Dark Application: TWO

by Brian Krogstad

  Leah groaned in exasperation and said, “Move, move. I’ll take care of it.”

  Sabrina stood back, embarrassed, and watched as Leah quickly grabbed a towel, tossed it onto the floor and wiped the mess up with one foot, swooped down for the cup, the jug, and the towel, and within moments was preparing the cappuccino she had been working on. Sabrina stood by awkwardly, and out of her peripheral vision she could see the waiting customers looking at their watches, tapping their feet, swaying with impatience. The other barista, John, dexterously whirled past her, and when Leah left the counter, Sabrina stepped up again, looking over the menu directions.

  “You still haven’t memorized the drinks?” Leah chirped.

  Sabrina ignored her and ungracefully measured out the milk.

  John swished past cautiously with two large steaming drinks in hand. “Dennis?” he called. A large man with a suit and tie and slicked black hair stepped forward. He nodded a dismissive thank you at John and took the drinks.

  Sabrina stood at the steamer, looking at John expectantly.

  “There are four steamers here, Sabrina. I have a huge order to make right now,” he said calmly.

  Sabrina measured the fresh-ground espresso and packed it into the tiny filter, tamping it down like she had been taught, and slid it into the machine, tightening it securely. Hesitantly, slowly, afraid of making a mistake, she pulled a lever and watched the steaming water trickle through the filter and into the cup, a thick foamy syrup. Then she held the cup of cold milk under the steam release, holding the wand at the bottom, and slowly released the pressure valve.

  The loud snarling fizzle of the steaming wand always startled her. She jumped as the steam came out, a searing hot jet that jerked the cup back and forth in her hand. She could feel the metal heating up close to her knuckles, and her hand threatened to jerk away, as it had done her first day on the job, when she had dropped the first drink on the floor. The noise was terrible - a loud churning that rang in her ears and hurt her head. She hated it. Whenever she could, she would ask John to do it.

  Finally, she poured the milk and espresso together, spooning the foam into the cup. She stepped to the counter and called, “Jenna?”

  The customer came for her drink and stood for a moment, looking at it. “I ordered a large,” she said. “That’s a medium.”

  Sabrina stuttered something that may have been an apology and turned back, dumped the drink angrily down the sink and started over.

  ***

  At 7:30 pm, Sabrina was disappointed to see that the sun looked a bit lower already than it had last time she had paid attention. The sky had the slightest hint of amber color, casting yellow glowing light on the maples on either side of the road. The shadows seemed deeper and longer each day, and it signified the second half of summer, when the color spectrum began to reverse in the light tints of the sky, making the trees look fake to her, like she was in a movie in which the color balance was off.

  She parked her faded little blue Geo in the large, nearly-empty parking lot of the gym right next to Antonio’s white van and began walking toward the door, her duffle slung over her shoulder. The air was fresh and the sound of the highway could be heard in the distance. The streets were nearly abandoned, just an occasional passing car that clanked over the loose manhole covers in the street. As she walked briskly across the pavement, she saw a black Mercedes car rolling quietly around the other end of the large parking lot. It made a sharp turn, and then stopped. The windows were blackened, the engine was quiet. She squinted, and quickened her paces, only about 300 feet from the glass gym doors. The car idled for a moment, and then pulled away. She tried to place the vehicle, wondering if it was someone she knew, but the car was too far away to see well.

  When Sabrina stepped into the gym every night, she took on a new persona. The dimples in her forehead caused by worry smoothed out. The tension in her shoulders dissolved. All the anxiety that wound her up during the day turned to liquid in her meat. She wrapped her knuckles in a criss-cross pattern with long elastic wraps, her shoulders twitching in anticipation.

  The kickboxing routines started with jabs and hooks, and worked up to kicks and knees and complex combinations of both. Her instructor, Antonio, would hold a sparring pad in each hand, his arms jerking back with every contact. The slaps would echo throughout the room, loud and rhythmic.

