Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1)

by Jerry Hatchett

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?

  THE 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.

  CHAPTER 11

  SPACE

  ONE WEEK LATER

  JACOB ALLEN SAT behind his desk, his mouth a little open, looking over his reading glasses at me. "You're sure about this?"

  I nodded.

  Brandy Palmer kept reading the status report I had prepared for the meeting.

  Allen stabbed a button on his phone and his secretary answered. "Yes, sir?"

  "Get Jerry Rose in here right now."

  MINUTES LATER, Rose arrived. Allen pointed to a chair. "Sit."

  Rose looked offended, but he sat, arranging his white lab coat as he did, smoothing its little lapels.

  Allen looked at me and said, "Tell him, Sam."

  I was sitting on a sofa, opposite end from Palmer. I leaned forward, elbows on knees, looked at Rose, and began. "Every machine here has been compromised. Slots, poker, all of them. They—"

  "Nonsense!" Rose said, interrupting. "This is the most secure envir—"

  "Shut up and listen, Rose!" Allen said. More pit bull than Bassett hound now.

  Rose's face reddened and he drew a breath, but held his tongue when Allen pointed at him and shook his head.

  I continued. "You're familiar with how the gaming commission constantly polls the machines to verify the integrity of their code?"

  He gave a little snort. "I know my job, Mr. Flatt."

  "Well, not a single machine here has been polled by the commission in almost three months." Rose started to rare up again but this time I held up a hand and continued. "The commission computers have been polling, and as far as they and the commission know, all is normal. The problem is that what they've been communicating with is not the thousands of SPACE EGMs, but a single computer."

  Rose scrunched up his face, confused.

  "Specifically," I said, "they've been polling a computer designated on the SPACE network as VM2467. I'm assuming that's a virtual machine?"

  He nodded, and I went on. "That virtual machine is running a database and some really clever routing code. It intercepts each incoming query from the commission computers, decodes the request, then answers. In short, that VM 'pretends' to be whatever slot or poker or whatever machine the commission is polling, and responds with the perfect answer every time."

  "How could you possibly know this?" Rose said.

  "I've spent the past three days, and most of the nights, tracking it all down. I'm right on this."

  "That would require full admin and root on my network, which you don't have, so I don't see—"

  My turn to interrupt: "Which I do have, and which I have had since my second day here. I know my job."

  He was puffing up again. "You what, broke into my network?"

  Allen rejoined the conversation. "He accessed the company's network. With my blessing."

  "You're legal counsel," Rose said. "What gave you the right or the authority to interfere in my department?"

  "Rose," Allen said, "this happened right under your nose. If you want any chance of keeping your job, any chance of ever working in this industry again, you'll start kissing ass as of this moment. Clear?"

  Rose said nothing, but now looked like a leaky balloon. He said, "Why would someone do this?"

  "To give themselves free rein over SPACE's electronic gaming environment."

  "To what end?" Rose said.

  I handed Rose a copy of my report, then said, "To steal millions. And to destroy the company while doing it."

  AFTER THE MEETING with Jacob Allen, I headed back to my workroom with Nichols in tow. I really liked the guy, something that doesn't happen often. I was anxious to see what my latest search had turned up on Gamboa's devices. The past week had been productive, and now I had that fire in my gut. I wanted to nail this thing down, put all the puzzle pieces together.

  I had designed a search to comb through Gamboa's network activity, both on the Internet and the internal network, and extract anything unusual. The search was done, so I settled into my chair and started scrolling through the results. Five minutes later, I leaned forward and studied the screen. Then I smiled and slapped the table.

  Nichols looked up from his Kindle, which he'd started bringing to work a couple days earlier. "What you got?"

  "I have an onion, Mr. Nichols. A lovely and splendiferous onion."

  "An onion?" Nichols said. "Color me confused, Sam."

  I motioned him over and pointed to a picture of a stylized onion on my screen. "That, my friend, is a very special onion." He arched his eyebrows and I continued. "What you're looking at is an icon for a web browser called Onion, and that browser has been used on this computer before."

  "Like Chrome, or Firefox?"

  "Sort of, but special. Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, they're all made for browsing the World Wide Web, you know, all those WWW addresses. Onion is made specifically to browse something called the Tor Onion network."

  "Never heard of it."

  "Most people haven't, because the people who do use it prefer it that way. Techy users may call it Tor, but a lot of people call it the deep web, or the underground web, or dark web. I prefer the term ‘dark web' myself."

  "Is it legal?"

  "Sure, the network itself is legal. And to be fair, many users are just paranoid about privacy. They don't want people snooping around their online activity. And with Tor, nobody is going to."

