Terror Machine Read online

  Every once in a while, Katinka was able to focus on the work at hand. She wasn’t running her own brand-spanking-new lab at a biotechnology startup as she thought she would be. But she still had to pay the bills, namely the rent and the internet, not necessarily in that order. She had a therapy session scheduled in twenty minutes, fifty bucks for forty-five minutes, and she didn’t want to miss it like the other three she’d forgotten that week.

  However, Katinka was still distracted by the television. Blasted all over the airwaves and the internet for the last few days had been headlines about the Bryant Park massacre. She only knew what was reported but couldn’t turn her head away. The police had nothing, or at least they weren’t releasing any information. CNN reporters stood outside of One Police Plaza asking questions, and none of the grim faces that emerged had any answers. One of them, wearing black leather from head to toe, simply stared coldly at the camera and didn’t respond while reporters blasted him. As the man walked away, the CNN reporter turned back to the camera. “I believe that is NYPD Detective Jake Rivett, himself no stranger to controversy. You heard it from him and others. Or, rather, you didn’t hear. The police are being very, very tight lipped right now. Meanwhile, the President of the United States has promised another update to the nation . . .”

  Katinka scrambled to find a piece of paper on her small desk. Unable to locate one, she grabbed an old unopened bill and flipped the envelope to the back where she wrote down Rivett’s name.

  “Jake Rivett. Detective Jake Rivett,” she said out loud.

  She had a habit—some of her family members might call it an obsession—of writing down the names of people and things she wanted to investigate further. The license plates and descriptions of cars parked outside her apartment were one favorite. Another was obscure individuals referenced in articles she read online. Katinka herself had become quite the investigator. It had begun with the fire that had engulfed the lab at Penn State. The fire wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t started the fire, no matter what the school administrators thought. Her former mentor was definitely responsible. That much she was sure of. She couldn’t prove it, though—not yet. But she wasn’t done trying.

  After the depressing update about the Bryant Park massacre, Katinka mindlessly began her daily web browsing routine, something that she would repeat hundreds of times per day. Clicking begets clicking. She started with the regular news sites, where she would get her fill of daily news. Then she would move down the ladder, to obscure video sites like VidLeak and her favorite psychology and nanotechnology blogs. Down in the rabbit holes of these online worlds were where she felt most comfortable. She was an active commentator.

  When she saw the top post on the front page of VidLeak, a compilation of underground videos one would never find on YouTube, Katinka was startled. A new video of Abdel Hayat had just been posted four minutes prior. It was titled “NEWLY RELEASED VIDEO OF TERROR SUSPECT-WHAT IS HE DOING?”

  Katinka quickly read the caption underneath the video. Apparently, the terror suspect had stopped at a 7-Eleven for breakfast on the morning of the attack. One of the employees at the store had gotten his or her hands on the video and uploaded it to the internet, bypassing the authorities completely. Katinka couldn’t stop herself. She hit play.

  Hayat was dressed well, in crisp slacks and a polo shirt. He wandered through the store, ostensibly looking for something to eat. He poured himself a cup of coffee, took a sip, and then left it sitting on the coffee stand. That was when the cashier began to take an interest, moving from behind his register and beginning to shadow Hayat. Hayat paced down another aisle of the store before grabbing a bag of chips, which he immediately opened and began to eat. The cashier spoke and the audio was clear as day.

  “Are you planning on paying for that? What about the coffee?” the cashier asked.

  “No,” Hayat said quietly under his breath.

  “Then you need to leave my store.”

  “What’s your mission?” Hayat asked the cashier.

  “To get you to stop shoplifting.”

  “I know my mission,” Hayat said. “I will drive to the center of Bryant Park.”

  “That’s great, man. But you gotta go.”

  “I’m going to leave. I’m going to leave. I’m going to leave.” Hayat repeated the same phrase three times, and then he truly began to rant, his voice growing deeper and stranger as he did, until it took on an almost otherworldly tone. “Say it with me. I’m going to leave. Say it with me one more time . . .”

  “Whaddya mean? No way. What’s wrong with you?” replied the cashier.

