Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1) (25 page)

O
RLEANS HOTEL
& CASINO

LAS VEGAS

C
hristine Gamboa

T
he days
and nights were running together, melding into one never-ending nightmare of surreality, but she thought it was two days ago that they had returned to Vegas. Their small plane had taxied into a hangar, where someone had been waiting with an SUV that brought them here, to the Orleans Hotel & Casino. They were in a suite and she had her own bedroom, but the place was a dump. Peeling wallpaper, a big grimy window, and a toilet that flushed about half the time. Sasha and Zuyev sat on a sofa in the living area, hunched over the coffee table, playing some card game. Sasha never stopped talking and drinking and laughing. Zuyev drank and said nothing.

With nothing to do but sleep and watch TV, she'd had far too much time for reflection. How did she get from the girl she used to be, to this? A girl with brains and looks and character and morals is what she had been once upon a time. Then the stark and ugly truth was that she had become nothing more than a well-paid whore. She glanced over at Sasha and tried to imagine the old Christine screwing him, the girl who studied day and night, the girl who wouldn't even kiss a guy on a first date. To that girl, the idea of sex with Sasha, or sex with anyone for money, or sex with anyone she didn't love, would have been so repugnant as to be unfathomable. The guilt of it had eventually consumed her when she was working at SPACE, enough so that she made the move to tech. But once you've done something, no matter how deplorable, it's too easy to do it again. Even after getting the half-million dollars for the computer work, she missed the money, so she had slipped right back into it, spreading her legs in exchange for the ridiculous "tips" that Sasha and others like him doled out. For what? A fancy apartment? A nice car? Some clothes? What did any of that matter now?

On top of it all, there was the knowledge of what was
really
going on at SPACE, knowledge even Sasha didn't have, of a reality so horrible that she sometimes wondered if she'd dreamed it. But no, she hadn't. After providing Sasha’s people the access they needed to penetrate SPACE’s network, she’d left herself a backdoor to keep an eye on the operation. She had seen the websites with her own eyes. It was all too real, and she was terrified to say anything or do anything about it. Put it all together, and she was about two degrees from batshit crazy.

"We need to
do
something other than sit here, Sasha!" Christine said. "What's our plan?"

Sasha's eyes never left the card game. "Chrissy, we must to hide until FBI catch Max."

"What makes you think they
will
catch him? We should go back to the FBI and get protection."

Now he laid his cards on the table, face down, and turned his big head toward her. "No. FBI cannot to protect us if Max still free."

"He's probably back on the other side of the world, don't you think?"

Sasha turned to Zuyev. "Zuyev, you think Max is where?"

Zuyev turned his dead eyes to Christine. "Max is here, United States."

"You can't know that," Christine said.

"I know him," Zuyev said. "He searches."

"For what?"

Zuyev raised a finger and pointed it at himself. Then at Sasha. And finally, at Christine, where it lingered far too long.

S
PACE

M
y phone rang
. The screen said MATT DECKER. I answered it quickly. "Matt, what'd you find out?"

"Can't share the data out of the four centers, but I have a workaround for you."

"Talk to me."

"We own some hardware out in the field now. They're little stations that monitor power quality that's feeding the last mile."

"I don't understand," I said.

"You know what, it's not important. All you need to know is we have thousands of these little boxes out there, all over the country. They might even be a better gauge for you, since they're the closest things out there to the end users."

"Yeah, that really would be better. I don't care about what's coming out of Great Western Electric, only what the power looks like coming out of a wall socket in Joe Blow's house. How do I get the data?"

"That's the hitch. As they sit, they only measure down to a tenth of a volt and tenth of a hertz."

I felt my hope deflating. "Aww crap, th—"

"Hang on," Matt said. "I have Abdul working on it. He says the stations can measure down to the micro level if that's what we need. It's just that the current software's not set up to use that level of precision, because we've never needed it."

"Who's Abdul?"

"Abdul Abidi, my right-hand man, one of the smartest guys you'll ever meet."

"Okay."

