Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1) (12 page)

S
PACE

B
y noon
, I had identified most of the hack targets on the portal. This wasn't a multimillion dollar operation. This was a billion-dollar operation. These people, whoever they were, had systematically identified, cracked, and tapped a staggering array of electronic cash sources. Toll roads. Public utilities. Parking facilities. If there was an enterprise out there built on huge numbers of transactions, an enterprise likely to have vulnerabilities, they had targeted it. Plus SPACE, which was still a solitary outlier. There were a few links that led to things I couldn't yet identify, but I would. For now, it was time to write an update report for Jacob Allen.

I had pondered how to handle the issue of notifying law enforcement. My lawyer brother had called after he researched it, and said he felt confident that I was under no legal obligation to go to law enforcement myself. His suggestion was to notify my client, in writing, of what I'd found, along with a clear suggestion that the authorities should be notified. And that was how I would handle it. I didn't want an unnecessary battle on my hands with my client. More importantly to me, I wanted them to think I had put the rape videos behind me. Let them think that. Let LVPD think that, too. But it wasn't true.

Those videos would not leave me alone. I couldn't get past the idea that these girls were alone, terrified, savaged. What if my own daughter were in a situation like that? The videos haunted my dreams. They haunted my days, hanging back in the black recesses of my soul, niggling at me like a single fly in a large house. Always there. Even when they weren't front and center, they were there, in the blackness, calling me to join them in the shadows.

C
RIMEA
, UKRAINE

S
asha Maslov

I
t had taken
hours for his people to get it, but after trying a hundred times to call Max's son Mikail, Sasha finally had a phone number for Benjamin Zuyev. He was not ideal, but he was all Sasha had if Mikail was missing. According to Sasha's contacts, Zuyev was a wily old Muscovite who had become Max's chief lieutenant in the United States by way of attrition when Mikail killed Dmitry. The contacts all seemed to agree that Zuyev's reputation was one of competence. Sasha dialed the number, then stuck the phone back in its cradle. The sound of the ringing came through the car's speakers. When the call was answered, he said, "Benjamin?"

"Who is this?"

"Benjamin, is Sasha Maslov. Please to speak in English so my companion can to understand."

"I am speaking in English. What you want, Maslov?"

"Benjamin. I believe we can to help each other."

"How?"

"We can to go to FBI, make deal."

Zuyev laughed, a long and guttural affair, before saying, "Have you lost your Ukrainian mind, Maslov? Why would I do that?"

"To live."

"What the hell are you talking about? You really are insane, no?"

"Max ordered Mikail to kill Dmitry," Sasha said, although it was highly unlikely. Max would come closer to killing his own son before Dmitry. "And Benjamin? He has also to ordered him to kill
you
."

Now there was a long pause, then: "I do not believe this."

"Is true, Benjamin."

"Why? Why would Max want me dead?"

"FBI knows about operation. Preparing to arrest everyone. Max wants no one alive to talk, but if we make deal with them, we live and not much time in the prison."

An even longer pause. Sasha looked over at Chrissy and winked again.

"And why you want to help me?" Zuyev said.

"I want to live, and I want my friend to live. Max has to ordered us killed, also. With what I know, and what you know, and what my friend knows, we can to make very good deal. We can to blame Max for everything. He will go to prison forever. We make deal, not much prison."

"I don't believe that is possible."

"You listen to my friend Christine. She is smart, like genius. Okay?"

"I am listening."

S
PACE

L
ike everyone else
, I've seen plenty of casino security operations on TV and movie screens. Huge walls of monitors in a dark room with an army of eagle-eyed experts watching. Hollywood got it wrong. The security operations center of the largest casino the world had ever known, was maybe half the size of a typical convenience store. Maybe. There were monitors, of course, but not a sea of them. And there were watchers, but here's where you're gonna be tempted not to believe me. I counted seven people, each seated at a computer desk with two monitors. At least there was a wall with one giant screen on it.