  “I’m going to leave. I’m going to leave anyway. I’m going to leave anyway. Say it with me. You’re going to leave anyway. You’re going to leave anyway. You’re going to leave anyway. Say it with me. Three times. I know my mission. I will drive to the center of Bryant Park. I will drive to the center of Bryant Park. I will drive to the center of Bryant Park.” Now Hayat was screaming, his face caught up in muscular spasms as he spat angrily at the cashier, who was amazingly holding his ground. “Say it with me!”

  “Get out!” the cashier screamed back.

  Katinka was stunned. The hairs on her arms stood up, and she felt a deep anxiety race through her body. There were many possible disorders that might cause a man to act like this. She didn’t doubt that once the FBI saw this video, they would be investigating Hayat from numerous mental-health angles. But Katinka knew, deep down inside, that there was only one reason for Hayat’s behavior. Her proof had nothing to do with him being a terrorist, his unstable performance in the convenience store, or even most of the words he muttered.

  “Say it with me. Three times,” she muttered under her breath. Say it with me. Three times. Those words—random connectors—were what scared her the most. Because she’d heard those words before. Many, many times. She’d helped develop the taxonomy behind those words. They were not meaningless. They were the key to everything.

  Katinka scrambled to open up her video-editing application. She wasn’t great at shooting and editing, but she knew enough to get around. She’d done it many times in the past. Thirty minutes had passed by that point, and she was well aware that she would miss her appointment with her therapy client. Her client could wait. This could not. She began recording into her webcam.

  “This is Katinka Johanssen speaking.” She paused dramatically. “I just saw the Abdel Hayat video—the one in the Seven-Eleven. I need to get this out right away, because there may not be very much time. The armchair psychologists will have a field day with this evidence. They will pick all the most obscure diagnoses out of the DSM they can muster, but I know what he’s displaying has nothing to do with mental illness. Hayat might have a few screws loose, but I know who was turning them. Dr. Maximilian Borin is responsible for what you see. All you have to do is watch the video. First, one must examine the subject’s intonation. Can you hear it? Go watch the video on VidLeak and then come back here. He is not repeating his own thoughts. Those are not his words. Those are not his ideas. The things coming out of his mouth are programmed. I will say it once, loud and clear. Abdel Hayat was brainwashed. He was conditioned. Abdel Hayat was brainwashed by Maximilian Borin. Say it with me. He has been brainwashed. Say it with me. You’ll see . . .” Katinka kept speaking before eventually trailing off and staring out the window for a full twenty seconds before she realized that she was still recording. She stopped the recording and saved the video file as “THE TRUTH ABOUT BRYANT PARK.”

  Katinka logged into her own personal video channel on VidLeak. All of the past videos that she’d uploaded were there, along with their view counts. She had posted about twenty-five videos over the last year, all with sensational all-caps titles like “MAXIMILIAN BORIN IS EVIL,” “I WILL NOW EXPOSE DOCTOR MAX BORIN,” and “PSYCHO PSYCHOLOGIST, MAXIMILIAN BORIN.” Her most-watched video had nine views.

  Katinka uploaded her new video. Then she stared down at the name she’d written on the envelope earlier: Detective J
ake Rivett. She loaded a new tab in her browser and searched for Jake’s name.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE CRIMES OF THE BOSSONOV family were exposed on video—the footage that Jake had recovered from the back of Roschin’s car was voluminous.

  The whole joint task force was back inside the command center at One Police Plaza. A dozen analysts, led by Rivett, had spent the entire night scrubbing through thousands of hours of footage. Thanks to the hard drives the Bossonovs had invested in, the authorities had close to a months worth of activity to work with. The results were clear. A majority of the video was incredibly boring. But for every hundred hours of mundane tow and rental truck servicing and leasing, there were fifteen minutes of prime criminal activity. Roschin seemed to specialize in the Photoshop work—printing fake titles and forging signatures. Petrov was better with his hands. He took care of replacing VIN tags, altering mileage, and, in one particularly important clip, painting and glazing license plates. The whole enterprise was relatively mundane. The Bossonovs were essentially operating an anti-DMV for a whole dark and shadowy part of the economy that most people don’t know exists. But it was crystal clear here, thanks to the high-resolution video system they had chosen to put in. It never ceased to amaze Jake how eager some criminals were to immortalize their own misdeeds with surveillance cameras. But that was the nature of being an organized criminal—if you’re a robber, you’re more likely to get robbed.

