Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1) (24 page)

S
AN YSIDRO
, CALIFORNIA

M
ax Sultanovich

T
he shit hotel
and the Waffle House had been bad, or so Max thought. That was before he got to the Greyhound bus station, which apparently served both as a transportation hub and a gathering place for the rejects of the universe. Despite being in California, ostensibly part of the United States, he was surrounded by stinking Mexicans. Everywhere he looked, Mexicans. Old ones, squalling babies, and every damned thing in between.

He held on to Tatyana's hand as they stood in the line at the ticket window. She tried to pull away, but he held firm and looked down at her. "Tanechka, no." The squirming and pulling stopped. A bastard right in front of them was wearing a sombrero. An honest-to-fuck sombrero. Who the hell wore something like that in the twenty-first century? Stupid sonofabitch.

The line moved like a geriatric tortoise. When the sombrero bastard reached the window, he and the cow selling tickets yammered and laughed and yammered and laughed, as if no one else might want to buy a ticket of escape from this hell portal. Civilizations rose and fell and still they flapped their useless gums. When Max had taken all he could, he reached up and rapped his knuckles hard on the idiot's shoulder. When he turned around, Max jutted his face forward, bared his teeth like a hyena, and snapped them at him.

"Dios mio!"
the man said, scrambling to gather up his ticket and his change and leave, never taking his eyes off Max.

Max stepped to the window and said, "Las Vegas."

S
PACE

L
ess than a minute
after my chat with Jimmy the Geek ended, my phone rang. The screen said ABBY FLATT.
Not now, Abby.
My ex-bride doesn't call that often, but when she does, that one quick question she needs to ask somehow takes an hour. I touched DECLINE and turned back to my computer. Almost instantly, the phone started ringing again. Again, it said ABBY FLATT. Resistance is futile when she does this, so I picked it up, touched ANSWER, and said, "Abby, not a great time to talk, can we—"

She was hysterical, screaming so loudly I couldn't tell what she was saying.

"Abby, baby, calm down so I can understand you!"

Her next words were loud but clear: "Sam, they took her! They took Ally!" My heart pounded and my mind spun hyperactive. Why would Meyer pull this shit even after I started cooperating with her? Why is irrelevant. I warned the bitch.

I said, with all the calm I could manufacture amid the flood of adrenaline dumping into my system, "Abby, don't worry. I'll fix this."

"Don't worry? Fix it?" She was still screaming. "How, Sam? How, how, how are you gonna 'fix it'?"

"I'll call the immigration lawyer as soon as we hang up, and—"

"What are you
talking
about, Sam?
Lawyer?
"

"Yes, Abby, the lawyer Paul found." But even as these words were crossing my lips, my brain was reinterpreting what she was saying, and by the time all the synapses fired, she confirmed it.

"Sam," she said. "It wasn't the government! Some men snatched her! Outside the school!"

Courtesy of my work history, I have experienced a lot of dreadful moments. None of them, not one, not ever, compared to what I was feeling. "Dear God."

Now Abby's hysteria was devolving into sobs of misery. I could almost feel her body wracking with the pain.

I took a deep breath. "Where are you, baby?"

She sniffed and took a couple deep breaths. "At the school."

"Are the police there?"

"Yes."

"Las Vegas PD?"

"I don't know. Police. I think all of them."

"If you see one nearby, please hand him your phone for a minute, okay?"

After some rustling, a female voice said, "Detective Hall."

"Detective Hall," I said, "Sam Flatt here. I'm Allison's father. Can you catch me up?"

I heard a muffled and brief conversation between her and Abby, then she was back. "Allison and a couple friends were sitting on a bench on the sidewalk, outside the school, waiting for their rides. Lots of other kids around, lots of parents coming and going. Surveillance video shows a Lincoln Town Car pulling into the pickup line the wrong way; the car stops near Allison and two men emerge, grab her, then drag her kicking and screaming into the car. The car then departs in a hurry. No plates. That's all we have right this minute, but we do have clear video and we also have a ton of witnesses."

"Can you protect Abby?"

A pause. "Mr. Flatt, do you have reason to believe she's in danger? Do you have information on this situation?"

"Nothing that will help you," I said. "Can you get her safely home and put someone there with her?"

"I'm sure we can, but whatever information you have, I need."

"Thank you, Detective. I assure you I'll give every scintilla of information I have to the authorities. Can you please put Abby back on for a second?"

She didn't sound quite mollified but said, "Sure."

A moment later, Abby said, "Hey."

"Baby, the police are going to take you home and leave someone there as protection, okay?"

"Protection? For me? Why?"

"I'll explain as soon as I can. Now I need you to trust me. Please do that."

She sniffed. "I do. Please tell me our baby girl is gonna be okay, Sammy. Please tell me that." Then she broke into sobs again.

"Abby," I said, "I will find Allison. I love you."

She didn't say anything to this, then after a moment said, "The police want to talk to you again."

I touched END CALL.

I
willed
my body and brain to calm themselves so I could think strategically. That's what Ally needed right now, not me chasing my emotions. As my breathing slowed, I closed my eyes and envisioned the neural pathways in my brain as they transformed from a tangle of red- and white-hot electrical spaghetti, unwinding and sorting and morphing into rational routes of cooler colors. I fought back the black fog, but only for now, only because it wasn't useful at this moment. When the time came, I would not only allow the black fog to rise within my soul, I would summon it, nurture it, grow it. I would welcome its crimson edges and allow them to consume me. And then I would loose a hell on these motherfuckers they couldn't fathom in their worst nightmares.

I no longer felt any compunction about protecting my client. The importance of my career wasn't even a blip on the screen. I dialed up Agent Meyer.

