by Bryan Devore
* * *
Kazim’s rage had consumed him. He hated America with a fury he could no longer control. As he moved down the snowy sidewalk toward the president and the last remnant of her protection team, he cut down those from the crowd who tried to interfere. Sirens wailed somewhere in the unseen maze of Paris’s streets, but help would not arrive in time to save the American president from his wrath.
He quickened his pace to a jog. His chest heaved and the muscles in his back bulged as he parried a blow, hooked the Frenchman by the neck, and turned, letting the man’s inertia break his own neck. Then he fired into the encroaching crowd, dropping two more people and pushing their line back a few yards.
He had left the two men who climbed up the ladder with him, for they had not successfully fought the crowd that charged them. He didn’t need their help anymore—he could assassinate the president by himself, killing her just as her people had killed his three brothers.
Trotting through the snow, he locked his eyes on the last protection agent, who lay cocooned around the president in a gallant but useless attempt to keep her from her fate. Christmas lights lined the sidewalk, dangling between antique streetlamps, adding green and red to the yellow glow. It seemed the perfect setting to honor his lost brothers.
Only ten feet away from his quarry, he stopped. Seeing the way the Secret Service agent tried desperately to cover and protect the motionless body, he realized that the president wasn’t even conscious. This angered him. It somehow diminished the justice of his actions if the last words the president heard were not his pronouncement that she was dying for America’s crimes.
“Is she still alive?!” he yelled at the Secret Service agent, who lay with her back to him. She lay on her side, with her forehead pressed against the president’s hair so that no bullet from the direction of the threat could hit the American leader’s head without first going through her own.
The agent didn’t answer him.
“Is she still alive!” he roared.
The female agent seemed to cower in fear, even lowering her head slightly and pulling her arms close to her chest.
“Answer me, witch!”
“Yes,” the woman said, her voice muffled by the president’s hair. “She’s still alive.” She seemed to understand the hopelessness of her situation, that all she had fought to protect was lost, for she gave up shielding the president and slowly rolled over to face him. It was as if she now accepted the price of her failure.
And despite his profound hatred for America and all who supported its ideals, he felt a grudging respect for this young woman who was passionate enough to kill and die for what she believed in. And out of respect, he would kill her first so that she need not endure the moment of shame between the death of the one she had sworn to protect, and her own.
He waited to meet her eyes before killing her.
But when she turned around, he felt a surge of confusion at the sight of the small silvery object in her right hand.
His rage exploded. He would not be denied the glory of avenging his brothers and destroying the personification of American tyranny. His arms were spread wide, with both guns pointed at the crowds lest anyone else try any heroics. Now he swung his arms forward to fire all his remaining bullets into the female agent and the president. But before he could bring his guns around, he saw a small flash from the agent’s hand.
* * *
Rebecca’s eyes darted about, looking for the next threat. She kept the little .38 derringer pointed at the corpse of the last terrorist, even though she had fired both its bullets into his brain.
“Mademoiselle! said a young man emerging from the huddle of men who had subdued the other two attackers. “Vous allez bien, mademoiselle?”
She didn’t respond, but just stared at the dead man’s motionless face. The terror she felt from how close he had come to killing the president now made it difficult for her to believe that he was really dead.
“Are you okay, mademoiselle?” the man said, switching to English.
She blinked.
“Mademoiselle?”
Looking at the young man, she said, “Carefully give me his guns.”
He seemed startled by this, but then nodded vigorously. Leaning toward the dead man, he moved in slow motion with wide eyes, as if death were a contagion that one might catch by contact. Carefully reaching between the dead man’s awkwardly folded arms, the young Parisian picked up the two black pistols. He saw the submachine gun strapped to the man’s back, half tucked under his body.
“Do you want me to try to unstrap the big gun on his back?” he asked.
“No. Just give me the two pistols in your hands. Carefully. Point them toward the ground, away from the president. Hold them by the barrel, and let me take them from you.”
He did exactly as she said.
The distant sirens were growing louder.
“Thank you! Merci!” she said, taking the pistols. “Now, I need more help from you.”
“Yes, of course. Anything!”
She motioned toward the other two attackers, motionless amid the half-dozen Frenchmen who had beaten them down. “I need you to gather all the guns from those two men as well and bring them to me, just as you did with these.”
“Even big guns?”
“Yes. Everything. And tell everyone to stand back and form a circle around this area—to create space to help protect the president.”
“Yes.”
“And find a few men to sit on the manhole cover in case other bad men try to come up. Have them stay off the hole at the center, in case someone tries to shoot up through it. If any are still down there, we can’t let them come up here.” She paused. “And find out if there is a doctor in the crowd.”
“Oui! I will do this.”
Then he stood up and ran back toward the group of men by the manhole. She heard him giving excited instructions in French, which no one seemed to question.
Finally, Rebecca had a moment to evaluate the president’s condition. Keeping the two pistols on the ground beside her, she turned onto her side to check the president. Looking at her closely, she felt a jolt of fear.
