Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1) (9 page)

M
cCARRAN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

LAS VEGAS

C
hristine Gamboa

C
hristine's heart
felt ready to leap out of her chest as she threw some bills at the cab driver and stepped out into the hot night. She had spent the past several hours hopefully creating the illusion of normal activity, running errands, a little shopping, all while trying to ascertain whether she was being followed. She hadn't seen anyone, but she wasn't naive. Yes, she was intelligent and had good, maybe even great, skills of observation. Two dressing room changes into new clothes should help. Using a different mall exit than entrance, and grabbing a cab while her car was parked on the far side of the mall could help. But being on the run and spotting clandestine pursuers wasn't exactly a skill set she possessed.

Her stride was quick and her path direct as she stepped inside McCarran International Airport. She was just one more traveler rushing to make a plane. She hoped. The cab ride had been quick, but it gave her enough time to get the new smartphone set up well enough to buy her ticket. The electronic boarding pass was on its screen and she was ten yards from the TSA podium at the entrance to the security checkpoint. She could hear her pulse in her ears as she held the phone against the scanner and handed her ID to the TSA agent. The agent gave her a perfunctory smile as he took the ID and squinted at it. Then the scanner flashed red and beeped. What the hell?

But she knew. All her clever tactics had been for nothing. The electronic web of the modern world had tracked her. Someone would show up and haul her off and that would be that.

"Ma'am?" the TSA agent said.

Christine jerked her head up. "Sorry, what?"

"Please move ahead."

She looked down at the scanner and saw it had turned green. Oh, thank God. She stowed her ID and phone and moved into the security line. The crowd was light and she was through the security area in three minutes. Now she just had to make it to the gate. Maybe she'd make it after all. They could track her, figure it out soon enough, but if she could pull this off, at least she'd have a little time. She quickened her stride toward the gate.

F
ive minutes later
, she was in the jetway, midway through the line as it crept forward. She was going to make it. When she reached the door and stepped into the plane, her body relaxed. She couldn't wait to get airborne so she could get a drink. As she was making her way through the first class cabin, her heart stopped. There, in the third seat on the right, sat Sasha Maslov, staring right at her. Smiling that smile.

He was in the aisle seat. When she drew even with him, he reached over and patted the window seat. "Come, kohona. This is much better seat than row twenty-seven."

G
OLDEN NUGGET CASINO

LAS VEGAS

W
e sat at a blackjack table
, just Nichols, a dour-faced Asian dealer who had to be in her seventies, and me. We were both beyond a little buzzed, and well into the blood alcohol levels at which guys slip into the maudlin lands of lost loves and such. I played basic strategy and knew it well enough that there were no decisions to make while playing. Just stand, hold, split, or double down, based on the combination of your two cards versus the dealer's up-card. Nichols played the same way, but with an impulsive move every now and then that varied from the strategy.

"Married?" Nichols said.

I shook my head and slipped my cards beneath my bet to signal a stand. "Not anymore."

"How long?"

"Married thirteen, divorced five," I said. "You?"

"Nah, never married. Figured it's best to wait till I really settle into a career and stuff."

"Yeah. Maybe I should've done that."

"You move around a lot or something?" Nichols said.

"Something," I said, as the dealer raked in my chips from her twenty-one against my twenty.

"What'd you do before the forensic thing? I've asked a couple times and you just said nothing, didn't answer at all. What's up with that?"

A cocktail waitress arrived with her tray of goodies and put two new shots of tequila before each of us. I picked one of mine up and took care of it, then picked up the other one, along with my chips, and motioned with my head for Nichols to follow. He did.

O
ut on Fremont Street
, we walked beneath the garish animated canopy as it splashed the street with never-ending swaths of color and light.

Nichols said, "Now you gonna tell me what you did before?"

I walked a few steps without answering, then killed the shot of tequila I'd walked out of the casino with. (Rules are made to be broken, remember?) I looked at Nichols, knowing I shouldn't answer his question. But I wanted to answer it. I needed to answer it, had needed to answer it for so many years.

A
IRBORNE

C
hristine Gamboa

T
he flight reached
altitude and the seat belt light dinged off. Christine watched as Sasha pulled a flask from his pocket and drew a long sip. She could smell the pepper vodka as he passed the flask to her. She shook her head. "No, thanks."

"Ah, kohona, you—"

"Stop calling me that, Sasha. If I were a ‘special girlfriend’ you cared about, you wouldn't have been tracking me, wouldn't have been waiting for me on this plane."

"Sasha only want to help you, Chrissy."

"I'm not an idiot."

"Oh no, you are very smart girl. I think maybe too smart, is why you now to run away."

"What does that even mean?"

"Too smart. Know too many things, too many dangerous things. So you try to go."

