Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1) (5 page)

S
PACE

I
t had taken some talking
, but there they were, stepping off the elevator outside Alpha Centaurum, one of SPACE's higher-end restaurants. Ally broke into a run when she saw me and leapt into my arms. I hugged her tight, taking in the wonderful smell of my teenaged baby girl. When I let go, Abby had reached us. I saw her and my heart skipped a beat, as it always had. "Hey, Ab," I said, and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

"Sammy," she said with a tight smile.

"Come on," I said and gestured them into the restaurant. The maitre d' led us to a quiet booth by a glass wall that overlooked the casino.

Ally took the seat closest to the glass. "This is so amazing," she said. "When can I see the rest of it?"

"We'll see," I said, which earned me an instant stink-eye from Abby.

We spent the next ninety minutes eating, talking, and laughing. It felt almost like the old days. Almost. When we were done, I walked them out, down, and through the casino to the front entrance. Abby gave the valet attendant her ticket and in a few minutes he delivered her car. Ally and I hugged again, but Abby got in before I had a chance for any kind of physical goodbye.

"Call me!" Ally said.

"You got it!" I said.

Then they were gone, and watching them leave gave me that same old empty feeling I'd felt too many times before.

T
he "module transport
" whisking us through the spoke from the dome out to the "simulation center" was unlike any other people mover on earth. I don't claim to have been on every people mover around the planet, but trust me, sometimes you know. We didn't stand. We sat in seats that reminded me of modern roller coasters, with a padded lap bar that locked in place. Good thing, since we had to be doing fifty miles an hour and it had not taken long to hit that speed. Quick trip.

As in the central dome, the bracelets, no doubt embedded with RFID chips, worked like magic. Wherever we went, doors opened, turnstiles spun, and SPACE employees greeted us with great enthusiasm. Nichols called this place Sim City. It reminded me of a huge mall, except it was round and looked to have been beamed back from the future like everything else here. In the center, an area half the size of a football field was dotted with fountains of glowing water, trees that didn't look terrestrial, and people of every stripe gawking with open mouths.

Nichols pointed at an area across the way, where a holographic sign floated in midair. The sign looked like a metallic blue globe wrapped with rotating green text that said MISSION TRAINING CENTER. "Our destination."

"Wow," was all I could manage.

"You a gamer?"

"Not compatible with my lifestyle," I said.

"Figured you for a gadget freak extraordinaire. You telling me you don't have a house full of tech goodies?"

"I don't have a house."

"Apartment dweller, huh?"

"Nope."

Nichols mulled that. "If you don't have a house, and don't have an apartment, where do you live, in the office?"

"Nope."

"Then where?"

"Nowhere," I said.

He stopped walking. "Nowhere?"

"Nowhere. Everywhere. I move around a lot, stay where I have the urge to stay." I resumed walking and he followed.

"So you, what, just drive around from place to place? I don't get it."

"Not exactly. I don't have a car."

"Then what do you have?"

"A horse."

"Horse?" Nichols said.

"His name is Johnny."

N
ichols was right
: The Mission Training Center was as close as you could get to a holodeck outside Star Fleet. After donning electronic glasses and stretchy sensor suits, we chose our weapons. Not all the games were weapons-based, but it's something I know and I chose what looked and felt like a real M4, fitted with some electronics. Then we stepped into a twenty-by-twenty room with walls full of cameras and sensors and speakers. We went through a five-minute session that explained how to navigate the virtual world, which was basically getting used to walking on a weird pad that we stood on that moved under our feet when we walked and also allowed us to swivel and turn. When the learning was done, Nichols said, "System engage," and we weren't in a little room anymore.

We stood in the center of a cavernous space that reminded me of an aircraft hangar, except in this case it would have been more accurately called a space hangar. A command cluster of holographic screens and controls floated in midair before us. The middle screen showed a woman in a command-style uniform, styled in the SPACE color scheme. She said, "Please select a mission," and a series of video images appeared below her. The acoustics were perfect, sounding exactly as they would if the large space around us had been real.

I looked over the selection of scenarios, then reached out and touched a video of a post-apocalyptic city labeled AFTERMATH: EARTH COLONY 42. I couldn't believe how real my hand and arm looked as they reached out, and the sensor suit even provided a little tactile sizzle to my fingertip when I touched the video. I had no idea such tech even existed.

"Thank you," the synth girl said. "Train as peacekeepers or rebels?"

