The Paris Protection (36 page)

Seeing those gorgeous hands lift the president into the snowy Paris night, Rebecca felt an overwhelming relief. Her protectee was out of the nightmarish tunnels, but not yet out of danger. Rebecca could still hear the men thumping and banging their way up the ladder from below. She had done all she could, and now she hadn’t the strength to climb an inch higher.

Her chin fell weakly to her slowly heaving chest, and her eyes caught faint movement in the darkness below. The men below her would be here in maybe twenty seconds, maybe sooner. She didn’t have weapons to fight them, or the strength to run from them. Her grip on the ladder was beginning to slip, and she realized that if she fell, she would hit the top man on the ladder. The domino effect would send her and everyone below her down the shaft to the rock floor seventy feet below.

It was the only way she could protect the president.

Her consciousness drifted and seemed to float above her body. She had pushed herself to the limit to save the president, and now all she had to do to seal her country’s victory was to let go of the ladder. Her face hardened, and her breathing calmed. Memories flashed through her mind like rapid lightning strikes: watching her father come home from work in his policeman’s uniform when she was a little girl . . . hiking a mountain trail with her three older brothers . . . pulling an exhausted swimmer out of Lake Dillon . . . beholding the Rocky Mountains from the summit of Mount Evans.

With her feet still on the rung, she let go of the ladder and arched backward.

Then, just as her spent legs buckled enough for her feet to slip into the open air, something grabbed her. Hearing excited voices, she opened her eyes and saw three men, lying outstretched over the manhole, holding on to her with all six of their lowered arms.

“
Tout va bien, mademoiselle. Nous sommes là,
” one said.
It’s okay. We are here.

She tried to focus her half-open eyes.

The men had caught her as she fell back off the ladder, and now they lifted her closer to the rim of the manhole. As she rose, other arms grasped her and gently lifted her out of the darkness and onto a spread trench coat on the snow-covered sidewalk. Beside her, she saw the president, lying on the other half of the trench coat.

A man from the gathering crowd seemed to notice the US Secret Service pin on her shirt. Looking at her, then at the unconscious woman beside her, he murmured, “
Mon Dieu. Le président américain
. . .” His eyes widened. “
Le président américain!
” he repeated more loudly.

Others followed his stare and gasped in turn. A wave of shock and disbelief and excitement rippled out from the crowd’s nucleus as, for a moment, all the faces stared in silence at the unconscious American president, lying bruised and bleeding, with frazzled hair, small cuts on her face, and a tourniquet on one arm. She was covered in a film of dirt, which was now growing wet from the soft, white snowflakes.

Rebecca’s voice broke the silence. “Cover the manhole.”

Only some in the crowd even acknowledged that she had spoken. Most were still stupefied to find they had hauled the US president out of a hole in the street. No one moved.

“Cover the manhole,” she said again, louder now, pointing weakly. “Close it!
Ferme-le!
” she ordered. “
Ferme-le!
”

A woman in the crowd must have registered the concern on Rebecca’s face, and repeated the frantic command to a group of men around the manhole. “
Ferme-le! Ferme-le!
”

The men, prodded into motion by the woman’s tone, moved as if they, too, could suddenly sense the danger.

The men spoke to each other with decisiveness and urgency. “
Dépêchez-vous! Couvrez le trou! Vite!
”

Rebecca, lying only five feet from the hole, watched the men intently. The cold snow on her face was reviving her. Something about being on the sidewalks of Paris with the president . . . something about the uncontrollable factor of crowd control with no other agents to secure a rope line . . . It went against all her Secret Service training. Something about the men who were still climbing up the shaft with the sole objective of killing her president.

The men hunched over and dragged the heavy iron lid back toward the round black hole in the street. It grated across the concrete.

“Quickly!” she yelled. “
Vite!
”

As the men reached the manhole, they paused to adjust their grips on the thick iron disk. A careless move could cost a finger. As they fought it back into position, a flash and a loud bang erupted from below, and one of the men fell back onto the street, a piece of his head missing.

