by Bryan Devore
“Do you know where they went?”
“Hold on,” Kazim said through the radio. “We’re nearly at the bottom.”
Maximilian waited in silence during the excruciating seconds it took for Kazim to finish the climb. As he stared at the radio, his mind ran through the memorized hotel schematics, trying to imagine how President Clarke’s guardians hoped to escape from that location. Even though the position was likely safe from the fire for the moment, the president would be behind his army’s front lines, with no way for any American response team to flank his men.
It would be much like when Marcellus, the great Roman general, scouting battle conditions near Venusia with a small group of soldiers, had stumbled into an ambush laid by Hannibal. Surrounded and trapped far from the Roman army, Marcellus was killed by Hannibal’s Numidian soldiers. Now the American president herself had wandered too far from her army, not realizing she would be trapped in the basement. Once he got a better report on where she was, he would turn his men around to rush back into that specific part of the basement and crush her. But while Hannibal had given Marcellus an honorable burial afterward, Maximilian had no such plan for the leader of the United States.
Kazim’s voice returned through the radio. “Sir, I’m in the hallway now, and I know the direction they headed: north.”
“You’re certain?” Maximilian asked.
“There is dirt and blood on the carpet, leading north. The top of the elevator car’s roof was very dusty in the few parts not bloodied. My shoes make the same marks theirs did. They went north down the corridor.”
“All right, go! I’ll shift the other men to double the cordon to the basement. When you have a specific location, let me know and I’ll tighten our line until we have her.”
Lowering the radio to his side, he tried to imagine any scenario where the group of surviving Secret Service agents moving away from him might serve as a decoy for the president to escape by another route. But he knew from his years on the protection detail for the Israeli prime minister that this was not how protection worked. The men and women of the USSS were trained to surround the protectee in a bubble of security, and if the protection bubble was sufficiently formed, the extra agents would attack the threat head-on. It was unthinkable that any Secret Service agents would be running away unless they were the last remnant of the president’s protection bubble.
He saw in his mind the building schematics that he had memorized six months ago along with those of the other Paris hotels most likely to host the American president. He knew exactly what Kazim had described. The service elevator shaft, the ends of the hallway—both had been strategically set afire to block potential entry points by the emergency response team outside the premises. Assuming that the agents had gone down to the basement levels with the president, they would still be trapped on level B-4 or B-3 because there was no way out. B-1 was too close to the fire, and B-2 was too close to his men holding off the emergency response team. There was no way the agents could get the president past his men without a terribly risky firefight. He had the northwest corner blocked; dozens of men with automatic assault rifles populated the southwest corner; fire was in the southeast, rubble in the northeast. There was no way out, unless . . .
“Kazim!” he shouted into his radio. “They could be heading for the furnace and boiler room on the northeast side, through the maintenance door. Level B-three. The room where we first broke through to enter the building.”
“The room we came in through?” Kazim gasped.
Maximilian nodded to the radio as any lingering uncertainty evaporated. The hypothetical scenario now had his full attention. “They are completely trapped. We never imagined they could make it to the basement. There is no other way out of the building from their position except the tunnel system we came through. And they know the location of our breach.”
“How would they know where we breached?”
“The agents we killed when we first broke through. They were there only because they must have heard something. That could be how they made it to the roof so fast.”
“But the tunnels?” Kazim said.
“Sweep the basement and assess their options,” Maximilian said. “Then examine the tunnel breach.” He glanced at his watch. Kazim was a dozen minutes behind the agents protecting the president. “And hurry,” he said, doing the math. “If they were heading for the tunnels, then they’re already in them.”
46
WITH THEIR FLASHLIGHT BEAMS BOUNCING like headlights on a bumpy road, the three agents moved swiftly with the president through the dark, narrow, musty passages. They had switched positions again: David was now in front, with John at the rear, the president and Rebecca always in the middle. Rebecca kept one hand on the president at all times, ready to pull her down or behind her and making herself a human shield at any moment. Her small but powerful flashlight was in her other hand. And she had plenty of guns and ammunition now—they had taken as much as they could, including extra flashlights, off the three dead agents outside the tunnel entrance.
David was in front because he was the quickest and surest shot. It was the most likely place a sudden threat would appear. Both John and David had a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other. She had given one of the extra flashlights to the president, who was doing remarkably well at keeping their fast pace.
The tunnels were more claustrophobic than she had imagined. Growing up in Colorado, she had loved the few trips her family had taken into the great caves near Colorado Springs. Her brothers and she had so wanted to leave the tour group and duck under the restrictive ropes. They had dreamed of disappearing into the off-limits vaults and chambers of the vast system and exploring like the kids in the Mark Twain story. But between her parents and the tour guide, they had had no chance of wandering off the safe, marked path. Her childhood fascination with caves was one of the reasons she had studied the Paris underground so extensively when preparing for the president’s trip. Now, in hindsight, she was angry at herself for not realizing that the concrete walls and motion sensors still left an opportunity for a determined, well-organized group of assassins to strike at the US president. She should have recommended that the president stay in a different hotel, or in a more controlled location outside the city. Or closer to the ground floor, which had been standard operating procedure in the past. Or, at the very least, she should have positioned a half-dozen CAT agents in the tunnels around the hotel’s foundation.
