True Faith and Allegiance

by Tom Clancy

  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.”

  62

  Luca Gabor smelled fresh dirt, wet air. He had no idea where the hell he was or what the hell was going on, but he did not ask. The confusion that began when he was taken from his prison cell at four in the morning morphed into fear when he was blindfolded, cuffed, and led out of the prison and into the back of a van, and this fear kept him silent even now.

  And while he had spoken little to the people in the vehicle around him, they had said nothing back to him.

  They’d driven for twenty minutes, then he was transferred to another vehicle. He had the impression he was with a new bunch of captors, but they’d said nothing more than the first group, and they drove him around for another twenty minutes.

  Then the vehicle stopped, he was led out, and this is when he smelled nature for the first time.

  Now he was pushed onto his knees, and he started to fall forward. As he cried out in surprise he was grabbed from behind and held in a kneeling position.

  And then the blindfold was pulled from his eyes, he was released, and he blinked away the sweat of fear. It was dark, but he could tell he was somewhere in the woods, because the headlights of a vehicle behind him lit the scene.

  A thick tree line was just twenty meters ahead, but right in front of him, a foot from where he knelt, fresh dirt had been dug, a hole two meters long by a meter and a half wide.

  Luca looked inside it.

  It was shallow, no more than a foot deep. The body of a man wearing a white shirt and a tie lay faceup. Even though the shadows were thick in the hole, Gabor could see there was a bullet wound in the man’s forehead.

  In Romanian he screamed, “Shit! Shit! What is this? What am I doing here?”

  From right behind him he heard a man speak. “How’s your English, Luca? I hear it used to be good, back when you worked for Romanian intelligence.”

  “I . . . I speak English. What is going on? Who are you? What do you want? I have done nothing to anyone!”

  The person behind him moved even closer now. Just behind his ear. His voice was intimidating in its tone and proximity. “I heard you’re a tough guy. But you whine a lot for a tough guy.”

  “I . . . I want to go back to Jilava. Take me back. Now!”

  Instead of an answer, Luca Gabor got a boot in the small of his back. He fell face-first into the hole, right next to, and partially on top of, the dead man. His hands cuffed behind him meant he had trouble scooting back off the body.

  A flashlight’s beam centered on the corpse next to him. Gabor squinted away the light, but he looked at the body, crammed up next to him in the small shallow grave. The dead man and Gabor’s face were a foot apart.

  “You know this guy?”

  “No! No, I swear! I’ve never seen him.”

  “His name is . . . was, Dragomir Vasilescu.”

  Luca Gabor looked again, then he squinted into the light. “The director of ARTD. I know the name. I did not know him. But . . . I swear I had nothing to do with anything he might have—”

  “Alexandru Dalca paid you a visit.”

  Gabor began shaking his head violently, but he heard the sound of the slide on a semiautomatic pistol being racked.

  “Before you answer, asshole, know this. Ol’ Drago there didn’t want to talk to me, either. And you see what that got him.”

  Luca changed his tune quickly. He wasn’t going to risk his life to defend Alexandru fucking Dalca. “Yes, It’s true. He wanted me to make a connection for him. To get him out of the country. I didn’t know why. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know.”

  “I know why he wanted to run.” The voice behind the flashlight said. “I was why he wanted to run. He’s a smart guy, after all. What I don’t know is what you told him. You tell me right now, or you end up next to old Drago here for eternity, or until a dog comes by, smells your stench, and drags you off.”

  Luca thought about the three million dollars his daughter received this afternoon. He could give up Dalca’s secret, but he could not lose out on so much money. He said, “I didn’t help. I refused.”

  From his right side, he felt the slap of mud being tossed on top of him. A second later he heard the sound of a spade piercing the pile of loose soil there, and then another load of wet dirt came crashing down. This time it landed on his chest.

  He was being buried alive.

  “I’ll tell you!” he screamed. “I’ll tell you everything!”

  —

  Ten minutes later Midas and Jack pulled Luca out of the hole, put the blindfold back over his eyes, and began leading him back to the minivan. They both noted that Luca Gabor had soiled himself somewhere along the process, and they really did not want to drive him anywhere, but a promise had been made. They’d take him back to Romanian intelligence agents waiting in a parking lot in nearby Sinteşti, and the agents would take him back to Jilava Prison. They would probably be pissed that the clean prisoner they’d handed off an hour earlier was being returned to them covered in mud and shit, but the Americans had gotten the intel they needed, and they would apologize for the trouble and the mess.

  Mary Pat had moved heaven and earth to make this happen. The moment Clark had called her after the shoot-out with the Chinese, she’d contacted her counterparts at Romanian intelligence and asked them to look into Dalca immediately. She claimed she had proof he was behind the intelligence leaks in the U.S. that had become the biggest story in the world in the last few weeks, and she needed to know everything about the man in minutes, not hours.

