The Paris Protection (9 page)

Now he would just maintain his slightly elevated internal alert level until he heard back from his men in the basement.

16

REBECCA STOOD BY THE ELEVATORS on the twenty-second floor, staring out the windows at the smoke plume from a small fire blazing a mile away, its flames occasionally reflecting back at her off the long glass-covered tour boats drifting under lighted stone bridges on the Seine. The orange flames stood out in a city lit only in white. Only the bright yellow lights of the Eiffel Tower competed with the liveliness of the distant fire.

The fire itself no longer concerned her; it was far enough away and wasn’t spreading. There was no wind, and the snow was drifting down heavier now. What did concern her were all the flashing lights of fire trucks and emergency crews around the fire.

She spoke into her sat phone. “JOC, how many emergency responders were sent to the fire?”

After a short delay, the voice replied, “All available.”

“The Paris dispatchers
are
aware of our requested protocols regarding local law enforcement around the president, correct?”

“Yes, ma’am. They have been briefed, and we’ve been monitoring their radios to make sure they comply with our requests. No Paris police officers have been pulled away from the outer perimeter of the protection bubble.”

Rebecca exchanged a nod with her reflection while still trying to make out details around the distant fire. Then she felt a sudden chill. “What about firefighters?” she asked. “How many from the area were dispatched to the fire?”

Silence roared in her earpiece.

“How many?” she demanded with more urgency.

“Hold, please . . .” After ten long seconds, the voice returned. “All fire response from central Paris responded to the fire. I repeat, all in the area have responded.”

“Oh, God . . .
all
of them!” Rebecca said, her mind flashing through the possible scenarios. “Get the White Top airborne. Now!”

She knew that this was quite possibly merely a coincidental fire and nothing more. But the risk level had increased for the second time in two minutes, and all her training and instincts told her to err on the side of overreacting to an increased risk. So there was no question in her mind what she needed to do. She switched from the sat phone to her wrist microphone.

“Alexander, this is Reid. Do you copy?”

“Go ahead,” the SAIC’s voice said in her earpiece.

“Joint Ops says all fire responder resources have been directed to the fire at the Montparnasse Tower. No one’s on standby. I recommend we move Firefly to a lower floor until the emergency responder resources become available again.”

“Roger, Reid. Can’t move Firefly for five minutes. On a Nat Sec call with the JCs. I’m meeting a CAT group on twenty-five. Then we’ll bring her down.”

“Copy that,” she said. Five minutes for POTUS to finish a National Security call with the Joint Chiefs. There hadn’t been enough threat indications to move the president while on an important call, but the timing couldn’t be worse. The risk level was now higher than Rebecca had ever experienced.

She looked at her watch. Five minutes couldn’t go by fast enough.

17

MAXIMILIAN AND KAZIM RAN THROUGH the tunnel that ran beside the hotel’s foundation. During planning of the raid nine months ago, when the men who hired Maximilian had identified the sixteen hotels where the president might stay during the conference, the entry point to this one was determined to be the northeast corner of the third basement level. To support the garage and the weight of the twenty-seven-story hotel, the builders had laid a fifty-foot foundation of Iranian quartz-infused concrete. Not even a bunker-buster bomb dropped from the sky could break through that much concrete, so Maximilian’s team sure as hell couldn’t, either. But in their planning, they had found one vulnerability in this building’s schematics: the water pipes coming through the northeast foundation wall of sublevel three.

