The Paris Protection (22 page)

“The president is back in the building!” he yelled into his radio, no longer making any attempt to mask his thick Turkish accent.

“Is the rooftop secure?” Maximilian’s voice erupted from the radio’s small speaker.

“Negative,” Kazim said. “We stopped the extraction and killed many American agents, but one helicopter went down, crashing on the rooftop, killing my men and destroying our heavy guns. Bodies and spot fires are everywhere. The landing area is destroyed, but the Americans could use ropes to land a team up there if they wanted.”

“But they can’t evacuate the president?”

“With ropes, maybe. But it would have been too dangerous to keep the president there. We have men that could get there before their next helicopters could. There would be another firefight. The president’s security team wouldn’t risk pinning her down on the roof for twenty minutes—they would want to keep her moving.”

“There are reports of a team of armed agents moving down the service elevator shaft. Are you saying the president might be with them?”

“I’m saying the president isn’t dead on the rooftop,” Kazim yelled into the radio, his rage burning in him at the thought that his quarry was getting farther away and might escape.

“There have been no more reports of other Secret Service teams. Everyone else is dead or fighting on the ground level or trying to breach into the building from the outside. We thought it was just a team of agents lost from the pack. But they must be the ones with the president.”

“Where, exactly?”

“Central service elevators. We had our last contact with our men on the fourteenth floor two minutes ago. Now nothing. They may be dead. I’ve sent another group.”

“Send EVERYONE!” Kazim yelled. “They must be heading for the subbasement, to climb back up to an outside escape staircase—around the fire. Out of the building. Focus everything on the entrances out of the sublevels.”

As he pounded down the stairs, he saw “19” painted in blood red, left of the stairwell door. Only five flights to go.

“We can’t send everyone,” Maximilian said. “We have other areas in the building to cover. And we need to fight off a possible breach. We don’t know for sure that the president is with them.”

“I’ll find them,” Kazim said. “And I’ll kill them. Send as many as you can to block off the exit points from the sublevels. I’ll be there in one minute. Once I get to them, I’ll report when I have eyes on the president, to confirm she’s with them. Then . . . send
everyone
.”

He clicked the lightweight radio back to his hip and continued racing down the dimly lit staircase as fast as he could go.

43

JOHN RACED OUT IN FRONT down the dark hallway in the B-4 sublevel. Rebecca was directly behind him, jogging with the president, and David was running at the rear. They were approaching the northwest side of the building—the side they deemed most secure based on the information they had gotten over the radio.

As they neared the end of the hallway, John motioned for them to stop. Peeking around the corner, he saw another long hallway, but this one had an open right wall, with spaced divider support barriers that showed an opening to three large rooms. This must be the lower structure below the three giant ballrooms two flights above. There would be a wide stairway at the end of the hallway, leading up to level B-3. From there, they would have two options: head up a long, narrow staircase to the level near the lobby, or try to make their way to the lower garage level on the south end.

“Okay,” he whispered, seeing that the area was clear. “Let’s go.”

They took off running down the long, broad hallway, with John leading the way.

As they raced past the rooms, he saw in the shadows hundreds of chairs stacked against the wall in preparation to being moved upstairs for the banquet ball tomorrow night. The advance team and frequent Secret Service security sweeps had been thorough and meticulous. They had left nothing unexamined. And the Secret Service Forensic and Investigative Division had been tracking and monitoring all available intelligence around Paris for weeks before the president’s arrival. They had left nothing to chance, so he still didn’t understand how an elite paramilitary attack force had made such an effective assault on the hotel.

Rounding the corner at the end of the last room, he threw up his hand at the three behind him. He heard Rebecca pull the president to a halt, and he knew that David would stop behind them and guard the rear. But John didn’t look back at them, for he was focused on the stairwell. He motioned for the others to be silent while he closed his eyes to concentrate on the faint sound he had heard somewhere above. He heard air circulating and the fast, light panting of the president only a few feet behind him. Rebecca and David were silent. A soft ambient echo of sirens drifted around them like humidity in the air. But these things were not what John was searching for; they were not the danger he had sensed.

Then he heard the faint rattle and snap of distant gunfire. He could tell from the sound that it was at least three floors above them, maybe even higher. It was most likely on the ground level of the hotel, four floors up.

John was torn. In his twenty-year career, he had never faced a decision like this. He knew that the terrorists would sooner or later track them from behind, following the trail of bodies. And if they hadn’t already realized that the president was in this group, they would soon figure it out.

So how could he stay here, knowing that men were likely tracking their movements and might attack them from the rear at any minute? He couldn’t risk going back the way they had just come. Even with all this in mind, knowing that the only direction they could go was up, all the training he ever had warned him against taking the president in the direction of gunfire.

And yet, in this moment, John felt he had no choice but to do just that, the unthinkable: take the president up the staircase, closer to the line of fire.

Turning to the others, he said, “We’ll try going up each floor. We may not make it all the way up to the ground level, but there are some exits on B-two and B-one that could be safe. Wait for me to get to the top of each flight of stairs first. If I see it’s safe, I’ll signal you up.”

John moved lightly up the stairs, two at a time, and slowed near the top, pistol in both hands. The only sound was the distant random chatter of automatic gunfire. He slid out from the stairwell’s corner, gun forward, eyes and ears searching. The long hallway was shadowy but seemed empty of threats. He didn’t trust it, and his instincts told him not to let his guard down. He watched and waited, half expecting someone to jump out from any of the dark doorways spaced evenly along the hallway and falling into a distant vanishing point in the gloom.

After thirty seconds of motionless concentration, John’s instincts calmed. There didn’t seem to be any immediate threat in this hallway, and he was comfortable moving the president up to this level.

