Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1) (14 page)

S
PACE

T
he word play
for "unallocated space" in this particular case could go on for a while. The term has a lot of meaning to digital forensic geeks like me, since it's the name of the electronic trash heap on a hard drive or flash drive or whatever. We often pull our juiciest tidbits from this junkyard of bits and bytes. That was true in this case; it was in unallocated space that I found Gamboa's deep web history. Then there was the obvious SPACE connection. And now here was a mysterious area with the label on a SPACE architectural drawing. I don't believe in omens, but as previously mentioned, I do investigate aberrations.

I shot an email over to Station Manager Bert Addison and asked him what the mystery space was for, and if he happened to have any more detail on it. Specifically, data network information. Less than a minute later, the phone on the conference table rang. I answered it, "Sam Flatt."

"Mr. Flatt, this is Bert Addison." His accent was Southern and strong.

"Call me Sam."

"All right. Listen, I wish I could tell you more about the 'unallocated space,' but I can't."

This was the first pushback I had encountered at SPACE in a while. "Will it help if Jacob Allen calls and okays you to tell me about it?"

"Ummm, no. You misunderstand, Sam. I can't tell you about it, because I don't know anything about it."

"You're in charge of this whole physical complex, and you don't know what something is for?" I said.

"Listen, it's not for lack of trying, believe you me. I pitched several hissy fits over that dadgum yellow void—that's what I call it, the yellow void. In the end, I was told I could shut up about it or be on my way."

"Who told you that?"

"Allen. Listen, they may call him just an in-house lawyer, but he's the biggest boss anybody's ever seen here. If you want to know what's what, he's your huckleberry."

I smiled at the colorful language. "Okay, I appreciate your help, Bert. Holler at you later."

After I hung up the phone, I leaned back in my chair and stretched while little red flags pinged up across my mind. I liked Jacob Allen and he had been nothing but helpful to me, but I also couldn't forget the way he shut me down on getting law enforcement involved in those rape videos. Now I was hearing that perhaps Jacob was more influential than a typical in-house counsel. I'd ask him about the unallocated space, but not now. Later.

Jacob Allen had told me I had
carte blanche,
so I felt empowered to dig on my own. If I asked him about the space and he told me directly to stay away from the issue, I'd have no choice but to comply. I had a better idea. It was a long shot, but sometimes long shots come through.

S
PACE

W
e first crossed
paths at a digital forensics training conference I attended. This particular affair always brings in a big tech name to deliver the keynote address, and that year the big name was Matt Decker, of Decker Digital fame. Decker had gone through a hellish week when the U.S. power grid went down a year or so before, since the grid was controlled by software his company created. In the span of seven days, he had gone from celebrity geek to scapegoat to national hero, and his speech was one of the more interesting ones I'd heard.

I happened to catch him standing alone for a moment at a meet-and-greet after the talk, and decided to introduce myself. We hit it off and ended up hanging out some for a couple days, and it had been right here in Vegas. He's easily the most brilliant geek I've ever met. I had also discovered during my investigation that his company won the bid for all the network hardware in the SPACE complex, so if anyone had any helpful tricks, Matt Decker should be the man. I wasn't sure he'd remember me, but it was worth a shot so I emailed him.

H
ey Matt
,

R
emember me
? We met in Vegas after one of your talks, and took a helicopter ride out to the Grand Canyon, checked out Hoover Dam and some other stuff. Anyway, I'm back in the desert working a case and would love to pick your brain on something. Understand if you're too busy. Hope all is well.

S
am Flatt

T
hat evening
, I was in my room responding to a long list of personal email that had piled up, when my email notifier dinged. When I checked it, I had a response from Decker.

S
am
! Do I remember? How in hell could I forget getting kicked out of Hoover Dam? Great to hear from you, man. I'm in LA at the moment, so if you can hang on til tomorrow, I'll grab a shuttle flight over there. Where are you?

T
he caller ID
said PAUL FLATT and I answered quickly. "Talk to me, bro."

"It ain't good."

My stomach tightened, did a little flip. "I'm listening."

"I found a great immigration lawyer at one of our offices, had a long talk."

"And?"

