Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1) (17 page)

S
PACE

J
acob killed
another hefty glass of the liquor before continuing, and by then the slur was pronounced. "This old man—his name is Maxim Sultanovich—nodded to one of the gaggle of lawyers on their side of the table, and this guy pulled out copies of a new purchase agreement and slid them around the table. I asked for an electronic copy so I could quickly find the changes. Guess what those changes were?"

I shrugged. "No idea, but I'm betting they didn't favor your side of the equation."

"That's putting it mildly, Sammy. You mind if I call you Sammy?"

Okay, he was fully lit. "Not at all."

"Good, because I feel like I can talk to you, Sammy."

"I appreciate that, Jacob. I try to be a good listener." Truth? I worked
hard
to become a great listener. Hearing and interpreting tiny details has saved my life more than once.

Jacob went on: "The changes he made are to this day the most bizarre thing I've ever seen in a real estate transaction. Hell, in any transaction! You see this damned space you've got highlighted, this 'mystery area' nobody knows anything about?" This came with three knuckle-raps on the document.

I nodded.

"He refused to sell
that exact space.
The thousand or so acres around it? No problem! Mineral rights? No problem! Hell, get this, Sammy: He didn't even have a problem selling the ground and sky above that space. Just that one narrowly defined area, which is underground. That's it!"

My face no doubt registered confusion. I picked up the document and looked at it for a moment, then laid it back on the desk. "He only wanted to keep that little rectangle of ground, and even then, he just wanted the portion of it that runs from twenty feet below ground, down to forty feet below ground? That's what you're saying?"

"Bingo! Is it not the dumbest bullshit you've ever heard in your life?"

"It's way up there on the list. I assume you went along with it?"

"Had no choice," Jacob said. "Oh, and he also demanded that the space be built out to his specs, and that we give him free everything in the way of service. Power. Internet. Infrastructure."

"And let me guess," I said. " No one is allowed to enter the area?"

Jacob pointed a wavering finger at me. "Gonna start calling you Bingo Boy, ’cause you just hit another one, Sammy."

B
randy Palmer

I
t felt like forever
, but the hillbilly finally left Jacob's office. Palmer walked back into the inner office and found the lawyer sitting behind his desk with a drink glass in one hand and an almost-empty liquor decanter in the other. "Jacob?" she said. "Are you drunk?"

He looked up at her as if he hadn't heard her come in and didn't particularly care that she had. He raised the decanter to eye level and squinted at it. "I'd offer you a drink, but I want it all for me."

She stared at him, her brain trying to make sense of this scenario and failing. "What in hell are you doing, Jake?"

"It's all gonna come down on my ass." He picked up the decanter again. "Or more likely on my head, I suppose. Hard for something to fall straight onto the ass, wouldn't you agree?" He burst out laughing.

"What's coming down? Tell me what's going on, Jake!"

"It's that old bastard. That old commie bastard. I knew it, knew it all along." He looked like he was about to cry.

Palmer walked around the desk and took both the decanter and glass from him. She took them to the credenza, then returned to Jacob and took his face between her hands. "Jake, what are you talking about?"

"Sammy. He's my only hope, you know?"

"Sammy? Are you talking about Flatt? I warned you at the beginning not to hire that countrified hick. What has he done? "

He burst out laughing again. "Done? He'll save me, you'll see. You'll s—" His head flopped straight back. He was out.

Palmer pulled her phone from her purse and started to dial. Changed her mind. Put the phone back, dug around, came out with another one, a basic little flip-phone. She dialed a number from memory and put it to her ear. A few seconds later, she said, "Not sure yet, but we may have a problem."

S
PACE

I
opened
the surveillance app that had recorded the cameras in the tunnel and the unallocated space overnight. I told the app to show me the segments in which motion occurred in any camera's field of view, hit PLAY, and settled back with my cup of Jelorian Java to enjoy the show. I watched mundane traffic in the tunnel for the first few minutes, then a more interesting clip made me sit up.

The view showed one of the corridors I suspected to be inside the quasi-bunker of the unallocated space. A male figure who looked to be in his twenties walked toward the camera and left the field of view as he passed underneath. I backed it up and played it again. And again. Paused the image on the frame with the best view of his face. The image quality was excellent, at least compared to most surveillance imagery. I used a feature in the surveillance app that let me grab a still image of the guy's face and save it to my hard drive.

