Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1) (20 page)

S
PACE

A
lex

A
lex looked again
at the picture the girl had found. Then he picked up a second picture he'd been given, this one a frame from one of the thousands of surveillance cameras on this property. Same man, no doubt about it, and he'd bet money this man was involved in their loss of access to the SPACE network. He slipped the phone from his pocket and dialed the number again. This time he got an answer.

"It's me," Alex said. "We have a major problem."

Two minutes later, Alex ended the call and returned the phone to his pocket after checking the time. 12:22 p.m. He moved the mouse to wake his screen, and navigated to the folder on the server where the workers had saved the network captures from that morning. Starting with the capture from the computer that had taken the picture of the intruder, he began to pore through the mountain of network data.

Twenty minutes into his dig, he found the first confirmation of his fears. "Sonofabitch," he said to no one. Now that he had found the first tamper, he knew exactly what he was looking for on the remaining computers. He set a filter to show him only the traffic generated by the spyware app the intruder had left behind. It was already on twelve of the twenty computers on the floor. It was moving from machine to machine, duplicating itself and self-installing on the computers one by one.

How the hell was that possible? This wasn't some simple trojan. It was a sophisticated snoop that would make a record of everything that happened on a computer, and no doubt deliver the results to the asshole who planted it. None of their antivirus or antimalware scanners had picked up the slightest trace of it, and they were running superb scanners that were updated daily and supposedly capable of finding and eradicating any threat, including activity recorders like this. If Daria hadn't found that picture, they would have never known. But they did know, and now he had the advantage.

He also had a plan for how to press that advantage. He stepped out of the office and onto the workfloor, then called out, "Daria, come here."

When she arrived, he gestured for her to sit in the lone visitor's chair.

The girl looked scared. "Yes, Mr. Alex?"

"Just Alex, okay?"

She nodded.

"We have a lot of work to do this afternoon, and I need your help."

"Yes? What can I do?"

"We are going to build a trap, Daria. We're going to bait that trap, and then we're going to catch us a predator."

F
BI - NEW YORK

C
hristine Gamboa

"
S
asha
, I think maybe we're safer here, in a locked apartment in the middle of an FBI building."

Sasha turned to her on the sofa and took her face in his pudgy hands. "Chrissy, you think this because you do not know Max. We must to go from here. We must to hide."

"How could he know we're here?" she said. "And even if he did, how would he get to us in here?"

"Chrissy, you must to trust Sasha. Max own people everywhere. He knows. Max is man who will kill one thousand people to kill one person."

She heard the electronic lock on the front door beep as it unlocked, and turned toward it. The young FBI employee who had been bringing them food and other requests since they were put in the apartment stepped through the door with a large pizza box in hand. Zuyev walked to him as if to take the pizza. Instead, at the last moment Zuyev picked up a heavy ceramic table lamp and hit the man in the side of the head with as much calm as a normal human being might have when picking up a newspaper. The lamp shattered and the man grunted as he went down to his knees.

Zuyev took the pizza from his hands during the fall and said, "Thank you very much."

The man looked confused for a couple seconds, then his eyes closed and he crumpled onto the carpeted floor.

"Now we go," Zuyev said.

C
hristine felt
like she was in a dream as the cab weaved in and out of New York traffic. She wasn't worried about a car wreck. The taxi driver wanted the thousand-dollar tip Sasha had promised upon successful delivery, and he was handling the yellow Crown Vic with expertise, blowing his horn and cursing out the window at other drivers who somehow offended him. Best as she could tell, that included every driver they encountered. Plus she was wedged tightly enough in the back seat between Sasha's width and Zuyev's bones that she probably wouldn't go anywhere even if they did crash.

What scared her was everything else. Max Sultanovich had already wanted her dead. Now? He probably wanted her flayed alive or some such. Sasha had won a lot of trust from her over the past couple days, so she didn't worry about him, but that Zuyev was another story. She had looked into his eyes after he attacked the young man and did not sense a soul behind them. Then there was the fact that she was on the run from the FBI. Was it illegal to run from the FBI when you hadn't been arrested? And would the FBI honor the deal they had made, now that they had taken off? Maybe she should have refused to leave. And maybe she should have been a little more forthcoming about the full extent of her own involvement, such as it was.

