Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1)

by Jerry Hatchett

  "Don't you run the risk of missing cheats and such, watching so few of the cameras?" I said.

  "We're not watching few. We're watching all of them, just not with human eyeballs. Our algorithms have been fed data on every scheme imaginable, data gathered over decades."

  "Like what?"

  He tapped one of the technicians on the shoulder and said, "Steve, put an algo-feed on the big screen." Steve tapped a few keys and the view on the monitor wall switched to a high-res view looking straight down onto the playing surface of a blackjack table. Overlaid green circles and squares flitted in and out of existence on the image; they reminded me a lot of the targeting display on modern military aircraft. It's like they were "locking on" to stacks of chips, cards, players' hands, the dealer's hands, all in rapid succession.

  Hank Dobo said, "Got anything showing activity?"

  Steve scanned one of his monitors. "B-J one-fifty-nine." He hit a few keys and the view changed to a different table. This time not all the targets were green. One stack of chips was ringed by a blinking red circle.

  "Wait for it," Dobo said.

  The player at that spot placed a bet and the cards came out. He looked at his cards, and then with a lightning move of one of his hands, reached out and pulled most of the chips he had bet back out of the betting circle.

  "I'll be damned," I said. "The software knows the game, knows what movements should and shouldn't happen at the various stages of the game."

  "Bingo. All the algos are some variation of that, watching for something that's not right. When it finds it and watches enough to verify suspicious activity, it will alert the tech who's watching that zone." No sooner had he said that than one of the computers sounded a little bell, and that same camera view appeared on the monitor of one of the technicians.

  "Amazing," I said, and shook my head. "Did the computers or the techs pick up on anything weird for the EGMs and dates I sent you?"

  "Not a thing," he said. "I read your report and I've been going through those recordings for the past several nights. Nothing out of the ordinary, but I did compile a list of the players."

  "Names?" I said. "How?"

  "Well, some names. Pictures of all of them, and our facial recognition database was able to put names with about eighty percent of them. You wanna see the list?"

  I nodded, then followed him into a small but well-appointed office. He closed the door, picked up a file folder from his desk. As he handed it to me, he said, "Here you go, Flatbread."

  I've developed some pretty good acting chops through the years, because as covert as we were in our missions, we were still around the military all the time. Several times through the years, I've run into someone who said, "Hey, didn't we serve together?" or something like that. It's easy enough to blow that off. But no one, and I mean no one has ever called me “Flatbread” other than other BAM-team members, and that's been a long time. So when Hank Dobo said it, no amount of acting could mask the way time froze for several seconds.

  There was no point in acting. I said, "When and where?"

  "Remember a mission in a cave, guy with a computer?"

  "A lot of them."

  "You lost your partner."

  I nodded slowly. Remembered exactly which mission now.

  "Saw you guys on base beforehand. Your partner was giving you shit in the mess hall about your horse."

  I nodded again. "Ditto. Giving me shit about my horse was his favorite thing to do."

  Dobo smiled. "I was in one of the F-18s at the end of that thing. Small world, huh?"

  I looked him in the eye and said, "Tiny."

  CHAPTER 39

  FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

  MANHATTAN FIELD OFFICE

  NEW YORK CITY

  SPECIAL AGENT COURTNEY Meyer

  COURTNEY MEYER WAS at her wit's end. After eighteen months investigating the Eastern Europe crime family headed up by Maxim Sultanovich, she had exactly nothing. Not just nothing on Sultanovich himself. Nothing on anyone of value. Sure, she could haul in a gaggle of street thugs and threaten, scream, and shout. But it would accomplish nothing. There wasn't a Ukrainian or Russian soldier on the street who wouldn't prefer federal prison over the consequences of betrayal.

