Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1) (21 page)

S
PACE

D
aria Bodrova

D
aria had been
at her workstation about ten minutes when Alex arrived. Her insides were doing flips. What if he started talking to her? Could she behave normally? Or would he be able to tell something was wrong? And why had she talked so much, so freely, to the man named Sam, the man who had snuck into this room in the middle of the night like a bandit? Was she that desperate, so desperate as to talk to a complete stranger? And could she really trust the man? Of all the questions, she was most confident she knew the answer to that one, and it was yes. She didn't know how she knew, but yes, she believed she could trust the man Sam. Why else would she have talked to him?

"Daria," Alex said, startling her.

"Yes?" Did she flinch? Did he see it?

"Any new action on the videos?"

"No. All were normal."

"Have you checked the keylogger to see if the reports went out to the intruder last night?"

"No, I will do this now." She maneuvered through the system, Alex watching over her shoulder, her heart beating so hard and so fast that she worried if he could hear it.

"Be careful," he said. "Do it like we talked about, so he can't tell that we know."

She nodded and continued navigating to the log. "Yes, nine reports were transmitted," she said.

Alex did something he had never done. He gave a little squeeze of her neck. Then she felt and heard him kiss the top of her head.

"Good job," he said. "Very good job."

Daria fought the urge to vomit.

S
PACE

I
had made
Daria wait while I checked the tunnel to be sure no one was coming, then sent her on her way to the bunker. I left the tunnel at a jog and continued the pace until I was back inside the casino. The last thing I wanted was to be seen by "Alex," and according to Daria, he would be arriving at the tunnel soon.

After a visit to my room to retrieve my laptop, I made my way to the workroom, all the while trying to process what had just happened. Through a chance meeting—maybe divine intervention was more likely—I had just gotten a huge break. I now had an inside source. I also had the invaluable knowledge that those in charge inside the bunker were aware of me, aware of my visit in the wee hours. What had Daria said? Alex made a computer cage for me? Trap. She meant trap.

A known trap is not much of a trap at all. No more accessing the hacker computers for me. Whatever I'd find there was quickly becoming secondary anyway.

I emailed the private investigator and told him to get everything he could on 742 Green Mountain Drive, the house where Daria and the other forced tech workers were living. Then I Googled the address and checked out what I could see from the Internet myself. The house was a largish cookie-cutter situated in a cul-de-sac of a fairly new-looking subdivision, the kind with a thousand houses that all look way too much alike. Suburban America of the twenty-first century. Further searching turned up nothing useful, so I'd wait for the PI's report.

Now I had a dilemma: what to do. My instant reflex was to call the FBI agent, Meyer. They would be best equipped to deal with such a situation, and maybe such a tip would be big enough to get her off my back for good. I also had a responsibility to inform Jacob Allen, the client who was paying me and had a right to know what was going on in the bowels of the business he ran.

The problem? I wasn't sure who I could trust to react in a way that wouldn't endanger Daria or her sister or the others, who could only be described as prisoners and hostages. I liked Jacob well enough, but I also remembered how he not only didn't want to notify the police about the rape videos; he actively thwarted my attempt to involve the police. I understood his desire to keep the company brand from being associated with such a sordid situation, but I didn't agree with it. His right to know was important, but not important enough to risk this. Then there was Meyer, a cold-hearted bitch I knew I didn't trust.

In the end, the list of who I trusted to handle it was short: me.

My email notifier dinged and when I looked at my inbox, I had a reply from the professor with the fancy algorithms.

A
fter sending back
a thank-you email, I hopped on Amazon and looked up the C300. The camera was a newish model, out less than a year, which meant there were relatively fewer owners out there. I leaned back in my chair and thought about the professor's point on shooting with such quality gear, then uploading versions that had been compressed so much that the quality was indistinguishable from a low-end smartphone's output. After a couple minutes, it hit me: Maybe the deep web versions were just teasers, previews of a much higher-quality version that could be bought.

I switched to the forensic environment in which I'd watched the rape videos, a special computer setup that allowed me to view anything online without a trace of it being stored on my computer. Just having a few child porn pictures on your computer is enough to land you in prison. I sure didn't want to find myself in that situation as a result of trying to find and stop these subhumans.

