True Faith and Allegiance

60

Dominic and Adara spent the afternoon and evening seated at a table in the lobby of the Chicago Athletic Association hotel, their laptops in front of them and their Bluetooth connections to their cell phones wedged in their ears.

They’d been at it for hours, but so far they’d been unable to find any one obvious Islamic State target here in the city.

Adara said again that the single biggest target was the JTTF itself, but again they dismissed it as too hard an objective for al-Matari and his people, since they’d lost a lot of cell members in the past week on attacks that had been utterly unprotected.

At ten-fifteen they’d finished a dinner of pizza in the lobby, and were about to pack up for the night, when Dom’s phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number, but saw it was local.

“Yeah?”

“SA Caruso? This is Special Agent Jeffcoat.” Dom could hear obvious excitement in the man’s voice, which surprised him, because that morning Jeffcoat couldn’t have been less interested in talking to him.

“Hey. What’s up?”

“Well, either you were holding out intel on me, in which case you and I are going to have words later, or else you are one lucky son of a bitch.”

“How so?”

“Twelve minutes ago we got a facial-recog hit of the New York shooter, David Hembrick, checking into the Drake hotel, over on Lake Shore Drive. He was with another man. This guy matches the description of Abu Musa al-Matari.”

Dom stood from the table, startling Adara. “You’ve got to be kidding me! I’m ten minutes away. They’re still there?”

“We’re assuming so. We have images of them going together into the elevator with a good amount of luggage, but some of the cams in the building are out of order. Still… no images of them leaving, so we think they are both in the same hotel room.”

“What are you guys going to do?”

“We are taking them down now.”

“You think that’s a good idea?”

“Chicago PD SWAT is one of the best in the nation, and we’ll back them up. We’re bringing everyone onto the scene quickly and quietly with a full JTTF mobile unit. We don’t have FBI HRT in the area, so Chicago PD’s SWAT team is already spinning up. They’re top-notch and we liaise with them regularly on counterterror drills. We’re moving plainclothed FBI and CPD into the area to put eyes on all the exits, and when we get set up, SWAT will breach Hembrick’s hotel room.” Dom could hear the intensity in the special agent’s voice. He was a hunter whose ultimate prey had just walked in front of his gunsight. “A few hundred hotel guests are going to have themselves a night to remember.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” Even though Adara didn’t know what was going on, she was following Dom’s lead and quickly packing up their laptops.

Jeffcoat said, “Your creds will get you under the tape and into our command post, but we won’t move into position until the SWAT breach has begun. We don’t want anybody around talking about the big black counterterror trailers and a hundred cops bum-rushing the neighborhood, in case al-Matari has confederates out on the street.”

Dom said, “Jesus, man. I don’t know about this.” Dom was thinking how The Campus would do this, and he was sure they would go with a much lower-profile operation.

Jeffcoat snapped back. “No offense, Special Agent, but this call wasn’t to consult with you. It was to give you a heads-up.”

“Right. I’m heading that way, and can provide eyes from a distance. What’s the room number?”

Jeffcoat said, “Five-fourteen. Just come to the CP if you want updates, do not go to the hotel. When we get set up we will be on East Delaware, a block south of the Drake. I’m serious, don’t crowd our scene, Caruso. SWAT and local PD will handle the Drake and do any trigger-pulling, and JTTF and FBI will manage the operation covertly on scene from standoff range via the mobile command. I’m only notifying you because I was ordered by D.C. to keep you informed. We don’t need too many cooks in the kitchen.”

“Right. Good luck.”

Dom and Adara climbed into their rental and headed north on Michigan Avenue. Dom carried a Glock 26 subcompact nine-millimeter pistol in a shoulder holster under his blue sport coat, and a second G26 in his backpack for Adara’s use in an emergency. Without comment she pulled it out, along with an extra mag, and slipped the equipment into her purse. She then pulled her hair back into a ponytail with a rubber band.

They were both dressed conservatively, but they knew how to conceal their weapons, no matter what their attire.

“What’s our play?” Adara asked.

“We’ll go to where the command center is and see who’s running the show. Offer any help we can give.”

She asked, “Does it seem like a good idea to you for SWAT to hit them in their hotel room? There’s a ballroom at the Drake, it will be in full swing, and a lobby bar, plus people in their rooms. IED shrapnel or AK rounds are going to go through walls like butter.”

Dom said, “I’m with you, I’d rather they sat back and put eyes on them, took al-Matari and Hembrick down while they were somewhere else, but this isn’t our call to make.”

Adara said, “Would we be more help if we got inside the hotel, just in case? I mean, sometimes it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.”

Dom looked at her a moment while he drove. “It’s my show, Adara. You are subordinate to me on this.”

“I know that.” She went quiet.

Dom thought about what he’d said, and how it sounded. The last thing Dom wanted or needed right now was a fight with his girlfriend. After driving in silence for a minute, Dom said, “We’ll just feel it out when we get there. If we think we can help on the inside, then we’ll find a way into that hotel.”

“Okay,” she said, and then added, “I’ll do whatever you think is right.”

Five FBI agents working with the Chicago Division of the JTTF arrived in the lobby of the Drake in ones and twos, sat on benches, walked through the bar and mall on the lower level. They all were in text message comms with each other, as well as with CPD and JTTF officials, who were scrambling to get their big mobile command trailers staffed and moving and patrol cars into the neighborhood to create a cordon around the century-old hotel.

The lobby teams had filtered in covertly in an attempt to identify known al-Matari cell members who might have been going to or coming from the elevators. A lower-level access to the room-floor elevators, one story below the main lobby, was put out of commission by FBI agents dressed as maintenance staff. This led to a brief shouting match with the actual hotel maintenance staff in the lower concourse before uniformed CPD officers intervened and pulled hotel maintenance into an employee-only hallway to explain they’d just threatened to kick the asses of a group of covert FBI agents.

