True Faith and Allegiance

49

Walid “Wally” Hussein left the Ahlul Bayt Mosque in Brooklyn at seven-thirty, following a small group out after morning prayers. He turned right on Atlantic and headed back for his car, checking his phone for any missed calls as he strolled.

His Chevy Suburban was parked on the street and he climbed in, fired the engine, then pulled out into traffic.

Hussein was a thirty-eight-year-old special agent for the FBI, and he worked in the Counterterrorism Division of the New York field office in Lower Manhattan. His morning drive was always something of a pain in the ass, but he was a lifelong resident of Brooklyn, so a half-hour commute to go the three miles from his mosque to his office didn’t faze him like it would some FBI transplant from Nebraska.

He listened to his voice mail as he drove north, a message from a fellow special agent at the field office telling him they’d received something promising on the tip line, so he needed to haul ass into work so they could check it out.

Hussein looked at the bumper-to-bumper traffic in front of him on Adams and he called the other agent back.

“Special Agent Lunetti.”

“Hey, man. Got your message. I’m headed in, but if it’s out this way you might want to come to me. The bridge is backed up this morning.”

Special Agent Lunetti was a local as well, born and raised in Queens. “Hey, Wally. How’s it goin’? No… this is over here. A tipster said a guy who looked like one of the BOLOs from the ISIS attacks checked into a two-star joint near the Bowery. The Windsor. You know it?”

“Forsyth and Broome?”

“Yeah. If you want we can meet in front of the Y a couple blocks south of there. Head in on foot. How’s that sound?”

“Sounds a lot like the four dry holes we went to yesterday.”

“You’re probably right, but whatcha gonna do?”

“This, I guess. Is the subject still at the hotel?”

“Caller says she doesn’t know. Said he checked in yesterday, she thought he looked familiar, but didn’t know where from till she saw the pictures again this morning on the Today show. She works at the hotel, and can meet us outside.”

Wally Hussein looked ahead at the traffic again. He was still half a mile from the Brooklyn Bridge. “Okay. It’s gonna take me another twenty to get—”

Something caught Hussein’s attention on the sidewalk on his right. The movement of a long narrow cardboard box falling to the ground behind a man walking into the street. His eyes turned to the motion, and he saw a black man just as he stepped out from behind a donut cart and into the street, some thirty or forty yards away. The man had pulled a long device out of the box before discarding it, and he hefted it on his shoulder. It was a tube with a fat end shaped a little like a football.

Hussein knew he was looking at an RPG-7 grenade launcher, and it was pointed right at him.

“Holy shit!”

The flame and smoke of the launch of the device were the last things to register in Special Agent Wally Hussein’s mind before he died.

David Hembrick was knocked to the ground by the explosion of the FBI agent’s big SUV. He dropped the empty rocket launcher and his sunglasses fell from his face but he left the weapon and the shades in the street and crawled back to his feet. He began running to the east through Willoughby Plaza, knocking into a few stunned passersby as he made his escape from the crime scene. A woman sitting on a bench locked eyes with him as he passed, and he wanted to draw his Glock and shoot the bitch, but Mohammed had been clear. His job was not to martyr himself, it was to get away and live to fight another day.

The woman pointed at him and screamed, but Hembrick kept running through Willoughby Plaza, his heart pounding from the terror of the action.

He made a left on Pearl Street, and immediately saw two NYPD officers approaching, responding to the loud noise. Neither of the cops had his weapon out, and at first they let Hembrick rush past, as others were fleeing the area and it didn’t look suspicious at all to race away from an explosion.

But Hembrick made it no more than ten yards up Pearl Street before the busybody on the bench said, “There! That man! That’s him!” and Hembrick heard the order to halt come from the NYPD.

He kept on running. Hembrick was twenty-six, both officers were over forty, and he had a twenty-five-yard head start that turned into a fifty-yard lead by the time he made a right in front of the Marriott. In front of him was Jay Street, and he took off for it.

There was a security camera out in front of the Marriott, not the only one in the neighborhood, but this was the only one Hembrick stared directly at as he raced by.

At the curb on Jay Street, a silver Chrysler 200 was waiting for him with the passenger-side door open.

David Hembrick dove into the car, while the back window rolled down. Husam leaned out the window, hefted his Uzi, and centered it on the first of the two cops, now just thirty yards away.

Husam fired short, controlled bursts, slammed rounds into the body armor and extremities of the stunned cops, hitting both of them in their Kevlar, but also tagging one man in the underarm and the other in both legs.

The Chrysler raced north on Jay with Ghazi behind the wheel, following the GPS on his windshield away from the flow of morning traffic into Manhattan. They hit the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in two minutes, exited at Metropolitan Avenue, and parked in an underground lot near the Graham Avenue subway station.

The three men entered the station and separated at the bottom of the stairs, and then all three entered different cars on the first train heading into Manhattan. They made a connection and arrived at Penn Station shortly after nine a.m. Here they moved separately through the morning crowd, and then each boarded a different car on the first train heading to Newark Liberty Airport.

At the airport train station they separated for the day, following plane tickets they had purchased online from their phones en route, and they all boarded flights within an hour of one another. Hembrick flew direct, both Husam and Ghazi made connections, but all three of them would arrive in Chicago by the midafternoon.

After the chaos that ensued at the FBI New York field office with the murder of one of their special agents, it was past noon before anyone checked out the tip of the man at the Windsor hotel. He was still there, in his room, and he was questioned, but his alibi stood up.

He had nothing to do with ISIS and the attacks here in America.

Musa al-Matari sent the recording of the killing of a Shiite FBI agent on the streets of New York City to the Global Islamic Media Front. The image quality was fair, although the camera attached to David Hembrick’s chest with bungee cord moved along with him as he stepped into the street, fired, and fell back on the ground, so the image stabilization was poor.

No matter, the Yemeni sitting in his room in Chicago knew the wizards at the GIMF’s headquarters in Raqqa would make the adjustments necessary to create a masterpiece as good as an American action film.

Al-Matari had watched the act in real time, and at first he was certain his cell member had been killed in the blast. Hembrick had been instructed to make sure he fired the RPG from a minimum of fifty meters away, but obviously with the thrill of the hunt and impending kill he’d neglected to take his distance into account, and nearly fried himself by launching the grenade at thirty meters.

Still, al-Matari was pleased. A dead FBI agent and two wounded NYPD officers would bring him new recruits, and his three soldiers had all escaped without any injuries.

There had been three more attacks in the past twelve hours, two of them by self-radicalized young men who had pledged allegiance to ISIS on social media while in perpetration of their crimes. A man in Connecticut had emptied half a magazine from his AR-15 pistol into a Marine Corps recruiting station before he’d been felled by a Marine who’d carried his own weapon, but not before three other Marines had been wounded. And a thirty-five-year-old man in Kansas City had opened fire with a shotgun on a random city bus, killing six. While this attack had not been directed at the military or intelligence communities, al-Matari was proud to see the wellspring of insurrection building in America, and he knew it would grow exponentially.

The third attack had been carried out by two of the four remaining Santa Clara cell members. They’d thrown four grenades through windows of a home in Scottsdale, Arizona, killing a Department of Homeland Security official.

The Kansas City gunman had been shot to death by police, but the Santa Clara team members had made it out of Scottsdale undetected.

As had the Fairfax team working in New York. Soon the men from both Santa Clara and Fairfax would be here in Chicago. This was more good news, because tomorrow would be the biggest hit in the fight to date, right here in the city. It had been drawn up by al-Matari over several days and nights of work, and Musa al-Matari was especially excited by the prospects of this high-profile hit, because he would play an important part in the operation himself.