Shortly after I arrived, a sturdy man of about fifty with a definite military bearing walked up with his hand extended. "Mr. Flatt, Hank Dobo."

I shook his hand. Hank had a great handshake, strong, just long enough. "Good to meet you. Please call me Sam."

"You got it, Sam." He gestured for me to follow him and said, "Come on, let me show you my little kingdom." He walked through the door from which he had appeared. I followed and he talked as he went. "Figure it'll be easier for me to help you once you understand what we do and how we do it. Okay with you?"

"You bet. Looks fascinating," I said.

"Won't argue with you on that, Sam.”

We stepped into what was obviously a server room, and it put Jerry Rose's (impressive) IT fiefdom to shame. This room was huge, and most of it was occupied by a glassed-in area with enough racks of servers and equipment to run a country. Dobo walked up to a glass panel that looked just like all the rest and pressed his splayed hand against it. The entire panel flashed green and slid to the side. A blast of cold air hit us and we stepped inside.

"Now I'm impressed," I said, following him around to the back of the racks.

He pointed at the line of racks, where thousands of cables glowed green as they snaked out of the floor, up the racks, and plugged into the backs of the servers. "Everything feeds in here, all the cameras. Self-monitoring. If there's a problem anywhere—" He walked about twenty feet down the line and pointed at a single cable, glowing red instead of green. "We can pinpoint it at a glance."

"How many cameras are there?"

"Seven thousand and change. All high-def, ten-eighty minimum. About a quarter are four-K." I'm sure I looked bewildered, because Dobo said, "Question?"

"Yeah. I counted seven guys out there watching video. How are they keeping up with a thousand cameras a man?"

He smiled. "We'll get to that." And Hank Dobo kept walking and talking, and I kept following and listening as he walked me through the techno-flow of his remarkable system. When we arrived back in the operations center, he said, "Here's where the technology really shows off."

"Obviously," I said.

"This is the same basic setup you'll see in just about every up-to-date casino in town. Each technician is responsible for a patrol zone, or group of cameras. Maybe five hundred of the cameras are on the general grounds, meaning they're not in the casino. Typical surveillance. The rest are divided up among the various gaming areas. Our guys watch a rotating sample of cameras, as opposed to sitting and staring at a camera waiting for something to happen."

"Don't you run the risk of missing cheats and such, watching so few of the cameras?" I said.

"We're not watching few. We're watching all of them, just not with human eyeballs. Our algorithms have been fed data on every scheme imaginable, data gathered over decades."

"Like what?"

He tapped one of the technicians on the shoulder and said, "Steve, put an algo-feed on the big screen." Steve tapped a few keys and the view on the monitor wall switched to a high-res view looking straight down onto the playing surface of a blackjack table. Overlaid green circles and squares flitted in and out of existence on the image; they reminded me a lot of the targeting display on modern military aircraft. It's like they were "locking on" to stacks of chips, cards, players' hands, the dealer's hands, all in rapid succession.

Hank Dobo said, "Got anything showing activity?"

Steve scanned one of his monitors. "B-J one-fifty-nine." He hit a few keys and the view changed to a different table. This time not all the targets were green. One stack of chips was ringed by a blinking red circle.

"Wait for it," Dobo said.

The player at that spot placed a bet and the cards came out. He looked at his cards, and then with a lightning move of one of his hands, reached out and pulled most of the chips he had bet back out of the betting circle.

"I'll be damned," I said. "The software knows the game, knows what movements should and shouldn't happen at the various stages of the game."

"Bingo. All the algos are some variation of that, watching for something that's not right. When it finds it and watches enough to verify suspicious activity, it will alert the tech who's watching that zone." No sooner had he said that than one of the computers sounded a little bell, and that same camera view appeared on the monitor of one of the technicians.

"Amazing," I said, and shook my head. "Did the computers or the techs pick up on anything weird for the EGMs and dates I sent you?"

