Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1) (7 page)

S
PACE

I
've seen
it a hundred times: People who should know better, don't. Gamboa didn't invest the five minutes it would have taken to learn how to properly install and configure the programs for her to access the deep web. If she had, figuring out what she had done on the deep web would have been a nightmare at best, impossible at worst.

As it was, within a half hour I had reconstructed a long list of sites she had visited. Most of them had nonsensical online addresses, which is common. On the World Wide Web, businesses and people want their addresses to be easy to remember, so they're straightforward, like www.google.com. Not so with these businesses. Their addresses are arcane combinations of numbers and letters, and they change a lot, to make it more difficult for law enforcement to trace the site back to a real computer at a physical address.

I worked my way down the list, typing each of the addresses into my own Onion browser. The further I went, the less attractive Gamboa became. A lot of the addresses weren't working anymore, the sites having moved on to new addresses. There were a few porn sites, raunchy but not that different from what's on the normal web. Then came the bad stuff.

The tingle and buzz around my psyche that tells me I'm getting close to the nut of a case, had turned into screaming klaxons. This was an unexpected direction, unrelated to the original thrust of the case, but it was big. Miss Gamboa had spent considerable time on multiple occasions browsing a rape site. There are a lot of fake sites out there on which actors and actresses act out rapes to sate the desires of evil, worthless human beings who get off on seeing women—and sometimes men—brutalized. This site wasn't fake. No tiny disclaimers at the bottom saying "simulation for entertainment purposes only."

On the home page, a column of thumbnail videos ran from top to bottom, each one looping some particular scene over and over. No audio. Beside each thumbnail, a text description explained the content in graphic detail. Once you clicked a thumbnail, the full version of that video loaded. Too much sound. Many of the videos in high-def. All of them disgusting, depraved. I watched one of them start to finish, eighteen minutes of horror. Every time a shot revealed even a slight bit of the rapist's face, I studied it, committing it to memory.

I had spent years remaking myself, mending my psyche, leaving behind the man I was and vowing to never become that man again. Now, looking at this, witnessing the degradation of the innocent at the hands of the brutal, the old Sam was coming to life somewhere deep inside my soul. I tried to tell myself I could control him and the elemental urges he would bring back into the here and now, but at the same time I was telling myself that, I was hoping and praying that I would come face to face with this rapist, this animalistic waste of human flesh.

A
FGHANISTAN

T
HEN

T
he metal bucket
creaks as it tips in a rusty bail. A fraction of a second later, the cold weight of the water hits the towel over my face. Now it drops through the towel, again, into my mouth, down my windpipe, into my lungs. I think this is the eleventh time, but my count could be off a pour or two in either direction. My back arches and my naked body convulses against the hemp ropes as the pain and wild physiological fear erupt. I think I've felt worse pain, but at this moment I can't remember specifics. I know the savagery of this pain. There is nothing else in the world, nothing else in the universe, nothing else that has ever been or ever will be, except this agony.

Then a tiny light emerges from the darkness. It's not much, but I focus on that pinprick in my screaming mind as it becomes a firefly, a gorgeous and wondrous firefly, one with a cerulean glow instead of yellow-green. And it comes closer and closer as I watch it, and finally it speaks to me in a soothing voice, saying, "You will survive. You will survive. You will survive. You will—"

The water stops and someone lifts the towel away. The firefly of salvation is gone, replaced by eyes of black hatred looking down on me. I gasp in great heaves, trying to get all the oxygen I can into my body before it is again deprived. The Taliban animal above is named Atash Sadati. He has information I need, but things have obviously not gone well to this point, or I wouldn't be on the wrong end of this affair.

Sadati's face is disgusting. It has a half-dozen boils scattered across it, each filled with pus. Who knows what caused the sores, but they're surely exacerbated by the fact that he hasn't had a bath in months. Assholes like him care so little about any standards of civilized human beings that they won't even wash their faces when a water hose is ten feet away. His beard is a collection of filthy, matted clumps, especially around his mouth. A mouth that is too small for his face; it looks like a rectum filled with rotten teeth. Some are completely black with decay. Others are mottled with black among the green shade that comes from years of chewing khat to stay stoned.

