Terror Machine

by Denison Hatch

  Once Hanafi and Dr. Borin were inside the secret passageway, Hanafi sealed them off again. Borin turned on the lights. Track lighting on the ceiling illuminated a large workspace, hidden in an unpermitted space underneath Hanafi’s building. The white room was much cleaner than the rest of the basement. It had a clinical look because that’s what it was—a clinic, run by Dr. Borin. Dr. Borin was already hunched over his computer, gazing at a series of newly outputted reports.

  “Abdel did exactly what was requested of him. Is it not phenomenal?” Dr. Borin asked, unable to conceal the glee running across his face.

  “He didn’t do it at the right time, Max.”

  “The next one will.”

  “There may not be a next one. And if there isn’t, you won’t be able to complete your research.”

  “But Imam—sorry, Hanafi. Hanafi, Abdel is our confirmation. Of everything. It might seem like a failure to you, but this is . . . this is everything I’ve ever worked for, proven, in the flesh.”

  “I think you’ve worked for more than a little lab in a basement. There’s a bigger vision . . .”

  “Right, right . . .”

  “We each care about what matters to us. That’s what makes us such a great team.”

  “I understand what you’re saying. I do,” Dr. Borin said. “I didn’t mean to get so giddy. It’s just . . . I didn’t expect Abdel to break so early. I didn’t expect it to . . . work so well.”

  “It needs to work perfectly, mot just well. Not too early. Not too late. But perfectly,” Hanafi said.

  “And it will,” the doctor replied.

  The two men turned away from the doctor’s computer and rested their eyes on a machine at the end of the laboratory. The machine was the central focus of their lives and partnership. At the center of the machine was an ergonomic office chair that had been bolted to the floor. Four sturdy steel columns stood on each side of the chair, supporting a large white tube, which was suspended in the air and utilized a vertical dolly system that allowed it to be raised and lowered. Behind the chair was a haphazard stack of machinery—the guts of the thing, pieces of custom-manufactured electrical equipment and computers. The technology dated back to Dr. Borin’s time as a graduate student, through his career in the pharmaceutical industry, and eventually his tenures at Penn State and Stony Brook. Connected by all manner of wire and apparatus, the whole machine had a Rube Goldberg quality. It had not been designed for mass production. It was simply made to work.

  “So you won’t even give me a little bit of credit, Mr. Alim-a-man?” Dr. Borin asked Hanafi.

  “We’re definitely onto something.”

  “Thank you. From you, I will take that as a compliment.”

  “No one can call you crazy anymore,” Hanafi added.

  “They were always wrong.”

  The doctor turned back to his computer and started to analyze spectrophotometer results. But that wasn’t the only reason he turned away. He also didn’t want Hanafi to see the tears welling up in his eyes. He was so happy.

  “I’ll be here for a while,” Dr. Borin eventually said.

  ▪

  Hanafi padded down the dark hallway and out of Dr. Borin’s lab, using the remote again to close the door from the outside. He exited the prayer study room, paced through his basement, and then rose up the staircase that led to the restaurant. As he walked through the restaurant, Hanafi pulled out his cell phone. He had an app that streamed footage from Best Diner’s surveillance cameras. On the app, Hanafi could see two young men standing idly by the building’s entrance, silhouetted by street lamps. Hanafi was expecting them. He headed towards the front door.

  “All good?” Hanafi asked once he’d unlocked the door.

  The men all had slightly worried looks on their faces.

  “I think so,” said Darab, a sturdy man with a strong beard.

  “Assalamu alaikum, Darab,” Hanafi said as Darab passed through into the dark restaurant. The other man, Ataullah, entered as well, and Hanafi greeted him in the same way.

  Hanafi turned. “Where’s the last one?”