This tunnel was narrow and of darker stone, giving off only a slight reflection from their flashlight beams. She could hear running water somewhere in the walls, below them or above them—she wasn’t sure. She knew that the Médicis Aqueduct passed through some of the tunnels, even flooding some levels. Some of the limestone from the old quarry had been stacked in haphazard rubble pillars to support the tunnel ceilings as early diggers carved deep caverns and passageways hundreds of years ago. In other places, solid pillars of original limestone had been left intact by early quarriers excavating the surrounding stone. An old plaque on a wall read “I6 G I783,” marking the reinforced quarry wall built by the inspector general’s office in AD 1783. Water droplets had formed milky stalactites on the ceiling, which gleamed in the flashlight beams.
The ground was mud in some places: slick and mushy, but not deep enough to sink into. Then, a few yards later, dry gravel crunched beneath their feet. In some places the ceiling was barely six feet tall, forcing John and David to hunch over as they ran, the rectangular passage so narrow that even Rebecca could stretch her arms and touch both sides.
Occasionally, her light picked up designs on the walls—painted pictures and symbols left there centuries ago. One aging graffito was a crude red sketch of a Revolutionary-period guillotine, drawn perhaps by an eyewitness to Marie Antoinette’s death.
They passed a small chamber where glass from a broken wine bottle flickered in the flashlight beam. She recalled that Parisians even today often hosted illegal under
ground parties in the tunnels. She pointed this out to John. Since this very spot had likely been the scene of recent revelry, they were likely close to an exit shaft, though seventy-five feet of limestone still lay between them and the city streets.
When they reached the first fork in the tunnel, David scanned both passageways. Once he felt that it was secured, he looked back at the others for direction. John deferred to Rebecca. She pointed right—north, toward the Seine and the central concentration of the tunnel system. The closer they got to the center, the more difficult the complex network would make it for anyone to follow them. And, she also hoped, they would be less likely to get cornered, and more likely to come across one of the IGC shafts leading to the surface.
As they moved down the next tunnel, the president tripped over a slight rise in the stone floor and pitched forward. But before she fell even halfway to the ground, Rebecca lifted her back up by the upper arm, which she had held since they started their underground flight.
With barely a break in stride, the little band kept moving.
“You okay, ma’am?” Rebecca asked.
“Yes. Thank you.”
“It’s dark and the terrain is uneven. Hit with your heels and roll through onto your toes with each step. Run in short, steady steps and keep your weight back. Grab me if you need to. And don’t forget to breathe—deep breaths. Okay?”
“Got it.”
Rebecca actually felt better having the president in the tunnels. There seemed a much smaller chance of coming across the attackers down here than in the hotel—no bullets flying, no fire burning. And with David in front, she felt confident that if they came across any hostiles, he could drop a half dozen before they got off a shot. And with John at the rear, she need only keep the president upright and moving. Her biggest worry was not finding an exit—getting lost, getting trapped. But right now all she knew was that each step they took got them farther from the group of fanatics dead set on killing the president.
Not on my watch, she thought to herself. No way in hell.
47
KAZIM RAN WITH HIS MEN down the long hallway on B-4, covering the ground quickly. With no sign of the president or any agents, he raced up the stairwell at the end of the hallway. Looking down the B-3 hallway, he continued up the stairs to B-2. But on B-2, it was clear that both fire and gunfights were very close.
“There is no way they took the president through that,” he said to his men, looking toward the noise.
He turned and raced back down to B-3.
His men followed.
Landing hard on the bottom step of B-3, he slid a few feet before coming to a stop. He listened to every detail of the sounds around him, searching. With a predator’s hunting instincts, his entire body and mind were melded and homing in on what he had come to kill. He moved to the northeast corner and down the wide staircase to the open room where they had blasted through the hotel foundation. He stepped over the bodies of the Secret Service agents they had killed there. Then his eyes narrowed. He stared at the jagged crack in the wall, and the loose rubble scattered around it.
Was it possible that the surviving agents had taken the president into the tunnels? It was not something he and Maximilian had even considered when planning the assault.
But even if the president had been taken into the Paris underground, Kazim and his men could find her before she escaped. No matter how good the remaining agents were, his men probably outnumbered them at least tenfold. And he and his men had memorized much of the intricate network within a few miles’ radius of the hotel, which gave them a huge tactical advantage over the agents.
But what if the agents hadn’t gone underground? He couldn’t risk sending thirty to forty armed men if the president was still somewhere inside the hotel.
Then, almost as if it were a message from God, he saw the sign that told him exactly what to do.
48
MAXIMILIAN RAISED HIS RADIO TO his face and yelled, “Repeat that!”
