Terror Machine Read online

  Terror Machine: A Rivett Thriller

  Terror Machine

  The Jake Rivett Series

  DenisonHatch.com

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  A Note on Reviews

  About the Author

  TERROR MACHINE

  A RIVETT THRILLER

  by

  Denison Hatch

  CLICK TO FIND:

  THE RIVETT SERIES ON AMAZON!

  THE RIVETT THRILLERS:

  FLASH CRASH

  NEVER GO ALONE

  TERROR MACHINE

  Add your email to Denison Hatch’s mailing list for new releases:

  DenisonHatch.com/signup/

  PRAISE FOR THE JAKE RIVETT SERIES

  FLASH CRASH

  “Dialogue as entertainingly raunchy as that in The Wolf of Wall Street or the Showtime TV series Billions.”

  -Kirkus Reviews

  "An absolute bullseye, reinventing the heist thriller for the information age."

  -BestThrillers

  "Theft, murder, betrayal, and computer coding come together in Flash Crash. Deftly going from the rich world of bankers to the dregs of Chinatown, Hatch's pacing ensures there is never a dull moment."

  -IndieReader Approved

  TEROR MACHINE is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination and/or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 Denison Hatch

  Published by Lookout Press

  All rights reserved

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9972812-4-8

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE MAN IN THE TRUCK knew he was going to die. A part of him wanted to slam on the brakes, jump out, and sprint away. But that section of his brain had no power—not anymore. He knew his mission. He was certainly aware that the scholar, the alim, didn’t think it was the right time. The right time was later. Always later. That’s what the alim had said last night. The plan was bigger than any of them, they’d been told. It was much more elaborate than they could imagine. The stakes were higher and perfect execution was required. But for the man, “later” simply no longer cut it. The alim would be irate. So would the others. Maybe even the doctor. In fact, the man knew that he was probably jeopardizing his group’s entire existence. But now that he had access to the truck, he couldn’t wait. The second his hands had touched the steering wheel of the vehicle, he simply hadn’t been able to stop himself. His life motivation had narrowed into a scope with one target. The man was a Muslim, but this had nothing to do with religion. He used to be devout. But over the last few years, he’d lost all of his convictions. He didn’t believe the story about the awaiting virgins, he barely subscribed to the effectiveness of jihad, and he didn’t care if any money was delivered to his family back home. Most of the others believed in at least some of the tenets of the struggle. But the man didn’t. Not at all, no longer, no way—that was for sure. There was only one resonating fact that had grown from a whisper to an unavoidable bass line and now defined his entire life: Abdel Hayat hated himself with an all-consuming passion.

  ▪

  Bryant Park’s Winter Village was buzzing with optimism and capitalism a few days after Thanksgiving. The small square in the center of Midtown Manhattan was packed with hundreds of stalls selling any manner of Christmas and holiday-related wares. Whether it was a customized ornament, socks with embroidered Bernese mountain dogs, or sunglasses carved out of wood—it was available at the Winter Village. The market was overwhelmed with shoppers in the midafternoon hours before the sun dropped for the day. The patrons came from the tall skyscrapers that framed the area. They were bankers and lawyers and entertainment executives on a quick coffee break before a few more hours of end-of-the-year computer time. The shoppers came from Connecticut, and New Jersey, and California. They arrived in family packs and poured out of tour buses. The people also came from everywhere in between, with their strollers and their backpacks and even their ice skates—there was a temporary ice-skating rink set up in the middle of the park.

  And it was right in that moment, when no one was expecting anything at all, that the screams began.

  ▪

  Abdel Hayat’s truck barreled through the market without prejudice. No one was targeted but no one was spared—except by luck. Abdel’s only mission was to reach the center of the ice-skating rink. The truck was big and heavy and it did an immense amount of damage on the way in. He ran directly through the newly painted green stalls of the market, and he impacted squarely with dozens of innocent civilians. Abdel turned from a murderer to a mass murderer within seconds, but he was in a daze by that point. His death was already imminent.

  Abdel’s windshield cracked into a thousand spider webs. The glass was painted red with blood, but he could just make out the ice-skating rink in front of him. The people ahead were finally figuring out what was happening and fleeing in every direction, creating a path of sorts for Abdel’s truck. He easily broke through the small wall separating the rink from the rest of the park, and his truck skidded to a stop in the middle of the ice.

  The wailing was the first sound Abdel heard when he exited the truck’s cab, and it contributed to his daze. He had a gun in his hands. It was loaded. He lifted the weapon up and into his sight line and stared down the barrel at a little boy who was sitting on the rink ahead of him, watching Abdel with frightened but also curious eyes.

