Terror Machine

by Denison Hatch

  “Sir! Not another step,” the officer said.

  Jake turned back to see the officer holding a straight-up machine gun with the muzzle aimed directly at him.

  “Whoa, cowboy,” Jake started up.

  “Need to verify your identification,” the officer demanded.

  “How many dead?” Jake asked as he handed over his NYPD detective identification.

  “Dunno. All I got is we’re at top-level alert. DHS raised to severe, and there’s feds pouring into Fifth, where command is . . .”

  The man glanced at Jake’s badge and then quickly back up at Jake. The cop was surprised, and Jake knew exactly why. It wasn’t that this well-intentioned cop couldn’t see he was staring at the same face in the picture. Jake’s baby-blue eyes were distinctive and piercing. It was clear that he was a member of NYPD’s large detective corps. But the Jake Rivett on his ID no longer existed. The Rivett in the picture had short hair, close to a buzz but ever-so-slightly parted on the right side of his scalp, with well-proportioned shoulders tucked neatly into a dark blue uniform. The photograph had been taken years before. Now, Jake Rivett’s blue eyes peered out from a face that was almost gaunt. He was much skinnier. His hair was grown out to shoulder length and was casually tied behind him. He had gone about two weeks since his last shave. He wore all black, from the boots to the black dress shirt buttoned up to the neck. A shiny black leather jacket finished off the ensemble.

  “Detective . . .” the cop stammered.

  “Rivett.”

  “Right. Yes, sir.” The cop handed Jake’s ID back and lowered his gun. “Sorry ’bout that. At the other entrance you’ll have a faster go-through.”

  “You know if Tony Villalon is here?”

  “Don’t know him. Chief Herlihy is.”

  “Can’t miss her.”

  “Ya sure can’t,” the cop replied.

  Jake proceeded past the cordon and paced up Sixth Avenue.

  “Hey, Rivett?” It was the cop again. “Ain’t you the guy who climbed the Statue of Liberty?”

  “Uncorroborated,” Jake answered with a slim grin.

  “It’s an honor, bro.”

  “Thanks.”

  As Jake gazed to his left at Bryant Park on his way to the command center, the flurry of activity had turned into an avalanche. Thirty-three now, Jake was a junior in high school when 9/11 occurred. He had only seen anything like this in archival footage. The chaos was almost overwhelming—a panic attack in and of itself. Every single city, state and federal emergency responder that one could imagine had descended upon the park. A true human wall of SWAT operators in full tactical gear guarded the site. Across the way, he noticed that the triage tents were filling up with doctors and EMTs. On the blacktop of Sixth Avenue were a few large groups of civilians, being debriefed by what appeared to be a handful of FBI agents. But it was the center of the park, the now-melted ice rink, that drew most of Jake’s attention.

  The heaping mass of metal that was formerly the truck resembled a fire pit on steroids. The middle of the pile still burned red hot with thick coagulated embers. Firefighters were assembled to tend to the mess but were not quickly extinguishing the scene. At first he thought they didn’t want to wash away any evidence, but then Jake realized that a chemical accelerant must have been suspected. Most of the booths surrounding the ice-skating rink and the Christmas market were pockmarked with shrapnel from the explosion. Thirty percent of the windows on the back of the library, which sat on the east side of the park, were blown out. It looked as though a bomb had gone off because it had. But it was worse than that. The scene was primordial, not from modern day. In fact, it looked as if a volcano had erupted in the center of Manhattan.

  ▪

  Susan Herlihy thought the same. Susan had only been Chief of Police for about twelve months, having replaced Tom Marks during the administrative upheaval that resulted when the prior mayor, Ronald Berg, suddenly and unexpectedly resigned. Susan was notable for many reasons. The most public fact about Susan was that she was the first woman to serve as chief in New York’s history. The newspapers and blogs had reported this fact with gusto, but sometimes the reporting had an undertone of the department “embracing diversity” as if Susan wasn’t there out of merit alone. The truth was that Susan wasn’t there simply due to merit, but her gender had nothing to do with it—far from it. The reason Susan Herlihy was chief was that she was an absolute wrecking ball of determination and personality tucked into a pint-size body. She reminded Jake of a female Napoleon, standing there addressing her troops, hands on her hips and high heels scraping across the pavement with no wobble at all.