Christine said, "Whatever you think I know, you're wrong. I don't—"

The look on Maslov's face, which had been amiable and warm until that moment, went cold and hard. "You shut up. You shut up with lies to me!" His voice was quiet, hissing, terrifying.

She wiped her eyes with her sleeve, but said nothing.

"You take our half the million dollars for computer instructions," Maslov said. "Do not to tell me you know nothing. Why you decide to run?"

Christine didn't bother wiping her eyes again, and let the tears stream down her face. She nodded. "I was afraid."

"I think you afraid. And something else, too."

She shook her head.

"I think you thought to stop operation, but you want to get away from SPACE first. No connection. Make hard to figure out it was you who go to police."

This was her nightmare, the worst-case scenario unfolding at 35,000 feet. She stared at the video screen in the seatback in front of her and thought how nice it would be to be as carefree as the sitcom actors looked on that screen. She dried her tears and made a decision to stop the tears. Maybe she couldn't be carefree, but she didn't have to melt into pitiful mush, either. She turned and looked at Sasha. "So what is it you have in mind? How are you here to help me?"

Sweet, cordial Sasha was back. "Right now, no one else knows these things. Only me, me and my loyal people. I think is best to stay this way, yes?"

"And what do you want in return for that?"

No more tears came, but his smile did raise goosebumps all over her body.

F
REMONT STREET

LAS VEGAS

"
Y
ou gonna answer
your drinking buddy or what?" Nichols said, giving me a little spur with his elbow.

"If I tell you, you take it to the grave. I like you, Jimbo, but if you ever breathe a word of this, you will have betrayed me. I don't like betrayal. Deal?"

Nichols gave a little laugh. "Sure, man. I get it. If I tell, you'll have to kill me, right?"

I didn't laugh. "No, I won't kill you. But I will track you down and give you an ass whipping like you've never imagined. I'm serious. No joke."

No more laughing. "Okay, Sam. Never pass my lips. You have my word." He extended his hand and we shook on it.

We were walking past a bench beside the sidewalk. I stopped and sat. Nichols joined me. "I spent seven years working for the government, most of it overseas."

"Military?"

"Yes and no. We were trained by the military, different special ops groups. After the training, which all took place under false names, we disappeared from the books. We didn't exist anymore."

"Like the CIA? You became spies?"

I shook my head. "No. Spies have legends where they're deployed, but they're ultimately still on record with the agency. We weren't. There is no record anywhere that I ever had one minute of affiliation with the United States government. On paper, I was a traveling tech consultant my entire adult life."

"Are you shitting me, man? Sounds like a movie."

I looked at him. "James, do I look like I'm shitting you?"

"No," he said. "You sure don't."

"We were deployed in two-man teams called BAM squads, and we were the ultimate in covert, the blackest of black ops."

"BAM?" Nichols said.

"By. Any. Means. We did the stuff the military isn't allowed to do in today's pussified environment."

"And you did what, exactly?"

"Whatever had to be done."

"Give me an example."

I blew out a long breath, and could still taste the tequila. I had dozens of stories I could tell, but like many men of war, and like many policemen who encounter awful things, I had one story in particular. The one that haunted me. The one I could never push far enough back in my mind, the one I couldn't contain inside my soul. I'd had opportunities to tell it to off-the-books shrinks who work for the government, but never had. Truth is, I never trusted anyone enough to talk about it, especially from the government. Yet here I sat on a public street in Las Vegas, drunk, about to spill it to someone I'd known a couple weeks. Was I crazy? Drunk or not, I knew not to do it. I knew that if it ever got out that I had told anyone, I'd disappear from the earth, and not just from records. I knew all this, but still I started talking.

"My first partner was a guy we called Ditto. On our second mission, we were tasked with grabbing a Taliban asshole from some no-name village, after—"

"Afghanistan? Or Iraq?" Nichols said.

"Afghanistan. We were supposed to grab him, take him outside the village, and find out what he knew about an upcoming attack they had planned against some of our guys. We went in at some ungodly hour in the middle of the night and snatched him from his bed without much of a fight. Took him a couple clicks outside the village, up a hill and into some woods. We started interrogating and he kept insisting we had the wrong man, that he didn't know anything. Which is exactly what about ninety percent of them say. After an hour of beating him and tazing him and burning him with a propane torch, we still had nothing. He was still insisting we had the wrong man. The picture in my pocket made it clear we had exactly the right guy.

"I got tired of his bullshit." I stopped talking, my eyes closed, the scene as vivid in my mind as Fremont Street was right then when my eyes were open.

Nichols sounded scared of the answer, but asked it anyway: "What'd you do?"