Nothing appeared for me to touch, so I said, "Rebels."

"Mission will begin in five…four…three…two…one…Begin."

The hangar disappeared. We stood in a street of a decimated but futuristic city that reminded me of New York. I looked down and saw that we were dressed in tattered fatigues. My rifle still looked like an M4, but one that had been futurized. When I looked at Nichols, I couldn't believe my eyes. He looked exactly like himself except for being filthy. I don't mean he looked like a video game version of himself—he looked real. So did the buildings. So did everything. In fact, it even smelled real.

"We need to move," Nichols said.

"You played this one before?"

"They're never exactly the same, but I've played enough scenarios to know that the enemy will appear sooner rather than later."

"Roger that," I said. "Let's find cover."

We jogged toward a shell of a building and I was back in an old familiar element.

U
SDA FOREIGN AGRICULTURAL OFFICE

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN

T
HEN

T
he sawed-off
little bureaucrat's name was Eugene Hathaway. He reminded me of a banty rooster, all puffed up and pacing back and forth behind the Formica counter while he pointed his finger at me. "Sir," he said, "I don't know any more ways to say it: You're not taking a wild Afghan horse into the country."

"Johnny's not wild. He's an exceptionally well-trained animal who has served the U.S. with far more distinction than you have. Or ever will."

He snorted at that. "That animal will never see the United States of America."

I drew a long, deep breath. Counted to five. "I want to see the law or regulation that gives you the authority to make that decision."

"Hire an attorney to look it up for you. I'm not required to show you anything. You have my decision. Good day." He turned his back to me and started walking away.

The past few months had been pretty rough. Ditto's replacement had died too, and almost got me killed in the process. Now here I stood, listening to a bunch of bluster from this office weenie. "I don't accept your decision," I said.

He stopped, pivoted to face me. After staring at me for a moment, he stomped to the little gate that separated the visitor area of the lobby from the employee area, burst through it, and huffed over to where I was standing, his face red, spidery veins coloring on his greasy nose. "You know what?" he said, spittle hitting my face. "I'm half a mind to order the animal destroyed. How would you like that?" He punctuated the last word by sticking his finger in my face.

To be clear, I don't remember the next few minutes, nothing beyond the feeling of the red fog boiling up in my soul, but I later saw a surveillance recording that captured everything in quite clear video and audio. I grabbed that finger and wrenched it back until it lay flat against the back of his hand. His eyes bulged for a couple seconds, then he started screaming like the bitch he was. We were the only people in the little cinder block building, but hell, it was obvious on the tape that I didn't want to listen to his blubbering. Despite the red fog, I showed restraint because I didn't cock my fist more than twelve inches before hitting him in the mouth. After that, however, things went downhill a bit.

When I yanked on his tie, it came loose. Who the hell wears a clip-on tie in the twenty-first century? He was still screaming, which sprayed me with blood from his busted-up mouth. That pissed me off. I grabbed a snow globe paperweight from the counter—it was a little smaller than a pool ball and had a red-white-and-blue bald eagle inside—and shoved it into his mouth. After tying the clip-on around his head to secure the snow globe, I grabbed him by the shirt with one hand and by the nuts with the other. I picked him up and sat him on the counter.

Then I stood in front of him with my arms crossed and, in a calm voice, said, "Eugene, I respectfully request that you revisit your decision on this matter."

He looked at me like I was crazy, didn't answer.

"Eugene," I said, "I would really like to discuss Johnny's status again. Can we do that, Eugene?"

This time he started nodding, his head bobbing up and down at the speed of light.

I smiled. "Excellent!"

S
PACE

N
OW

W
e were
about twenty minutes into the game, hunkered down and waiting for our weapons to recharge. Thanks to some real ass-kicking on our part, we had earned a number of privileges. One of those was a stealth mode that rendered our enemies deaf to anything we said or did, so we were able to converse without giving away our position. Nichols said, "Thought you weren't a gamer."

"That's right."

"Never played Call of Duty? This scenario is a lot like it."

"I didn't say I've never played it, but I'm not a gamer. Maybe a couple hours in that game, total."

He shook his head. "That makes you a prodigy in my book. I am a gamer, and Call of Duty is my game."

"It shows," I said. "You're good."

"Yeah. I am. But you have double the kills. How's that possible?"

"There are ways other than video games to learn certain skills."

