Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1)

by Jerry Hatchett

  It took a couple minutes of hard work, but she wrestled her jeans down to her ankles and got the bottle positioned. A short time later, she snapped the lid back down and contorted enough to stow the bottle behind the seat again. After cleaning herself up, she finally got her pants up, zipped, and snapped. She gave Zuyev a jab with her elbow. "Done."

  The eyes opened, a reverse of the way they'd closed. A demon doll. With the pee-wrestle over, Christine noticed that they were descending through the clouds. She watched out the window as the white shroud around them thinned to occasional wisps, then disappeared. A familiar landscape lay below the rare cover of gray clouds. They were back in Las Vegas.

  CHAPTER 79

  TIJUANA, MEXICO

  MAX SULTANOVICH

  THE LANDING at General Abelardo L. Rodríguez International Airport in Tijuana, Mexico, had been routine and smooth. Max snorted as he thought about a bunch of damned Mexicans sitting around on their asses and coming up with such a name for a pathetic dump of an airport in a shithole of a country. Bastards.

  Sometimes he hated that he was forced to deal with such scum, but as the cartel had promised, the airport process was hassle-free. A Mexican government official who looked like all the rest met his airplane and took him and Tatyana to a car. The car took them to a neighborhood of filth and squalor. After turning into a gravel driveway in front of a small adobe hovel, the driver motioned for them to exit the car. Yet another Mexican stood waiting in the doorway of the house, gesturing for them to come inside.

  The inside of the house smelled like grease and peppers and onions and stinking Mexicans. For good reason. He counted at least a dozen of the cockroaches in the tiny front room alone, all turning their insect heads toward him and his granddaughter as they followed their guide through the stench, down a hallway and into a bedroom. The guide pulled the bed to one side and flipped up a rug to reveal a hole in the floor. A stairway was lit by a bare lightbulb hanging on a piece of flat white electrical cable. The guide stepped down into the hole and they followed.

  The nasty aroma of the house gave way to the scent of cool dirt as they descended. At the bottom of the stairs, a dirt tunnel stretched into the distance. More electrical cable lay on the ground on one side, a glowing bare bulb in a socket every ten meters or so. The guide kept walking, so they did, too.

  Tatyana said, "Are we almost there?"

  Max patted her on the head and said nothing. He watched as the Mexican leading the way ducked beneath an occasional short wooden beam that crossed above their heads and supported a piece of plywood. Max didn't need to duck. That stretchy sonofabitch in front of them probably thought being tall made him physically superior. Max snorted at the thought, trudging forward as he slipped into a daydream involving a hammer and a handsaw.

  After at least a kilometer's walk, Max saw a brighter glow ahead. Then he could make out the dirt wall of the tunnel's end. When they reached it, they climbed another crude stairway built from lumber scraps. When they stepped onto the floor above, Max looked around. Like their entry point, it was a bedroom. This one had dirty clothes all over the floor, and poster pictures of more Mexicans covered the walls here and there. Mexicans grinning through ridiculous gold teeth, holding guns in arms covered in tattoo ink. Nasty bastards.

  The house itself was nicer, much nicer, than the one on the other end of the tunnel. Still shit he wouldn't live in, but better than the fly-infested rotbox to the south. They followed the tall Mexican through the house and into a decent-sized living room. Did these Mexican fuckers ever do anything that didn't involve a cluster of them? Every seat in the room was taken by either a thuggish male or a whore of a female. Some stared at phones in their hands, while two of them on a big sofa writhed and shouted with game controllers in their hands. The television they stared at with their rat eyes had to be two meters wide. It was absurd, just like all of these animals.

  Max walked to a window at the front of the room and pulled apart a couple slats of the blinds to peek outside. Neat green lawns. The house across the street had a flag on an angled rod sticking out from the porch, its red, white, and blue rippling in a slight breeze on a sunny day. A fat bastard sat jiggling on a green lawn mower as it went back and forth across the grass. God bless America.

