Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1) (33 page)

S
PACE

A
t first glance
, the web page looked like a standard eBay page. The same familiar color scheme, same general layout of products with their thumbnail photos and descriptive headlines. That first impression lasted seconds. At the top of the page, the jaunty logo with its primary colors had a twist: Just to the left, set at an angle in faint purple, were the letters "sh." It was no longer an eBay logo. It was a SheBay logo, and the products on the page weren't the standard fare. The "products" were women.

The more I looked, the clearer it became that girls was the more accurate description. As I scrolled down the page, they looked to be anywhere from twelve to twenty. They all had one thing in common; they were beautiful. The level of beauty varied a bit from girl to girl, but every single one was striking. The photos were professionally shot, perfectly lit, framed and angled with meticulous care.

At the top of the list was a girl who couldn't be more than fifteen. She was obviously Slavic, with pale hazel eyes that looked almost iridescent. Straight dark hair hung to her shoulders, parted on one side and pulled over in a style you might see on a schoolgirl. Her descriptive text said: GALINA, A UKRAINIAN WOMAN WHO LONGS TO MAKE YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE. I clicked her photo and her individual page loaded. A paragraph of text anchored the top of the page.

I
'm not
a man of fragile constitution. I've seen a lot and done a lot. Now, however, my hand had a little tremor as I reached to the touchpad on my laptop. Below the text, an array of photos of the girl filled the page. No nudes, but there were lingerie and bikini shots. High-fashion shots. Household-looking shots. Smiling. Pensive. Sad. The gamut was covered.

Once the pictures ended, I came to the "business" section of the listing, where bold red text screamed, SALE COMPLETE. PRICE 1,375,000 EUROS. Presumably on March 1st—was that this year?—this poor child had been sold as if she were nothing more than a piece of property. I had to find these bastards.

S
PACE

C
hristine Gamboa

S
he couldn't stop now
, couldn't pause and think about what she was doing. If she did, she'd freak, and that couldn't happen. She walked with casual purpose through the casino, as if she still worked there and had every right to go where she wanted. At the service elevator that led up into the tower, she walked in behind a SPACE employee and watched as he touched the screen for his floor. Without an employee bracelet, she couldn't choose a floor in this elevator. His selection was six floors below where she wanted to go, but it would have to do. When he left the elevator, she did too. The guy was absorbed in his phone and never gave her a glance.

Now that she was in the employees-only section of the tower, she could use the stairwell to get where she needed to be. Her legs were burning by the time she got through the six-floor climb, but she was there. She stepped from the stairwell, ran her fingers through her hair, and hoped she could work the necessary magic sans makeup and wearing sloppy clothes. She walked to the double glass doors and pushed through them into the nerve center of SPACE Security.

L
AS VEGAS

C
ourtney Meyer

I
t had taken almost
ninety minutes, but Meyer finally had a transcript, in English, of Sultanovich's phone call in hand. Silently cursing the need, she dug through her purse and found the reading glasses she required more and more often. She perched them on her nose and started to read. Her hopes of a breakthrough faded. He had called a woman Meyer assumed to be his housekeeper in Kiev, Ukraine.

The call did provide a bit of illumination into the monster's psyche. He demanded that the woman give a detailed account of what she had done while he had been gone. She was apparently used to the grilling, because she recited a long list of mundane details as if she'd done it thousand times. All was well in the conversation until they got to the subject of how often she had walked Sultanovich's dog, "Little Boris." The transcript read as if she had hesitated before answering his question, and he went ballistic. He explained to her how he would kill her, kill her children, her husband, and presumably everyone she had ever known, then have them all ground into sausage for Little Boris's culinary enjoyment.

Meyer tried to mentally square such fondness for his dog with such disdain for humanity, but she didn't try long. Her experience had taught her that the quickest path to insanity was for a sane person to try to make sense of a crazy one. He eventually calmed down and the conversation returned to the banal and stayed there. She laid the transcript on the counter and picked up the comms headset. She switched to two-way comms and called for the Team Leader. He answered promptly. Meyer said, "We have a surveillance team in place now. You guys can pull out when ready."

"Roger that."