  Two years ago when she had stepped onto this floor for the first time, she had been weak and unsure. Her kicks had been soft and clumsy, and she had been crippled by shyness. Her dad had signed her up for it, and she had only shown up because he’d dropped her off and left her there. Antonio was an attractive Latino, with dark sharp eyes, a hard thick physique and a short hair cut, and that had made her painfully awkward at first. She had worried that he was looking at her critically, or that he knew she was embarrassed by being there, and she would falter mid-punch. But over the months, which had now turned into years, Sabrina was fast and strong. Antonio had won her trust eventually, had become a friend and mentor. His consistency was reassuring. He never missed a single session. Punching the bags was meditative, hypnotic. It was the one thing that took so much concentration that she was not able to think about anything else at all. She became a machine.

  “Good, Sabrina. Bring, it, bring it,” Antonio would chant. His coaching had brought her light-years from where she had been. Her stutter had vanished, her posture had improved. Her back and shoulders were toned and muscular, although she hid them under long sleeves most of the time. Her legs had become so powerful that when she undressed in the bathroom mirror, she had begun to marvel at the strands of muscle shifting ghost-like under her skin.

  But for all her improvements brought about through kickboxing, she maintained an underlying current of shyness and social anxiety that never fully went away.

  When her routine was over, she wiped the sweat off her neck with a towel, and Antonio clapped her on the shoulder. “Buen trabajo hoy,” he said.

  She nodded, turned and bowed before stepping off the mat, and then ducked out the door and jogged to her car. She glanced around vigilantly for the black car. It was gone. A shape in the gym doorway caught her eye. Antonio was watching her walk back to her car, his arms crossed in front of him. His outline in the glass door was a shadow, but she could see the look on his face, one of pleasant contemplation. She waved at him, and he waved back before she got in the car.

  When she finally came home for dinner, her father was sitting on the tall swiveling counter stool, spinning the chair side to side, watching a football game. During the commercials he liked to flick to the news, which he’d done, and was watching a broadcast of the latest news on the Brafferton College Attack.

  Their house was a high-ceilinged modern home. The kitchen was done in black granite and chrome, with accent lighting around the bottoms of all the cabinets. Along the side of the kitchen was a long wide bar that had four stools, and that was where Doug Dobson would sit. Gabriela, his wife of eighteen years, would pester him to sit in a fluffy recliner, or lay out on the huge plush couch. But Doug insisted that the hard wood stool was more comfortable because he had grown up poor and his rear end was used to it, or so he would tell her.

  Sabrina came into the kitchen and nearly tripped over Doug’s shoes as she poured a glass of juice. She stepped up behind the bar and looked over her father’s shoulder.

  “You won’t believe this, Bean,” he said. Bean was his never-ending nickname for her. “You know that guy that blew up Brafferton? He was one of the kids your brother was training at work. Can you believe it? Kevin was actually in a room every week with a terrorist.” He dramatized a shudder for her. “Don’t tell your mom, she’d probably drop dead on the floor.”

  Sabrina looked over her shoulder at her mother, who heard the word mom and squinted suspiciously at them. She was preparing dinner, cutting slabs of juicy roast chicken and spooning ancho chili sauce onto the plates. A steaming pan of jalapeño corn bread sat on the counter. Sabrina’s mouth watered.
Gabriela was real Old World Mexican, straight down to the crucifixes and the cornbread. Sabrina sometimes felt she was at the crux of the culture clash, but so often she just felt downright lucky to have Gabriela as a mom.

  Then her attention was grabbed away from the food by the picture that appeared on the screen. It was a mug shot, a young blond man with red-rimmed eyes and a dirty face. She stared for several moments in disbelief.

  She knew that face. That was the guy who had been on fire the day of the explosion. He had blown up the building on purpose while he was inside it? And his girlfriend? Really?

  ***

  Agent Kennedy settled into the chair across from Sergeant Drake, and set the coffees down on the table.

  “How’d the BAI go?” she asked in her southern accent.

  Kennedy shrugged. “He didn’t behave the way I expected,” he said. There was a long pause. When he didn’t continue, she shifted in her seat.