  She got a call back in under an hour. Dalca’s name had shown up in a database as having visited a prisoner in Jilava just that day, and Romanian intel officers knew the prisoner well. They told Mary Pat she could send someone over to interview the prisoner at her convenience, perhaps early the following week.

  Mary Pat replied she could have someone ready to interview him ten minutes after she hung up the phone.

  This was at two a.m.

  Romanian intelligence agents, knowing just how fucked-up their world would be if it turned out the attacks in America had anything to do with a former colleague of theirs and they did not make him immediately available to the Americans, went personally to Jilava to cut through any red tape involving the local Bureau of Prisons. Prison officials were rousted out of bed, and at first they tried to send the agents away empty-handed, guards even fingered their guns at one point, but cooler heads prevailed, and promises were made to have Gabor returned before sunup.

  No one asked the Americans if they’d had anything to do with the gunfire outside Dalca’s apartment earlier in the evening, or the death of three police officers alongside a half-dozen mysterious Asian men in a nearby park.

  The answer to this
question was clear, but America’s involvement in this international incident would be covered up by a Romanian government desperate to not publicize the fact one or more of its citizens had been involved with ISIS attacks in the U.S.

  After Chavez got what he needed out of Luca Gabor, the shot-up white Renault delivered Gabor back to Romanian intelligence, and they left the body of Dragomir Vasilescu in the shallow grave, one more item for the Romanian government to quickly and quietly forget about for its own good.

  63

  Dominic and Adara entered the Drake Tower, a thirty-floor co-op on Lake Shore next to the Drake hotel, by means of Caruso waving his creds at uniformed police officers on Lake Shore, which had now been closed off. He showed them again, to another officer, standing at the door to the co-op, and Dom could tell from the face of the lone CPD officer that he was well aware he was standing there, basically alone, guarding a door adjacent to an active terror incident.

  The cop wasn’t happy about it, but he was doing his job.

  Once inside the building the two Campus operatives took an elevator down to a lower level, and here they followed the plans on Adara’s phone until they found a narrow stairwell. They descended as low as it would go, and this led them to a locked door. Caruso pulled his lock-pick set out of his bag and had the door open in under one minute, then both of them drew their pistols and entered a dark hallway lined with rusty pipes. Dom clicked on his tactical flashlight, and switched to the red filter, because it was harder to detect at a distance, even though it didn’t appear anyone had made it down here from the Drake.

  This was no drainage pipe, as it appeared to be on the schematic. It looked and smelled like this concrete hallway had flooded recently and it was filthy and disused, but at the moment it was completely dry.

  They made a turn and found a set of concrete steps, at the top of which was another locked door. Adara held the light while Dom knelt and picked the lock.

  Adara whispered, “What other skills do you have that I don’t know about?”

  Dom said, “You won’t be impressed for much longer. Once Clark gets you back into training, you’ll probably be better at this than me.”

  The lock clicked and Dom looked up at her. “But for now, I’m still cool.”

  He opened the door carefully and peered in.

  When he saw nothing but black, he used his red light again.

  A storeroom full of cases of alcohol was as dark as the hallway behind him. He and Adara moved forward to another door, then cracked it open.

  Here they were met by blinding light. It was the kitchen of the Coq d’Or, a famous and venerable restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel, directly below the lobby. Adara followed the plans on her phone and realized the elevators were not far from the exit to the bar, but an additional employee-only staircase was just to the right in the hallway below the lobby.

  They moved through the dark and empty restaurant, their weapons in front of them, and they could see evidence people had left in a hurry. Drinks on the bar and on the tables still had ice cubes in them, and chairs and barstools were knocked over. There didn’t seem to be any victims down here, but it was clear how chaotic it must have been for the patrons when the volleys of gunfire and explosions kicked off in the lobby, right above their heads.

  Dom moved carefully into the downstairs hallway, looked to his left, and saw the exit to the hotel. Police had moved back away from the door, but he could see two teams of CPD SWAT officers crouched behind ballistic shields across the street, and using the partial cover of armored trucks that had been moved there.

  Adara came out behind Dom and spun right, her gun in her hands in front of her. She found the employee stairs and entered, and Dom moved behind her. They controlled the door so no one in the stairwell could hear it close, and they listened for movement above. There was a slight shuffling. They knelt together while Dom held his weapon up on the stairs, and whispered into Adara’s ear. “There could be civilians trapped all over the place, so make sure of your targets.”

  She nodded, pushed back over her ear a wisp of hair that had worked its way out of her ponytail, and began leading the way up. Dom took her by the arm and passed in front of her.

  On the landing of the main floor, they found three female hotel clerks crouched in hiding. One of the women sobbed loudly when she saw Dom and Adara with their guns coming up the stairs, but she grabbed her own mouth to stifle a scream. Dom moved up to them and knelt back down, while Adara covered up the stairs.

