True Faith and Allegiance

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.