’s uncle, Dr. Marwan Khalifa. Naturalized American citizen of Jordanian descent, a founder of Georgetown University’s Ph.D. program in Islamic studies, and one of the foremost experts on the textual history of the Koran. He also teaches in Georgetown’s Department of Arabic, the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, and the Departments of History, Theology, and Government,” replied Rasmussen as he handed the file over.

“That’s one hell of a résumé.”

“You’re telling me.”

“Where is he now?” asked Ozbek as he flipped through the folder.

“The answer to that question might not be exactly what we want to hear.”

Ozbek looked up from the file. “Why not?”

“Salam was telling us the truth about Dr. Khalifa working on a project for the Yemeni Antiquities Authority. The thing is, he wasn’t in Yemen. He was in Rome at the Italian State Archive Services.”

“So at least we know where he is.”

Rasmussen held up his hand. “Five days ago, they had a fire.”

“Khalifa’s dead?”

“According to my contacts at the Italian Internal Security Agency, the police in Rome have four unidentified bodies, all pretty badly burned. I’ve got our people working on trying to locate Khalifa’s dental records in the States. Once we’ve got our hands on those, we’ll shoot them over, but at this point it doesn’t look good. One CFLR staff member says that Dr. Khalifa had been working late the night of the fire and no one has seen him since.”

“What was he working on? What were you able to find out?”

Rasmussen nodded. “The Yemenis had uncovered stacks of old parchments and scraps of varying documents dating back to the seventh and eighth centuries. They supposedly were some of the earliest pieces of the Koran.

“The Yemenis brought Dr. Khalifa in to authenticate them. Because they don’t have any decent facilities in Yemen, he’d gotten their approval to transport the find to Rome so that all of it could be photographed and preserved.”

“Did any of it survive?”

“It’s all gone.”

“So that’s it? Old bits of the Koran? That’s what he had been working on? That’s what his niece thought made him a threat to Islam?”

Rasmussen referred back to his notes. “Dr. Khalifa was working closely with the deputy assistant director of the Italian State Archive Services. He’s the one who told the police that Khalifa was working late the night of the fire. Anyway, this guy, Alessandro Lombardi, claims that Dr. Khalifa was very excited about the find because he had discovered intriguing inconsistencies between the Koranic parchments from Yemen and the Koran that Muslims worldwide use today.”

“What kind of inconsistencies?” asked Ozbek.

“Lombardi says Khalifa didn’t elaborate much. But what he did say was that several of the things he had found supported another project he was working on. It was based on some story about the prophet Mohammed having a final revelation that never made it into the Koran and that he had been assassinated to keep it quiet.”

“Whatever this final revelation is,” said Rasmussen, “it’s supposedly enough to turn the whole religion on its ear. Mohammed shared it with his apostles, but some of them didn’t like it and apparently bumped him off. Mohammed knew he had been poisoned, so he summoned his chief scribe and recounted the final revelation to him in hopes that it would survive.”

“And?”

“According to Khalifa, the scribe was hunted down by the men who had poisoned Mohammed. They found the final revelation hidden beneath the scribe’s robes. They burned it and then chopped the scribe’s head off.”

“End of story,” said Ozbek.

“Not quite,” replied Rasmussen. “What the scribe was carrying was a copy. The killers never located the original.”

“But Khalifa found it?”

Rasmussen shrugged. “Supposedly, his partner on this other project thought he had a line on it.”

“Then, presuming Khalifa is dead, he might not have been the only target. Do we have a name for his partner?” asked Ozbek.