The Paris Protection (3 page)

4

SPECIAL AGENT IN CHARGE JOHN Alexander sat in the front passenger seat of the presidential limousine as it drove through the bright-lit streets of Paris. An agent from the Secret Service’s transportation division sat beside him, driving the armored vehicle behind the black counter assault team Suburban in front of them. The follow-up vehicle, an identical limousine, was right behind them, with two more CAT Suburbans behind it. An ambulance and a dozen police motorcycles completed the eighteen-vehicle motorcade racing down the Champs-Élysées.

John’s long, athletic build would make him look much younger than his forty-five years but for the bags under his eyes, and the prominent streaks of gray overtaking his brown hair. His twenty-year career in the Secret Service had taken its toll. The stress and nearly constant anxiety of working on the Presidential Protection Detail was more than most agents could handle for so many years. Thus, most agents assigned to PPD were usually reassigned to other sections of the Secret Service after four or five years, if not sooner. No one spent his entire career working protection—except, maybe, for John Alexander.

It was a week before Christmas, and a light snowfall was drifting down on the city. Armed officers from the Garde républicaine and the Préfecture de police de Paris were stationed at cross streets along the planned route from the World Economic Forum venue to the president’s hotel. The vehicles in the motorcade had rapidly flashing red and blue lights, sirens off, but occasionally one of the flanking motorcycles would chirp out a
whoa-whoa
.

They approached the massive, brightly illuminated Arc de Triomphe. As they entered the broad roundabout, John glanced at the eternal flame at the head of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and let himself be briefly distracted with thoughts of his fallen brothers in arms from a lifetime ago.

It was a fleeting distraction. His alert mind turned from the past and processed everything happening around the limousine. The cold was keeping people indoors and off the Paris sidewalks, which was fine with him because it lessened the threat of a gunman hiding in a crowd. Not that there was much an assassin could do as long as President Clarke was inside the vehicle. The presidential limousine was so weighed down by its armor that it was slow off the line even if the driver should gun its powerful 450-cubic-inch engine. In addition to the heavy armor, the vehicle also had seven-layered bulletproof glass, run-flat tires, and a sealed interior with oxygen supply pumped into the inside cabin from tanks secured in the trunk, making the vehicle proof against even a chemical attack. The inside of the presidential limo was so protected and cut off from the outside that speakers inside the cabin were needed to pump in sounds from the small microphones on the vehicle’s exterior so the president could hear the outside crowds.

They drove along the length of the Louvre Museum, catching only a brief glimpse of the giant glass pyramid in its courtyard. Crossing the Seine on one of the many bridges infested with small padlocks of love, he saw the illuminated towers of Notre-Dame on the other side of the Palais de Justice. The upper half of the Eiffel Tower was visible much farther away to the right, lit in bright yellow, its two spotlight beams spinning across the night sky from its top level as if it were a lighthouse.

Once the motorcade rolled onto the Left Bank, low buildings blocked the view of the tower. They continued through St. Germain and the Latin Quarter. When they were only four blocks from the hotel, John raised his wrist to his mouth and spoke into the small microphone clipped to the cuff of his shirtsleeve. The encrypted radio was linked to all two hundred agents on PPD in Paris for the president’s trip.

“Firefly approaching Shield One,” John said into his wrist communicator. “Sixty seconds.”

The motorcade was right on schedule, to the minute.

The small American flag and the presidential seal flag flapped from the front corners of the limousine. The black suburban in front of them had its backseat windows half lowered and the rear window flipped up. He could see the Secret Service CAT agents sitting hunched near the windows, in their black tactical gear with helmets and submachine guns, peering out and ready for anything. He needed CAT agents, the Secret Service equivalent of a SWAT unit, anytime he was transporting the president. They were so well trained and armed, they could take on a small army, and he would rely on them if there was an attack on the motorcade.