  CHAPTER 80

  FBI - NEW YORK

  COURTNEY MEYER

  MEYER SETTLED into her office chair with a printed copy of the report she had received from Computer Boy, Sam Flatt, ready to really dig into it for the first time. As expected—she had researched her target, after all—it was well written and had the feel of being accurate on the technical front. And now that she'd had some time for the adrenaline of the case to subside, for the first time she felt a twinge of regret over the way she'd coerced his cooperation. She didn't have kids, had never married. Maybe she couldn't appreciate the full gravity of going at someone through his kid, but in her calm, quiet office, what she had done started to feel very wrong. There was his unexpected threat, too, but that didn't really bother her. She'd been threatened by everyone from drug dealers to pedophiles to full-blown mafia gangsters, so in retrospect, some computer nerd's rant hardly registered. Her conscience did, however; that's not the kind of agent she was.

  She pushed through the reverie and focused on the report. Interesting. He was brought in because SPACE was being hacked. Meyer hadn't seen that one coming. Her interest in SPACE had been based on the fact that the land the casino sat on had been bought from Sultanovich. In fact, the real estate records showed that Sultanovich still retained ownership of some tiny part of the land, which had piqued her interest. The money-laundering possibilities of a casino were huge, and the connection was something she couldn’t ignore.

  Her plan had been to co-opt Flatt, just to see if she could get any kind of inside scoop on the company and whether any ongoing business relationship existed with Sultanovich. It had been the ultimate long shot, really. Her assumption had been that they hired him to search for an embezzler, or to check out allegations of some employee looking at kiddie porn, something like that. That's the kind of thing the FBI's computer forensic nerds looked at day in and day out, at least according to the ones she'd talked to. Computer Boy was working on something much different.

  Then the report got very interesting: Christine Gamboa was a person of interest in the affair. Meyer's pulse quickened and her brain sped up. Now she had a nexus between Flatt's work and the Sultanovich case. Coincidences do happen, but everything about this screamed that this was not the case here. No way. Time to fire up a new pot of coffee.

  CHAPTER 81

  SPACE

  I COULDN'T STOP THINKING about Daria and her predicament. And that of the others in her situation, but Daria now had a flesh-and-blood face in my mind. I needed a brainstorm partner but had none. Couldn't trust Meyer. Wasn't sure I could trust Jacob Allen. And this was too much to trust Nichols with. Truth is, now that I was having to do more and more of my work on the sly, Jimbo Nichols was starting to be a bit of a disruption. I could only send him on so many errands before raising his antennae, so I worked while he sat at the end of the table reading his book.

  As I pondered the facts, it again occurred to me that the rape videos could be connected to the business going on in the bunker. This wasn't the first time I thought about this, but now I was entertaining it as a significant possibility. Before now, I had thought of the videos as something Gamboa had watched on the deep web, but could the connection be more entwined? Was there more to the bunker business than stealing mountains of e-cash? Why was Daria forced to work in the hackroom, while her sister was used as the hostage? What about the other workers? Why were they chosen? I needed more info from Daria.

  In the meantime, I needed info on those who owned Canon C300 video cameras. Canon wouldn't be handing over their customer data, not without a subpoena or court order, something I had no access to at this point. I might be able to break into their databases, but doing something like that without leaving a trail of digital
evidence behind was tricky business. I don't mind skirting a law on occasion when the need is urgent, but opening myself up to felony charges isn't at the top of my list.

  I jumped online and searched for forums where people were discussing the C300, and felt a little surge of positive energy at the small number of results. After combing through them for several hours, however, I had nothing. I moved from the web to the deep web and my search for discussion AND c300 yielded exactly one hit. I clicked into the forum. I looked through the list of topics and quickly saw a thread for C300 lighting, but when I tried to click into the discussion, I got a dialog box telling me I had to be registered to view content. With a sinking feeling, I clicked REGISTER. Three fields into the registration process, my fears were confirmed. Registration required an existing member to vouch for you, a common requirement on deep web forums where underworlders hang out.

  No other options came to mind, so after a couple more minutes of considering the pros and cons, I jumped to a deep web forum I did have access to. After logging in, I created a new topic called NEED SPECIAL TALENT IN WASTE MANAGEMENT. In the message field, I entered, URGENT NEED. DM HERE. With that done, I clicked POST.

