dogs through countless sweeps of every location where the president would be. Counter assault teams were stationed all around the hotel. Blood matching the president’s type was stored in the limousine, and additional reserves had been sent in secured storage to all regional hospitals in Paris—each guarded by a shift agent from the Service. The HMX-1 White Hawk that would serve as Marine One was parked next to Air Force One and the other nineteen passenger and cargo jets and helicopters in their entourage at Charles de Gaulle Airport. And the Secret Service’s cyber team back in Washington was electronically monitoring every aspect of the president’s movements, and the location of each key member of the protection team.
The front four motorcycles split from the motorcade as it turned along the side of the massive twenty-seven-story hotel, which took up an entire city block. The streets around the hotel were closed to public vehicles, but sporadic clusters of pedestrians braved the cold to watch the procession from behind barracks guarded by a mix of French police and US Secret Service agents. Early in his career, John had spent many years working rope lines or standing post on the perimeter of the protection bubble. Even though it had been many years since those entry-level shifts, he still glanced toward the line of pedestrians and, out of habit, scanned their faces for any out-of-the-ordinary behavior or expression in the brief moment that the motorcade moved past them before turning into the underground garage.
As the vehicle sped through the hotel garage, which had been evacuated and secured by the Secret Service two days ago, John exhaled a sigh of relief. POTUS was now back within the safest area that the Service could control on foreign soil. Raising his wrist to his mouth, he communicated the status to the other agents stationed in and around the hotel. “Firefly is back at Shield One. I repeat, Firefly is home and secured for the evening. Initiate Night-watch. Good job, everyone. Over.”
Although the possibility of threats to the president was always at the forefront of every Secret Service agent’s thoughts, John allowed himself a few seconds of relief. This week, the agency’s Intelligence Division at the Secret Service’s headquarters in Washington had received over two thousand threats against the president, all of which were being thoroughly investigated by the agency’s National Threat Assessment Center. And the CIA was reporting heightened terrorist chatter in its daily intelligence reports the past few days. So even though John had been on protection details for nearly fifty presidential foreign trips in his career, he couldn’t help feeling relieved that the cares and worries of another day were now winding down.
5
THE SUBTERRANEAN MAZE HAD LONG, unobstructed passageways, as if it wanted to lull explorers into complacency before gradually disorienting them. Maximilian slowed so the men behind him could close the gaps that formed as they ran. The long line moved through the tunnels in a single file, like a column of ants. They were nearing the end of a shelter used by the French in the Second World War.
Passing an open doorway, he spied a long room with six metal desks lined against the walls. A bundle of dusty cables rose from a panel of forgotten gauges and snaked along the wall before branching off and disappearing into a hole. A rusted bicycle, welded to a stand, was connected to the base of an air duct with a gauge facing out—he assumed it was some early 1940s innovation for soldiers to generate electricity or create airflow while cut off from the outside world in the shelter complex. Though the desks were now abandoned, he could imagine the importance this room must have once had during the war. He could envision it filled with military officers sitting in metal chairs or standing over the desks, studying large, unrolled paper maps and engineering schematics. Now the