The Event

by McBride, Michael

  “Nutshell, Badgett. The clock’s ticking.”

  Ninety-six minutes post-event.

  “It works like your standard phone bill. I can tell you when they talked. I can also find the residua of saved video files that correspond with those particular times.”

  “Are you telling me you have this Ryan Beatty’s phone number?”

  “I have an IP address. And better than that, I have a recording of him. Live and in the flesh.”

  “Get me a trace on that IP address.”

  “Way ahead of you. This guy took every precaution he could. He hid his actual IP address and routed it through a dozen different routers around the world, each of which has hundreds of different IP addresses, but we’ll eventually be able to work our way backward through that mess. I’ve got half a dozen guys back in the lab already on it.”

  “How long will it take?”

  Lawton glanced at her watch.

  Ninety-eight minutes post-event.

  “My guys are the best. We’ll have it in under an hour.”

  “When’s the most recent recording?”

  “Three days ago. If he’s smart, he’ll be long gone by now.”

  “He’s smart, all right, but I have a feeling he thinks so little of our chances of catching him that he’s in no real hurry.”

  Badgett smiled, looked back over his shoulder, and raised his eyebrows.

  “Want to see him?”

  She checked her watch again. Ninety-nine minutes post-event. Gestured impatiently for him to proceed.

  He’d set up his own laptop beside the subject’s. It was old and beat-up by comparison, but it was a custom job with keys for which there were functions she’d never even heard of. It was thick and bulky and chipped and covered with faded bumper stickers and product logos and had been networked to the subject’s with several wires and cords and an external hard drive. He swiped his fingers across the mouse pad and brought up a screen full of program files, running times, and a half-dozen other functions that might as well have been coded in Sanskrit for all she understood.

  “You have to remember these files were erased. Most of them some time ago. The process of erasing is really kind of deceptive, though. All it really does is get rid of the bookmark in the file tree so that the original data can’t be indexed. So the data itself remains intact until such time as it’s overwritten in full or in part by other files; you just can’t find it through the customary search mechanisms. So the majority has already been overwritten. The remainder is largely fragmentary. Only the most recent are intact, and I’ll bet you my left nut the guy on the other end didn’t know any of their conversations were being recorded. He might have understood the kid, but I think he underestimated the kid’s feelings, if you know what I’m saying.”

  “I don’t care about the nature of their relationship. I just want to see this monster’s face.”

  “If only it were that easy…”

  He opened one of the video files and a dark image filled the screen. The bar at the bottom indicated the clip was only twenty-three seconds long. Not even the length of a commercial. The poor quality lent little real contrast between the subject and his surroundings. His face was blurred at first, thanks to his proximity to the camera. When he leaned back, the aperture adjusted and she saw him more clearly. He wore a black sweatshirt with the hood pulled down low over his forehead, hiding his face in shadows. Like every teenager she saw on the street anymore. He wore it large and baggy to disguise any definition of his frame. No logos or insignia by which to trace its purchase. He kept his hands out of sight. The room behind him was dark. She could make out an unadorned wall behind him in the ambient glow from the computer screen. No pictures or posters or otherwise identifiable features. No cracks or discolorations. Just a plain white wall like any and every other.

  “I just wonder, you know, if there isn’t a better way of making our point is all,” a voice said. It was the voice of an adolescent, spoken in the words of a child. A note of whining. A hint of fear. A need for reassurance.

  The figure on the screen raised a gloved hand and scratched at the back of his head. An unconscious gesture of frustration. He quickly caught himself and replaced his hand in his lap. The movements were jerky, a consequence of missing frames or a slow connection. He drew a deep breath. When he spoke it was in a calm voice, one noticeably older than the first. Or perhaps merely more mature. And obstructed, as though he were speaking into a cup or through some other device meant to alter the intonation of his voice. It sounded vaguely metallic, artificially deepened. Obviously computer-altered.

  Lawton committed it to memory. Let it inflict a fresh wound on her gray matter. Rehearsed it. There was the hint of an accent. Unrecognizable. One that had either faded over time or the subject had gone to considerable lengths to repress. Something she couldn’t quite pin down.

  “What did Atlas say when asked if the weight of the world was too much?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know.”

  “You’ve just got to grin—” He leaned closer to the camera and for the first time revealed his face. “—and bear it.”

  He wore the mask of a brown bear. There was nothing stylized about it. It was the face of a dead bear, custom-fit to his head. The bony framework of the snout remained intact to preserve its fearsome growl, immortalized by sharp teeth and furrowed skin and furled lips. She glimpsed the hint of the subject’s chin through its open mouth. The fur was coarse and brittle. Matted on the right cheek. The eyelids remained intact; the black, rubber-like rims framed a pair of human eyes. Brown, like nearly two-thirds of the population. And then he leaned back in his chair and the mask disappeared into the shadows of the hood once more.

  He started to laugh. A horrible, taunting sound. One that she knew would haunt her for the rest of her life. He was still laughing when the recording ended and the image stilled.