  "What about the government?"

  "Not even them. Breaking Tor encryption so they can snoop on its users is a high priority for the NSA, but they have an uphill climb. If you set it up right, Tor is very secret and very anonymous."

  "I see," Nichols said. "I'm assuming it's popular with cyber-criminals, too?"

  "Indeed it is," I said. "H
ang on a sec, let me show you something." I fired up Onion on my laptop, ran a quick search, and loaded one of the websites identified by the search. Then I spun my laptop around, so Nichols would have a full view, and said, "Feast your eyes on that, Jimmy Boy."

  His eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. "Holy crap, this can't be real."

  "Wrong," I said.

  CHAPTER 12

  TUNICA, MISSISSIPPI

  MIKAIL SULTANOVICH

  MIKAIL SULTANOVICH PUSHED BACK from his table at the Blue and White Café. He didn't know if it was a place where you paid at the table or not, and he didn't care. He dropped a twenty and headed out, grabbing a toothpick from the front counter along the way. He got into his car, cranked the engine, and sat there while he dug roast beef from between his teeth and spit it out the window. That done, he backed out, then pulled into traffic headed north on Highway 61. The drive from Las Vegas to Mississippi had been a tough one, but now that he was here and had eaten a proper sit-down meal, it was time to move forward. His fuck of a father would regret the day he tried to have him killed. Dmitry already did. Mikail smiled at the thought.

  FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, he turned into the "deer camp" that sat between the Mississippi River and its levee. Perhaps the long, narrow building set on top of poles had been for deer hunters at some point, but it served a very different purpose now. He hated driving his Bentley on gravel roads and through mudholes, but some things could not be helped when you were running from a father who wanted you dead. After pulling inside the garage and closing its door behind him, he climbed a short set of stairs and stopped at the top long enough to pull his .45 from its holster. He racked a round into the chamber, then opened the door and stepped into a large kitchen. Almost immediately, a Slavic-looking man he knew only as Peter came charging toward him like a bull. Mikail shot him in the throat and moved deeper into the old lodge.

  The far end of the kitchen opened into a long corridor that stretched the length of the structure. He stepped through the door and closed it behind him. Then he dropped to one knee and waited, pistol forward and ready. Closed doors lined both sides of the dim hallway. He didn't have to wait long. Within ten seconds, two men entered the corridor from two separate doors, one on the right and one on the left. They never stood a chance. Especially the dumb shit whose pants were still halfway down. Mikail shot them, then waited a couple minutes to see if more men would arrive. None did. He stepped over the first man; he had a bloody and pulpy hole where an eye used to be.

  The second man was still very much alive, with blood that looked almost black leaking from his gut. Mikail stood above him and laughed, the big Slavic animal in him rising up. "Hope was good pussy for you! Maybe I shoot your dick off now?"

  The man looked terrified and shook his head side to side. "Nyet! Nyet!"

  "Okay, okay," Mikail said before he began another laughing jag that went on until he wheezed. After he caught his breath, he shot the man between the eyes and stepped over him.

  Continuing down the hall, he glanced at the doors as he went, all of which had locks on the outside. Most of them were locked. Father's goons had been busy. Good. Easier to negotiate when you hold something of great value to the other side.

  CHAPTER 13

  SPACE

  "IT LOOKS JUST like an online store," Nichols said.

  "That's exactly what it is," I said.

  "How is that possible? If we can see this, anybody can, right?"

  I nodded. "Installing the software to access the deep web takes four or five minutes. After that, just do a search like I did, and follow some simple instructions."

  He was scrolling through the products, looking at pictures, reading descriptions, shaking his head in disbelief. He clicked into a product listing for 1g Afghan #4 Heroin. At the top of the page was a picture of a block of what looked like heroin. The seller's net name was listed next, along with a price. Then came the features and benefits, listed in nice bullets.

  High quality #4. Use with extreme caution.

  What you get with me:

  -> Free shipping

  -> 100% Refund/Reship policy

  -> All prices are in Bitcoin

  -> Top quality product

  -> Big stockpiles of product

  -> Timely communication

  Please also carefully read my profile before ordering!

  These are my Terms and Conditions.

  THE LISTING WENT on to show shipping options and all the other details to be expected with any online product.

  “If anyone can see this," he said, "why doesn't the government shut it down?"

  "They have shut this one down. Several times. It just pops back up at a new address the next day. These sites are in constant motion, different URL addresses, different servers. It's a shell game and the black hats are very good at it."

  "Black hats?"

  "Technogeeks on the wrong side of things."