"He's cobbling together an app right now that will get the data and then populate an online database. I gave him your email address, and as soon as he has it up and running, he'll shoot you the location of the database, login creds, everything you need."

"Bless you, brother. I appreciate this more than you'll ever know, and I'll owe you big time."

"You owe me nothing, Sam. They have your kid. Find her, and let me know if I can do anything else to help. I mean that."

"Thanks, Matt."

"Later," he said, and then he was gone.

M
cCARRAN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

LAS VEGAS

C
ourtney Meyer

T
he pilot announced
that landing was imminent and advised that large electronics should be shut down and stowed. Meyer was the only passenger and she ignored the silly command. If they crashed, the state of her laptop wouldn't affect the outcome one way or the other. After poring through Flatt's reports and the supporting data for most of the flight, she had spent the last half hour composing her thoughts, as well as a list of questions for Flatt. As the plane touched down, she began her final readthrough. Close enough. She closed the laptop, bagged it, and gathered up the papers around her.

She was on her feet the moment the plane came to a stop on the tarmac, her soft leather briefcase in one hand and the handle of her roller bag in the other. One of the pilots came out of the cockpit, opened the door, and folded down the little set of stairs. She descended into the late afternoon desert environment, the sun just above the western mountains painting the other business jets around them a soft amber, the air like a blast from a furnace. A black SUV was waiting no more than fifty feet away. Meyer walked toward it as the driver exited and came to meet her. When they met, she stopped briefly to shake his hand and then resumed her pace. He was part of the bureau's Critical Incident Reponse Group, a specialized sector that handled kidnappings and other intense scenarios.

Inside the truck, she pointed both her AC vents at her face and sucked in the cool air as they pulled away from the airplane and made their way along a service road that took them out of McCarran International Airport. Meyer said, "Progress on the girl?"

"Nothing tangible yet, but everything is in motion. I talked to Memphis a little while ago. They've mobilized everything they have and additional resources are being brought in from other field offices."

"Good," Meyer said.

"I'm hearing there's an Eastern European O-C element?"

She nodded. "Major enterprise, headed up by an old man named Max Sultanovich."

"The one who bugged out of Memphis on the run?"

"The one and only. The organization is run mostly out of Kiev, but with a heavy presence in Russia, Georgia, Chechnya, Moldova, you name it. Word is there's even a strong tie to Putin himself."

"What's the Vegas connection?"

"It's complex and, frankly, bizarre. Sultanovich used to own the land that the SPACE casino sits on."

"Are you kidding?"

Meyer shook her head. "How long till we get there?"

The agent pointed to his ten o'clock. Meyer leaned forward, looked out the windshield, and gasped. "Holy moly."

"Yeah, we get that a lot from people who haven't seen it before."

"I knew it was big, but that…it's…"

"Like something from a movie?"

She just nodded and continued to stare. "More like a city from the future landed in the middle of the desert."

S
PACE

A
bout fifteen minutes
after my conversation with Matt, the email from his man Abidi showed up. It contained a web address, username, and password. I popped a browser, went to the web page, logged in. It was bare-bones, but it had all the data I needed, spread across four columns:
STATION #, VOLTS, FREQ(Hz), LOCATION.
The station number was obviously an internal designator for Decker Digital. Voltage was expressed to three decimal places, frequency to two. Location was in latitude and longitude. Perfect.

The voltage and frequency values occasionally changed a bit, so the data was live. I watched it and figured out that the system was pulling a reading from each station once per minute. Now that I had the data, I sat back and thought about how to best utilize it. More accurately, I tried. My mind kept wandering to Ally, imagining her shock as those animals grabbed her. The fear. The horror. Her trying to understand why this was happening to her. What were they doing to her? Where was she right now? Locked in a room? Tied to a chair? As these thoughts spun through my mind, the blackness materialized in my mind and soul, first as scattered gossamers, wispy patches that grew until they merged into each other. No. Not now. I suppressed the black, pushed it deep. She needed my mind on what was before me right now. The black would be fuel, a cold burn.