  She and Badgett sat in silence for a long moment. She felt tainted, as though in that brief recorded encounter she had allowed the same evil that had infected the boy to seep through her pores. She resisted the urge to lash out and shatter the agent’s computer.

  “Get me voiceprint analysis and call me the second that IP address comes through.”

  Lawton stood and made for the door.

  One hundred and one minutes post-event.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Someone’s got to talk to the kid’s mother.”

  Six

  New York City Subway

  IND Queens Boulevard Line

  Steinway Street Station

  New York, New York

  October 1st

  Three Years Ago

  Lawton hopped down from the platform to the ground beside the rails. She smelled dust and oil and a lingering scent she equated with gun smoke and burnt oil. Flashes strobed behind her, casting her shadow at strange and shifting angles ahead of her, limning the inside of the concrete and white tile tube. Reporters shouted questions at her back while uniformed patrolmen did their best to keep the vultures at bay behind the yellow police tape cordon. The media all knew something had transpired down here and had every right to be furious at their exclusion and the few scraps of information that had been tossed their way. The problem was that until the authorities understood exactly what had happened, releasing any information at all could trigger a panic the likes of which this city hadn’t seen since 9/11. Any misstep could prove to be a public relations disaster of almost criminal proportions. As it was, half of the country was already crying terrorism and screaming for the blood of everyone of Middle Eastern descent, which Lawton knew wasn’t the case. They wouldn’t have called her in if it had been.

  Exactly eighty-eight minutes ago 911 switchboards had lit up with calls reporting either a loud gunshot or an explosion and a resultant shaking of the ground. Pictures falling from walls. Windows shattering. Car horns blaring. Manhole covers firing into the air on plumes of dust and debris. Simultaneously, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s
automatic emergency system had sent an alarm indicating a derailment on the IND Queens Boulevard Line that was confirmed within seconds by the shift supervisor, whose board also showed that the flow of power down the line had been severed at a point corresponding to the reports from the surface. A half-block stretch of Broadway itself collapsed roughly three minutes later.

  Eyewitness accounts swamped the emergency response system and flooded the internet within seconds. Pictures of jagged asphalt standing upright from the gigantic hole. Crumpled hoods and people climbing on the roofs of their cars to reach the sidewalk, now eight feet above the sunken road. Emergency vehicles were the next to arrive, with the news vans riding in their slipstreams as the cloud of dust diffused throughout the metro corridor. Flashing streetlights and swirling sirens cast multicolored auras through the cloud. Live feeds showed men and women wearing suits gray with dust and handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses coughing as they ran toward the cameras.

  While the world focused on the aboveground spectacle, the emergency transit management and response teams swept through the underground on parallel subway tracks and on all-terrain vehicles, enacting a plan established in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and rehearsed every six months since with various nightmare scenarios. The response was perfectly coordinated. Agents from the ATF, DHS, FBI, and SWAT were on the subterranean scene with CBRNE suits, specially trained medical personnel, and a select team of biological warfare specialists, who quickly ruled out the involvement of biological agents while the ATF contingent diagnosed the source of the explosion to be a device improvised from ammonium nitrate, like the bombing in Oklahoma City.

  They’d found the three rear cars crumpled and on their sides, buried beneath tons of concrete and brick and rock. Victims had been crawling from one car to the next to escape through the rear car with the sounds of buckling metal and snapping rivets all around them. Their efforts had been heroic. Not a single one of them had fled, even as the smoke intensified and blue sparks shot from the power lines above their heads. They’d formed human chains to reach those trapped in the rubble and even covered the dead with their coats and sweaters and the shirts off their backs. Their actions were not only a credit to New Yorkers, but to an entire race that had seen enough tragedy to last until the end of time.

  The wounded were held at the site and treated as best as possible in the haze of smoke and dust before being evacuated on foot through the Steinway Station, which was what had attracted the attention of the vultures and brought them down to the hurriedly erected cordon. DHS agents meanwhile collected the survivors as they fled up the stairs and ushered them off to tightly guarded triage and routine roundup centers for thorough debriefing before they could provide the sound bites that would trigger global panic.

  It was only when the first agents reported eyewitness accounts from the survivors of the second car, who claimed they had seen a young man stand up in the first car and turn to face the aisle behind him with a smile on his face—a face painted to look like some sort of animal with horns—that Lawton had been called. She’d been halfway uptown when the security footage recovered from the first car had been retrieved and forwarded to her cell phone. She’d pulled to the side of the road and watched the grainy, static-riddled recording of a subway car full of people looking at anything other than each other, unaware that the boxes beneath their seats labeled “Replacement Vinyl for Model R160A Seats” and stamped with the both the Kawasaki and Alstom corporate logos were actually something entirely different. Something they must have smelled, but to which they otherwise paid no mind. Something that would explode outward at more than ten thousand feet per second when the young man who curiously stood up in the aisle and held out his arms in imitation of Christ pressed the trigger on the remote detonator. He’d been seated in such a way as to give the camera a shot of little more than his hair, his right ear, and the faintest outline of the side of his face and kept it at his back when he stood up. He’d known exactly where it was and had done everything in his power to keep from tipping off anyone watching the footage with his face paint or undoubtedly nervous behavior. Not until it was too late to do anything about it.