S
PACE

T
he entire page
turned out to be for the sale that took place on March 1st. Galina had fetched the highest price, but according to the reported figures, none of the girls sold for less than a half-million Euros. I continued to be mortified. Knowing that slavery is alive and well in the twenty-first century is one thing, but it's so abstract and such an affront that most of us can't really grasp the reality. Seeing this site had made it nauseatingly real for me.

I clicked the browser’s HISTORY menu and selected the very last page in the list, which I suspected was similar to this one. The entire screen was filled with huge red text that said, SEPTEMBER 1 SALE BEGINS AT 11:00 A.M. GMT. I calculated local time at a glance, but it wasn't necessary. The next line of huge text was a running countdown. As I watched, it changed from 2 HOURS, 0 MINUTES, AND 0 SECONDS, to ONE HOUR, FIFTY-NINE-MINUTES, AND FIFTY-NINE SECONDS.

When I scrolled down on the page, my entire being—body, mind, soul, spirit—froze. I stared, unable to process this new and most horrible reality that was staring me in the face: Ally, my daughter, my baby girl, was the first girl shown. Her headline read, LAST-MINUTE FIND! AMERICAN VIRGIN!

My stupor lasted an indeterminate number of minutes. It eventually dawned on me that my burner phone was ringing. I answered it, my voice flat, my soul deflated like an old balloon. "What?" It would of course be Meyer, since no one else had the number.

"Sam, that you?" It wasn't Meyer, but Nichols.

"Yes."

"You okay?"

"No."

"What's wrong?"

"How'd you get this number?"

"From Meyer, and it took some talking, believe me. Listen, I—"

"They're selling my baby girl."

"Selling? What are you talking about, Sam? Where are you?"

"What do you want?"

"Matt Decker called me, said they had urgent information for you. Said somebody named Abdul had been calling and texting you for hours."

"So what's the information?" I said.

"Don't know. Matt said tell you to check your email, immediately."

"Okay." I pressed the END button.

I
brought
up my inbox and near the top I saw an email from Abdul. The subject was RESEND: INFO YOU NEED. Out of curiosity, I scrolled down and saw several more copies of it. Freaking junk subscriptions had filled up my screen and caused me to miss it. I opened the email.

N
ow my heart
was beating hard enough that I felt it in my neck, heard it in my ears. I looked at the time stamp on the email. It had come two hours ago. Damn it! Another royal screw-up on my part! What if my bullshit mistakes caused—

I willfully cut off that line of thought. No time. Those rape videos had been shot
here.
My mind shifted into operational mode. I opened the architectural drawings of SPACE and zoomed into the unallocated space where the bunker was. It had to be there, in the bowels of the building, the bowels that the Sultanovich piece of shit owned.

Leaving the drawings, I pulled up the live video feeds from the bunker. Not a soul in sight. Back to the drawings. I studied them, matching up the wireframe rendering before me with my memory of being there. And then I saw it.

S
PACE

B
ack in my own room
, I thought about all the grief and giggles I'd taken from Abby over the years since I left the "service." And after I lugged it on at least a hundred business trips without ever opening it, there were times I almost gave in. Almost. Opening the suite's storage closet, I retrieved my Maxpedition tactical bag and unzipped it on the bed. I walked to the little wall safe, keyed in the code, opened it, and took out my Kimber .45 and extra magazines. Yeah, it's a hassle now to check a firearm every time you fly, but that "just in case" moment had arrived. All those times standing in line at an airline check-in counter, all the time spent arguing the law with some dumbass counter clerk, all the grief and giggles? All worth it.

Despite the years that had passed since my final operation, I was ready to go in under five minutes. My heart was calm, my breathing slow, my mind emptying of all distractions. I didn't just allow the black fog. I summoned it. I welcomed it, embraced it as an old friend. I was one with the fog. When a knock sounded on the door, I walked across the room, careful to stay away from the centerline.

I stood to the side of the door and twisted the doorknob enough for the door to open. If someone had bad intentions, now is when either they or their bullets would storm through. Instead, the door eased open about an inch, and someone said, "Flatt?"

My mind raced, looking for a match. Found it. "Dobo?" I said.

"Yep."

"Come in."

He pushed the door open, stepped through, saw the Kimber pointed at his face. "Whoa," he said, hands rising, palms out. "I'm a friend."

"Convince me," I said.

"How about lowering that cannon?"

I shook my head.

