Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1) (28 page)

S
PACE

W
ith the four
bodies stashed in the stalls, I washed my hands, then used wet paper towels to clean up the pool of blood and urine that had leaked out from the leader's bifurcated crotch. I had to find out if I'd missed Meyer during any of the interruption. I left the restroom and casually walked to the workroom. Still empty. I returned to my vantage point inside the restroom, door ajar, waiting and watching.

It didn't take long. The elevator sounded its sci-fi tone and the doors whooshed open. Moments later, Meyer and Nichols were headed my way at a brisk clip. As soon as I was sure they were out of the camera's field of view, I opened the door and motioned them in.

As soon as they were inside, Meyer said, "What's going on?"

I said, "Jimbo, please guard the door and be sure we're not disturbed."

It took about ten minutes, but I explained to Meyer everything that had happened. Well, almost everything. Not the bodies in the stalls six feet away, and not the tasks I had Jimmy the Geek working on. She listened closely, asked a question now and then.

When I finished, she said, "I'll get my office working on identifying the buildings across the street, who owns them, who's in them, what they allegedly do inside. Oh, and our Las Vegas office is prepping a team to conduct reconnaisance and surveillance on the house on Green Mountain."

"I hope that's covert as hell."

"It will be. By the way, can you show me these rape videos?"

"I don't have a safe way to do that right now. Given the sophistication of the operation in the bunker, I can't be sure my computer isn't compromised. I do need a favor, though."

"What's that?"

"I need Internet access. You have a laptop?"

"Sorry, I can't loan my bureau laptop. Besides, I need to use it myself."

"Agent Meyer, all I need is a web browser to check my mail to be sure I'm not missing anything important. I have leads working."

"What leads?"

"I'll explain later if anything comes of them. Five minutes, that's all I need."

Meyer cocked her head and looked at me for about ten seconds. "Five minutes. And nothing but a browser."

I nodded and she left the restroom. I stepped outside the restroom door, where Nichols was standing guard over our privacy. "Jimbo, can you put your hands on a laptop I can use for a while?"

He thought a minute, then said, "We have a stash of tech items we keep on hand in case a whale asks for something. I think there's a laptop or two. You need it now, I assume?"

"Yeah, if you don't mind, go see what you can find."

"You got it." He headed for the elevator.

Meyer returned and handed me a laptop that looked like it might have been the first one ever built.

"Seriously?" I said. "This is what they provide you?"

She shrugged. "It works."

I opened the lid and when the laptop came to life, I ran Internet Explorer, the only browser installed. A few seconds later, I had the web portal to my email on screen. I silently cursed as I scanned through a long list of useless email in my inbox, and vowed to unsubscribe from a thousand mailing lists as soon as this was over. Toward the bottom of the list, I saw what I was looking for, a subject that read MONKEYS RULE.

S
PACE

I
opened
the MONKEYS RULE email, which had come from an email address composed of gibberish, and found a message that said SAME BATCHANNEL. That would be from my man Jimmy. Now I needed Nichols to reappear with a laptop that would be mine for a while, so I could talk to Jimmy and get whatever info he was able to glean.

Meyer walked back in and said, "Sorry, I know it's only been a couple minutes, but I need my laptop right now."

"Sure." I logged out of my mail server, killed the browser, and handed her the computer. "Could I ask another favor?"

"What's that?"

"Borrow your phone long enough to call and check on my ex-wife?"

She didn't argue, just pulled a Blackberry from her belt and handed it over. "Bring it to me in the workroom when you're done?"

I nodded and started dialing Abby. She answered on the first ring: "Sam, did you find out something?" She still sounded frantic, on the edge.

"Got some leads, working on them now. I also called a contact I had in the FBI and they're on it bigtime. They're the best in the world at finding and recovering victims of kidnapping. We're gonna find her, Ab."

"But what are they doing to find her, Sam? What?"

"I'm not privvy to all the particulars but I'll find out more, okay?"

"And you'll let me know?"

"I will."

We said goodbye and ended the call. I left the restroom and started down the hallway to return the phone to Meyer, then caught myself before I got in range of a camera. I walked back to the restroom and had just stepped inside when I heard the elevator tone. I looked out and and saw Nichols headed my way, and he was holding a MacBook. He handed it to me and I gave him Meyer's phone. "Hand that to Meyer for me, please. She's in the workroom."