As they passed the next street, he caught another glimpse of the Eiffel Tower, less than two miles away now, through the falling snow. Looking at its ghostly outlines, he could tell that the snowfall was getting heavier. This, too, was good, because the low visibility would make it tougher for a sniper to get a shot at the president. Countersnipers from his team were paired with the watchers on the rooftop of the president’s hotel and many of the surrounding buildings, and they were prepared to make precise shots in any kind of weather.

He was anxious to get back inside the hotel. The safest place for the president was either the White House or Air Force One. After that, it was Camp David and a few other of the president’s favorite locations that the Secret Service had fortified after the election last year. Then came private meeting locations and small events with foreign diplomats, or large fund-raisers on US soil. Ground transportation was always riskier, and large events open to the public gave most special agents sleepless nights as their thoughts cycled through endless nightmare scenarios. But nothing was more complex and difficult than planning and coordinating a president’s protection on foreign soil.

At least, the hotel gave them better odds for limiting the president’s exposure. The advance team of a hundred special agents had been in Paris, working around the clock for two weeks with the police to ensure that nothing went wrong during the visit. They had covered every inch of the planned site visits, and every minute on the two-day itinerary. All routes and vantage points had been mapped and covered with ground teams. Agents had taken bomb-sniffing Belgian Malinois dogs through countless sweeps of every location where the president would be. Counter assault teams were stationed all around the hotel. Blood matching the president’s type was stored in the limousine, and additional reserves had been sent in secured storage to all regional hospitals in Paris—each guarded by a shift agent from the Service. The HMX-1 White Hawk that would serve as Marine One was parked next to Air Force One and the other nineteen passenger and cargo jets and helicopters in their entourage at Charles de Gaulle Airport. And the Secret Service’s cyber team back in Washington was electronically monitoring every aspect of the president’s movements, and the location of each key member of the protection team.

The front four motorcycles split from the motorcade as it turned along the side of the massive twenty-seven-story hotel, which took up an entire city block. The streets around the hotel were closed to public vehicles, but sporadic clusters of pedestrians braved the cold to watch the procession from behind barracks guarded by a mix of French police and US Secret Service agents. Early in his career, John had spent many years working rope lines or standing post on the perimeter of the protection bubble. Even though it had been many years since those entry-level shifts, he still glanced toward the line of pedestrians and, out of habit, scanned their faces for any out-of-the-ordinary behavior or expression in the brief moment that the motorcade moved past them before turning into the underground garage.

As the vehicle sped through the hotel garage, which had been evacuated and secured by the Secret Service two days ago, John exhaled a sigh of relief. POTUS was now back within the safest area that the Service could control on foreign soil. Raising his wrist to his mouth, he communicated the status to the other agents stationed in and around the hotel. “Firefly is back at Shield One. I repeat, Firefly is home and secured for the evening. Initiate Night-watch. Good job, everyone. Over.”

Although the possibility of threats to the president was always at the forefront of every Secret Service agent’s thoughts, John allowed himself a few seconds of relief. This week, the agency’s Intelligence Division at the Secret Service’s headquarters in Washington had received over two thousand threats against the president, all of which were being thoroughly investigated by the agency’s National Threat Assessment Center. And the CIA was reporting heightened terrorist chatter in its daily intelligence reports the past few days. So even though John had been on protection details for nearly fifty presidential foreign trips in his career, he couldn’t help feeling relieved that the cares and worries of another day were now winding down.

5

THE SUBTERRANEAN MAZE HAD LONG, unobstructed passageways, as if it wanted to lull explorers into complacency before gradually disorienting them. Maximilian slowed so the men behind him could close the gaps that formed as they ran. The long line moved through the tunnels in a single file, like a column of ants. They were nearing the end of a shelter used by the French in the Second World War.