"Not a thing," he said. "I read your report and I've been going through those recordings for the past several nights. Nothing out of the ordinary, but I did compile a list of the players."

"Names?" I said. "How?"

"Well, some names. Pictures of all of them, and our facial recognition database was able to put names with about eighty percent of them. You wanna see the list?"

I nodded, then followed him into a small but well-appointed office. He closed the door, picked up a file folder from his desk. As he handed it to me, he said, "Here you go, Flatbread."

I've developed some pretty good acting chops through the years, because as covert as we were in our missions, we were still around the military all the time. Several times through the years, I've run into someone who said, "Hey, didn't we serve together?" or something like that. It's easy enough to blow that off. But no one, and I mean no one has ever called me “Flatbread” other than other BAM-team members, and that's been a long time. So when Hank Dobo said it, no amount of acting could mask the way time froze for several seconds.

There was no point in acting. I said, "When and where?"

"Remember a mission in a cave, guy with a computer?"

"A lot of them."

"You lost your partner."

I nodded slowly. Remembered exactly which mission now.

"Saw you guys on base beforehand. Your partner was giving you shit in the mess hall about your horse."

I nodded again. "Ditto. Giving me shit about my horse was his favorite thing to do."

Dobo smiled. "I was in one of the F-18s at the end of that thing. Small world, huh?"

I looked him in the eye and said, "Tiny."

F
EDERAL BUREAU
OF INVESTIGATION

MANHATTAN FIELD OFFICE

NEW YORK CITY

S
pecial Agent Courtney
Meyer

C
ourtney Meyer was
at her wit's end. After eighteen months investigating the Eastern Europe crime family headed up by Maxim Sultanovich, she had exactly nothing. Not just nothing on Sultanovich himself. Nothing on anyone of value. Sure, she could haul in a gaggle of street thugs and threaten, scream, and shout. But it would accomplish nothing. There wasn't a Ukrainian or Russian soldier on the street who wouldn't prefer federal prison over the consequences of betrayal.

Her big RICO case a few years ago had gotten her on the map, given her some juice. But a year and a half of nothing spent a lot of juice. Every investigative trail she followed had eventually hit a dead end. Not because she was wrong. She wasn't. It was the same old story: the bigger the fish, the more money and clout they had, the harder they were to land. People like Sultanovich insulated themselves. They didn't tell underlings, "Hey, go shoot this guy in the head." They said it with a look, a nod. Then those people looked and nodded at someone else. By the time you drilled down to someone dumb enough to open their mouths, they were low-level thugs who mattered little, whose absence from the operation would change nothing. It was an old story in the investigation of organized crime, and it was made even tougher when the bad guys were on the other side of the planet.

Her SAIC, Tom Belt, had supported her all the way, but that too would play out. Belt hadn't made it to the top of such a cherry office by backing losing causes. She needed a break, had to have it.

Meyer leaned back in her chair, hands clasped behind her head. The damn tilt lock on the chair gave way and she tilted so far back she almost fell over.

"Damn it!" she said out loud as she righted herself, then reached beneath the seat of the chair and wiggled the lock back into place. While looking down, she saw that her butt almost filled the width of the chair.
Focus: One problem at a time. Solve the case, then you can address your lard ass.

The key was Vegas. She knew it, felt it in every bone of her body. Too many Ukes and Russkies in and out of there over the past couple years. And there was the hard link between Sultanovich himself and that casino, SPACE. Yes, she needed Vegas. She needed to know how the casino figured into the equation. Special Agent Courtney Meyer needed Samuel Flatt to cooperate. Her initial, direct approach hadn't worked. Nor had the sappy apology Belt had suggested she send. No surprise there. Time for a new strategy. The chair creaked as she leaned forward and moved back into a work posture. She pulled a drawer open and extracted the file folder labeled FLATT, SAMUEL.

"Let's get more acquainted, Computer Boy," she said as she opened the folder. "Bound to be something here I can use to convince you to do your patriotic duty."