The Paris Protection (25 page)

It was that type of bold, creative genius in military affairs that had inspired Maximilian and had led him to admire Hannibal more than any other figure in history. And it inspired him now to focus on the enemy forces outside the fire barricade and to try to draw them toward the south side of the building—away from the tunnel entrance. In all the chaos, his soldiers had captured a dozen people on the president’s floor, who appeared to be part of her staff. He would now have them brought down to the second-floor conference room on the south side, where they could be easily displayed in the windows facing the street. His men could also then fire their weapons out at the area surrounding the hotel. The resulting distraction might shift the outside response team’s focus just enough for him to get half his fighters back into the tunnels while still maintaining a strong reserve in the hotel. And it just might pull some of the outside Secret Service forces away from the side of the building he was now most concerned with defending. It might keep their focus on the hotel while his main force left the building and returned into the Paris underground, just as Hannibal had tried to do by luring his enemy away from Capua and toward the gates of Rome.

Maximilian knew that he could stay in the hotel no longer. Moving toward the double doors, he jogged down the hallway with a dozen of his fighters. Other men, at the staircase they had secured, opened the metal door for him. He raced down the stairs, his web belt jostling up and down with the weight of the equipment it held. Pulling around each corner, he had to don his portable oxygen mask, for the smoke was thick in the enclosed stairwell. His men had given him updates on the fire every few minutes, so he knew that despite the slow engulfment of the entire hotel, this stairwell was still passable.

Hurrying down the stairs, he tried not to think of the consequences of failing his mission. His team had worked too hard for this opportunity. And the world desperately needed a rebalancing of power. For too long, the great military powers of history had prevented a true evolution and freedom of the world. The Egyptians, the Macedonians, the Persians, the Romans, and the Mongols conquered, subjugated, slaughtered, and enslaved their weaker neighbors. Muslim tribes attacked Constantinople, and in turn, Christian nations responded with unspeakable crimes during the Crusades. European empires colonized African countries and kidnapped men for the world’s slave trade, throwing that continent into a whirlwind of poverty, instability, and violence that lasted to this day. The United States dispossessed hundreds of Native American tribes, displacing them or killing them outright. European powers sparked World Wars, East and West faced off for decades, threatening worldwide nuclear holocaust, and now global terrorism threatened innocent lives everywhere.

Maximilian was no hypocrite. His actions tonight were not to conquer or exterminate a people, steal land, enslave a workforce, or murder innocents out of fear or hatred or religious fanaticism. His action was for world justice—to reset the scales and give mankind across the planet a chance to evolve freely the way they should have been able to evolve before the Romans conquered Alba, the Sabines, the Etruscans, Carthage, and Gaul, until mankind was forced to combine in groups, to kill or conquer other groups, for all eternity. He knew he couldn’t stop or reverse the dark side of human nature in just one night, with just one death, but as with Romulus’s murder of his brother, Tullus’s dismemberment of Mettius, the assassination of Nero or Tiberius, or the senate’s hundred stabbings of Julius Caesar, his actions tonight would weaken America and its meddling influences in the other countries of the world.

His body felt strong as he raced down the steps. The world didn’t know it, but he was its best chance to bring it back to equilibrium. And if he failed, mankind’s eternal conflict with itself would only continue until someone else found the courage to succeed where he might now fail. But as long as his lungs drew breath, he would pursue his goal of striking the colossus.

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.