  “You guys came from the lobby?”

  “Yes, we were at the counter when it started.”

  “How many bad guys?”

  They looked between each other. Finally one said, “We never saw any bad guys. No one but police and guests. There was shooting and explosions. I saw people die. One of the police officers I had just been talking to dropped in front of the counter, I think he’s dead.”

  She began crying.

  Dom showed the women Adara’s schematic of the lobby on her phone and asked them to tell him where they were. According to the women, the other side of the door in front of them led to a back office behind the counter, and no one in the lobby would see them if he went in there.

  Dom said, “Okay, good. Listen, it’s clear down these stairs out the front door. Does anybody have a cell phone?”

  One of the women said, “Our phones are at the counter.”

  Dom was worried about the women running out onto East Walton with a hundred police with rifles pointing at the door, but he didn’t have time to call ahead for them to warn Jeffcoat they were coming out. He said, “Go into the kitchen of the bar, through the liquor closet, and down the stairs. The long dark hallway leads next door and you’ll be safe over there.” He pulled a flashlight out of his backpack and handed it to her.

  “Are you . . . are you sure?”

  Dom nodded, squeezed Adara on the shoulder, and said, “I need to see what’s going on in the lobby. I want you right here doing what you’re doing, covering this stairwell.”

  She nodded. “Be careful.”

  Dom slipped into the office, staying low with his pistol in front of him. The door to the lobby was propped open, so he went wide of it and looked out into the large space.

  He saw a few bodies on the floor, but looking across into the Palm Court, he could see two men holding Uzis on a group of guests cowering there. Another man was moving several roll-aboard suitcases around the group, and then playing wire out from a backpack. Men and women, mostly over the age of fifty, were seated in chairs and on the floor, and Dom saw panic in many faces, even across the length of the lobby, as the terrorist carefully attached wiring to something inside one of the cases.

  Dom was certain the terrorists were prepping a massive bomb, big enough to collapse the higher floors of the building and kill virtually everyone inside.

  Looking around, he was surprised he didn’t see anyone else in the lobby. Even the stairs down to the main level and the exit appeared to be unprotected by al-Matari’s cell members.

  Dom took pictures with his camera, zooming in on the Palm Court and what he assumed to be three cases full of explosives, and then he backed into the office. Quickly he texted them to Jeffcoat, then he called him.

  Jeffcoat answered, “You are in the fucking lobby?”

  Dom whispered, “Listen to me carefully. I count only three tangos down here, covering two dozen hostages. They are rigging a massive daisy-chain explosive of some kind. In a couple of minutes this whole rig could go up, or they could set it on a dead man’s switch and we won’t be able to save these people. SWAT needs to breach now. I can engage them from here till they come through the front. It’s a straight shot to the left for them after that. All the lobby threats are in one place, but you have to act right now.”

  “We can’t! We are missing SWAT officers up on the fifth floor. Al-Matari and Hembrick have them
.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because he called and told us! We sent eighteen men up there. Only five retreated down with some FBI agents, and their body cams show at least seven dead in the hallways. There’s some dead and missing FBI up there as well.”

  Dom thought it over quickly. “Okay. Here’s what you’ll have to do. I’ve got access to employee stairs. I’ll go to the fifth floor with my colleague, take down al-Matari and Hembrick, and whoever the hell else is there, and you guys get to the lobby and end the threat here.”

  “I don’t have the power to make that happen, Caruso.”

  Dom thought for a moment. “Well, notify Russell of my plan. I’m about to start shooting bad guys on the fifth floor. Either SWAT comes through the front and stops these three tangos from setting off that bomb or they don’t.”

  “No!” Jeffcoat shouted. “You will stand down and get the fuck out—”

  “Three minutes and the shooting starts.”

  “Wait!”

  Caruso hung up the phone. He didn’t have a lot of love for his plan, but he saw the consequences of inaction in the next couple of minutes to be even more dangerous than what he and Adara were about to attempt.

  64

  Back in the stairwell Dom was glad to see that the three women from the counter had left. He began moving up the stairs, covering high, and Adara moved up beside him. He whispered into her ear as he ascended.

  “We have less than three minutes to engage on the fifth floor. Unknown number of shooters. They think al-Matari is there with Hembrick, along with hostages.”

  Adara nodded and the two of them increased their rate of climb.

  On the door out to the fifth floor they paused. Dom brought a hand up and with his fingers he reminded Adara the room number was five-one-four. They opened the door and spun out into the hall, Dom to the left and Adara to the right. In front of them they saw the devastation of the suicide bombing, as well as the explosion that took place at the far end of the hall at the stairwell there. Olive-clad men with black body armor lay all over the place, blood and body parts were strewn on the blue and gold carpet, and the walls were ripped, burned, and bloody.