"I started by tying him to a tree, standing up with his back to the tree, and plucking out his left eye." Nichols's eyes were huge, the glassy sheen of alcohol fast clearing. "There this guy was, his eye hanging by the optic nerve, screaming like you wouldn't believe. He still didn't break, so I popped out the right one next."

"Ho-ly shit," Nichols said.

"Yeah, it was pretty freaky, but you can usually pop the eyeballs back in and they're fine."

"Well, that's…good to know."

"Then I went for what we were taught as 'the ninety-nine maneuver,' because once you've done enough to make them believe you capable of anything, ninety-nine percent of all guys on the planet fold to this threat."

"Oh hell," Nichols said. "Oh hell, oh hell, oh hell, tell me you didn't—"

"I cut all his clothes off him, stretched his dick out, and put a knife at the base. Told him he had ten seconds to talk, or I'd turn him into a eunuch. I still remember looking at him, seeing his eyeballs hanging on his face and realizing that he had no choice but to watch. His eyes were pointed straight at his crotch and he sure as hell couldn't move them." I stopped talking, my eyes closed again, reliving it for what felt like the millionth time.

Nichols said, "And?"

"I cut his dick off. And the instant the blade was all the way through and his dick came loose in my hand, a round from an AK-47 hit the armor plate on my back. Knocked me down, and I instinctively rolled away when I hit the ground. Good thing, because the fire kept coming from some guy charging through the woods toward us, bellowing like a stuck bull. I found cover behind a fallen tree, and when I looked back at the dickless guy through my night vision, the guy with the rifle was at the tree, hugging him, talking to him."

At this point, Nichols was sober and without words, so I continued.

"I raised my N-V goggles and hit the scene with a flashlight that lit it up like daylight. The new arrival turned toward me and I couldn't believe what I was looking at. He was the guy from the picture in my pocket."

Nichols still said nothing, just gawked at me.

"The guy we'd tortured had been telling the truth all along. We had the wrong guy. We had the twin brother, a brother no one had bothered to mention to us. I screwed up, tortured and killed an innocent man. And that is the one that's haunted me forever."

2
4-HOUR DINER

LAS VEGAS

T
he drinking was done
. My cathartic, if shocking, revelations had come to a close. Nichols looked about normal—well, as normal as anyone looks during breakfast at the end of an all-nighter. Thanks to my mistake of looking in a mirror in the bathroom, I knew I looked the same. We drank coffee while we waited for our order to arrive.

"You know what?" Nichols said.

"What?"

"You still never told me what happened with your marriage. Why'd you break up?"

"Lots of reasons, but looking back? When we married, I was a brash, young asshole, way too full of myself. I went and did what I did for my country, and became a screwed-up asshole, during my time over there, and especially the few years after. I was lost, distant to my wife, not there even when I was."

"You guys get along?"

I nodded. "We have a daughter, she's fourteen. We have to get along."

"What're their names?"

"Wife, Abby. Daughter, Allison."

"Abby and Ally, the A-team," Nichols said.

"Yup."

"Where do they live?"

"Here, Vegas."

"Really?"

I nodded.

"Seen them since you got here?"

"Yeah."

"I know you miss your daughter. What about the wife? Miss her?"

"Every day," I said.

"Most guys wouldn't admit missing an ex after so long."

I shrugged. "It is what it is. She was—is—the love of my life. Every day since she left? Feels like I'm living some alternate timeline, a future that was never supposed to happen."

Nichols was looking at me with an odd expression.

"What?" I said.

"I wouldn't have picked you as the sentimental type, is all. Not in a thousand years."

"Sentimental is not a word I'd use to describe myself, Jimbo."

He laughed. "Okay, I'm sure lots of non-sentimental types are sitting around pining for their ex-wives after five years. My bad."

"Smart-ass," I said.

"Just speaking truth, Sam."

"Smart-ass."

The waitress showed up with a wonderful tray full of fried pork and eggs and potatoes and grits and biscuits, and distributed it among us. We had enough grease before us to float a boat. Nichols bit into a biscuit and said through a full mouth, "Got a picture of your daughter?"

I pulled my phone from my pocket, touched and swiped for a few seconds, and handed it over.

"Man," he said. "She's gonna be beautiful. Very exotic looking."

"Thanks," I said, taking the phone back from him. "We adopted her out of a Russian orphanage when she was a little girl." I looked at the picture before putting the phone away, her blond hair, blue eyes, the dimples beside the glowing smile. I smiled back, but only for a moment. Because it only took a moment for the videos to take over my mind, videos of young girls being brutalized, some of whom looked no older than my own daughter. The smart and safe thing for me to do was to focus on the job my client was paying me for, and try to forget the rest, try to leave alone what I had no legal power to do anything about.

I've never been very good at smart and safe.