True Faith and Allegiance

“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.