Now, unbelievably, Zuyev was opening the damned pizza box. The smell of pepperoni, onions, and peppers flooded the small sweaty space and her stomach roiled. Enough. Without saying a word, she reached across Zuyev, rolled the window down, yanked the pizza box off his lap, and flung it out the window. Zuyev stared at her and she stared right back.

Sasha burst out laughing. "Yes! Yes, Chrissy! I must to marry you!"

F
BI - NEW YORK

C
ourtney Meyer

M
eyer looked
in the restroom mirror. No surprise there, but what a sight. Bloodshot eyes in puffy sockets. Pale face. And that hair. Good grief, that hair. She dabbed at her face with a damp paper towel, trying not to wipe off what little makeup remained, and did the best she could with the mess on her head. Time to go.

She arrived to a full conference room and walked to the end that had the wall-mounted display. "Can someone dim the lights, please?" The lights softened and she picked up the remote for her presentation. She clicked and the FBI logo on the screen faded to a picture split in vertical thirds that showed photos of Maslov, Zuyev, and Gamboa.

Someone in the room, a man, quietly said, "Wow."

She turned away from the screen and toward the room. Picked up her cup of coffee and took a sip. Looked at a young man at the far end of the room who looked like a penny that had just been struck. "Chad, and the rest of you men, can you please get your gawking at Gamboa out of the way right now?"

Nervous chuckles rippled around the table.

"All done?" she said. When the room was quiet, she went on. "Alexander Maslov, Benjamin Zuyev, and Christine Gamboa. As most of you know, these three assaulted an agent earlier today and fled from one of our in-house apartments. They were in protective custody, not under arrest. That said, Maslov and Zuyev are admitted felons, and now that they've assaulted a federal officer, all three have been classified as wanted and warrants have been issued. Their capture is a high and immediate priority."

Click. The screen switched to a photo of Sultanovich sitting in the interrogation room the night before. "Meet Maxim Sultanovich. This frail-looking old man is the head of the Ukrainian mafia and the most powerful organized crime figure in all of Eastern Europe."

"Including Russia?" someone said.

"He operates out of Kiev, but his reach is long and complex. We believe he has a personal relationship with, and the blessing of, Putin himself. So yes, including Russia."

Fresh-faced Chad said, "Where is he now?"

"He was apprehended in Mississippi yesterday and taken into custody by our Memphis field office. We were forced to release him when a legal attaché from the Ukrainian embassy presented papers showing Sultanovich to be a special envoy."

"Diplomatic immunity?" someone said.

"Yes. It's trumped-up nonsense, of course, but State gave us no support and we had to cut him loose, at least temporarily."

"Where'd he go?" someone else said.

"I'm getting to that," Meyer said. "We were able to get the FAA to put a hold on his plane while we tried to get around the diplomatic cover. An hour ago, however, his plane defied that order and took off from Memphis."

"They couldn't stop the plane? I thought airports had ways to deal with that kind of thing since nine-eleven?" Chad said.

"Homeland Security tried and failed. I understand they were attempting to ram the plane on the runway and missed getting there in time by a matter of feet."

"What now?" someone said.

Meyer took another sip of coffee. "The FAA is looking and we also have at least some support from the Air Force."

Someone gave a low whistle.

"Yeah," Meyer said. "It's a great big deal, people. Our immediate objective is to apprehend Maslov, Zuyev, and Gamboa. They're our best evidence—actually, our only evidence—against Sultanovich. We don't think they fled to avoid any potential prosecution. They came to us, and we had succesfully negotiated a deal for their cooperation."

Young Chad was full of questions. "Then why?"

"Fear of Sultanovich getting to them."

"Here?" Chad said.

"I know, I know. Secure apartment, secure building, surrounded by federal agents. So if two career criminals like Maslov and Zuyev were scared enough to run, that should give you some idea of what we're dealing with in Sultanovich. Let's find these three, and let's do it before Sultanovich's people do."