“You were right! The president has been taken into the tunnels,” Kazim’s voice said excitedly.
“You are positive?” Maximilian asked. He had to be certain before shifting and reallocating his men.
“The dead agents in here that are close to the tunnel entrance—the ones who died when we broke through,” Kazim said. “They are missing their guns and ammo.”
Maximilian exhaled. Kazim had to be correct. At least one or two agents were still alive with the president, and they had stripped what weapons they could find from their dead comrades before leading her on their desperate bid for escape. He had been monitoring a USSS radio taken from a killed agent, and there had been no communications on it regarding the president’s location. These remaining agents with the president were stealthy. Not communicating their location to others was smart, but it also meant they were alone. It was perhaps the type of bold strategy that Hannibal might have used, and it had already given them a head start. He would need all his focus, all his cunning, to devise a strategy to find them. He must make sure the agents got no backup, that they remained alone in the tunnels until his men could trap and kill them.
Hannibal was renowned for devising creative strategies for every new military situation his army found itself in. When a massive Roman army surrounded and besieged his allied town of Capua in southern Italy in 211 B.C., Hannibal devised many clever and perfectly timed maneuvers to attack his enemy and free his trapped friends. But when the Roman army around Capua proved too large for his smaller army to break, Hannibal, with his keen sense of honor toward any ally, devised a completely new and creative strategy: he turned and marched straight on Rome, hoping to lure the enemy away from Capua. Hannibal knew that Rome’s walls were too strong for him to breach, but he marched right up to its gates anyway and began pillaging the surrounding countryside. Even though the strategy ultimately failed, it was the first time in history that a general had attacked an enemy’s capital just to lure the enemy away from another location.
It was that type of bold, creative genius in military affairs that had inspired Maximilian and had led him to admire Hannibal more than any other figure in history. And it inspired him now to focus on the enemy forces outside the fire barricade and to try to draw them toward the south side of the building—away from the tunnel entrance. In all the chaos, his soldiers had captured a dozen people on the president’s floor, who appeared to be part of her staff. He would now have them brought down to the second-floor conference room on the south side, where they could be easily displayed in the windows facing the street. His men could also then fire their weapons out at the area surrounding the hotel. The resulting distraction might shift the outside response team’s focus just enough for him to get half his fighters back into the tunnels while still maintaining a strong reserve in the hotel. And it just might pull some of the outside Secret Service forces away from the side of the building he was now most concerned with defending. It might keep their focus on the hotel while his main force left the building and returned into the Paris underground, just as Hannibal had tried to do by luring his enemy away from Capua and toward the gates of Rome.
Maximilian knew that he could stay in the hotel no longer. Moving toward the double doors, he jogged down the hallway with a dozen of his fighters. Other men, at the staircase they had secured, opened the metal door for him. He raced down the stairs, his web belt jostling up and down with the weight of the equipment it held. Pulling around each corner, he had to don his portable oxygen mask, for the smoke was thick in the enclosed stairwell. His men had given him updates on the fire every few minutes, so he knew that despite the slow engulfment of the entire hotel, this stairwell was still passable.
Hurrying down the stairs, he tried not to think of the consequences of failing his mission. His team had worked too hard for this opportunity. And the world desperately needed a rebalancing of power. For too long, the great military powers of history had prevented a true evolution and freedom of the world. The Egy
ptians, the Macedonians, the Persians, the Romans, and the Mongols conquered, subjugated, slaughtered, and enslaved their weaker neighbors. Muslim tribes attacked Constantinople, and in turn, Christian nations responded with unspeakable crimes during the Crusades. European empires colonized African countries and kidnapped men for the world’s slave trade, throwing that continent into a whirlwind of poverty, instability, and violence that lasted to this day. The United States dispossessed hundreds of Native American tribes, displacing them or killing them outright. European powers sparked World Wars, East and West faced off for decades, threatening worldwide nuclear holocaust, and now global terrorism threatened innocent lives everywhere.
Maximilian was no hypocrite. His actions tonight were not to conquer or exterminate a people, steal land, enslave a workforce, or murder innocents out of fear or hatred or religious fanaticism. His action was for world justice—to reset the scales and give mankind across the planet a chance to evolve freely the way they should have been able to evolve before the Romans conquered Alba, the Sabines, the Etruscans, Carthage, and Gaul, until mankind was forced to combine in groups, to kill or conquer other groups, for all eternity. He knew he couldn’t stop or reverse the dark side of human nature in just one night, with just one death, but as with Romulus’s murder of his brother, Tullus’s dismemberment of Mettius, the assassination of Nero or Tiberius, or the senate’s hundred stabbings of Julius Caesar, his actions tonight would weaken America and its meddling influences in the other countries of the world.
His body felt strong as he raced down the steps. The world didn’t know it, but he was its best chance to bring it back to equilibrium. And if he failed, mankind’s eternal conflict with itself would only continue until someone else found the courage to succeed where he might now fail. But as long as his lungs drew breath, he would pursue his goal of striking the colossus.
