The Paris Protection (16 page)

“But you’re taking her down?
Toward
the hostiles and the fire?”

“We don’t have a choice,” John said. “And we don’t have time!” He motioned for the other agents to enclose the president and start their final rush toward whatever chaos awaited below.

“Wait!” Rebecca yelled. “There’s another way!”

“Where?”

“The cargo lift.”

He shook his head. “All the elevators would have automatically gone to the first floor when the fire alarm went off.”

“No,” she said, “not so. The advance team shut down the cargo lift a few hours before the president arrived in Paris,” she said. “We wanted to minimize entrance points to the top floors, so we locked it and limited access to the other service elevators.”

“Tell me you froze it up here,” John said.

“No, but we did lock it on the bottom level. Not on the first floor, like the other elevators after the fire alarm. It’s on sublevel four—locked manually, so the fire alarm won’t have moved it.”

“Can we call it up here?”

“No, but we can climb down the shaft. Nothing will block our way until we reach it in the basement. From there, we can find a way out with the president. The fire’s going to move up faster than it moves down. And the attackers will move up with it. We’ve already seen that from the men on the rooftop. They must have been planning to trap us with the fire and then hunt down the president. They wouldn’t know about our locking down the cargo lift. They would never expect us to make it past them, unseen, into the basement levels. From there, we can find an exit from the hotel.”

“We can’t risk taking the president down a high ladder on the side of an elevator shaft,” John said.

“Can we risk taking her through a firefight?” Rebecca asked. “We obviously can’t keep track of all their men. The fire’s spreading. The elevator shaft is concrete and will shield us from it as well as any place in this building. It’s our only way out that might avoid the attackers and the fire.”

“She could fall,” John said. “One slip, and it’s all over.”

“I can do it,” the president said.

They both turned and gave her an appraising look.

“Ma’am, it will be dark,” John said. “It could be slippery, the metal ladder could heat up if the fire is close on any of the floors, and smoke could come into the shaft and blind us and choke us before we get halfway down.”

“Right now I feel like we’re playing into the terrorists’ hands,” President Clarke said. “Let’s do something they don’t expect. Let’s take back the initiative.”

John glanced at the faces around him. From David to Rebecca, to Colonel Marks with the football, to the other six PPD agents, and finally to President Clarke. He saw strength and determination in all of them.

They were just below the fourteenth-floor stairwell door, and the two agents providing the scouting motioned that it was clear. Since the president was only a few steps up, he didn’t have the agents lift her.

“This way, ma’am,” he said, motioning for the scout agents to hold open the hallway door. Then he gestured for Rebecca to lead the way onto the floor, with David and another agent, and take them to the cargo elevator shaft.

As they raced down the hallway, the other agents formed a tight cluster around the president. John made sure he was always directly to her right so that, if necessary, he could pull her to the ground with his left hand and fire his P229 with his right. He even asked the military aide to run behind them and do whatever he could to act as a human shield for the president if they should come under attack from the rear.

Everyone in the group seemed prepared to make whatever sacrifice necessary to protect the president. John only prayed that he had made the right decision on how to get the president to safety.

34

MAXIMILIAN HAD HEARD THE SOUND of gunfire over the radio. While simultaneously coordinating the efforts of his men on the ground floor and his small band of fighters flanking down the south stairwell to surround the remaining Secret Service agents, he had also been monitoring Kazim’s critical attack on the roof. If the president escaped on Marine One, all his plans would collapse.

He had radioed to his men to stay away from the windows for the past five minutes—except for the two small groups he had sent to the east and west sides on the seventh floor. He had instructed them to fire their automatic weapons frequently near the windows at various levels of the building. Hannibal was one of the first military generals in history to use deception as a key strategy in war, and it had been a powerful tactic against the Roman army. And like Hannibal, Maximilian knew how the enemy would respond to his maneuvers and deceptions. And part of his deception was to have these half-dozen men fire enough shots near the windows in the middle floors to give outside observers the impression of hundreds more men than he actually had in the building. By placing these men in sections where there was currently no fighting, he could also add another layer of confusion to any French or US emergency response teams trying to evaluate the situation from outside. It was a ruse inspired by Hannibal, who once tied torches to the horns of a herd of cattle and released them down a hill at night to mislead his distant enemy as his army marched another direction in darkness.

He had seen two helicopters approach from the distance. Kazim had radioed that he was near the rooftop and that he assumed the president was there, too, waiting for her military lift while protected by whatever Secret Service agents surrounded her. Maximilian had watched as those two enormous helicopters emerged through the snow flurries and slowed somewhere above the rooftop, out of his line of sight from the third-floor window. He had warned everyone to stay away from the windows; American countersnipers would have been positioned on surrounding rooftops before the night even began, and now their numbers had surely multiplied.

But he wanted to see where the helicopters hovered.

Creeping along the edge of the window, he stayed close to the wall and tried to look up at the best angle he could manage. He could hear the massive helicopters a few hundred feet above him, one of them the president’s Marine One, and the other a powerful war bird: a King Stallion or a Sea Queen, or perhaps even a deadly Apache.

It had been impossible to hear any gunfire from the rooftop except over the radio, because of all the other shots going off throughout the building. But even though Maximilian couldn’t hear the small-arms fire on the roof, he heard the RPGs exploding. One, then two, and then a third. Sparks flew past the window, looking like a hundred miniature flares. Then flames and large pieces of metal followed the flares. At least one helicopter must have been hit. Then another, bigger explosion sounded, and he thought he felt a shiver run through the building. He wasn’t even sure he felt it—the sound was immense, confusing him momentarily because he hadn’t expected anything big to hit the building.

Putting his radio to his mouth, he said, “Kazim!” After a few seconds of silence, he repeated, “Kazim! Report!”