Maximilian and Kazim stopped and knelt in the passageway. The cool limestone enclosing them made the stink of the men more noticeable than back in the warehouse. Metal clanked behind him as the men at the front knelt and rested the butts of their MP5s on the rock floor. He glanced back at the long procession of heads silhouetted in the beams of their mini headlamps. They looked like an army of miners frozen in the black subterranean void. His own light shone on the two men closest to him and Kazim. One, Tomas Lindqvist, had a pale face, blue eyes, straight blond hair, and a curly blond beard. The other, Asghar Maadi, had Mediterranean olive skin, a black goatee, and shining dark eyes. In the shadows of the tunnels, Tomas looked like a Viking, Asghar a Barbary pirate. Both had a background in arms dealing, and aside from Kazim, they were the most dangerous killers Maximilian had recruited. The first month in camp, the two men had bonded over their similar experiences selling illegal weapons in conflict zones. Now Tomas and Asghar were like brothers. The other men had nicknamed them the Merchants of Death. Maximilian was proud that his polyglot collection of terrorists and mercenaries resembled the mix of races in Hannibal’s own hodgepodge armies.

Mozgovoy’s assistant worked fast, his burned-pink hands deftly connecting a detonator to the shaped charges plastered over the outer concrete wall. After Mozgovoy attached the wires to the detonator box, he and his assistant darted back around the bend and crouched with the rest of the group, out of blast range. Reaching out a long, thin arm, the assistant handed the remote trigger to Maximilian.

Maximilian looked at the small black device that had the power to release a shock wave of death and suffering on America. If they succeeded, it would be one of the most brutal blows in history to the failed experiment in democracy known as the United States of America. The Civil War, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Pearl Harbor, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the terrorist attacks on 9/11—these were the most iconic tragedies in American history. And now Maximilian and his men were about to add themselves to that infamous list of men who, individually or anonymously as a group, had struck a devastating blow to the pride and strength of America.

He moved his thumb to the small red button embedded in the center of the device. Then he turned to Kazim, still kneeling beside him.

“Are you ready to claim your revenge?” Maximilian asked.

Kazim looked at him with the intent expression of an attack dog waiting eagerly to be unleashed. “I am ready to send her to the hell she deserves.”

Maximilian grinned and nodded. Then he looked forward again and pressed the button.

18

SPECIAL AGENT PEREZ MOVED DOWN the steel-and-concrete stairs into the third sublevel of the hotel. With him were Agents Franklin and Silver. Agent Perez had gotten to know both men well during their time together in Beltsville and during their postings on PPD. They even played together on the same intramural softball team with other agents back in Washington. Now they were moving together to sweep the basement and check the positioning of the EK-1 that had registered the vibration one minute earlier. Perez wanted to report their findings back to SAIC Alexander as soon as possible.

Reaching the concrete floor of sublevel 3, he directed Franklin and Silver to sweep the northeast corner while he examined the EK-1. The fourth-generation seismometer was a cutting-edge device developed to detect slight movements and vibrations in the air and through solid matter. Three feet tall, it consisted of a metal cube the size of a small hatbox, with little holes drilled into the surface, mounted on a tripod.

As Franklin and Silver walked along the wall, Perez examined the device for anything suspicious. Its foundation was well set, and all the safeguards the advance team’s technicians had put in place on and around the device were undisturbed. Barring an unlikely technical error from the device, the readings detected must be accurate.

Without warning, the north end of the east wall exploded inward. Shards of stone and concrete flew into the large basement, followed by a billowing cloud of dust. The deafening bang had set off a high-pitched ringing in Perez’s inner ears. The blast had thrown him off his feet and back to the base of the stone stairs. The EK-1 was fallen and buried under loose rubble.

Blinking, he tried to focus, tried to see the room. In the brief moment of the explosion, he had registered seeing both Franklin and Silver blown back like rag dolls. They had been much closer to the wall than he, and the blast had undoubtedly killed them.