  Her big RICO case a few years ago had gotten her on the map, given her some juice. But a year and a half of nothing spent a lot of juice. Every investigative trail she followed had eventually hit a dead end. Not because she was wrong. She wasn't. It was the same old story: the bigger the fish, the more money and clout they had, the harder they were to land. People like Sultanovich insulated themselves. They didn't tell underlings, "Hey, go shoot this guy in the head." They said it with a look, a nod. Then those people looked and nodded at someone else. By the time you drilled down to someone dumb enough to open their mouths, they were low-level thugs who mattered little, whose absence from the operation would change nothing. It was an old story in the investigation of organized crime, and it was made even tougher when the bad guys were on the other side of the planet.

  Her SAIC, Tom Belt, had supported her all the way, but that too would play out. Belt hadn't made it to the top of such a cherry office by backing losing causes. She needed a break, had to have it.

  Meyer leaned back in her chair, hands clasped behind her head. The damn tilt lock on the chair gave way and she tilted so far back she almost fell over.

  "Damn it!" she said out loud as she righted herself, then reached beneath the seat of the chair and wiggled the lock back into place. While looking down, she saw that her butt almost filled the width of the chair. Focus: One problem at a time. Solve the case, then you can address your lard ass.

  The key was Vegas. She knew it, felt it in every bone of her body. Too many Ukes and Russkies in and out of there over the past couple years. And there was the hard link between Sultanovich himself and that casino, SPACE. Yes, she needed Vegas. She needed to know how the casino figured into the equation. Special Agent Courtney Meyer needed Samuel Flatt to cooperate. Her initial, direct approach hadn't worked. Nor had the sappy apology Belt had suggested she send. No surprise there. Time for a new strategy. The chair creaked as she leaned forward and moved back into a work posture. She pulled a drawer open and extracted the file folder labeled FLATT, SAMUEL.

  "Let's get more acquainted, Computer Boy," she said as she opened the folder. "Bound to be something here I can use to convince you to do your patriotic duty."

  CHAPTER 40

  SPACE

  BACK IN MY MAKESHIFT LAB, I studied the contents of the folder Hank Dobo had given me. Looked through the names of the high-value slot players he had given me, didn't recognize any of them. I plugged in a flash drive from the folder and started watching video of the people who had won significant jackpots on any of the hacked slots during the timeframe of interest. All the cameras in the high-stakes areas were 4K resolution, so the quality of the video was remarkable. There were several dozen different people, a mix of men and women. Reaction to their wins varied from ecstatic jumping around, to subtle fist pumps.

  What was a Hornet driver doing working in casino security? Most of the guys who fly fighter jets are so eaten up with flying that they don't want to do anything else. And they're so good at it, they can get any job they want in the private sector.

  I played the video again. And again. And again. After an hour of this, I had something. I'm not a gambler myself—not anymore—but I have some insight into those who are. Frequent gamblers are addicts, always chasing the high of the next win, and this has to be doubly true with those who play for big dollars. Casinos treat these people like kings and queens because they want them to keep gambling. If you keep gambling, the house eventually wins. It's not luck. It's math. The casinos want them to keep gambling, and they do keep gambling. That's why I kept seeing a lot of the same faces on the videos. But there were several I saw only once. Not impossible, but outside the norm. A few people will make a big score and walk away, but most people who hit a $25,000 or $50,000 jackpot on
a machine would keep going. They'd want to do it again. And because they sit and feed these machines absurd amounts of money for days on end, they usually do have several big wins.

  After all the watching, I focused on three people. One man and two women. Each of them appeared just once. I cobbled together a quick edit of just those three, and put it playing on a loop. The loop was a little under three minutes. I watched it dozens of times. Memorizing. Absorbing. The way they sat. The way they pushed the buttons. Where they put their feet. How they scratched an itch. How they celebrated their wins. I became one with each of them. Then I composed an email to Hank Dobo the Hornet-Driving Casino Security Chief.

  Hank, I need some more footage. I've attached a spreadsheet of the dates, times, and machines. Please pull every angle you have, and please include five minutes before and after each win event.