It took more than two hours of sifting through the most disgusting websites imaginable—child porn, torture porn, rape porn, snuff films—but I finally scored a direct hit. The site had no name, just a long URL on the deep web that looked like gibberish. If you got to this site, either someone had given you the URL, or you'd found it via one of the deep web's unfiltered search engines. Probably with a search term like “REAL RAPE” or similar. It was laid out like a typical online store, although the aesthetics were minimal, crude by today's standards and more in keeping with online stores one would have seen in the early days of the Internet. People didn't come here for flashy graphics and a slick user experience. They came because they were the lowest form of life on the planet, the kind who derive sexual gratification from watching helpless girls brutalized. These miscreants weren't content watching twentysomething actors pretend to be fifteen-year-olds being raped. No, this scum wanted to see innocent teenagers ripped and torn body and soul, for real.

Bold text at the top of the page said AUTHENTICITY OF EVERY VIDEO GUARANTEED. WATCH THESE YOUNG BITCHES SCREAM. Below the header, a grid of thumbnails showed select frames from the videos for sale. Each thumbnail had three tiny links below it: STREAM HD $55, BLU-RAY $75, and PREVIEW FREE. Clicking the preview link played the exact videos at the exact crappy quality level I had seen earlier, although they played from a different deep web address. Both the streaming and Blu-Ray links added that video to a shopping cart and went to a view of the cart that offered the choice to CONTINUE SHOPPING or CHECKOUT NOW.

Buying the streaming version would be a waste of time. These people weren't idiots, so tracking a high-def stream's origin down would yield the same results as I got when trying to find the source of the previews I'd watched. A Blu-Ray would at least provide something tangible that came from somewhere in the brick-and-mortar world. I thought about setting up a blind mailbox at one of the many services in Vegas, but decided against it. I had some Bitcoin and could pay without leaving a clue of any kind, but I didn't want this stuff shipped to me in any way, especially since I already had an FBI agent willing to throw out all scruples and notions of fair play in what she no doubt viewed as her noble quest.

I had a better idea. After working through the checkout screen and double-checking the information I'd entered, I clicked the button that said COMPLETE ORDER.

C
hristine Gamboa

G
iven their previous travels
, this wasn't what Christine imagined when she learned they were taking a chartered flight to parts unknown. The Cessna had four seats, and none of them was built to accommodate Sasha, even though he managed to lodge himself in the right front seat. She was directly behind him—the pilot said she had to sit there—with Zuyev on her left. The short seatback pressed into her knees and the back of Sasha's giant head was no more than a foot from her face.

They had taken off, landed for gas, taken off, landed for gas, taken off again. Sasha declined to answer her questions about where they were or where they were going. You must to trust Sasha, Chrissy. The only thing she was sure of was that during the daylight hours, they'd always been headed generally westward. That was the case now. The sun was straight ahead, low in the sky, painting the fluffy white carpet of clouds below them a soft golden color.

She turned to Zuyev. "I have to pee. Close your eyes."

His eyelids slowly dropped, the way a doll's eyes would as you laid it back. His mouth turned up just a bit on the right side, the closest she'd seen to a smile from him. The surrealism of the situation, the confinement in the ever-more-stinky cabin as they flew, the stress and exhaustion, were all beginning to mess with her mind. She now almost believed Zuyev wasn't really a human being at all, but some macabre automaton. Sasha was some amphibian glob. She stretched to reach the pee bottle behind the back seat, got a finger through the handle, and brought it forward.

The pilot turned his head ever so quickly and their eyes met. He had done it many times, but she had gotten used to men doing that since she was about fifteen. He had bright brown eyes that seemed to always be on the verge of a smile. The grizzle on his face was dark with a flash of gray on occasion. Christine didn’t know who he was or where Sasha had found him, and didn’t really care.