“Ma’am! Can you hear me, ma’am?” she asked, her voice rising in concern.
She got no response from the president’s motionless body. Pressing her fingers lightly against the president’s throat, Rebecca felt no sign of life.
“No! Please, God,” she said, staring up into the snow that fell gleaming past the overhanging Christmas lights. “Oh, please no,” she whispered to the winter night.
She moved her fingers less than a half inch down, and a euphoric jolt shot through her. She had found a pulse—weak but steady.
A wide smile broke through tears of relief.
The sirens she had heard for the past minute grew suddenly loud before dying in an eruption of blue and red strobe flashes. The immediate threat was neutralized, help was here, and the president was still alive.
She placed her hand over one of the two black handguns, wrapping her fingers around its grip. But there was nothing to fire at. No threat to the president remained. She and John and David, along with many others, had succeeded in their job: they had protected the president.
Something caught in her throat as she thought of John and David and the other agents who had died tonight. She had been trained to react in the moment of an attack, but nothing had prepared her for the aftermath.
As she lay beside the president, hugging her close to give what warmth she could, with the cold gun gripped in her hand, she looked out at the Christmas lights of Paris in the falling snow. And her body shook as she cried.
But never once, even now, with French and American backup arriving, did she ever, for a moment, relax her vigil. Never once did she stop protecting the president.
Epilogue
DOMINIK KALMÁR STARED AT THE silent story unfolding before his eyes on the flat screen at the private resort’s large, open-air dining l
ounge. For the past month, he had been at the luxury hideaway on this remote island five hundred miles southeast of Singapore in the Java Sea. It was the perfect place to hide from the Western world.
On the television was the view of a Paris street, taken, according to the news caption, via amateur video from a high floor in an apartment building. Fluffy clumps of snow glimmered in the flash of emergency lights as security vehicles rushed from the edges of the video’s frame toward its center. His tired eyes glared at the focus of all the attention. In the center of the video, a young woman sat on the ground, holding a gun in one hand and cradling another woman’s head with the other arm. A body lay directly in front of her, and a dozen other bodies lay scattered farther away. Pedestrians had formed a wide circle around the two women. The emergency vehicles arrived, and men in black tactical gear sprinted toward the women as the crowd parted. A second later, a black SUV raced up to them, and the men, after speaking hurriedly with the young woman, lifted the other woman into the backseat. Then the young woman was quickly helped inside, and the SUV jerked forward with a sharp turn and darted back through a gap in the crowd. The video followed the vehicle for as long as possible. As it raced away from the scene, a half-dozen other black SUVs followed, roaring through the Paris night. The video held on them until they vanished around a turn.
The breaking news caption said that the American president had survived a major assassination attempt in Paris.
It was all a colossal failure. Dominik couldn’t understand the disturbing mix of anger and fear that he felt at this moment. So much work had gone into this night. And now, with nothing to show for it all, he was open to so many destructive repercussions. Maximilian had promised him victory but had failed in a way that could paint a very large target on Dominik’s chest.
He focused one last time on the start of the video, which the news network was playing in a loop. The motionless American president again lay in the arms of the female Secret Service agent. And the agent was again pointing a gun forward with an outstretched arm, looking as if she had only barely survived the massacre that had claimed so many lives this night. Dominik stared hard at her, his blood boiling as he saw just how close he had come to success—just how close this woman and her president must have come to death. This should have been one of the most tragic nights in the history of the United States, but instead it would go down as one of its most heroic.
He felt sick.
Standing up with a jerking, awkward motion, he grabbed the silver lion’s-head knob of his black Italian cane and moved with uneven strides toward the open terrace, away from the dining tables. It looked out over the rocky cliff and the crashing waves below. The warm air moved in a faint breeze laden with frangipani, and Java sparrows squabbled noisily in the jackfruit tree under a cloudless sky. The morning sun was still below the horizon, but its expanding line of orange light fired the ocean horizon.
Taking no pleasure from his tranquil surroundings, he turned his thoughts back to Paris, still in the dead of night five time zones behind his tropical island hideaway.
An hour ago, he had received a message that Ryurik Fyodorov, the Russian crime boss, had sent a man to talk to Maximilian just before the assault began. But the man hadn’t contacted Fyodorov afterward, and it was now apparent to all the crime syndicate representatives on the Commission that Maximilian’s actions had reached well beyond his orders.
Orders that Dominik had seen as too limited for dealing with the United States. And so he had developed a more aggressive plan for dealing a crushing blow to the American people—a plan that hinged on this president’s assassination. A plan that Dominik would now have to find a way to execute on his own, without Maximilian’s brilliant strategy and tactics, and without Kazim’s powerful rage.
With one hand on the waist-high rock wall lining the terrace, he slid the expensive cane in his grip until he held it near the tip. Then, tightening his grip, he swung the heavier end with the silver lion’s head against the rocks, then swung again, until the silver knob broke off and the cane cracked near the end. He flung the broken stick off the terrace and onto the rocks below.
