Terror Machine

by Denison Hatch

  “Are you still happy to be engaged to me?” Mona asked Jake as they started slurping down the pasta.

  “Of course.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “You tell me. You really want to get married? Always said you didn’t.”

  “I don’t want to get married,” Mona said. “But I do want to get married to you.”

  “I feel exactly the same.”

  “I know.”

  “So . . . when?” Jake asked.

  “Take it down a notch, big boy,” she said as she laughed.

  “You know me. I go full bore—zero to a hundred.”

  “You don’t want a very long engagement like everyone else?”

  “I never want to do what everyone else does,” Jake replied.

  “I’ll think about it.” Mona shrugged. “We can go fast.”

  “I’m into that,” Jake replied. “Crazy, though. I was a cop, thought you were a robber, and now we’re getting married.”

  “More like ironic—since I’m sure you’ve done a lot more bad stuff than me.”

  “Only to bad people,” Jake said. Then his mood darkened. “Like this evil bastard.”

  “Try to leave it—just for dinner.”

  “I know,” Jake said. He pushed back from his chair and stood. Then he started pacing. “It’s just so difficult. I gotta figure out who the white guy is. The one with the truck . . .”

  “What truck?”

  “Never mind.” Jake knew he wasn’t supposed to discuss the operational details of his investigations with Mona. But he simply couldn’t avoid talking it out, and anyway, she wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he was perpetually trying to connect the dots in his head. He was constantly going over the connections and evidence they had: Hayat, the rental truck, the Bossonovs, Einstein . . .

  Unfortunately, all he was getting was a bunch of loose ends sparking around in the ether—and the result was the anxiety he was feeling.

  “Jake. Please. You gotta stop for just, like, thirty seconds. Relax. I don’t want you to go crazy. And neither do you, ’cause then how are you going to solve any more crimes?” Mona asked as she watched him pace back and forth.

  Not a bad point, he thought. But he kept pacing.

  Then, all of a sudden, there was a knock on the door.

  “Rivett, ya in there?”

  Both Jake and Mona knew exactly who it was. They could easily recognize the voice through the door. Jake quickly opened it to find his bandmate and good pal, Schaub. He was completely decked out in black-and-white leather, with slicked back hair and four long necklaces hanging around his neck.

  “Ready to rawk?”

  ▪

  Jake, Mona and Schaub hustled towards the club. Jake had completely forgotten that Mythics was scheduled to perform that night as the late-night closer at a rock club in Brooklyn called ExCulture. Obviously, this wasn’t a convenient night for a performance. It was Mona who had convinced Jake to go. She knew him better than he knew himself. After an hour of screaming his lungs out onstage, Jake might actually be able to sleep that night. They dipped down the alleyway to the side of the venue and into the talent entrance with just minutes to spare.

  ▪

  ExCulture didn’t book the most popular bands. The venue couldn’t pay for them. But what it lacked in finances was made up for in energy. If anything, ExCulture was a place that made a band in order for that band to never have to perform there again. There was an informality about almost everything, including the set lists and even the performers each night. That’s why Omer Amin wasn’t sure if there was another band to go or if the evening was over. He’d been standing to the side of the crowd for about ten minutes since the last act finished. The lights hadn’t come up, but it was getting late. He’d stick around for a little longer, he thought, as he gazed around the crowd. The crowds were one of his favorite things about New York and these rock venues in general. People there truly did not give a fuck. The ethos was so different from his upbringing, where his father, mother, brother, and even his sister certainly did give a fuck . . . about every little thing. Omer wanted badly to morph completely into this world and leave his own behind. But he wasn’t quite ready yet. For now, he simply watched. He rarely spoke to anyone at the clubs. He just danced and watched.

  “Can I get you a drink?” a man standing next to Omer asked politely.

  Omer glanced at the guy. He was just a few years older than him. Early twenties. Asian. But Omer kept to his rules of engagement. He never accepted drinks.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Okay. No problem,” said the man. “You excited about Mythics?”

  “Wasn’t even sure if they were coming on . . .”

  “They will. They’re classic—as close to a house band as this place gets. You come here a lot?”

  “Not really. Just a few times.”

  “I love your makeup. I’m Ty.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And what’s your name, my friend?”

  Before Omer could respond, all of the lights in the venue collapsed to pitch black. Then a single spotlight burned onstage, and into the middle of the light stepped the striking local New York legend known as Jake Rivett.

  ▪

  Rivett raged. Spit coated the microphone in front of him as he belted out Mythics’ most popular song, “Out of the Mist,” a melodic and actually somewhat poppy journey punctuated by interludes of deeply complex beats. “Mist” ended with a grotesque scream, as many of Mythics’ songs did. It was Jake’s trademark, a loud and cacophonous yell that was only appropriate in a place like ExCulture.