"So you were, what, some kind of special ops guy who did this for real?" Nichols was now very interested, his virtual head cocked in anticipation.

"Not exactly."

He beckoned for more with his hand. "Then what?"

I winked and said, "A little like this, but definitely not in freaking outer space. Come on, let's kill some virtual assholes."

S
PACE

I
t made no sense
. The test machine had been running more than twenty-four hours, yet hadn't registered a single query from the gaming commission. So much for my expectation that each machine would have been polled many times per day. This didn't meet the barest minimum required by the gaming statute, and the failure looked to be on the state, not the casino. I verified my setup again, tested connectivity, found no problems.

After a couple calls by Nichols, I was able to check the polling on all the casino's gaming machines. What I found made me shake my head in bewilderment. None of SPACE's machines—there were more than ten thousand of them—had recorded a single interaction with the gaming commission in the past twenty-four hours. I went deeper. Not a one of them had been touched by commission computers in weeks.

Now I was dumbfounded. I could understand why the casino wouldn't check this kind of activity on a regular basis. But the state gaming commission? No. First, it was law that they had to check it. Second, surely the gaming commission wasn't in the habit of letting casinos run wild with their electronic gaming operation. Based on what I was seeing, SPACE could have all their machines set to pay back 10% instead of 95%, and aside from disgruntled gamblers, who would be the wiser? The amount of money they could make by tweaking even a fraction of their machines to illegal payout rates could be staggering. I doubted anything like that was going on, but with no oversight, it was possible.

"Hey, Jimbo," I said. Nichols was staying in my workroom most of the time now. No need to make the guy hang out in the hallway like a kid in trouble. Besides, I liked him.

"Yeah?"

"You know anything about the regulatory end?"

"Like what?"

I gave him a capsule version of what I'd found—given Nichols's near-constant proximity to me, Jacob Allen had cleared him to be in the loop—and then said, "I'm curious as to whether the gaming commission provides any reports to the casino on stuff like this."

"No idea, but I can find out." The phone came out and he went to work. I've never seen anyone who could accomplish so much on the phone in so little time. A skill that no doubt saw plenty of use when taking care of the rich and famous in his job.

While he worked the phone, I stepped meticulously through my test setup one more time. Raising this issue with the client and then finding out I'd made an error somewhere wasn't acceptable. I make mistakes like every other human on the planet, but when a client is paying me $600 per hour, I make damn sure they're rare. Once again, my setup checked out as perfect.

About five minutes later, Nichols slipped the phone back into his pocket and said, "Check your email."

My computer sounded its new-mail ding before my hand touched the mouse. I double-clicked the new email and it blossomed onto the screen. It was a forward from the gaming commission and it had a spreadsheet attached. I opened the spreadsheet and skimmed it for a couple minutes, then leaned back in my chair.

Now I had that little quiver in my brain that happens when I find something in an investigation, a skittering around the edges of my psyche. After days of finding little, this felt big. SPACE's gaming machines had not been queried by the gaming commission's computers in weeks. Yet according to the report on my screen, a report from the commission, every one of those machines had been queried thousands of times per day for the entire time they had been in use. Either I was wrong when I looked at the machines, or the commission report was wrong. I wasn't wrong; the machines had not been touched. So why did the commission systems think they had?

T
he P.I. report
on Special Agent Courtney Meyer that I had ordered the day before arrived in my email inbox late that afternoon. I spent some time reading it. Ms. Meyer looked to be a pretty standard career FBI agent. Forty-two years old. Penny-ante assignments until five years ago, when she was involved in a major RICO case that netted a half-dozen indictments and a subsequent mashup of pleas and convictions from a bunch of corrupt New Jersey politicians. That case put her on the feeb map and she'd been a rising star ever since.

Native New Yorker, third generation law enforcement, although Daddy and Granddaddy had both been NYPD. Never married. A smattering of photos from news articles showed an average-looking woman, not ugly but not particularly attractive.

The report was sparse on her recent activity, the only information being that she was thought to have been working on a case involving organized crime in several major U.S. cities that tracked back to foreign origins. Nothing that illuminated specifically why she was poking around SPACE, and nothing to hint at why she would have approached me like a bitch on wheels. My investigation was still in its early stages, but I'd seen nothing to point toward an organized crime connection, which seemed to be her forté.

My gut said I'd eventually find out exactly why she was intruding on my case and in my life, whether I wanted to or not.