"I will to tell you. We in Simferopol. Is in Crimea. Now we go in my house."
The plane came to a stop and the door opened on a rolling stairway. She followed Maslov down and across the tarmac to a helicopter with its blades already slowly turning. He helped her in, then climbed in beside her. The interior was plush, all gold carpet and blue leather and burled wood, and it smelled brand new. When he closed the door, the noise of the helicopter all but disappeared. He tapped the pilot on the shoulder. After a slight vibration, they lifted off the asphalt, tilted forward a bit, then moved forward and up.
Christine looked out the window at the airport below. Its main building was flat, not really large, a white and blue block that looked mundane, industrial, compared to airports in the United States. She wondered if she'd ever see one of those airports again. "How far to your place, Sasha?"
"Soon," he said, already reaching for a bottle of his hideous pepper vodka that was held onto a small shelf by a gold-colored bungee cord.
He wasn't lying. Within minutes, she felt the helicopter slowing, and looked out the window. Whatever she had expected, this wasn't it. They were descending onto the grounds of a mansion, or maybe castle was a better description. She didn't know what time it was here, but it looked to be late in the day. Soft golden sunlight bathed the expanse below them, beautiful green grass dappled with shadows cast by copses of large trees. At the center of the grounds, the house looked more like a royal palace than a place where normal people lived. Then again, who could call Sasha normal?
Once they were on the ground and out of the aircraft, Sasha led her from the concrete landing pad behind the house through a complex of tennis courts, past the biggest swimming pool she'd ever seen, and finally, inside. After passing through a kitchen that could cook for a state dinner, they went down a long and wide corridor and arrived in a living room. Everything there was opulent, a display of grandiosity that exceeded anything Christine had ever seen in someone's home.
Ten feet into the room, Sasha froze. It was abrupt enough that she literally ran into his back. She stepped back and to the side, so she could see what he was looking at. It was a who instead of a what, an elderly man sitting on one of the sofas with his legs crossed. Another man, much younger, but still in his fifties, stood behind the sofa with his hands folded in front of him. The standing man looked like a bodyguard type, a goon. They were still ten or fifteen feet away, but already she could see that the old man on the sofa had bright, piercing eyes, an unnatural light blue. They could have been beautiful in another face. Not this one.
"Max," Sasha said, before launching into a foreign spiel she couldn't understand.
The old man gestured toward a sofa facing him and said, "Both, please sit. And we will speak English. I want your guest to clearly understand what I have to say."
CHAPTER 28
SPACE
BACK IN MY MAKESHIFT LAB, a.k.a. conference room, a.k.a. conference chamber, I dug into the other links on the list of links I had found on the deep web. I had dubbed the page of links "the portal," so I'd have something short and simple to call it going forward. I sure didn't want to be calling it "the list of links I had found on the deep web" a dozen times in every report I wrote for this investigation. The SPACE links were straightforward enough. They linked to the high-stakes EGMs. The other links were more cryptic.
One was labeled "HCTRA," and when I clicked it, I found myself on a black screen filled with ever-changing green numbers. No words, just numbers. Within the context of my hometown, I knew that HCTRA stood for Harris County Toll Road Association. It was the government agency that administered the various toll roads in Houston and the surrounding area. At first, it was hard to fathom that outfit as a hack target. The more I thought about it, though, the more sense it made as a perfect target. The money involved was huge. I Googled up the agency's latest financial report and saw that the toll revenues for the most recent year had been almost six hundred million dollars. That's a number worthy of any hacker's attention.
Even better, that money is taken in a dollar or two at a time, which means hundreds of millions of transactions are involved. You would only need to skim a tiny portion of those transactions, transactions watched over by mainly low-level government employees. Within minutes, I knew exactly how I'd pull off such an operation: EZ TAG.
