Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1) (32 page)

O
RLEANS CASINO HOTEL

C
hristine Gamboa

O
n one hand
, Christine was beyond relieved to be getting out of the tired, dingy hotel suite. On the other, she was confused as to the sudden impetus for going. After a couple secretive phone calls in the other room, Sasha had declared it was time, and was rushing them to move.

"What's going on, Sasha?" she said.

He was at the door, gesturing for them to hurry. "Chrissy, we must to go. We must to go now."

"Fine. Why now?"

He blew out a long noisy breath that blubbered his lips. "I am thinking Max may to know where we are."

Zuyev stood by the door, a dead-eyed, animated corpse ready to do whatever.

Christine said, "You think he's coming here?"

"Maybe he comes. Maybe he will to send other killers. We must not to wait and find out."

She nodded, and by habit, looked around to be sure she wasn't leaving anything behind in a hotel room. Then she realized that she had nothing. Nothing to take. Nothing to leave.

They left the room and rode the stale-smelling elevator to the ground floor. They walked through the casino, toward the rear of the casino, where she assumed Sasha had someone waiting with a car.

The idea came to her in an instant, but she knew she had to do it. "I have to go to the restroom," she said, and walked away from them without waiting for an answer. The moment she was out of their sight, she broke into a run.

L
AS VEGAS

C
ourtney Meyer

"
A
nd you're
certain both houses are jammed?" Meyer said into the comms headset. "No calls in or out, right?"

Team Leader responded, "Correct."

"Let's do it," she said, shifting in her seat and leaning forward to concentrate on the console screens. Two of the HRT agents remained at the 966 house where Sultanovich was. The warrant for 742 Green Mountain had just arrived, and they would hit the house hard and fast in a pure hostage rescue posture.

She turned to Console Agent and said, "How long should it take to get that translator? We still don't know what he said on that phone call."

"It's unusual to take this long. Been almost an hour. Want me to call and rattle some cages?"

"After this is done," she said, with a nod toward the console.

The screens were all green, the four agents of immediate interest advancing on 742 along the railway behind the houses, just like they had with 966. After several minutes of bouncy green walking, they arrived. One took a prone position in the rear, facing the house from about twenty yards back. Meyer watched as the three others crept around the house, two on the right and one on the left. Soon they were converging at the front door. Team Leader gave a silent countdown from three using his fingers, and the quiet of stealth and creep was instantly replaced by a cacophony of sound and moving images.

One of the agents hit the door with a one-man door ram and the other three charged inside, Team Leader in front. Shouts of "FBI!" and "Freeze!" and "Hands in the air!" issued from the console speakers. A room light switched on and the screens, now in full color, showed a living room with two sofas against walls and three cots arranged in the middle of the room, all occupied. A female on one of the sofas was sitting up, a panicked look on her face and a paperback book in her hands. Another stood from a cot, holding what looked to be an old Nintendo GameBoy. The others were rousing from sleep. All looked bewildered and scared, and all were female. Young. Meyer guessed the range from mid-teens to mid-twenties.

Three of the agents left the living room, one straight ahead into what looked like a kitchen, one into a hallway on the left, and the other into one on the right. The kitchen and bathrooms were empty. Meyer counted four bedrooms as she tried to keep up with the fast-moving action. Each bedroom had multiple occupants and proved to be a repeat of the scene she had watched in the living room. Confusion and fright on young faces. One bedroom held five males, but everyone else in the house was female.

Now the screen still showing a green view of the rear of the house came to life. A figure was coming out of the back of the house, actually, out of the back side of the garage. The prone agent was on his feet in an instant. "Freeze! Hands in the air! You move, you die!" Now the agent was advancing toward him, his rifle visible and leading the way.

"Don't shoot! Don't shoot!" It was a man. Meyer watched a bright splotch bloom around the his crotch on the green screen. Had the agent shot him? No. The man had peed himself. Some big bad criminal he was.

She switched her attention back to the 966 screens to be sure all was quiet. It was. They had done it.