  “So when’s the preliminary?” she asked.

  Kennedy tapped the table with his finger tips. “End of this month,” he said.

  “So they’re gonna to hold him in county until then?” she asked, frowning.

  Kennedy just nodded slowly. “We want to keep him here until the investigation is over.”

  Drake grunted and slurped her coffee. “What’s there to investigate? The kid was caught because he wanted to get caught. It’s nothin’ more than a cry for attention. And he’s gonna get it.”

  He sipped his coffee and stared at her. “Did you know, we have been working together for almost two years and you have never thanked me for a single cup of coffee?”

  Her freckled nose wrinkled. She leaned forward and looked intensely at him. He had seen this look before, her chin down, wisps of brown hair hanging over her ears. “Can we stay on topic Kennedy?” Drake looked much more human in her civilian clothes. In jeans and a fitted plaid button-up shirt, the stockiness turned into muscle and extreme curves. She wore torn up cowgirl boots that looked like they’d been lived in. Overall, she was a pretty country girl. But this country girl was packing a Beretta. “So the Directorate officially assigned you then?”

  “He will when I ask him next week,” he said. “You in on this with me?”

  She nodded.

  They sat in silence for a long moment. He looked around The Drip, a place he liked to come where there were no other cops to be seen. It was very artsy, very colorful. The kids who worked the register were under-slept and confused. There was a couch where someone was invariably affixed with a poorly-tuned guitar. He felt peculiarly comfortable here, though he caught stares and teenagers lowered their voices when they walked past.

  Drake, of course, hated the place. A bunch of liberal young hipsters? Not Drake.

  Kennedy could clearly see his younger self in Drake. That might be why he was still working with her. She was a good partner, had a knack for investigation, and being both in the Army Reserve CID and an investigator for the State of Virginia, she had a remarkably well-rounded resume. She was a good agent. On her way to being great.

  Kennedy had himself spent twenty six years in the army and nine in the FBI as an investigator for both the Directorate of Science and Technology and the Directorate of Intelligence. This was his fourth case dealing with domestic terrorism. And his last case before he retired.

  “I think he’s innocent,” he said flatly.

  Drake scoffed and snorted out a childish laugh. “Wait, you’re serious? What, do you think he was framed or somethin’?”

  Kennedy took a long breath and decided whether to explain. “Back in oh-three, up in D.C. when I was on the Cybercrime Division, I worked on a case where a young man had broken into a research facility and stolen some flash drives and discs and such, and on the way out he got shot and killed on the spot.”

  Drake blinked, unmoved.

  “Well, it turns out he stole some software, some secret spy weapon.”

  Drake squinted her eyes and nodded slowly. “Dark Application, I ‘member you talking about this before. Sounds very… paranoid middle-aged man conspiracy theory.”

  Kennedy shook his head. “Never mind then,” he said.

  Drake suppressed a grin. “No, I’m really interested. Please, go on.”

  Kennedy leaned forward on his elbows, suddenly into the conversation again. “Well, these defense researchers figured out some form of quantum physics that can be controlled through telephone signals. The phone, it has to have a hard drive, and it has to have this software on it. But what I understand of it is that it can see you. It takes a picture of your face, and it can… tell things about you.”

  Drake was blinking again. “That’s impossible. You can’t tell anything about a person by their face.”

  Kennedy crossed his eyes and stuck his tongue out at her.

  “Ugh, nerd!” she said, laughing.

  Kennedy sighed and got serious again. “Have you ever heard of biometrics?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Yes, actually, I have. They use a biometrics security system at the Pentagon and a lot of other places I’ve worked.”

  Kennedy nodded deeply. “Yes, but security is barely scratching the surface. Biometrics goes deeper than that. Much deeper.”

  Drake looked around. “So maybe Jeffers used biometrics to deploy the attack?”

  “No,” he replied. “I think biometrics used Jeffers to deploy the attack.”