  The FBI’s Rapid Response Forensics Team was in the process of erecting high-wattage lights along the recessed ceiling and on mobile tripods beside the tracks. For the first time, Lawton saw the sheer amounts of dried blood on the ground, tracked everywhere by a riot of footprints over which the dust had settled like snow. The air still seemed to reverberate with their cries, or perhaps merely from the water coursing through the mains or the cars thundering along the Broadway Local Line. Whether real or imagined, she smelled the telltale scent of blood, a cross between something biological and metallic, far stronger than the trampled trail could have generated. It wasn’t until she was within sight of the wreckage that she noticed the body bags stacked like firewood against the right side of the tunnel, away from the bedlam. Or maybe the bedlam had shifted away from them to create both a literal and metaphorical distance between the living and the dead.

  Lawton flashed her badge at the officer with the digital clipboard and waited for an affirmative grunt before proceeding. She looked through the sea of faces for one she knew and made a beeline for Special Agent Manuel Ramos the moment she recognized him. Manny had started at the New York Division at the same time as she had, although his path had led him to counterterrorism while hers took her to white collar crimes. She figured he was her best shot at getting anything resembling an accurate appraisal of the situation. When he saw her coming, he disengaged from the ATF liaison and gestured for her to join him off to the side beneath a bank of lights.

  “How you holding up, Manny?”

  He was a big man with an even bigger mustache and reminded her of the love child between a seventies-era Cheech Marin and Dwayne Johnson.

  “Never seen anything like it, Renee. Had this thing been a coordinated effort instead of the work of a single demented fuck, they could have sunk the whole island. As it is, we’ve pulled twenty-some bodies out of the wreckage with more to go. We got parts we can’t even match to bodies yet. And that’s not even counting however many might have been in that first car. It’ll take weeks to shovel up what’s left of it and even longer to sift through it. And I don’t know when they’ll be able to open this line again.”

  “You guys have officially cleared this for terrorist involvement?”

  “Too soon to say anything for sure, but my gut’s telling me we’re dealing with a different kind of animal. We’ve got eyewitness accounts that this piece of shit was a white kid, somewhere late-teens to early-twenties. You saw what little video we’ve got, right? We’ve got Steve Madden boots, True Religion jeans, and a black leather trench coat. We’re talking five hundred bucks right there. Easy. While we can’t rule out indoctrination into a terrorist cell—and I’m telling you, using our own kids against us is the wave of the future—it doesn’t have any of the earmarks. First and foremost, he didn’t turn himself into the bomb, but rather posed like some melodramatic douche bag while he was setting it off. Like he was romanticizing the act itself instead of converting himself into a weapon of wrath. And the horns? I mean, please. This guy was a whole lot more concerned with how the world would see him than how his god would. Allah would laugh him right out of virgin paradise land.”

  “So why do you figure he’s the kind I’m looking for?”

  “I’m not sure he is. That’s why you’re here. Most of the guys think you’re tilting at windmills, you know. But some rich prick blows half my partner’s face off and I’d be right out there on my donkey, too. What this here comes down to—no offense—is I’d be happy enough to wash my hands of the fallout on this one. Can’t fault a guy for that, right? Besides, this whole painting his face and gluing on horns thing reminded me a lot of what happened down at Rutgers a couple years back. From what I hear, that’s exactly the kind of thing you’re looking for. Got a little extra invested into that one, do you?”

/>   His words resonated with her. Invested. She held up a finger to signal she’d catch up, made a quick call back to her office, and left a message for someone on her team to check into any large stock dumps during the previous week and to keep an eye out for anyone overly aggressive when the market opened. She caught up with Ramos and another agent near the end car. They’d taken the entire rear wall off of the car like a can of sardines. Blue sparks flashed from deep in the darkness ahead where search and rescue teams cut through tangles of metal in their largely futile quest for survivors, but that wasn’t the reason for the glow that washed over the faces of Ramos and the agent whose badge identified him as Graham. He held a cell phone, on the screen of which was a shaky recorded image, taken through the front window of one car and through the rear window of the one in front of it. The image shook and the framework of the windows jostled independently of one another. She saw the sides and the backs of heads to either side of the main aisle, in the middle of which a boy with his face painted to resemble a goat stood, arms out to his sides. His hair and stringy goatee had been similarly painted, although it had smeared from the roots of his blond hairline. The horns appeared to be real and looked to have been glued directly to his forehead. He smiled and raised his face to the heavens. The detonator was in his right hand. His trench coat fell open to reveal a black T-shirt with a design that made her heart stop. A human face painted to look like a snake with the stylized R of the Rutgers Scarlet Knights on his forehead. A flash of light. A series of unfocused images she couldn’t quite decipher, and the recording ended.