"You are not so tough now, fucking American! Not so tough!" His breath is rotten and the spittle that hits my face is a foul slurry out of hell itself.

I say nothing. I have nothing in my heart and soul for him but contempt. Not because he tortures me; I do the same when it's needed. I hate him because he is an abomination, a putrid sub-human who is unworthy of conversation of any kind. I'm not yet near giving up information that will harm my country, but he isn't even worth the oxygen required to tell him a lie. In my mind, to speak to him at all is to grant him some measure of respect, and that I will not do unless it furthers the needs of my mission or somehow provides personal pleasure to me.

"You will talk to me!" He's in a pure rage, unable to believe or comprehend that someone is able to withstand hours of everything he has to offer.

Pure rage is exactly what I want from him right now, because rage doesn't think. It exists and it consumes all else.

His co-animal speaks for the first time in an hour: "Atash, the hour is late. Perhaps we should take him to the camp now and let them have him. Chief Azizi will be very pleased with such a valuable gift."

It never occurs to them that I speak Pashto far better than they speak English.

Sadati explodes. "We will take this fucking American nowhere! Do you hear me, Koshan? Allah willing, this fucking American will tell me what I want to know!"

"Yes, I hear you, Atash. But sometimes we must consider that Allah is not willing at this moment. We do not know his ways."

Now is the unexpected moment that making my first voluntary sound in their presence can benefit me: I loose a burst of laughter. It's not difficult, because this really is some funny shit. Both men stare at me. Ali's face is a study in bewilderment. Sadati is over the edge, apoplectic, veins throbbing, eyes bugged. His hell-zits look like they may burst at any moment.

I seize the moment and drop right down to their elementary level of insults and language. "You assholes are entertaining as hell, you know that?" They look at each other, clearly stunned by my behavior. "For years, I've been listening to you goat herders talk about all the mighty things you're going to do, 'Allah willing.' So I have to wonder, why do you idiots never seem to notice that Allah obviously is not willing?

"You fail at every damn thing you do. You live in caves. Caves! You smell like raw shit. Half of you love to fuck little boys, probably because no woman in her right mind would want anything to do with your pathetic little dicks. Every fight you get in, you get your asses kicked. Doesn't matter who you're fighting: United States. European pussies. Even yourselves. Hell, your bunch can't even handle tiny little Israel. They've kicked your ass so many times it's like a hobby to them."

I pause for just a moment to check their status. They still look stunned, but there's also a difference between the two of them slipping more into play. Ali has a much cooler head; he knows what I'm worth to his superiors, both in money and in prestige. Sadati, however, is a man who burns with hatred and lets it rule him. Fire and ice. Time to bring them together.

I laugh again, and move in for the final push. "The way I see it, there are only two possibilities. First, even Allah doesn't give a flying fuck about your dumb asses. He didn't do a damn thing when Abraham told Ishmael to hit the road, did he? Did he care when Jacob bought Esau's birthright for a damned bowl of soup? Not a bit. And he's not doing a damn thing for you today, is he? Nope. Now the second possibility is the one I personally favor. Want to know what it is?”

Sadati is breathing hard, eyes wide, that nasty little mouth hung open, which makes it about the size of a quarter. His nostrils are quivering and, most importantly, he's opening and closing his hand around the hilt of his pesh-kabz, his tribal fighting knife. Here we go. "I guess the pussycat got your tongues, but I know you boys will want to know this. The second possibility is that Allah, your moon god, doesn't exist at all. He's just—"

Showtime. Sadati lunges toward me, screaming like an animal as he pulls the old knife from his waistband. Ali sees money, power, and probably even his life slipping away. He reaches out and grabs at Sadati. "Atash, no!"

Throughout my rant, I've been working on the rope around my wrists. Since I'm on my back with my hands tied together atop my stomach, it's all been in plain view, but they weren't watching my hands. They were transfixed by the laughter and insults coming from the fucking American. Watching my face. The knot comes loose just as Sadati wheels around toward Ali. My hands are free.

