Terror Machine

by Denison Hatch

  “Katinka’s dead,” Jake said first.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Pete Mack said.

  “Don’t patronize him,” Susan cut in. “The only similarity Rivett shares with Sherlock Holmes is a terrible sense of fashion.”

  “So I’m right . . .”

  “It wasn’t really necessary for you to risk your life to figure that one out, Jake,” Tony said.

  “His life?” Pete Mack said. “How about the firefighters that had to go in there and save him? Did he think about them? I’m sorry, Susan, but if this guy is your best, then maybe the NYPD needs to step out of the way.”

  “Don’t be hysterical,” Susan replied. “You need me. But you’re right about one thing—I don’t think any of us need Detective Rivett.”

  “Hey!” Jake yelled. “Stop talking about me. There is no one angrier at myself than me. That’s my problem to work out. But everyone in this room? We are nowhere. Absolutely nowhere! You wanna know what I was thinking, or are you just going to sit there and pile on? I thought to myself . . . If there’s a one-percent chance I can find that girl alive, we’re all going to be that much closer to finding the doctor and figuring out who Hayat was working with. You want to yell and scream? Fine. Maybe it makes you feel better. Maybe it brings you up. Doesn’t help us, though. Only thing that’s going to move the needle is figuring out what’s going on. Take me off if you want. Hell, do whatever you think you need to cover your ass, Susan. But this is still my case. The second I get out of the bed, this is my case. When I go to sleep, it’s my case. When I wake up, it’s my goddamn case.”

  “I don’t cover my ass, Rivett,” Susan replied. “I shake it in people’s faces and dare them to try something. Don’t start thinking anyone in this room doesn’t want to find Hayat as badly as you do. Have some goddamn faith in the full power of the lawman. And in case you’re not sure who the fucking lawman is—it’s me.”

  As usual, Susan had a way with words that rendered the room silent for a few moments.

  “Peter, let’s go. Rivett, don’t come back until I decide what to do with you,” Susan commanded.

  After Susan and Peter had exited the room, Tony approached Jake’s bed.

  “So you think they took the girl out on purpose?” Tony asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “I’m running everything we possibly can on the doctor. We got a lot more of his backstory. Still can’t find him.”

  “Family? Relationships?”

  “Mom lives way out in Long Island, middle of nowhere. Interviewed her this morning. Real God-fearing lady. Christian with a Jewish last name. Came from her late husband, I guess. She says there’s very few friends and no girlfriend. Closest the doctor had to a girlfriend, actually, was Katinka Johanssen. But that’s just because they used to work together and he’d talk about her. Mom says she hasn’t seen or heard from him since he moved out of Stony Brook four months ago.”

  “I should be good to go tomorrow.”

  “Impossible,” Mona’s voice interrupted. She’d stepped back in the room.

  Jake grinned. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “I’m right,” Mona replied.

  “She’s right,” Tony added.

  “I don’t know, detective,” Mr. White spoke up from his chair, an eyebrow raised. “You seem to specialize in proving everyone wrong.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE FIRST TIME OMER AMIN heard of Pat Welch was a year prior, when Grant High School’s soccer team was paraded through the cafeteria during lunch period. The school had been honoring the players for appearing in their state division’s semifinal soccer match. Grant High School in Astoria wasn’t known for much—certainly not their sports teams. The school did not prioritize athletics. In the back of the campus, there was barely space for one full playing field. Both the football and soccer teams shared the pitch, alternating practice times. Pat Welch was the captain of said soccer team and was perhaps the only sporting star that Omer could remember having ever emerged from Grant. Pat had singlehandedly scored fifty-two goals during the past season, more goals than any striker in their entire division. He was on track for similar stats that year. It was even rumored that Pat was going to NYU on a soccer scholarship after graduation, but Omer wasn’t quite sure about that. The truth was that Omer had spent almost four years at Grant and had never spoken to Pat Welch. Omer had barely even thought about him—except to know that he was good at soccer.