  Jake arrived towards the end of her speech.

  “. . . Mayor’s going to be coming to us as the nexus of intelligence.” Susan glanced at her phone. “And I’ve got to talk to him and the FBI super, Pete Mack, in twelve minutes. Nobody’s sleeping. There are no holiday parties. There is no shopping. There is only this.” She paused for a moment. “I want the departments to link up. Hey, Fong? You and tech need to move to wherever the feds set up their signal room. Most likely down at Foley Square. Link with antiterror and intelligence. Markle and SWAT need a voice in that room as well.”

  “Who’s pulling city cams?” were the first words out of Jake’s mouth.

  “Down at Real Time Crime Center,” Susan replied. “A compilation is being put together. We’ve already streamed a bunch of it. One big box truck, all white. Comes in on the Queens-Midtown and just heads right up to Forty-Second Street and over. It’s less than eight blocks . . .”

  “One guy?”

  “Looks like it. We’re combing through the clips now for more . . . no ID yet. Rivett, where’s Tony?”

  “I’m not his keeper.”

  “That’s clear. When you find him you tell him to call me. You, Tony, and Major Crimes are on this. Every-fucking-body is on this, but I need my own eyes and ears, and that’s gotta be you two. Understood?”

  “Got it, boss,” Rivett said.

  “Counterterror is always slow as goddamn molasses. Think they are a bunch of scientists. Right now we need old-fashioned gumshoe shit happening and triple timed—super, super fast. So go hit the detectives up. Figure out what we know about the truck. Work it backwards through registration, grab video . . . Find me an address. That should keep ya busy for a couple hours. I’ll let you know what Mack and the FBI want after my meeting.”

  “Suse—”

  “Chief,” she corrected Jake.

  “Chief, why is it that the more senior you get in the force, the more you sound like you’re from Long Island?”

  “You think nowsa time for a joke, Rivett?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Get your game face on, people. I ain’t sugar coating when I tell you the whole world changed tonight.”

  ▪

  Jake could see a group of detectives huddled together underneath a tent about fifteen feet away—some of his colleagues from Major Crimes, a half floor of the downtown boys from the office, and a whole bunch he didn’t know at all. Before heading over, he paced through the crime scene.

  The carnage was simply overpowering. Even for a man with a stomach like Jake’s. He was used to darkness, and he was a pragmatist. He knew very well the world he lived and worked in. But that didn’t make it any easier to stare at pools of blood and body parts. All Jake knew was that he needed to absorb what had happened in order to understand it. He continued walking through Bryant Park, a lone man operating against the current. The current itself was about forty-five individuals from the evidence department—“CSI” as they were colloquially known—all wearing white coveralls and canvassing the scene for evidence. Each technician was responsible for combing a three-foot radius. Rivett walked right through them—upriver, as it were.

  Amidst all the earthen colors, he could have sworn he’d seen a flash of blue. But when he was standing above the spot he’d identified, there was nothing there. Rivett turned and continued scanning. That’s when he f
elt it under his foot. There was something hard embedded in the wet grass. He stopped and addressed the closest crime-scene technician.

  “You guys covered this, right?” Rivett yelled.

  One of the technicians turned and replied, “Yes, sir!”

  “So I can put hands on it over here?”

  “With gloves, detective!”

  Rivett did as he was told. He snapped on a pair of latex gloves before he went digging. Whatever the item was, he felt the earth around it stubbornly resisting at first. He kept digging, and his fingertips grasped the item, which was almost entirely buried six inches under the soil. Jake was finally able to expose a sharp corner of the object. It was a piece of aluminum. Jake worked the dirt on both sides of the aluminum with his fingers, exposing the item millimeter by millimeter. Eventually he created enough leverage to pull the metal chunk out of the ground. He flipped it around in his hands and immediately noticed the familiar white-and-blue bordering of a New York State license plate.