  ***

  Sabrina collapsed into the house on a Saturday afternoon after another hectic shift at The Drip and was welcomed by the smell of roasting chiles. She fell into her dad’s armchair and kicked off her sneakers, but sat there in silence, staring at the blank TV screen. When her mother came in, she still sat there in the stuffed chair, keys and purse in hand, her long dark brown hair spilling over her forehead.

  “¿Cómo? ¿Qué esta mal?” asked Gabriela.

  “Nada mama,” she groaned.

  With a doubtful look on her face, her mother turned back to the kitchen. Sabrina would tell her in time. Sabrina told her mother everything.

  Eventually, she slinked upstairs to her room, and opened her backpack, pulling out her homework. She was down to the last few weeks of school. Almost a graduate, and still not even enrolled in college.

  She slid open the desk drawer and jumped when she saw the smartphone glaring back up at her, the screen off. Her reflection in the shiny screen was a blank outline, the shape of a face with the features distorted and obscured. She quickly shut the drawer.

  But her curiosity was piqued, and she could no longer deny that. She slowly slid open the drawer and picked up the phone. She pressed the power button and waited as the phone flickered on. The battery was at 50 percent, the reception was a little over half. She flicked through the menu, first clicking on the contacts list and going through each name, seeing if she recognized any of them. She thumbed through for several minutes. There seemed to be thousands. The list went on and on.

  She then decided to scroll through the pictures. There were pictures of people dancing, people drinking, holding beers up, posing in groups, some during the day, most at night. Hundreds of pictures. There were some so blurry they were unrecognizable. There were some that looked like they were taken by accident or in passing. A few appeared to be skin, but it was unapparent which body part was being photographed. And there were dozens of the pretty mulatto girl that was clearly the girlfriend of the person who owned the phone. As she clicked through all the pictures, she saw the guy again, the blond one who had been on fire. The one whose face was plastered all over every news station in the country now because he had killed all those people and murdered that girl… after taking the ransom money her parents had given him. What the hell kind of criminal does that? Takes the ransom money and still kills the girl and sticks around town, spending it all conspicuously? She was puzzled and frightened over the whole story.

  It occurred to her that this was his phone. It was after looking through a group of pictures of him with his girlfriend, kis
sing her, their arms around each other, that this dawned on her. They looked really happy, and you could tell it was a self-shot. I have the perpetrator’s phone. I have a phone that belongs to the biggest criminal in the country right now.

  Immediately it struck her that having this phone might implicate her in the crime itself. Why are you in possession of the very phone that was used to send over a dozen text messages that would cause the entire wing of the chemistry lab to be blown to smithereens, they might ask. Why didn’t you turn the phone in immediately? What were you hiding?

  Her older brother was already associated with the guy, if she turned up two weeks later with his phone, how suspicious would that be? How bizarre a coincidence for them to not try to find something tying her to the crimes?

  And what if they did find something? What if there was some stupid little way that they could accuse her of something having to do with the phone or the murder? Like a hair at the scene, or a fingerprint? She had been there. She had been at the scene of the blast, she had witnessed everything. And she had fled before a single authority had arrived.

  As her brain whirred out of control, she placed the phone back into the drawer and slid it shut again. Get a grip, Sabrina, she told herself.

  Finally she decided that she needed to focus on something else and that she would take the phone and drop it off anonymously at the police department. She wasn’t sure exactly how she would do it, but for now, the phone would stay put where it was, hidden, where nobody knew she had it. She opened the text book on her desk and began her last chapter of American History. Later, she told herself, she would think about it later.

  ***

  Kennedy dropped the manila folder of papers onto the desk with a slap. “Deputy Conner, thanks for meeting with me,” he said.

  Conner shook his hand and sat across from Kennedy. He was young and handsome, with a clean-shaven face and a hard-lined chin. His eyes were a sparkling shade of gray, and he looked Kennedy openly eye to eye, which Kennedy interpreted as a sign of intelligence and confidence. He was physically fit, his chest and shoulders solid under his uniform. To Kennedy, he looked like the average small-town sheriff deputy. That was perfectly okay with him. These guys loved being the go-fers for the FBI.