She should've worn a dress, because getting her jeans down enough to pee in the bottle was a difficult proposition in this cocoon. She unsnapped the pants and the pilot's head did another quick swivel. This time she was ready and met his eyes with a stare that said,
Not gonna happen, buddy. What may happen, though, is me pulling your eyeballs out of your face and stuffing them in your ears.
The twinkle disappeared from the brown eyes and he turned back forward.

It took a couple minutes of hard work, but she wrestled her jeans down to her ankles and got the bottle positioned. A short time later, she snapped the lid back down and contorted enough to stow the bottle behind the seat again. After cleaning herself up, she finally got her pants up, zipped, and snapped. She gave Zuyev a jab with her elbow. "Done."

The eyes opened, a reverse of the way they'd closed. A demon doll. With the pee-wrestle over, Christine noticed that they were descending through the clouds. She watched out the window as the white shroud around them thinned to occasional wisps, then disappeared. A familiar landscape lay below the rare cover of gray clouds. They were back in Las Vegas.

T
IJUANA
, MEXICO

M
ax Sultanovich

T
he landing
at General Abelardo L. Rodríguez International Airport in Tijuana, Mexico, had been routine and smooth. Max snorted as he thought about a bunch of damned Mexicans sitting around on their asses and coming up with such a name for a pathetic dump of an airport in a shithole of a country. Bastards.

Sometimes he hated that he was forced to deal with such scum, but as the cartel had promised, the airport process was hassle-free. A Mexican government official who looked like all the rest met his airplane and took him and Tatyana to a car. The car took them to a neighborhood of filth and squalor. After turning into a gravel driveway in front of a small adobe hovel, the driver motioned for them to exit the car. Yet another Mexican stood waiting in the doorway of the house, gesturing for them to come inside.

The inside of the house smelled like grease and peppers and onions and stinking Mexicans. For good reason. He counted at least a dozen of the cockroaches in the tiny front room alone, all turning their insect heads toward him and his granddaughter as they followed their guide through the stench, down a hallway and into a bedroom. The guide pulled the bed to one side and flipped up a rug to reveal a hole in the floor. A stairway was lit by a bare lightbulb hanging on a piece of flat white electrical cable. The guide stepped down into the hole and they followed.

The nasty aroma of the house gave way to the scent of cool dirt as they descended. At the bottom of the stairs, a dirt tunnel stretched into the distance. More electrical cable lay on the ground on one side, a glowing bare bulb in a socket every ten meters or so. The guide kept walking, so they did, too.

Tatyana said, "Are we almost there?"

Max patted her on the head and said nothing. He watched as the Mexican leading the way ducked beneath an occasional short wooden beam that crossed above their heads and supported a piece of plywood. Max didn't need to duck. That stretchy sonofabitch in front of them probably thought being tall made him physically superior. Max snorted at the thought, trudging forward as he slipped into a daydream involving a hammer and a handsaw.

After at least a kilometer's walk, Max saw a brighter glow ahead. Then he could make out the dirt wall of the tunnel's end. When they reached it, they climbed another crude stairway built from lumber scraps. When they stepped onto the floor above, Max looked around. Like their entry point, it was a bedroom. This one had dirty clothes all over the floor, and poster pictures of more Mexicans covered the walls here and there. Mexicans grinning through ridiculous gold teeth, holding guns in arms covered in tattoo ink. Nasty bastards.

The house itself was nicer, much nicer, than the one on the other end of the tunnel. Still shit he wouldn't live in, but better than the fly-infested rotbox to the south. They followed the tall Mexican through the house and into a decent-sized living room. Did these Mexican fuckers ever do anything that didn't involve a cluster of them? Every seat in the room was taken by either a thuggish male or a whore of a female. Some stared at phones in their hands, while two of them on a big sofa writhed and shouted with game controllers in their hands. The television they stared at with their rat eyes had to be two meters wide. It was absurd, just like all of these animals.

Max walked to a window at the front of the room and pulled apart a couple slats of the blinds to peek outside. Neat green lawns. The house across the street had a flag on an angled rod sticking out from the porch, its red, white, and blue rippling in a slight breeze on a sunny day. A fat bastard sat jiggling on a green lawn mower as it went back and forth across the grass. God bless America.