  “Hey, who’s got a bag?” Rivett yelled to the detectives ahead. Hearing Rivett’s voice, Tony Villalon perked up and moved out of the huddle. He saw Rivett holding the license-plate shard and quickly jogged over to him with an evidence bag.

  “What you got there, Rivett?” As Tony neared Rivett, he exclaimed, “No shit! A plate?”

  “Think so . . . A piece of it. From the truck?”

  “They’re gonna wanna see this right away. Come on!”

  Inside the detective huddle, a laptop had been placed atop a small folding table, and a streaming video program was pulled up. Dennis Fong—Major Crimes’ tech guru—was already working through footage that had been pulled and sent over from the Real Time Crime Center, a networked command center that NYPD had set up in years prior for instantaneous responses to events such as these. While the RTCC wasn’t as spectacularly accomplished as its name might signify, they had a lock on the various city surveillance systems that were set up around Manhattan. Their computers sucked in video footage from almost every municipal, state, and federal camera in the city. Just an hour or two after the explosion, RTCC had already edited a montage of the white box truck as it traversed into Manhattan and towards Bryant Park. The truck had first been picked up on video driving through the Queens-Midtown tunnel, indicating that perhaps it had come from the east. But Jake knew one could never trust first impressions. What was more remarkable, however, was it seemed as though Jake was in fact holding a piece of the box truck’s license plate. Rivett’s shard, now in an evidence bag, consisted of the last two numbers on the right side of the plate. As he and Tony crowded over the piece, they confirmed that its numbers matched the two numbers on the video of the truck.

  “Here’s the problem,” Fong remarked in his generally deadpan voice. Fong held his cell phone up for Rivett and Tony to view. On the screen was a very clear picture of another truck with the exact same license plate number.

  “Where’d that picture come from?” Rivett asked.

  “Got it five minutes ago. Plate is registered. There was an address. And there is a truck, currently parked inside a moving company’s parking lot in Queens, with the exact same license-plate as the one that seems to have blown up our park . . .”

  “It’s legit?”

  “Hundred percent,” Fong replied. “Which means that our plate here, is—”

  “A fake,” Tony answered.

  “It’s a . . . something,” Jake said.

  “Shitburgers,” said Tony.

  “Indeed,” replied Fong.

  “So we don’t have a bead on whose truck this is . . .” Jake said.

  “Well, RTCC’s still working on getting more footage out of Brooklyn and Queens. And, look, we’ll track the route in the morning and see if we can pull video from any other restaurants or stores. We definitely should be able to build backwards and figure out where the truck came from. Just might take a little time,” Fong said.

  “Back up a sec,” Rivett broke in. “Fake plate’s a huge deal. First of all, you gotta create it. That ain’t an easy trick. Or you buy it. But those sellers are hard to come by. Why does a terrorist make a plan to use a fake plate?”

  “To hide their tracks . . .” Tony said.

  “But is that what terrorists do?” Jake asked. “Hide their tracks?”

  “Only if they’re protecting something,” Fong replied.

  “Right,” added Tony.

  “And it’s not just the plate, Tony. It’s everything. It’s the size of this. The shrapnel. Chemical explosives. Whole thing is just a fucking nightmare scenario for us, and let’s be honest, ’cause it’s crystal clear.”

  “There’s a cell,” Tony said.

  “There’s a big cell.” Jake nodded.

  “Case is going federal as we speak,” Fong added.

  “I know,” Jake replied. “We’re about to become real little guys on the totem pole.” Jake held the license plate inside the evidence bag in his hands. He turned it under a spotlight in their tent. “Hey, Fong. Got anything sharp on you?”

  Fong pulled a razor blade from his pocket.

  “Rivett! You can’t do that . . .”

  “Tell that to all the people that died here today, Tony.”

  “But if you break the seal of the evidence bag—”

  “Get me a new bag.” Jake didn’t wait for permission. With a swipe, he ripped the bag open. But he wasn’t done. Once the license plate shard was accessible, Jake held it just inches from his eyes.

  “Got another lead . . .” He held the plate out to Fong and Tony, who gazed curiously.

  “What’s the lead?” Fong asked.

  “The three ain’t a three,” Jake replied.

