by Bryan Devore
He reached the bottom steps to B-3 and sprinted through the stairwell door, held open by one of Kazim’s men. Having memorized the layout months ago, he turned left, rounding the corner so fast, he had to push off the wall with his right hand before dashing down a hallway only dimly lit with the glowing red exit signs in French and English. As his mind worked through what the Secret Service was trying to do by taking the president into the tunnels, he began to realize that he had much more to worry about than he had first thought. Based on the maps he had studied of the labyrinthine tunnel systems and their current location in Paris, he realized with horror that there was actually one way the Secret Service might stumble upon, to get the president to safety. It was unlikely that they would know how to find the way even if they knew of its existence, but if they did find a way to get the president out of the tunnels and onto the streets of Paris, Maximilian would have lost all advantage of this trap that he had so meticulously designed and, until now, executed to perfection.
So he raced down the hallway with all the speed that his 50-year-old legs could manage. For the first time since this exciting, immortal night began, he was terrified of missing the historic triumph that he had been born to fulfill.
49
“JUST A LITTLE FARTHER, Ma’am,” Rebecca said.
The three agents and the president were jogging through the dark tunnel system, their lights glinting off the sheen of the large, wet stones that walled in the narrow passage. Part of the passageway had walls of solid limestone; other parts had been bricked over centuries ago. The older brick walls were weaker—there were stories of them collapsing when people leaned against them. The stone, however, was as sturdy as steel.
Rebecca worried that the president was getting tired. Even though she had worked only on the advance teams, she had witnessed President Clarke’s life up close on many occasions. And she had seen a side of the president that the public couldn’t glimpse: the tender side of a loving mother trying to raise her two children in the harsh environment of Washington politics. She had seen the brief personal moments of a wife juggling a terribly complicated and stressful job while still trying to enjoy a private life with her husband of twenty-five years. And almost from the beginning, these intimate glimpses into the way the president managed her job while protecting and nurturing her private life had left Rebecca with more respect and admiration for the president than she could remember feeling for anyone outside her own family. As divisive as American politics could be—with strong rhetoric and powerful opposing views that were sold to the American people until they, too, were hating one side or the other—Rebecca had never seen another leader as widely loved and admired as this president. When Abigail Clarke stood before the American people, she seemed to speak for everyone. And somehow, she got most of them to see that she was in this to unite a diverse citizenry and keep the country strong. A Herculean task in this increasingly complicated and dangerous world, but she admired the president for giving it her best.
They had been in the tunnels just ten minutes, and already Rebecca feared that they had lost their sense of direction. The long passageways sometimes turned sharply, other times making long, gentle curves, and even when they seemed to chart a straight path through the darkness, she still felt that they were shifting left or right over time. Twice, they had hit dead-end caverns no bigger than the Oval Office and had to backtrack and find a different path. The air was thick and dank and cold. While their footfalls seemed to travel forever and echo back at them, nothing but silence followed—it was as if they were marooned in the caves beneath some distant world light-years from Earth.
The third dead end gave them pause. Brightly colored symbols and images like modern graffiti had been painted on the wall. Rainbows and skulls and a low sun with splintering rays of orange light, and an ocean of azure waves had turned this dark, abandoned room carved out of stone into a place of reflection and peaceful meditation—a place that had been touched by humanity not so very long ago.
“People have been here recently?” the president asked.
“Maybe,” Rebecca answered. “But maybe not for weeks.”
“So we must be close to a way out,” John said.
“Probably, but sometimes they explore for miles using maps they’ve made themselves, or directions they got off online community discussions.”
“Online community?” the president asked.
She nodded. “Yes ma’am. I had an agent in the New Orleans field office monitoring the Web discussions on a few Parisian sites as part of our advance work, but there was no unusual traffic on the discussion boards indicating any increased activity during your visit, or any interest or events in the areas around the hotel.”
“So how do we get out of here?” David asked. “Any hidden doorways? Secret passageways?”
“This whole place is essentially the largest network of secret passageways on the planet,” Rebecca said.
“We keep moving,” John answered. “And we keep searching until we find a way out.”
They moved back out of the painted cavern and hurried down another tunnel they hadn’t tried yet. It ran mostly straight for the first few hundred feet before opening into a wider room with a central column of stacked limestone, which the IGC must have built ages ago to keep the ceiling from collapsing. They ran around the column and darted into the narrowing tunnel on the opposite end of the room.
A few seconds later, they hit a fork. John turned again to Rebecca.
“I think right goes toward the river,” she said. “We’re still a few miles south of the Seine, but the closer we get to it, the more likely we are to find older shafts that lead to the surface.”
“Okay. David, you take point.”