"Meyer," she said when she answered.

"Agent Meyer, Sam Flatt. I need your help."

"How so, Mr. Flatt?"

"My daughter's been abducted, and I have no doubt that it's related to the case I'm working here in Las Vegas."

There was a pause of about ten seconds. To my relief, she didn't try to dismiss my theory or start talking about not jumping to conclusions. She said, "What can you tell me about the abduction?"

I gave her all the information I had, and I could hear her typing notes into her computer. Then I added, "I'm going to email you everything I've found during my investigation here. It's much more detailed than the summary I sent earlier. I can also put together a list of other things I've found that aren't documented except in my head."

"All right. I'll get the bureau resources rolling and head to Las Vegas shortly."

"Thank you," I said.

"You did right by calling me, Mr. Flatt. Our people are very good at solving kidnappings. Try to stay calm. I'm on my way."

S
PACE

A
lthough I thought it would
, I couldn't be certain my carte blanche access around SPACE would remain in place. I needed that access and went to work crafting safeguards. Okay, “safeguards” is a bit too innocuous a description; I created surreptitious backdoors into every area of the SPACE data universe I could imagine a need for: Surveillance. Gaming machines. Security. Physical plant. Accounting. My access to the network, combined with the deep access I had to the Decker Digital routers, made it doable. A lot of work, but doable.

If my access ended up being curtailed, using any of these covert gateways into the SPACE network would be considered both unethical and illegal. Using his routers to do so might also piss off my buddy Matt Decker. My level of concern about any of that? Zero. Ethics, laws, rules, and even friendship no longer mattered. Someone had my daughter. After a couple hours, the back doors were built, operable, and stealthy. No one would be locking me out.

My email notifier dinged. I opened my inbox and saw I had another email from the professor who had so graciously agreed to help on the rape videos via running them through his algorithmic magic.

I
fired back
a thank-you email and read his email again. After thinking about it a couple minutes, I dialed Decker's cellphone.

To my surprise, he answered, "Matt Decker."

"Matt, Sam Flatt."

"Hey, Sam. What's up, buddy?"

After giving him a quick rundown on what was going on with my daughter, and receiving stunned commiseration, I said, "Need a favor."

"Shoot."

"Your firm is still sort of running the power grid, right?"

"I wouldn't put it that way, but yeah, our CEPOCS system is still the control mechanism for the U.S. grid. Why?"

"I need a list of the mean voltages and frequencies for power plants."

"Which ones?"

"All of them."

He whistled and said, "Let me think a minute on that." After a minute or so, he went on: "Getting the data shouldn't be a problem. Releasing it might be. We're under a crapload of non-disclosure agreements with the government and the involved corporations."

I said, "Damn it, Matt. I need this!" Then I explained the professor's findings and how finding the folks behind the videos would get me closer to knowing who took my daughter.

He listened without interrupting. When I finished, he said, "Let me give it a little more thought and do some checking. I'll get back to you the moment I know if I can help."

"Thanks, man. I appreciate it." I touched off the call.

S
OMEWHERE OVER COLORADO

C
ourtney Meyer

A
s the little
bureau jet pushed westward, Meyer dug through the mountain of data Flatt had sent her. Much of it was over her head, but she knew enough to be impressed. This guy knew what he was doing. In fact, she had to admit that the detail and deductive reasoning in his reports far exceeded what she had seen from the FBI's own digital forensic people, who were endlessly touted within the organization as the best of the best. Maybe not.

She was flipping through the profile sheets of the people who had allegedly been the ones playing rigged slot machines. When she saw the sheet for Jennifer Randle, she froze. She had seen this woman before. Where, where, where? She pulled her laptop from its bag, positioned it on the little table in front of her, and powered it up. Once it was running, it took her several minutes to get connected to the Internet via the airplane's Wi-Fi connection, but finally she was there, wired back into the world.

The connection was slow, but she was able to connect to the network in her office and then to the bureau's internal database, which might have more information than the NCIC system that was available to every local cop everywhere. She keyed in JENNIFER RANDLE and clicked the magnifying glass to execute the search. A few seconds later, search results began to populate the screen. Slowly. As the results came in, the person's name, along with last known city and state, appeared in the list. As the search continued to run, she worked through the system options at the top of the screen and changed the results layout to include a thumbnail photo alongside the entry for each person.

Sixth on the list was RANDLE, JENNIFER - ATLANTA, GA. To the left of the info was a mugshot, the same one included in Flatt's material. There was no nice way to put it; the woman was so ugly that she was memorable. Meyer clicked on Randle's name and a detailed dossier filled the screen. Much of it was the same information that was on Flatt's profile sheet, but not all. One of her previous arrest records had intersected with the FBI, so that entry had internal case notes from the agent who had handled the case, notes that didn't feed into the NCIC network.

Randle had been arrested in Birmingham several years earlier and charged under 18 U.S. Code § 1029 with “Fraud and related activity in connection with access devices.” As soon as Meyer was a paragraph into reading the case notes, she remembered. Randle and some other low-lifes had installed skimming devices and cameras on a bunch of ATMs in the Birmingham area.

When they were arrested, Meyer was working in the D.C. office as part of a group of agents targeting these skimmers. Unfortunately, it wasn't just the FBI who caught Randle. Birmingham PD had been involved on the periphery of the case, and a turf war ensued between them and the feds. In a bureaucratic pissing contest fraught with bumbling and stumbling, Randle and her fellow fraudsters had walked when it was all over. But Meyer remembered that face being on the wall in their war room for months. Now here it was again. She wouldn't walk this time.