Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1) (26 page)

S
PACE

I
still remembered
the dirty trick Meyer had pulled, but she seemed to genuinely regret that. More important, she seemed serious about helping to find Ally. I'm not naive. She has her larger investigation in mind, as well, but she was here now and helping, and that's what mattered to me. My resentments could be put on a shelf.

Now that I had the room to myself for a bit, I returned to the issue of the electrical power I'd been working on when Meyer arrived. I got a phone number from the Abidi email and called.

He answered on the first ring. "Decker Digital, this is Abdul."

"Abdul, Sam Flatt. Got a second?"

"Sure."

"You happen to have historical data for these monitoring stations?"

"Mountains of it. What do you need?"

"Has Matt filled you in on what I'm doing?"

"He has, yes."

"Great. I need to be able to search the station logs for a range of parameters."

"Such as?"

"I have a video whose camera was powered at one-two-two-dot-four-nine-three volts, sixty-dot-two-nine hertz."

"And you want to know if logs show a station that was outputting that kind of power?"

"Almost. Those numbers are averages calculated over a duration of several minutes, so I'm thinking I'd start by searching for settings that match, plus or minus two volts, and plus or minus one hertz."

"That's doable," Abidi said. "Rather than reconfiguring the whole online system I set up for you, how about I run the search here, against the raw data? I can send you the results."

"If you don't mind, that would be fantastic."

"You got it."

"Oh, Abdul?"

"Yeah?"

"Can you include time stamps in the results?"

"Of course. Anything else?"

"Not now. Huge thanks."

"Welcome. I'll be in touch soon."

I said goodbye and ended the call. Then I did something I should have done way before that moment: I prayed.

M
eyer walked back
in about fifteen minutes after I got off the phone with Abdul.

"Just wanted to touch base," she said. "I'm headed to meet my team." She picked up a Post-it pad from the table and scribbled a number on it. "That's my cell. Call if you need me, or if you hear anything, okay?"

"You got it," I said.

She was barely out the door when an email arrived from Abdul.

I
double-clicked the attachment
, an Excel spreadsheet. When it opened, I scrolled down to see the total number of hits and was surprised to see there were only 298. They were all clustered around a period of days, several months ago. I guess that was a weird combination of voltage and frequency, for which I was thankful. Even better, the latitude/longitude values were the same on every line of the spreadsheet. I clicked one of the locations and my browser opened and started loading a Google map. My heart pounded when I saw what was loading. It was a map of Las Vegas, and the marker designating the exact location for the power monitoring station was on the Strip. When I zoomed in, my heart beat even harder. It was only two blocks from where I was sitting.

S
PACE

C
ourtney Meyer

S
tanding
in the doorway of the meeting room Nichols had set up for Meyer was perhaps the most unprofessional-looking police officer she had ever encountered. Given the spread of her own butt over the years, she was hardly one to judge someone over a few extra pounds, but this guy was out of control. How the hell could he pass any kind of physical? He wore his pants high with a belt cinched about six inches too tight, resulting in as much belly protruding beneath the belt as above. Atop the acre of black trousers was a skin-tight black T-shirt festooned with an LVPD logo. Completing the caricature, the guy was honest-to-God standing there eating a
donut
. Flakes of sugary glaze speckled the black shirt and caked the corners of his mouth. Despite the spectacle, none of this was the problem. The problem was that he had his fat ass parked in her way and refused to move.

"Detective Huddleston," she said with all the patience and calm she could dredge up, "why are you here? And for that matter, how did you know where 'here' would be?"

Meyer would have bet money that the guy couldn't possibly make a worse presentation than he already had, but when he grinned at her, she realized she would have lost that bet. He had a mouthful of tombstone teeth that somehow managed to make his melon-sized head look undersized.

He pointed with his donut at the door. Meyer looked and saw that it said, LAW ENFORCEMENT COURTESY QUARTERS. Then he started talking around a mouthful of donut. "This is where they always stick cops. As for why I'm here, this is my town, lady. And I wanna know what the feds are doing here."

His
town. "It's Special Agent Meyer, and I'm having a hard time believing you're as stupid as you look and sound." The tombstone teeth vanished behind a pound of lips. "The Federal Bureau of Investigation is conducting an investigation that has nothing to do with you."

"So you say, but until I see documentation of that or receive an order from my superiors, I'm not going anywhere."

Meyer sighed, stepped through the SPACE-logoed onlookers into the hallway, and dialed her phone.

L
AS VEGAS BOULEVARD

I
exited
the front "air lock" of SPACE and broke into a jog along the edge of the long driveway, heading toward the street. When I made the sidewalk on the street, I stopped and checked my phone. I had entered the latitude and longitude of the power monitoring station into the phone's GPS, and it pointed me north along the Strip. The Google map showed the walking distance from SPACE to the coordinates to be just over a mile and the phone showed 6,143 feet. I slid it back into my pocket and resumed my jog.

It was almost eight o'clock and the sun had dropped well behind the mountains to the west of the valley. The air was still hot, but cooling. It looked like a crystal clear evening was on the way as the peach-colored western sky faded to cerulean overhead and then a deep Pacific blue further east. I finally reached the northern edge of the SPACE campus and pulled my phone again. I had covered about half the distance; just over 3,000 feet to go. I picked up the pace, my shoes smacking the concrete sidewalk that still radiated the heat of the desert day.

I started looking ahead, trying to figure out where exactly the power station would be situated ahead. The land immediately to the north of SPACE was empty. After that, I saw a couple of utilitarian-looking two-story buildings that had little chance of long-term survival. Someone would eventually pay a fortune for them in order to get the land beneath them. The crews and cranes would move in and some outlandish casino would take shape and climb the sky.