  “Petrov Bossonov personally did the work on Abdel Hayat’s license plate,” Jake announced while the footage played behind him. “He’s the one that doesn’t speak English—or at least he doesn’t let on if he can. Has his brother do all the talking. But for what he lacks in speech, he makes up in craft. The man is meticulous, frankly. First, he’s refashioned a metal stamping machine to flatten the number or numbers he wants to alter. Then, after taping a stencil to the plate, he uses another machine to extrude new numbers. Finally, he sands everything down just a little bit before painting, adding an epoxy finish, and finishing with a dirt sand.”

  Rivett was speaking to the entire task force, most of whom had only arrived in the last hour. He gazed past Tony and Fong to Susan and Pete Mack and, of course, the inimitable Mr. White and his right-hand man, Moseley.

  “So where’s Hayat in the video?” Susan asked.

  “Funny you should ask . . .”

  Rivett waved to Tony, who loaded a new file and hit play.

  “It was the camera in Axel’s office that we were really interested in. On the morning of the Bryant Park bombing, it was running, for sure. We all expected to see Hayat retrieve the truck that morning. Problem is . . .”

  The surveillance video showed the elder Bossonov sitting by himself and fiddling with his computer before the glass door to his office opened and a man walked in.

  “A man walked in to pick up the truck,” Jake said. “That man wasn’t Abdel Hayat.”

  “What the fuck?” Susan glanced at Pete Mack, who was locked in on the surveillance footage.

  Onscreen was a white man, seemingly in his late fifties or early sixties. He was tall, with a huge mop of curly hair that had gone halfway grey. The man wore slacks and, strangely, what appeared to be a long white lab coat. Even though there was no audio, the man seemed like a chatterbox. He kept grinning and gesticulating with his hands as he and Axel talked. Axel picked up his telephone, quickly spoke, and then hung up. Finally the two men walked outside, and only the bottom portion of their legs and feet were visible on the video while they waited for the truck to pull up.

  “Who’s Einstein?” Mr. White asked.

  “This is outrageous . . .” Pete Mack said.

  The joint task force watched the screen in shocked silence. The problem wasn’t necessarily that they weren’t looking at Hayat. But the man they saw was nothing like the profile they’d been building of Hayat’s cell. The more they learned, the more concerned they became.

  “I don’t think I gotta tell you this, Agent Mack,” Jake said, “but a very weird looking white guy picked up our truck.”

  “He looks like my unemployed neighbor who mows his lawn four times a week with a weedwacker,” Mr. White said from the back of the room. “Not a terrorist—a nothing. And that . . . scares the shit out of me.”

  Pete Mack jumped into action. “Start the facial recognition algos cracking. Get the best face scans you can from the video here, and get his image to absolutely everyone and anyone—Google, Facebook, Twitter, local newspapers, everything. I’ll make sure NSA gets it, too. Sheldon, can your boys do something with this?”

  “Done,” Mr. White answered. “We’ll pump it internationally through Interpol and then personally call our partner agencies. DHS should have it, too. We’ll tell them to run it through every passport photo in the last ten years. If he traveled, we might be able to get him. My guess is he’s an American. Looks like a doctor or pharmacist,” Mr. White said.

  “Thinks he’s one, at least,” Jake added.

  “Beyond all.” Pete Mack stood next to the monitor and rapped his knuckle on the screen. “Einstein is our number-one lead and our number-one person of interest right now. Everyone in this room get on the horn with your people. We must find Einstein.”

  “Agent Mack,” Jake said. “You gotta let me go talk to the Bossonovs. I have a way with them . . .”

  “They’re in custody. My people are doing that as we speak,” Pete Mack answered.

  “Your people aren’t me.”

  “Rivett, you need a break, not a new interrogation,” Susan added.

