by Bryan Devore
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?”
“I researched them during the advance trip,” Rebecca said. “There are more than a hundred and eighty miles of old quarry tunnels that snake through the foundations of Paris. Nearly all of them are off limits, and most have been sealed off by city engineers. It’s a huge underground labyrinth, with all the dangers you might expect. There have been collapses.” She paused. “Most of the underground has been mapped by the Inspection Générale des Carrières, the government department responsible for monitoring them.”
“So we don’t know where to go once we’re in them?” John asked.
“No,” Rebecca said. “The main catacomb path, open to the public for tours, is well mapped. But even after nearly three hundred years, the IGC hasn’t been able to map all the other tunnels, because of waterholes and multileveled passages, partial collapses, undiscovered entrances from ancient basements, et cetera. Some tunnels are flooded, some collapsed, some walled up with concrete by the IGC, some stacked floor to ceiling with bones of the dead.”
“We can’t be sure how to get out?” John asked.
“It’s a dark maze,” she said. “There are public exit points, unmarked shafts up to street manholes, and even access shafts built by the IGC—but there are also dead ends and passageways to quarries that have been walled up with concrete to prevent illegal exploring.”
“Do you have any idea where we’re at within the underground area?” the president asked.
“No ma’am.”
“Well, we can’t stay here,” John said. “There’s no way out going back the direction we came from, and I’m not taking you up any closer to the gunfight above. And it sounds like the fire is completely out of control and could even consume the building. Bottom line: we can’t go up, can’t go back, and can’t stay here.”
“It’s your call, John,” the president said.
He nodded. In situations where the president’s safety was in question, his authority overruled everyone else’s in her typically large entourage—even the most demanding White House staffers. He was the only one who could ever say no to the president, but this was the first time in his twenty years on presidential details that he had ever heard a president openly admit that he was in charge.
And he had already made his decision.
“The only entrance into the underground from the hotel is where the security breach occurred?” he asked Rebecca.
“Yes,” she answered. “The reason there are not many buildings over five stories tall in this part of Paris is because, in much of the area south of the Seine, the tunnel system is right under the city streets. So large-weight-bearing foundations are out of the question. This hotel is the exception. They filled in the already sealed and off-limits tunnels directly below this site during construction. So all the hollow spaces under this building are now concrete. And the tunnels around the hotel’s foundation should have been sealed by the IGC, but sometimes those barriers are just locked iron gates instead of proper concrete walls. The breach into the hotel basement will be our only access point into the tunnels.”
“And you think we can find a way out once we get into them?” he asked.
“If we move far enough through the tunnels, we should eventually find an IGC access shaft to the surface. Maybe even one of the unauthorized chambers and sewer manhole entrance points used by the cataphiles: people who illegally explore and map the Paris underground for fun.”
“Cataphiles?” he said. “Any chance we might run across any of them?”
“Yes. Once we go into the tunnels, it’s quite possible. Sometimes they have underground parties. If we run into them, they could show us the way out.”
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s move toward the EK-one and find our way into the tunnels as fast as possible. Even if we get lost in them, that might still make it hard for the terrorists to find us.”
“If it makes you feel better, Madam President,” Rebecca said, “the French Resistance used these tunnels to hide from the Nazis when Paris was occupied during the war.”
President Clarke nodded approvingly. “If they helped the French against the Nazis, then I have faith they’ll help us against these psychos.”
John allowed himself a brief grin before turning his thoughts to the Stygian depths of the Paris underground. He couldn’t think of another instance in the Service’s seventy-odd years of protection when an agent had ever needed to rush a protectee into a blind maze with no known exit. But in this moment, it wa
s their best option.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
The four of them ran along the tiled hallway that seemed to stretch forever through level B-3. The emergency lighting offered only a feeble red glow that reflected off the tiles.
Rounding the corner, they went through a metal double door and down half a flight into the large furnace and water heater room. John stopped and raised a hand. He trained his gun on a man’s body in a dark suit, lying on its back with the left wrist resting over his mouth.
