The Paris Protection by Bryan Devore Page A

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