Terror Machine

by Denison Hatch

  “I could tell you, but I couldn’t make you understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “You and I . . . We’re like two completely separate alien races—oil and water. We can’t combine. Only one wins, and the other loses. That’s the only way this goes. I’m just a little part of it.”

  “Are you talking about, like, religion? I’m not so good with that.”

  “Religion, culture . . .” Hanafi shrugged. “Resources, geopolitics . . . All of it.”

  “That’s a little wishy-washy.”

  “Huh?” Hanafi asked.

  “You strike me as a little more than just a buzzword guy . . . Religion, culture . . .”

  “You want to know about me personally?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a light at the end of the tunnel for me.”

  “Not anymore,” Jake said.

  Hanafi shook his head. “I told you that you wouldn’t understand.”

  “You called yourself ‘a little part.’ I feel like you’re a big part of everything. From all our intel, it seems you’re the big boy in the room. You’re the boss.”

  “Every boss has a boss, detective.”

  “So who’s yours?”

  Hanafi shrugged.

  “Sorry. My bad. That’s my job, isn’t it?” Jake asked.

  “You’re the cop,” Hanafi confirmed.

  “I really do want to understand. I know I don’t, but I wanna. So you planned and carried out multiple terror events just because of an overall culture war?”

  “It’s a bit more complicated than that.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “I told you—I’m part of something.”

  “So who else is out there?”

  “There’s nobody in New York. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “No one?”

  “Nope. You got us all, but not before we got some of you . . .”

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth?

  “I’m sitting here in the heart of your government, detective. What do I have to lose?”

  “Maybe two of your guys?” Jake pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and swiped through a number of photos on the phone. “You left out the part where these two got away,” Jake said. He showed Hanafi a grainy surveillance photo of Dr. Borin and Murad running down the street in Manhattan.

  “Don’t know them,” Hanafi said.

  “I do—Maximilian Borin and Murad Amin. Quite the odd couple, if you ask me. How’d you find the doctor?”

  Hanafi didn’t reply.

  “My guess is it wasn’t during your annual checkup,” Rivett joked.

  “I’m done talking. You’re not my lawyer, and you’re not my friend.”

  “The doctor is the one who made the mind-control machine, yeah? The one you ran on Abdel Hayat?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Hanafi said.

  “Right, right. I forgot. Sorry. I have a problem with listening. Everyone tells me that.” Rivett stood up. His hands gripped the chair he’d been sitting on. “I want you to remember something, Alim.”

  Hanafi listened.

  “You’re the one who ended this conversation, not me,” Jake said. “Me? I could go on talking for days. I told you I’m not so big into religion. But I’ll talk to you about it—happily. I’ll talk about sports. Music. Man, there’s one I can talk for days about. Weeks, really. Motorcycles. Art . . . at least a little. Hell, I can even talk to you about love. But you gotta talk back. Talking’s a privilege. It’s like a relationship. Needs both sides. You don’t wanna talk? That’s fine. Some people call me dense, but I’ll get the picture eventually. Then I’ll be gone. But . . . When I’m gone, you might never have another conversation again. Not with someone who can change your future. The day will come when the only person you’ll be able to talk to is yourself.” Rivett slammed the back of the chair against the table that Hanafi was sitting behind. The noise ricocheted around the room like a bullet with no way out. “And when you’re sitting in Supermax up in Colorado, in your tiny little cell . . . When you’re talking to yourself . . . That’s when you’ll finally realize that you’re completely insane.”

  ▪

  “More I get to know him, the more I like the kid,” Mr. White said. He was sitting in a glass conference room in back of the command center alongside Susan. They were watching Jake’s interrogation.

  “Rivett’s a wild man,” Susan said. “But that’s his secret to staying employed. He makes you like him.”