"I figured out your bracelet switch. Don't know how you did it, but I don't care. I got that fat-ass detective off you. He's stranded in the outer rim."

"Why? Why would you do that?"

"Pardon my French, but he's an ass. I don't like him and I don't trust him. Also…"

I backed up a few steps, but kept him in my sights. "Also what?"

He looked at me several seconds, then said, "I do trust you. I may not know exactly who you guys worked for—you know, over there—but stories got around. Anybody who'd do the stuff I heard? You love the same country I do. We're brothers."

I lowered the gun but didn't stow it. "So why are you here now?"

"Just wanted to warn you about Huddleston. That guy has a major woody for you."

"Yeah. No shit. You want to help me?"

Dobo nodded. "If I can, I will."

I walked toward my computer, where the wireframe drawing of the SPACE tower still glowed. "Take a look at something for me."

I
sat at the desk
, handling the mouse, zooming in and out of the architectural drawings of the unallocated space, while Dobo knelt beside me and studied the screen. He shook his head.

"Who would know?" I said. "There has to be another entrance to it, and I have to have it. Now."

"I want to help you, I—" Dobo's phone rang with an urgent bleating. He put it to his ear. "Dobo." I watched his lips part and his jaw go a bit slack as he listened. Finally he said, "Bring her to one-forty, two-sixteen."

"Whoa," I said as he dropped the phone back into his pocket. "Do not bring anybody to this room."

Dobo raised a hand, palm out, patting the air. "I think you'll want to hear this. A woman showed up in Security and insisted on seeing me, said she had 'life or death' information. They tried to get her to sit and wait, but that got crazy. She took her shirt off and said she'd screw the first guy who told her where I was, and if you've ever seen this woman, well—"

I couldn't believe my ears. Here I was trying to find my daughter and Dobo wanted to tell me some
soap opera cum psycho
tale? "What the hell does th—"

Dobo said, "It's Christine Gamboa, Sam."

Minutes later, I opened the door and there she was, the initial focus of my case, the investigative thread that had taken a back seat to more fruitful areas of inquiry: the impossibly beautiful Christine Gamboa. No makeup, dressed in worn-out jeans and a T-shirt, and still breathtaking. I gestured her in, then closed and relocked the door.

"What's this about?" I said.

"Who are you?" she said, then looked to Dobo in his SPACE Security garb.

Dobo said, "Christine, I don't think we've met before, but I'm Hank Dobo. This is Sam Flatt, an investigator. Whatever you have to tell me, he can hear."

"Are you sure?" she said to Dobo.

I said, "Here's what I'm sure of, Miss Gamboa. You're in my room, which makes you my guest, and if you don't have something really important to say, I'm very busy and will ask you to get the hell out."

"Okay, okay!" She turned back to Dobo. "There's something very illegal going on in the basement of this place, a big computer operation and more."

My turn: "How would you know that?"

"I'm the one who sold them the access into the SPACE network."

That's where the big pile of money in her bank account had come from. How could someone so intelligent be so stupid as to do something like that and then put the money in the bank? "What else?" I said.

"You have to understand, I had nothing to do with the other part. Nothing!"

"What other part?" I said.

"They're selling girls down there."

"They sure are," I said. "How long have you known about this and did nothing?"

"These people are scary. I was afraid, but I'm here now. I want to help."

"So far you haven't told us a single thing we didn't know, so how is it you think you can help?"

She pointed at my computer screen, still displaying the wireframe architectural drawing. "I can show you how to get inside there."

"I've been to the computer room," I said, hoping her next words would confirm what I’d finally seen on the wireframe myself.

Gamboa shook her head. "Not the computer room. The other part of the building down there."

Now she had my full attention.

D
obo was gone
. Out of sight, not out of mind. He sounded sincere, and I think he was. Irrelevant. There is no trust. There is no compassion, no consideration. There is nothing now but black that glows with a thick red edge waiting to blossom and consume. The burner phone rang. Meyer or Nichols, I didn't know.

Meyer: "Sam?"

"Check your email," I said. "See what this is really all about. I know where they are. I'm ending this."

"I've seen the email, Sam, the screenshots. I have teams ready to go. Tell me where you are and we'll be there."

"No."

"You can't do this alone."

"Thank you for behaving with honor. We all make mistakes. You've corrected yours. Goodbye, Courtney."