  Each man shrugged. No one seemed to know. Hanafi gazed back out into the street. It was crucial that everyone showed up that night. If they didn’t, it could mean that everything was over. He could tell that the men were nervous. Even Hanafi was nervous, which was a rare thing indeed. Life’s troubles had always rolled off of Hanafi’s shoulders like raindrops. He had an innate confidence that worked to his advantage. Very little bothered him, and when something did, it was never for long. The possibility of exposure in and of itself wasn’t what worried Hanafi that night. He didn’t think twice about his men’s allegiance. He didn’t care that thousands of men and women across all branches of the US government were searching for any and every shred of information about Abdel Hayat. Hanafi wasn’t afraid of a SWAT team breaking down the door. He knew that day would come. It was just that there was so much more to do, and he didn’t want anyone or anything to stop his forward progress.

  Finally, Hanafi heard two feet pounding down the pavement in front of the restaurant. The final member of the club had arrived.

  “Assalamu alaikum, Murad.”

  “Hello, Alim Hanafi. Sorry I’m late . . . Family stuff.”

  Hanafi wrapped his arm around Murad Amin’s shoulders as he guided him into the restaurant.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  RIVETT DIDN’T HATE CHIEF SUSAN Herlihy, but that didn’t mean he liked her. Unlike the rest of the puppies lapping up her every word in the briefing room, Jake knew it was best to hold Susan at arm’s length. Susan had been a source of great misery for Jake. She’d demoted him. She’d threatened his career on multiple occasions. She was even responsible for blowing his identity once. But she was still the boss, and what had happened at Bryant Park transcended personal feelings. Jake was back at One Police Plaza after a short but merciful night of sleep with his new fiancé, and a joint task force had fully coalesced by the time of the morning briefing. Jake sat at a long table filled with Major Crimes investigators, including Tony and Fong. Multiple divisions of the NYPD were there, as well as the FBI, and in the back row was a serious group of individuals Jake had never seen in his entire life. As Susan introduced a representative from the Real Time Crime Center who was loading their newest montage of surveillance footage, Tony leaned over to Rivett.

  “See those guys in the back?”

  “Sure . . .” Jake said.

  “We hit big time,” Tony replied.

  “Why? Feds?”

  “OGA.”

  OGA stood for Other Government Agency, which was a generic slang nomenclature among the NYPD for any of the federal agencies that stood above the FBI. That meant the men in the back could be CIA, they could be NSA, or they could represent the other sixteen federal intelligence agencies that formed America’s federal security backbone. Jake casually peered over his shoulder at the group. He was struck by their utter normalcy. The agents looked like well-dressed, well-meaning, traveling IT professionals. They didn’t have the macho persona of some of the NYPD detectives, but they were certainly paying attention. Jake immediately recognized a razor-sharp clarity and determination in the OGA agents’ eyes.

  Jake turned back to the briefing, where the RTCC representative was beginning his presentation.

  “We get our first bead on the truck going into Manhattan on the Twenty-First Street entrance to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel,” the rep said. “He does pay the toll, in cash. The cameras at the tollbooths are 1080p, but the encryption is subpar. Sorry for the choppiness. We’ll let the FBI and the profilers talk more about what we see here . . . But it’s fairly clear that our subject is not incredibly stable.”

  On the video, Abdel Hayat seemed to be conducting a haphazard conversation with himself.

  “I will drive to the center of Bryant Park,” Abdel was saying. At first, the tollbooth operator thinks Hayat is asking her a question and she responds, but then he begins to speak over her. He’s not listening. H
e simply repeats the same phrase about Bryant Park over and over again, at least four times, while the operator prepares his change. After the awkward moment, Hayat drives the truck away from the toll and into Manhattan.

  The rep continued speaking. “The rest of his path has been discussed. Our office will continue to widen our net. Obviously, we’re most focused on getting data from Queens and Brooklyn. We’re doing everything—canvassing, talking to the cloud camera companies to see if we can get all their geolocated imagery. We’ll have another update at four today with at least ten to twenty minutes more footage. Please let me know if you’re not already on the chain from us. Thank you.”