  Mr. White nodded, his hand tapping on a keyboard in front of him. Sheldon White was good at multitasking. His personal motto was “multa bene facta”—many things done well. The credo had served him very well for over thirty years as a CIA agent. As was standard, not even inside this room was the CIA’s presence overtly advertised. But everyone knew. Every single individual in the room was aware they had to listen to the quiet but confident agent and his aides who sat in the back. In fact, Mr. White was probably the only person Susan was willing to listen to as well—and everyone knew that, too. He didn’t speak often, but when he did he was listened to. As was normal for Mr. White, he had spent the last few days in the way that a swashbuckling CIA agent should—doing deep financial research on his laptop.

  Mr. White’s thought process began and ended with the gym. The only way the terrorists had been able to escape the raid was because of the old construction hallway below Best Diner. But Hanafi and his crew would have needed to ensure that their escape route was clear. The gym’s sub-basement was new construction. There were at least two locked and reinforced doors that led from the sub-basement to the rest of the building. However, none of the locks had been broken. They were all unlocked. It seemed as though Hanafi and his crew had simply walked through an open portal to freedom.

  “I can understand the doors . . .” Mr. White talked out loud to Susan, who turned to listen.

  “You’re still thinking about the gym?” Susan prodded. “You read the maintenance guy’s transcripts, right?”

  The NYPD had interviewed the owner of the gym’s maintenance man for eight hours. He checked out. He was just a dude with a job. He had reported that he didn’t remember unlocking the doors to the utility room in the sub-basement, but he also didn’t remember locking them—because they were always locked. It was possible, he’d explained, that he’d simply forgotten at some point. He didn’t go into the sub-basement much in any event, sticking to the main supply room in the basement.

  “That’s why I said I can understand about the doors . . .”

  Susan watched as Mr. White continued to click through folder after folder of dense financial files.

  “But what I can’t understand is the cameras,” Mr. White continued. “New construction and a new owner, and a fully installed camera system. But they tell us their system had been down for about a month prior. What sort of establishment lets their system go down for a month? Does that ring true?”

  “I think the owners were cleared. Fong and Moseley have been running through all of it,” Susan replied.

  “Right, right . . .” Mr. White continued to click on his laptop. “It got me thinking. Let’s take a step back. On one hand, Hanafi may have just gotten lucky. It’s certainly possible. On the other hand, maybe Hanafi knew this was his escape route, and he had some way of making sure the doors were open. Maybe someone at the gym, or the owners of the building, had a reason to help Hanafi. So for plausible deniability, they broke their security system nice and early—so that if and when we came along, they could say it was a months-long problem, not something that conspicuously happened that night.”

  “Possible but improbable . . .”

  “We are so far past improbable,” Mr. White said.

  “Where’s the lead?”

  “I’ve been looking for it for about three days, Susan,” Sheldon said. He finally broke his attention from the computer screen and turned to address her. “Is Hanafi married?”

  Fong perked
up from across the room. “No marriage records in any of the fifty states. Still trying to pull data from our foreign partners.”

  “I think Hanafi’s married, which means I think we might have found our edge,” Mr. White finally announced.

  The whole room turned towards Mr. White, eager to understand.

  “I sure ain’t a real estate investor, but that building with the gym bothered me. Yeah, the doors. The cameras. But not just them. It’s the whole goddamn hulking thing. It’s so damn pretty, right? It’s gorgeous. I am aware of the concept of gentrification that you city folk always like to complain about. But no other development has arrived on that street. Not like that. So with one building, the place goes from zero to hero? I’m not so sure. So that made me start digging deeper into the building itself. Who’s the developer? Well, last night I paid a visit to the guy who built it. He’s completely legitimate. Big builder in New York—a hundred employees and another thousand subcontractors. But he told me something interesting. He didn’t originate this project. He was a hired gun. Another company, an LLC based in a corporate factory in Delaware, gives this developer a low-interest loan to buy the land and build the building. Simultaneously, a related LLC signs a contract saying they’ll buy the finished building from the developer for a fixed price above the interest and equal to his profit margin. So, of course, we go after these LLCs. Don’t find a lot there either. Except they’re both run by an attorney named Ronald Fitzpatrick out of Long Island. Here’s where it gets really interesting. Fitzpatrick is either the trustee of trusts or the officer of corporations that own multiple buildings along that street.” Mr. White paused for a moment and then continued, “Including Best Diner.”

