Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1) (23 page)

T
IJUANA
, MEXICO

C
ourtney Meyer

A
fter more than two
hours of wrangling via the State Department, the TSA, the FAA, and who knows how many Mexican agencies, the Mexican official led the way down the corridor, with Meyer close behind. When they came to a door marked DIRECCIÓN GENERAL DE AERONÁUTICA CIVIL, the airport police official swiped a key card and they stepped into a dimly lit room. Meyer looked around and estimated a dozen people in the room, all staring at computer screens showing the feeds from surveillance cameras.

The official scanned the room until he spotted the person he was looking for, then gestured for Meyer to follow. They reached the workstation of a skinny girl who looked to be in her mid-twenties. The official spoke to her in Spanish and the girl typed and clicked her way through a maze of screens until she hit the right one. She looked back to the official, who nodded, and the girl clicked PLAY.

Meyer leaned forward and watched as Sultanovich's jet came into view. The airplane was coming straight toward the camera, which was obviously mounted on the outside wall of the private jet service facility the pilots had chosen. A worker in coveralls stood with his back to the camera, motioning the jet forward with handheld orange batons. The quality of the video was sharp, the colors vibrant in the sunlit recording. As the jet came closer to the camera, Meyer saw that it was streaked with rivulets of dirt, not the shiny jewel it had been when it powered its way out of Memphis. Had they landed in a field somewhere? Flown through a dust storm?

The tarmac guide crossed his batons and the Falcon stopped. Less than a minute passed before a white SUV with government plates entered the frame and pulled close to the jet.

"What agency is that?" Meyer said.

The airport policeman leaned closer and squinted. "Customs."

"Would they normally meet a plane like this, this quickly?"

He shrugged. "Maybe if someone important is on the plane. Or someone rich." He looked at Meyer and rubbed his thumb and index finger together.

Moments later, the door of the airplane opened and a stairway folded out and down. A beautiful little girl walked down the steps, followed by Max Sultanovich. The driver and passenger doors on the SUV opened and two uniformed men stepped out. Meyer looked to the police official. "Customs?"

He nodded.

The men then opened the rear doors on the SUV. Sultanovich got in on the left, the little girl on the right. The men closed the doors, returned to the front seats, and the vehicle left the frame in a hurry.

Meyer turned to the official again. "Did that look normal to you?"

He gave her the universal thumb-finger money rub again. "That looked rich to me."

S
AN YSIDRO
, CALIFORNIA

M
ax Sultanovich

H
e preferred
to stay out of sight in the dreadful box of a hotel room, but Tatyana needed dinner and the idea of room service in this dump was a joke. After a brief walk on a grimy sidewalk littered with bottles and food wrappers and condoms, they arrived at a place called Waffle House. He didn't like the looks of the place, but Tatyana pulled him that way and he followed.

Once they were inside and seated in a booth, a skinny old crow who may have had a total of five teeth in her head walked over and handed them menus. "Coffee?" she said.

"Yes, strong coffee, please," Max said. "Orange juice and milk for Tatyana."

"Coffee just comes one way. I think it's pretty strong but I—"

"Fine, fine, just bring." Max dismissed her with a flip of his hand.

The crow looked offended but moved away with a little grunt. He leaned over toward Tatyana. "What would you like to eat?"

She didn't speak—she rarely did—but she pointed to a picture of a waffle. Max nodded. When the crow returned with the coffee and Tatyana's juice and milk, he placed their order and sat back to wait. He looked around at the assortment of human trash with their dirty caps and blue jeans, or shorts and sandals, or that one absurdity wearing a cowboy hat. He probably thought he was the actor John Wayne.

Then the crow was headed back. Could this bitch not merely leave him in peace? When she got there, she surprised him by handing a small box of crayons and a coloring sheet to Tatyana. Her little face lit up.

"You like to color, honey?" the crow said.

"Da. Spasybi," Tatyana said with a big smile.

"Huh?" the crow said.

"Speak in English, Tatyana."

"Thank. You," Tatyana said, enunciating the two words with care.

"Aw, now ain't that the cutest thing?" The crow turned to Max and said, "What language was she talking?"

"Ukrainian," Max said. "Native tongue."

"Y'all from the Ukraine, huh?"

Max seriously wanted to leap to his feet and choke the crow until she stopped twitching, as he always wanted to do when some stupid American said "the Ukraine." He restrained himself and nodded.