  “You’re not the mission,” Abdel mumbled.

  Abdel didn’t shoot. He pivoted away from the boy, taking in more stragglers who were attempting to flee from the rink. He lifted his gun into the air and let off a few warning rounds to keep any heroes at bay. Then he calmly walked around to the back of the truck. It had a ladder installed on its rear end, which Abdel climbed.

  He soon stood atop the truck and watched as the little boy’s mom slid across the ice in front of him and scooped up her son. As she sprinted away, she slipped and collapsed onto the ice. Scrambling, she covered her son while crawling for the side.

  Abdel did nothing. Amid the noise, he could make out the ringing of police sirens. It had only been a minute, maybe less, but the NYPD was already there. He heard a bullet whistle past his ear and he ducked down. He pulled off a backpack and unzipped it. Inside was a red gas canister. He poured
the gasoline all over himself and around the roof of the truck. As he stood, holding the fuel can above his head with gas dripping all over him, he heard a few more shots ring out. One rushed past his head. The next impacted him directly in his neck. The third cut through his sweater. But it did more than that—it ignited Abdel completely.

  He couldn’t even bring himself to scream out the words the alim would have wanted him to say as the flames grew. Not because he couldn’t, but because he didn’t want to. He didn’t care. He’d accomplished everything that had been asked of him. He’d completed his mission. He was on the ice-skating rink in Bryant Park’s Winter Village, wasn’t he? No one would ever forget about him. They’d all know his name. They’d know his face. Abdel Hayat was no longer anonymous, and, best of all, he’d no longer be unhappy. Of course, he’d be dead. But for him, the absolute nothingness of death was better than the total awareness of the emptiness of life.

  Abdel’s body burned bright atop the truck, like a macabre Christmas ornament turning the holiday completely on its head. Now the people around the edges of the park just watched him burn—those not attempting to provide first aid to injured and dying civilians who had been in the path of the truck. The blaze was excruciatingly hot, as Abdel had poured a copious volume of gasoline over everything. His supernova of a body soon melted through the top of the truck as the fire spread. The flames ripped down the sides of the truck and began to consume the vehicle. Uniformed police officers, multiplying exponentially as the seconds ticked by, slowly approached the melting mass. Sirens could be heard, ringing from all directions. Help was coming. But no one was quite sure what to do . . .

  And no one knew that Abdel had planned a final assault on the optimism of humanity, and this city, and it sat placidly inside the truck for about ten more seconds while the flames worked their way towards it. The load was six keg-sized plastic containers, brimming with combustible liquid chemicals, and daisy-chained to one another. The bombs exploded in a gargantuan and fiery blast of pure evil, and Bryant Park’s skating rink fragmented into a million razor-sharp icicles, which pelted all four sides of the block and every person standing in their path like sleet from Hell.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “WILL YOU MARRY ME?” DETECTIVE Jake Rivett asked on bended knee.

  Eighteen months prior, Rivett wouldn’t have been able to imagine having a girlfriend, let alone a wife. But Mona Rosas was everything he’d never known he needed and much, much more. Now here they were—staring over a glowing Manhattan out of the diagonally slanted Art Deco windows in the observatory of the Chrysler Building. He had one knee on the floor and was looking up at his future. And she was saying . . .

  “Yes!”

  Jake Rivett had lived his entire life fighting crime and living in grime. To have known Rivett only a few years ago was to know a man unmoored from the rules of civil society. It’s not that he wasn’t a good man. He was. He had been a cop for close to a decade, after all. But Rivett had never felt fulfilled by living the way the rest of the cops and detectives on the force did. Whenever Jake had tried to fit in, he’d lost. And when he’d been forced to fit in, he’d also lost. It made him dislike the stable neutral zone of conventional life. That’s why he drove a Ducati through the city every night, instead of a pre-owned BMW or minivan in New Jersey. He felt more at home in dive bars filled with rough-and-tumbles than the gentrified local cop pubs. He had stayed undercover for years, refusing to take any promotions to desk jobs and watching as his friend Tony Villalon leapfrogged way past him and up the ladder. Ah, the career ladder. Jake hated the politics of the ladder. He didn’t think a man or woman’s purpose in life should have anything to do with internal posturing. His purpose in life was to make the world a better place by removing bad guys from it. Ironically, this very mindset had catapulted Jake full circle into a world of publicly celebrated success. He was a known entity. He’d been in the news many times. His success as a detective had gone from brief write-ups on internet crime blotters to local news until he’d finally appeared on CNN. The anchor had even brought up Jake’s hobby as the lead singer of a screamo band. Due to the publicity, as well as Mona, Jake had finally taken a more conventional job within the Major Crimes division of the NYPD. And although he didn’t crack every single case, he still maintained the lowest ratio of unsolved cases of any detective. Everyone who mattered knew this, and it was one of the reasons that the hardest cases were thrown at him by the chief of police, Susan Herlihy. Jake believed she was secretly just trying to bring him down to size, but nothing had stumped him recently. There was only one issue with Jake’s success—life was fantastic and it scared him. He was posting big wins all the way from work to his love life and back again. While this would thrill most people, it made Jake tense. That’s because discord was Jake’s great motivator. Ever since he was a little kid, conflict had pushed him to keep reaching for his goals. As he stared up at Mona’s excited face, Jake wondered what he was going to do if things became too good.