  "Ah, got it. Hey, what currency is this in?" He pointed to the price on the screen.

  0.164544

  "BITCOIN," I said. "A global, digital currency. And if you want it to be, it can be just as anonymous and just as untraceable as these deep web stores."

  "I've never heard of that either. If it's global, are you telling me I can walk into a bank and exchange dollars for bitcoins?"

  "Some banks, yes. Not widespread yet in the banking industry. You can buy it at countless online exchanges, though, and not only on the deep web. Plenty of places on the normal web, too. More and more legitimate online vendors are accepting it."

  From the look on his face, Nichols was still trying to wrap his head around the whole thing. "So how much does a gram of this Afghan heroin cost in good old American dollars?"

  "No clue," I said, "but it's easy enough to find out. Copy that amount to your clipboard, then open a new tab in your browser."

  He did.

  "Now search for 'bitcoin converter' and you'll get plenty of hits."

  He chose a site and plugged in the amount. Using the conversion rate of the moment, the equivalent amount was USD $137.80.

  "I'm blown away," he said.

  "Well, you didn't expect it to be cheap, did you? After all, it's Afghan number four, whatever the hell that is. With free shipping!"

  We laughed and Nichols gave me a knuckle-bump for a good one. He said, "Will you be able to tell what sites Gamboa visited on the deep web?"

  "If she set it up right, no, that would be tough."

  "You think she set it up right?"

  "I hope not."

  CHAPTER 14

  TENNESSEE AIRSPACE

  MAX SULTANOVICH

  MAX SAT ALONE in the plush cabin, looking out the window of the private Falcon as they neared Memphis. The digital clock at the front of the cabin read 1:56 a.m., and he could not believe the number of other airplanes he could see in the skies around them. It looked like there could be a hundred of them, all lined up with their lights blazing, going to the same airport in the middle of the night. What the hell?

  His decades in the Soviet Union had given him a strong sense of skepticism regarding unusual activity. Communism was about order and routine. Usual was tolerable. Unusual meant trouble. He pushed the intercom button on his armrest.

  "Yes sir, Mr. Sultanovich?" one of the pilots said.

  "Why are so many airplanes around us? Should we land at another place?"

  "It's routine, sir. This is the time of night when FedEx planes arrive from around the world."

  FedEx. Yes, he knew this company, even used their services sometimes. From the looks of it, they had enough airplanes to make an air force. American bastards.

  The intercom sounded again: "Will there be anything else, sir?"

  "When will we land?"

  "We should touch down in about fifteen minutes."

  Max switched the intercom off. He hated long flights for the way they corrupted the timings of his body. He had barely slept in the past eighteen hours, no matter how many times he had tri
ed during the flight. Now here he was in the middle of the night, exhausted and preparing to deal with his lummox of a son. Mikail was difficult enough under the very best of circumstances, and this was far from that. By killing Dmitry, Mikail had put great hardship on the family's business operations. Plus there was the fact that Dmitry had always been more of a son to Max than that cumshot Mikail. Depriving Max of that would be something Mikail would come to regret during the short remainder of his life. Max would see most personally to that.

  CHAPTER 15

  SPACE

  I'VE SEEN it a hundred times: People who should know better, don't. Gamboa didn't invest the five minutes it would have taken to learn how to properly install and configure the programs for her to access the deep web. If she had, figuring out what she had done on the deep web would have been a nightmare at best, impossible at worst.

  As it was, within a half hour I had reconstructed a long list of sites she had visited. Most of them had nonsensical online addresses, which is common. On the World Wide Web, businesses and people want their addresses to be easy to remember, so they're straightforward, like www.google.com. Not so with these businesses. Their addresses are arcane combinations of numbers and letters, and they change a lot, to make it more difficult for law enforcement to trace the site back to a real computer at a physical address.

  I worked my way down the list, typing each of the addresses into my own Onion browser. The further I went, the less attractive Gamboa became. A lot of the addresses weren't working anymore, the sites having moved on to new addresses. There were a few porn sites, raunchy but not that different from what's on the normal web. Then came the bad stuff.

  The tingle and buzz around my psyche that tells me I'm getting close to the nut of a case, had turned into screaming klaxons. This was an unexpected direction, unrelated to the original thrust of the case, but it was big. Miss Gamboa had spent considerable time on multiple occasions browsing a rape site. There are a lot of fake sites out there on which actors and actresses act out rapes to sate the desires of evil, worthless human beings who get off on seeing women—and sometimes men—brutalized. This site wasn't fake. No tiny disclaimers at the bottom saying "simulation for entertainment purposes only."