S
PACE

D
etective Ronnie Huddleston

F
inally
! Flatt's tracker had shown up on the screen. It appeared first in the employee parking area, then moved inside. The asshole had left the property. He would have stayed gone if he had any sense, but his stupidity was Huddleston's good fortune. He stood from his chair. "Let's go, Dodo."

"My name is Dobo."

Awww, little faux pas hurt the rent-a-cop's feelings. Huddleston wanted to burst forth with a gut-busting laugh, but he held it in. "My fucking bad, let's go." He hooked a thumb toward the tracking screen on the wall. "Where is that?"

"Looks like he's headed out toward the entertainment complex."

"Why the fuck would he do that?"

"Detective, I've cooperated to the best of my ability. Mind easing up on the f-bombs? Getting tiresome."

Huddleston couldn't believe his ears. Here he was trying to catch a criminal, not to mention a personal threat to Huddleston and his income, and having to put up with this candy-ass shit? He shook his head. "Whatever. Can we go?"

Dodo picked up an iPad and walked out. Huddleston followed.

S
PACE

T
he burner phone
rang and I looked at its tiny screen: FEDERAL BUREAU O… I answered it. "Flatt."

"Sam, it's Court."

Court?
"Sorry?"

"Courtney Meyer."

"Oh, oh, got it. Tell me you have good news."

"Your daughter wasn't there. I'm sorry."

Even though I expected that, the disappointment still hit me like a shot to the gut. I took a deep breath. "What about Daria?"

"She's safe, and fifteen others. They're pretty freaked out, worried about their families. None of them are what I'd call fluent in English, so we're having a bit of trouble getting them calmed down, making them understand that no one knows they've been rescued."

"I'm glad they're safe. Any bad players with them?"

"One man, Jeff Tindle, one of your shady slot machine players. He'll be interrogated posthaste, and he'll break quickly. The guy literally wet himself when he was being apprehended."

"What about Sultanovich?"

"We're still watching, hoping he'll make a move so we can track him to the others. Hang in there."

W
hat was
I not thinking of? What clues had I missed? Did they really expect me to kill Jacob, or was it a distraction? A new thought occurred to me: What made them think I was even capable of such a thing? As far as they knew, I was nothing more than a computer nerd. Or did they somehow know more? How? The security chief, Hank Dobo, knew at least something about my background from being in the same place at the same time in Afghanistan. The only other person I'd ever shared information with was Nichols, a drunken move of idiocy on my part. Could one of them be involved?

Too many questions I couldn't answer. Time to ground myself in things I did know. I fired up the virtual copy of Gamboa's computer that I'd copied to my laptop. It resumed to the exact state it had been in the last time I'd looked at it, which felt like a year ago even though it was a week or two max. The last thing I'd seen was the deep web page that listed all the hacking targets, the “hacking portal,” as I'd come to call it. No untapped investigative value there; the feebs had the hackers themselves. I clicked the HISTORY menu in her browser and looked through the list of page titles. Even though I'd been through it, maybe something would jog a memory or spark an idea.

When I got to the hacking portal at the bottom of the list, I stared a minute. It wasn't the bottom of the list. It was third from the bottom, and that was as far as I'd gotten. How had I left two pages unexplored? I stared at the ceiling, cracked my knuckles, thought about the day I'd found that page. Then I remembered. I found the hacking portal and had believed it to be the holy grail of the investigation. That night, I went out with Nichols, acted a fool, got way too drunk, and blabbed like a gossipy old woman. We stayed up all night and I got very little sleep before heading back to work. When I did resume my investigation, I followed the hacking evidence and never went back to the rest of Gamboa's deep web history. Bottom line? I forgot it.

Both the remaining pages showed in the history list as UNTITLED. I clicked the first one. When it loaded, I stared, trying to wrap my mind around what I was seeing. I couldn't. Surely, for the love of God and all that is holy in the universe, this could not be what it appeared to be. It just could not. It wasn't possible. The more I looked, however, the more a sickening and debilitating certainty settled in my gut, in my very soul: It was exactly what it appeared to be.