At the same time the altercation was going on downstairs, in the lobby a forty-something couple, both special agents, stepped up to the counter and asked to speak with the hotel manager. They took him into a back room with a flash of their credentials, and told him they needed every unoccupied room on the fifth floor right then. The manager stepped to a terminal with a shaking hand, and with difficulty managed to generate keys for three deluxe king rooms on the fifth floor.

Over the next five minutes, three teams of armed FBI special agents went to the three rooms, posing as guests. All the other guests on the floor were contacted, one by one, by hotel staff inquiring as to their satisfaction with their stay. This identified which rooms were occupied by civilians, and which guests were still out on the town this evening.

There was one exception to the telephone survey — room 514. A decision had also been made not to call David Hembrick’s room to avoid the chance the call might make Hembrick and al-Matari suspicious.

Dom and Adara parked in a garage on East Walton, just a block west of the Drake. From the street it looked just like a regular Saturday night in front of the big old hotel, but when the couple turned right on Michigan, then made their way down to East Delaware, it was a different story. A half-dozen obvious government sedans and SUVs covered the road, and motorcycle cops blocked the turn off Michigan onto the one-way street.

As they walked closer to the dozen or so FBI and CPD men standing by one of the SUVs, Adara said, “Remember how I said I thought the biggest target would be the JTTF itself?”

“Yeah.”

“Well… what better way to target them than to draw them all here to one place?”

Dom thought it over. “That makes a hell of a lot of sense. Jeffcoat said a mobile command vehicle is standing off somewhere, but it will arrive on scene at the same time as the hit on the Drake. This street is going to be a zoo in a minute.”

Adara looked around and said, “I guess the cops have it under control,” but her voice didn’t sound so sure.

There were eleven public or employee ground-floor entrances to the Drake hotel and the small shopping mall attached to it, and this made controlling access to the building a nightmare for police concerned that lookouts at ground level might tip off Hembrick and al-Matari and cause them to barricade themselves, set off an explosive, or try to flee. But as soon as the three groups of agents were in their rooms on the fifth floor, all looking out through peepholes into the hallway, three armored trucks pulled up around the building. One on Lake Shore, and two on East Walton Place. Eighteen men in all, SWAT officers from the Chicago Police Department, leapt from their vehicles and moved on the building. A second unit was parked four blocks to the west as a quick-reaction force to help the first in the case of disaster, and every one of the men on the second team was pissed that he wasn’t on the team called on for the hit itself.

One truckload of SWAT leapt out of the back of their vehicle at the south-side main entrance, raced through doors held open by plainclothes cops and Feds, and entered the building. Here the six officers took the stairs up to the main lobby. They shot past shocked hotel guests who watched them with mouths agape, and then they moved to the employee access door, again held open by a special agent who’d been hanging out in the lobby looking for known ISIS personalities. The olive-drab-clad SWAT members moved into a stairwell and began ascending in a tactical train toward the fifth floor.

The second team entered from Lake Shore, ran the full length of the street-level high-end shopping mall, and took the main elevators one flight below the lobby. One floor above, an FBI agent heard the transmission that they were on their way up, so he blocked anyone in the lobby attempting to use the elevators. From now on, the four elevators off the lobby would be only for people trying to escape their hotel rooms above.

The third group entered from the front as well, and they entered the public-access stairwell.

Now a dozen police officers, many wearing uniforms, moved into the lobby. They did not evacuate the hotel completely, and many in the ballroom just a half flight of stairs up from the lobby had no idea anything was amiss.

Two minutes later all eighteen SWAT officers were up on the fifth floor. Three groups of four quietly evacuated the rooms where guests had answered their phones to respond to the survey. The officers did not take the time to check the rooms where no one had answered.

When this was done, a half-dozen officers stacked up a few yards from the door to room 514, and six more men approached slowly, their M4 rifles pointed at the door. The last six took up positions by the stairs but trained their weapons on the entire floor.

The six FBI agents who had checked into the rooms on the floor opened their doors, drew their weapons, and stayed well behind the action, but ready to help, if needed.

A breacher and a security man moved up to the door. The security man kept his weapon up while the breacher gently attached a small water-tamped charge next to the door latch, then stood back with the shock-tube detonator in his hand.

The team leader, back in the stack along the wall, whispered into his mic. “Bravo One has positive control. Breaching in three, two, one.”

The door to room 514 blasted inward, and the team flooded into the room.

As they did so, the door to room 515, directly across the hall, opened inward, and just as the fourth man in the stack recognized the movement on his right and turned toward it, twenty-year-old Maria Gonzalez, the lone female of the Chicago cell, took one step out into the hall.

Without a word she detonated her suicide vest in the center of the team of SWAT officers.

The door to room 501 opened as well, and Ahmed, another member of the Chicago cell, slung a C-4 bomb the size of a briefcase toward the SWAT officers standing by the stairwell on the south side of the hall. The case landed in the middle of the group, but not before they shot Ahmed to death, riddling his body with bullets.

Even though the would-be bomber was shot, the device exploded in front of the stairwell, killing everyone there and blasting out windows throughout the several floors on the southern side of the building, spraying glass down onto East Walton Place.

Two floors down, three Chicago cell members and two from Santa Clara left their third-floor room armed with grenades and AK-103 rifles. They wore body armor and suicide vests, and together they took the one flight down the main lobby stairs. As soon as they opened the door they saw the police, and while three men fired their AKs, three others hurled grenade after grenade into the lobby.