"You cannot do—" Ali starts, but he never gets to finish.

Sadati shoves the curved blade in just below the left side of Ali's ribcage, then shoves it up into the heart. As Ali's eyes widen in shock, Sadati screams, "Fuck you, Koshan! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!"

I pull the final knot apart and unwrap the rope from my ankles. I roll off the table and move toward Sadati. He doesn't have his back fully to me; he's at more of a forty-five-degree angle. I'm six feet away when he picks me up in his peripheral vision. He spins around to face me, yanking the knife out of Ali as he turns. I'm no more than a foot away as he drives the blade toward me with an underhanded motion. I move in closer, grab his wrist with my right hand and his elbow with my left, then force his knife hand up and back. I wasn't quick enough. A burning sensation rips up the left side of my abdomen as an inch of the knife's tip scores for about six inches.

With the knife now forced back from my torso, I lean my head back, then whip it forward as hard as I can. The head-butt connects, a point just above my hairline driving into Sadati's nose with a crunch I find almost musical. He staggers back a step and tries to back away, but I stay with him. I twist his wrist and the knife falls free. Now it's hand-to-hand, and that means Mr. Atash Sadati is well and truly a dead man walking. The red fog rises in my soul.

S
PACE

N
OW

I
worked
my way through the presentation, explaining the deep web to Jacob Allen and Brandy Palmer. Nichols was there in the conference room too, but he'd already heard this whole spiel. I wrapped it up with a trimmed-down version of the same sickening video I had watched earlier. When it finished and faded to black, I touched the END PRESENTATION icon on the control screen that was flush-mounted in the table. The large display panel returned to the SPACE logo, the room lights raised to a pleasant glow, and the electrochromic windows lightened to reveal the bustle of Las Vegas outside.

At least a minute passed in silence before Allen said, "Dear God."

Palmer stood and started pacing back and forth between the conference table and the windows. After a few trips, she stopped and looked at Allen. "Jake, I don't need to tell you how important it is to keep this contained. If this is linked to the company in any way, it—"

"I know, I know," he said, and they looked at each other a long moment. The look was curious, a wordless communication between the two of them. Then Allen said, "Sam, James, not a word of this can get out. Not one word."

Nichols nodded. I did not. Could not. "That's a problem," I said, looking Allen in the eye.

His eyebrows scrunched down, making for a confused look on his droopy face. "Pardon?"

Palmer planted her hands on her hips, a dramatic pose. "What does that mean?"

"The rape videos have to be turned over to the police," I said. "Today."

"Oh, hell no," Palmer said. "They most certainly will not." Now she looked like a bull getting ready to charge.

"Brandy's right," Allen said. "That's unacceptable, Sam."

I said, "Let me be really clear, people: This point is not up for debate. I've uncovered evidence of a crime, numerous crimes, and I'm required both by law and by the ethics of my profession to notify the nearest law enforcement agency, not to mention the moral obligation."

"What moral obligation?" Palmer said.

That pissed me off. "You," I said, "are being either disingenuous, or obtuse. Do you think they let those women go when they were through raping them? No, they didn't. They either killed them, or they still have them."

She stomped to my side of the table in her heels, a little flurry of clicks and clacks on the hard white floor, stopped right beside me, and stuck her finger in my face. "You are completely out of line, in more ways than one."

I drew three deep breaths before responding. "Ms. Palmer, your gender and my sense of chivalry are the only things keeping me from—"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Allen said. "Let's take a deep breath, everybody."

"I just had three deep breaths," I said. "And you don't want to know what I did with the last finger somebody stuck in my face."

She dropped her hand and turned to Allen. "Jake, I told you it was a mistake to hire him. His type are all the same."

"My type?" I said.

She was cocked and ready to fire a response when Allen gave her a look that caused her to freeze momentarily, then fume. But she said no more.

Allen said, "Sam, I understand the need to notify police, but I need you to understand that the timing of this is…precarious for the company. Perhaps you can give us a few days?"

