Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1) (31 page)

S
PACE

I
n my room
, I did a pretty thorough five-minute scan for cameras or listening devices and found none. The next few minutes were spent activating the cheap burner phones I had grabbed from the gift shop before coming up. I plugged them up to their chargers to be sure they were topped off, then booted my laptop and went to work. Much had to be done, and time was short. Tombstone would get my room number as soon as he stopped crying about his fingers, and then he'd be on his massive way within minutes. This time he'd bring help.

Thanking the Lord that I'd taken the precaution of setting up a number of backdoors into the SPACE network, I went straight for the reservations system. I chose an empty room on the seventy-second floor and eventually figured out how to assign it to a non-existent guest. For reasons I can't fathom, the name that popped into my head was Edna Haverstein, and I went with it. Next I looked in one of my rolling suitcases and pulled an old keycard from one of its pockets. I tend to keep them when I check out, because they're handy for forensic experimentation and testing. I'd always opened my room with my bracelet, but the locks also had conventional keycard slots. Out of the main reservations database I went, and into the module that allowed desk clerks to program the electronic cards. I connected the card writer I'd retrieved from my workroom gear, and coded the old keycard for room 72195.

The next need was for Sam Flatt to disappear from SPACE's techno-tracking system. Shocker of shockers, I finally caught a break. The bracelet management system was in the same permissions module as the keycards, which meant I at least didn't have to go hunting for that. Now I needed a name and position. The human resources database was easy. I filtered it down to people assigned to the security division, sorted by employee name, and started scrolling through the long list, looking. Hoping to find two people with exactly the same name, so I could add a layer of confusion, I struck out. I did, however, find a pair who were close. Julia Gomes and Julia Gomez. I jumped back into the permissions module and with great care not to disturb the nearly omnipotent permissions my bracelet wielded on the property, I did some name-switching.

Now my bracelet was assigned to Julia Gomes and hers to Sam Flatt. Then the tedious part: I had to switch the history of movement that was assigned to our two bracelets. If the police or anyone else looked at my tracking record, they needed to see my known movements; they needed to see that Sam Flatt left the murder scene after breaking Tombstone's fingers, and high-tailed it to Sam Flatt's room. Anything else would lead them to suspect that I was using someone else's bracelet ID. I imagined Tombstone's big ass shaking the floor more than once as time kept ticking. Finally I got it done and tidied up with a little e-housekeeping.

One more task and I'd be ready to go. I hated to do this to a client who had already paid me close to a hundred grand for the few weeks I'd been here, but I had no choice. First, I found the bracelet tracking system. Then I rebooted that system's main server and quickly jumped to the surveillance network. Too bad the casino surveillance system wasn't isolated from the rest of the property, but I had noticed a while back that it wasn't. Design flaw. With a wince, I shut down SPACE's surveillance system. All of it.

The clock was ticking. With those systems down, I had a few minutes of invisibility. As soon as the servers came back up, I'd be visible on camera and my bracelet would be trackable. I didn't want my “Julia Gomes” bracelet anywhere near my room when it came back online. I threw everything I could imagine I'd need into one of my roller bags and headed out.

S
PACE

H
ank Dobo
, Chief of Security

"
I
don't give
one damn who he is or what emergency you have going on here!" Huddleston waved his bandaged hand in the air. "He assaulted a police officer, and that makes him a wanted man, so open this fucking door or we'll knock it down!"

Dobo reached up and wiped away a spray of the man's spittle that had peppered half his face. Turning to a female SPACE security officer standing behind them with a video camera, he said, "Be sure you keep the camera rolling."

The security officer nodded, and Dobo looked directly into the camera. "Hank Dobo, chief of security. Despite a critical systems failure that I was addressing on behalf of my employer, I am here because Detective Ronnie Huddleston of the Las Vegas Police Department threatened to arrest me unless I left my station and personally assisted him. We are here at guest room one-four-zero-two-one-six, the room provided to a SPACE contractor named Sam Flatt. We object to this violation of a guest's privacy in the absence of a warrant, and I am opening this room under duress of what I believe to be an illegal coercion."