S
PACE

I
t was a little after eleven
. Less than an hour until the first batch of midnight reports should start arriving from the bunker computers. I had worked until about seven on a comprehensive report I had begun writing for Jacob Allen, one with lots of detail and data. It would take several days to put together, and on this night I was tired of it. I closed the file and sent Nichols away, told him I wanted to work on some personal things for a bit.

I opened the rape videos and all the data behind them. I studied that data, tried to find clues that would let me trace the origin of the monstrous videos beyond the anonymity of the deep web. I dug into the metadata, the hidden data buried in the code of the web pages that contained the videos. Hoped I'd get lucky and find some piece of information left behind by a sloppy tech, something that would let me get even a tenuous grip on who built the pages. Nothing. Generic pages that could have been put together by any of a countless number of people using any of a hundred different apps.

Next came the actual video files. Pictures and videos often contain a lot of hidden data, as well. It's how you can load them into some electronic photo albums and get a pretty little map with cute little pushpins showing where they were shot and when. I extracted and studied that data. No go. Every field of metadata had been stripped clean.

After stepping away for a couple minutes to grab a cup of coffee and stretch, I sat back down and pulled up my address book. After a bit of searching, I found the guy I was looking for. A professor who had done a lot of research on photographic and video evidence. He had discovered that even when you don't have the metadata, cameras leave electronic fingerprints behind. Artifacts in images that aren't visible to the human eye. Patterns in the way they process color and light that can be tied to a specific manufacturer, sometimes even a particular model. If you have the source camera, you might even get lucky and match that particular camera to images it created.

I shot the professor an email and asked if he'd be willing to take a look at a couple disturbing videos, run them through his magic algorithms, tell me what he could find. I attached a couple of the videos, along with a clear warning that they were graphic and sickening.

That done, I moved to the part of the analysis I dreaded, watching the videos. Over and over. Looking for any clues to location. Anything that might help me identify one of the girls or where she was from. An accident, a name spoken. Any peculiarity at all. After three hours of watching, I had a tiny list of notes to research, none of which were likely to yield results.

I also had an old and unwelcome friend with me at the end of the viewing session, one I had spent years burying in the deepest, most securely guarded recesses of my soul. He moved in my essence like an impossible gathering of a million black holes, sucking away all light, leaving me with only dark resolve and immutable purpose. Do my job. Mercy does not exist. Survive. Purge Earth of those who prey on the innocent. He manifested in my mind as an ethereal black mass. As he moved, as he took over my thoughts and actions, as he devoured the light, his wispy edges glowed a brilliant crimson. Then he grew stronger and stronger, devouring more and more light, the crimson edges becoming a blood-red fog that filled every crevice of my soul.

As I watched innocent girl after girl being brutalized, watched them scream and beg for mercy that never came, he grew. When I watched one young girl in particular, who reminded me of my own daughter, be savaged by these creatures, these walking wastes of flesh who were unfit to be deemed human, he grew.

He had no name, because the red fog and I were one and the same.

#

A
fter watching
the horrible videos the night before, I lost all interest in reports from the dungeon and instead crashed and tried to sleep. It was a night filled with fits and starts and sweats and dark dreams. When I woke the next morning—earlier than usual—I showered and dressed, then checked to see if any dungeon reports had arrived. They had, a lot of them. I'd study them later.

I ate a light breakfast and drank three cups of coffee at Rings of Saturn, then grabbed another cup to go on my way out. The weird hours and poor sleep of the past few nights had my body clock out of kilter. A few minutes of walking outdoors would fix it. After completing the maze through the casino, I exited the rear doors and hung a left. Might as well walk toward the tunnel.

The morning was cool so far, low seventies, the desert air crisp and refreshing and so clear it looked like the mountains ringing the valley were no more than a few miles away. Now that I was outside, though, it became obvious that I should have gone out the front entrance to experience the body-clock-resetting rays of Sol. The back of SPACE faced west and was of course in shadow. I walked, not wanting to trek the casino maze again. I'd just circle the tower till I hit sunshine.