Passing an open doorway, he spied a long room with six metal desks lined against the walls. A bundle of dusty cables rose from a panel of forgotten gauges and snaked along the wall before branching off and disappearing into a hole. A rusted bicycle, welded to a stand, was connected to the base of an air duct with a gauge facing out—he assumed it was some early 1940s innovation for soldiers to generate electricity or create airflow while cut off from the outside world in the shelter complex. Though the desks were now abandoned, he could imagine the importance this room must have once had during the war. He could envision it filled with military officers sitting in metal chairs or standing over the desks, studying large, unrolled paper maps and engineering schematics. Now the room was stripped, forgotten after the war, abandoned in the darkness for all eternity by soldiers long since dead.

Mehmet, the older of the two guides spoke to him. “We are very near point Beta,” he said, pointing at a map in a soft binder of pages in plastic sleeves. “The tunnels used by the Inspection Générale des Carrières are just ahead. We will be at the old aqueduct in less than five minutes.”

“And we still believe going through the catacombs is the best route?” Maximilian asked.

“Yes,” Mehmet said. “Fastest and safest. Won’t get lost in them . . . won’t have collapses.”

These were advantages enough, but he also saw value in taking his men through the Empire of the Dead before assassinating the American president. It would put his men into a dark and sober mind-set before the attack. And days from now, when investigators started putting together the pieces of what had happened on this singular night, the added horror of the catacombs’ part in the story would send chills down the spine of every American. The effect was too perfect to pass up, and it was exactly the sort of strategy that Hannibal would have taken.

The tunnel narrowed, and a pair of large rusted pipes stretched down the corridor only a foot above his head before curving right and disappearing down a branching corridor. The ceiling was lower now, and it was clear they were past the shelter area.

His heartbeat ramped up as the team hurried through the claustrophobia-inducing passageway. By attacking at night, they had the most flexible time schedule in case they should have trouble navigating the web of tunnels. In preparation for his plans, the guides had spent months walking and, where necessary, crawling through much of the two hundred miles of passageways that honeycombed the bedrock below Paris. They shouldn’t get lost. But like Hannibal in the Alps, he must move his men with caution as well as speed, for over the centuries, the tunnels had been known to take the lives of lost visitors. But they had time. The president wouldn’t leave the hotel tonight, and the US Secret Service would soon fall into a strong but predictable night watch.

The bricks lining the tunnel walls were now larger, which meant this part was older. Maximilian smiled, knowing they had just entered the concentrated network of IGC access tunnels west of the old Arcueil Aqueduct. The Rochefoucauld Hospital was somewhere on the streets far above them. He slowed to give the line of men another chance to close the gaps.

Red graffiti scarred the bricks near him, as if the walls were bleeding. This was the hell he must journey through to pay for failing to protect the man who would have brought peace to his country—a peace that would have protected Naomi and Eli. A peace that would have prevented him from becoming the monster he now saw every time his dark, dead eyes gazed for too long into the mirror.

His past haunted him now more than ever. But after tonight, his demons would leave him forever.

Now in the IGC tunnels, they often encountered diverging paths. Mehmet and his assistant led the way with spotlights glued to their plastic-covered maps. No more straight running, for they continually hit forks and were constantly turning, this path then that path, as if in a hedge maze with a low ceiling and stone walls. Maximilian was disoriented by the headlamp beams slicing through the enclosing shroud of darkness. The floor crunched as the men’s boots trod the grains of rock that had fallen from the walls and ceiling over the centuries. Without the guides, he would have been lost.

Then, after moving through the IGC tunnels for what seemed an eternity, the tunnel came to a dead end. It was filled with gray concrete that reflected his light more brightly than the darker-gray rock walls and ceiling he had encountered so far.

“Is that it?” he asked excitedly.

“Yes,” Mehmet said, looking from the wall to the plastic-sheaved map.

“The Empire of the Dead is on the other side?” Maximilian said, placing a hand on the cool concrete.

“Yes,” Mehmet repeated, his voice more certain now.

“Twelve feet of concrete,” he mused. “Hannibal’s engineers had to build small bridges in the Alps where rock paths had fallen from the mountainside. I can certainly get around twelve feet of concrete.” He turned to Kazim. “Ready for the demolition team.”