I returned to the numbers. As a first step, I got the numbers from the professor's email and wrote them on a Post-it note: 122.493V @ 60.29Hz. Stuck to the top of my screen, that fluorescent pink square would be my rallying flag. I pictured the setting of the rape videos in my mind. A room with a bed. Beside the bed, a tripod. On top of the tripod, a Canon C300 camera. A power cable hung from the camera down to the floor and connected to an AC adapter. From the other end of the AC adapter, an electric cord emerged, laid on the floor, then up the wall where it terminated with a plug in an electrical outlet. An outlet feeding its child a diet of 122.493 volts, oscillating 60.29 times per second. Where was that outlet?

As a rudimentary first step, I searched the web page of data for any occurrence of either “122.493” or “60.29” and got no hits. Not really a surprise. These were very precise numbers that varied pretty much continuously. I looked back to the professor's email to verify my memory; the numbers were mean averages. How would the professor have calculated them? Best to ask him and be sure. I got his phone number from the email and dialed. Please answer, please answer.

He did. "Hello?"

"Professor, this is Sam Flatt."

It took him a moment to process the name. After a few seconds, he said, "Hi, Mr. Flatt. How can I help you?" His voice was refined, almost aristocratic sounding, a mismatch to his email style.

"I have a quick question about the power artifacts you found in the videos."

"Very well."

"Can you give me a basic rundown on how you calculated those averages?"

"Certainly. I measured the artifact once per second for the duration of each video, then calculated a simple mean average. Is that what you mean?"

"Exactly," I said. "Thanks so much, professor."

"My pleasure."

With the call finished, I looked back at the web page and its gently morphing columns of data. Now I knew how to approach it, and it would require one more phone call. I picked up my phone and was starting to dial when a knock sounded on the door to the conference room. A second later, the door opened and Nichols stuck his head into the room. "Someone here to see you," he said. "Says she's FBI."

S
PACE

C
ourtney Meyer

U
nder normal circumstances
, even working a normal case, Meyer would have been tempted to spend some time checking out SPACE. She had no idea anything so futuristic, so staggering in scale and realism, even existed. But this wasn't a typical investigation.

Meyer walked with Nichols, the man who met her when she stepped from the SUV. After what seemed miles of walking and a brief ride on an elevator, they entered a small vestibule that served as an anteroom to a medium-sized conference room with glass walls. Inside the room, a man she assumed to be Sam Flatt worked at a table arrayed with several computers. Nichols knocked on the door to the conference room. The man inside looked up from behind a computer screen, then stood and came to the door. Meyer was startled: Her mental picture of Flatt had been that of, well, a nerd. The specimen headed her way was anything but. Tall and lean, he was not just handsome. He was good looking in a way that she found disarming, a little roguish but with no thug vibe.

He stepped through the door with a hand extended. "Agent Meyer, Sam Flatt."

She shook his hand, which was on the rough side, again not in keeping with her preconceptions. Meyer nodded. "I'm truly sorry about your daughter. Let's get to work on finding her."

"Yeah," Flatt said. "Let's do that." He held the thick glass door to the conference room open with a finger and gestured for her to enter, then motioned Nichols in before stepping back into the room himself. He took a seat at the head of the table and said, "Have your people found anything yet?"

Meyer shook her head. "Our investigation is being run out of the Memphis field office, and they're fully engaged. Nothing to report at this point. Have you received any demands from the kidnappers?"

"No," I said, "but I'm sure that's coming."

They spent the next half hour going through Meyer's list of questions, occasionally diverging for a discussion of some point, or for Flatt to pose a question of her. She didn't pick up anything new that struck her as significant, but she did get a lot of holes filled in and she was now convinced Flatt was right about the kidnapping being tied to what he was working on here in Las Vegas. He had a strong investigative mind and continued to impress her.

Meyer stood. "I need to make some calls, get in sync with my guys here and in New York. Is there somewhere I can work?"

"I'm sure Jimbo can find you a spot," Flatt said, pointing a finger at Nichols.

Nichols stood. "You bet. Come with me, ma'am."

As they left, she turned back and said, "I'll be back, Mr. Flatt."

He nodded. "Call me Sam."