Forget the paper currency and coins people paid manually at the toll booths. The real money was in the flood of cars with the RFID tags on their windshields that auto-charged their accounts as they flew though the stations without ever slowing down. I went back to the black screen of shifting numbers and started trying to figure out the scheme. I stared until my eyes watered, then set up an app to record the stream of numbers. My plan was to let it collect the numbers overnight, then crunch them the next day and find the trick. But I couldn't. An old school screen of numbers that looked like it was from the eighties was irresistible to a geek like me. It took about an hour. Then I saw it. It was simple. It was brilliant. And someone was stealing an unfathomable amount of money with it.
CHAPTER 29
CRIMEA, UKRAINE
MAX SULTANOVICH
MAX UNCROSSED his legs and leaned forward, elbows on knees. He stared at Maslov for a moment, then turned his eyes on the woman. It excused nothing, but he understood as soon as he saw her, exactly how it was that his lummox of a son had gotten distracted from following the Crimean. Perhaps he should buy her from Maslov. A diplomatic approach, as it were. But, no. If he wanted the bitch, he would take her. That would be that, and Maslov could go fuck himself.
"I have flown around the world and back," Max said, eyes locked on the woman's. "I am old, and I am tired. I have enough to worry about without you making trouble in my life. If you do not—"
Maslov interrupted, "Max, she—"
Sultanovich shot one look at Maslov, and the fat bastard closed his mouth.
Max continued, eyes back on the woman. "If you do not understand me, girl, if you cause me one more minute of trouble, I will have you put in a gulag with a thousand men who have not seen a woman in years. You will not be so pretty a cunt when you are fucked a hundred times a day."
He watched her eyes go wide and liquid, and fought the urge to smile as tears rolled down her face. She looked to Maslov, as if that tub of fat would or even could help her; the Crimean bastard did not even turn his head to her. Max felt his cock stiffen in his trousers, stiffen like it had not done in years. He felt the whirling lightness in his gut, in his mind. Oh, how he wanted to take her right there while Maslov watched. Perhaps later.
"So tell me, girl, how is my English? Am I communicating clearly for you?"
She wiped at her face, nodded.
"Good," Max said. "Now tell me what you know. Tell it all to me right now."
And she did, for the most part.
CHAPTER 30
MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE
MIKAIL SULTANOVICH
HE HAD TO MAKE A PLAN, and soon. After dragging the dead men out of the lodge and into the woods, he had relieved the lodge's safe of its cash. It had a pathetic $12,000 in it, and that wouldn't last long. He had already gone through half of that since going to Memphis to avoid his father. There was no doubt that the old bastard would come for him. It would be better to face the fucker and do away with him, but Mikail wasn't quite ready. It was reasonable to clear the head, to think and prepare for such a thing as killing one's father, right? He could've gotten a cheaper hotel room and laid low, but he had needed to clear his head. He did that by buying a couple grand worth of coke, picking up a pair of whores, and retiring to The Peabody. He thought they might ask him to leave when he and Tiffany and Angel started quacking at the ducks while they made their famous march, but five crisp hundreds had taken care of that.
Now that his dick of a father had not shown back up at the lodge for twenty-four hours, he felt pretty good about going back there, but that was not a long-term plan. The old man would eventually return or, more likely, a small army of his
goons would. And they would keep coming until they got him, because the word quit just was not in the old bastard's vocabulary. Maybe it was time for a different kind of thinking. He told the whores to go, stuffed his few things into a plastic laundry bag from the closet in his room, and left The Peabody.
Forty-five minutes later, he drove slowly up to the lodge. He had never understood why they even had this place. If it were up to him, he'd put all these bitches on the streets in Vegas and L.A. and New York as soon as they got them. But his decrepit old father insisted on bringing them here to the backwoods until—how did he put it?—they were “properly broken of spirit and ready to be compliant earners.” Dumb shit.
After sitting in his car and watching for five minutes and seeing nothing, he got out and went inside. As soon as he closed the door, he heard beating and banging and shouting coming from many of the rooms. He stomped into the hallway and screamed, "Shut up!"