Dobo touched his bracelet to the door handle. The LED turned green. He twisted the lever and pushed the door open, then walked inside and gestured for the others to follow. It was obvious the suite was empty as soon as they entered, but Huddleston waddled around looking in every conceivable hiding place. When he finished, Dobo said, "Are you satisfied, Detective Huddleston?"

"Shit no, I'm not satisfied!"

More spittle hit Dobo. "Would it be all right if I assign one of my security officers to assist you with anything else? I need to get back to my station. The casino's frozen because of the surveillance outage, and we're losing big money."

"No! You will assist me. I'm not about to run around here with some flunky who has to make a phone call for permission every time I need something."

"I can assure y—"

The man looked like his head might literally explode. He got closer, squared up with Dobo, and said, "No, no, no, no, no," tapping one of his good fingers on Dobo's chest with each “no.”

"Very well," Dobo said, "but let me give you some advice. Do
not
touch me again. Clear?"

Huddleston grunted and huffed his way toward the door. "I want to know where he is. Now."

S
PACE

S
afely inside the
room of the fictional Ms. Edna Haverstein, I opened my laptop and checked my inbox. Amid another screen full of newsletters and special offers, I had two emails of interest, one from my P.I., and the other from Meyer. I opened hers first. One sentence:

M
y reply was brief
. I told her I had a burner phone and would call her soon. The P.I.'s email was a bit more substantive than Meyer's.

S
am
, I've attached all the reports, but only one of them looks interesting in light of the little bit you've told me about your case. And honestly? I only stumbled onto that connection, LOL. One of the names was ALEX SOSA. Sounds Italian or something, right? Turns out that's an alias. Sorta anyway. He came here when he was grown, from Russia or somewhere like that, because his original name was ALEXANDRE ANDREYOVICH SOZONOV. He legally changed it to the more American sounding ALEX SOSA. Anyway once I had his real name I started searching and came across something curious. He didn't come here by himself. Had a brother and a sister. Brother's name was DMITRY SOZONOV and I couldn't find anything on him except he came here with the other two many years ago. Not a peep since. The sister is the connection. I don't know how you say her original name cause it's in all the databases in some weird ass letters that wouldn't copy and paste for me. You'll see what I mean if you look at her report. Anyway she changed her name too, and when I searched on her, that's when your client turned up, the Space casino. She's a lawyer and talks on her web site about them being a client of hers. Her American name is BRANDY PALMER. Anyway it's late and that's all I got for you. I'll jack the volume on my computer so it will wake me up if you need to email again.

T
he connection
to Brandy Palmer caught me off guard but when I thought about it, it made sense. She was probably part of engineering the whole mess with the unallocated space in the bowels of SPACE. She'd had access to both sides of the equation, the criminals as well as Jacob. And Alex was the name of the guy supervising Daria and the other hackers. That tingle on the edge of my psyche when something big is breaking in a case was now way past a tingle. More like a big blue electric arc jumping around my brain.

S
PACE

SURVEILLANCE ROOM

D
etective Ronnie Huddleston

H
uddleston pulled
a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped the sweat off his face again. The cloth was getting saturated. And no wonder at that, given the fact that these stupid fuckers couldn't find Flatt. All the electro-magic in the world at their fingertips and still, a big fat goose egg was what he had. "Can you turn the damn air conditioning a little colder?" he said.

That Dobo looked at him like he was crazy, said, "It's sixty-five degrees. You're hot?"

Dodo would be a better name for this asshole. Huddleston held up his handkerchief and wrung out several drops of sweat. "What the hell you think?"

"Interesting, but I can't help you on that one. Computer controlled. Maybe you'll want to arrest me for that?"

"Don't be a smart-ass."

"Never."