A wave of screams ran through the crowd. Many scurried away, tripping and crawling over each other in panic and fright. Some stepped back from the hole but then hesitated to run as they realized that the American president still lay unconscious on the sidewalk, with only one exhausted, unarmed Secret Service agent to protect her.

Rebecca had been trained to protect the president alone as well as with a team. In training, a crowd was always viewed as cover for a potential threat, and the crowd itself as a potential threat. So she was surprised when a number of Frenchmen rushed over to her aid and frantically asked her permission to lift and carry the president away.

She nodded.

Three men lifted the president. And three others lifted her, because she had been slow to sit up and hadn’t shown them that she had even the strength to stand.

There couldn’t be much time before the gunmen reached the street level.

The manhole cover had come so close to sealing the terrorists’ only remaining path to the president. But she had come too far, suffered through too much, witnessed too many sacrifices by others, to fail now.

With only open sky above her now, the radio transmitter David had given her would work. As the men carried her and the president away, she spoke into the radio. “This is Special Agent Reid! I’m with POTUS! Located along an open street around pedestrians! Use the tracer to locate POTUS! Armed hostiles encroaching! Emergency secure POTUS! All ops! I repeat, POTUS is open and hit, with hostiles lighting up! I need an Em Sec now!”

Seconds went by, but support was out there somewhere. Then, finally, she heard a voice from the radio.

“Reid, this is Commander Jacobs. Trace confirmed! Interception in two minutes! Hold on! We’re coming!”

The tears came again. She had known they would be out there, looking for them, listening. 

But just as she felt relief wash over her, a gunshot cracked through the air. One of the three men carrying her fell and flopped spastically on the cobblestone street. With the man down, the others stopped carrying her. But the three carrying the president kept going, even faster now, until another shot rang out and one of those three fell.

People ran screaming, stumbling this way and that, scrambling for cover. She had been dropped near where the president now lay, and amid the confusion, she crawled the few feet that separated them. The men who had been carrying them stayed close, some to watch over them, others to check on their two countrymen who lay sprawled on the cobblestones.

More gunshots begat more screams. Still lying on the ground, Rebecca leaned up against the unconscious president to shield her from bullets as best she could. Looking through the scampering legs from her low vantage point, she saw a half-dozen other legs, moving purposefully toward her.

The three men were only seconds from reaching her and killing the president.

As the feet came closer, she was about to plead to the few men still around her for help. Then something strange happened. Several in the crowd stopped running away. She could scarcely believe her eyes when a dozen unarmed Frenchmen ran screaming at her attackers. 

The three gunmen turned toward the men and fired, and half the Frenchmen fell. But the remaining six charged forward, as if aware that their chosen course was now irreversible. They lunged forward and tackled two of the three gunmen, sliding as they fell onto the snowy sidewalk. But the third attacker seemed faster, stronger, somehow more determined than his comrades. He shot a man dead in mid lunge, then whipped his arm around another man’s neck and pivoted. The courageous Frenchman fell dead on the snow.

As Rebecca watched, the assassin turned from his kills and strode toward her and the president, not pausing to help his two colleagues who were now being pummeled. Others from the crowd had sneaked forward and sealed the manhole. And others were throwing whatever they had—keys, coins, a shoe—at the last attacker still moving toward her. It was the same tall, swarthy man with shoulder-length hair that she had first seen in the hotel stairway and, later, on the roof. After all that had happened on the rooftop, she had trouble believing he was still alive.

Rebecca rolled the president onto her side, with her back to the assassin. She heard sirens in the distance—not only the high-low claxons of the Paris police, but also the rampant chirp and scream of the presidential motorcade’s Secret Service team. Help was on its way, but it would be too late.