Then, through the cloud of dirt and concrete, he saw men come spilling out of the darkness. They were scrambling over the rubble, yelling to each other, their guns and equipment clattering with the sounds of a fast-moving army. Everything was moving so fast, his training now took over. He acted on instincts conditioned uniquely for protecting the president. As shocking as it was, he understood this threat. His training had developed a muscle memory that created a counterintuitive movement—one focused on saving someone else’s life instead of his own. He had spent countless hours preparing himself for this moment in his career as an agent. As the man leading this army saw him and raised a gun toward him, Perez reacted in the way that his training had conditioned him. His life was over—this he knew—but the only thing that mattered was protecting the president. So, leaning against the stone stairway, he raised his left wrist to his mouth and, a half second before he saw the flash of the man’s gun pointed at his head, Special Agent Perez yelled into his communicator, “Crash POTUS!”

19

SPECIAL AGENT DAVID STONE HAD stepped into the post position just outside the twenty-sixth-floor conference room. The president was still inside, video conferencing with the Joint Chiefs in Washington. 

David had his back nearly touching one of the double doors so he could always have President Clarke in eyesight through the small crack left open in the doors. Secret Service agents on PPD often found themselves privy to sensitive and sometimes personal conversations that a president had with others, including private and even emotional moments with family members. This could be uncomfortable for the agent, but most of the time they were too focused on the job to pay any attention to the conversation. And all agents knew that one of the highest privileges of working on PPD was the conscious knowledge that at times, they were essentially standing next to history.

Because the protection bubble was so secure at the moment, David allowed himself to hear some of the president’s conversation. It appeared that an international crisis had boiled up in Nigeria. But before he caught much of the conversation, he heard Perez in his earpiece, reporting to SAIC Alexander that he and two other agents were checking on the seismometer in basement sublevel three. He was still amazed at how much nonstop precautionary activity had gone on at every protection site he worked.

David had been trained and conditioned to be suspicious always, never to let his guard down. In training, he had reviewed and studied every known assassination attempt, not just of past US presidents, but all known assassination attempts on leaders or other influential people in history. If an assassination attempt had failed, he had studied what agents, security details, or circumstances contributed to the assassination’s failure. If an assassination attempt succeeded, he had studied everything about it to determine where the protection had broken down, where safety and security compromises had led to an opportunity for the assassins.

He had studied the assassinations of William McKinley and James Garfield. He had studied the assassination of Lincoln. He had read the accounts of the assassination attempt against Andrew Jackson, studied the police photos of the scene of the attempt against Truman outside Blair House near the White House, watched the videos and dissected transcripts related to the two attempts against Ford. He had studied the complete lack of security planning that gave easy opportunities to the assassins of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. And he had watched slow-motion video of the attempt on Reagan, which illustrated how all agents on the scene reacted exactly as they had been trained: one agent throwing Reagan into the bulletproof limousine while another agent stood up tall and spread wide to take a bullet even as the surrounding police officers instinctively crouched down to locate the shooter. The agents had reacted exactly as they were trained. Only a few months into his first term, President Reagan might have died on the sidewalk if Special Agent Tim McCarthy hadn’t taken a bullet for him. Or Reagan certainly would have died inside the limousine—from the one freak bullet that had ricocheted through the seam of the open door—if Special Agent in Charge Jerry Parr hadn’t realized from his training that Reagan had suffered a lung injury and required immediate surgery at the nearest hospital.

David had studied the importance of controlling access even during back-of-the-building entrances, as during Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. As a candidate in the presidential primaries in the sixties, he had only a single bodyguard and wasn’t under the protection of the Secret Service—a policy that changed overnight after his assassination. And, of course, David had studied the single greatest failing in Secret Service history: the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas.

According to the training that he and every agent now went through, the Secret Service had made one mistake after another by bending to the will of President Kennedy’s staff—and possibly of the president himself—to compromise security procedures for the president’s political image. The secure motorcade route was changed to a less secure one that gave the president more access to the crowds along the sidewalks, the metal roof that could shield the president was removed from the vehicle to give the president greater visibility, and agents were told not to stand on the running boards on the sides of the car, so that the crowds could more easily see the president. On all these points, the Secret Service should have refused to budge, but instead they had given in. And that had left open the window of opportunity for an assassination that shouldn’t have been possible.