"Thought you people had super-duper facial recognition. Why the hell can't you find this asshole?"

"Well, 'we people' lost all our surveillance for right at ten minutes. And it's still not fully operational, not synced back up with the face-rec software. Maybe we could've gotten it back up a little quicker, but I had to take you to one-forty, remember?"

Huddleston's bowels were churning. He had to find Flatt. Not just because the asshole broke his damn fingers, either. It was much more serious than that. That damn Flatt was a problem. He knew something. Twenty years of cop-sense told Huddleston that. And that just could not fucking stand, no sir. "Go back to that bracelet map," he said.

Dodo blew out a big sigh, like he was just so damn put out because he was being asked to help a law enforcement officer find a criminal. He clicked around a little bit and pointed up at the screen on the wall. "Just like last time and the time before that."

The screen showed a big blue map of the whole SPACE complex. Blinking up top, a line of red text said TAG NOT DETECTED. Huddleston pounded the counter and said, "Where
is
that sonofabitch!"

S
PACE

I
dialed Meyer
. She answered on the second ring: "Meyer."

"It's Sam, Agent Meyer. How're things on your end?"

"It's still quiet here at good old nine-sixty-six Green Mountain Drive. What's going on with this BOLO?"

"Long story and it's not worth the time to tell right now," I said. “Just know that it involves a certain portly detective."

"Understand that I can't be a party to evasion of any law enforcement. Where are you?"

"I have another piece of the puzzle for you."

"Ignoring my question?" Meyer said.

"Like you said, you can't be a party to some things."

"Okay, what's the piece?"

"Two pieces, really. First, I got another email from the bad guys. It had a picture of somebody holding a knife to my daughter's throat, and instructed me to kill Jacob Allen. I've also found a connection between the Sultanovich operation and Brandy Palmer."

"Who?"

"Brandy Palmer is outside counsel for SPACE," I said. "High-powered little bitch of a lawyer."

"And how does she fit into all this?"

"That's the second puzzle piece. She's from Eastern Europe, came here with two brothers. One of them's named Dmitry. I looked back at Daria Bodrova's summary, and the original overseer of the hackers was named Dmitry, the one who vanished."

"Lots of guys named Dmitry in that part of the world."

"No doubt. But I'm pretty sure the other brother is the one who bought the video camera that was used to film those rapes."

"Holy shit," she said. "How do you know that?"

"Unimportant right now, but I'll share all of it with you later, once we find my daughter."

"Fair enough. What's this other brother's name?"

"He and his sister anglicized their names a long time ago. He goes by Alex Sosa now."

"Any idea where he is?"

"I think I know exactly where…"

I
t was
the word “address” that triggered a momentary mind-freeze. More accurately, it's like my subconscious was screaming, Whoa, go back! Go back! What was it? Then it hit me.

Meyer said, "Sam, you there?"

"Where are you?"

"Uh…same place I've been for a couple hours now, the house on Green Mountain."

"No, exactly where?" I said.

"In the mobile command post, behind a church. Wh—"

"The address, Agent Meyer. Give me the address of the house you guys are surveilling."

"Nine-sixty-six Green Mountain Drive, Las—"

My mind raced as goosebumps popped all over me.

"That's not the address I gave you."

"What? Sam, you're losing me. Correction…you've lost me."

"Listen very carefully, Agent Meyer. The address Daria gave me was seven-forty-two Green Mountain, and that's what I gave you, not nine-sixty-six."

She went silent as it sank in. Then she got it. In perfect sync, we both said, "There are two houses."

I said, “Where’d you get the nine-sixty-six address?”

I could hear Meyer typing on a keyboard. “I sent the Green Mountain address you gave me to my office to research. They called and said it was registered to Sultanovich, and I was sure it was the right place. The search warrant they emailed me, though, is for nine-sixty-six.”

“How long will it take to get a warrant for seven-forty-two?”

“I’m on it.”

“Hurry!” I said.