My next phone check showed 312 feet to go. I was passing the first building, so the second one should mark the spot. I slowed and stopped in front of the second building. Now the phone said I was thirty-two feet from my target, which made no sense. I was standing on a sidewalk with not so much as a shrub showing within anything close to the allotted distance. I looked around again, and then I saw it. Flush mounted in the sidewalk was what looked like a small manhole cover, except it was square. In the center of the cover, I saw a logo that said DECKER DIGITAL.

S
PACE

C
ourtney Meyer

M
eyer ended
her call with her boss, Tom Belt, and waited in the hallway for him to work the political and bureaucratic magic that would get Donut Cop out of her way. While she stood, a man wearing a SPACE SECURITY shirt approached and stuck his hand out.

As she shook his hand, he said, "Hank Dobo. I'm in charge of security here."

"Special Agent Courtney Meyer, FBI."

"I understand Huddleston is giving you trouble?"

Meyer nodded. "It's being handled."

"Okay. Anything I can do to help you, Agent Meyer?"

"Are you former law enforcement, Mr. Dobo?"

"No."

Meyer arched her eyebrows. "Isn't that unusual, for an operation this size having someone in charge of security with no law enforcement experience?"

Dobo shrugged. "I can't speak to that. I can only tell you that the company thought my background qualified me for the post."

"What was that background?"

"Military."

"Something in an investigative capacity?"

"Not really." Dobo shifted his weight from foot to foot, reached up and scratched at his upper lip. "You know, I'm starting to feel like I'm being interrogated."

"Who hired you, specifically?"

"Jacob Allen. Why?"

"No reason, just curious."

Meyer heard a phone inside the office ring, followed by Donut Boy talking in low tones. Within a couple minutes, he came waddling out. He met her eyes for only a second before looking away and trundling away. Meyer extended her hand to Dobo. They shook and she said, "Thanks for your cooperation, Mr. Dobo. It's much appreciated."

L
AS VEGAS BOULEVARD

I
walked
up the sidewalk to the front door of the building. Typical commercial glass doors, beyond which sat a typical-looking commercial lobby, a small one. No signage on the building, none on the door, and I couldn't see anything in the dimly lit interior to identify the purpose or occupants of the building.

Back on the main sidewalk, I crouched to get a closer look at the cover of the power monitoring station. Not because I thought a little manhole cover was going to tell me anything useful, but because I'm a visual creature and looking at elements of a puzzle stimulates my thought processes. It worked. What was I thinking? The location of the power station itself wasn't going to tell me anything. I had gotten excited and jumped into motion for nothing. Now I'd make the right move. I looked more closely at the station cover and memorized the small number cast into the metal beneath the logo, then called Abdul.

When he answered, I said, "Abdul, Sam. Question: Can you tell me which buildings station five-five-six-eight-eight feeds?"

"It doesn't really feed, it—"

"I don't care about the technical explanation. Which buildings, or which addresses, would have the voltage-frequency combo reported by station five-five-six-eight-eight? Can you tell me that?"

"Hold a minute."

I heard him typing and a minute later he was back. "Okay, Sam. All the buildings on that circuit are on the same side of the street, the east side."

"Makes sense. I'm standing on top of the station right now, by the way."

"Okay, the station should be directly in front of a building on the west side of the street."

"It is."

"Behind that building is a major electrical substation that provides power for most of the southern end of Las Vegas Boulevard, so it—"

"The circuit, Abdul. I care only about this monitoring circuit."

I heard him draw a slow, deep breath. I was acting an ass and I knew it. Apologies could come later. "Sorry. Okay, if you stand facing east, across Las Vegas Boulevard, I count one…two…buildings to your left, and another one on your right. That's what's on five-five-six-eight-eight."

Huh?

"Wait a second," I said, "this circuit feeds buildings across the street? That's the east side of the Strip, Abdul."

"Correct, that's what I said."

Damn it.

"Thanks," I said, and punched off the call. So much for my theory that all circuits and all evidence led to SPACE. If these assholes were across the street, it didn't matter that they were close enough to see. They were in buildings I had no access to, no physical access, no electronic access, no human contacts, no intelligence. That complicated the hell out of this situation. Complexity means time, and time is something my little girl might not have.

My phone rang. The screen said PRIVATE CALLER. I answered, "Sam Flatt."

A voice that was obviously altered, deep and raspy, said, "Sam Flatt. If you want your daughter to live, return to your casino and wait for instructions. They will arrive by email, on a phone that is waiting for you at the concierge desk. Talk to no one." A beep sounded and they were gone.

G
REYHOUND BUS STATION

LAS VEGAS

M
ax Sultanovich

H
olding firmly
to Tatyana's little shoulders to guide her up the aisle, Max slowly moved them out of the bus. When they stepped off the bottom step and onto the concrete, a wave of fumes hit them. Hot rubber, burning diesel, and most of all, the stink of what was undoubtedly the most disgusting pile of humanity he had ever had the displeasure to be around. He looked at his watch and saw that it was 20:35. Ten hours to move such a distance was ridiculous. It would have been less than an hour in his airplane.

He moved Tatyana to his side and took her hand in his. He began shoving their way through the maggots and into the bus station. Once inside, the crowd thinned and he moved to an area with rows of chairs and no people. After positioning Tatyana in a seat beside him, he removed the phone from his pocket and dialed.

Phone to his ear, moments later he said, "Come now," then folded the phone shut and put it back into his pocket. He bent down to Tatyana and said, "Come, Tanechka. You want candy, my precious girl?"