"Well, I'll just declare." Then she leaned down close enough that Max could smell stale cigarette on her breath and said, "Not from around here myself. I'm an Alabama gal."

After all he had tolerated from America and Americans over the past days, this invasion of his personal space pushed Max right to the limit of his sufferance with this hag. He could feel the vein over his eye throbbing, his nostrils flaring as he drew his mouth into a tight little wad. With his last gram of forbearance, he said, "Yes, very nice." And with fortuitous timing that may have saved the crow's life, his phone rang.

Max flipped it open, put it to his ear, and said, "Yes." After some listening, he smiled. A little more listening, then he said,
"Da, sdelayte eto." Yes, do it.

S
PACE

M
y alarm sounded
at six o'clock. I pressed a button to open the drapes and early-morning sunlight flooded the room. I turned on the shower and waited a few seconds as the glowing water morphed from blue to purple to pink to red, then stepped into the stream and let the heat chase the sleep away. Once I was clean, awake, and shaven, I killed the water and the body dryer spun up. Thirty seconds of swirling warm air later, I was done. Teeth brushed. Check. Out of longtime habit, I started to dress tactical black for my upcoming rendezvous, but remembered this was a daylight meeting in which looking normal would be the best way to not be noticed. I pulled on a pair of chinos and a FLATT FORENSIC logo shirt, then headed to breakfast.

As I walked through the casino, I looked at the number of people still plunking chips down on tables and pushing buttons on machines, people who had obviously been at it all night. Saggy stubbled faces, red eyes, and crumpled clothing told the tale. On a weekday morning, well before seven, there they were, feeding the coffers of the SPACE Corporation like mind-numbed minions.

When I reached the entrance to Rings of Saturn, the hostess said, "Good morning, Sam!" She was a black lady of about fifty who apparently never stopped smiling, and the smile was always real, the kind that brightened your soul a bit just by seeing it.

"Hey, Rose," I said. "They got the good stuff in here this morning?"

"You know it!"

I extended my fist for our ritual knuckle-bump to celebrate the good stuff, winked at Rose, and headed in. After loading up my plate, I found my favorite booth, said a prayer of thanks for the good stuff, and ran through my mental checklist of things to ask Daria this morning.

At 6:45, I left the buffet and ran the rest of the casino gauntlet to the rear exit. At 6:55, I was in the offshoot tunnel's alcove where we had talked the day before. A couple minutes later, I saw Daria approaching. Her walk was fast, her head on a nervous swivel. She really was a beautiful young woman, glossy dark hair on fair skin, and those striking Slavic eyes. Eyes that showed such vulnerability and fear. It wasn't fair, and it could not be allowed to stand.

I slipped a finger into my shirt pocket and touched the RECORD button on a small digital recorder. "Hi, Daria."

"Hello."

"Are you sure no one followed you?"

She nodded. "I not see no one."

"Good. I need to ask you some questions."

She nodded again. "You ask and I tell you. I also bring this." She withdrew a folded sheaf of yellow papers from her purse and handed them to me.

I unfolded the papers and saw that it was a stack of three pages taken from a legal pad. I flipped through them and said, "This is good, Daria. Very helpful." She had handwritten a ton of information about her and her predicament. I should've thought yesterday to ask for exactly this. No matter. She was more on top of it than I was.

"To save time," I said, "if I ask you a question that you already answered here"—I tapped her paper summary—"tell me you already answered, okay?"

"I tell you."

"Who started all this? Who did you talk to in Ukraine to arrange the trip to America?"

She pointed at the papers. "In story."

Her English was a little less careful today, but I had zero problem getting her meaning. I nodded. "Are there guards at the house where you stay? Someone watching you?"

"Sometime yes."

"How many?"

"Only the one. Is woman, not nice."

"Do you know her name?"

Daria shook her head.

"Is she Ukrainian?"

"No. Is American. Gray hair. Ugly woman with large bottom."

"Have any of you tried to escape when no one was watching you?"

She shook her head quickly. "No, we afraid."

"Are they holding family members of the other workers hostage?"

She tilted her head a little to the side, forehead creased.

"Like Anya," I said. "Are other workers afraid because the bad people have their brothers or sisters?"

Understanding, she nodded. "Some, yes. Maybe four or five."

"What are the others afraid of? What keeps them from running away?"

