The Paris Protection (10 page)

David nodded at the two agents across the hallway. The president was scheduled to spend maybe another hour on video conference calls; then she would retire for the night. All three perimeters were tightened and ready for the full Night-watch. The only activity in the area was a hotel fire too far away to be a threat, and a strange vibration blip from the EK-1.

It should be another quiet night of cautious tension.

Then his earpiece crackled, and a voice yelled, “Crash POTUS!”

Then silence.

David’s eyes widened when the three spoken syllables reached his ear, but the silence that followed made the message feel even more urgent. His training had prepared him to act fast in every sort of situation, but never more so than in a crash alert.

His eyes darted to the closest agent to him, and he pointed toward the south staircase. Then he looked at the other agent and nodded toward the doors to the conference room. David pushed open the double doors and rushed toward the president, with the other agent on his heels. Startled, the president shot to her feet. The generals on the monitors watching through the video conference cameras gasped, helpless to do anything more than watch as the Secret Service burst into the room and rushed toward the president.

“David? What is—?”

But before the president could say another word, David and the other agent flanked her, lifted her by the underarms, and whisked her out of the room. Her feet scarcely touched the floor. Without speaking, they carried her down the hallway to the staircase, where the third agent had the door open. Then, lowering her so her feet could reach the floor, they half-carried her into the stairwell.

“What’s happened?” President Clarke gasped as they started down the stairs, holding her tight.

“There may be a threat, ma’am,” David said, conserving his speech so he could focus on the evacuation plan for a crash scenario.

“Can you please put me down?”

“No time, ma’am.” Then, with his free hand, he spoke into his communicator. “Firefly in south stairwell, twenty-sixth floor, moving towards secure alley. Rendezvous with Stagecoach in two minutes, twenty seconds.”

The response came through his earpiece, confirming the rush evacuation of POTUS. The presidential limousine would be raced from the garage to the back alley. Getting the president inside the vehicle was the quickest way to control security directly around her until any threat could be identified and neutralized. With the limousine’s advanced communications equipment and a small army of PPD and CAT agents strategically posted all around the building, more agents ready for emergency response, and a few hundred French police within response range, the president would be safest inside the armored limo. It was one of the best protective bubbles the Secret Service had outside the White House and Air Force One.

But David knew he couldn’t take the president all the way down the staircase until the location of the threat was identified and the CAT agents had secured a safe path to the alley. In his earpiece, he could hear the frantic calls of other agents throughout the hotel: some trying to locate and engage the threat, some trying to secure the president’s escape path, others trying to get to the president, to increase the inner perimeter of the protection bubble.

David could hear John Alexander on the communicator, racing toward their location to intercept them on the twentieth-floor stairway landing. But that was still thirty seconds away. For now, David was the lead agent protecting the president.

Rushing down the steps, he heard Alexander giving sharp orders over the encrypted Secret Service radio. No one knew who had given the crash alert or even why, or where the threat was. 

“Stone, stop on the twentieth floor. I’ll rendezvous with you there.”

David knew that other agents were escorting the president’s personal physician down from the twenty-seventh floor, and a team of five agents was bringing down the military aide responsible for the football. The suitcase attached to the aide’s wrist contained the controls and secure satellite links to confirm a launch order of the US nuclear arsenal.

Other agents were scrambling urgently all over the hotel, responding to the crash alert exactly as they had been trained to do.

As eager as David was to rush the president down the remaining twenty flights of stairs and get her inside the mobile protection of the limousine, he never hesitated to follow the SAIC’s command. They had no idea where or even what the threat was, and they couldn’t risk running blindly into it. They had been on the twenty-sixth of twenty-seven floors, and he needed to get them down to a more central floor and hold until they knew whether the threat was coming from the ground or the roof. Alexander had called for the limousine to circle around to the alley, and just before the crash alert, Rebecca had called for a White Top to get airborne and fly toward the hotel.

“Wait,” David commanded the president and the two other agents as they reached the twentieth floor. “Hold here!” He held his hand up, then spoke into the encrypted radio. “Firefly on south twenty. Holding for thirty.”

As he waited, he saw the terrified eyes of the president, staring at him as if she was trying to read his mind.

“What’s happening, David?” she asked quietly.

But he had been trained not to answer her in situations like this. What she knew or thought or felt didn’t matter when there was a possible immediate threat to her life. His job was to keep her alive at all costs. And that meant focusing only on the things that might save her life. Answering her questions could pull his focus from the many split-second decisions he might need to make over the next thirty seconds.

He pressed his hand to the center of the president’s back, making sure the blazer she wore over her blue shirt was one that the Secret Service had provided her, with the bulletproof material sown into the inside fabric by one of the best tailors in Washington. He felt the stiffness in the fabric and was a little relieved.

“Button up your jacket, ma’am,” he said.

Then he stood in front of the president in the stairwell, with one agent a few steps above them and the other a few steps below. Then, as instructed, David held their position, waiting for reinforcement agents from the counter assault team and for information about the threat.

It was the longest half minute of his life.

20

JOHN ALEXANDER RAN AS FAST as he could down the hallway with the five CAT agents he had grabbed from a team briefing room. They all had been near the elevator bay a floor below the president when the Crash POTUS came through the radio. The cover-and-dash would use the south stairwell to evac POTUS. The command center reported an explosion somewhere on a basement level. A few gunshots had followed.

“Hold Firefly at twenty!” he yelled into his radio. If the threat was coming from the sublevels, there might not be a safe path to the armored limousine. 