More routine service vehicles in the tunnel, followed by another corridor clip. Same guy as before, no new information. At first. Then two more people—one male, one female—entered the scene. The three stopped and talked, dead center in the camera's field of view. I went back and forth until I found the frame with the best view of the second guy's face, grabbed it, saved it. Did the same with the girl. That done, I left the paused image on screen and studied it. The girl was slim, with dark hair and Slavic features, quite pretty. Both males were unremarkable. Slender, dark hair of average length, T-shirts with no logos or other identifying information. The first guy's shirt was black, the second one's lime green. No watches. No visible tattoos. Generic jeans, both blue denim. Shoes. Black Shirt was wearing white sneakers. Not Lime Green, though. He had on a pair of leather shoes with his jeans and T-shirt, light brown loafers. A little unusual, but not unheard of. The style of shoes, however, told a tale. Long, flat, tapered toes. I'd never seen a young person in the USA wearing that type of shoe. But I had seen them many times before. In Eastern Europe. Damn skippy.

T
UNICA
, MISSISSIPPI

M
ax Sultanovich

M
ax followed
his driver-bodyguard up the few steps and through the door of the small government building. Red brick, squat, ugly as his withered old ass-cheeks, like most non-casino things he saw in this forsaken land. Inside was just as bad. Cheap tile floors. Buzzing lights in one of those ceilings made of drop-in panels so cheap they sucked up a bit when a door was opened, then settled back down when the door closed. Cheap bastards. In Kiev, government buildings were regal, strong, worthy of a country.

He stepped to a desk in the middle of a room where an American cow sat pecking at a computer. She looked up at him and squinted through spectacles that made her eyeballs look the size of golfballs. "Help you?"

"I am Max Sultanovich, come to get my son, Mikail Maximovich Sultanovich. His body."

Now her eyes looked even bigger. "What? Oh, that—him? Oh, he's not here."

"This is coroner's office of Tunica County, correct?"

"Sure, that's right, hun. But the body's not here. We don't have bodies here, for heaven's sake." The cow gave a little shiver.

"I don't understand. Why would coroner not have body?"

"Can't say as I can tell you why, but it doesn't work that way here."

"Then where can I get the body of my son?"

"Well, I expect he's over at the hospital. In the morgue. But they won't let you have him."

"I am his father. How you say—next of kin. It is my right."

"Oh, you can get him when they're done, I'm sure. It's just th—"

"Done?" Max said.

"With the autopsy, of course."

"No!" Max slammed the heel of a fist down onto the cow's desk. "You may not cut my boy."

The cow jumped, her huge breasts jiggling. "Uh, look, mister—sir—I think you need to talk to—"

But Max was not waiting to hear the rest. He was on his way out the door and down the steps, his man trotting ahead to open the car door.

Once he and the driver were inside and the car was running and ready to go, Max said, "Go to this hospital."

T
he hospital looked new
, still had the smell of new carpet and fresh paint when Max walked through the revolving door and into the lobby. He walked straight ahead to a high counter with a uniformed man sitting behind it.

"Can I help you, sir?" the man said.

"Where is the morgue?" Max said.

The man pointed to a pair of elevators on his right. "Down to the basement level, turn left."

Max grunted and started toward the elevator with his man in tow, but they turned toward a commotion at the hospital entrance they had come through a minute or two earlier. The ruckus was a small army of police and FBI. Moving toward and around him.

"Maxim Sultanovich, freeze!" It was the leader of the little army, a man in a dark blue jacket with “FBI” in yellow letters a half-meter tall splashed across the front. He had his gun drawn and aimed at Max. So did the others, many of whom were dressed as if they were going into the battle of the century, with all their armor and helmets and other overwrought bullshit.

As Max raised his hands, he turned toward his man to tell him to cooperate, but it was too late. The simple-minded act on instinct, and this stupid bastard's instinct was to pull his own gun and take on at least a dozen assault rifles and numerous handguns, all wielded by a gaggle of testosterone maggots who had probably dreamed their whole pathetic lives of shooting someone. His man's gun never cleared its holster. Max heard the shots and watched as the bullets tore into his man's torso, each one leaving a small crater as a gout of blood erupted. He looked at Max, a look of bewilderment on his dumb face. Then he went to his knees, stayed there a few seconds, and fell face first onto the clean tile floor.

