The Paris Protection (13 page)

She heard the men shouting to each other in a foreign language. They tried to move around the corner to ascend the stairs. She fired five more shots until her magazine emptied. Yanking her one standard-issue flash-bang grenade off her belt, she tossed it over the railing and covered her ears as she turned away with eyes closed. Hearing the loud pop and seeing the bright flash even through her eyelids, she then jumped to her feet. She heard men below, groaning from the noise and flash of the crowd-control grenade, but someone very strong was still on his feet, and shooting at her. A bullet whined off the steel banister near her. Knowing she couldn’t risk being killed before she could warn the protection team around the president, she snapped one of the last twelve-round magazines into her gun, fired a few shots down the stairs, and then took off running up to the next floor. She had to reach the roof and warn John and the rest of the team.

One of the men behind her was moving very fast, and it felt like only a matter of time before she would be hit. She opened the hallway door to the twenty-third floor and closed it from inside just as bullets hit all around it. Pulling out her telescoping metal baton, she snapped her wrist down, opening the baton to its full eighteen-inch length. She then wedged it downward and lodged it into the door handle and outside frame. It would prevent the men from opening the door if they tried to follow her.

Then she turned and sprinted down the hallway. She had to warn the president’s team before it was too late.

27

KAZIM SHOOK HIS HEAD. He was rattled from the shock explosion. Rising to his knees, he took stock of the space around him. Two of his twelve men were dead of gunshots. The other ten were groggy from the flash grenade and getting up more slowly than he. Their weapons were scattered; some had fallen down the stairs to the floor below. But many of their weapons were still with them. And most importantly, they still had the two large black cases at the corner of the stairwell, and these looked unharmed.

He sprang to his feet while the other men were still trying to regain their wits and equilibrium. Having a good idea of what must have happened, he was grateful that the explosive device the agent had thrown down at them hadn’t been a real fragmentation grenade, like those in the Iraq war. Raising his automatic rifle, he pointed it up the stairs where the agent had been, and fired a short burst. Everything had moved so fast, he had seen only a silhouette, but now it seemed to be gone. With his gun pointed at the landing above, he fired three more shots and then raced up to the next floor.

No one was there or at the next level up. And he couldn’t hear any movement above on higher flights. Grabbing the door to the hallway, he pulled, but it wouldn’t open. He pulled harder, but it was jammed by something on the other side. Looking through the small window in the door, he saw the agent moving away from him fast, down the hallway. He raised his gun and stepped back from the door a few feet so that the shattering glass wouldn’t cut him when he fired. The glass would alter the first bullet’s course, but then he would have a clear shot. The agent was moving fast, sprinting down the hallway, undoubtedly toward the far stairwell. He had put up an impressive fight against Kazim’s superior numbers, but it wouldn’t be enough to save him. A real soldier would have stayed and fought as long as he could before dying honorably in battle.

Narrowing his eyes, Kazim leveled the assault rifle at ninety degrees to the glass, to make sure of a direct shot. He would not miss. The agent was in a dark suit, running fast, arms pounding. He aimed at the center of his back. It was hard to see through the haze of the window, but he could still make the shot. He had it now. Target locked . . . finger on the trigger. A slight pull . . . then he stopped in astonishment at the sight of long dark hair swinging to either side as the agent ran. Everything had moved so fast in the stairway confrontation, he hadn’t realized he was fighting a woman. A
woman
had just now killed two of his soldiers. A woman had met his group in a stairwell and been able to push them back enough to kill some and delay the others before escaping. She had even barricaded this door, and all in a few seconds. He watched her run, admiring her speed and strength and passion. And even though she was the enemy, his instincts made him pause. He couldn’t shoot her in the back—not at a distance, not after the fight she had just put up.

He could hear his men staggering to their feet below. Lowering his gun slightly so that it was still pointing at the window but was now off target, he watched as the young woman ran down the hall, hit the door hard on the other end, and disappeared into the opposite stairwell.