"I know why you took her out of Russia without the paperwork, and why you snuck her into the country without a visa already in place. I get it, I—"

"A history lesson is not helpful at this point, Paul. I know why I did it, you know why I did it. What does it mean now? That's all I care about."

"The feds could retroactively void the adoption. We might win in court—it's hard to imagine that we wouldn't win and be able to stop the deportation of a fourteen-year-old who's been here since she was five. But they could legally take her from you and put her with CPS during the fight. You work in the court system just like I do, so no need to tell you how long such a battle could last."

"So that's it? No options, nothing we can do to head it off?"

"I'm sorry, Sam."

"Thanks, bro," I said, and ended the call.

I walked to the window and looked out, wishing I'd never heard of SPACE. Then I returned to the desk, got her phone number from the last email she had sent, and dialed Special Agent Courtney Meyer.

She answered in a cheerful tone that made me want to reach through the phone and strangle her. "Good evening, Mr. Flatt! I didn't expect to be hearing from you."

"Bullshit," I said. "I'll send you updates on my case from a secure, anonymous email. Understand this, Ms. Meyer: If you ever let word get out that I'm doing this, I'll make you wish you'd decided to be a sewage worker instead of an FBI agent, and—"

"Don't you
ever
threaten m—"

"Shut your damn mouth and listen, you despicable bitch. And record this if you like, because I don't give a rat's ass who hears it. If anyone remotely connected with the United States government ever comes near my daughter, in any way, I will hunt your ass down and make you suffer like you can't imagine. Then I. Will. Kill. You."

I touched END CALL and laid the phone on the desk.

K
IEV
, UKRAINE

M
ax Sultanovich

M
ax sat on the sofa
, reading that day's copy of the
Kyiv Post.
Beside him, his six-year-old granddaughter Tatyana sat coloring a picture of a horse outside a barn. He paused his read and watched her, watched the way she carefully replaced one crayon before choosing another. The meticulous way in which she filled in the colors on the page. Her little face was a picture of concentration. She was the one thing Mikail had ever done right, and of course even that was only by chance, a fluke that what was likely the single good sperm in his body happened to be the one to squirm its way inside the egg. With a kiss to the top of Tatyana's head, he returned to his newspaper.

On the front page, below the fold, a headline read, SON OF PROMINENT KYIV BUSINESSMAN DEAD IN USA. Inserted in the text of the article was a picture of a younger Mikail. Probably his passport photo. Max's first thought was that some American bastard had killed his boy, for which he would require the life of at least that American bastard in return. Yes, he had given an order for Mikail to be killed, but that was different, a matter of fatherly and business prerogative. After mulling the issue and the appropriate retribution for a minute or two, he decided to read the article before thinking on it further. The more he read, the colder the blood ran in his old veins.

The women in Mississippi had escaped. It was a disaster. And his son was killed and he learned about it from a newspaper six thousand miles away? He picked up his phone and dialed Zuyev, the man he had moved from New York to Las Vegas when Mikail killed Dmitry. No answer. Something was very wrong. Zuyev would never not answer his call.

He scrolled through his contacts and dialed another number. When the call was answered, he said, "I must fly to America right now."

S
PACE

I
n my room
the next morning, I set up the anonymous email to use with Meyer and put together a terse summary of why I'd been hired, some of what I'd done, and some of what I'd found, then sent it and made my way to the workroom.

Matt Decker arrived a little before noon, and Nichols arranged for him to be brought straight to the workroom. I had already spoken with Jacob and gotten clearance to use Matt as a consultant, so we were good to go from a confidentiality perspective. After a little small talk and catching up, I brought him up to speed on my hunt for the location of the hackers and the HCC, my nickname for the Hackers' Control Computer.

"You sure we're allowed to investigate however we like?" Matt said with a crooked smile.

"Positive," I said.

"Then this should be doable. We sold the routers and switches for this place."

"Yes, you did. I saw that before I emailed you."

"Ah, so you just wanted to take advantage of me," he said, smiling.

I shrugged and gave him my best you-got-me smile.

"I pulled the records this morning. They bought the best of everything, which is gonna be very good for you, Uncle Sam."

"Oh no," I said. "You remember."

"Coolest name I ever heard."

"Glad you think so. How do we do this? Gotta tell you, I've already checked everything imaginable via routers and switches."