  It was sometime in mid-October when Omer realized he’d have to pay closer attention to Pat Welch. The realization began when Omer’s class schedule changed. Instead of Omer waiting for Salma after school on the front steps, as he had for three years, Salma began to wait for Omer. Then one day Omer exited the school but couldn’t find Salma anywhere. He finally located her sitting on the cement wall that separated the sports field from the sidewalk. From then on, Salma would wait by the wall instead of the front steps of the school. At first Omer didn’t think anything of it, until the day he turned down the street and saw Pat Welch leaning over his sister. Pat whispered something flirtatious in Salma’s ear and lightly touched her lower back before he ran back onto the field.

  On that particular evening, the walk home had been fraught with tension. Omer wasn’t happy about what he’d seen, and he let Salma know in no uncertain terms.

  “What are you doing? You can’t talk to that guy. You know how pissed off our parents would be if they knew,” Omer said.

  “You’re going to stop right there,” Salma said. “You don’t get to say that.”

  And she was right. Even as he had said the words, he wasn’t sure that he actually meant them. But Salma wasn’t done.

  “I’m the one who protects you. Don’t get preachy with me. Don’t think I don’t know about how you steal makeup from me, and who knows what you’re doing with it . . . Actually, what are you doing with my makeup?”

  “I go out to the shows. You know that—”

  “Whatever. You know what? The point is I don’t actually care what you’re doing, because I know you’re a good person. I know you wouldn’t do anything to get yourself or anyone else in trouble. And I trust you. So do you trust me?”

  “Obviously. Yes. I do,” Omer replied. “I just don’t want Dad finding out. And even worse would be Mom or Murad.”

  “Well, there’s nothing for them to find out, and they’re not going to find out anything anyway.”

  “So what’s the real deal? Is Pat Welch your boyfriend?”

  “We just talk,” she said.

  And talk they did. From that afternoon onwards, it became clear that Salma and Pat were becoming a thing. After another month, Salma began to stay at school until soccer practice was over. That was fine with Omer, because he didn’t like being home for long periods of time. So he’d wait until Salma was done hanging with Pat, and then the two of them would walk home together.

  ▪

  It was the last few days of the fall semester, just before the holiday break. Omer noticed that Pat was standing on the sidewalk next to Salma—in his school clothes. That was very uncharacteristic.

  “Hey, Omes,” Pat said.

  “Pat,” Omer replied with a nod.

  “Since the holidays are coming up, I was going to walk with you guys. Gonna have to be away from my girl for too long!”

  “Salma, you think that’s a good idea?” Omer asked his sister.

  What was unsaid between the two siblings was not just their family dynamic, but also the close-knit nature of the community they lived in. The streets were somewhat anonymous, but not fully. The Amin family was well known due to their prominent and public-facing business. One never knew if the clerk at Zaman’s, or the guy working on cars at the corner of Steinway and Thirty-First might notice Salma and Pat walking together and take enough issue with what they saw to bring it up to Moradi. It was a long shot, but it was possible. Omer was naturally risk averse. He did everything he could to avoid conflict and make sure the spotlight was never on him.
He knew that his father might not particularly care. But fury would rain down upon the siblings if their mom found out—and Moradi knew better than to try to lie to Azza. All of this was unsaid but nonetheless realized by Salma. That’s why she came up with the idea that Pat Welch was going to be Omer’s friend.

  “You guys are friends,” Salma announced. “I’m just your sister . . . and I walk with you, too!”

  And with that, Salma had implicated Omer in the plan to keep his sister’s budding romance safe from prying eyes. The three of them padded down the sidewalk westward, towards the Amin family’s cleaning business.

  “So if we got married, would you still be Muslim?” Pat asked in a remarkably earnest way.

  “Of course,” Salma said.

  “That’s just ridiculous,” Omer said. “You’re sixteen years old.”

  “We’re not getting married,” Salma said.

  “Yeah, dude, are you cray?” Pat said. “But wait, what about our kids? I’m Catholic, you know . . .”

  “Hypothetical kids . . .” Omer muttered.