  I wheeled my chair back, hit something. When I turned around, I nearly jumped out of the chair. James Nichols had been standing behind me. "Damn, Jimbo!" I said. "What the hell?"

  He backed away, hands up, palms out. "Whoa, Sam. Sorry, man. Just finished my book and was curious as to what you were working on. That's all!"

  CHAPTER 82

  FBI - NEW YORK

  COURTNEY MEYER

  MEYER WAS MAKING notes in the margins of Flatt's report when her door opened without a knock. A fresh-faced analyst stood in the doorway with an excited look on his face.

  "Agent Meyer," he said. "We just picked up something in the op center I think you'll want to see."

  Then he was gone. Meyer stowed the report inside its folder and made quick tracks to the room where a half dozen of the most junior people in the building sat and watched screens for alerts related to their work, or scoured emails, or fielded phone calls from around the country. Fresh Face was at the front of the room, pointing to a large display panel.

  The screen showed a picture of a business jet, and Meyer knew it at a glance. It was the jet Max Sultanovich was in when it narrowly escaped the runway in Memphis.

  "Where?" she said.

  "Tijuana," said Fresh Face.

  "When?"

  "Little less than an hour ago."

  "How'd we get this?" Meyer said.

  "Dassault."

  "What the hell is Dassault?"

  "Sorry," Fresh Face said. "Manufacturer of the aircraft. We asked them to run any geotracking they had. Since it was a fairly new plane, it had telematics which—"

  "Fine, I get it," Meyer said. "What else do we have?"

  "Not much. We should have been able to query the database and get the names of pilots, passengers, you name it, but when I run this tail number, I get nothing."

  "How's that possible?"

  Fresh Face shrugged. "Mexico?"

  Meyer was a half-second from telling him that Mexico was a country and not an answer to her question, but she reconsidered. Given the nature of Mexico, a corrupt hovel of a country run by drug cartels, Fresh Face's answer was probably on target. "Good work," she said. "Keep digging, and email me anything you find, the instant you find it."

  Fresh Face nodded and returned to his seat and his computer.

  Meyer headed back toward her office. As she passed through the little cube farm populated by admins, she spotted her favorite. "Jenny," she said without slowing down, "I need a chopper on the roof yesterday, and a bureau plane waiting with its motors running when I hit JFK. Oh, and get State involved."

  "Destination?" Jenny said.

  "Tijuana."

  CHAPTER 83

  SPACE

  DARIA BODROVA

  STILL AT HER desk even though all the other workers had left for the day, Daria grew more uncomfortable by the moment being alone with Alex. Whatever his reason for telling her to stay late, it could hardly be good. She had been terrified all day that he knew, that somehow she had acted strangely and now Alex had found out about her meeting with the American.

  She tried not to flinch when she felt his hand on her neck. Not a casual touch. He was rubbing, massaging her neck.

  "Why so jumpy?" Alex said.

  Obviously, her attempt had failed. She said nothing.

  "And so tense," he said, his fingers kneading the base of her neck on either side.

  A day earlier, the thought of what was happening would have mortified her. Now, disgusting though it still was, there was also relief flooding through her body and mind. Being touched by this man, and no doubt he planned to do more than touch, was awful, but it was so much better than being discovered. What would he do then? What would his superiors do? Not just to her, but to poor Anya. I can do this. I can do this. For Anya, I can do this.

  CHAPTER 84

  SPACE

  MY PHONE RANG and the screen said SPACE. "Sam Flatt," I said when I answered.

  "Sam, Hank Dobo here."

  "Hey, man. What's up?"

  "We've ID'd the slot players. Gonna email you what we have on them, just wanted to give you a heads-up."

  "Great. I'll watch my inbox."

  I ended the call, and seconds later the email appeared in my inbox. I clicked the message, then opened the PDF attachment. The first page was just the SPACE logo. The second had three photographs, the two women and one man I had identified on video as the beneficiaries of the rigged high-dollar slots. The various disguises they had used during their slot play were nowhere to be seen here. These were mugshots.