I set up shop on the bathroom counter between the two lavatories. Fortunately, there was a power outlet within distance. I wanted to keep it charged in case I had to go mobile. It only took a few minutes to get the Mac set up for anonymity and deep web access. I downloaded an IRC chat client and loaded the room Jimmy the Geek and I had used that morning, assuming that's what he meant by SAME BATCHANNEL.
Please be there,
Jimmy.
He was.

I
killed
the chat and loaded a browser to get at my email. By the time I had it loaded, the email was there with a subject of POXY MONKEYS STINK. What was it with this guy and monkeys?

L
AS VEGAS

C
ourtney Meyer

T
aking a cue from Flatt
, Meyer had handled her phone calls in the ladies’ restroom to avoid even the potential of electronic eavesdropping. She wrapped up the final call and walked across the hall to the men’s room, where she knocked on the door before entering. It was possible the guy could be using the room for its intended purpose. He was not. Flatt had turned the bathroom counter into a desk, complete with an office chair she assumed Nichols had procured from somewhere.

Meyer said, "I'm going with the recon team to the Green Mountain location. I want to be sure they understand the importance of not doing anything to spook these people before we have more information."

Flatt continued to look at a bunch of dense text and numbers on his screen. "Probably a good idea."

"Anything new to share with me?"

Flatt shook his head and kept working.

"Keep me posted."

He looked up. "Will do."

L
AS VEGAS

M
ax Sultanovich

T
he bitch lay curled
up in a ball on the bed, whimpering like a fucking mongrel. Max looked at his naked body in the bathroom mirror. It looked like shit, a dried up husk of the man he had been. His chest muscles sagged so much that his nipples were pointed at the damned floor. But he still had the cock of a stallion, and that was worth a smile. True, it took some chemical assistance to get it into proper order, but that was fine. It had certainly sufficed to vent his frustrations and sate his appetite on the Russian cunt on the bed. After cleaning himself, he went back into the bedroom and dressed.

He arrived back in the living area to find all the girls sitting exactly where they had been, all still looking trembly and pathetic. He stared again at the one he really wanted, and felt a new swell in his crotch. He walked to the sofa and stood in front of her, just staring, saying nothing, feeling his equipment coming back to life. Not now. He bent over and leaned in, his face an inch from hers. When she was looking straight in his face, he curled his lips back and snapped his teeth at her. She drew back in a big flinch and he burst out laughing.

He stepped back and turned to the cow. "Take them back."

She looked surprised. "Now? I thought we would be staying here tonight."

Now Max moved to her and got nose to nose. "You brought them here for me. I cannot very well traipse in and out of the hotel, not safely. Perhaps you want some fucking American camera to see me? Is that what you want, you ugly bitch?"

The cow shook her head so hard he thought it might come loose. "No sir, of course not. I'll take them back right now, sir."

He leaned in and snapped his teeth at her too, just for good measure.

S
PACE

T
he data
on Canon C300 registrations yielded nothing immediately useful. There were a handful of registrations in Ukraine and Russia, and a couple dozen in Las Vegas, but no recognizable names or other information. I copied out those names and their associated data like physical and email addresses, and sent it to my private investigator, asking him to find everything he could on them within the next few hours.

When I opened the other attachment, however, I found that Jimmy had left me a little bonus. In addition to the data on flights from Kiev to L.A. on August 10, and then from L.A. to Vegas on the 11th, he had included a username and password, along with an IP address and a comment that said, LAXBIGBRO. If it was what I thought it was, could I be that lucky? I entered the IP address in a browser but caught myself just before hitting ENTER. Better to be careful. I took a few minutes to get hidden behind a chain of proxies. That done, I went back to the browser and hit the key to load that page. I got a plain white screen with a dialog box asking for username and password. I entered the ones Jimmy had sent and pressed ENTER.