John walked forward and knelt at the man’s side, staring at the face as he placed two fingers on the throat to search for even the faintest pulse. After a few seconds, John snorted in frustration and anger. Then, realizing his lapse, he regained his normal dispassionate expression.
“One of your men?” the president asked. “Down here?”
John nodded. “Carlos Perez. Third-year field agent. He was a good agent, ma’am. He and two other agents were investigating the strange EK-one readings down here.” John stood up, still looking at Perez’s young face. “He’s the one who gave the Crash POTUS alert after the attackers broke through, which gave us an extra thirty seconds to move you and our emergency response team. That may have been the slight difference that saved your life from their initial strike.”
Looking back at the president, he pointed down the stairs. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I shouldn’t have stopped. We need to keep moving.”
With Rebecca helping the president, all four headed down the short, wide staircase into the lower level of the vast room. Slipping past the burned and blasted remains of the other two agents, they rushed toward the concrete foundation wall and the jagged vertical rent that opened before them like a gateway into the netherworld.
Motioning Rebecca and the president to the opening, he stood on the left side and pointed at David to step through the underground portal. Gun up, David stepped into the darkness with the intensity and focus of a man expecting to walk into an ambush. As David stepped over concrete rubble and disappeared in the darkness, John pointed his pistol back in the direction they had come from, and listened, taking one last look at his fallen men.
David stepped back into the opening thirty seconds later and gave an all clear.
John nodded and raised his wrist microphone to speak. Then he paused.
“What’s wrong?” Rebecca asked.
“Damn it!” he growled. “I can’t tell anyone where we are.”
“We’ll need support in the tunnels,” David said. “That place is a labyrinth. I only went a little ways and still almost got lost finding my way back here.”
“And we don’t know how, exactly, we’re going to get out,” John said.
“We’ll find a way out,” David said.
“But right now we don’t know how. We might take a left and a right and hit a dead end. We might have to double back. We might go in circles. Every time we take the president into a building, we have set escape routes mapped and planned. But all our planned exits have been removed. And all we have left is this ancient underground maze seventy-five feet below the city. Our only advantage right now is that the attackers don’t know where we are. And I can’t risk informing them by trying to communicate anything to agents outside the building.”
“But your communications are encrypted,” the president said. “The terrorists can’t possibly intercept the signal.”
“They don’t have to decrypt it to intercept it,” Rebecca said, looking at John.
He nodded, impressed that she understood the reason for his concern. “Ma’am,” he said, “all our agents use the same encoded frequency for lightning-fast communication and threat response across PPD. The Secret Service is designed to prevent threats, and when they do occur, we’re designed to rush protectees to a secure location safe from the threat.”
“What are you saying?” the president asked.
“Ma’am, we aren’t set up for a long battle. A lot of our agents have fallen, and the attackers may have taken communicators from the dead and are listening for any message we send. We haven’t heard anything from the command center. We can’t risk revealing that we’re going into the tunnels. The attackers could track us down before agents could locate someone from Paris’s IGC to help find us.”
“What about the Joint Operations Center in DC?” David asked Rebecca. “Can you have them relay rescue info?”
“The sat phone can’t get a signal down here, even using GMS mode. We’re already sixty feet below.”
“Ma’am,” John said, “we can’t stay here any longer.”
“So we’re just going to jump down the rabbit hole without any support?” the president asked.
“I’m afraid so, ma’am. But no matter what we find in there, no matter what happens, we’ll get you through it.”
“Okay,” she said. “I believe you.”
David turned and stepped back through the opening, into the darkness. Rebecca took the president’s arm and helped her over the scattered rubble. And John, giving one final glance at his fallen brothers behind him, stepped into the darkness beneath the City of Lights.
44
KAZIM HAMMERED DOWN THE STAIRWELL, his footfalls echoing off the concrete walls. Breathing hard, he grabbed the next metal banister and slingshotted himself around the corner and down the next level, then the next. As he descended toward the last known location of those survivors he believed were protecting the president, he was consumed by worry that he might miss his best chance of avenging his brothers.