He pulled up a terminal window and started entering commands. "A lot of our high-end gear has experimental features. We don't document it because we don't want to support it yet, and in a lot of cases, we even cripple it."

I watched everything he did, and it became obvious that he was running commands that were proprietary to the Decker Digital gear. "And what feature are you accessing now?" I said.

"Would on-premises geolocation interest you?"

"No way," I said.

"Our customers with big networks have this problem often enough to be a problem. Networks get set up without proper naming conventions and things get 'lost,' in that they still work but nobody knows what is where. We expect big things when we roll this feature out to market."

"And the devices here have the feature?"

"They're crippled, but every router and switch here has the capability. I'm about to run a script that will turn the feature on in every one of them." He raised his hand and brought a finger down on the Enter key with flair.

"Unlikely that many of the devices can get a GPS signal in here."

"They don't have to," he said. "At least not many of them. If just a few of them can get a lock, we're golden."

He minimized the terminal window and brought up a blank white page in a web browser. It wasn't blank for long. Little globe icons started appearing in what appeared to be random locations on the page. After a couple minutes, the page had the icons scattered left to right and top to bottom.

"Watch this," Matt said. Using the mouse, he hovered the cursor over one of the icons and a series of numbers popped up.

"I'll be damned," I said. "Latitude, longitude, altitude, and IP address. Sweet."

"Keep watching. The real magic starts soon."

We waited a minute and nothing happened. Two minutes. Then more icons appeared, globes like before, but colored red, not blue and green like the others. I leaned over and drove the mouse to hover the cursor over one of the red globes, and got the same type of location data as I'd seen on the blue and green globes. "How's it doing that?" I said.

"Every device has an encrypted RF transceiver. They talk to each other. And since we have a good number of devices with GPS lock, and thus known locations, the devices that don't have a GPS signal can triangulate their position based on the radio signals from the ones that do. Pretty slick, huh?"

"Slicker than gorilla snot," I said, and extended a fist for a bump-five.

"As more devices establish location, the accuracy goes up. Within an hour, this map will be accurate to within a couple feet. Now, with that done, you guys got any food around here?"

N
ichols begged off for lunch
, saying he had to run a couple errands. I would've figured he'd find Matt interesting to talk to, given his fairly famous status. I guess not everybody is as big a nerd as me. We went to Rings of Saturn, which had settled into the number-one spot on my list of SPACE eateries. After a visit to the Saladium Sector, we made the rounds and chose a quiet booth in the Titan Habitat.

"Been fighting any megalomaniacs lately?" I said.

Matt shook his head. "Just government bureaucrats and corporate egos."

"How's married life?" I said. He had met a Mississippi girl named Jana during the chaotic week he'd spent there while battling the aforementioned psycho, and she was something special. I had read a news article about them getting married a few months back.

He grinned. "I like it. A lot."

"You know she's way too hot for you, right?"

"No debate from me on that."

"What's she doing with herself now that you transplanted her to the other side of the country?"

"Travels with me quite a bit, hangs out with Norman the rest of the time. I think she's getting bored with it, though. She'll tell me soon that she wants to go back to work."

"Norman?"

He nodded and talked around a mouthful of butter-slathered Renduvian Roll. "My chocolate lab."

"Ah," I said.

"Still living on the land with your horse?"

"Most of the time. I did build an addition on the side of my lab. A little bedroom for me and a stall for Johnny, for when the caseload is too heavy to come and go."

"Speaking of cases, how'd you get this one?" he said.

"My brother's a lawyer. His firm had done some kind of contract work for them, I think. Not sure just how it went down, but somehow he knew they were looking for somebody, put in a couple calls."

"Where's he?"

"Houston. Listen, Matt, there's another angle to this case, something I stumbled onto."

He looked up from his plate, raised his eyebrows.

"I gotta ask you to keep this between us," I said.

"You got it. What's up?"

I told him about the rape videos. When I finished, I said, "Can't get it out of my mind."

Matt had stopped eating. "Who could?"

"A couple of those girls are younger than my daughter. I can't stop thinking, what if it was her? What would I do if I found out somebody knew about it and didn't want to get involved because it might sully a corporate image?"

"So, what are you gonna do about it?"

"Not sure yet," I said. "But something, and soon."