True Faith and Allegiance

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.

50

Dominic Caruso and Adara Sherman arrived in Brooklyn four hours after the death of FBI Special Agent Wally Hussein. They hadn’t expected to learn much at the crime scene, and indeed there was not much to learn, other than the fact the terrorists had used an Uzi submachine gun, just like in Alexandria, as well as a rocket launcher, as had been found in El Salvador.

The local Joint Terrorism Task Force set up a large mobile command post near the scene, and here the security tapes from various buildings in the area were available for viewing by FBI and JTTF personnel, so Dom watched them multiple times. The entire attack had been picked up on several cameras in the area, but it was a little hard to make out large parts of the action.

One of the NYPD officers assigned to the JTTF quipped in the command post that they’d all do well to wait around for ISIS to produce its own video so they could watch the attack with music, editing, and better resolution.

But when the feed from the camera in front of the Marriott came up on screens, everyone saw a perfect image of a black male in his twenties running by and looking into the camera as he passed.

Dom was just saying good-bye to the men in the trailer when an urgent call came through. Facial recognition got a hit at Penn Station that matched an image of the man from the attack. The images came through a minute later. It seemed almost assuredly to be the same individual, and they were able to track him via multiple cams all the way till he got on his train to Newark Liberty.