She curled her body around the president, protecting every vital part of the woman against a distant shot from this last attacker. And she prayed. She prayed that somehow, the response team from the US Secret Service or the Paris police or the military would arrive in time. She prayed that someone from the crowd would break through and be able to stop the last attacker. And she prayed that no matter what happened in the next half minute, no matter the cost, the president would somehow survive.

*     *     *

Kazim’s rage had consumed him. He hated America with a fury he could no longer control. As he moved down the snowy sidewalk toward the president and the last remnant of her protection team, he cut down those from the crowd who tried to interfere. Sirens wailed somewhere in the unseen maze of Paris’s streets, but help would not arrive in time to save the American president from his wrath.

He quickened his pace to a jog. His chest heaved and the muscles in his back bulged as he parried a blow, hooked the Frenchman by the neck, and turned, letting the man’s inertia break his own neck. Then he fired into the encroaching crowd, dropping two more people and pushing their line back a few yards.

He had left the two men who climbed up the ladder with him, for they had not successfully fought the crowd that charged them. He didn’t need their help anymore—he could assassinate the president by himself, killing her just as her people had killed his three brothers.

Trotting through the snow, he locked his eyes on the last protection agent, who lay cocooned around the president in a gallant but useless attempt to keep her from her fate. Christmas lights lined the sidewalk, dangling between antique streetlamps, adding green and red to the yellow glow. It seemed the perfect setting to honor his lost brothers.

Only ten feet away from his quarry, he stopped. Seeing the way the Secret Service agent tried desperately to cover and protect the motionless body, he realized that the president wasn’t even conscious. This angered him. It somehow diminished the justice of his actions if the last words the president heard were not his pronouncement that she was dying for America’s crimes.

“Is she still alive?!” he yelled at the Secret Service agent, who lay with her back to him. She lay on her side, with her forehead pressed against the president’s hair so that no bullet from the direction of the threat could hit the American leader’s head without first going through her own.

The agent didn’t answer him.

“Is she still alive!” he roared.

The female agent seemed to cower in fear, even lowering her head slightly and pulling her arms close to her chest. 

“Answer me, witch!”

“Yes,” the woman said, her voice muffled by the president’s hair. “She’s still alive.” She seemed to understand the hopelessness of her situation, that all she had fought to protect was lost, for she gave up shielding the president and slowly rolled over to face him. It was as if she now accepted the price of her failure.

And despite his profound hatred for America and all who supported its ideals, he felt a grudging respect for this young woman who was passionate enough to kill and die for what she believed in. And out of respect, he would kill her first so that she need not endure the moment of shame between the death of the one she had sworn to protect, and her own.

He waited to meet her eyes before killing her.

But when she turned around, he felt a surge of confusion at the sight of the small silvery object in her right hand.

His rage exploded. He would not be denied the glory of avenging his brothers and destroying the personification of American tyranny. His arms were spread wide, with both guns pointed at the crowds lest anyone else try any heroics. Now he swung his arms forward to fire all his remaining bullets into the female agent and the president. But before he could bring his guns around, he saw a small flash from the agent’s hand.

*     *     *

Rebecca’s eyes darted about, looking for the next threat. She kept the little .38 derringer pointed at the corpse of the last terrorist, even though she had fired both its bullets into his brain. 

“
Mademoiselle!
said a young man emerging from the huddle of men who had subdued the other two attackers. “
Vous allez bien, mademoiselle?
”

She didn’t respond, but just stared at the dead man’s motionless face. The terror she felt from how close he had come to killing the president now made it difficult for her to believe that he was really dead.

“Are you okay,
mademoiselle?
” the man said, switching to English.

She blinked.

“
Mademoiselle?
”

Looking at the young man, she said, “Carefully give me his guns.”

He seemed startled by this, but then nodded vigorously. Leaning toward the dead man, he moved in slow motion with wide eyes, as if death were a contagion that one might catch by contact. Carefully reaching between the dead man’s awkwardly folded arms, the young Parisian picked up the two black pistols. He saw the submachine gun strapped to the man’s back, half tucked under his body.