by Bryan Devore
Then she thought of David’s final plea to accept the gift as nothing more than a good-faith gesture. It was sweet that he had thought of her and planned to give her this gift for over a month. She hadn’t even realized he was thinking of her for that long. And she did like him a lot—maybe more than just liked him. She certainly didn’t want to discourage him.
She would return it to his room. It was only a gift. It wouldn’t change anything if she returned it. She hoped it wouldn’t, but look how long it had taken to get him to open up to her.
What kind of fool felt an “instinct” to buy a girl a gun like this?
Perhaps her fool.
She stared at the gun, knowing she didn’t want to risk losing him over something so small. Maybe she could keep it. If she did, it would be wise to keep it a secret from her family and anyone else who asked.
She picked it up, held it in her hand, and thought of David. It was a sweet gesture, even if it had been a miscalculation on his part. Perhaps he just might be the thoughtful, silly fool she had been looking for all these years.
3
MAXIMILIAN AND KAZIM WALKED ALONG the concrete shipping platform, where the two hundred men were distributing cases of weapons. Maximilian grabbed a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun from one of the men, checked that the safety was on, and released the magazine. Seeing the full double stack of nine-millimeter rounds, he pulled the bolt back and locked it, reinserted the magazine and felt the two clicks, and vigorously slapped the cocking handle out of the indent. Then he opened up the collapsible stock and flipped the safety selector to full automatic, raised the MP5 to his shoulder as if to fire, and lowered it, switching the selector back to the safe position.
“You need to grab anything?” Maximilian gestured at the case.
Kazim took one of the MP5s.
“How many men does he have?” Maximilian said.
“Five here with him, but he also has the cartels behind him.”
“An hour from now, that won’t matter.”
They kept walking until they reached the metal staircase leading to the basement below the abandoned factory. Approaching the large windowed foreman’s office on the underground level, Maximilian saw Julian with five burly bodyguards inside. When the men made eye contact with him, Kazim took a quick step forward and fired the submachine gun. The windows shattered as bullets punched through the glass and riddled the falling, sprawling bodyguards.
Julian fell back in his chair. Looking wide-eyed at Maximilian, his shocked expression hinted at a question he seemed desperate to ask if only he weren’t so terrified.
Maximilian stepped through the shattered glass doorway, his boots crunching the shards scattered along the concrete floor. Kazim followed and stood a few steps behind him.
“Why did you do that!” Julian yelled, as if he were in charge.
But Maximilian saw sweat building on the pudgy Frenchman’s pale skin. “Why have you come here tonight?” Maximilian asked. “You should be far away from this place by now.”
“It has been my responsibility to make sure you have everything you need. Have I not supplied you with everything you requested during these past two months? Have I ever failed you?”
“You failed yourself and your family by coming here tonight,” Maximilian replied.
“The cartel wanted to make sure that all evidence is destroyed after you leave. I’m here at their request.”
Maximilian shook his head and looked at Kazim. “You hear that? The cartel sent him.”
Kazim glared, his dark features frozen except for the habitual movement of his lips, as if he were chewing tobacco.
“You have more men here than we agreed on,” Julian said.
“I needed this many for things to succeed.”
“Succeed? What in God’s name are you talking about! You are to fail! That is the plan! You know this!”
Maximilian stepped to the side and windmilled a kick to Julian’s face. A crack sounded as the heavy boot broke the Frenchman’s jaw and sent him spinning to the floor.
Julian lay on his side, gurgling while holding his broken jaw and staring up with confused, fearful eyes.
Maximilian leaned in close. “We have new plans, which are supported by Dominik Kalmár.”
Julian mumbled something unintelligible.
Maximilian lectured the suffering man. “This goes beyond your cartel friends and their network of organized crime. This is a revolution. This is the beginning of a realignment of world power. And it starts with the death of the American president. We will not hide the evidence that we were here. While my men move through the tunnels, I will leave clues to make sure future investigators can follow the path we traveled. The president will be dead within the hour, and weeks from now, when the investigators are here, they will find the connections to the cartel and to governments in the Middle East. And then the fire, already ignited, will grow faster than any politician or military leader can control.”
Julian tried to slide away from Maximilian while still holding his broken jaw. Kazim pulled out one of his pistols and held it at his hip like a gunslinger, leveled at Julian’s head.
“Why does no one understand what needs to be done?” Maximilian added. “Why does no one see how quickly we can solve so many of the world’s problems?” He wiped away the few beads of sweat that had formed on his forehead. “Well, soon everyone will understand.”
Turning, he walked toward the door. “Good-bye, my friend. Thank you for all your help. Your assistance will help change the world.”
Then, as he walked out the door, he nodded, and Kazim fired a single shot from across the room and silenced Julian’s mumbling forever.
Then Kazim followed Maximilian back up the metal stairs to the armed company that three years of planning had created. With their deep passion to right the world and level the field for future generations, they would now unleash hell.
When the two men arrived on the main floor of the factory, all the fighters were ready and waiting. Maximilian led them to the opposite end of the factory and down an old stone stairwell into the basement. There they proceeded to a narrow metal staircase, built in perhaps the 1930s, which descended yet deeper into the earth. It ended at a short landing in front of a steel door encrusted with small clumps of rust. Maximilian grabbed the round handle protruding like a steering wheel from the door and turned it counterclockwise a few rotations until he felt the latch release from the steel frame.
He pushed open the door and stared into the dark tunnel, which led into one of the many abandoned shelters that the Parisians had built in these ancient underground tunnel systems to protect themselves against German bombing raids. After Hitler decided to forgo bombing Paris in order to preserve the city for occupation, many French resistance fighters had used these same shelters and tunnels to hide from the Nazis.
Maximilian turned on his headlamp, which pierced the tunnel’s darkness for perhaps fifty feet. Beyond stretched the pitch-black void. Here, near old war shelters, the tunnels were as tall and wide as most hotel corridors, with perfect ninety-degree angles cut into the bedrock. He knew that most of the tunnels beneath Paris were not nearly this wide or modern. But these shelters still hadn’t been used since the war, though random spray-painted words and markings left indisputable signs of recent illegal exploring. His headlamp picked up a white stripe painted on the left wall, with orange and black line arrows pointing ominously back at him, opposite from the direction he planned to go.
Stepping through the doorway, he jogged down the tunnel with Kazim and their two guides right behind him, followed by his small but eager army. They would encounter a few concrete obstacles along the way, but eventually their path would take them to the basement wall of the American president’s hotel. He could hardly believe that this night was finally here. The greatest fight of his life was about to start. One night to alter the course of history. Strength flowed through him at the thought that the future was now his
to decide.
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.”