  “I don’t take breaks.”

  “Kid, if it weren’t for this being what it is, you’d be on a permanent desk break for six months with what I heard you did there at the lot yesterday,” Pete Mack said.

  Rivett flinched. His muscles contracted ever so slightly. Pete Mack was doing the thing he hated most of all. He was doubting Jake. Sitting next to Jake, Tony lightly placed his hand over Jake’s arm to try to calm him down. Jake reacted badly, elbowing Tony angrily and standing up.

  “Don’t speak to me like that, Mack.”

  “Your request is to talk to the Bossonovs, yeah?” Pete Mack began. “The same guys you assaulted with your crowbar? Are you so stupid, so bereft of all due process, that you don’t realize their lawyers can already use that against us? Your goddamn crowbar might’ve wiped ten years off their sentence. If you want to get tough with me, you’re welcome to. I’ll meet you outside. Then after we’re done, no matter who wins, you’ll never step into this room again. I’ll make sure of that. So are you ready to go, or what?”

  Jake took a deep breath. In the past, he might have reacted differently. But instead of doing what he was practiced at—escalate, up the ante, lash out—he thought about what Mona would tell him to do.

  He shut his damn mouth and he sat down.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THANKFULLY, SHE WAS STILL WEARING the ring. Jake had barely spoken to Mona since two days earlier, when his proposal was punctuated by the horror of Bryant Park. As he entered their new apartment in Williamsburg, waves of emotion poured out of Mona. She ran towards Jake and jumped into his arms. They embraced.

  “Are you okay? I didn’t expect you back . . .”

  “I’m fine,” Jake nodded. “It got a little heated, and they told me to take the afternoon . . .”

  “Oh, so you pulled a Jake Rivett.”

  “Hard not to be myself,” Jake said as he grinned.

  “If you cooled off a little, you might accomplish more.”

  “I’m passionate. It’s what makes me tick.”

  “I’d put it differently,” Mona said. “I’d say it’s what made you. Doesn’t have to be you. So what’s going on? Are we getting them?”

  “It’s complicated,” Jake said.

  “Always is . . .”

  “I’m telling you . . .” Jake shook his head. “This one’s intense, Mona. Guy is like some ghost terrorist out of a movie, and we know he’s got at least one person he’s w
orking with—an old white. Breaks the mold completely. It’s gonna be a real puzzle.”

  “More attacks?” Mona asked.

  “I don’t know.” Jake paused thoughtfully. “And that’s what’s been eating at me.”

  “Speaking of which, let’s do just that. I was making some pasta. There’s enough for both of us.”

  Mona pulled the pasta off the stove, drained it, and quickly mixed in some tomato sauce she’d been heating up. The two of them sat down at the kitchen table. Although they loved their new place, Jake and Mona lived in New York. That meant their apartment wasn’t huge. In fact, it was tiny. The “kitchen table” was about the size of some people’s bedside tables. There was just enough room for the two of them, with Jake’s back pushed against a wall and his knees scraping the bottom of the table. On the wall above their table was a corkboard with important mail and bills. Mona had also pinned up a few photographs of the two of them, one with her co-workers at her graphic-design job, and one featuring Jake with his band, Mythics.

  Jake was a fantastic detective, but he was also a great singer. To Jake, Mythics was nothing more than a hobby. However, the rest of the band thought Mythics could be something. There was evidence, too. They had been approached by agents and labels multiple times. But Jake had remained steadfast in his refusal to commercialize the band. That created a strange duality where they didn’t perform all that often but had an avid underground fan base. Schaub, the drummer, set up their few performances per year. The shows were always at local establishments in the city, usually in the East Village or Brooklyn. Schaub did everything else, too. He was the one who updated their social media, uploaded songs to the streaming services, and coordinated all of their practices. Jake knew that Schaub wanted to expand Mythics and that he was the reason they couldn’t. But what Jake loved about Mythics wasn’t the music or the camaraderie, although he respected and enjoyed both. Ironically, what he loved the most about singing was that it helped him relax. And for a guy like Jake, that meant a lot.