by Bryan Devore
“Why isn’t the dark-haired knight having any fun at your party?” Jessica asked.
“The knight?”
“Yeah, why isn’t he having any fun?”
Abigail followed her gaze to the side of the stage, where John stood scanning the crowd.
“Is that the knight? Agent Alexander?”
“Yes,” Jessica replied. “Stacy said you’ll be like a queen now, and he’s a knight to protect you from bad people.”
Abigail smiled. “Well, your sister’s right, and we’re very lucky because he’s one of the best knights in all America. But don’t worry, he’s having fun tonight. He just can’t show it.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s here to keep us safe.”
“From the bad people?” Jessica asked, her eyes widening.
“Yes, but it’s okay because he’s stronger than the bad people and he will always keep us safe.”
“Okay.”
“And you know what else? If I’m a queen, know what that makes you?”
“A princess!” Jessica said without hesitation, slightly embarrassed.
“Yes,” Abigail said. “A very special princess. Both you and your sister are my little princesses.”
Jessica burst into giggles. Abigail hugged her tight and then reached out an arm to wave at the celebrating crowd. She would need to start her acceptance speech soon. In it, she would pledge her devotion to helping the country past the divisive election season and toward a just and prosperous future—as all great presidents had done throughout the rich and turbulent history of the United States.
* * *
Flash—flash—flash. Her thoughts returned to Paris, and her eyes stared at the dancing light coming from inside the elevator. Agent Reid still had her pinned against the wall. She was tired and light-headed from the climb down and the adrenaline overload brought on by the constant danger. The darkness of the hallway only added to her confused state of mind.
It had been only a few days since she saw her family, but it felt like years. She wasn’t accustomed to such violence, to such darkness.
But then, through the light of the elevator, John emerged into the hallway, followed by David.
And she felt Rebecca still at her side.
And with these three around her, the darkness became bearable.
41
JOHN AND DAVID JUMPED OUT of the elevator and moved into the hallway toward Rebecca and President Clarke.
“Clear?” John asked.
“Clear,” Rebecca said.
John was familiar with all the details of the building’s schematics, including the basement levels. They were now just below subbasement level three. Because of the collapsing attack and their frantic scramble down the elevator shaft, he had told the protection team to stay off communications until they knew where to move POTUS. Throughout the past few minutes, he had heard reports from other agents. The hostiles had stormed the hotel from somewhere in a sublevel, rising up into the building as the fire grew. The combination of armed men and fire had been a shock to the protection detail. The attackers were moving with the fire, as if it were a key element of their strategy. The hotel’s fire suppression system had not worked, which couldn’t be a coincidence. In hindsight, it might not have been too difficult for a team to cut the water supply to the building moments before the attack started.
But now he needed to open up communications with the other agents on-site. He raised his wrist and spoke into his communicator. “This is Eagle One with Firefly. I need perimeter status.”
Almost immediately, a response came through his earpiece: a young man’s voice, professional and steady, but speaking with urgency. Guns were firing in the background. “Sir, middle perimeter is lost. Zenith is lost. Command Center is lost. Most of Shield One is lost. Outer perimeter holds, and reinforcements are moving to retake middle perimeter.”
“Where’s the fire?” John asked.
“Spreading everywhere. The fire suppression system is out. Local fire trucks had been rerouted for another fire. They’re a few minutes out, but it can’t be stopped now. The building won’t last an hour.”
John swore under his breath. They couldn’t go back up the elevator shaft, and they couldn’t say here. Their only chance was to find the safest stairway up and pray that they could avoid the attackers and the fire.
They had to move fast.
John stepped into the dark hallway, illuminated only by the red glow of the exit signs. The president was still in the alcove, protected by Rebecca. David had moved thirty feet out in the hall to secure the section that branched into a delta of other corridors in the hotel basement.
“Are you okay to move, ma’am?” John asked.
“I’m okay,” President Clarke said.
“Rebecca?” he asked.
“I’m okay.”
“David?”
“Ready to go, sir.”
John nodded. He knew that this had become a defining moment in the history of the United States. By now the entire world would be shocked and horrified, watching on television or listening on the radio. Some few would be celebrating. But as long as the president was alive, there was still hope of avoiding a catastrophic blow to his country.
He raised his gun and started jogging down the dark hallway. Rebecca ran with the president. David moved in the back of the group because he was best able to cover the president from either front or rear attack.
The four moved through the dark basement hallway. They could smell smoke and hear the fire and distant gunshots from somewhere above. John could only imagine what the rest of his men and women—those still alive—were going through. His fear was well concealed and controlled by his training. But no matter how much the Service had conditioned its agents to react with instinctive heroism, no training had ever been devised to last as long as this attack had already lasted. Over half an hour had elapsed since the Crash POTUS alert, and the president was still in danger. The stress was nearly unbearable. But he was digging deep for courage, and he would keep on digging deep as long as he needed to.
He would not lose the president.
42
KAZIM’S RAGE BURNED. So many of his men were dead! Most of the building was a blazing inferno. And yet, the American president was still alive.
He pelted down the stairs two at a time, his mind racing to adapt the team’s strategy. Everything they had done was designed to kill the president on the rooftop. It had been their ultimate goal to decapitate her—throw her head off the roof while her body burned. It was that simple: send a message of horror to outrage the world and warn it that oppression had its consequences. And like the Romans in the empire’s waning decades, the West misunderstood its foes to be savages. But the Germanic tribes and the Goths of France were not savages; they were a civilized foreign people. And like them, Kazim’s and Maximilian’s men represented that spirited group of people that refused to let the intruding American empire dominate their lives any longer. As with Rome, mighty America must fall to give the rest of the world the opportunity to forge its own destiny.
And Kazim would find immortal glory that would carry his name through the ages.
“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 anothe
r 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 coul
dn’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.”