No sound came through the radio.

“Kazim!”

Nothing.

Then a large burning chunk of helicopter fell past the window. It was a ball of flames, plummeting fast, and even still, he felt the radiant heat through the window. And in that fleeting instant, he saw the US flag painted on the burning fuselage that fell past him.

Reports came through the radio that all the agents on the roof had been killed, that a helicopter had crashed onto the roof and broken apart, that the entire top of the hotel was now in flames, and that Kazim and his men were all dead. The president had also likely died in the explosive crash.

Was it really all over so quickly?

“Take a team of five to the roof,” he said into his encrypted radio. “Check for survivors. And confirm that the president is dead.”

Lowering the radio, he stared out at the sparks and burning debris still hurtling past the window. In the distance, he could see the Eiffel Tower rising above the low lights of Paris. A sense of awe washed over him at the sudden realization of how far he had come on the journey to this night. The whole world seemed showered in sparks. The memory came to him, unbidden, of a night five years ago.

*     *     *

Maximilian gazed at the sparks flying up from the train wheels. Mesmerized, he scarcely felt the frigid air blowing between the flimsy plastic flaps that gave the only protection from the elements. This was his third time standing outside during the night’s journey, for he found sleeping difficult, even with the soothing rock and sway of the train. He was traveling to Istanbul, but he may as well have been voyaging through deep space. The world had become disgusting to him. Not the world as a whole, but the powerful, concentrated part that controlled all the rest. The injustice just went on and on for decades, with not so much as a breath of equality or fairness or empathy. The few turned a blind eye to the many, and no one, it seemed, could do anything to change this. Life was unfair. Nature knew this truth best and didn’t bother trying to sugarcoat it. And for a long time, he had not cared, because he hadn’t the energy to care, for he was powerless. He had been too busy fighting for his people before even they betrayed him. For a long time, he had dreamed of getting back at them. But then one day, he had found a book that opened his mind to the possibilities of living purely for a cause greater than himself. He had discovered a book about Hannibal Barca and his lifelong commitment to save Carthage from Rome. Hannibal had ultimately failed in his quest, but through no fault of his own. Rome had been too powerful for any army of that time. But Hannibal and his men had achieved astounding victories against superior forces, using tactics so brilliant that by the end, even though he had lost the war, he was forever remembered as one of the greatest military generals of ancient times. Of course he had to know that the odds were against him. And yet, Hannibal knew he had to fight. And reading that book had helped Maximilian come to know that he, too, must fight against the modern-day Rome—and its ally that had betrayed him. He must inspire the weak to defend themselves, and he must show the powerful that they could no longer act with impunity.

Looking out at the snow-laden stands of scattered evergreens that marked the crossing from the barren Mongolian plains into the endless wintry forests of Siberia, he felt the first real peace he could recall in months. In the pale moonlight, the patches of trees made dark islands on the vast, rolling sea of snow.

Hearing the door between the cars open, he turned from the austere landscape to see who was behind him. It was a man younger than he, perhaps in his late thirties. He had a short beard, and a hard strength in his expression that Maximilian often saw in this part of the world. But unlike so many Mongolians, who had a look of weathered tranquility, and a slow deliberateness in their movements, this man had yanked the door open and was moving toward the next car with a pent-up aggression that felt almost dangerous.

“Good evening,” Maximilian said.

The man turned sharply with blazing dark eyes, obviously surprised to find someone standing outside on the small walkway between train cars. Maximilian was fascinated by his response: first the reaction to potential danger, then a wary stance, and finally, almost a hatred at the surprise. This man before him was like a snake: startled and immediately ready to strike at any possible threat. Not seeking company or conversation. Alone and wandering in the night.

“Is it
not
a good evening?” Maximilian asked.

“It’s colder than Satan’s bum out here,” the man replied.

Maximilian nodded. “Hannibal and his men fought the frozen landscape of the Alps in the fall of 219 B.C. to invade Rome. He was a great man, in part because he could tolerate pain.”

“I’m no expert on history, but didn’t Rome defeat Hannibal?”

“Not really,” Maximilian said. “He invaded Italy and terrified the Roman army for sixteen years, defeating them in battle after battle on their own ground—right up to the city gates of Rome itself. The very mention of his name struck fear into the heart of every Roman citizen. Eventually, his twenty thousand men—an army that he needed to replenish constantly with new recruits to replace the dead—did fall to the Roman war machine of a quarter-million soldiers. But can that really be called defeat? What man in the history of the world, other than Alexander the Great, could have achieved even a fraction of what Hannibal did? No, Rome didn’t defeat Hannibal. Not really, not ever.”

“You sound as though you worship him.”

“No, not worship. But I respect him more than any other man who ever lived. Whom do you respect?”

“My brothers.”

“All of them?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“I had three.”

“They’re gone now.”

“Yes.”

“All of them.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

The man nodded.

“Would you like to join me inside for some tea?” Maximilian asked. “One of the great pleasures of traveling is meeting new and interesting people with interesting stories.”

The man stared hard at him for a few seconds, then nodded.

They walked back to the dining car, where they could get late-night drinks. A few hundred souls traveling through the Siberian forest on a winter night, and Maximilian felt he had finally met someone with eyes darker and more dangerous even than his own. What kind of man could have survived a life more violent than his? If there was one thing that a man who had killed could do, it was to recognize the eyes of a killer.

“I’m Maximilian,” he said as they sat down at a small table along the stretch of dark windows.

“I’m Kazim,” the man replied, shaking the offered hand.

They were the only two in the dining car besides the barman, puttering about at the far end. Maximilian was ready to move past the pleasantries and start using the tactics he had learned as a case officer for the Shin Bet, recruiting Palestinian agents in Israel.

“You’ve been in prison,” he said. Not a question, but an instinctive guess.