  The final number on the license plate was painted to look like a three. But now that the men were looking closer, they saw what Jake saw. Something was wrong with the three.

  “Last number on the plate—the three. See how there’s an extrusion coming up through the white paint? The plate was painted and glazed over. That three started out life as an eight,” Jake said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  OMER AMIN COULD FEEL THE makeup around his eyes dripping down his face and running across his lips and neck, but he didn’t care. That’s what dance-punk was all about—show up glam and end up however the heck you ended up. No one cared what you looked like at this concert venue, just that you felt something while they were feeling something too. Omer was only seventeen years old, but he’d been going to these gigs for about a year. He understood most of the implicit rules of the scene. You didn’t have to wear an outrageous costume. You didn’t have to wear makeup. You just had to be yourself. But Omer preferred to have his face covered in product. He didn’t want anyone to know who he was, although there was no way he’d be recognized. His hiding was figurative. He wanted to be masked so that he could pretend he was someone else.

  The venue was ExCulture and the band was called Thrasher Disco and they were one of Omer’s favorites. Their music was darkly cinematic but pumped up with rhythm and tempo. It was the type of music that would be chosen for an action sequence in a dark fantasy film—for example, if the hero was escaping from a prison ruled by a dragon. Thrasher Disco had a lead singer, but he didn’t often sing actual lyrics. Every once in a while, there would be a word that repeated itself, and the singer would lean down into the microphone and whisper in a guttural fashion. But, no, mostly the band’s music was all about the way the beat made you feel. What was particularly impressive about Thrasher Disco was the fact that, within a ninety-minute set, there would be periods where the whole crowd transferred from mosh-pit combat to nothing less than a religious wave of rolling and bobbing heads. Most bands picked one or the other and ran with it. Thrasher Disco did both, and well.

  Omer bucked around the dance floor without a care in the world, his sweat-wet hair whipping back and forth in every direction to the rhythm of the music. He would generally cycle into the mosh pit in the center and then out every twenty minutes or so. He’d stand
back to the side, catch his breath, people watch, and jump back in. His favorite pastime was dancing. He didn’t care about the stink, the grime, or the elbows that he’d randomly take on the dance floor. He didn’t need alcohol and had no use for drugs. Dancing gave him everything he needed and more.

  Omer had learned a few tactics in the clubs that kept him safe. Don’t accept drinks from anyone—even water. Buy it in a bottle from behind the ticket booth. Don’t be a hero. If someone was bumping into you too much and you didn’t like it, just move away. And finally, help people if they needed help—ask yourself what you’d want to happen if the same occurred to you. These rules weren’t hard to pick up, and the scene wasn’t particularly lecherous. It was true, however, that ExCulture’s crowd was drawn from absolutely all over the city. It wasn’t creepy, but it was diverse, and sometimes things that were foreign were also scary. The fact of the matter was that Omer was more than capable of taking care of himself. He’d always been that way. Ironically, he’d learned the art of survival from his family. His family. Every single person inside this venue understood Omer’s need to simply be himself. His family, however, did not.

  Sadly, the show was ending. As the lights came on, Omer pulled his cell phone out of his pocket while waiting for the slow-moving crowd to exit the venue. There was a text from his mother.

  “I know you’re at Haseem’s for dinner, but please come back for dessert,” the text read.

  Omer sighed. Now he’d have to rush. But he knew exactly why his mother wanted him home—the terror attack in Manhattan, apparently perpetrated by a Muslim. He’d heard about it just as he’d been walking into the concert a few hours before, but he had managed to block the terrible event from his mind until now. His parents weren’t politically active but they were certainly current-events minded. He’d have to brace himself for their opinions.

  Ahead, Omer’s section of the crowd was finally reaching the stopgap that was the front door. An ExCulture promoter stood to the side, handing out neon-yellow flyers advertising the upcoming week of shows at the venue. Omer grabbed one and jammed it into his pocket without looking at it. He didn’t have time. In fact, if he was going to show up within even a semblance of a reasonable timetable, he’d have to run. He sprinted from the venue and began to race north. He charged along the city streets in northern Brooklyn, headed over the Pulaski Bridge towards the Vernon metro station, and raced down the stairs.