  “Holy shit,” Jake Rivett said. He’d just stepped into the room and listened to the end of Mr. White’s story. “Should I go back in and ask Hanafi about Fitzpatrick?”

  “No,” replied Mr. White curtly.

  “So one person owns all of those buildings?” Susan asked.

  “Or one organization. One big pool of money.”

  “Where’s Fitzpatrick? We’re gonna go get him, right?” Jake said.

  Mr. White whipped his laptop around and clicked on an application, which loaded up a live-feed video. Onscreen, the attorney Fitzpatrick sat surrounded by serious men in suits.

  “FBI is talking to him right now. A bunch of Mack’s guys. I can assure you they won’t be nice.”

  “And what’s he saying?” Susan asked. “How does this relate to Hanafi having a wife?”

  “That’s what’s interesting.” Mr. White glanced at Susan. “Lawyer is telling us jack shit. More he opens his mouth, the more he’s buying himself time in the fed pen. I know this because while he lies to us, we’ve been pulling his bank accounts warrant by warrant. Still haven’t figured out who actually owns all these buildings, but it isn’t Fitzpatrick himself. Fitzpatrick says he’s only dealt with foreign lawyers in Panama and denies knowing his ultimate client. He also denies knowing Hanafi personally. Meanwhile, Hanafi only communicated with a real estate management firm. But Fitzpatrick’s lying through his teeth. There is a connection.”

  “What is it?” Susan asked.

  “Fitzpatrick is married with three kids. For all intents and purposes, he seems happy. Good social media. No cheating on his texts or emails. And his phone doesn’t have him straying past Long Island, and certainly never to the countryside of Pennsylvania.”

  “Pennsylvania?”

  “Huh?” Jake interjected.

  “The Hiller School.”

  “Say again?”

  “The Hiller School. Fitzpatrick makes tuition payments to a high-end private college-prep school in the middle of Pennsylvania. It ain’t cheap. He’s paying over seventy thousand dollars a year for two kids of Pakistani descent. So either Fitzpatrick has some secret children he’s storing in Pennsylvania . . .”

  “Or Hanafi does.” Jake finished Mr. White’s statement.

  “Exactly,” Mr. White said. “I’m sending Moseley and Tony to Pennsylvania to take care of it.”

  “Warrants might be a little tough. Lot of supposition . . .” Susan said.

  “I know,” Mr. White said. “The agency has learned a lot over the years.” Mr. White chuckled. “First we tried good—cigarettes and porn. Then we tried evil. You probably read all about that in the newspapers. But what we’ve come to realize is neither of those work. It’s all too one-dimensional, too literal. Everyone knows those tactics now. Especially on US soil. You saw that firsthand, Rivett. Hanafi knows all of our limits.”

  “Yeah . . .” Jake trailed off.

  “Don’t get down,” Mr. White said.

  “What can you do different?”

  “Tricks, Rivett. That’s what we do. We play tricks,” Mr. White said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  THE NEXT DAY WAS VERY Queens—hectic, dirty and frustrating. Sometimes Queens was also magical, but not at present. Jake had spent the whole morning chasing down leads. The leads themselves were like wild geese and the chasing had gone just as well. It was slightly frustrating, albeit nothing out of the ordinary. If he was being honest, Jake was still a bit upset that Mr. White and Susan hadn’t allowed him to head down to Pennsylvania. That was a real lead—at least it seemed to be. Maybe Mr. White didn’t trust him. Or maybe Susan had spoiled the well. Either way, it grated on Jake while he spent the day humping around the borough.