  “Yes. I will, Jake! Oh my god!” Mona was ecstatic and also a bit shocked. She stared at the diamond ring that Jake was sliding onto her finger. After he’d placed it on, they embraced.

  “Did you tell my sister first?” Mona finally asked.

  “Of course I did. Adriana just wanted to know why I’d waited so long . . .”

  “She didn’t hear that from me. No way . . .”

  “Sure.” Jake chuckled.

  In a way, she was joking. But in another, he knew she wasn’t. Mona certainly wasn’t a conventional chick in any sense of the word. That’s probably why they were so good for each other. They were similar because they both felt more comfortable at the margins of society. After all, they’d met at an illegal rave inside an abandoned warehouse in Red Hook. She hadn’t pressured him about marriage. They had barely talked about it. But it was exactly like Jake to take a risk on a proposal without any assurances.

  “Did you really get permission for us to be up here?” Mona asked.

  “Permission, or, official police business. One or the other,” Jake said with a grin. “But that’s what you want to know? What about the ring?”

  “I love this ring. It’s . . . insane. But I don’t need it. Don’t spend too much money on me, Jake. We might need it later.”

  “C’mon, I literally have nothing to spend money on. What do you think I’m gonna do? Buy some clothes?” Jake replied.

  Rivett specialized in ascetic simplicity. His clothes were old and black. He’d never owned a car. His personal belongings could be packed up into a backpack—at least before he’d met Mona. Remarkably, the whole “not trying” ensemble gave him a uniquely trendy look.

  “Well, you actually could consider that . . .” Mona started up before changing gears again. “Holy crap. We’re gonna get married!”

  Mona jumped for joy. It made Jake incredibly happy to know he’d found her. This was the woman he was going to spend the rest of his life with and that was no joke. To know Jake Rivett was to know that his word was his bond. Yeah, he could be moody. He could be downright impossible. But when he went down on one knee, that meant a choice had been made and he would stubbornly stick with it forever. He was just like his father in that way, as much as he hated the bastard.

  “So . . . when?” Mona asked with a smile.

  “Whenever you want, babe. I’ll hit the courthouse tomorrow.”

  “Let me think about it,” Mona said. “But if we have a wedding, I’m not wearing a white dress.”

  “And I’m not wearing a suit.”

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way,” Mona replied. “So are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “What’s that?”

  “We gotta get the heck out of here so we can go home and—”

  Ring. Riiing. Riiiiiing.

  It was at that very moment that Jake’s cell phone started to ring. He took one look at it, and his face dropped.

  “Who is it?” Mona asked.

  “It was Tony,” Jake said
. He began to read a text message, also from Tony.

  “Tell him to get in line. Just this once. Please?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  Jake’s disappointed face had turned to utter horror. He suddenly looked up and raced towards the closest window of the observatory. He gazed down at the city streets below. Bryant Park was only four blocks away from the Chrysler Building. He could make out a wonderland of emergency lights and hear a growing cacophony of sirens. Without pause, he grabbed Mona’s hand and sprinted towards the elevator.

  “You have to go home. Immediately. Promise me you will?” Jake finally said.

  “What happened?”

  “Some guy just blew the hell out of Bryant Park.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “When will you be back?” Mona asked.

  “Don’t know. But with any luck, this is the end, not the beginning.”

  “And what if it’s the beginning?”

  “Then you know me . . . I’ll be there when it ends.”

  “I know you will,” Mona replied with a resigned look on her face. Then she glanced at the new bling on her finger and, at least for one small second, seemed to forget that her fiancé was about to do what he did best and jump into the center of the ring of fire.

  ▪

  By the time Jake arrived at Bryant Park, a massive police cordon had been set up and was being guarded zealously by blues of all stripe. Forty-Second Street, on the north end of the park, was being used as a giant triage center with only ambulances allowed through at a steady clip. Jake approached a police officer guarding the crossing at Sixth Avenue and Forty-Second and flashed his badge.