  “How many do you want?” Salma asked.

  “A lot.”

  “The whole thing’s impossible,” Omer said.

  “Huh? What about pure love? Your family wouldn’t deny pure love, would they?”

  “Yes. They most definitely would,” Omer said.

  “I don’t know, actually.” Salma thought about it. “Each of us are so different. Omer’s mostly afraid of our family values . . .”

  “Hey!” Omer protested.

  “It’s true. Murad . . . He’s like the enforcer of them. But I feel like I’m the one they all listen to. Dad would be fine. Mom would have a fit. She probably wouldn’t talk to me for a year. But I know she’d keep loving me. By the way, I’ll always be Muslim. That’s never changing. But the world changes around us, and I’m not the person who’s going to tell anyone else what to do with their life. Omer knows that.”

  Omer nodded. He couldn’t really focus on their conversation anymore, because Steinway was coming up, and it was already making him nervous.

  “Don’t you think Pat should head off now?” Omer asked.

  “He’s your friend . . .” Salma shrugged. “That’s up to you guys.”

  “No way!” Pat said. “I’ll hang out with my pals all the way to their house.”

  “Don’t think so,” Omer said as they turned the corner. “This is the place. It’s not worth it, Salma.”

  “Fine,” Salma replied. “If I don’t see you beforehand, good luck at the game tomorrow,” she said to Pat.

  “I’ll see you. I promise. Later, Omes,” Pat said. He stuck out his hand in a fist bump towards Omer, who awkwardly tried to cup it into a handshake. Pat shrugged the encounter off. Then he wrapped his arm around Salma in an awkward side hug. As he pulled his hand away, he brushed down her arm and their fingers intertwined for a brief moment. Pat turned and headed back the other direction.

  Omer and Salma continued padding down the sidewalk towards Steinway Cleaners.

  “Omes?”

  “It’s cute.”

  “Not my name,” Omer said.

  “It’s a good thing. You could take a couple lessons in coolness from Pat,” Salma said.

  “You really think you know what you’re doing?”

  “He’s kind and funny, and at the end of the day he’s right. We shouldn’t create artificial barriers.”

  “I know he’s right. Doesn’t mean dating him is the right thing to do.”

  “I’m not worried, Omer.”

  “How come?”

  “Because I have you.”

  They finally reached Steinway Cleaners. Salma pulled open the door and gestured dramatically for Omer to enter. He did. They danced their way inside.

  ▪

  What neither Omer nor Salma knew was that someone was watching them. A few blocks back, a man stood inside a convenience store. He’d been spying on the three young adults for the last five minutes of their walk. The man didn’t need to watch them, of course, because he knew two of them very well. But Murad Amin had certainly learned something new about his younger siblings—one was dating a white boy, and the other was protecting them.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  RIVETT ONLY HAD ONE GOOD eye. The other was wrapped up with a pound and a half of surgical gauze and he’d promised the doctors at Weill Cornell Hospital that he wouldn’t cut it off himself. Meanwhile, Mona had quickly learned that Jake made for a terrible patient. He had been instructed to spend at least three days in bed, but after one night of sleep, Jake was already sitting on the couch in the living room. He was surrounded by a potent mix of hospital-prescribed painkillers, Gatorade, Chinese food, his laptop, and reams of printed pages of evidence from the Hayat investigation.

  As promised, Rivett was still on the case. That morning, he had called Tony at home to catch up on the investigation, and Tony wasn’t stupid enough to try to knock Jake Rivett out of the box. He had revealed to Jake that the joint task force had successfully utilized a cell-phone tower triangulation technique, mastered by the CIA after 9/11, to track down Dr. Borin’s number. The method worked by cross-referencing data from the three closest cell towers to the Bossonovs’ rental lot and loading every device present at the same time Dr. Borin had appeared in the surveillance video. The hard part was identifying and eliminating all of the erroneous phone numbers that were scooped up by the algorithm. The process could take as long as a month or two during a normal investigation, but the feds had completed the task in less than forty-eight hours. It was confirmed that Dr. Borin had a cell phone in his pocket when he spoke to Axel Bossonov. However, the joint task force’s overall assessment was that Borin rarely used the phone. It seemed he hadn’t contacted anyone out of the ordinary, or really anyone personal at all. In one year, Borin had sent less than ten texts. He had not used the browser function on the phone, nor downloaded any apps. As for his calls, they consisted of a long list of big-box stores, taxicab companies, and takeout restaurants.