Some of the bitches did, but some did not. They started shouting about food. Okay, fair enough. He had not thought about food for them since killing all the attendants a day and a half ago. Apparently, his father had missed this issue as well. Pretty funny, really.
"Okay, okay, I will get you food if you will hush your mouths!" The noise stopped. He would find them food, but first things must come first. He pulled the plastic bag from his pocket and looked at his remaining coke. Running low. He opened the bag, held it over his nose and sucked in a good hit, then put it back in his pocket. Not as efficient as running a line, but hey, he was in a hurry.
In the kitchen, he found a lot of food, but it was the kind of food that had to be cooked. He was not cooking shit. He stepped back into the hallway and said, "Who knows how to cook?"
One reply, about halfway down the hall on the right: "I can cook."
He walked to the door, unlocked it, and motioned for the girl to come out. She was maybe eighteen, a brunette with brown eyes, maybe a Mexican, he thought. Like all of them, she was dressed in a blue jumpsuit. He took her to the kitchen, spread his hands to the room, and said, "Cook."
While she got busy in the kitchen, Mikail sat on a stool and watched. The coke felt good, very good. And her ass looked good in the jumpsuit. He watched her, watched that ass, as she moved back and forth, gathering things from the pantry, from the refrigerator. Hit the bag of coke again. Watched it some more. After five minutes, he said, "Take off the clothes."
The girl froze, her back to him. He said it again: "Take. Off. The. Clothes. Bitch."
She reached to her front and he heard the satisfying sound of the zipper as she pulled it down. His coke-jacked senses were running a thousand miles an hour now. He saw everything, heard everything, felt everything. Heard the rustle of the fabric as she pulled the jumpsuit apart and wiggled it off her shoulders. Heard the wonderful, soft friction of fabric on skin as she pulled it down around her knees and stepped out of it.
If her ass was nice in the jumpsuit, it was perfection bare. "Turn around," he said.
The girl turned, and he took in the view. Everything about her was perfect. The face. The little tits with their dime-sized nipples. The patch of dark hair between her legs. He stood, unsnapped his jeans, pulled the zipper down, and let the pants fall to his ankles. He looked her in the eye for several seconds, liked the fear he saw there. He pulled his briefs down, felt his manhood spring free.
"Suck my cock," he said, and sat back onto the stool, leaning backward with his elbows on the counter behind him.
She walked toward him, the steps of her bare feet making the old floorboards creak ever so gently. His heartbeat raced—thump, thump, thump—and his member throbbed in anticipation. This was living, making a beautiful young bitch do what he wanted and what she did not. When she reached him, she bent over without a sound and took him in her mouth. Mikail closed his eyes and leaned his head back. Seconds later, he heard a small sound, one that should have been instantly familiar, but in the ecstasy of the moment, he could not identify it.
Then the pain exploded in his crotch, and in a microsecond, he knew what the sound had been. She had reached behind him and pulled a knife from a wood block. He shrieked and looked down. The girl looked up at him, her face feral, teeth bared. He looked past her face and gasped at what he saw. Her hand still gripped the handle of the knife. She had driven it up into him, under his balls, through the muscles there, and into his insides. Though his balls hid the full view, he could see enough to tell it was stuck in him as far as it would go. While he watched, she grunted and twisted the knife a quarter-turn, then pulled it slowly out. He was now one with the pain. He was pain and pain was him. And smell. He smelled piss and blood draining from him.
She kicked the stool out from under him and he fell, his tailbone cracking as he hit the wooden floor. But a tailbone was nothing, a bite of a bug by comparison. And then, as if by magic, the pain seemed to fade. He felt her doing something else to him but it was like a dream. The bitch let out a roar and held up her hand as if she had just been declared the victor in a great battle. Her hand was bloody and there was something in it. It looked like…a dick. How strange. She lowered her hand and leaned down over him, again doing something to him that he couldn't really discern because now everything was fading. But he did know that he was choking on something, something in his throat. And for just a moment, he knew. After all the times people had tried and failed to kill him, this little girl with the dime-sized nipples had succeeded, and he was going to choke to death, on his own dick. He thought that was pretty funny in a way. And then he thought no more.