S
PACE

H
ank Dobo

I
f he didn't have
such a sweet gig at this place, Dobo would've leapt on Huddleston way before now and beat the ever-loving crap out of him. When it came to obnoxious, this pathetic excuse of a detective was light-years beyond anyone Dobo had ever met. Maybe he couldn't beat his big head senseless, but he could have a little fun.

The little rail shuttles that propelled people from the center tower out through the spokes to the outlying structures were designed to hold either two or four people. They arrived every thirty seconds in sequence, a double-seater, another double, then a quad. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. A double stopped in front of them and Dobo said, "Go ahead, I'll catch the next one."

It wasn't like there was any choice. By the time Huddleston manipulated that butt down into the seat, he filled the double from wall to wall. The left armrest lit up in SPACE's cerulean blue and a contralto synthetic voice said, "Please touch credential bracelet to the lighted armrest to begin your journey."

"I got it," Dobo said. The facilities manager had taught him a neat trick. Management bracelets had the ability to double the speed of the shuttles, which were already so fast they felt like a thrill ride at a theme park. At twice that, they rivaled the brutal acceleration of a Hornet on its takeoff roll on an aircraft carrier. Dobo missed that sensation from his pilot days, and used the trick every time he rode the shuttles. With a tiny smile, he extended his hand and tapped the bracelet on the armrest four times in quick succession.

Huddleston screamed as the shuttle shot forward, kept screaming, in fact. Dobo grinned and listened to the howl as it Dopplered into the distance of the spoke. The next shuttle arrived and Dobo climbed in and quad-tapped his own armrest.

W
hen Dobo arrived
at the entertainment complex, Huddleston had just extricated himself from the shuttle. He looked pale and clammy as he wobble-waddled away. Paler and clammier than usual.

"That can't be normal," Huddleston said when Dobo approached.

"What?"

"That!" He pointed at the shuttle. "Felt like I was being shot from a fucking gun. I need to sit down."

"Hmmm," Dobo said. "Felt normal to me. We need to get going if you want to track down your fugitive." Dobo looked at the iPad. "Looks like he's a couple hundred yards to the left."

"I think I'm gonna be sick."

Dobo looked at the iPad again. "He's stationary right now. Think you can keep it together? If not, we can shuttle back to the tower and get you to the infirmary."

"Hell no. I'm never riding that thing again!" Huddleston bent over, hands on his knees for about a minute, then stood. "Let's go."

They moved at a snail's pace. Dobo tapped around on the iPad as they walked. He didn't think for a moment that they were about to find Sam Flatt, but he'd play along.

Ten minutes later, the iPad's tracking screen showed that they were within fifty feet of the bracelet. They were standing at the edge of a large cluster of tables centered in the midst of a food court. Even in the middle of the night, easily two hundred people sat eating. Dobo gestured at the area and said, "We're here. Let's interrupt his meal."

"Oh shit, not food," Huddleston said.

Dobo could've sworn the jerk was literally turning green as he rubbed a hand across an acre of belly. He fought back another smile and started threading his way between tables. The money this corporation had spent on this tracking technology astounded Dobo. Who put RFID readers in tables, for heaven's sake? Sixty seconds later, the iPad beeped. He looked at the screen and saw the tracker icon flashing red with a line of text above it that read, BRACELET LOCATED.

Only one person was in the immediate area, one of his security officers named Julia Gomes. She seemed to sense someone was looking at her and turned around with a burrito paused halfway from plate to mouth. She said, "Chief?"

"Hey, Julia."

Huddleston lumbered up with a bewildered look on his face. Dobo pointed at Julia's wrist. "There's the bracelet we've been tracking."

"What the fuck, Dobo?"

Dobo shrugged. "I don't know, man. The technology's not foolproof. You ready to head back?"

Huddleston shook his head as he pulled a chair out and collapsed into it. "You go on. I gotta rest up."