As they jogged into the right tunnel, Rebecca could tell that the president was feeling the pace. They had adjusted their speed to hers from the beginning, but she was tiring fast. The Secret Service knew all there was to know about her health: she was thin, 120 pounds, in her late forties, and had passed the two most recent annual physicals with no real concerns from her doctor. But Rebecca also recalled from the physician’s report that President Clarke wasn’t managing to get in as much physical exercise as many of her predecessors—just the usual twenty minutes each morning on the elliptical machine in the small White House gym installed in the residence.
She wasn’t sure how much longer the president could continue under this level of physical strain.
Her flashlight cast a stylized shadow of David onto the uneven rock walls as they rushed through the tunnel. All their lights jounced and jostled as they ran, throwing flickering beams of transient luminosity into the pervading dark. In front of them, the view remained much the same: a perpetual black distance of unseen vastness, until the moment they reached a turn or dead end. Now, as before, a great solid object loomed out of the shadows some fifty feet away, but unlike the mottled, dark-brown rock they had crossed before, this barrier was uniform gray concrete.
“No!” David groaned. Running the lead, he had been the first to arrive at each of the last three dead ends before this, and he couldn’t contain his frustration any longer. The group stopped behind him. Kicking a small rock on the blocked path, he watched it ricochet off the concrete wall and land in a small mound of rubble along the side. Turning to John, he said, “This was a mistake. We never should have entered the underground. There’s no way out of this place!”
“Is it solid?” John asked. “Can we break through it?”
Rebecca said, “The IGC plugged a lot of passageways with concrete to prevent unauthorized exploring. Only certain parts are walled off like this. It’s mostly to keep people from entering the unstable sections.”
“What side are we on?” the president asked. “Stable or unstable?”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” Rebecca answered.
“What does it matter if we can’t shake the attackers?” David said.
“Wonderful,” the president whispered.
“All right,” John said. “If we stay focused, we’ll find a way out. We’ll backtrack to the last fork and take the path going away from the river.”
“We keep backtracking like this, and we’re going to backtrack right into the attackers,” David said. “You know they’re going to figure out we came in here sooner or later.”
“They won’t know for sure,” Rebecca said.
“They might not have to,” John said. “It’s occurred to me that these tunnels could be the perfect way for them to escape after completing their mission. The hotel was burning to the ground. It may have been their plan from the very beginning to exit back through these tunnels after they’re done. They obviously know them better than we do.”
They hurried back down the tunnel toward the fork. Reaching it, they turned right and continued their dogged run—even faster now after wasting so much time on dead ends. They had been in the tunnels for fifteen minutes, and Rebecca didn’t feel that they had made it more than a half mile. David and John were right: once the assassins realized they were in the tunnels, it wouldn’t take long at all to catch up to them.
Hunching over as they entered a low-ceilinged section, they slowed their pace. David splashed through a puddle on the rock floor, and Rebecca said, “Be careful! There are vertical shafts, filled with water, that go forty feet down in some places. Even if it looks like a surface puddle, it could be a water hole that runs down into the underground rivers or aqueducts. You step in the wrong puddle, and you might never be seen again.”
“And even if it’s just a little puddle, it could leave a temporary trail of wet stone for anyone following us,” John added.
The tunnel finally opened like a delta into a larger cavern with five separate tunnels branching out in different directions, in addition to the one they had just come through. Five choices, each leading into unknown darkness. And if they had learned anything in their failed navigations so far, it was that this section of the underground had more dead ends than pass-through corridors.
“We can’t waste any more time getting lost,” John said. He turned to Rebecca. “You’re the only one who looked at the map of the tunnel system south of the Latin Quarter, so you’re the only one with any chance of picking the right path. I need you to tell us how to get out of here.”
“I only looked at the map once, a few weeks ago,” she said. “And only for a few minutes. I can’t remember the details enough to know exactly where we are or how to get out.”
“I need you to remember,” John said.
“There are too many tunnels to know exactly,” she said. He had to understand how impossible it was to do what he was asking.
“I need you to remember,” he repeated.
“Come on, Rebecca,” David said. “You can do it.”
“Please,” the president said. “You have to give us a chance to escape.”
But Rebecca knew she couldn’t. If she had only known how important it would be, she would have studied the complex map of the tunnel network and committed it to memory. The system had evolved a lot since the Romans dug their first quarry shafts in the limestone outcroppings, back when Paris was still just a small outpost of the empire. The limestone had been used to erect columns and forums and buildings, some of which still existed today. Then, when the Romans were forced to abandon Paris and their many other colonies as their empire split in two and eventually collapsed, the world slowly rebuilt itself during the Middle Ages. And during that time, the tunnels were forgotten. But when a cave-in swallowed buildings and people in 1774, Parisians got a shocking reminder of the extensive network of tunnels beneath their city. And King Louis XVI created the IGC department to map and manage the underground labyrinth.