I was approaching the tunnel when I saw her. She too was approaching it, but from the far side, coming toward me. My heart gave a little stutter. It was the girl from the surveillance video, the girl who had stopped beneath the camera and talked with the two guys inside the bunker. I crossed the mouth of the tunnel, felt its gentle waft of cool air, stepped onto the sidewalk on the other side. The girl was ten feet away, looking down as she walked. Five feet away, she must've sensed my presence, because she looked up.

Her reaction was instant. She literally stopped midstep, her mouth slightly parted and her eyes wide as she looked into mine.
She recognized me.

When she stopped, I did too. In the space of a second, I processed the fact that she recognized me: She had seen me on surveillance footage inside the bunker. No other explanation for her surprise. And if she had, others might have. She looked like she was ready to bolt, so I raised my hands, palms out. "Please," I said. "I'm a friend."

Her face and posture relaxed a bit, but barely. She said nothing, so I continued. "My name is Sam. I'd very much like to talk. You have nothing to fear from me."

She whipped her head to the left, looked behind her, to the side, then back to me. The look on her face had gone from surprise to fear. But maybe not fear of me. Fear of being seen talking to me. She stepped around me and walked at a fast clip toward the tunnel, then into it. I turned and followed. Not close enough to spook her, I hoped. I stayed about twenty feet behind her. When I saw one of the offshoot tunnels approaching, I made a guess and said, "I can help you."

There it was. The tiniest glitch in her step. I said, "Please take the tunnel to the right. There's a place we can talk. No cameras."

Her pace slowed, just a bit. Five feet from the tunnel…three…there. She turned. I followed. "There's a corridor ahead on the left. Go there."

She did and I was right behind her. No more than six feet into the corridor, a locked door formed a dead end, but that was fine. We were out of sight of anyone or any cameras. I said, "I'm Sam."

"I am Daria Bodrova. You policeman?"

"No, but I can call police later. Where are you from, Daria?"

"I live in Kiev."

Classic Eastern European pronunciation.
KEE-uhv.
I took care to speak slowly, enunciating, avoiding contractions. "You do not know me, Daria, but you can trust me. I want to help you. Do you need help?"

She nodded, and I went on. "Do you know the type of work you are doing here?"

"I know. We stealing money."

This time I nodded. "Who are you working for?"

"I do not know. There is man we call Alex. He pretends to be American, but he is Slavic. I know when someone is from Russia, maybe Ukraine."

"Are you here against your will?"

Her face scrunched up and her head tilted a little to the side.

"Do you want to do this work?" I said.

She shook her head. "No."

"I can take you somewhere safe, right now."

This time she shook her head emphatically, and the fear returned to her face. "No, no, no!"

"Why not?"

"Anya. They kill Anya! I must work!"

I patted the air, spoke in a low, gentle voice: "Okay, okay. I understand. Do not worry. Who is Anya?"

"Sister. Anya my sister." Her accent was heavy, but her English was pretty strong, good enough that she didn't have the habit of prefacing verbs with the word 'to.' She had studied.

I said, "Do you know where Anya is?"

She shook her head.

"Do you know if she came to the United States?"

She nodded. "Yes, we come together on airplane."

"When did they take Anya?"

"In airport. They say we join later, but we do not."

"Okay. The Las Vegas airport?"

"Yes. They take Anya away in different automobile. Then I go in house here at Las Vegas. I ask many times where is Anya, but man scream on me and hit me."

"Alex hit you?"

"No. Alex come later. Was Dmitry."

"Can you tell me where the house is? Are there other girls?"

"House in street called Green Mountain, but I do not see mountain. Only flat street. Seven hundred and forty-two is number."

"And are there others?" I said.

"Many more girls. Boys also." She looked at a simple watch on her wrist. "I must go. Alex come soon."

"Okay. Can we meet later?"

"Tomorrow. I come early. I come in seven."

"Thank you, Daria. I will help you. One more question: How did you know me?"

"I see you on the recording, in room."

I nodded. "Did anyone else see the recording?"

"Alex see recording. Alex make computer cage for you. I must go now."