  Thanks,

  Sam

  CHAPTER 41

  OVER THE ATLANTIC

  CHRISTINE GAMBOA

  OVER THE PAST twenty-four hours, Christine had listened and talked through numerous phone calls between Sasha, Zuyev, and her. Their plan for going to the FBI and cutting a deal was coming together. It was complicated, all the schemes and lies the two men had concocted to shift as much blame off themselves as possible and onto Max and his henchmen. Henchmen other than Zuyev and Sasha, anyway. In addition to the lies themselves, Sasha had been busy creating evidence to substantiate the lies. He apparently had a whole network of people willing to create any kind of document imaginable, willing to testify to anything, willing to do anything. She wished she had never met any of them. She wasn't like them. Sure, she took their money. Who wouldn't? But there was a hell of a difference between getting somebody into a computer network, and doing the kinds of things these men did.

  She was exhausted from the mental effort of participating, from walking the line between being forthcoming, and being too forthcoming about what she knew. She wanted to pull the window shade down, recline the jet's comfy leather seat, and crash. Sasha, unfortunately, wouldn't shut up.

  "Chrissy, you must not to trust Zuyev. He is bad man."

  Gee. She would never have guessed. Thank God she had Sasha, such a good man himself, to educate her. "I know, Sasha. I won't."

  "You must to never go alone with him."

  "I won't."

  "I cannot to protect you if you go alone with him."

  "I know."

  He nodded his big head and said nothing more. Christine pulled her shade down, pressed the button to recline her seat, and pulled the little blanket up under her chin. The ride was smooth, the jet engines just loud enough to provide perfect white noise for sleeping. As she started to drift, she cycled through the things she knew, things she had to remain constantly cognizant of in order to stay safe. Based on what Sasha had told her, Zuyev was a bad man, a brute, a classic thug in every sense of the word. Max was black-souled evil. And Sasha, while a criminal, was a better man than she had given him credit for. He also had no idea what was really going on. He thought he did, but he did not. Zuyev, and hopefully Max, thought she was likewise ignorant to the truth, thought she believed this whole thing to be about breaking into computers and stealing money.

  They were wrong.

  CHAPTER 42

  SPACE

  I SHUT down my work computers and stood for a few minutes looking out the window of my workroom. It was late in the day and I loved the way sunlight transformed into a soft golden hue and cast shadows with feathery edges. From this perspective, Vegas was beautiful, with its tall buildings bathed in amber, along with the mountains that ringed the valley. When I was done soaking up the peace, I pulled a flash drive from the computer I'd been working on and dropped it into my pocket. Time to visit Hank Dobo again.

  After an elevator ride, I walked to the door labeled SOC—I guess they don't want the uninformed to know when they're walking by the Security Operations Center—and watched the glass-looking door handle turn green when I touched it and my bracelet's credentials were accepted. The techs never looked up as I passed through the room on my way to Dobo's office. I rapped on the frame of the open door and he motioned me in.

  "Hey, Flatbread," Dobo said, his hand out.

  I shook it and said, "If it's all the same to you, how about sticking with 'Sam' instead?"

  He shrugged. "What's up?"

  Taking the flash drive from my pocket, I handed it across his desk and sat down. "Can you put that flash drive’s content on that monitor?" I pointed to a large panel on a side wall.

  When he had the video up and running, he said, "What am I looking for?"

  "Let it play. I'll narrate." The video started with a still shot that used a split frame to show the two men and one woman who'd attracted my attention during my watchathon. "These three faces only appeared once, which made me curious. So I studied them." The video cut to the first guy, switching between camera angles and showing him from a minute before his jackpot to a minute after his little celebration ended. Then parts of it played again, this time slowed down and annotated to highlight certain movements. After that, the view switched to a different man and the same basic sequence repeated itself.

  When the sequence finished playing, Dobo paused the video and looked at me. "Sonofabitch. Same guy."