Reaching the fourteenth floor, he met a group of twelve men, sent by Maximilian. He motioned them to follow as he raced to the service elevator shaft where armed resistance had been reported.
As he neared the small alcove in the corridor, he saw the cargo lift doors, wedged open by the bodies of four of his team. Any force deadly enough to take out these men had to number several Secret Service agents—and any agents still left in this part of the building must be with the president. It was clear they had used the shaft in an attempt to escape the building. And then he smelled it: the unmistakable scent of perfume, which no agent would wear. The president had recently been here.
“Exactly when did these men report this encounter?” he asked the craggy, shaved-headed man beside him.
“Eleven minutes ago, sir.”
Kazim grabbed the metal edge of the doorframe and leaned out over the shaft to peer down into the darkness. He studied it for seconds, as if trying to see back into the events of eleven minutes ago. The shadows seemed to shift and reshape from the recent battle, and the cool wafting air to whisper the haunting cries of combat and death. He saw the ladder next to the elevator door. A steel I-beam led to it from along the wall. The president must have felt like someone walking the plank on a pirate ship as she edged out over the abyss. For a politician, a woman in her late forties, it must have been terrifying. And it would have been even more frightening for the Secret Service agents who were so careful not to put her at risk.
Still scanning the shaft and imagining how events had played out, he asked, “How many of us were here?”
“Maybe six or seven, according to our scout plans,” his roughhewn lieutenant answered.
“And since I’m not hearing any gunshots down there, I’m assuming they’re all dead. Four dead up here, so three must be lying on the bottom.” Continuing to look around the shaft, he tried to imagine how the Secret Service could get the tactical advantage over his men from below them. “The Secret Service are all excellent marksmen, but it is too dark to be very good when shooting from below, especially with a pistol. Maybe one or two of our men could be hit with lucky shots, but not all of them.” Then he saw the second ladder, across the shaft, barely visible in the gloom. “If one of the agents had climbed up that ladder,” he said, “back into the fray, then they might get a better line of sight to take out our men.”
But oh, the courage to climb up in the darkness, armed with a pistol, to
ward men with automatic weapons—and the skill it would take to kill them all with such limited firepower . . . He pondered for a moment, and despite the unlikeliness of such a feat, he could think of no other way that his men had lost this fight.
“These last agents are extremely good,” Kazim said.
“They won’t make it out,” his lieutenant said. “We have all exit points covered, and the Secret Service’s emergency response team has not been able to break through our lines, because of the fire and our own men’s strength.”
Kazim nodded, but he was still thinking about the type of agents he was tracking. They had gotten the president to the roof faster than he ever expected, but even then he still should have been able to end this up there. That they had managed to protect the president on the roof and escape through this elevator shaft had him concerned.
Stepping carefully out onto the iron beam, he swung his legs onto the first ladder. The agents had an eleven-minute head start plus the minute he had spent evaluating their skills. But there was nowhere for them to escape from this hotel. It was only a matter of tracking them down on a lower level. And then, after disposing of the agents, he would have the pleasure of killing the most powerful person in the world while his brothers cheered his victory from the other side of death.
45
MAXIMILIAN WOLFF CLENCHED THE RADIO in his hand and repeated the question. “Status?”
It felt like an eternity before he heard Kazim’s voice. “A force of Secret Service agents has broken past our midpoint cordon.”
“The group in the service elevator shaft?” Maximilian snapped.
“Yes.”
He felt his facial muscles twitch. Even though Kazim couldn’t see his tightening expression, he was certain his friend could sense his disappointment from the long pause before his reply. Finally, he said, “Do you have eyes on?”
“No,” Kazim replied. “We’ve moved down the ladder to the elevator locked down in the basement. There are a lot of bodies: theirs and ours. The top is open. So are the doors.”