  Susan stood up again in front of the crowd. “I want to mention that we’re doing our best to put the fear of God into any sources who have access to unreleased footage of Hayat. But it’ll get out. Even the tollbooth footage will. I promise you that. There’s also about a million news trucks parked outside the front steps downstairs, in case you’re blind. The public, the press—they’re all going to be on this like nothing else matters. Because it doesn’t. Let’s be clear. This is the largest terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11, so the microscope is on us and the zoom is way up high . . . Be prepared for it. Assistant Director Mack, talk to us.”

  Pete Mack, head of the FBI’s New York City office, stood. Mack was an impressive man, broad shouldered and bald headed. If Rivett was the opposite of what a detective should look like, Mack was out of central casting. Mack was probably the most connected individual in the room. He knew everyone, all the way from Susan to the feds in the back. He had once been an NYPD detective, but was recruited by the FBI about fifteen years prior and had quickly risen up the ranks. As a man whose name was being whispered for even higher profile jobs, such as the advising of presidents, Pete Mack was well aware that this case would either doom or cement his legend once and for all.

  “First off, my extreme gratitude to my team of analysts. I have a handful of them here with me, but we have literally two hundred people across the street who slept on the floor last night. I mean, they probably didn’t even sleep. We are pulling from absolutely everything we possibly have to create a biography of this guy. Not a huge amount so far, but here’s what we know.” Mack took a deep breath. “Abdel Hayat is, I mean was, twenty-nine years old. We consider that on the slightly older side for a terror event such as this, but not alarmingly so. He was born in Pakistan in 1990, immigrated to the United States with his parents and younger sister in 1993. Father had a valid work visa and managerial job in IT, which eventually became a green card and then citizenship for the entire family. Father, mother, and sister are all still alive and living in Michigan. From everything we can tell, they are law-abiding citizens who have been expressing anger at what has happened. They told us last night that they hadn’t seen Hayat in about four years. Hayat had behavioral issues which may be the result of an undiagnosed mental illness. From what his family related, he never talked to himself like he’s doing in our tollbooth video. He wasn’t necessarily psychotic, but in the years that they knew him, he was prone to angry outbursts and stubborn idealism. After high school, he wandered around the Midwest and would see his family once or twice a year. Eventually he told them he was moving to New York—said he had a job lined up at a restaurant. He moved. They do not know the name of the restaurant, nor did they have any of his contact info. He continues to call them for about a year, and then the calls stop. They report that it had been three years since they’d spoken to him, and our filtering of their phone and electronic records so far indicate that’s true. We’re still working on verification, though. Once Hayat arrives in New York, we begin to lose any record of him. He stops filing taxes, and his credit report shows no new accounts or addresses. He does not get a New York driver’s license. Any mailing addresses that we do have for him go back to Michigan, usually to his parents’ house. He doesn’t create a Facebook account or seem to use the internet at all. And after disappearing, he suddenly reappeared yesterday . . . and you know the rest of it.” Pete Mack shuffled with slight unease. “Our number one goal right now is to rebuild Hayat’s missing three to four years in New York. Where did he live? Who knew him? Who were his friends? There is no way this man labored by himself to put this bomb together. He was clearly working with others. So there’s a cell. Or a group. Whatever they are, they are organized enough to keep one of their own living in our city without a shred of records, which is saying something in this day and age.”

  “Did he have a phone on him?” one of the feds in the back asked. “Can you track a device using triangulation?”

  “Don’t have an answer to that yet. There’s been no physical evidence recovered that indicates he had a cell phone. Tower reads are being pulled as we speak, timed to the tollbooth appearance. Problem is this is Manhattan. If he were driving down a country road, we’d know if he had a cell phone. We may be dealing with over thirty or forty thousand devices in the five-minute span that we’ve requested. The processing is going to take a while.”

  “Excuse me . . .” Jake spoke from the middle row. “How is this guy able to live so dark in America—in New York, man?”

  The group lost a half beat while Pete Mack tried to locate Jake.

  “I’ve spoken to that . . .”

  “Agent Mack, I understand the literal. I heard what you said. But think about how hard that is, up here . . .” Jake tapped his head. “Not just the fact that most people can’t do it. Most people don’t want to do it,” Jake said. “Does that worry you?”

