True Faith and Allegiance

“Absolutely. Special Agent in Charge Thomas Russell runs the entire JTTF in Chicago. He is of the belief O’Hare was just a transit station. These guys had cars nearby and they skipped town.”

Dom asked, “Is Russell in the office?”

“Yeah. I’d introduce you, but he’s a busy man and, again, I am not exactly sure just who or what you are. I was told to take care of you, so that’s why we’re talking. I wasn’t told to pass you on to the boss, so the only guy you get to bug today is me.”

Dom let the snipe roll off his back. He understood this guy was confused as to why his busy day was being taken up talking to some random agent from another part of the map.

Dom shook the man’s hand, and Jeffcoat said, “Hate that you came all the way out here for twenty minutes of spiel I could have delivered over the phone. Call next time and we’ll save the government a few bucks.”

Dom said, “Oh, I’m not just here for the briefing. I’m going to stick around, sniff into the situation a bit more. I’m not as convinced as you there’s nothing here ISIS would find worthy of attacking.”

“Not what I said, Caruso. But if you’re from D.C., I do think an ISIS shithead and his goons will find that to be a more target-rich environment.”

Dom turned for the door. “You may be right. Good luck to you.”

* * *

Once he was out of the building, Adara picked him up. He filled her in on the supervisory special agent’s churlishness.

Adara said, “Do you want me to go beat him up for you, honey?”

Dom just laughed.

“What do you want to do now?” she asked.

“Let’s see. A sunny afternoon in Chi-town? I want to take my girl to go see a Cubs game. But I think we’d better keep at it, because the JTTF here doesn’t think there is any real threat, and they are concentrating their efforts on digging into the pasts of the three local terrorists. Personally, I’m more concerned about the near future.”

“So… what’s our plan?”

Dom shrugged. “Honestly, I think the only thing we can do until we get more to go on is work on threat assessments. We’ll go through lists of events in town, lists of places where military and senior government LE agencies congregate.”

Adara said, “Why don’t I just make a U-turn and we can go back to the FBI building. If the JTTF is there, then that’s where all the bigwigs in LE and intel are in the city.”

Dom conceded the point. “Very true, but they’re well protected. I passed multiple sets of X-rays and scanners, bulletproof glass, and security armed with body armor and rifles. Al-Matari is too smart to hit that building. At best, his people might kill a secretary and a couple of lobby guards before they got slaughtered. We have to think like he does. Try to find exposed targets here in the area. Something akin to what we’re seeing in attacks in other parts of the country. Intelligence agency folks, special operations troops, pilots, that kind of stuff, but out in the open. If we can determine where they will hit, we might be able to make ourselves useful.”

Adara said, “There could be a half-dozen or more cell members in the area, so the scope of their attack could be larger than any of the al-Matari hits we’ve seen so far. Let’s get to work.”

* * *

The first news of a fire at the ARTD building reached the Campus detachment working in Bucharest when Gavin called his IT office at Hendley Associates in Virginia and got one of his subordinates to hack into the security camera of a hardware store across the street from the ARTD building.

It took a few minutes for the intrusion to take place, and when the image from the camera showed up on Gavin’s computer, he was surprised to see a row of fire trucks.

Felix Negrescu was asked to look into the situation, and he opened an app on his phone that had a local police and fire department scanner. In no time at all he relayed to the rest of the team that a fire had started in some trash in the building’s basement, but it had been extinguished by firefighters in twenty minutes. There were no injuries, and other than some smoke and water damage, the building was fine.

None of the guys had any indication this small fire had anything to do with their target here in Romania, and they continued on with their plan for the afternoon, which included making entry of Dalca’s apartment to plant listening devices and remote-access tools on any computers, phones, pads, or other devices they could find there. Before they could initiate the break-in, however, Chavez decided they would surveil the building for the afternoon and evening to get a baseline for the location. This way they would have some idea of the patterns and habits of Alex Dalca and the men and women who lived around him.

It was a decision that would cost them some time, but Chavez had done this sort of thing for long enough to know this was a worthwhile expense, considering the alternative could have involved one or more of his team being compromised.