True Faith and Allegiance

61

Two massive black mobile command trailers, each with a full array of technical and communications gear, rolled to a stop out of view from the Drake on East Delaware. Instantly the street was reclosed for the block and the entire command post was surrounded by CPD police cars.

Inside and around the vehicles were over forty members of the JTTF, all senior members of the FBI, the Department of Defense, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the Bureau of Naval Intelligence, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Secret Service, the Illinois State Police, the U.S. Army Criminal Investigations Division, as well as the antiterrorism division of CPD.

Assistant Special Agent in Charge Thomas Russell was not only the local head of the FBI office, but also the director of the JTTF in Chicago. He stepped out of a black Chevy Suburban parked in a fire zone and darted into the trailer labeled on the sides as Mobile Command Unit One the moment the steps had been placed by the side door.

They’d all heard the explosions a block away and five stories above, and now the radios were alive with reports of officers down on the fifth floor. Transmissions squawked into transmissions, the flow of information to the command center deteriorated, but within seconds of the first bit of bad news, the sounds of fully automatic weapons fire crackled up the street.

Again the radios screamed. “We’re taking fire in the lobby! Man down! Active shooter!”

“What the fuck is going on in there?” Russell demanded.

A CPD communications and dispatch specialist said, “I’m getting reports of multiple explosions and a gun battle on the fifth floor. Tangos in multiple rooms. And multiple shooters are in the lobby, with S-vests and assault rifles. All our elements from the fifth floor have evacuated, but there are dead and wounded.”

“How many civilians in that hotel?”

“Hotel management said five hundred seventy-three rooms at an eighty percent occupancy. Figure an average of two per room, that’s nine hundred sixteen people, but no way to know how many are in there right now, and how many in the bars, restaurants, and conference rooms.”

“Good Christ.” It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He and his entire outfit had just performed a full-scale drill on a terrorist attack of Soldier Field six weeks earlier, and the operation had gone off without a hitch, so Russell had been confident in his and the local police department’s ability to see this arrest through.

But somehow it had turned to utter chaos in the Drake.

A communications specialist down at the end of the trailer shouted over the din of the operations center. Director Russell? I’ve got a call from room 514, they are asking for you by name!”

Thinking the only possibility was that a SWAT commander on the floor was calling, he answered immediately.

“Russell?”

“Good evening, Special Agent in Charge Thomas Russell.” The caller had a Middle Eastern accent tinged with British vowels.

“Who is this?”

“I am offended you do not recognize my voice. I am certain your drones found ways to listen to my phone calls when I was in Syria. Isn’t that how your military found out about my camp there last year?”

Russell grabbed the arm of his second-in-command, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel. The man had been passing on his way through the command center, and the director yanked so hard he spun him on his heel.

Russell put his finger over the mouthpiece of his phone and whispered, “Al-Matari.”

The lieutenant colonel raced to alert communications techs to record the call.

Russell asked, “What’s the status of the police officers up there?”

“Up here we have six alive. All under our control. I have more mujahideen on other floors, rounding up civilians. Pull all your forces out of the building and then we will talk again. Unless I hear you have done this in three minutes, I will personally shoot one hostage a minute until you comply.”

“What do you want?”

“For you to follow my instructions. Then… we negotiate.” The line went dead.

Russell turned to his second-in-command. “Get all our people out of there now, and have them bring out the civilians they can grab. They have three minutes. We’ll bring in FBI HRT, regroup, and do what we can to defuse this. Stage as many CPD SWAT as you can outside, in case they have to go back in if the shooting starts up again.”

It took Dom Caruso several minutes to find Special Agent Jeffcoat inside the tape on East Delaware, just fifty feet from one of the two mobile command centers. The SA was on his phone, a Benelli shotgun hanging across his chest over his soft body armor.

As soon as he hung up, he looked up to see Caruso. “Not now.”

“What the hell is going on in there?”

“It was a trap. We have a hostage situation, but we did get a call from inside, so at least they are talking to us. We’re backing off, to try to get some people released.”

Dom didn’t like that at all. “No. You’ve got to hit them right now!”

“You’re nuts. They have a half-dozen SWAT officers alive up there on the fifth floor, plus God knows how many civilians. We don’t know how many terrorists there are in the building or what weapons they have. We have to get our shit together and wait for HRT.”

Dom couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “All the way from D.C.?”

“They can be here in three hours. In the meantime, we negotiate.”

“Look,” Dom implored. “Al-Matari isn’t doing what you think he’s doing. This is a common tactic jihadist terrorists use all over the world. It’s called ‘negotiation for fortification.’ These talks are a stall tactic. They are in there right now rigging bombs, making mantraps, prepping for the next stage of their statement. They are waiting for you to get every camera in the country pointed at Chicago, and then they will do what they really set out to do.”

Assistant Special Agent in Charge Russell saw the argument from the back of Mobile Command Post One and pushed through the crowd of JTTF responders. “What’s going on? Who are you?”

Dom said, “Special Agent Caruso, out of D.C.”

“Right. You’re the guy Murray wanted read in on the situation. Is there something you know that you aren’t sharing with me?”

Dom said, “You are treating this like a hostage situation. You are trying to calm things down and talk. That’s the opposite of what you need to do right now. The quicker you get shooters back in there, the fewer innocent lives you’ll lose.”

Russell responded by questioning Dom’s authority. “I know you’re the President’s nephew, but that doesn’t give you command of my scene.”

“I’m just trying to help. Look. This mobile command is too close to the Drake. For all you know he has a dirty bomb in there and—”

“Does Washington have intelligence that says he has a dirty bomb, because if you guys do, then I sure as shit wasn’t notified.”

“No, sir, but—”

Russell said, “I don’t have time to justify every action I make to an SA out of another division. Stand here with your mouth shut or get on the other side of that tapeline.”

Dom did leave the command post. He found Adara in a growing crowd on Michigan Avenue.

Clearly, she’d seen the entire altercation. “Did that go as badly as it looked from over here?”

Dom’s face was rock-hard and serious. “I think this hostage-taking thing is a ruse. Their demands, whatever they are, are just stalling tactics. They want as many eyes as possible on them so that when they slaughter all the hostages, they’ll get more publicity.”

Adara said, “What do we do?”

Dom replied, “We don’t sit around and wait. We go in.”

“Do they have any idea how many terrorists are in there?” she asked.

Dom shook his head. “No. That is a shitty situation in that hotel, and it will only get worse every minute someone waits around to do something about it. If someone can get in there and begin engaging al-Matari’s people, get the shooting to start again, then the other SWAT teams will have no choice but to move on the scene.”

Adara said, “Then what are we standing around talking about it for? Let’s get in there and get started.”

Dom hesitated and Adara was about to get angry, because she thought he was going to order her to stay behind.

But before she could say anything he said, “I need you with me in there.”

“I know. I just had Clark send schematics on the building to my phone. We can go through what looks like an old drainage system under the hotel — it connects to a building on the east side on Lake Shore.”

Dom was already jogging in that direction, pulling a small light out of his backpack. Adara jogged along with him. “Let’s get wet.”