The leader advanced toward Max. "Maxim Sultanovich, you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney…"

Max tuned the voice out. More men were around him now, pulling his hands behind his back, snapping handcuffs into place. He said nothing, offered no reaction of any kind as he was shuffled into the center of the herd of silly men. Then the herd was moving toward the door. The leader's eyes were still on Max and his lips were still moving, but Max wasn't listening. Instead, he looked the man in the eye, held the gaze for a while, then smiled.

S
PACE

I
kept thinking back
on the meeting with Jacob Allen. I expected him to shut me down on anything involving the unallocated space. I expected it more so after he told me the details of what it was and who owned it. Just the opposite. He almost begged me to do something, anything, to extricate him from the coming tsunami of trouble. Yes, he'd been inebriated by the end of the meeting, but that didn't matter to me. I had authorization to act. A lack of authorization doesn't necessarily stop me from acting, mind you, but having it in your pocket sure can grease the skids.

After watching all the surveillance footage recorded the night before, I had identified a total of four different people inside the unallocated space, which I started mentally calling “the bunker.” Three guys, one girl. All looked to be in their twenties, and I believed all of them were most likely from Eastern Europe. Much of that belief was based on common sense, given that the owner of the space was a Ukrainian, but there were other things. The shoes I spotted earlier. Mannerisms. And with the girl, the eyes. The camera had caught a great shot of her face as she looked up while talking to one of the guys. She had classic Slavic features, especially the eyes, a pale blue so striking it looked almost metallic. Were these the hackers, or at least some of them? My gut said yes.

After some time inside the router feeding the bunker and the area around it, I had gotten access to the router inside the bunker, and then to the electronic lock on the bunker's steel door. Sort of. I had gotten the lock's electronic serial number. Once I had that, I compared pictures of the keypad/credential sensor I had taken with my tablet, to pictures I had shot of other access panels around SPACE. The keypad-sensor on the bunker door was different. I moved on and compared pictures of the device to similar keypads and locks on Google. The result was a short list of three potential lock makes and models. I called the first manufacturer; the serial number didn't match their numbering convention. The second one did. I was looking at an ElectroSmith PX1462 keypad with proximity sensor. It was a high-security access control device that was no doubt controlling an electric deadbolt.

Things got touchy after that. Since I had knowledge that the bunker didn't belong to my client, any attempt to circumvent the lock could be interpreted as criminal breaking and entering. Strike “could be interpreted.” It would be breaking and entering. Fortunately, I was certain the people inside wouldn't be calling the police. I couldn't shake the feeling that all this was tied together, not just the hacking operation, but the rape videos, as well. And on that front? Rules and laws were of no interest to me.

N
EW YORK

C
ourtney Meyer

M
eyer stood
in front of Belt's desk and waited, anxious for her boss to get off the phone and tell her what was going on.

After another minute, SAIC Belt hung up the phone and looked at Meyer. "Sultanovich is in custody and en route to the field office in Memphis."

Meyer pumped a fist. "Yes!"

Belt said, "Get down there, Court. Now that we've committed ourselves on this thing, we need to move."

She nodded, left his office, and walked to the conference room where her informants waited. When she entered, every head turned her way. "We got him," she said.

Balderas: "Protection for my clients needs to begin immediately."

Maslov: "Max will to try to kill us as soon as he knows we are to speaking with you."

"Don't worry," Meyer said. "We have a secure apartment here in the building that will be safe until we get longer-term arrangements in place."

Zuyev said, "Where is Max now? What city?"

"Memphis, Tennessee. I'm on my way there now."

"You should know," Zuyev said, those flat eyes locked on hers, "Max will think nothing of having you killed, or a dozen of you. He is a man who is capable of anything."

Meyer felt a little ripple of goosebumps on her neck. "Thank you for your thoughts, Mr. Zuyev. I'll be fine."

Zuyev locked those dead eyes on her. "I am trying to help you."

She left the room and, for the first time since this thing had started to unfold, entertained the notion that she could really be in danger. If the stakes were as high as Maslov claimed, and if Sultanovich was as ruthless as his colleagues believed him to be, what was he capable of?