She remembered the history she had learned two weeks ago, sitting in her hotel room late at night, preparing for the president’s visit. Every detail of the trip had been rehearsed and planned for. Every site the president was visiting had been scouted and discussed by the advance team. And then, just ten minutes before heading to bed for a short night’s sleep before another long and difficult day of advance work with the team, Rebecca had picked up a magazine on the nightstand and flipped past the history of the Paris underground to stare at its map.
She saw in her mind’s eye the blue line that was the Médicis Aqueduct, running north-to-south across the map. She saw the yellow clusters scattered everywhere, showing the number of solid limestone pillars and structural rock beds. She saw the grid of tunnels running haphazardly as a rabbit warren—impossible for anyone to memorize in just a few idle minutes. Some tunnels had been filled with concrete; some were unfilled but still inaccessible; some were accessible only to engineers and government inspectors. She vaguely remembered the site of the deadly collapse of 1784, the Port Mahon Quarry, and the main catacombs. And then she faintly remembered the brown line on the map, representing the one public-access tunnel that ran north-south, across the aqueduct, and zigzagged through the main catacomb—a two-mile passageway open to the public for a limited tour of the Paris underground and the catacombs. It was their best chance for finding a way back up to street level.
“We’re facing south, correct?” she asked the others.
“That’s right,” David said, checking the compass on his digital watch.
“I don’t remember this specific room, but there were only a few large tunnel splits like this on the map.” She paused. “We might actually be very close to the main catacombs.”
“What’s the main catacombs?” John asked.
“In the nineteenth century, Paris was becoming so overcrowded that the government exhumed many of the bones from the old cemeteries. They had been burying bodies on top of bodies for centuries, and no one remembered any of these dead anymore. So they exhumed them and threw them down into the sewers at night. Water washed them into what’s now the catacombs.”
“The six million dead people,” David said.
Rebecca nodded. “It’s been turned into a huge catacomb now, with bones stacked on other bones to form the inside walls. The Parisians call it the Empire of the Dead.”
“And we’re close to it?” John asked.
“I think so. I think it’s down that way,” she said, pointing to the tunnel leading away from them on the right.
“And why should we go in there?” he asked.
“We can’t make it into the main catacombs: the part open to public tours. The IGC sealed it off, with concrete, from the rest of the tunnel network decades ago. But if we get close to the outer ring around it, we should be able to find one of the IGC shafts leading straight up to a street manhole.”
“Fine,” said John. “Then that’s our best choice.”
He had needed an answer, so she had come up with the best one she could find. She tried not to think of how significant her decision might prove for her country.
Leaving the large chamber room, they entered the tight tunnel on the right. Again their lights bounced off the wet, hard rock walls. Again they hunched over to avoid hitting their heads on the low ceiling that seemed ready to come down on them and grind them into nothing.
She thought she heard a small clink of stone somewhere behind them. Not loud enough to make her stop or look—in fact, barely enough to register. At any moment, they could come across hostiles in front of them or overtaking them from behind.
As they rounded another turn, she heard David swear under his breath. He was staring directly ahead of him.
She instinctively positioned herself in front of the president as they slowed, though she knew from his reaction that whatever had stopped him wasn’t a direct threat.
Rebecca could see it now: a split gate of crisscrossing bars, mounted in concrete. The bars had three-inch gaps and a double-barred door with a chain and a heavy antique padlock.
“We can’t get through,” David said. “And we can’t just keep hitting dead ends and backtracking until we come across the attackers.”
John shook the gate, then examined the lock. Bigger than his hand, it looked like something from an ancient prison. There was little chance of breaking this monster with pistol rounds.
“It’s okay, Madame President,” he said. “We’ll head back to the main chamber and start again. We’ll take the tunnel closest to this one heading in the direction of the catacombs. Eventually, we’ll make it.”
The president responded with a tired nod.
“No, wait,” Rebecca said, moving closer to the gate. “This is right.” She touched the iron bars. “This gate is right. This tunnel is right.” She looked at the concrete placements that had been poured to hold the thick iron bars in place. “The IGC did this to block off part of the tunnel.” She moved her eyes across the pattern of iron squares, then shined her light through the bars to an engraving on the next tunnel wall. “Rue Dareau,” she read. “That means we’re below Rue Rémy Dumoncel. The street name was formally Rue Dareau. We must be very close to the catacombs tour. We have to go through here. There must be an IGC shaft somewhere along it. The other tunnels might not go near the main catacomb tunnel—and even if they did, they would all probably have gates.”
“Can we break the lock?” the president asked.
John looked at it again. “It won’t be easy. It will take time and make a lot of noise. But, Madam President, if this is our best chance to get you out of these tunnels to safety, I’ll chew through it if I have to.”
As John examined it more closely, David stepped back in the direction they had come from. He knelt by the inside curve of the tunnel and trained his eyes and ears on the darkness behind them. Rebecca led the president over against the limestone wall. Then, while David kept watch at the entrance, she turned to help John with the lock.
“Can you get it open?” she asked.