  Tony had emailed Jake a secure PDF with Dr. Borin’s phone records, along with the FBI analysts’ conclusions and research notes. Jake had been up all morning reviewing every single line item on the list, but he’d found nothing that made him doubt the team’s conclusions. The work wasn’t fun, but Jake knew it was necessary. He didn’t love the slog. It just sometimes happened to solve cases.

  He continued checking the entries from Dr. Borin’s logs. He was looking for anomalies, but he was especially interested in numbers that the FBI’s investigators had yet to assign an identity to—about ten percent of the calls. Nothing interesting was coming to the surface, except Jake did keep running across outgoing calls to an unknown number with a 631 area code. The analysts had been unable to figure out who was behind the 631 number. It wasn’t Mrs. Borin’s number, it didn’t belong to any of Dr. Borin’s few friends or former colleagues, and it wasn’t coming back as a business. The number was registered to a prepaid wireless carrier. Although he knew the FBI would already be working on the carrier, Jake’s interest was piqued. Where was 631? Jake loaded a map and discovered that 631 encompassed the entire eastern portion of Long Island. Hadn’t Tony mentioned that Borin’s mother lived out there in the boonies? But the analysts said it wasn’t her number . . .

  Jake sighed. It was hard to focus with only one eye. He placed the records down and stared out the window. One of the nicest features of their new apartment was the large bay window in the living room, which afforded a perfectly framed view of the Brooklyn Bridge leading over the East River to Manhattan. Jake studied the beautiful pointed arches of the neo-Gothic suspension bridge for a while, until his vision became blurry from fatigue.

  “Frustrated?” Mona asked from the kitchen table. She was working from home.

  “Beyond,” Jake admitted.

  “Maybe it’s time to take a nap. Rest your eyes.”

  “I hate naps.”

  “Sometimes people need to do things they don’t like
in order to get to where they want to be.”

  “Just like you taking care of me?”

  “Bingo.”

  Jake leaned back on the couch for a brief moment. Then he shot back up.

  “Can’t let another attack go down . . .”

  “It’s not all on you, Jake.”

  “Can’t sleep. Can barely eat. I’m nervous. Everything about the case bugs me. Hayat’s dead, but he has no past. Someone went to extremes to hide him from society. Then with the doctor, it’s the opposite. He’s too normal. Who owns a cell phone and never browses the web? How does that happen? So is he a nothing, or is someone protecting him, too? Was Katinka right? Is the doctor creating some sort of terror machine? Is that what he’s all about, or is it a means to an end? And most importantly . . . where is he?”

  “Maybe you’re looking too hard.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean . . . people want clean and easy reasons for things. It’s what feels good. But that’s not how the world works. Just like us. Think about how we tell our story to people we’ve met.”

  “We say we met at a party.”

  “Exactly. It’s not a full-on lie. We sort of did. But the truth is, like, so much more spaghetti. It’s messy. Lots of moving parts. You were investigating my ex-boyfriend but ended up respecting him, and meanwhile I was just about to go full-on criminal. But people don’t really care. Their eyes gloss over after a sentence or two, even though it could fill a book. So we just go with the simple answer, even if it’s not the full answer.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “You’re probably not going to find easy connections. Maybe there’s nothing there. Maybe Hayat was just a hermit. Maybe the doctor is just a boring dude, angry and out of a job. Maybe Hayat met him on the street and paid him to rent a truck. Maybe there’s no conspiracy. In fact, there’s probably no conspiracy.”

  “But maybe there is . . .”

  “I see I’m really making an impact here,” Mona joked. “Can we change the subject?”