  “This is Jake Rivett, one of our detectives,” Susan added. “He’s the one who figured out the license plate had been painted over . . .”

  “The plate job was professional,” Jake said. “And I just heard the new plate number came back to a stolen car from over a year ago. So I’ll just say it. I’m sure you all are thinking it. But right now we’ve got a perpetrator who seems like he’s been backstopped by nothing less than a damn intelligence agency. Right? All of it points to some sort of, like, super bad—not normals with jihad on their minds. Not just some regular guys who wanna do mass murder and use the internet to talk to their pals in the Middle East. It’s all a step above all that.”

  “We share your conclusions, Detective Rivett,” Pete Mack replied.

  “Yeah, and finally, forget about where he lived. We still have no idea where this guy even came from on the morning of the attack. That’s the lead we need and we got nothin’. We can’t trace him ten minutes, let alone four years,” Jake added.

  “That’s not entirely true,” a voice announced.

  A man began to speak from the back row of tables. Unlike Susan and Pete Mack, the man didn’t stand. He handed a small flash drive to one of his underlings, who hurried up to the front to load a new file. Within seconds, a video played. High-resolution playback scrolled from the top down over Manhattan, like a live-action version of Google Maps. It took a beat before Jake realized that the video was satellite imagery and it was following a white box truck . . .

  “What you’ll see in this video is Abdel Hayat’s truck driving through Brooklyn about four hours before the bombing. Oh, and I should mention that this technology is classified, but that seems less relevant at the current moment . . .”

  Audible gasps punctuated the crowd.

  “Don’t worry. We weren’t tracking Hayat. He wasn’t on our radar at all. The eyes in the sky aren’t up there all the time. One just happened to be over Manhattan yesterday, which means that we have fourteen hours of to-the-inch footage over a twenty-mile radius. The truck sat in a parking lot and didn’t move until about eight o’clock in the morning. We do have information regarding this business . . .”

  Onscreen, the video footage rewound quickly. Now the box truck sat idly in a large parking lot filled with other trucks. Early morning pink light flooded the satellite view. The technician hit play on the video again, and the whole room watched a small figure walk towards the truck and jump in.

 
“So what I would suggest to all of us, including the detective in the front, is that we do in fact have our first lead. We have an address in Brooklyn. It’s a commercial truck rental shop. They’ve got a few parking lots—looks like at least a handful of mechanics working. But they ain’t a conglomerate. It’s a family-run thing. Russians. Axel Bossonov—”

  “Bossonov?” Rivett erupted.

  “Yeah. Why? You know him?”

  Rivett was well acquainted with the Bossonov family. Their name brought him right back to the case that had made him famous within the department: the Flash Crash robbery of Montgomery Noyes. Axel and his nephews Roschin and Petrov were the only three criminals who’d managed to walk away from that case scot-free. Now here they were again.

  “Yes, sir,” Jake said. “Axel’s the patriarch. He’s older. Not so sophisticated . . . or at least we didn’t think he was. He’s got two nephews . . .”

  “Roschin and Petrov,” the man in back said.

  “Right. We used to have surveillance on all these guys—two years ago. You remember them, Tony?”

  “Of course,” Tony answered. “Axel’s old school, a boxer. Roschin’s the young buck, the leader. And Petrov, if I remember, doesn’t speak a lick of English at all. More of a workhorse.”

  “They basically run one of the biggest crime syndicates in the city. Thought I’d busted it up when we got Axel’s former boss Vlad. But terror? That’s just not part of their game plan,” Jake said.

  “We’ll need all your files on them,” the man instructed Jake.

  “Let’s be clear,” Susan jumped in. “You’re not operating in Brooklyn without my men working hand in hand with you. Right, Peter?” She looked to Pete Mack for backup.

  “She’s probably right,” Pete Mack agreed. “Interagency means interagency. We’re all in this together.”

  “Great. Then the blond kid comes with us,” the man said. He pointed at Jake.