As the gunfire continued, it occurred to him that his men were still up there somewhere, fighting like hell against the terrorists. And even though the Secret Service had somehow failed to detect this threat in advance, to prevent the attack from ever happening—always the agency’s primary goal—he couldn’t help feeling pride in the way the Service had responded once the attack began. It was clear to him that the attackers had planned multiple opportunities for killing the president: the building fire, the small group of assassins on the rooftop, the group that attacked them in the elevator bay. In each case, the enemy must have hoped to kill the president. But in each case, the Secret Service had moved faster, with deadly force and heroic sacrifice, doing everything necessary to protect the president. And even though the Service had paid dearly in lives, they still had the president. It was terrifying to think of the force they were still up against with only three agents in the president’s protection bubble, but they were close to getting her out of the building. They just needed a little luck.

He knelt and looked back around the corner and down the staircase to give Rebecca the signal to bring up the president. Then they proceeded up the staircase between B-3 and B-2, with John in the lead, Rebecca holding the president in the middle of the flight, and David at the bottom landing to watch the hallway on B-3.

At the top of the staircase, John repeated his cautious reconnaissance of the hallway. He sensed immediately that something on this level was different. The gunfire was much louder than he had expected. And he heard shouts in a foreign tongue. Something moved in the shadows up ahead.

He ducked his head back behind the corner. This wasn’t going to work. They couldn’t take the president any farther without getting too close to the attackers. He didn’t know how big this group was, and shooting one or two terrorists down here could alert the rest to their location. They couldn’t take that chance unless there was no other option. John motioned for Rebecca to move the president back down to B-3.

“It’s too risky up there,” he said once they were all back on B-3. “They’re all over the place. We can’t keep going up.”

“Can we go back toward the elevator bay?” David asked.

“I don’t like that, either. They might now have groups in that area looking for us.”

“Well, we can’t stay here,” David said.

President Clarke hadn’t said a word for several minutes. The commander in chief was hesitant to strategize with the Secret Service on protection matters, either because she had no experience in the area or, more likely, because she truly entrusted her life to John. But the hesitation shown by all three agents had seemed to encourage her to speak up.

“Can we work our way toward the parking garage?” she said. “There has to be a way into it from down here.”

“Ma’am, it would be almost as risky,” John said. “If they’ve secured the lobby, then they’ve most likely also secured the inside access to the garage—probably with a strong force since they would know it could be an entrance point for our emergency response teams.”

“But what other choice do we have?” she asked.

“None,” David said.

John nodded, although he felt terrified of the prospect of taking the president closer to the attackers—perhaps even into a situation that could make protecting her impossible.

“So how do we get to the garage?” President Clarke asked.

“We’ll have to go back up to B-two and hope no one’s on that floor on the north side.”

“What are our chances?” the president asked.

“Not good,” he answered.

“We have no other choice,” David said.

“No—wait,” Rebecca said, speaking for the first time after spending the past ten seconds in what looked to John like a deep, almost meditative reverie. “There might be another way.”

The other three looked at her.

“What is it?” John asked, feeling a spark of hope. There were few opinions that he listened more carefully to than Rebecca’s. Even though she wasn’t a good enough marksman to earn an assignment on the direct PPD bubble around the president, she had proved over the past year that she was one of the best field agent analysts and investigators he had ever seen in the Service. It was why he had requested her as assistant lead agent on the advance team for Paris, and the liaison between the PPD and Secret Service Headquarters in Washington.

“What is it?” he repeated.

“The threat—the attackers. How did they get into the building?” she asked. “The EK-one detected them underground just seconds before they breached the hotel, right?”

“Yes,” John answered, growing more excited as he sensed where she was going.

“They must have found a way to use the tunnel systems below Paris. And if they used the tunnels to get into the building, couldn’t we use them to get out?”

“The Paris Catacombs?” President Clarke asked, surprised at the suggestion.

“It’s possible,” John said, “but it’s risky. We don’t know the tunnels at all. We have no support in them. Our communicators probably wouldn’t work down there. Most of the passageways are at least one level below any subway lines, and probably multiple levels below the Paris streets. It’s an ancient, forgotten maze, a burial ground. We could easily get lost—easily get trapped and pinned in.”

“But we wouldn’t be walking directly into a fight,” Rebecca said. “A fight where we could be outnumbered twenty to one or worse. A fight where we could lose all chance of protecting her.”

“Wouldn’t they just follow us?” the president asked.

“Maybe,” Rebecca said. “Or maybe they won’t realize we escaped the building.”

“And if they did follow us?” David asked.

“Even then it could still be to our advantage,” Rebecca said. “They might not be able to track us. And if they can, we’re still better off fighting them in a narrow space, where their superior numbers won’t matter as much. And they couldn’t surround us; they would always be at our backs.”

“Unless we get trapped,” President Clarke said.

“Yes ma’am,” Rebecca conceded. “Unless we get trapped.”

“Do we even know how to get into them?” the president asked.

“Northeast side on level B-three, ma’am,” Rebecca said. “This level. It’s on the next wall of the building, around the corner and down that hallway. We know this from the report our perimeter agents communicated before the wall was breached and the Crash POTUS alert went out. We’re very close.”

“What if men are waiting there?” David asked.

“The men have swarmed the building, setting it on fire, and by our reports, they seem to have moved upwards in the building to force the president toward the roof—where they must have hoped to complete their mission. They may not have calculated that we might survive the rooftop assault and escape back into the building. The skirmish in the elevator shaft seemed random. I don’t think they would have many men, if any, in the basement level near the tunnel entrance.”

Rebecca looked at John. This was his decision to make.

John looked down, clenching and unclenching his jaw. “We set up the EK-ones to detect any underground movement or vibrations near the hotel, but otherwise, I don’t know a lot about the tunnel system. What could we expect if we go into them?”