Then he took a deep breath and began planning his next move.
* * *
Rebecca stood over the hospital bed at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Her eyes welled anew with tears as she studied all the tubes and monitoring devices attached to David. She had been overcome with joy after hearing that the CAT rescue team sent down the shaft had found him buried under a pile of rubble, nonresponsive but still with a faint pulse. He was unconscious the entire time as they lifted off the rubble and hoisted him to the surface in a wire litter provided by rescue workers from the Paris IGC.
She touched his bare arm, gently moving her fingers along his skin. She hoped he could feel her, that somewhere deep inside his subconscious he might know that she was here next to him. She had never seen him so helpless. All these tubes and beeping, sighing, whirring medical devices . . . the casts on his other arm and his elevated leg . . . the relaxed features of his bruised face. She would have cried if she weren’t so grateful he had survived.
The doctors had told her that David’s left eardrum was ruptured and bones in his right leg shattered. Even if the surgeries went well, he would have a bad limp for the rest of his life. He had been shot four times, had a bad burn on his right arm, and had a dozen other broken bones and cracked ribs. But they had stopped the internal bleeding in time to save his life, and his heart was strong. The doctor said he should regain consciousness by tomorrow.
She heard footsteps stop in the doorway behind her.
“Special Agent Reid,” a man’s voice said.
“Yes,” she replied without turning around.
“She’s asking that you lead her out.”
Rebecca turned to face Special Agent Chris Snyder, a tall, fit man with dark skin and a piercing intelligence. He had been in her and David’s cadet class.
“You make sure you’re here when he wakes up, okay?” she said.
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
“He’ll need to see a familiar face.”
“I’ll be here,” he said. “And I’ll tell him you’re with the president. He’ll be happy to hear that.”
She nodded. “Call me at once, Chris. Okay?”
He stepped into the room and put his hand on her shoulder. “I will. We have two more agents who’ll stay here as well. No one’s leaving him behind.”
“I spoke with his parents,” she said. “They’re flying from California and should be here tomorrow morning.”
“We’ll have agents meet them at the airport.”
She turned and gazed at David for a moment. Then she leaned over and whispered into his good ear, “You saved the president’s life. And you saved mine. Now I need you to fight through this.” She rose up and kissed him gently on the forehead, and with tears in her eyes, she turned and left the room.
Less than a minute later, she walked past the Secret Service’s command center, manned by four agents. When the president had first arrived in Paris, only one agent was assigned to the hospital, to guard the president’s blood supply and act as a quick-response emergency liaison. But now the medical facility was swarming with two hundred agents, most flown in from field offices across Europe.
The president had been in surgery for six hours in a secured operating room, to repair the damaged right brachial artery. The surgery had gone well, and she had spent the past ten hours resting in recovery. In that time, a team of top American surgeons had arrived from the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, operated by the US Army in Germany. They had evaluated her and determined that—under constant medical supervision—she could fly back to Washington. And Rebecca knew that the Service was anxious to get the president back into the protective confines of Air Force One and, eventually, the White House.
She walked through the third security checkpoint and entered the restricted area in a recovery waiting room.
She stood alone in the center of the room as other agents and military medical personnel moved around her. She had gotten a few hours’ sleep in a chair by David’s bed, so she wasn’t especially tired. Waiting here gave her more time to reflect on the events of last night. Reports were coming out that a hundred hotel guests had died in the attack, most of them suffocating in the fire. And over a hundred agents from the Secret Service had been killed, many during the prolonged assault on the first floor. It had been the one area that she hadn’t personally seen during their escape. They had made the right decision using the elevator shaft to avoid the ground floor. And they had made the right decision going into the tunnels.
At least, that was what she told herself. But she couldn’t stop replaying everything over and over again in her mind. She couldn’t stop wondering whether they might have done something different, something to avoid coming so close to losing the president. She couldn’t stop replaying the nightmare.
A hush fell over the room. She turned around as President Clarke, in a wheelchair, was pushed through an open doorway. It was the first time Rebecca had seen her out of a bed since they arrived at the hospital sixteen hours earlier. She looked pale.
The agent brought her wheelchair to a stop in front of Rebecca.
“Madam President,” Rebecca said.
“Rebecca, how are you holding up? They tell me David’s getting great care and is going to make it.”
“Yes, ma’am. I was just with him. He’s still unconscious, but his surgeries have gone well and his vitals are pretty strong.”
“I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that,” she said. “I owe both of you everything . . . everything.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“They’ve cleared me to fly,” President Clarke said. “I’m leaving in a few minutes.”
“Yes, ma’am. The motorcade’s waiting in the underground garage, the route to the airport has been cleared, and Air Force One is waiting on the tarmac.” Technically, it was Air Force One only when the president was onboard, but at this moment, Rebecca didn’t care about technicalities. It was the president’s plane, and she would soon be back on it.