"Family at home. These people kill family at home."

"In Ukraine?"

"Ukraine, Russia, Moldova, maybe other places. I not sure."

"Okay, I understand. Do you know the names of any of the other workers?"

"Some," she said. "In story."

I chewed on my bottom lip and thought for a moment. "Are you safe inside, when you work? Does anyone strike you, hit you?" I pointed in the general direction of the bunker.

Daria flinched and her eyes flooded in an instant. There was my answer. "Is it Alex?"

"Alex…yesterday he make me stay after others leave. He want me to make sex with him."

Now the tears were streaming, although her face remained otherwise resolute, almost defiant. "I'm sorry, Daria. He will be punished. I promise."

She wiped at her eyes and nodded.

"Have you seen anyone else, anyone other than Dmitry and Alex and the ugly woman?"

She nodded and pointed at the papers again. "I put all in story."

"Great. You are doing great. Do you remember the exact date you left Ukraine? Where you flew to? When you arrived in the United States?"

"In story. I must to go now."

"Okay, can we meet tomorrow?"

"I will to be here in seven o'clock."

I reached over and squeezed her shoulder. "It's gonna be okay, Daria. I
will
help you."

S
PACE

A
fter retrieving
my portable scanner from my workroom, a.k.a. makeshift lab, I went back to my hotel room. I wanted to get Daria's summary into the computer so it would be part of my case dataset. I made high-quality scans of each sheet, then ran those images through a handwriting recognition package. The software wasn't perfect, but it was leaps and bounds ahead of where the tech had been just a few years ago, and it was good enough for what I was doing here. Within a half hour, I had scanned, converted, and corrected the data. I had only skimmed her summary thus far, so I sat down at the desk to read it in detail.

W
hile I sifted
Daria's summary through my mind and looked for info and angles that might be helpful, I pulled up my deep web browser and logged into the board where I'd left the message earlier. Bingo. My "Waste Management" message, which was a coded shout to a particular hacker in West Memphis, Arkansas, had a reply. I also had a blinking envelope icon at the top of the screen, signaling a private message. I checked the reply to the board message first and found an entry that said only 'NFM,' an acronym for 'no further message.' It was simply a way of saying my message had been read.

I clicked into the private message. It was from the right guy. He has to be the single nerdiest, dorkiest, most cliched human being and caricature of a hacker I'ver ever encountered, but he's also one of the most talented anywhere when it comes to accessing protected data. His name is Jimmy Arlington. In the online world, he's known as Jimmy the Geek, and his handle here was
jgeezer.
Mine was a less creative and meaningless
4692fellow.

F
ROM
: jgeezer

TO: 4692fellow

L
ong time no see
, 46! How can The Geek be of service? Msg me here or hit me up on #dw777-chat.

I
brought up an IRC window
, which is sort of an old-school precursor to all today's instant messaging apps, and connected to the channel Jimmy specified, confident that it would be secure if he set it up.

4
692fellow
: you there?

jgeezer: my man!

4692fellow: urgent need for some data

jgeezer: talk to me.

4692fellow: need all registration/sales data available from canon for model c300 camera

jgeezer: whoa! major. expensive.

4692fellow: don't care, can you do it?

jgeezer: tsk. tsk.

4692fellow: how long?

jgeezer: don't know but can start now.

4692fellow: there's more

jgeezer: ?

4692fellow: need anything and everything possible on flights from KBP to LAX on august 10, and LAX to LAS night flights on august 11

jgeezer: dude! that's auto-prison if caught!

4692fellow: you in habit of getting caught?

jgeezer: love you, dude, but that is some SERIOUS shit.

4692fellow: i can make it worth your risk

jgeezer: how so?

4692fellow: whatever your fee is in cash, plus some of the sweetest tech you've never seen

jgeezer: detail?

4692fellow: NSA keylogger, stealth install over the wire on any machine you can ping

jgeezer: BULLSHIT. NOT POSSIBLE.

4692fellow: tech is REAL and i have it right now

jgeezer: your word?

4692fellow: my word

jgeezer: if i wind up some dude's bitch in club fed, i'll kill myself just so i can haunt you, dude!

4692fellow: hurry

jgeezer: roger roger. will hit you with a monkeymail when i have something.

4692fellow: monkeymail?

B
ut he was gone
. I assumed I'd be able to recognize what he sent. I killed the chat and shut down my deep web access.