He didn’t understand what had just happened to him. He should have killed her, but instead he had just watched her disappear down the corridor. No matter, he told himself. She couldn’t make any difference to their plans. They would be on the roof in less than a minute—a little later than planned, perhaps, but still early enough.

Part of him believed it had been more surprise than empathy that stayed his finger on the trigger. He wasn’t sure that he could have made the shot anyway. The glass complicated things, he told himself. His shots would likely have missed, so it felt more honorable to let her go. To choose to release her from death, rather than risk a difficult shot. He could think of many reasons why he hadn’t taken the shot, but deep down, he knew the disconcerting truth: for some mysterious reason, he hadn’t
wanted
to shoot. He had felt that she somehow deserved to live. He hoped she had gone down in the stairwell, not up. Gone down through the spreading fire, somehow gotten past Maximilian’s men and, miraculously, to the safety of the Paris streets. Gone down to the rest of whatever life she had in front of her. For to go up would be to find the death he had spared her. If they met again, he couldn’t grant her that kindness a second time. He hoped she hadn’t turned to go up the stairs. For he was going up. And death was with him.

28

REBECCA DARTED THROUGH THE HALLWAY door into the far stairwell, pulled herself around the banister, and raced up the stairs. She tried her wrist communicator again. 

“Reid to Alexander!” she yelled. “Do you copy?”

Nothing. She pulled the encrypted radio off her belt, yanked out the cord, and pressed it to her mouth with the talk button held hard.

“Alexander . . . E-comm. Do you copy?” she yelled, identifying her emergency communication message.

Again nothing.

As she feared, her radio was smashed and useless.

“Alexander! If you can hear me, there are hostiles ascending the north stairwell. They have heavy equipment—likely heavy weapons. They may be heading for the roof. I repeat, the roof may be compromised. Keep Firefly off the roof! Alexander, if you can hear me, keep Firefly off the roof!”

Still nothing.

She raced on, sprinting up the stairs two at a time, quads burning as she drove her body upward. Pulling around the metal banister post at each landing, pounding up the next flight. The president was up there somewhere, with Alexander and other PPD agents. And at any moment, the attackers from the other stairwell could reach the rooftop. With no way to warn the president other than in person, she continued her frantic climb.

*     *     *

David and another agent propelled President Clarke up the last flights. They had passed the twenty-seventh floor and were now climbing the service stairs to the roof. She was trying to run with them, but she felt her weight in her shoulders instead of her feet. She tried to catch the steps with the balls of her feet or even just her toes, but the two agents still had her clamped under the arms, carrying her even as they climbed the stairs.

John was in front of her with a dozen other agents, and others had joined them in the past thirty seconds. Behind her were her personal physician, the military aide with the football, and another nine PPD special agents. As their entourage gradually grew in size and strength, her fear lost a bit of its edge. They were only a few steps from the steel door leading to the hotel roof.

Everything had moved so fast, she barely had time to process what was happening. But she trusted the men around her, even though their complete physical dominance over her body terrified her. She had never seen the Secret Service move with such fierceness and speed, and she tried not to imagine what danger must be rushing up toward them.

29

COL. JOSEPH MAZURSKY GLANCED AT the White Hawk’s instruments to determine their distance from the landing zone on top of the hotel. Major Parker flipped through various controls on the cockpit dashboard, lit by dark green and red underlights as if this were a Christmas-themed flight. They should reach the hotel roof in less than two minutes.

Approaching from the north, Mazursky looked out the bubble windshield at the lights of Paris through the falling snow. The Eiffel Tower was faintly visible. The lights seemed dimmed, as if he were seeing a lantern-lit Paris of long ago. 

Glancing back over his right shoulder, out the small side window, he saw the hulking King Stallion helicopter flying with them at four o’clock.

“Ninety seconds, sir,” Parker said.