  Screamo was the opposite of commercial music, and it was also Jake’s favorite. Screamo had been his jam for a long, long time. For much of Jake’s life, he had used music as a distraction from everything else going on around him—from his father’s drunken rages to his early years in New York when he didn’t know up from down and was struggling in the back kitchen of a restaurant in Chinatown. Now, finally, music was becoming something that he was able to sculpt to his own liking. That’s how “Out of the Mist” had come into being. It was more accessible than Mythics’ old stuff. It had a touch more Radiohead and a dab less darkness—not much less, mind you. But enough that the crowds were growing more diverse and the band’s iTunes downloads were increasing. Jake didn’t care about the money or the fame and never would. He whipped his blond hair around the stage like a mop cleaning the walls and the crowd went berserk for him. And in that very moment, Jake Rivett was an absolute, no-doubt, genuine-beauty, heart-throbbing rock star.

  But at the end of the day, Jake wasn’t there for the fans. He was there for the feeling. Performing was his only drug and practically his only drink. The more he lost himself on stage, the more he felt as though he had found his real self. While he was performing, he didn’t perceive the audience. He only cared about how he felt. There were a lot of eyes on him that night, but he couldn’t see any of them. That was the nature of the spotlight. He did what he wanted, and everyone else watched him do it. Jake Rivett was the piece of art.

  ▪

  Besides the five hundred concertgoers, besides Omer Amin, besides the bartenders and proprietors and promoters, there was one more set of eyeballs watching Jake Rivett perform. Those eyes belonged to Katinka Johanssen.

  At the end of the evening, Katinka stood in the alleyway beside ExCulture and waited for Jake. It hadn’t been easy to find him, but it also hadn’t been hard. Buried deep in the comments of a newspaper article about one of Jake’s recent cases had been a mention of Mythics. Katinka had quickly connected the dots after that by locating Mythics’ Twitter handle and hustling over to ExCulture. She stood out like a sore thumb amongst the cigarette smokers and loiterers in the alleyway. Maybe people thought that the skinny, solitary girl with the frizzy red hair was a groupie. But probably not.

  A moment later, the artist door opened and Jake and Mona walked out. Katinka stared directly at Jake. She caught his eye and a chill ca
me across her body. When he passed by Katinka, she grabbed his arm forcefully. Jake attempted to brush it off as Mona stepped ahead, unaware that he’d been stopped. But Katinka held on.

  “I know who did it to Abdel Hayat.”

  Jake stopped in his tracks and stared at her.

  “Who?”

  “The doctor.”

  “Who’s the doctor?” Jake asked. “Who are you?”

  “I’m—”

  “Hey! Now’s not the time!” Mona had turned around and was yelling at Katinka. “Get away from him.”

  “Wait,” Jake said. “What did you just say? Who’s the doctor? Who are you?”

  Katinka suddenly clammed up. She didn’t answer. She could see that Jake was becoming annoyed, and his girlfriend even more so. Maybe this all had been a huge mistake.

  “I— It’s all in my videos.”

  “What?”

  “It’s in my videos,” Katinka finally said out loud.

  “I’m off the clock,” Jake said. “If you know something about Abdel Hayat, call the hotline. Okay? You need to call it in.”

  “I . . .” All of a sudden, a look of horror came across Katinka’s face. “You guys have no idea, do you? You don’t know anything.” Katinka’s face turned red, and she raced out of the alleyway.

  “Hey!” Jake yelled. He jogged towards the alley’s entrance. But by the time he reached the street, there was no sign of the red-haired girl.

  “C’mon,” Mona said, following him. “Don’t worry about that.”

  “She was talking about a doc—”

  “I don’t think that girl had any idea what she was talking about,” Mona replied. “She was probably wasted.”

  “Yeah. Maybe . . .” Jake answered.

  “You ready to go home now?”

  “I think so. I’m . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “Tired,” Jake finally said.

  And those words were truly music to Mona’s ears.

  CHAPTER NINE

  JAKE WAS BACK AT ONE Police Plaza by seven thirty in the morning. When he walked into the office, he saw most of the joint task force crowded around a television. They were watching CNN. The news network was broadcasting a previously unseen video, shot in a convenience store, of the terror suspect before the attack. Jake quickly learned that the footage had been found by someone on the internet and was being broadcast by all the major networks.

  “What I’d love to know, Peter, is how the goddamn internet gets this video before we do?” Susan asked.

  “How would I know that, Susan? I’m not God.”

  “No, that’s Mr. White,” Susan said.

  The whole room chuckled nervously.

  “Much obliged,” Mr. White said, barely looking up from his computer screen. Mr. White and his group continued to be somewhat standoffish when it came to cooperating with everyone else—but they were still undeniably part of the team.

  “Seriously . . .” Pete Mack said, steamed up at the apparent indictment of the FBI’s cyber investigation. “I can’t stop some guy who owns a Seven-Eleven from uploading whatever he wants to upload. I can’t force him to call us first. Let’s move on and focus on what the profilers are saying about it.”

  “And what’s that? That the guy’s insane?” Jake said.

  “We agree that when this video is analyzed in the light of the tollbooth video—which is not public, mind you—that a mental-health conclusion is becoming more and more likely. But mental health is not binary. We don’t know what he was suffering from. We don’t have a diagnosis. We don’t have any medical records for Hayat . . .”

  “And we don’t have Einstein,” Mr. White added.