His team was desperately trying to locate and engage the threat while also securing the president. All it would take to kill her would be one well-placed bullet, one piece of shrapnel from an explosion, or a few toxic particles from a chemical weapon. Statistically, the most dangerous threat to any president—despite continued developments of new threats—was a lone gunman willing to sacrifice himself for a kill shot. Four US presidents had been assassinated, each by a lone gunman. John sprinted down the hallway. His greatest fear was that this unknown threat involving an explosion and gunfire and reports of missing agents could be the lone-gunman scenario multiplied exponentially by a strong number of attackers.

Nearing the end of the hallway, he drew his gun and opened the door by throwing his shoulder into it. The CAT agents were right behind him. Pelting down five flights, he saw Stone and the two other agents spaced around the midflight landing in the stairway. Then, in the corner, behind Stone, he saw a shaken President Clarke.

“What’s going on, John?” she demanded.

“Ma’am, we think there’s a threat from the basement. We need to move you to the car.” Then, without another word to her, he turned away and said into his wrist communicator, “Alexander on twenty with Firefly! Evac to Stagecoach! Two minutes! All agents secure evac route White Sigma!”

Lowering the radio, he stepped toward the president and, together with David, lifted her under the arms just enough to keep her feet on the ground but with little weight for her to support. This allowed David and him to essentially half-carry her down the stairs, fast, without worrying about her tripping and falling. “No word on the exact location of the threat, but we need to keep moving. We need to get her to the limo.”

As he and Stone raced the president down the stairs, they were protected in front and behind by the two PPD agents, in suits, and five CAT agents, in tactical gear. Other agents were giving situational status calls over the radio. Four more PPD agents entered the stairwell at the next floor and joined them.

John was relieved that the number of agents around POTUS had increased from three to thirteen in the minute since the crash call. They had dozens more agents scrambling on floors above and below them, and at any moment, the limousine should arrive in the alley, just two minutes from their current location.

Now that the added agents directly around the president had strengthened the protective bubble, they could fight off any terrorists in the race to the armored vehicle. Then they would rush POTUS across Paris to Air Force One, where, once they took off, she would be safe. The sound of the agents clomping down the concrete steps echoed like thunder in the narrow staircase that wound down the interior of the hotel. And in the center of this moving, clattering shield was the terrified president of the United States.

21

MAXIMILIAN RUSHED THROUGH THE DUST cloud and into the basement. An advance team of a dozen men was in front to protect him, but he was leading the rest of the 200 men behind him. They had less than a minute to seal the first floor.

He signaled Kazim to take his twelve men up the north stairway to the rooftop, twenty-eight floors up. Then he waved for the other men to follow him to the hotel lobby.

They entered a basement corridor of white-painted cinder block, used by the laundry and cleaning crews. He could hear the metallic hum of a roomful of industrial-size laundry machines, and the massive water-heating system.

Two maids in black-and-white uniforms came around the corner, screamed in terror, and fled behind a giant laundry machine. Unconcerned, Maximilian charged ahead. But as his men neared the short staircase at the end of the hallway, two Secret Service agents appeared. The agents stood square and fired six shots between them, killing four of his men with impressive efficiency before being riddled with submachine-gun fire.

Maximilian stopped at the base of the stairs and slapped his men on the shoulders as they ran past the two dead agents and pounded up the steps. As the first wave in his attack, many of these men would be killed in the next few minutes. But like Hannibal with his Numidians at the Battle of the Trebia, he was willing to sacrifice some of his men to lead his enemy into an ambush. And his men—aware of his plans and loyal to him and their cause—were eager to do their part.

He allowed the designated thirty men, armed with Kalashnikovs, to rush down the hallway at the top of the stairs. He could hear their brief firefights with some of the Secret Service men and women standing their posts in this part of the building. He understood the protocols and protective procedures of America’s Secret Service. Any agents they encountered in the first thirty seconds, down in the basement stairways and first-floor hallways, far from the president, would be PPD agents instead of the deadlier counter assault team agents. PPD agents would be in dress suits and carried only SIG Sauer P229 semiautomatic pistols and the occasional shotgun. But the CAT and emergency response team agents wore full tactical gear and carried a number of powerful weapons, including the Knight’s Armament SR-16 assault rifle. PPD agents would be stationed everywhere throughout the hotel at strategically chosen posts, while CAT agents would be in a few select locations, waiting in concentrated teams, ready to respond to any sudden threat identified by PPD.

Maximilian had ten to twenty more seconds before his first wave of men encountered CAT agents responding to the explosion. They would meet more PPD agents before that, but these they could push through without too many losses.

He had given careful instructions to all his men so that each knew exactly what he needed to do to fill his role. After watching the first thirty race away from the top of the stairs, he turned to the four waiting behind him. Each held in his hands a long brass nozzle connected to a black hose that ran from a metallic tank strapped to his back.

“Remember, on my signal,” he told them.

Then he took from his pocket a small foghorn of the sort used by hooligans in soccer stadiums all over the world. He would use it to communicate to his small army, just as Hannibal had used signal flags to direct the movements of his men on the ancient battlefields across Italy, in a type of warfare now forever lost to time.

He raised the red and white horn, which was scarcely larger than a cigar, and pushed the plastic button to let out one short, bellowing shriek. It was loud enough to be heard by all the men in the hallway behind him. They roared in response. Raising an arm, he gave another blast of the foghorn before moving all his men into position on the wide stairway.

*     *     *

Special Agent Phil Abbott led the counter assault team stationed next to the Secret Service’s command center, set up in a first-floor conference room usually reserved for hotel management. The instant the Crash POTUS alert went out, he and the twenty CAT agents on his team had jumped to their feet and rushed into the lobby. Every member on his team had joined the Secret Service after the military, and most had fought in combat zones. It occurred to him that after all the various hellholes these men had battled in during their military careers, it must seem strange to be running in full tactical gear through the sumptuously appointed lounge of this five-star Paris hotel.