  I nodded. "Unless both men just happen to use their middle finger to scratch their left ear in exactly the same way, yep, same guy. Play the rest of it."

  Dobo resumed the video and the same thing played out with four more men. "Crap," he said. "Six times he hit us." He paused it again, stood, paced a bit.

  "I call him The Itch. He's the most obvious, but when you watch the rest of the video, you'll see that there are two more 'morphlings,' another man and a woman. They were also sharp enough to never give the cameras a great view of their faces, so I'm not sure your facial recognition system will be much use, unless you want to get a graphics expert to try to use all the different angles and partials to compose a frontal view."

  He nodded. "I'll work on that."

  "Okay," I said. "I'd like to know if you identify them. Keep me posted?"

  Dobo said, "I'll do that."

  CHAPTER 43

  SPACE

  BACK IN MY SUITE, I showered and sat down at the glass desk to check my email once more for the night. While the laptop powered up, I ran my finger along the smooth edge of the glass and tried to spot the tech that made just the edge glow in an ever-morphing range of colors. I was ready to stretch out on the bed and find a movie to watch. Then I saw the email at the top of my inbox with the now-familiar subject of CONFIDENTIAL AND URGENT: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION. I clicked into the message.

  Dear Mr. Flatt,

  I wish you had reconsidered, but I have no choice but to accept your decision. Thank you for your reply.

  Courtney A. Meyer, SA

  PS: As an aside, your name happened to come up in a conversation I had today with a friend who works at ICE. He mentioned that there is some kind of irregularity from several years ago concerning the adoption of your daughter. She was from Russia, right? I was surprised to hear of them revisiting something that far back, especially in the context of Child Protective Services and such. It hardly seems fair. Anyway, I pass this along merely as a courtesy. I'm sure you handled everything properly and it's nothing to worry about. Have a wonderful night.

  I READ IT AGAIN, my blood sizzling through my veins and arteries, my heart pounding so hard I could feel the pulse in my neck. That bitch. That low-down, bottom-feeding, ass-sucking bitch. I slammed the lid on the laptop and stood, sending the desk chair wheeling across the marble floor before it bounced off the coffee table. After walking to the big window, I stood looking at the expansive view of Vegas for a good ten minutes, my mind working. My first instinct was to call my ex-wife and tell her about it, but it was late and there was no need to ruin her night, too.

  She couldn't do anything about this anyway. This was all between me and a petty bitch in Manhattan. I placed my pa
lms flat against the cool glass and willed my heart to slow, taking long deep breaths. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Back in control, I forced down the urge to call Meyer and explain to her what a life-changing mistake she had made. Always better to show instead of tell.

  CHAPTER 44

  SPACE

  "THIS IS OUTSTANDING WORK," Jacob Allen said after I brought him up to speed the next morning. "I see why you're expensive. I have to say it concerns me that an outside consultant with no experience in casino security found in a day what our people didn't find in weeks."

  "Not sure that's fair to Dobo," I said. "Not my call, though."

  "How much?"

  "According to the logs, over a three-day period, they hit jackpots of almost a million bucks."

  "Against what kind of input?"

  "That's where it gets really interesting," I said. "Once I had these narrow timeframes to work with, I was able to get far more granular with my digital inspection of the machines. The nut is that the combined input for all these wins was six thousand and change, but—"

  "Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all the apostles! How is that possible?"

  "The moment before they pushed the PLAY button on each and every one of these jackpots, that machine was set to a payout rate of virtually one hundred percent. The software won't allow a rate of a hundred percent, but it will allow ninety-nine and a whole bunch of decimal places. A win was all but certain on every occasion. And the moment the win was registered, the machine dropped back down to its normal rate. The ultimate in rigged games."

  He sat, shaking his head several times before looking up. "Where are we on identifying these people?"

  "That's in Dobo's hands. I'd like to continue my current track of investigation. This is just what I spotted in a day. There could be more."