  “The doctor . . .” Jake muttered, remembering his strange conversation with the red-haired girl.

  “What?” Susan said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Peter, what happened with the Bossonov interrogation?” Susan asked.

  “They gave us absolute shit. But now I think they’re telling the truth, at least. Apparently the man we’re calling Einstein, from the video, he showed up in person each time and never called in. He always called himself Daniel. He paid cash for everything,” Pete Mack said. “They figured he was a local.”

  “If the doctor had a cell phone in his pocket, we may be able to triangulate it,” Mr. White announced from the back of the room. “My guys are working with Pete’s on that downstairs right now. But it’s a real needle-and-haystack job.”

  “Where’d the new video come from?” Jake asked. He pointed to the 7-Eleven video playing on CNN. At the bottom of the video file, a watermarked image had been applied. But the CNN chyron obscured it.

  “File was first uploaded to a site called VidLeak yesterday,” Dennis Fong announced. “Twitter got ahold of it in the middle of the night.”

  Jake paced towards Fong’s computer. Fong had loaded VidLeak already and was playing the video again. Rivett watched as Hayat paced and ranted inside the 7-Eleven.

  “What’s VidLeak?” Jake asked.

  “Just some video site. Anyone can upload anything.”

  “All surveillance video?”

  “What do you mean? No. I know this site, actually,” Fong said. “It’s mostly real-life stuff—dangerous stunts, road rage, police chases, weird and random crap. Comes from all over. It’s pretty much non-denominational.”

  Jake watched as Fong scrolled down the page. Along the bottom row of the VidLeak page was a series of thumbnails containing videos that had been auto populated by VidLeak’s algorithm. Jake’s eyes quickly scanned across them, but he didn’t spot anything unusual.

  “Who uploaded the video? The owner of the store? Is that confirmed?” Jake asked Fong.

  “Yeah. Seems so. Our guys are already there interviewing him. We’ll have the HD version in under an hour.”

  “Good.”

  As Fong was about to click off the page, Jake suddenly took a second look at one of the linked thumbnail images.

  “Hey! Wait a minute,” Jake said as he pointed at the thumbnail. “That one. Click on it.”

  Fong did as instructed.

  The new video featured a woman who was staring at the camera. But she wasn’t just any woman. Jake knew her face. It was the same red-haired young lady who’d accosted him briefly the night before. The video was titled, “THE TRUTH ABOUT BRYANT PARK.”

  “Play it,” Jake said.

  Fong clicked, and soon Katinka Johanssen’s most recent VidLeak upload was being displayed across the task force’s massive wall of screens. Katinka’s angst-filled face filled the frame while she ranted.

  “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 . . .”

  “Why are we watching this—some conspiracy theorist?” Pete Mack asked.

  But the whole room was still drawn to the video. The insanity of her presentation felt like a well-needed comedy break for the investigation. At the end of the day, it was all conjecture. What she said didn’t add up to anything, and she had no proof.

  As Jake vaguely listened to Katinka speak, his eyes quickly scanned across her VidLeak profile page. He noticed that she’d been posting videos for at least the last two years. Virtually every video had a similar thumbnail—just Katinka’s face looking straight ahead at the camera. The uploads barely had any views. But there was a remarkable throughline to many of the videos’ titles. They all referenced the same person’s name.

  “Maximilian Borin,” Jake said quietly. He spoke louder the second time. “Maximilian Borin.”

  Fong glanced up at him. “Who?”

  “Search for Maximilian Borin,” Jake commanded Fong. The room realized that Jake was becoming unusually aggressive. What was going on? Fong loaded a new window, typed quickly, and t
apped search. His results piled up on the main screen in the front of the room.

  “Images,” Jake said.

  Fong clicked on the search engine’s image tab. A professional portrait of Maximilian Borin stared back at the room.

  “Holy mother of—” Sheldon White muttered. “It’s the doctor. You found fucking Einstein, Rivett.”

  Dr. Borin was clearly the same person as the unknown man from the Bossonovs’ security-camera footage.

  ▪

  In under an hour, a veritable army of law enforcement personnel were ripping halfway across Long Island and heading towards the leafy college town of Stony Brook, New York. The FBI had pulled up tax returns and credit checks for Maximilian Borin, all of which listed his address as a unit in an apartment building adjacent to SUNY Stony Brook.

  Jake read through the doctor’s hastily created FBI biography as he sat shotgun in Tony’s SUV, following two armored personnel carriers filled with SWAT members. Borin had spent most of his adult life in academia. For the last two years, he’d been an adjunct professor at Stony Brook. Before that, the bulk of his time had been spent as a full professor at Penn State.

  “What are you learning?” Tony asked Jake.

  “It’s light on details . . . Distinguished academic. Full tenure at Penn State, but suddenly leaves the university a couple years ago. In the videos, the girl says she was his graduate student. We need her address—immediately.”

  “I know,” Fong said from the back seat. “VidLeak just came back and gave us the IP without a court order, which is great. But her ISP’s demanding a warrant. Susan’s trying to get the judge to sign it right now. We should have her name in a few more minutes.”