  Jake’s primary mission was to locate Omer Amin . . . again. Overnight, the security team at Twitter had quickly provided an IP address, which was tracked to Omer’s cell phone. However, when Jake and a few detectives had arrived at the cell phone’s location, they had found the device inside a trash can just blocks away from the Charcoal Stop.

  Now the detectives were midway through an interview with Omer’s family at their house in Astoria, and it was abundantly clear that none of them knew where Omer was. Jake was silently kicking himself inside. If he hadn’t let Omer go, they might be further along. But at the same time, if he had stayed even a few more minutes with Omer, it’s possible that Times Square would have gone much worse than it did. Adding to the conundrum, the Amin family was claiming that their son had been kidnapped by another one of their sons.

  “And your cops . . . Know what they did while my business burned? Nothing!” Moradi Amin raised his voice as he complained to Jake about his destroyed business.

  Moradi’s dry-cleaning business was the last thing on Jake’s mind. While the other detectives listened patiently and attempted to mollify Moradi, Jake spent his time carefully padding around the Amin family home and taking everything in.

  “We get it, sir,” Jake said. “But like we told you, that’s not our department.”

  “It’s my life,” Moradi replied. “Aren’t you detectives?”

  “Terror, Mr. Amin. Terror. That’s what I care about. So are you gonna answer our questions about Omer?”

  “We have nothing to hide, nothing at all . . . I’ve answered everything!” Moradi exclaimed.

  “So your other son, Murad . . . He and the doctor Maximilian Borin show up . . .”

  “Sure. The one from your pictures . . .”

  “How long were they in the house?”

  “Murad came to look for Omer. He was here for about an hour beforehand and then not long after.”

  “Do you have any idea where they took Omer?”

  “No.” Moradi shook his head. “I told you. I mean, it was very traumatic. I don’t remember absolutely everything . . .”

  “So they could have said something about where they were going, but you might not remember?”

  “I remember,” Salma Amin said as she popped up, sitting next to her quiet mother.

  “And?” Jake asked.

  “They didn’t say where they were going. No. But . . . there was one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When the SUV showed up—the black one that they all got into . . . The doctor said something about a man in Dubai. But,
like, the man was here. The man from Dubai was picking them up. Something like that . . .”

  “The man from Dubai? Who’s that?”

  “No idea. They didn’t say his name. That’s all they said—‘the man from Dubai.’”

  Jake sighed. Another wild goose. And this one from Dubai.

  ▪

  The winter sun had already begun to dip below the horizon as Jake headed south, away from Queens and towards Mona. It was only midafternoon, but he was done for the day. As usual, the case was bothering him. But he planned to do his best to disconnect. That’s what he’d promised Mona and what she wanted—no, needed. And he understood that. He also had a band practice scheduled for that evening but was about one text away from cancelling it.

  He hoped Mona would be in a good mood. The last two weeks had frayed both of their nerves, although he knew most of it was his own fault. Jake was excited about spending his entire life with Mona, but the irony of a terror attack occurring on the very night he’d proposed was not lost on him. It was truly a newsworthy international incident that manifested itself as a giant signpost about the issues that they would continue to face in their relationship. Jake wasn’t a person who was used to drawing a line between work and life. The two would always be inextricably linked to one another. After all, his most successful cases of the past had required fanatical obsession. Criminals never slept, so why should he? And while Mona had met him on the job, she was probably still coming to terms with exactly how deep Jake’s devotion lay. That’s what happened when you were the only thing standing between good and bad.

  Thankfully, when Jake arrived at the apartment, he found Mona in a downright chipper mood. Something was up. She sat on their couch next to her laptop, with a menagerie of printed materials strewn out across the coffee table ahead of her.

  “What’s all that?” Jake asked as he walked in. He kissed her.

  “Sit down for a second.”

  Jake did as requested. On the coffee table, he noticed a number of wedding-invitation mock-ups, both printed and pulled from magazines.