“Where are the backup White Tops?” Mazursky asked, knowing they might well need the two other HMX-1 White Hawks from the Paris lift package if the exec lift got hairy.

“Crew chief has ’em out,” Parker said. “Pilots firing ’em up. At least twenty minutes behind us.”

“Where’s POTUS?”

“PPD’s bringing her to the roof. She’s there in sixty seconds.”

“Okay. Let’s not keep her waiting.”

The White Hawk’s great mass lowered a hundred feet, its pounding roar no doubt attracting the attention of anyone out on the streets. They were moving over the cluster of five-story apartment buildings and narrow streets of St. Germain and would soon pass the closed, darkened patch of Jardin du Luxembourg. It wasn’t every day that Parisians saw a giant green and white helicopter with an American flag painted on its side, gliding low over their city, followed closely by an even bigger, all-black helicopter.

Mazursky knew that somewhere back at the Paris airport, a US military commander was talking fast with the Pentagon and in contact with the French government, getting authorization for the flight activity over Paris. But it was an approval that, in this emergency, no one was going to sit around and wait for.

“Touching down in forty-five seconds, gents,” Mazursky said into his headset. “POTUS will be on the roof with a few dozen from the PPD. Ten seconds down and up! SS chop provides cover during evac! Building’s on fire and hostiles reported on ground levels! Neither fire nor hostiles are near the rooftop, but we’re not going to wait around for either. Ten seconds to save POTUS. Touching down in thirty seconds. Lights out, guns up. Let’s get her safe, everyone.”

Thirty seconds. With over ten thousand hours’ flight time in military helicopters, this was the most important minute of his life.

30

SPECIAL AGENT IN CHARGE JOHN Alexander stood in front of the group of men surrounding President Clarke on the roof. They were close to the south-side roof access door from the stairs they had just raced up. He had tried to get in touch with Rebecca about the arrival of Marine One, but he couldn’t raise her on the comm channel.

In the past sixty seconds, an enormous amount of controlled information had come across the PPD encrypted channel. The fire had spread to nearly the entire ground floor of the hotel and was quickly climbing up through the building. There had been numerous explosions in the garage, with no explanation or contact from the agents protecting the backup motorcade. The president’s limo had made it out but was now taking assault rifle fire from the third-floor windows. The command center had been broken down and would be dark for another few minutes.

Additional Secret Service CAT agents had crashed the building on all sides and were fighting the attackers, but the fire was making any counterassault difficult, and there were disturbing reports that the hostiles were much more numerous than initially thought. But John was confident of the CAT unit, which he saw as the missing link between SWAT and the Navy Seals. John had been rotated to PPD fifteen years ago, after spending his first five years in the CAT division, so he knew firsthand how good those agents were.

He did another quick check, glancing around to make sure everyone was in the best protection position. Tucked in close to the president were her personal physician and the military aide with the football. Then, in a tight two-ring huddle, were a dozen agents, including David Stone. Another dozen agents were spread across the roof. The three USSS countersnipers stationed on the roof were holding their positions on the far edges, to help cover the area. He had received reports that another two special agents were in the stairwell between the doorway and the next level down. He had relayed everyone’s position into his wrist communicator so the half-dozen USSS countersnipers on surrounding rooftops could also help cover them.

He had the roof secured. The sky was dark, with thick snowflakes swirling in the unsteady rooftop air currents.

A crackling voice in his earpiece said, “This is Marine HMX-one-four-seven, inbound toward Zenith. ETA forty-five seconds. Do you copy?”

He couldn’t resist the urge to do a little fist pump at the news. Marine HMX-1 pilots could do an emergency exec lift in less than sixty seconds on arrival. And once the president was inside one of the most technologically advanced helicopters in the world, flown by one of the best pilots, she would be safe and moving fast away from the threat.

He turned toward the president, who was staring at him with wide eyes from the center of her protective huddle. “Ma’am, your ride’s on the way. We’ll have you out of here in less than two minutes.”