"No, Jacob. I can't. There's no time in something like this. I have—no, we have—evidence of multiple felonies. Do you think the police will give a damn why we didn't turn it over as soon as we found it?"

"I believe I can handle the police," he said. "And I'll sign an addendum to your contract that indemnifies you from any fallout. I don't mean to seem callous to this situation, but my legal responsibility is to protect the company. And I think the best way for me to do that right now is to very carefully consider the fallout before any of this is disclosed."

"First, you can't indemnify me against criminal prosecution. Second, what the hell is wrong with you people? You saw that video, and there are a lot more of them. If those animals had you, would you want someone to wait a few days?" He didn't say anything. I had more to say, and did. "Understand this, Jacob. I always maintain maximum confidentiality for my clients, but when I see clear evidence of a crime, that's it. It's out of my hands. It will take me a couple hours to get everything extracted and copied. Once that's done, I'm headed to the police department. Any more questions?"

He looked at me with a sad face, maximum droop, and said nothing.

I closed my laptop, unplugged it, and left the room.

L
AS VEGAS POLICE DEPARTMENT

DETECTIVES BUREAU

W
e sat
in a cramped office that had to be ninety degrees. Puke-green cinder block walls, no windows, and an old surplus metal office desk without a square inch unused. The detective's name was Ronnie Huddleston. He looked about forty. At least three hundred pounds, with a complicated comb-over unlike anything I'd encountered before. The flushed look of his face suggested a lot of drinking and the puffy eyes told the same story.

Huddleston took the DVD, inserted it into an older Dell tower, and waited until a window appeared listing the contents of the disk.

I leaned over so I could see his screen and said, "The fourth file from the top is pretty representative of the collection."

He made no indication that he heard me, and double-clicked the first file, which was nothing more than a text inventory I'd included of the disk's contents. Huddleston stared at it as if it were a foreign language. After about a minute of that, he turned to me and said, "What is this, exactly?"

"It's a list of the files on the DVD that I put together, an evidence log of sorts."

"You made this DVD?"

"Yeah, I extracted the relevant files from the suspect's hard drive, and put them on that disk for you."

"So these aren't even originals?"

"No," I said, "but they're digital copies, exactly the same content as the originals."

He blew out a dramatic sigh and hit the eject button on the computer's DVD drive. The tray slid out, and he removed the disk and handed it across the desk to me. "This is no use to me, Mr. Flack. I'll have to have the original."

"The name is Flatt. You telling me you're not even going to look at it?"

He spread his arms, puffy palms face up on his desk. Then he smiled. I couldn't help but stare. He had tombstone teeth, bright white and way too big for his mouth. He looked like a grinning mule. It bothered me to look at him. "I appreciate you bringing it, but we can only work with original evidence. You had no way to know that, of course. It's how the law works."

"I have a decent understanding of the law, Detective. I've brought you evidence of dozens of rapes and other felonies, and you refuse to even look at it. Gotta tell you, that's a first."

Another mule smile. He pushed his giant ass up out of the chair. "Thank you for coming, sir. If you'd like to bring the original evidence, we would of course be interested in taking a look."

I stood, snapped the DVD back into its case, closed it. "Did you speak with someone representing my client before I got here?"

He didn't say a word, just stared at me with that disturbing smile. I had a wicked urge to knock those slabs of milk-bone down his throat, but I resisted, turned, and left.

I
n a cab
on the way back to the casino, I worked through the situation in my mind. When Jacob Allen said he could take care of the police, he wasn't joking. The sad-eyed hound dog of a lawyer was obviously wired into the authorities and didn't mind using his connections for his employer. I thought momentarily about calling the heifer from the FBI, but discounted that idea pretty quickly. I knew what she'd do; instead of doing the right thing and jumping on it, she would offer action on the videos in exchange for my feeding her info on my investigation. I couldn't do that, so best to stay off that road altogether. From a legal perspective, I had met my immediate burden by trying to give the evidence to the police.

Some people would say I had met my moral obligation, as well. I was not among such pussified assholes. Women were suffering. If not the women on the videos, if they were dead, more victims had almost certainly taken their place. That could not stand. I would not let it.