  Page three was a dossier on the first woman. Her name was Jennifer Randle. She was fifty-four, thick and tubby with dull gray hair that came to her shoulders. No way to say it but to say it: The woman was ugly. Her nose was fat, cheeks jowly, and she had a disturbing mole to one side of her mouth. Her background was no better, a mashup of arrests for mainly one con game or another that spanned most of the southeastern states.

  Page four showed woman number two, Rebecca Light. Her one arrest had been ten years ago for a hit-and-run in which an elderly man had died after being struck by Light's car while crossing a street in Peoria, Illinois, at eight o'clock in the morning. Light had been convicted and did six years as a guest of the state of Illinois. She was forty-two. While not particularly attractive in the police photo, which was old, she was not as unpleasant to look at as her colleague.

  Then came the man on page five, Jeff Tindle, who looked out of place alongside the two women. Tindle was younger, thirty years old. Handsome, a little baby-faced, but grinning like a rogue in his photo, which had been snapped by the Seattle PD. Like Light, he had a single arrest, and his was about as minor as they get while still earning you a full-on booking with photo and prints; he had been caught with a little too much weed in his pocket, a discovery made only because he smelled "strongly of marijuana" when pulled over for speeding.

  I closed the file. These people were of little interest to me, just low-value pawns in the big scheme. Dobo and the police could handle them. My attention was on bigger issues.

  CHAPTER 85

  SAN YSIDRO, CALIFORNIA

  MAX SULTANOVICH

  IF THESE AMERICAN bastards and bitches thought Maxim Andreyovich Sultanovich would tuck tail and run away like some mongrel, they were mistaken. They had murdered his only son. They had at least indirectly caused the deaths of his men. And now they were interfering with his business. His business, which he had spent a lifetime building. And now, thanks specifically to that FBI whore, here he sat hiding in a squalid hotel. Not just him. His granddaughter, too! He loved having her with him, business or not, but he didn’t like her staying in peasant quarters like these. All the same, he wasn't going anywhere until he had settled his American affairs. All of them.

  As much as it exasperated him, in order to do
that, he would be forced to rely on some of the Americans in his employ until he could get suitable Slavic replacements moved here. He sat at the desk and looked through a window that had not been washed in years. Past the sidewalk that fronted the line of rooms, a gaggle of disgusting people sat around a swimming pool he wouldn't dip his cock in. He might piss in it before he left; it would be an improvement. Deciding on the immediate tasks at hand, he picked up the phone given him by the cartel baboon, flipped it open, and dialed.

  The American answered. "Report," Max said. After listening for several minutes with nothing more than an occasional grunt in reply, he said, "No. There is no time for these games. This must end, and I will end it." He closed the phone, stood, and paced the small room, scowling as he pondered.

  Tatyana sat on the bed, legs crossed, leaning back against the headboard as she worked some game in her hands. Max walked over, bent, and kissed her on the top of the head. She stayed focused on her game. Max smiled and patted her perfect little head, then returned to the desk and sat. A fat American man walked by the window, shirtless, his pasty white chest something that could pass for tits on many a woman. Max so wanted to go outside, walk up behind the gelatinous morphodite, and shove knives into his kidneys, one in each hand. No time for play today, however.

  He reopened the phone and dialed the number for one of his men in New York who operated a restaurant in Little Odessa. The man was dumber than a bowl of borscht, but he was loyal and he would know who to call. When he answered the call, Max spoke about a minute in Ukrainian, then said, "Sam Flatt." Then he closed the phone and laid it back on the desk.

  CHAPTER 86

  TIJUANA, MEXICO

  COURTNEY MEYER

  AFTER MORE THAN TWO hours of wrangling via the State Department, the TSA, the FAA, and who knows how many Mexican agencies, the Mexican official led the way down the corridor, with Meyer close behind. When they came to a door marked DIRECCIÓN GENERAL DE AERONÁUTICA CIVIL, the airport police official swiped a key card and they stepped into a dimly lit room. Meyer looked around and estimated a dozen people in the room, all staring at computer screens showing the feeds from surveillance cameras.