Jimmy, you are a wizard and a steely-eyed missile man.
I was looking at a screen with a banner across the middle of the page that said, YOU ARE ENTERING THE SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM FOR LOS ANGELES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. AUTHORIZED USERS ONLY. ALL ACCESS IS LOGGED. UNAUTHORIZED USERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. Sure was a good thing I'd set up the proxy chain instead of going into the site naked.

Now that I knew what I had, I jumped to the flight data. Everything was in a spreadsheet and there were several tabs, or worksheets, of different data. I started with the tab labeled MANIFEST and was shocked to see how many people traveled from Kiev to L.A. in a day. Thousands. Fortunately, I had a shortcut for plowing through this particular dataset.

I searched for Bodrova and went right to the info I needed. There on consecutive rows were BODROVA, ANYA and BODROVA, DARIA. They arrived at 7:42 p.m. on flight 6180 from London. The airline was listed as AA/BA, a codeshare between American Airlines and British Airways. The two sisters had sat in seats 23A and 23B.

Since I had access to surveillance imagery, I had a brainstorm. Looking through the other tabs in the spreadsheet, I clicked one labeled LOGISTIC. This worksheet was packed with columns of data, and I had no idea what much of it meant. What did make sense were the columns labeled ARR-GAT and BAG-CAR. A quick search for “6180” revealed that AA/BA flight 6180 had arrived at gate B6, and its baggage had been delivered on carousel #4.

I switched back to the web browser and dug into the LAX surveillance system. The interface was a clunky mess, which is par for anything the government touches. It took several minutes to figure out how to navigate the network of cameras, but eventually I was looking at a live video feed of gate B6. Now to get back to the footage from the evening of August 10.

After five minutes of increasing frustration, I accepted that there was no way to do it from the screen I was on. I jotted down the arcane six-character identifier for the camera—naming it something like “GATE-B6” would have been much too logical—and backed out to the main screen. A tiny button that almost required a magnifying glass to read sat perched in the upper right corner of the screen: SEARCH ARCHIVE.

I clicked the button, entered the date, time, and camera designator in the appropriate fields, then clicked the search icon. Finally. The screen filled with a view of the gate. Superimposed along the bottom was AUG-10 and a ticking time stamp that started at 7:40:00 p.m. After a minute or so, I could see the airliner pulling up to the jetway beyond the windows. Shortly after it stopped rolling, people began streaming from the jetway into the airport.

As the time stamp rolled through 7:51 p.m., I spotted Daria on the screen. She exited the jetway beside a girl I assumed to be her sister, Anya. The bright spot in the crappy surveillance system was the quality of the video. It was high-def and among the best I had ever seen, giving me a great view of the two young ladies as they walked toward the concourse and the camera.

I paused the playback just as they were about to turn for their walk down the concourse. They were looking at each other, Daria saying something. Whereas Daria had an earthy beauty about her, Anya looked like a model, classically gorgeous. Both girls were smiling. Despite having just stepped off a long and tiring flight, they looked excited, happy. They were in America and all their dreams were coming true. Or so they thought. I tamped the black wisps forming in my soul back down into submission. For now.

After rewinding and replaying the footage several times, I saw no one approach them, and nothing to indicate that anyone was watching them as they deplaned. I backed out to the main screen again, then navigated my way back into the live feeds, where it took a good fifteen minutes to find what I wanted. I jotted down the designator for several cameras this time, then backed out again. I really wanted to choke the moron who designed this system, then slap the crap out of the bureaucrat who approved it.

Back into the archive I went, and entered the date, time, and camera designator. And there was carousel #4, still and empty. The first passengers from flight 6180 were just arriving to await their bags. After a couple more minutes of staring at the screen, I saw Daria and Anya step off the escalator. They walked to a bank of displays, stared and pointed briefly, then walked toward #4.

That's when the large man entered the frame from the left, the direction of the doors that led outside. He was holding a small sign but his angle to the camera was such that I couldn't read the sign or see his face. I knew he was my guy, though, because he was headed straight for the girls.

I checked my notes on the cameras in baggage claim, then returned to the search screen and entered the new parameters. This time the video started rolling just before the man arrived. I had a clear view of the doors as he walked through and as he grew closer, the letters on the sign became clear: ANYA & DARIA.

Only then did I look to the man's face. I immediately paused the playback and stared.
Ho-ly shit.