CHAPTER 31
SPACE
FINDING the hack of Houston's toll road system had expanded my investigative mind on this case in a big way. This wasn't just about hacking a casino. This was an organized operation, massive in scale. By this point, there was little doubt in my mind that when it was all uncovered, this thing would dwarf any nefarious hacking operation that had come before. Well, at least operations outside the NSA. Who knows what all that bunch had pulled off, and they fell squarely into the nefarious column as far as I was concerned.
Houston was one of many. The portal led to connections inside toll road systems all over the country. In each one, the hackers had basically installed taps between the automated car-counting systems, and the database that stored and processed the money transfer from each driver's account into the account of whatever government agency administered the toll roads. These taps siphoned off a tiny percentage of those transfers, but because of the amount of money involved, those siphons were pulling off a staggering amount of funds. I spent a little time trying to figure out where the money was going, but that was going to be a lengthy process because every dollar was riding a pipeline into the deep web, where it was converted to Bitcoin. That would have to wait for later, and most likely for someone other than me to solve. If my client hadn't wanted to get the Las Vegas Police Department involved, they would really freak when all this had to be turned over to an array of federal agencies.
Oh, toll roads weren't the only targets involving government agencies. These guys were running similar hacks on "smart" utility meters, siphoning pennies here and there off payments of water bills, electric bills, gas bills, you name it, but always in systems run by some form of local or state government. Towns or cities that ran their own utilities. Never private electric or gas or water providers. The more I dug, the more incredible it became. On the other hand, the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Why go after hard targets like banks, or Amazon.com, or other major corporations? Go soft. Smaller government agencies were exactly where you'd find systems without the protections put in place by the Amazons of the world, outfits with huge resources and not beholden to the lowest bidder.
The one outlier in all this? SPACE. Exactly the kind of hard target they appeared to avoid with the rest of their operation. Dr. Jerry Rose may be a dweeb, but for the most part casinos hired some of the top minds available in security, both the electronic and brick-and-mortar flavors. S
o why go after them? It was a mystery, one that didn't fit. I hate things that don't fit.
I STARTED one of my periodic scans through my email to be sure nothing important had come in, and stopped cold when I saw a subject line that read CONFIDENTIAL AND URGENT: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION. I opened the email and saw that it was from Courtney Meyer, the FBI agent who had called a few days earlier.
Dear Mr. Flatt,
I would like to apologize for my tone during our earlier conversation. I need your assistance, and my behavior was not conducive to a good working relationship. I hope you will reconsider your position. The matter is of utmost importance.
Sincerely,
Courtney A. Meyer, SA
GIVEN THE BREVITY, I wondered if Ms. Meyer hadn't been coerced into sending that one. She'd been much more verbose while spewing venom and threats, and I suspected that was the real Special Agent Meyer. I typed and sent a quick response thanking her for the email and explaining that, regrettably, I still couldn't cooperate.
I also spent a fair amount of time pondering her request, wondering exactly what she was looking for. Federal involvement made a lot more sense since I'd found the hacking operation, but there was no way to know if she was looking for what I'd found, looking for something altogether different, or fishing in the blind for something—anything—on a suspect she'd been unable to pin down.
One thing was sure: Hearing from her again made me uncomfortable. She was an unknown factor, a wild card who wanted something and thought she was entitled to it, whether I could give it or not. Feebs in that situation have enough power to create trouble. I'd have to think some more on how to handle the oh-so-Special Agent Meyer.
CHAPTER 32
CRIMEA, UKRAINE
Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1) Page 9
